Nice Girls Finish Last (14 page)

“They came by tonight to see you. One right after another.”

“To see Sally,” I corrected. Sally, the witch, did psychic readings out of her apartment and did a brisk business with the demimonde. Young dog-collared rockers and their stripper girlfriends made up a big part of her client base.

“That woman put a curse on me,” Mrs. Ramirez said, accusingly, as though I had something to do with it. Suddenly, she raised her cane.

Instinctively, I put a hand to my forehead to protect the bandaged lump where Reb had beaned me.

“Hit me,” I warned her. “And
I'll
put a curse on you.”

Just then, the mysterious, and insanely handsome, guitar-playing man who lived upstairs came around the hallway corner. We had eye contact for one suspended-outside-time moment and then he was out the door and the spell was broken. The guitar-playing man had moved in two weeks earlier, after Mr. Rybynski passed away. As there was no name on the mailbox and the super was in the hospital, I didn't know who he was. I could have asked the mysterious man himself, but we weren't yet on speaking terms. About all I knew was that he played the guitar, was about six feet tall and forty-ish, and was really handsome in an offbeat, kind of scary way, with long brown hair, intense brown eyes, and sharp, angular features.

And I knew I liked him.

It was that fabulous eye contact that made me so sure I liked him. It was intense. I mean, really intense, like a cold wind blowing across the moor. I had to force myself not to look back at him. One time I even caught myself involuntarily mouthing the word “hello” at him, and, simultaneously, he mouthed the word back.

Electrifying. Yet, despite my reputation for speaking without thinking, for some reason I couldn't bring myself to speak to him, maybe because of the flashing red lights and alarm bells that went off in the back of my head. Maybe because I was sure I had seen him somewhere before under unpleasant circumstances and until I figured out when and where, I didn't want to talk to him.

As soon as he was gone, I realized that he had probably heard me arguing with Mrs. Ramirez about whores and curses. What flattering picture of me would he cobble together based on that little exchange, not to mention the bandage on my forehead and my disheveled demeanor?

“I saw them, transvestites and criminals coming by all evening,” Mrs. Ramirez continued. “And your aunt saw them too.”

“My aunt?”

“Your Aunt Maureen. Such a good lady. Too bad you don't have more of that blood.”

“My aunt was here?”

Mrs. Ramirez and Aunt Mo. This is a bad combination, like the meeting of matter and antimatter. As I've mentioned, Mrs. Ramirez erroneously believes that I am the Whore of Babylon, that my apartment is a nest of perverts awash in unsafe bodily fluids, and she insists on
telling
everyone she runs into about my immoral lifestyle.

And Aunt Mo insists on
believing
everything bad she hears about me.

I was being doubly menaced by evil old women. Two more and it was the apocalypse.

By this time, Louise Bryant was growling testily in her carrier, anxious for her dinner. I often accused her of letting success go to her head, but the truth is, Louise Bryant had always been arrogant and aristocratic, half pugilist, half princess, something I admire in an alley-bred cat.

Señor growled back at her and strained at his leash. I had half a mind to let Louise out of her carrier, as I figured she could take this anorexic gopher in a fair fight. She'd whip his ass. But Señor had a cane-wielding, cat-hating old woman on his side, so it wouldn't be a fair fight.

“Excuse us,” I said, as politely as possible, and tried to push past her before she blocked my way with her cane. The woman was persistent and it took all my powers of evasion to avoid kicking the shit out of her in self-defense.

Don't get me wrong. I have a pretty firm policy about not beating the crap out of little old ladies. But in our ten years as neighbors, she'd landed a few blows with that hard oak cane of hers, and I'd had the stitches to prove it. One of these days, I was afraid, she was going to rap my head and I was going to snap.

Today might be that day, I thought.

There was only one way out, a trick I learned when I first moved to New York and was pretty innocent. Street creeps would sense my naïveté. Men were always trying to lure me into dubious situations. Pimps were always trying to recruit me.

