by Al Roker
“I’ve accounted for the served entrées,” Cassandra said, “and the takeouts. That only cost me an hour and a half studying receipts, which in turn led to my developing a killer headache. I think I may need glasses. Are contacts covered by our health insurance?”
“You’d know more about that than I,” I said. “Thank you for the coq au vin report, Cassandra. And would you do me a big favor? Before the silverfish cops take all the steaks from kitchen, set two aside for me.”
She rolled her eyes. “My boss, an ass man.”
“Spread the word,” I said. “But mention I’m not so jaded I’d turn my nose up at a pair of nice round breasts.”
“Sometimes, Billy, you really disgust me.”
“Don’t forget the steaks,” I reminded her.
Chapter
SEVENTEEN
New York’s Finest had snagged all the steaks by the time Cassandra went looking for my deuce. So I wound up working a little harder than I’d planned that night at Phil Bruno’s, building a dinner around a two-pound rack of lamb. While I put Phil’s Viking stove to use roasting the lamb, simmering a ginger-mint sauce, and creating a potato-leek soup, he occupied himself by putting together a presentation of the footage he’d shot in Kabul.
The kitchen was impressive, better equipped and better-looking than the one we used on set at the Wine & Dine. The onyx sink and built-ins, and the leather, chrome, and smoked-glass dining-room furniture, all rested on a sparkling black-tile platform. It was a sort of freestanding set piece for a huge living space that occupied the complete upper floor of a converted warehouse in the Meatpacking District, south of West Fourteenth Street, just a few blocks from Pastis and PM and the other hot restaurants and clubs.
The walls were a dark wood, the floor covered by a deep sea-green carpet that added timbre to the voice of Frank Sinatra, who at the moment was singing about the Isle of Capri from some hidden stereo source.
I enjoyed the kitchen time: I found it very therapeutic to perform familiar tasks that I was confident would be completed successfully within a relatively short period of time. Sinatra had made his vocal tour of vacation spots and we’d moved to another Jersey Frankie, Valli, by the time I laid out the lamb en croute on the dinner table, along with the potato-leek soup, hot dinner rolls, and, to slosh it all down, a tasty, Bordeaux-styled Corbières.
Phil took one look at the spread and said, “Fuck you, Blessing, where’s the ketchup?”
For a while we were too busy eating to talk. Then, hunger satisfied, we polished off what remained of the wine and sampled the lemon tarts I’d rescued from the Bistro’s freezer and discussed an assortment of things unrelated to why I was there.
Phil told me a little about his late father, the famous Life photographer Claudio Bruno. One of his most recognizable black-and-white pictures, blown up about four times the size of a magazine page, occupied a section of the loft’s rear wall, between Phil’s bedroom and office. If you’re old enough, you may remember the photo. It captured in crisp detail a puffed-up, then-still-ambulatory Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace Jr., strutting in some gala state parade, blissfully unaware that a little black boy in pressed white shirt, short white pants, and saddle oxfords was sticking out his tongue, razzing him from the sidelines.
Old Claudio had been a real pro with a camera but not much of a dad, as Phil saw it. Usually away from home on assignment and when at home preoccupied and distant, the elder Bruno wasn’t exactly Cliff Huxtable. When Phil’s mother died from cancer, he and his sister, Gina, were left to fend for themselves. Years of therapy had led Phil to believe that his father’s rejection was why he’d settled for a bachelor’s life.
“What exactly are you hoping to find on my footage?” he asked me, when we came to the end of the lemon tarts.
“I don’t know. I may not even know it when I see it.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” he said, picking up our coffees and leading me from the raised platform to the living-room area at the front of the former warehouse. A plush, dark-green leather sofa and chairs looked across a smoked glass–topped coffee table and an expanse of soft carpet to a large shiny black slab approximately nine feet high, ten feet wide, and two feet deep that rested near the wall. From it came the electronically subdued voices of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, dueting on “Banana Split for My Baby.”
