Savant (11 page)
He had cleaned all the loose notes out of his office. Anything that he might use toward creating a great theme. It boiled down to a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings, book reviews, and cryptic annotations that referred to sound bites on scraps of half-inch home VHS tape that he'd collected over the past year or so.
The next project he'd build at home. If he used the telephone he'd dial from card-op public phones and use his credit card or bill the calls to the station line. He'd dedicate himself to coming up with something that would pull his rear end out of the flames. He wanted to save his job—at least until he figured out what he wanted to do for a living. Understandably, the first theme was Big Brother. Surveillance. He seriously toyed with the idea of paying Buzz or some unsavory character to climb down the "Engineering ladder" to the internal security vault and get proof of the station's spying on its employees. Wasn't there a Missouri statute against "entrapment" or something? He could check all that out. Build a case. A brief against KCM! File it on the air over "Inside America," and—when it got humongous numbers and regional press—it might be enough that they wouldn't have him killed. What the hell was he thinking? His big theme was to indict the people who employ him? That made zero sense. But still—he'd let it simmer.
He began taping streamers of news clippings around the apartment in categories:
Mistrials and Plea Bargaining-the Courts in Trouble, Child Abuse, Pornography, Censorship, Adolescence in the American Value System
. It was a personal favorite, but he wondered how it would play in the Kansas/Missouri radio ether: the concept that we'd rather squander millions on parades celebrating a tiny war that had no complete resolution, pretending it was the heroic victory of all time, when Vietnam vets had only begun to be honored, than feed the poor…. He junked that one immediately—too much realism! Pretty soon he'd covered all the walls and was starting a series of file folders with the offshoot topics that ranged from Abortion to Zoning.
So many of these big topics had been done and done and redone and done to death. Could he really stand one more show about the pornography shops, television, the NEA, movie ratings—all of that? Borrrrring. He went around the room pulling down the environmental stuff, the porno stuff, and pretty soon the walls were visible again.
This wasn't the way to go about it. He'd start with categories and get precise definitions, then open them up. He looked at a stack of notes and the one on top read Vandalism. He pulled down a dictionary and turned to the
V
s: Vulgarity, Volumetric analysis, Vitriol, Violins, Violence…He stopped his thumbing backward through the dog-eared book and read:
"Violence:
N
(1.) Physical force exerted to abuse or injure. (2.) Instance of a physically forceful treatment or action. (3.) Effecting injury by physical force, brute strength, brutality, physical assault. (4.) Unwarranted or unjust use of physical force or savagery. (5.) Furious, turbulent, or physically violent act of destruction or fierceness."
He read on through the synonyms and variety of meanings: "Excessiveness, rage, brutality, assault, vehemence, fury, destructiveness, force, rampage, savagery, frenzy, fervor, attack, severity, onslaught, turbulence, bedlam—" There was a word or definition explaining violence for nearly every clipping he had! Bloodbath, mad passion, craziness, deadly force, rebellion, street gangs, child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, rape, hysteria, bestiality, explosions, desecrations—it was all here under this one mad umbrella.
Violence
. Even vandalism!
Certainly, there were topics that didn't fit, but even those that fell immediately outside this category pointed him toward specific future show subjects: "Waste and Corruption," "The Japanization of America," and others instantly gave him slants he'd not looked at before. He'd tapped into the talk-show gold vein.
Violence was the broad background theme for thirty shows—at least. Trask had a month of material he would do in advance, and blow the minds of Flynn, Metzger, and everybody at the station. He would ask for a parking space in the lot, and—in lieu of a raise—Barb Rose's head on a silver platter. No, too violent. He'd ask for a pay-to-play contract clause but settle for the parking space.
Suddenly every story in his stack in front of him, from "Mistrial in Rape Case" to "Infant's Body Believed Placed in Trash by Parents," all went back up on his apartment wall. Subdivided into appropriate categories—a few of which were arguable—it appeared at first glance that Trask had the makings for nearly six weeks of fascinating late-night shows—all on the same universally encompassing theme.
