Hostage (5 page)

Unlike the staff at Channel 7, the bunch here was a friendly group, and various hands waved and faces smiled as Todd walked through the center of the newsroom toward his office on the far side.

“Hi, Mary,” he called to one of the reporters, who sat in her cubicle to the right.

“Knock ’em dead today, will you?”

“Just for you.”

“It’s still a go,” called the assignment editor, Frank, a burly guy with thin brown hair, who was coordinating today’s activities like a mad ballet. “One o’clock and he’s yours.”

“Great.”

There’d been some worry, after all, that Clariton might cancel again on Channel 10; six months ago on another brief trip?before he had a book to sell—the congressman had backed out literally seven minutes before a scheduled interview. Using that as leverage, Todd had managed to get Clariton’s PR person to grant him an exclusive today.

Todd entered his office, a small glass-walled space on the far side of the newsroom, and before he even put down his briefcase or took off his overcoat, he hit a couple of keys on his computer keyboard. As he hung up his coat his messages came up on the color screen, and he sat down and quickly scrolled through them. Nope, nothing that couldn’t wait until later this afternoon. Next picking up his phone and checking his voice mail, he found five messages, including one from Janice, his girlfriend the lesbian, as he called her, with whom his life was so intricately entwined. She was visiting family in Santa Fe, and she had called to wish Todd good luck with the interview.

“But I wish you were here, Todd,” she said on the message. “All of us do. It would have been really terrific.”

There was a knock on the glass, and Cherise, one of the producers, a woman with rich black skin, poked her head in. “Todd, I just wanted to let you know that we’re entering your pieces on the Megamall in all the awards.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, they’re both among our most widely watched segments of the year.”

“Does that mean I get to keep my job?”

“It’s been a rough decision, but I guess so,” she said with a smile.

While Todd despised the Megamall because it threatened to turn Minneapolis into a doughnut city—another sprawling Detroit with its shopping and life drained from the city core—Todd knew that viewers first and foremost loved a someone-done-somebody-wrong story. With that in mind he had first focused on the crime at the Megamall that wasn’t being reported because it was happening within the confines of a private establishment; with a tip from a former gang kid they had videotaped one mugging, two car thefts, and a handful of hookers scoring in one of the bars. Next a guide from some part of the dismembered Yugoslavia had taken him on a tour, starting at the Grand Balcony—a perch attached to the food court that overlooked the enormous indoor amusement park—and then continuing all the way down into the space where they were planning to build the humongo exhibit and ride called Journey to the Center of the Earth. But where they were about to start construction on buried dinosaurs and rivers of lava, Todd had failed to find any safety flaws. There was a rumor that payoffs had been made to building inspectors, and when Todd could find no evidence of that either he focused the second segment on how little taxes the mall actually generated since there was no sales tax on clothing in Minnesota.

“You know,” added Cherise, “the Clariton interview will probably be even more widely watched. We’ve had promos running for the last two days.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’m going to give you guys fireworks.”

“I’m sure you will. Good luck!”

Todd turned back to his computer, calling up Lexus-Nexis, a professional research database. Yesterday he’d printed out no less than a dozen articles from sources such as
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times,
and he’d taken them home and read them all last night, highlighting key points and any and all crackpot comments the congressman had made. In an interview such as this Todd liked to find the subject’s main buttons and then, of course, hit the biggest one first. Naturally Todd was going to go right to health care and Clariton’s comments on AIDS. Then he’d move to the book, which was drawing fire because of the millions of dollars he was earning from it. Hey, and wasn’t the thing ghostwritten? And lastly, the national budget, more specifically Clariton’s tax plan, which sounded good but didn’t seem to add up.

