"I'll wait for you, Buddy.
I want you to remember that!"

"George, put the station on. This deejay seems to be messing up Concert Billboard."

I was also quite inquisitive, so I flipped the switch on the console to find out how well this new guy was announcing. "John Cougar" just had to wait. Besides, I was soon to go on myself, and I could use all the help I can get.

Just a few second proved Dan Toft had been correct.

"He's not giving the dates in the right order," Michelle Coles affirmed the suspicion.

"What can we do? We'll have to wait until he goes off exposure," I reminded everyone.

"Michelle, you're the program director this term. You go in," Toft concluded.

"By the way," I interrupted with obsequiousness. "When am I going to get some work to do? I looked in the file cabinets for the third time this week, and there is still nothing."

"Michelle, he's off," Toft blurted while ignoring my question. As Coles sallied out of the room, I stared at Toft. His boyish and mischievous blue eyes twinkled, and his mouth curved upward, pulling up his beard. I had known that facetious grin.

"Okay, I'll make something up, but I do want some practice."

In a nonverbal agreement, Toft's locks bounced up and down.
Breaking through the exchange, the station door creaked open, and in stepped the smiling face of Bill Landers, a graduate in marketing at the university last May and now a discjockey at a downtown FM station. He used to be one of the students at the station.

Before either of us acknowledged Landers's presence, Coles burst out of the door from the control room. With an air mixed between satisfaction and disgust, Coles sputtered, "I think he had it now, but I find it hard to get through to him."

I could see the frustration because Coles's countenance reddened in the dearth of natural light of the operations room. I averted the gaze by glancing at the clock in the control room.

"I hate to disturb anyone, but where is the jazz jock? It's five to noon, and it is Wednesday. Does Brian Minors do it today?"

Before I said anything more, Minors floated in from the hallway. He must have been reading our minds.

"Never mind that. -- Just get the jock to put on a long cut," Minors retorted. He wiped off his eyeglasses, pulled at his curly butterscotch hair, nervously grabbed a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and moved his 1.75-meter frame toward the jazz cabinet.

"Am I still on for today?" I quizzed about the board training he'd promised me two weeks earlier.

As he passed me from behind, Minors answered, "Wait until I settle down. Perhaps by one thirty, I'll cut you in."

With that termination of our conversation, I turned the phonograph back on for Chicago XIV. Both Toft and Coles left the room for production work, and Landers sauntered over to my table and broached, "We didn't get that album in yet."

"How about John Cougar's "Nothing Matters and What If It Did?" I asked, pointing at the album I had just labeled.

"No, but I haven't seen the mail from today yet."

"What're the tapes for?" I inquired, now observing the towering frame over me. Landers was tall at 1.86 meters, but I was sitting as I asked about the tapes.

Landers's cerulean eyes peered out from under a pile of golden sepia hair, which spilled over attached lobed ears to his shoulders. His forears had earbrows down to mouth level and a nosebrow hung beneath a long proboscis. His smile produced serpentine dimples along cheeks ravaged by puberty.

"I'm now working fultime for XRR," he answered.

"Very good. When do you start?" I quizzed while offering a nearby chair for sitting.

"Next week from 1 to 6 AM."

I could feel my eyes light up. "Well, I guess I'll listen whenever I have insomnia."

Then we delved into expatiations of which I did the more of the talking. I finished my work, and Minors gave me an almost useless board training. I knew the entire board, and I learned very little for the time spent. However, such perfunctory motions were prerequisites toward getting on the air.


I then trudged home, fighting the thirty-degree heat up North Atherton Street. It appeared an ordinary Wednesday in July until I arrived at the complex. While I was walking part the apartment of the neighbors, I noticed peripherally that the door was ajar. When I put down my mail to open my door, I realized the door next down had been forced open and there was someone inside!

At least in hindsight that was the case. At the time, I'd thought nothing of it. The thieves must have detected my presence when I rattled my key in my door, for they sallied out the nearby room before I even had a chance to put on my stereo.

