Page 9 of The Word Master

I slumped back in the chair and stared at the darkened ceiling for a long moment, my thoughts swirling, my senses alerted by some distant premonition. Then suddenly Sondra’s voice sliced through the night.

“I want to meet you, Jericho.”

My eyes went wide. I sat upright and covered the mic with the palm of my hand. “She’s still on the line!” I hissed at April.

She nodded. “I stopped recording. We’re playing music, but your caller is still on the phone. Do you want Grover to cut her off?”

I hesitated. “No.” I decided. I uncovered the mic and sat forward.

“Sondra, I can’t meet you. I’m sorry. You sound like… like a very interesting woman… but professional restrictions and the policy of this station prohibit me from making contact with callers at any time outside the limits of the program.”

“I want to meet you,” Sondra said again. She told me her phone number.

And then hung up.

For a long time I stared vacantly into the dark and the silence.

April stepped away from the desk purposefully, snapping my attention back. “We’re going into a fifteen minute block of music,” she decided as I heard The Little River Band start singing about curiosity killing the cat. I slipped the headphones off my ears and scraped my fingers through my hair.

“Good,” I said with a sigh. “I need a break.”

“And I need to go freshen up,” April said demurely. She picked up her handbag and went out through the studio door.

I sat for a moment longer and then shrugged myself out of the chair. I headed for the coffee machine.

I filled a Styrofoam cup with instant coffee and boiling water, and wandered down the hall to the door of the producer’s booth. It was open. Grover was sitting at the desk with the phone cradled in the crook of his neck, talking quietly and typing at the same time. I waited in the doorway until he sat upright and stretched his back.

“Busy?”

Grover turned round, and it seemed to take a second before he recognized me. “Oh, hey, man!” he said like we had been friends for life. “Have you come to see how the other half operates?”

I smiled faintly. “We’re on a fifteen minute break,” I said. “I thought I’d drop in and see if it has been busy with callers tonight.”

Grover shook his head in wonder. “It’s full-on!” he said. He was a middle-aged man who spoke like he rode to work on a skateboard. His fingers were nicotine stained and there were deep creases at the corners of his eyes.

“Busier than normal?”

“A lot,” Grover admitted. “Normally we get this kind of response on breakfast radio, not during the graveyard shift.”

“Have you been a program producer for long?”

Grover hesitated for a moment and something shadowy shifted behind his eyes. The boyish enthusiasm faded from his voice. “Two years,” he said.

I kept my expression neutral. “And before that you were on the air, right?”

Grover nodded. “I did the breakfast shift.”

“And you just… what? Stopped?”

Grover picked up a pen from the desk and fiddled with it between his fingers. There was a sudden nervous twitch that tugged the corner of his mouth into some kind of a sneer. It was an involuntary reaction – one he had no control over. His eyes became darker.

“I got fired,” he said with a deep lamentable sigh. “Drugs… and chicks.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

He nodded his head and his gaze became distant, like he was sifting through a book of bad memories. “I used to get stoned before going on air. Then one morning Nancy fucking Collett caught me with my hand up a very young girl’s skirt. The shit hit the fan…”

“And she fired you.” It was a statement.

“Fired,” he shrugged, “Demoted. Same thing. She took me off air and gave me the choice of becoming a program producer, or looking for a new career.”

I sipped at the coffee and then set it down. There were little islands of powder floating in the cup. “That sounds decent of her,” I said warily.

Grover sat upright in the chair and grunted. “I guess,” he said grudgingly. “But she’s a piece of work, man,” he shook his head. “A real fucking piece of work…”

I glanced up at the clock – it seemed that every room in the radio station had one. We had just a few minutes left before we had to be back on the air. April was still in the ladies’ room. I stepped over to Grover’s console and looked at the list of callers waiting on the line.

“How many are on hold waiting to talk to me?”

Grover scrolled down a page on the screen. “Seventy-eight,” he said like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

I frowned. The screen display was different to the one in the studio. “Do you keep a record of the people who phone in?” I asked.

Grover nodded. “The basics,” he said.

“Does that include their phone number?”

“Of course.”

I nodded. “Can you give me the number that Sondra called from?”

Grover leered at me and his face broke into a quirk of a smile, but he said nothing. He tapped at the keyboard and then sat back. He offered me the pen. “Wanna write it down?”

I did. I stood up, and then had an afterthought. “Does every producer follow the same format – the same procedure?”

“Sure,” Grover nodded vaguely.

“So could you tell me what number she phoned from last night, when Cecily was producing the show?”

Grover frowned and attacked the keyboard. A second later I was looking at a fresh screen. He glanced at the display on the monitor, and then at the scrap of paper in my hand. “Same number,” he said.

I nodded, and shrugged. I rubbed my chin ruefully. “You know last night when that woman phoned in, Cecily wa

s clutching a phone, and April had disappeared into the ladies’ room. I honestly thought the mysterious Sondra was one of them.”

“You thought it was someone from the radio station?”

I nodded, but with less conviction now that I thought about it. “I did – at the time,” I confessed.

Grover got up from the chair and tugged at his beard. He drifted around the booth for a few moments, touching things absently. Finally he turned back to face me, his expression serious, his face grey and ashen.

“April’s not the type,” he said. “She’s in the ladies’ room right now getting herself off with a vibrator most probably. She’s like that… she’s the ‘all talk, no action’ kind of cock tease that gets a guy hot and bothered and then backs out at the last moment.” Grover scratched his chin. And Cecily…” he shrugged. “Well maybe….”

I know how to read body language, and I know when someone says something and leaves things unsaid with a significant pause. Grover lapsed into exactly that kind of meaningful silence.

“Say it,” I encouraged.

He eyed me speculatively, like he was trying to decide whether he could trust me. Finally he grunted and averted his gaze as though what he was about to reveal was awkward for him.

“If it’s anyone, it’s probably Cindy,” he said at last in a rush of words.

I flinched. “Cindy?” For a second I was dumbfounded. “The receptionist? She’s only a kid!”

Grover nodded. His mouth was twitching and twisting. “She’s twenty,” Grover said. “When Nancy Collett caught me with my hand up a young girl’s skirt… it was Cindy’s pussy I had my fingers inside.”

What the hell?

“Are you serious?”

Grover nodded. “She was eighteen at the time. I was fucking her every morning after the show. She would meet me for lunch. She’s kinda crazy, man. Know what I mean? She loves sex, and she’s right into this whips and chains stuff you talk about.”

I was reeling. My impressions of young Cindy were that she was an awkward nervous intern, not a committed nymphomaniac with an insatiable thirst for sex and submission.

“How did Collett even find out?”

Grover walked another restless lap of the producer’s booth, like it was a cage. “One day after the show, Cindy was hornier than usual,” Grover started shaking his head like he wished he could erase the memory. “We were in the ladies’ room. I had her bent over in one of the stalls, her skirt up around her perfect little ass, taking her from behind. She was clinging to the wall, pushing back against me and grunting as we screwed. Collett came into the washroom and found us together. That was when I learned a big life lesson.”

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