Phil placed my coffee near the chair on the right and his close to the left side of the couch. “I had wireless controls built into the left armrest,” he explained. To illustrate, he pressed a button and Louis and Keely were immediately silenced. Another button and the front of the slab split apart, its sides sliding silently to the left and right, exposing an elaborate entertainment unit consisting of a large flat monitor and an assortment of decks with blinking lights—God knows what leisure-time delights they all delivered.
“I designed the case myself,” Phil said, his grin a clear indication of the pride he had in his creative furniture, his electronic gizmos, and his whole setup.
“You should be working for Sharp or Sony or launching the Space Shuttle,” I said. “On the other hand, looking at this place, I guess you’re doing pretty well at the network.”
“Oh, the building was my inheritance,” he said. “The old man finally came through. When Life closed shop and he got hit so bad by arthritis he couldn’t keep running around, he bought this warehouse for studio work. Portraits. Some ad stuff. The irony was, by the time he finally settled down in one place where we might have been able to connect, I was beginning my career at KCBS on the West Coast. He had one foot on a cloud when I started the gig here at WBC. We had just a few weeks to get to know one another.
“After he died, I took this building and my sister took the house in Long Island. She wanted to get away from winter and the Northeast, so she sold it right off. That was back when property values were up. Gina’s a Miami girl now.”
He’d been sorting through a stack of DVDs that he’d assembled, studying the labels as we talked. He selected one and, holding it, clawlike, by outer edge and center hole, fed it into one of the glowing decks. Then he returned to the couch, where, using his wireless armrest, he lowered the room lights, turned on the monitor, and played the DVD.
The image on the monitor was high-def sharp and crisp, a handheld scene of a poorly lit secluded street in, Phil informed me, central Kabul. Five men were walking, mainly in shadow, not talking. You could hear distant gunfire and shouts on the soundtrack.
“There we are, approaching the Irish pub,” Phil said.
The quintet was suddenly illuminated by a streetlamp. The three armed security guys dressed in camouflage clothing were strangers to me, but I knew the others. Rudy Gallagher, slightly in the bag, and Gin’s boyfriend, Ted Parkhurst, looking wary but game and performing a familiar gesture, using his hand to comb back a hank of the fine light-brown hair that was forever falling across his forehead.
“Ted could use a little gel,” I said.
“Or find a better barber,” Phil said. “But that might not be necessary. My guess is he’ll be bald by the time he’s forty. Hell of a nice dude, though.”
“Yeah, he is. He spend a lot of time with you guys?”
“Hung out with us most nights,” Phil said.
“Which one of the camo guys is the one who was murdered, Hall?” I asked.
“The biggest one, with the buzz cut. The guy with the ’stache is Gault. The one with glasses is Fredricks. He was almost human. The others were pricks. Standard merc meatheads.”
The men looked as if they were headed for a concrete wall, then veered left and walked around it to the lighted but unmarked door of a mock-Tudor two-story. Hall opened the door and the others followed him inside, Gault remaining behind until even Phil and his camera entered.
They wound up in an Irish pub that couldn’t have been any more festive if it had been St. Patrick’s Day. Bono was wailing from the loudspeakers. Afghani waiters in white shirts, black bow ties, and black pants moved t
hrough the crowd with trays carrying bottles and mugs of beer to mercenaries, soldiers, and men and women in civilian garb.
Phil’s camera panned the room, the people, the Afghan carpets covering the floor, the Guinness ads on the walls, the lanterns on the tables (“In case of power failure,” Phil explained), and the bar with its green-marble top (“Imported from Ireland”).
A giant Afghani who looked like he was about to bust out of his tux stood near the front door. “The dude’s a bouncer to keep the natives out,” Phil told me. “That’s the deal the owners, a couple of Sinn Féin rejects, cut with the local militia: The bar is for the use of foreign visitors only.”
“Then how did the guys who started the fight get in?” I asked.
“They were dressed like waiters.”
On the screen, Gallagher, Parkhurst, and the Touchstone guards were seated at a long table. Deacon Hall, the soon-to-be victim, gestured for Phil to turn off the camera.
