Killed in the Ratings

by William L. DeAndrea

“So that hit-and-run attempt was made. Lieutenant, you don’t happen to know off the top of your head where Devlin was Wednesday night, do you?”

  “No, why should we?” he said. “At the time, we figured he was clean.”

  “I can give you a pretty good idea of what he did. He flew to New York during the day and rented a car from the Big Apple outfit. Then, he staked out either my apartment or Monica Teobaldi’s, more likely mine. He followed me and a friend of mine for blocks, looking for a clear shot.

  When he got one, he blew it. He drove into Tony Groat instead.

  “The only thing to do then was to drive the car back to the airport and fly home. The next day, he took the train up to New York. He couldn’t have stayed overnight in New York, because he had to be home to talk to the police if they wanted him. I brought him to my apartment, and shortly after I left him, he was killed.”

  “That’s what you say,” the Chairman of the Board said. “It sounds—this whole circus sounds like an attempt to cover up the fact that you killed the two of them. Martin,” he began ominously.

  “Cut it out, Mr. Hewlen,” I said. “This is serious. You know your daughter killed Devlin.”

  That surprised everybody but the cops. Roxanne Schick goggled. “You’re kidding, right, Cobb? I mean, my ... she ... doesn’t have murder in her.”

  Cynthia Schick might have been in church, from the look on her face. It was the serene look I’d seen twice before, at the hospital, and here in this office, last Wednesday.

  I was talking to Roxanne, but looking at her mother. “Of course she has murder in her,” I said. “Don’t be foolish, Roxanne. She murdered ‘Harbor Heights.’ She tried to murder Tom Falzet’s career. Along with your father, she’s murdered the Network, maybe the whole industry. It will never recover from this. Just because of the ambition and greed of Walter and Cynthia Schick—”

  “That’s a lie!”

  It happened. Cynthia Schick’s composure had snapped. She leaped from her chair, and warily, as though backing away from a predator, edged toward the windows.

  In a different way, she became as much a caricature of herself as her husband was. Where life had redrawn him as an infant, she took on the appearance of a rabbit; nostrils wide and twitching, eyes liquid and wide, body trembling, wary and fearful in every nerve.

  “That’s a lie!” she said again. “Tell him, Father. Tell all of them! I don’t want them to say that about Walter, please, Father, make them stop, please.”

  “Cynthia, I—” he began helplessly, and more than a little fearful himself.

  “I’ll admit what I did. I did kill Devlin, I don’t care who knows about that! He was dirt. But they can’t think those terrible things about Walter, tell them, Father, tell them how good Walter was for the Network.”

  Mr. Hewlen was suffering, and he wasn’t used to it. It’s not easy to watch your daughter go off the deep end in front of your eyes.

  “What ... what do you want me to say?”

  Cynthia Schick’s attention was concentrated on the old man. Lieutenant Martin edged closer to her. There was no telling what she’d do in that condition.

  “I want you to tell them—get away!” She saw the lieutenant move, and jumped back, thudding against the brown glass windows. Like a frog’s tongue, her hand was in and out of her purse.

  There was a clicking noise, and a silvery arc in the lamplight.

  By the time action slowed enough to be perceptible, I could see Lieutenant Martin holding a bleeding hand, and Cynthia Schick holding the point of a pearl-handled switchblade against her throat.

  23

  “You are about to enter another dimension a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind ...”

  —Rod Sterling “The Twilight Zone” (CBS)

  “LIEUTENANT, ARE YOU ALL right?” I demanded.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “My pride hurts the most. Nobody ever surprised me with a knife like that before.”

  Falzet offered him a handkerchief to wrap around the hand. As he took it, he said, “Look, Mrs. Schick, put that knife away, please? You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  She laughed at that, a girlish giggle. “How could I possibly hurt myself, Lieutenant? How could I be hurt anymore?”

  He took a step toward her again, she pressed the point against her throat harder. It made a kind of obscene dimple.