Todd had stayed up late, scratching notes and questions on a yellow legal pad, and now he scrolled through the research program, hunting the wire services for last-minute news. There was news about a storm brewing in the Rockies, something about an overturned school bus in New Hampshire, more on the political problems of Russia, but only a couple of small mentions of Clariton’s book tour. Searching for anything else, new or old, Todd scrolled on and on, through listing after listing. Although he couldn’t convince himself, he really didn’t need anything more, but he pushed on, at the same time trying to visualize how the interview might go, what might happen. Without ever thinking about it, Todd did a great share of his work in the shower, on the road, while he jogged, and now while he busied himself with an essentially unnecessary task.

An odd title popped up on Todd’s screen, one he hadn’t noted yesterday, and he hit the RETRIEVE button. Seconds later a short, humorous article appeared from the
L.A. Times
in which a reporter wrote how Clariton was the master of saying something totally weird right at the beginning of an interview. Todd pondered this a moment, then realized something quite important. So Clariton was that kind of ass, was he?

Completely consumed, Todd was startled when his office phone rang. Checking his watch as he picked up the receiver, he realized that nearly forty-five minutes had passed.

“Channel Ten, this is Todd Mills speaking.”

“Hey, it’s me.”

Todd immediately smiled. Rawlins. Clutching the handset in his right hand, the interview and everything else vanished.

Todd said, “So what did the doctor say? We’re on for New York, right?”

“What?”

“The doctor—what did he say about your sinuses? Will you be able to fly next week?”

“I don’t know yet. I mean, my appointment’s not until after lunch. I’m still at your place.”

“Oh, just lying around, are you?” joked Todd. “So what’s up?”

“You won’t believe it: We got a witness.”

“A witness? A witness for what?”

“I called down to the station to check on messages,” continued Rawlins, referring to the police station. “And some old guy across the street from Curt’s apartment saw something.”

Todd had been so focused on the interview that at first he couldn’t quite switch gears. Someone saw what?

“You’re talking about the night Curt died?” asked Todd.

“Exactly. Granted, it’s not much, but it’s a start,” replied Rawlins. “You see, there’s this old guy who lives across the street from Curt’s apartment building, and he hasn’t said anything before this because he really hasn’t gone out this winter. Something about a bad hip. I don’t know how or why he wasn’t questioned, but… but, anyway, the night Curt died he hears something right outside his back door. He puts on his glasses, goes into the kitchen, and turns on a light. And what do you think he sees?”

“Some kids?”

“No, a bunch of raccoons in his garbage. So he bangs on the door and scares them away, and they dart out front, dragging some junk with them. The old guy then goes to the front of his house without turning on any lights, and when he looks out the window he sees the raccoons in the middle of the street ripping apart a McDonald’s bag. Apparently his grandson had stopped by and brought him some dinner. Gutsy little things, he thinks. Gutsy because they broke into the garbage and stole the last of his dinner. And gutsy because they’re not even frightened by some guy walking down the street. Get this, a guy who turns and heads into Curt’s building.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“So what does this guy look like?” pressed Todd. “Did the old man see much? Better yet, does he even remember?”

“He was wearing a dark coat and hat. And he was white.”

“Great, I wonder how many white guys in Minneapolis own dark coats.”

“True, it’s not much to go on,” replied Rawlins over the phone, “but it does prove someone went into the building. And whoever that was obviously went into Curt’s apartment, because none of the other tenants had any visitors that night. None. That much we already know.”

“Any idea what time of night this was?”

“Shortly after two. The old man is sure about that because he looked at his bedside clock when he got out of bed.”

“Which is about when Curt died,” said Todd, recalling the coroner’s report. “So it obviously wasn’t a simple suicide.”

“Nope. Either it was an assisted suicide—which I suppose isn’t all that bad, is it?—or… or just a plain old murder.”

It probably wasn’t the latter, pointed out Todd. After all, nothing had been taken, not Curt’s stereo or his VCR or even his gold watch, which was sitting right on his dresser.

“So given Curt’s health,” commented Todd, “I suppose an assisted suicide is the logical explanation. I mean, if I were that sick I’d probably want something like that.”

With a deep sigh Rawlins added, “Yeah, me too.”

“But listen, I have to get going. We’re leaving in about twenty minutes.”

