Waiting (26 page)
Authors: Frank M. Robinson
Just before the car pulled away from the curb, he cranked down the window to say, “If I were you guys, I’d watch my back.” A thoughtful look, then, “Take care of yourselves.”
The scary part, Artie thought, was that he wasn’t just being polite.
They had breakfast at
a small restaurant on Haight Street, sitting in the back, half hidden by a magazine and paperback-book rack. The fried eggs were passable, the bacon cold and greasy, the orange juice fresh frozen.
a small restaurant on Haight Street, sitting in the back, half hidden by a magazine and paperback-book rack. The fried eggs were passable, the bacon cold and greasy, the orange juice fresh frozen.
But Artie could have been eating hay and he wouldn’t have complained. “Schuler’s no dummy,” he said at last.
Mitch dug into a jar of grape jam to spread on his toast, then gave up and shoved his plate away. “Never said he was. He was just in a better position to know some things about Cathy Shea than we were. He was right—we were too close to Larry and we didn’t have the authority to interview the neighborhood. But we still know a lot more than he does.”
“I wish to hell I didn’t,” Artie muttered.
“Probably wouldn’t make much difference. We knew Larry—that’s the major sin. Our homicidal Hound would have assumed Larry told us everything in any event and things would have happened just as they did.”
“Professor Hall might still be alive.”
“Paschelke would still have been killed—and so would Lyle.”
The coffee was enough to gag on, but Artie drained half his cup.
“So what’s next on the agenda? Cathy’s a closed book—there’s nothing she can tell us.”
Mitch pulled several bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “Right in one sense, wrong in another. She was good friends with whoever killed her and there’s a good chance he’s mentioned in Charlie’s diaries.”
Artie dug in his pocket for some coins as a tip. “The only thing that’s wrong with that is apparently she was good friends with almost everybody.”
Mitch’s smile was bleak. “Except you.”
“Except me,” Artie agreed.
“When you get around to the diaries all you have to do is pick out the right boyfriend, Artie.” Out on the street, Mitch asked, “When are you going to get them from Charlie?”
“He said he’d call me at work so I could drop over to the library after hours.”
Mitch leaned against a newspaper box and flipped open his cellular phone. “I’ll help you run through them when I get back to the hotel.” He looked apologetic. “I’ve got to check my messages and tell Linda I’ll be in today—I’ve postponed too many sessions already.”
He concentrated on his phone, punching in his code for message retrieval. A few nods—Artie assumed that patients had called in to make appointments or cancel them. Then Mitch’s face suddenly became starched and flat of emotion. He glanced at Artie, then turned away. He punched in another number, looked again at Artie to see if he was listening, then held the phone so it was partly muffled by his coat. Artie could hear what he was saying but not the other half of the conversation. The only thing that gave Mitch away was his eyes, blinking furiously behind his granny glasses as they always did when he was excited.
Artie was insulted at first, then curious. What the hell? Mitch listened intently to the voice message he was getting, glanced again at Artie after the voice stopped, then punched in still another number.
Artie kept his own face blank and looked away, making a show of giving him some privacy. What was going on? Mitch had obviously received his messages, then punched in for a repeat of one of them, and now presumably was calling the caller back.
Mitch made his connection, then said in a soft voice, “Stu? Levin. Don’t want to talk about it now, just repeat the date.” A moment of tense silence. Then: “Got it. Yeah, unbelievable.”
He clicked off and slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Artie looked at him, ready to be sympathetic.
“Bad news?”
“You could say that.” Then a failed attempt at a smile. “Just business.”
It was business that had something to do with him, Artie thought. He’d stake his life on it. Mitch suddenly seemed remote, a hundred miles away.
“I’ve got to meet somebody, Artie—you can get back to the hotel okay?”
“I’ll grab a cab, go right to. work. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” But when Mitch looked at him, it was with the eyes of a stranger sizing up somebody he had met for the first time.
