Dead Air

by David A. Poulsen

  “Anybody else at the station receiving threats?”

  “I’ve talked to all the other on-air people.” He consulted his notebook. “Jared Petterson, Jason T. Carver, Nava Dehl, and Terrance Peete — they’re the on-air big guns, along with Larmer. All have been threatened at various times in their careers, but none recently.”

  “And you want what from me?”

  “Whatever you can dig up. I’d like to know as much as I can about Buckley-Rand Larmer. Going back as far as you think is relevant and going as far afield as you think you need to.”

  “In depth.”

  Cobb sat forward, drank the last of his coffee, and nodded. “Uh-huh. Everything you can give me. Maybe by learning all I can about him, I might find out something about the threat maker. Or at least the kind of person who would want to threaten him.”

  “Like I said, it’s take-a-number when it comes to people who wouldn’t mind seeing Larmer get hit by a bus.”

  “We’re only interested in those who want to be driving the bus.”

  “We?”

  “Partners again.” The grin returned to Cobb’s chiselled features. “And the good news — no budget constraints. He’s paying me a big dollar and I told him I may have to call on outside resources. He couldn’t nod his head fast enough. Adam, the guy’s scared. He’s trying to macho his way through it but it’s there — fear.”

  “How are the threats being made?”

  “Some of it’s the usual stuff — phone calls from untraceable cells …”

  “Burners,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure you knew the jargon, but yeah.”

  “I covered the drug trade for a few years — picked up a few things.”

  Cobb looked sheepish. “Sorry, I should have known that.”

  “No harm, no foul,” I said. “What else?”

  “Calls from phone booths, emails, notes in the regular mail … a couple of hand-delivered letters to the station, but of course, the delivery people were paid cash, never actually saw the person wanting the package delivered. So far, whoever’s making the threats has been very good at avoiding detection.”

  “Phone booths, snail mail, package delivery — old school.”

  Cobb thought for a minute. “Good point. But there were also the emails and the calls from burners.”

  I nodded. “So maybe the bad guy wants to confuse investigators. Or he’s just eclectic.”

  “He. Funny how we assume the bad guys are guys.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve learned my lesson on that the last time around. So what’s Larmer being threatened with?”

  “The recurring theme is agony — pretty much every one of the threats has referenced the pain that will be coming his way. ‘Like the pain you’ve caused others, you piece of shit.’ That’s an exact quote by the way. A lot of stuff similar in nature. All of which will happen if Larmer doesn’t get off the air and out of Calgary — immediately.”

  “How long’s it been going on?”

  “Close to six weeks,” Cobb answered. “But there’s more. The thing that has him really worried is the fact that someone has been in his house — disarmed the alarm, got inside, and left a couple of pointed warnings.”

  I rubbed a hand across my chin. “That’s taking things to another level, all right. No wonder he’s scared.”

  “And one more thing. Some of the notes have included references to things in Larmer’s life, past and present, that not a lot of people would know about.”

  “References to what exactly?”

  “Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem. Larmer won’t tell me that and won’t even allow questions about it. In fact, I’m getting the feeling that there are a few things Larmer isn’t telling me.”

  “So you haven’t seen the notes.”

  “He destroyed them.”

  “Kind of handcuffs you, doesn’t it.”

  “It would if he wanted me to investigate who’s doing the threatening. But that’s not it. In fact, he’s been very specific about how that’s not my role. My job is to keep his ass on the top side of the grass. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “But if the identity of the person making the threats isn’t determined, you could be guarding Buckley-Rand Larmer for a couple of decades.”

  “My thought exactly. Which is why we’re having this conversation.”

  “Any chance he’s faking it? Making the whole thing up?”

  “To what end?”

  “He saw what happened to the guy in Hamilton. More listeners. More sympathy. More love.”

  Cobb shook his head. “I think I’d know if he was conning me. Like I said, the guy looks and sounds scared. And I don’t think it’s an act. Besides, if he wanted to make points with listeners he’d want it all out there. And he doesn’t want that. At least not now.”

  “Do you know if the guy who got killed in Hamilton — did he receive any threats before either the first or second shooting?”

  “I wondered that myself. Made some calls. If he did no one seems to know about it.”

  I thought about that, finally leaned forward. “I’m guessing you want whatever I can come up with fast.”

  “The quicker the better.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And for now at least I’d prefer that our arrangement remain confidential.”

  “You worried about Larmer finding out?”

  Cobb shook his head. “No, I told him I’d have someone doing some digging — I might have failed to mention the digging would be into his past. But more than that — if there is someone out there intent on doing more than threaten this guy, I’d prefer for them not to know what we’re up to.”

  I put my finger to my lips. “These babies are sealed.”

  “So you’re game?”

  “Researching the life of a slimeball. Being sneaky. And getting well paid to do it. What’s not to like?” I nodded, we stood up and shook hands, then started for the door of Colossi’s. “I’ll get into this and give you a call in a day or two, let you know how I’m faring.”

  “Perfect.”

