Night Talk (3 page)

Greg stopped short of the body. Gawking would dishonor the dead. Soledad and the others went by him. He said, “Don't—” intending to tell them not to touch the body but stopped because someone should at least make sure the young man was dead.

He was petrified and shivered, not from the cold, but from the tragedy. A life had ended. Suddenly. Violently. He had been in a serious car accident once as thousands of pounds of metal suddenly banged and crunched into each other. For moments afterward the accident had felt unreal to him, as if he were in a mental twilight coming out of a dream. That was how he felt now. The body and blood didn't seem real. The horror did.

Sudden death was a strange business. Nothing fit in place. It was all the more perplexing because he didn't know Ethan well enough to understand what drove the young man to kill himself.

You killed me.

What the hell had he been talking about? Why would he say something so crazy? He tried to remember what else Ethan had said but his brain froze and wouldn't back up.

He looked up at the building that the hacker had burst out of. It was too dark to make out the broken window. But it was unbelievable. Incomprehensible. Ethan had spoken to him on the phone and then flung himself through the window. A dozen stories down. Propelled by what? Meth? Coke? Some new street compound that fried brains?

Soledad got on her cell phone as she walked back toward Greg. A good show runner, she was the one who called the police. There may have been other calls to 911 but it was after three in the morning and only a couple cars had passed. Greg didn't see any pedestrians when he stepped out of the broadcast building. The only people at the body were staff members.

A police car pulled up and officers shooed everyone back from the body and took a quick look. EMT arrived with a blaring siren and examined the body for life as officers taped off the area.

Greg sent the staff home except for Soledad before the coroner and evidence teams arrived and went to work. The others had witnessed nothing. Soledad had seen the falling body but had not heard the accusation Ethan made over the phone to Greg.

Plainclothes officers were the last on the scene. Greg gave his statement to a female sergeant while Soledad was taken aside and gave hers to the sergeant's male partner.

Ethan was identified by the contents of his wallet. None of the radio program's staff had ever seen him.

Greg had no explanation for Ethan's wild accusation and had little to offer about the young man, period. “I never met him in person,” he told the officer. He cringed when he related what Ethan had said. “I have no clue as to what he was talking about. I never met him,” he said again. Ditto for having no clue as to whether Ethan had a spouse or family the police could contact.

The sergeant had an explanation for Ethan's dying words. “The guy was high on drugs, upset because he couldn't get on a radio show. He wasn't a virgin when it came to a needle. People with fried brains don't need a rational basis to blame others for their problems or even to kill them or themselves—the dope provides all the hallucinations they need.”

Soledad and Greg stayed and watched the coroner's people and crime investigators prepare the body for transport and take pictures. The sergeant told him entry had been made through a back door that had been kicked in. Then up the service elevator to the top floor, which was vacant and gutted like the rest of the building.

“That twelfth-floor suite had floor-to-ceiling windows,” she said. “They scare me just standing by them even when they're not broken. I think the guy just took a run and crashed right into the window. Probably thought he could fly and went out flapping his arms.”

The image shook Greg. He'd heard about a high-rise-building manager showing an office with big floor-to-ceiling windows that didn't look like anything was holding them in place. When asked by the prospective tenant how safe the windows were, the manager showed off by hitting a window with his shoulder. The window gave and he fell through. When Greg heard the story, he wondered what the guy was thinking on his way down.

Greg's own high-rise apartment had floor-to-ceiling windows but ones that looked more anchored than those in the building Ethan crashed through.

Soledad stayed closer to the body so she could hear what was being said by the crime scene techs. Greg hung back, leaning against the wall next to the door to the building that housed his broadcasting studio, watching the parade of officialdom come and go.

He spotted someone in the entryway of a closed store across and half a block up the street. A woman wearing a dark, hooded overcoat. She was too far away for him to see her facial features or even tell her age. From her body language he was sure she realized that he was looking in her direction.

She left the doorway and walked quickly in the direction opposite of the police activity and disappeared around a corner.

When the police and other agencies wrapped up and the body was gone, the night was quiet, the street deserted again except for him and Soledad.

Greg felt empty.

Death was a lonely business even for the living.

 

5

“I'll walk you to your car,” Greg told Soledad.

Her car was in a secured lot down the street and they headed for it, walking slowly down Broadway. The only sign of life on the street this late except for an occasional passing car was the glow of a liquor store sign.

South Broadway had three or four traffic lanes, depending on where you were standing, and a faded 1950s look: shopworn low-rise buildings selling shoes, clothing, booze, hamburgers, tacos; jewelry stores; bridal shops; and both pharmacies and
farmacias
.

The street looked ready for urban revitalization or a wrecking ball. Greg was on a committee trying to keep wrecking balls off the street.

“You have to call Liz,” Soledad said.

He had already thought of that. Liz Tucker was the in-house attorney the network assigned to the show. She would have to be told that Ethan had called to announce he was going to kill himself and about the strange accusation.

“Liz is in Aspen for her son's wedding,” Greg said. “I'll call her later.”

Soledad wore her hair pulled back in a severe bun. In her fifties, she had dark hair with creeping gray she didn't attempt to hide. She didn't have the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes ironed away, either. She accepted and welcomed her age rather than trying to airbrush the years away.

She ruled the studio staff with the stern but benevolent efficiency of a drill sergeant, leaving him free to focus on dealing with millions of listeners.

“Why would he do such a thing?” she asked as they walked.

