Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  13

  PARK AVENUE is a grand boulevard with a tree-lined concrete divider that stretches from Union Square downtown up into East Harlem. From Grand Central to the 90s, it is an aberrant stretch of quiet in New York, super-ritzy, with clean, broad sidewalks, buildings with doormen, bright lights, very few shops, and a rather snotty attitude designed to keep the city’s less hygienic riffraff at bay. Even at this late hour, you could almost choke on the smell of White Shoulders perfume and old money in the air.

  The doorman didn’t know who we were and there was no answer on the house phone, which supported my theory that the party was elsewhere, that Kathy had come here after she’d run into Julie and been drawn into the prank and they’d gone on from here. We made up a big story, about our friend Kathy, a cleaning woman who we feared had fallen into a diabetic coma and was stuck in a closet. But the doorman either didn’t believe us or wasn’t anxious to let a trio of strange women in costume up into his building, and he couldn’t leave his post to accompany us.

  “Parking garage,” Claire said. We went around the corner to the building’s garage entrance, and waited about five minutes before the garage door rolled open and one of the tenants drove out. As casually as possible, we walked in under the closing door. From there, we caught the elevator.

  The apartment was on the eleventh floor. There was no answer to our knocks, but the door was slightly open, exposing about a quarter-inch of the door jamb. It gave easily with a firm push.

  For a moment, I forgot this was all a big joke, and felt alarmed. Then, I remembered, and laughed. Claire and Tamayo, who had been waiting for my emotional cue, laughed too.

  Claire said, “I think they’re waiting for us.”

  The door opened into a beautiful apartment, as cold as a meat locker. The A/C was cranked up full and there was the scent of aftershave in the air, something expensive with a woodsy cedar undernote, like Chanel Antaeus. The place was decorated with country antiques, the very expensive kind, lots of rough-hewn blond wood cabinets and things with applique. Expensive, and yet comfortable.

  “Hello?” I called out. There was no answer.

  Claire called. Nothing.

  “There’s nobody here,” Tamayo said, going into the kitchen. Claire and I went into the bedroom, which was similarly furnished, right down to the antique blue ceramic pitcher and basin on the bedside table. You would have thought you were in nineteenth-century Provence if it weren’t for the desk with the computer on it. Didn’t seem like Julie’s taste, though, at least not the old Julie, the one I knew. If she had money, and evidently she did, I figured she’d go way overboard, lots of rococo gilt and crystal chandeliers, like a smaller version of the Plaza Hotel after it was Ivana-ized.

  This sure was a long way from the basement suite in the house where Julie and her mom lived with Julie’s uncle and his common-law wife. From a grim gray carpet, stained in spots and musty-smelling from the floods every spring, to this, a blue-and-gold Qum carpet worth tens of thousands of dollars. From cast-off square brown furniture with frayed edges to French country antiques, and instead of the cheap print showing covered bridges and mountain vistas, numbered prints by trendy artists.

  “Maybe it doesn’t belong to Julie. Maybe it belongs to this Anne Winston person,” Claire said.

  In the closet, there was nothing but a giant clown costume hanging on a wooden hanger and two big red floppy shoes. On the floor just outside the closet was a telephone, which had big number buttons, all lit up. We followed the cord to the answering machine on the desk.

  “Check it,” Claire said. I pushed the replay button.

  The first message was from Kathy: “Hi, I work for Robin Hudson and I’ve been following clues in the murder mystery you set up. I am outside a place called Joy II and I think there has been a mistake.…”

  “Hello?” said a man’s voice on the machine. Then the machine clicked off.

  After that were two messages from me.

  “A man answered, not your friend Julie,” Claire said.

  “One of Julie’s charitable co-conspirators, I guess,” I said.

  “Should we snoop?” Tamayo asked, poised at a desk drawer.

  “We shouldn’t,” I said. “But …”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Tamayo and Claire were opening drawers and looking for things. A lot of the drawers were completely empty. There were magazines: Town & Country, Architectural Digest, People, Vogue, Forbes, Business Week, and a few obscure financial journals. We found bill stubs, all to Help for Kids, some underwear and snagged pantyhose, a few unmatched socks, and some sundry items. Though plugged in, the computer didn’t turn on. It had either been locked or was out of order.

