The Anything Goes Girl (A Brenda Contay Novel Of Suspense Book 1)

by Barry Knister

  “Better every day,” she said, taking a seat. “Am I free to leave now?”

  “Any time. That’s fudging it by a few hours, but two nights equal two days. We’ll give you a diet. You should plan to have blood and urine tests on a weekly basis. I’ll contact Ford Hospital and forward your records.”

  “I appreciate all you’ve done,” Brenda said, and meant it. “Bending the rules, patching through radio calls. Playing along.” She pointed over her shoulder to the door.

  “Got something planned?” he asked. “I assume you do, but don’t tell me. And be careful.” He nodded to the door. “If you’re leaving, I think it’s time someone got her walking papers.”

  “It’s not necessary. She didn’t mean anything.”

  “You’re probably right, but I wouldn’t be able to trust her now. She’s a big girl and she made her choice. Do you have transportation?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “I think it would be better if one of our security guards drove you.” Haffner looked across the desk at her a moment, then stood and held out his hand. “Good luck.”

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  It was four in the afternoon when the Mercygrove van turned into the W-DIG entrance and stopped next to the security booth. The guard came out and stepped to the window. “Miss Contay.” He touched his hat and smiled. “Great to see you.”

  “Nice to be back.”

  “You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  “I will.” She waved and directed the driver around to the back entrance. He unloaded her plastic carryall containing her clothes and the three personnel files. Brenda thanked him and walked up the ramp into the studio. She was sweating, and wondered whether her chemistry would ever return to normal.

  She walked down the broad corridor, hearing familiar voices in offices, the click of computer keys. It was strange to her now, disorienting somehow—until she realized the walls had been painted. Pale blue a month before, now they were peach.

  She approached the receptionist’s station, and someone unfamiliar looked up from her desk. Good, Brenda thought. Now is not the time for war stories.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Jerry.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “Brenda Contay, yes I do.”

  The woman’s mouth dropped. “Oh God. Of course you know where to find him—”

  At the far end of the hall, Joyce Delarossa got up from her desk and ran. Brenda moved to meet her and they held each other, saying nothing. Finally Joyce let her go, holding her by the hands. The secretary’s eyes were wet.

  “That bad?” Brenda smiled.

  “I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Joyce said.

  “How’s Tiger Woods?”

  “The little prick.” The assistant narrowed her eyes. “If I didn’t need this job, I’d kick him in the balls and quit. Never in my life have I met anyone so selfish.”

  “He’s in?”

  “Ever since you called, he’s been on the phone getting ready for you. His damned office looks like a florist’s. The caterer just left, he delivered half a dozen trays.”

  “I need to talk to him alone,” Brenda said. “Keep people out for a while.”

  “Make him squirm,” Joyce said. “Make him beg.”

  “Don’t we have a wheelchair in the building?”

  “You feel weak?”

  “I’m fine. I need it for a little demonstration.”

  Joyce was already walking away. “I’ll ask the custodian.”

  Brenda went down the hall and opened the producer’s door. The room smelled of roses. Jerry was on the couch to her right, eating off a plate. A trestle table filled the middle of the room, crowded with deli trays and floral arrangements. Large bouquets covered his desk and stood banked against the walls. Jerry jumped to his feet, dropped his plate on the coffee table and grabbed a napkin. Wiping his mouth, he crossed to her with open arms.

  She held out a hand. “No, Jer. My skin.”

  He stopped short, bobbing his head, still chewing. “I understand. Tender. Jeez, though, you look great, Brenda, fabulous.”

  “Is Lindbergh here?”

  “What? Come on, no, just us homeboys. Your friends, family.” He wiped his mouth. “Hungry? I didn’t know what you might want, so I got everything—” He looked to the door. “Joyce!”

  “We’ll party later,” she said. “Right now, you and I have business.”

  “We do, you’re right. Me and you need to talk alone here, just the two of us.” Nervously he wiped his hands. “I just thought, you know, everybody’s so concerned, a little reception.”

  The door opened and Joyce came through wheeling the chair. “It was in the super’s closet,” she said. She glared at Jerry, walked out and closed the door firmly.

