Third You Die (kevin connor mysteries)

by Scott Sherman

  Andrew rested his chin in his hand. He nodded. “Maybe. I don’t know. You’re right about one thing. It wasn’t so much that I felt he was aping his films that bothered me, it was the total lack of interest in, like you said, ‘making a connection.’ I could have been anyone. He wasn’t expecting to ‘enjoy’ me; he was looking to ‘wow’ me.”

  “That’s the thing with narcissists. It’s all about them. Brock wasn’t looking for a lover. He’s looking for an audience. For attention and applause. And, if my two semesters of psychology at NYU can be trusted, it’s a deeply ingrained personality trait. Here’s my bet: Porn didn’t make him that way; he makes porn because that’s the way he is.”

  Andrew smiled. “I feel kind of… relieved. It really bothered me how… detached Brock seemed. I mean, generally when a guy has his head between my legs, I think he’s at least a little into me. But not Brock. He reminded me of those guys who demonstrate home appliances at department stores. It’s a good show and everything, and at the end you might get a tasty treat, but he’s still just going through the paces. I thought maybe I was losing my mojo.”

  Andrew was still probably one of the ten best-looking guys I’ve ever met. “You haven’t lost a thing,” I assured him. “You just happened to spend the night with a guy who wasn’t looking for mojo-he was looking for a mirror.”

  “How did you know he asked me to put one by the bed?” Andrew asked. “Did I tell you that part?”

  I’d been speaking metaphorically, but I figured it didn’t hurt to leave Andrew guessing. “The magic eye of Kevin,” I said, tapping my forehead, “sees all.”

  In hindsight, I’d wish I did. Then I’d have known to get out of there before disaster came crashing through the door.

  “What,” my mother screeched, her voice reaching a frequency I’d have thought capable of breaking windows, “is this fakakta dreck? ”

  This didn’t look like it was going to be good. She came crashing into the office like a hurricane, only less concerned with the damage she might be leaving behind. She flapped a paper in her hand wildly. Worst of all, she was using Yiddish, always a bad sign.

  Andrew, who was paid by my mother and therefore contractually obligated to placate her, sprang to his feet. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his eyes soft with concern.

  “This!” she wailed, directing a withering gaze at the paper she clutched in a death grip.

  “This what?” Andrew asked.

  “This!” my mother said louder, as if the problem was that we couldn’t hear her. People in New Jersey could have heard her.

  “Sophie,” Andrew said in the low, measured tones of a person trying to talk a jumper off a bridge, “why don’t you sit down and we can…?”

  “Sit?” my mother echoed, as if Andrew had asked her to commit hara-kiri. “This is not the time for sitting! This is the time for action! Sitting around,” she cried, thrusting the paper she held at Andrew like a dagger, “is hardly going to get us on this! ” She returned to shaking the paper like a crazy woman.

  “Okay,” I said, having had my fill. “Enough with the drama, Mama. We can’t even see what you’re talking about if you keep waving that around like you’re trying to put out a fire. Maybe if you let one of us see it, you could get an answer.

  “So, why don’t you settle down”-I pointed at the small sofa in Andrew’s office-“and we can talk like normal people.”

  She collapsed into the seat with a resigned plop and sighed heavily.

  “Oh my god,” she said, no longer loud but with a miserable whine in her voice, “I just threw a diva fit, didn’t I?”

  “Just a little one,” I reassured, rising to join her on the sofa. I took her hand in mine. She squeezed back with the same pressure with which she’d previously throttled the paper into submission. I heard one of my knuckles crack. At least, I hoped that was all it was. A broken finger or two wouldn’t have surprised me.

  I ignored the pain and soldiered on. “Now, what’s all the fuss?”

  “This,” she repeated. But now she actually handed me the paper, which made the conversation more productive. “Look!”

  I looked.

  “The nominations for the Daytime Emmys,” she moaned. “Someone just showed me. And look-under Best New Talk Show. Notice who isn’t there?” Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s the Jewish thing, isn’t it? They always hate the Jews.”

