And now, on the screen, Jimmy Lowe is into the evil heart of the matter. “Soon’s I walked inair and I looked unner that tallit doe and I seen that guy’s knees on the flow, and I hud these two guys going,
‘Unnnnnh, unnnnnh, unnnnnh’—
I mean, I knew’zackly what h’it was. And when I walked overt the tallit and stood up on tippytoe and looked daown over the doe and seen it was a feller fum my own goddayum cump’ny—”
And now Jimmy Lowe’s voice sank below the Country Metal throb of the DMZ, and Mary Cary’s voice-over rose up, and once more she paraphrased, just the way Irv himself had written it:
“Now it was Jimmy Lowe who was witnessing—by eavesdropping—a display of gay affection. Randy Valentine was in that locked toilet booth, embracing another man—the two of them driven there by the public’s and, more severely, the military’s sanctions against amorous gestures in public by persons of the same sex.”
Then Mary Cary’s voice disappears, and Jimmy Lowe’s rises up again, as he says:
“I mean, I saw some kinda
rayud,
and ‘at was when I kicked inny doe. Broke’at little metal tab rat off’n it.”
“Summitch mussa wunner what the hale hit him,” says Ziggefoos.
“Whole goddayum doe hit him, I reckon,” says Jimmy Lowe. “That summitch, he was lane upside the wall when I grabbed him.”
Now the Bombshell face of Mary Cary fills the screen, and she says with the sincerity that only a truly gifted video performer can summon
up: “As you have just seen … in unmistakable terms, these three young men, these three soldiers of the United States Army, these three members of an elite corps, the Rangers, revealed the motive for the crime they had committed: homophobia, pure and simple. They revealed the fact that the killing began with an unprovoked, blindsided assault. And they revealed the fact there exists an as-yet-unidentified
witness
to this senseless murder … the young man who was with Randy Valentine when the assault began …”
Once more Mary Cary stares into the camera without uttering a sound. Another eternity seems to elapse. Those blue eyes blaze as they have never blazed before. And then she says:
“We
urge
that young man … to
come forward,
to make himself known. We urge anyone who may know his identity to come forward. This crime was too
monstrous …
for
anyone
to allow society’s prejudice against the gay life or current military law and custom regarding the gay life to
muffle …
the ringing call for
justice …
in this case.”
Now, all at once, you’re back in the DMZ with Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory, and they’re grinning again and drinking beer again and chuckling and leering up toward what the viewer must figure is the bar and the topless dancers, as if nothing has happened, as if they don’t have a worry in the world. The same old Country Metal music is banging and sloshing away. And then you hear Mary Cary’s voice:
“James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory had made it clear, in their own words, as caught by our microphones and cameras, precisely how the murder of Randy Valentine had occurred. But here at
Day & Night
we were determined to show them what you have just seen and get their response. So we enlisted the services of a well-known Bragg Boulevard exotic dancer, Lola Thong”—now you see Lola, walking through a parking lot—“to invite the three of them back to a High Mojave recreational vehicle we had parked out back of the club. She was the one person we could find, on short notice, whose invitation … to view their own videotaped confession … the three soldiers just might accept. That night we sent Lola Thong into the DMZ … to make the trio a proposition. As you will see, it was not an entirely candid
proposition, but it seemed to us that, under the circumstances, her less than full disclosure was justified …”
You see Lola at the booth inside the DMZ. “You like veedeos?”
“What kinda videos?” asks Jimmy Lowe.
“Unusual veedeos,” says Lola with a full-blown, star-quality leer.
And now they’re all sliding out of the booth and heading for the parking lot.
Suddenly, as Irv sat there slumped way down in an antique bergère in Snackerman’s vast library, his heart began racing—even as it had raced that night when he knew the three young thugs were leaving the bar and heading for the High Mojave and the immediate proximity of his mortal hide.
