Hand of Fate (19 page)

But underneath, Allison carefully weighed Victoria's words and actions. People either lied by commission, or they lied by omission. Did she cut her eyes to one side, stutter, stall, add emotion that she really didn't feel, vouch for her own veracity? How many lies had Allison heard preceded by the words I swear to God?

Victoria said, "Jim was always the one who chose the topics. Oh, he asked me what I thought, but in the end it was his decision. He was a little bit more old-school than me."

"What does that mean?" Nicole asked.

"I look at the research. And yeah, people want topics they can talk about when they come to work. But there's other information they want before that. When they listen to the radio, they want to be grounded. Jim thought that kind of stuff was a waste of time."

"What do you mean, grounded?" Allison leaned forward.

Victoria's face became more animated. "The first thing people want to know when they get up in the morning is, is my world safe?

Did we drop a nuclear bomb in Iraq? Was there an earthquake in the middle of the night? After they get that information, then they want to know what time it is, even if they have a clock. Somebody on the air telling them the exact minute it is lets them know they're still on schedule. So in between talking about stories and taking calls and interviewing folks, I would mention how many minutes past the hour it was. That might seem like just a way to kill time, but it's what listeners really want to hear. Once they are oriented, then they're ready to call in and talk about the big story of the day. But Jim felt it wasn't a good use of airtime."

"It sounds like Jim had a lot of opinions." Allison gave her a knowing smile.

"You're right about that. I even have a bell to ring when he's going a little crazy, you know, to tell him he needs to shut up."

Allison was surprised. "And he was okay with your doing that?" "He gave me the bell." Her smile faltered.

"How long have you worked with Jim?" Nicole asked. Allison could tell by Nicole's narrowed eyes and the set of her mouth that she continued to have reservations about Victoria.

"I was hired about a year ago. Aaron told me I would be billed as Jim's cohost. That's not exactly true. If our names are in print, Jim's is ten times bigger than mine. Aaron keeps saying I have to prove myself." Victoria rolled her eyes. "You try getting a word in edgewise. There's a reason Jim has succeeded in talk radio. It's like survival of the fittest. Only in talk radio, it's survival of whoever can keep talking. He who talks the loudest and the longest wins."

"It must have been difficult, playing second fiddle to him," Allison observed.

Victoria's smile looked like it had been ordered up. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, Jim and I got along great."

"But I saw a transcript of a time where you didn't agree with him, and he cut your mike." Allison tried to pin her down. "That must have been hard, having him just cut you off like that."

"That was just part of the game." Victoria shrugged. "People like it when we argue, so sometimes we pretend and give it to them. Look, the Jim you heard on the radio wasn't really Jim. Not completely. You're not you on air. You're more like an actor playing you. Before the show starts I always take a deep breath and picture the person I'm playing. She's like me, but she's louder, funnier, braver, stronger. But she's not really me. Just like Jim wasn't the same outside of this studio. When Jim and I were off air, we got along great."

Nicole stepped in to play bad cop. "That's not what we've heard from your coworkers. They told us there was tension between you two. Do you want to tell us about that?"

Victoria snorted. "Tension? You get two people in the room, and only one of them can be on air at a time, of course there's going to be a little tension. But as Jim always told me, it's The Hand of Fate, not The Hand of Hanawa. And maybe we had some different ideas about what was best for the show. But that wasn't personal. That doesn't mean I would kill him."

"What do you know about the threats he was getting?"

"Jim got as many as a thousand e-mails a day. A lot of those were threats. He relishes--relished--them. It meant people were talking about him."

"But something must have changed." Allison lowered her voice. "This isn't to be shared outside of this room, but he approached us about some threats that were bothering him. He died before we could talk to him. Do you know what these threats were? Why they were different?"

Victoria bit her thumb, looking thoughtful. "He showed me
a c
ouple of them recently. He hadn't done that before, so I don't know if they were worse or different from the ones he normally got. One said something like, `You jerk--you think you can get away with what you're doing, but you can't. If you can't shut your mouth, I'll shut it for you: And another one showed his head with a noose around it. It said, 'We are measuring your neck for the noose:"

"Did he tell you who he thought had sent them?" Allison asked.

"No. But he's made a lot of people mad over the years. If you were lying, covering up, especially if you were rich and arrogant, then Jim wanted to take you down. He's certainly made enemies?' She lowered her voice. "And not just out there in radio land. There are a lot of people here who fought with him."

"So who fought with him here?" Nic asked.

Allison wondered if Victoria would nominate herself, but instead, after a long pause, she said, "Chris, sometimes."

"Chris?" Allison was surprised. She hadn't detected any tension when Chris was talking about Jim Fate. Was Victoria lying, trying to throw them off the scent?

"Jim was always screaming at Chris. He would yell at Chris if one of the callers turned out to be nutty or turned nervous or inarticulate once they were on air. Jim would start screaming, Vhat's the problem, Chris? Can't you just give me people I can work with? Sometimes by the end of the shift, Chris would jump if you touched his shoulder when you were walking by him."

"What about you?" Allison asked, her eyes never leaving Victoria's. She was looking for a blink, a twitch of the lips, any kind of tell that would betray Victoria's thoughts. "We understand that you might not have agreed with Jim blurring the line between ads and the show."

"Did Chris tell you that? Jim and I are both two strong-willed people, that's all. Look, maybe when I started working here I had t
o s
urrender a few of my principles. But the show isn't about principles. It's about ratings. You know what Jim said to me? He said, 'This isn't journalism. This is showbiz, and don't you forget it."

"What about the flip side?" Nicole asked. "Did you and Jim date?"

