"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
As I replaced the receiver, the woman at the reception desk motioned to me.
"Still nothing on the computer," she said. "But I called upstairs. Mr. Rodriguez is in intensive care. His condition is 'critical'."
"Can I see him?"
"Sorry. Not unless you're a member of the immediate family."
I thought fast. “His brother is on the way. He'll be here in twenty minutes."
***
"You're his brother." I caught Higgins by surprise as he walked through the automatic doors. “He’s in intensive care.”
"His brother? Who's going to believe that?"
"The receptionist seems pretty busy. I don’t think she’ll ask for identification.”
"What floor's he on?"
"Four, but you need a pass." I led Higgins to the desk.
"This is Manny Rodriguez’s brother."
The woman looked at Higgins for a moment, as I held my breath. She finally opened a drawer, withdrew a numbered visitors’ badge and handed it to him.
“ICU’s on four.”
Higgins started for the elevators with me close behind.
35
I described the scene at Rodriguez’s condo, and the trip to the hospital. As we reached the elevator, the doors on our left parted, and I followed Higgins inside.
"Where do you think you're going?"
"With you," I said. "Until someone stops me.”
The doors closed and a moment later opened on the fourth floor, the hallway vacant. The numbers and arrows on the wall across from the elevator told us to go right for the Adult Intensive Care Unit.
"I still don't think this is a good idea...I mean your being here," Higgins whispered.
"The place is deserted. Who's going to see me?"
The answer came two seconds later.
"Your passes, please." We found ourselves confronted by a woman as tall as Higgins, and nearly his weight. Standing hands on hips, she reminded me of a WAC drill sergeant.
"You need a pass to be on this floor," the woman said, walking closer. Her tag read "Dahner, Head Nurse, Intensive Care."
"We’re here to see Manny Rodriguez." Higgins held out the plastic pass. Dahner examined it briefly, returned it and looked at me.
"Where's yours?"
"I...I don't have a pass," I said. "I'm the one who found Mr. Rodriguez.”
"Sorry. No pass, no visit. You'll have to leave."
"Can you at least tell me how he is?"
"The doctor just left. He's alive. Vital signs are stable. That's all I can tell you."
Not exactly Florence Nightingale. She turned to Higgins. "You can have ten minutes."
"Is he conscious?"
"No." The way Nurse Dahner said it, it sounded like it would be a long while, if ever, before Manny regained consciousness.
36
Higgins followed the nurse through two metal doors into the Intensive Care Unit. Here, rooms with glass walls provided visual access to the patients inside. Through the glass Higgins heard the whirring, beeping and hissing of machines that kept those patients on this side of an even thinner wall between life and death.
Nurse Dahner took a sudden left into a glass-walled room. Higgins followed; as he walked inside a shock hit him like a rushing lineman. Even a career witnessing concussions, compound fractures and worse on the football field hadn’t prepared him for what he saw. Manny Rodriguez lay surrounded by metal IV-stands, each draped with a bottle dripping fluid. Tubes were everywhere: nose, arms, chest...running underneath the covers. His eyes had swollen shut, and a respirator had been inserted in his mouth.
Higgins stood riveted to the floor, staring at the inert form, hearing the beeping and whirring of the machines that kept Rodriguez alive.
He had seen enough: it was time to get the hell out of there.
“How is Manny?” I asked as Higgins stepped out of the elevator.
“Unconscious. I can't tell you any more than the nurse did.”
We walked toward the lobby of the emergency room, echoes of our footsteps piercing the silence. I couldn't help thinking about Rodriguez and how much his positive attitude meant to the creative group -- and to me.
"What do you figure his chances are?" I asked Higgins.
"I'm not a doctor."
We avoided stating the obvious: that the bruised and bleeding body we had seen tonight bore small resemblance to the man we knew, and its chances of regaining the spark of life we knew as Manny Rodriguez might well be just as small.
