She was trying to sound brave, but tears were streaming down her face.
“You done good, Kathy. You’re a trooper. I’m sorry.…”
“Now that it’s over,” she said, wiping her eyes, “and we’re safe, it seems kind of … exciting, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. With that attitude, you’ll probably make a great reporter one day.”
“You think?” she said.
“Yeah. God, I am so glad I don’t have to call your mom and tell her I lost you,” I said.
She smiled a little.
I was exhausted and felt strangely deflated. I know I should have been happy it was over and we were all alive, but I just felt depressed and disillusioned and tired. As we drove downtown to Federal Plaza, I looked up at all the big beautiful buildings around me and, it was funny, it all looked so strange to me.
We gave our statements. Special Agent Jeff Walter told me that Julie had worked her way up from being Johnny’s mistress and bagman to money-laundering, advancing to run a complicated money-laundering system, using byzantine money transfers and currency exchanges, and funneling money through a series of offshore accounts. Given Julie’s demonstrated skills in leading people astray, I could see why she was such a good money-launderer.
Among other crimes, there was major income-tax evasion involved. The government wanted to jail Johnny for a long time, and they wanted to get their hands on that money. Julie was the key to all of it. Only she knew the money trails. This was how she kept herself alive within the family.
With Johnny going to jail for a year, Julie would have to report to Johnny’s wife, and Johnny’s wife would just as soon kill Julie as look at her. But first Johnny’s wife needed to learn where Julie and Johnny had stashed all the cash.
It looked like Julie had arranged to run off with Johnny, only she left him in the lurch, took off with all the money. Before she vanished, she sent the FedExes out, grabbed Granny at the convalescent hospital, and dumped her in the Hotel Vincent. She’d left clues so the Perrugia sisters would find Johnny at Help for Kids, and so Mary MacCosham would find me, and she’d told the feds to contact me. I was the pawn, the wild goose. But a wild goose with an insurance policy—Granny. And while we were running all over Manhattan, Julie had, as far as we all knew, taken off for points unknown.
“She’s got the whole family in jail now, she’s got the money, and you’ve got a story. Pretty clever woman,” Special Agent Jeff Walter said.
He was pretty cute, this Special Agent Jeff Walter, Tibetan-brother cute. Very upright, clean-cut. Looked like Dudley Do-Right, the kind of guy you just want to get real dirty with, the kind of guy you want to corrupt a little. That’s a great aphrodisiac, a man who will compromise his morals to sleep with you.
But no, it ain’t gonna happen, I thought. The timing wasn’t right, and I didn’t expect it ever would be. But maybe, somewhere in a parallel universe …
“Where do you think she’s gone?” he asked.
“You know, if I had any idea, I’m not sure I could tell you. Would that be breaking the law?”
“Only under oath.”
“Well, I don’t think she’d tell me,” I said.
After we were all released, Tamayo asked, “Do you have any other pissed-off ex-friends lurking in the wings?”
“God, I hope not,” I said. “I’m really sorry about this, goils. Really sorry.”
I apologized all the way back to ANN, where we worked until 5 A.M. putting together the story for Claire to voice-over.
Tamayo seemed thrilled by it all, and that was rubbing off on Kathy. “It was exciting, now that it’s over and everything,” Tamayo said.
“You know what Carrie Fisher says, good anecdote, bad reality,” I said.
The phone rang. It was someone from the assignment desk, saying there were a lot of calls from other news organizations who wanted to talk to us.
“This could be great publicity for my career,” Tamayo said. “Robin, can we call a press conference?”
“Go ahead. But I’ll pass, I think. Just read off the statement I gave to the assignment desk.”
“I should call my agent too. Start negotiating the film rights,” Tamayo said.
Tamayo and Kathy went to the outer office and started making phone calls. And why not? Might as well make lemonade out of these lemons.
Tamayo, what a dame. It wasn’t hard to see Tamayo as a playground pariah. She just grooved to her own rhythms, and if people objected, they were in need of an “anal stickectomy,” in her words. Case closed.
Claire walked in.
