Nice Girls Finish Last (11 page)

To make up for these shortcomings, I had to do a lot more work, and I did, because it was worth it just to have her around for comic relief and to harass Jerry, since I couldn't, due to my new Positive Mental Attitude.

“Someone told me to say hi to you. Who was it? Oh, Howard Gollis,” Tamayo said.

“He's insane.”

She gave me a pot-calling-the-kettle-black look.

“He's a creative personality,” she said finally. “He goes to the edge. You thought it was attractive when you saw him perform.”

She was right. When I saw him the first time, when I'd gone to see Tamayo perform at the Duplex, I thought he was very sexy, dark, handsome, and funny. Edgy. Lenny Bruce meets Mel Blanc with a soupçon of Leonard Cohen. His brand of humor was really out there, sick but very funny. More importantly, he was the first man I'd been sexually attracted to since Eric.

“You
begged
me to introduce you,” Tamayo reminded me.

Again, she spoke the truth. I had begged her, and she had pointed out that he was a nutcase and I was a nutcase and we were both very vulnerable at the moment because of failed relationships and maybe we should steer clear of each other for the sake of innocent bystanders like herself.

So I begged her some more, and she introduced us. The first two dates were like a trip to Coney Island. Howard was really funny, we really hit it off. The third date he had a Fear of Intimacy attack. On the fourth date, we almost had sex, things went wrong, and the bloom was off the rose.

“I don't want to talk about Howard Gollis. He's history. What are you working on?” I said.

“The nomination forms for the Dumb-ass Foundation Awards.”

“Dundas Foundation,” I corrected.

“If Jerry's up for one, I stand by my pronunciation,” she said. “He told me today not to bring my personal problems into the office. So I told him he had a few personal problems too, but nothing ten large lesbians with baseball bats couldn't handle. That's no idle threat, because you actually know ten large lesbians with baseball bats, don't you?”

“Indeed I do,” I said.

You can find them in my Rolodex cross-indexed under Lesbian Justice and Vigilantism—Gays & Lesbians.

“Jerry's worse than that jackass Yamamoto I worked for on the Japanese game show,” Tamayo said.

For someone in her mid-twenties, Tamayo had had quite a long and varied career. Before going to work for ANN in Tokyo, which had led to the job in New York, she had worked for a sleazy Japanese TV program called
Amazing True Stories.
They did features like “The True Living Gold Snake.” Tamayo's job, as she summed it up, was “to paint the snake gold.” Sometimes, when Jerry asked us to do something journalistically dubious, we would turn to each other and say, “It's time to paint the snake.”

Before
Amazing True Stories
she had been a prize hostess for a Japanese game show she referred to as
Humiliate Me for Pennies.
What it entailed, I wasn't sure, but she once said that at ANN she finally had a job that didn't involve live tree slugs, styptic pencil, or welding glass.

Humiliate Me for Pennies.
Exactly how was Special Reports different?

Just as she was about to leave my office, she turned around and said, “Did I mention that Bianca called, twice?”

“I'll call her.”

“Call her now. It sounded urgent.”

When I called Bianca back, she said, “Can you meet me? I'd like to talk to you.”

“We can talk now on the phone.”

“Oh, now's not a good time. It has to be done in person.”

“Oh, all right,” I said.

“Ladies' room near Sports, five minutes,” she said, and hung up abruptly, without good-byes.

Bianca was waiting, and as soon as I got there she yanked me inside.

“What—” I started to say but she clasped one hand over my mouth.

“Ssssh,” she said.

Bianca, blond and blue-eyed with a Varga girl figure, wasn't a bad news reader, although her appeal was perhaps best summed up by Dillon Flinder's involuntary comment, made somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, “That mouth! Oh God, that mouth.” She had a great mouth—bee-stung, I think they call it—and she didn't require collagen to maintain it.

