The Morning Show Murders

by Al Roker

  “Where are you going?” she asked as I headed for the door.

  “You don’t expect me to just sit here and let Rodell and his pals build a case against me? I’m going to try and find some other suspects to throw at ’em.”

  Cassandra frowned. “There are people you hire to do that, Billy. Private investigators. Pros who know what they’re doing.”

  I considered telling her that I was not exactly a novice at reading the signs of guilt. That shortly after my mother’s death, my unofficial stepfather, Paul Lamont, the wily confidence man, and I had traveled the country, living off of the gullibility of the greedy and the dishonest. I could have explained that my teens had been filled not merely with the education received at a long list of ever-changing schools but with Paul’s lectures and on-the-job training in discovering the evil hidden in some human hearts.

  But these were my secrets to keep hidden, so instead I said, “Hiring an investigator costs money. And at the rate things are going, money may be in short supply around here. Anyway, it’s all a matter of prying information out of people, which is what I do every morning on Wake Up.”

  “The people you interview aren’t potential murderers, Billy.”

  “You should watch the show more often,” I told her.

  Chapter

  ELEVEN

  To avoid the crowd out front, I used the rear exit.

  Night had just fallen, and I strolled through it for a block before flagging a cab.

  The address I gave the driver belonged to a pale-orange brick apartment building in the West Fifties. The green awning was faded and, judging by the debris gathered in the stairwell to the basement entrance, the smudges on the glass front door left by a hundred fingers, the junk mail and freebie tabloids cluttering the tiny vestibule, and the burnt-out bulbs in its cheap chandelier, the superintendent of the Corey Apartments wasn’t very house-proud.

  That made me wonder if instead of pressing a lot of buzzers and getting residents all stirred up I shouldn’t just check to see if the door separating the apartments from the vestibule might be unlocked.

  It was.

  I decided to avoid the tiny and undoubtedly dangerous elevator. Instead, I climbed up three flights of carpeted stairwell. I arrived gasping from the exercise and the dust. I swore that as soon as this was over, I’d start working out. No joke.

  According to her employment form, Melody Moon lived in apartment 319. The improbably named Ms. Moon was the beautiful black teenage chef wannabe who’d caught the eye of Rudy Gallagher at our ill-fated Food School pilot shoot.

  There was a cartoon daisy painted at eye level on the dark wooden door to 319. I pressed the buzzer and almost immediately heard the slap of approaching feet.

  “Who’s there?” a feminine voice inquired.

  “Billy Blessing.”

  There was a metallic click, and the bright-yellow center of the cartoon daisy was replaced by an eyeball.

  “Wow,” the voice said. “It is you.”

  Chains rattled. Locks unclicked. Eventually the door opened on an undernourished, milk-pale young woman in her twenties with spiked, dark-blue hair and a tattoo of the Batman logo on her arm. She was wearing a tattered tee featuring the cat and dog from the Get Fuzzy comic strip, pink cargo shorts, and matching flip-flops.

  Definitely not Melody Moon.

  “Wow,” she said again. “Chef Billy Blessing. Come on in.”

  I entered a bright room with royal-blue walls trimmed in butter yellow. Rainbow-hued shag carpets were scattered on a light hardwood floor. Twin pink stuffed chairs flanked a large flat-screen TV/DVD player combo that had been trimmed in press-on zebra-striped paper. On the walls were anime cells and original comic art in frames that picked up the TV’s zebra-stripe motif.

  It was like walking onto a set at Cartoon Network.

  “I guess you’re looking for Melody,” the young woman told me. “That’s so sweet of you. She’s out on a grocery run, but she’ll be back soon. I’m her roommate, Rita Margolis.”

  She extended an ink-and-paint-stained hand with nails bitten to the quick. Her grip was firm and no-nonsense.

  “Sit down,” she suggested, indicating a maroon couch that seemed to have been made from densely packed sheets of cardboard. It was more comfortable than it looked, but then, it would have had to be.

