“Max Guffy. I did a pre-interview with him one evening at Guffy Funeral Services.”
“Is that all?”
“This blind date, Gary Grivett. But he lives in Minneapolis, so I expect he’s okay. And Howard Gollis-- Oh God. I did have Kerwin in my Filofax. We met a couple of times to discuss some vigilante videotape I shot that he wanted to use in his show,” I said. “I didn’t want to give it to him.”
This was a lot to handle. Had Herman Kanengiser been killed not because of his human failings, not because he was a priapic misogynist or a liar or a fraud, but because of me?
Back at my office, Ferber and I went through my fan mail, which I kept, in no particular order, in a cardboard file box. Pete Huculak hovered over us and watched. Unlike many people at ANN, I didn’t get bags and bags of fan mail. I got a few letters a week.
“These are part of a flurry of letters I got after someone placed an ad under my name in the pen pal pages of Prison Life magazine. I never did find out who,” I said, handing Ferber a stack of letters.
“Suspicious,” Pete said.
“Well, actually, most of them are critiques of my reporting and the stories I do, or story ideas. Not at all threatening. I get the nuttiest letters from outside the penal system. A considerable number of them from masochists for some reason. But no Verns.”
The further you are from most people, the better they look. The television screen adds a lot of distance, with a paradoxical illusion of warmth and closeness, so that you feel you know the people you see, you identify with them, or at least with their television personae.
My ex-husband Burke likened this to Carl Jung’s observation of the “bush-soul,” wherein primitive people identified with the soul of something in nature. One man might feel he was sharing his soul with a tiger, another with a tree, a rock, a waterfall, an elephant, et cetera. (I think I share mine with an eighteen-pound turtle named Henri, but anyway . . . ) He called the obsessive fan phenomenon the “celebrity-soul” syndrome, wherein people identify too strongly with a famous figure and think that person knows their innermost thoughts and desires and is speaking directly to them, and them alone.
Hey, I’m no Jodie Foster. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the American population probably doesn’t even know my name. So it is especially sad to me that some guy out there identifies with me this way. I mean, if you’re going to go to all that trouble to be obsessed with someone, write them many letters, call them at home and hang up on them, even physically stalk them, you ought to aim a little higher, stalk Joanne Armoire or Diane Sawyer. “Hard work without ambition yields few fruits,” my father used to say. But hell, Lorena Bobbitt gets adoring letters from men obsessed with her, so why not me?
Especially scary to me was that this underachieving stalker would kill because of his twisted affection for me, or for my television persona.
Ferber was sorting the letters into piles by category: “obsessive love”—this included the masochist faction, led by would-be footlicker Elroy—”death threats,” and “other,” which covered unfocused rantings about freemasons, Jews, blacks, Mexicans, extraterrestrials, and missives from all those people who claimed to be delivering messages from God, Satan, or dead world leaders.
“I’ll take these,” Ferber said, scooping up a bunch of letters. “See what we can find out from them, if anything.” He turned to Pete. “Her security is arranged, right?”
“I’m sending my best men to look out for her,” Pete said.
“You don’t have to talk about me in the third person. Can I say something here?”
They both looked at me.
“This guy isn’t threatening me, okay? Maybe you should put security on Reb, and Fennell, and Mike, in case he decides to do some follow-up work.”
“We have security arrangements for them too,” Pete said. “Don’t worry. We need to give our ladies extra protection. Hector and Franco will be parked outside your building tonight, guarding you in shifts.”
I had a feeling this sexist strategy was going to cost us. At the very least, I questioned the wisdom of leaving those two alone in my nutty neighborhood. Would they be safe? But who was I to argue with professional law-enforcement people?