  On the sidewalk outside, Cobb said, “I’ll let you get back to the baseball festivities. By the way, milkshakes when they lose, what do they do when they win?”

  “Hasn’t been an issue so far this season.”

  “Long as they’re having fun.”

  “The kids are fine,” I told him. “It’s the manager we may have to arrange counselling for.”

  Cobb laughed and started walking away, singing, “‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’”

  “Ha, ha,” I said to his back.

  TWO

  By nine the next morning I was at my desk — actually a table-desk I had picked up at an antique store. It had come from the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, sixties vintage. It was banged up and the centre drawer — the only drawer — opened only when it was in the mood. But it was the place I liked to be when I wanted to create/research/read Calvin and Hobbes.

  The desk faced the picture window in my bachelor apartment. The view of Calgary was the biggest reason I’d rented the place a couple of years earlier. The view wasn’t as good as from the North Hill or Scotchman’s Hill, but it was better than average and required a significantly smaller investment than places with the view.

  I tinkered with the volume on my CD player, finally satisfied that Martha Wainwright’s Come Home to Mama was at just the right level to be background for my foray into the life and times of Buckley-Rand Larmer.

  I had decided to start with the obvious. Googling Larmer’s name netted me a few thousand references. Initially I thought I’d start with the biggest, most frequently accessed, and work my way down to the more obscure only if I needed to. I knew there would be lots of poorly spelled, badly punctuated, “Go get ’em Big Guy. You’re saving the free world from
all those lefty wing nuts,” and on the other side, “Drop dead, you redneck asshat.”

  I didn’t feel either of those would be particularly enlightening and figured I’d be able to ignore well over half the posts. But I changed my mind and spent the first few hours of my assignment sifting through the ultra-passionate, often semi-articulate rants, raves, and ramblings of extremists from both ends of the political spectrum.

  I came to one unsettling conclusion. The amount of hate that each side harboured for the other was astonishing. It was clear that even the most appallingly inept candidates for political office were perfectly palatable to their followers as long as they kept the other side — the hated enemy — from taking a step forward. Even if that step was arguably in a direction that would benefit a large percentage of the electorate. Had it always been this way? Maybe, but it seemed to me that Larmer and others of his ilk had taken the desire to crush and eliminate all opposition and reasoned debate to a new level — a level that appeared to have as its goal the establishment of one, and only one, way of thinking.

  I wasn’t surprised that the volume of right-wing rhetoric was several times greater than that on the other side — not unlike the overwhelming disparity between conservative and liberal talk-radio stations in the United States and (increasingly) in Canada. News-talk radio was almost synonymous with small-c conservative ideology.

  And in the world of conservative politics Buckley-Rand Larmer was a big deal, often quoted, much admired, and the subject of countless interviews. He was also the author of dozens of articles and three books; PDFs poured forth his wisdom on countless websites and blogs.

  There were pictures, too, lots of them, no doubt due, in part, to Larmer’s being photogenic, even handsome. Six feet two inches, maybe three, deuce and a half on the scales and a lot of it muscle — he worked out daily and told the world via his more than one hundred thousand Facebook friends. Impressive, but only half the number of his Twitter followers.

  Most of his myriad supporters appeared to expend a great deal of time and effort in trying to emulate their hero. His phrases were their phrases, his ideas their ideas, and most importantly, his hate-targets were eagerly, enthusiastically, and endlessly attacked by “Larmer Nation,” a not particularly original, but probably fairly accurate term to describe the men and women, mostly men, who breathlessly awaited the next Larmer pronouncement.

  But beyond reinforcing the fact that he was articulate, persuasive, intelligent, and popular with the ladies, or at least a certain segment of ladies, I didn’t feel that my morning had given me much of a feel for the man. I learned that Larmer was an army brat and that his parents were both fundamentalist Christian, right-wing thinkers, which accounted for their naming their son after not one but two conservative luminaries — William F. Buckley, the brilliant political commentator who founded the National Review, and the novelist Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of objectivism had been welcomed by early American conservatives.

  I discovered, as well, that Larmer had been kicked out of the campus pseudo-Republican, pseudo–Reform Party group that he had actively worked for during his time at the University of Ottawa. He then spent several years publicly vilifying the man he felt was responsible for his ouster in a largely successful attempt to destroy the man’s career and personal life. The man’s name was James Leinweber and he sued Larmer after a particularly vicious attack Larmer made during a television interview in 2002. I jotted Leinweber’s name in my notebook as one of those with ample reason to want to harm his persecutor, then wrote a large “NO” next to his name when a subsequent search lead me to an obituary, written in October of 2003, three days after Leinweber had taken his own life, leaving behind a wife and twin teenage daughters.

  Never one to miss an opportunity, Larmer had commented on the passing of his long-time foe and got in a few more nasty shots, insinuating that Leinweber’s suicide, while unfortunate, was appropriate in that it symbolized the cowardly way the man had lived his life.

