We Interrupt This Broadcast

by K. K. Beck

  But then he realized why she was screaming. Inside the Hide-A-Bed was a large bloodstained corpse that had apparently been the cause of the jammed mechanism. It was Ed Costello, KLEG’s sales manager—or rather it had been Ed Costello. There was absolutely no doubt in Bob’s mind that Ed was dead. “Jesus Christ,” he said, leaping backward and gagging. There was a cloying, fruity smell coming from the corpse.

  Melanie, her screams reduced to panicky whimpers, rushed from the break room and ran out to the reception area, grabbing her purse. “I’m getting out of here!” she shouted.

  “Yes, yes, good idea,” Bob said shrilly, following her away from the thing that had been Ed. She had stuffed her breasts back into her bra, fastened it and was now jerking awkwardly at the zipper of her dress.

  “Let me help you,” said Bob, coming to her assistance. His voice was pitched back down in the lower register now.

  “Don’t touch me!” she shouted.

  “Listen, I’m sure there’s some sort of explanation for this,” said Bob. “That was our sales manager, Ed Costello. Clearly he’s met with some horrible accident.” As he said this, Bob realized it would have had to be a very freaky accident indeed to result in Ed’s becoming imprisoned against his will in a Hide-A-Bed. And there was all that blood, too. “I’d better call the police,” he said dully.

  “Don’t tell anyone I was here,” pleaded Melanie. “I’ve gotta go.” She padded to the door in her stocking feet and clawed at the lock. Bob noted vaguely that she must have had shoes on when she arrived, but he didn’t want to bring that up and delay her departure.

  “Will you be all right?” said Bob halfheartedly. Now that the evening was clearly ruined, he was thrilled that Melanie was leaving voluntarily. “Let’s keep in touch,” he yelled as she slammed the door behind her.

  He took a deep breath and crept back to the studio, after making sure the outer door was locked after her. Some homicidal maniac could be lurking around the darkened station. Fleetingly he hoped Melanie made it safely to her car and back to Edmonds. He shook as he reached for the phone and hit the speed-dial number for Franklin Payne, one of the station’s owners.

  Like everyone else in the programming department, Bob loathed Franklin Payne. Franklin’s sister, Caroline, who actually held the title “station manager,” was, however, a complete ditz. Some comparatively reasonable person ostensibly in authority should be notified. Bob’s nerves were completely shot, but his animus for Franklin was strong enough that he was still able to enjoy the prospect of dumping a messy problem on him and ruining his evening.

  “Bob Kreckelschmidt here,” he said, using his real name as befitted the seriousness of the occasion.

  “Who?” snapped Franklin Payne.

  “Bob LeBaron, I mean. We’ve got a problem down here at the station.”

  Franklin sighed heavily. “If the transmitter is acting up again, we can wait until morning and deal with it then,” he said.

  “It’s Ed,” said Bob. “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Ed’s dead, I just found the body.”

  “What! Ed Costello?” Bob noted with satisfaction that he had Franklin’s attention. He was tempted to add, “That’s right, Ed Costello, your sleazy little management spy.”

  Bob gave a garbled account of finding Ed inside the sofa. “There’s a lot of blood,” he added with a certain relish.

  “Are the police there?” demanded Franklin.

  “No. I haven’t called them yet,” Bob said smarmily. “I thought you’d want to know first.” That would probably give him points. These slick corporate types liked to begin damage control right away.

  “For Christ’s sake, Bob, call the cops. It’s what you’re supposed to do when you find a dead body. Dial nine-one-one. Okay? And don’t touch anything. Just stay in the booth and call the police. Never mind. I’ll do it. Just stay where you are.”

  “Okay,” said Bob, sounding slightly hurt.

  “I guess I’m coming down there,” said Franklin wearily. “Listen, Bob, don’t call my sister. She’ll just get upset.”

