The Talk Show Murders (6 page)

It was a little past midnight.

Cassandra with more bad news? Kiki in trouble?

As soon as I lifted the receiver I realized it was a mistake.

“Billy,” Pat Patton’s gravelly voice said, “hope I didn’t wake you.”

“What do you want?”

“Aw, hell. I did wake you. Well, it’s like this, Billy: I thought I’d better give you a heads-up. I mighta … misjudged the situation with our mutual friend Polvere a little.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not on the phone. Come here to my place.”

“It’s late,” I said. “I think I’ll just go to bed instead.”

“Wait, I—”

I counted to ten before releasing the phone plunger and calling the hotel switchboard. “I’d like a wake-up call at five in the morning. And would you hold any calls until then?”

Feeling entirely too smug, I went to bed. There, I was suddenly fully awake to the fact that my silencing of Patton was only temporary. I’d be bumping into him at the show in the morning.

For the next two weeks, our show was going to be broadcast from Millennium Park, a popular public area filled with architectural wonders that had been constructed on the site of railroad tracks and parking areas at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars. As far as I could tell, no one was saying the money had been ill spent. Quite the contrary, the prevailing opinion was that it had been Chicago’s most important project since the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Walking through the park at five-thirty a.m., I ordinarily would have been transfixed by its amazing constructions, even in the predawn darkness. But my thoughts were on my inevitable meeting with the monster.

You know the old bromide: Things that worry us the most rarely come to pass? Well, that morning it was true and not true. As I passed the Cloud Gate—110 tons of shiny stainless steel reflecting the lights of our temporary telecasting area—I saw a group of my coworkers huddled around the entrance to the set.

Arnie Epps was looking even more hassled and distraught than
usual. He spied me and stepped away from the others. “Damn it, Billy. You’re cutting it a little thin, aren’t you?”

I looked at my watch. “Nearly half an hour before showtime,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you. Last-minute cancellation. I’ve got nine minutes to fill.”

This information was overheard by the show’s co-host Lance Tuttle, who shuffled our way. “I could do my version of Ed Murrow’s wires-and-lights speech. I know it by heart.”

“Not gonna happen, Lance,” Arnie said. “We don’t do nine-minute speeches on
WUA
. We don’t love
Today
or
GMA
that much. Anyway, you must realize the wires-and-lights was anti–TV news.”

“Of course. That’s what makes it timely,” Lance said.

“That may be,” Arnie said. “But we don’t bite the sharp hook that feeds us.”

As I left them to their “discussion,” I heard Lance mumble, “Olbermann would do it.”

The techs were prepping the lights. The stagehands were merrily cobbling the set together like little elves. Happy little elves making time and a half. The camera operators were setting up under the watchful eye of Moses Dunham, the line director. None of them seemed to be overly concerned that we’d be on the air in twenty-six minutes.

Trina Lomax was huddled with Gin McCauley. They appeared to be a bit on the uptight side.

“Ladies,” I said.

I’d planned on pausing briefly, just to be polite, before heading on to a tiny tent, where Kiki was supposed to be awaiting my arrival with news of my schedule. But Trina stopped me. “Can you stretch your ‘meet the crowd’ seg another nine minutes?” she asked.

“Assuming there’s a crowd to meet,” I said.

“We have built it and they will come,” she said. Turning to Gin, she added, “That’s that. Sorry you wasted time on the prep.”

She strode off to put out the next brush fire.

“Pretty grim, huh?” Gin said.

“What’s pretty grim?”

“Jesus, Billy. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Patton?”

Patton’s not dead. Patton’s not dead. Patton’s not dead
. “What about him?”

“The buggah’s dead.”

Crap
! “What do you …? When? How?”

“A real Mistah Newshound, you are.” She took my hand and led me to her tent, where her assistant, a high-energy young man named Guy, was seated at a prefab desk, pounding on a laptop.

“Guy, shugah, wheah’s the iPad?”

Without breaking his concentration on his laptop’s monitor, he reached down and pulled up a massive leather purse and handed it to her. She found the iPad, turned it on, and in seconds brought what she wanted to its surface.

