The Talk Show Murders

by Al Roker

  “Assuming there’s a crowd to meet,” I said.

  “We have built it and they will come,” she said. Turning to Gin, she added, “That’s that. Sorry you wasted time on the prep.”

  She strode off to put out the next brush fire.

  “Pretty grim, huh?” Gin said.

  “What’s pretty grim?”

  “Jesus, Billy. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Patton?”

  Patton’s not dead. Patton’s not dead. Patton’s not dead. “What about him?”

  “The buggah’s dead.”

  Crap! “What do you …? When? How?”

  “A real Mistah Newshound, you are.” She took my hand and led me to her tent, where her assistant, a high-energy young man named Guy, was seated at a prefab desk, pounding on a laptop.

  “Guy, shugah, wheah’s the iPad?”

  Without breaking his concentration on his laptop’s monitor, he reached down and pulled up a massive leather purse and handed it to her. She found the iPad, turned it on, and in seconds brought what she wanted to its surface.

  It was the front page of the Tribune website. “Retired Supercop ‘Pat’ Patton Slain.” This was accompanied by a photo of a fortysomething Edward Marshall Patton in his dress blues and a sizable hunk of reportage by a staffer named Farrah Foster.

  According to what Ms. Foster had been able to cobble together, the sixty-four-year-old Patton’s heart had given out sometime between midnight and four a.m. The location was the three-story, five-apartment building on Cedar Street that had been his home for twenty years.

  The condition of the body indicated that he had been brutalized prior to death. His apartment, which occupied the entire upper floor of the building, had been torn apart. A spokesperson for the CPD had issued a statement that robbery appeared to be the motive for the crime, though revenge had not been ruled out. Patton had not been America’s sweetheart, exactly. His popular website had consisted primarily of daily video rants. Recent targets had included the former CEO of the Tribune, the mayor, the governor, various other local movers and shakers, and the entire Democratic Party, including the illegal-alien Muslim in the White House.

  Yesterday, several hours before his death, he’d castigated homicide detectives Hank Bollinger and Ike Ruello, the “dumb-dumb dicks who are screwing the pooch tryin’ to get a handle on that hacked-up corpse found on Oak Street Beach. Some guys don’t even know what time it is.”

  “Guess our show is just gonna have to stay liberal-pinko,” Gin said.

  I mumbled something by rote. My mind was definitely elsewhere than on the effect Patton’s death would have on our show. The number of people who wanted to kill the guy could probably fill Wrigley Field, but my money was on the mysterious Giovanni Polvere.

  Failing to extort money from me, Patton, that dumb son of a bitch, had made good his threat and gone to Polvere. Only he hadn’t been as careful as he’d thought. That was why he’d phoned me last night, and I, in my wisdom, had cut him off before discovering the extent of his folly. It would have been good to know if he’d mentioned me to Polvere. And in what context.

  Patton may even have been willing to tell me Polvere’s current name. Now he was lying on a metal slab in the morgue. And I was left to wonder if I might soon be on the next slab over.

  “Billy,” Kiki said, from the entrance, “they’re set up for our visitors.”

  Yeah, so’s the morgue.

  Chapter

  TEN

  As much as I love the Big Apple, the Second City looked pretty spectacular that morning as the sunrise made the skyline sparkle under an azure sky. A surprisingly large crowd of early risers was lined up in front of our temporary set, many of them wearing outfits including Cubs uniforms, funny hats, hair dyed the color of orange pop, painted freckles the size of bottle caps. Two men were dressed like homeless.… No, actually, they were homeless. And apparently in better spirits than I.

  There were banners welcoming the show to Chicago, signs calling attention to local establishments and hometowns and schools and organizations. I spoke to a pleasant young woman who was painted blue in celebration of a blues festival scheduled to be held in two weeks a stone’s throw away in Grant Park. A couple of guys—at least I think they were guys—in a cow suit wanted the world to know that it was drink-a-glass-of-milk week. Several cute teens from Wilmette were spreading the word about live performances of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women at their school that weekend.

