Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  Also not very confidence-inspiring: the day Deputy Hector patrolled the offices, with his typical affected law-enforcement swagger, one thumb hooked into his beltloop, the other hand on his gun, and a Kick Me sign on his back. Until Pete and Franco saw it, which showed you how much respect people had for our Barney Fife.

  “These are only the tapes from the commercial elevator. What about the freight elevator?” I asked.

  It turned out the other tapes had been sent over to the cop shop without anyone running dubs, so now I had to wait for the cops to dub them for me.

  No matter. These were the tapes I was most interested in. They were grainy, black and white, but also time-coded, with hour, minute, and second, which would help match the names in the sign-out book to real people.

  Back in my office, I scanned them on fast forward. You couldn’t see much when the elevator was full except the tops of people’s heads. After I did a quick log of the daytime tapes, I popped in the after-hours tape. Not many people went up and most who did got off on twenty-six or twenty-eight, where there were several accountants’ offices. Nothing unusual about that, since it was tax season.

  At 9:11:54, a man went up to the twenty-sixth floor. Oblivious to the security camera in the ceiling corner, he picked his nose, examined the result, then wiped it on the elevator wall. Eeuw.

  As I was watching this unenlightening tape, Phil the enlightened janitor came by. He took priority in my eyes, so I paused the tape. Every day Phil came in to empty the trash, shoot the shit, and fill me in on the company gossip. An older guy, late sixties, early seventies, who had been in the States for only a few months, he claimed to have spent the last fifteen years working his way around the world as a janitor or handyman. During his life he had had all these near-death close calls, or so he said, starting when he was fifteen (“I looked eighteen”) and served in the British army in North Africa. Rommel’s Afrika Korps launched a surprise attack on Phil’s unit and when it was over and Rommel had rolled past, Phil got up, looked around, and saw he was the only person still alive. “I felt dead sorry for me mates,” he told me. “But me first thought was, ‘Ha! Rommel, you missed one, you sorry bastard.’ “ He then made his way back to British lines. Later, he said, he was a fireman in Liverpool and had saved many babies and old women from fires.

  Since then, it had been one adventure and close call after another.

  I didn’t really believe he’d been the only survivor of a ferry sinking in Bangladesh, or that he’d walked away from a small plane crash in the Himalayas, or that a cobra had come up the loo in Calcutta and tried to “bite me bum.” (What a nightmare, huh?) I wanted to believe all his stories, though. They were entertaining and weirdly truthful, and I liked his philosophy. “I’m just too silly to die, I guess,” he always said.

  “Glad to see you back, Phil,” I said. “Over that flu?”

  “Oh yeah. It’s tough on a man me age. Imagine, all the things I survived, to get nailed by a microbe or a virus.”

  “Heard anything from the executive suite?” I asked.

  Since the recent custodial cutbacks, Phil had been emptying the poobah trash upstairs as well as that of some of the features offices at ANN.

  “Madri Michaels is being taken off the air, pushed into a PR job,” he said. “Bianca de Woody is to replace her.”

  An allergic reaction to having her lips cosmetically plumped had taken Madri off the air for a while. It took two weeks for the redness and swelling to go down, and in that time Bianca de Woody had made the seven p.m. slot her own. Anchorwoman Madri Michaels was no friend of mine. Still, I felt bad for her, and I felt bad for me. Madri was just a year older than me and she ranked slightly higher in the newsroom food chain.

  “Heard anything about this murder on twenty-seven?”

  “Spoke to the guy who found the body. A cleaning man. He’s pretty shook up about it still,” Phil said.

  I’d spoken to the cleaning guy, Dom Lecastro, too, through an interpreter as Mr. Lecastro didn’t speak much English. He’d only just started doing the twenty-seventh floor, didn’t know anything about Kanengiser, and hadn’t seen anything.

  “I’m cleaning the north wing on thirty-five tonight,” Phil said on his way out of my office. “All the Xerox rooms are on that side. Should be able to get something for you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Phil.”

  There was a commotion outside the door, and Tamayo’s voice saying, “I’m going. You don’t have to push.”

  I went out and saw her flanked by two security guards.

  “We caught her smoking in a cleaning-supply closet near Sports,” said one of the guards to Jerry, who was shaking his head.

  There were few places you could still sneak a smoke at ANN. A couple of people had been caught on video smoking in the stairwells and one of them was fired because it was a third offense.

  Okay, take a high-pressure place like a newsroom where people are staring at bad news for hours on end, add job insecurity, big egos, and troubled marriages, then ban smoking so the whole place is having a nic fit. And what do you have? Endless good cheer and camaraderie.

  “I’ll look after her,” Jerry said, taking custody. He and Tamayo went into his office.

  “Are you nuts!” he shouted at her. I pressed my ear to the glass. I heard him open that big drawer full of resumes.

  “See these?” he said. “These are the resumes of all the people who want to replace you. . . .”

  After Jerry finished chewing her out, Tamayo brought me my mail and my faxes. She was such a startling presence. Maybe it was that shock of white-blond hair atop that semi-Japanese face, or maybe it was just her anarchic personality coming through.

