Nice Girls Finish Last (18 page)

When I got out, Fennell said, “You certainly are the most interesting date I've been out on recently,” he said. “C'mon, let's go get a drink.”

“Oh thanks, but I've had a really long, bad day,” I said. “I just want to go home. Really.”

For “safety reasons,” Fennell
insisted
on seeing me home. Under normal circumstances I would have refused, but why take too many unnecessary risks? I told him he could drop me off on his way back to his hotel.

However, when we got to my place, Fennell didn't “drop me off.” Despite my protests, he got out with me and sent the cab away. I knew then that his intentions were not honorable.

I said, “Well, thanks for a great time. See you on TV.”

“Let me come up,” he said.

“No thanks, I'm safe now.”

“I'm not going to bite you. I thought we could talk. That's all.”

“It's late. I don't think so. But thanks for a wonderful time,” I said.

“You don't trust me!” he said, suddenly wounded. “I just thought a little company might be nice, that's all.”

What? Did I just fall off a turnip truck? I was oh too familiar with this routine, which hadn't worked on me since the last college frat party I attended in 1981. Now I was supposed to soothe this fragile artist by assuring him that I did trust him and he could come up for coffee and conversation, and then we'd get upstairs and a new cycle of coercion would begin.

“I'm tired, so thanks anyway, but I need to call it a night,” I said.

At this point, I usually got the “Think you're too good for me? Don't flatter yourself” speech from guys like this, or else a play would be made for sympathy sex by making me feel guilty for not liking him enough and thus hurting his feelings.

But Fenn tried an even more audacious approach.

As I started to turn he grabbed me, spun me around, took me in his arms, and started trying to kiss me. I say
trying
because I did not want to kiss him and I was twisting my head every which way, trying to wriggle out of his grasp, saying, “No, Fennell, stop.”

Sometimes, you can be too nice. I knew how to get rid of this guy. What I didn't know was how to get rid of him NICELY.

So he didn't stop and his big fat lickered-up mouth finally suctioned onto mine.

My arms were pinned against my sides but my hands were free. There was a car behind me and I let myself fall backward onto it, which set off the car alarm, scaring the shit out of Fennell. I took the opportunity to run up to my building. Fennell stood there screaming at me. I don't know what he was screaming, because of the car alarm and all, but I could see his mouth wide open and his eyes bulging.

Jeez. Guy buys you dinner and he thinks he's entitled to stick his tongue in your mouth, no matter how much you protest. And I didn't even want him to buy me dinner. I wanted to buy my own to head off such an incident, but Fennell had INSISTED. After arguing for ten minutes, I had let him pay the damn bill. What an asshole.

He got off lucky. In my purse was my beloved high-velocity hot glue gun, with two settings, stream and spray. I could have turned Fennell's face into a giant hot glue ball, if I wasn't such a nice person.

Damn. Why did I have to be so irresistible? One thing I can't stand is a man who won't take no for an answer. I sure had dated a lot of them recently.

As I was going in, the insanely handsome man from upstairs was going out and we had another moment of heart-stopping eye contact. He mouthed the word
hi
to me, almost shyly, and

I felt myself mouthing the word back, before rushing past him.

I just couldn't decide: Run away from him or talk to him? He gave me such a charge that I was knocked a little senseless and walked smack dab into Sally at the mailboxes.

“Whoa! Your aura!” she said, recoiling slightly.

“What's the matter with it?”

“It's really heavy-duty, really dark.”

“Sorry.”

With her white Pan-Cake makeup, black-lined eyes, bright red lipstick, and black scorpion tattoo up the back of her shaved skull, she gave off a rather dusky aura herself. I sympathized a little with pious Mrs. Ramirez. I could understand how just looking at her made the old bat's bowels seize up. You had to talk to Sally a bit before you understood she was really a very sweet person. Weird, but nice. But I suppose she was quite frightening to an elderly, blue-haired lady who hadn't had a man since 1942.

“You ought to come by for a tarot reading,” Sally said.

“I'll take a rain check,” I said. “Have you seen Gladys Kravitz lately?”

“Ramirez? She was lurking about earlier, but then she got a visitor and she's been in her parlor ever since.”