“See you at the hotel tonight?” Artie asked, suddenly tentative.
For a moment Mitch seemed surprised, then nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He started up the street to his car. He didn’t look back.
Artie stared after him. He had known Mitch Levin almost all his life, but inside of a few minutes it suddenly seemed like he didn’t know him at all.
“I’ve changed it a
lot,” Connie said nervously. “Jim and I had to go ahead without you—sorry about that, Artie, but Hirschfield wants it sooner rather than later.”
lot,” Connie said nervously. “Jim and I had to go ahead without you—sorry about that, Artie, but Hirschfield wants it sooner rather than later.”
“Have I made Hirschfield’s shit list yet?”
She shook her head. “Not yet—but close.”
She looked worn out, Artie thought—she must have shed five pounds in the last few days.
“You stayed here and worked on it all night?” He felt a brief twinge of guilt, then realized there was no way he could have helped her any more than he had.
“Not quite—we were here until three in an editing booth. Most of the audio track and sound bites are laid down and Jim started covering it with B-roll.”
Jim Austin was their star editor, and he and Connie had been friends from the day she’d started working at KXAM.
“What’s the standard, Connie? A bottle of Chivas?”
She gave him a long look. “Beam—and make it half a case. We took him away from his family at Christmastime.”
He pulled a stool over in front of the monitor, sitting close to Connie, who had balanced her yellow notepad on her knees. Jerry asked, “Ready?” and, when she nodded, started the tape rolling.
It was more of a PBS opener than Artie had figured Connie would use. Stock tape of lush forests of oak and pine with eagles flashing through blue skies, tumbling rivers with salmon leaping over rocks, grasslands spreading as far as the eye could see with a herd of buffalo on the distant horizon. Eden, Artie thought. Then the camera dipped for a view of an Asian forest and a tiger padded into the frame, highlighted for a moment against a patch of waving grass. It looked overwhelmingly majestic. Then a dissolve into the field tape they had shot of the Siberian tiger the day before, pacing back and forth in its tiny enclosure of weeds and artificial rocks.
And finally a shop in some unknown Chinatown with a shelf of mounted tiger’s paws, tins of something unknown but with the logo of a tiger on it—dried gall bladder? Powdered tiger’s blood? Aphrodisiacs of some sort? And in the back of the shop, draped over a small mound of boxes, a tiger’s skin, its teeth bared in a taxidermist’s idea of a snarl, muted by the poorly painted plastic buttons that served as eyes.
The skin could have come from the same tiger they had seen a few seconds earlier.
“I’m not sure about this title setup,” Connie murmured in his ear.
On the monitor was an animated version of an artist’s palette with splotches of brilliant paints: greens and blues and reds and yellows and purples and pinks. Then an animated brush started mixing the colors, slowly at first, then speeding up into a flurry of motion. The different splashes of pigment were swirled into various tints and shades, which gradually lost any sense of purity and merged into a brown that covered the palette and then the entire screen. The title “World Without End?” was reversed out on the muddy background.
All the brilliant colors at the start had been reduced to a shit brown, Artie thought. The analogy was obvious: a pristine world that had been reduced to … what?
“We took it from the opening of a Disney cartoon,” Connie said in a low whisper. “We can do a variation if we can’t get permission.”
Artie was fascinated by the images on the tube. She had taken the assignment and run with it; he’d been egotistical to think she had needed his help at all.
Now the screen was filled with portraits of various animals while Connie narrated the names of the endangered species: the Siberian tiger—fewer than five hundred remaining in the wild; the Florida panther—thirty to fifty; the black-footed ferret—less than five hundred; the red wolf—fewer than three hundred; the ocelot—a hundred … .
Her voice faded into a chroma-key shot with Connie standing in front of what would have been the weather map, only with the zoo footage rolling behind her while she explained the “sixth extinction”: the thirty thousand officially threatened species, including more than five hundred mammals, almost a thousand each of birds and fishes, more than twenty-five thousand plants.
