Killed in the Ratings

by William L. DeAndrea

  I walked away from the edge of the platform, close to the wall. I wanted to read the shy graffiti, the stuff you can’t see in a darkened tunnel at sixty miles an hour.

  That’s where I saw it, written small between “Benny 102” and the curiously understated “carlotta loves raoul” in lower case. It felt as if the hand of Destiny had led me to that wall, even if I didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. But it was so true, so right, it was like a mystical experience.

  It had been written by a member of the old school, the graffitists who had more than their names and house numbers to share with the world.

  I read it again.

  “Help!” it said, “the Paranoids are after me!”

  That was it, I realized. We’re all paranoid. Worse than that, we’re all paranoid, and we’re all right about it. They are out to get us. Why? Because they think we’re out to get them. And we are, so they won’t get us first.

  It had all the beautiful logic of madness. We run around, seeing everyone else as the agent of our destruction, so we take defensive measures that make us the agents of their destruction.

  I pulled my mind up short when the train pulled in. I had a fifty-yard dash across the platform and a dive between closing doors to make it in. I always get in trouble when I start getting philosophical.

  I left the subway system at Times Square, hoping to lose myself among the other homeless drifters. I walked around. I stopped in a steak house and ate. I got propositioned by four prostitutes, three of them female. I was exhausted and my head hurt. I had to get off my feet. The thought of the Hotel Cameron or a similar establishment didn’t appeal to me. I figured the safest place to be would be alone in the dark, so I bought my way into an all-night porno movie.

  It was a good choice. No bombs, no squealing tires, just violin music and groans to lull me to sleep.

  The groaning was still going on when I woke up. “This is where I came in,” I announced to no one in particular, and went back out on the street. I mixed in with the influx of early morning people, bought the morning papers, and settled down for breakfast at a pancake house.

  I read the papers while I ate, finding nothing new on the Carlson murder, nothing at all, in fact. The story had backed right out of the paper.

  At a drugstore, I bought one of those little travel shaving kits and a sewing kit. I ducked into a rest room, and, turning off my olfactory system, made my face and my clothes more presentable.

  I had a lot of time to kill, so I passed up the subway and walked down to Penn Station. Penn Station used to be the same kind of monument to Victorian excess as Grand Central, but now it’s just the train set Madison Square Garden keeps in the basement. Its concourse could pass for any enclosed suburban shopping mall.

  The Arrivals/Departures board told me the Amtrak Devlin was supposed to be on hadn’t come in yet. I took my Times, and retreated to a wall at a spot where I’d have a good view of the information booth. I was forecasting only a thirty percent chance of his showing up, but I wanted to see him first if he did.

  I waited twenty minutes, but I didn’t get a chance to get bored. In that time, I was invited to learn about four different religions, and was informed the world was coming to an end a week from Monday. I wondered why he bothered to go on the record with his prediction. Nobody would be around to give him credit for it.

  I was explaining to an earnest young man with no hair on his head that I didn’t want to bathe in the all-purifying Light because strong light makes me sneeze, when a man wearing a white carnation on the lapel of a charcoal grey suit appeared over by the information booth.

  I looked at him in the barely adequate Light of the station. He was a little shorter than I was, six feet tall or so, with deepset eyes under an eyebrow that vaulted the bridge of his nose. He had paid twelve to twenty dollars for a haircut that had been designed to hide the movement of his hairline toward the top of his head. His features were unremarkable, but frowning the way he was, he looked mean.

  He looked at his watch, scanned the now thinning crowd, looked at his watch again. When he raised his head, he was looking dead at me. He yelled my name across the concourse, and walked toward me.

  “Sorry the train was late,” he said, extending a hand.

  I took it. If I regretted it later, I could always wash. “No problem,” I lied, “I just got here myself.”

  He smiled. It made him look like a much nicer person. “Well, I’m glad I finally met you,” he said.

  “How did you recognize me? I was supposed to spot you.”

  “I found your picture in a back issue of Broadcasting magazine.” He had shifted a small overnight bag to his left hand to shake. He shifted it back.

  “Where to now?” he asked.

  “My apartment,” I told him. “We’ll get a cab outside.”

  I decided to stop first at NetHQ, and told the driver of the cab we caught. Devlin and I were both silent for the first part of the ride. We were circling each other like a mongoose and a cobra, and neither one of us was sure which was which.

  Devlin had a habit of, at about twenty-second intervals, patting his body gently with his right hand; touching his chest, his hips, his sides. It got on my nerves.

  “What’s the matter? Got an itch?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, nothing like that. I think I lost my glasses on the train.”

  “You’ll manage,” I said curtly. “You recognized me from far enough away.” I had a natural antipathy for Devlin, part of which had to do with his not going along with my theory. The spoiled brat part of me held it against him.

  I wasn’t about to let him out of my sight, so I told the cab to wait, and dragged Devlin upstairs to Special Projects with me.

  Spot was making himself at home on the floor beside the receptionist’s desk, making a game out of switching his tail out of the way whenever Jazz rolled her chair forward or backward.

  I said hello to both of them, told Devlin to stay put, and whispered the magic words to Jazz that could make Spot prevent him from leaving. Then I got down to business.

