Horizontal Hold by Robert R. Irvine

Author:Robert R. Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

In big business the buck never stops anywhere. It’s passed and passed until those accountable become totally invisible. An hour’s worth of phone calls to Metric Oil proved that. Executives referred me to assistants, who passed me on to PR flacks, who were only too happy to talk with me. But after listening to their brand of information, I referred them to a course in Basic English.

I decided to attack from the other end, right here at Channel 3. I got as far as the station manager’s secretary, Norma Lewis, who’d been assigned to handle all calls and messages for Dale Cody. Norma had survived a number of regimes. She had been handed from station manager to station manager, and was rumored to be “the company lay.”

A recent face-lift made her age doubtful, but it was somewhere between forty and fifty.

“Business or pleasure?” she asked me.

I assessed her trim figure. Forty-five was not exactly antique, I decided.

“Business, Norma. I’m working on a story that might involve Dale Cody. I’d like to talk to him about it.”

Her change of tone chilled me. “In that case, I’ve been instructed to refer you to the parent company, America-West. Do you have the number?”

“Dale Cody’s number? That’s hard to say. I don’t really know him.”

“I see.” A wintry gust hit me. “I can get you that number if you’d like.”

“Don’t bother. I think I’ll call it a day.”

“Me too,” she said, warming up now that business was out of the way. She was good at her job; she protected her bosses like a determined guard dog. “I could use a drink.”

It was an invitation. But I was in no mood to find out if the plastic surgeons had gone all the way with her.

“I wish I could join you, Norma, but I’ve got an important appointment.”

My date was with the Golden State Freeway. At five p.m. it was stop-and-go, and the car behind me kept playing tag with my bumper.

I stared in the rear-view mirror. “There’s no place to go,” I said.

When I got an opening, the tailgater came right with me, sticking so damn close that we could almost be counted as one car.

To survive in Los Angeles you have to accept the fact that driving is a way of life. Some drivers think of it as a more deadly game. My bumper-hugger was obviously one of those.

I stayed in the slow lane. That gave him four other aisles to play with. But he stuck with me.

Traffic got worse as we approached the junction of the Ventura Freeway where it branches into the San Fernando Valley one way and into Pasadena, via 210 Freeway, in the other direction.

I checked the mirror again. There were two men in the car behind me, one in the front seat, one in the back. The car was either a Ford or a Chevy, I couldn’t tell which. Lately I’ve noticed I have to read the labels to distinguish makes of cars, a sure sign of approaching old age.

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