by R. G. Belsky
“You’re not going to get rid of me so easily.” Laurie Bateman laughed now. “I’m not going to disappear from your life. You and I will be talking again real soon. Trust me on that, girlfriend.”
It turned out she was right about that.
And I was wrong.
But I didn’t find that out until later.
PART II
KATIE, BABA WAWA & ME
CHAPTER 31
JANET AND I were playing a game we’d played a lot of times in the past. It was a silly game. But it had become kind of a ritual whenever something good happened to one of us, like all the media acclaim I’d gotten from the Laurie Bateman story. We called the game “What If?”
“What if I become a really big star from all this?” I said.
“You are a big star.”
“Even bigger than I am.”
“How big?”
“Let’s just say I’ll be a legendary newswoman.”
We were having a drink at the Rock Cafe in Rockefeller Center. It was really starting to feel a lot like Christmas in New York City. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. The ice skaters on the rink outside where we were sitting. Radio City Music Hall next door with its Christmas show and the Rockettes dancing. Sure, the area was flooded with tourists during the holiday season. But Janet always thought that battling the crowd and the shoppers and all the rest was worth it, and she generally managed to drag me along with her.
“Do you think you’ll be bigger than Connie Chung?” she asked me now.
Connie Chung was one of the first female news anchors at CBS News back in the eighties. She was a personal favorite of mine because of that, and Janet knew it. Although Connie had lost points in my estimation with the whole marriage to Maury Povich.
“Bigger,” I said.
“Katie Couric.”
“Bigger than Katie Couric.”
“C’mon, Katie Couric was a CBS News anchor. She was the cohost of the Today Show for years. And she even had her own talk show like you’re going to have if this all works out. How can you go wrong with Katie Couric?”
I thought about that. If I wanted to pattern myself after a female legend in the news business in this fantasy, I needed a real legend.
“Barbara Walters,” I told Janet.
“Really?”
“Sure. She was the first female news anchor in TV news history for ABC. She did all those great interviews over the years with celebrities and political figures. She had her own incredibly popular talk show with The View. And, even better than that, she became famous as Baba Wawa when Gilda Radner did that great imitation of her on Saturday Night Live. After all this time, she’s still Baba Wawa to a lot of people. Now that’s fame. That’s a legend. That’s what I want to be. I’ll be just like Barbara Walters.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, my show is a big hit. It wins an Emmy. I win an Emmy. Everyone wins an Emmy. I get offers for TV and movies. I’m on the cover of People Magazine …”
“Okay, you’re a big Hollywood star. Everyone loves you. In the midst of all this, you have a torrid love affair with a big star out there. But who?”
“Give me some choices.”
“Ryan Reynolds.”
“Someone better.”
“Uh, Ryan Gosling.”
“How about someone not named Ryan?”
“George Clooney then.”
“I don’t know, he’s a bit long in the tooth, isn’t he? I mean he’s no kid anymore.”
“Neither are you,” Janet pointed out.
“Yeah, that’s true. All right, I fall in love with and marry George Clooney.”
“And live happily ever after?”
“Wrong. The marriage breaks up because I start playing around with another Hollywood star …”
“Who?”
“Bradley Cooper!”
“All right!” Janet laughed and the two of us sat there giggling like a couple of schoolgirls.
I took a drink of my wine and looked at everything around us. The Christmas tree. The ice-skating rink. The happy holiday families milling around. I’d been to Rockefeller Center many times since I’d moved to New York City. But I was here even before that.
“The first time I ever came to Rockefeller Center I was eleven years old,” I said to Janet. “I won a big national contest for a school essay I wrote about ‘What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.’ I wrote about wanting to be a journalist. Even then, it was like I knew what I was destined for. Anyway, the prize was a trip to New York City. Me and a couple of other kids got to see the sights here. The Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. And they brought us to Rockefeller Center. For me, because I wanted to be a journalist, I got a tour of NBC News. I met Jessica Savitch that day.”
“Who?”
“Jessica Savitch was the golden girl of news then. A female newscaster who was blazing a pioneer trail in the news business for all who would follow. She had it all. Everyone figured she’d wind up being a female network news anchor one day. Just like Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric. Except it all fell apart for her.”
“I sort of remember the story. What happened? She had a drinking problem or something?”
I nodded and drank more of my wine.
“She went on the air one night and began slurring her words. She was almost incoherent. It seemed to everyone who saw that live broadcast that she was either drunk or on some kind of drugs. That pretty much destroyed her career ambitions and then, just a few weeks later, she drowned in a car accident. She wasn’t driving, but I always thought there had to be a connection between her on-air disaster and then the fatal car crash. I mean it all happened—the meteoric rise and then the sudden fall from grace—so fast. Her career. Her life. She lost everything in an instant. You know, she was so nice to me that day I met her. She told me that one day I could grow up and be a big TV news star like her. And that’s sort of what happened, I guess. Maybe that’s why I still think about Jessica Savitch. I think about Jessica Savitch a lot.”
