While I knew this parcel of weight-loss products was a peace offering of sorts, I found it terribly insulting, more evidence that Aunt Mo was never going to get what I was all about, and that there was no use even trying with her.
Because I was expecting Claire to call, I eagerly played my messages as soon as I had popped my dinner and Louise’s leftovers into the microwave. There was a message waiting from, I assumed, Howard Gollis.
“The last time I called, I forgot to ask: Did you enjoy the car-alarm concert the other night?” he said, as Ronald Reagan.
“What an asshole,” I said to Louise.
The next message was from Aunt Mo. It wasn’t enough that she had stopped by my building, she had to call as well. I couldn’t bear to listen, and fast-forwarded through it.
Aunt Mo’s message ate up almost my entire answering-machine tape. The next caller, a man, was only able to say, “I know something but I couldn’t tell you when I saw you so I—”
And the tape ended and began to rewind.
I didn’t recognize the voice. Goddammit, I thought. I could only hope that whoever it was, he’d call back. Unless it was Howard, in which case I didn’t want him to call back.
The microwave timer dinged.
I’d programmed my VCR to tape Backstreet Affair, which I watched while I ate dinner—a bad idea because I almost choked on my manicotti when the first report came up. This time, the show wasn’t led by the Kanengiser story.
Instead, Backstreet led with the Congressman Dreyer story. Specifically, how Dreyer had been caught in an Upper East Side love nest with his personable secretary. They had some pretty compromising shots of the pair, thanks to long-range zoom lenses and sheer curtains. You could even tell that Dreyer wore boxer shorts with little gray elephants on them.
Wow. And all I’d been able to find was great stuff about Dreyer, what an upstanding, Dudley Do-Right kind of guy he was. Well, this made me question my own judgment. Maybe Jerry was right. Maybe I’d become too nice for my profession.
But how could that be? I’d been faking the good attitude, the positive outlook. I mean, I’d been trying, sincerely trying to be sincerely positive, but it just didn’t come that naturally for me so I forced it a lot. Was I now doing it without even thinking about it?
While I was watching this, Claire called me.
“I know you’re there. Pick up,” she said on my machine. I did.
“I have some news for you. Bianca just called me. Guess what?”
“There was an anchorman fight at Keggers.”
“Oh yeah, I heard about it. But that isn’t what I was going to tell you. Someone took a shot at Dillon Flinder,” Claire said.
“No! When? Where?”
“It just happened, like, in the last half hour. After he left Keggers, he went home and when he was walking his dog, someone took a shot at him.”
“You’re kidding!” I said. “He isn’t hurt, is he?”
“No. He’s shaken up. The cops are still trying to find the bullet. But he was walking on the East River promenade and the bullet may have ended up in the river.”
“Maybe there is a sniper then,” I said. “Dillon wouldn’t make it up.”
“No, he wouldn’t. I’m thinking of starting a pool,” Claire said. “Who will the sniper take a shot at next? I’m putting my money on Sawyer Lash.”
“By the way, did you check your insurance . . .”
“Oh yeah. And you’re right. I was billed twice,” she said. “What does it mean? Fraud?”
“It could ... for starters,” I said.
What did it mean beyond that? That Kanengiser needed extra money? Maybe with two ex-wives, he did. Or maybe he was into drugs, or gambling. Maybe he was being blackmailed.
“It could be an accident, a computer glitch in Kanengiser’s office,” Claire said.
“Yeah. I’ll find out tomorrow.”
“That’s something about the sniper, huh?” Claire said. “Well, at least he’s not shooting at women.”
After I got off with her, I called Dillon to express my concern about the sniping, left a soothing message on his machine, got some ice for the lump on my forehead, and went to bed. For a long time, I lay there, reading the Desiderata on my ceiling, trying to believe its Zen words about how the universe was unfolding as it should and all that crap. After the day I’d had, I had a hard time making myself believe it. What part in the cosmic plan decreed a sniper?