My mind was churning with possibilities and anxieties, but then my eye caught on a photograph Mike had given me, which I’d taped to my computer. In the mountains of Pakistan, on the Karakoram highway to China, they have signs that say, WARNING:—SLIDE AREA and then RELAX, SLIDE AREA OVER. As the road gets closer to China, the signs become more economical, even Zen. The photo showed a plain triangular white road sign that said, simply, RELAX.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I had worked hard to keep myself out of the tabloids in the last year and a half. I’m not one of those boldface mentions you read about in the columns being squired around by actors and moguls. When I get into the columns, it’s usually because I’ve done something embarrassing. But even during the death series fiasco, I had managed to keep it quiet, keep it out of the “TV Ticker” column of the New York Post. I’d been lucky for a long time.
But in the morning, there, on the front of the News-Journal, was my face, with the big black words, FEMME FATALE?
Below, it asked: DID YOU DATE THIS WOMAN?
They hated me at the News-Journal.
It was almost all there in the story. Kanengiser, Reb Ryan, Fennell, Pinks, Anya. A gynecologist, a dominatrix, an attempted mother-killer, and two famous television personalities. Two dead, one wounded, the other scared shitless, et cetera, and all, the paper said, because of their contact with me. It was made for the tabloids.
Who had leaked all this?
“We decided to make all of this public,” Detective Richard Bigger was quoted as saying, “in hopes of saving the lives of other men who may have been in contact, even innocently, with Ms. Hudson.”
They also dredged up the old Griff murder case, as well as my live, on-air belch and a few other incidents I really wanted to put behind me.
Was I ever going to escape my past?
By the afternoon, men all over the city had publicly disassociated themselves from me. There were jokes on Democracy Wall and in the Rumor File, and someone at ANN graphics had run up T-shirts with DON’T SHOOT ... on the front and i NEVER DATED ROBIN HUDSON on the back. I saw four or five people wearing them just in the cafeteria. Admittedly, they were pretty funny T-shirts. Har har.
Well, I would probably never get another date as long as this nut was loose. The problem with nuts is, they’re so unpredictable and can be so hard to detect. I mean, there are guys like Hank, who stalks Dillon Flinder backward, who are obviously nutty. Then there are those nice quiet types who live next door for years and end up having a freezer full of dead drifters.
Around three p.m., a press release was issued by Max Guffy, which someone thoughtfully, and anonymously, faxed to me.
“Not only did I not date Robin Hudson,” he wrote. “I found her offensive.”
That was rather overstating it, I thought.
No, I hadn’t dated Max Guffy. I had, however, thought about dating him when we met for our pre-interview, before I blew it all with a slip of the tongue.
There’s always that one question I should never ask, that one anecdote I shouldn’t tell, that one comment I shouldn’t make, but I can’t seem to stop myself, like the cannibalism question I asked the plane-crash survivor a couple of years ago.
With Max Guffy, avant-garde undertaker, I never should have told the Lazarus-sex story.
The notorious Romanian Lazarus-sex story, which ran on one of the European wire services, never made our air, although it was probably the most widely reported story within the network for a week or so.
As the story goes, a funeral home attendant had sex with a young female corpse, freshly dead, and the shock of it brought her back to life.
Imagine the attendant’s horror. He’s having sex with a dead woman who suddenly opens her eyes.
Now, imagine her horror. She wakes up after being unconscious
to find a strange man is having sex with her on an examining table in a strange room.
(“Imagine that guy’s ego now, standing around the bar, bragging,” my neighbor Sally had said. “ ‘I can bring dead women back to life.’ “)
In any event, the girl’s family didn’t press charges, despite the vileness of the crime, because they got their Olga back. That’s what I call a blessing in disguise.
I asked Guffy what he thought about that, if it was possible to bring someone back to life that way. People at ANN were torn over that story, and it was endlessly discussed as some sort of extreme metaphor for the gender wars. A few argued the moral implications, as if it wasn’t completely black and white and they could actually build a defense, the “might be okay if it’s a matter of life and death” necrophilia defense. The rest of us argued the veracity, since the story came from Romania, a country so far into its id it brought us vampires, torchlight mobs, and Nicolae Ceausescu. But some people swore by it, so I figured I’d settle a few bar bets by asking an authority like Max Guffy. Remember, Guffy and I had had a little vodka, he’d told some morbid jokes, and I was feeling very comfortable by this point.