The screen went to black. Then almost immediately it popped back to life, this time from a fixed angle facing down the table. “If he’d asked nicely, I might have kept the camera off,” Phil said. “But I don’t like muscle boys ordering me around.”
Nothing much happened on-screen.
The men talked, mainly about the war, drank, and discussed women, not always in gentlemanly language. Rudy spilled beer on his pressed khaki jacket and emitted a few curses. Ted joined the recorded Clancy Brothers in a stirring rendition of “Fighters and Biters.” I was getting bored.
I was about to suggest that Phil use one of his famous wireless buttons to speed up the action when something caught my eye.
“You see that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Reverse it? Great. Now … stop … THERE.”
The action froze on a still image of Hall leaning toward Rudy, who was seated to his left. “I see it,” Phil said. “Their hands. Hall’s slipping Rudy something. Something shiny that’s causing a little flare-up.”
“What’s it look like to you?” I asked.
“A Zippo lighter, maybe. No. Thinner. Because of the flare, it’s hard to tell.”
“Any way you could magnify the image?”
“Maybe,” Phil said. “But regardless of what you see on 24, we can’t just zoom in on it now. It’d pixilate into nothing. I’ll have to put it through a computer and play around a bit. I don’t know if that’ll make it any easier to identify the object. You think it’s important, Billy?”
“Hall gets murdered in Kabul and Rudy gets murdered here. So … it just might be very important.”
“It’ll take some work, and ordinarily I’d tell you to go screw yourself. But that was a hell of a meal, Billy. Let me futz around with it, see what miracles I can make.”
I thanked him and thanked him once again when he said he didn’t need any help loading the dishwasher and scrubbing up. I lowered myself to ground level via the warehouse’s ancient open-sided pulley-operated lift, took a quick jog over to Ninth Avenue, and caught a cab near one of the flash clubs.
On the way to my building I was feeling pretty good about my chances of sliding down a few notches on Solomon’s list of suspects. In less than forty-eight hours, I’d turned up a little black book with the phone numbers of an assortment of women who had far better motives for murder than I, and now a bit of intrigue linking Rudy to a murder in Kabul.
My mood remained high until I arrived at my darkened building. Was my old visitor, Clove Boy, waiting for me inside?
I unlocked the rear door, turned off the alarm, and immediately reset it. Then I prowled around the building. The only thing I found of note was a message Cassandra had tacked to my office door. Our new E.P., Trina Lomax, had called at six-fifteen. An executive decision had been made: I was to remain on leave from the show until further notice. She’d let me know if and how my series on the Wine & Dine Network might be affected.
Great.
Dispirited, I changed into my pajamas and flopped on the bed.
I lay there, evaluating my situation. I was still at the top of the suspect list. I was out of work. And my restaurant was in lockdown. Not to mention the usual depressing thoughts that pop into your head at that time of night. The concerns about growing old alone, and that chest pain that may not be indigestion, and the fact that you haven’t really done much with your life.
It took two hours and half a bottle of Glenmorangie, pride of the Highland peats, to rock me to sleep.
Chapter
EIGHTEEN
“Why are you going to the weasel’s funeral, Billy?” my lawyer Wally Wing asked.
“I worked with the guy.”
“Hell, I worked with the guy, too. On your contracts. But you won’t catch me anywhere near Saint Pat’s. Too nice a day to tempt the fates.”
“Tempt what fates? It’s a Catholic funeral service.”
“You and I know, my brown brother, that as we speak, Gallagher’s getting his ass tanned by Satan’s furnace. Yet in less than an hour, people are going to be lying through their teeth about what a swell human being he was. In a house of God, no less. I don’t need to be soaking up that kind of bad karma.”
We were in Wally’s office on Mott Street in Chinatown, a few doors down from the Peking Duck House. It was an oddly comfortable room with dark, polished furnishings—black and red lacquered chairs, a black leather couch with legs like lion paws, and Wally’s sleek black desk, the size of a dining-room table.
