The Talk Show Murders

by Al Roker

  “Henry …”

  “Nothin’ violent, Billy. I swear. Maybe I can get him to lower that fiddy-gran’ tag. We owe it to Paul to find out, right?”

  “I wouldn’t want—”

  “Don’t be doubtin’ my word, son,” he said. “Not a hair will be mussed on Mr. Patton’s head. Now, he’ll be comin’ back at you with a new offer. Fo’ty gran’, maybe. Walk away from him. Let me take care of it.”

  “They may be hiring him for our morning show,” I said.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all? Usin’ his piddlin’ website is one thing, but a network TV show? Man, that’s a free license to blackmail. You better straighten that out with your bosses or he could be puttin’ your mug shots on your own show.”

  “I’m a little less worried about that than I am about the possibility of Polvere being real,” I said. “I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder.”

  “Remember what Satchel Paige said?”

  “ ‘Don’t look back, because something might be gaining on you.’ ”

  “Bum advice. That’s precisely when you want to be lookin’ back. Even if I’m right about Patton bein’ a bullshitter, you be careful in that town. They can say what they want about New York, but the bodies they pull out of the East River usually got their heads still attached.”

  Good point.

  Chapter

  SEVEN

  I didn’t need Henry’s final warning to depress me.

  I was far from convinced that Patton had been conning me. What if Polvere was real and believed I was a danger to him? How long would I last without having even a clue as to his current identity?

  That was a worst-case scenario, of course. And the best case? Patton would sell me out to the supermarket tabloids. All right. Suppose I did wind up on the cover of the Inquirer. Well, maybe not the cover. That was reserved for Brad and Angelina and UFOs. On page two, then. How bad would it be? Twenty-five years ago, I paid a price for trying to cheat a dishonest man. It didn’t seem like a career killer. Might even give me a little street cred.

  Who was I kidding? As a celebrity chef/restaurateur I needed street cred about as much as I needed gingivitis.

  What to do?

  After about an hour of that, Kiki arrived to plague me with my morning show homework, and Patton, the former Gio Polvere, and the long-deceased Messrs. Venici and Bassillio were pushed to a temporary compartment of my mental vault.

  Over a room-service luncheon of cheeseburgers, which, though admittedly delicious, cost nearly as much as a McDonald’s franchise, we worked through schedules, correspondence, and publicity handouts for my week’s interviewees—among them two city chefs, the newest pubescent singing sensation, and a former Tribune reporter who’d written a new biography of the late mayor Richard J. Daley, titled Da Mare.

  Kiki had brought a copy of the Daley bio. Judging by the humongous size of the tome, the author had done a day-by-day analysis of Daley’s seventy-four years.

  “I hope he’s not expecting me to hold this monster up for the camera,” I said.

  “It’s all a matter of balance,” Kiki said. “I’ve been carrying it in my right hand, and my laptop and everything else in my left. No problem at all.”

  “Yeah? Well, you work out every day.” I lifted the cover of the book, then flipped a few pages. “I’ll never get this read by Wednesday.”

  “Just look at the section with photographs and captions and fake it,” she said. “Like you always do.”

  “That’s not true. I usually ask for an audio version and then play it while I sleep.”

  Somehow I managed to push the book away without giving myself a hernia. “What’s the story on the kid singer?” I asked.

  “His name’s Ellroy Johnson, and he’s thirteen.”

  “A rapper? Rocker?”

  “You really should make an effort to stay au courant, Billy,” she said. With a sigh, she punched a few keys on her laptop and turned it around to let me see Ellroy Johnson’s YouTube video. It had been clipped from last week’s America’s Got Much More Talent Than England (aka AGM2T2E), a show on our network, I’m sorry to admit. My interview subject was a seemingly frail little boy, who looked a few years younger than his age. Pasty pale, with slicked-down black hair, wearing a starched white shirt and dark trousers about an inch too long, he marched center stage, stared frozen-faced into the camera, opened his tiny mouth, and …

  “ ‘To dream the impossible dream …’ ” burst forth with vocal timber so full and rich and powerful it overcame the laptop’s tinny speakers.