  The nominations had come out yesterday, but I guess no one thought to tell my mom. Probably an oversight, I reluctantly admitted to myself. Luckily, Andrew and I had discussed them, so I had the words to put her at ease. Andrew and I exchanged relieved glances before I explained.

  “It’s not you,” I explained. “It’s the rules. A show has to have been on for six months before it can qualify. We’ve only been on for four.”

  The tension drained from my mother in a palpable rush of relief. Her fingers released my hand, which I pulled back and flexed. It seemed like all the digits still worked.

  “So it’s not,” my mother asked, “an anti-Semitic thing? In your opinion?”

  My mother blamed the majority of her self-caused problems on anti-Semitism, an issue about which she was very sensitive. Which made it so odd that she’d married my father, a German who looked like the poster child for the Aryan nation. It was from him I’d inherited my blond hair and blue eyes.

  “I think it’s just the rules, Ma.”

  My mother turned her face to Andrew. “I’m sorry about that little outburst, darling. I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it’s this studio-the ghost of Yvonne possessing me.”

  “Yvonne isn’t dead,” I reminded her.

  “Well,” my mother observed, “you can’t have everything.”

  “It’s hard,” Andrew said, still speaking with the caution of someone defusing a bomb, “to be in the public eye. Sometimes, you just have to let off a little steam.”

  “It’s so nice to have a professional like you on my team,” she answered him. “But there’s still no excuse for bad manners. Promise me-you’ll tell me if I’m becoming too much of a pain in the tuchus, won’t you?”

  Talk about a golden opportunity. “You’re already…” I began.

  My mother cut me off. “I was talking,” she said, icily, “to Andrew.”

  “Oh.”

  She put her arm around me. “I’m your mother, darling. I’m supposed to be a pain in your ass. It’s in the job description.” She looked at the list of Emmy nominees again.

  “This does get me thinking,” she offered.

  Andrew and I looked at each other with an unspoken “uh-oh.”

  “I’m never going to be nominated, let alone win this thing, unless we start doing some more serious shows around here.”

  “Serious?” I asked.

  “Let’s face it.” My mother sat up on the sofa, her posture eager and determined. “Nobody’s getting any awards for shows like we’ve been doing. Yes, it’s all very entertaining to interview transvestite dentists and the women who love them, but it isn’t the kind of serious-minded feature that’s going to get me recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.”

  She knew the name of the organization that awarded the Emmys? I was impressed. It must have shown on my face.

  “See?” she said, smugly. “I can use the Google.”

  “Really? I bet Nancy looked that up for you,” I asserted, crediting my mother’s personal assistant.

  “So what if she did?” my mother answered. “I can use the Nancy. The point is: I get things done. And it’s all up here,” she said smugly, tapping her forehead the same way I had moments before when talking to Andrew. I shivered in the way I always did when noticing any resemblance between us.

  “Which is why,” she continued, “I think we need to tackle some bigger stories. If I want to play in the big leagues, I’m going to have to show I have the chops to do investigative reporting like a real journalist. Like a Barbara Walters. Or a Kelly Ripa.”

  “Don�
��t forget Sherri Shepherd,” I offered.

  “Exactly!” my mother enthused. “We need to dig deep, team. Find the big stories. Expose injustice. Make some headlines.”

  Suddenly, my mother was turning into Perry White. For no good reason, I wanted to run around the offices like a lunatic screaming, “Stop the presses!”

  “Those are great ideas,” Andrew agreed with the patience of a man who’d spent the last two years working with a woman even more deluded than my mother. “We’ll get right on it. I see no reason why we can’t combine the fun lifestyle advice and entertaining human interest topics we normally cover with some harder-hitting reportage.”

  I knew my mother would be impressed, if by nothing else, Andrew’s use of the word reportage in the same sentence as the nonsense we usually aired. Sure enough, she sprang up and pulled the seated producer’s head to her in an embrace that threatened to suffocate the poor boy in her ample bosom. “I knew I could count on you,” she beamed.

