As for the filthy things I was supposedly willing to do, I’m not sure which filthy things she was speaking of. What I’m willing to do depends a lot on who I’m going to do it with. With Burke, the sex was never very far from the ordinary, although we sometimes let our cat watch.
Chapter Seven
I FOUND GRIFF INVESTIGATIONS in two rooms on the second floor of a dusty old building on Thirty-fourth Street, right above the Conway’s Discount store. Larry Griff’s secretary, Crystal O’Connor, a classic petite with a lot of frosted brown hair, was packing up her office supplies.
“Like I told the police, I hadn’t been with him long,” she said. He just opened the office six months ago, right? And, like, he didn’t talk about his cases much. He was real . . . secretive.”
“He must have kept files on his clients.”
“Whatever information he had on clients he took with him wherever he went because he, like, didn’t trust anyone, not even me. And the cops took all his books and stuff after he died,” she said.
Into the box went a framed photo of a guy, probably her husband, a stuffed bunny, the aging Polaroids of her and two girlfriends on vacation on a beach with palm trees—all of them with dark tans and white smiles—a black plastic pencil cup, a tape dispenser, a box of labels, two rolls of white correction tape. She hesitated at the cut-glass bowl full of M&M’s, then offered me some.
“Please, help me eat these. I don’t want to pack them and I hate to throw them out.”
I took a small handful. “What books did the cops take?” I asked.
“Oh, phone books, Who’s Who, stuff like that. Oh yeah, and he had a picture of you on his office wall.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Standing with a microphone in front of a courthouse or something. You were wearing a long coat. It was a black-and-white picture.”
That would be my publicity photo, which public relations sends to news outlets and fans. Anyone who wanted one just had to write in and, except for those sent to residents of penal institutions, no record was kept. Cheery thought.
“Did he have a photo of Joanne Armoire?” I asked.
“I don’t know who she is,” Crystal said. “I know he had yours and he had a thing for you. Like, he’d sometimes ask me to call ANN and find out when your special reports were going to air. He never asked me to call for anyone else, right? When you were on, he turned on the TV in his office and locked his office door.”
“Do you know anything about his investigations? Anything at all?”
She shrugged, apologetic. “What can I tell you? I know he did most of his work on the phone, but sometimes he had to go out. Sometimes, he’d call someone and say he was Craig Lockmanetz, a reporter doing a story about ANN. I only know this because he always took his callbacks as Lockmanetz on a separate phone line. I had to answer it People’s News Service.”
“You don’t know the names of any of the people he was investigating, or who hired him?”
“All he wanted me to do was answer the phones and do minor, routine paperwork. He even picked up the mail himself at the main post office. I wish I knew more. But I don’t. Like, this is a hardship for me too. Now I have to find another job, and I know I’ll never get another easy job like this one. My husband hurt his back three months ago, so . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it’s tough all over, right?” She rolled the last M&M around the glass bowl and then offered it to me. I took it and she put the bowl in the box and closed it up. “I wish I knew more, you know, because I asked Mr. Griff to let me help him more, to teach me the business. But he wouldn’t.”
“Did he tell you why he wouldn’t?”
“Top-secret project,” she said with a smirk. “Or so he said. For a guy who poked around for other people’s secrets, he sure kept his. I didn’t even know he was, like, divorced until I read it in the paper.”
“Well, if you remember anything, will you call me?” I gave her my card and we said good-bye.
I was halfway down the airless, dimly lit hallway when Crystal O’Connor came running out behind me.
“Ms. Hudson? I remember something.” She stopped, huffing, and then said, “I think.”
“What is it?”
“About a week ago, or maybe more, I’m not sure—anyway, Griff came back from meeting someone on his case and there was a blond hair on his coat and I, you know, pulled it off, automatically. No big deal, right? Well, he grabbed the hair from my hand and looked at it, and he got this peculiar look on his face. It was so . . . funny, I mentioned it to my husband.”
“What kind of look?”
“Like he was angry and . . . hungry.”
“Hungry?”
“Maybe not hungry. It’s . . . it’s the look a cat gets in its eyes, right, when it’s playing with a bird.”
“Do you have any idea who the bird was?”
She smiled. “No.”
“Was he dating anyone?”
“I don’t know, but he had to be getting it somewhere, right? We all have to get it somewhere.”
“Right,” I said.
I had over an hour before my meeting with Teddy Boylen, the last survivor of the three Boylen brothers who founded Boylen Investigations in the 1970s, all ex-NYPD. I took a cab downtown and drank coffee at Raps Coffee Shop on Seventh Avenue, wondering how much Griff knew about me, how much was now in someone else’s hands, and how much of it he took to the grave. It’s just like Fats Waller said. One never knows, do one?
That’s my problem, or one of my problems, I hate not knowing. I can’t handle too many unanswered questions in my life at one time. Because I can’t find answers for those big Q’s—Is there a God? Why am I here? What happens when I die?—I get a little obsessed with finding the true answers for those questions that have answers somewhere. That’s one of the reasons I got into news. I hate it when answerable questions go unanswered, like when people get away with murder. It really gets under my skin.
