They were late, but by 8:50 we were headed out of Manhattan over the Queensborough Bridge and onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Ellis turned the car radio to a classic rock station, and we listened to a rockumentary on the blues guitar, an appropriate soundtrack as we passed over the rusty, brown industrial clutter of the Brooklyn waterfront. The show broke for a Dentucreme commercial. On a classic rock station. How depressing.
“How is the house?” I asked.
“It’s coming along,” Ellis said. For the last year, Ellis and his wife had been restoring a rundown Victorian on Staten Island. “It’s almost finished. Cami and I are painting it next weekend with some friends.”
I leaned my head against the window and looked out at the neighborhoods that straddled the BQE. There were all these single and two-family homes out there, clustered together in neighborhoods. Sometimes I forget that New York City isn’t just the boxy apartment buildings, skyscrapers, tourist traps, and garbage of Manhattan. Real people with real families live here too, with backyards and trees, close to grandparents and uncles and in-laws, in little steamy houses that just then looked so inviting.
Ellis was describing the six-foot round window they’d put in on the third floor to exploit the morning sun and I thought, I want to have a husband and restore a Victorian house and have painting parties. Then he started talking about a carved oak fireplace mantel Cami had found at an auction in New Jersey, and I fell into a deep drowse. When I awoke, we were on the off ramp and he was talking in a low voice about Cami.
“I’m monogamous and couldn’t be happier with my sex life,” he said to Jim. “I’m sexually gratified by my wife and proud to say it.”
Oh, I want a sexually gratified man who boasts about it, I thought.
The Zander Tarsus family insisted on being interviewed with coats over their heads, despite our promise to “gauze” their faces and electronically alter their voices. They didn’t trust us, so they sat on their sofa—a man, a woman, and a little brown baby—with coats over their heads. Below the shoulder, they looked just like people, with chests and arms and legs. Above the shoulder, they were coatheads. It was like an evil haberdashery experiment run amok.
Zander, who had come to America as a teenager from some dark Carpathian principality just after the second world war, was clearly the king in this modest castle, which smelled of paprika and roses. He was much older than his wife, who spoke with an indeterminate Old Country accent, and he directed her like a child and spoke for her while she sat silently, holding the baby.
Two years before, he told us through his coat, he’d had prostate trouble and, afraid he would be infertile after his operation, he had banked some sperm at Empire Semen. The operation had, in fact, made him “unable to sire children,” as he put it, so Marina—Mrs. Zander Tarsus—was impregnated with his stored seed. Or so he thought, until she delivered the African-American child.
“Look, I don’t care what color people are,” Tarsus said. “They can be white, black, green—hell, they can be striped if they want!” He laughed, like he thought this was original and hilarious.
“I don’t care, but people should be with their own. Their own, you see? This is not my son. This is some other man’s son. I paid for some other man’s son, a Negro man.”
Negro?
“I am expected to pay now and in the future, for some other man’s son! Where is my son? Where is my own?”
He was very dramatic and impassioned, and there was a note of deep betrayal in his voice. I felt for him, I did. I mean, his family line was finished if his sperm couldn’t be found. There would be no son, no heir. The Coathead Dynasty ended.
But it was extremely prickish of him to speak of his huge disappointment, his great dishonor, in front of his speechless wife, whose skin was moist and whose hands were trembling, and especially in front of the child. It wasn’t the wife’s fault, it wasn’t the child’s fault, and yet he aimed much of his anger at them.
“At least you have a child,” I offered, hoping to elicit a more humane response from the guy.
“I have no child!” he shouted, his arms waving wildly from beneath his coathead. “I, me, Zander, have no child! You understand?”
Next to him, his wife pulled the child closer to her as he raged. I felt a pain in my chest. The baby clung to her, his head concealed by a tiny blue parka.
I looked at Zander to see if he had noticed his wife’s quiet gesture. It was hard to tell, with a coat over his head and all, but he didn’t seem to. I had this powerful urge to take the woman’s hands and say, “Leave him now and don’t look back. Take your baby and be a free woman!”