  A pleasant young woman dressed in starched white butcher’s gear was assuring me that the annual Meatpackers Guild picnic was open to all, when I spied Kiki off camera to my right, pacing impatiently. As soon as the floor manager cut me loose, I headed for her.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing we haven’t been through before,” she said. “Two police detectives want to talk to you.”

  Right on time. Wonder what kept them?

  “About …?”

  “They don’t confide in me, Billy. All I know is that they chatted Trina up about how the late Pat Patton was going to fit into the show. They’ve talked with Gin. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Gin was going to interview him. Why me?” As if I didn’t suspect.

  “I imagine they’ll let you know.”

  She was being even more surly than usual.

  “Have fun on your date?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Billy,” she said.

  Detective Hank Bollinger was big and raw-boned with skin so black it was almost purple. With his premature gray hair buzzed close on the sides and a day’s growth of whiskers covering his chin, he reminded me of a salted ripe eggplant. Detective Ike Ruello, was, like his partner, in his early forties. Unlike Bollinger, whose rumpled dark jacket, open-neck blue shirt, and gray slacks looked not only off the rack but also two for the price of one, Ruello’s jacket was a well-tailored gray suede, his shirt a black silk, his trousers a crisp charcoal gabardine. Combined with curly black hair on his head and a less curly matching mustache, he cut a figure a bit too fashionable to seem totally loyal to the code.

  “I’m a big fan,” Ruello said, shaking my hand. “I’ve tried a lot of the recipes I’ve seen on your cable show.”

  Bollinger was evidently not a fan, big or small. He quickly set the professional tone of the meeting in a deep, unwavering voice with all the timber of a bowling ball rolling through a tunnel and all the humor possessed therein. “Good of you to talk with us, Mr. Blessing,” he said. Like I had a choice.

  We were alone in the temporary greenroom. Bollinger and I were seated on campaign chairs. Ruello, possibly to keep the crease in his pants, had decided to remain standing near a silenced TV monitor on which Gin and Lance were vamping until the final credit roll.

  Bollinger got out a tiny voice recorder. “You mind?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  He clicked the recorder on, mentioned the time, date, location, and my name, then said to me, “As I’m sure you’ve heard, we’re investigating the murder of retired Chicago police officer Edward Patton. We’re here because Officer Patton was supposed to appear on this show this morning. So far, we’ve talked with your producer, Ms. Lomax, and Ms. McCauley, both of whom have had recent conversations with the deceased. Now we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But before we start, I should tell you that Patton phoned me last night.” This was something they either knew or would know as soon as they checked the murdered man’s phone record.

  “What time was this call?” Bollinger asked.

  “He woke me, just after midnight.”

  “What was the reason?”

  It was possible that Patton, being a wily old bastard, had recorded the call. If that was the case, and they knew the gist of our conversation, I was screwed anyway, so I decided I might as well lie. It was a criminal act, I suppose, hiding information crucial to their investigation. But I was convinced that rather than sending them off on the trail of the declared-dead Giovanni Polvere, t
he truth would only have confused matters by putting me at the top of their suspect list.

  “He was nervous about appearing on our show,” I said. “I tried to convince him that he’d do fine. He was hoping the appearance might lead to a permanent spot.”

  “Sounds like you and he were friends?”

  “No. We’d only just met on Friday when we were both guests on the Gemma Bright show.”

  “I see. Then you guys hit it off? Went out on the town, maybe?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “In fact, we didn’t even have much of a talk, either then or on the phone last night.”

  “What about when he was in your hotel room on Saturday?” he asked.

  It took everything I’d learned as a young confidence man and an older on-camera host to keep the sinking feeling from my face. How’d they know about Patton’s visit? From the chauffeur? Or had Patton kept a log of some kind? Maybe a diary? No. It had to have been the chauffeur. If they had the details of our meeting from a diary I’d be getting the prime-suspect treatment at headquarters.

