Cold Open, A Sam North Mystery (5 page)

Chapter Eleven

I found Marty Glover standing in Jack Steele’s office.

He was behind Steele’s desk, which is what I was assuming was buried under the mountains of books, papers, and files surrounding Glover.

“Waiting for the hazmat guys to come in and clean up the place?” I asked.

Marty jumped, startled by me.

“Hey, Sam,” he said, like that was all he could manage at the moment.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, just sad. You know?” he said.

“I do.”

I looked around at the office, which was cluttered with knee-high stacks of books and papers. There were windows that looked out onto Fiftieth Street, but most were blocked with piles of crap on the windowsills.

“You would never have known the man was such a …”

“Slob?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Jack preferred pack rat to slob,” he said.

Glover was short but packed a lot of weight on his frame. He was dressed in khakis and a light blue dress shirt that strained to do its job of covering his wide belly. What was left of his thinning hair was going from black to gray. Around his neck was a lanyard holding his Liberty ID card, which was tucked in the breast pocket of the shirt.

“You know the amazing thing?” he asked. “Jack really did know where every piece of paper was in this mountain of crap. The man had an incredible memory.”

He tapped the top of the desk, which looked like a landfill, with all the piles of folders and papers.

“I’d put his nightly research folder on a pile here, and he never once had to ask where it was,” he said.

I picked up a book off the desk. It was a hardcover.
The Retaking of America
. “Oh, boy,” I said.

Glover shook his head. “Jack never read any of this shit. He got more books than Amazon, but he barely cracked them. The author would come on, and he’d make it sound like he read them but he never had.”

“And the guest was usually too intimidated to call him on it.”

“Bingo,” he said. “You knew one his little tricks.”

“Maybe I could host the show.”

He stared at me, not quite sure what to say.

“It’s a joke,” I said.

“Oh, okay. It’s just that I got every freaking talk-radio-show host in the country bothering me for a tryout.”

“They’re all going to be the next Jack Steele. The next big superstar,” I said.

“They all suck,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, and Jack made it look easy.” He sighed and shook his head. “This goofball doing tonight’s show? Hotshot talk-radio guy from Miami. Has the usual bag of tricks: anti-gay, anti-government, anti-everything rants. But you know what? He sucks on TV. He doesn’t know that—he thinks he’s hot shit.”

“How’d he get in the door?”

“Cal is under all kinds of pressure to find someone who can at least hold the ratings steady until he discovers the next big star,” I said. “Jack’s been gone less than a week, and there’s already squawking from some advertisers.”

“You lose a guy like Jack, and all of sudden your network doesn’t look so strong,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. He pushed some of the papers and books back from the corner of the desk and sat on the cleared space. It was like he needed to take weight off his feet. “What are you working on?” he asked.

“Special assignment.”

“Anything good?” he said.

“You know Robbie Steele at all?”

“Just from when she would call and scream at me because Jack wasn’t answering his cell phone.”

“She doesn’t think Jack killed himself.”

His eyes squinted, and he shook his head like he had trouble processing what I just said. “Huh?”

“She refuses to believe Jack killed himself.”

“Oh, brother,” he said. “She’s a piece of work.”

“She called me after I went on that morning to tell me I was wrong.”

“Helloooo, the note,” he said.

“Yes, that presents a problem, a hole in her theory. Although she doesn’t really have a theory.”

“Thank God,” he said.

“She just has … well, she has a feeling Jack didn’t kill himself.”

“Well, if Jack didn’t kill himself,” he said, “that would leave an accident as cause of death. Or …”

“Or something worse.”

His shoulders slumped like an invisible weight had fallen on him. “Oh my God. Does she actually …”

“Yes, she does.”

“So where do you come in?” he asked.

“She asked me to investigate.”

“Investigate?”

“Yes, you know, ask questions and all.”

“She paying you?”

I shrugged. “Who knows?” I said.

“Maybe you’ll get to make out with her,” he said.

“Depends on what I find.”

“This is fucking priceless,” he said.

“I think she’s probably trying to make sense of why Jack did what he did,” I said. “You know, get some answers and bring some closure. That sort of thing.”

“Whatever,” he said.

“You got any theories for me, about what happened?”

“Is this part of your official investigation?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged and his big, round shoulders rose. “I don’t know. I’m not a shrink, but I think maybe it got to be too much for him.”

