Nice Girls Finish Last (27 page)

“Has he hurt you?”

“He hasn't touched me, except to put me into this contraption.”

Was Hector really Elroy Vern? It made a little sense, and lately things had been so senseless that a little went a long way. Using his position in security, Hector must have switched the tapes from the freight elevator, so nobody would see he'd gone up to twenty-seven the night Kanengiser was murdered. He had been able to switch tapes, because he worked in security. He had been able to steal my Filofax and keep tabs on me, because he worked in security.

“What else did Elroy Vern say?”

“Oh, not very much. He says he was ‘away' for five years and he watched you on television in that time and wrote you letters. He came here to find you.”

“Away where? Where was he?”

“Judging by the time I've spent with him,” Aunt Mo said, “I'd guess a mental hospital.”

“What else did he say?”

“Not much. Sometimes he just won't talk at all. He just stares at a photograph of you.”

“We have to get out of here, Aunt Mo.”

“I've tried to get out of this thingamajiggy, but I haven't been able to.”

“Is it day or night?”

“Day,” she said. “I think.”

“Aunt Mo, how did you get the Filofax? How did you end up involved in this?”

“Your neighbor, Dulcinia Ramirez, met a man outside your building, and he had this book for you and a message … Didn't you get my message? I left messages all about this on your answering machine.”

“You did?” Oops. Those must have been the messages I fast-forwarded through. “I guess my machine screwed up. I didn't get the message. What was it?”

“According to Dulcinia, your pimp was hurting your boyfriends and this man she met thought he might hurt you too. I tried to warn you. I tried to help you. But you just ignored me.”

“Why didn't you let my boss know when you saw him? He could have warned me.”

“I certainly didn't want to tell your employer all these terrible things about you. I wanted to talk to you personally.”

“Now tell me about this so-called boyfriend of mine who called you up.”

“Well, he called me at the hotel and said he was very, very concerned about you. I said I was concerned too, but that you wouldn't listen to me. We agreed to meet. That's when he knocked me out and abducted me. I'd seen him before.”

“Where?”

“One night, I saw him outside your apartment building.”

“What night was that?”

“I hardly know what day it is now, dear. It was a few days ago. There were several strange men outside your building that night. A young man shouting about a blindfold …”

Howard Gollis.

“… an older man, middle-aged with hair plugs.”

Fennell Corker.

“And Hector,” I said. “Or Elroy Vern.”

She nodded. “Now, tell me how you managed to get us into this mess,” Aunt Mo said.

It was so like her to assume that it was something I'd done that started this whole ball rolling, that at its root, the responsibility for all this lay with me.

So I gave her the whole story and tried to impress upon her that it wasn't me at fault, it was just my bad luck. But Aunt Mo didn't hear a word of it. When I was done, she said, “Robin, this is where sin and abandon lead …”

It was very disorienting to hear her voice coming out of that outfit.

“I don't need a lecture right now, Aunt Mo. All that stuff you heard about me, and saw, it's not true. I was researching a story. I was being stalked by a crazy man. There was nothing I could do, really, to prevent this.”

“You could have prevented this a long time ago, by making different choices with your life,” Aunt Mo said. “If you'd married Chuck Turner and stayed in Minnesota, instead of running off to New York and going into television, I daresay we wouldn't be sitting here dressed like minions of the devil and being held hostage by a crazy person.”

She trolleyed closer to me and put her hands over mine. “You know, dear, we may die here. So I want you to think seriously about some things. It's not too late for you to be born again,” she said. “Do it for me, so if we die, I'll die knowing you're going to be in heaven.”

Aunt Mo, she just never gives up. On one hand, it was really sweet of her to think of me. On the other, I saw this as a last-ditch effort to win our lifelong battle of wills.

I thought about how, when I was little, Aunt Mo had said to me, “Don't you want to go to heaven?” I paused, thought about it, and asked, suspiciously, “Are you going to be there?”

That's the thing. If she's right, then heaven is going to be full of people like her. Frankly, the idea of spending eternity with Aunt Mo, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oliver North, Paul Mangecet, and Phyllis Schlafly is, well, hell.

“I can't do that for you, Aunt Mo,” I said. “Can we talk about something else, other than how I've fu— … fouled up my life and yours?”

“You are so stubborn. Just have to spite me and try to pick a fight …”

“I'm not picking a fight. Why is it, if ever I disagree with you, I'm picking a fight? I'm merely defending myself.”

“Defending yourself? Against whom?”

“Against you.”

“I'm not your enemy! I'm on your side!”

This is a confrontation I have played out in my head a thousand and one times. Never in a million years would I have pictured it happening like this, however. Here we are, dressed like something out of an Anne Rice novel, pushing each other's buttons again, screaming at each other.

“What did I ever do but help you, or try to help you?” she asked.

“You found constant fault with me and you embarrassed the hell out of me—”

“Well, I had to get the hell out of you somehow.”

“This isn't the time or place to discuss this …”

“Name one time I embarrassed you.”

“What about the time I was fifteen and I came in with a boy I liked and you grabbed my face and started talking about my acne …”

“You're still holding a grudge about that?” Aunt Maureen said to me.

“There are so many times. You always saw only the worst in me, Aunt Mo,” I said. “Whenever I was feeling weak, you were there to make me feel weaker.”

“Well, your parents praised you to the heavens, and I didn't want you to get a swelled head. Your mother and father thought you could do anything. Your father thought you could be the first woman president of the United States and your mother … your mother thinks you're an English princess royal. She thinks you should be a queen. I felt they were feeding you false expectations of what a woman could expect in this world. I felt you'd be happier if you'd submit your will to God and accept your fate, accept your place as a woman. Look at you. You're not happy now.”