The question of the day. “The cop had a good explanation. She said Ethan had an altered perception of reality from using too many drugs too often. Crystal meth was the likely candidate. Cheap and easy to get. Or to cook up yourself if you did an Internet search for a recipe and could get your hands on some cough syrup or cold pills with pseudoephedrine in them.”

Feelings of panic and paranoia were common side effects and Ethan sounded on the phone as if he was experiencing both altered states.
You killed me.
Greg wondered what the hell he'd meant.

With the pulsating lights and uniformed techs gone, the area had shut back down. Downtown L.A. in the wee hours was even more deserted than the center of many other great metro areas because the city-center streets were ones of faded glory—the city's pulse had moved closer to the ocean to something called the West Side, with Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and West Hollywood thrown in, none of which was actually part of L.A. but rose like concrete islands as the city swept west to the coast.

He chose downtown for his broadcasting studio over beach towns and the Valley because he liked the moody, darkly atmospheric, almost film noir atmosphere of the area, which had been too long forgotten but was haunted by the ghosts of movie palaces from the Golden Age of Hollywood and visions of grand days long gone.

Tonight the street no longer felt like a fit for Greg. Ethan's body would always be there, not on the ground but in his head each time he came and went into the building. It would take a while to get the studio moved, but he'd start thinking about a new location from which to broadcast.

They walked under the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway. The theater was nearly a hundred years old and was one of the first great movie palaces. He loved movies, and old classics were his favorites.

“I wonder what he meant,” Soledad said.

He knew what she was referring to. The last words from Ethan. A bizarre accusation.

“I don't know. Some thought generated by whatever chemical cocktail cooked his brain.”

“He'd called earlier.”

“Earlier this evening?”

She shook her head. “No, the last couple of days. I didn't pass on the calls because he was only a little crazy. Not threatening. He said they were trying to play God.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

“He never said and I didn't ask, but if you remember his hot point over the air to you was the overwhelming intrusion into our lives by the government and business. Not that I blame him. People used to worry whether having a social security number would permit the government to keep track of them. Today we can't watch a movie, buy a loaf of bread, make a phone call or send a text message without some governmental or business entity storing the information.”

“Worse than that,” Greg said. He nodded at the bank across the street. “We're being filmed right now not only by cameras at the ATM but by most of the businesses on this street. Getting to work in the morning in any big city means getting filmed dozens of times; I've heard as much as a couple hundred times when you add in all the traffic cams. A lot of people are bothered by it, but Ethan was particularly agitated.”

“Angry,” Soledad said.

“Maybe he was just more aware of it than the rest of us because he was aware of how intrusive electronics can be. Did he ever tell you which government agency he worked for?”

She shook her head. “When I interviewed him for airtime he said he wasn't allowed to disclose where he worked, but hinted it was secret stuff. I took it to be something to do with terrorism because everything secret today seems to head that way. He said he got caught hacking into someplace and got one of those get-out-of-jail-free cards by testing security systems for the good guys.”

“He had a dark view of the future, like many of us. He talked about how mass surveillance created by the electronic tracking that is recording everything we do has paved our way to being controlled from birth to death, that we're already there and just don't know it. He mentioned
1984
the first night he was on. He said it was the only novel he read in school that stuck with him.”

In Orwell's
1984,
a totalitarian regime ruled through mass surveillance. People in the dystopian book were constantly reminded that “Big Brother” was watching.

“Ethan's not the only one,” she said. “I can't surf the Internet without ads targeting me because my buying history has been recorded and sold to businesses. I can't get away from it no-how. When I go through a thirty-day supply of pills I get a message from my pharmacy. Remember the condoms?”

He remembered. A caller to the show claimed that just before taking a business trip out of town, a friend of his bought condoms at the local drugstore. To get a discount, he unwittingly scanned his family's drugstore card that registered purchases. Not long afterward his wife got an email from the drugstore offering a discount on more condoms. It wasn't hard for Greg to anticipate the punch line—naturally, the husband and wife didn't use condoms.

True or not, it illustrated the fact that people were stripped naked mentally and physically by what they purchased.

“The invasion of our privacy by our every move being watched on the Internet and our being filmed when we step outside is like the weather,” Greg said. “We bitch but still put up with it. Not just because we're told it's for the war on terrorism but because the information on us is being collected in so many different ways from thousands of entities—from government to businesses—that we have no control over. Worse, most of the time we don't even realize what we're revealing when we send an e-mail or swipe a credit card. They know our loves and hates, wants and desires and needs, even our sins—what we read, what we watch, what we buy, who we do it with and who we don't.”

“You've been hammering that fact on the air for years.”

“And we still elect the same do-nothings to Congress. I doubt if they ever can stop the ball rolling. The onslaught on our personal lives has become a world-class steamroller with the war on terror as its mantra. Remember the caller who theorized that it wouldn't be long before movies we stream are programmed for an ending the system knows we would prefer and with computer-generated images of the actors we preferred in the role?”

“Sounds good to me,” Soledad said.

“Sounds like
Brave New World
and
1984
are no longer dark visions of the future but the society we are coalescing into.”

They stopped at the entrance to the parking facility.

She squeezed his arm. “You look pretty devastated. I shouldn't have insisted you take the call.”

“It's nobody's fault, not even Ethan's. For some people suicide is the only way they can see to avoid the pain they're experiencing.”

He felt bad for the guy. He didn't get close enough to the body to pick up any of Ethan's physical details other than he had dark hair, but he had a mental image of the hacker from the call-ins. Probably late twenties, early thirties, a techie with his head stuck up a C drive, a computer geek who was better able to communicate in a computer language than table talk.