“The weight of being Jack Steele?”

“Yeah, you got to remember, Jack and I were doing a radio show in Hartford when Cal found us,” he said. “He was trying to stay sober. I was coming out of some financial difficulties, as they say. And then, boom, fourteen years later, here we are. He’s the biggest cable personality in the country, and we got the number one show.”

“But not exactly loved by everyone.”

“He said some nights it felt like everybody hated him,” he said.

“That’s got to get to you after a while.”

“Depends on if you care about it,” he said.

“Did he?”

“Sometimes. I mean, you can only read so many nasty stories about yourself before it affects you,” he said. “But you know what, Sam? Those people didn’t know him like I did. Let me tell you something. A few years ago my mother was very sick. I mean, real sick. Found out she had a heart condition. Jack knows my dad is gone, so what’s he do? He makes sure she sees the best specialists in the city, gets the best treatments.”

“Damn big of him,” I said.

“And that’s not all. She needs surgery, right? Frigging insurance barely covers the bill for the room. Jack has me send him the bills, and he takes care of them. He took care of everything.”

“The benevolent Jack Steele.”

“The man did some nice things. Things people didn’t know about. Things he didn’t want people to know about.”

“How was he the last few weeks? Any signs that maybe he was unraveling?”

“He seemed to be unraveling most every night.”

“So nothing unusual?”

“He was getting nuts about the numbers.”

“Lose twenty percent of your audience in six months, and I’d get nuts, too,” I said.

“What about that new strategy, the ‘attack the fat cats of Corporate America’; that pay off at all?”

“Hah. What a load of bullshit.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“You know who it paid off for?” he asked. “It paid off for the consultant Cal brought in who came up with that half-assed idea.”

Once the ratings of
Steele Yourself
began to slide, Daniels had pushed for the consultants to come in and make it all better. They rarely did.

“It’s always the executive producer’s fault when the numbers drop, you ever notice that, Sam?” Marty asked. “It’s never the anchor’s fault. Always the EP.”

“That’s why you get the big bucks.”

“Not as big as that asshole Jerry Drake. He comes in and has Jack go after Corporate America, and the numbers get even worse. And you know who’s left to clean up his mess?”

“Marty Glover,” I said.

“No kidding,” he said.

He got up off the corner of the desk but did so slowly, like he was hesitant to put too much weight on his feet.

“Maybe you go talk to him,” he said.

“Jerry Drake, right?”

“Yeah, you know what he calls his little know-nothing operation?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“The Show Doctor,” he said.

“Catchy.”

“Yeah, like he can fix things.”

“Maybe we can sue for malpractice.”

“That guy caused me a shit load of trouble and worry, Sam.”

“He still working with us?”

“No, thank God. Jack got pissed at him and told him to get lost. Told Drake he didn’t care what agreement he had with Daniels, it was his show and he called the shots.”

“Can’t imagine the Show Doc was happy with that.”

“With any luck, maybe it put him out of business.”

Chapter Twelve

Liz and I ran on the sidewalk up University Place heading toward Union Square. It was early Saturday morning, and the city was quiet. Some people went out for a Saturday-morning jog. Liz went for a Saturday-morning run. At this point, I would have preferred the jog.

“Sprint to the corner,” she said as we crossed Twelfth Street. “Loser buys coffee.”

“Hope you brought money.”

My lead was slim and, I knew, short-lived, and within a few steps she had pulled even with me. I caught a glimpse of her long legs chewing up sidewalk as she pulled ahead. I gave it one last shot and pulled close to even.

“Got ya,” I said.

“Not quite.”

She took off again and reached the corner a foot ahead of me. We slowed, and she walked with her hands on her hips and seemed like she could do it all again. Sweat trickled down her tan cheeks, but she barely seemed winded.

“Did I win?” I asked.

“Of course. You always win.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You were a bit closer this week,” she said.

“It’s the little victories that matter.”

We walked up to Fourteenth Street, and I tried to slow my breathing as we waited for a truck to rumble past.

“You know I let you win,” I said as we crossed into Union Square.

“Of course you did,” she said, and reached over and slapped my butt. “That’ll teach you to mess with a younger woman.”

We crossed Park Avenue South at Seventeenth Street and walked over to Irving Place, then turned north toward Gramercy Park. We stopped in front of Gramercy Grounds and Liz stretched out her hand and snapped her fingers.