Brightening things up was a large Oriental rug the color of pink rose petals mixed with sky blue. To our right was an altar hosting a foot-high statue of a Chinese god with a furious face, holding a hammer in his right hand. His name was Lei Kung, Wally had informed me on my first visit to the office. He was the god of retribution, who makes thunder with his hammer and punishes criminals who have escaped the legal system. At the moment, his hammer was quiet, which I took as a sign of affirmation of my innocence. A brass pot near the god’s sandaled feet filled the room with the soft scent of sandalwood.
With us was Wally’s clerk-assistant, a young woman of heartbreaking loveliness named Tina, who was a recent graduate of the Columbia Law School. Dressed in a dark business suit and pale-pink blouse, she sat nearby with an open steno pad, as if she fervently expected the noted contract attorney Wallace A. Wing to say something worth recording.
Wally, handsome, well-preserved in his early fifties, was garbed in a casual broad-shouldered black cashmere jacket, a black silk shirt with a Mandarin collar, floppy gray linen trousers, and gray silk socks with red clocks on them. His gray suede loafers, which rested just outside the office door, were probably twin brothers of the shoes I considered buying at Ferragamo until I saw the six-hundred-fifty-dollar price tag.
He wore small, round glasses tinted a pale blue and framed in silver. His hair was long, mainly black but with dramatic strands of gray, tied in a ponytail that didn’t quite hide the cue underneath. He was a little bit trad, a little bit rock and roll.
“I didn’t think you believed in stuff like karma,” I told him.
“I do, when I’ve got a client who can get a seven-figure advance for a book titled You Can Change Your Karma.”
“At the risk of bringing you down to earth with my petty problems,” I said, “why am I here?”
“When you told me what they’re trying to pull over at the Glass Tower, I had Tina dust off your contracts. Tell him the good news, hon.”
“Bottom line,” she said, “they don’t have to use you, but they do have to pay you. You’ve got another three years to run at WUA!, with a slight annual bump, and two years on your contract with Wine and Dine. The deal we made for the new series, Food School 101, appears to be moot, since they will not be proceeding with the pilot.”
“Nice of them to tell me about it.”
“I think they either have notified or are about to notify your partner in the project, Lily Conover,” Tina said. “In any case, there is a generous kill fee now due.”
“So
I just sit out the other jobs?” I asked Wally.
“If you want,” Wally said. “But I gave Gretchen a jingle, and she says you can come back to work whenever you so desire.”
“Just like that?”
“I had to sell her, of course,” he said. “I told her how much the show sucked this morning without you. And she agreed.”
“You watched the show?”
“Billy, on the rare occasion I’m up at seven a.m., I watch the Today show. Or maybe, if I’m feeling just a little too upbeat, CNBC, to see how much loot I’m losing.”
“So you never watch my show?”
“Say the word and I’ll watch it every morning and just add the hours to your bill.”
“Stick with the Today show,” I said, standing. “Although I’m not so crazy about the weather guy, the rest of them are pretty good. I’ll be going to church now, where I will pray for your enlightenment. Tina, a pleasure seeing you, as always.”
“Hold on,” Wally said, hopping to his sock feet. He circled the desk and walked me to the door, saying, “There’s more good news. My source at the DA’s office says they’re letting you get back to business at the Bistro.”
“That is good news,” I said.
“In the words of my glorious ancestor, Charlie Chan, ‘Settle one difficulty, and you keep a hundred others away.’ Go forth, my brown brother, and remain difficulty-free.”
Chapter
NINETEEN
If I really was free from difficulties, most of the mourners at Rudy’s funeral hadn’t gotten the word. They were gathered, some fifty strong, near a side altar in the massive cathedral. In any normal-size church, they would have seemed a crowd. In that huge, high-domed, white-marble edifice, they barely qualified as a gathering.
In any case, it was a gathering where I was clearly persona non grata. But not a total outcast. My coproducer Lily Conover seemed glad to see me. She’d been standing at the rear of the church, checking things out before committing herself to a pew.
