Back at the office, I called Vicki Burchill, the night nurse, and learned that Kanengiser had handled all the billing himself. She was sincerely stunned when I told her about the fraud, even more stunned when I asked her if Kanengiser did drugs or gambled, and claimed she had no knowledge of either.
Now that Kanengiser was dead, I knew so much about him, so much seamy and mundane personal stuff. He was an old-fashioned chauvinist Don Juan, a fraud, a connoisseur of fine wines, a superb racquetball player, a member of Mensa, and a sailing enthusiast.
It was weird. I mean, I had been willing to pay this man to stick his arm up me, a man who was a perfect stranger, just because he had a diploma on the wall. I don’t know. You want your gynecologist to enjoy his work, I guess, but not too much.
While I was pondering this, the sun shifted in the sky outside the building, and the only sunlight we ever received in this office, the afternoon sun, came in through the high narrow windows and shone down in beamed slats that swirled with dust. I was alone in the office. It was quiet.
Someone came in. I was about to jump up and go out to see if it was Jerry when I heard a woman’s voice saying, “It’s very spartan.”
It was Aunt Maureen.
“This is Special Reports. It isn’t much, but we call it home. The highest-rated series come out of here.”
It was Jerry.
“Well, I saw one my niece did and it didn’t impress me. I never watch anymore.”
Stealthily I crawled toward my door, so they wouldn’t see my shadow through the glass, and reached up to lock it. Just as quietly, I crept back and hid under my desk.
“Well, Robin has her own bad taste,” Jerry said. “You know, I go to church every Sunday. I’ve been trying to convince Robin she could use a little religion . . .”
My office door rattled.
“It’s locked,” Jerry said. “Robin?”
I held my breath. Here I was, thirty-seven years old, an independent divorced woman, a taxpayer, and a professional, crouched under my desk like a four-year-old. I knew I should get up and go out there and face them like a Woman, but the two of them together, Jerry and Aunt Mo . . .
“She must be late, again. Would you like to wait?” Jerry asked.
No! I silently shrieked.
“I can’t. I have a sales seminar and then a political action committee meeting.”
“Oh, you’re involved in politics.”
“I’m thinking of running for school board next year,” she said.
“Good luck to you. It was certainly nice having you visit.”
“Well, it’s nice to know everyone in the media isn’t a counterculture McGovernik,” she said. “Tell Robin it is urgent she call me. Absolutely urgent. I want to help her, to save her.”
“Well, somebody certainly needs to,” Jerry said.
When she was gone, I was left with a problem: How to come out of my office without letting Jerry know. Still under my desk, I reached up and pulled my phone down. I called Louis Levin and, whispering, asked him to call Jerry and get him out of the office for a few minutes.
“Welcome back, Robin,” Louis said.
A minute later, the phone rang in Jerry’s office and he took off like a shot.
(I asked Louis later that day what he’d said that sent Jerry running. “I told him I thought I saw strippers heading toward studio for a show on implants,” he said. “I decided against subtlety.”)
When a disappointed Jerry came back, I was at my desk, smiling.
“Guten Morgen, Fraulein,” he said. He said something else in German that I didn’t understand, something rude and/or filthy no doubt. I’m pretty sure I heard the word Nacktheit, which I think means “nakedness.”
“Your aunt was here,” he said. “You just missed her. She stopped in on her way to a seminar.”
“My aunt was here?” I said, innocently.
“Yeah. Security called, said she was here to see you, so I went and got her.”
“How did you know she wasn’t an insane fan or something?”
“She had ID, and family pictures showing the two of you together.”
“How long was she here?”
“Oh, about an hour,” Jerry said. “I gave her a tour of the newsroom and chatted with her. A very nice lady. Told me a lot of stories about you. She seemed very concerned about what you were doing in your off-hours.”
“Why? What did she say?”
“Just that she’s very, very concerned and wants to talk to you. Oh, and she told me some stories about your childhood. About your fear of curlers. That’s a new one on me, Robin.”
