“Damn,” he said, checking the rolling message on the beeper’s LCD screen. “It’s my ex-wife.”
“Felicia? She can wait,” I said, trying to pull him back.
He threw my arm off him and read the message. “It’s urgent, about Samantha. I’d better call her. I’ll use the phone in the bedroom.”
He talked real low on the phone and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. When he came back, his pale Irish face was even paler, if that’s possible. He said, “Samantha was supposed to come straight home after ballet three hours ago to go to her grandmother’s place for a birthday dinner.”
“Maybe she forgot,” I said, suppressing the thought that Samantha had escalated her tactics. Lately whenever Mike and I were close to refinding our old intimacy, there was some emergency with Samantha requiring Mike to spend time with her and his ex-wife. You don’t have to be a genius to see the Hayley Mills parent trap scenario there.
“Samantha loves Felicia’s mom, she wouldn’t forget the birthday,” Mike said.
“God, maybe she is missing then,” I said.
“I’ll call you later. Sorry, Girl.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But you were about to tell me something …”
“It’s … it can wait, really.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Not enough time now. It’s complicated … I gotta go, Robin.”
“Not even a hint?”
“Gotta go … Samantha …”
“Yeah, of course. I hope Samantha is okay. Call me when you have the scoop.”
He looked at me in a way he’d never looked at me before, kind of sad, kind of nostalgic, and kissed me. And then he was gone with his suitcase and my newfound hat on his head. It was a far cry from the man I used to know, who would read excerpts from pornographic books to my voice mail at work and then ravish me with chest-thumping gusto for a full hour when I got home.
Men leaving me in the lurch—just part of the curse I travel under, to be attracted to interesting men driven by a vision who just can’t be counted on to stick around. But to be fair, I’ve left a few in the lurch myself. Still, it didn’t feel good, standing there half-dressed, my black slip sticking to my skin, all sweaty and slatternly like Patricia Neal in Hud, having just been rebuffed by a man.
It wasn’t until I turned on the lights that I noticed that Mike had taken some of his Mecca souvenirs with him, the best of his collection of cheesy Mecca knickknacks, including his Mecca snow globe and his Mecca cityscape carved out of cork.
The guy was slowly moving his stuff out of my place. I was losing him, I thought.
“Men! Why do I like them so much?” I asked Louise Bryant, who was scratching at the window. She wanted to go out to visit my neighbor Sally. Lately, she’d been spending a lot of time with Sally. It was like my cat was cheating on me too.
“Don’t leave me tonight, Louise,” I said to her.
As the Roman poet Ovid said, if you seek a way out of love, be busy. I had plenty of other stuff to think about, i.e., the Man of the Future series and my interviews the next day with Gill Morton, CEO of Morton Industries, and incendiary man hater Alana DeWitt, who believed men were devolving to extinction.
Despite how lukewarm Benny Winter had been at our dinner meeting, I still hoped he would come through with anthropologist Wallace Mandervan. I had the old boys’ network on my side—specifically, my CEO Jack Jackson and Gill Morton of Morton Industries. It was Jack who set me up with Gill Morton, who in turn set me up with Benny Winter. They were powerful allies.
For the next hour, I read through my research and pre-interview notes, until just before 11:00 P.M., when Mike finally called to say Samantha was home and she was okay. She had fallen asleep in the library at school (or so she claimed). He was going to spend the night out at his ex-wife’s place in Jersey and fly out from Newark in the early A.M.
“What did you want to tell me?” I asked.
“I can’t talk here. Someone’s here …”
“Give me a hint.”
“It can wait.”
“Should I worry?”
“No, don’t do that. Once you get started you don’t stop. It’s fine. No big deal. I’m going to be crazy the next few days, but I’ll try to call you when I can. If Veronkya calls, will you give her Felicia’s number?”
“Oh, I’ll be sure to,” I said, half wishing I’d replaced the condoms in his shaving kit with the promotional talking condoms a sex magazine sent me when we were doing a series on porn magazines featuring dominant women. I collect talking and singing condoms. A tiny microchip at the base of the condom is activated by body heat to make the penis appear to be talking, in this case, saying, “Bad boy! Baaad boy!” The Hungarian singing condoms were pretty good too.
