Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  The PA system crackled. She was being paged.

  “My master’s voice. Gotta run. Thanks for keeping this quiet,” Bianca said.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but it might lead this story away from S&M into something more prosaic, like an insurance scam, something boring that might convince Jerry to drop it altogether.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I caught Cyndi in employee benefits just as she was about to leave for the day. After she told me tersely that all benefits information was confidential, I said, “I’m reporting a possible rip-off to you. I’m helping you out. You don’t have to tell me who he saw or why. All you have to do is check to see if other Jackson employees saw this guy, and if he was double-billing them too. All I need to know is yes or no.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do a quick search and beep me when . . .”

  “Hey, I’m not one of you news moonies,” she said. “I’m overworked, underpaid, and it’s quitting time.”

  Quitting time, two words that did more for my state of mind than all the philosophy in the world. Time to put our work away and resume our real lives. There were places to go, people to see. Me, I was meeting Mike, Jim, and Claire at Keggers, the tacky but unassuming bar-restaurant-refuge in the basement of the JBS building.

  Originally, Claire had wanted to meet at one of her noisy, twenty-something hangouts, but the older I get the less I like those places. Unless you’re in full mating mode and the place is full of eligible men your own age, loud, crowded clubs are kind of a drag. You have to shout to have a conversation, people are always jostling past you, and you end up doing shots at the bar with some guy young enough to be your son (in one of those backward child-bride countries).

  It had been over a month since I’d seen Claire Thibodeaux, longer since we’d been able to get together for more than five minutes, although we talked pretty regularly on the phone. She’d flown in from D.C. the day before to attend meetings and an all-star brunch on Saturday with Georgia Jack Jackson (to which I had not been invited). Her meeting that day was running late, fueling all sorts of speculation.

  While I waited for her, Mike and Jim kept me company at a table near the bar and we had a wide-ranging discussion on male and female sexuality that began when Jim said that Kanengiser was right about one thing: Men had a much stronger sex drive than women.

  I had to straighten him out.

  “Women have strong sex drives too, I mean, who in their right mind doesn’t like orgasms, and as many as possible? But we have fewer outlets and more penalties. That’s why we’re so pissed off.”

  “Still celibate?” Mike said to me, sympathetically.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “See, most men would never be able to handle months of celibacy.”

  “It’s not like I haven’t been trying, Mike. I’ve been dating. But something always happens that makes me not want to have sex with my dates. That’s the discrimination factor.”

  You know, after Eric and I split up, I had thought about being a libertine, and I hadn’t, in fact, ruled it out yet. In theory, I was open to the idea of safe, dirty, noncommittal sex with several men I knew and admired until such time as I met someone I wanted to have a monogamous relationship with (who wanted to have one with me). In theory.

  Of course, in theory, I’d be honest about it with the men involved and one thing I have noticed is that most men who want to be libertines don’t want their girlfriends or lovers to be.

  In any event, Kanengiser now stood to me as an example of where freewheeling ways could lead.

  “I don’t mean to be celibate but you know, whenever I end a relationship, I take a breather before entering another. It’s my way to, in the words of Carrie Fisher, ‘Find myself before someone bigger does,’ “ I said.

  “You takes yer chances or you don’t get laid,” Mike said. “But I agree women have strong sex drives. I’ve known a lot of women with strong sex drives.”

  Jim said, “The thing is, once you have a baby, for example, the wife is tired all the time from all those three a.m. feedings, and has no sex drive—”

  I interrupted. “Or maybe just no energy.”

  “Whatever. But the guy still has the same sex drive he had before the baby was born. So what’s a guy supposed to do? Not that I’ve ever cheated on my wife,” Jim quickly added.

  “Except for blow jobs at bachelor parties,” Mike said.