  “You too,” she told me. “Except, not for anything constructive.”

  “Nk ooo,” Andrew said.

  “Sorry,” my mother said, releasing him from the deep valley of her breasts. “What was that, sweetheart?”

  He gulped in a breath. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you, ” my mother gushed. “I can’t wait to get something I can really sink my teeth into.”

  Instinctively, I put my hand over my jugular.

  7

  Fallen Angel

  “Trust me,” I’d told Andrew, the minute my mom left his office, “in a few days she’ll have lost all interest in becoming the next Diane Sawyer. We just have to provide a distraction. I say we go for an episode where she takes some of her girlfriends to Chippendales. They start all embarrassed and silly, tentatively slipping dollar bills, with the delicacy of vestal virgins, into the dancer’s G-strings, and by the end they’ll be kneading those boys’ buttocks like dough. That’ll take her mind off things.”

  It’d improve Andrew’s mood, too, I reckoned. Although maybe the last thing he needed was more testosterone-fueled narcissism.

  Andrew drummed his fingers on his desk. “I don’t know,” he said, a little dreamily. “Have you considered your mother might have a point?”

  “Crazy say what now?” I asked.

  “Listen.” Andrew leaned forward, his eyes a little brighter. “I’ve spent two years producing hundreds of hours of daytime television that, combined, have had about as much impact on the world as a butterfly’s fart. That’s a lot of my life to waste on nonsense, Kevin.”

  “It hasn’t all been nonsense,” I countered. “You’ve entertained a lot of people. Touched some, too.”

  “Not enough,” Andrew said. “I think she’s right-we should set our sights a little higher. We reach millions of viewers a week, Kevin. We could be educating them. Enlightening them. Instead of being satisfied feeding them… drivel.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” I argued. “Too hard on the show, too. This isn’t the CBS Evening News. It’s a fun, gossipy talkfest with a wacky hostess who the audience, god help us, seems to love. It’s exactly what the people who watch it want it to be.”

  “Is it? And, even if that’s true, is it enough? ” Andrew ran his hands through his hair. “Maybe I’m stuck on this thing with Brock. He was so focused on giving me what he thought I wanted, there was no chance I’d get what I needed. By pandering to my expectations, he wound up putting a lot of effort into leaving no real impression whatsoever.

  “It was all artifice and no substance-stunts and clown cars. Cotton candy-eat as much as you like and you’re still hungry. It’s sweet going down, but it dissolves into nothing before it even reaches your stomach. In the end, you feel as empty as you did before. Is that what we’re serving?

  “Maybe-every once in a while-we can provide something a little more filling.”

  Great. Andrew was having a midlife crisis in his twenties. He’d bought into my mother’s insane idea to disrupt the formula of her inexplicably popular show. Whatever happened to “Don’t mess with success”?

  Not to mention the absurdity of imagining my mother as some bastion of journalistic truth seeking. Unless you count the TV listings or coupons, I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. As far as general information, if it wasn’t covered on Entertainment Tonight or in US Magazine, she didn’t know it happened.

  And yet… my cynicism wasn’t particularly attractive, either. What, exactly, was so threatening about my mother’s and Andrew’s enthusiasm? Instead of being appalled by their desire to elevate what they did, what if I let it inspire me? Hadn’t I just done it with my own life-left the safety of easy money and the freedom to do as I pleased for the chance for a “real” job and a life with Tony?

  It was easy to be bitter and sarcastic and predict disaster. Yeah, my mother doing any kind of real investigatory work had the potential of being a total fustercluck. But even a possible train wreck is better than staying parked in the station your whole life. At least it’s forward motion. Maybe, just maybe, we could even stay on the tracks and get somewhere. Somewhere better.

  Who was I to say otherwise?

  “Okay,” I began, “if we were going to do this, where would we start? It’s not like we have a crack team of reporters to get on the case.”

  “How hard can it be to find news in New York City, Kevin? Everything happens here,” Andrew said. “Keep your eyes open. Watch what’s going on around you and look for angles no one’s seen yet. There isn’t a place in the world with more stories, Kevin. We just need to find one.”

