Maxi had set Richard’s clock-radio for 7:00 A.M. She was awakened by the news at the top of the hour, blaring the sensational events during the night surrounding the arrest of actress Meg Davis. When Richard had left for Sybil Brand it was almost three in the morning—she felt as if she’d just dropped off to sleep. Reaching over to the nightstand, she turned off the radio, picked up the TV remote control, and clicked on the Channel Six morning news. Richard Winningham was on in close-up, leading in to the footage that his crew had shot at the jail. The tape ended, revealing Richard in a wide shot standing in front of… good God, standing in front of her house!
“How could he!” she sputtered out loud, watching as he traversed her lawn and went up her front steps, explaining, as he walked, how the spectral figure had entered and confronted the owner of this house, Channel Six reporter Maxi Poole, along with a houseguest who was the son of the murdered Carlotta Ricco…
Maxi was barely able to stifle the urge to throw his high-tech clock-radio at him right through his high-tech giant TV monitor in his high-tech bedroom. As he described in detail the attack by the black-robed intruder, an EXCLUSIVE graphic flashed across the lower screen. I’m going to kill him, she thought. I will kill him! Of course he had an “exclusive”—she had spilled her guts to him in the innocent pillow talk they’d had last night.
She picked up the phone and called Pete Capra at the station. “I’m not coming in this morning, boss,” she told him. “Got hardly any sleep last night, my dog may not recover, the bulls from the police crime lab are going to be swarming all over my house in an hour—”
“Where the hell have you been all night?” Pete interrupted. Good—at least Richard hadn’t blabbed at the office that she’d slept at his apartment. In his bed.
“I stayed at a friend’s—”
“When you didn’t answer your phone I went over to your place, and the Ricco woman’s son said he didn’t know where you were. Jesus, Maxi, why didn’t you call in?”
“To let you know I was okay, or to give you the story, Pete?” she asked, an edge in her voice. She wondered how much Richard had told him.
“Not fair!” he barked. “You know I was worried about you! Okay, okay, so I wanted the story, too—my new best friend, Mike Cabello, wouldn’t take my calls.” Maxi had to laugh. Pete was Pete, and Pete was a newsman, arguably the best in the city.
“So where did you get the ‘exclusive’ I just saw on the morning show, in front of my house?” she asked. He told her the sheriff’s department had held a press conference at Sybil Brand after Meg Davis was released, and the station had Winningham there, so they shifted him to her house with his crew.
“How the hell could you send him to my house?” she demanded.
“Everybody went to your house,” Pete told her. “Finding your house wasn’t exactly rocket science. This is gonna be the lead story all day on every newscast in the country. The whole industry is doing live shots from your front door. Your grass is gonna be fucked!” he added.
Maxi groaned. But she was grateful that she wasn’t there. And grateful that Richard had not breached her trust after all. That information had just saved his clock-radio and his TV tube. And he hadn’t led the caravan of news troops to her home, either. In fact, at this very moment he was probably doing his best to keep the news gang-bang out of her geraniums, she supposed. Not only were his TV and his clock-radio safe, she’d have to buy him lunch one day when this was all over.
“So how come you chyroned the story ‘exclusive’ if everybody was there, and everybody had it?” she asked Pete.
“You, of all people, have to ask?” he returned, with more than a hint of exasperation. “You know the idiot slaps ‘exclusive’ on every piece of shit we run! He put an ‘exclusive’ on the mayor’s press conference announcing the new metro-rail lines yesterday—the world was there! Sanders came up with a sidebar that they were planning a program to let neighborhood kids do some artwork for each train station, so the idiot and the underjerk decided that we therefore had an ‘exclusive.’ Are you looking for integrity this early in the morning? It’s a Tappenoid thing!”
