I prepared for the interrogation.
“Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“Excuse me?”
“On your show. I mean, do you coach callers? Are they actors? Do you have plants? How scripted is it? How many writers do you have? At first I thought it was a gag, we all did. But you’ve kept it up for a year now, and it’s great! I gotta know how you do it.”
I might as well hit my head against a brick wall.
Conspiratorially, I leaned forward over the plastic arm of the retro office chair. He bent toward me, his eyes wide. Because of course I’d give away trade secrets to anyone who asked.
“Why don’t you stick around tonight and find out?”
“Come on, not even a little hint?”
“Now where’s the fun in that?” I stood. “Hey, it’s been great meeting you, but I really should get going.”
“Oh—but you just got here. I could show you around. I could—”
“Is he bothering you?”
A woman in a rumpled navy-blue suit a few years out-of-date, her black hair short and moussed, stood in the doorway, her arms crossed.
“You must be Liz Morgan,” I said, hoping I sounded enthusiastic rather than relieved. “I’m Kitty Norville. My colleague should have been in touch with you.”
“Yes. Nice to meet you.” Thankfully, her handshake was perfectly sedate and functional. “Wes, you have that marketing report for me yet?”
“Um, no. Not yet. Just getting to it now. Be ready in an hour. Yes, ma’am.” Wes bounded to his desk and closed the solitaire game.
Liz gave me exactly the tour I wanted and answered all my questions. Even, “That Wes is a bit excitable, isn’t he?”
“You should see him without his medication.”
She saw me to the door and recommended a good hotel nearby.
“Thanks again,” I said. “It’s always kind of a crap shoot finding a station that’ll even touch my show.”
She shook her head, and her smile seemed long-suffering. “Kitty, we’re five miles from Washington, D.C. There’s nothing you can throw at us that’ll compare with what I’ve seen come out of there.”
I couldn’t say I believed her. Because if she was right, I was about to get into things way over my head.
I returned to the station a couple of hours early and waited to meet Dr. Paul Flemming. I fidgeted. Ivy, the receptionist, told me all kinds of horror stories about traffic in the D.C. area, the Beltway, the unreliability of the Metro, all of it giving me hundreds of reasons to think that Flemming couldn’t possibly arrive in time for the show. It was okay, I tried to convince myself. This sort of thing had happened before. I’d had guests miss their slot entirely. It was one of the joys of live radio. I just had to ad-lib. That was why the phone lines were so great. Somebody was always willing to make an ass out of themselves on the air.
Ivy went home for the evening, so at least the horror stories stopped. Liz and Wes stuck around to watch the show. I paced in the lobby, back and forth. A bad habit. The Wolf’s bad habit. I let her have it—it gave her something to do and kept her quiet. Anxiety tended to make her antsy.
Me. Made me antsy.
Fifteen minutes before start time, a man opened the glass door a foot and peered inside. I stopped. “Dr. Flemming?”
Straightening, he entered the lobby and nodded.
A weight lifted. “I’m Kitty, thanks for coming.”
Flemming wasn’t what I expected. From his voice and the way he carried on, I expected someone cool and polished, slickly governmental, with a respectable suit and regulation haircut. A player. Instead, he looked like a squirrelly academic. He wore a corduroy jacket, brown slacks, and his light brown hair looked about a month overdue for a cut. His long face was pale, except for the shadows under his eyes. He was probably in his mid-forties.
In the same calm voice I recognized from a half-dozen phone calls, he said, “You’re not what I expected.”
I was taken aback. “What did you expect?”