“Wow, that’s pretty heavy-duty stuff coming from you. I’m more used to the jokes. But you’re not going to wind up like Jessica Savitch, Clare.”
“No,” I smiled, “I’m going to be like Katie Couric and Barbara Walters.”
The new “happy talk” format at Channel 10 News had gotten off to a rocky start. I wouldn’t describe it as a complete disaster. But it sure wasn’t working out as well as Jack Faron and the consulting firm had hoped.
One of the biggest problems was our anchor team of Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine. Brett and Dani did all right making routine—and fairly obvious—quips on most of the innocuous stories. Like saying how adopting a cat at a local shelter was the “purr-fect” gift at Christmas. Or exchanging banter with a reporter at a pie-eating contest like how it “must have taken a lot of crust” to cover that assignment.
But when the exchanges got more personal between Brett and Dani, they looked tense and uncomfortable and even a little bit angry at each other.
“Why aren’t Brett and Dani happy on air?” Faron wanted to know.
“They are married,” I pointed out.
“Can’t married people be happy?”
“Not in my experience, no.”
There’d been a particularly awkward on-air exchange between them the night before. Brett made a remark about how much food the pregnant Dani was eating every day—and also joked about the weight she’d put on. Dani then made a “joke” suggesting that Brett’s performance in the bedroom was pretty lackluster these days. It was like watching a reality show to see the two of them going after each other like this.
I found out later what the real problem was between them—the one that had started all this bickering. I brought them into my office and listened as they told me how they’d been arguing for days about what to name their baby. They knew it was going to be a girl. Dani wanted to name her Elizabeth because that had been the name of her beloved grandmother. Brett liked t
he name Anne. Neither of them was budging in their position.
“What about naming her Elizabeth-Anne?” I suggested.
They both looked at each other.
“I can live with that,” Brett said.
“Me too,” Dani agreed.
Ah, Carlson, you silver-tongued genius you! The great compromiser. I’m telling you I should get a job after this negotiating peace treaties in the Middle East. Or going down to Washington to straighten out all this bickering between the Democrats and Republicans. Carlson’s the name, diplomacy’s my game.
Not all of it was this easy though. It’s dangerous when people are talking live on air without specifically following a script. The worst on-air gaffe came from Cassie O’Neal. I mean I could have predicted this would happen. Giving Cassie the freedom to ad-lib anything she wanted on air was like handing her a loaded gun. You knew it was going to go off—you just didn’t know when.
It happened while she was covering the opening of a school for special-needs students and decided to banter with Brett and Dani about it at the end of the report. “You’d have to be retarded not to be impressed by what’s being accomplished here with these kids,” she said with a laugh. Yep, I know. Well, we were deluged by viewer complaints and had to issue an apology on air the next night.
After that, Maggie and I started writing the quips people could say into the actual script. So they weren’t actually impromptu anymore. That might have taken away from some of the realism of the “happy talk” idea—but it seemed safer to us if we knew exactly what people were going to say.
Maggie asked me how long I thought we’d have to keep doing this.
In other words, when would this damn happy talk idea go away so we could just concentrate on the news again?
“As soon as another big story breaks,” I said. “Happy talk only works when there’s nothing serious going on. It’s no good when you’re covering a sensational murder or a plane crash or a big corruption case. You don’t have to joke about that to get the viewer’s interest. A big story will solve our problem.”
“A big story, huh? God, I hope you’re right.”
“A big story always makes everything better,” I told her.
That big story didn’t seem like it was going to be the Charles Hollister murder.
It—along with Laurie Bateman’s arrest—had been a media sensation when it happened, but now everyone had moved on. That’s the way it was in the news business. Stories—even big stories like that—don’t have a long life span. Especially in this era of instant news with Twitter and other social media.
Sure, the story would be big again if they arrested someone. But the police didn’t seem close to doing that. And there were other big crimes happening all around at the same time in New York that we had to cover.
I hadn’t heard from Laurie Bateman since the party that night after she was freed from jail. I’d tried calling her once or twice, but never got a return call or text. Which didn’t surprise me. I didn’t really believe what she’d said that night about us wanting to be “girlfriends” and all that crap. Laurie Bateman operated on a whole different level of celebrity than me, and we didn’t have much to talk about with each other except for that interview I did that helped her go free.
I did read in the Wall Street Journal how Laurie Bateman had taken over the controlling interest in Hollister’s business holdings. The story pointed out again how Hollister had never had a chance to alter the will—i.e., write her out of it—before his death. So the original will he’d drawn up at the beginning of their marriage was still valid, which gave her power over all her husband’s holdings.
I wondered what that meant for Charles Jr.
Or Bert Stovall.
I thought about Elaine, his estranged daughter, too, and about Melissa Hunt, his mistress, and the rest of the people in Charles Hollister’s life.
