We had no choice. Joanne and I both promised secrecy. This, my friends, is a conspiracy – of sorts. Above us, the minute hand on a clock featuring the Cream of Wheat man clicked loudly forward. Susan went on.
“He called me up about three weeks ago, told me some stuff about myself, and said he knew a lot more, stuff I’m not going to tell even you two. I met him the first time in that restaurant in Macy’s Cellar and he showed me a sheet of paper with most of the information blacked out.”
Joanne and I nodded. The very pink waitress brought us our meat loaf platters.
“He said he had two more sheets, and if I wanted them, I could have them for ten thousand dollars.”
“Only ten?” Joanne interrupted.
“Well, I’m not as well-known as you,” Susan said. “You’re more famous, so you had to pay more. Anyway, I told him I didn’t have ten thousand. I have about five in my 401(k) but I can’t get at it, and I have a little more in CDs I can’t get at and …”
“What did he say?” Joanne asked, between bites of the mealy meat loaf.
“He swore and said he hated the nineties, because nobody was liquid.”
“Hard times for blackmailers,” I said.
“And he said I’d better find the money, or he was going to turn over all the information on me to someone at ANN. I wanted to know who, because I was afraid he’d turn it over to Solange. I … I don’t want anyone to know my private business, but especially not her.”
“She’d probably do a whole show around you and your private problems,” Joanne said.
“Yeah,” Susan said, picking at her meat loaf, which was growing cold in a congealing pool of amber gravy flecked with green peas.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“He called me up a couple of weeks after that, and insisted on coming to my place.”
“Uh-oh,” Joanne said.
“I didn’t have any choice. So he came over, and when I told him how much I’d been able to raise, selling my grandmother’s jewelry, he got upset.”
“And-”
Another drink came, and she halved it in one gulp and emptied it in the next.
“So, he offered me an alternative.”
“A blow job?” Joanne said. “That’s the deal he wanted to make with me.”
“Well, I …” Susan stopped.
“Don’t go on if …,” I began.
“I performed … um … manual masturbation on him. A – a – what would you call that? A hand job?”
Joanne and I nodded.
“Once, only once. And you know, that worm still didn’t give me the information.”
“I’m sorry, Susan,” Joanne said, giving Susan’s hand a squeeze across the table. “Robin’s right, don’t go on if you feel uncomfortable.”
“No, it feels good to talk about it, to tell you the God’s honest truth,” Susan said. “It’s been awful carrying it around these last few weeks.”
She stopped for a drink of water. “So, anyway, on New Year’s Eve he called and told me to meet him at the post office with the money.”
“Which post office?” I asked.
“The main one on Eighth Avenue, across from Madison Square Garden. He came, I gave him the money I had, and then he told me he didn’t have the information with him. He’d already sent it to a certain reporter at ANN, but he said she wouldn’t actually be able to get it without first talking to him. But if I didn’t show up at the party that night with another five thousand, he would hand over his information about me to this reporter.”
“Who?” I asked.
“I asked him again who it was and he said it was someone down on her luck who would be real grateful to get a scoop.”
She and Joanne looked at me. I said, “Why would I be interested in his information? He was taking a chance if he thought I’d rat out my colleagues. How did he know I wouldn’t take the information and burn it? Or … or turn it over to Standards and Practices for an endless, discreet, internal investigation. Besides, he investigated me too.”
Joanne snorted. “Maybe he thought he could use it to get a blow job from you. I hear he had a thing for redheads.”
“The way he described it, it did sound like he meant you,” Susan said.
“And you do have kind of a whistle-blower pathology,” Joanne added. “Not to sound like Solange …”
“I’ve been worried sick the last week,” Susan continued. “It hasn’t shown up in your mail, has it, Robin?”
“No, of course not!” I said at once.
Did they believe me? Despite our benign relations in the past, we were suspicious of each other now. I was beginning to experience that universal feeling of guilt. Once I stole a package of Life Savers from a five-and-dime and to this day whenever I walk into a Woolworth’s I feel a little shabby and a little guilty and I always keep my hands where the clerks can see ‘em.
“He said I had to know something in order to get it, right? Well, except for the initial phone call and brief encounter on the dance floor, I didn’t see or talk to the guy, okay? When I went up to meet him, there was no answer. You remember, Joanne? You were coming out of your room when I was knocking …”
“That’s right.”
“I figure he was already dead at that point. If he was going to tell me something, he took it to the grave.”
“Well, I know this sounds terrible, but I’m glad he’s dead,” Susan whimpered. “I don’t think he ever would have given me that information on me.”
“Probably not,” Joanne said. “Sounds like he was building a harem. Women he could control through information.”
Susan, who had rather an unfortunate love life, worse even than mine, launched into her ritual condemnation of the entire male gender. Men were brutish, lying, hypocritical traitorous shits, she said, adding, “And they never call when they say they will,” as though this were the worst offense. “I hate men. Don’t you?”
“I love men,” I said. “In general, I love them. We’re just as bad as them and we’re just as good as them, I think.”
“Some of them can’t accept that, though,” Joanne said.
“Some of us can’t accept it,” I said.
