“At least he only got two this time,” the man in the string tie said, not into the microphone. “I suppose that’s something to be thankful for.”

“You mean they found the baby?” the woman asked, looking up from her clipboard.

“Well, I guess it is three, counting the baby. No, they haven’t found it. I just hope they don’t trip over it when we’re on the air!”

“Oh, I don’t know.” The director leered around her cigarette. “I doubt Martin feels that way. It’d probably make his week.”

“You know, I really think Martin’s getting a charge out of all this. The on-the-spot was his idea.”

“Not only do you have the sweetest voice on the A.M.—” The cigarette bobbed again—“you’re even beginning to get some smarts. Go on. I’m calling One Minute.”

“On my way, Starshine.” The man in the string tie touched the microphone’s gray plastic ball to his forehead in salute, grinned, and started forward.

The producer, holding her mike in one hand, spoke down into it. Once she stopped to move her cigarette from the center of her mouth to the side, but noticed it was all ash and dropped it, ground it under the brown leather toe of a low flat, and went on whispering.

I followed the man in the string tie.

Once he adjusted his earphone and said, softly, into his mike: “Sure, Mary … ready when you are.”

The light on the police car was still turning, but as I came up beside the open windows I saw no one was inside. Someone had left the radio going. “American Pie” was playing, though not very loudly. About ten feet away, the man in the string tie began.

9

“This is Edward Sawyers, it’s June 27th, 1969, and I’m at the Crawhole waterfront tonight, walking through a crowd of people who have gathered behind a loose police line to watch the investigation of this nightmare day’s latest—and we all pray the last—act of mindless slaughter. There are searchlights set up on the barges around the docks. There’s an ambulance here—it arrived only seconds before me. But, from what police have already told me, there isn’t much need for one—except to take the bodies to the morgue. Thankfully, there are only two known victims this time—Harry Bunim, twenty-nine, and his common-law wife, Mona Casey, thirty-four. Right now the police are searching for a missing year-old child, the Bunims’ little son, Chuck. And we are all hoping here, as I know you are all hoping out there, that he has not been …”

Through the police car window, “American Pie” finished, and over the sound of Mr. Sawyers in front of me, I heard from the police car’s radio speaker: “This is Edward Sawyers, it’s June 27th, 1969, and I’m at the Crawhole waterfront tonight, walking through a crowd of …”

I listened about half a minute, then looked back. Sawyers was beckoning to one of the shirt-sleeved men. The assistant led over a fisherman from the ring of spectator—a barefooted, bullet-headed nigger. Up in front of his plaid shirt, he clutched a harmonica.