  “I can’t remember what I did with your phone messages,” she said. “Can I give them to you later?”

  “Listen,” I said. “This is really important. If a woman calling herself Maureen Hudson Soparlo, also known as ‘Aunt Maureen’ or ‘Aunt Mo,” calls, I’m not here.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever. If she calls, I’m out on a story, won’t be back until really late, if at all.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Write it down, okay?”

  Tamayo’s heart wasn’t really in her job—her dream was to be a full-time stand-up comic—and she didn’t do a very good job in Special Reports (although she was a crack comic). Often absentminded, she’d wander off in midsentence. She’d take milk from the minifridge in our conference area and forget to close the door. By the time it was discovered, Jerry’s liv-erwurst would be spoiled. She’d lose phone messages and forget to pick up tapes.

  To make up for these shortcomings, I had to do a lot more work, and I did, because it was worth it just to have her around for comic relief and to harass Jerry, since I couldn’t, due to my new Positive Mental Attitude.

  “Someone told me to say hi to you. Who was it? Oh, Howard Gollis,” Tamayo said.

  “He’s insane.”

  She gave me a pot-calling-the-kettle-black look.

  “He’s a creative personality,” she said finally. “He goes to the edge. You thought it was attractive when you saw him perform.”

  She was right. When I saw him the first time, when I’d gone to see Tamayo perform at the Duplex, I thought he was very sexy, dark, handsome, and funny. Edgy. Lenny Bruce meets Mel Blanc with a soupcon of Leonard Cohen. His brand of humor was really out there, sick but very funny. More importantly, he was the first man I’d been sexually attracted to since Eric.

  “You begged me to introduce you,” Tamayo reminded me.

  Again, she spoke the truth. I had begged her, and she had pointed out that he was a nutcase and I was a nutcase and we were both very vulnerable at the moment because of failed relationships and maybe we should steer clear of each other for the sake of innocent bystanders like herself.

  So I begged her some more, and she introduced us. The first two dates were like a trip to Coney Island. Howard was really funny, we really hit it off. The third date he
had a Fear of Intimacy attack. On the fourth date, we almost had sex, things went wrong, and the bloom was off the rose.

  “I don’t want to talk about Howard Gollis. He’s history. What are you working on?” 1 said.

  “The nomination forms for the Dumb-ass Foundation Awards.”

  “Dundas Foundation,” I corrected.

  “If Jerry’s up for one, I stand by my pronunciation,” she said. “He told me today not to bring my personal problems into the office. So I told him he had a few personal problems too, but nothing ten large lesbians with baseball bats couldn’t handle. That’s no idle threat, because you actually know ten large lesbians with baseball bats, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do,” I said.

  You can find them in my Rolodex cross-indexed under Lesbian Justice and Vigilantism — Gays & Lesbians.

  “Jerry’s worse than that jackass Yamamoto I worked for on the Japanese game show,” Tamayo said.

  For someone in her mid-twenties, Tamayo had had quite a long and varied career. Before going to work for ANN in Tokyo, which had led to the job in New York, she had worked for a sleazy Japanese TV program called Amazing True Stories. They did features like “The True Living Gold Snake.” Tamayo’s job, as she summed it up, was “to paint the snake gold.” Sometimes, when Jerry asked us to do something journalistically dubious, we would turn to each other and say, “It’s time to paint the snake.”

  Before Amazing True Stories she had been a prize hostess for a Japanese game show she referred to as Humiliate Me for Pennies. What it entailed, I wasn’t sure, but she once said that at ANN she finally had a job that didn’t involve live tree slugs, styptic pencil, or welding glass.

  Humiliate Me for Pennies. Exactly how was Special Reports different?

  Just as she was about to leave my office, she turned around and said, “Did I mention that Bianca called, twice?”

  “I’ll call her.”

  “Call her now. It sounded urgent.”

  When I called Bianca back, she said, “Can you meet me? I’d like to talk to you.”

  “We can talk now on the phone.”

  “Oh, now’s not a good time. It has to be done in person.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said.

  “Ladies’ room near Sports, five minutes,” she said, and hung up abruptly, without good-byes.

  Bianca was waiting, and as soon as I got there she yanked me inside.

  “What—” I started to say but she clasped one hand over my mouth.

  “Ssssh,” she said.

  Bianca, blond and blue-eyed with a Varga girl figure, wasn’t a bad news reader, although her appeal was perhaps best summed up by Dillon Flinder’s involuntary comment, made somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, “That mouth! Oh God, that mouth.” She had a great mouth—bee-stung, I think they call it—and she didn’t require collagen to maintain it.

  I’d already spent a considerable part of my day hiding out in bathrooms, including the ghost of a bathroom we now knew as Special Reports. Quietly, I watched as Bianca checked all the stalls to make sure we were alone. It was all pretty cloak-and-dagger, but I was nonchalant about it. Cloak-and-dagger was getting to be the normal atmosphere around ANN. Because I’m a tad self-absorbed and figure everything that happens somehow relates to me, I figured Bianca was acting strange because she’d heard something about my fate in the impending shakeup.