When dessert came – layers of lime Jell-O alternating with layers of Cool Whip for $5.95 – we got into the trickier aspects of the situation.
“So the question,” Joanne said, “is, why us?”
“Yeah. And is it only us?” I asked. “And who hired him? Who else from ANN had a room at the Marfeles that night?”
“A bunch of us,” Joanne said. “Most of the execs, some ‘talent.’” Talent is the term we use for on-air people, provoking much mirth among the writers and producers.
“Solange had a room, I had a room … let me see … Sawyer Lash and his wife stayed there that night, and Greg,” she continued. “who else? Oh yeah, Pat Lattanzi and Elsie Ormsby Ward.”
Pat and Elsie were married. They anchored the 6 p.m. together and earlier shows separately.
“That’s it?”
“Oh no, there were others – execs, some civilians. But I didn’t keep track. I didn’t know at the time it would be important,” Joanne said. She went on. “Robin, are you sure Griff didn’t slip you something or tell you something that …”
We went over the events of the evening, where we were and when, what we saw and when. Of course, it was a New Year’s Eve party and we were all pretty liquored up, so the details were blurry. They were particularly blurry for Susan.
“When Griff was killed,” she said, “I was passed out in a stall in the bathroom. Remember, Robin, after I spilled that drink on Solange, I went to throw up? I … I was there until about midnight, when someone found me and put me in a cab.”
That sounded reasonable enough. I did remember my last vision of Susan that night, green and weaving, as she headed to the john. No, I didn’t think she had done it. But then, how well did I really know her? What were her secrets? Surely more than a fear of an unlikely Post headline: FLORENCE
BRAVE’S DAUGHTER NOT VIRGIN.
“What about Solange? I heard she ‘confessed’ to Dunbar. Any idea what that was about?”
“She told me she didn’t confess anything,” Susan said. “She said she went in to give Dunbar advice.” Then Susan said she had to go. She was cooking dinner for her mother that night at her apartment in Brooklyn.
We all agreed to honor the omerta and not speak of our meeting.
As soon as Susan left, Joanne turned to me, “Think she did it?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I don’t think she’s capable,” Joanne said. “I hope she doesn’t get mucked up in this in the papers. It’s awful to be tried in the press. Oh, the irony. When you’re exposed, you start thinking about all the people you’ve exposed, and how their stories were warped or distorted by your own bias without your even being aware of it. And yet, it’s our job to expose hypocrisy.”
“Even though we’re all hypocrites too.”
“It’s the human condition,” she said. “Strange to find ourselves on the receiving end.”
“Who do you think is investigating us?” I asked her. She smiled. I couldn’t help noticing how immaculately dressed she was. I don’t think you could even find a piece of lint on her. How did she manage it? In my haste that day, I’d thrown on a big gray shirt and faded black jeans. My hair was loosely tied back and unkempt.
“Between us, since we’re sworn to secrecy, Jackson really thinks it’s Paul Mangecet. It makes sense.”
“The holier-than-thou man?” I asked.
“Millennial Broadcasting is doing great, it’s a money machine for Mangacet. But imagine what a guy like him could do if he had Jackson’s global reach,” she said. “Only I doubt if Jackson’s stockholders would sell to an archconservative theocrat like Mangacet. They’re very liberal and he thinks interracial dating is unholy and feminism turns women to witchcraft.”
“Yeah, too bad there aren’t really witches. Too many televangelists in the world, not enough frogs. One twitch of Samantha’s nose could fix that little imbalance.”
“Oh, I loved Samantha when I was little,” Joanne said, whooshy and girlish all of a sudden. “I used to sit in class and if I didn’t like my teachers, I’d pretend I was Samantha, cast spells on them under my breath. Poof! You’re a bag of shit!”
“But … back to Mangacet. He could have hired Griff, and then Griff could have turned on him, played both sides, for money and for sex.”
I trusted her just then. Later, in the taxi home, I wondered if I trusted her because she didn’t seem to trust me. You know, the best defense is a good offense and all that. On paper, she made a damn good suspect, but in person you couldn’t entertain the idea seriously because she seemed too … real somehow. None of the revelations about her were that surprising; she’d made no bones about her sexual prowess in the past, but, gentledame that she was, she never named names and left out telling details, like armored personnel carriers.
When I got home, I pushed all my heavy furniture back in front of the door and the windows, just in case. I had considered staying with a friend – for about ten seconds. Due to my rather careless lifestyle and housekeeping habits, I’ve often lost friends by staying with them too long.
So friends were out, and I couldn’t afford a hotel. I compromised by making it impossible for anyone but the Terminator to get into my place while I was there, although I was in big trouble if there was a fire.
Actually, it made me feel very cozy, all locked up like that. I kicked of my shoes, untucked my gray shirt from my jeans, and listened to my answering machine, Louise Bryant in my lap. I was hoping for a message from Eric, but he hadn’t called and despite my fears and doubts, that disappointed me. There were two hangup calls (I’d had a few the day before too) and several messages from tabloid reporters who had, like any persistent journalist, obtained my unlisted home number.
