Do You Want to Know a Secret? Read online

  At their meeting that morning, Bill had seemed a bit preoccupied again. Bill’s mind seemed to be elsewhere more and more lately. Range tried not to dwell on it. A guy was entitled to an off day once in a while, even Bill Kendall.

  Range looked at his watch. He couldn’t stall any longer. He had to call Yelena Gregory, the KEY News president, and tell her that Eliza Blake would have to fill in for Bill. If Bill couldn’t make it, Range much preferred Eliza to that idiot from the Washington bureau, Pete Carlson. For some reason he couldn’t understand, Yelena was high on Carlson. She had agreed to a terrific contract for the guy, including the provision that Carlson was Bill’s first-choice replacement. Range was happy that there had been no time to fly Carlson up from Washington that evening.

  Range wondered if Eliza had seen the Mole story yet. If so, he hoped to God that it wouldn’t affect her performance tonight. What a lousy break! He remembered how hard they’d worked to keep Eliza’s hospitalization confidential. That was four years ago. Why was someone raking the whole bloody thing up now?

  Where the hell was Eliza? He wouldn’t need those damned Tums if she was sitting at the anchor desk going over the copy. He had a show to get on the air.

  This job was killing him.

  Chapter 3

  Judge Dennis Quinn stood in the express checkout at King’s, his cart containing cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce, poached salmon, roasted red potatoes and a large salad. Bad enough he didn’t have a woman to take care of the menial task of grocery shopping, he sure as hell wasn’t going to cook for himself, too.

  As he waited, he pulled a copy of The Mole from the display rack. He enjoyed reading about other people’s misery.

  If you could believe what was in The Mole, Eliza Blake, the beautiful network anchorwoman, was a big-time cocaine addict and had been forced, a few years back, to check in as a patient at the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey. The story spent a lot of time describing the various psychological problems and alcohol and drug addictions treated at the hospital. The article wound up by quoting an unnamed KEY News source who said, “The public depends on the mental stability of those entrusted with reporting the news,” and went on to question Eliza Blake’s ability to do her job.

  Dennis Quinn threw the paper into his cart. He would read the story to his mother later. She was such an Eliza Blake fan. He didn’t think she knew about this.

  He carefully counted out the money to pay for his order and carried his grocery bag out to the parking lot.

  “Hello, Judge Quinn.”

  Oh, no. It was Amber. Dennis cringed as he watched the smiling woman with the heavy thighs hurrying across the macadam toward him. Why did she persist in wearing those short skirts? Didn’t she know how gross it was to see her legs rubbing together?

  Of course he hadn’t thought her so gross every Tuesday night after the Westvale municipal court sessions. He’d been only too happy to get some of those chubby thighs. But that was two years ago when he’d just been a town judge, before he had moved on to the Bergen County Superior Court. Amber had been convenient, but she wasn’t classy enough for his larger aspirations.

  “How ya doin’, stranger? Long time no see.” Amber was grinning. Bad caps. God, she was chewing gum, too. The cow.

  “Hello, Amber. How nice to see you again.”

  “Haven’t you gotten my messages? You never call me anymore. A girl would think you didn’t care.” She looked up at him in a pathetic attempt at coyness.

  A girl would be thinking correctly, he thought. “Oh, you know how it is, Amber. I’m so busy trying to keep up with all my cases. The courts have such a backlog. I have no time for a social life anymore.”

  “I liked it better before.”

  “Well, it certainly was simpler then.”

  “I was wondering, could you use any help in your office?” Amber asked hopefully. “You always said what a good secretary I was.”

  I’d say anything to get what I wanted. “Unfortunately, Amb, there’s a hiring freeze on.” Seeing her mouth begin to turn downward, he hurried on. “I wish I could stay and talk but I have several briefs I have to get to tonight. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah, I know how it is.” Amber stood watching as he got into his black Lincoln Continental with the JUDGE decals on the license plates.

