There were two messages from Aunt Maureen, which I fast-forwarded through, and a message from Pete Huculak asking me to call him. His call I returned.
“I just heard from the police, they checked that license-plate number,” Pete said.
“Yeah.”
“It was a car service, hired for the day by Maureen Hudson Soparlo. Any relation?”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
Jesus, Aunt Maureen was following me. Following me, hell. The woman was stalking me. That meant she’d seen me in front of the Hotel Bastable hanging out with drug dealers, as well as going into and coming out of a sex club.
Good God. It was going to confirm for her all the wild stories she’d heard from other people.
Of course, the good news was, I wasn’t being followed by a killer, I thought, just Aunt Mo. There’s a bright side. Maybe.
After I fed Louise Bryant I took a long, almost scaldingly hot. All I wanted to do was put on my flannel pajamas and watch Four Weddings and a Funeral for the thirty-seventh time. But I had to go into work and edit the stupid S&M doctor story.
Weekends were usually kind of fun at ANN. It was a blue-jean shop Saturday and Sunday, traditionally slow news days, so the atmosphere was more relaxed and playful.
Normally, the newsroom is a fine example of an orderly anarchy, with people at every pod, bodies streaming in every direction, and a lot of noise—rings and buzzes and “urgent story” alarms. But weekends were generally quiet—so quiet you could hear the soft, steady clattering of the old-fashioned Teletype machines we kept around just in case the computer system failed. And weekends were unsupervised, as the execs steered clear of the place, making it a fertile breeding ground for Nerf football games, spitball throwing, and the masterminding of pranks.
My first stop was the library, where I picked up two stories that mentioned Joey Pinks, old stories about how Joey, age thirty-four, after living quietly with his mother most of his life, had suddenly shot her.
“She was a terrible nag. You could hear her screaming all the time,” said neighbors, who went on to $ay that the mother had driven two husbands into early graves and one other son, Joey’s half-brother, into the nuthouse long before Joey grabbed the family firearm.
Joey, on the other hand, was “a devoted son, a good boy. Dutiful. Quiet.” He was “completely distraught and remorseful about his mother’s injury.”
Other people had known a slightly different Joey Pinks, who snuck out of the house after his mother was asleep to hang out in California’s S&M scene, where he was sometimes a “male lifestyle-submissive,” and sometimes a “male lifestyle-dominant.”
It did have something to do with Anya’s, I thought.
I looked again at the tapes Tamayo had shot, but nothing jumped out at me. I popped in the tape Mike had shot the night before and looked at the scenes of Charles the slave, which Mike had mentioned. The slave did seem twitchy, but who wouldn’t be, dressed in sweat-inducing leather, leashed to a coldhearted woman with a whip?
I fast-forwarded through some of the other raw tapes, the interview with Anya. But it just didn’t connect for me. All those people in masks didn’t help either. For all Anya’s lofty talk about her crowd being more honest about love and pain and rules than most people, how trust is important in these relationships, they certainly had their own hypocrisies, the masks, the code words, the fact that Anya couldn’t trust her boyfriends beyond the length of a leash.
Anya said she’d been at the club the night Kanengiser, whom she claimed not to know, was killed. Said she’d been with Charles, as I recalled. But a man who couldn’t be trusted to mean “no” and “stop” when he said them couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about where his mistress had been two nights before—especially a man who walked around on all fours like a dog to win her approval.
Now I had a new theory. Maybe Kanenigiser had been walking on the wild side and got mixed up with Anya. Maybe he was one of her Werners. Maybe she found out he had a lot of other women. Maybe she got mad. Anya didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who knew how to handle rejection or loss of control.
I could imagine Anya removing the handcuffs from her purse, and some change and a matchbook falling out. She took no note of it, since her hands were full, gun in one, cuffs in another. Maybe she was talking, or Kanengiser was pleading with her. And so she had unwittingly left a clue behind.
