by Marvin Kaye
Taking his coffee, he settled at his desk and opened the program to review the night’s calls. Later, when he looked back on that moment, it was the trivial things he would remember…what he was planning, the day’s temperature, the sky’s color, what he was wearing. Even as he began to read, he had no idea how quickly his day would disintegrate. Pandora’s Box was child’s play.
The calls that came in between the hours of eleven-thirty to two-thirty a.m. were the kind they usually received at that time of night: bar brawls, prostitutes on Eighth Avenue, neighbor dogs barking, theft at an all-night drug store and so on. Every call received a followup. It was amazing what people thought was newsworthy. They needed to do a program on that. It was when he reached the call that came in at 3:22, that his heart nearly stopped.
The caller was Frank Holzer. A name he hoped never to see again in this lifetime. The ‘reason for calling’ was not mentioned, but he left his location as the Catskills. Same person who caused him nightmares back at the Winter Games in Innsbruck had returned.
He tried not to panic. It was not in his nature. He was too old a newsman to be rattled. And while he didn’t know the nature of the call, he could make a guess. He hoped he was wrong.
To compound the problem, the call was picked up by Meg Worth. Her handling of it would be worse than an A-bomb being detonated. As a former secret service agent she saw herself as a network news personality and used connections to get a coveted spot as a junior reporter for domestic news—over his objections. She didn’t understand the protocol that went into developing and handling news stories and was too busy scrambling to get to the top to learn. If she picked up the call on Holzer at five thirty, where was it? He reviewed stories under development and it wasn’t listed for local or national news. What was she doing with it?
He rubbed the bottom of his chin as he thought. Nothing he could imagine made any sense. As much as he hated to, he picked up the phone and dialed her number. No answer. Maybe there was nothing. He was letting the memories of Innsbruck get the better of him. Then again, Holzer wouldn’t be calling the network in the middle of the night because he had nothing better to do.
Frazier stood, then paced the room. Where else would she go with it? As he stared at the trophies and awards for news excellence lining the shelves on the opposite wall, he had the answer. Weekend News…Jim Regan’s department.
He looked at the time. A half-hour from now, Regan’s Weekend Edition team would meet and spend the morning deciding what stories would fill the Saturday and Sunday broadcasting hours. The program handled late breaking news, but as research discovered, the audience turned in for the amusing, lighthearted, and mostly off-beat news stories that the team spent the week gathering. Since Weekend Edition didn’t air until Saturday at noon, Regan didn’t post the loglines in advance. This was the only place left for Meg and Frank Holzer.
At eight forty-five, Frazier put aside the work he was doing, slipped into his suit jacket which hid the circle of flesh that was causing his belt to expand, loosened his tie, checked his dark hair that seemed to be threaded with more and more gray, and headed for the conference room. He entered from the rear and took a seat at the table next to Regan.
A few weeks had passed since the last time he sat in on one of Regan’s meetings. It was good to see that UBS’s renovation team finally made their way to this spot after five years of requests. Gone were the depressing beige walls, the moldy-looking green carpet and beige colored chairs. Now the walls were a tranquil blue and the chairs had a striped pattern that sort of matched the walls and new carpet. It was good for him. He hoped it was for everyone else.
“What brings you here?” Regan asked, looking at his boss. Regan was about six foot, gray hair, and a build that suggested his down time was spent in the gym.
“Searching for the cave of the Minotaur.” Frazier looked around the room. One of the smaller conference rooms, the table sat twenty people and it seemed as though all seats would be taken. He noticed that a few of the men who had been slouching, sat up straight as they saw him.
“Minotaur?” Regan opened his laptop and turned it on. “What are you following to get there?”
“A phone call that appeared on last night’s call-in report. It went to Meg Worth.” At the mention of her name, Frazier could see Regan’s features tighten. “It wasn’t on the logs for any of the morning news programs and it didn’t appear in the stories under development, so you were my last hope.”
“Why are you tracking it?” Regan looked at him.
“The call was from Frank Holzer.”
At the sound of the name, a strange puzzled look came over Regan’s face. “Holzer?” Regan began to pass around the typed sheets with the list of the stories to be discussed. He nodded his head. “Refresh my memory.”
Frazier moved closer to Regan and lowered his voice. “Saturday night in Innsbruck before the games opened, a guy by the name of Harmon Thatcher tried to steal one of our experimental cameras. Multi-million dollar theft. He was a member of the U.S. Bobsled Team. Needed money. Anyway, remember, we caught him with the camera and brought him back to the control center. He claimed someone paid him fifty thousand to steal it. We thought he might have been lying, but he showed us a hand-drawn map and the key to the cabinet where the camera was kept.”
“What happened to him?”
“Weren’t you around the control room that night?” It was Frazier’s turn to look puzzled.
“I was in town. We had just finished wrapping a story on how Innsbruck handles the Olympics. Only heard the Thatcher story in bits and piece. So, what happened to him?”
