by Lis Wiehl
“For a long time it was just you and Jim, right? How did you get this job?”
“I was working at another station, but I always liked Jim’s show. Usually I’m so tired of people talking that I only listen to music in the car and at home, but for Jim’s show I made an exception. Then one day he fired his call screener.” Chris chuckled and shook his head. “Live and on air. Typical Jim. As soon as my shift was over, I drove over here and applied. I ended up talking to Jim directly. I guess he liked what I had to say, because two weeks later, I started working here. And that was four years ago.”
“Were you a little anxious,” Allison asked, “knowing that your predecessor had been fired?”
Chris shrugged. “Jim always said you either like this business or you get out. I like it. And I like Jim.” He pressed his lips together. “Liked Jim,” he said softly.
“How do you decide who gets to talk to Jim?” Allison asked. “Or do you put almost every caller on the radio?”
“No, I have to choose. My job is to figure out who would be good on air and who would be horrible.” Chris ticked the requirements off on his fingers. “I want people who are on topic. Who are coherent. I don’t want people who are going to freeze up when they hear Jim Fate use their name. Some people don’t make any sense. Some can’t get to a point. And some use colorful language that the FCC would frown upon.”
“What if someone does swear once they’re on-air?” Nic asked.
“There’s a short delay before anything is broadcast. See this button?” He took two steps back into Jim’s space and pointed. “Push it once, and it cuts off the last three and a half seconds. Press it twice, you get seven. That’s the most you can get, but that’s usually enough. And then the computer stretches out their words like taffy until the time’s made up.” He bunched his fingertips, touched his hands together, and then pulled them apart.
Nic moved back to the doorway to look at Chris’s phone. “Do you have caller ID?”
“Sure.” Chris nodded. “It comes in handy when Jim bans someone from calling in for two weeks. Of course, the hard-core ones will just borrow someone else’s cell phone. But I can still tell. I remember voices really well.”
Nic made a note. “How much hate mail would you say Jim got?”
“Oh, dozens every day. Maybe more. Largely anonymous. Jim would pick out the most outrageous one for his NOD award.”
“Was he ever afraid that someone was going to do what they threatened?”
“Jim?” Chris looked surprised. “He thought it was funny.”
“Do you think one of those people killed him?” Allison asked.
Chris’s answer was immediate. “No way.”
“Why not?”
“Because the people who get mad, they get mad in the moment. They shoot off an e-mail right away and get it out of their system. Killing Jim like that took planning. It wasn’t a crime of passion.”
Nic nodded in agreement. Fashioning a deadly gas grenade was not a spur of the moment act. “How many calls can you take at any one time?”
“An hour of talk radio is actually forty-one minutes after you take away the weather, traffic, news, commercials, and promo. So in an hour, you might be able to take twenty calls. Jim always said there was no point in having more than six waiting on the phone lines. And if he had someone on air who couldn’t get to the point, he would get impatient and dump them.”
“I’ll bet that made some people unhappy. All of a sudden they are talking to a dial tone.”
“Oh yeah,” Chris agreed. “Then they would call back and really ream me out. Like I was the one who cut them off.” His green eyes flashed from Allison to Nic. “But it would be ridiculous for someone to kill Jim over that.”
“People have been murdered over spare change.” Nic shrugged. “How about people who have been angry about shows Jim has run about them?”
“I got several calls from Brooke Gardner’s parents right after she killed herself. But I never put them on. It wouldn’t have made Jim look very good, especially after their grandson turned up. And then recently Quentin Glover has been calling, yelling that Jim has to back off, that Jim is ruining him, that Jim’s going to be sorry if he doesn’t shut up.”
“Really?” Nic and Allison exchanged a glance.
“I guess at one time they actually used to be friends, back before Glover got caught with that mistress. Jim went to college with Glover’s wife, Lael. The affair turned Jim against him. It didn’t matter to him that Lael took Glover back. Once Jim’s made up his mind, it stays made.”
“Do you have any regular crazy callers?” Nic asked.
Chris looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe Craig. He’s a regular caller and also a nut. He always disagrees with Jim. Jim could come out against Satan, and Craig would call to say he’s wrong. He’s always got his Bluetooth on, and he’s always in his car. Jim has even had him come into the studio every now and then. It’s good for entertainment on a slow news day. It generates calls.”
“Anyone else?” Allison asked.
“Jim has more than his share of crazy fans. One guy we always see lurking around the background every time we do a remote broadcast. He’s pretty distinctive—he always wears a leather hat with this wide brim. We just call him Leather Hat Guy. He paces back and forth and watches us, but sooner or later he’ll get close enough to snatch whatever junk we’re giving away: refrigerator magnets, key rings, window decals.”
“Do you know Craig’s last name?” Nic wrote as she spoke. “Or how about the Leather Hat Guy? Do you know his name? Has he ever called in to the show?”
“No, no, no, and not that I know of.” Chris shifted from foot to foot. “But they’re both just lonely guys who have to turn on the radio to hear any other voice besides their own. There’s no way they would kill the guy they think about so much. I mean, for some people, it’s like their lives revolve around the show. They get upset if Jim takes a day off.”
