I hadn’t expected life at work to be pleasant after kicking out anchorman Ted, but it seemed he’d been busy over the weekend while I’d been losing my dog.
For one thing, when I entered the studio Undead Ted the Splitting Toad was canoodling with Sheena Coleman by the blue screen. For another, the news director, Fred Fogelmann, called me into his tiny windowless office for a little two-person conference.
“Sit down, Delilah. What’s the matter?” He must have just noticed my maroon eye-circles (a problem with tissue-thin pale skin), so this conference was about something else. “You look like hell.”
I tried to dredge up a patina of perky. Looking bad was a mortal sin in the TV biz.
He rolled right on before I could defend myself and my raccoon eyes. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
That was even worse news, but I still couldn’t gather any words or gestures to fight my way into a good mood.
“Er, there’re some changes in the hopper.” Fred was formerly a newspaper City Editor and he still talked like someone with a dwindling pint of rotgut whiskey in his bottom desk drawer.
“Ted’s eager to get out on the streets.” I bet. “To use his reporter skills again.” Again? Really? As if he’d ever had them. “You’ve done a great job with the ritual crimes beat, but he’ll be taking that over. And Sheena wants some street cred too. She’ll be doing that ‘pornanormal’ spot you thought up. Fresh face, you know.”
“You mean ‘blond and anorexic’,” I said, finally peeved enough to growl a little.
“Ann or Rex who?” He shrugged. What a with-it guy on women’s issues!
I saw the strategy. Ted had grabbed the juicy beats I’d made mine. What’s better to cover than sex and violence? Especially exotic sex and violence. Who did Ted think he was, his journalistic idol, sob-soul brother Geraldo Rivera? Really! Vampires and Geraldo are so over! And what did I get in exchange?
“I have something new for you,” Fred said.
It was a good thing I was still feeling too down to pretend to be up, because his next words would have crashed me even if I’d won the lottery the night before.
“We’ve got a vital demographic that isn’t being served and you’re just the one to put them in the spotlight. I’m calling the feature ‘Good Living After Death.’ A lot of influential Baby Boomers underwrite those Sunset City retirement communities all over the country and they have a heck of a lot of interesting stories.”
When you have to use “heck of a lot” as a news peg, you’re in trouble.
“This old doll, for instance.” He handed a black-and-white glamour photo from the Ice Age of film history across the desk. “Right here in Wichita at Sunset City. Quite a looker once. I bet she has tales to tell.”
The name under the classic thirties’ face with its arched penciled eyebrows made my pulse blip once: Caressa Teagarden, a major star who’d vanished from screen and media as thoroughly as Garbo, at about the same time. My love of vintage made me familiar with films and their stars from the silents to the sixties when the star system crumbled. This would be a fun one-time change of pace, maybe, but a whole beat based on dredging up the almost dead? I knew what the problem was. The “whole group of senior citizens out there now” just won’t die. Rumor had it that the North Koreans, banned from nuclear experiments, had gone to the cellular level, even getting into cloning. Through their various experiments, they’d invented a method of replacing death with a “twilight awake” state. A thing like that would rake in billions. Think Donald Trump paying to be preserved in amber and comb-over. Forever.
“It’s set up for tomorrow,” Fred said, totally co-opting me. “Slo-mo Eddie is the videographer. Cheer up, Del. A spin out to Sunset City should be real scenic. Some fresh air would put roses in your cheeks. You’ve been too deep into all that sicko murder stuff. You look like a zombie yourself. Do something to make the old dear happy. A little attention should do wonders for her latest face lift.”
I sleepwalked out of there, living up to my new rep, Zombie Reporter. So that was my new beat, Death Warmed Over? Kinda like my career at the moment.
* * * *
Slo-mo Eddie was one of those lanky, laid-back guys, instead of hyper nutso like most videographers. Deadlines, dead bodies in rapid rotation, it can make you crazy. He chewed Butternut gum while I explained about tomorrow’s assignment at Sunset City.
“What’s the deal with this Sunset City dame?” Eddie asked. Videographers never paid any attention to the news, the culture, and the wider world. It was all inside the box with them. The camera box.
I explained. “If you have the money, you can retire in clover. Every resident gets the quarters from his or her favorite time of life. There are rumors that they live on only there, like a Virtual Reality personality.”
Eddie shrugged. “Weird world.”
“Yeah, the Retread Retreat. She probably won’t look a day over this,” I said, waving the photo.
“Sexy.”
“That was then. We can’t expect a woman living, er, residing, in a lakeside cottage at Sunset City to resemble any available photos of her salad days. She was a real star once, though, back in the days of the Silver Screen.”
“So were we all, kiddo.” Eddie snapped his gum and rolled his eyes back toward the TV studio. “Didya hear the latest on Undead Ted? He’s had his incisors artificially lengthened. You know what they say about vamps: not enough fang, no wang.”
Suddenly, I felt better.
Eddie loved gossip. Or maybe he just hated Ted. “I see Ready Teddy is getting into Witch Twitch. What a bimbo! So what’s got you down?”
“It’s personal.”
“What? You got a life away from WTCH?”
* * * *
At home that night, I thought about Fast Eddie’s mocking comment on having a life beyond WTCH. I stared into my faint reflection on the glass-topped coffee table. Achilles used to stretch out underneath it, dog under glass: safe, sleeping, and elegant in his wavy-haired, short-legged, sharp-toothed way.
The sight of myself on Dead TV still haunted me. I picked up my cell phone to dial one of my few female friends, a street-producer for CSI Bismarck.
“Hey! It’s Del. Listen, Annie, I need a copy of the latest Vegas CSI V episode. Yeah, it was a live feed here in Wichita.” Or a dead feed, to be precise. “No tapes available. I need the addresses of the producers and writers. Oh, just for a piece I’m working on. You know, always chasing the latest ‘in’ thing.
“You have a digital recording? Really? Fabulous! Sure. Just Fed Ex it. Overnight? Thanks, you’re a doll.”
Once I had the names and titles, my reporter self could call and find out what the hell was going on.
Figuring out what was going on in my dreams was another matter.
I didn’t wake up the next morning with the usual nasty fragments floating around in my head. Instead, I had a vivid scene right out the Wizard of Oz movie.
I saw Achilles standing, wagging and waiting for me, on the yellow brick road. Only he was white instead of black like Toto, and the whole scene was black and white and gray, like the opening part of the film set in Kansas, not wildly Technicolor like the “merry old land of Oz” sections.
I looked down to sparkly sequined pumps on my feet. Black and to die for. Maybe I was going somewhere unexpected. Soon. But not into Dorothy’s Oz. Someplace darker, a Wonderland all my own.
And Achilles was waiting for me somewhere out there.