Nice Girls Finish Last (23 page)

“Anyway, I'm glad you're here,” Louis said. “I have treats galore for you, little girl. Wanna see what I did with your obit?”

He pulled it out of his drawer and popped it into the tape player at his desk.

ANN keeps obits on file for various famous people and ANN's own on-air personalities, of which I am one. They're now updated four times a year, and the updated script is stored in the computer, so that if someone famous dies unexpectedly, the script can be scanned to make sure it is up to date while the tape is run to playback to air as soon as possible.

The problem is, the script in the computer doesn't match the taped obit of Robin Jean Hudson, girl reporter. Louis and I had enlisted people in graphics and in effects to make a fake obit that showed me, dressed like a vamp in a stunning red dress and matching high heels, in a bunch of different historical scenes, à la
Zelig
or
Forrest Gump.
If I died suddenly, the world would see me advising Kennedy, climbing Mount Everest, filling in for Judge Ito, and skating around Madison Square Garden with the Stanley Cup.

“Looks the same to me,” I said as I watched.

“It's coming up,” he said. “Remember when Kim Il Sung died? The footage of all the thousands of grief-stricken Koreans prostrate before billboard-size photos of the Great Leader?”

“You put my picture up instead of Kim Il Sung's! It's brilliant, Louis. I can't wait until I die. Thanks. Have you heard anything about the reshuffle, by the way?”

“Everyone knows Joanne is going to Paris and Claire is going to Washington, Rappaport to
Perspective,
Madri to PR. Other than that, anything could happen. Sure you don't want pizza?”

“No, as soon as that stupid tape is on Jerry's desk, I'm going home,” I said.

“Take this with you,” he said, handing me a clipping.

“You
are
full of treats today.”

“It's about a guy in England who can't turn his television off because it makes his monkey crazy. The monkey goes ballistic and starts tearing people's hair out.”

“I know people like that.”

“‘It makes my monkey crazy,' I like that phrase,” Louis said.

He yelled at an indolent PA who was leaning on a pod flirting with a writer. “Hey, don't lean on the furniture,” he said. “It makes my monkey crazy.”

“That doesn't make sense,” I said.

“It makes more sense than ‘It gets my goat,'” Louis reasoned.

“If the viewing public knew what high-caliber philosophical questions occupy the minds of the omnipotent news media …”

“The viewing public,” Louis said, “makes my monkey crazy.”

I didn't go straight home. Because I was feeling badly about Fennell, I took a detour to Saint Vincent's.

Before I went up I bought a huge floral basket. I was still glad I hadn't kissed the pig, but I did feel bad that he'd been shot and I wanted to pay my regards, out of respect for him as a professional, if not for him as a man.

Fennell saw me and said something through his broken, wired jaw. It sounded like “Uunnh. Ee khet arr arrerz.”

Poor Fennell. His face was swollen and bruised and encased in a wire grid.

“I can't understand you,” I said, putting the floral basket down on his bedside table.

His eyes grew wide. He wanted something from me. Suddenly, he reached up and grabbed me by the coat lapels, pulling me back down toward his face. I thought he was going to try to kiss me again, maybe try to tongue me through the wire grid, but he didn't. Instead, he sneezed all over me.

Then he screamed in pain from having to sneeze through a broken, wired jaw. Then he sneezed again. Followed by yet another scream of pain.

“Aiii ayyeryic!” he managed to shriek between sneezes and cries of agony.

Sneeze, scream. The nurse came in.

“Omigod,” she said, rushing over. “Who brought these in here?”

“I did.”

“He's allergic to flowers,” she said, and whisked the offending bouquet away.

“I'm so sorry, Fennell,” I said. Who knew a basket of flowers could be such an object of pain and menace?

He groped for a pen and paper and wrote: “It's all your fault.”

It wasn't all my fault, but I decided to humor him, seeing as I'd just inadvertently inflicted pain upon him.

“I am really really sorry, Fennell. Really. God. It's awful.”

He scribbled something on the pad.

“That perfume you wear smells like cat piss,” he wrote.