“Well, good luck. And Todd?”

“What?”

“Don’t forget your tie.”

“Thanks, I’ll put it on right now.”

“I’ll be thinking of you.”

“And I’ll be thinking of you.” Todd hesitated. “Listen, if your doctor says you can’t fly, we can cancel everything in New York and just take a drive up to Lake Superior or something.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

Even though I had to do it before he said too much about our plans, I thought I would have been more upset about killing Curt. On the other hand, did I really kill him or did I merely help him catch an earlier train out of his own personal hell? I mean, let’s face it, anyone would have done as much for a dog in half the pain.

I’ve never seen anything more cruel than AIDS, the way it attacks your entire body and creates all those sores and weird infections. They used to say the lucky ones got something like pneumonia and croaked overnight. Now they say the lucky ones get the pills, all those protease inhibitors or whatever. Frankly, I don’t know which is better. No one does, actually. Over these long years of the epidemic I’ve just seen too many guys linger and linger, bouncing from crisis to crisis, hope to despair, Kaposi’s sarcoma to blindness to fungal infections. Nowadays some guys are able to get their T-cells back up there, but who knows for how long. Sure, the new drugs are inching toward promise, but if you ask me, AIDS is like watching the end of your own life come racing toward you. You know it’s going to smash right into you, eventually take you six feet under, and there’s nothing you can do.

Watching Curt fade away over this past year has affected me like nothing else. So would I do it again? You bet.

These past couple of
months Elliot had never been happier. He wasn’t really sure why, everything just seemed so clear, all the complex questions so black and white. As he now walked down Nicollet Mall, the main street in downtown Minneapolis, with his small nylon backpack slung over one shoulder, he couldn’t help it. He just wanted to stop there at the corner of Nicollet and Seventh, rip off his little black tam, and hurl it into the air just like Mary Tyler Moore. Sure, he thought, you can turn the world on with your smile. Everyone has that power, that magic. He used to spend so much time worrying—what was he doing with his life, why wasn’t he more successful, when would he ever get out of the stupid restaurant business and become a real, serious artist?—and for what? Where had it gotten him? Everything was so much simpler. You live and you die. And he’d probably be dead by fall, if not a whole hell of a lot sooner.

A true Midwesterner from Omaha—Homoha, in his lexicon—Elliot had always been tall and gangly with long Ichabod Crane legs and arms, but of course he was now thinner than he’d ever been in his entire skinny life. He had a long face with a little mouth, dark eyes, and for the past few months he’d been sporting a little goatee, a sprout of light-brown hair on his chin and above his lip. He’d never been handsome, though some people found him cute, even now at forty-three, probably because of his lankiness, his smile, and, well, his artistic bent—namely his hip clothes, the gold hoop earrings that he wore in each ear, and so on. For a long time he’d been worried that he’d never had a long-time companion—he had a girlfriend once way back in his freshman year at college, and over the years a couple of guys he used to date—but being unattached was just making this so much easier. If he had a lover now, Elliot would worry about leaving him behind.

As he’d done for the last ten years he’d worked here, he ducked into the brick building on the corner, entering the marble lobby and walking directly to the escalator. The restaurant, Jerome’s, was on the second floor, connected to the skyway, that system of second-floor passages and bridges that turned the entire downtown into one big ant farm, and as he rode the escalator upward he realized he could walk this route blind, no prob. Like his best chum, Curt, who’d worked here since the restaurant had first opened until over a year ago when his health really went to pot, Elliot had spent so much time here. He’d worked four evening shifts and two lunches a week, making a pretty good buck too, for he was a pro at humoring the customers and anticipating their every need. He got to paint as much as he wanted during the week and work an invigorating job—all in all not bad. Fun people too. Oh, the parties they’d had after work, drinking wine and smoking pot, laughing and dancing. God, he used to dance a lot, didn’t he? He should, he knew, be doing more of that while he could still walk, but frankly he just didn’t have the energy anymore.