The Talk Show Murders

by Al Roker

  “Yes, yes, and doubtful,” I replied.

  “Do you need protection?”

  I considered making a smart-ass riposte about always carrying protection in my wallet but censored myself. “Not at present.”

  “Well, it’s six-twelve your time. Trina will be calling you shortly to let you know when to be at WWBC for a segment on Hotline Tonight.”

  That was a nightly show hosted by Vida Evans from D.C. Vida was a newswoman with whom I’d shared a somewhat fractured relationship during my brief sojourn in L.A.

  “Let’s talk about this,” I said to Gretchen. “I’m not—”

  “This is not subject to discussion,” she said. “I was disappointed when you refused to be our on-camera reporter on the progress of the Pat Patton murder investigation. I was outright furious that you didn’t even have the courtesy to let Trina, or anyone else at the network, know about the second murder, even though you were on the scene! So you will be on Hotline Tonight or … you’ll be out of a job.”

  “Since you asked so sweetly, of course I’ll be there,” I said to the phone, even though Gretchen had already hung up.

  Kiki watched me put the phone to sleep. “You look like you need this,” she said, pushing the premixed martini my way.

  “No ice?” I complained.

  “We proud few prefer not to chill our libations.”

  I raised the glass in a toast. “To the uncompromised life,” I said.

  Chapter

  NINETEEN

  Trina Lomax had cajoled a satisfactory complement of talking heads for the segment.

  In addition to yours truly, the others in the hall just outside of WWBC’s Studio 3 that night included two acquaintances: Carrie Sands, who glommed on to me as if we’d been friends from grade school, whispering, “Do most of the talking, please!,” and Gemma Bright, whose approach was a bit the opposite, clearly not whispering when asking, “What the fuck am I doing here, Billy?” Neither expecting an answer nor getting one.

  The strangers were two in number: Lieutenant Maureen Oswald of the CPD Office of News Affairs, a briskly efficient, lean woman with well-groomed reddish-brown hair and a preference for minimal cosmetic enhancement whose active blue eyes suggested both intelligence and a sense of humor, and local private detective, J. B. Kazynski, an amply built dirty blonde in a dark business suit whose arched right eyebrow seemed to suggest a suspicion of events transpiring in the studio, if not life in general.

  I was consoling myself with the happy thought that my participation on the show might be minimal with such a full panel when Ms. Kazynski sauntered up, aimed her cocked eyebrow at Carrie, who was on my arm, and said to her in a surprisingly throaty voice, “Think you could go stand on your own two feet somewhere for a few minutes, honey, while I talk to this guy?”

  Carrie seemed uncertain as to whether to be annoyed or amused. She chose the latter. Using a breathy voice, she said, “If you need anything, Billy, just whistle,” and strolled off, switching her hips.

  Ms. Kazynski didn’t seem to notice. “Have you read Hot Corner?” she asked.

  She was referencing one of a series of bestsellers by a Chicago author named Stacy Lynne Chomsky, who had appeared on our show. In the thrillers, a character based on and named for Ms. Kazynski undertakes seemingly mundane investigations that invariably lead to much bigger cases.

  I told her that I had read the book. Which I had. At least enough of it to know that her fictional counterpart starts out by searching for an anonymous blogger blackmailing her cousin, a standby pitcher for the Cubs, and winds up taking on the military-industrial complex.

  “Yeah, well, Stacy Lynne went a little over the top on that one,” she said. “But some of it was straight. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “About the book? Why?” I asked, pretending I had no idea why a novel involving a Chicago-based blackmailing blogger could be in the least relevant.

  Her cocked eyebrow went up another quarter-inch. “You didn’t know the bad guy in the novel was based on that bastard Patton?”

  “No. Patton was a blackmailer?”

  She smiled, and her eyebrow went up another quarter of an inch. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think anything. I barely knew the man.”

  “Really? If that’s true, what the hell was he doing in your hotel room the day before he died?”

  I didn’t blink. “He wanted to work on our show Wake Up, America! He asked me to put in a good word for him.”