“She has that wrong,” I said, but I didn’t elaborate.
“How was Lina?”
“Interesting but irrelevant, I think. Listen, I have a lead on this Kanengiser story.”
“Something to do with Anya’s?” Jerry said, eagerly.
“Actually no. Kanengiser may have had no connection to S&M at all. It turns out he was double-billing his patients’ insurance companies, big-time. At least fifty grand in the last year.”
“Insurance scam. Yawn,” he said. “Mention it in the script, okay, but surely you aren’t suggesting he was killed because he was padding his bills. If it had anything to do with it, it was just a symptom of what was wrong.”
“He may have had gambling debts, a coke dealer to pay off . . . and I’ve even heard a theory that he was killed by a disgruntled former employee because he worked in the JBS building. It’s possible it isn’t S&M.”
“Two words: Handcuffs, matchbook.”
“But Kanengiser didn’t smoke, which means probably the killer dropped those matches. So, yeah, it’s possible the killer may have been involved in S&M, or has some remote connection to Anya’s, but I don’t think the murder has anything to do with it. The insurance fraud suggests Kanengiser had financial problems . . .”
“I think it ties it even more strongly to S&M,” Jerry said. “Maybe he was feeling guilty because of all the women and/ or because of the insurance rip-off. Maybe he went to Anya’s to get his punishment, to atone, to ease his conscience because women insist on making men feel badly for doing what comes naturally to them. It makes perfect sense to me.”
Before I could think of a polite, nonconfrontational way to dispute this, he said, “You’re not approaching this from the right point of view. I just have a feeling S&M is why he was killed. You women, you put faith in those things, right? Feelings, what do you call it, intuition?”
I call it enhanced right-left brain cooperative information processing, but I held my tongue.
“Saturday night, you go to Anya’s and you get some juicy stuff. I’m sending Tamayo in too, undercover. Sunday you write, fax me the script at home, and then track and edit.”
“She’s going in undercover? Mistress Anya invited us to the club and you’re going to . . .”
I stopped myself, upon hearing a tone of sarcasm creep into my voice. Bend with the wind, I reminded myself.
“Sure,” I said. “But what if we don’t have a stronger connection to Anya’s? What if the murder isn’t solved by Monday? Chances are it won’t be.”
I said all this as politely as possible, but Jerry wouldn’t brook anything even resembling argument these days. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it up, trying to get along with him. But if I left there was nowhere to go but to infomercials. There I’d be, hawking Hair-in-a-Hurry or Rug-O-Rama Carpet Cleaning System for a living.
“Robin, that’s your job! Get it? If you put as much energy into making this S&M link as you have trying to refute it, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation. Your job isn’t to find the killer. Your assignment is to find what connects him to Anya’s. You understand? Then we go a little more in-depth, and take a look at others in that world. You’ll do it as an unsolved murder. We don’t need to claim a strong connection to Anya’s, just a connection. Kanengiser, handcuffed, match-book from sex club at scene, did it have something to do with S&M? Let’s look at t
his shadowy world. It’s a no-brainer, Robin. Earn your keep.”
“But Jerry ...”
“Do you understand the assignment now? Do I need to speak slower?”
Would anyone have blamed me if I’d suddenly jumped on his desk at that point, grabbed him by the lapels, and slapped him silly cartoon-style? But instead, I looked down at my feet and said, “Yes, I understand.”
“This is Special Reports, not the crime and justice beat,” Jerry went on. “We can look at any angle of a story. That’s the beauty of it.”
Defeated but seething, I nodded at him, lest he show me that drawer full of resumes again. The fact was, Jerry was golden, I was not, and he had the power to end my on-air career with a phone call.
