by Rex Miller
"What's wrong?" Barb asked innocently. "Did he come up with similar stuff?"
"Yeah," Flynn said. "Coincidences happen. What can I say. Let's get on with it. Here's the way I think the show should come together: first, you guys get me somebody who…" Victor Trask tuned halfway out as the meeting continued and Flynn put the "Discoveries Made in Therapy" program together.
They eventually went back to their cubicles and Trask made a cursory search of his phone and office. Nothing looked out of place, but how would he know if he saw something? He gathered up a briefcase full of papers and looked at his watch: six-fifteen P.M. Buzz, his old engineer buddy, was still working dayparts last he'd heard. He'd check at the "Zoo" first.
Trask left the KCM building and found a pay phone. It was still bright daylight at six-twenty. He dropped money, dialed, and after a half-dozen rings, a young girlish voice answered.
"Z-60."
"Hi. Is Buzz Reid working, do you know?"
"Is who working?"
"Buzz Reid? Engineering?"
"Um. One moment please." The line went dead. He waited. It was hot and smelly in the alcove where he was calling. There were two coin phones side by side, with a small divider for privacy between them. Old tobacco smoke and God-knows-what-all made him wrinkle his nose. There were no directories, which had gone the way of phone booths years ago. Vandalism had seen to their demise. Most of the public phones near KCM were card-type or third-party-billing-number-type. Again, coin ops had been phased out because of vandals. He flipped his pen out and scrawled the word vandalism on a pad. This was the kind of stuff he fed off of. He might be able to get a show out of that one thought. Now he'd start a file on the topic and see just where it led him. He was writing locked churches when a voice said hello.
"Buzz?"
"Yo."
"Vic."
"Hey, man. What's up?"
"Not too much. I wondered if I could buy you a cold one when you get off? Talk about a couple things."
"I can't do it tonight. I got a game."
"When?"
"I'm going to be leaving in about…fifteen or twenty minutes, matter of fact."
"Would you have time to grab a cup cross the street? Five minutes or whatever? It's kind of important."
"Yeah, if you wanna come on by right now. I could give you ten minutes or something. Say—meet me at Sammy's in five minutes?"
"I'll be there. Thanks." Trask hung up, started to walk, and changed his mind. Went around the comer and saw a couple of taxis in front of a nearby hotel, got in the first one and had them take him the eight blocks to the greasy spoon across from the radio station. He got there before Buzz Reid did. He had his coffee in front of him when the engineer walked in.
"Hey, stranger," Reid said, settling down beside him in time to have a cup of coffee set in front of him. "Thanks."
"I appreciate it," Trask said. "I know you're runnin' but I wanted to shoot the shit a minute."
"No problem." Buzz was notorious in Kansas City radio. He was forever trying to get guys to screw his wife, a plain woman in her thirties, who, Trask recalled, had long red hair and an Olive Oyl shape. Reid and his wife were "into swinging," so he claimed. Trask had always managed to slip out of such invitations. It was all but impossible to fire an engineer, but his sexual "misconduct" had somehow gotten him terminated from KCM, in spite of a ferocious shop steward and an unforgiving union, back in the days before they'd worked together at the Zoo. He hated KCM, and had a great deal of expertise in what Trask thought of as "bugging."
"You remember how you always used to say they taped the phone calls and stuff at KCM?" he whispered to the small, thin man at the counter beside him.
"Um."
"Is that something you knew for a fact or were you saying what you thought they were doing?"
"Fact. They tape everything. Not just the phones."
"How did you know? Mind if I ask—confidentially?"
"I heard the fuckin' tapes is how. Jimmy Olfanski who used to be the chief at KCM showed me all that shit downstairs. I heard private conversations made in the sales manager's office, in the fuckin' control room. Et cetera, et cetera."
"Downstairs."
"In the manager's office it used to be. Now it's all in the security room down there next to the supplies 'n' shit. Everybody knows about it. They been doin' that shit for years."
"And they play all that back and listen to it? Everybody's conversations? Why?"