But Max Guffy got very defensive and angry, launching a rant about stereotypes, rigorous screening and supervision, double-teaming so the bodies were never alone, how such sensationalist crap preyed on the public’s fears and helped make people uncomfortable with death.
Then, red-faced, spitting mad, he asked me to leave.
Before you rush to judge me, consider that Max Guffy specialized in offbeat funerals, funerals as performance art, as comedy, as a reflection of the individuality of the dead guy. In his spare time, he also authored pseudonymous humor books about death.
Understand also that the man was proud of the New Yorker article that had said he was giving death a raucous eroticism. I was just a little blunter. It’s not like I asked him if he ever did it with a dead person. I mean, hey, anyone who can stage a Mummenschanz funeral with a straight face and then write a humor book called 101 Uses for a Dead Clown can take a story about necrophilia.
(Make that 102 uses.)
In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have told a necrophilia story to a mortician, but how often does one get the chance to tell a necrophilia story with a happy ending?
People called me all day. My ex-husband Burke called from Washington, where he was now a big-shot reporter at the State Department.
“Holden,” he said, using one of his nicer pet names for me. “Take care of yourself. I assume you’re armed to the teeth with corkscrews and, electrolysis needles . . .”
“A glue gun and pepper spray,” I said.
“And you still grow the poison ivy in your window boxes.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m not really in any danger. Men who’ve been involved with me are in danger.”
“That’s always been true of you,” he said. He was not properly sympathetic. What had once been a passionate love affair between me and Burke had dwindled down to an occasional phone call, an occasional dinner, a few shared memories, some joshing. We were like war buddies who get together every year to recall the battles they shared.
He laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Don’t tell me your legendary sense of humor in the face of everything has deserted you? I was laughing thinking how funny it would be if this stalker actually met you and discovered he didn’t like you.”
“You’ve always known how to flatter me, Burke.”
“You take care of yourself, seriously. I’m laughing, but this guy has killed people, so be careful. I mean it. You have some protection, security?”
“Yes, I’ve got our top security men looking after me,” I said. I was being sarcastic. Hector and Franco did not make me feel safer. I was sure they could both be lured away from their posts by a fast-talker on a snipe hunt.
“You be careful too, Burke.”
“I will.” Burke is smart and good-looking and has a lot of obsessed women fans
Dillon called. “I’d take a bullet for you any day,” he said.
Louis Levin brought me some funny stories, and Phil the janitor brought me a flower.
“You’re a lot like me, Robin,” Phil said. “Life throws you into craziness. But you’re too silly to die too, I think.”
Ferber called me twice. Once to tell me he couldn’t find Howard Gollis, and once to tell me ballistics had matched the bullet Mike recovered.
Then Mike came in.
“I’ll be happy to stay at your place tonight,” he said. “Just to keep you company.”
“Thank you, but it’s really not that big a deal. This isn’t someone who wants to hurt me, just men who are seen with me,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk. Be careful. This guy might take another shot.”
“Girl, I’ve been in much tougher spots than this one,” he said.
After he left, Tamayo came in. “You’ve seen the latest papers?” she said, sympathetically, and put the evening papers down on my desk.
“I’m doomed,” I said. “This was the last thing I needed right now, what with the reshuffle and the cutbacks and some nut out there shooting at any man who whistles my way . . . and my Aunt Maureen is in town, she’s bound to see the papers and ...”
“Oh, someone called about your aunt,” Tamayo said.
“Who?”
“Where did I put that message? Just a second.”
She came back a moment later. It was a message from Aunt Mo’s roommate, Mrs. Sadler.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Mrs. Sadler said when I called her back. “But your aunt didn’t come back to the hotel yesterday. I woke up this morning and her bed was made. Did she stay over at your home?”