We hugged and she said, “I left the report in playback, Robin. Did you call the hospital?”
“Yeah. Sally’s in really bad shape. But the doctors think she’ll be okay after they pump her stomach. Good thing I told them about the PMS medication she was taking on top of everything else. It turns out the PMS pills react badly with street roofies.”
“Let’s send her some flowers for her recovery. Poor Sal,” Claire said.
“We’re calling a press conference,” Tamayo called out. “Want to take part?”
“No,” Claire said. “I’m not interested. But you guys have fun.” She turned to me. “It is fucking dangerous being your friend. But, you know, that was great, Robin. We tracked a story together, you and me, just like the old days.”
“The old days.”
“We broke the Perrugia family. You and me, and Tamayo, and Kathy and … Julie Goomey. I saw it so clearly, after the feds came, a flash in my mind. This is what your life is about, that flash said. Not being a congressman’s wife, not being an anchorwoman, but being in the field, tracking a story. God, it was exhilarating, Rob. Fuck a duck.”
“Did I mention that you’re swearing a lot these days?”
“Bad companions,” she said, turning the volume up on the monitor in my office to hear her story about us and the Perrugia sisters.
I walked into the outer office. I just felt so strange. I looked at myself in the glass wall of a darkened office. Staring back at me was a tall, gangly girl with pale skin and frizzy red hair. It was a ghost, a cootie-girl ghost, floating in the dark glass like a character in a nightmare. That wasn’t what I looked like. Where was the Rita Hayworth face that always stared back at me?
I started wondering how many other people had been murdered around me without my even being aware of it. Maybe, if I had been, I could have provided some clue. I was under a curse, just like the cab driver who couldn’t escape bad traffic and was losing his penis. In addition to the curse of cooties, delivered upon my head by Mary MacCosham, people I was somehow connected to got murdered and I was menaced by wig-wearing women.
I wondered about people who died in “accidents” too. Like the guy who lived in a shack down by the railroad tracks who killed his wife while he was cleaning his gun. And all those people who died in gun-cleaning accidents in my hometown the year the iron-skillet factory closed. I remember thinking at the time that those poor people were just really stupid—I mean, why didn’t they take the bullets out of their guns before they cleaned them? Duh.
But now I see.
It seemed to me that nothing was what I thought it was.
Claire came out. “You okay, Robin?”
“I don’t know. Everything is upside down. And I feel responsible for everything that happened.”
“You’re not.”
“I know this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t ratted Julie out to Lance, who ratted her out to Doug after she cheated on him in Minneapolis. She got mixed up with hoodlums, in trouble with the feds, and was going through midlife stuff, thinking how she could have been happy with Doug Gribetz if it wasn’t for Robin Hudson.”
“Come on, the girl has some serious psychological problems.”
“She had a hard life.”
“Who didn’t? I had cooties too, you know?”
“You had cooties?”
“Well, duh. My father is black, my mother is white and Native Americ
an, it was the deep South, I was bussed, people burned a cross on our lawn once. But I survived.”
“You come from a good, strong family,” I said. “Julie didn’t.”
“So you were in love with the same boy and you pulled a nasty on her. All’s fair in love and war, especially at that age. Although at least in war they have the Geneva Conventions.”
“I wanted to get even with her because … I was jealous,” I said. “I kinda liked the guy in Minneapolis Julie made out with. I mean, she had the best guy of all back home, Doug, and I felt it was unfair of her to move in on a guy I could have maybe had a shot with. But, first and foremost, I did it because I was in such puppy love with Doug, because I was jealous of her being Doug’s girlfriend, and because of that joke she played on me, the letter in the locker. What if he was the guy who would have made her happy? And I fucked it up for her, my best friend. Not only that, but I knew what I was doing. I knew it was wrong.”
“First of all,” Claire said, “this is not a good reason to pull this kind of dangerous shit on you. What a lot of fucking nerve she has. There is no excuse. Second, are you absolutely positive that your bestest friend, Julie, wrote that letter that was stuck in your locker?”
Hmmm.