37
Now
The good news came just past five o’clock. Ken Cunningham telephoned to say AVC had named Adams & Benson agency of record for their entire business.
Winning the AVC account called for a celebration. Higgins rummaged through the pantry closet and came up with half a fifth of Johnny Walker Red. He poured an inch or so into two tall glasses, added ice and water and we took them out on the deck. I was anxious to hear details of the AVC presentation, but first I wanted to know if Ken Cunningham was still on our side.
“We didn’t have much time to chat,” Higgins said. “He was at the airport and his plane was ready to leave.
“He asked me to tell you he’s behind us. But of course insisted again that we turn ourselves in.”
We talked about how the additional AVC business might change our lives. Both of us would gain additional responsibilities and, presumably, increases in salary. That is, if we managed to solve our present dilemma.
Higgins nodded off first, having gone without sleep for twenty-four hours. He headed for bed just after seven.
I stayed awake mulling over our situation. I couldn’t get Manny’s last words out of my mind.
What do you know about subliminal persuasion?
What did I know? I had read a few articles about the subject, but never really delved into it. If it somehow lay at the heart of why people were being murdered over the Avion disc, I owed it to Manny and the other victims to find out. I decided to visit the Gaylord library the next morning.
38
Now
Tuesday, Oct. 19 -- 9:24 a.m.
Gaylord’s Otsego County library is small by big city standards, but it wasn’t books I was after. I needed access to the internet. I still doubted that subliminal messages could influence the subconscious, but Manny had found something on that DVD. Something important enough that someone had tried to kill him.
I tried to minimize the risk of being recognized by pulling my shoulder-length brown hair into a bun and donning a scarf. Sunglasses completed my feeble disguise and it seemed to work. No one looked twice as I strolled past the checkout desk and into the room housing about half a dozen computers.
A google search of “subliminal persuasion” coughed up a collection of subliminal help tapes for sale. I also found reports on that famous movie theatre experiment.
The man’s name was James Vicary, and back in late 1957 he used a device he invented to flash the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coke” onto a movie screen in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The words appeared every five seconds for 1/3000 of a second, too fast to be recorded by the conscious mind. According to the theory, though, the subliminal suggestion passed into the subconscious. According to the article, Vicary claimed the theatre registered an 18% gain in the sales of soda, and a 57% increase in popcorn sales.
The news created a media blitz followed by an almost hysterical reaction from a public fearing they might be brain washed in other ways. But Vicary failed in subsequent attempts to duplicate the results and subliminal persuasion faded into the nation’s subconscious.
I clicked through a few more pages when a couple of articles I had never seen before caught my eye. One from Time magazine featured a Russian scientist’s experiments curing drug addicts with subliminal messages in the mid-eighties.
If drug addicts could be cured through subliminal persuasion, could they also be created?
Another entry reported the F
BI considered using subliminal telephone messages to convince David Koresh's followers to turn on him during the Waco confrontation in the early nineties.
It got even more interesting. I found a title: The CIA and Subliminal Research. Calling up the entry, my eyes followed down to a paragraph reporting that an article “Operational Assessment of Subliminal Perception” had appeared in the CIA’s classified journal, Studies in Intelligence. The date of the original article? Early 1958, right on the heels of Vicary’s 1957 movie theatre experiment. A rundown of its contents showed the CIA’s interest in subliminal persuasion and its efforts under a top-secret initiative code-named MKULTRA in the mid-to-late Fifties.
I drilled deeper, entering MKULTRA into the search box. Entries spoke of MKULTRA as a CIA run project authorized by CIA Director Allen Dulles who had been concerned about rumors of communists brainwashing POWs during the Korean War. MKULTRA used private and public institutions to conduct experiments on unwitting subjects. The experiments ran the gamut from ingesting them with illegal drugs to exposing the subjects to, you guessed it, subliminal messages.
It took the Freedom of Information Act to make these details public.
I found more entries, including the testimony of Stansfield Turner, CIA Director in the late seventies, before a Congressional Committee. Turner acknowledged the project, denounced it and said it would never happen again.
