What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Absolutely!” the nurse said. She couldn’t believe I was telling her all this.

  I leaned in towards her, confidentially. “Actually,” I said. “There’s no rule that I have to use his sperm, is there? When the time comes, maybe I could make a switch. You … you have any of that Nobel-prize-winner sperm here?”

  She shook her head. “A lot of medical students from Columbia University, though.”

  I asked her to take me on a tour of the storage facility. At first, she resisted, but I convinced her Eugene would be furious if I couldn’t at least assure him that his seed would be well cared for.

  “Personally, I don’t care what you do with it,” I said, which was not a lie.

  This is where going undercover became valuable, because I was able to see the refrigerated back room, with all its signs of shoddy organization. The sperm was kept in big liquid nitrogen containers, some with faded labels, one of them leaking something. Outside, a lackadaisical attendant watched television.

  I asked her all the questions I had to for the piece, and continued trashing Eugene Fullmark and telling embarrassing stories about him, sex stories involving prosthetic limbs and self-abuse. When Jerry and I left, she gave him a strange smile.

  “I think that nurse had the hots for me,” he said.

  “She was fascinated by you,” I told him, in all seriousness. It was not a lie.

  We gave Claire the tapes to log when we all got back to ANN. Jerry had to run to an affiliate seminar.

  “Don’t make any dubs of mine,” I said to Claire, tipping her off that it was highly dubbable stuff. Tapes that show on-air talent or executives being embarrassed are passed around by the workers to be dubbed for private blooper reels in a kind of samizdat system. I had appeared on several, and had one of my own at home.

  “Sure,” Claire said, smiling slyly.

  What had I accomplished with my performance at Empire? Well, I had assured that my part as Ivy Fullmark would end up largely on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, and only my relevant questions and the video from the back room would make it into the series, thus limiting my exposure to further humiliation.

  What else could I do? I have a bad attitude and an ironclad contract.

  And, I admit, it was fun.

  I started transferring stuff from my pockets back into my real purse (the purse-cam hadn’t been designed to hold anything but the camera and battery-pack) and I realized I didn’t have my keys. Goddamn it. I started looking around my office, knowing that even if they were there I might not find them. My office, you see, is pretty cluttered, like my apartment, although at work a cleaning lady came in nightly. Newspapers and raw tapes from previous stories were stacked in precarious piles all over the room. Interoffice memos overflowed from the fish bowl into which they were jammed. Papers, yellow Post-It notes, and pens of various colors covered the desk, while along the back wall was a bookshelf holding all the books I thought I might need in writing, all haphazardly shelved. (There was a Pelican Complete Works of Shakespeare, the collected works of Mark Twain, a dictionary, the Columbia History of the World, collected poems of W. H. Auden and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, a few biographies of movie stars, the definitive bio of Edward R. Murrow, and a Bartlett’s Quotations in a glass case with a tiny steel mallet and a sign that said, “In case of emergency break glass.” That was a gift from McGravy.)

  I couldn’t find my keys. Believe it or not, I misplace them a lot, although never for very long.

  I called out to Claire, “Did maintenance empty the trash baskets this afternoon, while we were out?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered back, her voice muted by the wall between our offices. “I was in the library most of the morning, boning up on sperm. So to speak. Go ahead, ask me anything. I’ll take seminal fluid for four hundred, Alex.”

  “I can’t find my keys,” I said. “Shit.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to retrace my steps that day, where I last saw my keys and what I then did, like that. Did I drop them somewhere when I was taking stuff out of my purse and putting it into my pockets? But it was no good. I couldn’t remember.

  As luck would have it, there was only one set of spare keys to my place and Burke had them, which meant I’d have to call him and I’d have to talk about the Griff case.

  I dunno. Maybe a part of me wanted to see him, and the keys were a good excuse. I hadn’t asked for my keys back because I still had this romantic idea he would just quietly come back one night, slipping back into my bed as though he had never gone, and my real life could resume. He hadn’t given them back to me for reasons I couldn’t presume to know.