17

“D
id you hear about Fennell?” Tamayo asked me as soon as I got in Monday morning.

“Yes.”

“Did you know he had a prosthetic knee?”

“No.”

“Did you hear a creak creak when you and he—”

“I only went out with him once and we didn't have sex.”

“Have you ever had a legless man?” she asked.

“No.” Pause. “Why? Have you?”

“No. Not yet.”

I couldn't keep up with the range of romantic options in her life. I had thought she was kidding around when she asked me once, in a voice thick with nostalgia and primal longing, if I'd ever had a glassblower. I thought she was kidding, until she showed me a picture of him, blowing a blue glass globe.

“If I met the right man, and he had no legs, it wouldn't bother me,” I said.

“I think it might turn me on,” Tamayo said. “Oh, Mike called twice.”

“I'll call him later,” I lied. I was avoiding him because I wasn't sure how to deal with sleeping with him Sunday morning. I'm notoriously bad at aftermaths.

“Jerry wants you to work up a new series on Satan now that the Kanengiser story is over.”

“The Kanengiser story isn't over.”

“I mean, now that it's over for
us.”

“Yeah, it's over for us,” I said. But I couldn't quite let go. “I just wanna make another call to Anya. Ask her about a few loose ends, like Joey Pinks, a black book—”

“Oh, that reminds me! Mistress Anya called. She wants you to call her back. Boy, did she sound pissed off.”

“She always sounds pissed off,” I said, dialing. “It's her bread and butter …”

When Anya came to the phone, she didn't bother with formalities like “Hello.”

“I ought to sue you,” was the first thing she said: You'd be surprised how many conversations I've had that began this way.

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

“About two a.m., after you left my club, an elderly woman came in with two very large men in suits and demanded to see the manager, and when I came to her, she asked me about you.”

Aunt Maureen.

“She caused a scene.”

That was certainly saying something, because it would be hard to cause a scene in a scene like that one. But Aunt Mo did it. All those sinners in one place, overripe for salvation—Aunt Mo was like Jesus with the money changers. After getting no information about me, she and her two fundamentalist Christian henchmen had stood in the dungeon room loudly exhorting people to “put some clothes on and go home to your families for heaven's sake!”

Then she gave her testimony.

I had to laugh. That's one thing about my Aunt Maureen, she takes a stand. I would expect no less from her. Another thing about my Aunt Maureen, she believes what she says. Yes, she's bigoted and fascistic and mean and has the power to reduce me to a quivering mass of low self-esteem.

But she's also a tough, big-mouthed broad who stands up for what she believes in. For that, you gotta respect her. She's no hypocrite, except in one way: Aunt Maureen has constantly preached the docility and submission of the female of the species. “Nice girls,” she repeatedly told me, “should be seen, not heard.”

Aunt Mo was never docile, never submissive, and she knew how to make herself heard.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Anya.

“I almost called the cops on her,” she said.

“I wanted to ask you about Joey Pinks,” I interrupted, trying to sneak it in.

“I told you, I don't know him,” she said, and hung up.

Aw hell. I might as well meet Aunt Mo, see if I can undo some of the damage, I thought. If she saw me, maybe she'd see I wasn't moonlighting as a call girl/witch/dominatrix/sex slave. Maybe I could explain I was researching a story.

So I called her hotel and left a message.

And she didn't call me back.

I called her again.

Again, she didn't call me back.

I called her three more times, at different times of the day. She never did call me back.

I didn't need the Empire State Building to fall on me. Aunt Maureen was now avoiding me.

But why?

As it turned out, I didn't have much time to think about it that day. I got off the phone and heard people come into the outer office.

“Our humble abode,” Jerry Spurdle said.

He wasn't alone.

“We've offered Jerry new offices, but he says he's happy with this. Doesn't need much. Wastes no resources,” Georgia Jack Jackson was saying to someone.

My door opened.

“This is the reporter's office,” Jerry said, and Jack Jackson and Dave Kona, the supercilious pip-squeak who was after my job, came in.

“Miss Hudson,” Jack said, smiling. “You still work here?”