  “My God, of course, you must need that,” he said. “I can see it. I mean, you look terrific, but not a hundred percent.”

  Brenda stepped behind the wheelchair and rolled it next to the TV monitor, angling it toward the wall. She pulled the black headscarf from her pocket and gathered up her hair. During the two days of physical therapy, she had worked out the meeting. Anxious to please, Jerry would also be worried about legal threats from Neff. He would never let her air live, but if she gave him something convincing, a format and outline he believed she wanted to do….

  She finished tying the scarf and sat in the wheelchair. “Sit down,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  He backed to the leather couch and sat. “Don’t you want—”

  “Later, pay attention,” she said. “What we’re talking about is a great special someone’s going to run. W-DIG or News 2, I don’t know which.”

  “Us,” he said. “Whatever you want, it’s a done deal.”

  “We’ll see. First, we open with my new Lightning Rod graphics,” she said. “The ones we did before I left.”

  “The new ones—wait, let me get this down.” He hustled around the trestle table to his desk. Shoving aside flowers, he grabbed a legal pad, ran back to the couch and sat. “Okay, go.”

  “First, the graphics. Me running, then Ned’s tape from the sidecar. But no voiceover. No theme, either, just the graphics. Silent running on the whole thing.”

  “You’ve got me already,” he said, scribbling.

  “Then, cut to me next to a swimming pool. It’s the indoor pool at my apartment building. I’m sitting as you see here. It’ll be effective, the contrast. The running and cycle, then still water and me sitting next to a pool, in a wheelchair. Stock gave me a robe. If you do this instead of News 2, that’s what I’ll be wearing.”

  “Love it,” Jerry said, still writing. “Don’t even think 2.”

  “This will be the teaser for Lou’s story,” she said. “Prep work. We’ll hook people and they’ll come back for Lou when he does the main feature. First the Lightning Rod with a medical-travel angle. What happened to me, where I was, the rehab process.”

  “Got it, great.”

  “In the chair, I have my college yearbook. I say how glad I am to be alive, how grateful I am to so many people. Then I hold up the book, we zoom in. We show shots of Vince Soublik, stills.”

  “Great, perfect.” He looked up from the legal pad. “Vince who?”

  “Soublik,” she said. “A guy who died, a swimmer. He’s the reason I went out there.”

  “Got it, okay, I remember. Shots of the dead swimmer, your classmate. I get the pool thing now, very strong. Creative.” He looked up again. “Parents? Friends? What do you do with it?”

  All business today, he was sitting forward on the couch, collar loosened, shirtsleeves rolled up. “You were touched by the story,” he said. “This swimmer who joined The Peace Corps. A friend. What happened to him? How’d he die? You’re supposed to fly to Rio, but screw that, this is more important. You can’t just leave it there, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Looking at him on the couch, the room heavy with the smells of ho
thouse roses and pickled herring, Brenda felt sick to her stomach. “Essentially right,” she said. “I’ll need island footage. Beaches, palm trees.”

  “Which one?”

  “Something tropical, it doesn’t matter. Lots of sky and beach. An empty desert island.”

  “Desert island—” Jerry wrote it down and looked up. “Canoes? Grass skirts?”

  “Nothing recreational. This is serious.”

  “I follow.” He made another note. “Empty. Vacancy with waves. Something waiting to happen.”

  “Right. Then starvation, just a few frames.”

  “What, famine? Africa?” Jerry winced. “I don’t know, Bren. People have had a lot of that, it’s a downer.”

  “What do you think, I missed lunch out there?”

  He pinched his eyes shut. “Forgive me. Wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry.” He opened them and looked at her. “You look so great it made me forget. Go ahead.”

  “Lou’s story,” Brenda said. “Under development to come later. We build off it. His colleague at W-DIG went out on a story and nearly died. Lou Stock is dropping everything to develop what really happened.”

  Jerry was shaking his head, writing it all down. “That’s so generous,” he said. “So dead-on professional.” He looked up from the legal pad. “This is going to blow the shit out of the ratings,” he said gravely. “I mean it. I’m pumped.”

