It was delicious. She thought her fiancé was cheating on her with his wife. She started to sob again and only the pathetic sight of her tears kept me from laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of the situation, at the two of us sniffing around each other like dogs over a sorry piece of animal carcass like Burke Avery.
“Robin,” she said. “Are you having an affair with Burke?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.
“You know what I mean. Are you?”
“No. Burke and I were discussing the Griff case. We drank a bit and he helped me get home because I drank too much. He probably soaked up L’Heure Bleue in the taxi.”
“But Madri said—“
“Madri is full of shit, okay? Burke and I are not reconciling.”
“How can I believe you?” she asked, then she turned her dewy, fresh face and looked up at me with her Bambi brown eyes.
“It’s not me you have to believe,” I said. “Listen, I don’t like you. So you understand that if I was a malicious person I’d tell you I was having an affair with Burke. I’d give you dates, times, and motel room numbers. But I’m not sleeping with Burke. Believe me when I tell you this, Amy. He really hurt me and embarrassed me. That jerk kicked me when I was down. All’s fair in love and war, and people fall out of love and it’s nobody’s fault and all that, but I’d dance naked at Sing Sing before I’d take him back.”
“Would you really?” she asked, apparently cheered by this thought.
“Yes.” I wanted to hate her and I would have been ruder to her, but she was being very nice and in contrast I felt like a bit of a bitch. “Frankly, Amy, I don’t think he’s worth all your tears. You’d be better off with a less good-looking, less mixed-up fellow.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Oh yes, you would.” I insisted. “Living in a constant state of jealousy isn’t a nice way to live.”
“I know,” she said softly. Our eyes met. “But I can’t leave him now. I’m pregnant.”
I groaned. “He didn’t mention that little detail to me.”
“He didn’t want to tell you. He thought it might hurt you because you can’t … you know.”
“Have children … the conventional way.”
“Yes.” She burst into tears again. “I’m sorry you can’t. I’m sorry, Robin. I’m sorry, so so sorry.”
“Well, it’s over. Forget about it. Burke must be really happy. He always wanted to be a daddy.” I was behaving very reasonably, I thought, but inside I was burning: I wasn’t humiliated enough already, now you tell me my husband has impregnated his fertile young fiancée. What other hell lay in wait for me?
“I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said, taking a monogrammed handkerchief out of her purse and delicately wiping her eyes.
“It’s all right.” She probably wasn’t such a bad sort, I thought. I was probably biased because my heart got broken. The image of Burke and Amy together flashed in my mind, and for the first time it looked right to me. Well, not right, but it didn’t make me feel sick any more.
“Did you follow me from the subway?” I said.
“No. I waited outside for you, inside the doorway of the video store on the corner, until I saw you come up the block.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really sorry to bother you this way. But I had to know. I’m carrying his baby--”
“I get the point,” I said. “Congratulations and all that. Forgive me if I’m not completely overjoyed.”
“I’m so sorry. You know, I couldn’t help but fall in love with him … I wasn’t trying to break anything up.”
“Yeah, he’s got a way about him, doesn’t he?” I said. I changed the subject as I didn’t much feel like saying nice things about Burke to salve Amy’s feelings. Besides, I just realized Amy could be very useful to me. “Listen Amy, I understand you shared a cab with Madri on New Year’s Eve. Who got dropped first, you or her?”
“She lives a little closer, so I dropped her. Why?”
“Did you see her go in to her building?”
“Yes,” Amy said.
“Hmm. But she could have gone in and come back out after you’d left, couldn’t she?” I mused aloud.
“She had to change to go on to another party, she told me. So when I had to leave early, she was happy to go with me.”
“Oh. Amy, I’m sorry if I drove you away from the party,” I said, immature enough to try to salvage some small victory from this whole situation.
“You didn’t. Not at all,” she said. “I said it was flu, I know, but really it was morning sickness. They call it morning sickness, but it hits at all different times.”
“You had morning sickness that night, and you got into a New York taxi?”
She smiled. “I’d already thrown up my dinner. Madri brought me a glass of soda and Eric helped us get a cab.”
“You threw up in the ladies’ room?”
“Well, not in the cab,” she said.
“A lot of people throwing up that night. Susan, for example. Did you happen to see her in the next stall?”
“I don’t remember seeing her,” Amy said.
It didn’t matter, because I remembered now; I’d gone into the ladies’ room, and it was empty. I made a note to call Susan.
“Hardly anyone knows about the pregnancy yet. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I have my image to consider and the divorce isn’t final …”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” I said.
“This is difficult for you. But you know, there are silver linings. You can date again,” she said. “And you get rid of your in-laws.”
I didn’t want to let her off this easily, but she’d managed to find our common ground here. My soon-to-be ex-in-laws, who live in East Percy Township, New Jersey, the preserve of pearls at lunch and the Pat Nixon hairdo.
“Have you met Eileen and H.A. yet?” I asked.
She nodded and smiled a small, wicked smile. “They don’t like me so much. When Burke left you, Eileen was … um …”
“Ecstatic,” I suggested.