  “I warned you to get away!” she snapped. “Believe me, I know just where to put this. I’ve had practice.”

  “Mrs. Schick,” I said respectfully.

  “Yes?”

  “You took that knife from Devlin, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. The coward. It was meant for you, you know. That fool. When he failed Wednesday night, he called me and said he’d try again tomorrow. He thought you’d take him to your apartment. I was to call to distract you. So you’d turn your back on him. I don’t know why he didn’t. He stabbed his friend in the back.”

  “Why? Why did you want to kill me?”

  “Why? Don’t be a hypocrite, Mr. Cobb. You’ve destroyed me, you don’t have to gloat. You were plotting with that slut of a daughter of mine. You knew, I could tell. You knew, Carlson told you. I knew you knew when you came to the Willowdale hospital the day after the murder.”

  “Did you know Devlin was going to kill Carlson?”

  “Stop it! You know I did!” Her face was twisted and distorted. The face is the mirror of the soul, I thought. “Devlin warned me to keep my mouth shut,” she went on.

  “But when you came to the hospital, you didn’t say anything to me about the murder. Then I knew. You were plotting with her. You were going to destroy me, so she would get control of Walter’s stock and my stock, and add it to hers, and take over the Network.”

  Cynthia Schick looked at her daughter with hatred. Roxanne looked at her and cried.

  “Mrs. Schick,” I said softly, “I know you won’t believe me, but I swear I wasn’t sure you had anything to do with it until Fred Barber told me he gave you your husband’s wallet on Wednesday. It was the use of your husband’s license that tipped me off, and the missing page with the picture that turned up in Devlin’s wallet that confirmed it.

  “I never wanted to destroy you, Mrs. Schick. It was just the only way it made sense. Carlson was killed by Devlin, then Devlin was killed. A blackmailer and his victim have a common interest in seeing that a third person doesn’t reveal the secret. That’s what accounts for the murder of Carlson and the attacks on me.

  “Then, I guess, the temptation to remove the blackmailer was irresistible. Was that how it was?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I never even thought of killing him until Thursday afternoon, when he called me and told me to meet him at your apartment. I drove into the city.

  “He was a fool. He wanted to go to Goldfarb—he had heard of him from Carlson—and tell him about ARGUS. He said with Goldfarb’s backing, he could make millions—that we could. He planned to make me his mistress. As though I would do that to Walter!”

  Of course. Devlin should have known. Just because a woman commits fraud, and connives at homicide, it doesn’t mean she’s ready for adultery. It was too ironic not to laugh at.

  “That’s right! Laugh at me! He laughed, too. That’s when I knew I had to be rid of him. I took the steak knife from your kitchen. It was expensive, I knew it could be traced back to that apartment. I told Devlin I was bringing him back to my house and ... well, I let him think what he wanted. I let him drive. When we came to a good place, I said I was carsick and made him pull over, then put the knife in his neck.”

  “Did you take the second switchblade from him then?”

  “Yes. I ... I don’t know why. I took Walter’s license back, too.”

  “You should have burned it.”

  “I know that now. I didn’t want to.” She started to sob. “I failed him, I always fail. Except now. Walter is free, I freed him from that machine after you called, I pulled the plug—”

  Roxanne Schick
screamed and bolted from the office.

  Lieutenant Martin pointed Falzet’s bloody handkerchief at one of his men. “Check on it,” he barked.

  During the distraction, I had circled to my right, until I was just a couple of steps from Mr. Hewlen’s desk. I reached over and picked up his telephone.

  “What are you doing?” Cynthia Schick demanded.

  “Don’t mind me,” I told her. “I don’t care what you do anymore.”

  I dialed extension 223. I was prepared to fake it, but the phone was answered.

  “Jack Hansen.”

  “Jack? Matt Cobb.” I looked over at Cynthia Schick, she was beyond help, now; her face was a death mask. Still, she wasn’t going to kill herself without everyone paying attention.