Maxi sighed. Tappen was the station’s consultant company, whose job was to “consult” on its news coverage with an eye to making the stories more glitzy, more razzle-dazzle, more compelling to the viewer. Pete and all the hard-news pros in the business called the consultants “Tappenoids.” One night at Haley’s, the bar across from the station where newsies hung out, she had heard Pete characterizing the “Tappenoids,” in his loud, blustery voice, as “a bunch of snot-nosed college kids and yuppie clowns in striped shirts and suspenders who charged money for suggesting that news reporters take their pants down and tap-dance to make a story ‘more compelling to the viewer.’”
“So why were we ‘exclusive’ on this one?” she asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Pete growled. “I guess they figured because you’re ours, that made the story our ‘exclusive’—did you see the chyron ‘Home of Channel 6 news reporter Maxi Poole’?”
“Great!” she groused. “I’ll have to move.” She meant it. “Look, Pete, I’m going to the vet’s to see my dog; then I’ll be at my house to fend off the vultures and protect what’s left of my property. I’ll try to stay out of all the other stations’ live shots, since they don’t sign my checks.” With the telephone receiver tucked under her chin, she was pulling on the assortment of Richard’s clothes that he had set out for her.
“Maxi, are you okay?” Pete asked, knowing the bravado was her way of getting through this.
She took a deep breath. “Not really, Pete. I’m devastated over Carlotta, I’m aching for her son, I’m worried about Debra Angelo and Gia, I’m terrified that my dog will die, I’m exhausted, and… and I’m scared.”
Maxi found Yukon curled up on the floor of a small cage lined up with several others in a foul-smelling hallway behind the treatment rooms, cages that held yelping, whining, ailing animals. She was told by a woman at the front desk that Dr. Sullivan had gone home—Dr. Brice would be in to update her on her dog’s condition when he was finished examining an arthritic Great Dane.
Maxi knelt on the floor and lowered her head to Yukon’s level. He was lying on his side, bandages wrapped around his throat and upper body, his only movement the heaving of his chest with his labored breathing. His big, mournful brown eyes gazed out through the slats of the cage at Maxi.
The day-shift vet walked into the hallway. He was very young, very tall, very skinny, had very short dark hair, and wore huge black-framed glasses that were much too big for his face.
“How’s he doing?” Maxi asked him, without getting up from the floor.
“I’m Dr. Ray Brice,” the doctor said, kneeling down beside her, putting his hand through the bars and stroking Yukon’s head. “He’s doing okay, but he’s had a rough time. His surgery was more complicated than we’d anticipated, and those crime-lab techs demanding specimens didn’t help. He’s getting antibiotics for infection, and we’ve got him on heavy sedatives so he won’t move around and rip his stitches.”
“Is he out of the woods?” Maxi asked.
“Can’t promise that, Ms. Poole,” the doctor said. “We’ll be watching him carefully for a few days.”
“He looks so… so lonesome, cooped up in this little cage,” she mused. “I didn’t expect—”
“What did you expect?” Dr. Brice asked.
“I don’t know…. I thought—”
“I’ll bet I know,” the vet put in with a smile. “You expected old Yukon to be sitting up in bed in a private room, munching doggie treats and watching game shows.”
“Yes,” she said, realizing that she was being silly. “And I expected that his doctor would stay by his side night and day, and never go home to his wife and children.”
“Yeah,” Brice said wistfully, “they all do. Dr. Sullivan is the Marcus Welby of veterinarians, and instead you got me, the Ichabod Crane.”
Maxi stood up and extended her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve cheered me up—you don’t know how much I needed that.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I saw the news this morning.” She’d completely forgotten that the private life of Maxine Poole had probably been the subject of half the breakfast table conversations in Southern California.
“What can I do for my baby here?” she asked, looking solicitously at Yukon.
“You can go about your day, think good thoughts for him, and call us later this afternoon. Meantime, we have your number—if anything changes, we’ll call you.”
“Thanks, Doc.” She smiled, feeling reassured that Yuke was in good hands.