But an intriguing question remained: Why were the CIA, the FBI and the Russians so fascinated with a phenomenon that supposedly didn’t exist?
39
Saturday, Oct. 16 -- Early Morning
Manny’s condition affected me deeply. I crawled into bed around four a.m. and couldn’t sleep, despite the fact our presentation to Cunningham, Higgins et al loomed just hours away at eleven forty-five. I kept thinking about Manny. I needed to know what the police were doing to track down the animals who assaulted him.
Around seven a.m. I started dialing the Precinct, but got the runaround so many times I felt like a carousel. As a last resort, I tried my ex-husband.
Ordinarily Garry Kaminski’s name would come up right after Charles Manson’s on a list of people I’d ask for a favor. But I was desperate. This time, I asked for him and found Garry to be his usual, open-minded self.
"What do you expect me to do?"
"There has to be something you can do, Garry. Manny Rodriguez was nearly beaten to death. And, you're handling the Vince Caponi and Darren Cato murders."
“That’s different. Caponi got two nine millimeter hollow points through his skull. The ME Report says someone rigged Cato’s suicide. The D.A. calls both of those situations murder. You're telling me this Rodriguez guy was beaten during a robbery. I work Homicide. Best I can do is talk to the cops assigned to the case. Find out where they're at."
"That's just it, damn it," I said. "They haven't done a thing. I gave some cop my name and address at the hospital. One of your guys is supposed to call this morning. Some investigation, Sherlock.”
"Look, Darcy, I know you’re frustrated. How do you think I feel? Caponi's widow isn't telling us anything, either."
Caponi's widow? Why would he mention her?
"What do you mean, she’s not telling you anything? What do you expect her to tell you, Garry?”
Silence. Garry realized he’d said something he shouldn’t, and no way would I let the subject drop.
"It’s been days since the murder, Garry. Why are you still talking to Caponi's widow? You said it, damn it. Now tell me."
Garry lowered his voice. "I need you to promise you didn't hear it from me."
"You've got it."
"The night Caponi was killed, he sent out two packages."
"Two? How do you know?"
"The Federal Express guy. We checked his records. One package went to Darren Cato at Adams & Benson, the other to Caponi's house. His wife signed for it."
"So?"
"She denies having received it. Says her signature was forged."
"Was it?"
"No way. The lab verified her signature, all right. But what the hell can we do? Throw a helpless widow in jail because she denies receiving a package? The media would be all over us."
"Maybe I can help."
"How?"
"We have common ground. First, her husband edited commercials our agency produced. Second, I'm a woman. She might talk to me."
"It's worth a try."
By now the clock read eight-thirty. Just enough time to grab a shower before heading for the office.
40
9:24 a.m.
What in the world was that piece of paper doing on my office desk? The square bar napkin had been folded neatly in half, then in half again.
The message on the sheet of yellow paper underneath it read, "Hope you like the line." It was signed, "Manny." I recalled a story Manny Rodriguez had told me about the writer who dreamed up the famous “No Car Rides Like a Rembly” line. He was in a bar at the time and wrote it on a napkin.
Manny must have left the napkin before he went home last night, figuring he’d found the right theme line for the campaign. We had settled for "The little car that could," but I still hoped for something better.
I unfolded the napkin. The words were printed in black magic marker.
A little Ampere goes a long way.
Perfect. It emphasized the Ampere’s strong points while giving the car a definite personality. We’d insert the line into the layouts for presentation this morning. It fit so well, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Rereading the line, I laughed out loud.
Then, picturing Manny in Intensive Care, I cried.
41
11:34 a.m.
My group and I filed into the eighth floor conference room to find Sean Higgins and Lyle Windemere waiting.
The aroma of coffee filled the air, emanating from a shiny metal urn on a table against the far wall. Beside it sat two trays of bagels and sandwiches, which Bob Roy and Matt Carter dove for.
