Exposé: First of the Sally Harrington Mysteries (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 5)

by Laura Van Wormer

  Spencer is smiling at me. "You know what my dad said? He said you sounded a lot like my mother, my real mother. In the most flattering ways."

  I could have told him that because I know that Spencer is, in some ways, like my father.

  We walk to my hotel, chatting, swinging hands. We decide he will come up for a little while to my room but then will go home; we both have a lot to do. Tomorrow we will spend the night together.

  It has been a near perfect day.

  I am falling in love.

  27

  Tuesday begins with an interview with Cassy Cochran's old boss at WST. After an amusing account of how they begged she go on the air as the station's first woman co-anchor, which she adamantly refused, the interview is not particularly enlight­ening. It does, however, give me enough superlative quotes about Cassy to, say, wage a congressional campaign on her be­half.

  "Financially responsible." "Excellent supervisor of work­ers." "Strong but never offensive." "Creative and hardwork­ing." "Detail oriented." "Absolutely brilliant at long-range planning."

  And it says a lot about Cassy that he would say all these things about her after she jumped ship to DBS. On the other hand, when she joined WST it was an insignificant inde­pendent player in New York and by the time she left, Cassy had turned WST into the first "super station" to be carried on cable networks across the country.

  One bonus of the interview is a cherished photo her old boss agrees to loan me. It is of him and Cassy some twenty-three years ago, when she was a producer in the news department and he had come on board as an accountant in payroll. He was, he admitted, "Head over heels in love with her at the time, but then, everybody, everybody was." He looks at the photograph again before handing it to me. "Everybody is in love with her still."

  Looking at the photograph, at least from a physical view­point, one can see why.

  I ask him if he knew Michael Cochran and he says, yes, of course he did, everyone did. When he adds nothing further, I ask him what he thought of him. "As a news producer?" he asks, sitting back in his chair. "An ace. Absolutely first-rate."

  "And as a husband?"

  He frowns and vigorously shakes his head. "No comment." After a moment, though, he adds, "But I'm glad she's not mar­ried to him anymore."

  As I ride over in a taxi to West End for my big interview of the day, with talk-show host Jessica Wright, I make some notes. It has become very clear, very fast that Cassy could have easily strayed along the way, that her beauty had attracted all kinds of offers. It has also become increasingly interesting to me how rigorously she insisted on staying behind the camera, preferring instead to slog her way up the production side of the business.

  There was, of course, the mother. With that woman scream­ing at her for so many years, Cassy no doubt came to view her looks as synonymous with hell.

  The cab stops at the front gates and I am checked in. We drive down into the reception circle. Today I am met at the driveway by a woman who says she's DBS security, but I think she looks more like a recruiter for the Junior League. Her ID reads Wendy Mitchell. She is somewhere in her thirties, I guess, and has a calm, laid-back look.

  "You don't look like security," I say, attaching my security pass to the lapel of my blazer.

  "Which is exactly why I am," she says with boarding-school ease. "This way." She gestures. "I'll take you up to Jessica's of­fice."

  I follow her into the complex. In the elevator I ask, "Do you mind me asking how you got into this line of work?"

  "Not at all. I was a private investigator, and after Jessica had her incident—" This translates, I assume, into, After Jessica Wright was kid­napped and nearly killed, "The network offered me a job to supervise the security on the talent."

  "Just here, or elsewhere, too?"

  "Oh, I travel with them. Like when The Jessica Wright Show was taping on the West Coast a few weeks ago. Or if Alexandra goes overseas, I usually go."

  "So you're kind of a bodyguard as well."

  She laughs a little, holding the elevator door for me as I get out. "Yeah, I guess." I don't know why she finds that funny, but I don't have time to ask.

  We are already walking down the third-floor hallway of Darenbrook III, the north wing of the DBS broadcast center. We stop outside Jessica Wright's office where Marianne, the young Asian woman I met last week, is furiously typing into a com­puter. She glances up and then stands to stick out her hand. "Hello, Ms. Harrington. It's nice to see you again."

