25

 

 

Later that night, I called home. I’d had my beer (and a couple extra) and a burger and now I needed some wifely contact.

“So, how’d you like the show today?” I asked her.

I heard a long deep sigh. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. “I spent all day with my band of merry fourth graders, who all think they’re as smart as fifth graders already because it’s the end of the school year; I had to take Vickie to a play date; I had to bathe, feed, and re-bathe DJ and he has a cold, and now I’ve got a couple hours of packing boxes left. And you want to know if I spent any time sitting around watching golf on TV?”

Her voice was beginning to rise in timbre. It hadn’t yet reached the shriek stage, but it was getting close.

“I withdraw the question,” I said. “Besides, you know it went well. I wouldn’t have asked, otherwise.”

“Good for you,” she said. She sighed again. “I’m sorry, Hacker,” she said. “It’s just been a long day.”

“Completely understand,” I said. “I’ll be home late Sunday, and we haven’t got another broadcast for two weeks. So I’ll take over the packing and moving part.”

“That will be a big help,” she said.

“DJ call out my name yet?” I asked.

“Not so I can tell,” she said. “He did say ‘blaaaad” today. That’s pretty close.”

“Kid’s a freakin’ genius,” I said. “Mensa material for sure.”

She laughed. I liked that sound. Mary Jane had a wonderful laugh.

“So, no new murders today?” she asked, a mischievous tone in her voice.

“Not yet,” I said. “But there’s still a couple hours left in the day.”

She yawned. Loudly.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” I said. “Try again tomorrow.”

“Good idea,” she said. “I was going to start packing up some of DJ’s picture books first. The only one he’s heavily into at the moment is Goodnight, Moon. I’ve started to hate that one.”

“Screw the picture books,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

 

After we said our good nights, I decided to wander down to the inn’s restaurant and bar for a nightcap. IBS had booked most of the rooms in the place, so I figured there’d be some friendly faces in the lounge.

I was surprised to find the place mostly empty. It was a little after ten and there were maybe eleven people in the place. Most were are tables, finishing up a late meal with coffee and dessert. There were three people sitting at the long wooden bar. Two guys, who I didn’t recognize, were sitting together at one end watching a ball game, but on the far end there was just one young woman, sitting alone. Jenny LoBianco. She was staring into her half-finished pint of beer.

I slipped onto the chair next to her.

“Hey, Jenny,” I said. “Mind if I join you for a quick one?”

She turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were shadowed, her face strained. Then she shook her head and forced herself to smile.

“Oh, hi, Hacker,” she said. “Sure.”

I ordered a shot of Bowmore from the barkeep and when it arrived, I held it up. She picked up her beer and we clinked.

“That history segment came out pretty good,” she said. “Oswald was pleased. He even told me that, if you can believe it.”

“Wow,” I said. “I hope he’s feeling OK. If Ben is handing out compliments, he must be sick.”

She smiled. “True enough,” she said.

“You have any ideas how we can make the next one better?” I asked.

Her back straightened and her eyes brightened.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said.

“Lay it on me,” I said, and sipped a little of my peaty Islay scotch.

For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Jenny LoBianco reeled off a dissertation on how to improve Hacker’s History. She started with describing the demographic breakdown of our audience and how we could direct our segment to appeal to that demographic. She had a few topics in mind that we could develop for future segments and described how they should look and sound and feel. She spoke in the strange language of television production, all framing shots and cutaways and white values and other stuff I had no idea what she was talking about. I bounced a few ideas back at her, and she liked a couple of them. When I next looked up, it was past eleven.

I drained the last of my second wee dram.

“Shooter was right,” I said.

“About what?” she said.

“That you were sharp,” I said. “You really get this TV stuff. I’ll ask Ben if he can assign you to work with Tony and me. Produce the segment. I think the three of us would kill it.”

She beamed at me. “That would be great, Hacker,” she said. “I’d love to.”

I motioned to the bartender to bring me the bill for both our drinks, and she began gathering her stuff to go upstairs to bed. She had a small purse next to her on the bar, sitting on top of a stack of yellow legal pads, file folders and a big leather-bound notebook. When I saw it, I did a double-take.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That notebook looks familiar.”

She looked at it, then picked it up and held it in her hands.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was Arnie’s. I like having it around. It reminds me of him.”

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

She held the notebook, rubbing its nubby surface as if it were an old friend.

“He left it at my place,” she said. “That night …”

Her voice caught, and she couldn’t speak for a bit. She was remembering.

“After work, we went to my place,” she told me. “I didn’t have anything in the apartment to eat, so he said he’d go out and pick some stuff up at the Fairway. Some wine. Something we could have for dinner. He …he never came home.”

Her head dropped, and she began to weep, quietly, head down so no one could see.

