Nice Girls Finish Last (22 page)

“Can't have 'em without a lot of costly medical treatment and risk and … well, it's just not practical for me. What happened between you and your wife?”

“Oh, we grew apart. She wanted a husband who was around more, someone to really look after her seven days a week. We've been divorced five years. I've spent five years dealing with it by jumping into one war after another. I t'ink, I don't know, but I t'ink I needed a big war outside me to take my mind off de war inside me. It was takin' too great a toll on me, my daughter, my job. So I declared a unilateral peace and came to America.”

“What does your wife do?”

“She illustrates children's books.”

“I've heard it's better if you mate with someone outside news.”

“Who told you dat?”

“Claire says that. But I kinda knew that already. Relationships within the business don't fare very well, when both people are in news. Look at Elsie and Pat, Solange and Greg Browner, Reb and his ex-wife …”

“Your ex-husband is a reporter, isn't he?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened wit' you two?”

“We were good in the short term, but we had different long-range visions. I guess we grew apart too.”

“What drew you to him?”

Irish guys, most of them don't mind talking about love and romance, and they know how to do it without getting either wimpy or macho about it. Mike had a robust, healthy, slightly cynical interest in the subject, and wasn't afraid to ask questions.

“Burke is really good-looking. We met on a murder trial and we were seeing each other there every day. There was that sense of shared adventure, you know? He was looking for a little chaos and I was looking for a little order in my life. We both got a lot more of each than we bargained for.”

“Be careful what you pray for …”

He squeezed my hand. I don't know if it was the sense of danger, or the beers, or that we had worked together so closely for the last couple of months, or the way he smelled, but I felt a deep pelvic twinge when he did that. Maybe it was the fact that he was sexy without being pretty, that he had that great Irish accent, that he told great stories, or that when I looked in his eyes at that moment I saw something kind of sweet and unprotected there. I completely forgot about the twenty-seven dogs in Pakistan.

“I think it's like this guy, Phil, says. He says, he's too crazy for love and too silly to die. I think I might be like that,” I said. “I'm just tired of it all, the control games, the illusions.”

“Ah, but you never know, do you? You t'ink you've smartened up and you can't fall in love and den, whammo, some fantastic creature walks into your line of vision.”

Because I am a tad self-absorbed, I thought he was talking about me. I thought he was hitting on me because we'd been through a car chase together and had a few beers. I was about to cut the long evening short, tell him I was tired and would take a cab home, when he said, “Dere's dis great Afghan farewell. Have I told you dis before?”

“I don't think so.”

“You should know it. ‘Don't be tired.' When I want to give up the fight, I just tell myself dat. ‘Don't be tired.'”

Don't be tired. I loved that.

Maybe that's why I invited myself back to his place.

16

M
ike was still asleep when I woke up, dressed, and crept out of his Greenwich Village apartment, hungover and confused.

It was about six a.m. Sunday, a bright, bright day, and my eyes were stinging. After scanning the street to make sure there were no dark blue sedans lurking about, I pulled up the collar of my coat and began walking home.

There was almost nobody on the streets. I had a moment of déjà vu because this scene so closely resembled one in my nightmares. To wit, I wake up, and it's a beautiful day, but I'm the only person left on earth.

Oh God, I thought, I just went to bed with a man
before
our first date. That wasn't like me at all. How well did I really know this guy? Just because he's good-looking and tough and has a sense of humor …

This is always how it starts. I get close to someone through work and we end up in the sack and then we end up in some tempestuous relationship and we get our feelings hurt. I was repeating the same mistake I had made with Burke, with Eric.

Sure, the sex was good, but of course that had something to do with my long bout of celibacy. Sex, with another person, usually feels great after not having it for a while. It's like the old joke about the guy hitting himself with a hammer. When asked why he does it, he says, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

And yes, I had been the aggressor. I took full responsibility. But I had to stop getting involved with news guys, especially guys with whom I worked so closely.

