Savant

17

Trask had no trouble simulating illness on the second day he called in sick. He phoned Flynn to let him know how ill he was and Jerri Laymon spoke with him.

"Sean's out for a couple of hours, Vic. Do you want me to have him call you?"

"Not unless he needs to speak with me, Jerri," he rasped into the phone.

"You sound awful."

"It sounds worse than it is."

"Well, get some rest and I'll tell everybody, okay?" she said. He thanked the Mystery Tramp and broke the connection. He was ill. He'd had almost no sleep during a headachy period when he was coming down with a cold, and the lack of sleep had done him in. He had the odd feeling of being in a great mood, jubilant in fact, and sick as a dog simultaneously. He socked the vitamin C down, popped aspirins, and worked.

He knew what he had to do and it was making him nuts to think how much had to come together just right to make this sweetheart really happen. He had the inside track on one of the great beats of the year. It coursed through his innards like molten lava—he could taste the richness of it. Gang war! He'd hit on a secret that maybe even the cops hadn't found. He was positive of it. Every time he tried to test his theory it "proved" against the known facts. And he was in the process of weaving it into the very guts of his massive presentation on "American Violence."

On the face of it, the discovery didn't appear to be much of anything. Everyone knew that drugs were the cause of most violence nowadays. What he'd found, however, was a secret beyond chilling—it was so frightening he hadn't completely sorted out the ramifications of it, and he couldn't without official cooperation.

He'd found what he was certain was evidence of a secret race war being waged under Kansas City's nose—without the cops' knowledge! It scared the hell out of him.

Victor Trask's apartment was papered in faces, biographies, background checks, newspaper clippings, photocopies of maps, magazine stories, and his own notes. Looking up from his desk this is what he saw:

The face of the young cabbie, David Boyles. Lived in the 700 block of Truman Road. Secretive. A loner. A weird kid of a man who identified with the De Niro part in Taxi Driver. His friends—such as he had—were casual ones who knew he liked to smoke a little hash, snort some blow, party quietly, and—if you were a bud, he'd deal you some stuff for a profit. Trask was an expert investigative guy when he really went on trail, and all you had to say was "I'm preparing a show for 'Inside America,'" and people would talk. They were conditioned to personal questions such as Flynn routinely asked on the air, and most persons would open up to radio or TV people in a way that even cops had trouble matching.

When you were talking to somebody "off the record," or on "deep background," it was truly amazing what they'd reveal. Tax scams, black-sheep confessions, drug usage, there wasn't much they wouldn't reveal about their own pasts, and they'd tell you everything about the next guy. People, basically, liked to gossip.

From mustached, dark-eyed closet dealer David Boyles, an arrow ran to the other side of the room where wild-haired twenty-four-year-old Steve Yoe's picture adorned another sheet of notes. There was a tie between the two of them. Yoe was an artist for Anderson Design Group, and his own drug record had come to Trask's attention. His connection at one time was "a guy who drove a cab." So Vic knew he was on solid ground.

He didn't know how Jim Myers, Laura Miskell, Annie Granger, Gerald Smotherman, Henrietta Bleum, or Bub Foley fit into the mix yet. But twenty-three-year-old Brad Springmayer, a sheet-metal worker at Mid-America Products, Inc.; thirty-one-year-old waitress Mae Ellen Dukodevsky; and Robbie Allen Scovill all had acquaintances who'd inferred that a puff of reefer or a little hash oil was not out of the question. Bernie Salzman, a pre-med student who had been killed mysteriously just before the big firebombing, had once figured in a three-person scandal at one of the hospitals in which drug thefts had been suspected. Drugs flowed through so many of these names you couldn't help but see the commonality.

Trask had a face for nearly every clipping he'd collected: "Man Admits Murdering Daughter's Husbands," "Kansas Man Charged in Gun Battle," "Woman Shot in Robbery," "Man Charged in Wife's Death," "Woman Pleads Not Guilty to Murder"—dozens of clippings that at first did not appear related to drugs in any remote way. They stared back at him from the wall, between the genial, fatherly face of James Wrightson, Sr., the manager of Missouri Farm Machinery, who was shot and killed in a "drive-by" according to one source, and the sullen, pretty countenance of Monica Foster, twenty-eight, the woman who'd been a fifth-grade teacher at Priester Elementary before she'd been blasted apart. There was another common quality all the victims had.

The Steel Vengeance Scenic Motoring Club members, the forty-three-year-old housewife married to a carpet store manager, the guy who worked at Truesdale's, the woman who'd been decapitated in her home, all these victims of mysterious shootings and even the three headless, mutilated bodies found north of Sugar Creek—they all shared the same thing. There was not a black face among them.