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This was still a strange country to her. Single mothers born and raised in America have a hard enough time of it—what would it be like for her? Zander Tarsus probably wouldn’t pay child support for “some other man’s son” and she’d probably be doomed to living in poverty. So she was better off economically if she stayed with this old ungrateful control freak. Boy, that made me mad.
I was fuming by the time I got to ANN. “The guy’s an asshole, Jerry,” I said, as I showed him the relevant parts of the interview.
“Robin, put yourself in his shoes,” Jerry said.
“I’m trying, Jerry. He’s growing old and he’s afraid of that, and now he has lost his last best hope for some kind of immortality, offspring. But the way he treated that baby, the way he spoke to and about his wife …”
“Look, the story isn’t about Zander Tarsus. It’s about Empire Semen. The only thing we need from Zander Tarsus is a bite that illustrates the extent of Empire’s alleged wrongdoing.”
He rewound the tape to isolate the bite he thought best, in which Zander Tarsus recounted his father telling him, the day he set off for America, that he was going to the U.S. to make a life not just for himself, but for his children and their children. It was like an AT&T commercial. I half expected the scene to cut to Zander holding baby Zog, dialing grandpa Zog in the Old Country to tell him of the birth. Happy, snappy, sappy music up.
Jerry was right about the old guy and he was wrong. He was wrong about the scene to use too. The scene where Zander raged against the child while the mother drew the child closer to her, their heads in coats, best illustrated the tragedy of Empire Semen. If you ask me.
“Don’t let your personal feelings color your news judgment,” Jerry said.
“What do you mean?” I asked defensively. What did he know about me?
“I mean, you’re at that age, Robin, your biological clock is ticking and you ladies get goofy around babies at this age.”
“Yeah, right, it’s all hormonal,” I said. I popped the tape and went into my own office to log it.
Jerry had it partly wrong again. My biological clock wasn’t ticking, but my personal feelings probably were mucking around with my objectivity, since I was infertile. I’m not sure I want to be a mother, I’m not sure I’d make a good one, and I’m not sure what kind of world I’d leave to a kid. But I wish to hell I had the choice, that’s all.
Claire was scoping out Empire Semen that morning, posing as an interested customer. Casing the joint, as she called it, in preparation for our undercover shoot that week. I had hoped my newfound notoriety might exempt me from going undercover, but Jerry figured a wig and prop glasses borrowed from JNC’s weekly sketch comedy show would render me unrecognizable. Going undercover, in disguise, was all the more distasteful to me.
But not everything was grim. I logged into the computer and there was an E-mail message from Eric.
“My place, Saturday,” it said. “Fritz the Cat, a bottle of vodka, and thou.”
“I’m busy Saturday,” I typed back.
It was one thing going for a drink with him at Keggers, surrounded by colleagues, but Saturday night would be a date, and I wasn’t ready for a date. I could envision too many things going wrong on a date, like I might open my mouth to say something and belch, or break something valuable.
<
br /> Or worse. I remembered one dismal date, when I was just out of college, and I decided to try the direct approach on a guy I was lusting after. My plan was to put a little Sinatra on, dance a little slow dance with him around the living room, and then put my hand assertively on his crotch. Just cop a feel.
But as I was reaching for his groin, I slipped and, to keep my balance, I grabbed the nearest object.
Which happened to be his crotch.
I grabbed hard and he screamed. That really killed the mood. He let me make him an ice bag—to go—and he never called me again.
“It’ll be fun,” Eric messaged back.
“Busy,” I typed.
“Quit chasing me, Robin. You’re embarrassing yourself,” he answered. While I pondered my response, he said, “In the woods? In a midsize car in the woods? In winter?”
Yes yes no, I typed back. Jeez, he said all the right things. That’s what scared me most.
I picked up the phone and dialed his extension. “Eric, I have kind of a lot on my plate right now,” I said. “Between Burke, ANN, and the News-Journal.”