Was he kidding? It was hard to tell with Jack. Even given the fact Jackson never watched the crap we put on the air, I figured he'd know I still worked there. This was a bad sign.

“Yes sir,” I said.

This was only the fourth time the Great Man had spoken to me. The first time was when I was a young newswriter and still smoked, and he wandered into the newsroom after midnight and caught me smoking at my typewriter.

“Did they change the rules about smoking in the newsroom?” he asked.

“No sir,” I said.

“Then don't smoke,” he said, and strode away.

Once, he saw me in the hallway and said, “Hello, sweetheart.” Yet another time, he complimented me on my dress at a company shindig, just before I dropped a plate of lasagna down the front of it. What a fine impression I'd been making.

“Robin is the reporter working on the Kanengiser story,” Jerry said. “I should say she
was
working on it.”

“Jerry and I have been talking about some interesting changes in your unit,” Jack said, slapping his right arm around Jerry's shoulder paternally. For some reason, he seemed to have genuine affection for Jerry.

“Oh yes?” I said.

“The research shows viewers are getting turned off by so much sex and sensationalism, that they want a little more ‘good news,'” Jackson said. “Jerry's completely in sync with me on this one. Has some ideas about blind tap dancers, a free clinic on Twenty-fourth Street, some welfare mothers who … What did they do?”

“They formed a baby-sitting cooperative with the help of a social worker so they could all go back to school,” Jerry said, avoiding my eyes.

Actually, there was more to it than that. They shared a group house, shared all the chores, pooled their food aid, and bought healthy foods in bulk. Three of the six women in the experiment were off welfare, and two others were just about to get their GEDs. I know, because I wrote up the story proposal.

“Maybe you can come up with a few ideas too, Robin,” Jerry said. Our eyes locked. He was challenging me to say something.

Oh, what I wouldn't have given just then for an eighteen-pound turtle named Henri.

Around five p.m., when I was reeling from my topsy-turvy day, Mike wandered in, holding a videotape.

Okay, I thought. I'll just act like nothing happened Sunday morning, make a joke about it if he brings it up. It isn't that I didn't like the guy, you understand. It's just I didn't want him to assume I expected more from him and for him to then get defensive about it. My third date with Howard Gollis, he abruptly gave me a completely unsolicited speech about what a freedom-loving guy he was and how he wasn't ready to see anyone exclusively. Well, I hadn't asked him to. And that had been before our ill-fated attempt at sex.

“Hello, Robin,” Mike said. “That was fun the other night, wasn't it?”

He smiled in a very nice way.

“Yeah,” I said.

He said no more about it.

“Sorry I didn't get this to you sooner, but I had to stop off at security.”

“Why?”

“Oh, someone took a shot at me last night. Would have got me, but I hit the sidewalk in time to duck the shot. Sixth sense, you know, from all the wars.”

“That's odd. Do they think it's the sniper?”

“Yeah. Unlike Reb, I recovered the bullet, so once they finish the ballistics testing, they'll know for sure.”

“Did you see the guy?”

“Fleetingly. A flash of green, and then all I saw was the gray of the sidewalk.”

“I thought he only shot at people who were on the air. Hmm. Maybe it
is
someone with a grudge against the company and maybe it is connected … but then … How would Anya's figure into it? See, Mike. This is what I mean. There are too many guns around, and too many of the wrong people have them.”

“I'm glad I have one. I only wish I'd got a shot off at the guy who shot at me. Let's look at the tape,” he said, clicking the remote control and starting the video.

“I saw the tape yesterday and you're right. Charles was twitchy. But I don't think it's—”

“I took shots of two different shoots, then did a split image of the two times we shot ‘Charles.'”

I looked at the monitor. The second Charles was a little longer in the torso and a bit wider around the waist than the first Charles, but not so much that you would notice without seeing them side by side.

“See the front right paw … hand, on the first Charles,” Mike said, freezing the frame and zooming in.

There was a thick red scar on his very white hand, one conspicuously absent from the second Charles. I hadn't noticed it before.