  “So it works for you?” she asked.

  “I can see the whole thing,” he said. “I can feel it. We have to do this.”

  “You see how important timing is,” she said. “It has to air right now. This week.”

  “You mean next week.”

  “I mean this Friday.”

  “Wait, darlin’. Not possible.”

  “Pre-empt ‘Page One’ on Friday night,” she said. “Run this right after the eleven o’clock.”

  “Whoa, Brenda. Think what you’re asking.”

  “Tell me Lou Stock won’t approve,” she said. “Tell me he hasn’t been waiting years for a local story worth shoving Ray Kramer off at eleven-thirty.”

  “I know, but Jesus. Such short notice.”

  “Jer, don’t make me say the magic word,” Brenda said. “I’m serious, look at your numbers. Am I missed here, or what? If you mean what you say, this is not a hard call to make.”

  “I’d have to phone Atlanta.”

  “You better sell it to him, Jer. If he’s here and has all the facts, no question he says yes. But he’s away and it bothers him. He doesn’t understand how serious I am.”

  “You can tell him. We’ll do a conference call, all three of us.”

  “Jerry, this is something I’m doing for you. Me to you, reporter and producer. I’m giving you first refusal. You know my contract expired when I was out there. If you get a no from the station manager, I’m gone. So, make it happen.”

  Jerry shook his head. “Do you really mean that, darlin’?”

  “I really mean that, Jerry. Lou Stock authorized sending someone out there. If I give it to News 2, who do you think will be the next person on leave?”

  “This is painful,” he said. “I really thought we were friends.”

  “Sure, Jer, we are. We’re family. But this terrible thing happened to me. It changed my life. Don’t you believe I starved for two weeks? You think I made it up?”

  What could he say? “You listen up, Jer,” she said. “Before viewers forget who I am, I want to do this piece. This Friday. Is that unreasonable?”

  “No no, you’re dead on all the way. It never sank in until this minute, what you went through. It’s just I don’t see why we can’t wait a week.”

  “There’s leakage. I learned print reporters went to see the Soubliks last week.”

  “Oh, shit. So we have to go with it tout de suite.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying.”

  “Anyone didn’t jump on this would be wrong,” he said. “Sleeping at the switch.”

  “How’d you like that on your resume?”

  “Okay.” He raised his chin defiantly. “That’s what I’ll tell Atlanta. We’ll pre-empt Kramer Friday night.”

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  Joyce Delarossa drove her home. “Did you get what you want from him?”

  “He said yes, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “If you don’t get what you want, leave,” Joyce said. “I’d miss you, but that’s what I’d do. These Neff people have been all over him. Someone named Lindbergh, then a woman yesterday. He’s terrified they might sue if he gives you a free hand.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The man came alone on Monday afternoon. He didn’t stay long, but when he left Jerry looked shook. This Lindbergh came back Tuesday with a woman. The three of them went to lunch. When he got back, Jerry was very full of himself. He said they were happy and going to work with us, whatever that means. Then he told me to call Ned Chambers and tell him to pack.”

  “For what?”

  “Rio. They sent him down there yesterday with Gloria. Jerry told me he thought it might be best if you didn’t know.”

  First her mother, now this. They wanted Ned out of town until after Labor Day.

  Joyce turned off Civic Center Drive and pulled to a stop under the canopied entrance. “If I hear anything more, I’ll call,” she said.

  Brenda got out, slammed the door and glanced at the row of parked cars. After being abandoned for a month, her Camaro looked like something in a landfill. She entered and crossed the lobby, nodding to the guard as she waited for the elevator. She rode to her floor feeling cold. Michigan was starting September with warm weather, and the building’s air-conditioning was on.

  Inside her unit, the air was chilly, but the smell of chemicals was almost gone. Brenda took a brief tour to confirm all was unchanged, then popped a freezer meal in the microwave. Tomorrow, she would shop with the diet sheet Haffner had given her.