  It was probably time to close the book on that fantasy, I thought. I called Burke and asked him to meet me and bring my keys. I wasn’t keen on seeing him, but I had no choice, right?

  All the same, before I left I checked my desk one more time, pushing around the loose papers, still hoping to uncover my keys. I didn’t, but I found a Xeroxed sheet with a yellow Post-It note attached.

  “Squirreled this away from Gil Jerome for you. Eric.”

  I peeled off the Post-It and read. It was the preliminary medical report on Griff, which Jerome wouldn’t give me, me being a witness and all.

  Based on the last time he was seen, a partially digested meal in the stomach, liver temperature reading at the crime scene, and lividity (the way the blood settles in a corpse), time of death was guesstimated at sometime between nine-thirty and eleven, New Year’s Eve. He had been attacked from the front with the murder weapon, and he was in the bathroom when it happened, judging by blood splatters and fingerprints—his—on the bathroom door. The report speculated that he fell to his knees, holding his bleeding head with one hand. He was hit again, on the top of his head. When he collapsed, facedown on the floor, he was struck sixteen more times.

  Chapter Nine

  TWO WORDS BUZZED AROUND Keggers that night: conspiracy and confession.

  Because it had good prices and because it was in the basement of our building, right across from the subway, Keggers was the ANN hangout. Open a bar near a network or newspaper and you can make a fortune. Journalists like to unwind, they like to drink, and they leave big tips.

  Keggers catered to us by papering the walls with facsimiles of historic newspaper editions (the ladies’ room was done completely in Women Get the Vote! editions of the New York Telegraph). Behind the bar were caricatures of ANN personalities and executives (not always mutually exclusive nouns), including my caricature, with my overlarge mouth. If we didn’t already feel at home, the bartender always knew our drinks, and the lighting was kept low and flattering.

  Keggers was where Burke wanted to meet me, presumably because he could stop by the Gotham Salon offices and see Amy on his way to or from meeting me, or maybe so he could cultivate a few sources. However, Burke was not there when I arrived, which was unusual. He was an early person. I, on the other hand, am a late person.

  A Willie Dixon blues song was playing on the jukebox when I walked in. The regulars were all there. By the door, a table of senior assignment desk guys were loudly discussing the possible conspiracy against ANN, which preempted their usual war stories: Khe Sanh, Dhahran, Sarajevo. Bullets, booze, broads. Dallas ’63, I drank with Ruby. I’d heard these stories a hundred times, and so had they, but they didn’t seem to mind the repetition, lubricated as it was by steady glasses of sour mash sippin’.

  Louis Levin and a bunch of writers were sitting together in the back, trapped by Turk Hammermill, who was probably the only person not discussing conspiracies and confessions. Louis saw me and waved at me, signaling me to come over. I shook my head—no way—and went to talk to Mark O’Malley.

  O’Malley, a financial reporter who once advised me to “think geriatric” in my investments, had a theory that fit his special area of expertise. Jackson had taken the company public in the early eighties to raise cash, but the only way he could get investors to buy into h
is dreams, which seemed farfetched and quixotic back then, was to give them forty-one percent, with another thirty percent given in royal grants, i.e., stock options, to top employees. So Jackson, chairman of the board, held just twenty-nine percent of the stock, hardly a controlling interest.

  Of course, that was never a problem for Jackson. He controlled his stockholders, a disproportionate number of them wealthy feminist widows, with charm. And they were very loyal. Their loyalty increased as JBS took off and the profits rolled in. That loyalty helped fight off takeover attempts.

  But everyone has a price and the disloyalty price on the stock was believed to be $50. Fifty bucks, and the devoted suffragettes would hitch up their petticoats and run for the highest bidder. At the moment, it was listed on the NYSE at about 28½. It seemed safe as long as we weren’t ruined by scandal and stockholder panic, Mark asserted, before taking his drink and his theory to another group.