  As soon as Bob hung up, he crept back into the break room. Bolero kicked in for another sixteen minutes. Avoiding looking at Ed’s body, he retrieved the half bottle of Korbel and scuttled away. Getting rid of that bottle seemed like the sensible thing to do, seeing as Bob had already been warned twice about drinking on shift. He went into the reception area and collapsed wearily into a chair, tilting the bottle to his lips and draining it methodically. How was he going to explain what had possessed him to open the Hide-A-Bed? He gazed dully at the empty bottle in his hand. He went over to Ed’s messy cubicle, which the new girl they’d hired hadn’t started fixing up yet, and buried the bottle under some papers in the wastebasket.

  He proceeded back to the booth, slid behind the console and put on the headphones, leaving one ear half uncovered so he could hear if any killers were lurking around. He switched on the mike, activating the On Air sign. “Bob LeBaron, with you until midnight,” he said. “Then, of course, it’s Teresa, Queen of the Night, to keep you company till dawn. We’ve just heard Ravel’s Bolero. Hypnotic, isn’t it, folks?” As always, Bob felt more secure now that he was back on the air. The soothing sound of his own voice calmed him.

  He consulted the log and scanned Ed’s copy from the black plastic three-ring binder on the desk. “You know, friends,” it read, “none of us are getting any younger.” Here Ed had typed in “Chuckle” in parentheses. “I’d like to tell you about a remarkable breakthrough in mattress technology that makes a good night’s sleep possible once again.”

  Ed had insisted Bob read this as a personal testimonial. Well, the hell with that. Ed wasn’t around now to jump on him. Bob changed the lead. “You know,” he began, “like many people, I’ve been concerned about an elderly relative who, because of the natural process of aging, had trouble getting a good night’s sleep. Now, thanks to a remarkable breakthrough in mattress technology . . .”

  He heard sirens approaching and reached over to close the studio door. The cops, of course, would just have to wait until he got into the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, Opus 48, before he could let them in. Bob might have screwed up a lot during his long, down-spiraling broadcast career, but he’d never screwed up on the air.

  Now that he’d overcome the physical horror of it, he reflected on the fact that Ed Costello’s death, while superficially tragic, was good for KLEG and bad for its greedy, ruthless owners. In fact, Bob was quite certain that the staff would be delighted to hear Ed was dead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time Franklin Payne’s vintage Mercedes made it down to the station and crunched into the gravel parking lot, the place was surrounded by police cars. Their radios crackled in the night air. To his horror, a TV news van with a big satellite dish on top of it was rolling into the parking lot. A female police officer with dark, shiny hair coiled up in a big braid approached him. She carried a huge flashlight.

  He introduced himself as one of the owners of the station. “The night man called and told me what happened,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

  “We appreciate that,” she said. “The detectives are on their way. They’ll probably have some questions for you.” She gestured toward the news van. “Want to talk to these guys?” she said. “You don’t have to.”

  “Hell, no,” said Franklin. He loathed all local TV news on principle. He was also extremely reluctant to be identified publicly as one of the owners of KLEG. As far as he was concerned, it was akin to being exposed as the absentee landlord of a firetrap slum tenement.

  “You’ll keep them out of here, I trust,” said Franklin.

  The officer smiled and nodded. “You bet,” she said. She lifted some yellow crime-scene tape that had been attached across the front door, waited for him to duck underneath, and followed him.

  From the lobby, Franklin glanced sideways into the break room. He saw two uniformed officers staring
down at the open Hide-A-Bed, their broad blue backs mercifully obscuring his view of Ed. Franklin, while he had been dimly aware of a repulsive old sofa in the break room, hadn’t realized it opened into a bed, but he was hardly surprised. It was typical of the slackers on the KLEG payroll to have installed a place to crash out on the job.

  “These things can be a real bitch,” said one of the officers. “We have to sleep on one when we visit my brother-in-law in Arizona. It’s always full of Ritz crackers and shit, and there’s this metal bar that gets me right in the middle of my back through this thin little mattress.”

  “Bummer,” said cop number two.

  “I’m going to ask you not to touch anything,” said the woman officer, shooing Franklin through the open area surrounded by cubicles. “In fact, we’d like you to wait in here with Mr. LeBaron until the detectives arrive, okay?”

