Dead File (12 page)
At home, now, she was devouring the report. Trying to read the subtext, trying to find things that weren’t actually there in print. Like a definitive cause of death. Like what it was, exactly, that
caused
Gillian Rose’s heart to stop. Nothing in the report cleared up that question.
As Charlie had told her, the thirty-two-page report was not yet signed and dated by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office deputy medical examiner who was working on the autopsy, but all organs had been weighed, measured, and examined, their condition noted, and all pertinent descriptions, numbers, and status positions were documented. The cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest, and the time of death given a range of from noon to 1:30 P.M. on Monday, December 16. Maxi remembered that day well. She assumed that window was settled on because Gillian would have been seen alive by colleagues at least up until noon, and her body was discovered by Sandie Schaeffer when she got back to the office after lunch and called the paramedics, who had arrived and pronounced Gillian Rose dead at around 1:30 P.M.
Gillian’s personal statistics were listed. Gender: female; height: 5 ’ 7½”; weight: 124 lbs., color of hair: dk. brn; color of eyes: blue.
Blue.
No surprise, really; everybody knew Gillian’s eyes were blue. Blue as the October sky, as one writer had poetically reported in
People
magazine. But when Maxi saw her body on the day she died, the body lying on the carpet next to her desk in her penthouse office, Gillian’s eyes were partly open, and they were brown. Deep, dark, dusky, unnatural brown. Was Maxi imagining that? Was it the lighting? She didn’t think so. Her journalist-trained powers of observation would never have failed her to that extent. Would they?
She put down the autopsy report. It contained more questions for her than answers.
W
hoa! You look terrific, Maxi. Hot date?”
Tuesday morning in the newsroom. Wendy was already at her computer terminal and Maxi had just come in, wearing a short, silky, printed skirt with a soft sweater in shades of what her grandmother used to call ashes of roses. She was hefting three shopping bags full of groceries.
“Yup. Dinner with Richard Winningham.”
“Oh, great! I heard he was coming home. What’s up with him?”
“Capra pulled him out of Pakistan and he’s sending him to Israel.”
“By way of
Los Angeles?
”
“He’s giving him R and R for a few days to bond with his house plants.”
“Generous. I’m amazed Capra didn’t just shuttle him across the Persian Gulf, save the airfare.”
“Well, of course that’s what he
wanted
to do. I talked to Richard this morning. He said he begged Capra for some home time.”
“How’d he get it? Newsies don’t do Christmas.”
“Oh, he knew asking Capra, the Italian Scrooge, if he could come home for Christmas wouldn’t fly. He told him he needed to go through his mail, take care of bills, get his life up to speed. This, Pete could understand—he gave the guy seven whole days.”
“Big heart, our boss.”
“Richard is actually grateful. He’ll leave here on Friday and stop off in New York to spend part of the holidays with his mom. Today he was planning to just zonk out. Says he hasn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep a night since he left here. But he’s coming in for our party after the Six.”
“Cool,” Wendy said, beaming, still typing. “We’ll entertain him royally. At least it’ll
seem
royal to him after Afghanistan and Pakistan. What’d you bring?”
Maxi rummaged through the shopping bags. “Totally royal stuff. Chips, dips, water crackers and two different cheeses, dippable veggies, peanut-butter pretzels, napkins, plastic glasses with actual stems like you ordered, and six bottles of a nice Pinot Grigio and an okay Cabernet. And some fabulous homemade chocolate-chip cookies from Bristol Farms.”
“Fancy,” Wendy said approvingly.
“Hey, it isn’t every day that we snag a literary agent.”
“Or a drop-in from our man in the Middle East.”
“And it’s Christmas Eve,” Maxi added, giving Wendy a peek at a few wrapped presents in one of her shopping bags. Holidays, even major ones, went largely ignored in the television news business, because whatever the day, the news went on the air as usual and the work had to get done as usual.
