The Morning Show Murders (1) (12 page)

"No big deal," I said. "I should just keep my mouth shut around Solomon."

"He's a sweetheart, for sure," Phil said. "He reminds me of Rudy, may God rest his black soul."

"You didn't think much of our late executive producer?"

"You should have seen him in Kabul, Billy, in his Abercrombie and Fitch great-white-hunter garb."

"I didn't know you'd made that trip."

"Oh, yeah. Me and"--Phil deepened his voice theatrically to imitate the WBC evening news anchor--"Jim Bridewell."

"Sounds just like him," I said. "Who else was over there?"

"Rudy brought a couple of crew guys in from the L.A. bureau. Damn, but he loved to throw his weight around. In just a few days, he had the noncoms hating his ass and the officers going out of their way to avoid him. I wished I'd had that luxury. Bridewell is like a Calvinist or something, but he doesn't bother anybody with it. Rudy was a demanding, rude-as-hell asshole."

"What was that trip all about, anyway?" I asked. "There wasn't any special story, as far as I could see."

"It was the commander's idea," Phil said. "At least it was according to the late unlamented. Our first night there, Rudy got plowed at dinner. He told me Commander Di Voss had sent him there on a special mission."

"He say what the mission was?"

"No. Made out like it was a big secret, strictly need-to-know. Then why bring it up, asshole?"

"He didn't even drop a clue?"

Phil thought about it. "You know, I've been wondering if it could have had something to do with this thing that happened the next
night when a bunch of us were in an Irish pub near the Mustafa Hotel. These Afghanis showed up at the pub, looking for trouble. They picked a fight with two of our security guards. A third guard got us out of there pronto and back to the hotel. The next day we found out that one of the remaining guards, a guy named Deacon Hall, got his throat cut."

"Rudy mentioned that," I said. "But he claimed he was there when it happened."

"No way." Phil shook his head. "Rudy was with me, safe and secure back at the hotel. But he freaked big-time when he heard about Hall. Took it surprisingly hard. In fact, he caught the next flight out. Bridewell and the rest of us had to stay and finish up the week. In that heat. With bombs going off. Still, conditions improved one hundred percent without Rudy."

"What makes you think the bar fight might have had something to do with Rudy's so-called mission?"

"After they brought us the news about Hall, and Rudy got over his freak and decided to head for home, he said, 'My business here is finished anyway.' Since he hadn't been planning to leave
before
he heard about Hall, I guess that made me think Hall might have had something to do with his 'mission.'"

His failed mission, according to the commander.

"They catch the killers?" I asked.

"Billy, that sort of shit goes on all the time over there. Those guys don't know from
Law & Order
. My guess is the surviving guard took care of the two Afghanis. Those Touchstone mercs don't take it well when you kill one of their buddies."

"There must have been some talk about it."

"Talk? Yeah. The Army general's office informed us we were to keep the murder off the newscast until Hall's relatives could be notified. The Touchstone security rep would tell us when we could run the story. That didn't happen while we were there. Far as I know, it never happened."

"You shoot a lot of footage?"

"That's how I roll, Billy."

"What about off-duty action? Like the night in the Irish pub?"

"I got some stuff. Nothing on the murder, though, since they dragged us out of there."

"I'd still like to see what you shot," I said.

"Anytime, Billy."

"How about after you're finished here?"

"Sure," Phil said.

"I'll see if I can sneak a few of those steaks away from the cops," I told him.

While Phil roamed the restaurant with his camera, I shut the door to my office, then took Rudy's black book from my pocket. I started at the first page and worked toward the last, looking at the initials of the dead man's sexual partners. I wondered what their full names might be and if any of them might have caused Rudy's death and sent Clove Boy to my building to retrieve the black book.

I briefly considered picking up the phone and starting to dial numbers and see who answered. But there were hundreds of entries. Even if I had the time and the patience to run the numbers through a reverse directory, I'd come up with only a percentage of the names. And then what? The bottom line was that I simply hadn't the heart to invade the privacy of so many women, especially since I doubted it would accomplish anything. The odds of my discovering a homicidal needle in this haystack of one-night stands and best-forgotten seductions and broken affairs were too long.