The day that started semi-shitty for the senior researcher at KCM Radio had ended solid gold.
The next day Trask called in sick and stayed in his apartment "on aspirin and vitamin C, to shake this cold" that was coming on. The fact is he probably didn't have much more than that, in the form of a glass of orange juice, and four cups of coffee which he took time out to fix from a jar of instant, as he worked on his files, from before sunrise to one o'clock the following morning.
When he finally stopped to take a deep breath and examine the results of his work, he wanted to call Sean Flynn, who'd probably just be returning to the studio from his nightly post-show donut and coffee, to tell him to "clear the decks for the next two sweep periods!" He was bursting to tell somebody about what he'd stumbled across, but he knew it would be professional suicide to do so. Metzger and his pal Ms. Rose would get cut in on it and he'd be left right where he was.
What he did instead was set his alarm for eight A.M., and he went into the bedroom and crashed for a deep seven-hour sleep. He was up the next morning and writing, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, stoked as he hadn't been since his early years in the business. Victor Trask had come alive!
The focus began with an international overview of violence, cribbed mostly from TV news and talk shows, and an interesting study he'd wangled from the local sheriff's Homicide unit.
From there, it focused on Kansas City, and the statistics on property crimes of burglary, larceny, auto theft, arson, robberies, assaults on persons, rape cases, attempted murders, homicides, and suicides. His source on this was an FBI press kit, and the K.C. cops were using it to help bolster a political fight to stem budget cuts.
Violent crime was up over ten percent overall, with murder having jumped nearly fifteen percent in the past year. In a period of twelve months, Kansas City, a town of—according to a recent census—slightly less than 450,000 citizens, had recorded nearly sixty thousand violent crimes. That was just within the city limits. The K.C. metro area, a vast sprawl of densely populated suburbs, wasn't included in the survey. The city alone showed that approximately one out of every seven persons had recently committed or would commit a violent crime. And those were just the crimes reported. Rapes and assaults went notoriously unreported. Violence—it appeared—was genuinely epidemic in proportions.
What Trask's discovery had been, however, was not in the sheer numbers, but in the nature of the crimes. His file headed Violent Deaths was the key to the "exposé" aspect of this series of interlinked shows he was outlining. It would be what other media would tag as the core of the programs which would deal with escalating violence in America. If his conjecture could be proved it would bring both Sean Flynn's program, and by projection
himself
, to the attention of the entire country. Trask saw something nobody else had seen, or so he believed. He saw a single thread of motive weaving through some of the most violent murders.
How was it possible he'd found something the Kansas City cops had missed? This was nothing to rush to the station with. It was the chance of a lifetime, the "beat" of a career, and came with its own built-in public forum. All he needed was time to put his case together.
First things first: If Rose had an ear on his phone or in his office, he could have it uncovered, but if she did—and he knew that she did—it had to be with Metzger's tacit approval. If the producer was as close to the woman as it appeared, Trask would accomplish little by exposing her spying and thievery. Perhaps Metzger hadn't encouraged it, or even known about it, but he would probably protect her. She was a tough cookie. Like so many in broadcasting, she had limited talent but a terrible driving ambition. She probably saw the bug or wiretap business as industrial intelligence—just good business one-upmanship. There was also the possibility that Babaloo and Barb were a secret coalition, and the plan was to undermine Trask for whatever reason. It really didn't matter. What he had to do was now create a false agenda, which they would then find.
By memoranda and scraps of notes, by phone calls made out of his office at KCM, by a select batch of tapes left on his desk, he would create this fictitious slate of projects to be discovered and—for all he knew—purloined.