“Who was the visitor?”

“Some old woman.”

“A big scary woman, with big, bouffy silver-blond hair?”

Sally nodded. “Don Rickles in drag.”

“Listen, you didn't see me.”

“Why …”

“I'm avoiding that woman,” I said.

“Okay,” Sally said. “By the way, I found out something about the guy upstairs, the one who plays the guitar?”

“What?”

“His name is Wim Young. He's an actor or an artist.”

“How do you know? Did you talk to him?”

“I've only seen him twice and both times I was in a hurry. I asked Mrs. Fitkis on two. She's talked to him.”

Mrs. Fitkis was a feisty unrepentant Communist and the widow of a longshoreman. I'd have to stop downstairs one of these days and have tea with her, talk about the workers' struggle and the insanely handsome man above me. Once I figured out whether I really wanted to know.

“I should warn you,” Sally said. “I added up the numbers in Wim Young's address, street numbers plus apartment number. And you know what I came up with? 666.”

“Thanks, Sally.”

“It's a freebie,” she said. “I'll do a spell for you if you like.”

“No thanks.”

What Sally does, it's just her religion, her attempt to find order in the universe and feel she has some control over it through the exercise of rituals, the uttering of chants, and the adherence to certain rules, the rules of good karma in her case. Just like Aunt Mo and the pope—and, in a way, Lina and Harv—she has a faith to stanch her fears of the great unknown.

I have a glue gun.

I became very aware that Aunt Mo was on the premises. I could
feel
her there. When I got to my apartment, I carefully inserted the key, turned the lock, and pushed the door open as quietly as possible, so as not to alert Mrs. Ramirez downstairs to my presence. I took off my heels so I could pad about stocking-footed, and slowly closed the door.

Louise Bryant wanted to be fed, so I stealthily stir-fried her dinner. The doorbell rang. With measured steps, I walked to the door and peered through the spyglass peephole.

There, corseted to within an inch of circulatory disaster, was my Aunt Maureen.

“Robin, are you in there?” she shouted.

I didn't answer.

“Robin, if you're in there, let me in. I want to help you, Robin. You need help!”

I held my breath. I could hear chained doors opening down the hall to see what the commotion was.

“She's not in there, Dulcinia,” Aunt Mo said. Apparently, Mrs. Ramirez was in the hall with her. “That mustn't have been her. Well, you'd better call me that car service.”

And she left.

Anxiously, I watched out the window for the car service to come and get her, partly out of concern—it wasn't safe for an elderly woman in my neighborhood after dark and I wanted to make sure she got into the car—but mostly because I wanted to see her leave. The car alarm had stopped.

There was a man standing on the street staring up at my window. I focused my eyes. It wasn't Fennell. It was … Howard Gollis, looking very handsome, I had to say, in black jeans and de rigueur black leather jacket. And just as I realized it was him, he saw my face in the window.

“Robin! Robin!” he shouted, doing his best Brando-as-Kowalski. “Let me in.”

I turned out the lights, hoping Howard would take the hint.

Aunt Mo's car drove up.

“I'm sorry about the blindfold, okay?” he shouted.

He was referring to the time we almost had sex.

“I thought you'd be into it. I apologize!”

Aunt Maureen stepped out onto the stoop. I was afraid she'd talk to Howard and he'd mention he'd seen me in the window. I didn't want to show my face, so I was pressed against the wall, peeking out with my peripheral vision. I couldn't really see what was going on. But I heard Aunt Mo scream, “Get away from me,” and then the car door closed and the car squealed away.

I peeked out. Howard was still there, staring up at my window. This was really ridiculous. I had no doubt that if Howard ever won my heart, he would immediately feel trapped and break same heart. I saw hints of this our first four dates, and enough other stuff to make me realize he and I were not compatible in the long term.

Stuff like his next little soliloquy.

“You
shrew
! You stupid, heartless bitch! Let me in
now!
” he shouted. “You can run but you can't hide. You know you want me.”

