‘He can’t do that. . . this is a hot break. Everybody in town’s been after Caldwell since he got indicted. And I’ve got him... exclusive.’
‘Hey, baby, you don’t have to convince me. You got to convince Tubby Slocum.’
By five-ten she had her show together and was ready to write the intro and close. She went up to the fifth floor and found Vicki, the floor manager, talking to a human mountain.
Tubby Slocum made even George look like a dwarf. He was six-four and weighed somewhere in the neighbourhood of three hundred and fifty pounds, a great deal of it resting dead centre.
His enormous belly sagged over his belt, his pants hung as full as an Arab tent from his global stomach, his neck swelled out over a shirt that had to be opened three buttons down to accommodate it. His thinning hair, combed in strands from one ear to the other, was always damp with sweat, and when he spoke, his voice, squeezing up through that enormous hulk, wheezed out, like a chipmunk in a Walt Disney movie.
Slocum had inherited his bulk with his job. He had always been ample, but he had become obese in the past four years. Those who disliked him attributed his five-year tenure as producer of both the six and eleven o clock news to the fact that he was a shameless sycophant t Raymond Pauley, the station manager. Fat or not, sycophant or not, he was still the toughest, hardest-driving and best news producer in Boston. Channel 6 had dominated both time slots since he took over. And as long as he stayed number one, Pauley didn’t give a damn how fat he was.
Eliza looked up at him like Hillary appraising Mount Everest. ‘Tubby, I’ve got a hot one,’ she said.
‘You always got a hot one, Lizzie. What is—’
‘It’s E-liza, Tubby.’
‘Right. So what’s so hot?’
‘I’ve got Jonathan Caldwell on tape. Five goddamn good minutes, Tubby...’
‘Your spot’s five minutes, kiddo,’ the big man said, walking laboriously toward the control room. ‘Not four fifty- nine or five-oh-one. Five minutes. Now, if you can run it without any intro and close — great.’
‘Listen to me, Tub. It’s really strong stuff. I’ve got him saying that the only way to do business with the Arabs is through bribery. I’ve got him admitting to several flagrant violations of the Fed banking laws. He says he’s a victim of the times and he says he expects to go to jail and that all the banks do the same thing and the Federal Reserve people are just making an example of him.’
‘Sounds like dynamite. You’ve got five minutes.’
‘Dammit, Tubby...’
‘Hey, you got problems? I got a lot more, okay. I got three teenagers dead out in Lynn in a head—on, a former Secretary of State lost at sea on his sailboat, a Harvard doctor who thinks he can cure cancer with a mixture of prune juice and asparagus, and I haven’t even started on what’s going on outside Boston. You got five minutes, Eliza. Five.’ He held up five chubby fingers and vanished into the control room.
She called the editing room.
‘Well?’ Eddie asked.
‘That son of a bitch.’
‘Four minutes on tape, right?’
‘Yeah, I guess. I need at least thirty seconds to get in and thirty to get out of the interview.’
‘No problem, lady. We got two thirty-second options we can pull out.’
‘I hate to lose that stuff — where he’s talking about being a victim of the times — but everything else is so good.’
‘Go write your stuff; it’s twenty of. I’ll edit the tape and get it on Max.’ Max was the nickname given to the computer that controlled all the tape feeds on a program.
‘Thanks.’
She went back to her office and started writing.
Ten minutes. There was never enough time. She scribbled out a first draft, threw it away, and started pecking out her intro and close on the typewriter.
The phone rang. It was the monitor typist. She needed copy.
‘Two minutes,’ Liza barked and hung up.
She went back to the typewriter and finished the second draft.
The phone rang again. She snatched it up and said, ‘On the way,’ pulled the sheet out of the typewriter and ran down the hail to the crib setter.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
The gal who set the type for the monitor was never in a hurry. ‘It’s okay, you got the tag story, just before the editorial. I got plenty of time.’
As Liza was leaving the room, a secretary called to her, ‘Phone call, Liza. It’s urgent.’
‘Not now, Sally, it’s two minutes to six. I can’t take it, get a number, please.’
‘I think you’ll want to take this one. . . it’s Mr Howe. Charles Gordon Howe, two minutes before air time. She went into Sally’s office and picked it up. ‘Hello?’ ‘Miz Gunn, this is Charles Gordon Howe.’
‘Mr Howe, it’s less than a minute to air time and I’ve got a very hot story working and I really don’t have time right now to-,