  “Robin, isn’t it awful about Dr. Kanengiser?” Bianca said finally, having ensured we were completely alone.

  “You saw Dr. Kanengiser too?”

  “Yeah. I referred you to him. A couple of months ago.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure, when you and Tamayo and I had lunch with Susan Brave.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Yeah. Do you mind if I smoke? I mean, you wouldn’t tell, would you?”

  “No.” I wasn’t the type to call up the human resources office anonymously and rat on someone for smoking, despite HR’s encouragement to snitch. HR had even set up a twenty-four-hour line you could call if you saw someone smoking at work, out on the street, even at a party after hours.

  Bianca climbed atop the vanity and disabled the smoke alarm above the mirrors before peeling off her nicotine patch and lighting a cigarette.

  “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to sneak a smoke when you’ve got a bodyguard shadowing you.”

  “Who?”

  “Deputy Hector.”

  “Hector?”

  “Pete’s worried that one of my . . . fans is on his way to New York, so he assigned Hector to follow me around when I’m not on air. Hector is driving me crazy.”

  “Is that the reason for the cloak-and-dagger?”

  She didn’t answer that. “Robin, I want you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone I saw Kanengiser.”

  “Why?”

  “I went to him to have something embarrassing treated and I just don’t want it to get around this rumor mill. Or worse even, into the newspapers.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t want Pete to know . . .”

  Bianca was dating our security chief, Pete Huculak. Before settling into a steady relationship with Pete, she’d dated a lot of guys at ANN, including my cameraman, Mike. I mean, I’d dated a lot within the company too and she and I had dated a few of the same guys, but she’d dated more of them and much more seriously than I had. While I dated randomly and without any real relationship goals, she was a woman with a mission: Find a boyfriend. She was the type who always had to have a boyfriend. Once she told me she just felt safer with a man in her life.

  It was understandable. In the last year she had leapt up the media-market ladder from a small station in her hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a medium station in Cincinnati and then to ANN in New York. As Cincinnati had seemed a big, wild city to her, she’d naturally had some trouble adjusting to New York, so it was easy to see the attraction of a big, strong, take-charge kind of guy like Pete, who made her feel safe.

  “He’s old-fashioned and he wouldn’t be very understanding about my ... not that it’s anything serious ... I mean, it was cured before Pete and I ... consummated,” she said, with an odd note in her voice. The last time I had heard that coy, coded tone was when Dolores Savoy came up to me in the hallway of Hummer High School and asked for a tampon by whispering, “My friend just came to visit and she forgot her luggage. Do you have any?”

  It was such a strain for Bianca, trying to be delicate about whatever it was she’d had treated, while at the same time trying to communicate her distress. Bianca seemed like a nice young woman and she could be very witty, but she was weird about sex and her own body. I mean if you can’t talk about it openly with another woman in the ladies’ room . . .

  “I won’t say anything,” I said.

  “I heard you were doing a special report on it, so I wanted to be sure.”

  “We’re not trying to expose his patients,” I said. Not as long as we had an even sleazier angle to exploit.

  “Good,” she said. “I know I can trust you.”

  She pulled a piece of paper from her purse and said, “You can’t have this, you can only look at it. I think it might help you with your story.”

  But she didn’t hand it over right away.

  “I noticed this last night, as I was going through my medical records,” she said. “I wanted to get rid of any traces of Kanengiser, because of Pete . . .”

  Now she gave me the document, an insurance summary from our employee benefits department, showing a summary of her medical expenses for the first quarter of the year.

  “Please note I was billed for six visits,” she said.

  “Noted.”

  “I only saw him three times.”

  “Wow. Bookkeeping error?”

  “Maybe. But I thought it might mean something. I wanted you to have the tip.”

  “That’s swell of you. Thanks.”

  “You think the tabloids will get hold of my name in this murder bus
iness?” she asked. “You know, ‘Gynecologist to TV News Star Killed’?”

  “The cops have sealed his files, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Who else saw him?”

  “I don’t know. I referred him to you ... I don’t really know of anyone else. But he was in the building, and he saw patients evenings, so it wouldn’t surprise me if other women here saw him . . .”

  “What do you know about Kanengiser?”

  “Not much.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Two weeks ago, just for a follow-up.”

  “So you didn’t see him the night he was killed?”

  “No. I was anchoring all night.”

  “Did you date Kanengiser?”

  “No, of course not. Did you?” she asked.

  “No. I hardly knew him at all. You knew him a bit better. What do you think about this S&M connection?”

  “I didn’t get that vibe off him at all,” she said. “But God, in New York, you never know, do you? A guy seems like a nice, normal professional, and he turns out to be into whips and chains. I’ve been on more strange dates with more strange guys in the short time I’ve been in New York . . .”

  “In New York’s defense, I’ve been on some weird dates too, but not all of them were native New Yorkers.”

  “Speaking of that, I hear you’re going out with Fenn Corker,” Bianca said, blowing a smoke ring in a way that would give Dillon Flinder a coronary.

  “Who told you that?”

  “He did.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. It just came up when I spoke to him on the phone last week,” she said. She turned on the tap and ran her cigarette under it, then pitched it into the trash.