Murder Straight Up

1

The flashlight went dead with no warning. No fading to dim yellow. No sputtering. Just dead.

At the moment, I was somewhere on the second floor of KRLD-TV, Channel 3, standing inside an overly starched gray uniform that bore the insignia FEDERATED SECURITY on the right bicep, and the male equivalent of “sensible” shoes, big ugly brown mothers with thick squeaky rubber soles. I’m on my feet a lot.

My first reaction to any piece of gear that won’t work is to subject it to threats and ridicule. You know the routine. Shake/kick/stomp it, all the while swearing at it, until it gets so embarrassed that it starts working again. I once had a Muntz TV that this number worked very well with. Other than that, my method has been singularly lacking in success.

It was dark as hell up here, and while it wasn’t horror-movie spooky by any means, it was uncomfortable even for a thirty-eight-year-old ex-cop and now security man like myself.

For one thing, the flashlight had elected to cop out in the middle of a group of cubicles that were a long way from any windows. The second floor is the executive level, which means it had closed down for the day three hours ago.

Which meant it was only slightly darker in here than in Richard Nixon’s mind.

In addition to being a security man, I am also an actor. True fact. To prove it, I can show you cards from both AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and SAG (Screen Actors Guild). I’ve been in more than two dozen commercials (three of which have been on network) and innumerable dinner-theater productions, and can be glimpsed in a Paul Newman movie playing a priest. Yes.

I mention this here because one of the dinner-theater productions I’d done was Wait Until Dark, the play about the blind woman stalked by killers. One thing I hadn’t liked about the actress was that she overdid the blind bit — you know, banging into furniture as if she were playing bumper cars with it.

But tonight was making me change my mind. She hadn’t exaggerated, at least not by much.

If you’d been an observer standing to the side and watching me try to grope my way to light, you would have heard a succession of minor crashes and a steady litany of obscenities, the American male’s preferred way of dealing with virtually any crisis.

Finally, my knees sore from hitting desks, my hands twitching like the antennae on a berserk ant, I stumbled out into the hallway and over to a window that was haloed with foggy golden streetlight from below.

The fog made the light eerie enough to make me feel lost on a different plane of existence. Real “Twilight Zone.” Only the persistent squeak of my shoes kept reminding me of who and what I was.

The rest was easy. I just followed the path of windows leading to the wide staircase that swept downstairs to the lobby and the brightly lit, bustling news department of Channel 3.

Or at least that was my intention.

When I got halfway to the stairs, my eyes at last adjusting to the shadow shapes that moved in the foggy light, I heard something that froze me.

In police school you are warned over and over about dark places — about going into them unprepared. Your weapon and your flashlight, you are told, are the most important things you possess at this moment. Well, we already know about my flashlight. So, for reassurance, my hand touched the formidable handle of my Smith & Wesson. The only thing moving was the sweat draining from my forehead down my face and from my armpits down my side.

Somebody, no doubt about it, had scraped something against an uncarpeted section of flooring somewhere to my right.

My mind registered all sorts of unnecessary information: the smells of floor wax, cleaning solvent, dust; the sounds of electricity thrumming in the walls, of tires whishing over rainy pavement on the street below; the play of shadows deep in the staircase.

After thumbing free the catch on my holster, I drew my weapon in a single easy gesture and turned back to the origin of the sound.

Suddenly I became aware of the desperate noise my heart was making, trapped in the cage of my chest. Goddamn, only a year off the force and I was as nervous as a rookie covering his first prowler squawk.

I was taking some deep breaths, trying to calm myself down, when the intruder made his move. He was a brief silhouette against the golden fog of window. Then he was into the shadows, running.

“Stop!” I yelled.

My command didn’t have any effect. He kept running, shoes slapping the hallway, deeper and deeper into the darkness at the rear of the building.

Now my fear was gone. I was too busy to worry about being afraid.

“Stop!” I shouted again.

The slap-slap of his shoes. He led me down a corridor, around a corner, down another corridor, around yet another corner.

Finally I had to slump against the wall, catch my breath. For long moments I could hear only my breathing. Big wet gasps of it in my ears.

And then I heard his breathing, too.

