The Talk Show Murders

by Al Roker

  “Wake Up to Murder,” I said. “It’s available in trade paperback.”

  “You’re becoming a regular super sleuth, like … Monk.”

  I myself would have opted for Alex Cross or Easy Rawlins. Or even Guy Hanks.

  “The police did most of the work,” I said.

  “Well, I’m sure you contri—”

  “You were right in the middle of the West Coast murders.” This time, it was Carrie Sands, speaking up from the never-to-be heard-from far end of the couch. “I just read poor Stew Gentry’s book and he says you did all the detective work.”

  “Ah, yes,” Gemma said coolly. “That book. We had the young man on the show who helped poor, sad Stew write the book. Harry something …”

  “Harry Paynter,” I said. There’d been a time when Harry was supposed to have helped me with my book, but he’d declined, in favor of Fade-out: The Stew Gentry Story. Just as well. Harry was a little too much of a hack for my taste.

  “His and Stew’s book garnished unanimous critical raves,” Gemma said. “And it’s at the top of the bestseller lists.”

  “In second place, actually,” Carrie said. “Gerard’s latest, The Thief Who Stole Big Ben, is number one.”

  The French novelist Gerard Parnelle had begun a series of thrillers about a scruffy Marseilles orphan who, through several improbable encounters, had been transformed into a beautiful, remarkably resourceful master thief. Book one, The Thief Who Stole the Eiffel Tower, had been the basis for a motion picture so successful in Europe and Asia it had heralded a Newer Wave for the French film industry. The movie Carrie was making in Chicago was an American version, The Thief Who Stole Trump Tower. If they wanted to steal something really big, they could’ve ripped off Trump’s ego.

  The recently published sequel, Big Ben, had arrived at the tipping point of the series’s international popularity.

  “Gerard’s book is numero uno, of course,” Gemma said. “And, Carrie, I want you to remind that bad boy that he owes me a visit.”

  “He’s in Paris, Gemma,” the actress said. “He flew there weeks ago.”

  “Well, he’ll just have to fly back,” Gemma said before turning to me and, without batting an eye, asking, “Do you agree with what Stew had to say about you in his book, Billy?”

  “I … I haven’t read it.”

  That was a lie, but from what I’ve observed, lies don’t count on TV talk shows any more than they do in politics.

  “Sandy Selman’s making a movie based on Stew’s story,” Carrie announced. She was apparently the source of all that was literary in Hollywood.

  “Really? Will you be in it, Billy?”

  “Doubtful,” I told her. Hoping to close down the topic and move on to the reason the network’s public relations team had arranged for me to be on the show, I added, “That whole thing is pretty much old news.”

  “Still, it’s exciting to hear about it firsthand. As I recall, it was only by the merest stroke of good fortune you weren’t killed. I’m sure our audience would love to hear what that was like.”

  Sighing, I dutifully obliged with a brief wrap-up of my brushes with death, being careful not to say anything that was not part of the public record. Having returned to Los Angeles for the trial, I’d had my fill of courtroom command performances.

  “Do you think the punishment fit the crime?” Gemma asked.

  “Happily, that was not my call,” I said.

  “What the hell does it take for those touchy-feely idiots in La-La land to put killers away?” Pat Patton exploded.

  “They didn’t go free,” I said.

  “No. But they could be out in eight. And then they might come looking for the guy who helped put ’em away. Something to think about, huh, Billy boy?”

  He was actually grinning. “Anything to make you happy, Pat,” I replied.

  Then, assuming that even a lame segue is better than none at all, I said, “Speaking of ‘looking’ for something, Gemma, I hope your audience will be looking in on Monday when Wake Up, America! begins the first of two weeks’ telecasting right here from Chicago. We’ll be reminding the rest of the country about what a great city this is.”

  Thankfully, Gemma hopped right on board and we went back and forth on the glories of the Second City for a while.

  I’m usually relaxed even in this kind of environment, but I was thrown off a little by the sight of Patton in my peripheral vision. He kept staring at me—not in fascination or awe or even professional courtesy but with narrowed eyes, as if I were an irritant that was causing him some internal distress.