But how could I get her to admit it? She’d already denied knowing him at least twice. She had her slavering alibi.
And where was this diary, this little black book? Would Anya be in it?
Unfortunately, I did not have the time, or the authority, to look into it any further. Jerry had left a memo for me on my desk.
“Do it as an unsolved murder,” Jerry wrote. “If by some miracle it gets solved before we go to air, we’ll update it on cam with a reader. So don’t say anything in the script about whether it is solved or not. Just the circumstances of the death, the handcuffs, the matchbook, then straight to the undercover tape Tamayo got at Anya’s. You got all those people at Anya’s . . . use some of them . . .”
Blah blah blah.
“Gotta get this on the air tomorrow!”
Jerry wanted a script for a five-minute report faxed to him by lunchtime. When I called him, he told me “absolutely” to include the Joey Pinks story, as a corollary unsolved murder, and to speculate about the black book, but that he wanted that script by lunchtime and the edited piece on his desk by the time he came in Monday morning regardless.
“I can’t do this,” I thought. Five minutes doesn’t sound like a lot, but writing a five-minute report takes a lot of time and work. Of course, it didn’t matter what I wrote anyway, since Jerry would just change it all and fax it back. So I pounded out a script, faxed it, waited for the changes, and then took the tapes and the script to edit.
I didn’t stay for the edit. The shots were logged and the script was straightforward and, frankly, I couldn’t bear to hear my voice over this story or see any more of the videotape. For me, the story is over, I thought. Let go. Move on.
After dropping off the tapes and script, I wandered into the newsroom and was surprised to see Louis Levin.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m banking days so I can take two extra vacation days next month,” he said. “We’re ordering pizza for lunch. You want in on it?”
“No thanks.”
“I heard about the dead ex-con. Pretty scary.”
“I’m not scared. I think he wanted to tell me something about this story I’ve been working on, but someone got to him before he could tell me. Quel dommage.”
“Why was he coming to you?”
“Well, I’m the reporter on the story . . .”
“Why didn’t he go to Hard Copy or Backstreet Affair and get paid for his efforts?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Weird,” he said.
I was still trying to puzzle that one out when Louis said, “Did you hear about Fennell?”
“What?”
“He was missing, on a bender everyone figured. But they found him at Saint Vincent’s Hospital. He got kneecapped the other night.”
“Oh my God.”
“Got him in his artificial knee. Guess he should have been nicer to that last Steven Seagal movie, huh?”
“Oh, then he wasn’t badly hurt.”
“Well, the knee is destroyed. He has to have a new one made. Fennell himself was actually hurt because he was pretty drunk and when the knee collapsed, he fell into a railing, broke his jaw, and was knocked unconscious. Apparently, while he was lying there, someone robbed him, took his ID, all his money.”
I didn’t laugh. “Where did it happen?”
“Downtown somewhere. He was coming out of a bar.”
He must have stopped off for a drink somewhere after he left me.
“Did he see the guy?”
“No. This is one sneaky sniper,” he said. “You know the story ab
out that knee, right?”
“No.”
“Well, I hear he lost part of that leg to mobsters in Hollywood in the sixties,” Louis said.
According to Louis, the male “talent” were so jumpy now that the sound of a car backfiring—or any similar sharp, loud noise—was enough to make a roomful of anchormen hit the deck immediately. Reb had been seen in the parking garage examining the underside of his Jeep with something that looked like an oversize dental instrument, a large metal pole with a round mirror on the end, and both he and Kerwin had asked for permission to carry sidearms at work.
“Anyway, I’m glad you’re here,” Louis said. “I have treats galore for you, little girl. Wanna see what I did with your obit?”
He pulled it out of his drawer and popped it into the tape player at his desk.
ANN keeps obits on file for various famous people and ANN’s own on-air personalities, of which I am one. They’re now updated four times a year, and the updated script is stored in the computer, so that if someone famous dies unexpectedly, the script can be scanned to make sure it is up to date while the tape is run to playback to air as soon as possible.