Somewhere ahead in the gloom.

But he wasn’t just panting, as I was. There were sobs intermixed.

“Goddammit,” he said. “Goddammit.”

It was the first time I realized I was dealing with a relatively young man. Maybe even a teenager. I pushed off the wall, following my weapon, starting for the shadows where the kid was hiding behind a door.

“I’ve got a weapon drawn,” I said. My voice sounded huge in the darkness there. “I want you to drop any weapon you’ve got and step over there into the light.”

A window spilled more foggy light on the floor.

The breathing again. The sobbing. The kid was crying.

“Come on now,” I said.

“Fuck yourself.”

I might have felt sorry for him, the tears and all, if I hadn’t known from experience that he was in a very dangerous state at the moment. I’d once cornered a seventeen-year-old who’d been dealing hash. He’d slammed himself up against a wall and stood there convulsed with tears. All I could think of, being a parent myself, were the strange, sad paths taken by young people sometimes. You just hope it won’t happen to your own. My pity damn near got me killed. When I got up near him, shot out a hand to put reassuringly on his shoulder, he came up with a razor blade that cost me eight stitches in my forearm.

“Come on now, into the light,” I repeated to this kid on this night.

He went over into the light, but only briefly. Then he did what I was trying to prevent him from doing. Reaching the door with the electric red exit sign above it. The door opened onto an exterior fire escape.

He lunged for it, got it opened and dove through.

In that instant I had to make a decision: to fire or not.

“You sonofabitch,” I said, not sure if I was cursing him for running or me for not firing.

I jammed my weapon back into my holster and went after him. I reached the door just as it was closing. When I slammed it open, I stepped into hell. Damp, foggy, rainy light enveloped me, thick tumbling wraiths of it. I put a hand on a wet piece of iron fire escape. Below me I heard his footsteps banging on metal rungs of ladder, down, down.

“Damn,” I said.

I couldn’t even see him. Just hear him.

Then I couldn’t even hear him anymore.

He was gone, lost in the clouds below. I stood listening to traffic, an airplane forging ahead through the muck overhead, a distant siren. “Damn,” I said again. But this time I knew exactly whose ass I was gnawing on. My own.

I was going to look like one swell security guard when I filed my report with the Federated people. Not to mention the people at Channel 3.

On the first floor, in the light, I found the muddy footprints and learned how he’d gotten inside.

A john near the newsroom had gotten clogged up and started to overflow. One of the maintenance engineers had called a plumber, who, in turn, had come over and fixed the john. The only trouble was that he had left the back door — through which he’d brought all his tools — open by laying a wrench between door and jamb. You didn’t exactly need to be a brain surgeon to figure out how to sneak in.

I made all the proper reports, first to the police, second to Federated and third to a man named Sears, who was essentially my boss here at Channel 3. His official title was Building Manager. He clucked and said, “Damn, the boss ain’t gonna like it. Damn.” Then he hung up. The boss he referred to was a Mr. Robert Fitzgerald, station owner and local celebrity. He did his own editorials. You found him either stirring or hilarious. He could have given John Philip Sousa a few lessons in corn.

Around nine-fifty I went into the coffee room the newspeople use and had a snack from the vending machines, a purposely unhealthy one. Ho-Hos. Pepsi with real sugar. Even if it was the plumber’s fault the kid had gotten in, I didn’t look real good. Not with a busted flashlight and a kid who had found an easy way in and an even easier way out.

I let the news distract me.

The network show was just finishing, music up and the announcer talking about what the lucky viewer would find on the early-morning show; then suddenly there was David Curtis, Channel 3 anchorman, looking solemn as he told us what was ahead in just a few moments.

You had your basic city council scandal (the mayor was a flunky, it seemed, for every major vested interest this side of the Mississippi); you had your basic governor-at-the-ribbon-cutting-ceremony-for-a-new-factory story; you had your basic bad-news number on the Cubs (they always looked so happy; you’d think they’d have the decency to look glum at least once in awhile, the Cubbies); and you had your basic hotdog weatherman who tonight (no shit) was promising to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in honor of his grandmother’s birthday.

