Free Do You Want to Know a Secret? by Mary Jane Clark Page B

Peter Carlson took the Evening Headlines anchor chair.
    “Insert Carlson’s soundbite on his feelings.
    “Three, two, one. . . . Memorial services for Bill Kendall are still unconfirmed. This is Mack McBride, KEY News , New York.”
    McBride came back into the editing booth. “You want me to stay in here while you edit?”
    “No, we should be okay,” said Range Bullock. “But hang around until we feed this out. God only knows if something else will happen before feed time.”
    McBride left for the commissary and a cup of its trademark thin, bitter coffee as Bullock and Joe Leiding, a topnotch videotape editor, began putting the piece together. It was rare that an executive producer would piece-produce but, as Range pointed out to the night news manager, this was not a usual situation.
    Leiding carefully laid the video of the coroner’s news conference over the opening sentence of McBride’s narration and then popped in the soundbite from Calducci. The doctor estimated that Bill had taken seventy to eighty 40-milligram fluoxetine tablets. Calducci explained that fluoxetine was the generic name for Prozac.
    “How the hell could he do that to himself?” an anguished Bullock asked the television screen. “I didn’t even know he was taking Prozac.”
    They screened the pictures of Bill’s covered body coming out of his townhouse the night before. They looked at some file video of Bill very much alive and looking fit. The blanketed body shot they used to cover the part of the narration recounting Bill being found by his son. The alive-Bill file tape they used to cover the part about Louise receiving the suicide note and widespread speculation.
    They put in Jean next. Poor, bewildered Jean. God, she’ll be lost without Bill, thought Bullock. He watched Jean on the television monitor, puffy-eyed and holding a handkerchief under her nose, her hair slightly awry.
    “I hadn’t noticed anything,” she was saying. “He was just as he always was. If only I had known. I don’t know what I would have done, but I would have done something . He was always so good to me.” Jean dissolved in tears.
    Bullock looked at Leiding. First judgment call. Did they go for the emotion and let the whole thing run, or edit it down and just take the first two sentences? The producer decided to do something in the middle.
    “Let’s take ‘I hadn’t noticed anything. He was just as he always was,’ cut out the next part and skip down to ‘He was always so good to me.’ When she starts to cry, just take a beat or two of it. It’s moving stuff, but let’s not drown ourselves.”
    Leiding pushed the incue and outcue buttons on the editing console, expertly executing Bullock’s directives.
    Next came a soundbite from Yelena Gregory.
    “Let’s listen to her again,” said Range.
    The two men watched the interview, which had been taped in Yelena’s office within the last hour. She is almost homely, thought Range as he watched her on the monitor. Yet she did have a presence. An intimidating presence which came from her position. Vague rumors circulated at KEY about some sort of Russian royalty in Yelena’s background. Range reflected that she looked more like she came from good solid peasant stock. He knew that Yelena had attended all the “right” schools, had gotten her law degree and worked her way up in corporate law at KEY before being tapped to lead the news division as its first female president. She had built a strong legal reputation and was respected by her colleagues. She dealt firmly but fairly and set high standards for herself and for those who worked under her command.
    On the screen, Yelena was giving the official view. Kendall was a first-rate journalist, he would be sorely missed. Then she looked down at the blotter on her massive glass-topped desk and began to fiddle with a paper clip. “You know, I played golf with Bill a few weeks ago at the company outing. He seemed”—Yelena groped—“like Bill . Nothing