To find a black person who had died violently in Kansas City, Missouri, excepting a thirty-nine-year-old stabbing victim, one Marcus Little, you had to go back over a month. The recent spate of shootings, bombings, and the mob-style executions culminating with the crucifixions on Mount Ely, had claimed non-black victims. Even the three Hispanics and one Asian who had died in recent fatalities were light-skinned. The black man who'd died of his stab wounds had been killed in a drug-related incident.

Drugs and Race were the common threads woven through this tangled blanket of violent crime. Somebody had stepped on a gangbanger's turf, and a drug lord—perhaps one far away—had decided to wage a small war against the non-African-Americans involved.

To be sure, there were holes in this rough blanket. For example, the killing of Henrietta Bleum, seventy, a widowed woman, appeared on the face of it to make no sense. Then Trask discovered she had a grandson involved in dealing. There were a couple of others who seemed to be totally without ties to drugs, even by friends, coworkers, or relatives—but in time, these names would give up their secrets as well. All these killings were tied together, Trask thought.

His confidence was only bolstered by what he learned about Louis Sheves, an unemployed street guy, and a crook—perhaps even a hit man—by the name of Tom Dillon, both of whom had lived on the fringes of organized crime. The more Trask looked at this thing the clearer the picture became. Dope and gangs. Biker thugs cooking up lethal narcotics. Small-time drug guys, and the users/dealers who were their connections. It all fit together like a jigsaw. If the black gangbangers were an offshoot of the big clubs on the West Coast, or in league with the Colombian cartels, the seriousness of the ordnance also was self-explanatory. Either way, they would have access to rifle grenades, bombs, and the sort of individuals who could wield them expertly.

There were some problems in putting this whole bag of disparate parts together. First, he had to keep it absolutely his secret until he was ready to present it, complete and wrapped in pretty ribbon, to the radio station. If anybody found out what he was working on, this would no longer be a Vic Trask project. He'd have lost both his beat and his shot—which he saw as once-in-a-lifetime. Second, he had to go to the cops. If he was right, they had to be told about what he'd found. He thought it was quite possible, however far-fetched others might think it appeared on the surface, that he'd uncovered something the cops hadn't. His desire and his ego were cooking on that high a burner.

First things first: prepare for work. He had to have a presentation that would appear to preoccupy him, a seemingly rich skein of interwoven subjects that did not touch on this subject matter. His "stealables," he called them.

This divided into subsets such as the Factlet stuff. He had a collection of them:

"The Independence, Missourian reports that fifty-seven percent of Americans surveyed would support a tax-funded government program to shelter and care for the homeless." Flynn could almost do a show around such a fact.

"Did you know that when stamps get stuck together by accident you can put them in the freezer for a few hours and they'll usually come unstuck?" He had tons of that kind of stuff. Some of it was of little value, but he was looking for quantity not quality. He wanted bulk for show. And there was wheat with the chaff.

He had some good topics researched. Barb couldn't steal all of them, surely. He had a slant on the ban of rock concerts, and a series of likely booker-interview subjects that began with the Who concert deaths, and ranged from a local ACLU guy to the spokesman for Guns N' Roses—about an incident at a Missouri concert date.

There was a show on local broadcasting that Flynn, and for that matter Trask himself, would get off doing: a lot of data on the station that was being sued in a libel matter, they were appealing a multimillion-dollar judgment; the anchor at "4" who was celebrating twenty-five years on the air—he had a great slant on why he'd turned L.A. down twice; the scandal with the morning team who had talked their newsman into reporting a fake UFO sighting—all kinds of neat interview possibilities.

Then in with the goodies, he'd salted the notes with stories that he hoped Barb would steal. The KPERS show, about an investigation into the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, an exposé on white-collar crime, an interview with a guy in the Kansas attorney general's office that he knew would semi-suck, a big story on a judge who'd dismissed speeding tickets that was tied to ambiguous outmoded laws and "lost" ordinances, which would be about as much fun to research as gum surgery.

He had a large, graphic presentation that looked so good he thought it would work as a show in spite of having been conceived to be swiped, a thing on the five planes found in formation, wing-to-wing, on the ocean floor, that appeared identical to the famous, missing "Flight 19." All the planes had been Navy Avengers, and one of the numbers on the war planes matched the unit that had lost a squadron in 1945 (a story that hadn't done anything to dispel the "Bermuda Triangle" myth). He'd tied that all into a famous local story about a woman who had proof her husband, an MIA in Vietnam since 1970, had recently been seen. "Missing In Action" had Sean Flynn written all over it—he knew he'd build something with it.

Then there were the pure spikes. Tantalizing show titles he'd simply pulled out of thin air and his imagination:

Fatal Attractions

Up the Academy

So Long, Mr. Farmer

Bounty Hunters—Above the Law?