Now you see a medium-long shot of the High Mojave in the parking lot. From inside the RV’s living room, you see the door handle revolve, and then the door opens and in come the raucous traffic sounds and deep electric-bass strums of Bragg Boulevard, and in comes Lola, and you’re staring straight down her dress at her prodigious breasts, and behind her come Jimmy Lowe and Ziggefoos and Flory … with their T-shirts, their muscles, their tight jeans, their skinned heads …
When Lola slips the videocassette into the VCR, Mary Cary’s voice takes over: “Lola had promised James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory some ‘unusual videos,’ and that was what she proceeded to show them. All that she had left out was just how unusual they would turn out to be.”
You see the three rednecks sitting on the couch and staring at the TV, whose own screen has that scrolling blur you get when you try to film television images. Irv had cut out all of Lola’s striptease act, and now you’re aware that Randy Valentine’s murderers are watching the very tape on which they themselves disclose how they committed the heinous crime, and Mary Cary says: “Sitting on that couch, in that High Mojave, they watched
everything …
that you have just seen.”
The hidden cameras focus on each of the three, and each one is blinking furiously. Jimmy Lowe’s mouth is hanging open; Ziggefoos
smacks him on the side of his leg and says, “I ‘on know, Jimmy, I’on lack’is
bleep.”
And Jimmy Lowe turns on Lola and says, “Look here,
bleep
it, Lola, I wanna know what the
bleep’s
going on, and I wanna know rat now.”
And Lola keeps saying, “Eenteractive teevee, eenteractive teevee.”
And Jimmy Lowe says, “You kin innerack with my sweet
bleep,
Lola. I ax you a simple question.”
And Lola says, “You don’ believe me? Eenteractive teevee. Eenteractive teevee, Jeemy! I’m gon’ show you, Jeemy, right now! There! You have a special vees’tor!”
And all at once the three young thugs are blinking, dumbstruck and agog over quite something else:
“Hello, Jimmy. I’m Mary Cary Brokenborough.”
I’m Merry
Kerry
Broken
Berruh.
You see the three youths’ shock and incredulity at the sudden appearance in their midst, in the living room of the RV out back of a fifthrate topless bar on Bragg Boulevard, of the best-known female face in the United States. You see them with their mouths open and their eyes blinking and those damning blinks in the unspoken but universally known language of Newsmagazine Sting TV say:
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
Then you see the three of them, led by Ziggefoos, trying to turn the ambush into a joke. They start urging Mary Cary to “Gitcher tail up, gal” and join them inside the DMZ for some “vodka twilats.” Ziggefoos is the cool, cocksure, self-possessed one throughout this exchange, and so Irv had used the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory while Ziggefoos spoke. You hear Ziggefoos’s impudent, mocking words, but you see Jimmy Lowe’s and Flory’s blinking eyes saying, “
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
The rest was easy—if you knew this business the way he, Irv, did. He simply eliminated Ziggefoos’s Neanderthal rant, his self-pitying brute’s disquisition on manhood and “the unit,” and the rest
of his utterly irrelevant bleat. Instead, we see Mary Cary, at the top of her form, grilling him relentlessly.
Ziggefoos says, “Whatchoo know abaout it?”
And Mary Cary says, “I know what I’ve just heard you say—you and Jimmy and Flory—in your own words.” Then, to Jimmy Lowe: “If it wasn’t for the reason you said, why
did
you attack Randy Valentine?”
Blinking furiously, looking furiously guilty, Jimmy Lowe says, “All’s I did-”
Ziggefoos cuts him off. “Jes shut up, Jimmy!”
Then Irv had shifted to the camera on Jimmy Lowe’s face. A damning, guilty silence, that face! With much blinking!
Guilty!
The brute looks as guilty on that screen as if he’s just made a full and open confession.
Artistry!—
He had allowed Ziggefoos to say, “Didn’ none a us have nothing to do with Randy Valentine. Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him.”
But then he had cut to the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory—and not merely to capture their frightened, bugged-out, blinking faces, which said, without a word, “We do, too, know what happened to Randy Valentine! We kaled’at quair!”
