The Killing Room by Richard Montanari

it.
    They were doing a follow-up to a story that had aired a week earlier, a story about a Philadelphia city councilman whohad been under investigation on charges of corruption and kickbacks. The ruling had come down that afternoon – exonerating the four-term councilman of any wrong doings. The councilman had declined to comment on air, so they decided to do a standup across the street from his modest law offices, which were located on the second floor of the building that housed the tavern.
    Shane took Cyn aside and showed her what he was thinking. She shook her head, put the camera on the tripod, framed it, locked it down. ‘You are so bad.’
    ‘And still you won’t fuck me.’
    ‘Not if you were the last dick in the Delaware Valley.’
    Shane laughed. The best part of riding with Mortal Cyn was that she was openly gay, Shane was openly straight, so there was never any sexual tension between them. There was, and hopefully always would be, a lot of sexual banter.
    Cyn flipped on the light, and silently counted him down.
    Exactly thirty-one seconds later, wrapping up:
    ‘This is Shane Adams, Action News.’
    In this follow-up piece about the councilman (who everyone in the city of Philadelphia believed was guilty of taking kickbacks), they had framed the shot of Shane’s stand-up carefully to include a portion of the neon sign for the Crooked Toad Tavern on the corner. The way they composed the shot, with the tavern’s sign at the right side of the screen, cut out most of it, leaving a single truncated word over Shane’s left shoulder while he was talking. A word written in bright yellow letters:
    CROOK
Shane watched the playback on the camera’s LCD screen.
Perfect.
God , he loved his job.
    At home, Shane showered and ran an electric razor over his face. He followed with toner and moisturizer. Next to the bathroom mirror he always kept a life-size color photograph of his face, taken on the first of every month. He had these pictures going back nearly ten years. He had a file of more than one hundred of them. In this way he charted the changes to his face, which was his life. He’d never had any plastic surgery, not even a dermabrasion or single shot of Botox, but now that he was getting older he was already pricing various procedures.
    Still in his robe, he sat at his iMac, launched his database application, clicked onto the file he needed. He then launched iPhoto, maneuvered over to the corresponding folder.
    He had first noticed her coming out of her rowhouse on Fitzwater Street about six months ago, and had watched her a few times since. She was tall and leggy, had deep auburn hair (Clairol Dark Spice Natural Reddish Brown). She was well dressed (Nordstrom and Bluefly), and had what appeared to be an Imelda Marcos-sized shoe collection (mostly Zappos, with a lot of returns).
    Shane had systematically gone through her trash every other week for the past three months, meticulously recording the details he might need, inputting it all into his ever-growing database.
    For instance, he knew she subscribed to Wine Spectator and, according to three separate receipts from a Center City chi-chi eatery, had ordered a Barolo. She was also a fan of novelist SueMiller, having recently bought a copy of The Good Mother at amazon.com . Three of her recent emails – which she for some reason printed out and subsequently discarded – had recommended the book to friends.
    She also ordered Mexican food from a delivery service, favoring tapas on Tuesday and frijoles on Friday nights.
    Note to self: Write a Broadway lyric around this.
    Shane closed his eyes, visualized the upcoming encounter. He had learned this technique from a shrink he had been forced to see as a result of a run-in with the PPD the first week he had been on the job in Philadelphia. The court had thought he might be unstable.
    Little did they know.
    Twenty minutes later he dressed in a Zegna sport coat, Seven For All Mankind jeans, along with an inexpensive