“Um, well, happy. But then she met me. I don’t come from a pedigreed family, you know. I come from people who did fifteen cents’ work for every nickel they got paid.”
These folksy aphorisms of Amy’s were kind of her on-air trademark, that and her repeated assertion that she came from “salt-of-the-earth working people,” despite the fact that she looked and behaved like an Upper East Side princess.
“You know, my father was a salesman. He couldn’t give me an expensive college education,” she continued. She was very defensive about all this. I gathered these were all the things she wished she had said to Mrs. Stedlbauer – Eileen. “I had to work my way up. Like you did, Robin.”
It’s true. I didn’t grow up rich. My father had a college education, but we never had any money. By day he taught high school math, by night he toiled in the garage, “trying to make the world safe for children like you,” as he explained it to me. When he died, he held the patents on two safety valves for natural gas equipment and this generated enough income for us to subsist. I have worked since I was fourteen to help support myself and my mother, and I still send her a check every month.
The Stedlbauers, on the other hand, had money, money that had been in circulation for longer than my people had even been in America, which apparently meant something. Eileen seemed to see me as walking anarchy. She was constantly worried that I was going to say or do the wrong thing and bring shame upon my husband, her precious only son. For example, when we left after Christmas dinner one year, she handed me a book and said, “I thought you could use this.”
The book was Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, 1948 edition, in which I found this gem: “The whole relation of men to women, as far as etiquette is concerned, is based on the assumption that woman is a delicate, sensitive creature, easily tired, who must be feted, amused, and protected, to whom the bright and gay side of the picture must always be turned.”
The table
of contents had several listings flagged with red stars and little comments in Mrs. Stedlbauer’s perfect finishing-school handwriting, such as “formal dinner settings and dinner etiquette are still relevant today! PLEASE read, for your sake.”
Jeez. A couple of wrong silverware choices at the dinner table and a knocked-over glass of ice water and the woman thought I was Fred Flintstone. I was so offended. I told Burke I was tempted to show up for the next Christmas dinner wearing a black leather cat suit, pentagram earrings, and one extra-long lee press-on nail with which to scoop up cranberry sauce.
“You know, Amy, I have a book you’ll want,” I said, and went to get it. “Eileen would want you to have this. They have to like you now that you’re, you know …”
She opened her mouth to say the word and I held up my hand to stop her. I didn’t want to hear it again.
“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“It’s a boy,” she said.
“Eileen and H.A. will enthrone you.”
I walked her out and as soon as she was gone I went to the phone and called Susan, leaving a message on her machine.
Then I started thinking about Burke and Amy, about how I’d trusted him and how I stopped trusting him. It had been almost a year since I really seriously started to suspect Burke was cheating on me. You know, the classic signs. He was working late a lot, he was distant and preoccupied when he was with me, there were a lot of random hang-up calls at all hours. When I confronted him, he cut me off indignantly. He was merely “cultivating a source,” he said, which in one sense could be the truth, depending on how literally you take the statement and how dirty your mind is.
Chapter Fourteen
IN THE MORNING, the tabloids were all over Buster Corbus, alleged union goon, who had a long rap sheet for burglary, arson, sabotage, and assault with a deadly weapon. Only two convictions on his record, but with this he would be a three-time loser, a habitual criminal; another conviction, especially a murder, and it was a lifetime as a prison concubine.
Corbus was naturally fighting this with all his might and had attracted the interest of famous lost-cause lawyer Spencer Roo. I knew Roo from when I was on Crime & Justice. The last time I saw him, he was defending this guy accused of killing his wife with thirty-six hammer blows to her head. Incredibly, Roo claimed it was suicide. More incredibly, his client was acquitted, albeit on a technicality.
Complicating matters for Mr. Corbus were two well-documented and unlucky facts. One of his fingerprints had been lifted several weeks before from a Marfeles room where the partially decomposed body of a large rat was found stuffed in a bathtub drain. Six months before, Corbus himself had been found in a ventilation duct with wire cutters and burglar’s tools at the ultrahip neopostmodern Metro Grand Hotel, which had a contract with one of the same unions as the Marfeles.
In addition, the paper listed all these tenuous connections Corbus apparently had to the union, which in turn had tenuous connections to the Genovese crime family. It also included the interesting fact that Griff was naked when he was found. The paper speculated that he had been coming out of the bathroom after a shower when Corbus surprised him.
Anyway, while Griff’s client remained a mystery, the Marfeles story seemed to be tying itself up in one convenient, tidy knot. There was no jinx at the Marfeles, Eloise Marfeles asserted to the newspapers. It was all just union mischief and sabotage, which went terribly awry with the murder of Larry Griff. Hotels don’t kill people, people kill people.
On the way to work, I stopped at the main post office, where Susan had met Griff. Crystal O’Connor and Teddy Boylen had both mentioned that Griff worked a lot through the mails. I wondered if he had a post office box, and if there was a key out there somewhere that would open the box and spill out all our sins and secrets.
But if there was a p.o. box, it was under a false name, an alias I didn’t know. I’d stumbled down another dead end.