The odd thing was that when he'd got a slant on the violence theme, so many hitherto boring subjects began to fall into logical order. Slant was everything. When he saw how these other topics could be interwoven he seemed to get new perspectives on a wealth of tried-and-true topics from
organ donors
to
organic farming
. They all fell into place for him. It was tough to find shows he didn't want to research, all of a sudden. These new slants brought a hot light to these well-trod issues, making them interesting and provocative again. A topic as yawn-inducing as
tabloid news
had now become
name fixations
. He could imagine a clinically analyzed piece on our penchant for celebrity trivia that worked on a different level than the superficial one. We loved to hear, see both film and video, and read gossip about the Donald or the Kennedy family. But the why of it was linked to root causes more substantial than what might first appear to be the case: he could see ways this report might be part of an overall look at the human condition that would be tremendously thoughtful and thought-provoking—if not meaningfully revealing. Everything always came back around to the same basics such as sex, politics, and religious beliefs or personal philosophies—or the lack thereof—but it was the way in which those basics were probed that could make a talk show thrilling or lackluster. Trask knew that he'd touched a rich nerve near the pulse of mankind's existence, and he had that same scent in his nose that archaeologists must get on a hot dig. He smelled secrets and buried treasure.
T
he telephone in Elaine Roach's apartment had the bell position muted to its lowest point, but still she jumped when it rang.
"Hello," she said.
"Miss Roach, this is Tommy Norville."
"Oh, yes, sir!" Her voice brightened. One of the boss's infrequent phone calls.
"Well, how did the first auction night go?" he asked, with just a hint of sibilant simper and pseudo-world-weary petulance in his voice.
"Very well. Sir—I'm glad you called and I certainly hope you won't be angry with me but I—uh—had to take the phone off the hook at two-thirty A.M. I just couldn't stay awake any longer. I hope it's all right?" He could hear the nervousness and fear in her scratchy voice.
"Of course, it's all right. You mean you were still getting calls as late as that?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I think they must have tried to phone me all night, for when I put the phone back on this morning at seven-thirty, it rang instantly. A man in California said he'd been dialing and getting a busy signal all night long."
"Hmm. Amazing!" he said through fat pursed lips.
"Of course, I didn't tell any of the ones who phoned this morning that I took the telephone off the hook last night."
"Well," the effeminate-sounding man told her, "you certainly didn't get much sleep." He wanted to ask about the auction response but he decided he'd go gently. "Perhaps tonight you could retire earlier, Miss Roach. And then, of course, you'll have a couple of weeks to recuperate before the next round of telephone calls."
"Yes, sir. Oh, by the way, you might want to know that we had many calls on one of the items, Mr. Norville. Number forty-one? The cased dueling pistols that belonged to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?"
"Oh?" He kept the interest out of his tone. "Did they fetch a decent price?"
"Oh, yes, sir! The highest bid was from a man in New York who bid $24,500 for them."
"Pardon?" He had to make a noise that sounded like a loud cough, and he covered up the mouthpiece of the phone while he laughed. He loved making fools of the monkey people.
"A man in New York bid twenty-four thousand five hundred for them. And we had about two dozen bids on that item. Next to number forty-one item number three was the most popular, it appears—" Then she began to give him an accounting of the telephone auction. He let her ramble on for a while.
"That sounds excellent, Miss Roach. And you emphasized we would need cashier's checks or money orders, did you not?"
"Yes, sir. And I told them we had to be in receipt of payment within ten days as per the stipulation in our printed terms. Everyone said they would comply. Several persons wanted to know when their items would be sent out, and I reminded them that you will notify all winners within one week, and that it will take about two weeks to process the winning remittances, so with packing time one could safely say approximately six weeks from the time their remittance is sent." She was maddeningly pedantic and precise in spelling out everything she'd enunciated or done in the last twenty-four hours, but that was exactly what he'd wanted. Nothing would reassure a mail-order customer more than a nice, long phone conversation with somebody as obviously straight as Elaine Roach.
He realized that it was doubtful anyone would be writing him a certified check for $24,500, not for a sight-unseen item from an auction with whom they'd had no prior business, but if her figures were any indication, he knew that his war treasury would soon be healthy again.