  “We don’t really need the groceries,” Rita said. “I just thought it was a good idea to keep Melody occupied. She’s taking her fiancé’s death really hard.”

  I let the fiancé comment go unquestioned. Instead I asked, “When did she find out?”

  “It popped on the news a couple of hours ago. Melody freaked, but in a scary way. No tears. Just sort of froze, staring at the TV, even after I turned it off. Then she started talking, only, like, to herself, not to me.”

  “What was she saying?”

  ‘This isn’t happening. Rudy and I are in love.’ Stuff like that. I feel so bad for her.”

  “Sounds like she might be in shock,” I said.

  “No. I know shock. I studied nursing, back before I began my creative phase. Melody’s tough. I think she’s just working it out.

  “Like something to drink, chef? A cosmo? A negroni? Test me. I used to tend bar at Ganglion.”

  I’d never heard of Ganglion, which I suspected was a good thing. “I’m fine,” I said.

  In front of me was an antique footlocker standing in for a coffee table. Painted powder blue. Magazines and books and CDs were spread across its surface. I spied Rita’s name on the cover of a comic book titled Funny Girls. “This yours?” I asked, picking it up.

  “Yep,” Rita said. “My little baby. I’ve been selling it on my website. Moved nearly two thousand copies at twelve ninety-five per, not including tax or postage. The girls on the cover, the three girls, have crazy adventures all over the world. They’re bisexual, which adds to the fun. Both Eclipse Comics and HBO are very interested.”

  “Who wouldn’t be?” I said. “You have a shot at twice the audience.”

  “I’m very proud of my work.” She sat beside me and took the book from me. “Let me show you a few things.” She sobered suddenly and gave me a hopeful look. “Assuming you really are interested.”

  “Beautiful and bisexual? Sounds like a party.”

  Though I’m no better judge of comic art than fine art, it seemed to me that Rita’s work was professional and commercial. Her funny girls were drawn in an enhanced realistic style. Very beautiful, very shapely. Very, very bisexual. We were in the middle of an adventure in Rome, with Rita providing me with a detailed verbal annotation, when Melody Moon returned.

  She was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and bright red tennis shoes. She stared at us blankly over the huge brown grocery bag she was carrying. She seemed neither surprised to find me in her living room nor curious about why I might be there.

  “Look who’s here to see you, Melody,” Rita said, nervously breaking the silence.

  “Let me get that,” I said, relieving Melody of the heavy bag.

  “Thank you,” she said flatly, without affect. “I’ll show you where it goes.”

  Walking stiffly, she led me to a tiny kitchenette just off the living room. It featured a two-burner, a microwave, a small fridge, a sink, and, squeezed beneath it, a mini-dishwasher. After I’d placed the bag on a narrow counter, I noticed the wallpaper—white with little dark illustrations that upon closer examination turned out to be early black-and-white cartoon characters. Bimbo. Koko. Felix the Cat. Betty Boop.

  “Comic art is Rita’s life,” Melody said as she put the perishables away.

  “Caught that,” I said.

  “I appreciate your coming here, chef,” she said, shuffling objects in the small freezer to make room for a quart of butter-pecan ice cream, “but I’m doing fine. I’ll be okay.”

  I felt like a louse. She and her roommate were assuming I’d come to lift her spirits, when, in fact, I was there looking for someone to take my place as murder suspect num
ber one. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she might be in mourning.

  “I’m a little surprised you knew about Rudy and me,” she said, folding the now-empty brown bag and placing it with other folded bags in a narrow cabinet. “He told me he was keeping it a secret from the people he worked with. But I guess there are some things you don’t hide from friends.”

  Friends? How low could I feel?

  When we returned to the living room, Rita was slipping into what looked like a shiny Day-Glo yellow plastic pea jacket. “Mello,” she addressed her roommate, “since the chef’s here to keep you company, would it be okay if I ducked out for an hour or so? There’s a Love and Rockets retro at a gallery in the Village. Los Bros are supposed to be there.”