  Craning his neck, he preened before the rearview mirror as he drove off. Just twelve years out of law school, he was the youngest judge on the Superior Court bench. If you had the funds, anything was possible. The Superior Court was great, but he had bigger plans. He reminded himself he wanted to call Nate Heller again. It wasn’t too early to set up the next step.

  As he pulled into the driveway of his long, white ranch, he felt good. And then he remembered. Another payment to Bill Kendall was due.

  Chapter 4

  Eliza replaced the receiver in the cradle after Range’s call and wondered if he had seen the Mole article yet.

  Drug addiction! Cocaine! Dear God!

  She felt her heart pounding and her cheeks grow hot. This horrible story could ruin everything! Everything for which she had worked so hard. For herself, for Janie.

  Janie.

  Thank goodness Janie couldn’t read yet and was still young enough that her classmates wouldn’t be teasing and embarrassing her.

  You’ve got to get a grip, Eliza told herself. Everyone is going to be watching you for your reaction. Get a hold of yourself. Hold your head up. Do what you have to do to get through tonight’s broadcast. Take one thing at a time.

  She called home and asked Mrs. Twomey to stay with Janie for another two hours.

  “I know I’m already late, Mrs. Twomey. I’m sorry.”

  “Not to worry, Mrs. Blake. My little faerie and I are havin’ a grand time. She’s just finished her supper and I’m after pourin’ the Mr. Bubble into the tub.”

  Eliza smiled weakly to herself. “My little faerie.” Mrs. Twomey, born and raised in Ireland, was unaware of the connotation of the expression here. Eliza delighted in the woman’s affection for Janie.

  “Go on with ya,” the housekeeper went on. “Do what you have to and stop your worryin’.”

  Next, as usual, Eliza thought of John. Whenever anything of moment happened, she thought of John, wished she could still share it with him. She felt the loss, the persistent tug of missing him. She was almost used to it now, four years later. But just because you were used to something didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.

  She held the inside of her wrist to her nose and remembered one of the last nights in the hospital. John was dozing as she entered the room and she had watched him, loving him so. All the painful treatments had not worked. He was very thin and flushed with fever. Eliza could see his chest laboring slowly up and down under the thin cotton hospital blanket. She heard his wheezing breath.

  John opened his heavy eyes, and his gaunt, pained face cracked into a weak smile of pleasure as he saw her standing there. She straightened, smiled bravely back and went right to his bed, leaning down to kiss him. She felt the heat coming from his emaciated body as he held on to her. Please God, don’t take him from me. Not yet. Not ever.

  Then, in his rasping voice she heard him whisper, “Oh, you smell so good.”

  She knew she would never forget it. John had known he was near death. Yet, as sick as he was, he had taken pleasure in something as simple, as basic as her perfume.

  She would never wear another fragrance.

  Stop it! Stop replaying everything!

  Eliza rose determinedly from her desk, replacing the gold button earring she had snapped off to call Mrs. Twomey. She walked the few steps to the mirror on the pale gray office wall and looked into it. A thirty-four-year-old face gazed back. It had a look of honesty and intelligence, though most of the written critiques of Eliza Blake’s face had used words like attractive, pretty, engaging. The face that stared back was the face that greeted millions of viewers every morning on KEY to America.

  She looked into dark
blue eyes which Harry Granger, her morning co-anchor, said “never missed a trick.” Right now, the white parts were tinged ever so slightly with pink. She reached back and grabbed the small, ever-present bottle of Visine from the top of her desk, tilted her head back, and squeezed.

  She forced a smile she did not feel and gazed into the mirror. Her top teeth, the ones that showed, were white and straight. The ones that didn’t show were white and crooked. The orthodontist had never given her a retainer for the bottom ones. Nor had she ever asked for one, she admitted ruefully. As it was, she had only grudgingly and sporadically used the uncomfortable mouthpiece for the upper teeth. She thought of her parents, who hadn’t had that much money but did have plenty of problems of their own. She was grateful that they had found the funds for those teenage braces.

