Savant (9 page)

He'd been a news announcer and writer for Z-60 for two years—his tenth and eleventh year in the business—when Chase Kincaid, KCM's program director, and also national P.D. of the Karrash chain, had brought him in to work for a guy who was then managing editor of their Kansas City news department. He did three on-air casts a night, good bucks, and no hassles. It had been like the early days at WNEW in New York, where a buddy of his had done the nine-to-midnight radio news. Three casts a night, and you split, the guy told him. "I work fifteen minutes every three hours, sleep all day, and at nine I go down to the Village and hunt for virgins." He was kidding but once it had been almost that big a skate.

D. Andrew Karrash had been a wrestling promoter, of all things, and had made his fortune back in the early days of television. He'd retained the rights to the early grudge matches between the vintage mat stars and the "freak shows" like tag teams and battles royal. When MacLendon and Turner and other broadcast pioneers such as Storz were experimenting with formats in the early days of all-news radio and TV, Karrash was recycling his old Gorgeous George kinescopes to "U"s, independent UHF channels, and other small and medium market properties who were seeing numbers in trash sports.

Karrash's chain ended up with three major market stations, of which KCM was the flagship. When Andy Karrash became ill and retired, less than a year after Trask moved to nighttime news at KCM, there'd been a tremendous shakeup. First, KCM had gone all-talk, under the national ownership of Rogers Communications, a New York—based publishing house expanding into broadcasting. The absentee owners had so far kept Chase Kincaid as local program director, but nearly everything else had changed.

A big-time TV and radio anchor had been imported to helm the news department, and Trask's easygoing boss had been axed. The new managing editor, Adam David, from Pittsburgh, was a top-notch air talent and writer/producer, but about as laid-back as sulfuric acid. To say that Adam David took himself, and the news, seriously, was like saying that "the universe is rather a large place."

All-talk could be a mind-bending concept. At KCM, it was an often uneasy melding of entertainment and hard news, and the two sides of the coin were not necessarily comfortable bedfellows. Louie "Captain Kidd" Kidder, a venerable Midwestern radio and television old-timer, had been brought in to set the tone of the station. In a market that ranged from "more music/oldies" to hard rockin' country formats to zany morning men, Louie Kidder's homespun, gentle wit and thoughtful insights were a welcome breath of radio air. From nine A.M. to three P.M., KCM's airwaves were filled with a basic news and "human interest" mix, some of which involved feeds and special packages such as business and financial/investment news, sports, weather, and various remotes. At three the talk turned to telephone call-ins. The three-to-six and six-to-nine shifts were helmed by men and women who were adept at eliciting the greatest amount of heat, if not light, from the topical subjects of the moment. The midnight phone show starred popular Kim Streeter, who was thought to have one of the three or four sexiest voices of any woman on major market radio. She sounded like the most beautiful, sweetest angel who ever drew a breath. In fact, Kim Streeter was beautiful in the face, and had an angelic personality to go with it, but she outweighed Vic Trask by ten or twenty pounds. This eclectic hodgepodge appeared to be working, if the ratings and word-of-mouth were barometers. Into this stew was stirred the legendary Sean Flynn and company.

Flynn had once been a king of talk, working almost as much as Larry King, with a profile the equal of King's or Tom Snyder's, having made his bones in the competitive Chicago market. Rogers Communications had brought him in from a night gig in some southern armpit of a market, and told him—in effect—do or die. It was his last shot to regain his crown and he came at it with a vengeance; a bright guy who'd fallen down the well of alcohol abuse, he hit the air boldly, with such a cutting-edge intelligence and sense of awareness that he made the nine-to-midnight gig his own overnight. The numbers were astonishing. He nailed the position with his first killer sweep book, a ratings response that two competitive stations sued over, forcing the survey companies to recount. The second count was even higher for Flynn. The guy
owned
Kansas City at night!

Within twenty-four hours of the announcement of the resurveyed numbers, Sean Flynn, forty-four-year-old has been alky, and two Jewish attorneys from Krelberg, Boda, and Kamen—whom Flynn referred to over and over as Nafka, Kafka, and Putz—with a set of contractual demands unprecedented in the mid-echelon annals of KC broadcasting:
astronomical
money; a stepladder clause linked to the ratings books; grandfathering out the exhaust pipe; a pay-to play page that made the guys from Rogers wince every time they thought about it, and demands for a producer-writer staff, for God's sake, began a three-day haggling session that ended up with Sean Flynn owning the store.