“Who fills in when that happens?” Allison asked.
“Victoria, but for a lot of listeners, it’s not the same. Some people don’t like to listen to a woman, to be frank. They say her voice is too shrill or that she’s not serious or smart enough.”
“Do you think that?” Nic asked. “That Victoria doesn’t have the voice or the smarts that Jim had?”
Chris looked away. “She doesn’t have the same edge Jim does, that’s for sure. Jim’s all about getting in someone’s face. People want the arguments, the excitement. They want a knock down, drag out fight. And Victoria doesn’t offer that. Not on the radio, anyway.”
Allison took a new tack. “Maybe whoever targeted Jim was someone in his personal life. Tell us a little about that.”
Chris lifted his empty hands, palms up. “I don’t know much. Jim wasn’t the type to kiss and tell.”
“What about him and Victoria? Did they ever date?” Nic asked.
Chris opened his eyes wider, the picture of innocence. “I don’t really know.”
“Come on, you look through that window right there at the two of them for hours at a time,” Nic said in a tone that implied she already knew the answer. “You can see how they talk to each other, how they look at each other, how much they touch.”
“Exactly. Do you think Jim is going to do anything while he knows he’s got me and the board op guy and maybe the reporters and the station manager watching him? No way. Besides, if Jim had any relationship at all, it was with his listeners. They were a lot more real to him than people he actually saw day to day.”
“What about the other people who work at the station?” Allison asked. “How did they get along with Jim?”
After a long pause, Chris said softly, “Maybe you should talk to Victoria.”
“We’ll be talking to her later.” Nic cocked her head. “What do you think we should talk to her about?”
“Ask her how well she got along with Jim.” He looked away.
Nic hated coyness. “Look, we need you to tell us whatever
you know.”
He straightened up. “Okay, for each show Victoria goes in with three or four folders, one for each segment. They have research she wants to have handy, points she wants to make, stuff like that. And as the show goes along, her papers tend to get spread out.” He pointed at Victoria’s place. “See that Talk button? A couple of times, her folders ended up on top of it. She didn’t know it, but I could hear everything she and Jim were saying. And what I heard was them arguing.”
Nic looked up from her notes. “What about?”
“Victoria was maybe a little starry-eyed. You know that saying about people not really wanting to know how sausage is made? She didn’t really understand how the talk business works. That there’s a give-and-take.”
“What kind of give-and-take?” Nic asked. “And who’s giving and who’s taking?”
His mouth twisted, as if he would have been happier to continue winking and nudging. “Okay. Jim had LASIK eye surgery awhile ago. So for a few weeks he talked up the surgery, kept saying how easy it was and how he wished he had done it years ago.”
Nic saw the light. “And he got that LASIK surgery for free. In return for talking it up.”
Chris nodded. “Exactly. Jim always said one hand washes the other. But Victoria doesn’t understand that sometimes you have to do things to keep the sponsors happy. It’s not always about news value. You don’t do a live remote from the opening of a big chain store because it’s news. You do it to help out on the advertising side of things. The wall between advertising and editorial came down a long time ago. It’s all just content, and if it gets you listeners and advertisers, then you know it’s working. Victoria liked to talk about the freedom of the press, but no one just hands you a microphone and says, ‘Go for it.’ Nothing is for free.”
“So you’re saying Victoria didn’t understand the business side,” Allison said.
Nic knew Allison well enough to know that she sympathized with Victoria.
“Yeah. She was always talking about fairness and transparency.” Chris’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling. “Like they would have hired her if she wasn’t a thirty-one-year-old woman who was easy on the eyes and half Asian. They hired her to get the ratings up and to bring in more young women listeners.”
“What will happen now?” Nic asked.
Chris shrugged. “For right now, she’s host. And the station might keep her on, if the ratings stay high once everyone has gotten over wanting to talk about Jim’s death. She acts like she’s just taking the baton from Jim’s fallen hand or whatever. But now she gets to take the show in a whole new direction. And that never would have happened if Jim hadn’t died.”
CHAPTER 24
KNWS Radio
As a prosecutor, Allison knew never to interview a potential witness by herself. If she did, and the witness said something different on the witness stand, she couldn’t take the stand herself to counter him. She couldn’t be both prosecutor and witness, which is why she needed Nicole.
More than that, she and Nicole made a good team. Allison was skilled at building connections with people, whether they were victims, witnesses, or even perpetrators. While it wasn’t as simple as good cop, bad cop, Nicole brought completely different strengths to an interview. She sat back and listened with all her being, which made some people feel off balance. They could tell they were being put under a microscope.
The next person to be interviewed was the program director, a tall, thin man in his midfifties. “I’m Aaron Elmhurst,” he announced when he opened the door. He reached out to shake their hands as Allison and Nicole introduced themselves.