He’d been living a soap opera.
My daughter wanted to know if I was coming to their house in Virginia for Christmas.
“Christmas?” I said. “Bah, humbug.”
“I was hoping we could spend it together as a family. Our first Christmas together,” she said.
“I don’t think I can get away from work for long enough to do that.”
The truth was that I’ve always hated holiday family gatherings. Have ever since I was growing up. I suppose that’s because Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the rest was such a tense, unpleasant time for me with my parents. Looking back on it, I realize now that I didn’t have a happy childhood. And it ended badly when my father kicked me out of the house once he found out I was pregnant with the child who turned out to be Lucy. My parents and me … well, we never resolved our issues before they both died.
Of course, I did have my own new family now to spend the holidays with, if I wanted. I’m sure Jack Faron would let me have time off to do it. But saying I had to work was a good excuse not to have to deal with my holiday anxieties. I had been down to Virginia for Thanksgiving with Lucy and her husband and Audrey. It was fine, but I still felt a bit uncomfortable. Like I didn’t really belong to that family yet. Maybe next year.
That’s why I was happy to spend Christmas alone in my apartment, eating take-out food and watching A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street on TV like I usually did.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Lucy asked me.
“If I start feeling suicidal,” I said with a laugh, “you’ll be the first person I call.”
And then there was the whole issue of the breast cancer gene that Lucy had discovered she was carrying—and presumably passed on to Audrey.
Did I have the same gene in me?
Was I responsible for that?
Did I really want to have to deal with one more thing I felt guilty about with Lucy—and all the mistakes I’d made since that long-ago day when I’d given birth to her as a nineteen-year-old college freshman?
I’ve never been good with medical issues, putting things off for as long as I could. And this one was no different.
I had finally gone to a doctor, told him the story, and taken the test to discover if I had the BRCA1 gene inside me or not. The test itself was relatively simple. But it would be a few weeks before I’d know the results, they told me. I didn’t want to think about it until then. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to deal with it.
I also had not dealt with the other part of this. Doug Crowell. The guy I had a one-night stand with nearly three decades ago that resulted in the birth of my daughter. Crowell was dead now. But, if it turned out I was not the one carrying the gene, then he had been. That meant his children were at risk. I was the one who could warn them to get tested, if things turned out that way. But I hadn’t reached out to his family since I got the news. Not yet.
I was procrastinating on that, too.
I’m really, really good at procrastinating.
It’s one of my specialties.
When it comes to procrastinating, I’m right up there with the best of them.
Meanwhile, there wasn’t much happening in my romantic life.
Just out of curiosity, I looked up the number of Nick Pollock, the guy from the Treasury Department. I called him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say if he picked up the phone, but he didn’t. I didn’t leave a message. No reason to think he was interested in me. Just because a Treasury agent picks up a woman and takes her back to the Federal Building to interrogate her doesn’t mean he’s hot for a romance with her, right?
Anyway, it looked like I was not going to find out the answer to that.
Which was okay.
He sure was good-looking though.
I’d had a few more exchanges with my ex-husband Sam Markham about the Hollister case, but he seemed happily married now with his new wife and new baby. So he was out of the picture.
So was Scott Manning. Manning was the ex-NYPD homicide cop who now worked for the FBI. I’d slept with him two times—once
when he was on the NYPD and again last year when we worked together to capture a serial killer. But he was married, too, and thus unavailable.
So where did that leave me?
I could try Wild Bill Carstairs again. He probably had a lot of time on his hands now that his star in the DA’s office had fallen so far.
But I wasn’t that desperate.
Not yet anyway,
And so I was sitting there alone in my apartment when an old Laurie Bateman movie came on one of the cable channels.
It was one of the best ones she’d made. She didn’t make a lot of good movies, but this one was worthwhile. She played a “working girl” kind of real estate broker who falls in love with a man she’s selling a house to or something like that. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the plot.
It got me to thinking about Laurie Bateman again though.
For no particular reason, I went over to my computer and began looking up other movies she’d done. I hadn’t seen a lot of them, and I hadn’t missed much. They weren’t exactly Oscar contenders. But I clicked on a couple of YouTube segments from them to get a feel for what they were about.
There was one where she was being stalked by a serial killer. Another where she and a group of other women were trapped in a haunted house. And even a few beach pictures—which had more soft porn shots than story line—where she frolicked around in a revealing string bikini.
I was just about to stop when I came across another movie she’d made. It was called Victim of Love. This one had hardly been seen by anyone. It was made a long time ago, and seemed to have gone directly to video. Laurie Bateman was very young; it must have been one of her first movies. I figured I’d give it a quick scan and be done with this. But then something on the screen suddenly caught my attention.
Laurie Bateman played the part of a young wife in an abusive marriage who fought back against her husband in self-defense during one of the attacks.
The climax of the movie featured an emotional scene where she was on trial for his murder. I watched as she delivered her lines from the witness stand.