  “My God,” I said. “Sounds like some insane surgeons swapped out the kid’s larynx with Pavarotti’s.”

  “Amazing, no?” Kiki said. “According to his mum, he’s been singing like that ever since she took him to the theater to see Phantom of the Opera.”

  “All I got from that show was a fear of being hit by a chandelier.”

  “Philistine,” she said. “Anyway, the boy has a full repertoire of Broadway show tunes that the network is hoping to exploit to the hilt. And here’s what some might call the beauty part, Billy: Unless he’s singing, he’s nonverbal. Like King George VI, only worse.”

  “Should be a heck of an interview,” I said.

  “He can always sing it,” she said, getting to her feet.

  I watched as she closed her laptop and began shuffling papers back into her briefcase. “Eating and running?”

  “A very nice gentleman is taking me to the Art Institute.”

  “Do I know this nice gentleman?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. I only just met him.”

  “At the station?”

  “Here, actually.”

  “In the hotel?”

  “The elevator.”

  “A pickup?”

  “No, not a … Well, I suppose you might call it that. I’d say it was more a case of two consenting adults flirting a little.”

  “Who is this bozo?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like my father, Billy. Not a compliment, by the way.”

  “We’re supposed to be working here,” I said, “not cruising the hotel.”

  She glared at me for a beat. Her angry knit brow and laser eyes were nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

  “My work is done for the day,” she said, her British accent clipped to a razor’s edge. Gesturing toward the books and papers with her chin, she added, “Yours is just beginning. Have a lovely evening with Da Mare.”

  As soon as she left, I opened the Daley biography. But I registered only a percentage of what I was reading. Patton kept getting in my head.

  By the time Gin McCauley called, I was fifty pages into the book and had barely any knowledge of what I’d read. She informed me that the “crew” was downstairs in the bar “enjoyin’ the heck out o’ the happy hour,” and she hoped I might join them.

  I looked at Da Mare. Da Mare looked back at me.

  “We’re thinkin’ about havin’ dinnah at Charlie Trottah’s,” Gin said.

  Visions of the restaurant’s grilled turbot and sweet-potato mousse danced in my head.

  “You comin’, Billy?” she interrupted my reverie.

  I was about to say she had me at “happy hour,” but I was feeling cautious. “Pat Patton isn’t down there, right?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” she said.

  “Then order me a Sapphire martini,” I said. “I’ll be there before the last drop leaves the shaker.”

  Patton who?

  Chapter

  EIGHT

  I’d been a pretty good boy that night, drinking and eating in moderation. Moderation being that the wine cellar still had a few bottles left and the walk-in cooler wasn’t completely bare. Striving to be an even better boy, I awoke early enough Sunday morning to make the nine-thirty service at the Holy Name Cathedral on State Street.

  As you might expect from one of the largest Catholic congregations in the United States, it’s something to see, with its marble and bronze, and a sc
ulpture of a surprisingly emaciated Jesus Christ on the cross, suspended from an elaborate 150-foot-high vaulted ceiling. A brochure I picked up said that the cathedral was capable of housing two thousand worshippers, and it seemed to be well on its way to doing it that morning. If they were like me, they were wondering why, considering the surrounding splendor, the wooden pews were so austere. What I’m saying is: Would padded seats be asking too much?

  I wouldn’t categorize myself as a church-on-Sunday guy, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But every now and then I get the urge to rekindle the sentimental memories of attending mass with my parents so long ago. And in times of stress, which, thanks to Patton, I was experiencing, there is something to be said for the serenity of a church service.