It was all very frustrating. I was bursting with information I couldn’t reveal, from people to whom I had sworn an oath of secrecy. Trying to keep track of what I was allowed to talk about and what was classified was hard. Under other circumstances, I could take a bit of information from one person and bait a hook with it, use it to get more information from someone else, until all the bits and pieces added up to something resembling a clear picture.
It was going to be tricky.
Trickier still was going to be getting away from Jerry to look into the murder. As soon as I got to work he ordered me into edit with Claire to finish the first part of our sperm bank series, or “Sperm – the last Frontier,” as Claire referred to it.
“Don’t come out until you’ve got a finished tape to hand me,” he said. “You’re my girls today.”
My girls. I just love that macho, proprietary crap. I take to it like a fish to battery acid. I was about to say something but Claire grabbed my arm and gave me a slow-lidded blink that said, let it rest.
So I went to lay down my track – the voice-over narration – and took it into edit, where Claire was waiting with Hosea, a dreadlocked virtuoso with a Sony edit bay.
“You shouldn’t let Jerry get to you,” she said. “He’s just trying to get your goat.”
A production assistant poked her head in and the frantic sounds of a newscast under construction blew in. In another edit room a reporter was yelling, “Back it in!” A feed room producer screamed, “We lost the feed!”
“Stevenson promo tape?” the P.A. asked. “Oh, wrong edit room.” She closed the door and shut out the cacophony.
“I just don’t want my goat to get got,” I said, picking up the narrative thread precisely where Claire had dropped it. “Especially by Jerry.”
Hosea laid my track down and then we inserted the sound bites, which Jerry had chosen. When we began to cover the rest with video, Claire said she’d look after it and sprang me to check out the Griff story, promising to page me by my pseudonym when she was done, or if Jerry came by.
I fled down the hallway to the wing where all the features and talk show offices were, stepping lightly past Sports to avoid Turk Hammermill.
I didn’t have much luck. Madri Michaels was home with the flu and Susan was too busy to talk. She was at work on a new segment for Solange’s show called Group, featuring a therapy group she and Solange had “auditioned” in order to get a good cross-cultural, cross-generational, cross-gender mix of neurotics. Twice a week and on the weekend highlights show, Solange would run these ten-minute minidocumentaries following the group through a year of therapy. It was expected to be a big ratings grabber, as viewers became involved with the participants and their real-life soap operas.
So I went to the Browner offices, but Greg’s secretary, Frannie Millard, wouldn’t let me past to see Greg.
“He doesn’t like you,” she explained, as though the reasons were self-evident. “He might fire me if I let you through.”
“Tell him it’s about Larry Griff.”
“Well, I can’t do that right now,” she said. “He isn’t even in his office. He’s tied up in a meeting.”
Frannie had worked for Greg at least ten years and was very efficient. She was also sixty-three, heavy, and had a hairy chin, so I immediately ruled her out as a suspect. She wasn’t Greg’s type.
“What about Eric? Is he in?”
“He’s on a conference call to Los Angeles and can’t be disturbed,” she said.
“Well can you …,” I began.
The phone rang.
“Excuse me,” she said, in a please-leave tone of voice.
I was going to track Madri down, but when I left the Browner offices, I saw Jerry steaming down the hall towards me. In the next second I heard, “Paging Josephine Tey, Please call the operator…”
I turned around. At the other end of the hall, Turk Hammermill stood, a big book of baseball stats under his right arm. I opted for Jerry.
“You were supposed to supervise this edit,” he said.
“Don�
��t you trust Claire?”
“More than you,” he said. “That isn’t the point. The point is, I told you not to leave that edit room until this piece was done.” He followed – or rather, herded – me back to Special Reports, where he confined me to my office and made me log a graphic medical tape on sperm to find suitable wallpaper video for part two of the series.
Fortunately, I still had my computer terminal and my telephone. As little white spermatozoa shucked and jived across my TV screen, I logged on to the computer and started a Nexis search for newspaper and periodical articles about Paul Mangecet.
Then I called Spencer Roo. He claimed to have airtight alibis for Corbus. He was just having a little trouble locating them. While I was talking to him he almost had me convinced but as soon as I got off the phone I began to doubt. This was, after all, Spencer Roo, who once used a “nicotine fit” defense for a client who went berserk and killed his wife and all her terriers.
I was starving, but I was “grounded,” under office arrest, and Jerry was keeping an eye on my door from his office so I couldn’t escape. Finally, he went out to a lunch meeting with some Japanese advertising guys and I was able to flee to the company cafeteria, or Bad News Café, as the writers called it, a large room painted in toxic-waste colors with sludge green-brown walls and surface-scum yellow furniture. Rumor had it Dunbar consulted a cut-rate colorist, who determined that these colors would discourage long lunch breaks by creating an uncomfortable atmosphere. The menu, it was said, was designed to reflect the same principles. And, I might add, the same colors.
Eric was there, about ten people ahead on the line for trays. He was talking to Claire, who was getting a diet soda. At first when we saw each other, he turned away, then turned back to me, puzzled. Claire smiled, got out of the way, and Eric came over.
“Hi,” I said, guarded. He just looked at me.
“What?!” I said.
“You were supposed to call me,” he said.
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