A talking penis, that’d put the fear of God back into Veronkya. Not that I had any right to complain, not with Gus coming to town.
I’d almost forgotten about Gus.
Mike imagined Gus to be a short, blond doctor in his late thirties, married with two kids, and Lola a raven-haired mistress, or mister, Gus saw whenever he could get away to New York. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Gus was a single, hetero, brown-haired actor, five eleven, thirty-eight years old, who liked rock climbing, simultaneously translating Tori Spelling movies into Shakespearean dialogue, and going to a dark restaurant called Mia Cara, where the tablecloths reach all the way to the floor.
I hadn’t heard from him for a while.
I called the Boulderado and left a message, “Lola is free.”
When I got off the phone, Louise was back scratching at the window.
Sometimes I think the only reason I have her is to keep me from talking to myself, though she also warms up the bed. Bed. That was a good idea. I grabbed Louise Bryant and crawled into bed to watch the news. The day had been jam-packed, my bones were tired, and my bed was criminally comfortable.
Just as I was about to doze off, an anchor intro to a breaking news story jarred me awake.
“The dead man had no ID on him,” the anchorman said. “He was wearing a brown suit. The only thing the police found on the body was some Doublemint gum in the jacket pocket. We now go live to Archer Wilkie at Coney Island. Archer?”
According to Archer Wilkie, the body of a white man in late middle age had washed ashore on Coney Island, shortly after sundown, and been discovered by a gang of preteens, who, before they reported the corpse, put a blunt cigar in his mouth and had their pictures taken with it. And then, after they had squeezed all possible fun out of the dead man, they went for the police.
CHAPTER THREE
While we waited for the morgue attendants to locate and pull out the right corpse, Detective June Fairchild, public relations liaison for NYPD Homicide, asked a fair question: “Other than the Doublemint gum, what makes you think this might be the same man you saw on the street?”
“You know my history, June,” I said. “I’ve had several run-ins with people who later ended up as corpses.…”
“So have I. It comes with my job, and with yours too, doesn’t it?”
Fairchild was a well-pressed, very efficient, and unflappable woman, and just thirty years old. The local media knew her as the “Debutante Detective” because she came from a well-to-do family on the Upper East Side and had gone to Dalton before going on to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the NYPD. Despite her connections and fair looks, she had not been a deb, having opted out of the social whirl of the frivolous rich in favor of a career as a crime fighter. Naturally, this made the media love her and her boss, Detective Richard Bigger, resent her.
A logical sort of person, she didn’t buy my theory that I was traveling under a curse. True, my job did take me into some hairy corners with some hairy characters, but the murders in my life went beyond that.
“The guy you met had a half package of Doublemint gum … not just one piece,” Fairchild pointed out.
“The rest might have washed away, or those kids who found the body migh
t have taken it,” I said. “There was nothing else found on him?”
“No.”
“Distinguishing marks?” I asked.
Fairchild consulted her notepad.
“Port wine birthmark shaped like a small banana on lower back. Tattoo on left bicep, the word ‘Fraternité,’” she said with a perfect Parisian accent. “Oh, this is interesting. He only has nine fingers. He’s missing the pinky on his left hand.”
“Born that way or severed?”
“Not severed recently. But we won’t know more until an autopsy is done. Did the man you met have all his fingers?”
“I didn’t notice and I think I would have if he was missing a finger,” I said. “Does it look like the John Doe was murdered?”
“This one hasn’t been classified yet,” Fairchild said. “Looks like death by drowning. Could be accident, suicide … Even if it is the same guy, I don’t know how you can help. You don’t remember the car make. You don’t remember the license plate number, and you didn’t clearly see the faces of the occupants.” She sighed. “Robin, I’m reminded of the dead dry cleaner case. Remember that one? You were convinced you knew him and that there was some clue in your laundry receipt.”