  Eliza lifted her chin, jutting it out in the direction of the mirror, and considered the thin scar, a vestige of an eleven-year-old girl’s too deep a dive into a cement-floored swimming pool. Luckily, the scar fell just beyond the camera’s watchful eye.

  She knew that she had been genetically fortunate in many aspects of her life. A noted cosmetic surgeon had once told her that people paid him thousands of dollars to make a small, straight nose like hers. The shiny brown hair, now resting freshly trimmed on her shoulders, was kissed with natural highlights, though no one around the jaded KEY News broadcast center believed it. At five foot seven, she was tall and thin, the baby pounds from Janie’s birth having come off with some concentrated effort.

  Yes, in the general scheme of things, she had been physically blessed. But as Eliza looked at the crow’s feet crinkling insistently at the corners of her eyes and the furrows that had become decidedly more pronounced at her brow line, she knew that the events of the last few years were taking their toll.

  Don’t start thinking about all that now, she told herself as her adrenaline started to pump.

  Chapter 5

  The KEY press information officer called. The New York Times wanted a statement from the president of the news division regarding the Mole report of Eliza Blake’s cocaine addiction.

  “Tell them it’s ridiculous,” snapped tired Yelena Gregory.

  What else could go wrong?

  Chapter 6

  In the six years Eliza Blake had been with KEY News in New York, the professional gods had certainly been with her. Hired away from the Providence affiliate, where she had anchored the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts, her first job at the network was general assignment reporting. Just a few months into her new position, the vicious winds of Hurricane Anthony had smashed into southern Florida. Mispredicted by the weather service, the malevolent storm had caught Floridians and the network news division unprepared. The end of August found most of the seasoned correspondents vacationing and news management hastily assigned Eliza to the story. She had been on the air around the clock, face wet, hair blowing, raincoat flapping furiously, many times shouting to be heard over the roaring wind. Her reporting had been authoritative and controlled, and yet Eliza had also managed to convey a human reaction to the enormity of what was happening as the hurricane devastated the homes and hopes of thousands of people. She, like too many others in South Florida, had huddled in a bathtub with a mattress over her head as the walls shivered and the roof of her motel began to collapse. Eliza talked herself through the horrific night, making spiritual bargains as the hurricane winds raged. When the senior correspondents arrived the next day to survey the destruction, the story had clearly stayed hers.

  Surveys showed that the audience liked what they saw. Executive Row had been impressed. Sensing star potential, KEY News president Yelena Gregory decreed that more of the stories likely to make air were to be assigned to Eliza Blake. Eliza appeared with increasing frequency and her audience popularity and identification ratings rose. The scores told KEY management that viewers recognized, liked and tended to believe Eliza Blake. When the female anchor of the morning show, KEY to America, departed for another network, Eliza got the job.

  That’s when the migraines had started. It had all happened within a year. The anchor job, the new baby, John’s death, checking herself into Carrier. Now, four years later, the ache of losing John had become so much a part of her life that some mornings she noticed that she almost forgot the pain.

  Any other time Eliza would have enjoyed filling in for Bill Kendall. Anchoring the KEY Evening Headlines was one thing, but filling Bill Kendall’s shoes, even if only once or twice, was heady stuff. But not tonight. Tonight she just wanted to get home.

  As her heels clicked down the long corridor from the elevator to the studio, her mind turned to Kendall. Recently, Bill had been arriving late quite often. It was the subject of much staff speculation and now Eliza was concerned, too.

  When KEY News wooed Eliza away from Providence, Yelena Gregory had suggested that Eliza spend some time observing the anchorman. Bill had been an amiable and charming tour guide of the network news operation. Eliza watched as he filled the morning with telephone calls, script reviews and narration recordings. Lunch varied, Bill explained, but more often than not, it was a notable meeting with some influential type at ‘21,’ San Pietro or the Four Seasons. He said he made it a point to be back in the news center by 2:45 to go over the copy for the 3:00 radio hourly. Kendall loved radio, he had gotten his start there. He never wanted to let the radio guys down.