  “Brophy and Arnstein in yet?” I asked.

  “Arnstein’s here, but not Brophy, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Call me Matt,” I said. “New rule I made up last night.”

  I reminded Devlin to stay where he was one more time, then went into Shirley’s office.

  “How did the dog behave?” I asked her.

  “He was a real gentleman. By comparison with Harris, anyway.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” I said in mock horror. “Any word from Motor Vehicles?”

  “No, it appears the secretary Harris knew has gotten married and retired. He says he has to start all over from scratch with a new one, and it might take a while before she’ll do him that kind of favor.”

  “Great,” I said. “How long?”

  “He says he can’t be sure, probably by tomorrow.” It was typical; we both laughed. “He’s a swine, isn’t he?” Shirley asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s better or worse that he really believes it. What’s new on the Walter Schick finances?”

  She eyed me curiously through her wire-framed glasses. “I wish I knew what this was all about.” She shook her head.

  “No you don’t. What have you got?”

  “Well, I can’t say anything for sure, I’ve only given it a quick once-over; but so far, nothing. He drew his salary, clipped his coupons and the like. No expenditures out of the ordinary, at least during the period you specified.”

  “What did I say? June to November of last year?”

  “Yes. Of course, I’ll check everything over, but I don’t expect to find anything more about Walter Schick. However ...”

  “Yes?”

  “I only learned about it in passing ...”

  “Yes?”

  “It probably doesn’t even mean anything ...”

  One thing I’ve learned is that as infuriating as it may be, things get accomplished more quickly if you play along with the other
person’s dramatic pauses. It makes them feel better.

  “Yes?” I said again.

  “Walter Schick’s daughter inherited some money.”

  I sniffed at that one for a second.

  “How much?” I said.

  “Fifty thousand dollars. It was left to her in her grandmother’s will. That’s the second Mrs. Hewlen, who died nine years ago. She left the money in trust for Roxanne Schick, to be collected on her eighteenth birthday, which was last July fifteenth.”

  “Saint Swithin’s Day,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind, it just bubbled to the top of the tar pit. Do you know what Miss Schick did with the money?”

  “Well, no, you did say Walter Schick. I could find out, but it would mean extorting from all those lawyers and banks all over again. What’s wrong?”

  From that last comment, I figured I looked as sick as I felt. I had hoped what Shirley had to tell me would dispel a certain idea I had that I didn’t like. Instead, she had raised an even grimmer thought.

  I sighed. “Well, don’t bother about it yet. And don’t refer to it as extortion. It’s called ‘collecting favors’ around here.”

  “Semantics,” she said. It sounded like a swear word.

  “People like you are my crusade,” I told her. I made her promise to read Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa and have a talk with me before bad-mouthing semantics again.

  I went back to the outer office. Devlin was still there, reading the bulletin board.

  I figured my apartment would be safe this time of day. I brought Devlin there. I asked him if he wanted anything.

  “Maybe a Scotch on the rocks to cut the dust,” he said.

  It figured he would be a Scotch drinker. Luckily for him, I had some, left over from a BYO party I’d thrown. I got him his drink, fixed something for myself, not Scotch. To me, Scotch tastes like Essence of Gauze.

  He took a sip on his drink. “Nice place you’ve got here. That rug must have cost a lot.” He indicated a white shag Jane Sloan had bought to go with the dog.

  “Actually, it’s not mine. I’m just keeping the place warm for a couple of friends.”

  “Lucky,” he said, taking another sip.

  “Yeah. It’s my boyish good looks that do it.” I took a sip on my drink, chocolate milk. I never take alcohol before sundown.

  I decided it was time to get down to business.

  “Why are you here?” I asked him.

  “You brought me here.”

  “I mean, what are you doing in New York? Your name wasn’t kept out of it. Why did you come to meet me?”

  “Why are you so sure I came to meet you? Maybe I’m here on business.”

  “You wore a flower. I’m in no mood for games, Devlin. Why are you in New York?”

  “I figured I owed it to you. After what the D.C. cops did to me, with my alibi, I could only imagine what you were going through, being found standing over the corpse and all. It wasn’t your fault I was dragged into it.”

  “What did the cops do to you?” I strove to keep the skepticism I felt about his concern for me out of my voice.

  “Well, they didn’t beat me, or anything, but they grilled me for the better part of the morning. They got me just as I was getting home. I was tired, you know, I worked half the night.”

  “Even after you heard about your friend’s death?”

  “Look, ARGUS doesn’t wait for anybody. Vince wasn’t around, and I had to get that thing set up for the summer run. We do a lot of special stuff in the summer.”

  “How long did you know Carlson?” I asked.

  “About five years. Ever since I started at CRI. He was my boss, but it’s a small department. We got to be pretty good friends.”

  “How good?”

  “Good enough to ... well, good enough.”

  “Good enough to know why he was killed?”

  He looked surprised. “Sure, don’t you?”

  “I,” I told him, “don’t know a goddam thing, for sure.”

  He found that funny. “You know,” he said, “when I got you on the telephone Tuesday night, I thought sure you had killed Vince to protect the Holy Name of Television. Or somebody like you had.” He laughed some more. “So you don’t know anything, huh? I was sure somebody would have figured it out by now.”

