Hard News

2

Rune watched the tape once and then a second time. And then once more.

She sat in a deserted corner of the Network's newsroom, a huge open space, twenty feet high, three thousand square feet, divided up by movable partitions, head-high and covered with gray cloth. The on-camera sets were bright and immaculate; the rest of the walls and floors were scuffed and chipped and streaked with old dirt. To get from one side of the studio to the other, you had to dance over a million wires and around monitors and cameras and computers and desks. A huge control booth, like the bridge of the StarshipEnterprise, looked out over the room. A dozen people stood in clusters around desks or monitors. Others carried sheets of paper and blue cardboard cups of coffee and videocassettes. Some sat at computers, typing or editing news stories.

Everyone wore casual clothing but no one behaved casually.

Rune was hunched over the Sony 3/4-inch tape player and small color TV that served as a monitor.

A tinny voice came out of the small speaker. "Itold them back then just what I'm telling you now: I didn 't do it. "

The man on the screen was a gaunt thirty-something, with high cheekbones and sideburns. His hair was slicked back and crowned with a Kewpie-doll curl above his forehead. His face was very pale. When Rune had first cued up the tape and started it running, ten minutes before, she'd thought, This dude is a total nerd.

He wore a tight gray jumpsuit, which under other circumstances – say on West Broadway in SoHo

– mighthave been chic. Except that the name of the designer on the label wasn't Giorgio Armani or Calvin Klein but the New York State Department of Correctional Services.

Rune paused the tape and looked at the letter once again, read the man's unsteady handwriting. Turned back to the TV screen and heard the interviewer ask him,"You'll be up for parole, when?"

"Parole? Maybe a few years. But hell…" The thin man looked at the camera quickly then away."A man's innocent, he shouldn 't be out on parole, he should just be out."

Rune watched the rest of the tape, listened to him tell about how bad life in prison was, how nobody in the warden's office or the court would listen to him, how incompetent his lawyer had been. She was surprised, though, that he didn't sound bitter. He was more baffled-like somebody who can't understand the justice behind a plane crash or car wreck. She liked that about him; if anybody had a right to be obnoxious or sarcastic it was an innocent man who was in prison. But he just talked calmly and wistfully, occasionally lifting a finger to touch a glistening sideburn. He seemed scared of the camera. Or modest or embarrassed.

She paused the tape and turned to the letter that had ended up on her desk that morning. She had no clue how she'd happened to receive it – other than her being your typical low-level-person-of-indeterminate-job-description at a major television network. Which meant she often got bizarre letters dumped on her desk-anything from Publishers Clearing House award notices to fan mail for Captain Kangaroo and Edward R. Murrow, written by wackos.

It was this letter that had motivated her to go into the archives and dig up these old interview tapes.

She read it again.

Dear to who it may concern:

You have to help me. Please.

It sounded so desperate, pathetic. But the tone wasn't what affected her as much as the third paragraph of the letter. She read it again.

And what it was was that the Police which I have nothing against normally, didn't talk to all the Witnesses, or ask the ones they DID talk to the questions they should of asked. If they had done that, then I feel, in my opinion, they would have found that I was innocent of the Charges but they didn't do this.

Rune looked at the image freeze-framed on the screen. A tight close-up of Randy Boggs just after his trial several years ago.

Where was he born? she wondered. What was his history? In high school, had he been a – what did her mother call them?-a hood? A greaser? Did he have family? A wife somewhere? Maybe children? How would it be to have to visit your husband once a month? Was she faithful to him? Did she bake him cookies and send them to prison.

Rune started the tape again and watched the dull-colored grain on the screen.

"You want to hear what it's like to be in here?"Now, at last, bitterness was creeping into the thin man's voice."Let me tell you 'bout the start of my day. Do you want to hear about that?"

"Tell me whatever you want, "the invisible interviewer asked.

"You wake up at six and the first thing you think is Hell, I'm still here…"

A voice from across the room: "Rune, where are you? Come on, let's go. We've got an overturned something on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway."

The Model was standing up from his desk, pulling on a tan London Fog trench coat that would keep him ten degrees warmer than he needed to be on this April afternoon (but that would be okay because this was areporter's coat). He was an up-and-comer-one of the hotshots covering metro news for the local O amp;O, the Network's owned-and-operated New York TV station, Rune's present employer as well. Twenty-seven, a round face, Midwest handsome (the word "sandy" seemed to apply to him in a vague way). He spent a lot of time in front of mirrors. Nobody shaved like the Model.