“I can’t do anything about Burke and ANN, but the News-Journal will have forgotten about you by tomorrow, I’ll bet you anything. Joanne will take the front page tomorrow,” he said.
“Joanne?”
There was a long silence on his end of the phone.
“Joanne Armoire?” I said.
“Yeah. She’s at Manhattan South now, being questioned. There’s an ANN lawyer with her. You didn’t know?”
I didn’t know, but suddenly I understood why Dunbar and the other mandarins were so concerned the day before. They weren’t worried about me, or my reputation. They were worried about Joanne, a star.
“What else do you know?”
“Just that it has something to do with Griff. I mean, I could speculate, but that isn’t good journalistic practice,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” I said, and began to speculate.
Joanne must have been the other ANN person he was investigating/blackmailing. Why, and what was the connection to me?
“Want to know what the rumors are?”
“No—and yes.”
“A conflict of interest issue. That she had an affair with a man she was reporting on.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Don’t know, although I’ve had a helluva lot of fun today running through the list of her interviewees. Boris Yeltsin, Yitzhak Shamir, that Afghan commander Massoud, that Argentine general, to name a few.”
I remembered a past conversation between Joanne, Solange, Claire, and me. We started off speculating about how certain newsmakers sounded in orgasm and then went into our dreams, wherein we discovered we all had recurring erotic dreams about newsmakers. I told of my dreams about me and John Sununu and me and Bishop Desmond Tutu, doing the wild thing in the back of a Chevy at a deserted Exxon station under the silvery city moon. Solange told of a dream involving a remote, snowbound cabin, leather restraints, and Supreme Court Justice David Souter.
We all laughed and Joanne described a vivid fantasy about Boris Yeltsin. Now I wondered if …
“So, Saturday?” Eric said.
Oh, I knew his type. I had seen it before—the ardent, earnest pursuit, the promises made to ensure the conquest, the conquest, the sudden drop-off in interest, the claustrophobia, that painful, overwrought farewell scene.…
But hell, the conquest was the easy part, the part I had control over, right? It was simple. I would not surrender.
Nothing painful could happen, if I didn’t let it. If he didn’t get his conquest, things would not progress to that painful, overwrought farewell phase of the game. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Nobody wins and nobody loses.
Shit. I knew he was just looking for a conquest, but he was so persistent, and it was so flattering. How we come to love our flatterers.
“Saturday,” I said.
Joanne didn’t come back to work that day. Apparently, half of ANN’s executive committee was at her place on Central Park West, devising scandal control strategy. I tried to call her, but her machine picked up.
In the afternoon, a press release went out: Joanne Armoire would be holding a news conference the next afternoon to discuss her involvement in the “Griff Case.”
I called Nora and Tewfik to see what they knew about the forensics on Griff, but they wouldn’t tell me anything, due to my peripheral involvement in the case. Although Tewfik seemed sure I didn’t do it, not everyone in the department was as eager to rule me out. Or so he said.
Jerry had a meeting with network sales that tied him up for the rest of the day so I made a couple more phone calls and then cut out early to do a little investigating of my own.
On my way out, I ran into Amy in the hallway. At first, she looked like she was going to scurry away in the opposite direction, frightened, as she usually did. But Burke had apparently told her my bark is worse than my bite. She pulled herself straight, fixed the appropriate smile on her face, and came towards me.
“I’m so happy you’re not in trouble with the police anymore,” she said sweetly.
It was a strange greeting. “Glad to hear you’re happy,” I said dryly.
“No, I mean it. I want you to know, I have a lot of respect for you.”
“You should, but you don’t,” I said, not softening.
I wasn’t going to fall for this I’m-OK-You’re-OK rap she and Burke were trying to put over on me. It wasn’t okay. “Maybe that crap worked for you as Miss Congeniality, but it doesn’t work with me, okay? It’s crap. You committed adultery with my husband behind my back, and then smiled at me in the hallway. The least courtesy you could do me now is not to feed me a bunch of bullshit about how much you respect me. Okay?”