  I tried shifting on the couch until he was out of my line of sight, but that left me at an awkward angle. Which was making Gemma nervous.

  During the commercial break, I turned to Patton and said, “So how do you like me so far?”

  He continued to glare, ignoring my question. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “We’ve met before, right?”

  “Not that I recall. But I’m on TV every morning. Sometimes people—”

  “I’ve seen you on TV. Not so much on your show. I listen to the radio in the morning. It was on the news coverage of those murders. But I’ve got a crappy little screen. Eyeballin’ you up close and personal, I’m pretty sure we met way back, Billy, when you had a lot more hair and less pounds. Yeah. Only the name wasn’t Blessing. Billy … something else.”

  “We’ve never met,” I said, wondering if that was true. Hoping that it was.

  “We’re chatting with one of our favorites, Chef Billy Blessing,” Gemma said, signaling to us that we were back on camera. “He and the rest of the Wake Up, America! team will be greeting you live from Chicago for the next two weeks over WWBC.”

  She turned toward me. “Will all the cohosts be here, Billy?”

  I’m sure I answered the question and that I continued to keep up my end of the conversation, but my thoughts were definitely elsewhere.

  I heard Gemma announce tomorrow’s guests and apologize to Larry Kelsto for bumping him once again. She then informed the studio audience that each and every one of them was getting a complete makeover, courtesy of several local entrepreneurs. With the squeals of their delight almost drowning out her goodbyes, Midday with Gemma drew to a close.

  As was the custom, while the credits rolled, Gemma, Carrie Sands, Patton, and I all stood and pretended to be chatting among ourselves as if we were old pals. Actually, Carrie was saying she’d be seeing me on Tuesday’s Wake Up. We were giving her movie a big push because we’d made a first-look deal with its writer, Gerard Parnelle, for a TV series idea he was putting together.

  Patton was not playing our game exactly. He remained silent, staring at me, sly smile in place.

  Given the all clear, I headed for the greenroom and Kiki, but Patton blocked my way. “Billy Blanchard. That’s your real name, right?”

  The sight of his smile had taken the surprise out of it. I stared at him, unblinking and unemotional. “My real name is Billy Blessing,” I said, walking around him.

  “Now, maybe,” he said, keeping pace. “But back at the tail end of the eighties, pal, you and I both know it was Blanchard. And you claimed a body that turned up in Cicero. I’ll have the stiff’s name in a second.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Patton,” I lied.

  Kiki appeared at the far side of the set. Frowning, she marched toward us. “I’m sorry, Billy, but we have to go now.”

  I nodded to Patton and allowed my very efficient assistant to pull me away.

  “Judging by the hooked-fish expression on your face,” she said, “I assumed you didn’t want to continue your conversation with that creep.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What was he saying to you, anyway?”

  “Nothing very pleasant.”

  “I told you,” she said. “He’s a monster.”

  I turned.

  Patton had been joined by a very tall, very muscular, very black man, neatly dressed in tan slacks and a tight
white T-shirt. He was in his twenties, but the slicked-down hair and thin mustache belonged to another generation. He shifted from one foot to the next, somewhat impatiently, while Patton continued to stare at me.

  The ex-cop raised one hand and gave me a jolly finger wiggle, as if seeing me off on a pleasant journey.

  “A monster,” I agreed.

  Chapter

  THREE

  The monster rested uncomfortably at the back of my mind until that night, when I met for dinner with a few newly arrived members of team Wake Up. Namely, coanchors Lance Tuttle and Gin McCauley; ex-starlet Karma Singleton, our latest entertainment reporter; producer Arnie Epps; and executive producer Trina Lomax, who’d opened up the purse strings for a lavish feed at a pricey but genuinely unique restaurant in the city’s Old Town section that owes as much to scientific innovation as it does to Cordon Bleu.