Rune worked as a cameraman for him occasionally and when she'd first been assigned to him he hadn't been quite sure what to make of this auburn-ponytailed girl who looked a bit like Audrey Hepburn and was just a little over five feet, a couple ounces over a hundred pounds. The Model probably would have preferred a pickled, chain-smoking technician who'd worked the city desk from the days when they used sixteen-millimeter Bolex cameras. But she shot damn good footage and there was nobody better than Rune when it came to blustering her way through police barricades and past backstage security guards at Madison Square Garden.

"What've you got there?" he asked, nodding at monitor.

"I found this letter on my desk. From this guy in prison."

"You know him?" the Model asked absently. He carefully made sure the belt wasn't twisted then fitted it through the plastic buckle.

"Nope. It was just addressed to the Network. Just showed up here."

"Maybe he wrote it a while ago." Nodding toward the screen, where Randy Boggs was freeze-framed. "Looks like you could carbon-date him nineteen sixty-five."

"Nope." She tapped the paper. "It's dated two days ago."

The Model read it quickly. "Sounds like the guy's having a shitty time of it. The prison in Harrison, huh? Better than Attica but it's still no country club. So, suit up. Let's go."

The first thing you think is, Hell, I'm still here…

The Model took a call. He nodded. Looked at Rune. "This is great! It's an overturned ammonia tanker on the BQE. Boy, that is gonna screw up rush hour real nice. Ammonia. Are we lucky or are we lucky?"

Rune shut the monitor off and joined the Model at his cluttered desk. "I think I want to see her."

"Her? Who?"

"You know who I mean."

The Model's face broke into a wrinkleless smile. "Not Her, capital H?"

"Yeah."

The Model laughed. "Why?"

Rune had learned one thing about TV news: Keep your back covered and your ideas to yourself-unless the station pays you to come up with ideas, which in her case they didn't. So she said, "Career development."

The Model was at the door. "You miss this assignment, you won't have any career to develop. It's ammonia. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Ammonia," Rune repeated. She wound a paisley elastic silkie around her ponytail then pulled on a black leather jacket. The rest of her outfit was a black T-shirt, yellow stretch pants and cowboy boots. "Just give me ten minutes with capital H Her."

He took her by the arm, aimed her toward the door. "You think you're just going to walk into Piper Sutton's office?"

"I'd knock first."

"Uh-uh. Let's go, sweetheart. Double time. You can visit the lion's den after we get back and wrap the edits."

A figure stepped out of the corridor, a young man in jeans and an expensive black shirt. He wore his hair long and floppy. Bradford Simpson was an intern, a Journalism-School senior at Columbia, who'd started out in the mailroom his freshman year and was by now doing slightly more glamorous jobs around the station – like fetching coffee, handling deliveries of tapes and occasionally actually assisting a cameraman or sound crew. He was one of those madly ambitious sorts-Rune could identify withthat part of him-but his ambition was clearly to get his degree, don a Brooks Brothers suit and plunge into the ranks of corporate journalism. Sincere and well liked around the O amp;O and the Network, Bradford ("Don't really care for 'Brad'") was also cute as hell -in a preppy, Connecticut way. Rune had been shocked when he had actually asked her out a few days ago.

But while she appreciated the offer, Rune had found she didn't do well dating people like Mr Dockers TopSider and, instead of his offer for dinner at the Yale Club, she'd opted to go film a fire in lower Manhattan for theLive at Eleven newscast. Still, she wondered if he'd ask her out again. No invitations were forthcoming at the moment, however, and he now merely looked at the screen, saw Randy Boggs's lean face on the monitor and asked, "Who's that?"

"He's in jail," Rune explained. "But I think he's innocent."

Bradford asked, "How come?"

"Just a feeling."

Rune," said the Model. "We don't have time. Let's go"

She said to them, "That'd be a pretty good story-getting an innocent man out of jail."

The young man nodded and said, "Journalists doing good deeds-that's what it's all about."

But the Model wasn't interested in good deeds; he was interested in ammonia. "Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Rune," he said like an impatient professor. "Now."

"Oh, the tanker truck," Bradford said.

"See?" the Model said to Rune."Everybody knows about it. Let'smove."

"It's a goddamn traffic accident," Rune protested. "I'm talking about an innocent man in jail for murder."

Bradford said. "Thereis something about him…" Nodding at the screen. "He looks more like a victim than a killer, if you ask me."

