What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Please,” Claire said. “I’ll protect you. We’ll get it to go, and bring it back here to eat. You’ll be there ten minutes at most.”

  “You go, I’ll wait here,” I said.

  “Okay. But lock your office door after me,” she said, the picture of friendly concern.

  God, how long was this going to go on? I wondered. Being babysat, escorted, watched, all for my own protection. When would I get my privacy back?

  The Ben & Jerry’s was melting through the paper bag with a sickly brown stain. I picked it up and dropped it into the trash can. “Special Delivery,” I said.

  And it hit me.

  Actually, it did a twist and a flop before it hit me. What is the opposite of Special Delivery? General Delivery. Anyone can receive their mail there. Anyone can send mail there. But you wouldn’t think to check there, would you, if you had a legitimate mailing address?

  Of course. I called the post office and got an automated recording. General Delivery was open at the James A. Farley Post Office from 9 A.M. until 1 P.M. It was twenty-five to one. I had twenty-five minutes to go crosstown and downtown—in midday New York City traffic.

  Well, I didn’t have time to wait for Claire or even to have her paged. I shoved some money into my pockets, grabbed the purse-cam, and scribbled a quick note telling Claire where I was going and when I’d get back. I taped it to her door on the fly.

  Murphy’s Law, right? I’m yards away from the security door when I run smack dab into Turk Hammermill.

  “Robin!” he said sympathetically. “How are you? Where are you going?”

  “I can’t talk right now, Turk. I have to be someplace,” I said, staccato.

  “What’s your hurry? Need a hand? Where are you going?”

  “Post office. It’s a personal errand.…”

  “Oh, I need some stamps,” he said, digging in his pocket for change. “Could you …”

  “Listen, Amy Penny was trying to defend the designated hitter rule yesterday. You need to have a word with her.”

  Escape facilitated by a little revenge, two birds, one stone. Sometimes life just works out that way.

  Without waiting for him to answer, I turned and ran out the door and up the stairs to the street. I stole another man’s cab, just as it was pulling up, by flashing my press pass and shouting, “News emergency!”

  “Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, please,” I said to the driver. “I’m in a rush.”

  “Everybody’s in such a big hurry,” the Sikh cabbie said, and chuckled. “You should take time to look around, enjoy the moment.”

  Jeez, and I thought Sikhs were martial and aggressive. What a rotten time for a stereotype to fail.

  “This is a life-and-death thing,” I said.

  “Oh sure, I know,” the driver said, inching through traffic, not seizing those miraculous traffic opportunities most cabbies do—the left-handed turn from the far right lane, making a lane where there isn’t one, skirting around traffic by driving in the oncoming lane. Fifteen thousand cabbies in New York, and I have to get the one who drives defensively.

  “It was life or death for me too, last spring,” he continued. “Triple bypass. You know, before that operation, I didn’t know how old my grandchildren were. Now I know the meaning of life.”

  Fifteen thousand cabbies in New York, and I have to get the one who speaks English. I took down his medallion number. I don’t know why. What was I going to do? Complain? Yes, Mr. Singh insisted on driving safely and being charming and wise! See that it doesn’t happen again.

  As we crept towards my destination, Mr. Singh went on and on about trees, flowers, birds, children, all that wonderful stuff until I was nauseous with anxiety. He did a long riff about the Empire State Building as we were stalled in traffic beside it.

  “Took my grandchildren up to the top a few weeks ago. Most New Yorkers don’t think to do things like that.”

  I had half a mind to jump the seat and yank the wheel away from him.

  “You must have passion in your life, and a passion for life!” he said, with gusto.

  “Yeah yeah yeah, can we cut over on Thirty-third, please.”

  He let me out right in front of the Farley Post Office, a Greco-Roman monument to the postal gods, with twenty-five steps up its broad face and twenty stone columns standing guard. Zip code 10001.

  I had seven minutes. I ran through the long, tunnel-like hall looking for the General Delivery counter. But there wasn’t one.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a security guard. “General Delivery?”