  "Hi, Marianne." From her expression I can tell she is both surprised and pleased I remember her name. No need for her to know that I have drawn a chart of DBS with everyone's name filled in.

  "May I get you something to drink?"

  "No, thank you."

  A loud wail comes from the inner office. Marianne smiles. "Jessica's on the phone with her agent. She said for you to go right in."

  Wendy leads me in and I see the talk-show hostess standing behind her desk with the phone at her ear. She is something. First off, she is not much older than I am. I don't know why, but while she looks great on TV, she "feels" as old as the hills. Here, though, in real life, there is a vitality that is undeniable.

  While I found everything about anchorwoman Alexandra Waring sleekly battened down, everything about Jessica Wright seems softly right out there, physically and emotionally. She is wear­ing a short blue-jeans skirt, cotton top and clogs. Her legs are bare and tan; she has little makeup on but her eyes burn fiercely green; and her auburn hair seems much lighter than it is on TV. She smiles at me as I come in. At Wendy's direction, I take a seat on the couch that runs along one wall and start setting up my gear on the coffee table in front of it.

  "No-no-no!" Jessica Wright is half yelling into the phone. "I don't care how much he's offering! Tell him he can burn in hell before I'll ever lift a finger for him— and even then it will prob­ably be to fly him the bird." Her eyes have lowered slightly­ and she is focusing on the chair across from me, listening.

  Her voluptuous mouth suddenly pulls horizontally into a line and her voice drops to a low rush. "I understand you have to deal with him on other projects with other clients. But I don't want you soft-soaping my reaction. I don't want you saying any of that 'As much as Jessica would like to, but—' crap. The message you are to convey to him is—" her voice is beginning to boom"—that he's a total fucking sleazebag and Jessica says ‘back off’ before she really gets mad."

  I have to choke down a laugh. Wendy mouths "goodbye" and backs out of the office, closing the door.

  In a few moments, Jessica Wright is off the telephone, we've shaken hands and she is seated across from me, deftly crossing her legs at the knee. There is a knowing wariness in her expres­sion. This gal's done a lot of interviews.

  "You certainly don't look like one of Verity's regulars," she observes.

  I smile. The tape is running.

  "She usually sends us some angry over-eater, or under-eater, or something not very healthy. You know what I mean? With a lot of suppressed rage coursing just below the surface? You know the kind of writer I'm talking about?"

  I'm laughing. It is true. I don't know what it is about maga­zine writers, but on the whole they tend not to be a very happy lot.

  "A little bird told me you got this assignment because you found Verity and Corbett in the woods," she says next. "It sounds like your big career break is as bizarre as mine was," and then she launches into a short history about how substitut­ing on a community affairs TV show in Tucson ultimately led her to becoming one of the best-loved TV personalities in the nation.

  I find Jessica Wright absolutely charming. She is funny and bright and slightly wicked, but I get the sense she is only slightly wicked about people she thinks deserve it. Like the pro­ducer her agent had just asked her to do a special for, a man who years ago had tried to blackmail a friend of hers. I'm dying to pursue this, but she sweetly refuses and instead launches into how Jackson Darenbrook discovered her "little" syndi­cated talk sho
w out of Tucson and gave her a contract with DBS.

  She's quite comfortable admitting she arrived in New York "pretty much an alcoholic basket case. Three-tenths a drinking problem, seven-tenths just neurotic and on the verge of a nervous breakdown." Jessica rolls her eyes as she claims she was unceremoniously dumped into Cassy's lap as the only hope for a strong lead-in show to the nightly news.

  "You know, of course, that Cassy was only hired to be the ex­ecutive producer of DBS News, don't you?" When I nod, she races on. "But you know, everything was up for grabs here. We were literally inventing the network as we went. Old Alexandra Eyes was sneaking around, trying to wrangle a merger of our budgets—news and talk, can you imagine?—in an effort to get the staff she needed and get her people on the air months ahead of schedule. It was a wild time."