Species went extinct all the time due to natural causes, she continued. But this time the culprit wasn’t nature; it was man. Take Mozambique, where a dozen different armies had used everything from assault rifles to helicopters to slaughter the animals. The white rhinoceros was now extinct, only a few black rhinos were left, the elephant population had fallen by ninety percent.
The image behind her now changed to a large commercial fishing boat, pulling in nets and dumping the day’s catch on the deck. The situation was no better in the oceans, where overfishing was gradually emptying the waters. Bluefin tuna in the Western Atlantic was down by ninety percent and due to drop farther—it was selling for three hundred and fifty dollars a pound in popular sashimi restaurants in Tokyo.
Overfishing had gotten so bad that Canada had shut down its fishery in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, throwing forty thousand people out of work. Poaching inside its two-hundred-mile coastal limits had already led to shooting with Canada firing on and boarding a Spanish fishing trawler; Icelandic fishing ships and Norwegian patrol boats had exchanged gunfire. Were these the first shots in the coming wars over the spoils of the sea? And inland, streams where fish had once been so plentiful early explorers claimed you could cross the water by walking on their backs were now so polluted they ran brown and empty.
Few fish caught within coastal waters were suitable for eating, the on-screen Connie said in the wrap-up.
Jerry stopped the tape after the end of the segment.
“How long did it run, Jerry?”
“Under five minutes—four forty-two. It’s still a little over.”
Connie frowned. “We’ll have to take the time out of the final segment.” She looked at Artie. “So? What do you think?”
Artie was impressed. “You did a great job—so did Jim.”
“It gets better. Okay, Jerry.”
The second segment was titled “Garbage World” and opened with squirrels gathering acorns at the bottom of an ancient oak, then panned to a stream a hundred feet away where the banks were spattered with rusting cans and empty bottles while the water was iridescent with oil and toxics spewing from a waste pipe jutting out from one of the sandy banks. Finally, shots of women washing clothing in the Ganges, a river that had “died of detergent.”
A stand-up with Connie talking about a consumer society while she wandered through the aisles of a Costco packed to the ceiling with electronics and household furnishings, racks of clothing, pallets of detergent and twelve-packs of soda and beer, refrigerator cases filled with TV dinners and frozen chicken parts, and a meat department with ground beef in five-pounds packages and steaks a dozen to the plastic tray. “And it all comes packaged,” Connie said.
Jerry stopped the tape again. Connie turned to Artie and asked, “You want to take a break?”
Artie’s coffee was cold but he didn’t care.
“Let’s go through the whole thing—after that I’ll go home and kill myself.”
Half an hour later
the tape finished and Gottlieb ejected the cassette.
the tape finished and Gottlieb ejected the cassette.
“Thanks a heap, Jerry.” Connie left for their glassed-in cubicle overlooking the newsroom, Artie trailing after her in silence. They sat and watched the activity outside for a minute or two, then Connie said, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong with it. I already know it can be polished.”
“I think it’s a great piece of work,” Artie said. “Also, depressing as shit.”
Connie nodded. “You read an article here and an article there, the newspapers run stories, once in a while you see a review of a book about it or watch a PBS special. But you don’t read or see them all at the same time—you don’t add them up. It’s easier to worry about your next raise, your heartburn, what the kids are doing to each other after dark and what about a curfew. You feel you can do something about those. This kind of stuff just makes you feel … helpless. What the hell, you don’t fish, you don’t farm, you recycle and hope the problems will go away.”
“Hirschfield seen the tape?”
She dumped some sugar in her cold coffee and stirred it with the cap of her pen.
“You hit the one bright spot. He loved the script, he loves this more—thinks he can get the network to carry it in six weeks or so, after the February sweeps. Hell, they’ve got nothing else important scheduled then.”
Maybe it was their one last chance to change things before the Hounds of Hell came up with something really final, Artie thought.
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