  Eric Slansky was at the bar. I took a seat between Dillon Flinder and Eric and ordered a lemon Stoly martini from Mickey, the barman.

  “Hi,” Eric said, flashing his pale blues at me. “I was hoping you’d be here tonight.”

  I suddenly felt a blush was imminent and I turned away from him, not wanting to reveal myself to him that way, not at this stage of the game.

  “Hey, Dillon,” I said. “Did I interrupt a heavy conversation here?”

  “No,” he said. “We were discussing the line of people who stood outside Dunbar’s office today, waiting to make confession.”

  “Hell, his memo worked! Who was there?”

  Eric jumped in. “According to my sources, about six people spoke to Dunbar after Joanne’s presser, including Mark O’Malley and Solange Stevenson.”

  “Solange? What could she possibly have left to confess?” Dillon asked, in his class of ’55 Hahvahd accent. Dillon Flinder was a second-string medical correspondent who sometimes drank with me at Keggers. “Now me, I could give Dunbar a confession that would be worth his while.”

  He laughed. Dillon was corrupt, dissolute, and unrepentant. Get a few drinks in him and he’d tell you all kinds of scandalous stuff about people, mainly himself, and would be completely unremorseful for his drunken confessions the next time he saw you. He considered himself a true scientist and had an excessive interest in sexual science and an unhealthy interest in botany.

  Once over drinks at Keggers he told me that in pursuit of the perfect sexual experience he had drilled a hole in a watermelon and then made love to it—his words, made love to it. How was it? I asked. I shouldn’t have refrigerated it first, he said.

  “You know what Mark O’Malley has to confess, don’t you?” Dillon asked.

  I did, but I wasn’t about to say it and confirm Dillon’s own speculation. Mark was the best-looking man at ANN, one of the smartest, one of the nicest and—ain’t it always the way, girls—he was gay. He hadn’t come out because his family didn’t approve of that sexual preference and because he felt it would hurt him on his conservative business beat. Man, it wasn’t fair, that Mark’s private life, which had no bearing on his reporting, could be forced out like this.

  I changed the subject to spare Mark’s ears from burning, and turned to Eric.

  “What do you have to confess, Eric?” I asked.

  “Want to give me something to confess?” he asked, and grinned. I felt a sudden, powerful pelvic twinge. I hated that he could affect me this way. I said nothing.

  “Well, I don’t have to confess anyway,” he said. “Obviously, whoever is trying to discredit ANN is gunning for on-air people. They’re going after the most visible symbols of the network’s credibility, its reporters and anchors. Nobody knows just who, though. Was every on-air person investigated, or just some? By the way, did you get that note I dropped off for you?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. “How did you get hold of it?”

  “I saw Gil Jerome in the Xerox room. He’d thrown that copy out to get one of better quality. After he left, I fished it out of the trash.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  I saw Burke’s head above the crowd as he squeezed through towards me. When he finally made it, he said, “Sorry I’m late. I had to wait for Amy to bring me your keys. I’d forgotten where I put them. I’d forgotten I even had them.”

  “But you brought them?” I said. Eric’s arm moved across the bar behind me, protectively. Burke looked down at Eric’s arm and then back up at me without reacting. Boys, boys.

  “Yeah,” he said. He pulled them out and dangled them in front of me. When I reached for them, he snatched them away.

  “How mature,” I said.

  “First, I need to talk to you. Privately,” he said.

  I looked at Eric. He looked at Burke suspiciously.

  “You want me to wait for you, Robin?” he said.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Eric plunked his money on the bar for Mickey and slid off his stool. “See you tomorrow then,” he said, and kissed me full on the lips, quickly, before he left.

  Burke said nothing about the kiss as he led me towards the back. We passed Madri Michaels, who saw Burke and me together and cooed, “Way to go, Robin!”

  “No, no, it’s not what you think,” I said.