Higgins didn't waste time. "Cunningham, Adams and Rathmore will be here at eleven-forty-five." He motioned to the far side of the conference table. "You can set up over there.”
"How long do we have?" I asked.
"You'll only have Ken for about twenty minutes. He flew in this morning, and has a two o'clock to Dallas."
My heart sank. I counted on pulling Cunningham aside after the meeting to fill him in on the past two days. Now I’d have to wait until Monday.
As we finished our preparation at eleven-forty, I noticed moisture on my palms for the first time, a reminder of the hundreds of jobs at stake. I rubbed my hands together to dry them.
Cunningham, Adams and Rathmore entered at precisely eleven-forty-five. The three couldn't have been more different. Even on Saturday Ken Cunningham wore the uniform: dark blue pinstriped suit and a red and blue striped tie. Joe Adams dressed casually in golf shirt and chino slacks that hung on him like a potato sack. C. J. Rathmore wore a gray herringbone jacket, the collar of his white dress shirt open.
As the former head of the AVC account, it was Cunningham’s show. Ebullient as usual, he greeted each person by name. Stunned to hear about Manny Rodriguez, he asked to be kept updated.
Adams tried to emulate Cunningham's easy manner, but failed miserably. Apparently he couldn’t let his hair down without downing alcohol first. Rathmore remained aloof, content to let the other two mingle with the troops.
"Let's get to it,” Cunningham said finally. He smiled at Higgins. "I know Sean wants to be in front of the TV by the one o'clock kickoff. Who's Michigan playing today?"
"Wisconsin." Sean smiled sheepishly. "In Madison."
Ken turned to me. "Got something good to show us, Darcy?"
"I think you'll be pleased." Hopefully sounding more confident than I felt, I started in.
“For the theme line, we searched for a choice of words that suggested a cute, fun-to-drive personality, while emphasizing Ampere's range,"
I held up a board with the line printed i
n large block letters and noticed a slight nod from Cunningham as I read aloud: "A little Ampere goes a long way."
I lifted a layout board from the ledge and turned it to face my audience. The graphic depicted an early "horseless carriage" and the new Ampere side-by-side. Beneath the vintage vehicle the headline read, The Twentieth Century came in with a roar. Under the Ampere: The Twenty-first Century comes in with a hummm.
"The copy focuses on silent operation, acceleration, and range."
I searched for an expression: a smile, a nod, anything that would tip their reaction.
Nothing.
I reached for the next layout. The graphic: a photograph of the Ampere. I read the headline. "With a zero to sixty time under nine seconds, the new Ampere passes a lot of things, including gas stations. The copy features Ampere's acceleration and range."
Cunningham smiled.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"When it comes to recharging the Ampere," I said, "we have two ideas. Both emphasize the Ampere can be recharged overnight, right in the garage. Both show the car attached to the recharging unit.
"One of the headlines reads Watts up. The other, What a re-volting development."
Higgins smiled. "Your humor’s right on target, Darcy. I like the way your ads convey the fun of driving the Ampere."
"I agree," said Cunningham. He turned to Rathmore. "I like what we're seeing, don't you, C. J.?"
"Of course." Rathmore, a bean counter more at home with bottom lines than headlines, seemed to welcome the opportunity of simply seconding Cunningham's remark.
Adams had also been waiting for Cunningham's reaction. He nodded and leaned back in his chair.
“How about ecology?” Cunningham asked. “The Ampere doesn't burn fossil fuel."
"Got it covered, Ken." I held up the ad M. J. Curtis and Will Parkins created with the picture of earth from space and read the headline aloud: "Here’s the biggest reason of all to drive our new Ampere."
Cunningham leaned forward. "How far have you taken that TV idea you described the other day?"
I pushed a button on the TV monitor. The screen sprang to life with computer animation and music we’d patched together in the past forty-eight hours. In the end, Ken Cunningham's expression said it all.
Freeze Frame Page 8