A Killing Spring (28 page)

“Then where is she?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

As I hung up, I felt the first stirrings of panic. I tried to tell myself I was overreacting. Rapti had talked to Jill that morning, and she’d been all right then. Obviously, there’d just been some sort of misunderstanding. Nonetheless, as I left the terminal, I was uneasy.

I was so preoccupied that I walked right by Ed Mariani. He called after me, and when I turned, I saw that he was carrying an overnight bag and was dressed for travel. I also saw that I’d hurt him.

“If you’d rather just keep on going, you can forget you saw me,” he said. “But I did want you to know how pleased I was to hear your voice on the message-minder last night. I’m glad you liked our gift.”

“I don’t want to forget I saw you, Ed,” I said. “It’s just that I have a lot on my mind.”

He put down his bag and came over to me. “Is something wrong?”

“I hope not,” I said. “But there are some things I’d like to talk to you about. Do you have time for a drink before your plane?”

Ed shook his head. “As usual, I’ve left arriving at the airport till almost the last moment. But if it’s an emergency, I can change my plans.”

His generosity brought tears to my eyes. “Ed, I’m sorry if I’ve been cool to you lately.”

I could see the relief on his face. “Don’t give it a second thought. I know I can be a bit overwhelming in close quarters.”

“It wasn’t that. It had to do with Tom Kelsoe.”

Ed’s eyes were wary. “What about him?”

“I saw you with him in the Faculty Club on Tuesday. It was just after I’d told you that I suspected him of abusing Jill.”

“And you thought I was warning him about your suspicions.”

“Ed, what were you talking to him about?”

Ed picked up his bag. “I don’t want to lie to you,” he said.

“Then tell me the truth. I’m going around in circles here. First Reed, then Kellee, now Jill …”

He took a step towards me. “Jill! Nothing’s happened to her, has it?”

“No, she’s fine. It’s just that Tom Kelsoe is the man in her life, and suddenly everything about Tom scares me.”

“It should,” Ed said quietly. “Tom Kelsoe is a violent man. That’s what I was talking to him about at the Faculty Club when you saw us. After what you’d told me, I had to make certain that Jill really had been mugged.”

At first, the implication of what he’d said didn’t hit me. When it did, my knees turned to water. “What did Tom say?”

“He was very forthcoming. He gave me all the details of the mugging. Then he told me to call Jill and ask her myself.”

“And you did?”

Ed nodded. “She gave me the same account, thanked me for my concern, and told me, very politely, to mind my own business.”

“And that was the end of it?”

“Yes.” Ed looked at his watch. “Joanne, I really do have to get in there. My flight is boarding.”

I stepped in front of him. “Ed, what made you think Tom Kelsoe was capable of violence?”

I could see he wanted to bolt, but he stayed his ground. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “I guess the confessional moment has come. As it inevitably does.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, here it is. Last year, Barry and I were having troubles: my mid-life crisis, I guess. I started cruising again, looking for younger men.” Ed looked straight into my eyes. “I’m deeply ashamed of what I did, Joanne. It was stupid and dangerous and a terrible betrayal of Barry. Of course, this being Regina, my sin did not go undetected. Nationtv was doing an investigation of male prostitution in the downtown area, and I, apparently, stumbled into camera range. When Jill saw the tape, she killed it; she also phoned me and told me …” He winced at the memory. “She told me that I had a good career at the university, and a great relationship with Barry, and I ‘should smarten the fuck up.’ ”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t know if you’ve ever been close to someone who’s decided to self-destruct, but our instincts to be obtuse are quite breathtaking.”

“So you kept on.”

“Yes, I kept on, and this time it was Tom Kelsoe who saw me on Rose Street, cruising.” Ed chewed his lower lip. “Tom didn’t have Jill’s scruples about protecting me from myself.”

“And that’s why you withdrew your name from the competition for head of the J school.”

“And why I shook that bastard’s hand the night of his book launch. I couldn’t risk him telling Barry.”

I was confused. “Ed, I’m missing something here. What’s the connection between Tom blackmailing you and what
you said about him being violent. Did he threaten you physically?”

