Star Time (2 page)

"Oh, didn't anyone let you know?" the unctuous control-room voice replied. "That's unforgivable. I'll get to the bottom of it, Chris."

"The question isn't whether I was told, but why you switched it without telling me."

"Well, because of your husband, it just made more sense. We didn't want viewers to think we were favoring either side in the debate."

"My husband's position never stood in my way before."

"Oh, I know, Chris, I know, I know. But the conflict in Congress has become so controversial, they insisted."

Who
insisted?"

He pointed upward.
"The executives.
I'm just a gofer in this."

"Right," she seethed.

At nine o'clock, as soon as the program concluded, Chris stormed into the control room, catching Skelly as he was trying to slip out.

Ron Skelly was a small, frail-looking, man with overly long gray hair. His unattractive appearance and long-married state had never inhibited him from propositioning every woman who crossed his path, rarely with success. What he
had
mastered, however, was rising in his profession by deftly placing a knife between other people's shoulder blades while commiserating with the victim over the death wound. Chris believed Skelly's advent as producer this year, her second on the program, had caused a marked decline in its quality. Out of a need to put his own stamp on her already popular show, he often acted illogically, arbitrarily, and even spitefully in picking stories and setting its tone. She was the show's most popular element. In order to elevate the importance of his own contribution, he sought to diminish hers. Her dislike of Skelly was a major reason for her reluctance to renew her contract. Unfortunately, network management considered him a loyal "pro" and felt replacing him would be a sign of weakness that ceded her too much power.

To increase the pressure on her to knuckle under in contract negotiations, they had stalled the talks until only weeks remained before her contract expired. Switching the interview had been Skelly's way of demonstrating that he was boss, part of a process he had convinced management would break her will and impose obedience.

"I'm really sorry about the interview," he intoned with practiced concern. "I wish there was something I could have done."

"Who did you claim took it away from me?"

He shrugged. "You know I can't say." His tone seemed to ache with concern for her.

"I'll just have to call your bosses one by one to find out."

Chris spun on her heel and strode down the corridor to her office. Skelly was an untalented lowlife, but she considered him more of an annoyance than an obstruction. What she really hated was this morning program itself, filled with guests plugging products, activists attacking others without providing practical solutions, psychologists hawking books that claimed to repair the love lives of unhappy women or emotional syndromes no one had until then ever noticed, and an endless procession of actors praising their films and TV shows, the latter usually on that network.

She had made no secret of her desire to return to straight news, but her network's news programs and newscasters were flying high in the ratings, so no position she wanted was open to her.

Chris's assistant was answering the phone at her desk as Chris charged by her.

"It's someone named Greg
Lyall
," the woman announced, her hand covering the receiver's mouthpiece.

Chris tried to clear her mind enough to make sense of the words.

"When I asked who he was, he said he was head of FBS," the woman continued. "But Barnett Roderick runs FBS."

"I'll take it in my office."

This was the second time in a few hours that Greg
Lyall
had shattered her composure. Stepping into the limousine that transported her to the studio, her gaze had fallen on the copy of
The New York Times
placed on the seat for her. The front-page story of his accession to FBS’s helm caught her with the shock of a surprise punch. Hurt and rage had welled up inside her, and she had quickly turned to the second section. Now, Greg was phoning her. Her anger at Skelly could not have a more satisfying target.

"Hello," she snarled.

"You took my call. That's something."

"You’ve got exactly five seconds to tell me what you want."

"Have you renewed your contract with your network yet?"

"It's no business of yours, but we're close."

"I think we should talk before you do."

Chris started to hang up. "You have nothing to say I'd be interested in."

"What if I said that I wanted you to be the permanent anchor of FBS's nightly news, our prime
newscaster.
Election coverage.
Summit meetings.
Space shots.
Catastrophes.
Everything."

"Oh."

Probably nothing else he could have said would have halted her. For several seconds she thought of all the reasons not to be interested, all the reasons not to trust him.

"You're tempted," he sensed.

"I didn't say that."

"Enough to talk at least.
How about tonight, over dinner?"

"I'll discuss it with my agent. If we're interested, he'll phone you."

She hung up and stared at the receiver. A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.

"Come in," she said.

Ron Skelly poked his head through the crack. "That satellite interview with Netanyahu? They want Sue Talbert to do that one."

"And just why?"

"Well, with your contract still up in the air, they seem to want to try out young reporters who might replace you."

Skelly managed to withdraw his nose an instant before the door slammed shut.

Chris had been thrown into turmoil by Greg's phone call. Even the offer of anchoring a network news program, of rising to a pinnacle reached by so few, might not have tempted her into considering Greg
Lyall's
network if Skelly had not added this new insult to his earlier injury.

She phoned her agent. He was excited by Greg's call. It would strengthen his hand when he met this morning with her network's president of News. He would try to meet later in the day with Greg.