  That serene feeling lasted for about an hour and fifteen minutes when, leaving the church, I passed a tour group on the steps. The guide was pointing at a cornerstone and saying, “You can still see the bullet hole, marking the spot where Al Capone’s men shot down rival gang boss Hymie Weiss back in the Roaring Twenties. Now, you’re probably thinking Hymie Weiss doesn’t sound very Catholic, but his real name was Earl Wojciechowski, and he was a member of the Catholic Church who may have been attending mass here, hoping for a respite from the violence on the streets of Chicago.…”

  Me and Hymie.

  I spent the rest of the day plowing through Da Mare.

  Daley’s biographer, Willard Mitry, handled the material in the straightforward, just-the-facts style of a seasoned newsman. But there was such an abundance of factual information that I grew a bit groggy separating out the crux.

  By page two hundred, barely a fourth of the way into the book, Daley had just started his political career as the manager of the Hamburg Athletic Club, ostensibly a sports and social organization, sponsored in part by the city’s Democratic machine. Blinking, I was starting in on a new chapter when the phone rang.

  I expected it to be Patton telling me I was a walking dead man.

  I waited a few rings, then, with a feeling of what-the-hell, lifted the receiver.

  It was Cassandra, calling from the Bistro. “All alone on a Sunday night, Billy? Things a little slow in the Toddling Town?”

  “You caught me between toddles,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “The good news or the bad?”

  “With you, is there a difference?”

  “Blame my parents for giving me this name,” Cassandra said. “I’ll start with the bad news: Because of all the rain, business was off both last night and today at brunch.”

  “How bad?”

  “Down a third at dinner, maybe a little more at brunch. It’s a good thing we’re closed on Sunday nights.”

  “The electricity holding up?”

  “So far.”

  “Is that the good news?”

  “No. Charles Limon was here last night with a party of six. He’s very anxious to talk with you.”

  Limon was the stateside representative of RI, Restaurants International, a French conglomerate interested in acquiring 51 percent of Blessing’s Bistro. RI’s plan was to open a chain of them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and other points west and east. Their offer was generous, to say the least. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up control of my baby. With my television work, the frozen foods, the cookbooks, and the restaurant, I really didn’t need the money.

  Cassandra, however, seemed to be sold on the idea. This was probably because she assumed that the bigger the Bistro franchise became, the better off she would be as my assistant. I suspected just the opposite, that I would become a figurehead, a Mr. Peanut, as it were, leaving her in an even less enviable position.

  “I’ll talk to Limon when I get back.”

  “That’s what I told him. He’s a charming man. So sophisticated, especially with that premature gray hair and French accent.”

  “The hair’s a dye job, and I understand he’s really from Jersey.”

  “And you call me a downer,” she said, hanging up.

  Back to Da Mare. Back to dark thoughts about Patton’s threat.

  I hoped Willard Mitry wouldn’t mind too much if I skimmed his masterpiece a little, as long as I got the title and his name right when we met on the show. I tried speed-reading and skimming for another forty pages, then flipped to the photo section. I had a quick memory flash of Kiki ribbing me about doing that very thing. I hadn’t heard from her. I wondered if she was in her room.

  I picked up the phone, then put it down again. That was a father’s move, and, as she’d made clear, I wasn’t her father.

  Da Mare. Photo captions. Hitting the high points.

  In just a few page flicks I progressed from young baby Richard being held by his mother, Lillian, in 1902 to his marriage to Eleanor “Sis” Guilfoyle in 1936 and being elected to the state senate two years later.

  I ordered up another of the hotel’s cheeseburgers and a beer, and went back to the photo captions. In 1946, running for Cook County sheriff, he suffered his only political defeat. Nine years later he was elected mayor by only 125,000 votes.

  That’s when things started getting interesting. His stonewalling of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1966. And, in 1968, his most ignominious year, his exhorting Chicago police to “shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand” after their somewhat more conservative handling of the riots after Dr. King’s assassination.

  The chickens came home to roost later that year during the Democratic National Convention. Confronted by a mass of protesters clogging the city’s streets, the Chicago police turned violent. I glanced at the riot photos and turned the page.