  “Well . . . ,” Jim said. He wasn’t willing to be as frank as Mike was, but he didn’t argue with Mike, so Mike must have known something specific. I learned a lot from Mike and, through his prodding, from Jim. Like the unspoken fidelity loopholes: bachelor parties, “under ten minutes and out of town,” and various scenarios involving being trapped in a life-or-death situation with an attractive member of the opposite sex. Mike assured me that a lot of women knew and took advantage of the latter two loopholes as well. He’d spent enough nights with married women in war zones, where normal rules are suspended, to know that under the right circumstances women can be as pagan as men. Not that Mike agreed with me all, or even most, of the time.

  Jim had to go.

  “Say hi to Claire for me,” he said. “Tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t stay till she got here. Have to get home to the wife and the baby.”

  Mike and I had Jim spooked about women and sex. He didn’t want to leave his wife alone for too long these days.

  “I’m always so tempted to lie to him,” I said to Mike. “You know, for his peace of mind. He’s been looking at me funny ever since we had that lunchtime conversation about vibrators.”

  “He wants to hear our points of view. That’s why he always brings up the subject. Besides, don’t you find as you get older it’s more trouble to lie than to tell the truth?”

  “Naw, I find that I get into a lot more trouble when I try to tell the truth,” I said.

  “You might be right,” Mike said, taking a drink from his beer bottle and glancing around the joint. “There’s a sinister vibration in this place tonight, isn’t there?”

  Now that he mentioned it, yeah, there was. It was busy at Keggers that night. Folks were two-deep at the bar and nearly every seat was taken in the dining room, with its faux Tiffany lamps, laminated wood tables, and malt-shop-style booths wallpapered with historic newspaper headlines. Rumors of reshuffles and cutbacks had everyone on edge, and the anchormen and male reporters were especially edgy, due to the reports of snipings. The place was crawling with on-air people looking for a little courage in a glass.

  So far, the reported sniper had only shot at men, specifically Reb and Kerwin, but the women had things to worry about too, such as the reshuffle and, possibly, the repercussions of the Kanengiser murder. How many of them had seen Kanengiser? Most women find a gynecologist they like and stick with her or him, but news people move around to different markets, bureaus, companies so much that they jump from doctor to doctor, dentist to dentist.

  That the files were intact must have been a huge relief, because Kanengiser’s files would have contained highly personal information: records of pregnancies, abortions, infections, STDs, number of sexual partners, among other things. The kind of information that, thanks to the ol’ double standard Kanengiser was so proud of, could be used to really hurt a woman.

  As I was looking around, I caught Dillon Flinder’s eye. Dillon, who believed in one very liberal standard for all, came over and asked if he could join us. Mike waved expansively at a chair.

  “You heard about Kerwin?” Dillon said. “Someone took a shot at his house.”

  “Do you believe him?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t, but after Reb got shot at . . .”

  “Reb is notoriously paranoid too,” I said.

  “With reason,” Dillon said. “He’s been shot at in Afghanistan, knifed in Gaza, bombed in Sarajevo, escaped from kidnappers in Beirut, escaped from Tajik terrorists ...”

  I looked at Mike. I had been star-struck by Reb
too, until I learned more about him from Mike, who had been Reb’s cameraman for a while and had been kidnapped with him in Beirut. I sensed he was keeping a lot of secrets for Reb, but lately he’d broken down and exploded a few Reb “Rambo” Ryan myths.

  For example, Reb claimed to have dated Kim Basinger when in reality they’d merely been tablemates at the White House correspondents’ dinner. The “Tajik terrorists” who had tried to kidnap him in Dushanbe, according to Mike, were just touts trying to get them to buy carpets.

  And then there was the Haiti incident, which Mike, loosened by a couple of beers, proceeded to describe to Dillon.

  After a hairy tour of Chechnya that left Reb a bit shell-shocked, he had been sent to Haiti, where he really snapped his cap. According to Mike, Reb was with a bunch of other reporters on a bus, when the bus broke down outside Port-au-Prince. He panicked. After five minutes in the hot sun, Mr. Macho Hemingway Foreign Correspondent suddenly advised the others to start drinking their own urine to help conserve water, and then demonstrated, with a flourish, like a man doing a juicer demonstration in a department store.