In my office, I took inspiration from the saying taped to my pencil cup, A WISE (WO)MAN KNOWS IT IS BETTER TO LEAD BY FOLLOWING. No, that’s not Confucius. This one came courtesy of a fortune cookie from the English No Problem restaurant. (Its real name is Kung Pao Kitchen, but the recent immigrants who own it have a big sign in the window that says, ENGLISH NO PROBLOM, so that’s what everyone calls it.)
This adage had replaced a statement made by New York Rangers’ captain Mark Messier after Messier and the Rangers won the Stanley Cup and removed a fifty-four-year curse from the city’s head: YOU CAN’T BE AFRAID TO SLAY THE DRAGON. Fooling with dragons just gets you burned, I’d decided one day, and removed the Messier quote in favor of thousands of years of fortune-cookie wisdom on passive aggression.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Detective Mack Ferber finally called me back that afternoon.
“I’m not supposed to discuss this case with you, since you’re doing a story on it,” he said, but he said it most reluctantly.
“You’re working with Detective Bigger on this case,” I said.
“He volunteered for it.”
“Do not believe anything he says about me,” I said. “He hates me. It has to do with some poison ivy . . .”
“Don’t worry,” Ferber said. “I’m not interested in what he has to say about you. But he’s declared a media blackout on the story to protect the privacy of the patients.”
“Do you know Kanengiser was defrauding insurance companies through double billing?”
“Yes.”
“You do know? Well, do you know if he had big drug or gambling debts . . . ?”
“I’m not supposed to discuss it but . . . okay, I’ll give you five minutes to ask all your questions. Detective Bigger will be back in about five—”
“So he did have drug or gambling debts?”
“Neither.”
“Well, where did the money go?”
“The insurance fraud doesn’t seem to be related to the murder,” Ferber said.
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Do you have a suspect?”
“No, not yet.”
“Leads?”
“Can’t speak about that.”
“You know, we’ve had this series of snipings at ANN people,” I said. I told him Dillon’s theory about the disgruntled -ex-employee, and how Dillon, Reb, and Kerwin all said they’d been shot at. It was a long shot, I knew—why would a disgruntled ex-employee go to all that trouble to hide in the building to kill a stranger who had nothing to do with JBS? All the same, I was hoping with all my heart there would be a link, since that at least would spin the story away from S&M, now that the blackmail and insurance-fraud angles had fizzled out.
“Thanks,” Ferber said.
“Any time.”
As we talked, I frantically read over my notes, not wanting to leave out any important questions before the elusive Ferber got off the phone. Two words jumped out at me: black book.
“One of the doctor’s ex-wives mentioned a little black book,” I said. “She burned the one she found, but in all probability he replaced it. Have you recovered it?”
“I have to go,” Ferber said, without answering my question.
“Is that a yes or a no.”
“It means ‘I have to go,’” he said, but he said it with an audible smile. “Listen, when you’re finished this story, give me a call. We can talk homicides and stuff. I might have another story for you.”
“A murder story?”
“Well, no. I coach a kids’ softball team in the Police Athletic League. Are you familiar with PAL?”
“Sure.” PAL is an organization run by cops for underprivileged kids.
“Nobody’s done a story about PAL in a while. Do you ever do stories like that?”
“No, but I’m hoping to do some stories like that,” I said, disappointed because I had mistaken grubbing for publicity, for a good cause of course, with flirting.
But I could use this. Two can play the you-scratch-my-back game. “I’ll really think about it,” I said. “In the meantime, if you learn anything about a suspect . . . you could call me. Any time.”
“I’ll do what I can,” he said. I heard Detective Richard Bigger’s voice in the background and Ferber hung up on me.
Franco was in my doorway with another box of tapes, these from the freight elevator, four six-hour tapes, starting from six a.m. the day Kanengiser was killed, ending at six a.m. the next day. He was about to say something when he heard Tamayo’s voice in the outer foyer, and he beat a retreat to avoid her and her jarhead jokes.
