Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF, said a pink Post-it stuck to the sink. It caught my eye as I was reapplying my mascara.

  I had a date that night. No big deal. I approached my post-Eric dating with a sense more of social obligation than of romantic adventure—like a school assignment, or a ticket I had to get punched x number of times before I would either meet a guy I really liked a lot or give up the game.

  Lately, I’d been leaning toward giving up completely because I didn’t have a good record in these things and I simply couldn’t trust myself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been absolutely convinced I was in love only to get my heart stomped with cleats.

  And I can’t tell you how many times I think back on guys I was absolutely moony for and cringe. Like Chuck Turner, a traditional lord and master back-home boy I thought I was going to marry. Until one night I looked up over his shoulder as we were having silent sex on the couch in his parents’ rec room and I saw the novelty backward bar clock on the wall, and my future flashed before my eyes. I saw myself washing his boxers and serving food to him and his friends and spreading my legs for him on demand and keeping my big mouth shut, since every time I opened it Chuck accused me of trying to show him up. I realized that if I married Chuck I could never have an original thought and I would have to have bad sex for the rest of my days, and something roared to life in me and got me the hell out of there and on a plane for New York.

  If I’d had my wits about me at the time, I would have broken up with him as soon as Aunt Mo met him and declared, “He’s a wonderful young man.” Yes, despite the fact that Aunt Mo liked him, I stayed with him for two years. Why?

  He was a pretty boy. Just like men, women sometimes do not think with the right part of their anatomy. Also, he was a football hero at Hummer High School, and it was considered a real honor in town to be his chosen one. People treated me like I was Grace Fucking Kelly because the Turner boy had selected me as his lifelong sperm receptacle. Not that I would have been the only such receptacle—not that I ever was, in fact, as Chuck had a wandering eye—but I would have been the first string.

  The point is, at one time I was madly in love with Chuck Turner. He’d walk into a room and I would feel like I had been kissed by God.

  Man, did Kanengiser drive that pretty-boy problem home. During our initial consultation, I had sat in his office and fantasized about dating him! Why? He was a pretty boy. At the same time, I had felt very uncomfortable with him. Maybe I subconsciously sensed that, in his way, Kanengiser was just a high-IQ big-city version of Chuck Turner.

  There are other horrendous examples, but I won’t go into them.

  Fennell Corker, ANN film critic and my escort that evening, worked out of LA and was just in town for the meetings, so I figured there wasn’t too much risk in one date. I didn’t know him that well and he wasn’t really my type—too tanned and moussed, with kind of an aging WASP chauvinist thing going. But since my “type” had only led me to heartbreak in the past, I thought it wise to date against type. Fenn wasn’t too pretty or too ugly, too old or too young. He’d had an interesting career, from Photoplay and Daily Variety in the sixties to the three broadcast networks, after which he landed in syndication for a few years before ANN picked him up. I figured he was good for a few bawdy stories about the Rat Pack, Marilyn, Annette, Frankie, you know. And it was better than being alone on a Friday night.

  I’m not saying it isn’t great to be a Free Woman on a great adventure, fraught with perils and dark princes, leading to fabulous rewards, as Tamayo puts it. I own my own life, outside of work that is. I do what I want, except at work. I don’t have to put up with another person’s annoying habits, or feel self-conscious about mine. Except at work. I enjoy my solitude immensely—but sometimes it’s lonely. When you’re lonely and someone semi-interesting asks you out, you don’t worry too much about whether it’s going to lead to a second date. Often, you don’t want it to lead to a second date. You’re just happy to have some decent company for the evening and hope you’ll be decent company for them.

  Admittedly, I was a bit worried because so many people had warned me about Fennell, but I figured as many others had warned him about me. Anyway, I wanted to form my own judgments instead of listening to office gossip, so I’d decided to go through with the Corker date. What was the worst that might happen? I might learn something?