  Our culinary adventure began with little round, crisp morsels that tasted like the best peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich I’d ever devoured. This was followed by eleven equally playful and unusual mini-courses, ranging from the essence of shrimp cocktail to lobster with vapor of rosemary (boiling water poured over rosemary leaves at the table), all proffered on delightfully odd dinnerware. The pb&j, for example, arrived nestled in something that resembled the legs of a steel spider resting on its back. The shrimp cocktail essence was sprayed into the mouth via an atomizer.

  To bottom-line it, our senses (including sense of humor) were happily occupied for nearly three hours.

  We’d just polished off an extraordinary dessert (flash-frozen chocolate mousse, complete with spray dried coconut milk, cocoa crumbs, anise, and a few other ingredients) prepared directly on our dining table by the restaurant’s owner, when Gin McCauley asked me a question that turned my heart chillier than the mousse.

  “Say again?”

  “Ah was wonderin’ what you can tell me about this Pat Patton charactah? He said you and he wah ol’ friends.” Gin’s Southern accent had been intensified that night by several strawberry margaritas. Usually I found it sweetly charming.

  “When were you talking with Patton?”

  “This evenin’. Soon’s ah got unpacked.”

  “And why were you talking with him?”

  “ ’Cause ah’m interviewin’ him on Monday’s show. Ah’m guessin’ he was exaggeratin’ your friendship?”

  “A little,” I said. “Why interview him?”

  “Because Trina tole me to.”

  “He claims he has inside information on the headless corpse that all Chicago is talking about,” Trina Lomax answered. “And Gemma tells me he’s something of a local institution.”

  “He belongs in an institution,” I said. “He’s a right-wing nutjob.”

  Trina waved the comment away. “Who isn’t these days?” she said.

  “Ah’d like to think ah’m not,” Gin said.

  “Nor I,” Lance added. “How bad is this guy, Billy?”

  “On Gemma’s show he was still calling the president an illegal alien,” I said.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” Lance said. “After the final certificate disclosure?”

  “Le’s dump this turkey,” Gin said to Trina.

  Our executive producer opened her mouth, then paused, as if censoring herself. She frowned and spent about a thirty-count watching the staff clean the dregs of our dessert from the tabletop. Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “I was waiting for a slightly less public moment to have this conversation, but … I’m sure all of you must be aware of the criticism Worldwide has been receiving lately from … some quarters. That we’re White House lackeys. That we’re biased, anticonservative members of the liberal elite.”

  “Bullshit,” Lance said. “We have Republicans on the show all the time.” He glared at Karma Singleton. “We even have ’em on staff.”

  “That may be,” Trina said. “But ratings are down and according to Fields and Fields’s most recent survey, a lot of our viewers think our programming is ignoring the neoconservative trend in America. Gretchen is … concerned.”

  That would be Gretchen Di Voss, the current head of Worldwide Broadcasting, whose family has been in charge of the network since her grandfather, Harold Di Voss, created it in 1931.

  “How concerned?” I asked.

  “She has requested we consider making a few changes,” Trina said. “Nothing more drastic than adding an occasional voice from the right. Like Mr. Patton.”

  “If he’s a right-wingah, maybe Karma oughta do the interview,” Gin said.

  “That’s a brilliant idea …,” our entertainment reporter said.

  She was a tall, willowy redhead who had appeared as a tall, willowy redhead in a couple of movies that no one but late-night cable watchers have ever seen. She had recently played a tall, willowy redhead weathergirl in a short-lived Worldwide sitcom, Fair and Warmer, set in a small-town television station. And now she was our tall, willowy redhead. The difference being that, suddenly freed from the confines of a prepared script, she was able to speak her mind—which belonged to someone a little to the right of Genghis Khan, as played by John Wayne.

  “… and this is brilliant news, Trina,” she continued. “Finally, we’ll have a politically balanced show.”

  “Fair and balanced,” I said.

  “An’ brilliant,” Gin said.

  “Exactly,” Karma said, a little too pleased by the news and herself to realize she was being ribbed.

