Deadline by John Dunning Read Free Book Online Page B

Gregory Peck had ever lied in the performance of his job. Right now Gregory Peck was talking about Roxy, who had opened Radio City almost fifty years ago. The camera panned the splendor of the lobby, while Gregory Peck went on and on about how grand it was. On came the Rockettes. Walker drew up close and peered at the seven-inch screen to watch the girls making up at the dressing room mirrors, laughing and talking to each other just like real people. The incredible world of Diana Yoder, Amish girl.
    He looked for her as the camera found the faces of the Rockettes in a series of close-ups. Few were beautiful, but all were nice-looking, white and worked into the regiment by rigid limitations of height and weight. The all-American gals, pure apple pie. But Diana Yoder wasn’t among them, at least not for NBC and the nation. The camera finished its probe of the famous line of high-kickers, and each girl said her name. And for nearly an hour Dalton Michael Walker escaped his solitary, slightly bitter world and became a kid again. It reminded him slightly of the old Mickey Mouse Club. Annette! Slight curtsy. Darleen! Small tilt of head. Doreen! Doreen had always been his favorite. His crush on her had lasted two years. In his adolescent fantasies he had imagined her nude. A full twenty years later she surfaced in the buff in a Gallery Magazine spread. He hadn’t even bought the magazine. Somehow it seemed like an invasion of his privacy.
    He watched for Diana, just as he had watched for Doreen in the old days. When she wasn’t there, he was disappointed but hardly surprised.
    Gregory Peck told him what it was like being a Rockette, and Ann-Margret and Beverly Sills sat in the empty rotunda and sang some songs. Ann-Margret told Beverly Sills how great she was, and Beverly Sills looked humble and very regular. Beverly Sills laughed a lot. She had always been one of Walker’s favorite people.
    In the morning Walker took a bus into New York and caught the early show at Radio City. They were reshowing Fantasia. He watched it all the way through, trying to rekindle those childlike feelings that had started the night before.
    Then the stage show started, and Jesus, it was a spectacle. He never came to Radio City Music Hall without being awed, without realizing what a national tragedy it would be if they closed it. At the same time he knew the inevitability of its closing. It was a lovely dinosaur, a palace in an age when smallness and cheapness were virtues, when people were packed like tuna into mini-theaters and heard more of the marital arguments in the row behind them than they heard of the performance. He estimated the audience at around twelve hundred, and the place was one-fifth full.
    But never mind. On came the Rockettes, doing a toy soldier routine that had something to do with the changing seasons. The line formed and did its eye-level high dance. Some inspired bastard backstage, some genius whose mind Walker couldn’t begin to cope with, had guided, molded and maybe bullied these girls into line. He didn’t know how it had been done, only that it had, and it was dying out to a new kind of entertainment that depended, as Count Basie had said, more on electronics than artists. The goddamn electrician was the most important man in today’s big band.
    Walker tried to spot Diana Yoder in the line, but couldn’t be sure. Afterward, he couldn’t help himself. He went around to the Fiftieth Street stage door and told the guard he was a reporter, there to see one of the girls. He flashed his press pass and in a moment someone came to show him in. An elevator took them down to the stage, now draped and beginning the Disney flick again. He walked behind the screen, across the blue floor, where great machines could move sections of the stage up or down. He waited, and eventually some of the girls came along, dressed for the street. Finally Diana Yoder came too.
    She was surprised, and maybe a little angry. “Mr. Walker,” she