  I hadn’t a clue as to what Rita was talking about, but Melody just said, “Go. I’m good.”

  Rita hugged her. “It’ll get better,” I heard her whisper.

  Then she hugged me. “You’re a lovely man to have come here,” she said.

  If I was so lovely, why was I feeling like a first-class creep?

  As soon as Rita closed the door behind her, whatever had been keeping Melody going suddenly gave up the ghost. Her rigidity dissolved and her legs buckled.

  I caught her before she fell onto the footlocker coffee table and helped her to the couch. “You’re worn out,” I said, sitting beside her. “You need sleep.”

  “I don’t think I can. My head is full of jumbles.”

  “Why don’t I fix you some warm milk?”

  “No. Really. I’m okay. I just keep asking myself why somebody would do such a terrible thing. I don’t understand it.”

  “Neither do I,” I said truthfully. The guy had been a dick, but that shouldn’t have cost him his life.

  She looked like she was about to cry, but she took a deep breath and got herself under control. “He was so wonderful to me,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s gone. I’ve been with … other guys, but he was the only man I really gave myself to.”

  Need-to-know basis. Please!

  “He was so sweet. He worried that I’d think he was too old, but that didn’t matter. For me, it was love at first sight that day at the tryouts.”

  “He told me he thought you were something special,” I said.

  She smiled. “I couldn’t believe it when he asked me out that night. This great-looking man of the world, who’d been to so many places and done so many things. And he was interested in me. Not just in having sex with me. There’ve been nights when all we did was talk and laugh and not make love at all.

  “Did Rudy tell you we were going to be married?”

  The question caught me off guard. Luckily, before I could decide whether or not to lie, her mood turned down again and she began to weep. I’d never thought of myself as a father figure, not to mention a grief counselor, but I had no problem putting my arm around her and giving her my Zegna pocket square to mop up her tears.

  “He’s gone forever,” she moaned.

  I let her cry against my shoulder and stared at a comic-book room that, in spite of its eccentric touches and bursts of color, had grown quite dreary.

  Eventually her body stiffened and she pulled away, moving into another stage of grief. She used my sixty-five-dollar pocket square to blow her nose furiously. “Some bastard took Rudy from me,” she said, anger distorting her lovely face. “Business deal, bullshit. Murder business.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “He was working on some deal that he said would make it possible for us to get married.”

  “What kind of deal?” I asked.

  “Television, I guess. Rudy didn’t say.”

  “But you think it could have had something to do with his murder?”

  “We were supposed to have dinner at his place last night. Like we’d been doing just about every night. But Rudy called and said we couldn’t because this important meeting came up. He said he’d phone me if we could get together later. I waited up until midnight, but … Oh, God. I was even sort of angry with him because he didn’t call.”

  She began crying again.

  I let the questions pile up in my head and waited silently for her to cry herself out.

  When she did, I asked if I could get her something. Water? Aspirin?

  She shook her head no.

  “You must miss him, too,” she said.

  Before I had to lie and say “Yes,” she suddenly reached out and plucked something from the coffee table, a thin, transparent jewel box housing a silver disk. “For a cool guy in his forties,” she said, “he could be like a little boy at times. You know what he really loved to do in bed?”

  I bit my tongue, shook my head, and hoped for the best.

  “Watch TV,” she said, pressing the jewel box to her chest. “Old shows that he’d had transferred to DVD. Black-and-white, some of ’em. He loved to lie in bed and watch old TV. Had shelves full of disks. He was in a lot of the shows.”

  “I guess he was,” I said, remembering that Rudy’s early career had been on-camera. “Melody, when you spoke with him last night, did he mention any details about the meeting? Where it was? Who’d be there?”

  She thought for a moment. “It was at his condo, I’m pretty sure he said. But that’s about it.”

  “Was he meeting with a man or a woman?”

  “I got the impression it was a man, but I don’t know that he said, really.”

  “You should probably tell all this to the police,” I said.

  “Oh, God. No police. I can’t go to the police.”

