“If you want to go, go.”
Ten minutes later, Mike’s hair still wet from his shower, they went. It took me a few minutes longer to get washed and changed. The house was quiet when I was ready, some unedited tapes tucked into my bag. I found Michael stretched out on the couch with headphones on.
I shouted his name.
He took off his headphones. “What?”
“I’m going to spend a couple of hours editing an interview. Would you like to come?”
He nestled down among the cushions. “Another time.”
I understood. He was enjoying some blessed aloneness while he could.
All the way down Ventura Boulevard, I was enjoying the prospect of having my work space at home again. No more commuting, no more rent. I would be more accessible for Casey, especially with her school only a couple of miles from the house. Best of all, I was thinking as I pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot, I wouldn’t be working alone at night.
I went upstairs first to check my studio slot for the following night. A special-education expert named Linda Westman was coming in to discuss the relationship between learning disabilities and growing up in a war zone. I picked up my mail-most of it junk-stopped at the ice cream machine before I went down the hall to my office.
The hall walls needed paint. The carpet needed cleaning. The whole building was an unloved, transient haven. I had never bothered to notice before. Now that I was a short-timer, I saw it all with a more objective eye. With pleasure, as soon as arrangements were made for the house, I would call the rental agency and tell them they could start looking for a new tenant.
When I put my key in the door, my first thought was that even the locks were cheap; sloppy works. But I had installed new locks of my own. Good ones.
Sometimes we have to listen to that little inner voice that may have picked up on some tiny nuance; something about the easy way the new locks turned set off the alarms. I pushed the door open and hit the lights without stepping inside.
My office, at first, seemed exactly as I had left it the day before. But things had been touched: The middle drawer of the old wooden desk had to be lifted just so to make it close all the way. Someone who didn’t know that had last closed my drawer. The shelved tapes were meticulously aligned, the shooting notes on the blotter were stacked with the corners nice and even. The usual dust was there, the trash had not been emptied. I am not meticulous about straight corners and aligned edges, the night cleaning crew had not been in to straighten anything.
The real clincher that set off the adrenaline rush was, the message light on my answering machine was not flashing. I took a pencil out of my bag and used the eraser end to punch the replay button. The day’s usual collection of messages began spieling out.
Right away, and using the pencil to dial, I called Michael.
“Check the doors,” I told him. “Make sure everything is locked. Until your dad gets back, don’t let anyone, anyone in.”
Then I paged Mike. While I stood by the telephone waiting for him to call me back, I saw that the power light on one of the tape players was glowing. I pushed play and watched Etta on the courthouse steps during the three minutes, twelve seconds-according to the VCR timer-that it took Mike to get to a telephone.
“What?” he said when I answered his call.
“Someone was in my office.”
“Is it tossed?”
“No,” I said. “Barely touched. Whoever it was put a tape in the VCR, listened to my phone messages, went through my desk and the tape files. I don’t know whether anything is missing. Or added. It’s damn spooky.”
“You’re there now?”
“Yes. What should I do?”
“Bolt the door and wait for me.”
I used the time to make another call. Lana Howard was at home.
“What’s the progress?” she asked me.
“Everything’s great,” I said, hauling up enthusiasm for her benefit. “A film always needs time to find its stride. At this point, we are in full striding glory. A few in-studio interviews and a follow-up or two, and then we’re ready to give it form. It will, I say with all modesty, knock your socks off.”
I was watching Etta on the screen again as I talked. “The reason I called, though, is, something interesting has come up in the process and I want to run it by you.”
“Sure.” She sounded eager.
“This Charles Conklin business?”
“Yes. Great story.” Sounded like real enthusiasm. “Really great. So many human interest elements there.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. Her enthusiasm seemed to be that of a convert, and my job would be the difficult one of re-education. Lana first, the entire viewing public next. “And the half you don’t know involves Baron Marovich, the murder of a prostitute, the shooting of a cop, media manipulation-stop me when I’ve peaked your interest-high-level perjury, breaking and entering and, if we stretch it, child abuse.”
“I don’t know, Maggie. How long is this piece?”
“I can do it in sixty seconds. I can do it in sixty minutes. Depends on what you want. Before you make a decision, though, you need to know that someone is after my data. My office was broken into this evening. I have a feeling that the sooner I get something on the air, the safer I’m going to be.”
“Really?” Dramatic expression. “Are you in danger?”
I fudged here. “I have been followed. Guido was doped. He’s in the hospital right now. My gut feeling is, someone is desperate to stop certain information from being made public. Now, you’ve been in this business almost as long as I have. You know that the more someone doesn’t want you to give some piece of information, the more that information needs to be broadcast. We’re not talking personal dirt here. We’re talking misuse of the public trust. And the election is six weeks away.”
“How soon can you have something for me?”
“If I can use the network facilities and borrow an editor, I can have something that will singe the paint off your nose by noon tomorrow.”
She didn’t need to think it over. “Just tell me what you need. If you can have something for me by noon tomorrow, I’ll schedule a lunch meeting and screen it for the editorial board.”
After good-bye, I turned off Etta, ejected her tape, and slipped it into my bag.
I heard Mike and Casey coming down the hall. When I opened the door, they looked as if they had been in a foot race. They surveyed the office, both of them disappointed that there was nothing to see. Mike was carrying a large fishing tackle box.
“They were here after seven o’clock,” I said. “The last message on my machine was from Guido’s mother giving me an update on his condition.”
“How’s Guido?”
“Asleep, but okay.”
Mike had opened his tackle box. He took out a large soft-bristle brush, a plastic bottle filled with dark graphite powder, and a roll of wide clear tape. With these tools, he lifted prints from the buttons on the answering machine and the VCR, from the light switch and the door knob. Then he took out an ink pad and made a set of prints from me and a set from Casey.
“If you find a stranger’s prints,” I said, “what will you do with them?”
“Run them through AFIS.”
Sounded like a garden pest, but it was the state’s computerized fingerprint identification system. Anyone with prints on file with the state, from school teachers to convicted ax murderers, was in the computer.
Mike lifted more than a dozen clear prints. Most of them were mine or Casey’s. The four or five that did not compare, he put into a small brown envelope and tucked into his tackle box.
“I’ll follow you home,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “But, if you’ll be okay watching over Casey and Michael tonight, I have some work to do at the network production facility. I need to pick up some material from home, then I’m gone.”
“How long do you think?”