“No matter what you say, I will always like and respect you,” she said adamantly.
Madri Michaels, who had been listening, came up behind Amy and put her hand on Amy’s shoulder for support. They were “friends,” if it was possible for Madri to have friends. It was maybe more of an “enemy of my enemy” bond between the two women. Madri had dated Burke, until he dumped her for me. In my defense, let me say that I met him independently of her, during a murder trial, and didn’t know at that time he was her boyfriend. Not that it would have made any difference.
“She’s trying to be adult about all this,” Madri said, to explain Amy’s stubborn niceness.
Right. “Amy, if it makes you feel any better, I hate Burke far more than I hate you,” I said.
I didn’t want to get sucked into some stereotypical cat fight over him, playing the scorned woman role, when clearly he was the cause of much pain for all three of the women present. I didn’t buy this crap that men are just horny imbeciles who can be led by their dicks by any woman with a good grip. Burke wasn’t “stolen,” he came and went willingly.
“Look, you’re right,” I said, jabbing my finger in Amy Penny’s face. “We shouldn’t be enemies. We have too much in common. We’ve shared my husband. Someday, after Burke has ditched you for someone new, let’s the three of us—you, me, Madri—go have pedicures and lunch. We’ll be like a club. But until then, I do not want to see you, and you can’t make me be nice to you.”
Amy Penny took a deep gasp, exploded into sobs, and then ran away. Madri turned to me.
“Do you have to be so cruel? What good does it do anyone to be a sore loser?” Her face was lit with indignation.
Five years before, when Burke and I started dating, she spread the rumor that Burke picked me because I was willing to do all sorts of filthy things in bed she would never do. Madri’s so out of touch, she thought that old sexist epithet “slut” would disable me, not realizing that her rumor only enhanced my reputation and hurt hers. Come to think of it, it was shortly after that rumor took off that Eric began flirting with me.
As for the filthy things I was supposedly willing to do, I’m not sure which filthy things she was speaking of. What I’m willing to do depends a lot on wh
o I’m going to do it with. With Burke, the sex was never very far from the ordinary, although we sometimes let our cat watch.
Chapter Seven
WHEN I GOT TO Griff Investigations, two rooms on the second floor of a dusty old building on Thirty-Fourth Street, right above the Conway’s Discount store, Larry Griff’s secretary, Crystal O’Connor, a classic petite with a lot of frosted brown hair, was packing up her office supplies.
“Like I told the police, I hadn’t been with him long,” she said. “He just opened the office six months ago, right? And, like, he didn’t talk about his cases much. He was real … secretive.”
“He must have kept files on his clients.”
“Whatever information he had on clients he took with him wherever he went because he, like, didn’t trust anyone, not even me. And the cops took all his books and stuff after he died,” she said.
Into the box went a framed photo of a guy, probably her husband, a stuffed bunny, the aging Polaroids of her and two girlfriends on vacation on a beach with palm trees—all of them with dark tans and white smiles—a black plastic pencil cup, a tape dispenser, a box of labels, two rolls of white correction tape. She hesitated at the cut-glass bowl full of M&M’s, then offered me some. “Please, help me eat these. I don’t want to pack them and I hate to throw them out.”
I took a small handful. “What books did the cops take?” I asked.
“Oh, phone books, Who’s Who, stuff like that. Oh yeah, and he had a picture of you on his office wall.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Standing with a microphone in front of a courthouse or something. You were wearing a long coat. It was a black-and-white picture.”
That would be my publicity photo, which public relations sends to news outlets and fans. Anyone who wanted one just had to write in and, except for those sent to residents of penal institutions, no record was kept. Cheery thought.
“Did he have a photo of Joanne Armoire?” I asked.
“I don’t know who she is,” Crystal said. “I know he had yours and he had a thing for you. Like, he’d sometimes ask me to call ANN and find out when your special reports were going to air. He never asked me to call for anyone else, right? When you were on, he turned on the TV in his office and locked his office door.”
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