Maxi drove slowly by her house to assess the situation there. News trucks were parked all over narrow Beverly Glen Boulevard on both sides of the road. Her gate was open, and one of its hinges had been ripped off, causing it to list drunkenly against the wood slat fence. Peering inside, she saw a strip of yellow crime-scene tape blocking off the walkway, and a police officer snapping photos of the ground behind it. Outside the tape, news crews camped on her front lawn, talking, smoking, drinking coffee. Cable was strewn everywhere, tripods dug into her flower beds, Styrofoam cups littered her grass.
She had borrowed a New York Yankees cap that she’d found in Richard’s apartment. Pulling the visor low on her forehead, she wondered if she could somehow get inside her own house without being noticed. Not a chance. These were news people. She kept moving.
One of the live trucks was coming toward her. It was her own station’s; she could make out the Channel Six logo painted on the sides. As the cumbersome van approached, she could see Richard Winningham in the passenger seat, with his cameraman driving.
When they’d pulled alongside, Greg Ross rolled the window down and Richard mouthed, “Go up past Briarwood and take a left on Nicada. We’ll meet you right around the corner—we’ve got a plan to get you in.” Then they rolled on past.
At work, they called Richard Winningham the “crime dog,” and they called Greg Ross, his cameraman, the “crime pup.” Greg was twenty-six, with boyish good looks and wavy blond hair that fell to his shoulders. His usual dress was surfer clothes—Richard kidded him that he looked like he had time-traveled from the sixties. But he was tough, bright, expert with a camera, and fearless in the trenches. The two were a good team. Maxi was waiting for them when they pulled around the corner.
“Hi,” Richard said as he approached her Blazer. “These goons—excuse me, our esteemed colleagues—are staked out, expecting to get you on camera. Even if you refuse to stop and talk, they’ll yell questions at your back as you drive in, and you’ll be at the top of every newscast on the air tonight. Do you want that?”
“God, no,” she said. “That’d be awful!”
“Yeah, especially in those clothes,” he said, grinning. She looked down at herself in Richard’s bicycle pants and huge denim shirt, his argyles jammed into her Nikes, and his baseball cap pulled down over her eyebrows. “Not exactly proper business attire,” she agreed. “So what’s the plan?”
He told her he would walk into her front yard and tell everybody that he’d just talked to Pete Capra on his cell phone, and Maxi was already at work, so she wouldn’t be back here until after the Six O’clock News tonight. A few of them would figure out that it was probably a ruse, but even if they hung around, she’d be able to use her zapper to get into the garage while he distracted them. They would definitely not be expecting Maxi Poole in a beat-up old truck dressed in Salvation Army gear, he told her. And the Blazer had tinted windows, so she wouldn’t be seen clearly. By the time they realized it was her, if they did, she’d be inside.
“They’ll hate you for this,” Maxi said, “and you’ve got to live with them on the street.”
“Nah.” He laughed. “They’ll give me points for it.”
She looked at her watch: 8:40. The police crime lab crew was already inside—she had given one of the officers a key last night in case she had to stay overnight with Yukon. She waited for about a minute before following the news van back to the house. When she tooled past her own gate, she saw the newsies gathered around Richard, listening to him. She opened her garage door with the remote control in her Blazer, scooted inside, and zapped the door shut behind her. Made it.
She slipped through the kitchen and into her living room. An officer was dusting surfaces for fingerprints, another was photographing the front door locks and the alarm system.
“Find anything significant?” she asked.
“Maybe,” said one who’d introduced himself as Delaney. “We photographed some footprints we’re pretty sure were made by the intruder. And we’ve got shots of footprints at the Nathanson house where the Ricco woman was murdered. We’ll see if they match.”
“What do you think?” Maxi asked.
“Can’t tell, and even if we could, we wouldn’t. It’s not up to us to release any information, especially to you folks.”
“Off the record, I swear,” Maxi entreated.
“Off the record—and I’ll hold you to that, Ms. Poole—I’m betting we have a match. And I think you’re lucky to be alive.”