  “Well, that may be,” Trina said, “but Gin will be interviewing Mr. Patton. Now, who’s up for a nightcap at the hotel bar?”

  On the cab ride to the nightcap, I played back a message left by Cassandra Shaw, the remarkably efficient hostess-manager of my restaurant in Manhattan. The tone was typically acerbic. “Too busy out on the town to answer your phone, Billy? Well, no matter. We had another power outage in the main dining room just after seven. I reset the breakers, but needless to say, the early diners did not take it well. Complimentary desserts for all.

  “At nine-thirty, the place was packed and that asshole city councilman Baragray dropped by with some of his friends, sans reservation, causing quite a ruckus and demanding a table. I suggested they join the mayor and his friends in the LaGuardia Room. Upon hearing that His Honor was on the premises, they scooted away as quiet as church mice. Other than that, all was well on this very busy Friday night. Over and out.”

  “Ever’thing okay?” Gin asked. “You got that worry crease in your forehead.” She was sitting beside me on the rear seat. Arnie Epps was up front with the cabbie. We were trailing a cab transporting the others.

  “We had a power outage at the Bistro earlier this week,” I said. “Our electrician didn’t find anything obvious. His solution, naturally enough, was to rewire the whole building. Mine was to wait and see. But there was another outage tonight. It looks as if I’ll probably be paying for his kid’s college education.”

  “Bummer,” she said. “Uh, Billy, why do you think Trina’s so insistent on me interviewin’ this Patton charactah?”

  I shrugged.

  “Arnie?” she asked.

  Arnie Epps continued to stare out the window, pretending not to hear. Which wasn’t a good sign, since it indicated he possessed info we wouldn’t like. He’s an odd dude, our producer: a tall, ungainly man with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts loud enough to make your eyes bleed and an often-unnerving passivity. But he wasn’t a bad guy and was actually a fair conversationalist if the subject was television history, the works of Charles Dickens, early jazz recordings, or East Coast flora and fauna, heavy on the flora.

  “Hey, Arnie,” Gin said louder. “What’s the deal on Patton?”

  He hesitated briefly, then replied, “Trina wants to see the guy in action.”

  “She should check today’s Midday with Gemma,” I said. “That’ll tell her all she needs to know.”

  “Trina’s not exactly a fan of Gemma’s,” Arnie said. “She wants to see the compatibility between Patton and Gin.�
��

  “Why?” I asked, though I thought I knew.

  “The guy’s an eyeball magnet. He’s on Gretchen’s short list for new regulars.”

  My fears confirmed, I slumped against the car seat. Then I brightened. “He struck me as a die-hard Chicagoan,” I said. “I can’t see him moving to New York.”

  “Actually, the plan would be for him to come in only once a month or so,” Arnie said. “The rest of the time, he’d be reporting from here.”

  “Plan? There’s a plan already in place?”

  “Predicated on how well it goes on Monday,” Arnie said.

  I turned to Gin. She winked. Then she gave me a sweet smile and drew her index finger across her neck.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  In the suite of rooms above my restaurant that I call home I’m usually up at five on weekdays, getting ready for the morning show. Weekends find me sleeping in a little longer, till nine or even ten on Saturdays. Because there’d been more than one nightcap in the hotel bar (which we’d closed at three, by the way), I could have used a little extra bedtime that Saturday. But I didn’t get it.

  Something—exactly what I wasn’t sure, only that I was dreaming of birds chirping—woke me at a little after eight. I opened my eyes, blinked a few times, and wondered where I was and why I could see sky outside my bedroom window. Sky but no birds.

  My head felt as if it was filled with Kleenex. Used Kleenex. In an effort to inject a small element of kindness in an unkind world, I will not even begin to describe what the inside of my mouth resembled.

  I staggered to the bathroom and did everything that had to be done. Revived by a hot and then cold shower and the taste of strenuously applied toothpaste and wrapped in a plush terry bathrobe provided by the hotel, I plopped down on the sofa in the suite’s sitting room and dialed room service.