IT WAS LATE, BUT Carmen was still at the station when she received the call from Dennis Ketchum. He wanted to see her in his office, he said. Tonight. Now.
She felt only slight trepidation as she knocked on his door. It couldn’t be bad news. All the feedback she’d received on her reports lately had been positive.
“Sit down, Carmen.” Dennis stubbed out a cigarette and let loose with one of his thick, frightening, smoker’s coughs as Carmen lowered herself into the chair near the door.
“Well.” He was almost smiling as he swiveled his chair around to face her. “I think we’d be crazy not to give you five days a week at this point.”
A surge of joy shot through her, but she kept her face impassive. “Right,” she said. “You would be.”
Dennis reached for a stack of mail on his desk and dropped it into her lap. She lifted her hands quickly to keep the letters from spilling onto the floor.
“All those viewers are asking for you,” he said, nodding toward the letters. “It’s a little like the old days.”
She had some difficulty keeping her smile in check. She wouldn’t appear too eager.
Dennis coughed again, then shook his head, a look of mild amazement on his face. Amazement, and something else. Admiration? “You’ve managed to turn nothing into something, Carmen,” he said. “I don’t mind saying that I was worried about you—about your ability to do your job after the past few years. But you’re impressing the hell out of me, kid.”
She crossed her legs, fully composed now. “So, does that mean News Nine will pick up the tab if I need to travel again to further the story?”
“I’ll arrange it.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked hard into her eyes. “There’s some real dirt on this guy, isn’t there?” he asked. “How close are you?”
“I’m not sure,” she hedged. She had no idea what she might find on Jeff, and she was no longer certain she would ever find anything of significance.
“Well, you’re doing fine with it. Keep the screws good and tight on Cabrio. Take your time. Just be sure you’re the first to get the scoop.” He sat up straight again and lit another cigarette. “The other stations are frustrated as hell,” he continued, blowing two streams of smoke from his nose. “They’re in the dark, and their ratings are falling day by day. Don’t let them get to it before you do, Carmen. I’m trusting you to time this right.”
Late the following afternoon, as ashes from a new fire danced outside her News Nine office window, Carmen reached one of Jeff’s high school teachers.
“I taught chemistry for forty years,” Frank Howell said, over the phone. “There are exactly three students who stayed in my mind, and Rob Blackwell is at the top of the list.”
With the receiver clutched in her hand, Carmen breathed a sigh of relief. The librarian at the high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, had been most cooperative. The yearbooks indicated that Robert Blackwell had attended the school for three years, graduating in 1973 at the age of sixteen. The librarian had given her the names of some of the teachers pictured in the yearbook, and Carmen spent the rest of the day trying to track down phone numbers for them, with little success. She finally reached Lillian Phelps, an elderly woman who had taught English during the years Jeff attended the school, but who didn’t remember him at all.
“He probably would have been more into science than English,” Carmen had told her, and Lillian Phelps suggested she try Frank Howell, who had retired from teaching chemistry only a few years earlier.
Frank Howell was an enthusiastic, clear-thinking historian. For the first time, Carmen decided to give her interviewee a taste of the truth behind her questioning. She had to know if there was a chance Jeff was for real.
“Robert Blackwell has suggested he might be able to ease the drought here by producing rain,” she said, careful to keep her voice neutral, to keep the cynicism in check.
Howell chuckled. “Cloud-seeding?”
“No. Some other way.”
“Well,” Howell said slowly. “I can’t say that surprises me. Rob had a real feel for science. A gift. Although he could be a reckless son of a gun.” He chuckled again.
“Reckless?”
“Yes. He caused an explosion in the chemistry lab one day. I’m sure he used to lay awake at nights and think of experiments that weren’t in the book.” He drew a long breath. “Truth was, by the middle of Rob’s sophomore year, he was way ahead of me. I went to the board and told them we needed something to challenge this kid or we’d lose him. So, they worked up a special program for him through Rutgers. Let him take some college courses in math and science for a few hours each day. It cost the family something, but Rob’s father—stepfather, I guess it was—paid for it.”
For the first time, Carmen could truly picture Jeff as a teenager. Serious, brilliant, far above his fellow students. Far above his teachers. Probably, he hadn’t fit in well.
“What was he like socially?” she asked.
“Socially? That’s something I didn’t pay much attention to. That wasn’t the part of him that intrigued me.”
“Well, I was wondering if he was perceived by the other students as a goody-two-shoes or a… a nerd because of his intelligence.”
“Neither,” Howell said. “He wasn’t a goody-two-shoes by any stretch of the imagination. He got into his share of trouble.”
“Like what?”j
“Hmm. Always had to push the limits. If you said to the class, ‘No talking or else,’ he’d have to talk just to find out what the ‘or else’ was. Or if you told him to add two grams of a particular compound to a beaker, he’d have to see what would happen if he added three.”
“You make him sound irresponsible and impulsive.”
“Oh, not really.” There was a smile in Howell’s voice. He had clearly felt some affection as well as respect for young Robert Blackwell. “He was just curious. Think where we’d be today if our inventors and scientists hadn’t been curious.”
“You said the other students didn’t see him as a nerd?”
“Not that I knew of. Seems as though he always had girls around him. I don’t know if there was anyone special, though. He did have a good friend who was another top chemistry student. Kent someone or other. I can’t recall his full name, but he was sharp too, and they were always trying to outdo each other. Talk about reckless! Kent lost a couple of fingers when he tried to plant a little homemade bomb in another kid’s locker.”