Greg was convinced that luring Christine
Paskins
to FBS would be the quick, bold signal to one and all that he was to be taken seriously, that he could restore FBS's luster and profitability. Her presence alone, at least in the short term, would guarantee a bump in the ratings, if only out of curiosity. Sustaining the rise over time would be far more difficult, but if accomplished, would translate into higher prices for the broadcast's commercial time and pump in millions more a year in income. More important, it would buy him breathing space and go a long way toward overturning the widespread assumption that he was a lightweight unequipped to cope with the demands of his unearned role.

Greg had no idea whether he could land Chris or not. At least she had not turned him down. That was probably more than he had any right to expect. He believed, though, that if he could just get her and her agent to listen to his offer, to his arguments, he might stand a chance.

The problem was that Christine
Paskins
was the one person in the world who knew precisely what he had sacrificed to attain his new position. She knew he had sacrificed his soul.

LOCAL

NEWS

JANUARY 2000

Greg arrived at KFBS’s newsroom an hour late because of a flat tire.  He was a news producer at the station. His first stop was the office Stew
Graushner
was temporarily occupying.

"I hear I've got a new reporter on my corruption
-
trial story."

A bearded, rumpled man in his early thirties, Stew was the TV station’s news director. A mass exodus of staff that included the news broadcasts' executive producer had forced him to cancel his Christmas vacation. Ordinarily someone whose pessimism reflected a funereal certainty that even good times were precursors to doom, he unexpectedly brightened. "Her name is Chris
Paskins
. I liked her reel. She's been working in Wichita."

"Wichita!" Greg muttered like a dirty word.

"If she doesn't pan out by the end of the month, we have the option to drop her. It's a no-lose deal." That seemed to be the part that had lightened Stew's spirits.

The only one who can lose is me, Greg commented to himself as he left to locate her.

Greg's investigation into corruption in the city's water department had led to arrests and a trial.  He had even tracked down the key witness the prosecution was relying on. Now, four weeks into the trial, when the water commissioner's conviction seemed all but assured, the judge had scheduled a surprise hearing to reduce the charges. The scuttlebutt was that the defendant had cut some sort of deal with the DA.

At the assignment desk Greg learned that his new reporter had long since left for the courthouse to get an early jump on the story and would meet him there.

Just what I need, he thought, an overeager would-be star reporter from the sticks who had neither asked him for background nor introduced herself, but who was already off and blindly running. Her trial at FBS promised to end quicker than the defendant's.

Stew
Graushner
emerged from his office. "You'll want to know what she looks like."

He handed Greg a black-and-white headshot of an arrestingly attractive young woman: large light-colored eyes, straight nose,
small
well-shaped mouth and, typically, blond hair with not a single strand out of place.

"She can always do the weather," Greg cynically observed.

The traffic was slug-slow and a parking place hard to come by. The hearing was already in progress when Greg squeezed into the courtroom. All the seats were taken, and standees were tightly packed into the rear and along the side wall. He spotted the young woman standing near the door.

"I'm Greg
Lyall
," he whispered to her.

She scowled. "Where have you been?"

He ignored her question. "What's happened so far?"

"They're still going through the preliminaries, but I've got it on good authority that
Meachum's
going to plead to a misdemeanor

no more than a year in prison. I already phoned that in. We made the ten
a.m.
news break."

"We what?"
Greg felt as if he had been shot.

"
Meachum's
agreed to testify against some people," she went on, her gaze never leaving the action in front of the bench, "and I'm pretty sure who they are." She stuffed her writing pad and pen into his hands. "Take notes here. The crew and I will catch him when he leaves."

Before Greg could stop her, she was out the door. With absolutely nothing to go on, this empty-headed idiot had put the most absurd rumor on the air. Visions of lawsuits and unemployment lines danced before his eyes. He did not dare leave for fear of missing the real adjudication. He had no idea what new sort of mischief she was creating downstairs for the station.

Ten minutes later, to Greg's stunned relief, the charges against the bribe-taking water commissioner were reduced to a single misdemeanor that carried a sentence of no more than one year in prison. The defendant was released on his own recognizance. Court adjourned in an uproar with dozens of reporters fighting to get out of the courtroom.

When Greg could finally push his way into an elevator and make it outside to the street, his crew—and his reporter—were nowhere in sight. He asked people from other stations if they had seen the KFBS crew, but none had. Greg's short-lived reprieve from disaster was about to be revoked.

Someone on the corner yelled, "There he is!"

The herd of
newspeople
toting video cameras, tape recorders, and microphones thundered around to the side of the building. Greg was caught in the middle of the pack and could not make out what was happening ahead of him until they were well down the block. Then, between people, he caught a glimpse of his camera- and sound-men standing shoulder-to-shoulder, wedging open the rear door of a black limousine.

A moment before the stampede reached
them,
the crew stepped back and let the limousine door slam shut. Revealed behind them was a blond young woman holding a
microphone.
Her wide smile and blue eyes gleamed brightly in the morning sun. Reporters banged in vain on the limousine's sides as it pulled away, its darkened windows revealing nothing of its interior.

"Who the hell is she?" a reporter asked the others in a voice loud enough to be heard over the frustrated groans of his colleagues.