Then I learned to scream. The moment I sensed a guy posed a threat, the very second I realized it, I'd turn, look at him, and abruptly scream like a demon from Hell, “Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaagh! Aaaaaagh!,” scaring the shit out of him. Later, I refined it by looking just past him and screaming. He'd always look behind him, and I'd run away. It was a variation on an old Bob Hope gag.

So I looked beyond Mrs. Ramirez and screamed. Naturally, she turned to see what I was screaming at, and when she did I took off for the stairwell, running a whole flight of stairs with the loudly complaining Louise Bryant thumping in her carrier, before I felt I was out of the old bat's reach.

It took a lot out of me, but boy, that scream felt good.

“There has to be an easier way to live one's life,” I said to Louise. I should move to a quieter neighborhood, I thought. I should get into another line of work.

Outside my apartment door I found a basket and a note left by Aunt Mo. The note said, “Hate the Sin, but Love the Sinner,” which is Aunt Mo's way of saying she cares about me. The basket contained things manufactured by companies owned by Christian televangelist and takeover king Paul Mangecet. Aunt Mo had signed on with the Paul Mangecet people after she learned of his well-publicized attempt to take over ANN, which I considered yet another betrayal but Aunt Mo saw as a way to save me.

Aunt Mo's already high-pitched religious fervor had gotten a fresh shot of faith when she became an area sales rep for Paul Mangecet, Inc., weight-loss products, a program of high-protein shakes, vitamin supplements, prayer, and an exercise video sold under the name
Lose Weight with Jesus,
or
LWJ
.

Lose Weight with Jesus.
This conjured up all sorts of blasphemous images in my head, of Jesus in a leotard doing leg lifts and pec flexes on video. I dunno. It was my impression that Jesus loved you even if you were obese, and probably wouldn't want his name used to peddle 16.6 million bucks a year's worth of dubious weight-loss products. But Aunt Mo had made a small fortune on
LWJ,
and this had reconfirmed her long-held belief that God was on her side. Who could argue with profit?

While I knew this parcel of weight-loss products was a peace offering of sorts, I found it terribly insulting, more evidence that Aunt Mo was never going to get what I was all about, and that there was no use even trying with her.

Because I was expecting Claire to call, I eagerly played my messages as soon as I had popped my dinner and Louise's leftovers into the microwave. There was a message waiting from, I assumed, Howard Gollis.

“The last time I called, I forgot to ask: Did you enjoy the car-alarm concert the other night?” he said, as Ronald Reagan.

“What an asshole,” I said to Louise.

The next message was from Aunt Mo. It wasn't enough that she had stopped by my building, she had to call as well. I couldn't bear to listen, and fast-forwarded through it.

Aunt Mo's message ate up almost my entire answering-machine tape. The next caller, a man, was only able to say, “I know something but I couldn't tell you when I saw you so I—”

And the tape ended and began to rewind.

I didn't recognize the voice. Goddammit, I thought. I could only hope that whoever it was, he'd call back. Unless it was Howard, in which case I didn't want him to call back.

The microwave timer dinged.

I'd programmed my VCR to tape
Backstreet Affair,
which I watched while I ate dinner—a bad idea because I almost choked on my manicotti when the first report came up. This time, the show wasn't led by the Kanengiser story.

Instead,
Backstreet
led with the Congressman Dreyer story. Specifically, how Dreyer had been caught in an Upper East Side love nest with his personable secretary. They had some pretty compromising shots of the pair, thanks to long-range zoom lenses and sheer curtains. You could even tell that Dreyer wore boxer shorts with little gray elephants on them.

Wow. And all I'd been able to find was great stuff about Dreyer, what an upstanding, Dudley Do-Right kind of guy he was. Well, this made me question my own judgment. Maybe Jerry was right. Maybe I'd become too nice for my profession.

But how could that be? I'd been faking the good attitude, the positive outlook. I mean, I'd been trying, sincerely trying to be sincerely positive, but it just didn't come that naturally for me so I forced it a lot. Was I now doing it without even thinking about it?

While I was watching this, Claire called me.

“I know you're there. Pick up,” she said on my machine. I did.

“I have some news for you. Bianca just called me. Guess what?”

“There was an anchorman fight at Keggers.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about it. But that isn't what I was going to tell you. Someone took a shot at Dillon Flinder,” Claire said.