  “That’s 390 Ninth Avenue, other side of the building,” he said. “You have to go back out to get to it.”

  I ran out of the building and down Thirty-third Street. There was nothing much on this street—parking lots and the Glad Tidings Tabernacle on one side, the long granite expanse of the post office on the other. The “other side of the building” was a full block away.

  As any New Yorker can tell you, the blocks between streets are short; between avenues, long. Very long. I kicked off my shoes and ran in my stocking feet to make better time. I got to 390 Ninth just as the guard was about to lock it.

  Inside, panting, I rested against the door and put my shoes back on. There were still a few people on line. When I got to the front, I said, “I’d like to know if you have anything for Robin Hudson.”

  The guy went away to check and returned with a thick brown envelope.

  “ID,” he said, releasing the envelope only after I showed him my press pass.

  I was about to leave when an idea occurred to me and I turned back to the counter. “Can you tell me if there’s an envelope here for Larry Griff or Craig Lockmanetz?”

  “I can’t give another person’s mail to you,” he said.

  “No, I know,” I said. “I don’t want it. I just work with them and thought I’d let them know if there was mail for them. We all just transferred here from Kansas City.”

  God, I’m such a liar. But it worked. The guy went to check and there was an envelope for Lockmanetz, Griff’s alias. Maybe this was where he hid his copies too.

  I went back into the street. It was a bright winter day and I had to cup my hand over my eyes to read the postmark. It was December 31st, the day Susan had met Griff at the post office. Beautiful. He’d probably mailed it just before meeting her. If his pigeons didn’t pay up, he planned to tell me about the letter and where to pick it up. Maybe he planned to tell me even if they did pay up, as long as I paid up, one way or another.

  I tore open the envelope as I walked down Ninth Avenue towards Thirty-third. Ninth was pretty deserted. I figured I had a better chance getting a cab on Eighth.

  I pulled the sheaf of papers out halfway and began flipping through them at the top, reading the names, which were not alphabetized. I hesitated at my own report for a second, then, prioritizing, flipped past until I got to Eric Slansky, in the middle of the pile. That one I pulled out to read.

  I had hoped it wouldn’t be there.

  After scanning the boring parts, I learned that he had smoked a considerable amount of pot in college (big deal) and had a drunk and disorderly for which he was fined while on spring break in Florida (big deal).

  On Eighth Avenue, I stuck my arm up for a cab while I read Eric’s credit report, which wasn’t bad. Bad guy, good credit? His academic record was pretty good too, and for the last twelve years he’d demonstrated a “strong community service ethic” by his work with homeless children, which he had never mentioned to me.

  Gimme a break. It meant nothing. Hitler was a vegetarian who was able to tame baby deer at his Berchtesgaden retreat.

  Sure enough, as I read further, I found what I was looking for, and what I hoped I wouldn’t find, Eric’s big secret. Not a what but a who. Wynn Codwell-Slansky to be specific, his ex-wife, from whom he was divorced shortly before coming to ANN, and whom he failed to mention to me. According to Griff’s report, Wynn Codwell-Slansky was now a realtor in Chicago and refused to discus
s her ex-husband.

  “Ms. Codwell-Slansky wouldn’t take my calls, and routinely hung up on me,” Griff wrote. “I was able to get a full credit report on her, but unable to obtain any detailed personal information about her or her marriage.”

  Maybe Griff couldn’t get the information, I thought. But maybe Wynn would talk to me, another woman.

  This all made me feel kind of sick. Man, I had sex with that guy, I thought. Worse, I had great sex with him. It was sick, sick, sick. Like Pascal and Amy Penny said, the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, which was reason enough not to follow your heart if you asked me.

  A cab pulled up. It was a bright, sunny afternoon and there were people all around me. As I reached for the door handle, someone grabbed my arm and I felt a jab in my back.