Ed shook his head. “No. That’s not where he gets his pleasure. Jo, during my walk on the wild side last year, I heard a few things, too. Tom Kelsoe is pretty well known to the prostitutes downtown.”

“Male prostitutes?”

Ed smiled sadly. “No, at least we’ve been spared Tom Kelsoe. As they say on ‘Seinfeld,’ he doesn’t play for our team. Tom’s a red-blooded heterosexual, but I don’t think that gives women much to celebrate. Rumour has it that he’s into some pretty brutal sex.”

My mind was racing, but I had to acknowledge Ed’s trust. “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

“You were the easy one, Jo. In two hours, Barry’s going to meet me at the Minneapolis airport. We’ve got tickets for
Turandot
. It’s an anniversary celebration. We’ve been together eight years today. I hope after I tell him, we’ll still have something to celebrate.”

I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “You will,” I said.

I watched as Ed Mariani plodded heavily towards the terminal. When he reached the door, he turned back. “I’ll call you from Minneapolis,” he said. “In the meantime, tell Jill to be careful.”

“I will,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled up in front of Jill’s apartment on Robinson Street. There was a moving van parked outside, and as I ran up the front steps I almost collided with a burly young man who was carrying out a love seat. “Hope you get there,” he yelled after me as I pushed past him and entered the building.

By the time I got to Jill’s apartment on the third floor, the adrenaline was pumping. I was prepared, if necessary, to
smash the door in, but Jill surprised me by answering after my first knock. She was wearing a jacket and dark glasses, and she’d tied a scarf around her head. She’d covered as much of herself as she could, but I could still see the bruises. Without a word, I reached over and lifted her dark glasses. One of her eyes was almost swollen shut, and the bruise under the other one was fresh. But there were other marks too: bruises that had faded and cuts that were healing.

“How long has Tom been beating you up, Jill?” I said.

Her voice was surprisingly strong. “Too long,” she said. “But it’s over. You’ll notice that I’m dressed and on my way out.”

“Are you going to the police?”

“Eventually,” she said. “But first, I’ve got a television program to produce.” She looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes to air.”

I put my arm around her shoulder. “You’ll make it,” I said. “You always do.”

Tom Kelsoe had taken Jill’s car, so we drove over to Nationtv in the Volvo. When I saw the pain on Jill’s face as she climbed into the passenger seat, I was filled with rage. But anger had to wait. During the ten-minute drive to the studio, I told Jill everything. She listened in silence, but near the end of my account, when we stopped for a light, she pulled the cellular phone out of her briefcase and made a call.

“Rapti,” she said. “It’s me. I’m fine. Yes, Jo did find me. We haven’t got much time, so you’re going to have to take this one on faith. I want you to tell Sam and Glayne that we’re changing the lead story tonight to a discussion of journalistic ethics. They’re both pretty quick on the uptake, so they’ll be okay with the change.”

Jill paused. Rapti had asked her the obvious question. When she answered, Jill’s voice was steely. “No,” she said, “Tom isn’t to know anything about this till we’re on the air. You’ll have to fill Toronto in on the change of focus, and you’ll have to fax Cam a new intro: something about how journalists who use composite characters in their stories
are violating the audience’s trust. You’d better define what we mean by ‘composite characters.’ Nothing too technical – just something like ‘composite characters are what you get when some journalist who doesn’t know his dick from a dildo rolls three or four people together and presents the new creation as a living, breathing human being.’ Throw in the Janet Cooke case. You remember that one from J school, don’t you?”

As soon as Jill mentioned Janet Cooke’s name, another piece in the puzzle fell into place. An article about the Janet Cooke case had been on Kellee Savage’s bookshelf in Indian Head. Cooke was a young journalist who had worked for the Washington
Post
in 1981. She won a Pulitzer for a story about child heroin addiction, but had to give the prize back when her paper learned that Jimmy, the eight-year-old addict Cooke had written about with such passion, didn’t exist. The story must have had a particular resonance for Kellee after she discovered that Karen Keewatin, the heartbreakingly determined hooker and mother in
Getting Even
, didn’t exist, and that, like Janet Cooke, Tom Kelsoe had used the lives and stories of a handful of people to create a character who would tear at the reader’s heartstrings and advance his journalistic career.

