"Were you surprised that he didn't?" Allison asked.
"Were you afraid that he would?" Nicole said.
Victoria shook her head. "I honestly believe he thought he could hold out until the paramedics came. Jim was never afraid of anything. Not until--" Her voice broke. "Not until the last."
She turned her head and laid her cheek on the table, sobbing, while Allison patted her shoulder and muttered reassurances.
Allison looked up. Nicole hadn't moved. And she was watching Victoria with narrowed eyes.
Chapter 27 Channel 4 TV
Holding a venti-size coffee the way a drowning man might clutch a piece of floating debris, Cassidy was shuttling through B-roll footage of old press conferences, trying to find some tape of Jim Fate. B-roll was footage without a sound track that could run while viewers listened to Cassidy or one of her interview subjects.
Normally it was easy enough to get B-roll footage. For example, the cameraman might want to shoot a sequence of the subject working at his desk. What if the person had no plans to work at his desk? No problem. Change his plans. What if he had no desk? No problem. Use someone else's desk. What if the subject wasn't working that day? No problem. Change his schedule.
And usually the subject agreed. It was for TV, after all.
But Jim was dead, meaning Cassidy had to rely on whatever footage already existed. Now all she had to do was find it. All the footage at the station was logged, which technically meant that someone had recorded what was on the tape and the time it appeared. Logging was supposed to save you time in the long run, so you could come back to the B-roll and find exactly what you needed without having to watch hours of tape.
The problem was that Jim Fate had only appeared in this five-year-old footage incidentally. If he was here at all. But Cassidy was pretty sure she remembered him asking some pointed questions.
As she took another sip of coffee, she used the knob to shuttle forward. At this particular press conference, the governor had introduced stricter state standards for handling "downer" cows that were too sick or weak to stand on their own. The idea was to make the risk of mad cow disease entering the food chain even smaller. The crowd of activists had cheered and applauded.
And if Cassidy remembered right, Jim had immediately denounced the governor's plan as alarmist, saying the legislation would be so costly it would put small, family-run farms out of business and make meat unaffordable for most low-income consumers. The two had argued, with the governor red in the face and Jim full of venom and vinegar. Jim being Jim, in other words. At least his public self.
Cassidy had sometimes seen a different side of Jim. More mannerly. More seductive. The last time she had seen him had been at dinner two weeks earlier. He had asked her to meet him at the RingSide, Portland's venerable steakhouse. A red-meat kind of place for a red-meat kind of guy. The RingSide featured big drinks, big prawns, big wedges of iceberg lettuce, and of course, steaks three inches thick. The waiters dressed in black suits and starched white shirts, and the walls were hung with autographs of famous athletes.
"You did a marvelous job on the Katie Converse story," Jim said after ordering for both of them. "You found a million angles. You always made it fresh and interesting."
"Fat lot of good it did me," Cassidy said as she settled her snowy-white napkin on her lap. "Station management promised me an anchor chair. Now they're saying I don't test well. When I had TV stations all over the country calling me."
"But that was then." Jim took a sip of his water. He had stopped drinking two years earlier, although callers sometimes accused him of falling off the wagon. "And this is now, right? And we all know that, in TV and radio, yesterday doesn't matter."
"Yeah." Cassidy raised her glass of gin and tonic to her lips. The bitter taste matched her mood. "Now that I've turned everyone down, Channel 4 has said they are going to bring in some pretty little wind-up doll who was Miss Connecticut, some kid who can sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and do a mean baton twirl, but who doesn't have any understanding. She's got no depth, no ... no context!"
And Miss Connecticut was about twelve, although Cassidy didn't bring that part up. Now that Channel 4 was broadcast in high-def, she was conscious of every laugh line, every imperfection. And the older she got, the more there would be. On the way to the restaurant, she had stopped to get gas, and the gas station attendant had called her ma'am. Ma'am, not miss. And Cassidy had looked at his pimply face and realized that she was nearly old enough to be his mother.
"Look, I want you to think about something." Jim's blue eyes drilled into her. "Think about coming to work with me."