  She opened the studio door and gestured inside. Bob LeBaron was sitting there behind the mike, biting his nails. Franklin hoped the detectives arrived soon. Following a time-honored radio tradition, Bob, the most obnoxious announcer on staff, had been assigned the six to midnight shift just so that no one else would have to deal with him in person. Now Franklin was being shut up with him in this little glassed-in room for God knew how long. He began to wish Caroline had been the one to have been rousted out of bed.

  “The audience doesn’t suspect a thing,” said Bob. “I’ve managed to keep the flow going, and my voice didn’t even tense up or anything. I thought you’d like to know. We didn’t miss any spots, either.”

  “That’s great, Bob,” said Franklin, sitting down on a tall, uncomfortable stool. “You’re a real pro. I’m sure Ed would be pleased to know we didn’t have to do any make-goods because of his untimely death.”

  Bob looked hurt and confused. Franklin sighed. “Yes, I was being sarcastic, Bob,” he said patiently. “Sorry, but I’m a little shook up. I never expected anything like this. Do the police know what happened?”

  “They haven’t told me a thing, except that it looks like he was shot and they think he might have been there for a few days.” Bob narrowed his eyes. “I wouldn’t rule out foul play.”

  “Gee, Bob, I’d say that’s a pretty good bet,” said Franklin, who couldn’t imagine Ed accidentally shooting himself then folding himself up into a Hide-A-Bed and quietly bleeding to death. “By the way, how did you happen to actually find him?”

  “Well, I had an awfully long piece running, and I’m afraid my back has been acting up again. The doctor says lying flat is the very best thing to do for it.” To indicate major pain, Bob winced and lifted one shoulder a few times. “Years of huddling over microphones has really played hell with my back,” he said. “You see the disks in my spine—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Franklin cut him off. The last thing he wanted was a big litany of job-related medical complaints. He could well imagine years of workmen’s compensation hearings, costly litigation, and support checks. He shook his head slowly. “Poor old Ed. He was a useless bastard in many ways, but no one deserves this.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, checking the timing on the Tchaikovsky. The digital readout indicated the piece had another ten minutes to go. “He’d been in this business almost as long as I had. We worked together years ago at KZZ. Before radio got screwed up. It was personality radio. I was the morning man, he was in sales. God, we had the best numbers in town. The dough was just rolling in.” Bob’s eyes started misting up. Franklin assumed Bob was mourning his vanished glory rather than his dead colleague.

  “It was just a couple of years after the World’s Fair. Seattle was a great town then, full of youth and vigor and promise. God, we were so young.”

  Bob gave Franklin a crafty look and added, “Of course, now that I’m older I’m sure glad they have laws against age discrimination. It’s terrible the way some of my old pals have been thrown out on their ass in later years, but some of them have collected pretty big settlements for age discrimination.”

  Here was another of Bob’s favorite topics. Franklin imagined he had the paperwork for such a suit all ready to file in case the ax fell.

  “Anyway,” Bob continued, “we used to go out and take the clients to lunch at Trader Vic’s. The expense account was bottomless. I remember this little Oriental gal that used to work in the bar there, always had an orchid over her left ear. Well, whenever we walked in the place, this little gal, Michiko her name was—”

  A man’s face appeared at the window, followed by a timid knock cutting off the mai tai–tinged reminiscence. Franklin opened the studio door. The man was tall and lean with prematurely gray hair. He stood there looking nervously up at the On Air sign.

  “It’s okay,” said Franklin. “He doesn’t go back on the air for another ten minutes or so. I’m Franklin Payne, one of the owners.”

  “Detective Lukowski.” He shook Franklin’s hand, then looked inquiringly at Bob.

  “This is Bob LeBaron, the announcer who found the body,” said Franklin.

  “Can we talk here?” said Lukowski.

  “Why don’t we go into my sister’s office, the one with the sliding glass door. It’s less crowded.” Franklin always felt slightly claustrophobic in the studio. Even as a child, he’d hated it in here.

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve got to back-announce this, then get into the all-night show,” said Bob. “Okay if I come join you in about ten minutes?”