But before she could agree, the Model took Rune's arm and led her firmly to the elevator. They descended to the ground floor of the four-story building that occupied a whole square block on the Upper West Side. The building had been an armory at one time then had been bought by the Network, gutted and rebuilt. Outside it was scabby and dark and looked like it ought to be housing a thousand homeless people; inside was a half-billion dollars' worth of electronic equipment and TV celebrities. A lot of the space was leased to the local O amp;O station but most of it was for the Network, which recorded a couple of soap operas here, some talk shows, several sitcoms and, of course, Network News.

In the equipment room beside the parking garage Rune checked out an Ikegami video camera with an Ampex deck and a battery pack. Rune and the Model climbed into an Econoline van. She grabbed the lip of the doorway and swung up and in, the way she liked to do, feeling like a pilot about to take off on a mission. The driver, a scrawny young man with a long thin braid of blond hair, gave a thumbs-up to Rune and started the van. Explosive strains of Black Sabbath filled the van.

"Shut that crap off!" the Model shouted. "Then let's move-we've got ammonia on the BQE! Go, go, go!"

Which the kid did, turning down the tape player and then squealing into the street hostilely, as if he was striking a blow for classic rock music.

As they drove through Manhattan Rune looked absently out the window at the people on the street as they in turn watched the van, with its sci-fi transmission dish on top and the call letters of the TV station on the side, stenciled at an angle. People always paused and watched these vans drive past, probably wondering if it was going to stop nearby, if something newsworthy was happening, if they themselves might even get to appear in the background of a news report. Sometimes Rune would wave at them. But today she was distracted. She kept hearing Randy Boggs's voice.

The first thing you think is Hell, I'm still here…

I'm still here…

I'm still here.

"So, why can't I just walk into her office and talk to her?"

The Model snapped, "Because she's the anchor."

As if nothing more need be said.

Rune trudged beside him through the scuffed corridor that led from the elevator back to the newsroom. The worn carpet was sea-blue, the parent company's corporate color. "So what //"she's an anchorwoman. She's not going to fire me for talking to her."

"Well, why don't you quit talking about it and make an appointment." The Model was in a bad mood because, yes, it had been an ammonia truck and, yes, it had tipped over but no one had told the station that the truck was empty. So, no spill. It had even had the courtesy to roll over onto the shoulder so that rush-hour traffic wasn't disrupted much at all.

They arrived in the studio and Rune replayed the tape she'd shot of the truck. The Model looked at the footage and seemed to be trying to think of something unpleasantly critical to say about her work.

She said enthusiastically, "Look, I got the sunset. There on the side of the truck. That ridge of red, see-"

"I see it."

"Do you like it?"

"I like it."

"Do you mean it?"

"Rune."

As the tape was rewinding Rune said, "But Piper's like ultimately my boss, isn't she?"

"Well, in a way. She works for the Network; you work for the local owned-and-operated station. It's a strange relationship."

"I'm a single woman living in Manhattan. I'm used to strange relationships."

"Look," he said patiently. "The President of the United States is in charge of the Army and Navy, okay? But do you see him talking to every PFC's got a problem?"

"This isn't a problem. It's an opportunity."

"Uh-huh. Piper Sutton doesn't care diddly-squat for your opportunities, sweetheart. You have an idea, you should talk to Stan."

"He's head of local news. This is national."

"Nothing personal but youare just a camera girl."

"Girl?"

"Cameraperson. You're atechnician."

Rune continued cheerfully. "What do you know about her?"

"Her with a capital H again?" The Model looked at Rune for a moment in silence.

Rune smiled coyly. "Come on, please?"

He said, "Piper Sutton started out where I am, right here-a reporter for the local O amp;O in New York. She went to the University of Missouri Journalism School. Anyway, she did beat reporting, then she moved up in the ranks and became head of radio news, then executive producer for radio. Then she got tapped as a reporter for the Network.

"She was overseas a lot, I know. She was in the Mideast and she got an award for covering the Sadat assassination. Then she came back here and anchored the weekend program then moved on toWake Up With the News. Finally they tried to move her into the parent. They offered her something pretty big, like executive VP in charge of O amp;Os. But she didn't want a desk job. She wanted to be on camera. She finagled her way intoCurrent Events. And there she is. She makes a million dollars a year. Lives on Park Avenue. That lady is ground zero in the world of broadcast journalism and ain't gonna want to spend time having a confab with the likes of you."

"She hasn't met me yet," Rune said.

"And she devoutly wants to keep it that way. Believe me."

"How come everybody talks about her like she's some kind of dragon lady?"

The Model exhaled a sharp laugh through his nose. "I like you, Rune, which is why I'm not going to ruin your evening by telling you anything more about Piper Sutton."