“This seem like not long to you?” Joe asked when I returned to the car.
“I couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes.”
“An eternity,” he said, “waiting here like lamb tied to tree with tigers all around.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Fear’s no fun.” I was feeling the effect of Henry’s warning.
“Where you want to go now? Flatbush? Iraq? Camden, New Jersey?”
“Let’s try someplace a little safer,” I said. “The Glass Tower.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “But I park underground, not on street.”
My first errand at the WBC building took me to a no-frills, windowless section at the rear of the nineteenth floor, where the editors worked their digital magic. It was like entering a workplace for low-ranking city-government employees. Gray carpet. Gray metal cubicles where the editors slouched on gray metal chairs, working at monitors resting on gray metal desks.
The walls were painted an ashlike smudge, their dullness unrelieved by any hanging art, even the color portraits of the network’s performers that graced many a wall in the rest of the building.
Judy Alridge, whose elevated position of senior editor merited a cubicle a few square feet bigger than the others and her very own ficus tree, was focused on her monitor, mixing and matching footage from a collapsed-bridge disaster in the Midwest. She was a full-figured woman, dressed casually in denim pants and a plaid woolen shirt cut large enough to hide the result of her fast-food addiction.
In response to her name, she spun around in her gray chair, saw it was me, frowned, and said, “Hey, Blessing. Fess up now. Did you poison that prick Gallagher?”
“No way,” I said. “I’m a live-and-let-live advocate.”
“And I was all set to reward you with a big wet one.”
“My loss,” I said. “Judy, I’m looking for some DVDs of Gallagher’s that you guys used in putting together his obit doc. Specifically a show he hosted called USS Huckleberry.”
“I did the obit myself,” Judy said. “I used a minute or two from that show. The son of a bitch actually seemed charming dealing with those kids. He shoulda stuck to his on-camera work. Then I wouldn’t have had to put up with his obnoxious real personality, not to mention his constant bitching and moaning.”
“And the disks are …?”
“We tossed all of his crap into a big cardboard box in the storeroom. Right down the hall on the left. Knock yourself out.”
The room was where she said it would be. Ditto the cardboard box and DVDs. There were about seventy-five of the silver disks in neatly labeled slim jewel cases. I shuffled through them and came up with a half-dozen labeled USS HUCKLEBERRY. Twelve full hours of stone-age TV animation interspersed with young Rudy Gallagher making nice with tots. Quite a treasure trove.
I jammed the six jewel cases into my coat pockets and moved on to the main reason I’d returned to the Glass Tower. For that I had to ascend much higher, to the sixty-fourth floor that pre-9/11 had been the exclusive aerie of the network’s top executives. Now it was a windows-to-the-world nesting place for publicists, promotion copywriters, some advertising salespersons, researchers, the editors and maintainers of the company’s Internet websites, and an elderly coot known simply as Marvin.
“Yo, Billy, what’s the hap?” Marvin asked from behind his desk, staring out of the always-open door to his spacious office. He was wearing his usual sea-green warm-up togs and white cap with a flying dolphin logo, leaning back in his executive chair, long fingers interlocked across his flat tummy, huge feet snug in New Balance runners resting on top of his big, bare desk.
“Nothing much to report, Marvin,” I said, before moving on to a large room filled with a long U-shaped table on which rested computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The room was empty. I backtracked to Marvin. “Any idea where the research people are?” I asked.
“Taking an early lunch,” he said, scratching his gray whiskers. “Violet—you know, the cute brunette with the ring stuck in her eyebrow—it’s her twenty-second birthday, and they all went to this new place opened on East Fifty-ninth. Nanu.”
“Any idea when they’ll be back?”
“They’re young,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t bother to come back. What do you need, Billy? Maybe I can help.”
Maybe. I was never quite sure what Marvin did at WBC, only that he’d been employed there long enough to have been hired by the commander’s father, Harold Di Voss. Marvin once told me he’d started in the business at NBC in the early 1950s, during the reign of Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the genius who created the Today show and The Tonight Show and still had found the time to inaugurate the unique news and entertainment radio program Monitor.
When Weaver departed Marvin left, too, and was immediately hired by Harold Di Voss for one reason only. As Marvin likes to tell you, “He couldn’t get Pat.”
“I’m looking for information about a guy,” I told Marvin.
“He got a name?”
I hesitated, then decided, why not tell him? “An international assassin who calls himself Felix the Cat.”
“Well, now,” he said, grinning. He swung his big feet off the desk and got up from his chair. “Let’s go see what we can dig up.”
He led me back to the empty research room, where he sat at the nearest computer. Like a concert pianist, he popped his knuckles, flexed his long, thin fingers, and sent them flying over the keys, making his own electronic music.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“It’s like anything else,” he said. “Once you figure out how it works, it’s just a matter of refining your skills. Did that my whole career. No reason to stop now that I’m retired.”