Flynn took Trask off the air and gave him a title—senior researcher—and they hired a producer from Memphis, a bird by the name of Babaloo Metzger, who had a rep for big numbers and a tough-as-nails shop, and Metzger brought in his own researcher from the Tennessee station, a woman named Barb Rose. Bookings were to be handled by Kincaid, various newsroom personnel, and Flynn had his own private secretary/receptionist/booker/handler/woman-of-the-night named Jerri Laymon. Sean Flynn's "America Tonight" became Sean Flynn's "Inside America," with important guests, open phones, in-depth interviews, and preproduced pieces, and the ratings went all the way through the roof.

It was quite odd—all of it. Victor Trask, headache forgotten, zooming around the tailgaters in the direction of downtown Kansas City, had the odd sensation of being fairly successful in a job he didn't totally understand. Beginning his thirteenth year in a business that made him, at thirty-six, wonder what he wanted to do for a living "when he grew up." And for all that, it was rather satisfying. He genuinely thought "Inside America" was entertaining radio, and this was at least as much fun—if harder work-than the news gig. The job also paid more, you could come in late, or leave early, if you didn't do it too often, and there was no heavy lifting.

He tuned the band of the radio, flipping across the polluted Missouri air:

"
Love thirty and the match. We'll be going to Lion, France, on Monday to bring you
—" Trask twisted, with a grimace, reminding himself to tell the news reader he'd mispronounced a word.

"…all you talk about is fish and seafood…"

"…on Power ninety-nine! No showers showing within twenty miles of Kansas City and…"

"…Royals lead. It's two and oh!"

"…Sweet Home Ala-bah-ma!…"

"…I-70 just three miles past the Truman Sports Complex. Come on down and check out this selection. You won't—" He clicked back to FM and got some easy guitar he couldn't identify and filed it all away.

Victor Trask was an observer. He noticed things. He would have made an okay cop or a P.I., he thought. Maybe the investigative reporting part of this research gig was what held such appeal for him. He liked the hunt. The dig. Yet, in personal relationships, he hadn't shown any of the same dedication, or tenacity, or grit. He'd in fact screwed away a perfectly good marriage—boring and dead-end but perfectly good—because it seemed as if he could never get into his home life the way he could his work. He was a workaholic, he supposed. Not for the money. That was obvious enough. He liked to keep his mind occupied.

Now his wife was a memory that would have faded completely but for odd moments when a desire to see or talk to his daughter brought the exes into brief contact again. Neither of them could believe they'd ever been married and had lived together for six years, a couple of lifetimes ago.

He finally made it downtown in one piece and went through the usual ritual of the parking garage. Lower-level employees (and you couldn't get much lower than Trask: a few news readers, apprentice engineers, various and sundry copywriters, purchasing assistants, receptionists and typists, and a couple of security guys shared the lowest plateau) could not park in the postage-stamp rectangles reserved for KCM's "key" employees. These were the executives; anyone with
chief, manager, or director
in their title; the station controller; Mr. Kidder; Mr. Flynn; the VIP rectangle; and of course the account execs. Even the engineers had two spaces! When contract renewal time came around, if he had the clout and the numbers were still up, he was determined to somehow lobby for a parking space. It would be the equivalent of a raise both in money and prestige, but to Trask the awarding of a space epitomized the tacit acknowledgment of worth. Not to mention the implication of a degree of assured tenure.

Trask came into the station through the big, showy front doors, a massive pair of bronze slabs in "lightning-bolt deco," waved to the guy at the security desk, and walked across the long foyer to the elevator. All you saw here were giant plants and the ultramodern artwork and sculpture that dominated the length of KCM's entranceway. From the front doors only the unobtrusive security post, the front desk—always staffed by a bevy of lovely youngsters who came and went with the tide—and the plush seating arrangements in the first-floor lobby waiting area were visible. If one made it past the guard and front desk and turned left, the richly appointed VIP waiting area beckoned. Beyond that was a door that led to the sales area: the sales manager's offices off to the right, the sales receptionist and account executives' offices to the left. Coming back toward the front of the building one would pass sales lounge and bathroom, the big sales conference room, and what they called no-man's-land. Here, at the front of the building, but inaccessible from the front doors or foyer, was the general manager's huge sanctuary, and sandwiched between various utility and storage rooms was the room that housed the internal closed-circuit internal security monitors, and, some said, the audio equipment. It was generally thought that every word spoken in the building was recorded, and-presumably—monitored.