Although the commercially decorated newsroom Christmas tree, placed behind the live set to be seen on air, was strictly for show to viewers, rebel Channel Six newsies did their own decorating when the bosses weren’t looking. With typical newsroom gallows humor, they impaled particularly grisly wire stories on the Christmas tree’s branches: the twin nurses whose bludgeoned torsos were found in separate freezers in a meatpacking locker in Chicago; the skeletal remains of a priest who’d evidently hung himself deep in the catacombs of a Boston cathedral; the man in Macon, Georgia, who slipped while high up in a tree on his property and cut off his own head with his chain saw. Merry Christmas. Management types would routinely strip the wire stories off the Christmas tree when they saw them, but they never put out memos to cease and desist. Most of them were at one time rank-and-file themselves, and it was tradition.
“I’m going to stow this stuff,” Maxi said, and she set off for her office with the shopping bags.
The light on Maxi’s phone was blinking. She dropped the munchies, paper, and plastic goods on top of a file cabinet and put the perishables in her small fridge. Then she sat at her desk and listened to her messages.
There were eleven of them. The first one was intriguing, from Goodman Penthe in Baltimore.
She dialed the return number; got an operator who put her through to Penthe’s assistant. “Yes, Ms. Poole,” the woman said, “Mr. Penthe will be on the coast the week after Christmas, and he wants to meet with you.”
“And the purpose of this meeting would be … ?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the assistant, as if astounded that anyone on the planet wouldn’t jump to meet with the important Mr. Goodman Penthe, no questions asked.
“Would you find out and call me back?” Maxi asked sweetly.
“Umm … okay. Meantime, can you give me some dates and times of your availability?” The woman was evidently not used to having Mr. Penthe put on hold.
“Well, there’s no point, is there, if we don’t in fact intend to meet. So call me back, tell me what this is about, and we’ll go from there. Thank you,” Maxi said, and hung up. Arrogance on any level got her back up.
She pressed the
message
button on her phone again to continue listening to her unplayed messages. Two were potential news stories. Then a callback from Jenny Braxton, the CHP officer who had given her the traffic ticket last week; Maxi had connected with her and was shooting a profile on the spunky, ash-blond “Chippie.” Turned out Braxton had had one of those Is-this-all-there-is? epiphanies one day while she was bagging groceries at Gelson’s, so she took all the courses, passed all the tests, and, at twenty-four years old, she was now jockeying the freeways on a big, brawny white-and-black BMW motorcycle displaying the colored star seals of the California Highway Patrol.
The next message was from Maxi’s mom in New York reminding her to call her aunt Beth in Boston tomorrow, Christmas Day. Then a viewer from Arcadia wishing her happy holidays. Then…
Maxi’s heart jolted. The next message was just one short, cryptic line, a raspy, whispered threat from an anonymous voice: “If you want to stay healthy, newsbitch, don’t try pumping Sandie Schaeffer for information again.”
She pressed the
REPEAT
button to replay the message. Was the voice male or female? She couldn’t tell.
Pressing the button for her second line, Maxi punched in Pete Capra’s number. He picked up, harried as usual.
“Capra.”
“Pete—I need you to come over to my office right away.”
She hung up before he could argue with her. Then she listened to the message again. During its transmission, the LCD readout on the phone read
PRIVATE CALLER
. That meant the caller either had an ID blocking feature or had punched star-67 before dialing her number. Maxi wasn’t hard to find. The station was listed, and operators routinely put callers through to the people who worked there.
In less than a minute Capra was at her door.
“What?” he barked, with his typical economy mixed with annoyance.
Maxi beckoned him inside and played the message for him. Then she told him about her short sojourn with Sandie Schaeffer in the ICU at Cedars on Sunday morning. Capra listened to her account of the hospital visit without saying anything, then he hit the REPEAT button on her phone.
“ ‘Private caller,’ ” he muttered, looking at the readout. “No way to put a police trace on it.” Then, “Who would know that you tried to talk to Sandie Schaeffer in her hospital room?”
“That nurse I told you about. Janelle Adams.”
“And who would she have told?”
“Somebody at the nurses’ station on the floor—whoever had me thrown out.”
“Did anyone else see you?”
“Sure. Lots of people. It’s a busy place.” That was no help, she knew. Maxi Poole was highly recognizable throughout the Channel Six coverage area, which stretched from Santa Barbara down to the Mexican border.
“Get a tech to lift the message and give me the tape,” Capra said. “I’ll send it over to Henders.” Detective Skip Henders was one of Capra’s contacts and buddies at the Burbank PD.