  “Yes, you’re right,” I said. “He did come to my hotel on Saturday morning. Quite a surprise.”

  “The reason for his visit?”

  “It’s the same thing. He was meeting with our producer later and wanted to know what she was like.”

  “Your producer, Katrina Lomax?”

  “Right. Trina.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  I smiled. “Not to call her Katrina. Other than that, to just be himself.”

  “Be himself, huh? I guess you didn’t know Patton very well,” Ruello said, earning a scowl from his partner.

  “When you and Patton were chewing the fat, did he happen to mention anything about the body that was found Thursday morning?” Bollinger asked.

  “We didn’t talk about it, but I believe that was why he was on the Gemma Bright show, and I guess he planned on discussing it this morning on our show.”

  “What’d he say on the Bright show?”

  “He had some theory, I think. A hunch.”

  “Which was what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know if he ever said. I wasn’t all that interested. He was pretty vague with Gemma, and he and I didn’t discuss it at all. According to the Tribune, you and Detective Ruello are also investigating that death. Is there a connection with the Patton murder?”

  Bollinger exchanged a quick glance with Ruello, then was back on me. “When did you arrive in Chicago, Mr. Blessing?”

  “Thursday afternoon.”

  “From New York?”

  I nodded.

  “When was the last time you were in this city?”

  “Three years ago, at roughly this same time. Maybe a month earlier. We take the show on the road every now and then.”

  Bollinger stood up. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Blessing,” he said. “We may be contacting you again. If you think of anything that might help us, please give us a call.”

  He handed me a white card with an embossed Chicago Police Department shield and his name, phone number, and email address. I put it in my coat pocket. I shook his hand, shook Detective Ruello’s hand, and watched them exit the tent.

  Then I let out a breath I’d been holding.

  My worry had been that they were sadistically letting me natter on about my innocent connection with Patton before hitting me over the head with his file on Billy Blanchard. That clearly hadn’t been the case.

  But now I had to wonder where that file was.

  Still hidden somewhere, on the cusp of being found by the police? Or worse yet, in the hands of the not-quite-deceased Polvere?

  “Billy?”

  Kiki was standing at the entrance to the tent, holding my cellphone. “Henry Julian,” she said.

  The old man was calling from his late mother’s doughnut shop.

  He’d heard the news of Patton’s murder and wanted to assure me he’d had nothing to do with it. “I won’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind, unnerstand,” he added. “But like I tole you, I don’t operate like that anymore. Seems to me the blackmailer wasn’t as smart as he thought himself.”

  I said I agreed with him.

  This was followed by a brief discussion of what the murder might mean to my survival rate. Henry understood, as did I, that unless the file turned up, it probably meant that Mr. X had it. “You should be on your way home, Billy. Chicago’s still a tough town. Take more than eighty-ninety years of so-called law enforcement to change that.”

  I explained that the show must go on. And since it would be here for the rest of this week and the next, so would I.

  “Well, then, son, you better keep your eyes wide open and your powder dry.”

  Chapter

  ELEVEN

  Lily Conover, my fashionista production partner on Blessing’s in the Kitchen, our weekly show on the Wine & Dine Network, had landed at O’Hare that morning. When she arrived at my hotel just before three, she was wearing a white blouse under what looked like tailored, formfitting orange bib overalls, cut off a few inches above knee-high white leather boots with high Cuban heels. This was topped off by large round sunglasses with thick white rims and a schoolgirl cap the same color as the overalls on her short-cropped blond hair.

  “That outfit could get you shot in this town,” I said, as she hailed a cab.

  “Oh, please. You’re going to talk to me about fashion, Billy? You, who walked around New York City wearing a gingerbread man suit, complete with chocolate buttons.”