“She took the rap for it. Why would she do that if … No, it’s not possible. Doug Gribetz knew me during my worst cootie years, and I hadn’t become semipopular yet. He wouldn’t have written me a love letter.”
“Robin, call him,” Claire said. “Or else I will.”
She did too. She called directory assistance in Minneapolis, where Doug Gribetz lived. Then she dialed his number and handed me the phone.
“I’m going to go peek in on Tamayo and Kathy. Just come down when you’re through, okay?” Claire said.
The phone rang seven times before a sleepy female voice answered.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is Doug there?” I asked, feeling shitty a few hundred different ways.
“May I ask who is calling?” she said, kindly.
“Robin Hudson,” I said. My heart was beating inside me in time to Yma Sumac.
“Just a moment.”
There was some mumbling in the background, and then I heard another voice I hadn’t heard in years. Even after all these years, that voice made me melt.
“Robin,” Doug said. “It’s, uh, nice to hear from you. Why are you calling?”
He didn’t say “at this hour.” He didn’t have to.
“This is an odd request, Doug. I am so sorry to disturb you.” I could hear a baby crying in the background.
“It’s okay. What is it?”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I need to know if you wrote me a letter in tenth grade and stuck it in my locker. I know this is bizarre.…”
“I understand … I guess,” he said. There was a beat. “Yeah, I wrote you a letter. I thought you knew. It seems to me … Yeah, your friend Julie came up to me and told me that you’d read the letter and sent her to tell me that you weren’t interested. So I assumed …”
“My friend Julie.”
“Yeah. It was a long time ago, Robin. What does it matter now?”
Normally, that would be a very good question. “It’s a long story, Doug.”
I heard a little girl’s voice say, “Daddy? The phone woke me up.”
“Just a second, honey, Daddy will tuck you back in,” he said.
“Well, thanks, Doug,” I said. “Really sorry to bother you. Really, really sorry.”
“It’s okay. Take care of yourself, Robin.”
“You too.”
I hung up. He sounded so sweet, and his family sounded sweet. But now he was just a faraway voice on a phone, someone I didn’t really know. I closed my eyes and saw his iconic face, which had remained so firmly and vividly fixed in my mind all these years, falling backwards into space, receding into a dot, and disappearing.
The same thing then happened with Julie’s face. Different Julies at different ages flashed through my head, like a slide show in reverse chronological order—in the community-college quad putting up posters for pep rallies and dances, in her prom dress, slow-dancing with Doug Gribetz, in Minneapolis when we were fourteen and went down to the big city by ourselves for the first time together, in her Girl Scout uniform before we quit Girl Scouts, standing on a pier, laughing, in a bathing suit that matched mine. I saw her grow backwards from a beautiful young woman to a gangly adolescent to a cootie girl with braces and dorky cat’s-eye glasses, and then to a dot, a spark really, and then nothing. I pulled a photo out of my recovered purse and looked at it, but it was like looking at a stranger.
I looked at my reflection again. I felt like the cab driver with the curse, whose face was changing into someone else’s, or like one of those Oliver Sacks people who suffer brain damage in the part of the brain that recognizes faces, and afterwards don’t recognize any face, not even their own.
That’s when the voice sounded in my head again, only this time it was very specific.
You have to go to Two Joes, it said, sudden but quiet.
20
TWO JOES WAS A CLASSIC New York coffee shop, not to be confused with the ubiquitous tony coffee bars that have mushroomed across the land. Two Joes had a half-dozen six-seater booths and a lunch counter. The humble doughnuts were kept elegantly under glass on plates atop metal stems, and in every booth one of those miniature jukeboxes perched on the wall above the square steel napkin-dispenser on the table. The waiters had potbellies barely held in by big white aprons and used their own corny code. Like, if you ordered a ham on rye, toasted, they’d ask for a “Ham on whiskey, down.” Over the years, they’d used the same plain white china, unadorned except for a single rust-colored stripe just below the rim. You had to bring your own beer and wine; they weren’t licensed to sell it. The last time I was there, there wasn’t a fern, pastel, or faux Art Deco accent in sight. Through many changing restaurant fashions, Two Joes had remained true to its roots.