I moved away from the window and turned up my stereo really loud—Mrs. Ramirez be damned—in order to drown him out. Then I called Pete Huculak and left a message with Bianca about Joey Pinks, watered my poison ivy, checked myself for signs of necrotic fascitis, took a Valium, and went to bed.

14

W
hen I looked out my window the next day, Saturday morning, the guillotine was back. What the hell did this mean? If Chaos Reigns was dropping it “randomly,” how come it was back at this location? It was like lightning striking twice.

“Not a good sign,” I said to Louise Bryant.

I called the ANN library and research department, and asked them to do a Lexis-Nexis on Joseph L. Pinks. They were kind of snippy with me, being overworked and underpaid, as most of us are. As a rule, I conduct my own searches, but it was Saturday, I'd had a shitty week, and I didn't feel like going in to work just to plug a name into the computer. The cops were on the job, et cetera et cetera.

Besides, I had a life that morning. I was supposed to meet Claire and Bianca for coffee. They'd both be coming from Jack Jackson's ANN All-Stars brunch, where I figured they would pick up a lot of inside info on the reshuffle.

On the way to meet Claire I bought the papers, which had lost interest in the Kanengiser murder in favor of more salacious news about the British royal family. The Joey Pinks angle wasn't covered at all, but that may have been because the cops ID'd him after the papers went to bed.

What I was most interested in at that point was the racing results from Belmont the previous day. Sure enough, Robin's Troubles had won her race by a length. Wow. Too cosmic. Of course, this racetrack triumph of Robin's Troubles could be interpreted in different ways, karmically speaking.

I place the occasional bet at OTB. I just wander in when I'm in a serendipitous mood and put five bucks on whichever long shot sounds lucky to me. One time, it was a horse named Hudson Queen, another time a horse named Eric's Chance. I had put five bucks to win on both those nags, who both trailed the pack in their respective races.

But then, I never expected them to win. I place bets just because I have a tendency to invest too much faith in omens and coincidences and stuff like that, and I need a quick, cheap reality check every now and then.

The point is, Joey Pinks bought that ticket for a reason. It sounded cosmic to him, because of what he knew or because of what he planned to do to me.

Thanks to Robin's Troubles, I got a lot of mileage out of my good news/bad news story when I met Claire and Bianca at Tofu or Not Tofu on Avenue A. This accomplished several tasks simultaneously, as it allowed me to tell, with humor and bravado, how close I'd come to danger for a story, gave me an anecdote, and let me laugh at the whole frightening thing.

“So the guy has my home address on him. And he's found dead three blocks from my building,” I said.

“That's like one of those ghost stories they told at camp,” Claire said, stopping to sip at her noncaffeinated herbal tea. “You know, the guy with the hook for a hand who escaped from an institution for the criminally insane and has been stalking young lovers and—”

“And they drive off and the hook's stuck in the car door,” Bianca finished. Hector was parked in a car across the street, keeping an eye on Bianca.

“That's pretty much how I felt when I heard about it, like the punch line to a horror story,” I said. “But it gets better. He had an OTB betting slip for a horse called Robin's Troubles, and this horse is a long shot. And it wins, pays fifty to one …”

“Joey probably thought it was his lucky day. And look what happened to him,” Claire said.

“Not much of a bright side for him,” I said. “The good news is, your horse finally came in, winning you a small fortune …”

“The bad news is, you're too dead to spend it. But you, you are so lucky.”

“I dunno. I think this guy had something to tell me.”

“Or he was coming to hurt you, Robin! The man tried to kill his mother, right?”

“Yeah, but this connects somehow to Kanengiser. I know it does.”

Bianca, who had been sitting quietly during this, flinched visibly when I mentioned Kanengiser.

“Did you call security?” Bianca asked, looking into her cup.

“Yeah. They told me I was very lucky. Pete offered me Hector as a bodyguard when he's through looking after you.”

“Maybe you should take him up on the offer,” Claire said.

“Bianca, do you feel safe with Barney Fife as your bodyguard?”

“Not really,” she said.

“See?” I said to Claire. “I could kick Hector's ass, easy. So what could some big dumb thug do to him? I could protect him better than he could protect me. But enough about Joey Pinks. Hear anything at the All-Stars brunch?”