Or, for that matter, this lump on my forehead? But maybe the lump was a kind of cosmic justice. I felt I probably deserved it for mishandling the whole Reb situation. I was sure Reb had, in fact, pushed his beer into Dillon’s elbow in order to provoke an incident and have it out with Dillon because Dillon and I were acting so cozy.
I should have confronted Reb, been honest, just told him I wasn’t interested in going out with him again rather than making excuses or playing these juvenile avoidance games, like shielding myself with Dillon at Keggers. I mean, wasn’t I as bad as Kanengiser, to a lesser degree, unable to be honest and take my chances? But after all the stuff Mike had told me about Reb, I was afraid to talk to him, to say anything that might make him snap.
Kanengiser had been afraid to be honest too, I realized. I couldn’t completely condemn him. Okay, I thought his speech to that association was a huge pile of retro crap. But as for his promiscuity, his dishonesty. . . he wanted to screw a lot of women, but the women kept demanding emotional commitment in return and because he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, he implied an emotional connection. Maybe he didn’t even imply it. Maybe he just didn’t go out of his way to dissuade them of the idea. Possibly, he was killed because of his dishonesty. It was also possible that, after years of living his exhausting lifestyle, he’d come clean with someone and been killed for it. People don’t like honesty any more than they like dishonesty.
While Kanengiser was an extreme example, I was familiar with that cowardice in my own way. When I was honest with Howard Gollis, he had started harassing me, and I was applying the lesson learned there with Reb, by not rejecting him outright whenever he asked me out, not making any sudden moves, not doing anything to alarm him or hurt his feelings.
I was trying to be nice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Star Trek airlock doors malfunctioned the next morning, trapping me between two of them for a very long five minutes while Deputy Hector tried to free me. Finally he did. As I was leaving the airlock zone, he started walking with me.
“Hi, Robin,” he said nervously.
“Hi, Hector.”
“Between you and me,” he said.
“What? What’s between you and me?”
“That doctor who was killed?”
“Yeah?”
“He had a lot of late-night visitors and we got a lot of calls about noise coming out of his office at night.”
“What kind of noise?”
“You know, um, making, you know . . .”
“Sex noise.”
“Yeah,” he said nervously, dropping his eyes downward.
This just in. “Well, thanks, Hector,” I said, humoring him, since I already knew way sleazier stuff about Kanengiser than that he’d had sex in his office. “Did you happen to see who the doctor was porking up there after hours?”
Now he blushed. I shouldn’t play with him this way, I thought.
“No,” he stammered. “But I thought you should know. Pete, Franco, and I, we think it was probably one of his lady friends who did him in.”
“And you’re in law enforcement, so you’d know. Thank you, Hector,” I said. Thanks for narrowing it down. That left just about enough suspects to fill Yankee Stadium.
“I wanted to be helpful,” he said, in full crimson flush by now.
“And you have been,” I said, thinking, this boy needs to get laid. Can’t even say the word sex to a woman without suffering a full-body embolism. Just like Bianca, talking in code.
What a relief it was to stop by Medical News and tal
k with someone who didn’t have a big stick up the ass, in this case, Dillon Flinder, who, despite the close call of the night before, was strangely serene.
“I’m safe now that I’ve been shot at,” he said. “The sniper hasn’t done any repeat business yet. I feel like my name is crossed off his list now.”
“Did you see the guy?”
. “All I saw was a blur, dear heart,” Dillon said. “I see the bump has gone down on your forehead. Sorry about that.”
“It’s not your fault, Dillon,” I said.
“I was just about to go to the cafeteria for a decaf cap. Join me?”
“Can’t. I have to call benefits and then meet the crew for another dominatrix interview. In fact,” I said, checking my watch, “can I use your phone?”
“Please.”
Cyndi in benefits was just starting to look for Kanengiser’s billing.
“I’ll get back to ya when I get back to ya,” she said when I tried to nudge her a little. Some people have such a bad attitude.