  “Why not?”

  She slid away from me against the sofa, arms crossed, chin tucked, shaking her head back and forth. Totally spooked.

  “Okay,” I said. “No police.”

  “It’s … I don’t want … some people to know where I am. And if I go to the police …”

  “What people?”

  No answer.

  “Your mother?”

  Hesitation, then the decision to remain silent.

  “Father?”

  “He’s not my father,” she almost shouted. “My father died. This one’s not much older than my brother. He thinks ’cause he gave my mother a ring, he can do anything he wants to me.”

  “Okay,” I said softly. “I’ve got the picture. How much does Rita know about it?”

  “Not a lot. Doesn’t take much to put Rita into attack mode. I’m not lookin’ for any payback. I just want that whole part of my life gone and forgotten.”

  She looked even younger than eighteen. Maybe she was. People have been known to lie about their ages on their contracts, though usually it’s in the other direction.

  “Melody Moon your real name?”

  “It is now,” she said. “Aw, hell. Everything would have been so perfect if only Rudy and I could’ve …”

  She drew her legs up and hugged them.

  She must have seen the concern on my face, because she attempted a grin and said, “I’ll be okay.”

  She looked at the disk in her hands. “We would have had a happy family. Rudy loved kids, you know.”

  “He had children?”

  “Oh, not any of his own. He never was married. But when he was starting out he hosted a kids’ show on a local station in Cleveland. That’s where he’s from.”

  I guess I didn’t know very much about Rudy. Maybe I should have been more curious about the guy who’d won Gretchen’s heart and, assuming he’d been straight with Melody, had decided to break it.

  “He gave me this,” she said, indicating the disk. “Four of his shows. You can see he really cared for the kids. Didn’t talk down to them at all. He was so nice to them. Like a real dad.

  “You mind if I put this on? It makes me happy to watch it.”

  “Please,” I said.

  It was a standard videotaped kids’ show circa the 1980s. Produced on the cheap. A youthful, skinny Rudy Gallagher, decked out in what looked like an old brass-buttoned Sergeant Pepper coat and a yachtsman’s c
ap, and operating under the nom de video of Cap’n Rudy, set sail in the good ship USS Huckleberry with ten or so kids on board.

  The ship’s bulkheads were black muslin, the portholes cardboard with cartoon waves. Rudy and the kids sat on fold-up chairs while some unidentified hapless station gofer, whom the cap’n called Yeoman Yuckie, pretended to operate an ancient motion-picture projector ostensibly showing Hanna-Barbera cartoons that suddenly filled the screen. Chief among the characters was Huckleberry Hound, hence the show’s title.

  Melody fast-forwarded through the cartoon segments, making the usually lethargic, blue-coated Huckleberry move faster than the Road Runner. Then she hit the play button and we watched young Rudy bonding with the kids, listening to their stories, singing sea chanteys and employing a truly awful “Avast ye, mateys” old-salt growl to spin tall tales that were rewarded with youthful cheers and laughter.

  While I found these blasts from the past initially interesting, they quickly lost their charm for anyone who’d not been in love with Rudy Gallagher. By the time I’d endured two of the thirty-minute episodes, my eyes were starting to roll back in my skull.

  To keep from screaming, I excused myself and went to the kitchenette, where I found an assortment of booze. I selected a half-full pint bottle of bourbon, took a sip to make sure it wasn’t turpentine, and used another inch of it to fashion a medicinal warm-milk punch for Melody.

  She accepted it, took a tentative sip, and pronounced it “delicious,” taking a larger swallow. “Do you think any of Rudy’s old shows might be for sale on eBay?” she asked. “Maybe more of these Huckleberrys?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to check,” I said.

  The possibility of owning more video minutes of Rudy seemed to please her immensely. She settled back against the couch and drank more of the milk punch.

  We were halfway through yet another Huckleberry episode when Melody put the empty glass on the coffee table and stood up, unsteadily. “Excuse me for a minute?” she mumbled and tottered off.