While the commercials were on, I looked around the coffee room. There were enough plastic chairs and tables in here to make Ronald McDonald happy for a long time. On the right was an imposing row of vending machines that sold everything from stale sandwiches to fake hot chocolate. On the left was a long bulletin board that attested to the celebrity of local newspeople. Here was Dave Curtis in his Channel 3 T-shirt making nice-nice with a heartbreakingly sad-looking little girl in leg braces; here was the singing weatherman, Bill Hanratty, leading a chorus of elderly citizens, each of whom wore a Channel 3 T-shirt; here was the ex-pro football player and now sports announcer Mike Perry in coaching togs (cap, whistle, Channel 3 T-shirt) explaining a play to a group of teenage black kids; and here was co-anchor Dev Robards, white-haired, white-bearded and Hemingwayesque, hunched over a typewriter in a pose that looked like a movie still from a 1930s tough-guy film.

There was something about the self-congratulatory air of these photographs that made me smile. From the little I’d gotten to know the Channel 3 news team (I’d been working here a week of nights), I had come glumly to realize that that was how they perceived themselves, in some theatrical way as idealized “stars.” Hey, man, Jerry Lewis helps the fuckin’ crippled kids; so can we, you know?

The door opened, and in came a slender, dark-haired woman in tight designer jeans and a blue pullover sweater. With the bow in her hair she managed to look younger than the body pushing against the jeans suggested. Her name was Kelly Ford. She was Channel 3’s news consultant.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice suggested that she thought it was wonderful of herself to speak in such a nice way to the hired help. She was in her mid-forties and — despite herself and her bullshit arrogance — there was something sexy in the desperation of her dark glance and the twitchy way she pushed quarters into the Pepsi machine. You began to think the arrogance wasn’t real, that it was a bluff.

“We’ve painted the set a new color for tonight. See what you think.”

“Sure,” I said.

I looked down at the empty Ho-Hos package in front of me. I noticed that she was noticing it, too. I’m afraid there is not much good you can say about a man my age who eats Ho-Hos.

“Glad to see somebody else has the same problem.”

“Oh, yeah,” I kind of muttered. “Junk food.”

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” She stood over me, hip cocked, smiling. “But I did, didn’t I?”

“Sort of, I guess. I mean personally I feel that anybody who would eat Ho-Hos is capable of doing anything.”

She laughed. “Anything?”

I nodded. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Then something happened to her face. The smile vanished as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw locked. “Straight up,” she said, glancing at the clock that read exactly ten o’clock. “The show is starting.” Her transformation from chatty companion to all-business news consultant was almost terrifying in its abruptness. But then, in a real sense, this was “her” show. Or at least it was her very nice fortyish ass that was on the line.

You know how news shows open these days. All that hokey horseshit with the fast cuts and up-tempo music to show that our newspeople go out there and, by God, personally bring the news back themselves. Right.

Well, it was just after one of those standard-issue news openings when it happened. The sequence was this. First there was a shot that briefly showed the entire Channel 3 team: David Curtis and Dev Robards, co-anchors; singing Bill Hanratty, weatherman; and Mike Perry, sports. And then the director cut to the number-two camera.

That’s when David Curtis, just as the camera fixed on him, got a very odd look on his otherwise handsome face and brought a hand up abruptly to his throat. A small silver circle of foam formed around his lips. His eyes bugged as he rose out of his seat. In a restaurant once I’d seen a man start to choke. Curtis looked this way now, desperate for somebody to help him.

He put the other hand to his throat — again the impression he was strangling — but before he could do anything else, he fell face first across his desk. On the screen you saw the hump of his shoulder blade and a blank Chroma wall in front of which he’d been sitting.

“Oh, my God,” Kelly Ford said. “Oh, my God.” The horror on her face could be likened only to films of the Robert Kennedy assassination that still haunt me. A kind of*silent scream on the faces of the onlookers, the mouth pulling back, the jaw dropping down, the neck snapping...

“I’ve got to go in there,” she said. “My God.”

She tried to set her drink on the table, but she missed. Ice and Pepsi exploded on the floor. Not that either of us gave a damn. At the moment we had more serious things to worry about.