“My deadline is noon tomorrow.”
He was upset, maybe angry. “All night? What are you doing?”
“I’m putting together a teaser for the evening news broadcast. The D.A. says he has new affidavits from the Conklin witnesses. But no one has seen them. I have affidavits of another sort, and I want to get them on the air as soon as I can, before this business gets any uglier. Breaking into my office was going too far. I have a bad feeling that whoever was in here tonight knew I was occupied at seven o’clock. I don’t keep regular office hours. No one knows when I’ll drop in.” I glanced at Casey and felt hot all over. If someone knew where I was, they probably knew where Casey was, too. And Michael.
Mike said, “What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure until I get into it, but I’ll put together a sixty-second package for broadcast. Maybe it will flush out something useful.”
Mike reached over to take my arm, bring me in closer. “You shouldn’t go out alone. I’ll call someone.”
At ten, I had Casey tucked in and my materials gathered into a big box. Mike waited outside with me until my escort arrived, a black and white unit with two uniformed officers, then he went inside and I heard the deadbolt shoot home behind him.
My escort followed me back through Burbank to the network studios. Their spotlight saw me all the way into the building.
Lana Howard was waiting for me at the security desk. She made a crack about the lengths I would go to one-up the usual limos the talent used, but I saw that any doubts she had about the gravity of my new project evaporate when she saw my police tag. I wasn’t about to tell her that if Mike wanted me to have an escort, I would have an escort, whether I was coming in to draw mustaches on the portraits of the studio execs in the foyer or to save the universe from certain destruction. She was impressed, and that was enough.
Chapter 19
Usually, it’s far easier to make an hour-long or two-hour-long film than it is to make one that lasts only a minute. It is not especially difficult to condense the facts. I had put together enough evidence-including the shot of attorney Jennifer Miller at Jerry Kelsey’s place, with Kelsey’s face perfectly framed in the window behind her-to show the broad audience gross manipulation of the facts relating to Charles Conklin. The real difficulty lay in eliciting an emotional reaction in such a short time without resorting to the usual knee-jerk images: a waving flag, bodies on the street, starving orphans. I could explain, I could make people believe. But, in a sixty-second package, could I make anyone care?
By ten-thirty Thursday morning I was mentally numb and half-blind. With the help of a very patient and capable editor, I had what I thought was a good piece. I borrowed a portable tape player from him and drove over the pass to the hospital to show Guido.
“You look like hell,” Guido greeted me.
“You look like you’ve had a holiday,” I said. “Get the nurses off your bed and let me climb in. I’m exhausted.”
The two perky nurses who were ministering to him-one feeding him broth, one adjusting an IV-scowled at me as if I had invaded their zone. I further upset order by pushing things aside on his bedside table to make room for the video player. I plugged it into the same socket as the heart monitor, put in the tape, walked around to the side of the bed without all the IV apparatus, climbed up next to Guido, and stretched out.
“Excuse me,” the little brunette nurse whispered, scandalized. “Patient beds are sterile.”
“I’m sorry, Guido,” I said, sliding one of his pillows under my head and crossing my legs atop his white blanket. “You would have made a wonderful father.”
Guido told his nurses, “It’s useless to argue with her. Come over and see what she brought to entertain us.”
I started the tape. I watched them watch. And was gratified by their reactions. When it was over, I rewound it and played it again. The nurses stayed through the second run.
“That is so scummy, what they did,” the brunette spat. “Really, really scummy. How did they think they could get away with it?”
“Exactly the point I hoped to make,” I said.
Guido wrapped his arm around me, pulled me close to him, and kissed my forehead.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Hard facts, vivid images, steady build to the tagline. You did it without being self-indulgent or melodramatic. I think you’re getting dangerous, but it’s damn good. What are you going to do with it?”
“Lana Howard is taking it to her editorial board at noon. If she talks it into the rundown, look for it on the news at four, five, and six. Anything you would change?”
“Not a nanosecond.”
The brunette nurse’s face lit up. “You’ll be on the news?”
“Probably,” I said.
“If you’ll excuse us,” Guido said to her, “Miss TV Star and I have some things to discuss.”
The nurses left us alone but left the door open.
I asked him, “When are they going to spring you?”
“Now. Soon as the doc signs me out.”
“Want me to wait and drive you home?”
“Yes. If I call my mom, she’ll stay at my house for days shoveling pasta down me and cleaning cupboards. I don’t have the energy for her ministrations.”
“I think I owe you at least some taxi service,” I said. He waved off the suggestion of debt.
“What’s new?”
“Plenty.” I opened my bag and took out the police file on Wyatt Johnson’s shooting and turned to the follow-up report that Mike had written a year after the shooting.
“This is so interesting,” I said. “Reads like an old Dragnet script. Wish I could figure a way to use it.”
I took a sip of Guido’s water and started reading aloud to him the straight, flat, prose description of the scene in the service station men’s room that November night in 1979.
” ‘On 11-6-79, at 0045 hours, the victim, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Wyatt Johnson, a male black, twenty-four years of age, was found mortally wounded in the men’s rest-room of a service station on the corner of Century Boulevard and Clovis Avenue, in the City of Los Angeles. The victim had been shot six times through the chest and abdominal area. Four bullets exited the victim’s back and two deflected off his fourth and sixth thoracic vertebrae and exited through his right side. The motive for the shooting is unknown. The weapon was not recovered. No slugs were located at the scene or recovered from the corpse during autopsy.
” ‘At 0120 hours, detectives responded to the crime scene. The crime scene was being protected by the first officers on the scene.’ ” Their names and serial numbers were listed. I didn’t recognize any of them, and I didn’t read the names to Guido. ” ‘The weather was dry and clear, with the temperature in the low forty-degree range. The crime scene was illuminated by three single globe mercury vapor lights at the intersection and a double-tube fluorescent light attached to the eaves on the east side of the building. The area is commercial with multiple-family residences to the south.
” ‘Detectives observed the victim, supine, face downward, on the floor of the men’s restroom with his head wedged between the toilet bowl and the wash basin and his feet extending out the open doorway.’ “
I held up the hand-drawn diagram of the scene showing the orientation of the body, and then several black and white photographs of the blood-spattered room and the dark river that poured out from under the victim. According to the diagram, the room was three feet by four feet, barely wide enough to open the door without banging into the wash basin. To myself, I read through the description again before I turned to Guido.
” ‘He was shot from the front and he fell forward.’ “
“There wasn’t room to fall any way but forward.”
“Right,” I said. “The shooter had to be straddling the toilet or else he was wedged into the corner between the toilet and the wash basin.”