  “Sure,” said Lukowski, who had now been joined by another detective, older and beefier, who wore a loud sport jacket and was introduced as Detective MacNab.

  The station had now become a hive of activity. Photographic flashes were coming from the break room. The place was crawling with police officers and civilians, all working away. If only the regular staff could manage to look so productive. Franklin led the two men into Caroline’s office, and they all sat down.

  “I know this has been a real shock,” said MacNab.

  “It sure has. Can you tell me what happened to Ed?”

  “He was shot. That’s about all we know for now.”

  “Here?”

  “Looks like it,” said Lukowski. “Your announcer told the officers who arrived first that the victim’s name was Ed Costello. What type of work did Mr. Costello do here?”

  “He sold ads.”

  “Did you supervise him?”

  “No, my sister did. Nominally. Actually, no one really supervised Ed Costello. He worked mostly on commission and kept his own odd hours.” Ed had met the basic minimum requirements for his job as radio time salesperson: he owned a necktie and a car. Franklin had often wondered how Ed survived on the tiny commission checks the station paid him. Maybe his wife had a real job. “In fact, we hardly ever saw the guy, and he didn’t seem to be trying to drum up business, so we decided to fire him as soon as we found a replacement, which we did this week.”

  “So you’re saying he was fired?”

  “Well, we planned to fire him. We would have if we could have located him. He stopped coming to work about three days ago. Caroline called his home, but his wife didn’t know where he was either.”

  “His wife? Has anyone told her about this?”

  “I certainly haven’t. I’ve never actually met her.” The last thing Franklin wanted to do was notify the next of kin. Surely the police would do that. “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about the staff or the day-to-day operations. My mother owned this station. Kind of a hobby, really. She was very fond of classical music. When she died six months ago, my sister and I inherited KLEG. Caroline, that’s my sister, has been managing it since our mother’s death. I’m afraid I’m not really much help.”

  “How about an address? Got a good address for Mr. Costello? His driver’s license has a P.O. box.”

  Franklin reached for Caroline’s address file and began fumbling through it. The fact that it wasn’t in alphabetical order made the task somewhat laborious.

  “Did he have any enemies you might know of?” said Lukowsk
i.

  “Well, the programming and the sales side of the house are traditionally antagonistic. I get the impression there’s a lot of office politics going on here all the time. Bob might know more, though of course the night-shift guy is usually out of the loop.”

  “When was Mr. Costello last seen at work?” asked Lukowski.

  “To tell you the truth,” said Franklin, “I was out of town, at my family’s old summer place on Lake Crescent. I was going through some of my mother’s things there, as part of settling her estate, and doing a little fishing. There’s no phone there, so I’ve been incommunicado for a few days.”

  Franklin finally managed to produce a dog-eared address card. Ed apparently lived in suburban Bellevue, on what sounded like a quiet residential street. Somehow Franklin had imagined him living in a cheap walk-up apartment somewhere, with naked lightbulbs, cracked Scotch tape on the blinds and the smell of cats and cooked cabbage in the threadbare lobby. His suits were clearly of ancient vintage—left over no doubt from his glory days with KZZ—and on the rare occasions when he made sales calls he drove an old beater that Franklin hoped he parked around the corner out of view of the clients.

  “Did his wife phone here, looking for him?” asked Lukowski.

  “I don’t know. Caroline said she didn’t seem too concerned about his disappearing. The truth was, I thought he was on a bender.” Most of Caroline’s hires were people rendered dysfunctional by a stubborn devotion to the arts, paired with massive lack of talent. Occasionally she hired someone whose life was a mess because of simple neurosis or substance abuse. Franklin had always suspected that Ed’s lack of productivity could be chalked up to booze. It was the only explanation he could come up with.

  “Can you show us which desk was Mr. Costello’s?” said MacNab.

  Franklin led them to Ed’s cubicle. The desk was covered with little Post-it notes with scribbled phone numbers as well as a few blank advertising contracts, a stack of rate cards, file folders and Xerox copies of pages from ratings books. It seemed like a lot of paperwork for the few accounts Ed carried.