  And then the talk-show hostess's expression dims slightly, and she looks thoughtful.

  She is a terrific-looking woman. I can see why she is such a fa­vorite with the people who have appeared on her show. There is something that is so alive, and yet gentle, about Jessica. A kind of vulnerability that surprises me enormously.

  She raises her eyes to meet mine. "It's no secret about how I stopped drinking during that time."

  I nod. "I read your autobiography—which was very good, by the way."

  She beams.

  "You wrote a great deal about Alexandra Waring and how you guys became friends—and how Alexandra helped you stay away from alcohol in those early days."

  "Mmm," she nods, looking as though she is remembering those days.

  "But you didn't say anything about Cassy."

  Jessica's smile widens. "That's because she made me take it out."

  My ears perk up. "Really?"

  She nods. "Really. And it was funny because what I had writ­ten was basically how wonderful she was, that it was Cassy, in fact, who arranged for someone to take me to my first self-help meeting. That's AA, but you know, we're supposed to be anon­ymous so please respect that, okay? Don't say AA or I'll have a fit."

  I nod.

  "She rearranged my work schedule, suggested a good therapist, got me a nutritionist who specialized in people in recovery, she... " She laughs. "Oh, she did everything. Cassy wanted me to have every chance of getting into recovery, in­cluding offering to sacrifice the launch of the network with the suggestion I should go away to a rehab for a month or two." She shrugs. "But I didn't. I went to the Alexandra Waring rehab instead."

  "Right." All this was in the book, how she had stayed with the anchorwoman until she was more stabilized. "But why did Cassy have you strike that from your book?"

  "Because that's Cassy. She sees herself as part of DBS. And unlike the rest of us egomaniacs who need our names in lights—" she laughs "—she believes the whole team should be credited for what she does. So I said 'the network' did this, did that. And in a way, she's right, because Cassy can only be who she is here because the CEO, Langley Peterson, and the whole board of directors of Darenbrook Communications, support her completely and totally and rely on her judgment in every­thing."

  I find it interesting that as Jessica starts feeding me Cassy sto­ries, the talk-show hostess doesn't realize they tell me a lot more about her than they do about Cassy. A big part of their re­lationship, it seems, has been Cassy mirroring Jessica's strengths back to her and pushing Jessica to develop them. While Jessica clearly adores her mentor, I'm not sure how well she actually knows Cassy.

  Of course, Jessica just may be refusing to transgress an imag­inary line in the sand.

  She mentions her recent highly publicized marriage to Will Rafferty, the executive producer of the news division. I ask if Cassy came to the wedding.

  "Of course she did!" she nearly cries. "And she would have been in it, if she hadn't thrown such a fit. She said she just couldn't be a bridesmaid, that she's a million years old or some such nonsense, so I finally let her off the hook."

  "Alexandra was your maid of honor." She nods. "And Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres, the actress, was—“

  “A bridesmaid. And Alicia Washington, who has her own show now. And then an old friend of mine from out west."

  And so the interview continues, and we talk through almost three hours of tape until Marianne comes in to tell Jessica that it's time to start prepping for that night's taping. "Which I hope you'll come to," Jessica says. "I think you might find it interest­ing."

  When I hesitate, she says, "But of course you've got work to do."

  “No, I was just thinking. I'm afraid I'm supposed to meet a friend—"

  "Say no more! We'll get this friend of yours a pass. Marianne will make all the arrangements."

  And so I call Spencer and he says great, he'll be at West End at six.

  Marianne escorts me up to the company cafeteria and has lunch with me, confessing that she's been told to keep her eye on me. And then, at two, Chi Chi comes to pick me up and take me to see Langley Peterson, the chief executive officer of all the electronics companies in the Darenbrook Communications em­pire.

