Farewell, My Lovely Truck Chase

I know an angry skirt when I hear one, and the irate viewer who left her number on my voice mail was plenty angry.

She said her name was Kathleen Rogers.

I yawned and started to tilt my hat down. But it was a slow day, so playing a hunch I poured myself a drink and rang her up. As soon as I heard her on the line, I knew what I had on my hands. Another ditsy dame, the kind who snaps a mean garter and works her eyelashes overtime. I was betting she had a full set of curves, too.

Outside, the street dozed peacefully in the sun. I felt like dozing, too, but I had pushed my big flat face into this story and it was too late to turn back now.

“What’s your beef?” I asked.

“Local news,” she said. “I want to see local news.”

She wanted to see local news? My head hurt like I’d been cracked with a blackjack. I asked her to be more specific. My mistake.

Her beef was about last Monday night.

“The chase?” I asked.

“The chase,” she answered. She was breathing hard.

It was one of those June nights that sweated you out like a steam bath, a night I had spent watching cops on TV, tough, honest cops wheeling after a truck on the lam through the streets of Los Angeles. Kathleen saw them, too.

Gobbling down my drink, I listened to her story. “KCAL is my favorite news station,” she said. “Bad enough that earlier they were promoting a news segment on RuPaul, you know, the transvestite?”

I knew him. All legs, skin as soft as silk.

“But it was even worse because when I turned on the 9 o’clock KCAL newscast there was a helicopter following this chase, and it just continued and continued.”

*

She didn’t have to tell me about it. Cops, their dusty hair darkened by the sweat on their foreheads, had briefed the press.

Their story? When a Burbank park ranger tried to stop Fernando Jaime Ramos for driving the wrong direction on a one-way street, Ramos feared the ranger would write a citation and discover he was smoking marijuana, revoking his parole and returning him to prison for life. So the mug tried to run down the ranger and sped off in his delivery truck, starting the 2 1/2-hour police pursuit across Los Angeles, with news choppers overhead, that KCAL-TV Channel 9 carried live during its 8, 9 and 10 p.m. newscasts, as did KTLA-TV Channel 5 and KTTV-TV Channel 11 during their 10 p.m. newscasts, even though none of them knew who was in the truck or why it was hurtling through L.A. with one wheel-rim exposed. Ramos was taken into custody in Vernon after a squad car rammed the rear of his battered truck, causing it to hit a building, and he now faces nine felony charges.

“Again, what’s the beef?” I asked Kathleen, who identified herself as a public relations consultant. “You could have turned it off.”

*

She was silent for a moment, obviously giving me one of those looks that make your spine feel like a run in a stocking. “I could have, that’s true,” she admitted frostily. “But the more I watched the more it became a question of fascination. How long would they follow this story? I mean the only exciting part was when the truck would make a turn, and it would bring pressure on the right rear wheel that would cause a shower of sparks. That was the highlight. I called my husband into the room, and it became hilarious. Not only did they keep showing it, but they had to make small talk about it. My husband and I became transfixed.”

So she had a husband. He must have had a fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser. “Whaddaya mean, small talk?” I asked.

“It was really amusing, because Pat Harvey, you know the anchor Pat Harvey?”

I knew her. Always dressed to go out. A little haughty but not too much. Sensual mouth that smiled easily. Eyes dark and shadowy under fluffed-out black hair. The kind of anchor to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

“Well, she and the guy in the helicopter tried to constantly examine and re-examine the motives of this character whom they knew nothing about. Then we changed to Channel 5, and that really shocked us because Channel 5 is usually so credible. But there was Larry McCormick, you know the anchor Larry McCormick?”

I knew him. Attached to Channel 5 for an eternity. The sort who’d live in a nice little house with a salt-tarnished spiral staircase going up to the front door and an imitation coach lamp for a porch light.

“Well, he also was trying to find interesting things to say about this person he knew nothing about. He kept calling him a gentleman. Like he’d say, ‘It’s amazing this gentleman has never gotten on the freeway.’ That was the only thing he could think to say about the guy.”

*

Kathleen insisted that stations had no business erasing regular newscasts to cover police chasing a truck, especially when ignorant of what it was all about. I tried to put her straight. “Not covering it live would have been a big gamble. Why, terrorists armed with explosives could have been in the truck. Or Al Cowlings driving. Or O.J. escaping. Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, Sacco and Vanzetti, Michael Jackson. Who was to know?”

She wasn’t buying what I was selling. So I asked: “What would you have had them do, sweetheart, short of not covering it live?”

She laughed demurely, then hit me with it. “They had no hard information about the truck. At the very least what they could have done was to mollify their viewers by having a researcher in the studio, someone who could say what might happen to the truck’s right rear rim or what could happen to the axle if the wheel would fall off. That’s it, they should have had a mechanic come on.”

Live coverage of cop chases producing a cottage industry of telegenic auto mechanics who would follow in the footsteps of TV’s lawyer hordes? A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.

Her sarcasm was sexy, but she lacked the facts. She hadn’t heard McCormick explain that night that such live coverage must continue, in part, so that fleeing suspects would know that “the media is watching.” Yes, that will stop them in their tracks. Nor had she tuned in the next night to KCAL’s promised in-depth analysis of why viewers loved chases. After all, newscast ratings exploded that night for KCAL, KTTV and KTLA.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” Kathleen said. “It’s just not news. It’s stupid.” I felt sorry for someone who failed to see the significance of a sparking wheel rim. Her idea of news was hard-boiled and full of sin. I wasn’t going to change her lovely mind.

Dames!