  “Out of the kindness of your heart?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “How’d you know he came to my room?”

  “One of my nephews works in the hotel,” she said. “I’ve got relatives just about everywhere in this town. But getting back to Patton, I’d like to know—”

  She was interrupted by the floor manager, a young man dressed in denims, a plaid shirt, and a wireless headset. He didn’t look as if he’d started to shave yet. Young and impatient, he herded and hustled all of us into the studio.

  “Later,” J.B. said, or perhaps warned.

  We were in a space about the size of an average walk-in closet. Three manned cameras were positioned a few feet from a curved desk built to seat a news team of three comfortably, not a panel of five. The rest of the studio was taken up by a backdrop of a Chicago nightscape looming behind our chairs, two overhead monitors, miles of coiled and twisted wires and cords, several technicians, the aforementioned teenage floor manager, and Trina, our beloved producer.

  It was like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, only minus the Marx Brothers. And the humor.

  With uncommon seriousness, Trina instructed us on the seating arrangements.

  Gemma and I wound up at opposite ends of the table. “We don’t want you in the same shot,” Trina explained. “This is news. We don’t want it to look like a network promo.”

  Ooooo. Change in policy? Had she watched her own show lately?

  She put Carrie next to me, then J. B. Kazynski, and the CPD’s Lieutenant Maureen Oswald, all of us touching shoulders like a flying wedge. Except for Gemma, the others were staring at the monitors. I’m not sure what was occupying Gemma’s thoughts. I was wondering what the others found so fascinating about monitors registering what in computer language would be called BSD. The blue screen of death.

  Shortly before we were set to go live at ten-thirty p.m. our time, eleven-thirty p.m. on the East Coast, the BSD was replaced by a close-up on a polished desk and an empty chair on which Vida Evans would soon be depositing her lovely bottom. Trina gave us a final pep talk, urging us to “just be yourselves, stay attentive, and speak with confidence. And remember, when Vida asks you a question, viewers will hear the question immediately, but there will be a few seconds delay before you hear it here in the studio. You may want to put a thoughtful expression on your face, as if you’re pondering the question. Otherwise, it’ll look to the viewers as if you’re an unresponsive idi—

  “What the heck is that?”

  Her attention had shifted to a novel titled Danger Zone that J.B. had positioned on the table in front of her, cover toward the camera. “It’s the new Stacy Lynne Chomsky,” she said.

  “Please remove it,” Trina said. “This is not The Tonight Show.”

  “There are water glasses on the table,” J.B. said. “Why not my book?”

  “Nobody will think we’re pimping water glasses,” Trina said, repeating her request that Danger Zone be removed.

  “The Nazis banned books, too,” J.B. mumbled, sliding the novel onto her lap. I guessed it would eventually wind up back on the table.

  The floor manager, standing between the dueling cameras, held up a hand showing two fingers. “Two minutes to air,” he said.

  Vida Evans, all five-foot-ten black-and-beautiful inches of her, settled down in her chair and received her final hair and facial tune-up. “Hello, everyone,” she said. “And, Billy, a special hello to you. So nice having you here on my show.”

 
A while back, I was asked to cohost Hotline Tonight, with Vida participating from the West Coast and I from the East. I’m very happy working in the early morning, having my evenings and nights free. And probably more important, I’d been treated to an unpleasant up-close-and-personal example of Vida’s ambitious, one might even say cruelly ambitious, nature. So I turned down the gig. She became the solo host, and the network execs moved her away from her beloved L.A. to D.C. to add to the show’s gravitas. That’s when those same executives discovered that viewers who wanted gravitas had their fill of it on PBS or Nightline.

  The ratings were tanking. She was in a city that she hated. And she blamed me.

  The floor manager held up one finger. No, not that one. The index.