I zoned them out and thought instead of what Joanne had said about Susan not being capable of killing Griff. In my experience, we’re almost all capable of killing under the right circumstances, even if it’s only in self-defense – and self-defense in the eyes of some people is a pretty broad category.
I doodled on a yellow legal pad, making a list of all the reasons a person could be incapable of murder. There weren’t many. I wrote down saintliness and then struggled to think up another reason someone couldn’t kill under the right circumstances. Coma, I wrote finally.
And what was it Griff was going to tell me? What did I need to know in order to find the information everyone was so anxious about? My head shot up at the next message on my machine.
“Ms. Armoire, this is Mary Coffield at the News-Journal. I’d really like to give you a chance to tell your side of the story before I talk to Robin Hudson. Please call me at--”
I laughed, because she’d dialed my number and asked for Joanne, and because reporters always say they want to give you a chance to tell “your side of the story.” If Joanne did tell “her side of the story” to an outside reporter like Coffield – and there was a better chance of her mud-wrestling with Jeane Kirkpatrick – Coffield would then use that to get at me, or someone else in the story. “I just talked to Joanne and she told me you did such and such--”
Then you have to explain, and you get drawn into it, and she takes your information back to Joanne with a slightly different spin and so on, provoking the information she wants for the story she wants to write.
That got me thinking again about that murder in my hometown, where all but one member of the Sesquin family were killed. I had been thinking about this a lot lately, how the police and reporters were sent on a wild goose chase, about how easy it is to follow your own imagination and lose sight of the truth.
This is what happened: One of the Sesquin teenage girls was quite beautiful, and the popular theory was that a rebuffed suitor, a mysterious dark-haired boy, had killed everyone to avenge his broken heart. It was a wildly popular theory.
The only problem with it was it drew on an outright lie. I know, because I’m the one who made it up, who told a reporter that a week before the killings I’d seen a boy trying to kiss the beautiful Frances Sesquin behind the Strand Theater, and I’d seen the girl push the boy away. A dark-haired boy. It was too dark to see the boy’s face, but I’d distinctly heard him say, “You’ll be sorry. I’m going to get you.”
I didn’t tell this lie out of malice. I told it for two reasons, one noble, one ignoble. First and most important, I wanted to steer suspicion away from my mother, who had been a little less sane than usual after my dad died, causing some talk after the murders. Second, I wanted to please the nice reporter who was interviewing me in front of the Central Café. And he was pleased. This was just what the national news desk in New York wanted. A beautiful girl. A spurned lover. A fatal kiss.
With shock and fascination, I watched the lie grow greater and greater as respectable grownups corroborated and enlarged my story, which made the front page of every major newspaper in the state and led the local newscasts, further legitimizing it.
I imagine this must have been a difficult time for dark-haired boys to get dates, but maybe not. I’d guess the parents in town weren’t keen on their daughters meeting dark-haired boys during this period, but that may have enhanced the allure of dark-haired boys. If parents forbid a teenage girl to date someone, she almost always sneaks out and dates him secretly, and with a great deal more enthusiasm than if the parents approved. Add to that the outlaw love factor, the possibility that any given dark-haired boy in town was the love-crazed killer.
But I’m only speculating about how my lie enhanced or changed the social lives of dark- haired boys in my home town. I know it had other, unhappy effects, but I try not to think about that too much. I mean, I didn’t do it alone. A lot of townspeople, many of them grownups, fed the lie. I was just a kid. What did I know? Why did they listen to me?
Chapter Twelve
WHEN I GOT TO WORK ON MONDAY my ke
ys were at the lost and found, turned in Friday night by an anonymous Samaritan, so I relaxed a little. I told Claire about my “fastidious burglar” and she laughed, both of us completely unaware that all hell was breaking loose around us.
It was Jerry, that baying hound – no, braying ass – of hell, who bounded in late that morning to tell us about the upheaval all over the network. It seems a lot of people, not knowing who Griff was or whether he had investigated them, were preemptively confessing.
At the end of their morning shows, Pat Lattanzi and Elsie Ormsby Ward had each read brief statements in which they admitted taking junkets paid for by travel organizations, ones they had reported on in the past. They then announced their own one-month suspensions, pending further disciplinary actions.
“The rumor is they confessed to the junkets to cover up some serous swinging in the late seventies,” said Jerry, always ready to promulgate truth. “But they have an airtight alibi for the time of death.”
Mark O’Malley, award-winning business reporter, issued a press release stating that he had spent the weekend with his family informing them of his homosexuality and, with their support behind him, he was now coming out to the viewing public. “No one should be forced ‘out,’” he said. Although he had no knowledge of an investigation into his affairs, he went on, he felt in the interests of honesty he should come out now and not be forced out by scandalmongers later.
Mark also had an alibi for every moment between nine-thirty and eleven. Part of his alibi, Jerry informed me, was Jack Jackson. Another part was Burke Avery. Seems Mark and Jack were chatting when Burke finally got up the nerve to approach the great man.
“And you’ll want to watch Gotham Salon this morning,” Jerry said, waving his melon-inspector coffee mug at me. “It’s on in, oh, about a minute. But don’t get too caught up in it. I want a script for the first part of our sperm series on my desk by six.”
What's a Girl Gotta Do Page 15