Inside that room abutting on the visible security desk in the foyer, was an invisible room of which Bill Higgins, head of KCM security, was lord high chamberlain. "Inspector Higgins of the Yard," as they called him outside the station, was a pleasant-looking balding man with a mustache, to whom no one but the G.M. and—rumor had it—Rogers Communications, conversed. While it was necessary to have security because of the controversial nature of some of the programming, the way it was handled added to the feeling of paranoia that helped to keep KCM's employees on their toes.

Trask had his I.D. on his shirt, but neither the front-desk guard nor the receptionist needed to see it. Both of them knew his face as he knew theirs. His ride in the elevator was a solo one, so his first words inside the station were spoken on the second floor when he got out and smiled at the beautiful girl at the desk. "Good morning."

"Good afternoon, Vic." She smiled, and he winked at her. All men winked at her—it was a law. Her name was Monica Bonebreak but they called her Monica Heartbreak, a former Miss Congeniality in the Miss Missouri contest, and if she was a loser, thank the Lord that Vic had never met the winner. He always had to fight to get his breath back as he walked past her.

The "program floor" receptionist sat with her back to a long glass wall that ran the length of the building. Behind the glass, one saw Adam David, if he was at his desk, flanked by all the news editors and news readers/reporters, the wire service room, and the editing facilities. All of this was backed with a display of electronic gear, world maps, and a long bank of clocks that gave the time in Tokyo, London, Paris, Moscow, and so on. Everyone who worked at KCM was
very
ashamed of the clocks, but so far they had been a legacy that Rogers Communications insisted was "part of the KCM-age." If it wasn't broke, don't fix it, so the hokey Dave Garroway-era clocks stayed.

Free-form seating and more silver and bronze sculptures flanked the artwork at the receptionist's desk. Glass walls were at either end of the long entrance area, and a visitor could see Production Studio C to the right, the back of which contained an impressive library, and the announcer engineer area, and to the left were the double-paned hallways that separated Broadcast Studio A and Master Control from the civilians.

Out front, it was all spacious and artsy-fartsy, but Trask no longer worked out here. He walked around the lounges and stopped at Production where he saw a news reader working at the mike. He cracked the door to Engineering.

"Is he doing anything I can't interrupt?"

"Naw," the engineer grunted.

"Thanks," Trask said. He went in to where the man was getting ready to record. "Hi."

"Hello."

"'Scuse me. Hope I'm not screwing you up?"

"Uh-uh. Watcha need? I'll be done in five minutes."

"No.' I don't need in. I was listening on the way in. It's
Lee
-ohn. The city in France?"

"Huh?"

"You pronounced it like
lion
in a zoo—it's
Lee
-ohn." He gave the word its French pronunciation, the second syllable nasal and thrown away.

"Yeah, so?" The guy shrugged and opened his eyes wider, obviously pissed off.

"Hey—not meant as a put-down. I just thought you'd want to know." He turned to leave, feeling like an idiot.

"Do you say 'he drives a Le Sabre'?"

"Yeah." Trask smiled.

"Why don't you say he drives a
Luh-sob-ruh?
That's the way it's pronounced in French."

"Yeah, but—"

"Do you say
Pah-rrryeeee?
" He exaggerated the French pronunciation. "Nobody would know what the hell you were saying. Are we in France? Nooo. We're in fucking
A-mare-ee-kuh
. Okay? That's why we don't use French on the fucking airsville." The man smiled but clearly he was torqued off.

"I gotcha." Trask wanted to say "Yes, but," and explain the logic, but he knew what this guy was like. His name was Michael Melody—his real name—and he was an asshole. "I didn't think. Stupid!" He hit his head with the flat of his hand.