  We went into the bathroom, which reeked of aftershave. On the floor near the toilet was a rubber clown mask, the kind that covers the whole head. Clowns are creepy and give me the chills anyway, but a disembodied clown face can really send a rat running up your trouser leg.

  There was one toothbrush, pretty worn down, the bristles yellowed. Inside the medicine cabinet was a half-box of Tampax and a half-bottle of expired aspirin, in the wastebasket a used Mennen Speed Stick and shards of a broken aftershave bottle. I’d nailed it: Chanel Antaeus. Normally, I prefer a man’s natural smell, but I do love Antaeus.

  “It’s like someone moved out and left their furniture behind,” Claire said. “Maybe they’re changing offices.”

  “And apartments. People live here too,” Tamayo said.

  “Yeah, looks like Julie … or someone … has been living here with a man,” I said.

  “Beautiful bathroom,” Claire said, pulling the shower curtain around the old-fashioned footed bathtub.

  “Fuckeroo!” she gasped.

  There was a body in the tub, a man, his knees brought up to his chest. We only got a quick gander, and then we heard someone coming in.

  “Hide,” Claire said.

  In a bad imitation of a Three Stooges routine, we all three tried to cram through the bathroom door at once on our way to the bedroom. We scrambled under the bed. The bedspread hung down almost to the floor, and we could see only about a quarter-inch beneath it.

  The bathroom door closed and a man said something nonsensical that sounded like, “Here’s the hamburger.” There was some muffled thumping, but I couldn’t tell if that was the men or my heart, and then we heard the sound of water running. A creak. The bathroom door opened. The slamming of metal on metal. More thumping. The front door closed. Silence.

  After a few minutes of tense waiting to make sure the coast was clear, we poked our heads out from under the bed, and looked at each other.

  “Fuck,” Claire said, and she went back into the bathroom.

  The body was gone.

  “Call the cops,” Tamayo said.

  “We can’t call the cops from here,” Claire said.

  Claire and Tamayo were wide-eyed and freaking out. I just stood back and let them go at it.

  “Why?” Tamayo asked.

  “Aside from the fact that we have no body, we can’t identify the men who came in, and we’re guilty of a B&E,” Claire said, “what about our reputations? And somehow Kathy and Robin’s friend Julie are mixed up in this, so we have to think about this before we do anything that might put them in danger. I don’t know what to do. Shit. This could destroy me as a journalist.”

  “Claire, it isn’t what …” I tried to say, but she didn’t even acknowledge me. I’d never seen her in such a panicky state, leaping to conclusions, so unsure what to do.

  “We didn’t B, we only E’d,” Tamayo said. “We came in here very innocently, expecting Julie and Kathy.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Claire said. “I can’t think in here. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  She took off out of the apartment and down the stairwell, not waiting for us, like she was following some weird voice in her head. Tamayo and I looked at each other, and then followed. We left the way we came.

  “Thank God, you’re both wear
ing gloves, and I have paws,” Claire said. “No prints. So, even if someone saw us through their peepholes or when we were going into the garage, the best they can give the cops is a physical description.”

  “Imagine that APB,” Tamayo said. “Be on the lookout for a giant dog, a vampire with a red ’fro, and Marilyn Monroe.”

  “There’s no reason to panic. This probably isn’t what it looks like, trust me,” I said, pushing the garage exit button. As we walked quickly away from the building towards Lexington Avenue, I said, “You’re operating on the assumption he was dead or likely dead. This is part of the joke. I’ve already had a dead harlequin come back to life on me tonight. It’s another Goomey-style red herring. It’s too convincing.”

  “Too convincing?”

  “It is if you think like Julie Goomey. So far, she’s used a real charity, real merchants, sent actors and possibly a male escort to deliver messages.…”

  “Robin, I don’t think that was a joke,” Claire said.