  I went back to my office and thought about what Andrew had said. What stories did my life offer?

  “My Boyfriend’s a Closeted Cop?” Naw, I didn’t think Tony would like that.

  “My Best Friend’s a Big Old Slut?” Naw, I didn’t think Freddy would like that.

  “My Mother’s Driving Me Crazy and She’s the Star of This Very Show?” Naw, someone’s mother driving them nuts hardly qualified as news.

  What else? In my time as a call boy, I’d serviced more than a few celebrities and politicians whose public personas were vastly different from their private lives. I’d also heard a lot of secrets. The sexual act can establish a sense of intimacy that’s way out of proportion to the reality of the relationship. Men who should have known better poured their hearts out to me.

  Hadn’t someone told me he had a tale to tell? Something potentially explosive? That could blow the lid off an entire industry and even put people in jail?

  Who was that? Oh, yeah. Brent Havens. The World’s Cutest Porn Star. (And this, mind you, from a guy who normally doesn’t go for “cute.”)

  Brent had been so interested in me that I thought his tease of a “big story” might have been nothing but a way to get some attention. If it wasn’t, though, it could be just what I was looking for.

  My mind raced through juicy, lurid possibilities of what Brent might know. “Secrets of the Adult Video Industry.” What could they be? Boys forced into making films against their will? Payoffs to politicians to ensure legal protections?

  Penis sizes enlarged through the use of special effects?

  Now that would be news.

  My mind reeled.

  He’d given me his number… on the inside of my wrist. I remembered scrubbing it off in a defensive move to avoid any awkward questions from Tony. Damn.

  Wait. I’d made a preemptive move, too, and snapped a picture with my iPhone. I opened Evernote and there it was. I dialed Brent’s number, practicing in my head a greeting that sounded interested but professional.

  No point in leading the boy on. Especially since I didn’t completely trust myself to resist his advances.

  This, I explained to myself, was all business. Brent hadn’t been sure he wanted to tell his story. If he wasn’t ready, I wouldn’t push.

  If he was, though, it could solve a lot of problems. Hopefully, for him, too. There was a part of him that wanted to get out
of the business-if he really did have beans to spill, I was pretty sure he’d be persona non grata in the skin biz.

  Which might be just what he needed.

  I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to give up the easy money and ego boosting a pretty boy could make in the sex industry. My transition was made easier by the launching of my mother’s talk show and the subsequent job offer. It just kind of fell into my lap at exactly the time Tony revealed to me he had a son, a milestone that indicated he was ready to get-somewhat-more serious about our relationship.

  I had no idea what Brent planned to do when he stopped making flesh films. I didn’t know if he knew, either. Maybe we could find something here. I was pretty sure Andrew would like him.

  Maybe too much, I forced myself to admit. I wasn’t sure being chased around the desk would be rewarding work for Brent.

  As I pointlessly planned Brent’s life for him, I realized, for the second time that morning, I was unconsciously taking on the traits of the woman who’d raised me. Why else would I be Jewish mothering a boy I hardly knew about a situation that might never happen? I thought of them as my Mother’s Rules of Parenting: Meddle, Nag, Respect No Boundaries, and Keep ’em Feeling Guilty.

  I was only on Rule One, but give me time.

  Not today, though. After ten rings, Brent’s voice mail picked up. “The voice mailbox of the customer you are trying to reach is full. Please try back later.”

  Couldn’t even leave a message. I switched from my desk phone to my mobile and sent him a text. “This is Kevin from Sophie’s Voice. We met after Brock’s appearance. Please call.” I typed in my number.

  Waiting isn’t my strong suit. I hoped he’d call soon.

  Brent seemed like a guy in hot demand. I figured he got a lot of messages and checked them frequently. I’d probably hear from him soon.

  Two days later, I sat in my office and concluded Brent either wasn’t as diligent at returning calls as I’d hoped, he’d changed numbers, was indisposed, lost his phone, or just didn’t want to talk to me.