"Who the fuck knows, man. They like to keep an upper hand. You know how management is, pops. Always fuckin' with everybody's head. They sit down there and watch the tapes, I guess, and make random checks and that. Old Inspector Higgins his bad self. I guess that's what he does all day. Sits there watching the tapes and jerkin' his wire."
"Watching—you mean they got videotapes?"
"You see the cameras, man. What did you think?"
"I knew they could see, but I never imagined they would be taping with video. What the hell's the point of it all? What do they expect to see or hear?"
"Hey. Go figure. I suppose…employee theft or some shit. I really don't know. I know I could sabotage the shit out of their security systems and they'd never fuckin' know what hit them."
"Yeah? How would you do that?" Trask asked.
"I know some shit about that place, man." Buzz Reid leaned close and whispered conspiratorially, "I know how to get into Security…" Trask just looked at him. "…from above, baby."
"How?"
"Engineering."
"Yeah?"
"You know where the equipment room is across from those offices like Copy and Purchasing?" Trask nodded. "In the early days that's where the other stairwell was. You could drop a ladder down through the back of the equipment closets and climb right down to the ceiling of the security room, pull the partitions out—" Reid proceeded to detail a break-in somewhere between Topkapi and the Brink's job.
"Judas! I wouldn't have the cojones for that, brother."
"Well, anyway—it could be done easily. Tear all that Big Brother bullshit up, man."
"Is there a way to stop that sort of surveillance? You know—make it so they can't hear what you're saying over the phone or in a private conversation in an office?"
"Sure. In theory, they got every kind of bug jammer you can want—stop any sort of pickup from phone taps to reflection bugs. Cost you a few hundred bucks to get a real good one, but they're available."
"Um."
"I got to get my ass in gear, man. Anything else?" Reid took a last sip of coffee.
"No. But I may call for more advice."
"Anytime. Whyn't you come out to the house sometime? Party with us."
"Might just do that one of these days. Hey, Buzz, I really do appreciate your time. I'll holler at you again, maybe."
"Sure thing. Good to see you." Reid got up and waved a salute.
"Same here."
Trask took a mouthful of cool coffee and held it for a few seconds, not wanting to swallow.
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8
Back at KCM that evening he found a "progress memorandum," as Flynn liked to call them, from The Man himself, telling Trask—in effect—you're letting down, looking for excuses; get your shit together. Not in so many words, but that was the sum of the long memo. He'd have been willing to bet good money that Barb Rose hadn't been sent one. He knew Flynn always checked with Metzger when he was sending memos or whatever, so this was probably a joint venture. He could recall phrases Babaloo had used in various shitty conversations they'd had: "open up the topics" and "start looking for larger themes" were two that echoed.
Specifics? Make-work. Time-consuming legman/legwoman stuff that he found interfered with the more serious business of digging. Stuff Barb should be doing, he felt. And then there was a page on what Flynn called "Factlets," the little stuff that he would use to weave into the nightly commentary that made people think he was a genius. In the middle of a discussion of The Impatient Americ
an, and how we wanted instant rewards and instant gratification, Flynn told a shrink guest, "Did you know, on average, we spend three years of our life waiting for traffic lights?" The shrink laughed, called him on it, and he produced the clinical verification off the "top of his head." Trask's work. You couldn't give him too many Factlets, he had a consuming obsession for the damned things, and they were a pain in the butt to find. Once one had exhausted the obvious printed recorded sources they were hard-won nuggets.
The memo was the perfect ending to a really semi-shit day that had become the genuine article. He went home in a blue funk, his head full of microphone paranoia and Factlet phobia.
He had cleaned all the loose notes out of his office. Anything that he might use toward creating a great theme. It boiled down to a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings, book reviews, and cryptic annotations that referred to sound bites on scraps of half-inch home VHS tape that he'd collected over the past year or so.
