Murder Superior

1


IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Norman Kevic was on the air—and in the air, too, in a way, since he’d been flying higher than a stratocumulus cloud ever since he’d snorted four lines of pure Peruvian crystal in the men’s room of the Philadelphia Baroque Rococo Club at five minutes before closing just a few hours ago. Of course, those four lines weren’t the last lines Norm had snorted, just as the Baroque Rococo wasn’t the last club he’d visited. The Baroque Rococo was a gay bar Norm liked to go to just to see if he could get thrown out of it—which he couldn’t anymore, because they knew him. He’d spent the rest of the night in a place called Bertha’s Box, about which the less remembered the better. It didn’t matter, because Norm never could remember what he’d done in Bertha’s, except for more lines. There were always more lines. It was six o’clock in the morning and Norm had to go to work—in spite of the fact that he owned a piece of the station and wasn’t about to fire himself. Long before he’d owned a piece of the station he’d been The Voice of WXVE, the King of Philadelphia Talk Radio, the Man of the Morning. He’d taken three days off with the flu back in 1984 and nearly been lynched. There were heads out there who stoked themselves up all night just to be cruising fast enough to take him in between six and ten. More to the point, there were heads out there who weren’t very stable. Norm’s mail was a steady stream of unidentified flying objects. A dead mouse with a bright purple satin ribbon tied in a crisp bow around its neck. A lifetime subscription to the neo-Nazi rag called Black Storm Rising: The Truth About the Second World War. An absolutely awful homemade carrot cake with a flic knife buried inside. The fans would send him anything. They were out there. And they had teeth.

The chair in front of the mike Norm was supposed to use had arms, and that was a no-no, because Norm was much too fat to fit into a chair with arms. He’d been fat all his life, to an extent, but lately it had gotten worse. Who said cocaine made you thin? There was a pile of books on the pull-out shelf next to the microphone and a note: steve says don’t say asshole on the air again it’s going to get us in trouble. Norm stared at the punctuation in “it’s” for a good half minute, then crumpled the note. It was Sherri who was the asshole as far as he was concerned. It was Sherri who ought to have been fired, except that he couldn’t fire her, because she was Steve’s assistant. In the old days, girls like Sherri didn’t punctuate words like “it’s” even if they knew how, because they knew better. They didn’t wear jeans to the office, either, unless the jeans were tight. They certainly didn’t stand in the open glass door to the broadcast booth in L.L. Bean baggies and overflowing flannel shirts, wearing no makeup and wire-rimmed glasses, looking at him as if he were a slug. It’s. God. What had he been thinking of? Why? He had to stop doing those lines.

Sherri had taken her glasses off and was tapping them on her chest. The red light over the microphone was lit. Somewhere out there, a boy named Dig Watter, whose sole job was to make sure there was no dead air on WXVE for any reason short of the Rapture, was probably getting an ulcer.

“Listen,” Sherri said. “Just one second before you start. Steve wanted me to tell you—”

“Not to say asshole,” Norm said.

“That, too. To lay off the dead Jap jokes. That’s what. There’s a big Japanese-American community in the suburbs around Philadelphia. You’re getting a lot of people pissed off.”

“That’s what I do for a living. I get people pissed off.”

“Just pay attention,” Sherri said.

“You ought to lose some weight,” Norm said. “You really should. You’d be a very attractive woman if you only lost a little weight.”

“You’d be a very attractive man if you just grew a bigger dick,” Sherri said.

Then she stepped into the hall and let the door swing shut behind her.

Norm stared after her, furious, the red light blinking, nothing to be done about the goddamned chair right away, furious. What had gotten into these women anyway? It was all that crap with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Sexual harassment. They were the 1990s version of those old maids who used to see rapists under their beds. Christ.

Red light.

Pile of books.

Big hand-lettered sign on his bulletin board:

    THE NUNS ARE HAVING A CONVENTION.



He grabbed the mike, snapped it open with his thumb and said, “Good morning Philadelphia, this is Cultural Norm, the free-form house worm coming to you from the studios of WXVE radio—any minute now I’m going to turn into the voice of radio past—the living dead—no, I can’t be the living dead, I’m not a Republican—I’m not a Democrat, either—if politics gets any sillier I’m going to have to vote for Yeltsin—I wish I could vote for Yeltsin—this is the wrong chair I have in this studio, Sherri sweetie, go get me another one—and I’ve got news for the lot of you out there, yes I do, before we get down to business. Business today is a good long discussion of that ancient question: can masturbation be good for you? And how? We’ve got a number of guests coming in, including the Right Reverend Thomas Willard, pastor of the Paoli Pentecostal Church. I think the good reverend’s answer to our first question is going to be no—but you can’t tell, ladies and gentlemen, you really can’t tell. I mean, look at Jimmy Swaggart Anyway, before we get into all that, we’ve got more religious news.”