“Fork over the buckeroos.”

“Going to hold me to it, huh?”

“A challenge is a challenge.”

I gave her a ten and took a seat at one of the little tables out front and waited. It was hot and humid, and sweat dripped from my forehead. A few minutes later she was back with the coffees. I noticed her staring as I took a sip.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“You already have,” she said.

“Why the look? Do I have a pimple I don’t know about or something?”

“You look perplexed.”

“I am.”

“The Widow Steele?”

“Yup.”

“You still don’t know what to make of her?”

“Still don’t know what to make of this whole thing. Been four days and I feel like I have nothing,” I said.

“Not sure if it’s nothing,” she said.

“I lied my way in to see Jack’s therapist and pissed him off, and I’m sure I came across as a nut in the process.”

“He’s a shrink; he’s used to nuts.”

“Then I told Marty about her little theory, and he looked at me like I’m insane.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy, if that helps,” she said, smiling a megawatt smile that showed off the dimple on her left cheek.

“And let’s not forget I told Cal Daniels, one of the most powerful TV execs in the business, that I was okay with taking my mug off TV for a few days to chase this.
I’m
beginning to wonder if I’m nuts.”

A young woman in shorts and a T-shirt walked past with her shades on and headed for the door of the coffee shop. I waited until she was inside before continuing.

“But you want to know the crazy thing?” I asked.

“Who doesn’t?”

“My gut tells me there’s something here. I don’t know what it is,” I said, looking around to make sure no one was nearby, “but I think she may be right.”

“And the note?”

“I don’t know. But maybe something will eventually explain it.”

Liz took a drink of coffee, and there was something about her demeanor that changed. I saw her stare off across the street like she was lost in thought.

“Hello?” I said.

She snapped back and looked at me.

“Solving a world problem?” I asked.

“I’m worried,” she said, looking right at me. “If she’s right, and your gut is right, then someone really did …”

Her voice drifted off and I nodded, knowing where she was going with this.

“I’ve had the same thought.”

“It could get dangerous if you start to figure it out. Someone is going to realize it and—”

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t even want to think about …” She shook her head.

I leaned forward over the table and put my hand over hers. “Liz, let’s just say she’s right. That means somebody is out there who did this. And as of now, they’ve gotten away with it.”

She nodded.

“Because no one, including the police, sees any reason to investigate this, because no one besides Robbie Steele, and possibly me, thinks anything happened here.”

“And what, you have a strong sense of justice?” she asked.

“You could say that,” I said.

She had some more of her coffee and studied me, then said, “Or, you want a story to help your career.”

I dawned on me that Liz Harrison knew me better than I realized.

Chapter Thirteen

The Show Doctor was located on a bland strip of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-first and Thirty-second Streets, a few blocks south of the Empire State Building. The company was on the third floor of a squat, ugly building five floors high. It was just before ten on Monday morning when I got there.

I rode the slow-moving elevator to the third floor and it opened into a sunny room with a battleship-gray metal desk a few feet in front of me. An attractive young woman with shoulder-length black hair that matched her black-framed librarian glasses greeted me.

“Well, hello,” she said with a wide smile.

I checked behind me, thinking maybe Brad Pitt had also stepped off the elevator. He hadn’t.

“Well, hello to you, too,” I said.

Off to my right was a small seating area with windows that looked down onto Fifth. To my left was a wall with a door that I guessed led back to the examining rooms of the Show Doctor.

The wall looked as if Jerry, or maybe a brother-in-law who was supposed to be handy, had slapped it up. It barely reached the ceiling in some spots and seemed like a good solid wind would take it out.

“I know you,” the young lady said. She was brimming with energy. “You’re on Channel Four.”

It was my guess she didn’t get many visitors during the day, and she was determined to make the most of this one.

“Oh, no I’m not,” I said.

“Channel Five?”

“Uh, no.” I extended a hand to prevent her from marching up the channel list. “Sam North, with Liberty News.”

“Oh, yes. Liberty. I’m Sherri,” she said.

“Sherri,” I said, “I don’t have an appointment, but I was hoping the Show Doctor could see me. It’s an emergency.”

She picked up a pen and had a small note pad ready to go. “Okay, and this is in reference to what show?”

“I don’t have a specific show. It’s more of a personal visit. Jerry does a lot of work for Liberty.”