The next project he'd build at home. If he used the telephone he'd dial from card-op public phones and use his credit card or bill the calls to the station line. He'd dedicate himself to coming up with something that would pull his rear end out of the flames. He wanted to save his job—at least until he figured out what he wanted to do for a living. Understandably, the first theme was Big Brother. Surveillance. He seriously toyed with the idea of paying Buzz or some unsavory character to climb down the "Engineering ladder" to the internal security vault and get proof of the station's spying on its employees. Wasn't there a Missouri statute against "entrapment" or something? He could check all that out. Build a case. A brief against KCM! File it on the air over "Inside America," and—when it got humongous numbers and regional press—it might be enough that they wouldn't have him killed. What the hell was he thinking? His big theme was to indict the people who employ him? That made zero sense. But still—he'd let it simmer.
He began taping streamers of news clippings around the apartment in categories: Mistrials and Plea Bargaining-the Courts in Trouble, Child Abuse, Pornography, Censorship, Adolescence in the American Value System. It was a personal favorite, but he wondered how it would play in the Kansas/Missouri radio ether: the concept that we'd rather squander millions on parades celebrating a tiny war that had no complete resolution, pretending it was the heroic victory of all time, when Vietnam vets had only begun to be honored, than feed the poor…. He junked that one immediately—too much realism! Pretty soon he'd covered all the walls and was starting a series of file folders with the offshoot topics that ranged from Abortion to Zoning.
So many of these big topics had been done and done and redone and done to death. Could he really stand one more show about the pornography shops, television, the NEA, movie ratings—all of that? Borrrrring. He went around the room pulling down the environmental stuff, the porno stuff, and pretty soon the walls were visible again.
This wasn't the way to go about it. He'd start with categories and get precise definitions, then open them up. He looked at a stack of notes and the one on top read Vandalism. He pulled down a dictionary and turned to the Vs: Vulgarity, Volumetric analysis, Vitriol, Violins, Violence…He stopped his thumbing backward through the dog-eared book and read:
"Violence:
N
(1.) Physical force exerted to abuse or injure. (2.) Instance of a physically forceful treatment or action. (3.) Effecting injury by physical force, brute strength, brutality, physical assault. (4.) Unwarranted or unjust use of physical force or savagery. (5.) Furious, turbulent, or physically violent act of destruction or fierceness."
He read on through the synonyms and variety of meanings: "Excessiveness, rage, brutality, assault, vehemence, fury, destructiveness, force, rampage, savagery, frenzy, fervor, attack, severity, onslaught, turbulence, bedlam—" There was a word or definition explaining violence for nearly every clipping he had! Bloodbath, mad passion, craziness, deadly force, rebellion, street gangs, child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, rape, hysteria, bestiality, explosions, desecrations—it was all here under this one mad umbrella. Violence. Even vandalism!
Certainly, there were topics that didn't fit, but even those that fell immediately outside this category pointed him toward specific future show subjects: "Waste and Corruption," "The Japanization of America," and others instantly gave him slants he'd not looked at before. He'd tapped into the talk-show gold vein.
Violence was the broad background theme for thirty shows—at least. Trask had a month of material he would do in advance, and blow the minds of Flynn, Metzger, and everybody at the station. He would ask for a parking space in the lot, and—in lieu of a raise—Barb Rose's head on a silver platter. No, too violent. He'd ask for a pay-to-play contract clause but settle for the parking space.
Suddenly every story in his stack in front of him, from "Mistrial in Rape Case" to "Infant's Body Believed Placed in Trash by Parents," all went back up on his apartment wall. Subdivided into appropriate categories—a few of which were arguable—it appeared at first glance that Trask had the makings for nearly six weeks of fascinating late-night shows—all on the same universally encompassing theme.
The day that started semi-shitty for the senior researcher at KCM Radio had ended solid gold.
The next day Trask called in sick and stayed in his apartment "on aspirin and vitamin C, to shake this cold" that was coming on. The fact is he probably didn't have much more than that, in the form of a glass of orange juice, and four cups of coffee which he took time out to fix from a jar of instant, as he worked on his files, from before sunrise to one o'clock the following morning.
When he finally stopped to take a deep breath and examine the results of his work, he wanted to call Sean Flynn, who'd probably just be returning to the studio from his nightly post-show donut and coffee, to tell him to "clear the decks for the next two sweep periods!" He was bursting to tell somebody about what he'd stumbled across, but he knew it would be professional suicide to do so. Metzger and his pal Ms. Rose would get cut in on it and he'd be left right where he was.
