Page 4 of Head Room

“Not close enough to see much.Police tape.Significant perimeter.”

That surprised me.Not that he’d respected the police tape around the scene, but that he hadn’t found a way to see despite it.

“Can’t see the body, either.Even for identification purposes.”

“Let’s get lunch,” I proposed.“I’ll check in with my assignment editor and we can go.”

“I’ve eaten.And have a plane to catch before long.”

“Even better.I can eat and you can talk.”

If I read him right — not a paltryifconsidering his demeanor — he did not look forward to his portion of the agenda, but remained determined to do his duty.

****

My comment aboutchecking in with my assignment editor was pro forma.

Audrey Adams probably did want to know where I was, on the chance that flying saucers landed at the Sherman Rodeo grounds.Every assignment editor thought about staffing for such contingencies.

Barring flying saucers, she didn’t care about me taking time away from my planned task.I was wrapping up segments forHelping Out!,my official consumer affairs beat, basically clearing my desk before the wedding.Though it wasn’t necessary, because of an accumulated backlog of those segments.

My other duties included helping oversee a couple young reporters and being a resource for Mike Paycik, who’d bought KWMT-TV late last year.

He had once been a colleague here at the station and still was in certain inquiries we pursued.

Now I was helping him search for more staff, particularly a news director and a half-time anchor.

Not a lot of progress so far.

We had a reprieve on the half-time anchor, because the opposite half-time anchor would take up her duties in ten days and cover that job until mid-fall.That meant the staffer who’d been carrying the anchor load despite loathing the job would get a break...and not kill Mike.

Good news all around.

The news director job wasn’t a matter of life or death — except for the newsroom’s future.

We needed a news director with sufficient experience to lead and teach a mixed bag of staff with a projected influx of youngsters.That meant we needed one who loved a challenge.Oh, yeah, and who’d come to the smallest news market in the country.

Oddly, it was turning out to be a hard position to fill.

After the wedding, I intended to buckle down to scouring the TV news world for the right person.

But for now, my focus was Colonel Crawford.

If he’d been eating, I would have opted for Hamburger Heaven, but since he wasn’t, I chose the café, with more privacy winning over male-preferred menu.

He followed my SUV in a rental.

That gave me time to call Dale, the news aide, and have him read the colonel’s career highlights as I drove.Impressive.

As we walked in, having rendezvoused outside the door, I spotted Tullie, the primary server at the café and the niece of Penny Czylinski.

The former mattered for getting the seat I wanted.

The latter mattered because Penny, the doyenne of the Sherman Supermarket checkout was also the most thorough news-gathering source for the northwestern quadrant of Wyoming.She sucked in information rapaciously, shredded it into bits, and filed the shreds in a system known only to her.

Don’t take this to mean she was a careless gossip.She ingested information at a vastly greater rate than she expelled it.

Now and then, she would share a few shreds with humble petitioners like me.Never in order, never in direct response to a question.