"That was just part of the game." Victoria shrugged. "People like it when we argue, so sometimes we pretend and give it to them. Look, the Jim you heard on the radio wasn't really Jim. Not completely. You're not you on air. You're more like an actor playing you. Before the show starts I always take a deep breath and picture the person I'm playing. She's like me, but she's louder, funnier, braver, stronger. But she's not really me. Just like Jim wasn't the same outside of this studio. When Jim and I were off air, we got along great."
Nicole stepped in to play bad cop. "That's not what we've heard from your coworkers. They told us there was tension between you two. Do you want to tell us about that?"
Victoria snorted. "Tension? You get two people in the room, and only one of them can be on air at a time, of course there's going to be a little tension. But as Jim always told me, it's The Hand of Fate, not The Hand of Hanawa. And maybe we had some different ideas about what was best for the show. But that wasn't personal. That doesn't mean I would kill him."
"What do you know about the threats he was getting?"
"Jim got as many as a thousand e-mails a day. A lot of those were threats. He relishes--relished--them. It meant people were talking about him."
"But something must have changed." Allison lowered her voice. "This isn't to be shared outside of this room, but he approached us about some threats that were bothering him. He died before we could talk to him. Do you know what these threats were? Why they were different?"
Victoria bit her thumb, looking thoughtful. "He showed me a couple of them recently. He hadn't done that before, so I don't know if they were worse or different from the ones he normally got. One said something like, `You jerk--you think you can get away with what you're doing, but you can't. If you can't shut your mouth, I'll shut it for you: And another one showed his head with a noose around it. It said, 'We are measuring your neck for the noose:"
"Did he tell you who he thought had sent them?" Allison asked.
"No. But he's made a lot of people mad over the years. If you were lying, covering up, especially if you were rich and arrogant, then Jim wanted to take you down. He's certainly made enemies?' She lowered her voice. "And not just out there in radio land. There are a lot of people here who fought with him."
"So who fought with him here?" Nic asked.
Allison wondered if Victoria would nominate herself, but instead, after a long pause, she said, "Chris, sometimes."
"Chris?" Allison was surprised. She hadn't detected any tension when Chris was talking about Jim Fate. Was Victoria lying, trying to throw them off the scent?
"Jim was always screaming at Chris. He would yell at Chris if one of the callers turned out to be nutty or turned nervous or inarticulate once they were on air. Jim would start screaming, Vhat's the problem, Chris? Can't you just give me people I can work with? Sometimes by the end of the shift, Chris would jump if you touched his shoulder when you were walking by him."
"What about you?" Allison asked, her eyes never leaving Victoria's. She was looking for a blink, a twitch of the lips, any kind of tell that would betray Victoria's thoughts. "We understand that you might not have agreed with Jim blurring the line between ads and the show."
"Did Chris tell you that? Jim and I are both two strong-willed people, that's all. Look, maybe when I started working here I had to surrender a few of my principles. But the show isn't about principles. It's about ratings. You know what Jim said to me? He said, 'This isn't journalism. This is showbiz, and don't you forget it."
"What about the flip side?" Nicole asked. "Did you and Jim date?"
She snorted. "Where did you hear that? I swear, all anyone does here is gossip. Oh, we went out for drinks a couple of times after work, but that's all. It wasn't anything serious. If you knew Jim, nothing was serious with him. Not really. He could argue about something like his life depended on it, but he stopped caring about it as soon as we went to break."
Allison said, "Why did you stay when he was dying? Jim ordered everyone to leave, and they did. But you--you stayed. Even knowing it might be dangerous."
Again, Victoria's dark eyes brimmed. "I think part of me didn't believe it was really happening. And if it wasn't real, then there was no risk to me. Have you ever been in a car accident?"
When Allison nodded, she said, "It's like that. Time slows down, and you don't believe it's really happening. You watch the bumper crumple, and then the hood buckles, and your face starts heading toward the dash, and you still have time to be surprised when you hit it. So part of it was just this feeling of unreality." Victoria took a long breath that shook at the end. "And part of it was that I just couldn't bear to turn around and run away. You could tell just by looking at Jim that he was dying. His eyes--I'll never forget the look in his eyes. Desperate, pleading, naked. I couldn't leave him. At that moment, we weren't two people who sometimes fought for control of the mike. We were two human beings. And I couldn't leave him to die alone."
"Weren't you worried about the gas getting to you too?" Nicole still looked skeptical.
"The studio is soundproof. There's weather stripping and magnets around the door, so it's virtually airtight. The air gets so stale in there sometimes. So I knew I was probably safe as long as he didn't open the door."
Allison and Nicole spoke at the same time.