  Langley Peterson is tall, quiet and patient. He is the perfect cop in the henhouse, as it were, and judging from the photo­graphs in his office, his wife Belinda—Jackson Darenbrook's sister—is not an unattractive woman. Still, I have to wonder if he has ever been tempted when working with women like Cassy, Jessica Wright and Alexandra Waring.

  "So you're writing an article about Cassy," he says, sitting behind his desk. The fact that he's returned to his seat is always telling. But I don't think it's a power play with Langley Peter­son; I think he is simply shy.

  "Yes," I say, placing the tape recorder on his desk.

  "I must admit, I was very surprised she went for this. Cassy is not big on personal publicity."

  "I think she views it as an opportunity to promote new areas of DBS programming."

  He lets out a gentle laugh, shaking his head. "Now, that sounds like Cassy." He sits back in his chair. "So what would you like to know?"

  I read back to him some of what Cassy's former boss said about her this morning.

  "Yeah," he nods, "that all still applies. All that's missing in those comments is that she is, without a doubt, the best-loved person in this company. And she inspires a kind of personal loyalty to our network that is without peer in the industry." He nods. "Cassy's the best. Really, like that song, better than all the rest. She's the one."

  "Surely she must have some unpleasant tasks to perform. I mean, she can't possibly do her job and be nice all the time."

  "Oh, she's not," he hastens to assure me with a laugh. "She and I— Cassy and I have gotten into such arguments, you cannot believe. One time Adele, my secretary, sent security in here because she thought for sure something bad was going to happen." He laughs. "Really. I mean, neither one of us is a pushover, and when we disagree, it can be quite a struggle. And if we lose our tempers, which happens maybe once a year, it's always with each other, because that's also Cassy. She knows I can take it, and not take it personally, whereas other people might not be able to get over it."

  We talk about this aspect of her personality, that she does have a temper hidden in there, and then I ask him if Cassy has ever fired anyone.

  "She's fired lots of people," he says. "This is TV. People come and go and if they can't handle the pace or the work, they've got to move on."

  "So there are people out there who aren't particularly fond of her?"

  "She couldn't possibly be a good executive and not have some of those people out there."

  "A couple of names?" I ask hopefully. "People she's had to fire?"

  "Oh, great," he mutters. "Comer me to be the bad guy and cough up names. Well, I can't do that. First of all, we almost al­ways let the people say they quit. Oh, hell!" he cries, hitting the side of his head as if it is an uncooperative old TV, "You can't put that in! That'll hurt a lot of people."

  As an answer I reach for the tape recorder, rewind the tape and erase that last part. "Just a few names," I coax. He gives
me two. One is a producer at a cable news network, the other a weekend anchor of a morning show here in New York. After we finish, Adele books interviews with both.

  28

  I return to the hotel whistling. I've got some good stuff.

  I order a pot of tea up to my room and start transcribing tapes into my laptop computer. Spencer checks in to see if we're still on for West End at six. I go back to work, laughing a couple of times through the Jessica Wright interview. I lose track of time and lurch away from my desk at five-fifteen and jump into the shower. I am just getting the last of the conditioner out of my hair when the phone rings. There is a phone in the bathroom and I wonder about getting electrocuted as the water from my hair streams into the receiver.

  "Hey, Sally." It's Buddy D'Amico. "Sorry to bother you." Pause. "Where are you, Niagara Falls?"

  "I have a phone in the bathroom. I was taking a shower."

  He sighs heavily. "How will we ever get you back on the farm, Sal? A phone in the bathroom, la-di-da-di-da."

  I wrap myself in a towel. "So what's up?"

  "Actually, that's what I was going to ask you. I heard through the grapevine that you're looking for a membership list of the Masonic Lodge from twenty-one years ago."

  "And who might be in this grapevine with you?"

  "A detective has his sources," he jokes. "Look, Sally, no kid­ding, why do you want it?"

  "Why are you asking?"

  "Because I'm conducting a murder investigation."

  "And what could it have to do with that?"