  Then I went back to the photos. Blinked and looked again. In one of them, a young uniformed cop was dragging a bleeding hippie by his collar to a police wagon. The hippie’s face was covered in blood. He was unconscious. The cop was holding his nightstick over his head and grinning at the camera in a mood that could well be described as sadistic ecstasy.

  The decades had made some changes, but I was pretty certain I was looking at a youthful Pat Patton at the beginning of his illustrious career.

  I’m not sure when I drifted off.

  The hotel phone woke me with a start. I was slumped on the chair with what felt like an anvil crushing my crotch. No anvil. Just Da Mare.

  I yawned. My neck was stiff and I had that raw feeling in my throat that, I’ve been told, comes from snoring. The phone rang again.

  It was a little past midnight.

  Cassandra with more bad news? Kiki in trouble?

  As soon as I lifted the receiver I realized it was a mistake.

  “Billy,” Pat Patton’s gravelly voice said, “hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Aw, hell. I did wake you. Well, it’s like this, Billy: I thought I’d better give you a heads-up. I mighta … misjudged the situation with our mutual friend Polvere a little.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Not on the phone. Come here to my place.”

  “It’s late,” I said. “I think I’ll just go to bed instead.”

  “Wait, I—”

  I counted to ten before releasing the phone plunger and calling the hotel switchboard. “I’d like a wake-up call at five in the morning. And would you hold any calls until then?”

  Feeling entirely too smug, I went to bed. There, I was suddenly fully awake to the fact that my silencing of Patton was only temporary. I’d be bumping into him at the show in the morning.

  Chapter

  NINE

  For the next two weeks, our show was going to be broadcast from Millennium Park, a popular public area filled with architectural wonders that had been constructed on the site of railroad tracks and parking areas at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars. As far as I could tell, no one was saying the money had been ill spent. Quite the contrary, the prevailing opinion was that it had been Chicago’s most important project since the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. />
  Walking through the park at five-thirty a.m., I ordinarily would have been transfixed by its amazing constructions, even in the predawn darkness. But my thoughts were on my inevitable meeting with the monster.

  You know the old bromide: Things that worry us the most rarely come to pass? Well, that morning it was true and not true. As I passed the Cloud Gate—110 tons of shiny stainless steel reflecting the lights of our temporary telecasting area—I saw a group of my coworkers huddled around the entrance to the set.

  Arnie Epps was looking even more hassled and distraught than usual. He spied me and stepped away from the others. “Damn it, Billy. You’re cutting it a little thin, aren’t you?”

  I looked at my watch. “Nearly half an hour before showtime,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you. Last-minute cancellation. I’ve got nine minutes to fill.”

  This information was overheard by the show’s co-host Lance Tuttle, who shuffled our way. “I could do my version of Ed Murrow’s wires-and-lights speech. I know it by heart.”

  “Not gonna happen, Lance,” Arnie said. “We don’t do nine-minute speeches on WUA. We don’t love Today or GMA that much. Anyway, you must realize the wires-and-lights was anti–TV news.”

  “Of course. That’s what makes it timely,” Lance said.

  “That may be,” Arnie said. “But we don’t bite the sharp hook that feeds us.”

  As I left them to their “discussion,” I heard Lance mumble, “Olbermann would do it.”

  The techs were prepping the lights. The stagehands were merrily cobbling the set together like little elves. Happy little elves making time and a half. The camera operators were setting up under the watchful eye of Moses Dunham, the line director. None of them seemed to be overly concerned that we’d be on the air in twenty-six minutes.

  Trina Lomax was huddled with Gin McCauley. They appeared to be a bit on the uptight side.

  “Ladies,” I said.

  I’d planned on pausing briefly, just to be polite, before heading on to a tiny tent, where Kiki was supposed to be awaiting my arrival with news of my schedule. But Trina stopped me. “Can you stretch your ‘meet the crowd’ seg another nine minutes?” she asked.