  Following her into the cab, I said, “It’s called Halloween on Wake Up, America! You might try watching the show sometimes.”

  “Right,” Lily said. “And the show was over at nine, but you were still in the gingerbread suit at noon. I saw you walking down Seventh.”

  “It was a zipper problem. Anyway—”

  She interrupted me to tell the cabbie where we were headed.

  It’s rare that Lily pays much attention when a restaurateur phones to suggest himself as a guest on our cable show. But this time her interest was piqued, and we were headed to Dann’s Sports Den on Clark Street to film a show that would feature its owner, Charlie Dann, the Puff Potato Man.

  Dann had been a lineman for the Bears until his knee blew out in a game against Tampa in 1985. That was a great Super Bowl–winning year for the Bears. But a bittersweet one for Dann, who, after a few surgeries, wound up using a crutch for a while and walking with a limp thereafter.

  His life in football ended, he and his wife, Gerta, now deceased, opened the eatery, where he used her family recipes to create an eclectic menu that included a unique air-filled crispy french fry that her mother had named the puff potato. It was not to be mistaken for a potato puff, which was heavier and less pastrylike. In any case, it became a staple of both the restaurant and the cocktail lounge, where, at happy hour, it was as popular as the third-martini-free option.

  Dann greeted us at the door. He was a big man. Maybe not Refrigerator Perry big but high and wide enough to make me feel low and nearly narrow. In his sixties, he had the dry, wrinkled face and baggy-rimmed but clear eyes of a heavy drinker who’d been off the sauce for a while. He’d minimized the limp over the years but wasn’t able to hide it completely.

  I knew from the moment we shook and he did not try to pulverize my hand that we would get along fine.

  “Your guys got here a while ago,” he said to Lily. “They’re waiting in the office.”

  She and Dann had already met. She’d headed to the Den directly from the airport to get the paperwork done and to suss out the possible logistics of the shoot. At that time, she’d also reminded the local two-man crew of the time and place. She’s nothing if not efficient.

  The Puff Potato Man led us past a long polished bar that looked like it belonged on the set of one of Randolph Scott’s better 1950s Westerns. Probably directed by Budd Boetticher. Behind it were a cheerful-seeming red-haired behemoth of a bartender, a huge mirror in an ornate frame, and about a hun
dred bottles of booze, plain and exotic, along with photos and trophies Dann had picked up during his salad days.

  The remaining wall space was taken up by more photos, jerseys under glass, pressed Chicago Trib sports pages, and the inevitable giant TV monitors displaying videos of Bears games through the ages, the sound turned down to a whisper.

  A couple of graying post–Mad Men types in business suits were sipping martinis and debating the relative merits of Walter Payton and Jim McMahon over Brian Urlacher and Devin Hester. One of them paused to question a pudgy young man with hooded eyes and what looked like a homemade crew cut, who was drinking something very brown from a tumbler. He was wearing denim pants, gym sneakers, a yellow T-shirt, and a black satin jacket that had a white onion in the alligator/polo player position over his heart.

  He halted in the middle of an energetic response to the query and gawked at us. At me, actually. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but Dann moved us past him quickly.

  My host took me through a door at the rear of the lounge into an efficient, clean kitchen, where chefs and staff were getting ready for the evening. Our destination was a small office beyond the kitchen, where the camera, sound, and lights duo Lily had hired awaited us amid more of Dann’s football-career memorabilia.

  While the sound guy miked Dann and me, Lily outlined her basic plan: The cameraman would pick me up on Clark Street, heading for the Sports Den, and follow me in. Dann would greet me at the entrance to the lounge (avoiding the restaurant, which was, in Lily’s professional opinion, “CU,” or cinematically underwhelming).

  The cameraman would reposition at the rear door of the lounge and tape us as we approached, staying with us while we entered the kitchen area and headed for the office. Then another repositioning to the office door, looking in as Dann and I were seated, he at his desk, with me on the visitor’s chair.