by Adam Sommers
Jayne undid her blouse, but she kept it on and sat down next to Pam on the couch, took a sip of wine.
Anita sat to the left of Jayne Grayman, Pam to Jayne’s right. Jayne had told them little of what to expect, only that it would be fun. This was standard procedure for their get togethers. The surprise was part of the thrill.
“I did a guy with my finger once,” Jayne conceded.
“Ugh. Gross!” Pam yelled.
“You put on a rubber, first, silly.”
“Oh, mmm… well… huh.” It was funny how that one little factoid changed Pam’s whole thought process on the possibility.
“You want to try it?” Jayne asked Pam.
“What?”
“Anal. With a guy. I can give you a number.”
She hesitated, but Jayne saw the color come up in her friend’s pale face. “Remind me before you leave,” said Jayne. “You girls ready for your treat?”
Pam squeezed her legs together.
Anita Juarez’s mouth hung slightly open.
“All right,” she said. Then, flicking an intercom button on the phone on a side table, she said, “You can come in now.” The door at the end of the hallway, which connected to the maid’s quarters, opened slowly, and into the hallway strode a tall, slender, black-haired man. “Ladies, I’d like you to meet my friend Warren, star reporter and amazing fuck.”
Warren Zalinsky entered the room somewhat sheepishly. Tentatively. He was wearing jeans and construction boots, but the upper part of his body was bare except for the leather dog collar around his neck.
“Take your pants off,” Jayne ordered.
Chapter 26
Eric struggled for two days with his secret before the burden got too heavy and he had to reveal it to someone. There was only one real choice. Janon Masterson. For all his flea-bitten faults, Janon was as loyal as a Doberman and would staunchly defend Eric against all comers. He’d also listen as long as it took and, since he was a lawyer, would know if there was some recourse.
Eric wasn’t at all sure he wanted to explore his “recourse” options just yet. He didn’t necessarily want to blow up his life, and he conceded that it was quite thrilling to see his name (and also his picture) on the front page now four times in less than three months. He had a growing list of sources willing to talk about the ills of the uniformed services and thus a promise of more and better stories to come. Down the road, he could even aspire to cracking the protective shell around the mayor and seeing Grissom Lester brought down by his hand.
If he could somehow manage the aggression of Jayne Grayman, Eric Berger could generate a little buzz for himself. He could write a book that could turn into a screenplay that could be a hit movie. He could be famous.
Janon listened to it all, from the onset of the stories, to the column sig above the fold, and how it all happened. He was indeed a good listener. They were at his favorite bar, in his favorite booth, sipping gingerly from mugs with the pitcher at Janon’s elbow.
At the end, Janon said: “First, you’re all right?”
“She didn’t do any physical damage,” Eric confirmed. “But it does kind of mess with my mind a little bit.”
“Okay. You know you could talk to someone about it. You could still tell the cops.”
“Forget it. She’s pretty plugged in and I have nothing but my word. It’d be hopeless. Far as a shrink goes…I don’t know. Maybe. Right now, I’m thinking of it as like a bad acid trip. I realized the thing that was killing me about it was she was trying to shit-can me, or get me to quit.”
“That doesn’t make logical sense.”
“Yeah, I know that. Then I kind of chilled out when she played my stories. I don’t trust her for shit, but long as I can stay at the job I’ll be fine-ish.”
“Okay,” Janon let out a sigh and Eric was touched that his grumpy friend actually cared about him.
“What I’m twisting over is what is wrong with her? Why did she do it?”
“Right. On first blush, I see three possibilities. One: It was a one-time thing. She was drunk or high or having some female hormonal episode, and you happened to be there. Two: She’s just messing with the new kid on the block for some sick entertainment or like a hazing kind of thing. Maybe every reporter goes through something like that. You might quietly ask around.”
Eric furrowed his brow. He didn’t think either scenario was likely and he clearly wasn’t going to start asking reporters if Jayne had tried to have sex with them. “Go on,” he told Janon.