“Yes, he does,” she said.

“I have something I need to talk to him about.”

She stood up and gave me a smile. “Let me see if Mr. Drake is free.”

I suspected Mr. Drake was always free when it came to Sherri. I went over to the windows that looked down onto Fifth and saw a double-decker tourist bus stopped at the light. Faces scanned the buildings like they were on safari.

“Mr. Drake is available,” Sherri said from behind me.

“Imagine that,” I said.

She led me to the door and showed me in and closed it behind me. I stepped into a windowless room that took up the rest of the floor. Drake’s desk was against the exposed brick wall to my right. There were two Chinese screens set up in the corners opposite him, with empty desks behind them.

Either everyone was at lunch at ten in the morning, or the Show Doctor was experiencing a drop-off in patients.

Drake was seated behind his desk and got up to greet me.

“Hey, Sam,” he said, “nice to see you. I’m a fan.”

He came around to me and we shook hands, and he put a hand on my arm as he did.

He was a skinny guy in wrinkled tan dress slacks and wore a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt open at the collar. There was no sign of a t-shirt, so I was treated to a view of his chest hair.

He went back behind his desk, and I took a seat on the only other place to sit, a beat-up brown leather couch to the side of his desk.

Drake caught me looking around the office.

“We’re moving. This is just a temporary office. Until the work is finished on the new place,” he said.

“Sure.”

He was attentive and fiddled with a pencil while he tried to figure out just what the hell it was that I wanted.

“So to what do I owe this visit?” he said.

He had a little smirk, like he was happy with everything.

“You know Robbie Steele?” I asked.

“No, but I’d like to,” he said.

Again, the little smirk, this time cementing the impression he was a sleaze.

“She asked me to look into the circumstances surrounding Jack’s death. You know, see what it was that drove him to—”

“Throw himself into the river?” he said.

“Yes. That.”

“Hmm,” he said, looking like he didn’t understand.

“I think it’s one of those closure things,” I said.

“Why you?” he asked.

“Lucky, I guess.”

“So what can I tell you?” he asked.

“I’m trying to see what Jack’s state of mind was. I know the show had been causing a lot of angst.”

“That ain’t the half of it,” he said.

“Marty Glover said all the changes and new strategy hadn’t really paid off.”

He slapped his desk and shook his head. “Oh, that’s rich. That is so fucking rich. Sounds like something Marty would say.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because he screws up the show and I try to clean up his mess, and now he’s criticizing me?”

“Is he wrong?”

“You got to understand something, Sam, guys like Marty hate guys like me.”

“Interlopers.”

“Exactly. But the thing you got to remember is that I’m only being called into a shop because guys like Marty aren’t doing their job,” he said. “There has to be a patient before the Show Doctor is called.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

He shook his head and sighed, like the experience was a painful memory. “There was just so much resistance to change on that show,” he said.

“From Marty?”

“Not just him. But from Jack’s asshole agent, Ron Marshall,” he said.

“So you got Glover, who doesn’t want you meddling with his anchor. And Ron Marshall, who doesn’t want you meddling with his prized client. Sounds like a no-win situation.”

“It wasn’t one my finer moments,” he said. “You remember that
Times
article?”

“I do.”

The
Times
had written a page-one story with a nice big color photo of Jack with the headline “Man of Steele’s Ratings Drop Worries Liberty.”

“Unfortunately,” Drake said, “the reporter failed to mention that Glover and Marshall were blocking me and keeping the show from being fixed.”

Drake knew the article well enough to have it memorized.

“The article said, ‘Even the hiring of outside consultants failed to slow the defection of viewers. TV consultant Jerry Drake was brought in to help, but his strategy of targeting Corporate America has thus far failed to produce a rise in the ratings,’” he said. He sat back in his chair and looked hurt.

“Not something you’ll use in your promotional materials,” I said.

“It wasn’t a good day, Sam. I can tell you that,” he said. “And if really affected office morale.”

Drake shot forward and slapped the desk and I jumped, thinking I might have to defend myself.

“But,” he said, “and it’s a big but, notice how the reporter said ‘thus far.’ Right?”

“If you say so,” I said, hoping he would stay calm.

“Has
thus far
failed to produce a rise in the ratings,” he said.

“Got it.”

“Meaning it was about to turn around,” he said. “See what I’m saying?”