“No! When? Where?”

“It just happened, like, in the last half hour. After he left Keggers, he went home and when he was walking his dog, someone took a shot at him.”

“You're kidding!” I said. “He isn't hurt, is he?”

“No. He's shaken up. The cops are still trying to find the bullet. But he was walking on the East River promenade and the bullet may have ended up in the river.”

“Maybe there is a sniper then,” I said. “Dillon wouldn't make it up.”

“No, he wouldn't. I'm thinking of starting a pool,” Claire said. “Who will the sniper take a shot at next? I'm putting my money on Sawyer Lash.”

“Put me down for Dave Kona … no.” I stopped myself. It was bad karma to wish ill on my enemies. “Forget it. I'm supposed to have a good attitude.”

“I don't like your good attitude as much as your old bad attitude.”

“Thanks for your support. By the way, did you check your insurance …”

“Oh yeah. And you're right. I was billed twice,” she said. “What does it mean? Fraud?”

“It could … for starters,” I said.

What did it mean beyond that? That Kanengiser needed extra money? Maybe with two ex-wives, he did. Or maybe he was into drugs, or gambling. Maybe
he
was being blackmailed.

“It could be an accident, a computer glitch in Kanengiser's office,” Claire said.

“Yeah. I'll find out tomorrow.”

“That's something about the sniper, huh?” Claire said. “Well, at least he's not shooting at women.”

After I got off with her, I called Dillon to express my concern about the sniping, left a soothing message on his machine, checked myself for signs of necrotic fascitis, got some ice for the lump on my forehead, and went to bed. For a long time, I lay there, reading the Desiderata on my ceiling, trying to believe its Zen words about how the universe was unfolding as it should and all that crap. After the day I'd had, I had a hard time making myself believe it. What part in the cosmic plan decreed a sniper?

Or, for that matter, this lump on my forehead? But maybe the lump was a kind of cosmic justice. I felt I probably deserved it for mishandling the whole Reb situation. I was sure Reb had, in fact, pushed his beer into Dillon's elbow in order to provoke an incident and have it out with Dillon because Dillon and I were acting so cozy.

I should have confronted Reb, been honest, just told him I wasn't interested in going out with him again rather than making excuses or playing these juvenile avoidance games, like shielding myself with Dillon at Keggers. I mean, wasn't I as bad as Kanengiser, to a lesser degree, unable to be honest and take my chances? But after all the stuff Mike had told me about Reb, I was afraid to talk to him, to say anything that might make him snap.

Kanengiser had been afraid to be honest too, I realized. I couldn't completely condemn him. Okay, I thought his speech to that association was a huge pile of retro crap. But as for his promiscuity, his dishonesty … he wanted to screw a lot of women, but the women kept demanding emotional commitment in return and because he didn't want to hurt their feelings, he implied an emotional connection. Maybe he didn't even imply it. Maybe he just didn't go out of his way to dissuade them of the idea. Possibly, he was killed because of his dishonesty. It was also possible that, after years of living his exhausting lifestyle, he'd come clean with someone and been killed for it. People don't like honesty any more than they like dishonesty.

While Kanengiser was an extreme example, I was familiar with that cowardice in my own way. When I was honest with Howard Gollis, he had started harassing me, and I was applying the lesson learned there with Reb, by not rejecting him outright whenever he asked me out, not making any sudden moves, not doing anything to alarm him or hurt his feelings.

I was trying to be nice.

11

T
he
Star Trek
airlock doors malfunctioned the next morning, trapping me between two of them for a very long five minutes while Hector tried to free me. Finally he did. As I was leaving the airlock zone, he started walking with me.

“Hi, Robin,” he said nervously.

“Hi, Hector.”

“Between you and me,” he said.

“What? What's between you and me?”

“That doctor who was killed?”

“Yeah?”

“He had a lot of late-night visitors and we got a lot of calls about noise coming out of his office at night.”

“What kind of noise?”

“You know, um, making, you know …”

“Sex noise.”

“Yeah,” he said nervously, dropping his eyes downward.