“Okay, three. Brace yourself.”
“I’m braced.”
“She’s in love with you.”
“No, no, no. That’s the stupidest one yet. None of that crap makes any sense. It just doesn’t fit.”
Janon’s natural inclination to argue and try to prove it could be one or more of his theories led him into a long defense of each, which Eric let roll over him and ignored as best he could. Finally, he said, “Give it up, man. There’s something else.”
“Like what? You’re so smart, what do you think is going on?”
“Only thing I can think of is she’s trying to get me fired for sexual abuse. Maybe she’s hoping I’ll make a complaint and she’ll say it was the opposite way around. I came after her. People would believe that over what really happened.”
“Yeah…uh, no,” said Janon condescendingly. “First, she doesn’t know you well enough to have a vendetta, and you just started there and you’re like doing all these amazing stories.”
Eric nodded. All that was true.
“Plus,” said Janon pouring another half glass from the pitcher and topping off Eric’s, “if she wanted to fire you, she’d just fire you. No reason for all the heavy breathing.”
“Well, one thing I can tell you, she’s not in love with me. You can scratch that off your list.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because I know. What happened wasn’t about love. She doesn’t even know me.”
“Okay, then it’s a one-time hormone thing,” Janon offered.
“Perhaps,” Eric allowed if only to try to bring the conversation to a close. His head hurt. After nearly destroying his apartment with beer puke, he had vowed not to drink more beer and yet here he was, drinking more beer. “You know, there is a sort of obvious explanation we haven’t even talked about.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe she’s just a straight-up psycho. Does this shit for thrills.”
Janon scratched his round stubble-encrusted chin and looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t like the idea because he had not thought of it, and it was at least as good as anything they’d come up with. His silence was as good as a thumbs-up and Eric kept going. “So let’s say that’s the case. She’s some sort of twisted bitch. What happens now? Does she give up? Does she keep after me? And what the hell do I do?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly where it goes from here, but the first thing you do is document everything. You go home, you write all this down. I’m going to write it all down myself so that, should the need arise, there is corroboration. Second, be prepared to record any future meeting with her. Make sure you have a cassette recorder, that the batteries are charged and the tape is loaded. Having said that, try not to be alone with her in any circumstances. Three, make inquiries at the Department of Labor on filing sex-harassment claims. Make sure they have your name and information, and write notes about that conversation.”
Sometimes flea bites were worth it, thought Eric Berger. He loved the conservative, rational, step-by-step methodology of Janon Masterson. But he did not want to go to war with Jayne Grayman. He simply wanted to be left alone. If he dealt with anyone at the paper, he was happy talking to John Williams and leaving it at that. Plus, he feared if she got wind of any hint he was going to take action against her she’d probably fire him on the spot.
&nbs
p; “Of course,” said Janon Masterson finishing his glass of beer. “You could always pack up and go running home to mama.”
“Fuck that,” spat Eric.
“Atta boy,” said Janon. “Play it a day at a time, but just doing this helps cover your ass. In the meantime, there’s some things I can do.”
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
“Like?”
“Like you ever hear of the expression ‘patterns repeat?’ ”
“Yeah, duh, that’s why they’re called patterns.”
“Right. And things don’t happen in a vacuum. If she’s like forty-something, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Everyone’s got a past, and that past is surprisingly well-documented. Those documents are available to lawyer-type people and they can be pretty useful.”
This hadn’t even occurred to Eric.
“I can’t promise anything, of course, but I can do a little very quiet digging.”
Eric liked digging and he liked snoops, especially when they were working for him. He nodded a silent assent that carried with it a “thank you” and “not bad, pal.”
“Give me a few days to see what I can come up with.”
Janon had his lawyer things, but it got Eric’s wheels spinning. Why should Janon have all the fun? The idea of investigating his own editor-in-chief was just too exciting for Eric to sit back and hope Janon came up with the goods. Eric would get busy, too. He might not get to the root of her actions, but at the very least he was going to start to know a lot more about his boss than he did at that moment. Somewhere in some of that information there might be something he could use against her. Just the act of digging, just the thought of starting to dig, made Eric Berger feel a whole lot better.