  (God, I hope he doesn’t kiss Kim with that mouth, I commented.)

  The other reporters watched him in shock but demurred when he suggested they all do it. Ten minutes later, they were rescued.

  When ANN management heard this story, they decided Reb had been in the field a little too long. So they brought him back to headquarters to anchor and chill out.

  I only wished Mike had told me this stuff before I’d gone out with Reb.

  “Reb’s been nuts for a long time,” Mike said to Dillon. “He’s happy in war zones, being threatened, at risk. He really gets off on it. He’s miserable here, and he may be imagining threats because he’s comfortable in an atmosphere of danger. That’s normal for him. I told you this just to put Reb’s sniper story in context. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention it to anyone else.”

  “I’ll try,” Dillon vowed, which was the best he could promise. He was compulsively honest and not good at keeping secrets.

  Neither was I. When Mike told me about the Haiti Incident, he had asked me not to repeat it, and in a loose moment I’d told both Claire and Louis Levin.

  “I have to go, guys. Gotta date,” Mike said, slapping some money down on the table. “Dillon, I’m sure these shootings, if they’re real, are random. I wouldn’t worry about being shot at, if I was you. See you tomorrow.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the sniper,” Dillon said to me, “if it wasn’t for that gynecologist being shot too.”

  “I’m working on that story. Stupid story but we have this exclusive security tape . ...” I said.

  “What I’m wondering . is, what if there’s a connection between all these shootings? What if someone is shooting at people because they work in the IBS building?”

  “What? As a vendetta against Jackson or something?”

  “Yes. Perhaps a disgruntled ex-employee. Can’t get into the broadcast facilities to shoot up the place, so he shoots a commercial tenant and takes potshots at ANN people on the streets.”

  “Hmm. You think this doctor wasn’t killed because he was a priapic, lying, woman-hating heterosexual, but because of ... geography?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s a possibility, enough of one to make me nervous,” he said.

  “It’s a stretch, Dillon. First of all, we don’t know that a sniper exists. Second, the killer had to go to a lot of trouble to hide out in the building in order to kill a complete stranger.”

  Dillon wasn’t listening. “Oh my God,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There she is,” he said.

  I turned and followed his startled but adoring glance to Bianca de Woody, who had just come into Keggers with Deputy Hector.

  “What’s she doing with Hector?” he asked. “I thought she was dating that overpumped overtanned homunculus Pete Huculak.”

  “Well, they got an anonymous call that one of Bianca’s fans has just been released from a mental health facility and may be headed this way in his grandmother’s automobile,” I said. “So Hector has been escorting his bossman’s moll around when Pete’s not available for the job. Kerwin’s going to be pissed.”

  “And Reb. They both want bodyguards. Of course, Bianca’s body is a body much worthier of guarding,” Dillon said. “Dear heart, she’s coming over.”

  This made him much more nervous than the idea of a sniper. He was even blushing a little, which is a state I’d never seen Dillon, a jaded, cynical old roue, in before.

  “Hi Robin, Dillon,” Bianca said.

  “Hi Robin,” Hector said. Whenever he saw me, he swallowed hard and his protruding Adam’s apple went up and down his neck like an Otis elevator. I guess I had the same effect on him Bianca had on Dillon. I smiled politely.

  “Bianca, you’re looking just lovely tonight,” Dillon gushed.

  “Thank you,” Bianca said. “That’s so sweet.”

  They didn’t stop, but greeted us in passing. Expertly, Bianca moved through the crowd, collecting compliments and dispensing sweet thank-yous without breaking pace.

  After they’d gone to join Dave Kona and several other young reporters at a table near the jukebox, I turned to Dillon and said, “You can close your gaping maw now.”

  “That mouth,” he said. “That mouth is worth three ratings points. I’m going to go over and ask her out.”

  Seeing my skeptical look, he said, “What?! I think I really have a shot with her. She went out with Kerwin so her taste can’t be too refined.”

  “She went out with Kerwin? God, her taste is so much worse than mine.”