Aaron looked awful—his eyes were shadowed, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved since Jim died. “Just let me know what I can do to help,” he said. “We need to catch the guy who did this to Jim and string him up. And not the fast way either, where your neck gets broken when you fall. I want him to feel what it’s like to strangle to death.” He sat down across from them and pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids.
Allison needed answers, not tough talk. A few softball questions might help Aaron calm down and focus, not on revenge, but on facts. And who knew? Every now and then a softball question got hit out of the park.
“I wanted to ask you how KNWS managed to broadcast yesterday when the station was shut down. Did you use one of those live remote trucks you see at events?”
Aaron dropped his hands, and some of the tension in his face smoothed out. “No. A live broadcast comes right back through the studio, so that wouldn’t have worked. We’ve got a transmitter site out in Damascus, and the engineers put something basic together. Greg— that’s the guy who runs the equipment—he grabbed a sound board and a couple of microphones before he left.”
“Pretty quick thinking,” Nicole observed, making a note. Later she would write up a report and share it with Allison.
Aaron shrugged. “If you work in live radio, you have to be quick on your feet. Thank goodness Greg was. He flipped the switch to the national feed, so we were never off the air. And locally, we were back up with a cobbled-together program within four hours. We came back here last night after you guys gave us the all clear, but there was never a gap in broadcasting. If you’re off the air for more than sixty seconds, you’re history. Listeners will change the dial, and you might never get them back.”
“So what does a program director do?” Allison asked.
“Just like it sounds. I direct the programming. I’m responsible for hiring, firing, and overall supervision of staff. It’s everything from controlling the on-air sound to the really important stuff, like deciding who gets stuck working on Christmas.” He managed a weak smile.
“And how long have you known Jim Fate?” Allison asked.
“His name’s not Jim Fate.”
“It’s not?” Allison said. She and Nicole exchanged a look.
“It’s Jim McKissick. That rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? All those s’s don’t sound too good hissed into a microphone. When I hired Jim twelve years ago, I told him to change his name. Not only was it wrong for radio, but it was already associated with the other station in town where he’d worked.”
“Did he leave that station so he could get his own show on yours?” Nicole asked.
Aaron snorted. “He left that station because he got a pink slip. Him and all the other on-air folks. A big chain of radio stations bought it up. That’s their standard operating procedure. Buy a station, fire all the talent, and then use one guy sitting in Texas or Nebraska or whatever to do shows for towns in a half-dozen different states. It’s called voice tracking, but what it means is it’s all robots and computers and prerecorded, and the only real people in the studio are the traffic reporters. They try to customize the program to make it sound as if the host is actually local, but when you listen, they can’t even say the names of nearby towns and roads.”
Allison tried to lead him back onto the path. “You said Fate’s real name was Jim McKissick?”
“Yeah. I told him he needed something punchier, something unique to our station. I didn’t want people thinking we were taking somebody’s leftovers. Of course, who was I kidding? That’s all our station was at that point. Leftovers. That was back when we were one of those stations that plays classic hits from the sixties, seventies, and more!” Aaron boomed out the last few words like a hammy announcer, then sagged back in his chair. “This was way before he was ‘Jim Fate with The Hand of Fate, heard in thirty-eight states.’ I thought I was doing Jim a favor when I hired him, but it turned out that he was doing me one.”
“What do you mean?” Allison asked.
“It was kind of an accident, but Jim has ended up being this station’s bread and butter. When I hired him, our Arbitron ratings were in the toilet, and we were hanging on by the skin of our teeth.”
Allison winced at the mixed metaphor, but Aaron didn’t notice.
“At that time, Jim did pretty much what you would expect for the kind of station we were back th
en. Took requests, did a little bit of patter between songs—nothing that anyone would remember the next day, let alone the next minute—and read the news at the top and bottom of the hour.
“Then one day the lead story was about an old lady who had been dropped by the nursing home staff on the way back from the bathroom. But they didn’t fess up about what they had done. Instead of taking her to the doctor, they just put her back in bed and tried to convince her that it had all been a bad dream. Yeah, right. A bad dream that left her right leg broken in two places. Eventually gangrene set in. When they finally took her to the hospital, it was too late, and she died.”
Allison was sickened. “That’s awful.”
“Jim thought so too. After he read the story, he made a few choice comments about it on air. It was definitely not part of the script. I remember sitting in my office and thinking I was going to have to give him a talking-to during the next break. At that time we were the go-to station for any dentist or office building that didn’t want to shell out for Muzak. They knew we could be counted on to play unobjectionable thirty-year-old hits that everyone had heard a million times before and that no one paid any attention to. I was worried we might have lost our toehold in the one niche we had.
“But instead people started calling in. And they weren’t mad about what Jim said. They wanted to talk about it. I think that was the first time in the station’s history that anyone wanted to talk about anything that we played or said. Before, they didn’t even notice. So when these people started calling, we put a few of them on the air. Then more people called in. And the whole thing snowballed. The more people listened to Jim, the more he talked. That was one man who was never neutral about anything. He always had an opinion, and the more anyone tried to argue with him, the stronger it got. You could never get Jim to back down. Never. It was great. Talk radio thrives on conflict.