I'd already spent a considerable part of my day hiding out in bathrooms, including the ghost of a bathroom we now knew as Special Reports. Quietly, I watched as Bianca checked all the stalls to make sure we were alone. It was all pretty cloak-and-dagger, but I was nonchalant about it. Cloak-and-dagger was getting to be the normal atmosphere around ANN. Because I'm a tad self-absorbed and figure everything that happens somehow relates to me, I figured Bianca was acting strange because she'd heard something about my fate in the impending shakeup.

“Robin, isn't it awful about Dr. Kanengiser?” Bianca said finally, having ensured we were completely alone.

“You saw Dr. Kanengiser too?”

“Yeah. I referred you to him. A couple of months ago.”

“You did?”

“Sure, when you and Tamayo and I had lunch with Solange and Susan Brave.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Yeah. Do you mind if I smoke? I mean, you wouldn't tell, would you?”

“No.” I wasn't the type to call up the human resources office anonymously and rat on someone for smoking, despite HR's encouragement to snitch. HR had even set up a twenty-four-hour line you could call if you saw someone smoking at work, out on the street, even at a party after hours.

Bianca climbed atop the vanity and disabled the smoke alarm above the mirrors before peeling off her nicotine patch and lighting a cigarette.

“You wouldn't believe how hard it is to sneak a smoke when you've got a bodyguard shadowing you.”

“Who?”

“Hector.”

“Hector?”

“Pete's worried that one of my … fans is on his way to New York, so he assigned Hector to follow me around when I'm not on air. Hector is driving me crazy.”

“Is that the reason for the cloak-and-dagger?”

She didn't answer that. “Robin, I want you to promise me that you won't tell anyone I saw Kanengiser.”

“Why?”

“I went to him to have something embarrassing treated and I just don't want it to get around this rumor mill. Or worse even, into the newspapers.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I don't want Pete to know …”

Bianca was dating our security chief, Pete Huculak. Before settling into a steady relationship with Pete, she'd dated a lot of guys at ANN, including my cameraman, Mike. I mean, I'd dated a lot within the company too and she and I had dated a few of the same guys, but she'd dated more of them and much more seriously than I had. While I dated randomly and without any real relationship goals, she was a woman with a mission: Find a boyfriend. She was the type who always had to have a boyfriend. Once she told me she just felt safer with a man in her life.

It was understandable. In the last year she had leapt up the media-market ladder from a small station in her hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a medium station in Cincinnati and then to ANN in New York. As Cincinnati had seemed a big, wild city to her, she'd naturally had some trouble adjusting to New York, so it was easy to see the attraction of a big, strong, take-charge kind of guy like Pete, who made her feel safe.

“He's old-fashioned and he wouldn't be very understanding about my … not that it's anything serious … I mean, it was cured before Pete and I … consummated,” she said, with an odd note in her voice. The last time I had heard that coy, coded tone was when Dolores Savoy came up to me in the hallway of Hummer High School and asked for a tampon by whispering, “My friend just came to visit and she forgot her luggage. Do you have any?”

It was such a strain for Bianca, trying to be delicate about whatever it was she'd had treated, while at the same time trying to communicate her distress. Bianca seemed like a real nice young woman, and she could be very witty, but she was weird about sex and her own body. I mean if you can't talk about it openly with another woman in the ladies' room …

“I won't say anything,” I said.

“I heard you were doing a special report on it, so I wanted to be sure.”

“We're not trying to expose his patients,” I said. Not as long as we had an even sleazier angle to exploit.

“Good,” she said. “I know I can trust you.”

She pulled a piece of paper from her purse and said, “You can't have this, you can only look at it. I think it might help you with your story.”

But she didn't hand it over right away.

“I noticed this last night, as I was going through my medical records,” she said. “I wanted to get rid of any traces of Kanengiser, because of Pete …”

Now she gave me the document, an insurance summary from our employee benefits department, showing a summary of her medical expenses for the first quarter of the year.

“Please note I was billed for six visits,” she said.

“Noted.”

“I only saw him three times.”

“Wow. Bookkeeping error?”