I was about to toss the book back into my desk drawer when the office door was flung open and Solomon and Butker sauntered in.

"Whatcha got there, Blessing?" Solomon asked. He quickened his pace to the desk and snatched the black book from my unresisting fingers.

I felt like screaming, but developing a mental method of staying cool under stress had been the first thing my mentor Paul Lamont had demanded of me before he took me on the road. "Thanks to you, I've got the night off, Detective," I said. "I don't plan on spending it alone."

Solomon flipped a few pages. "Damn, Blessing. You're the original sexist pig, aren't you? Look at this, Butker. He even grades the dumb broads who fall for his crap."

Butker gave the book a quick once-over. He seemed impressed.

"Can I help you, Detectives? Maybe you need a date for tonight?"

"Hardly," Solomon said. He grabbed the book from Butker's fingers and tossed it onto my desk. "There are some locked cabinets
downstairs. Before we tear the doors off, I thought I'd ask if you had keys."

I picked up the phone, dialed Cassandra, and asked her to provide the detectives with whatever keys they needed. "Anything else?" I asked Solomon.

His answer was to leave the room. Following, Butker did not bother to shut the door.

I sighed and looked at the little black book. If Rudy's name had been in it, I'd have been cooked. But while Solomon was pawing through the damned thing, I'd calmed my panic mode with the thought that a player who'd used only the initials of his conquests probably wouldn't have put anything in the book that might identify himself.

"My God," Cassandra said from the door, "a little black book, Billy? I'd never have taken you for an ass man. When do you have the time?"

"We ass men make the time," I said, opening a desk drawer and tossing in the book. Now that the detectives believed it to be mine, I suppose it was, officially.

"Those insufferable cops are driving me crazy," she said. "You think you're rid of them, then they return. They're like the silverfish in my apartment."

"What can I do for you, Cassandra?"

"You wanted a report on the coq au vin dinners?"

"Right."

"It is one of our most requested meals. And as Maurice reminded me"--Maurice Terrebone being the kitchen supervisor--"it's all but impossible to account for every single entree if it's on the specials list."

I understood what she was saying. Because the specials are often partially prepared in advance, and because it is impossible to accurately predict how many will be ordered on any given night, even with the waiters pushing them a bit, there may be as many as five or more left over at the end of the evening. These are often devoured by staff.

"I've accounted for the served entrees," Cassandra said, "and the takeouts. That only cost me an hour and a half studying receipts, which in turn led to my developing a killer headache. I think I may need glasses. Are contacts covered by our health insurance?"

"You'd know more about that than I," I said. "Thank you for the
coq au vin report, Cassandra. And would you do me a big favor? Before the silverfish cops take all the steaks from kitchen, set two aside for me."

She rolled her eyes. "My boss, an ass man."

"Spread the word," I said. "But mention I'm not so jaded I'd turn my nose up at a pair of nice round breasts."

"Sometimes, Billy, you really disgust me."

"Don't forget the steaks," I reminded her.

New York's Finest had snagged all the steaks by the time Cassandra went looking for my deuce. So I wound up working a little harder than I'd planned that night at Phil Bruno's, building a dinner around a two-pound rack of lamb. While I put Phil's Viking stove to use roasting the lamb, simmering a ginger-mint sauce, and creating a potato-leek soup, he occupied himself by putting together a presentation of the footage he'd shot in Kabul.

The kitchen was impressive, better equipped and better-looking than the one we used on set at the Wine & Dine. The onyx sink and built-ins, and the leather, chrome, and smoked-glass dining-room furniture, all rested on a sparkling black-tile platform. It was a sort of freestanding set piece for a huge living space that occupied the complete upper floor of a converted warehouse in the Meatpacking District, south of West Fourteenth Street, just a few blocks from Pastis and PM and the other hot restaurants and clubs.

The walls were a dark wood, the floor covered by a deep sea-green carpet that added timbre to the voice of Frank Sinatra, who at the moment was singing about the Isle of Capri from some hidden stereo source.