  “He was so pale, he looked pretty dead to me. But, then, so does Robin,” Tamayo said.

  “Claire, I think that was George the rich guy. I recognized him by his distinctive flaring nostrils.”

  “That was George the rich guy?” Tamayo said.

  “He looked familiar to me too, Robin,” Claire said. “I’m sure I read a story about him this week. Damn, I sure wish I’d paid more attention to the stories I was reading.”

  “You don’t pay attention?”

  “The funny thing about marathon anchoring, Rob, is that after the third hour you don’t even hear the stories you’re reading. Didn’t you watch the news this week?”

  “I didn’t have time in L.A. I was too busy going to screenings and visiting old friends.” And old husbands, I added silently.

  I pulled one of the photos out of my bag, the one I’d picked up at Backslash, showing George with Julie. “See? Here he is. This was taken when we came to New York. He’s older now, but looks a lot the same.”

  “That does look like him,” Claire said. She studied the picture closely. “It says September 1979 on the side of this photo. See here? The printed date?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t you say you came to New York for spring break?”

  “Yeah. So she didn’t get it developed until later. Or she had prints made in the fall. But you see, it’s part of the joke, the trip down memory lane.…”

  “You’re sure it’s just Julie’s sick joke.”

  “Yeah. Trust me.”

  “He was such a weird white color …” Tamayo said. “But there was no smell, except for that aftershave smell, so he couldn’t have been dead long. Maybe he was just passed out.”

  “With his eyes open?” Claire said. “The apartment was cold, so the body would stay cold and decompose more slowly.”

  “Maybe he was wearing Halloween makeup. We didn’t get a good look at him,” I said. “He heard us come in. Played dead in the tub. Then his friends came in and they left.”

  “Why would he have makeup on if he was going to wear the clown mask? Unless someone else was wearing the clown mask … God, breaking and entering, failing to report a possible crime … if I’d known … God, I’m a felon. An unconvicted felon,” Claire said.

  “What are we going to do now?” Tamayo asked.

  “There’s a pay phone,” Claire said. “We’ll call the cops, anonymously, report a possible murder. Maybe they’ll find some evidence in the apartment or something.”

  “That’s exactly what Julie would like you to do,” I said, but stood back quietly as Claire made a hysterical anonymous phone call.

  “Before we go any further, Robin, I need to know what you did to Julie that would make her fuck with you so much and make you jump to her tune all night,” Claire said. “It’s got to be a lot more than a stained dress and a game of Trouble.”

  Though I hated to admit it to Tamayo and Claire, I had fucked Julie over, a long time ago. Would Julie nurse a grudge for almost twenty years? I knew in the past she’d nursed a grudge or two—so had I. But we were the same age, so she must have gone through the same midlife crap I’d gone through in the past few years, questioning one’s choices, letting go of a lot of the crap, coming to terms with one’s limitations, forgiving, within reason, and forgetting.

  But that forgetting part, it can get you into trouble.

  I took a deep breath, started to say something, stopped, and took another deep breath, before I finally said, “I told you how Julie and I were in love with the same boy for years, Doug Gribetz, but I lost Doug Rights in a game of Trouble? Okay. Well, Julie finally went out with Doug Gribetz in eleventh grade. I was jealous, I guess. So, I did this thing to her.”

  “What?”

  “I kind of caused her breakup with Doug. I ratted Julie out to Doug—not directly, but through his friend Lance, who had a crush on Julie—after she cheated on Doug in Minneapolis. Lance let something slip, and I knew he would, because he always had a thing for Julie and had chased her for years. She didn’t find out that I was the one who ratted her out until a few years later, after we came back from New York. It’s terrible, I know. I’m sorry you have to see that side of me. But it was a long time ago.”

  “We forgive you,” Claire said, dryly.

  “What do we do now?” Tamayo said.

  “I’m not sure. The last clue I got was ‘neon hand,’ which alludes to a woman we saw.…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before? It’s a bar-restaurant, vegetarian, New Age, in your neighborhood,” Tamayo said.