  “That’s what I love, a beautiful woman with bad taste in men.”

  “Keep a safe distance, Dillon,” I advised. “She’s spoken for.”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he said, and left to pursue his quarry. Here was a man in his late fifties, and he still thrilled to the chase. I had a feeling Dillon was going to die at a ripe old age in the middle of a sexual indiscretion, just like that president of France. Just like Kanengiser. Maybe.

  I wasn’t alone at the table long. Louis came by and told me the rumors about Bianca replacing Madri, and that Turk Hammermill, an unbearable sports bore, was being extended in Beijing for the Amity games. Then Claire arrived. After shooting the shit a while, Louis motored away to spread the latest gossip.

  “Kiss kiss,” she said to me.

  “Kiss kiss yourself.”

  As usual, Claire looked gorgeous, as one would expect from a woman who had worked her way through university as a model, but a year-plus of reporting had given her a more mature air, not to mention a shorter, anchorwomanish haircut.

  “Sorry I’m late. I got back yesterday and it’s been nuts since then,” she said.

  I raised my hand for the waitress, but put it down again when Claire said, “Nothing for me. I can’t stay too long. The meeting ran late and I have to meet Tassy at Tabac for a drink.”

  “Sorry. I only do that in emergencies,” I said. “So what happened in the executive meetings?”

  “They actually had some insightful comments about my reporting.It was mostly flattering. But this image consultant they brought in suggested I might want to change my last name to make it easier to pronounce and ‘cleaner looking.” When I told him I wouldn’t do that, he then suggested I merely change the spelling, spell it phonetically, T-i-b-a-d-o.”

  “And after you finished laughing your ass off, what did you say to him?”

  “I just said no. I know other people have changed their names for television, but it isn’t me to do that. Besides, instead of dumbing down my name, why don’t we smarten up the viewers?”

  “Yeah, why don’t we? So, is it pretty certain now, the Washington job?”

  “They’ll announce it any day,” she said, breathlessly. “I am dying waiting for the announcement. But the contracts are signed and I am starting to get excited about the move.”

  Bec
ause I’m a good friend, I let Claire go on and on about how great her life was and how well she’d done in Washington. Her boyfriend lived there and she was so confident about the job that she and her beau Jess had gone apartment hunting.

  I smiled as she described the fantastic apartment she’d found in Adams-Morgan, in a renovated townhouse that had been there since the McKinley presidency. I smiled bigger as she talked about the attached deck and two working fireplaces. This was a practiced smile by now, the smiling in the face of your friend’s good fortune smile. I’d already used it plenty with Joanne Armoire, when she talked about the apartment she had her eye on, on lie Saint Louis in the heart of Paris.

  In the last year and a half, Claire had hoisted herself from producer for Special Reports to general-assignment reporter to UN correspondent. Now, she was poised for a junior job in Washington, and from there—who knew? Claire made no bones about her desire to be a foreign correspondent and travel the world. I was happy for her, really I was. She was a good reporter and she worked hard and it couldn’t happen to a better woman blah blah blah.

  What made it hard for me was that once I was up for a similar job in Washington. Yup, I’d had my shot and I’d blown it by rising to ask the vice president a question and letting rip with a loud belch, an event that began a series of disasters in my life. If I could go back to that day and do things differently . . . For one thing, I wouldn’t have had Mexican for lunch. And instead of sitting down in mortification, I would make a joke about it, try to eke some triumph out of the humiliation.

  “So,” she said, after sharing her happiness with me for fifteen minutes. “How are you?”

  “I told you about the murder on twenty-seven?”

  “Yeah.”

  Now it was my turn, and I let loose, how put-upon I was by Jerry Spurdle, how hard it was looking on the bright side when you’re watching a middle-aged woman paddle a grown man who thinks he’s a dog, how my Aunt Maureen was in town and how McGravy had warned me about blessings in disguise. But have you ever noticed how hard it is to get people to listen to your problems? Claire was hardly listening; she preferred to smile at herself in the mirror behind our table.