“We had the camera, and the first of the bobsled events was on the Sunday schedule. Some folks wanted to let Thatcher go. But our new commander-in-chief, the guy who sits in the corner office down the hall from me, chatted with both the local police and the embassy who set up a small office in Innsbruck for the Olympics. The local police saw it as our problem. The embassy wasn’t sure. So everyone decided that since it was late, after midnight, we’d deal with it in the morning. We gave Thatcher a room at the main hotel and had security watch over him.”
“That’s right. Thatcher disappeared, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. He picked the lock on the hotel room door. Can you beat that? He walked away around noon on that Sunday and disappeared. Been three months and he still hasn’t shown. We know Thatcher didn’t leave the country under his name so where is he? Still hiding out, or dead? We needed him to tell us who hired him. Had to be a UBS employee. Possibly a contractor, but I don’t think so.”
“Where does Holzer fit in?”
“He and Thatcher were roommates,” Frazier replied. “We think he was meeting Holzer outside the hotel that Sunday afternoon. If so, he would have known what happened. We hoped he’d come forth with the truth. Save his friend. Save the team. That kind of thing. Except it didn’t happen. After three months, he must have had some kind of epiphany to call us in the middle of the night.”
“And Meg Worth picked up the story? You think she’s going to show up here. Last minute.”
“There she is.” Frazier looked at the entrance.
They watched as the tall, good-looking blonde dressed in a red and navy suit spoke to the man who assembled the stories for this morning.
“Hard to believe she was Secret Service. Can you imagine her with a gun?” Regan shook his head. “She doesn’t seem all that together.”
“Let’s see how good she is at hitting the target with Holzer.”
The man who was assembling the stories kept shaking his head as Meg spoke. Finally he pointed across the room. She followed his finger and her expression froze.
“Gotcha,” Frazier said to Regan. “Let’s find out what she’s up to. Why don’t you start the meeting?”
Regan stood and got everyone’s attention. He quickly went o
ver the rules for story submission then said, “Rather than go through today’s list in alphabetical order, I’m going to call the stories at random.”
He chose two from the middle of the list and one from the end, then turned his attention to Meg Worth. “You’re not on the schedule, which you know is against the rules. But since Frazier is here I’ll make an exception What do you have?”
“I’d like to run with a story about Frank Holzer,” Meg said.
Regan looked through the computer at past titles. “We ran something on Holzer at the time of the Olympics. There wasn’t anything else press-worthy about him. What’s different about your story?”
“I spoke to Frank Holzer an hour ago. His teammate disappeared at the beginning of the Olympics. The story got hushed up. Holzer says he’s now ready to talk about it.”
Regan glanced at Frazier. “Why don’t you take this? Better you tangle with her than me.”
Frazier nodded. “I was there,” he said to her, leaning forward. “Holzer had his chance. At the time he had nothing to say. Not to me, not to Thad Bannen who runs UBS, not to the Innsbruck police, and not to the American Embassy. So what does he have now that he didn’t have then?”
She cleared her throat. “He has photos. Holzer was parked across the street from the hotel. While he was waiting for Thatcher to come out, he took pics of the area. As he was snapping away, he caught not only Thatcher coming down the steps but the people who met him.”
Frazier coughed and grabbed at the glass of water in front of him. “What happened after that? He never got in the car with Holzer, otherwise he wouldn’t be missing.”
“Something’s wrong here,” Regan said leaning over. “She’s not reading the situation. Are you sure she was secret service?”
Frazier sighed deeply. “I’ll take this one.” He stood. “We’re going to let Jim get on with his meeting,” he said, addressing Meg. “We’ll go to the conference room next door and continue this discussion.”
Meg stood her ground. “Am I getting on the air with this or not?”
Regan spoke up. “You don’t have a story yet. Until you do, we’ll put it in the ‘under development’ category.”
Angrily, Meg picked up her papers and walked toward Frazier with a venomous look.
He headed out the door and led the way to a room across the hall. Once inside, he closed the door and leaned against the conference room table, doing the best he could to keep his temper under control.
“Who knows Holzer contacted us? I mean besides everyone who was in that room, the camera team you’ve undoubtedly lined up, and all the folks in between you’ve mentioned this to.”
Meg looked uncomfortable. “Maybe a dozen.”
“Why didn’t you come to me with this story?” Frazier asked. “That’s the procedure.”
“You would have assigned it to someone else. I’m ready to handle this,” she argued.
Frazier looked thoughtfully at her. The hell she was. “What else did Holzer say?”
She hesitated. “He followed the car that Thatcher got into.”
That, he hadn’t expected. “And…”
“He saw Thatcher murdered.”
“Murdered?” Frazier blinked hard. “He saw it. He can identify who did it?”
“He said he can identify one of the men and the car.”
“What were you planning to do with this information?” Frazier kept the tenor of his voice on an even keel. “And what did you plan to do with Holzer? Didn’t it occur to you that if he has photos of the killer he’s putting his life in danger by coming forward? Why didn’t you head up to his place this morning to see what he had?”
“I wanted to make certain I had a time slot to air his story.”
No sense of anything. All she was interested in was being an on-air personality. The story before the man’s life. “And let’s say you get it. Then what?”
“He said to come Sunday. He owns an auto repair shop and Friday and Saturday are busy days. On Sunday, I want to take a crew to the Catskills where he lives and go ‘live’ from there.”