  “Don’t scream. This gun has a silencer and I can shoot you and get away before anyone notices you. We’re going to get into the cab and go to your place.”

  It’s like McGravy always says, sometimes you find the truth and sometimes the truth finds you. Who knew the truth would look like Fawn Hall?

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHAT CAN SHE DO TO me here, with all these people, I wondered. But then I remembered, this is New York.

  People here don’t necessarily like to get involved with cops unless they know you personally or there’s something in it for them. She could fill me full of holes and still make a clean getaway. I mean, I heard this story about a guy who was squeezed between automatic bus doors for four blocks on a busy avenue, screaming every minute. It was in all the papers, but when he tried to sue later he couldn’t find a single witness.

  So I got into the cab and she slid in next to me.

  “Please …,” I started to say to her.

  “Ssssh,” she said nervously but sweetly, jabbing the gun harder into that tender area between my breast and my armpit and taking the envelope from me with her other hand.

  Weird thoughts went through my head. I was in a pre-apocalyptic daze. I wondered how this cabbie, who spoke little English, was going to feel later, when he found out he had driven me to my death. Or worse, how the sensitive Sikh would feel when he found out my quest really had been a life-and-death matter.

  Weird thoughts: My cat could outlive me.

  I felt paralyzed and I found it hard to breathe, like a very strong man was squeezing my lungs. My face felt numb.

  The city, which I suddenly loved, whizzed by me on all sides, like in a dream. If she killed me, I’d never eat in that restaurant or shop in that store or walk in that park or see that vista again. I’d never sleep with another cute guy. I’d never hug my mom again. The Sikh was right; you have to take time out to enjoy the world. It could be gone tomorrow.

  “My keys are at the office,” I whispered to her. I couldn’t see her eyes, hidden behind oversized sunglasses.

  “I have keys,” she said.

  Yes, that made sense too. Burke had a set of spare keys. Amy must have had them copied before he brought them to me that day I misplaced mine.

  “Claire is waiting.…”

  “Ssssh,” she said, with the hiss of a kind librarian. This was the horror of it, that the face of death was such an appealing, gentle face and it spoke in such dulcet tones.

  I couldn’t stand it but my options were limited. Amy had a gun. I didn’t have my cologne, my umbrella, my Epilady, my staple gun, my spray glue, not even a can of coffee in a plastic bag. I was completely unarmed.

  Even the purse-cam was useless, in its current position, wedged under my right arm, Amy and her gun jammed against my left. It was impossible to reach over and turn it on, and even if I could it wouldn’t do much. Nobody was talking and the lens was pointed at a Taxi Commission decal on the back of the driver’s seat.

  When the cab pulled up, Amy paid the driver and she and I left the cab as one unit, like Siamese twins. She was shaking, not a good thing. Nervous, she might accidentally pull the trigger.

  She gave me the keys, made me open the door, and made me hand them back to her. I suppose Burke had told her a thing or two about me and my array of weaponry—which explained the Epilady attack on Greg Browner’s genitals—and she didn’t trust me to hold the keys.

  We took the stairs to avoid neighbors. Now I wondered if she had planned to kill me that night we talked in my apartment, but called it off after we ran into one of my neighbors in the building. But no, she’d been wigless that night. She must have wanted to see how much I knew, feel me out, find out if Burke still had feelings for me.

  How could I get that gun, I asked myself as we climbed the dark stairs up to my floor. And, even if I did, could I shoot her?

  Knowing how it would look in the tabloids made me cautious. I was already a scumbag in their opinion, while Amy Penny was a popular television personality, Miss Congeniality, the wholesome face that graced that upscale, low-dust baby powder until her ANN contract was inked.

  On top of everything else, if I killed her, they’d find out she was pregnant, that I’d killed a pregnant woman, carrying my husband’s child. Yeah, that’d make me look real good.

  The wig and dark glasses? The tabs would probably say that Amy Penny, in her quest to be taken seriously as a journalist, had gone undercover to solve the Griff murder.