I picked up
The New York Times
and hailed a cab on Sixth Avenue to take me home.

When I got home, the guillotine was still there but there was, thankfully, nobody waiting at the mailboxes. The stairway reeked of the sickly sweet smell of burning herbs and flowers. It is not wholly unpleasant, this smell, but kind of creepy and funereal. Sally was either entombing a pharaoh or casting some powerful spell, no doubt a love spell for some heartsick soul, or for herself. I held my breath to avoid getting a contact high, as about the last thing I needed at the moment was to fall in love.

There were two messages from Aunt Maureen, which I fast-forwarded through, and a message from Pete Huculak asking me to call him. His call I returned.

“I just heard from the police, they checked that license-plate number,” Pete said.

“Yeah.”

“It was a car service, hired for the day by Maureen Hudson Soparlo. Any relation?”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

Jesus, Aunt Maureen was following me. Following me, hell. The woman was stalking me. That meant she'd seen me in front of the Hotel Bastable hanging out with drug dealers, as well as going into and coming out of a sex club.

Good God. It was going to confirm for her all the wild stories she'd heard from other people.

Of course, the good news was, I wasn't being followed by a killer, I thought, just Aunt Mo. There's a bright side. Maybe.

After I fed Louise Bryant I took a long, almost scaldingly hot shower and checked myself for signs of necrotic fascitis. All I wanted to do was put on my flannel pajamas and watch
Four Weddings and a Funeral
for the thirty-seventh time. But I had to go into work and edit the stupid S&M doctor story.

Weekends were usually kind of fun at ANN. It was a blue-jean shop Saturday and Sunday, traditionally slow news days, so the atmosphere was more relaxed and playful.

Normally, the newsroom is a fine example of an orderly anarchy, with people at every pod, bodies streaming in every direction, and a lot of noise—rings and buzzes and “urgent story” alarms. But weekends were generally quiet—so quiet you could hear the soft, steady clattering of the old-fashioned Teletype machines we kept around just in case the computer system failed. And weekends were unsupervised, as the execs steered clear of the place, making it a fertile breeding ground for Nerf football games, spitball throwing, and the masterminding of pranks.

My first stop was the library, where I picked up two stories that mentioned Joey Pinks, old stories about how Joey, age thirty-four, after living quietly with his mother most of his life, had suddenly shot her.

“She was a terrible nag. You could hear her screaming all the time,” said neighbors, who went on to say that the mother had driven two husbands into early graves and one other son, Joey's half-brother, into the nuthouse long before Joey grabbed the family firearm.

Joey, on the other hand, was “a devoted son, a good boy. Dutiful. Quiet.” He was “completely distraught and remorseful about his mother's injury.”

Other people had known a slightly different Joey Pinks, who snuck out of the house after his mother was asleep to hang out in California's S&M scene, where he was sometimes a “male lifestyle-submissive,” and sometimes a “male lifestyle-dominant.”

It did have something to do with Anya's, I thought.

I looked again at the tapes Tamayo had shot, but nothing jumped out at me. I popped in the tape Mike had shot the night before and looked at the scenes of Charles the slave, which Mike had mentioned. The slave did seem twitchy, but who wouldn't be, dressed in sweat-inducing leather, leashed to a coldhearted woman with a whip?

I fast-forwarded through some of the other raw tapes, the interview with Anya. But it just didn't connect for me. All those people in masks didn't help either. For all Anya's lofty talk about her crowd being more honest about love and pain and rules than most people, how trust is important in these relationships, they certainly had their own hypocrisies, the masks, the code words, the fact that Anya couldn't trust her boyfriends beyond the length of a leash.

Anya said she'd been at the club the night Kanengiser, whom she claimed not to know, was killed. Said she'd been with Charles, as I recalled. But a man who couldn't be trusted to mean “no” and “stop” when he said them couldn't be trusted to tell the truth about where his mistress had been two nights before—especially a man who walked around on all fours like a dog to win her approval.