Chapter 27
Mitch Lozatti never talked about his feelings, his love life, his hopes and dreams. Mitch was simply Mitch. As long as he had his stacks of heavy metal CDs and a pack of Marlboro Light 100s, he was a happy boy. He lived for music, knew who had been with what band, for how long. Who’d gone on to re-form into what other group. Who was on tour and who was coming up.
Most of the time when Mitch was home, the door to his room was closed and the mega stereo was screaming Mega Death or Anthrax or The Scorpions or something else that made your ears bleed.
On the same night that Eric was out getting advice from Janon Masterson, Mitch was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his room trying not to breathe too loudly, or laugh like a raving lunatic. In front of him were his beloved CDs, but instead of the precisely organized towers built alphabetically from the front of the room to the back, with exactly three inches of space between them, there was a massive pile of plastic in a jumble. He was patiently, lovingly putting them all back exactly where they needed to be.
In theory, he should have been distraught to the point of drinking paint thinner, but such was not the case. Mitch was experiencing one of the great moments of his life because Terry was asleep on his bed.
The girl he had lusted after for two years, taken as “a friend” to twenty different concerts, bought a thousand drinks, listened to her stories of a hundred other guys who let her down, was in his bed. As Mitch well knew, Terry was not a girl who would travel any traditional road. She was a party girl who liked weed and mushrooms, had experimented with acid and had no problem snorting coke when available. Terry—brown-haired and wild-eyed—flitted from guy to guy, from crisis to crisis, like a hummingbird visits flowers. Mitch harbored no illusions that she’d be his forever, that they’d grow old listening to Def Leppard. He simply took what she gave, stacked his discs back into their correct piles and was happy, just a little bit more so on this day than most.
Chapter 28
Within twenty-four hours of his sit-down with Janon, Eric had learned much about his boss.
Tops on the list was that she was was rich—not a little rich, not nouveau riche, but filthy-stinking-rotten-old-money-rich. Her family had made millions supplying gears, bearings, and a variety of other machine parts to an array of companies during the Second World War, and turned that mountain of money into yet more money simply by selling off bits of the business throughout most of the 1950s. The last piece, Precision Industrial Lubricants Inc., went to Hawke Industries, based in Seattle, in 1957 for eighty-one million dollars. Eric whistled when he saw that number. How much lubricant someone had to sell to make eighty-one million dollars he could not comprehend.
Getting an overview of the Grayman fortune was relatively easy. Finding out what the family did with the money was more difficult, but for his purposes, what the Graymans did or didn’t do with their riches wasn’t that important. The only thing that piqued Eric Berger’s interest was one acquisition—an art gallery—helpfully called The Grayman Gallery, not far from Boston. It looked like the sole purpose of The Grayman Gallery was to sell paintings and sculptures created by Roland Grayman. When Jayne’s paternal grandfather died in 1971, the gallery followed soon after.
Jayne Grayman’s grandmother, who started out life as Pearl Duke, was a nonentity. There was no indication she ever had a job or was on the board of any cultural or business institution. The only thing remarkable about Pearl Grayman (nee Duke) was that at the age of one-hundred-and-one she was still very much alive and living in an assisted living facility less than a mile from where the gallery had stood.
Jayne’s mother, Ethyl, also still alive, was living outside Boston but suffering from a degenerative nerve disease that left her unable to walk. Her mind, however, was still sharp and she was enjoying her last few years without her husband, who had died a couple of years earlier. If only to satisfy his own curiosity, Eric made a mental note to delve a little deeper into what they actually did with their money. It would be the second issue to tackle regarding Jayne Grayman. The first was to find out why on earth she was not sunning her big ugly face on a yacht somewhere with some collection of boy toys rather than dirtying her hands with the likes of little Eric Berger, John Williams, and the rest of the people who make a living off of other people’s foibles and pain.