  Yeah, I learned something. I learned it sometimes pays to listen to office gossip. I learned it right after Corker picked me up in a taxi. Seems criticism wasn’t just Fennell’s livelihood, it was his life, his mission, and no area of the human condition was beyond his appraisal, from our taxi driver’s earthy body odor (“Whew! I just got a whiff of fermented sink clog. My man, don’t you bathe?”) to my shoes (“Robin, do yourself a favor and buy some good shoes. Those just scream Florsheim”).

  “Maybe we should do this some other time,” I said, trying to find a way to abort this date. “Aren’t you afraid of the anchorman sniper?”

  “Sniper,” Fennell scoffed. “Listen, I’ve had some of Hollywood’s biggest heavyweights threaten to break my arms and my legs. I’m not scared. Sniper probably doesn’t even know I’m in town. Reb and Kerwin think they’re so tough. Couple of pussies.”

  Ah, Fenn had the same endearing way with words that Jerry had.

  “And Dillon is a nut,” he said. “The guy once had sex with a watermelon for Chrissake.”

  True. But at least Dillon wasn’t a hypocrite. Besides which, he was my friend. I was starting to get very annoyed, but I talked myself down, figuring Fenn hadn’t been out of Betty Ford that long and he was sure to be crabby. I have to cut the guy some slack, I thought, as our taxi pulled up to the Doppelganger Cafe.

  Doppelganger is a hepcat downtown bar with thematic staffing, the latest craze among avant eateries, like Lucky Cheng’s, where all the waiters are Asian men in drag, and Skinny’s, where all the waiters (male and female) are bald. That’s in addition to all the restaurants with unofficial staffing themes, those that seem to hire only French chronic depressives, for example.

  In the case of the Doppelganger Cafe, all the wait staff are twins. Not just twins, but good-looking twins. You’d think it would be hard to find so many good-looking sets of twins who wanted to work in the food service industry, but in fact Doppelganger isn’t the only restaurant in New York that employs only twins. There’s a place with a similar staffing policy on the Upper East Side, near Elaine’s.

  Me, I’m waiting for the restaurant that employs only Siamese twins.

  Despite all of my attempts to be cheerful, dinner was a disaster. We got the Evil Twin as our waitperson, and there was much confusion about who was waiting on us, her or her sister. The food was mediocre, and Fennell complained about everything, then fell off the wagon and had two gin drinks. Between that and his seemingly endless repertoire of off-color jokes featuring talking parrots, it was turning into a very long date.

  Maybe it was just like Claire said: I only dated guys I knew I wouldn’t fall in love with, men who confirmed my desire to live alone. Not that my intentions were that overt. With the exception of Howard, I’d gone out with all these guys reluctantly, partly to get back up on the horse and partly because they were insistent and I thought it was better to be a nice guy and a good sport than to tell them to fuck off. I knew I was no day at the beach either and so had to make allowances for their personal quirks. It wasn’t like there were long lines of stable, happy men waiting to ask me out.

  After dinner, we went to a screening of a new comedy about heroin addicts. In the middle of it—mercifully before those hilarious needle scenes—my beeper went off.

  Thank God, I was saved by the bell, I thought. The perfect excuse to cut short this date.

  “Sorry about this,” I whispered to Corker. “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he whispered.

  “Sssssh,” said the people behind us.

  “That’s okay, you stay,” I said.

&nb
sp; “I insist,” Fennell said.

  “Shut up!” said the man behind us.

  Out in the lobby, I again tried to get rid of Fennell.

  “I have to call this number and . . . why don’t you just go back and enjoy the movie.”

  “Because it’s a piece of derivative crap,” Fennell said.

  “Let me just call this number.”

  I went to a pay phone in the lobby and dialed while Fennell paced behind me. The place smelled like sour popcorn.

  “Detective Mack Ferber.”

  “Detective Ferber, Robin Hudson. Did you just beep me?”

  “Yeah. I’m afraid I am going to have to talk to you. Can you meet me at my office?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “We found the body tonight, in an abandoned building three blocks from your apartment,” Berber said, shoving mug shots in front of me. “The body’s not in very good shape so we’ll have to go with the pictures.”

  “You say his name is Joey Pinks?”