“Maybe. But I thought it might mean something. I wanted you to have the tip.”

“That's swell of you. Thanks.”

“You think the tabloids will get hold of my name in this murder business?” she asked. “You know, ‘Gynecologist to TV News Star Killed'?”

“The cops have sealed his files, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Who else saw him?”

“I don't know. I referred him to you … I don't really know of anyone else. But he was in the building, and he saw patients evenings, so it wouldn't surprise me if other women here saw him …”

“What do you know about Kanengiser?”

“Not much.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Two weeks ago, just for a follow-up.”

“So you didn't see him the night he was killed?”

“No. I was anchoring all night.”

“Did you date Kanengiser?”

“No, of course not. Did you?” she asked.

“No. I hardly knew him at all. You knew him a bit better. What do you think about this S&M connection?”

“I didn't get that vibe off him at all,” she said. “But God, in New York, you never know, do you? A guy seems like a nice, normal professional, and he turns out to be into whips and chains. I've been on more strange dates with more strange guys in the short time I've been in New York …”

“In New York's defense, I've been on some weird dates too, but not all of them were native New Yorkers.”

“Speaking of that, I hear you're going out with Fenn Corker,” Bianca said, blowing a smoke ring in a way that would give Dillon Flinder a coronary.

“Who told you that?”

“He did.”

“Why?”

“Oh, no reason. It just came up when I spoke to him on the phone last week,” she said. She turned on the tap and ran her cigarette under it, then pitched it into the trash.

The PA system crackled. She was being paged.

“My master's voice. Gotta run. Thanks for keeping this quiet,” Bianca said.

It wasn't much to go on, but it might lead this story away from S&M into something more prosaic, like an insurance scam, something boring that might convince Jerry to drop it altogether.

9

I
caught Cyndi in employee benefits just as she was about to leave for the day. After she told me tersely that all benefits information was confidential, I said, “I'm reporting a possible rip-off to you. I'm helping you out. You don't have to tell me who he saw or why. All you have to do is check to see if other Jackson employees saw this guy, and if he was double-billing them too. All I need to know is yes or no.”

“Oh, all right. I'll get back to you tomorrow.”

“You can't do a quick search and beep me when …”

“Hey, I'm not one of you news moonies,” she said. “I'm overworked, underpaid, and it's quitting time.”

Quitting time,
two words that did more for my state of mind than all the philosophy in the world. Time to put our work away and resume our real lives. There were places to go, people to see. Me, I was meeting Mike, Jim, and Claire at Keggers, the tacky but unassuming bar-restaurant-refuge in the basement of the JBS building.

Originally, Claire had wanted to meet at one of her noisy, twenty-something hangouts, but the older I get the less I like those places. Unless you're in full mating mode and the place is full of eligible men your own age, loud, crowded clubs are kind of a drag. You have to shout to have a conversation, people are always jostling past you, and you end up doing shots at the bar with some guy young enough to be your son (in one of those backward child-bride countries).

It had been over a month since I'd seen Claire Thibodeaux, longer since we'd been able to get together for more than five minutes, although we talked pretty regularly on the phone. She'd flown in from D.C. the day before to attend meetings and an all-star brunch on Saturday with Georgia Jack Jackson (to which I had not been invited). Her meeting that day was running late, fueling all sorts of speculation.

While I waited for her, Mike and Jim kept me company at a table near the bar and we had a wide-ranging discussion on male and female sexuality that began when Jim said that Kanengiser was right about one thing: Men had a much stronger sex drive than women.

I had to straighten him out.

“Women have strong sex drives too, I mean, who in their right mind doesn't like orgasms, and as many as possible? But we have fewer outlets and more penalties. That's why we're so pissed off.”

“Still celibate?” Mike said to me, sympathetically.

“Well, yeah.”

“See, most men would never be able to handle months of celibacy.”

“It's not like I haven't been trying, Mike. I've been dating. But something always happens that makes me not want to have sex with my dates. That's the discrimination factor.”