On the flat screen, I saw that he had signed off the person who’d been using the computer and signed himself on, using the ID MonitorMan. It was obviously a reference to his work on Weaver’s weekend radio show.
“You’re retired?” I asked.
“Nearly seventeen years now,” he said. “Once I hit mandatory, I sure as hell didn’t want to spend all day in the house staring at my wife, Celia, even though she was and is very easy on the eyes. A certain amount of absence is needed. So I cut a deal with young Vern.” That would be the sixtysomething commander. Young Vern. “If he gave me an office to hang out in, I’d continue to advise him like I did his dad.
“Here we go, Billy.”
The name InfoScoob appeared on the monitor, followed by the description: “a meta search engine with the option to contact users conducting similar searches.” A line of type at the bottom of the screen read: “created by MonitorMan.”
“This is your program?”
“I worked it out last year when I got tired of watching these kids in research putzing around with Google. That Felix the Cat name all you got on this guy?”
“Afraid so.”
“We’ll start with that. But we’re gonna have to figure out a way to narrow down the search a little.”
Marvin typed in “Felix the Cat” and was almost immediately rewarded with more than a million hits. Judging by the first page, ninety-nine percent of those were references to the cartoon and comic-book character Felix the Cat.
Marvin changed the search to “Felix the Cat” plus “murder.” That brought the number of replies down to just more than one hundred thousand. “Felix the Cat” plus “assassination” narrowed the results to just eighteen thousand nine hundred.
Finally limiting the search to “Felix the Cat” plus “assassin,” we were rewarded with eighty-nine direct hits.
Nearly an hour later, having clicked through all the newspaper, magazine, and video reports, printing whatever I requested, Marvin said, “You’re not curious about who Minnie might be?”
“I don’t understand the question,” I said.
“You missed the notice that ‘Minnie’ had made a similar search last week,” he said. “I added user history to the program so that people who share a similar info quest might correspond with one another if they cared to.”
“I don’t think I want to correspond with Minnie,” I said. “But I wouldn’t mind knowing her real name.”
He tapped only two keys and the screen was suddenly filled with the user profile of … Trina Lomax.
“Hmmm. Looks like you and our executive producer share a common interest in Felix.”
I nodded.
“And since she’s already done her research, and since political assassination is a little off your beat, I take it your curiosity about Mr. Felix is personal rather than business. Right?”
“It’s personal.”
He nodded and closed down the session, logging the original researcher back on to the machine. “Why don’t we go back to my office and talk about it?”
I stared at him, wondering if it had been his age or the whiskers or the tarpon cap and warm-up suit that had led me to so underestimate the MonitorMan. He’d been a bright guy all of his life, smart enough to have earned the respect and confidence of both the commander and his father, and he hadn’t seemed to have lost any of his mental acuity to age. Still, I didn’t want to get into a discussion of my problems with a guy I barely knew.
“Thanks for the offer and for your help, but I think these printouts will be all I need right now.”
“Your call. As Vern will tell you, I give good advice.”
“I’m not even sure what kind of advice I’d ask,” I said.
“Well, if you figure that out, you know where to find me.”
“There is one thing.”
He eyed me, waiting.
“The commander sent Rudy Gallagher to Afghanistan on some kind of mission. I don’t suppose he asked your advice before he did that?”
Marvin smiled. “I see where you’re headed, Billy. You’re hoping to convince the cops that Felix had a better reason to put Rudy down than you did. And you think that reason may have something to do with Rudy’s trip to Kabul.”
He was definitely a shrewd old boy. “What was Rudy supposed to do for the commander, Marvin?”
“You’re going to have to ask Vern that question.”
“I did.”
“What’d he say?”
“That it had been a father’s mistake. I assume that means it had something to do with his son Bud’s death. Right?”
“I really can’t address that point,” Marvin said. “Good luck with your plan, Billy. But my advice is for you to abandon it and let nature take its course. If you didn’t kill Rudy, it’s gonna be damned hard for the cops to prove you did. Get on with your life and let Felix get on with his, until he slips up. They always do.”
I thanked him again for his help and his advice, and headed down to my dressing room with the printouts on Felix. I snagged a cup of Billionaire Blend from the kitchen and settled in at Kiki’s desk.
My assistant had left a reminder for me on the bulletin board: Lily Conover had scheduled the usual back-to-back Blessing’s in the Kitchen tapings for tomorrow at the Wine & Dine building. I groaned. Even in normal times, the every-other-Thursday workday was a grueling one, but rather than dote on that, I focused on the printouts.