I had one more stop before I went to meet the crew for the Mistress Lina interview: Democracy Wall. There I paused briefly to see if there was any reshuffle news. None. There was a sniper warning prompted by the shot at Dillon, a schedule of executive meetings, and a few letters from fans and viewers, one of which said, “Dear ANN ‘Commie liberals, You stink! You stink! You stink! You stink!” It went on for twenty-five “You stink”s, and was signed “Sincerely, Proud American.” Well, who wouldn’t be proud of a letter like that?
At the center of all this was a fake fight poster from the Wrestling All-Stars show on a sister network showing two grotesquely muscular wrestlers—with the heads of Reb Ryan and Kerwin Shutz.
THE BRUT CLASSIC MANLY MAN SHOWDOWN, said the poster. KERWIN ‘I’M A FIGHTER NOT A LOVER’ SHUTZ VS. REB ‘THAT WASN’T BEER I WAS DRINKING’ RYAN.
It was Louis Levin’s work. I never should have told him about the Haiti incident.
Mistress Lina, an outcall dominatrix, did a lot of business in the medical community. I liked her much better than Anya because Lina had a sense of humor. On her business card, she included the quote “No Pain, No Gain,” and she said she considered what she did a service to society because, “Do you know how many people out there are in desperate need of a good beating?”
Personally, I’m against beatings, but I thought that was a good answer all the same.
While Mistress Anya had been icy and plainly controlling, Mistress Lina was warmer, more down-to-earth, and more manipulative. For the interview she wore not dominatrix gear, but a generous floral caftan. She sat in her orange and brown kitchen sipping an herbal tea under a hanging spider plant slung so low the green, spidery extremities seemed to be growing out of her frizzy dark hair. Lina had a slave too, a smallish older man with a monkish fringe of brown hair and glasses, named Harvey, padding about—on two legs—in a crisp, pressed red flannel shirt carefully tucked into brown trousers. While Lina didn’t feel compelled to make a big show of putting him in a leather bodysuit and parading him around like a contestant at the Westminister Dog Show, it was clear who was the boss here by the way Lina barked orders and Harvey mutely obeyed.
“Get Mama that list of bondage shops,” she said to Harvey at one point, waving him with her finger to the fridge, where the list was held by a refrigerator magnet shaped like a chocolate-chip cookie next to a child’s drawing of an airplane and a notice about a PTA meeting at I.S. 44.
Then, “Get Mama another cup of tea and a cigarette.”
That “Mama” thing was pretty creepy, considering she was at least ten years younger than Harvey.
“This is the dead doctor from the news?” she asked, inhaling the smoke of her Benson & Hedges 100. “No, I’ve never done him and I don’t remember seeing him at the clubs. What’s his connection to B&D?”
“A matchbook from Anya’s.”
Lina flinched a little.
“You know her?”
“I used to work for her,” Lina said, shortly.
“And?”
“I have nothing more to say on the subject of Anya,” Lina said.
“What was she like to—”
“Nothing more to say,” she said. “I’m calling the shots here. Now, let’s talk about me. You wanna know how I got into S&M, right?”
According to Lina, she had found her calling pretty much by accident. At one time she’d been a New Jersey homemaker who carpooled and barbecued, did macrame, and sincerely cared about whether Tide did a better job with grass stains than Cheer. After her husband died in a car accident she had started dating again, and it was an old boyfriend who introduced her to the pleasures of pain.
“One night, as we were fooling around, he said, ‘Would you be offended if I asked you to hurt me?’ At first, I was offended, but then I got to know him better and I wasn’t offended at all. In fact, after a while, I started to enjoy it. Before that, I was the masochist in relationships, emotionally. But that changed my whole life, my whole way of looking at things. It empowered me, gave me control.”
“Do masochists often become sadists?” I asked.
“Some people are strict masochists, some are strict sadists, but most alternate between the two. I’m a sadist myself with Harvey and my customers, but not with my kids. I spoil ‘em rotten, don’t I, Harv?”
Harv laughed a little and nodded.
“I don’t even spank my kids,” she said, dropping a long ash into a brown ceramic ashtray.
“Why?”