“No. Are you sure she didn’t come in after you were sleeping and then get up early to pray or something?”
“I don’t think so. She was acting very strange when she left last night.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“I’m not sure. She got a call and said she had to go out. But she’d been reading your diary . . .”
My diary is kept on my home computer. To read my diary, she would have to break into my apartment, boot up my computer, access the software, load the relevant floppy disk, and find the relevant files, of which there are many, all locked. Then she would have to guess all the passwords, not an easy task, some of them in obscure languages, some of them made-up words, or she would have to find my secret password file in a separate subdirectory and then guess the password for the locked password file, tushnob, a Pushtu word for toilet I learned from Mike.
That’s a hell of an accident for a woman who can’t set the clock on her VCR.
“Diary?”
“I think it was your diary . . .”
“My Filofax,” I said.
Mrs. Sadler began to cry. “Oh dear, I never should have let her go out yesterday.”
“Why did she?”
“Your boyfriend called her and she went to see him.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”
I collected Hector and we went over together. I had to take Hector with me since it would have been impossible to sneak out of the office without him seeing me. Even if he hadn’t been parked right outside the door of Special Reports, guarding me like I was a vault full of money, someone would have seen me on the vast network of in-house video cameras.
On the way, I called Ferber from the car phone.
When we got to the Gotham Manor Hotel, the lobby was full of smiling Christians, milling about after some sort of symposium. I could tell they were Christians because they smiled so much and because they all had adhesive name tags with crosses on them.
Just as I was about to raise my hand to knock on Mrs. Sadler’s door, it opened. I guessed she’d been watching for me through the peephole.
“Thank heavens you’re here,” she said, ushering me into the chintzy, twin-bedded room.
“Tell me about the diary,” I b
egan.
“One of your neighbors ran into a man outside your building who gave her the diary,” she said.
“That would be Joey Pinks,” I said. “He gave it to Mrs. Ramirez and she gave it to Aunt Maureen?” I was thinking out loud.
“That sounds right.”
“What did the man tell Mrs. Ramirez, my neighbor? Did Aunt Mo say?”
“No.”
Not that it mattered. Mrs. Ramirez put her own spin on things. For that matter, she made stuff up out of whole cloth.
“Did she say anything about this ex-boyfriend?”
“Oh, I am sure she said ‘boyfriend,’ not ‘ex-boyfriend.’ And other than that, she said nothing.”
“It doesn’t sound like Aunt Maureen to be so reticent,” I said.
“Well, we didn’t speak much ... we weren’t. . .”
I watched her struggling for the Christian thing to say.
“You weren’t friends,” I helped.
“No, we weren’t.”
“How did you come to be roommates?”
“Well, er, I . . . nobody else wanted ... oh dear.”
“Nobody else wanted to room with Aunt Maureen.”
“Well, yes,” said Mrs. Sadler, apparently the group martyr.
Boy, even the other right-wing Christians didn’t like being around Aunt Maureen very much. It was like being the last kid chosen for softball, in a way.
Poor Aunt Mo. I had no doubt the shooter had her. I didn’t hold out much hope for her. A madman alone in a room with a gun and my bigmouthed Aunt Maureen? It would be awful hard not to kill her.
If only I’d seen her. Maybe she would have given me the Filofax and we could have given it to the cops and the shooter wouldn’t have come after her . . .
As traumatic a figure as she cut in my life, she was my aunt and blood is thicker . . . and stickier . . . than water. And, to be fair, there had been times when I was glad she was my aunt. Now that she was missing, I started remembering other times, other events. Episodes flashed before me all day and well into the night as I lay in my bed, inconsolable by rain forest singers or purring cats. Like the time I was cornered by a group of menacing older boys in the playground, and Aunt Mo saw out her kitchen window and came out with God’s Little Helper. She just went nuts with those boys, like a samurai, swatting them every which way until they scattered.
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