  Some of what I was reading I already knew; none of it surprised me. No, that’s not true. There was one surprise. It came in the form of Jasper Hugg — a man the media had dubbed Huggy Bear. Hugg was Larmer’s chief adviser; no mention of how the two came together, just that when Larmer made an unsuccessful bid for the school board several years earlier, Hugg had been his campaign manager.

  There were interesting similarities. Like Larmer, Hugg was a big man physically, in fact, bigger, which explained, in part, the media nickname. He was also reputed to be as mean as Larmer.

  But there was one important difference between the two men. Where Larmer couldn’t get enough of the limelight — he’d never met a microphone or camera he didn’t like — Hugg stayed strictly behind the scenes, an almost shadowy figure, always there but seldom in front of the lens. He was never quoted or the subject of interviews.

  More than one reporter described him as “secretive.”

  I broke for lunch, inhaling a couple of chapters of Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel to cleanse my mental palate from the vitriol of Larmer and his confederates, while working my way through a bowl of mushroom soup and a couple of slices of nearly incinerated rye toast.

  I was back at my computer by one-thirty, determined to get a better handle on the man my friend had been hired to protect. It was an hour into the afternoon when I came to an article that rather neatly crystallized my thoughts on Larmer. The article contained the nuts and bolts of an interview the writer had conducted with Larmer a few weeks earlier. But what made it interesting was the inclusion of the writer’s own thoughts, good and bad, about the interview.

  The writer was a reporter from a decidedly left-leaning provincial lifestyle magazine. Her name was Patsy Bannister, and I’d read a couple of things she’d written previously and found her pretty capable.

  With Larmer she’d eased into things and for a while threw him enough softballs to qualify for the slow-pitch World Series.

  But a half-hour into the interview things took a turn — she recounted the moment in her article:

  I asked Mr. Larmer if he had a criminal record. His answer was one he clearly had tucked away, ready to put to use if the need arose.

  “Your editor is a lesbian, is that correct?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The woman who assigned you this interview — she is a lesbian. Is that correct?”

  He paused between each of the three final words, to make the accusation more forceful.

  “I don’t see what the sexuality of anyone at the magazine has to do with —”

  “And you, are you of that particular inclination, Ms. Bannister?”

  “Inclination?”

  “Are you a lesbian?”

  “Let me repeat my answer to your previous, equally inappropriate question —”

  “No need to answer at all,” he said and sat, it seemed to me, a little taller in the seat behind his desk. The better to intimidate? Perhaps.

  “You see, Ms. Bannister, what people like you fail to realize in your self-interested loathing of people like me who choose to devote our lives to making the world a better place for decent families to live in and work is simply this —”

  “‘Decent families’ being those in which no one is gay or wears a turban or is just too damned intellectual?”

  “It’s simply this: We offer solutions. You offer platitudes. You and your ilk say, for example, that large industries should shut down in an area because some obscure kind of bird likes to dine on an equally obscure kind of insect there. We point out the financial implications of that stance — job losses, economic hardships for decent, hard-working families — while you celebrate that the bird will be able to continue to lay its eggs in the same tree it always has even though it would do just as well in a similar tree a few kilometres away.”

  “But, of course, it’s not about that at all, is it, Mr. Larmer? It’s really about making su
re that those large industries and their wealthy investors get still wealthier while the environment suffers one more setback and —”

  “Are you interviewing me, Ms. Bannister, or proselytizing?”

  He was right on that point. I wasn’t there to debate his views, however abhorrent they were to me and even though he had initiated the debate. I apologized though it pained me to do so. But when, a couple of minutes later, I asked him to explain his opposition to Quebec remaining in Confederation, he suddenly stood up and announced our meeting was over.

  And it was.

  There was more to the article. Patsy Bannister summarized the meeting in careful terms — trying to appear at least somewhat even-handed as she characterized a man she clearly loathed.

  I’d been in that position a few times myself — having to mask my own dislike for the subject of an interview and present a fair representation of that person and his or her views in the subsequent story or article. It was never easy, but I hoped I’d been more successful than Patsy Bannister had been in this instance.

  I moved on from her article and read for another forty-five minutes, surprised at the amount of support Larmer commanded. I reread the Bannister interview, then on a whim decided to call her, see if she had time for a late lunch or coffee and was willing to give me a little more of her insight into the man.

  The guy I spoke to in the news department of the Herald had a drinker’s/smoker’s voice that I thought was perfect for the newspaper industry, or at least the newspaper industry I had once been a part of — hard-drivin’, hard livin’ reporters who were passionate about writing stories for readers they didn’t know and seldom met.

  He put me through to Patsy Bannister and the voice I heard next was nothing like the one that had preceded it. It was soprano and gentle and slow, putting together each syllable of each word more like an actor than a reporter.

  “This is Patsy Bannister,” the voice said.

  “Hello, Patsy, my name is Adam Cullen. I’m working on something to do with Buckley-Rand Larmer. I read your article on him — congratulations by the way — and I was wondering if you might be able to spare me some time to chat a little about him.”