I heard Janice, the secretary of the oil company which owned the exmotel, demand what they were doing there. I peeked out my window over the aircond and managed to procure a glimpse of the perpetrators as they scurried to their car parked right in front of my room. Unfortunately, I could not see the license plate because of the bushes. Some maintenance men chased the fleeting vehicle to no avail.

As I opened my door, I saw Janice's going into the room. I stood on the porch as she went inside, but I could see that they had ransacked the place. Obviously, the thieves knew the tenants did not live in the apartment during the weekdays. Of course! I strolled over to the room next door and on the other side of the theft.

Tony wasn't home. I didn't need to knock, because his ultramarine Chevrolet was absent from the parking lot. In my mind's eye, I saw that canary yellow Chrysler Horizon.

I suppose I had seen that car in my mind for quite a long time. I went back into the room and sat in my big green armchair, but it was suppertime before I could think of anything else. Obviously, they must have been watching the place for the last week.

It seemed as if the whole incident would pass by without a trace. The police dismissed it as a third-rate burglary. "These must have been professional who just miscalculated," I thought. They found nothing in the place, but they took nothing. The occupants were rarely there, so what was the reason? It was a clue for later encounters.

However, the following Sunday morning I dropped by the station on my way downtown. I walked upstairs, and to my surprise, the door to the operations room was ajar. The lights were out, but natural light gave the room a dreary look.

Almost absent mindedly, I walked to the control room and found it locked. Well, at least they have some brains, I thought. I strolled into the music library, thinking the discjockey must be somewhere. The room was quite a bit darker because the drapes were drawn over the only window.

Then it became even darker. I could hear voices and running. It all seemed like an LSD trip, but then I became aware of the cold maroon carpet on which I was lying prone.


I kept quiet about the incident, thinking I had surprised burglars, and again, nothing was missing. I left the station without encountering anyone else. I felt an intuition that the two incidents were linked, but how? I left the whole problem bubble in my subconscience.

"What's the matter, buddy?" I heard behind me. I whorled around and smiled at Don Hough. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with whom I shared the solutions of many mysteries.

"Don, I'm involved in a mystery of burglaries in State College, but I don't want to bother you."

Don's hazel eyes lit up. "Tell me about it."

I narrated what I knew.

"George, this sounds like something related to what I'm doing right now. The police have contacted me about the mystery we solved nearly two years ago. I think you called it 'The Arrogant Agriculturist'".

"Yes, it was a play to take over a farm," Don added.

"The State College police think the syndicate was behind it. Could it be behind these burglaries?"

Don reached up and patted my back. "Well, why don't we find out? You keep an eye out at the station and the former motel. I'll check with my contacts."


The following Tuesday night concluded the enjoyable Red Dog Saloon, an oldies show at the station. The Discjockey, Joe Brian Peters, his cosmic aide Ray Crony, and I performed our usual shticks and farces. Toward the end of the show, I noticed someone new in the control room when I returned. When I inquired, Peters merely introduced him as Dave Lurkey. I scrutinized Lurkey as if I had had an unconscious familiarity with him.

He stood about 1.80 meters, mass around 85 kilograms. His flaxen curly hair topped an eyeglassed face with a somatotonic chin and protruding ears. When we shook hands, I definitely felt a cool and stressed metabolism. Anyway, Lurkey soon left the control room, and I asked Peters what he had wanted.

"Oh, nothing much. He'd like to become a deejay and asked me about sitting in to watch me run the board."

I did not think anything of it as a possible connection between a new member and the burglary two days earlier.

"Even though the burglars took nothing from the station, I wouldn't dismiss it as a prank," Don advised. "Remember they'd slugged you when you discovered them."

I became familiar with Lurkey in production. I was in a class, and Lurkey had been a reluctant learner. That summer I had production the management continued to ignore. I was too busy on the alert to be discouraged.

I stopped bugging about production any more than badgering about announcing. I graduated that August into graduate school, but the personnel at the station changed with the new school year.