“Because they’re small and helpless. The guys I do, they’re consenting adults. There’s a big difference. Harvey, bring Mama another cigarette,” she said, then turned back to me. “I’m trying to quit, so I keep the cigarettes in the living room.”
Keeping the cigarettes in the living room didn’t seem much of a disincentive when one had a flunky willing to ferry a single cigarette every few minutes.
“I turned pro,” Lina said, “because some guy offered me money to spank him. It was so easy and, look, you make a helluva lot more this way than selling Avon. I make my own hours, support my whole family.”
“Do you have your own control words?” I asked.
“Goldfish and apple,” she said.
“How long have you and Harvey been together?”
“Two years. Two years, right, Harv?” she said, and smiled at him.
He smiled back and nodded. I guess what was most disturbing to me was that they seemed happy—happier, in fact, than most couples I knew. She liked to spank, he liked to be spanked, it worked out. It’s nice when people find each other and it works out, I suppose.
We were about to wrap up, but I couldn’t go without pressing her again about Anya.
“Please tell me anything about Anya,” I said. “It could be important.”
She sent Harvey for another cigarette, which she lit off the end of the previous butt, and after inhaling deeply said, “I didn’t want to say this on camera. Who needs the lawsuit? But off the record?”
“Okay, off the record,” I said. Off the record is like kissing your brother. “Turn off the camera, Mike.”
“You can’t trust Mistress Anya. I used to work for her, and the woman can’t keep a slave. She’s had seven or eight since her husband died, called them all Werner ...”
“She’s moved on to Charles now.”
“So I’ve heard, but I never know what to believe about that woman. She’s a notorious liar.”
“How do you know this?”
“Harvey was Werner number one. He left her for me, and I then left her employ.”
Harvey nodded. He opened his mouth to speak, then looked at Lina, who nodded. I was expecting a great revelation, but all he said was, “I was with her for three months.”
“Can you describe it?” I asked him.
Again, he looked at Lina, and with her assent he said, “Terrible.”
“See, Anya doesn’t understand that discipline isn’t enough. You also need love. I love Harvey, right, Ha
rv?”
“Yes,” the unbearably reticent Harvey said.
“Anya is incapable of love, you see. So her slaves never stay long, and the quality of her slaves keeps declining. One of them turned on her, gave her a black eye. Don’t mention my name to her, she hates me.”
“Is she vindictive?” It seemed a silly question to ask about a whip-wielding woman.
“You bet. When Harvey and I left, we got threatening calls for months and the following Christmas we got a parcel of roadkill, wrapped up like a present with a bow and everything. This is the sick part. It was addressed to one of my kids. I’m sure she’s responsible. We can’t go to the same functions within our community. We avoid each other.”
“Is she violent?” Another silly question.
“Do you mean, would she kill someone? I don’t know.”
“What kind of men does she—”
“Listen, I just wanted you to be informed, okay? She’s a liar. That’s all you need to know.”
Then she ended the interview, not abruptly, as Anya had done, but in a friendly, left-handed way.
“It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “Harv, after you’ve shown our guests out, run Mama a bath. I’m going to my room.”
She left trailing orders. “Use the sea salts, not the oils, and unwrap a new loofah, Harv. The old one is starting to smell. . . .”
Lina had made a persuasive case against Anya’s character, but I still suspected the answer to this lay elsewhere, with Cyndi in benefits.
Cyndi beeped me as we were packing up the car after the shoot. I called her on the car phone.
“You were absolutely right,” she said. “Dr. Kanengiser was double-billing his clients. I checked with a few other insurance companies. He was ripping them—and us—off for at least fifty grand a year. And that’s just what we’ve found so far.”
Bingo, I thought. Confirmation that the overbilling of Claire and Bianca wasn’t a mere bookkeeping error.
Well, that explained why Kanengiser billed insurance directly—not because he was such a great damn guy, but so he could double bill. It made it unlikely that his patients would notice discrepancies since they didn’t have to file a receipt for reimbursement. I for one barely glanced at the quarterly summary of insurance claims the benefits department sent out, if I glanced at it at all. Usually, I just threw it in a drawer.
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