  “Jack, Cynthia Schick is about to kill herself, because she can’t face the consequences of two, or possibly three murders she’s been in on, not to mention maybe hurting American television beyond all repair.

  “So get up here right away with a minicam, a soundman, and some lights, maybe plug in on the air live, so she can have the whole prime-time audience to watch her. I’ll ask her to wait until you get here.”

  I looked up at a noise, a cry of animal fury from Cynthia Schick, who was springing at me, switchblade raised high.

  I dropped the phone, and used some Army judo on her. It was a simple move. It would have been harder if she’d come with the knife underhand, the right way. It ended with her prone on the rug with my knee in her back.

  Rivetz picked up the knife, then stood over her with Lieutenant Martin. They both had their guns drawn.

  I got up, carefully, but Cynthia Schick didn’t move.

  I picked up the phone.

  “Matt?” Jack Hansen’s voice said. “Matt? What the hell’s going on there? Are you crazy?”

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “I’m a goddam lunatic. I’m sending Harris Brophy and Shirley Arnstein down with a story. Good-bye.”

  Lieutenant Martin gingerly turned Cynthia Schick’s trembling body face up. Her lips were slack, and quivered with the vibrations of her body. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. They were focused on something far away I couldn’t see.

  24

  “Good night and good luck.”

  —Edward R. Murrow, “See It Now” (CBS)

  IT TOOK OVER TWO hours, until the police were out of there. I remember it only as snatches of conversation.

  Like one of the three psychiatrists (one official, two unofficial) who were doing a skull survey on Mrs. Schick saying to the others, “Complete schizoid withdrawal,” and the other two nodding solemnly.

  And this exchange I had with Harris Brophy, when he returned from the newsroom:

  “She was right after all, Matt.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You did destroy her. You took her big death scene and made a joke out of it. That was the crowning insult that put her away.”

  And this one with Horace A. Rivetz:

  “Cobb, that was incredible. I apologize for everything.”

  I was overwhelmed. “Thanks,” I said. We shook hands.

  Mr. Hewlen’s voice kept playing the refrain of the evening. “I loved her. I tried to be a good father to her. I tried to make it up to her. I did. I ...” He never finished it.

  At one point, Goldfarb said, “A remarkably entertaining evening, Mr. Cobb. Consider that offer for a position in my organization to be still open.”

  “What makes you think you still have an organization?”

  He just gave me his Ozzie Nelson smile and walked away.

  Lieutenant Martin was angry with me. “You held out on me, Matty. I don’t like it.”

  “I didn’t either. I was trying to protect the Network. That was my job. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately. Did it ever occur to you that if you leveled with me from the start, Devlin would still be alive and that woman wouldn’t be heading to the soft room?”

  “It occurred to me,” I admitted. “But you heard her. I was out to get her, everyone was out to get her. She was a time bomb. I’m glad it was Devlin who was around and not her daughter, say, when she went off. I’m very glad.

  “Speaking of Roxanne, have you heard anything from Willowdale?”

  “Yeah, my man caught up with Roxanne outside and went up there with her. It appears that Walter Schick has double-crossed his wife and surprised all the doctors by living without the respirator. The same way Karen Quinlan did over in Jersey. Maybe we’re tougher than we think, Matty.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Eventually, the room quieted down; the doctors and detectives were through with their various investigations, and the prisoner/patient had been taken away. The only noise was the slow chanting of Mr. Hewlen: “I tried, I tried, I ...” Falzet was trying to comfort him.

  I sat on the love seat and closed my eyes, trying to relax. No luck. My memory insisted on doing a high-speed playback of the last four days, and I was too tired to fight it.

  And then the tar pit began to churn again.

  The case wasn’t finished quite yet.

  I waited until the last policeman had left, and I was alone with Falzet and Mr. Hewlen at the top of the Tower of Babble.

  “Mr. Hewlen,” I said. “Mr. Falzet, we need to have a little talk.”

  The talk didn’t take as long as I expected it to, for the simple reason that I was the only one who said anything. When I finished, I left to let what I had said sink in.