There were more than forty separate articles and reports referencing the assassin. Not one of them offered anything other than rumors of Felix’s involvement. Nonetheless, I broke them down according to victims. Six piles. Six assassinations. The stabbing of the leader of the Moleta drug cartel in Bogotá. The long-range shooting of a Muslim firebrand with ties to Osama bin Laden in the Philippines. The bombing of an official in Yemen who was interfering with the investigation of another bombing, the one that took place on the USS Cole. There was a second stabbing that Henry Julian had mentioned, the Nigerian dictator General Santomacha. And finally, only a few weeks before, there had been an immolation of an ayatollah who’d been urging Iran’s president to break off talks with the West. You gotta love a guy who keeps changing the menu.
There were no witnesses to any of the crimes. No clues, other than the presence of a rudimentary drawing of a cat, that had led to the presumption that Felix had been the perpetrator.
The truly disturbing thing was that the assassinations weren’t just political, the victims had all been working against the interests of the United States. Could Felix be employed by the CIA? Or an agency even more clandestine than the CIA?
Marvin’s advice was sounding smarter and smarter. What had I been thinking? Just let nature take its course.
I collected the printouts and the notes I’d made, ran them through the shredder, and left my dressing room/office.
The Wake Up! studio was almost vacant, the exceptions being Trina Lomax standing at the news desk with Arnie Epps, complaining about the dullness of the set. Was Trina’s computer ID, “Minnie,” a reference to Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend, wife, whatever? Why hadn’t I thought of that immediately? Minnie the Mouse, looking up info on Felix the Cat.
Was it an inside joke she was sharing with Felix? Could they be associates?
I decided to slink away before I was spotted, but that didn’t work.
“Billy,” Trina/Minnie called out. “Hold a minute.”
She marched toward me, Arnie doing his best to keep up. “I was going to call you, but this is much better face-to-face,” she said. “I want to personally thank you for the professional way you reacted to our benching you. It was a mistake I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t been so new to the job. You’ve a whole lot of fans out there who missed you.”
“Good to hear,” I said, biting my tongue to keep from calling her Minnie.
“And that segment this morning, you and Gin discussing the Bruno fire with Lance, pure gold.”
Arnie looked uncomfortable. “Ah, speaking of Phil, we, ah, got word a while ago that the, ah, remains in the burned building were definitely his,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Any word about a funeral service?”
Trina looked blank. Arnie said, “Doesn’t look like there’s gonna be one. I spoke to Phil’s sister. She’s flying in from Miami. Plans to stay here just long enough to settle with the insurance company, arrange for the sale of the property, and have Phil’s remains quietly planted next to his father. She said something about donations to the Shriners children’s hospital in Manhattan.”
“Thanks for the information,” I said.
“Anyway, Billy,” Trina said, “I think we should capitalize on all this brand-name attention you’re getting. Arnie, I want you to fill Billy’s dance card every morning. Let’s put him to work and make his fans happy.”
“We have Billy’s segs with Mr. Turducken on our list,” Arnie said. “I could schedule it for Monday.”
“Mr. Turducken?” Trina said. “I hope that’s a trade name?”
“Guy claims to be the ultimate supplier of turduckens in the U.S.,” Arnie said. “Sends ’em out from his place in Fairview. You know the place, Billy?”
“Not exactly.”
“You should drive over and check it out before Monday,” Arnie said.
“I, ah … I’m not big on trips to Jersey,” I said. “The Lincoln Tunnel freaks me out. If God had meant for us to travel underwater, he would have given us gills.”
“Take the bridge,” Arnie said. “It’s a much longer trip, but if you—”
“I want you to give Billy some entertainment segments,” Trina interrupted, evidently bored with our New Jersey discussion. “I’m growing more and more disenchanted with our resident showbiz diva, Chuck. In fact …” She appeared to be thinking. “Yes. The Friday Favorites remote from the Manhattan Museum of Culture and Art.”
She turned to me. “They’re opening a new exhibit. The Mortal Superheroes: The Reality of Fantasy. It focuses on the comic-book superheroes who’ve died.”
“There are dead superheroes?” I asked.
“Quite a few, I gather,” Trina said. “I think even Superman is represented.”
“Sounds a little narrow and downbeat for our audience,” I said.
“I disagree,” Trina said. “Their thesis is that the comics mirror reality a little more than we think. Should make for an interesting discussion. And there will be plenty of eye candy. Arnie has talked them into letting us bring in some hot male and female models to wear those skintight costumes and show off some real flesh. It should be a fun segment with its touch of humanity, right?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to put her possible involvement with Felix out of my mind. “Superheroes. Sex. Death. It’s got everything.”
“And after you’re done there,” she said, “you can go visit Mr. Turducken.”