The problem is, the script in the computer doesn’t match the taped obit of Robin Jean Hudson, girl reporter. Louis and I had enlisted people in graphics and in effects to make a fake obit that showed me, dressed like a vamp in a stunning red dress and matching high heels, in a bunch of different historical scenes, a la Zelig or farrest Gutnp. If I died suddenly, the world would see me advising Kennedy, climbing Mount Everest, filling in for Judge Ito, and skating around Madison Square Garden with the Stanley Cup.
“Looks the same to me,” I said as I watched.
“It’s coming up,” he said. “Remember when Kim II Sung died? The footage of all the thousands of grief-stricken Koreans prostrate before billboard-size photos of the Great Leader?”
“You put my picture up instead of Kim II Sung’s! It’s brilliant, Louis. I can’t wait until I die. Thanks. Have you heard anything about the reshuffle, by the way?”
“Everyone knows Joanne is going to Paris and Claire is going to Washington, Rappaport to Perspective, Madri to PR. Other than that, anything could happen. Sure you don’t want pizza?”
“No, as soon as that stupid tape is on Jerry’s desk, I’m going home,” I said.
“Take this with you,” he said, handing me a clipping.
“You are full of treats today”.
“It’s about a guy in England who can’t turn his television off because it makes his monkey crazy. The monkey goes ballistic and starts tearing people’s hair out.”
“I know people like that”.
“ ‘It makes my monkey crazy’, I like that phrase,” Louis said.
He yelled at an indolent PA who was leaning on a pod flirting with a writer. “Hey, don’t lean on the furniture”, he said, “It makes my monkey crazy”.
“That doesn’t make sense”, I said.
“It makes more sense than ‘It gets my goat’,” Louis reasoned.
“If the viewing public knew what high-caliber philosophical questions occupy the minds of the omnipotent news media…”
“The viewing public”, Louis said, ‘makes my monkey crazy.”
I didn’t go straight home. Because I was feeling badly about Fennell, I took a detour to Saint Vincent’s.
Before I went up I bought a huge floral basket. I was still glad I hadn’t kissed the pig, but I did feel bad that he’d been shot and I wanted to pay my regards, out of respect for him as a professional, if not for him as a man.
Fennell saw me and said something through his broken, wired jaw. It sounded like “Uunnh. Ee khet arr arrerz.”
Poor Fennell. His face was swollen and bruised and encased in a wire grid.
“I can’t understand you,” I said, putting the floral basket down on his bedside table.
His eyes grew wide. He wanted something from me. Suddenly, he reached up and grabbed me by the coat lapels, pulling me back down toward his face. I thought he was going to try to kiss me again, maybe try to tongue me through the wire grid, but he didn’t. Instead, he sneezed all over me.
Then he screamed in pain from having to sneeze through a broken, wired jaw. Then he sneezed again. Followed by yet another scream of pain.
“Aiii ayyeryic!” he managed to shriek between sneezes and cries of agony.
Sneeze, scream. The nurse came in.
“Omigod,” she said, rushing over. “Who brought these in here?”
“I did.”
“He’s allergic to flowers,” she said, and whisked the offending bouquet away.
“I’m so sorry, Fennell,” I said. Who knew a basket of flowers could be such an object of pain and menace?
He groped for a pen and paper and wrote: “It’s all your fault.”
It wasn’t all my fault, but I decided to humor him, seeing as I’d just inadvertently inflicted pain upon him.
“I am really really sorry, Fennell. Really. God. It’s awful.”
He scribbled something on the pad.
“That perfume you wear smells like cat piss,” he wrote.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Did you hear about Fennell?” Tamayo asked me as soon as I got in Monday morning.
“Yes.”
“Did you know he had a prosthetic knee?”
“No.”
