A WEEK, MAYBE A week and a half after we ran our first story on the Maretto murder I come into the station around my usual time and there’s a message waiting for me. Suzanne Maretto wants me to call her up. You’ve got to understand, in my business a reporter usually has a lot of doors slammed in his face, people see him coming they go the other way. Her especially, who had the press crawling all over her life those first days after the murder, you might think she’d just want to go into seclusion. But it turns out, when I call her back, she has more things she wants to talk to me about. OK, I think. Let’s see what she’s got. “I can’t talk about this over the phone,” she says. “But I’ll give you the exclusive if you come over.” So we make a date for me to come by her folks’ house with a cameraman later that afternoon.
When I get there she’s all dressed up in this little jumpsuit outfit, high heels, her hair like she’s just come from the beauty parlor. She invites me in, asks what I’d like to drink. Lemonade, iced tea, beer, half a dozen different brands of soda, you name it. Would I like a sandwich? Cake?
She wants to know where our cameraman studied his technical work. How does he like the new lightweight minicam? What kind of mike do we have here? She says she saw my report the night before on the couple whose ten-year-old daughter gave her mother a kidney. Good work, she says.
Something about all this makes me uncomfortable. It blurs the lines so you don’t know where you stand. She’s meant to be the subject. But she’s acting like she’s the reporter herself.
“So,” I say. “What was it you wanted to tell us?”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, it’s kind of—complicated,” she says. After she called me she started to wonder if maybe I’d just get it all mixed up.
“Why don’t you just give me a try and we’ll take it from there,” I say. “Do you have some new theory as to the identity of your husband’s murderer?”
“Not exactly,” she says. Although she wants to emphasize again that the police have done a fantastic job, beyond the call of duty. “Just incredible. We should all sleep a little safer at night,” she says, “knowing there are officers like Detective Mike Warden and his great team watching over our community.”
“You didn’t have the camera going,” she says. “Did you want me to give you a retake on that?”
I tell her I guess that won’t be necessary. Not that I’d dispute what she says.
She sits there a second, playing with her earrings. Am I sure I don’t want a Coke? How about Rick, my cameraman?
“No thanks,” I say. “Really.”
At this point I’m just trying to figure out how to make a graceful exit. I mean, with a woman like this who just lost her husband, you never know what could set her off. Maybe she’s just lonely. Needed to talk to someone.
“He must’ve been a great guy,” I say.
“What?” she says. “Oh, right. Larry.”
“It’s just tragic,” I say. “So young. When you had your whole future to look forward to. And now it’s over.”
“Well I’m still alive,” she says.
“Right,” I say. “Thank God you weren’t there with him that night, or it might have been a double murder.”
“It was bad enough just finding him,” she says. “There was blood everywhere. It was the worst thing I ever saw. Have you ever seen what a person looks like, shot at close range like that? I mean, we’re not speaking of some neat little chest wound.
“When they shot President Kennedy,” she says, “you know the bullet blew off half his head. Of course that wasn’t close range like it was with Larry. But the effect was similar, actually. An unbelievable sight.”
I told her how sorry I was. And then I said something like “Gee, look how late it’s getting to be. I guess we’d better head back to the station if we still want to be on the payroll Monday morning, what do you say, Rick?”
“I never got to telling you what I called you about,” she said.
I say that’s OK. We’ll be following this story on an ongoing basis.
“The thing is,” she says, “as you must know, I’m in your line of work myself. At the moment I’m under consideration for a very big arts and entertainment reporting job in a nearby market, as a matter of fact. Not that I’ve had much time lately to think about that of course.
“Anyway, I’ve been working all year with a group of disadvantaged youngsters, making a television special about the hopes and dreams of a group of teenage kids. I finished the project just before, just, you know, a couple weeks back. I was just getting ready to submit it to my station manager, but now, with everything that’s happened, I was thinking your own station might be interested in taking a look at it and maybe airing it as a special. You could maybe show a little of our tape, or shoot a little footage of me working on the final edit in the studio. You’d have the exclusive of course.”
I told her I’d have to talk to the station manager about that, but it sounded like an interesting idea. What are you going to say? You had to figure the woman must be dazed with grief. Who knows how I’d act, if something like that happened to some family member of mine? You could hardly blame her even if she went crazy. Which clearly she hadn’t done.
We’ve got our equipment packed and we’re just loading it in the van when she comes out to talk to us one more time. “I’ll tell you another interesting angle on all this,” she says. “And that’s my dog. I mean, he loved Larry too, and now all of a sudden not only is he away from his familiar home and his old chew toys and everything, but Larry’s disappeared, and nobody can explain it to him. You know he’s got to be wondering.”
“Yup,” I say. “Dogs are amazing animals. Got as many feelings as people. More, sometimes.”