I enjoyed the kitchen time: I found it very therapeutic to perform
familiar tasks that I was confident would be completed successfully within a relatively short period of time. Sinatra had made his vocal tour of vacation spots and we'd moved to another Jersey Frankie, Valli, by the time I laid out the lamb en croute on the dinner table, along with the potato-leek soup, hot dinner rolls, and, to slosh it all down, a tasty, Bordeaux-styled Corbieres.

Phil took one look at the spread and said, "Fuck you, Blessing, where's the ketchup?"

For a while we were too busy eating to talk. Then, hunger satisfied, we polished off what remained of the wine and sampled the lemon tarts I'd rescued from the Bistro's freezer and discussed an assortment of things unrelated to why I was there.

Phil told me a little about his late father, the famous
Life
photographer Claudio Bruno. One of his most recognizable black-and-white pictures, blown up about four times the size of a magazine page, occupied a section of the loft's rear wall, between Phil's bedroom and office. If you're old enough, you may remember the photo. It captured in crisp detail a puffed-up, then-still-ambulatory Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace Jr., strutting in some gala state parade, blissfully unaware that a little black boy in pressed white shirt, short white pants, and saddle oxfords was sticking out his tongue, razzing him from the sidelines.

Old Claudio had been a real pro with a camera but not much of a dad, as Phil saw it. Usually away from home on assignment and when at home preoccupied and distant, the elder Bruno wasn't exactly Cliff Huxtable. When Phil's mother died from cancer, he and his sister, Gina, were left to fend for themselves. Years of therapy had led Phil to believe that his father's rejection was why he'd settled for a bachelor's life.

"What exactly are you hoping to find on my footage?" he asked me, when we came to the end of the lemon tarts.

"I don't know. I may not even know it when I see it."

"Well, let's take a look," he said, picking up our coffees and leading me from the raised platform to the living-room area at the front of the former warehouse. A plush, dark-green leather sofa and chairs looked across a smoked glass-topped coffee table and an expanse of soft carpet to a large shiny black slab approximately nine feet high, ten feet wide, and two feet deep that rested near the wall. From it came
the electronically subdued voices of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, dueting on "Banana Split for My Baby."

Phil placed my coffee near the chair on the right and his close to the left side of the couch. "I had wireless controls built into the left armrest," he explained. To illustrate, he pressed a button and Louis and Keely were immediately silenced. Another button and the front of the slab split apart, its sides sliding silently to the left and right, exposing an elaborate entertainment unit consisting of a large flat monitor and an assortment of decks with blinking lights--God knows what leisure-time delights they all delivered.

"I designed the case myself," Phil said, his grin a clear indication of the pride he had in his creative furniture, his electronic gizmos, and his whole setup.

"You should be working for Sharp or Sony or launching the Space Shuttle," I said. "On the other hand, looking at this place, I guess you're doing pretty well at the network."

"Oh, the building was my inheritance," he said. "The old man finally came through. When
Life
closed shop and he got hit so bad by arthritis he couldn't keep running around, he bought this warehouse for studio work. Portraits. Some ad stuff. The irony was, by the time he finally settled down in one place where we might have been able to connect, I was beginning my career at KCBS on the West Coast. He had one foot on a cloud when I started the gig here at WBC. We had just a few weeks to get to know one another.

"After he died, I took this building and my sister took the house in Long Island. She wanted to get away from winter and the Northeast, so she sold it right off. That was back when property values were up. Gina's a Miami girl now."

He'd been sorting through a stack of DVDs that he'd assembled, studying the labels as we talked. He selected one and, holding it, clawlike, by outer edge and center hole, fed it into one of the glowing decks. Then he returned to the couch, where, using his wireless armrest, he lowered the room lights, turned on the monitor, and played the DVD.

The image on the monitor was high-def sharp and crisp, a handheld scene of a poorly lit secluded street in, Phil informed me, central Kabul. Five men were walking, mainly in shadow, not talking. You could hear distant gunfire and shouts on the soundtrack.