That’s another reason I got into news, actually. Murder. Six months or so after my father died, someone walked into a farmer’s home on the edge of my hometown and shot seven members of a family to death, sparing only a four-year-old girl who hid in a closet and saw nothing. For several weeks nobody knew who did it, and for the first time we started locking our doors, not only at night, which was radical enough, but during the day. In bed at night, I had trouble sleeping, shooting bolt upright every time the wind blew through the trees or a dog barked. When I did sleep, the faces of the dead family, the Sesquins, took over my dreams.
One of the scariest things about it was that it seemed so random, so meaningless, and so immense. And it happened to people everyone in town knew, if only vaguely. The fear subsided when reporters and TV crews from all over North America and as far away as England converged on the town to cover the story, covering it so well that it would have been impossible for another unwitnessed murder to be committed. The atmosphere of terror was quickly replaced by a media circus.
There seemed to be no motive for the cold-blooded slaughter of the quiet, church-going family, and in the effort to get to the bottom of it, everyone in town was interviewed by reporters and questioned by FBI. We got used to being the center of attention very quickly. We felt almost loved, and we felt safe. After the killer was found, the reporters and the photographers packed up and left town an I felt their absence sorely. I think that was when I first began thinking it could transform me.
Later, in junior high school, my career decision was reinforced when I discovered that it was okay to go to the prom without a date if you were covering it for the school newspaper, and that, under the guise of “reporter,” you could get away with asking the principal a lot of pointed questions considered rude, even cause for detention, if asked by “civilian” students.
A little before seven, Teddy Boylen showed up. He was an older man, in his sixties. I guessed, with a bright red complexion and a white-crew cut. He came in huffing, bringing
an aura of cold air with him to the table, where it settled and dissipated around us. I shivered. After exchanging routine pleasantries, we got down to Griff.
“Larry Griff left Boylen six months ago,” Boylen told me. “He didn’t take any of our clients with him, but I heard he landed a cash cow. I don’t know who it was. I also heard he was working solo. That told me the job was hush-hush, and that he was investigating one person or a small group of people.”
“What kind of investigations did Griff do for you?”
“A variety. Insurance, corporate, title searches, employee background checks, a lot of marital. Sometimes we did contract work for attorneys. He worked the phone a lot, worked through the mails. I prefer to work in the field, one-on-one, face-to-face.”
“Why?”
“It’s a philosophical thing. My generation used a lot of psychology in detective work. Griff’s generation is too dependent on high-tech stuff.”
“Were you friends with this guy?”
“Friends? No. But we worked together okay for a while. He’d been a cop like me. I was NYPD for twenty years, he was a Philly cop.”
“Why’d he leave the force?”
Boylen laughed. “Taking payoffs, although they couldn’t make it stick. Griff was always looking for a big payday.”
“Did he have gambling debts? Drug problems? Women problems?”
“Women, that’s it, right there! He had a problem with women. He couldn’t get enough women, and he liked the real glamorous ones, with . . . good heads of hair—blondes, brunettes, but especially redheads, like you. But dames . . . ladies . . .”
“Dames is fine,” I said. “It’s the word I prefer for my gender, actually.”
He smiled at me. He was a cute old guy with clear, unflinching eyes. I had a puckish urge to rub my hand over his snow white crew cut, which I, of course, resisted.
“Dames cost. Dames like that. I mean, you don’t go dutch with them. You met him, didn’t you?”
“Only briefly,” I said.
“Yeah, I read that in the paper. Anyway, he never had enough money or enough women. He was greedy, that was his true problem.”
“Why did he leave Boylen?”
“I think he was blackmailing some of the people we were investigating for clients. . . .”
“But . . .”
“No proof. Just a strong hunch. Griff was working for the client and for himself. I figure, double-dealing.”
A car door opened in front of Raps and a woman got out. Boylen watched her until she was almost at the end of the block, then he jumped and said, “Gotta run. Call me if you have any more questions. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“You too,” I said.
As I left the coffee shop, a bum sang out to me from the sidewalk, “Got a quarter, lady? When I get rich, I’m going to marry a pretty young woman like you. Help me out, will ya?”
Sexist old fart. But I gave him a buck.
So far, I had a whole lot of nothing and not much choice. I was going to have to break the phalanx of ANN spin doctors and get to Joanne somehow. Fortunately, when I called Joanne again, her machine was off and a human being picked up, saving me having to scheme to get past Joanne’s doorman. Solange Stevenson answered the phone.
“Robin?” she said. “Joanne is under a great deal of strain at the moment. I don’t think she wants to see anyone else tonight.”
There was a noise in the background, and I heard Solange cupping her hand over the phone to muffle voices. When the hand was taken away and the fog cleared, Solange said, “Just a moment.”
Joanne came on. “You’d better come up here, Robin,” she said. “You know where I live, don’t you?”