“You were on the brink,” I said.

“Damn straight, big fella.”

He bolted from his chair and raced back to an old metal file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. He reached in and yanked out a folder then came back over and thrust it toward me.

“Get a load of this shit, Sam,” he said.

I opened the folder to see printouts of e-mails. I read the To and From lines and saw [email protected] and [email protected].

“Those are the e-mails from Operation Outrage,” Drake said.

“Which was?”

“That was the code name for my strategy of attacking the fat cats,” he said. “I wanted to brand the segments with that name, but Marty didn’t go for it. He kept saying, ‘Let’s see how it goes first.’ Mr. Take It Slow and Easy.”

“Not your style.”

“Freaking Rome is burning, my friend. The numbers are sliding, and he’s worried about slow and easy. Slow and easy got them in the mess in the first place.”

There had to be at least twenty e-mails in the folder. Across the tab of the folder there was scrawled in ink, “Op. Outrage—July.”

“These are just the e-mails from July?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Got a file for August, too,” he said. “We were ramping it up, Sam.”

“Who’s Ripley?”

“The corporate communications weenie for IT&E,” Drake said.

“Interesting title,” I said.

“This guy is Mr. Protective. Anybody says a word about IT&E or Buck McConnell, and he hits the roof.”

International Technology & Energy was a Fortune 500 company, one of the largest oil and exploration companies in the country, which also happened to manufacture equipment used for oil and natural gas production and a mess of other industrial purposes.

I read the first e-mail in the file. It was dated July 11 and was from Ripley to Steele.

Your report on the Iran story is completely false and absent of facts. There are at least six outright lies in your story, and you have done irreparable damage to our CEO, Buck McConnell, and the IT&E brand. That you would, on national TV, accuse Mr. McConnell and our company of selling equipment in Iran, and imply selling equipment to the Syrians, is simply outrageous and reckless. IT&E legal counsel is exploring what options we have available, and you can expect to hear from us shortly.

I looked up at Drake, who was smiling like he was a kid showing off a test with a good grade.

“Pretty good, huh?” he said.

“He does sound like a weenie.”

“Big time putz, Sam,” he said, pointing at the e-mail. “And that was just the beginning. That e-mail was from the first report Jack did on IT&E. And there were other companies right smack in the middle of our crosshairs.”

“But you never got to pull the trigger?”

He shook his head.

“Nope. Marty was always right there with the stop sign. Then Jack would go to Marshall for advice, and he’d side with Marty, and Operation Outrage would get shelved for a week or two. Marty would say, ‘We need more proof if we’re going to go after these companies.’ Then I’d see a report about IT&E on a Web site or blog or somewhere, tell Jack, and he’d start screaming, ‘Why aren’t we covering this?’ So we would get it in the show and get a little traction, but then it would go nowhere again. I was always fighting an uphill battle with Marty.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “He’s a baby, Sam. He’s not like you and me. He’s not a man of action. He was afraid it was going to backfire and the ratings would slide even more. And he was afraid he was going to get shit-canned if that happened.”

“Why’d Marshall push back?”

“Because he’s an ass. I told Jack he should dump him. Get a younger agent—someone in tune with a hipper audience,” he said.

“And?”

“Nothing. Jack would give it some thought, but at the end of the day, he wasn’t going to make a radical move. Not unless everything really fell apart,” he said.

“Guys like Marshall have a lot of influence,” I said.

“Don’t you know it,” he said, shaking his head and sighing. “We were so close, Sam. The public wants this stuff. Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch are tired of seeing fat cat CEOs and their mansions and million-dollar yachts.”

“I know I am.”

“And the idiots at these companies like Ripley aren’t used to having a guy like Jack attack them,” he said. “The business reporters don’t ask any tough questions, No one says, ‘Hey, so why is your equipment showing up in Iran?’”

“But you wanted to,” I said.

“I did. But I’m only one man, Sam. There was only so much I could do,” he said.

I opened the folder and thumbed through the e-mails. “You think I can get copies of all the e-mails you have from Operation Outrage?”

“Sure, Sherri can take care of that for you,” he said.

I stood up and thanked him and we shook hands, and he caught me looking around the office.

“Like I said, these are temporary quarters, Sam. While the new place is being finished. You’ll have to come by sometime,” he said.

“I can’t wait.”