Chapter 29
Carrie Scanlon usually fell asleep in seconds, but on this night there was no sleep. After lying down at eleven p.m., she was still wide awake half an hour later. She’d smoked a joint and tried to relax, but it backfired and just made her hyper.
At midnight she went for a run. When she came back and got showered, she expected to feel dead tired, but nothing happened. At one a.m. she tried a glass of wine, a big glass, and was relieved to feel at least a little groggy. But it only lasted a few minutes. Soon her mind started whirling again. She kept seeing Jayne’s face, itching to send her to Fairfax.
TV didn’t help. The radio was all commercials and talk. She tossed this way and that, got sweaty and then froze; took her temperature to see if she was sick; drank two glasses of water and another glass of wine.
Finally, her heart racing, everything in her mind jumbled—Fairfax, Warren, The Standard, the wine show, Eric, story quotas, sex, Fairfax, sex—Carrie threw off her covers, got out of bed and put on her clothes. She wanted to call someone. Warren was an obvious choice but it was so late and she didn’t want to bother him. Eric came to mind, but again, how could she call anyone in the dead of night when there wasn’t a dire emergency, or in fact, an emergency of any kind?
With no real consciousness of doing so, she found herself behind the wheel of her Acura on the way to the office of The Washington Standard. The stories she had to do were on her mind. Maybe if she at least started them, she wouldn’t be so jittery.
The parking lot was empty so she pulled right up front. It was quiet outside except for some night jays squawking to protect their turf. The guard woke up when she walked past in the lobby but didn’t say a word. She was thinking how good it would be to get ahead of her Jayne Grayman-mandated quota. The ever-present threat of Fairfax hung in her mind. Above all, she did not want to be take
n from Warren Zalinsky and her other friends. Yet she could not concentrate on the Wines of Winchester Annual Chardonnay Showdown or the other thing she’d just gotten a press release on—what was it?—the Douglaston Cat Show. That one she was going to enjoy. She really loved cats.
Upon entering the newsroom, she strangely did not go to her desk where, in theory at least, she could start the day’s work. She drifted around, eventually landing at the cluster where Mitch Lozatti and Eric Berger sat near each other and the big windows looking out on the woods. Carrie sat at Eric’s desk and looked at the window. There was nothing to see because it was black outside. The only thing visible was her own vague reflection. She got up and stood directly in front of the glass, put her hand up to it. Her reflection hand touched hers. Her reflection eyes looked sadly into hers. Then, from nowhere, she watched tears well up in her eyes.
That’s stupid, she thought and wiped at her face, then, in an instant, there was more, tears flowed down both cheeks, her mouth twisted downward and her nostrils flared. Disgusted with herself, she whipped around back into the newsroom where she collapsed into the chair at Eric’s desk and put her head on her folded arms. What in hell is wrong? she thought. I feel fine. I can write more for that bitch if I have to. It’s not that big of a deal. I’ve got a nice car and a cute apartment. Why am I here? What the hell is wrong with me? I gotta call a shrink or something. This is ridiculous.
Not being able to understand why she was crying or what she was doing made her more upset and she cried even harder. In her entire life this had never happened. The last time she cried was when a pet bird she had as a kid died. And she got over that in like two hours.
Carrie never got emotional. Her world was simple: Write bouncy little stories, go out with guys, have sex if she felt like it, have a little drink, a little smoke and repeat. She was happy. Life was fun. Her girlfriends were great shopping buddies or lunch dates. She didn’t have a care in the world. What was she doing at three a.m. bawling her eyes out in an empty newsroom? Forcing herself to stop crying, she took a big breath, coughed, and fought down the urge to resume the storm. “Stop it,” she told herself. “Just stop it. Stop it right now.” The sound of her own voice helped her calm down. Big breath in, slooowwly out. Big breath in, slooowwly out.