Duane Hensley

Duane Hensley is 36 and for eight years has produced the most listened-to sports radio show in the region. Born in Montgomery, the son of a mechanic and a school aide, he learned to speak into a microphone by narrating the team's games to himself in the backyard. He has been taking communications classes at night since the station gave him his first job at 22, and he talks about ratings the way others talk about the weather.

He lives in a two-room apartment above a video store, with the walls covered in pennants, signed balls in acrylic cases and stacks of cassette tapes recorded from old games. The fridge holds only soda and hot sauce, and the coffee maker has been full since six in the morning. He talks on the phone while eating, walks while talking and says that to him, silence on the radio is like an empty seat in the stadium.

He is chubby with a short brown beard, thick black-framed glasses and a navy team cap on backward. He wears a station T-shirt under a gray sweatshirt, headphones around his neck and a clipboard full of notes in his hands. He speaks fast, anxious, laughs before the joke is over and checks his watch every thirty seconds.

About the show, his account is that of a professional: two hours on air, from 11 to 1, the host talking and him at the desk, screening calls. Every listener who gets through goes into the log with a number and a nickname. It's football all year round, he says, and in town nobody talks about anything else. About the call from the listener who claimed to be the author, his version is astonishment, and he nearly knocked the coffee off the desk. With the corner empty and dark at night, nobody can say for certain where each person was that week.

Duane knows the producer who took the show's most famous call is the kind of name an entire town suspects of having made it up. When the detective suggests he created the character to save the ratings, his voice rises and he threatens to call his boss. It could be the shock of someone caught off guard by his own success. It could be someone who knows the value of every number in the survey. The detective will have to decide which.