Now I had a new theory. Maybe Kanengiser had been walking on the wild side and got mixed up with Anya. Maybe he was one of her Werners. Maybe she found out he had a lot of other women. Maybe she got mad. Anya didn't strike me as the kind of woman who knew how to handle rejection or loss of control.

I could imagine Anya removing the handcuffs from her purse, and some change and a matchbook falling out. She took no note of it, since her hands were full, gun in one, cuffs in another. Maybe she was talking, or Kanengiser was pleading with her. And so she had unwittingly left a clue behind.

But how could I get her to admit it? She'd already denied knowing him at least twice. She had her slavering alibi.

And where was this diary, this little black book? Would Anya be in it?

Unfortunately, I did not have the time, or the authority, to look into it any further. Jerry had left a memo for me on my desk.

“Do it as an unsolved murder,” Jerry wrote. “If by some miracle it gets solved before we go to air, we'll update it on cam with a reader. So don't say anything in the script about whether it is solved or not. Just the circumstances of the death, the handcuffs, the matchbook, then straight to the undercover tape Tamayo got at Anya's. You got all those people at Anya's … use some of them …” Blah blah blah. “Gotta get this on the air tomorrow!”

Jerry wanted a script for a five-minute report faxed to him by lunchtime. When I called him, he told me “absolutely” to include the Joey Pinks story, as a corollary unsolved murder, and to speculate about the black book, but that he wanted that script by lunchtime and the edited piece on his desk by the time he came in Monday morning regardless.

“I can't do this,” I thought. Five minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but writing a five-minute report takes a lot of time and work. Of course, it didn't matter what I wrote anyway, since Jerry would just change it all and fax it back. So I pounded out a script, faxed it, waited for the changes, and then took the tapes and the script to edit.

I didn't stay for the edit. The shots were logged and the script was straightforward and, frankly, I couldn't bear to hear my voice over this story or see any more of the videotape. For me, the story is over, I thought. Let go. Move on.

After dropping off the tapes and script, I wandered into the newsroom and was surprised to see Louis Levin.

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm banking days so I can take two extra vacation days next month,” he said. “We're ordering pizza for lunch. You want in on it?”

“No thanks.”

“I heard about the dead ex-con. Pretty scary.”

“I'm not scared. I think he wanted to tell me something about this story I've been working on, but someone got to him before he could tell me.
Quel dommage.”

“Why was he coming to you?”

“Well, I'm the reporter on the story …”

“Why didn't he go to
Hard Copy
or
Backstreet Affair
and get paid for his efforts?”

“I don't know …”

“Weird,” he said.

I was still trying to puzzle that one out when Louis said, “Did you hear about Fennell?”

“What?”

“He was missing, on a bender everyone figured. But they found him at Saint Vincent's Hospital. He got kneecapped the other night.”

“Oh my God.”

“Got him in his artificial knee. Guess he should have been nicer to that last Steven Seagal movie, huh?”

“Oh, then he wasn't badly hurt.”

“Well, the knee is destroyed. He has to have a new one made. Fennell himself was actually hurt because he was pretty drunk and when the knee collapsed, he fell into a railing, broke his jaw, and was knocked unconscious. Apparently, while he was lying there, someone robbed him, took his ID, all his money.”

I didn't laugh. “Where did it happen?”

“Downtown somewhere. He was coming out of a bar.”

He must have stopped off for a drink somewhere after he left me.

“Did he see the guy?”

“No. This is one sneaky sniper,” he said. “You know the story about that knee, right?”

“No.”

“Well, I hear he lost part of that leg to mobsters in Hollywood in the sixties,” Louis said.

According to Louis, the male “talent” were so jumpy now that the sound of a car backfiring—or any similar sharp, loud noise—was enough to make a roomful of anchormen hit the deck immediately. Reb had been seen in the parking garage examining the underside of his Jeep with something that looked like an oversize dental instrument, a large metal pole with a round mirror on the end, and both he and Kerwin had asked for permission to carry sidearms at work.