It was the front page of the
Tribune
website. “Retired Supercop ‘Pat’ Patton Slain.” This was accompanied by a photo of a fortysomething Edward Marshall Patton in his dress blues and a sizable hunk of reportage by a staffer named Farrah Foster.

According to what Ms. Foster had been able to cobble together, the sixty-four-year-old Patton’s heart had given out sometime between midnight and four a.m. The location was the three-story, five-apartment building on Cedar Street that had been his home for twenty years.

The condition of the body indicated that he had been brutalized prior to death. His apartment, which occupied the entire upper floor of the building, had been torn apart. A spokesperson for the CPD had issued a statement that robbery appeared to be the motive for the crime, though revenge had not been ruled out. Patton had not been America’s sweetheart, exactly. His popular website had consisted primarily of daily video rants. Recent targets had included the former CEO of the
Tribune
, the mayor, the governor, various other local movers and shakers, and the entire Democratic Party, including the illegal-alien Muslim in the White House.

Yesterday, several hours before his death, he’d castigated homicide detectives Hank Bollinger and Ike Ruello, the “dumb-dumb dicks
who are screwing the pooch tryin’ to get a handle on that hacked-up corpse found on Oak Street Beach. Some guys don’t even know what time it is.”

“Guess our show is just gonna have to stay liberal-pinko,” Gin said.

I mumbled something by rote. My mind was definitely elsewhere than on the effect Patton’s death would have on our show. The number of people who wanted to kill the guy could probably fill Wrigley Field, but my money was on the mysterious Giovanni Polvere.

Failing to extort money from me, Patton, that dumb son of a bitch, had made good his threat and gone to Polvere. Only he hadn’t been as careful as he’d thought. That was why he’d phoned me last night, and I, in my wisdom, had cut him off before discovering the extent of his folly. It would have been good to know if he’d mentioned me to Polvere. And in what context.

Patton may even have been willing to tell me Polvere’s current name. Now he was lying on a metal slab in the morgue. And I was left to wonder if I might soon be on the next slab over.

“Billy,” Kiki said, from the entrance, “they’re set up for our visitors.”

Yeah, so’s the morgue.

As much as I love the Big Apple, the Second City looked pretty spectacular that morning as the sunrise made the skyline sparkle under an azure sky. A surprisingly large crowd of early risers was lined up in front of our temporary set, many of them wearing outfits including Cubs uniforms, funny hats, hair dyed the color of orange pop, painted freckles the size of bottle caps. Two men were dressed like homeless.… No, actually, they were homeless. And apparently in better spirits than I.

There were banners welcoming the show to Chicago, signs calling attention to local establishments and hometowns and schools and organizations. I spoke to a pleasant young woman who was painted blue in celebration of a blues festival scheduled to be held in two weeks a stone’s throw away in Grant Park. A couple of guys—at least I think they were guys—in a cow suit wanted the world to know that it was drink-a-glass-of-milk week. Several cute teens from Wilmette were spreading the word about live performances of Clare Boothe Luce’s
The Women
at their school that weekend.

A pleasant young woman dressed in starched white butcher’s gear was assuring me that the annual Meatpackers Guild picnic was open to all, when I spied Kiki off camera to my right, pacing impatiently. As soon as the floor manager cut me loose, I headed for her.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing we haven’t been through before,” she said. “Two police detectives want to talk to you.”

Right on time. Wonder what kept them
?

“About …?”

“They don’t confide in me, Billy. All I know is that they chatted Trina up about how the late Pat Patton was going to fit into the show. They’ve talked with Gin. Now it’s your turn.”

“Gin was going to interview him. Why me?” As if I didn’t suspect.

“I imagine they’ll let you know.”

She was being even more surly than usual.

“Have fun on your date?” I asked.

“Shut up, Billy,” she said.