“So when he left the market, he wasn’t going to his apartment, he was heading back to yours,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I live about five blocks from him, just off West End Avenue. I told all this to Jefferies at the NYPD.”

“Did you tell them you had Arnie’s notebook?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t…didn’t want to give it up. I-I just like having it near. It feels like he’s with me.”

“I understand,” I said. “Have you looked inside? Maybe there were some notes or something that might be important to lead back to whoever did this to him.”

She shook her head again. “I’ve glanced through it. I can’t see anything relevant,” she said. “Arnie made a lot of lists, and there are many of them on almost every page. But there was nothing I could see.”

“Can I take a look?” I said. “Maybe I can see something you didn’t notice. New set of eyes.”

Jenny shrugged and handed the notebook over. I opened it. It was your typical office organizer—the heavy leather case opened to a week-by-week calendar, with lines for each hour of the day and space to add more notes. There was probably an alphabetized phone list in the back. A couple of straps and compartments on the inside cover provided places where he could have inserted a calculator and maybe his cell phone. Everything in its place and a place for everything. The motto of those office organizer types.

The calendar pages were covered with lots of scribbled notes. Arnie seemed to have been a very well-organized fellow. As Jenny said, he made lots of lists. Most of the entries had something to do with work. Some I could tell were directions and suggestions from Ben Oswald. But there were other notes jotted down by themselves—phone numbers, one or two words underlined or circled that meant nothing to me. I flipped through the pages to the day he was shot. He had had an eight o’clock breakfast with someone named Hillary and lunch with Ben Oswald.

Down near the bottom of that day’s column, he had written “6—dinner with JLB.” Jenny LoBianco.

Just above that, I read another entry: “4:30—D” followed by a question mark.

“Who is ‘D?’” I asked her. “Dave? Debbie? Don? She shook her head.

“No idea,” she said.

“He didn’t come in that night and tell you anything about his day? Who he might have met with?”

She smiled. “No,” she said. “He mainly wanted to kiss me. Then he asked what I had on hand for dinner. Said he was starving. We looked in the fridge, and he volunteered to go get us something. He left and I took a shower.”

She stared off into the distance, remembering that terrible night.

“I waited and waited,” she said. “When he didn’t come back, I thought something had come up at work. He often got late night calls and had to go fix some problem or other. I called, but there was no answer, his phone went to voice mail. So I eventually ate some cereal and just went to bed.”

Her head dropped, and tears began to flow again.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must have been awful.”

She nodded, silent.

“I didn’t find out what happened until I went into work the next morning,” she said. “Everyone was stunned. People were crying. It was awful, one of the worst days of my life.”

“Because no one knew you two were dating,” I said. “That must have made it worse.”

“Arnie wanted to keep it secret,” she said. “He just didn’t think an intra-office romance was a good idea for someone in his position. He had plans.”

“Plans?”

She smiled, a bit sadly. “Arnie was ambitious,” she said. “He knew about all the stuff going on with the network, all the negotiations about the new golf contracts. He wanted to move up.”

“Like into Ben’s job?” I asked.

Jenny shrugged. “There’s been some talk, watercooler gossip, that Ben may be on the downhill side of his career,” she said. “Arnie believed that if IBS got a good chunk of the golf contracts in the network negotiations, he might be able to pitch going after a younger demographic. Oswald has been in charge of IBS golf for a long time. But times change. Arnie wanted to be part of that change.”

“Did Ben know all this?”

“I don’t know, for sure,” she said. “Arnie said Ben was totally on board, but I wonder. They’ve worked together for many years and they seem to like each other, but there’s always been something there between them. I haven’t worked here long enough to know what it is. But there is something. Or, was.”

“Well, Ben Oswald has never been described as a warm and fuzzy guy,” I said. “And I imagine in his years he’s seen more than one or two young ambitious junior execs trying to work their way up the ladder.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she said. Then she yawned. “I’m beat,” she said. “See ya tomorrow?”

“Right,” I said. “Sleep well.”

She left and went upstairs to her room. I sat there for a while while the ESPN boys ran tape on the top baseball plays of the day, an amazing loop of great catches, scooped ground balls, fastballs painting the black and three or four monster smashes.

And while that was running, I was thinking about Ben Oswald and his young, ambitious assistant. Who wanted to move up. Maybe into the boss’ chair. Oswald had probably seen that before, probably lots of times. I wondered how that made him feel. I wondered what it could make him do. Like maybe follow that assistant to a market on the Upper West Side and put a bullet in his head. Possible? Sure. Anyone who has observed the human condition knows that anyone could do anything to someone else. But was it likely?

I didn’t have an answer for that. My gut was not telling me. It was sitting there dealing with two shots of a fine, peaty Scottish whiskey, and that was all it was willing to do at that moment.

So I gave up, and went to bed.