“And why is this important?” Claire asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her and Tamayo exchanging indulgent, meaningful looks. Kathy had gone home.
“It’s the very first place I went in Manhattan. Seeing it will help. I know it will.”
It was raining that night, the evening we landed at JFK. Julie and I had taken the JFK express from the airport, but we made a mistake and got off at 34th Street instead of Rockefeller Center. There were no cabs available, but we were young, healthy women, so we began the Long March uptown, dragging our suitcases behind us. After about three blocks, the torrential rain was too much for us, so we ducked into Two Joes to wait out the storm.
One of the things I loved about Two Joes was that the first time I was there I had a moment of déjà vu. As my super, Phil, says, “You never really feel at home in a place until you experience déjà vu there,” and I knew exactly what he meant. That’s the thrill I was looking for tonight. That old déjà vu.
I remember the guy behind the counter, Joe, singing a song he made up about me and Julie, interrupting himself to curse at the delivery guy: “Harry, where the fuck you been you’re an hour late goddammit we got orders waitin’.”
Joe, he cursed at Harry not with anger, but in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Better a sturdy Anglo-Saxon word that has stood the test of time than a punch in the face, I almost always say—or, for that matter, than a stiletto to the heart.
“You’re giving these girls from Minnesota a bad impression of New York,” Joe said. Harry gave an exaggerated salute and then bowed to us.
And all of it—the potbellied guy singing, the dim lights, the doughnuts under glass, the rain-streaked window, Harry the delivery guy—I’d seen it all before, exactly like this. Déjà vu. At that moment, I heard this unbidden voice say: Home.
Though the rain didn’t let up all night, a cabbie came into the coffee shop, and Joe told him about our predicament. He dropped us off at the hotel on his way home. Wouldn’t take our money. I remember he was Ir
ish, he had four-leaf-clover kitsch all over his car, and everyone called him Peppermint Paddy because his name was Patrick and he gave all his passengers a miniature York peppermint patty when they paid their fare.
It had been years since I’d been to Two Joes. The closer I got to the Two Joes corner, the more my heart beat. By the time we got to Sixth Avenue, I was craning my neck out the cab window, looking ahead for the Two Joes sign.
When we were ten feet away, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. At that point, I couldn’t really see the sign yet, but I could see an unfamiliar light coming from the storefront. Two Joes had a dimmish, warm glow. Up ahead was a bright fluorescent glow. For a moment, I wanted to turn around and bolt. I had to force myself to go towards the disturbing, unfamiliar brightness and face the truth.
Two Joes was gone.
In its place was a generic, ultramodern pizza place. The old Coke sign had been replaced by a gleaming, backlit sign in red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag, under which were the words “Open 24 Hours” in neon. Everything was gone—the booths, the lunch counter, the little jukeboxes, the potbellied waiters. Inside 37th Street Pizza (brilliant name), two young guys were standing idly behind the counter while one young man in very baggy pants ate a slice and glowered at the floor. It was so boring.
I turned and walked away a few feet, and abruptly I started bawling. Loudly, and I couldn’t stop. I had no tissues on me, and my nose was running. I could barely see anything through the milky glaze of tears as I ran into a deli, plopped a dollar down, and asked through sobs for some tissues. The stunned guy behind the counter, who was just a flesh-colored blob with dark hair to me, gave me a whole box of tissues. With Claire and Tamayo following me and saying things I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own bawling, I tore out of the store, pulling tissues out of the big box and blowing my nose as I stumbled down the street.
I plopped myself down on a curb in front of the pizza place.
Two Joes was one of the last personal landmarks left from my first trip to New York. Over the years, I’d lost a lot of them—the old Abbey Victoria Hotel was torn down, Jimmy Ryan’s jazz joint on 52nd Street had closed, the Malabar Disco was a strip joint now, the Brass Rail was gone—and now Two Joes. And there were only about a half-dozen old-style Checker Cabs still trawling the streets for fares. All of a sudden, I missed them terribly.
Revenge of the Cootie Girls Page 18