  Stepping onto her narrow balcony, Brenda gazed at the urban sprawl before her, a plane lazing overhead. The running lights blinked as it dropped and banked on the way into Metropolitan Airport. Perhaps it was the microwave’s noise inside, a dense whirring that made her feel empty. She thought of Calvin Moser and Sam Towland, of Ned, and her brother Morris. It felt as though she did not know any of them. Not really.

  The whirring stopped. Brenda went in and sat at her dining table to eat the tasteless food. Finished, she carried the plastic dish to the sink, then walked back to her bedroom. In the dark, she opened the closet door and pulled out the stool used for reaching the upper shelf. She sat on the stool, smelling cedar.

  She cried then, rocking, thinking of her father. What she was going to do would be done for no reason anyone else would ever know. Just a foolish longing for his approval.

  At last she pulled the closet’s light cord. A yellow jacket the housekeeper had missed lay on the carpet. Perhaps it had survived for a time, then dropped. Seeing it gave her resolve, and she went to the bed, too tired to undress.

  As she stretched out on her back, Brenda noticed the closet light was still on. She saw her father trooping her downstairs, and smiled. She was too tired. Blinking in the semi-dark, she thought of the Soubliks’ porch light.

  “They signed th’ contracts yesterday morning,” Morris said. “Gene 2’s no longer part of Neff. Your friend McIntosh wasn’t there.” He rattled ice in a glass.

  Brenda pushed up in the bed and rubbed her eyes. The digital clock radio read 7:12. Her brother sounded funny. “What about the buyout?” she asked.

  “Stillinprogress.”

  “Morris, it’s seven in the morning. You’re drinking.”

  He did the mirthless lawyer’s laugh. “Why would I be drinking? I’m shit-canned, th’ Nordic Princess docks in New York Harbor this afternoon. I can’t think’f any reason, can you?”

  McIntosh had learned of his visit. “I’m sorry, little brother. You better get some rest.”

  “Y’owe me, Brenda. Get on a plane. Right now. Meet
me at Pier 9.”

  “Impossible. I would if I could, but I can’t. We’re taping here all day.”

  “Get me fired. Leave me t’deal with mom all ‘lone. You never liked me.”

  “Don’t start, Morris. I like you fine. You have many excellent qualities.”

  “Name one.”

  “You’re…punctual.”

  “Thanks a helluva lot,” he said.

  “Who used to call who Slut Puppy?”

  “All these years you hold it against me,” he said. “What d’you know, Brenda? What d’you know ’bout being Brenda Contay’s kid brother in high school? Nothing.”

  “It couldn’t be easy, I admit that.”

  “Graffiti all over the toilets, th’ jokes—”

  “Morris, I have to go. When you see mother, tell her I’m not in Detroit. Tell her I went to Phoenix, on assignment.”

  “No more,” he said. “F’geddaboudit.”

  “She’ll make you fly here with her. If she knows I’m here, she’ll make you come with her.”

  He groaned.

  “See what I mean? If she sees me now, before I’m better, your cover’s blown. She’ll never leave you alone about it. So I’m in Phoenix, Morris. Don’t forget. I left the hospital and I’m on assignment. I’m fine and working. Go take a cold shower.”

  ◆◆◆◆◆

  Jerry called to tell her the station manager in Atlanta had agreed to preempt Ray Kramer’s show on Friday night. “After you and I talked, I never stopped thinking,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep, the ideas kept coming like missiles. I wish you could’ve heard me pitch it. Poetry in motion.”

  That afternoon, studio technicians brought the Harley to her apartment building. People would first see a silent version of the new opening for her Lightning Rod features—running down the corridor, bashing through doors, jump-starting the cycle. This would be followed by the parked cycle resting under her apartment building’s entrance canopy, then the quiet indoor swimming pool.

  The technician panned it slowly, zooming in on the sundeck’s view of the Southfield skyline. Finally, he came to rest on her, seated in the wheelchair next to the pool, in her Vietnamese hooker robe.

  “This is Brenda Contay,” she said. “I’m glad to be back. Glad to be alive. Maybe you heard about what happened to me four weeks ago. Maybe you’re watching just to see how I look, how I held up. I’m okay.”