What he did instead was set his alarm for eight A.M., and he went into the bedroom and crashed for a deep seven-hour sleep. He was up the next morning and writing, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, stoked as he hadn't been since his early years in the business. Victor Trask had come alive!
The focus began with an international overview of violence, cribbed mostly from TV news and talk shows, and an interesting study he'd wangled from the local sheriff's Homicide unit.
From there, it focused on Kansas City, and the statistics on property crimes of burglary, larceny, auto theft, arson, robberies, assaults on persons, rape cases, attempted murders, homicides, and suicides. His source on this was an FBI press kit, and the K.C. cops were using it to help bolster a political fight to stem budget cuts.
Violent crime was up over ten percent overall, with murder having jumped nearly fifteen percent in the past year. In a period of twelve months, Kansas City, a town of—according to a recent census—slightly less than 450,000 citizens, had recorded nearly sixty thousand violent crimes. That was just within the city limits. The K.C. metro area, a vast sprawl of densely populated suburbs, wasn't included in the survey. The city alone showed that approximately one out of every seven persons had recently committed or would commit a violent crime. And those were just the crimes reported. Rapes and assaults went notoriously unreported. Violence—it appeared—was genuinely epidemic in proportions.
What Trask's discovery had been, however, was not in the sheer numbers, but in the nature of the crimes. His file headed Violent Deaths was the key to the "exposé" aspect of this series of interlinked shows he was outlining. It would be what other media would tag as the core of the programs which would deal with escalating violence in America. If his conjecture could be proved it would bring both Sean Flynn's program, and by projection himself, to the attention of the entire country. Trask saw something nobody else had seen, or so he believed. He saw a single thread of motive weaving through som
e of the most violent murders.
How was it possible he'd found something the Kansas City cops had missed? This was nothing to rush to the station with. It was the chance of a lifetime, the "beat" of a career, and came with its own built-in public forum. All he needed was time to put his case together.
First things first: If Rose had an ear on his phone or in his office, he could have it uncovered, but if she did—and he knew that she did—it had to be with Metzger's tacit approval. If the producer was as close to the woman as it appeared, Trask would accomplish little by exposing her spying and thievery. Perhaps Metzger hadn't encouraged it, or even known about it, but he would probably protect her. She was a tough cookie. Like so many in broadcasting, she had limited talent but a terrible driving ambition. She probably saw the bug or wiretap business as industrial intelligence—just good business one-upmanship. There was also the possibility that Babaloo and Barb were a secret coalition, and the plan was to undermine Trask for whatever reason. It really didn't matter. What he had to do was now create a false agenda, which they would then find.
By memoranda and scraps of notes, by phone calls made out of his office at KCM, by a select batch of tapes left on his desk, he would create this fictitious slate of projects to be discovered and—for all he knew—purloined.
The odd thing was that when he'd got a slant on the violence theme, so many hitherto boring subjects began to fall into logical order. Slant was everything. When he saw how these other topics could be interwoven he seemed to get new perspectives on a wealth of tried-and-true topics from organ donors to organic farming. They all fell into place for him. It was tough to find shows he didn't want to research, all of a sudden. These new slants brought a hot light to these well-trod issues, making them interesting and provocative again. A topic as yawn-inducing as tabloid news had now become name fixations. He could imagine a clinically analyzed piece on our penchant for celebrity trivia that worked on a different level than the superficial one. We loved to hear, see both film and video, and read gossip about the Donald or the Kennedy family. But the why of it was linked to root causes more substantial than what might first appear to be the case: he could see ways this report might be part of an overall look at the human condition that would be tremendously thoughtful and thought-provoking—if not meaningfully revealing. Everything always came back around to the same basics such as sex, politics, and religious beliefs or personal philosophies—or the lack thereof—but it was the way in which those basics were probed that could make a talk show thrilling or lackluster. Trask knew that he'd touched a rich nerve near the pulse of mankind's existence, and he had that same scent in his nose that archaeologists must get on a hot dig. He smelled secrets and buried treasure.