These were far less useful than the tapes from the public elevator, where the floor was announced by a mechanical voice. In the freight elevators there was no way of knowing on which floor people exited. I could only guess. Maintenance and security people went up and down all day, but nothing jumped out at me, and nobody got on the freight elevator between seven forty-five p.m. and ten-twenty, when the poor janitor who found the body got on. He was followed by security and, a bit later, by the police.
It didn’t tell me much, if anything. However, it was interesting to listen to people’s conversations. These days, people are so inured to video cameras they don’t even see them half the time. They talk freely, as though in private. Even Pete Huculak, who should have been more video-conscious, made an indiscreet remark on tape two, saying to a security guard I didn’t know, “These reporters are soft, they’re chickenshits.” The unidentified security guard got off and Pete rode up alone.
An hour or so into the third tape, I heard Phil the janitor tell Hymie, the blind guy from the lobby newsstand, some gossip about Pete and Bianca.
“I was just about to empty the trash,” he said. “And I hear them screaming at each other, and then it gets quiet, and I hear what sounds like those whale songs, you know? And then I hear what sounds like a soprano caught in a bear trap and I realize, they’re having sex.”
No wonder it took security so long to give me these tapes, I thought.
“That Special Reports bloke, Jerry Spurdle? I’m pretty sure I heard him having sex in his office too,” Phil said.
Eeuw. Who did Jerry have sex with? I wondered. Maybe that exotic dancer he was chasing for so long, the eighteen-year-old with the “Kiss me, I’m Chesty” tattoo.
Phil got off first. As soon as Phil got off, Hymie said, “Hello?” to make sure he was alone, farted loudly, and then sighed with relief. Hymie got off a floor or two later and the freight elevator was empty until it picked up a cleaning lady a few floors up. From the way the cleaning lady wrinkled her nose and said, “Holy Moses!” I guessed that Hymie’s fart was still in the elevator.
Why was Hymie using the freight elevator?
“Freight elevator? When did I ride up in the freight elevator?” Hymie said when I called him. “Oh yeah, when I took my tax forms up to twenty-eight.”
“Why were you using the freight elevator?”
“Well, I work for JBS, so I stopped in Accounting to get a copy of my W-4. It’s a pain in the rear to get to the commercial floors from JBS accounting . . .”
“You’d have to go down to the lobby and then up again on a different elevator.”
“Yeah, and this janitor .
..”
“Phil?”
“I didn’t get his name,” he said. “He let me ride up on the freight elevator with him.”
Well, that made sense.
So—how could someone get in without being seen? That nailed it, I figured. It had to be someone already in the building, someone who had come during the day, when the place was busy, hid out somewhere on twenty-seven, killed the doctor, then hid out until the next morning, when he or she could leave pretty freely. And that could be anybody. It sure didn’t seem random.
Someone from one of the insurance companies had tipped off All News Radio, and when I got home 1010 WINS was reporting Kanengiser’s fraud.
WINS had gone one better, by managing to get hold of Kanengiser’s computerized credit card records. What they found completely ruled out my gambling and drug debt theories. Apparently, most of that excess cash went to buying flowers, jewelry, perfume, and lingerie. His florist bills alone were out of this world. Seems he did a lot of “apology” shopping. One florist said most of his cards began with the words, “I’m sorry.”
“So he ripped off the insurance company to finance his addiction to love, or sex, or both,” I said to Louise Bryant, who was sitting on the windowsill above the toilet watching me put on fresh lipstick. “I think he wasn’t murdered so much as put out of his misery.”
Jesus. The women increasing exponentially, the insurance company bound to get suspicious . . . Hunted by secrets and demons, maybe Kanengiser had been seeking punishment and atonement. Maybe he really was sorry.
In other words, maybe the murder really did have to do with S&M, with atonement. All the same, I had a hard time accepting it. I could accept the possibility that the doctor had seen a dominatrix once in a while for a therapeutic whipping. But I just couldn’t stomach the idea that Jerry Spurdle had been right all along.
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