Closing Costs, the Real Story

High-Tech, Two-Edged Sword of the 21st Century

Closing the Porn Shops

Honorable Men in Politics—Are There Any?

He'd crossed out "Men in Politics" and substituted "Politicians."

Laser Surgery

The New Retirement

Politically Correct, Buzzwords and Censorship

Outsmarting the IRS

Last of the Pioneers

Elvis Imitators—The Dark Side

Back to the Middle East? Post-Victory Questions

Religious Sex

Palimony

The Next Energy Crisis

Payola's Resurgence in the Music Business

Dubious Cures

Dinosaurs

Health Care—"Going Up?"

On and on. He put his stack of "stealables" and related visuals to take to work aside, and concentrated on his real thesis, on American violence. Trask's précis was headed "Causes of Increased Numbers of Violent Crimes." Based on the report prepared in part by the Kansas City Metropolitan Police Department, the Missouri Health Department, and the Department of Justice, its primary elements were listed as follows:

Cause:

Abject poverty, unemployment, lack of hope.

Solution:

Government work programs, communitywide welfare projects targeting the lowest economic strata and the homeless, education about job-finding, education about alcohol, drug, and other substance abuse, more programs for substance abusers.

Cause:

Ghetto slums.

Solution:

Planning of urban housing codes and enlightened federal, state, and city housing authority decision-making, prevention of neighborhood deterioration by stricter enforcement of existing codes, prevention of deterioration by grass-roots citizens groups, formation of neighborhood crime-prevention organizations, more funding for police, more targeting of high-crime areas for patrol by law enforcement agencies, more undercover units in high-crime areas, more crack-house raids, more drug sweeps and streetcorner-dealer-level busts, more gangbanger sweeps, more DEA units.

Cause:

Abuse of children, females, elderly.

Solution:

Education, more enlightened foster parent systems, community programs for abusers and local PSA-campaigns aimed at increasing communication skills among abusers, toll-free "help" hotlines (1-800 numbers), more shelters and shelter guidance, increased funding for counseling.

It looked hopeless when you imagined how much that kind of funding would translate into increased taxes. Perhaps the way to go about it would be to isolate certain areas of vested-interest lobbies—not defense spending, as that was too big a ratings tune-out. But the vested interests now controlled the U.S. Congress. There was an angle there. He wanted the solutions to completely resolve, at least theoretically, the thorny dilemmas which the series of programs on violence would imply if not categorically state.

If Kansas City was under the gun, as he believed, in the midst of a horrible series of homicides orchestrated out of racial hatred, and as retribution against encroachment on a drug mob's territory, what would the white population do? He envisioned a white response, a backlash to the response, and these widening out into all-out racial war. If Trask wasn't very careful about every move he made he could imagine himself touching off a powder keg!

He thought of another swipable note and jotted it down: "The maddening waste, abuse of perqs, and financial mismanagement by the House and Senate—did this earn them each a raise?" Then he decided that wasn't necessarily stealable and put it in a stack of "iffy angles." It had been jarred loose by his thinking on the lobbies, and maybe it belonged in some kind of sidebar to his precis. Trask made another note to go through the "iffy angles" pile and sort out those things that might have some relevance to possible solutions. He made a list of interview subjects: four blacks; an Asian; an Israeli man who was particularly articulate; two whites. He jotted a note for himself to make a "list of suitable Congresspersons worth interv'g."

Trask saw a scrap of note he'd made headed "B.R. Sez Station Bugged." He lifted his phone from the cradle and hit numbers. In a few seconds a young, chirpy woman's voice announced "Z-60" in his ear.

"May I speak with Buzz Reid, please?"

"Buzz Reid?" she said, in the voice operators always use when they're unsure if such a person works there, or in fact exists. "Um—just a moment, please." Another voice came on the line.

"Reid."

"Hey. It's me—Trask."

"You got a cold or somethin'?"

"Somethin'. Hey. About our recent talk. Any chance you could give me another chance to pick your brain about the same topic?"

"I charge."

"Oh-oh. How much? I'm poorfolks."

"At least a cuppa Java."

"Okay. I might be able to scrape that up. Same place?"

"Nah. You at the other place?" He meant the radio station.

"No. Home."

"That's better. You know where the fountains are? The ones we like?"

"You mean—" Trask thought he meant downtown.

"The old tasty fountains," Reid said to him, in the kind of codephrase an old colleague would remember. They had once talked at great length about great fountain sodas "just like they used to make." Only this one small greasy spoon still made them—or so they had agreed.

"Ah! The fountains of our youth."

"That's the place."

"Yeah." It was a few minutes away. "When?"

Reid gave him a time, and Victor Trask thanked him, hung up the phone, and headed for the bathroom. The thought of burgling KCM had loosened his thirty-six-year-old wimpy bowels.

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