She snorted. "Where did you hear that? I swear, all anyone does here is gossip. Oh, we went out for drinks a couple of times after work, but that's all. It wasn't anything serious. If you knew Jim, nothing was serious with him. Not really. He could argue about something like his life depended on it, but he stopped caring about it as soon as we went to break."

Allison said, "Why did you stay when he was dying? Jim ordered everyone to leave, and they did. But you--you stayed. Even knowing it might be dangerous."

Again, Victoria's dark eyes brimmed. "I think part of me didn't believe it was really happening. And if it wasn't real, then there was no risk to me. Have you ever been in a car accident?"

When Allison nodded, she said, "It's like that. Time slows down, and you don't believe it's really happening. You watch the bumper crumple, and then the hood buckles, and your face starts heading toward the dash, and you still have time to be surprised when you hit it. So part of it was just this feeling of unreality." Victoria took a long breath that shook at the end. "And part of it was that I just couldn't bear to turn around and run away. You could tell just by looking at Jim that he was dying. His eyes--I'll never forget the look in his eyes. Desperate, pleading, naked. I couldn't leave him. At that moment, we weren't two people who sometimes fought for control of the mike. We were two human beings. And I couldn't leave him to die alone."

"Weren't you worried about the gas getting to you too?" Nicole still looked skeptical.

"The studio is soundproof. There's weather stripping and magnets around the door, so it's virtually airtight. The air gets so stale in there sometimes. So I knew I was probably safe as long as he didn't open the door."

Allison and Nicole spoke at the same time.

"Were you surprised that he didn't?" Allison asked.

"Were you afraid that he would?" Nicole said.

Victoria shook her head. "I honestly believe he thought he could hold out until the paramedics came. Jim was never afraid of anything. Not until--" Her voice broke. "Not until the last."

She turned her head and laid her cheek on the table, sobbing, while Allison patted her shoulder and muttered reassurances.

Allison looked up. Nicole hadn't moved. And she was watching Victoria with narrowed eyes.

Chapter
27 Channel 4 TV

Holding a venti-size coffee the way a drowning man might clutch a piece of floating debris, Cassidy was shuttling through B-roll footage of old press conferences, trying to find some tape of Jim Fate. B-roll was footage without a sound track that could run while viewers listened to Cassidy or one of her interview subjects.

Normally it was easy enough to get B-roll footage. For example, the cameraman might want to shoot a sequence of the subject working at his desk. What if the person had no plans to work at his desk? No problem. Change his plans. What if he had no desk? No problem. Use someone else's desk. What if the subject wasn't working that day? No problem. Change his schedule.

And usually the subject agreed. It was for TV, after all.

But Jim was dead, meaning Cassidy had to rely on whatever footage already existed. Now all she had to do was find it. All the footage at the station was logged, which technically meant that someone had recorded what was on the tape and the time it appeared. Logging was supposed to save you time in the long run, so you could come back to the B-roll and find exactly what you needed without having to watch hours of tape.

The problem was that Jim Fate had only appeared in thi
s f
ive-year-old footage incidentally. If he was here at all. But Cassid
y w
as pretty sure she remembered him asking some pointed questions.

As she took another sip of coffee, she used the knob to shuttle forward. At this particular press conference, the governor had introduced stricter state standards for handling "downer" cows that were too sick or weak to stand on their own. The idea was to make the risk of mad cow disease entering the food chain even smaller. The crowd of activists had cheered and applauded.

And if Cassidy remembered right, Jim had immediately denounced the governor's plan as alarmist, saying the legislation would be so costly it would put small, family-run farms out of business and make meat unaffordable for most low-income consumers. The two had argued, with the governor red in the face and Jim full of venom and vinegar. Jim being Jim, in other words. At least his public self.

Cassidy had sometimes seen a different side of Jim. More mannerly. More seductive. The last time she had seen him had been at dinner two weeks earlier. He had asked her to meet him at the RingSide, Portland's venerable steakhouse. A red-meat kind of place for a red-meat kind of guy. The RingSide featured big drinks, big prawns, big wedges of iceberg lettuce, and of course, steaks three inches thick. The waiters dressed in black suits and starched white shirts, and the walls were hung with autographs of famous athletes.

"You did a marvelous job on the Katie Converse story," Jim said after ordering for both of them. "You found a million angles. You always made it fresh and interesting."

"Fat lot of good it did me," Cassidy said as she settled her snowy-white napkin on her lap. "Station management promised me a
n a
nchor chair. Now they're saying I don't test well. When I had TV stations all over the country calling me."

"But that was then." Jim took a sip of his water. He had stopped drinking two years earlier, although callers sometimes accused him of falling off the wagon. "And this is now, right? And we all know that, in TV and radio, yesterday doesn't matter."

"Yeah." Cassidy raised her glass of gin and tonic to her lips. The bitter taste matched her mood. "Now that I've turned everyone down, Channel 4 has said they are going to bring in some pretty little wind-up doll who was Miss Connecticut, some kid who can sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and do a mean baton twirl, but who doesn't have any understanding. She's got no depth, no ... no context!"

And Miss Connecticut was about twelve, although Cassidy didn't bring that part up. Now that Channel 4 was broadcast in high-def, she was conscious of every laugh line, every imperfection. And the older she got, the more there would be. On the way to the restaurant, she had stopped to get gas, and the gas station attendant had called her ma'am. Ma'am, not miss. And Cassidy had looked at his pimply face and realized that she was nearly old enough to be his mother.

"Look, I want you to think about something." Jim's blue eyes drilled into her. "Think about coming to work with me."

Was he serious? "What? On The Hand of Fate? Why would I want to do that? I'm a serious broadcast journalist."