  Madri’s assumption that this was a reconciliation pissed me off because I’m not the type of woman who would take a man back that easily. No, if Burke wanted back in my bed now, he’d have to perform feats that would make the twelve labors of Hercules look like child’s play.

  “Sure, sure,” Madri said, unconvinced. The rumor of our reconciliation would be circulating as soon as I left her sight—and she was Amy’s good buddy. Fuck it, I thought, as we moved past her, into a booth papered with Dewey Wins headlines. We sat beneath a fake green and orange Tiffany lamp. A waitress came over and gave us menus.

  “Have you eaten?” Burke asked me.

  “No.” I glanced at the menu quickly. I ordered a chili burger and a double lemon Stoly martini and Burke ordered the salad platter and an obscure local beer.

  When the waitress left, Burke started rearranging the condiments on the table, aligning the ketchup, sugar, and napkin dispenser, placing the salt and pepper in front of them in perfect symmetry, and putting the small bottle of Tabasco right in front of the salt and pepper. Then he straightened his paper place mat and moved the fork from the right side to the left, lining it up at a perfect ninety-degree angle from the table edge.

  Watching him do this, I felt my chest constrict with a familiar tension. “Do you have to do that?” I asked, irritated. “It’s so anal.”

  “Do what?”

  “Straighten the table.”

  “Did I do that?” he asked innocently. Ah yes. When you’re married long enough, you can annoy each other without even being conscious of it.

  “Forget it. So what do you want to talk about?” I asked.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “I can’t believe that is what you want to talk about, but since you asked: She has her good days and her bad days. Her bad days are real bad.”

  “Does she still believe she’s the queen of England?”

  “She never believed she was the queen of England, Burke. She believes she ought to be.”

  One of my mother’s delusions of grandeur involved her belief that her mother had mated illicitly with King George VI during a royal visit to the States that coincidentally took place nine months before my mother’s birth. My father, bless his heart, loved her despite this cracked view, and convinced her of the need for discretion. But occasionally, when she felt she wasn’t getting the respect she deserved, she would announce her alleged parentage to any and all. This often happened during disputes with Safeway checkers and once with a Woolworth fitting-room attendant, who curtly told my mother she didn’t care if she was the queen of bloody Sheba, she still couldn’t take more than three items into the fitting room.

  “She has some good days, though?” Burke prompted.

  “When she takes
her drugs she’s fine, except for a few minor lapses. I mean, she talks about my father like he’s still alive. I hate to call her because she’ll say, ‘Let me get your father. He’ll want to say hi,’ and she’ll leave me hanging there indefinitely while she looks for my dead dad. The long-distance bills are hell. She stills asks about you all the time. Well, she calls you Frank for some reason, but she means you. So—what is it you really want?”

  “Robin, word on the street is Griff turned some kind of information over to you the night he was killed. What can you tell me about it?”

  Word on the street. Burke liked to talk as though he were Hildy Johnson, as though he were plugged into every waterfront bar and hood hangout in the city.

  “They say lots of things on the street. Not all of them are true. Who told you Griff turned info over to me?”

  “Someone saw a guy fitting his description handing you something during the party.”

  “Who?”

  “A source,” he said. “Then Joanne said he threatened to turn info on her over to another reporter, and I put two and two together …”

  The waitress brought our food and drinks. I bit into my burger.

  “Seriously, can you tell me what he gave you?”

  I had a mouth full of food, so no, I couldn’t tell him just then. I purposely chewed very slowly, making him wait, and then I said, “If I knew, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you, Burke. We’re rivals now.” I emptied my martini and waved at the waitress to bring me another.

  We’d met on a story, Burke and I, the murder trial of a mobster named Lonnie Katz who was believed to have killed a dozen men with no penalty, but got in hot water when he killed a woman. A woman he was married to at the time. A woman with a suspicious mother. When Lonnie tried to buy his mother-in-law’s silence with a bookmaking concession, Ma turned state’s evidence and sent Lonnie away.