Detective Hank Bollinger was big and raw-boned with skin so black it was almost purple. With his premature gray hair buzzed close on the sides and a day’s growth of whiskers covering his chin, he reminded me of a salted ripe eggplant. Detective Ike Ruello, was, like his partner, in his early forties. Unlike Bollinger, whose rumpled dark jacket, open-neck blue shirt, and gray slacks looked not only off the rack but also two for the price of one, Ruello’s jacket was a well-tailored gray suede, his shirt a black silk, his trousers a crisp charcoal gabardine. Combined with curly black hair on his head and a less curly matching mustache, he cut a figure a bit too fashionable to seem totally loyal to the code.

“I’m a big fan,” Ruello said, shaking my hand. “I’ve tried a lot of the recipes I’ve seen on your cable show.”

Bollinger was evidently not a fan, big or small. He quickly set the professional tone of the meeting in a deep, unwavering voice with all the timber of a bowling ball rolling through a tunnel and all the
humor possessed therein. “Good of you to talk with us, Mr. Blessing,” he said.
Like I had a choice
.

We were alone in the temporary greenroom. Bollinger and I were seated on campaign chairs. Ruello, possibly to keep the crease in his pants, had decided to remain standing near a silenced TV monitor on which Gin and Lance were vamping until the final credit roll.

Bollinger got out a tiny voice recorder. “You mind?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

He clicked the recorder on, mentioned the time, date, location, and my name, then said to me, “As I’m sure you’ve heard, we’re investigating the murder of retired Chicago police officer Edward Patton. We’re here because Officer Patton was supposed to appear on this show this morning. So far, we’ve talked with your producer, Ms. Lomax, and Ms. McCauley, both of whom have had recent conversations with the deceased. Now we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay,” I said. “But before we start, I should tell you that Patton phoned me last night.” This was something they either knew or would know as soon as they checked the murdered man’s phone record.

“What time was this call?” Bollinger asked.

“He woke me, just after midnight.”

“What was the reason?”

It was possible that Patton, being a wily old bastard, had recorded the call. If that was the case, and they knew the gist of our conversation, I was screwed anyway, so I decided I might as well lie. It was a criminal act, I suppose, hiding information crucial to their investigation. But I was convinced that rather than sending them off on the trail of the declared-dead Giovanni Polvere, the truth would only have confused matters by putting me at the top of their suspect list.

“He was nervous about appearing on our show,” I said. “I tried to convince him that he’d do fine. He was hoping the appearance might lead to a permanent spot.”

“Sounds like you and he were friends?”

“No. We’d only just met on Friday when we were both guests on the Gemma Bright show.”

“I see. Then you guys hit it off? Went out on the town, maybe?”

“Nothing like that,” I said. “In fact, we didn’t even have much of a talk, either then or on the phone last night.”

“What about when he was in your hotel room on Saturday?” he asked.

It took everything I’d learned as a young confidence man and an older on-camera host to keep the sinking feeling from my face. How’d they know about Patton’s visit? From the chauffeur? Or had Patton kept a log of some kind? Maybe a diary? No. It had to have been the chauffeur. If they had the details of our meeting from a diary I’d be getting the prime-suspect treatment at headquarters.

“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “He did come to my hotel on Saturday morning. Quite a surprise.”

“The reason for his visit?”

“It’s the same thing. He was meeting with our producer later and wanted to know what she was like.”

“Your producer, Katrina Lomax?”

“Right. Trina.”

“What did you tell him?”

I smiled. “Not to call her Katrina. Other than that, to just be himself.”

“Be himself, huh? I guess you didn’t know Patton very well,” Ruello said, earning a scowl from his partner.

“When you and Patton were chewing the fat, did he happen to mention anything about the body that was found Thursday morning?” Bollinger asked.

“We didn’t talk about it, but I believe that was why he was on the Gemma Bright show, and I guess he planned on discussing it this morning on our show.”

“What’d he say on the Bright show?”

“He had some theory, I think. A hunch.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“I don’t know if he ever said. I wasn’t all that interested. He was pretty vague with Gemma, and he and I didn’t discuss it at all. According to the
Tribune
, you and Detective Ruello are also investigating that death. Is there a connection with the Patton murder?”

Bollinger exchanged a quick glance with Ruello, then was back on me. “When did you arrive in Chicago, Mr. Blessing?”