26

 

 

I woke up early Friday morning and made myself a cup of that execrable pod coffee that everyone seems to think is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I beg to differ, but I managed to down a cup of the stuff while I scanned the sports pages of the USA Today that the inn had slipped underneath my door.

Tommy Scannell had grabbed the first round lead of the PGA Championship with a smooth 65. The kid from San Diego was just two years out of college and had played the round like he was under hypnosis, hitting one good shot after another while draining a bunch of birdie putts. Could he do it three more days in a row? Anything is possible, but I would bet on the negative side and not just because I’m a cynical bastard. First round nobodies in the lead rarely go on to win.

After him was the horde, names known and unknown, about twenty players all bunched up within three shots of the lead and another cohort a few strokes further back than that. In other words, a typical major logjam. Everyone still jockeying for position, hoping to still be relevant and within hailing distance come Sunday afternoon. But the smart ones, the ones who would actually be there on Sunday afternoon, were only thinking about today and how to get their golf balls around the course in the fewest number of strokes. The really smart ones were only thinking about the tee shot on the first hole.

I had a couple of hours to kill before our pre-show production meeting, which Oswald had scheduled today here at the inn, instead of down in the hubbub of Television City. I took a long shower and thought about the two murder cases. It seemed more than logical that they were connected, even though no one had yet developed the first indication that they were.

None of us had been able to figure out the link between Parker Long and Arnie Wasserman, except that they both worked for IBS. There was no apparent reason why someone would want both Parker and Arnie dead. Parker had been an experienced broadcaster in his last year of work and Arnie had been a hard-charging TV exec on the make. What was the connection?

I could make a case why Parker Long might have wanted to shoot Arnie Wasserman in the head—Arnie had talked about ending Parker’s contract early and giving him the heave-ho. But of course, Parker was already dead when Arnie was shot.

Would Arnie have arranged to kill Parker, to get him off the payroll and out of IBS? That, too, was plausible, if more than a little far-fetched. But then who shot Arnie? And why? No good answer.

I shaved and dressed. I thought about the notebook belonging to Arnie that Jenny had kept. The New York cops would probably want to book that as evidence in their investigation, even though there was nothing in Arnie’s organizer that I could see that led back to anyone. I should probably tell them about it, but Jenny seemed quite attached to it, and for understandable reasons, and I finally decided not to drop a dime on her.

I made another pod cup of coffee and while it sputtered and hissed in the machine, I thought about Bulldog O’Shaunnesey. He had been a homicide detective in Boston, way back in the day when I had left the PGA Tour and signed on as a cub reporter for the Boston Journal, covering the crime beat. Most of the time, that meant hanging around the old police HQ on Harrison Ave. waiting for someone to hand over the day’s crime reports, then looking through them for something interesting. Like the wife who got tired of her husband’s farting during the nightly news and hacked off his head with a machete. Or the guy suffering PTSD after two tours in Nam who started torching parked cars on St. Botolph Street with a stolen flamethrower. Napalm in the Back Bay. My editor loved stories like that.

I got to know most of the guys who worked in the cop shop along with Bulldog, suffering the usual amount of abuse for being both a civilian and a news reporter. Bulldog was one of the department’s characters, a longtime homicide dick who could not more closely resemble the Irish cop stereotype: huge ruddy face, always wreathed in a wry grin, fast-talking smartass, big burly frame, red hair. And a heavy drinker.

Once he got to know you, Bulldog would occasionally invite you along on a squeal, letting you ride shotgun as he wheeled at high speed through Boston’s narrow street grid, blue lights flashing. The car would pull up in front of a tenement somewhere—South End, Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan—and Bulldog, who moved with surprising ease and quickness for a large man, would dash into the building and up the stairs to wherever the dead person lay. He’d let me snap a few quick black-and-whites before shooing me back out the door to wait by the squad car while he did his cop thing.

Anyway, I learned a lot by watching Bulldog work, and asking him questions. And more than once I heard him say about a tough case, “Go back and start at the beginning. What happened? How did events unfold? Forget what you think you know. Go back over it and pretend you don’t know anything. Ask some more questions. Something will pop up. Something you didn’t think about the first time through. And there you are.”

So, sipping my awful coffee, I went back to the beginning. Parker Long, sitting in his broadcast booth, commenting on a golf tournament. According to the cops, he was wearing headphones that were delivering an ear full of static, headphones that someone had apparently tampered with. I had been trying to figure out why someone would do that, tamper with the headphones.

But using Bulldog’s start-over strategy, I should be thinking “What did Parker Long do?” He’d been a broadcaster for a couple of decades. That day, he had crappy headphones. He was getting static and white noise. He would have called someone for help. The IBS tech crew. “Hey,” he would have said, “My headphones suck. Can’t hear a thing. What’s going on?”