  But there was something in the envelope worth killing three people for, and that would be my defense, I realized. Because nothing Griff had found out about me, no matter how humiliating, was worth killing for.

  It was dark in the stairway—the way my landlord uses light bulbs you’d think they were made of gold—and Amy had on dark glasses.

  Her vision can’t be too good, I thought. Could I wheel around and grab the gun from her? No, she was holding the gun right to my head.

  I was trapped.

  And still I couldn’t stop thinking what the papers would say, how bad they would make me look after I was gone. Christ. The cops would find my murder scrapbooks and make a link. Amy intended to take not only my life but my reputation, what little there was left of it.

  This would push my mother off the deep end, I thought. She’d end up wandering the streets in full coronation regalia—or a reasonable facsimile, using her high school prom dress and various things found around the house—like she did after Dad died.

  This is what they call having nothing to lose.

  It was dark in the stairwell and quiet. I could hear the whirring of some kind of generator deep in the lower depths of the building.

  I didn’t lose my temper. I bided my time. When we were coming up to the fifth-floor landing, I suddenly ducked, dodged, and got behind her, wrapping my arms around her in a kind of Heimlich maneuver, purse-cam flopping at my side.

  Unfortunately, I failed to secure her gun arm, and she simply pointed the gun at me over her shoulder.

  “You can carry me up if you want. I shouldn’t be on my feet in my condition anyway. But we are going to go into your apartment,” she said, in a voice I’d never heard her use before, a cold, mean voice that made me think of nuclear winter.

  I put her down and let go.

  We came to my floor.

  At my door, she again gave me my keys and pushed her body against mine so I was crushed against the door as I unlocked it, limiting my movement.

  “Push the door open and go in,” she said. “Turn on the light.” She shut the door with her leg and nudged me into the living room. She put the envelope on a counter.

  “Put your purse down,” she said. “Slowly.”

  I followed orders. I set it down on top of the television, and as I did I nonchalantly flicked the record button on top.

  Louise Bryant rubbed against my legs, trying to get me to feed her.

  “They’re expecting me back at work,” I said. “They’ll be worried.…”

  “I want you to call in and tell them you’re depressed and sick and you’ve come home to recuperate,” she said. “If they ask you anything else, just yes and no answers and then off, you understand?”

&n
bsp; “Sure, fine,” I said. This was my chance. I’d call Claire and somehow let her know I was in jeopardy and she’d send the cavalry.

  I dialed and waited for someone to pick up, but nobody answered in Special Reports. Finally, the switchboard picked up.

  “I have a message for anyone in Special Reports, from Robin Hudson,” I said. It was hard to breathe. What could I say that would tip someone off and yet slip by Amy? “I’m at home, I’m sick and … depressed. I can’t meet Claire at Old Homestead later, so …”

  Before I could say anything else, Amy’s gloved finger depressed the phone button and broke the connection.

  “Why did you say that about meeting Claire?” she asked.

  “So she wouldn’t go there and worry,” I said.

  “What’s the Old Homestead?”

  “You know, the office, the old homestead, it’s a figure of speech.”

  And, situated conveniently in New York’s meat district, it happens to be one of the city’s oldest steak houses. You’d see the pope in a whorehouse before you’d see Claire in Old Homestead. But would Claire get the message in time?

  “Do you have paper and a pen in your purse?” she asked, heading for it.

  “No!” I said.

  She stopped.

  “In my writing desk, middle drawer.”

  “Good,” she said.

  I kept waiting for my life to flash before my eyes, but it didn’t, perhaps mercifully. My past completely vanished. It was like this moment was frozen outside time, like I was watching it instead of living it.

  I found some of my nerve. “Amy, why did you do it?” I asked in a tiny, frightened voice. “Why did you kill Griff and Browner? Why are you going to kill me?”

  She said, “I have no choice.”

  “Did Browner harass you? Were you up for a job on his show? Did he get you on at ANN? What did Griff have on you?” I was speaking very fast.