  “Yeah. He’s an ex-con,” said Detective Richard Bigger, who was standing over me like a buzzard. “He did some time for trying to kill his mother ten years ago—she’s dead now, natural causes-—and he has a couple of forgery convictions, a transfer to a mental institution. He left there about a month ago.”

  I studied the mug shots carefully. It was hard to tell how old he was, thirties, forties maybe. His face was very, very white, roundish, ordinary. Another shot, taken by the cops, showed a red scar across the fingers of his right hand. That and a “Repent” tattoo were the only distinguishing marks.

  “No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before,” I said.

  “We found this on him,” Ferber said, holding a baggie up for my examination.

  It was my business card, with my home address written on the back.

  “It’s my address,” I said.

  “Your handwriting?”

  “No.”

  “We found something else on this guy. An OTB slip for a horse called Robin’s Troubles . . .”

  “Shit. . .”

  “And a joint, a few dollars, and a key for the Hotel Bastable,” Bigger said. “Pinks was shot in the heart, same caliber bullet as the one that killed Kanengiser, and he had your card on him. So we think it has something to do with this Kanengiser murder. We won’t know for sure until ballistics is finished.”

  “They’re backed up,” Ferber said.

  “So I guess, this guy was coming to see me,” I said.

  “And someone else got him first.”

  “Maybe he was coming to tell me something about Kanengiser. This is probably the key to the whole thing, and he’s dead and what he knows has died with him.”

  There were cops all around me, most of them men, young, fit guys in snappy blue uniforms and older, pudgier guys in plaincloth.es, jackets off and sidearms exposed. I found myself crossing my legs and remembering my rule about not dating cops, especially younger cops. Especially younger, pretty-boy cops.

  “A strange man called my answering machine,” I said. “I don’t know who he was, or why he was calling me because the message was cut off. But I wonder . . .”

  A uniformed cop came up. “Sirs, ma’am, Ms. Hudson’s escort wants to know how much longer she’s going to be.”

  Fennell had insisted on coming down to Manhattan South, and he was waiting for me outside on a bench. He was probably out there insulting the cop-shop decor or making rude remarks about body odor.

  When I got out, Fennell said, “You certainly are the most interesting date I’ve been out on recently,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go get a drink.”

  “Oh thanks, but I’ve had a really long, bad day,” I said. “I just want to go home. Really.”

  For “safety reasons,” Fennell insisted on seeing me home. Under normal circumstances I would have refused, but why take too many unnecessary risks? I told him he could drop me off on his way back to his hotel.

  However, when we got to my place, Fennell didn’t “drop me off.” Despite my protests, he got out with me and sent the cab away. I knew then that his intentions were not honorable.

  I said, “Well, thanks for a great time. See you on TV.”

  “Let me come up,” he said.

  “No thanks, I’m safe now.”

  “I’m not going to bite you. I thought we could talk. That’s all.”

  “It’s late. I don’t think so. But thanks for a wonderful time,” I said.

  “You don’t trust me!” he said, suddenly wounded. “I just thought a little company might be nice, that’s all.”

  What? Did I just fall off a turnip truck? I was oh too familiar with this routine, which hadn’t worked on me since the last college frat party I attended in 1981. Now I was supposed to soothe this fragile artist by assuring him that I did trust him and he could come up for coffee and conversation, and then we’d get upstairs and a new cycle of coercion would begin.

  “I’m tired, so thanks anyway, but I need to call it a night,” I said.

  At this point, I usually got the “Think you’re too good for me? Don’t flatter yourself” speech from guys like this, or else a play would be made for sympathy sex by making me feel guilty for not liking him enough and thus hurting his feelings.

  But Fenn tried an even more audacious approach.

  As I started to turn he grabbed me, spun me around, took me in his arms, and started trying to kiss me. I say trying because I did not want to kiss him and I was twisting my head every which way, trying to wriggle out of his grasp, saying, “No, Fennell, stop.”

  Sometimes, you can be too nice. I knew how to get rid of this guy. What I didn’t know was how to get rid of him NICELY.

