False Witness by Dorothy Uhnak Read Free Book Online Page B

gracefully light-handed Sanderalee would help her furiously impotent, insulted, besmirched guest to disengage himself from wire and microphone.
    She had one or two bad days, even with the control she was able to exert. One of her most controversial shows, which had brought forth the most mail, the highest ratings, the most anger, the most vicious amusement, had been her straight forty-five-minute interview with a former newsman who had written a book documenting Arab-Israeli relationships over a period of twenty years.
    The newsman tried to draw parallels and to explain differences between the two peoples. He was earnest and seemingly nonpartisan except for his abhorrence of terrorism.
    Sanderalee Dawson seemed hardly to listen to him; failed to respond to any of his gentle questions. She played with the rings on her fingers and the bracelets on her arm, with the scarf around her neck, with the long silk of her shoulder-length hair. She waited. At the last possible moment, when even her crew thought Sanderalee had been bested and silenced at last by a kindly, well-informed, eminently qualified and universally respected journalist, Sanderalee smiled at her guest, and everyone who knew her tensed and waited. Her producer, in the control room, bit down on his thumb, hard.
    “Tell me something, Philip,” Sanderalee spoke softly, turned directly to her guest, leaned forward as he regarded her politely, “you’re a Jew, aren’t you?”
    There was a split second left. Sanderalee turned full-face into the camera, shrugged expressively and in a hard, cold, deadly tone she said, “I rest my case.”
    Cut to black.
    A followup to this incident was carried in the New York Post and was also acknowledged by the journalist himself. As soon as the screen went dead, there was a stunned silence in the studio, a total lack of sound or movement. Sanderalee looked up, startled, to see the stricken face of her guest, the deathly white complexion of her director, the frozen positions of the crew.
    “Oh, my God,” Sanderalee had said, rushing to her guest’s side, “oh my God, Philip, I’m so sorry how that came out. It was just the ... the absolutely theatrically perfect thing to say. You know I love and respect you, my dear.”
    The funny part was, the journalist believed her and later stated that she was a woman totally innocent of the possible effects of what she said or did.

CHAPTER 6
    J AMESON WHITNEY HALE LACED his long white fingers over his long flat stomach. His custom-made three-piece suit hiked up slightly at the ankle as he stretched his basketball player’s legs, then repositioned himself thoughtfully. He was an aristocratic-looking man; genes did, indeed, tell. Fifty-eight years of good clean living and earnest dedication to the task at hand had carved themselves on his classic features: in another time and place, he’d have made a nifty king.
    “Do you think,” he asked me carefully, “there is a possibility that this attack was politically motivated? Or do you think that it’s just a case of out-and-out sexual assault?”
    Automatically the response rushed from my lips. “Sexual assault, in and of itself, has been a politically motivated act throughout all of history.”
    He frowned at my lapse into the semantics of the women’s movement. Surely, we were far beyond that; his arched eyebrows, his intelligent light brown eyes, showed disappointment.
    “Well, you asked me.”
    “Really, Ms. Jacobi. I am merely asking you for an informed guess in this specific case. Are we dealing with a political matter or with a lunatic nut?”
    “We are dealing either with a politically motivated act or with the act of a depraved lunatic nut.”
    “Thank you. We’ll see if events justify your initial guess.” He gestured to the neat, systematically stacked case folders on his desk with a shake of his head. He went over to his memo pad and made a check mark, probably next to my name; consulted his wristwatch and then his