They would have sent someone out to the tower on sixteen. Someone to fool around with the relay unit. If that unit had been in the booth overnight, it might have gotten wet somehow, screwed something up inside, which was causing the static. No? OK, check the headphone wires for frays. Maybe a wire was loose. Maybe the plug nose was broken. When nothing else worked to end the static noise, they would have swapped out the bad headphones for a new pair.

I sat up.

Parker Long had still been wearing the faulty headphones when I found him, dead. The ones I carefully removed from his body. The ones the Georgia cops had later examined and found to be tampered with. They had still been on his head.

Why?

I called Shooter Sciutto. He was in another room at the inn.

“Question,” I said when I got him on the line. “If one of us in the booth had a pair of faulty headphones on during the broadcast, was getting lots of static and white noise, what would happen?”

“You’d call in on the intercom line, tell them you couldn’t hear a goddam thing and have them send someone out to fix it,” he said. “Happens a lot, actually. Our equipment gets more stressed than, say, the stuff they use in a studio downtown. We’re out in the weather, getting rained on, moving from location to location. Stuff gets thrown around, banged up, and it breaks. A lot.”

“So someone from tech would come out and fiddle around with stuff?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’d send Digby out, or someone else from that crew. Benny is good. Sheila knows her way around all the equipment.”

“Would they bring a new pair of headphones?”

“Sure,” Shooter said. “There’s boxes of them in the trailer. New wires. Plugs. Cables. Probably back-up units for the audio relays. And our techies are good—they can rewire an entire camera in about three minutes flat if they have to. Unplug a circuit assembly and plug in a new one. I’ve seen ‘em in action.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Why do you ask?” he said. “Did you have some problems yesterday?”

“No,” I said. “Everything was cool. Does someone keep records on stuff like that? If they need to come out to the booth and change out a headphone unit. Who’d keep track of that?”

“I don’t think there’s a logbook or anything like that,” he said. “As you’ve seen, things get pretty busy during the broadcast. You’d call in, say my headphones don’t work, and Ben or the assistant director or whoever got your intercom call would call down to Tech and tell them to get out to your booth with some new headphones, stat.”

“So the control room would contact Tech and whoever’s on duty would grab some stuff and head down to my booth,” I said.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” he said. “There a point to all these questions?”

“Contingency planning,” I said. “Just in case.”

“That’s a little anal, Hack,” Tony said. He hung up.

I smiled. I might have sounded anal, but I finally had the first glimmer of a clue. Or at least, a pathway to follow. If Parker Long’s headphones had acted up, and the forensic boys in Georgia said they did, he would have called for help. Someone had taken that call and, in turn, called the Tech department to go fix it.

What had happened next? That I didn’t know. But I could probably find out.

Our production meeting started at eleven. I showed up a few minutes early. I was looking for either Bill Stirling or Nancy Davis. Both were Ben Oswald’s assistant directors, Bill handling the playback desk, Nancy in charge of graphics and Chyron, making sure the scoreboard screens and player IDs were ready when Ben put someone on the air.

Bill was sitting in the conference room when I walked in. He glanced up from the newspaper he was reading.

“Hey, Hacker,” he said. “Ready for another five hours of fun today?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. “Listen, do you remember getting a call from Parker Long that day down in Savannah? Something the matter with his headphones?”

Bill scratched his chin, thinking. “Nah,” he said finally. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

“I’m just pinning down some information,” I said.

People began walking in. Van and Jimmy came in together, each carrying a cup of coffee. The Boz sauntered in, looking like he needed another couple hours of sleep. Some of the other control booth people came in. Kelsey walked in with Nancy Davis. They were laughing together about something.

I went over and greeted them. Asked Nancy if she remembered anything about Parker’s headphones down in Savannah.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I told the cops down in Savannah when they asked that day. I got a message from Parker a little after five. Said he was getting static. He said it had been like that all afternoon and was getting worse. I called Tech and they said someone would get right on it.”

“Do you remember who they sent?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No reason for me to know that,” she said. “I just passed on Parker’s complaint. I assume they went and fixed it, because Parker never called back.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

Ben Oswald hadn’t shown up yet, so I wandered over to the far wall where some coffee and tea service had been set up and poured myself a cup. This stuff came out of a big silver urn and tasted a lot better than the pod crap.

Kelsey Jenkins followed me and began getting her own coffee.

“What was that about, Hacker?” she asked.

“What?” I said.

“The questions about Parker’s headphones,” she said. “What have you found out?”

“Not sure,” I told her. “But I’m pretty sure someone from Tech went down to Parker’s booth in Savannah just before he died. He was having headphone problems.”

“Yeah, well, that’s their job, isn’t it?” she said. “Fixing tech problems.”

“True enough,” I said. “But this someone may have fixed Parker’s problems permanently.”

“You mean?”

She looked at me aghast. I nodded.

Ben Oswald walked into the room.

“OK,” he said, “Let’s get this shit show on the road.”