  I took the elevator downstairs, waved good-bye to Wilkie the guard, took Spot out of the company car (I no longer felt I had a right to drive it), and walked through the rain to the apartment.

  “I think we’re going to be spending a lot more time together, Spot old boy,” I told him. He licked my hand.

  I unlocked the apartment door, went in, changed the water in Spot’s dish, took off my jacket and tie, grabbed a big handful of Squirrel Nuts candy, and collapsed on the sofa to eat them.

  I forced myself to eat three before I grabbed the phone and tried to call Monica. There was no answer at her apartment. She couldn’t have been visiting Tony this late.

  Maybe she had tried to call me. Rick and Jane had one of those automatic answering things on their phone, but I hardly ever used it because I got so few calls.

  There was a message there, all right.

  “Matt Cobb,” Monica’s voice scolded me. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you since the plane landed, and all I get is this stupid recording. Great news! I got the part, I got it! They’re going to announce it at a press conference on Monday, but I’m so excited, I decided to fly out right away. I’ll send my address as soon as I have one. Bye bye. My love to Spot.”

  Click. And that was it.

  “She did it to me again!” I yelled, I guess to Spot. “I let her do it to me again!”

  Another phone call after the fact, just what I needed to make the night complete. I shook my head. I would never understand that girl. She loved me with all her heart ... when I was around and handy. I tried to hate her, but couldn’t quite do it.

  I was still trying when the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see Roxanne Schick, with her dark hair plastered to her head, and her clothes soaking wet from the rain.

  “Can I come in, Cobb?” she asked meekly. “Please?”

  I got out of her way and let her in. She didn’t want to sit on anything and get the upholstery wet, so I got her a chrome and plastic chair from the kitchen. She straddled it backwards, and rested her chin on her arms folded across the back.

  I told her I was glad she came.

  She looked surprised. “You are? I’ve been walking around for hours, ever since the police finished with me, debating with myself whether or not to come up here.”

  “Why should you have to debate?”

  “I’m a monster, Cobb, I’ve told you all along. I’m poison. I’m no good, the product of no-good parents. Why should you or anybody—?”


  “Stop it!” I said. She shut up. “Look, this is stupidity, what you’re saying. Your mother is a sick, scared woman. Your father ...”

  “Yes,” she said in a deadly voice, “my beloved father. He wasn’t sick, he was just greedy. That argument they had that night—that wasn’t about me at all! It was just over paying blackmail because somebody knew about their dirty scheme.”

  “Not their scheme, Rox,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Your father didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s the problem. I blew it.”

  “What are you trying to say? Do you mean my parents didn’t do all those terrible things?”

  “No, your mother killed Devlin all right, and she was in on the ratings fix, too, but your father wasn’t.”

  There was a strange look on Roxanne’s face, as though she were begging me not to be lying.

  “Look, Rox, everything I said tonight, I believed when I said it. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truth.

  “Remember what your mother said, how she described the fight? She said, ‘Walter was furious, just furious,’ and ‘he was going to have it out with Father—Mr. Hewlen—the next morning.’

  “It just doesn’t make sense, Rox. If you’ve done something wrong, and a blackmailer finds out about it and puts the squeeze on, you don’t get furious, for God’s sake. You don’t get outraged. You get scared to death, is what you get.

  “And have it out with Mr. Hewlen? Stroll into the office of the Chairman of the Board and have it out with him that you’re being blackmailed over tampering with the ratings of a Network show, and what is he going to do to help you out? That would be tantamount to suicide. No, Rox, as far as I’m concerned, that alone makes your father innocent.

  “He was outraged, because the blackmail demand he got from Devlin was the first he heard about the plot. Your mother dealt with Carlson, he naturally assumed your father was behind it all, and he passed the assumption on to Devlin.”

  “Well, then, you mean my mother was in it alone?” Roxanne asked.

  “No, Rox. Your mother gave that away, too. Remember what she kept saying all the time she was protesting your father’s innocence.”