Frazier was so angry he could have put his fist through the conference room table. He shook his head at the stupidity of the reasoning. She didn’t get it. She never would.
“Get the story. Bring it back here. Then we’ll decide how it airs. And make it tomorrow early. I don’t care what Holzer wants. He came to us. He plays by our rules.” Frazier walked out of the room, calling over his shoulder. “And only one cameraman. You interview. He films. More than that comes out of your salary.”
He returned to his office. The encounter left him with a surreal feeling. The half-dozen people who had been involved with that Sunday at the Olympics fiasco had probably forgotten about it except for himself and the guy in the corner office Thad Bannen. He could tell him now. He could tell him later. Later was better.
Staring out the window, he thought about what came next. He could see his long anticipated weekend plans going south. Since he didn’t trust Meg to do the right thing, he needed to get there first and find out exactly what Holzer knew. And he needed to take his own advice and keep his trip secret. A search of Olympic files told him that Holzer lived in Big Indian. And a look at the New York State map gave him directions. It was now about eleven. He could be in Big Indian by mid afternoon.
* * * *
Even though it was May, it was still early spring in the mountains. The apple orchards, hardwood trees, and open fields, rubbed bare by the raw winter winds were just beginning to sprout their spring finery. As the two-lane highway rose over the increasingly higher elevations of the Catskills, the fields gave way to thick evergreen forests and rock-faced mountain peaks. In serpentine fashion, the road continued its ascent as it ran alongside the Esopus River, past the ski centers, then finally west into Big Indian.
It was nearly three-thirty by the time Howard Frazier reached the town. He stopped at the gas station Holzer owned. He filled his tank, then before going inside glanced momentarily at his reflection in the glass portion of the door. A change of clothes and a stop in the prop department provided him with a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a mustache. Just enough of a disguise in case someone had a need to remember. Before paying, he took off his driving gloves, laid them on the counter, then removed his wallet from his pants pocket. As he paid the man behind the counter, he said, “I see the name Holzer. Any relation to the man who competed in the Olympics?”
“The same,” the gray-haired man said with a broad smile.
“I stay at the Beacon Lodge every year about this time to do some fishing and just generally get away from it,” Frazier remarked of the lodge a few miles to the west, well-known as a mecca for sportsmen. “I’ve stopped in here before for gas. Never noticed the sign.”
“Many people around here didn’t know Frank competed. Shows you what a little publicity will do.” Being careful, Frazier pocketed the change, then put the gloves back on.
Before he left, Frazier learned a lot about Frank’s routine, where he lived, and a little about Meg’s interview, which wasn’t the secret he hoped it to be.
By the time he turned into the road leading to Holzer’s home, the sun was on the afternoon slide, leaving the heavily treed area in muted sunlight. At the end of the graveled area, he found the house. It was a type of split-level made of wood overlooking the lake. A balcony wrapped around the back of the house and opened onto a deck built atop the three-car garage. The door to the garage was closed. He climbed the stairs to the first floor and rang the bell.
When a minute passed and no one answered, he rang the bell again. The air was so still he could hear fish jump in the lake. Where was Holzer? He fumed as he waited. He peered in the windows. He could see a living room and beyond it, a kitchen. He followed the balcony around until he reached the deck above the garage. From here, he c
ould see the lake through the leafy branches of the trees. It was very quiet. Opening onto this side of the deck was a sliding glass door. He tested it and to his surprise it slid back. He called to Holzer.
Getting no reply, he stepped inside and found himself in a large kitchen with a built-in dining area. Clean. No pots, pans, or dishes showing. He called again then walked in the direction of the living room where country music was playing. The room had two walls which were paneled, and two were painted a deep green. In the middle of the far wall was a large fireplace with smoldering embers.
“Frank,” Frazier called out once more. As he looked around the room, he noticed a glass partially filled with amber liquid sitting on top of the end table. He went over and smelled it. Whiskey. The ice cubes had melted but the glass was still cool. Wherever Holzer went, he intended to come back soon.
Frazier returned to the deck. Once outside in the chilly late afternoon air, he walked to the edge of the deck and carefully surveyed the property. As he stood at the railing, he looked out over the leaf covered ground then his gaze followed the shoreline of the lake. About seventy-five yards away was a building. Probably a boathouse.
Curious, Frazier retraced his steps around the balcony and started down the stairs when it occurred to him to check the garage to see if any vehicles were missing. The man at the gas station indicated that Holzer was home, but maybe he had to duck out for a few minutes. He went down the stairs where he found a Ram 1500, a Jeep Cherokee, and a Harley. Wherever Holzer had gone, he wasn’t driving.
As he made his way to the outside, the breeze kicked up and the chill of night began to set in. He was beginning to get a very bad feeling. Something unexpected interrupted Holzer’s afternoon. He got his gun and flashlight out of the car then headed for the boathouse. Rather than take the gravel path to the lake then follow the shoreline where he’d be out in the open, he decided to take a few minutes longer and cut through the trees and the underbrush. This way, if he had asked too many questions in the gas station and Holzer was alerted to his coming, he wouldn’t see his approach.