“That was an easy mistake! He even looked like my dry cleaner.”
You wouldn’t be a tad paranoid if you’d been involved in several unfortunate murder cases? Whenever a dead body showed up without explanation, I was compelled to find out if there was any connection at all to me, because in the past, if I’d been more alert, if I’d been smarter sooner, I could have saved a life or two, or at the very least, saved myself a whole lot of trouble. The other detectives got sick of talking to me, and Fairchild inherited me. Up to now, she’d been very patient, but today she sounded annoyed. This was what … my ninth, tenth such call in the last four or five months? Hardly excessive, all things considered.
“I really hope this is another of your mistaken hunches, Robin, because my boss will be much happier if you’re not involved. If he’s happier, I’m happier,” she said.
“I’ll be happier too,” I said.
Her boss, Richard Bigger, and I had crossed paths before on homicides, always unpleasantly. He was a stick-up-the-ass guy, what my friend Tamayo would call a “cube,” square squared, Joe Friday without the stylish wardrobe and erudite cocktail conversation.
“Bigger really, really doesn’t like you,” she went on. “Among other things, he seems to think you gave his home phone number to a crackpot neighbor of yours … a Mrs. Ramirez who, thank you very much, I have since inherited.”
“Is he still pissed about that? I don’t know how she got that number,” I said.
“Mrs. Ramirez also sees murders everywhere,” Fairchild said. “You two should form a club.”
“But I have a history of actually being involved in murder cases. She’s just nuts,” I said. “By the way, I hear she has a gun and I’m fairly certain it’s unlicensed.”
“I’ll have someone from the precinct check it out,” she said.
We both knew nothing would be done until old Mrs. Ramirez shot someone. A uniform would inquire if Ramirez had a firearm, she’d deny it, and nothing would happen. It wasn’t like the cops and ATF agents were going to storm her apartment to confiscate a gun from an elderly, churchgoing woman with no criminal record. A thing like that can too easily turn into a standoff and a PR disaster.
“We’re ready,” said the morgue attendant, wheeling in a stainless steel gurney. The body was covered with a pale blue sheet.
“Are you ready?” Fairchild asked me.
Just thinking about seeing a corpse gave me a chill, exacerbated by the morgue’s heavy air-conditioning, which made me wrap both hands around my take-out coffee cup, trying to suck warmth out of it.
“Yes,” I said.
Fairchild threw back the sheet, revealing the waxy, blue-white face of a bald man I had never seen before.
“Well?” Fairchild said.
“I don’t know him.”
“Remember, he was in the water for a while. He’s slightly bloated.”
“The guy I saw had brown hair, a lot of it, and a completely different face and build,” I said. “He was wearing a different suit too.”
“Well, good. I’m relieved you don’t know him. Thanks for coming down, all the same.”
“No problem,” I said. “It’s just such a weird coincidence, the Doublemint gum, I mean.”
“A lot of people chew gum. When I learn more from Brooklyn Homicide, I’ll call you,” she said, which was her polite way of saying, “Don’t call me.”
Though Bigger and Fairchild saw me as some kind of murder fetishist, I was more than happy that the dead guy was a stranger. Not happy for him, poor slob. Whoever he was, he had lived and loved and died too soon. While I was heading to work, it was hard not to wonder about him, who he was and how he ended up dead. And it was hard not to be depressed after a trip to the morgue, with its bright lights, sterility—emotionally and otherwise—the chem lab smell and … what was that other thing? Oh yeah. Staring into the face of a dead man and confronting the chilly darkness of oblivion.
That face was hard to shake, but I managed to put it out of my mind as I went into the pink and granite Jackson Broadcasting Building in midtown Manhattan. As Wallace Mandervan wrote in his book, The Natural Leader, successful men leave their personal troubles and existential angst outside the workplace. No time now to contemplate the certainty of death and the uncertainty of an afterlife; I had to summon up enough of an air of authority to get me through another day as the Boss.