Yeah, I remembered. Joanne and I had been friends for a time, back when we were both writers for ANN’s flagship news program. Six months after she became a reporter, I became one, inheriting her weekend spot while she went to the U.N. full-time. I put in my six months covering dog shows and doing quirky stories about New York, the kind of stories the network relied on to flesh out twenty-four hour news on the weekends, which are traditionally slow news days. Joanne was interviewing ambassadors and visiting heads of state, doing a lot of thoughtful, cogent pieces on foreign policy. Before long, she was jetting off to wars and natural disasters worldwide. “Nerves of steel, heart of gold,” said Esquire in an infatuated essay in its “Women We Love” issue. “Gutsy and classy,” said Jack Jackson, when Joanne won her first Emmy for her Afghanistan reports. I envied her, and resented her a little, but what I envied most was not her job or her fame, but her pragmatic, unflagging savoir faire.
Solange greeted me at the door of Joanne’s apartment and we sat down in the cavernous living room, which was oddly devoid of furniture. Just a sofa, a chair, a television, and a liquor cabinet stood in the gymnasium-size room. The red-and-white Baluch carpet was marked by bright, clean squares and rectangles where Joanne’s beloved art deco antiques had been.
The network mandarins had all left, but Solange stayed behind. It wasn’t surprising, as she loved misery and was always ready to dispense her venomous psychobabble to “help” a friend.
“Are you getting enough sleep? You look terrible. I’m worried about you,” she said to me. She does this all the time, preemptively disarming you with a quick succession of blows to your self- esteem. I always look “terrible” to Solange.
“I’m fine. I’m having a bad week, but I’m fine, really.”
“Are you sure? You really look tired out. It’s understandable, I mean, you’ve had a hellish year, between the belch and Burke and Amy . . .”
“So you keep reminding me,” I said.
“Look, I’m just speaking out of concern for you.”
Was she? She certainly said that like she meant it, but hell, who likes to be told over and over how terrible they look, how bad their luck is, how miserable their life is?
“Your husband’s worried about you too,” she said. Oh, below the belt.
“You spoke to Burke about me?” I asked.
“Well, it was just a little remark of friendly concern on his part, that’s all. Actually, he called to pump me for information on the Griff murder, but I didn’t have any, so we talked about other things.”
She made it sound so chatty and intimate. Burke must have flattered her ass off, I thought, in his insidious way. The truth was, Burke could never stand Solange. “Here comes six feet of walking saltpeter,” he said to me once when he saw her approach at a party. But, of course, now he was cultivating a source.
Joanne came in wearing a black silk robe that set off her fair hair and skin and sat down across from me. Her eyes were red, but her expression was almost serene, like she’d been refreshed by weeping. She turned to Solange.
“Thanks for coming by, Solange. It means a lot to me that you did.”
Solange, who never picked up on my bare-faced hints to butt out of my life, picked up on Joanne’s cues all right. “Any time. I should be running along now, but call me if you need anything. If I’m not home, have my service track me down.”
“Thank you,” Joanne said, reaching behind her to squeeze Solange’s hand. When Solange had left, Joanne said, “It was Alejandro De Marco.”
“Who?”
“The Argentine general. He’s the one I had the affair with. When I did that series of reports on Argentina’s military adapting to democracy.”
“You slept with him and then you did a story about him? Why?” It was clearly a conflict of interest.
“Why? Hmmm.” She paused to formulate her answer. “He was sexy and smart and exotic and enigmatic and, frankly, I felt that having sex with him would give me valuable insights into his personality. I guess it sounds egotistical, but I felt sure I could detach myself emotionally and retain my objectivity.”
“Did you?” “More or less.”
“And did you gain valuable insights?”
“Yes, more about my own self than his. But I don’t think it really compromised my ob
jectivity. It was after I finished the first piece, which was critical of him and his political ambitions. The second and third pieces were no less critical.”
“But weren’t you scared you’d ‘disappear’ into a mass grave somewhere?”
“Not really. The disappearances had stopped by then. Besides, a little danger is an aphrodisiac. You know, it is probably more dangerous to date in New York City. I don’t want to go into the whole long story tonight, but I figured you were burning with curiosity about who it was.”
“I thought it was Yeltsin.”
She laughed. “No, not Yeltsin. I don’t make a habit of sleeping with the people I report on. I’ve never done it before, but Alejandro . . . he was intriguing and . . . it was right after I broke up with Marty and that was so painful. Alejandro seemed like a good way to be bad and get even with Marty in some way. Does that make sense?”
Marty was the cameraman on her foreign stories and her longtime boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend. He was very macho, very glam. They still dated sometimes—and slept together, I’m sure. Before Burke left me he had held this relationship up as a model.
“Completely,” I said.
“It was a mistake, though,” she said, standing up and going to a liquor cabinet to pour herself a shot of Jim Beam. “Want something?”
“No thanks.”
“I’ve been trying to decide all day if I am going to survive this or not.”
“You’re a survivor, Joanne,” I said. Joanne was too strong and in control to surrender.
“This kind of thing could be distorted by the news media,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve done that could be taken the wrong way if seen in a negative light. You understand.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Tomorrow I have to appear at a news conference and admit everything this investigator might have found out about me. You’d be amazed how many things like that a person can accumulate in thirty-some years of life. There was this lawn boy in Madrid—he was just nineteen—and a married man in Baghdad and on and on and on. You know what I mean.”
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