  As that finger disappeared into a fist, Hotline Tonight’s symphonic theme began. On the studio monitors, the show’s logo popped. When the music faded, an off-camera announcer in D.C. began his earnestly dramatic voice-over: “On Hotline Tonight … the story of two men”—Pictures of Pat Patton and Larry Kelsto appeared on the screen—“one a former police lieutenant and powerful voice in the city of Chicago, the other a struggling performer in the Windy City’s comedy clubs. Both were scheduled to appear on the same popular daytime television show”—Cut to a clip of Patton waving to Gemma’s audience—“just days before they were sadistically tortured and murdered”—Cut to another shot, this one of two body bags resting on twin gurneys. Maybe Kelsto and Patton. Probably not.

  Cut to an aerial shot of Chicago at night. “Did something occur on the show to cause the murders? Is there a serial killer at large in this great American city?” That drew a groan from CPD Lieutenant Oswald. “If so, where will he or she strike next? Searching for the answers, here’s Hotline Tonight’s Vida Evans.”

  Vida, her lovely face as serious as if she’d just seen her ratings drop even more, welcomed her viewers, gave a brief reprise of what the announcer had just told us, and introduced her “guests.” It might have been my imagination, but I think she was gritting her teeth when she mentioned my many accomplishments.

  She then said something that had me gritting mine. “I believe you know our own Chef Billy Blessing has become something of an expert on murder. Billy was on the Midday with Gemma talk show with the late Pat Patton, and I’m happy to report that he will be guesting on my show each night this week reporting on crime in the city of Chicago, with a special emphasis on the Chicago Police Department’s investigation into what many are calling the Talk Show Murders.”

  There’s nothing like being dragooned into doing something you’ve already refused, unless it’s being informed of the dragooning on live TV, where all you can do is nod like an idiot. I looked at Trina, standing just behind the floor manager. She was wearing a Cheshire cat grin. “It’ll be a joy, as always, to be working with you, Vida,” I said, lobbing the conversational ball back to her.

  From there, things went pretty much as expected, with Vida trying to pry information from Lieutenant Oswald and having to be satisfied with a very broad overview of what the CPD investigators had learned: basically, that some unknown party or parties had tortured both men until they’d died. The lieutenant would not specify the torture methods or the grisly condition of the corpses, nor would she validate the theory that the midday show was in any way involved or any of the other speculative theories abroad in bloggerland.

  Lieutenant Oswald did say that the detectives assigned to the murders were “certainly aware of the fact that both Patton and Kelsto were in this building for Midday with Gemma. They’re investigating the possibility that the two men may have made contact at that time or that they may have left the studios together. But the feeling is that their connection to the show was coincidental. A careful analysis of the program itself has been made, leading the investigators to conclude that nothing that transpired in the course of the hour led to Lieutenant Patton’s murder.”

  “Really?” Vida asked. “Let’s take a look. Right after this commercial.”

  There was not a lot of chatter during the commercial, nor while we watched a section of the talk show in which Patton and Gemma nattered on about the body on the beach. After the clip, Vida asked, “Lieutenant Oswald, what about Lieutenant Patton’s announcement that he was privy to information regarding the corpse?”

  Lieutenant Oswald’s smile was annoyingly patronizing. “Lieutenant Patton was an outstanding lawman who was not terribly happy in retirement and preferred the world think he was still on the cutting edge of law enforcement. He’d made similar statements about his insider’s knowledge before, on television and on the Internet. But they were based mainly on rumor and supposition, not fact. No one took them seriously.”

  “He claimed to have been right about ninety-four percent of the time.”

  “Using his own measuring criteria,” Lieutenant Oswald parried.

  Vida turned to Gemma and asked what she thought about Patton’s comment.

  “Oh, I believe he knew something,” she said. “I’ve never known him to just make things up.”

  Taking our cues from Lieutenant Oswald, Carrie and I stonewalled like politicians. We hadn’t met either Patton or Kelsto before the day of Gemma’s show. We denied seeing any contact between the two men either before or after the telecast. We were surprised to hear from Kelsto but were intrigued by his request for a meeting. That’s why we were at his home when the housekeeper discovered his body.

  No, we did not know why Larry invited us. We barely knew him. And we knew even less about Edward “Pat” Patton.