Just getting to my office these days involved a series of obstacles. To get into the All News Network part of the building, you have to go through a security desk ID check, a metal detector, a series of Star Trek–style airlock doors, and past Investigative Reports. There was always a risk of running into either Dr. Solange Stevenson—former TV psychologist and now Barbara Walters clone in the Investigative Reports Unit, whom my ex-husband once referred to as six feet of walking saltpeter, because of her great personal charm—or Reb “Rambo” Ryan, whose sartorial role model was Ernest Hemingway.
Fortunately, neither one was around that morning, so I felt safe stopping to see what was new on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway outside the newsroom. The state of Georgia had commissioned a study to select a second method of killing death row inmates, in addition to the primitive electric chair. Some dark-humored ANN wag had posted a contest soliciting suggestions. Topping the list were Batmanesque ideas involving conveyor belts, circular saws, and large, mutant Venus flytraps, along with the simpler, more whimsical methods such as “death by tickling.” Near the bottom, one gentle soul had added, “Old age.”
Someone else had posted a contest to determine the programming for Jack’s new nameless worldwide network, formerly Millennial Broadcasting. This was fairly fresh; the only suggestions so far were the 24-Hour Home Video Network and the 24-Hour Test Pattern Network.
Normally, I’d cut through the newsroom on my way to my offices, but at the moment, I was trying to avoid the newsroom gossips and their peasant-king, producer Louis Levin, lest they try to pry information out of me about Jack Jackson, my “benefactor,” as Louis Levin called him in the loaded way he has. So I took the long way, skirting around the newsroom through the warren of feature news offices, science, fashion, medicine, legal, the Kerwin Shutz show, to Special Reports, a room of partitioned offices off one of ANN’s back hallways.
My miserable employees were waiting for me with questions, complaints, problems, complaints, paperwork, and complaints, which I listened to as I made my own morning coffee (light, four sugars, in a cup that said “Bitch-Boss”).
Karim the tape editor had called in sick—again. The company accountants were getting anxious for the quarterly budget figures. During the night, the cleaning people had rearranged the conference area furniture and Liz the associate producer, who was legally blind and litigious, had
almost hurt herself.
“Are you going to look after the cleaning situation?” Liz demanded. She was very aggressive for a blind woman, which would have seemed admirable if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of it so much of the time.
“Robin, the cleaning crew must move the furniture back exactly where it was before they started cleaning. Otherwise …”
“I’ll write a memo to maintenance. Anything else?” I asked.
Liz always had a long list of complaints. The air-conditioning was on too high. Her Opticon, the text-reading device she used, was not working properly. How come I hadn’t done anything yet about the slippery tile outside the ladies’ room?
It was hard work wearing two hats, boss and reporter, in the Special Reports Unit, or as the newsroom called it lately, Village of the Damned, because it had become a repository for every outcast employee the network couldn’t fire for one reason or another. There was Liz, Karim, the hypochondriacal tape editor, and Shauna, the production assistant who either had really low self-esteem or no personality at all, I couldn’t decide. Plus, I had all the interns rejected by the other units.
This cast of characters arrived after Investigative Reports had pillaged my unit for talent. This is the deal. Jack Jackson went to war with media baron Lord Otterrill for control of Millennial Broadcasting after Millennial’s head, Reverend Paul Mangecet, went bankrupt. The company mandarins decided that the network had to be sleeker in order to do battle, and there was a lot of talk about Special Reports being shut down in favor of the higher-profile Investigative Reports Unit. Presumably, Human Resources thought they could replace my staff with the misfits and then fire them all indiscriminately in one fell swoop when my unit closed down, thereby protecting the company from lawsuits.
To the chagrin of the “serious” journalists and Human Resources, Jack Jackson saved Special Reports. Though we had been “saved,” it was with the understanding that this reprieve was temporary, until budget time rolled around again in another month and our status was reviewed. By this time, the serious journalists hoped, Jack would have come to his senses. By this time, I hoped, the Man of the Future series would have aired and been a tremendous success.
Revenge of the Cootie Girls Page 22