At that point, thanks to the simple magic of multiple cameras, it was easy for Irv to jump all the way from Ziggefoos saying, “Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him,” to a beaten Jimmy Lowe saying, “Wale, you got it all wrong,” and giving the television set a weak, guiltsapped, dismissive wave and getting up and turning his back.
“’At’s rat,” says Flory, also getting up and retreating, “you got it all wrong.”
“But they’re your own words,” says Mary Cary, “from your own mouths.”
“Yeah, but y’all rigged’is all up,” says Jimmy Lowe, now in a full and stricken retreat to the door.
Now Ziggefoos joins Jimmy and Flory, and he looks like a whipped dog, too. It was as if the entire ambush had taken all of ninety seconds. Overwhelmed by the evidence and the sternness of the Goddess of
Television, the three thugs had mounted one brief show of loutish bravado, then buckled cravenly, the logorrheic Ziggefoos included, put their tails between their legs and slunk off like the worthless mutts they were. And so what if after the ambush, Irv had learned that in fact Jimmy Lowe and Flory had been decorated for their actions outside the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu on Bloody Sunday? What did that have to do with their actions as homophobic goons and murderers inside a gin mill one bloody night on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville, North Carolina?
And now, on the screen, back in New York, is the victor, Mary Cary Brokenborough, at her futuristic desk at network command central. She begins her peroration, which she had retaped—and Irv had written—earher this very day:
“Already, various legal jurisdictions, federal, state, local, and military, have informed
Day & Night
that in broadcasting what you have just seen, we have violated laws concerning the wire interception of private conversations.” She pauses, and those fabulous blue eyes blaze. “Perhaps we have … Perhaps we have … Although we have been assured otherwise by our own legal counsel from the very beginning. Yet whatever the legal technicalities of the matter may be, we know very well—and we think that most of the citizens of our country know very well—that we have obeyed a far higher and more important law … and the most vital of American traditions, the tradition that values, above all else, Fairness … and Justice … regardless of what legislators and prosecutors, who come and go, might care to say …”
Prosecutors!
He, Irv, had written the entire thing for his Big Blond mouthpiece, but suddenly—
prosecutors!
The implications of the word hit him, and a horrible wave of fear went rolling through his central nervous system, and his heart began drumming away at an alarming rate.
What have I
done
? Jail! They’ll send me to jail—with relish! They won’t touch her. Oh no, not her, not Merry Kerry Broken Berruh!
They’ll treat me like the
accountant,
like the accountant who goes to jail when the Big Celebrity cheats on her income taxes! They’ll subpoena all the videotapes! They’ll see what I did! Bugged the DMZ—violated the laws of at least four jurisdictions—five years on each count—
the rest of my woulda-been working life!
The porno video I concocted with Lola Thong—that cheap little hooker thrusting the gorged red lips of her labia majora right into the camera—
entrapment!
—they’ll pin it on
me
! Every insidious editing trick I played with the tapes—they’ll see it all and reveal it all! We’re going to make
you,
Irv, an example of everything Americans instinctively hate about the arrogance of the media and the reptilian perfidy of entrapment TV! Yes,
you, Irv Durtscher—
you coldblooded, slippery, slimy little snake, you—all fangs and no
balls!
Now Irv’s heart had gone into not only tachycardia but a terrifying series of palpitations, and he slumped way down in the bergère
I’m having a heart attack! I’m—
—A beeper went off. Irv looked over. It was Dr. Siebert, Mary Cary’s husband, sitting over there on the far side by Senator McInnes’s wife. He pulled a little cell phone out of his jacket pocket. You could hear him speaking
sotto voce.
Then he got up and strode rapidly over to where Snackerman and Mary Cary were sitting. Mary Cary’s image was still up on the screen. She was completing her stirring peroration—Irv’s peroration—about residual fascism in America. Nevertheless, Hugh Siebert said to Snackerman: