Strangled - Brian McGrory [47]
“Possibly,” he said, “but —”
I cut him off and asked, “Walt, if I may call you Walt, what’s your viewership over there on the WBZ-TV morning show?”
Don’t ask me why I was this angry at this hour. Maybe because of the hour, though poor Walt Bedrock didn’t know I was trying to sleep 2,800 miles and three time zones away, and he never would. More likely it was my visceral disdain for reporters interviewing reporters, an increasingly common practice among the laziest denizens of my world.
“We are watched in a hundred and ten thousand households a morning.” He said this proudly.
I replied, “The Record prints five hundred and twenty thousand papers each day, with an average readership of 1.7 people per paper. Plus there’s however many hundreds of thousands of people who read the Record online, freeloaders that they are. Why don’t I just stick with my medium and you stick with yours?”
He hesitated yet again, and then said, “Because this is TV.”
Good answer. Perfect answer. Couldn’t have imagined a better one coming from a guy who undoubtedly sits in a studio for his entire three-hour workday, reads a script, and moves his hands and facial muscles exactly like the producers tell him to through an earpiece that’s never as well hidden as they think.
I said, “Walt, I’m going to do you a favor. We’ve never met, but I’ve got the kind of face that was born to be in newspapers. Trust me, you put me on the air and you’ll shrink to sixty thousand viewers that day, most of whom would have the last name of Flynn. And it’s not a particularly desirable demographic for advertisers. Thank you anyway.”
And I hung up. No sooner than I had sprawled out anew did the phone ring again.
“Jack Flynn here,” I said.
“Jack, you’re a superstar. You’re a real fucking superstar, but you probably know that already.”
“I do. Who’s calling?”
His voice, by the way, was inexplicably strong and nasally at the same time, like a football player addicted to Afrin.
“It’s Brett. Brett Faldo. Senior producer from the Today show. Meredith and Matt asked me to call you. They absolutely love your story in today’s paper. They want to get you on the air ASAP, as in this morning. We’re not even going to make you go into the remote studio. We’ll send a crew over to your place to make this easy on everybody.”
“Who are Meredith and Matt?”
He laughed his nasally, jocular little laugh, incredulous, as if I had asked who Christ was. He said, “Just give me an address. You’re a hero, and you’re going to make this a great show.”
I’m a hero. I’m a superstar. A killer emerges from a four-decade hibernation, or maybe a new killer comes along with a passion for history, decides to contact me with a couple of cryptic notes and the driver’s licenses of a pair of dead women, and that makes me, in the eyes of the broadcast-news media world, not merely a superstar but a hero as well.
I should have anticipated this, and I guess to a certain extent I probably did. But there’s a difference between anticipating something and preparing for it. I had no set answer, which may have been just as well, because that brought me to my default answer whenever a television show asked me on as a guest, which was, in a word, no. What I had said to Walt Bedrock about having a face meant for newspapers wasn’t entirely untrue — though maybe a little bit so.
I said, “Meredith and Matt, they’re on really early, right?”
“Every day, yes.” Proud of this. Very proud.
I said, “The problem is, I don’t get up that early.”
He gave me that same laugh. I’m betting he used to give Tom Brokaw that same laugh regardless of how bad the jokes may have been. Brian Williams, that’s probably a different story; he’s supposed to be legitimately funny, though I bet Brett, his nose constantly twitching for the next story or office politics vibration, can’t tell the difference.
“Like I said,” he said, his tone clicking ever so slightly from solicitous to demanding, “we’ll make this easy on everyone. Meredith and Matt really want this to happen. I’m not going to tell them it can’t. I’ll have a crew over to your place