  Another check with Jean, another consult with the executive producer and Kendall would start to go over the contents of that evening’s broadcast. Kendall took his title of managing editor seriously. Few things were more important to him than The KEY Evening Headlines with Bill Kendall.

  Thoughts of Bill Kendall were pushed from Eliza’s mind as she mounted the anchor desk platform and slipped into Kendall’s chair, sliding her shoulder bag out of sight under the desk. The atmosphere was charged in the studio. Each of the people allowed in at this time of day had a specific function for which they were well trained and well paid. The stage manager, the floor crew, the Teleprompter operator, the makeup woman and the directorial and editorial staffs hurrying back and forth knew well their individual and collective responsibilities and executed them precisely. It was the collective one, the total product, which was called The KEY Evening Headlines, from which some got a charge and others derived their entire identities. They worked in rarefied air.

  Range Bullock came out to the anchor desk from his glass-walled office which abutted the studio. Dubbed the Fishbowl by KEY staffers, the office was the nerve center of the broadcast’s operations. Producers and correspondents conferred with Bullock in his glass office throughout the day and all final decisions about the editorial content of each evening’s show were made there. Disgruntled employees had been known to gripe about the piranhas trawling the Fishbowl.

  The executive producer was all business. “The lead tonight is the typhoon in India. At this point there are an estimated three hundred thousand people dead and damages could run to a billion dollars. Not much by U.S. standards, the money, I mean, but the video is unreal and Roberts has a two-minute package. We’ll follow that with another minute-thirty from Snyder on the fouled-up relief effort. From there we go to commercial.

  “Next we do Washington, two pieces in that section, the president’s day and the Supreme Court.” The producer paused, studied the lineup he had planned and ran his free hand through his thick red hair. “The third section will feature the latest shuttle snafu and more dirty linen in the House of Windsor. Fourth section is two pieces on the candidates today, one on the Republicans, the other on the Democrats, and where they all stand after yesterday’s primary. We’ll wrap up with ‘Here’s Looking at You, America.’ McBride’s done a piece on the state of the American funeral industry that will make their toes curl.”

  Range Bullock looked over his bifocals and his jawline rippled as he bit down and swallowed. “Of course, all of this is in place until something changes. But you’re used to that, right?”

  Eliza knew th
e observation was made as much for the producer’s sake as it was for her own. She was surprised she was being called for the fourth time in six weeks to fill in for the unusually absent Bill Kendall. She also knew that Range Bullock did not enjoy last-minute scrambling to fill the anchor chair. It was unsettling for all concerned when the regular anchor was absent unexpectedly.

  She hoped that nothing was really wrong with Bill. She made a mental note to call him tomorrow and invite him to lunch. Maybe there was something she could do to help him. He had been so kind to her when she needed a friend. She also wanted to get his take on the Mole article. Bill had such a good sense of perspective.

  Looking at Range, she speculated again. Had Range seen the story? She couldn’t tell. His demeanor was brusque, but that was usual.

  “Right,” she answered.

  Bullock nodded and patted the pile of papers on the anchor desk. “Go get ’em,” he urged and he walked back to the Fishbowl.

  As she read over the copy, first silently and then out loud, Eliza noted the broadcast was packed full tonight. Of the half-hour show, eight minutes were always commercials. That left twenty-two minutes of air time. Tonight there would be almost nineteen minutes of packaged reports, leaving the anchor a grand total of three minutes in which to appear on camera. Eliza knew that Kendall got more than three minutes. Okay, okay, the inner voice told her. Just do your part right and be grateful for this opportunity.

  Yelena Gregory walked across the studio to the Fish-bowl, acknowledging Eliza with a casual wave. Had Yelena seen the story yet? If not, it would only be a matter of time until she did.

  Yelena wore her authority as she wore her fine dove-gray silk blouse bowed at her neck and the low-heeled black Ferragamos, with a quiet, understated dignity. There was nothing flashy about Yelena. She was a large woman and both her size and the expression on her solemn face left the impression that no one forced Yelena to do anything she didn’t want to do. She and Bullock watched the show together almost every evening.