  “Gemma, what do you think about the theory that a serial killer is working his way through everyone who’d been scheduled to be on your program that day?” Vida asked.

  “What a perfectly ridiculous question!” Lieutenant Oswald exclaimed before Gemma even had her mouth open. “This is real life, Ms. Evans, not pulp fiction.”

  “Including Gemma, five people were scheduled to appear on the show,” Vida said. “Two were murdered, apparently by the same hand. Not exactly pulp fiction, is it?”

  I felt Carrie’s hand grasp my arm. I have to say I was getting spooked myself by the conversation. Being the potential victim of one deranged killer was bad enough. Vida was opening that up to a nation of deranged killers who might want in on the fun.

  “Speaking of pulp fiction,” I said, derailing the lieutenant’s tentative reply to Vida’s question, “I think J. B. Kazynski’s got a new book she’d like to tell us about.”

  J.B. didn’t waste a second in holding up the copy of her latest Chicagoland caper.

  Vida looked frustrated by the interruption. Trina was furious. And J.B.’s motormouthed promo took us to the end of the show.

  All in all, that went pretty well.

  Chapter

  TWENTY

  After the telecast, I noticed J.B. lingering near the front door. The private eye had mentioned she’d wanted to talk with me about the murders, and since the word “no” seemed to be among those missing from her lexicon, I knew that meant we’d eventually have that conversation. But not then. Which is why I was still cooling my heels in the studio when Trina ducked her head in and said, “Billy? Good. You haven’t left.”

  I should have opted for the talk with J.B.

  Trina led me upstairs in the minimally occupied building. Most of the executive offices were dark, but the conference room had all bulbs aglow, with Lieutenant Maureen Oswald sitting at a sparkling glass table, sipping from a cup of something dark. Judging from her expression, the dark stuff wasn’t all that tasty.

  “There’s a coffee machine just outside the door,” Trina said, selecting a chair across from the lieutenant.

  “No coffee for me,” I said, and Lieutenant Oswald nodded her approval. I selected a chair next to her.

  “Re your new assignment, Billy, Maureen has agreed to assist you in every way she can,” Trina said.

  I smiled at the lieutenant, pretending this was good news.

  “I prepare a daily report on depart
ment activities,” she said. “I’ll make sure you get a copy.”

  “Stale news will be no help, Maureen,” Trina said.

  “It will be up to date. But I’m not going to kid you, Trina. There won’t be any exclusive information. Your merry band will only be here a limited time. The local media are with us always.”

  “Understood,” Trina said. “We’ll come up with our own exclusives. Right, Billy?”

  “It’s what we’re known for,” I said. “That and the Carlyle the Walking Penis sitcom.”

  The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “You really have a show called that on your network?”

  “It’s on right after Vaginatown.… Joking.”

  “I’ll take your word on that,” the lieutenant said, rising. Trina and I both stood, too. “You might want to check with me on the accuracy of whatever ‘exclusives’ you turn up.”

  “Absolutely,” Trina said, though nobody in the room believed that for a minute.

  “Chef Blessing, in reporting on the Patton and Kelsto murders, I hope you’re not going to continue to spread any more of that Talk Show Murders nonsense.”

  “Are you so certain it is nonsense?” Trina asked.

  “Pretty much,” the lieutenant said. “Good night to you both. Mr. Blessing, you know where to reach me.”

  Trina and I watched her leave.

  “There’s definitely something going on, some strong lead they’re following,” Trina said. “We have to find out what it is by tomorrow night’s show.”

  “I’ll get my investigative team on it right away. Wait a minute. I don’t have an investigative team. Why not? Because I’m a chef and a TV show host!”

  I paused to compose myself. “Trina, we both know I’m not a reporter at all. I know my way around a kitchen. I read books. I tell a fair joke, and I can talk to people. Why force me to do something totally alien to my interests?”

  “Maybe I see a talent you haven’t discovered,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “No. I’m using you because when you got mixed up in those murders on the West Coast, your TVQ score went through the roof. I think that’ll happen here, too. And we need something to pull Hotline out of its rut.”