“Thanks, boss,” Maxi said. It was all they could do.
Capra left her office. Maxi thought about his question: Who else knew? More important, who would care? Obviously, anyone who knew something about the attack on Sandie Schaeffer. The answer to that could be the key to an attempted murder.
The implication set in. Had somebody besides the nurses seen her in Sandie’s room in the ICU? And if so, what would that somebody have been doing there? The biggest question, of course: Was Sandie Schaeffer in danger?
And where did Maxi Poole figure in this?
Watch your back,
she told herself.
She picked up the phone and called for a technician.
A
ttention! Merry Christmas, everybody! We’ve got wine! We’ve got goodies!” Maxi called out over the cacophony in the newsroom. The clarion call for food and booze was never ignored in this crowd. It was 6:45 P.M.; the early block was off the air. Gone to Mars, as the newsies liked to put it. And the party was on.
Staffers were buttoning up after the Six O’clock News and drifting over to the area where Maxi and Wendy were setting out snacks. Wendy already had a glass of white wine in her hand as she filled a plate with crackers and wedges of Cheddar and Brie.
Sunday Trent, the station’s new, very young, very blond, very eager intern, came over and asked what she could do to help.
“Thanks, Sunday,” Maxi said.
“How did you get the name Sunday?” Wendy tossed out.
“I was born on Sunday, and Sunday is my mom’s favorite day of the week. But now she calls me Sunny.”
Sunday Trent had just recently stepped nimbly onto the north side of twenty. She was one of the most delectable young beauties the sweaty Channel Six news troops had ever seen. A communications student at USC, she’d started her Channel Six internship a week ago. And when Sunday walked across the newsroom, many pairs of eyes followed her. Eyes that lusted, almost to a man. Some women, too.
“What do you like to be called?” Wendy asked, pouring a bag of potato chips into a bowl.
“Sunday. Because it’s different, don’t you think? Because
I’m
different.”
“You are definitely different,” Wendy acknowledged. “Why don’t you put out these pretzels and corn chips.”
Wendy Harris was known in the business for mentoring young people, even those from other stations. She would sit them beside her for hours and explain everything she was doing as she produced a newscast. And if they showed promise, she would use her wide contacts to help them get entry-level jobs.
Sunday Trent had potential, Wendy thought. She wasn’t a strong writer, but she was smart, she was willing to work, hungry to learn, she stayed all hours, and she was devastatingly lovely. Nobody made it to reporter or anchor on looks alone, although being pleasing to the eye didn’t hurt, and Sunday Trent was surely that. Wendy had been trying to help her with her newswriting, which was bedrock basic to the job.
Now Sunday was talking to Rob Reordan. Maxi and Wendy overheard her asking if she could follow him through a typical day, see how an important anchor prepares. They could see Rob’s face lighting up. Yes, this girl was a mover.
Maxi called for attention again. “We have some great news,” she announced to her colleagues. “Wendy has just signed with a big-time book agent, and
Don’t Be Dumpy
is gonna fly!”
A cheer went up; glasses tipped toward Wendy. Questions were tossed her way. Who’s the literary agent? From here or New York? How did you find him? What, it’s a woman? What happens now? What kind of advance do you think she’ll get you? Is there a timetable? And on and on. Most journalists think they have a book in them.
When the initial hubbub died down, Sunday Trent came over to Wendy. “I’d like to help you with the book,” she said.
“Help me how?” Wendy asked as Maxi looked on.
“Oh, I know I can’t write like you two, but I could do leg-work. Research. Line up interviews. Proof your pages, Wendy. I’ll do it on my own time. I’d like to.”
Maxi and Wendy exchanged skeptical glances. Why would a young beauty like Sunday Trent, who carried a full load of courses at USC and who worked in the newsroom two nights a week as well as on weekends, want to take on anything more? Didn’t she have a boyfriend? A life?
“I couldn’t pay you,” Wendy said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t be doing it for money.”
“For what, then?”
“For the experience. I think it’d be terrific to work on a book. And I could use it on my résumé.”
“Well, if you mean it, maybe I actually
could
use some help. My new agent wants the changes yesterday. The sooner she gets them, she said, the sooner she can bring the book to market.”