Savant

hokey Dave Garroway-era clocks stayed.

Free-form seating and more silver and bronze sculptures flanked the artwork at the receptionist's desk. Glass walls were at either end of the long entrance area, and a visitor could see Production Studio C to the right, the back of which contained an impressive library, and the announcer engineer area, and to the left were the double-paned hallways that separated Broadcast Studio A and Master Control from the civilians.

Out front, it was all spacious and artsy-fartsy, but Trask no longer worked out here. He walked around the lounges and stopped at Production where he saw a news reader working at the mike. He cracked the door to Engineering.

'Is he doing anything I can't interrupt?'

'Naw,' the engineer grunted.

'Thanks,' Trask said. He went in to where the man was getting ready to record. 'Hi.'

'Hello.'

''Scuse me. Hope I'm not screwing you up?'

'Uh-uh. Watcha need? I'll be done in five minutes.'

'No.' I don't need in. I was listening on the way in. It's Lee-ohn. The city in France?'

'Huh?'

'You pronounced it like lion in a zoo—it's Lee-ohn.' He gave the word its French pronunciation, the second syllable nasal and thrown away.

'Yeah, so?' The guy shrugged and opened his eyes wider, obviously pissed off.

'Hey—not meant as a put-down. I just thought you'd want to know.' He turned to leave, feeling like an idiot.

'Do you say 'he drives a Le Sabre'?'

'Yeah.' Trask smiled.

'Why don't you say he drives a Luh-sob-ruh? That's the way it's pronounced in French.'

'Yeah, but—'

'Do you say Pah-rrryeeee?' He exaggerated the French pronunciation. 'Nobody would know what the hell you were saying. Are we in France? Nooo. We're in fucking A-mare-ee- kuh. Okay? That's why we don't use French on the fucking airsville.' The man smiled but clearly he was torqued off.

'I gotcha.' Trask wanted to say 'Yes, but,' and explain the logic, but he knew what this guy was like. His name was Michael Melody—his real name—and he was an asshole. 'I didn't think. Stupid!' He hit his head with the flat of his hand.

'You got a Band-Aid hanging from your face,' the news reader told him as he eased out the door, 'by the way.'

'Thanks,' he said, noticing his goofy reflection and peeling the small strip off and wadding it up in his fingers. He was glad that when he'd smacked his head in that gesture he hadn't given himself a headache again.

Jesus.

Trask walked down the hall past Production Studio B and Engineering, the Talent Lounge where the lesser air people hung out or had small cubicles, past Kidder's and Flynn's suites, and into the guts of 'Inside America.' Three offices, of which the largest was the producer's, were located across from the Programming Department's bathroom. Visitors to the P.D.'s office, the controller, bookkeeping people, copy chief and copywriter, purchasing assistant, and news readers all shared this one bathroom. The door was directly across from Trask's office. He was wedged in between the 'Jew and Jewess,' as Sean Flynn called them. (Flynn called the triumvirate 'two Jews and a snooze.') Babaloo Metzger, whom he didn't trust, and Barb Rose, nee Barbra Rozitsky, his sworn enemy, were on either side of him, and all day long people went to the crapper across from his office.

He had one hour before the production meeting. They were set for tonight and tomorrow night. They need a guest, a topic, a theme. Flynn was antsy.

He looked at his bulletin board, skimmed through his files, eyeballed notes. Somewhere, there was a clipping in this stack of garbage—yes! There! The words 'Black Dahlia' leaped out at him. A highly publicized 1947 murder case. He had a slant. He'd interviewed a guy with LAPD Homicide and had some notes which he began to shape for the production meeting. A team of volunteers had been called to the sight of this ancient torture/mutilation/slaying, because a woman had said she had memories of her father 'killing women.' They were going to dig. They didn't find anything. But Trask thought he could get some good stuff out of the person with whom the woman's therapy sessions had been conducted.

Four P.M.: Metzger knocked at his door, rubbing the indentations made by his glasses.

'Let's go.'

'Okay.' Trask got up and gathered his notes. They waited for Barb Rose to join them. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman with good features, a wide mouth, and carefully coiffed hair. She could have been any age from twenty to forty—one of those faces. She dressed upscale, and the largest pair of earrings Trask had ever seen on a white woman dangled from her ears.

'Hi,' she said to both men. 'You look like you cut yourself.'

'Uh-huh,' Trask said.

'Umm.' Her tone said it all. Too bad it wasn't lower and more severe. Why did they compete so fiercely? 'Had any coffee yet?'

'No. Been too busy.' God! He wondered if she was actually going to be nice and get him a cup of coffee.

'You look like you need a cup,' she said, ever the comic. They made their way into the Programming Conference Room, a somber place about the size of a railroad car, with a dozen or so chairs scattered around two scarred wooden tables placed end to end. Downstairs, the Sales Conference Room looked like the meeting space of a major bank. Upstairs, the conference room resembled the kind of place the border police bring people suspected of drug smuggling.

The three of them took seats as far apart from each other as possible, and waited for Flynn. He soon came, accompanied by the Mystery Tramp, which is what they called Jerri Laymon, who brought his coffee and various papers. She was a sultry, mysterious woman who was quite pretty but who wore dark glasses most of the time, and at night. Everybody thought Sean Flynn was putting the pork to her. Trask and Flynn thought Babaloo was porking Barb Rose. Nobody thought Trask was doing much of anything, except maybe with himself.

Flynn, handsome, gray and silver-headed, with a dark black mustache, his silk tie askew, read quietly, then —not looking up—said, 'Who's got something for the hole?'

'I do,' Barb Rose said, and everybody looked at her. 'Remember the so-called Black Dahlia murder?'

For ten minutes Barb Rose did a presentation based on Trask's notes. There was no way she could have come up with all the material independently, since some of the stuff had been gleaned from a phoner Trask did with the West Coast homicide dick. She had to have had a bug in his office or a tap on his phone. Or somebody else did and she had access to the tape.

'I don't think it's strong enough, even with the tie-in to the local case and the therapist. I do like the therapist interview, and that's strong material on the business about regressing a patient. Let's go at it from a 'Scam or Science' angle, you know?' Flynn pitched his voice down a register. 'Psychiatry and hypnosis, how much of it is real, how much is pure hogwash? Something along those lines. Get that old Bridey Murphy thing and get me the background on how it was brought forth, later proven a hoax and so on.' He looked at Trask, who was itching to say something.

'What? You got something?' Sean Flynn asked.

'Yeah. What you just heard.' He slid all his notes across the table and glanced at Barb Rose, whose face was a mask. She had a pair, he'd give her that.

'Nu?' Flynn glanced at a couple of the pages.

'So doesn't this strike you as a tad odd? We've got the identical shit?'

'Okay,' Flynn said with a smile. 'So?'

Trask just stared at him and shrugged.

'What's wrong?' Barb asked innocently. 'Did he come up with similar stuff?'

'Yeah,' Flynn said. 'Coincidences happen. What can I say. Let's get on with it. Here's the way I think the show