“Nice,” Carmen said. Lovely kids Jeff hung out with.
“They suspended him, but not for long. Guess they figured losing half his hand was punishment enough. He and Rob weren’t much alike outside of their interest in science, though. Kent was always a little strange, where Robbie was just a good-looking, normal kid who happened to excel in everything he did.”
Carmen wondered if it would be worth the bother to call the librarian back and beg her to look through the yearbook for a “Kent.” She doubted the request would be appreciated. “You mentioned his stepfather,” she prompted.
“Yes. At least I assume it was a stepfather. I don’t actually remember, but the man was black, and I’m sure Rob didn’t have a speck of black blood in him.”
“Rob was quite blond?”
“Yes, well, what they call dirty-blond, I guess. Anyway, there was some sort of scandal.”
“A scandal?” Carmen pulled her notepad closer to her on the desk and jotted down the word, even though she was taping the conversation.
“Right. I’m not sure I remember the details, but this stepfather of his was put in jail. Something to do with drugs. Seems to me there was a death involved because he was locked away for a long time, and Robbie got put in a foster family for his senior year. I even considered taking him in, but my wife wouldn’t hear of it. The whole mess hurt him academically, I remember. He couldn’t pay for the college courses anymore, and his grades really dropped that year. I was worried about him, about seeing all that potential go down the drain.” He fell suddenly quiet, as if trying to decide if he should tell her more. “Once I called him in to talk about his situation,” he said, after a moment, “but he didn’t want to talk about it. He kept trying to steer me back to an experiment we’d done the day before in class. But I kept pushing. I regretted it later. Probably it wasn’t the right thing to do, because he started to cry. It embarrassed him, and I let him go. Tore me apart, though. He was a kid in a lot of pain, and there didn’t seem to be a way to help him.”
Carmen felt an unwelcome surge of compassion for Jeff. She leaned back in her chair. She was going to have to think long and hard about how to present this information in her report. She liked the reckless, bad-boy stuff, but the underlying theme of struggle and misfortune that seemed so much a part of Jeff’s life could only gain him sympathy. That was the problem of gathering facts, of building a story. You couldn’t make it go the way you wanted it to. She could twist things a little, yes, but no matter how she colored the information for her audience, she would know the adversity that lay behind Jeff Cabrio’s grand bravado, she would know the losses he’d endured, the hardships he’d overcome.
“Well,” said Frank Howell, obviously summing up, “it was a joy to teach a student like Robbie. If he says he can make it rain, I’d buy an umbrella.”
SHE WAS GETTING INTO her car in the station parking lot that evening when she heard someone call her name. She turned to see Terrell Gates standing next to her own car—a silver Mercedes—blowing puffs of ash from the convertible roof..
“I understand congratulations are in order.” Terrell dusted her hands together as she walked toward Carmen. “You’re going to get a little more air time.”
Carmen opened her car door. “Yes,” she said.
“That’s terrific.” Terrell smiled brightly, but the condescension in her voice was impossible to miss. It was as if she were talking to a kindergartner about her first finger painting. “I know they’ve been getting a lot of mail on you,” she continued. “Apparently you’re quite the rage with the older viewers. Lucky there are so many retirees out here.”
Carmen closed the car door again and put her hands on her hips. “Do you have to practice being a bitch, Terrell, or does it come naturally to you?”
Terrell didn’t lose her smile, not for an instant. “Listen, Carmen.” She brushed a strand of gold hair from her eyes. “Things change very quickly in this business, and you’ve been away quite a while. Even some of the technology’s changed, and I’m sure it can be overwhelming when you’ve been out of the action for so long. Probably makes you feel a little insecure. You let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, okay?”
Carmen stared at her young nemesis. Terrell knew exactly what she was doing. Carmen recognized the manipulation, the innuendoes, the subtle taunting that preceded moving in for the kill. She had once been a master of the very same techniques.
She folded her arms across her chest. “Let’s tell it like it is, Terrell.” There was a wonderful strength in her voice. “You and I both know that I was a name in this business when you were still in diapers, and we both know you wouldn’t be sitting in that San Diego Sunrise chair if it weren’t for me. So don’t you dare patronize me, and don’t you dare kid yourself into thinking you have anything to teach me.”
Terrell seemed at a sudden loss for words. There was a quiver in her lower lip, the suggestion of a crease between her perfectly shaped eyebrows.
Carmen had said all she planned to. She got into her car and drove out of the lot, but by the time she reached the service road leading to the freeway, she had to pull over. Rolling down her window, she leaned back against the head rest and closed her eyes.
Any pleasure she’d taken in lashing out at Terrell Gates had quickly disappeared. She’d been given a glimpse into the woman behind the tough veneer. She’d seen the panic in the younger woman’s eyes, and she knew that panic well.
It can happen to you too, Terrell. You’re young and on top now, but just wait a few years.
Could she ever handle Sunrise again? Could she ever again go the extra, sometimes vicious, mile necessary to make that show come alive in the way that she used to, in the way that Terrell did now?
Keep the screws good and tight on Cabrio.
She would have to. Whatever it took, she would have to do it. Put on that tough-gal mask. Go after the grittiest news, blind to how much it might cost someone, how much it might cost herself. Right now, she had no other choice.