  So he didn’t stop and his big fat lickered-up mouth finally suctioned onto mine.

  My arms were pinned against my sides but my hands were free. There was a car behind me and I let myself fall backward onto it, which set off the car alarm, scaring the shit out of Fennell. I took the opportunity to run up to my building. Fennell stood there screaming at me. I don’t know what he was screaming, because of the car alarm and all, but I could see his mouth wide open and his eyes bulging.

  Jeez. Guy buys you dinner and he thinks he’s entitled to stick his tongue in your mouth, no matter how much you protest. And I didn’t even want him to buy me dinner. I wanted to buy my own to head off such an incident, but Fennell had INSISTED. After arguing for ten minutes, I had let him pay the damn bill. What an asshole.

  He got off lucky. In my purse was my beloved high-velocityindustrial glue gun, with two settings, stream and spray. I could have turned Fennell’s face into a giant glue ball, if I wasn’t such a nice person.

  As I was going in, the insanely handsome man from upstairs was going out and we had another moment of heart-stopping eye contact. He mouthed the word hi to me, almost shyly, and I felt myself mouthing the word back, before rushing past him.

  I just couldn’t decide: Run away from him or talk to him? He gave me such a charge that I was knocked a little senseless and walked smack dab into Sally the witch at the mailboxes.

  “Whoa! Your aura!” she said, recoiling slightly.

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s really heavy-duty, really dark.”

  “Sorry.”

  With her white Pan-Cake makeup, black-lined eyes, bright red lipstick, and black scorpion tattoo up the back of her shaved skull, she gave off a rather dusky aura herself. I sympathized a little with pious Mrs. Ramirez. I could understand how just looking at her made the old bat’s bowels seize up. You had to talk to Sally a bit before you understood she was really a very sweet person. Weird, but nice. But I suppose she was quite frightening to an elderly, blue-haired lady who hadn’t had a man since 1942.

  “You ought to come by for a tarot reading,” Sally said.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” I said. “Have you seen Gladys Kravitz lately?”

  “Ramirez? She was lurking about earlier, but then she got a visitor and she’s
been in her parlor ever since.”

  “Who was the visitor?” -

  “Some old woman.”

  “A big scary woman, with big, bouffy silver-blond hair?”

  Sally nodded. “Don Rickles in drag.”

  Aunt Mo.

  “Listen, you didn’t see me.”

  “Why . . .”

  “I’m avoiding that woman,” I said.

  “Okay,” Sally said. “By the way, I found out something about the guy upstairs, the one who plays the guitar?”

  “What?”

  “His name is Wim Young. He’s an actor or an artist.”

  “How do you know? Did you talk to him?”

  “I’ve only seen him twice and both times I was in a hurry. I asked Mrs. Fitkis on two. She’s talked to him.”

  “I should warn you,” Sally said. “I added up the numbers in Wim Young’s address, street numbers plus apartment number. And you know what I came up with? 666.”

  “Thanks, Sally.”

  “It’s a freebie,” she said. “I’ll do a spell for you if you like.”

  “No thanks.”

  What Sally does, it’s just her religion, her attempt to find order in the universe and feel she has some control over it through the exercise of rituals, the uttering of chants, and the adherence to certain rules, the rules of good karma in her case. Just like Aunt Mo and the pope—and, in a way, Lina and Harv—she has a faith to stanch her fears of the great unknown.

  I have a glue gun.

  I became very aware that Aunt Mo was on the premises. I could feel her there. When I got to my apartment, I carefully inserted the key, turned the lock, and pushed the door open as quietly as possible, so as not to alert Mrs. Ramirez downstairs to my presence. I took off my heels so I could pad about stocking-footed, and slowly closed the door.

  Louise Bryant wanted to be fed, so I stealthily stir-fried her dinner. The doorbell rang. With measured steps, I walked to the door and peered through the spyglass peephole.

  There, corseted to within an inch of circulatory disaster, was my Aunt Maureen.

  “Robin, are you in there?” she shouted.