  “Really?” I hadn’t been out much around the neighborhood lately and I couldn’t keep up with all the new places, not since the hit Broadway show Rent had made the neighborhood extra-trendy.

  “It’s on St. Mark’s,” she said. “Pretty new. About two months old. It was really hip about a month ago but it’s on the downside of the trend now.”

  “You go to Neon Hand, Rob. I’m going back to ANN, look through the fax photos, find out who this guy George is, run a couple more checks on Julie Goomey,” Claire said. “Tamayo, why don’t you come with me. I’ll get you a cell phone from the assignment desk. You can check out Julie Goomey’s old apartment building, see what her old neighbors have to say about her. Then we can rendezvous.”

  Claire was getting a grip. So miserable just an hour before, she was now energized by my problem, and reclaiming her authority, which boosted my confidence considerably.

  “Synchronize your watches,” she said.

  We thought she was kidding.

  “Synchronize your watches. After all the missed connections tonight, we don’t want to take any chances.”

  We synchronized our watches.

  14

  AS I RODE the Lexington Avenue local down to Astor Place, I thought about what Claire had said about Julie fucking with me. Claire was so suspicious that she now had me really wondering about Julie. I went back and forth for a while, with all the voices in my head arguing different sides of the question.

  But, no, I decided, not after all we went through together, fatherlessness, daffy mothers, cooties, and redeeming those cooties to become semipopular.

  Even though I look back on my shallow, semipopular high-school years with significant regret and embarrassment, I am still kind of proud that we were able to transform ourselves in one summer, and still grateful to Julie, because she was the engine behind it. Before she moved to Ferrous, she had been popular, or so she claimed, and it became her life’s work to get back her previous lofty social status. I had never been popular—I had always been considered weird—and, not knowing any different, I didn’t know just how bad a thing that was until Julie arrived. It was her deep shame at her cooties that made me aware of my own shame.

  Several things helped us redeem our cooties. Our junior high school fed into a huge high school serving five towns, four of which had no knowledge of our previous cootie status. That gave us a nearly fresh sheet of paper with which to start high school
, reputation-wise. It also helped that our enemies, Mary and Sis, were going away to some horsey private boarding school in Virginia.

  So, the summer before high school, we dieted, using a candy called Ayds that we ordered from the back of a trashy magazine. We exercised like crazy and practiced gymnastics and dance so we could go out for junior cheerleaders. We started wearing makeup, Julie got contact lenses, and I started relaxing my hair to give me a more sultry Rita Hayworth look, the Farrah style being beyond what I could accomplish. We read Susan Dey’s book about how to be popular. In preparation for dating, we even practiced closed-mouth necking with Julie’s cousin Jack when he came to visit. There was no French kissing—which is fortunate, because it would have been creepy to French-kiss Julie’s cousin, who was a full year younger and a twerp. (The practice kissing came to a halt when the little prick tried to cop a feel.)

  So many different images of Julie went through my head. Some of them made me crack up, like Julie dressed in her pirate costume. She loved to play pirates, and so did I. People still have this goofy idea about girlhood, even other women, which I find inexplicable, that girls of my generation spent all their time in frilly dresses drinking tea from tiny cups across the table from their dolls, or wheeling dolls in doll carriages and combing the hair on their Barbie dolls with tiny Barbie-doll combs. Dolls were such a small part of most girls’ experience. Most of the time, we were riding our bikes, playing cops and robbers, pirates, softball, climbing trees, doing homework, or torturing each other, just like boys.

  Then, for Julie and me, there was the whole bandit-queen thing. I had to laugh when I thought about Julie dressed up like Putli Bai, in polyester tunic and harem pants, full makeup, jewelry, with a toy gun in her hand and a fierce expression on her face. Somewhere, I had a picture of that. On the back of it, she had scrawled, “Be all that you can be.”

  That was her favorite role to play, bandit queen. Leading an army of men and sometimes women. Beholden to nobody but the gods and goddesses. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. What really got Julie was that Putli Bai was shot dead in January 1958, a few days before Julie was born. Julie thought that was somehow significant.