That morning, when Bernice Jacobs began leafing through my copy of
Getting Even
, it hadn’t taken her long to figure out that she was holding concrete proof that the story Kellee Savage had been putting together when she died was true. The tragedy of Bernice’s friend, Audrey Nighttraveller, a woman who’d been so severely beaten by a john that she was incapable of caring for herself, had simply been material for Tom Kelsoe. He had used Audrey’s life and the life of her sons as he had used the lives of countless unknown women and their families to create a book that would enhance his
reputation. What he had done was, in Bernice Jacobs’s words, “worse than the worst thing the worst bloodsucker of a pimp ever did to any of us.”

And Kellee Savage was going to expose him. I thought of the Post-it notes in the journals stacked on the shelf in the barricaded office in Indian Head. Each one of them had signalled an article on a reporter’s use of a composite character. Dogged to the end, Kellee Savage had been preparing the foundations for her story. Now it was up to Jill and me.

It was Saturday, so I didn’t have any problem finding a parking place outside Nationtv. Kellee’s graduation portrait was in its Safeway bag on the dashboard. After I’d helped Jill unsnap her seatbelt, I handed the picture to her. “This is Kellee Savage, the student who discovered what Tom did,” I said.

Jill took the picture from me. “How old was she?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Let’s take this with us,” she said. “I want him to see it.”

Jill shook me off when I offered to help her get out of the car. She said she could do it on her own, but as she began her methodical, agony-filled ascent of the stairs outside Nationtv, I had to look away. I had watched her bound up those steps a hundred times; she had always seemed invincible.

Nationtv was deserted. Jill used her security card to get us in, and we didn’t see a soul as we headed across the cavernous lobby. When we got to the elevator, Jill checked her watch and turned to me. “We have five minutes,” she said. “I’m going to go to the control room. You’d better stay out of the way till we’re on the air.”

“But you
are
going to call the police, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am, but not until every viewer who tunes in tonight has a chance to watch that bastard twist in the wind. Jo, if we hand Tom over to the police right now, the story
will be page one here, but I have to make sure that what he did ends up on the front page of every newspaper in this country. I owe it to Reed, and I owe it to Kellee Savage.”

“I’ll wait in the green room,” I said. “I can watch the show from the monitor in there.”

“When it looks like the time’s right, come into the studio,” Jill said. “If you sit on that riser behind the cameras, he’ll have to look at you. Be sure to bring the picture.” She ran her fingers through her hair. It was a gesture she often made when she was on edge, but this time, as she touched the back of her skull, she winced. “Sonofabitch,” she said softly.

I put my arm around her shoulder. “When the show’s over, let’s find ourselves a bottle of Glenfiddich and crawl in.”

Jill gave me a grim smile. “Promises, promises.” She pushed the elevator button, and we stepped in. “Let’s go,” she said. “It’s showtime.”

At some point within the past twenty-four hours, there had been a birthday party in the green room. Soggy paper plates, dirty coffee cups, and used plastic wine glasses littered the end tables and window sills, and on the coffee table in the middle of the room a big cardboard box leaked crumbs from the remains of a bakery birthday cake. I removed a plate full of half-eaten angelfood from the chair nearest the monitor and sat down.

The screen was already picking up images of the members of the political panel, taking their places, smoothing their clothes, adjusting their earpieces. Tonight, Glayne and Sam were both in Ottawa. Behind them I could see the shot of the Peace Tower Nationtv always used for its Ottawa segments. Usually, in the minutes leading up to airtime, there was laughter and nervous kibitzing, but tonight Glayne and Sam
were all business. They might not have known exactly what was coming, but their tense silence was evidence that they foresaw trouble.

When Tom Kelsoe’s face appeared on the screen, my pulse quickened. His microphone was turned on, and I could hear him chewing out the young woman who’d attached it to his jacket. She’d apparently caught the leather in the mike clip and he was berating her for her carelessness. The second hand of the clock on the wall behind the monitor was sweeping; in sixty seconds, the state of his leather jacket would be the least of Tom’s worries. The young woman disappeared from the shot. Tom settled in his chair, caught his likeness in one of the monitors, and assumed his public face. “Canada Tonight” was on the air.