  “I guess I’m just stupid.”

  “I’ll help you then. Vince needed money. Vince was in a unique position to control something somebody wanted to control. Vince got his money, but then he got killed.”

  I knew it. I had probably known it all along, but stifled the idea because I hated it.

  Devlin said, “Ah, now you catch on.”

  “Spell it out for me anyway.”

  “If you want.” He shrugged. “Vince was fixing the ratings.”

  14

  “... and learn about the wonders of Science.”

  —Don Herbert, “Watch Mr. Wizard” (NBC)

  SO NOW IT WAS OUT. I felt sick. If Devlin was telling the truth, Carlson had perpetrated the crime of the century. Or at least one of the top ten. As I mentioned before, billions of dollars are spent because of what the ratings say. To be able to add a point here, shave one there, would be the key to the strongbox.

  You’d have to pick your spots, of course. It would be foolish to try to make it look as though “Meet the Press” had outrated the Superbowl, but you could cut the margin by enough to cause a lot of people a lot of trouble.

  Worse than that, the industry’s credibility would be blown. People trust the ratings. They may not like them, but they trust them. But once this got out ...

  Devlin grinned at my consternation. “Hey, look Cobb, don’t take it so hard. Really, what’s the big deal? My company does the ratings for your company so you know how much to rip off Madison Avenue for the opportunity to brainwash the suckers at home. What’s the big deal if a guy decides to rip off the first link of the chain for a change?”

  “Shut up. You knew about this?”

  “Yes,” he said, with an inflection that said, “what of it?”

  “How long?”

  He cocked his head to think. “Oh, since last fall sometime.”

  “When?”

  “Let me think. Must have been Thanksgiving week. Yeah, because ARGUS was down, it was a black week, we weren’t doing any ratings. Could I have a refill?”

  I handed him the bottle. It had one of those valves on top that only pours a jigger at a time when you tilt the bottle. He tilted it a couple of times.

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  “Well, like I said, the computer was down, and Vince and I were scheduled to do a routine check, but he had a tough night with the bottle the night before, and didn’t come in on time.

  “So I did it myself, or started to. I ... how much do you know about computers?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “This is gonna be kind of hard to explain.”

  “Well, give it a try.”

  “Okay. Right. I’ll try it like this. A computer, electronically, is nothing but a switch, a huge, complicated, sophisticated switch, but still a switch.

  “Now you take a light switch. It’s either open or closed, juice or no juice, yes or no. Well, everything a computer does is based on a series of opens or closeds, signal or no signal. Got that so far?”

  “So far.”

  “Well, that’s it. There’s room in the ‘brain’ of the computer for millions upon millions of signal-no signal combinations, with an unbelievable number of combinations. When we program the machine, all we’re doing is setting up a series of these combinations to do what we want to do. I’m simplifying this a lot.”

  I told him I followed him. “But how did you find out he was messing with the ratings?”

  “I’m coming to that. Now, for the convenience of people (ARGUS doesn’t care) we break the kinds of information we put into the machine into categories, so when we want to che
ck what’s there, we have a label for groups of things. Like I said before, to the computer, it makes no difference at all, it’s all still just a series of ons and offs.

  “So what Vince did, was he hid a program to limit certain ratings.”

  “What do you mean, he ‘hid’ it?”

  “Just that. He took a kind of information we call ‘instruction’ but disguised it as a kind we call ‘data.’ That’s not all he did, but the rest is too complicated.”

  “How did he limit the ratings? I don’t get that part of it.”

  “You know how the ratings work? Coded signals for channel and time?”

  I nodded.

  He picked up the bottle of Scotch. “Vince made a program that works exactly like this gizmo here. No matter how much booze is in the bottle, only a certain predetermined amount comes through into the glass.

  “Vince set it up so the TV ratings system would only register a certain number of certain signals, and no more. It doesn’t matter how many people are actually watching; the final printout will show what Vince set it to show.”

  “Carlson had this thing set to sabotage a certain show?”

  “Right. After a certain point, it filtered the signal for that show right out of the system.” He grinned. “Three guesses what show.”

  I didn’t need them. “ ‘Harbor Heights,’ ” I said.

  “Very good.” He applauded me silently.

  “No wonder the ratings got lower every week.”

  “No,” he protested, “not at all. According to Vince, he only activated the computer program twice, the second and third weeks ‘Harbor Heights’ was on. He said TV ratings are self-fulfilling prophecies, he talked like that. He said that since ARGUS was implemented, shows are taken off the air so fast, that when the public hears a certain show has had bad ratings two weeks in a row, they stop watching it. Like rats deserting a sinking ship.” He smiled again. “And the other outfits backed him up. They weren’t fixed, but they showed ‘Harbor Heights’ taking a nosedive too.”

  I was holding in my fury. “And you let him get away with it.”

  “Hey, come on, he was my friend, you know? I asked him about it the next day, and he practically got on his knees to beg me not to tell about it. He said he hated himself for doing it, but he was in big trouble and had done it to get money to pay his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler.”