“Did you hear a creak creak when you and he—”
“I only went out with him once and we didn’t have sex.”
“Have you ever had a legless man?” she asked.
“No.” Pause. “Why? Have you?”
“No. Not yet.”
I couldn’t keep up with the range of romantic options in her life. I had thought she was kidding around when she asked me once, in a voice thick with nostalgia and primal longing, if I’d ever had a glassblower. I thought she was kidding, until she showed me a picture of him, blowing a blue glass globe.
“If I met the right man, and he had no legs, it wouldn’t bother me,” I said.
“I think it might turn me on,” Tamayo said. “Oh, Mike called twice.”
“I’ll call him later,” I lied. I was avoiding him because I wasn’t sure how to deal with sleeping with him Sunday morning. I’m notoriously bad at aftermaths.
“Jerry wants you to work up a new series on Satan now that the Kanengiser story is over.”
“The Kanengiser story isn’t over.”
“I mean, now that it’s over for us.”
“Yeah, it’s over for us,” I said. But I couldn’t quite let go. “I just wanna make another call to Anya. Ask her about a few loose ends, like Joey Pinks, a black book—”
“Oh, that reminds me! Mistress Anya called. She wants you to call her back. Boy, did she sound pissed off.”
“She always sounds pissed off,” I said, dialing. “It’s her bread and butter . . .”
When Anya came to the phone, she didn’t bother with formalities like “Hello.”
“I ought to sue you,” was the first thing she said: You’d be surprised how many conversations I’ve had that began this way.
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
“About two a.m., after you left my club, an elderly woman came in with two very large men in suits and demanded to see the manager, and when I came to her, she asked me about you.”
Aunt Maureen.
“She caused a scene.”
That was certainly saying something, because it would be hard to cause a scene in a scene like that one. But Aunt Mo did it. All those sinners in one place, overripe for salvation— Aunt Mo was like Jesus with the money changers. After getting no information about me, she and her two fundamentalist Christian henchmen had stood in the dungeon room loudly exhorting people to “put some clothes on and go home to your families for heaven’s sake!”
Then she gave her testimony about Jesus.
I had to laugh. That’s one thing about my Aunt Maureen, she takes a stand. I would expect no less from her. Ano
ther thing about my Aunt Maureen, she believes what she says. Yes, she’s bigoted and fascistic and mean and has the power to reduce me to a quivering mass of low self-esteem.
But she’s also a tough, big-mouthed broad who stands up for what she believes in. For that, you gotta respect her. She’s no hypocrite, except in one way: Aunt Maureen has constantly preached the docility and submission of the female of the species. “Nice girls,” she repeatedly told me, “should be seen, not heard.”
Aunt Mo was never docile, never submissive, and she knew how to make herself heard.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Anya.
“I almost called the cops on her,” she said.
“I wanted to ask you about Joey Pinks,” I interrupted, trying to sneak it in.
“I told you, I don’t know him,” she said, and hung up.
Aw hell. I might as well meet Aunt Mo, see if I can undo some of the damage, I thought. If she saw me, maybe she’d see I wasn’t moonlighting as a call girl/witch/dominatrix/sex slave. Maybe I could explain I was researching a story.
So I called her hotel and left a message.
And she didn’t call me back.
I called her again.
Again, she didn’t call me back.
I called her three more times, at different times of the day. She never did call me back.
I didn’t need the Empire State Building to fall on me. Aunt Maureen was now avoiding me.
But why?
As it turned out, I didn’t have much time to think about it that day. I got off the phone and heard people come into the outer office.
“Our humble abode,” Jerry Spurdle said.
He wasn’t alone.
“We’ve offered Jerry new offices, but he says he’s happy with this. Doesn’t need much. Wastes no resources,” Georgia Jack Jackson was saying to someone.
My door opened.
“This is the reporter’s office,” Jerry said, and Jack Jackson and Dave Kona, a supercilious pipsqueak who was after my job, came in.
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