“I'm happy sometimes. We shouldn't be arguing right now,” I said. It's funny how she and I can get going and lose perspective. Still, I was glad I had had it out with her, glad I'd stood up to her at last.

“No, we shouldn't,” she said.

We sat in silence for a while. Whenever we'd been together before, we'd only argued, or rather, Aunt Mo had berated me and I'd listened sullenly. We didn't know how to relate to each other in any other fashion. Every conversation we'd ever had, it seemed, had degenerated quickly into a battle. Small talk wasn't really appropriate at this juncture.

For a few long minutes, we sat there, staring at each other.

“Did you know your father was a miracle baby?” she said.

“What's that?”

“Our mother had four daughters, and she and father wanted a boy, but the doctor told her she couldn't conceive any more children. But then she had your dad. A miracle baby. He was a cute baby too. When he was little, he used to follow me around like a puppy dog. And did he get into trouble! He was so curious and full of mischief.”

She told a story about when she was a teenager and one of her young suitors came to call, and Dad hid in the back of the suitor's automobile and spied on them their whole date. It was hard to imagine my dad as a kid, even harder to imagine Aunt Mo as a teenager who “sparked” with suitors in the parlor.

I remembered a photograph of Aunt Mo when she was about seventeen, in my father's family photo album. In it, she had her hair done in a very glamorous 1940s fashion—I think they call it a finger wave. Even then, she had looked like Mussolini, but a young Mussolini with the hairstyle of Veronica Lake. She was wearing shorts and a striped T-shirt and leaning on the hood of a car, almost flirtatious. There was a young man in the picture, just back from the war. It wasn't Uncle Archie.

Dad always said Aunt Mo had never been young, she was born an old woman, but I knew from that picture that there had been a glimmer of youth there, however briefly.

I asked her about the photo.

“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my oh my.”

“Who was he?”

“Truman Dirk. I almost married him.”

“Wow. Why didn't you?”

“He was shell-shocked, from World War II. He fought in the forest of Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge and it changed him. Oh, he could be wonderful though. He had a charm sometimes, a joy … but then something would set him off and he'd drink, he'd get violent …”

“I'm sorry.”

“Oh it was hard. That's when I turned to the church, to give me the strength to go on. I really loved him,” she said. “But he wouldn't have been a good husband or a good father for my children. Archie, he was a good provider and a good father to Raymond.”

I would dispute that, since Uncle Archie had spent most of his free time alone in the attic making cribbage boards out of firewood, when he should have been guiding his young son toward manhood. But maybe poor Raymond had been better off not spending a lot of time with his dad. Who knew? After all these years, nobody knew much about Uncle Archie.

“How come you didn't have more kids, Aunt Mo?”

“Female problems,” she said. “I miscarried five times before I had Raymond, my miracle baby, and the doctor advised me not to have any after Raymond.”

“I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

“It was my faith that got me through that too. And your Uncle Archie. It wasn't easy for him.”

I guess not. Back then, before the Pill, the only way you could be sure
not
to get pregnant was to abstain. Made me think that maybe, when Uncle Archie was up there alone in the attic, he had more than cribbage on his mind.

“I think that's why I took an extra interest in you. I thought of you as the daughter I never had,” she said. “What always got me through, Robin, was my faith. I just wanted you to have that same faith to help you through life, because life is hard.”

“I envy you your faith, Aunt Mo,” I said softly. How comforting to have all the philosophy you want in one convenient book, and not have to pick it up willy-nilly from all over the known universe and then cobble it together.

“I really do,” I went on. “But I'm just built differently. Blind faith just doesn't work with me.”

“Your father used to say almost the same thing to me. It's funny. I never realized how much you remind me of your father.”

I saw something of my father in her too. Like my father, she was tenacious, opinionated, and fiercely devoted to her own vision.

“Let's read the Bible, shall we?” Aunt Mo said. “It will give us strength.”

She picked up a huge family Bible, the size of the
Complete Pelican Shakespeare
in hardcover, from behind the bed. I hadn't noticed it before.

“He let you keep your Bible?” I said.

“Yes. And he made me tea.”

“You carry that big Bible around with you everywhere?”

“Yes.”

“But it's so heavy.”

“I like feeling the weight of it,” she said. “It makes me aware always that God is with me. Now, I think this occasion calls for the Old Testament, when the Hebrews were in bondage to the pharaoh …”

“Aunt Mo, we have to get out of here.”

“How do we do that?”

“I don't know yet.”

“Well, in the meantime, why don't we pray for courage and inspiration,” Aunt Mo said, opening her Bible to Exodus and reading from it.

“I'm sorry, Aunt Mo, but would you mind reading that to yourself? I'm trying to think.”

“The Bible will set you free,” Aunt Mo said, absently.

I almost didn't hear her. I was thinking about Elroy, wondering what he'd do to me, to Aunt Mo, to himself. Would he shave his legs with a rusty razor, then sit in an acid bath while we listened to his screams? Would he then lick my feet? Or would he go nuts and just shoot us?

“What did you say?”

“I said, the Bible will set you free.”

“Let me hold that Bible.”

It was heavy. Five pounds, maybe more.

“Aunt Mo, we can stay here and behave ourselves and hope this nut lets us loose. Or we can do something. But it's risky, either way.”

“Let me take the risk,” she said. “I'm elderly, if I die, I know I'm going to heaven. But if you die …”

“We'll both be at risk, Aunt Mo,” I said. “Now, one of us will have to have her hands free. It will have to be you, I think. He'll be less suspicious of you, because you're an elderly Christian lady.”

I outlined the rudiments of a plan and we discussed it. Before we had it nailed down, we heard a door opening in another room, and then heavy boots. He was back.

It wasn't Hector.

It was Franco.

21

F
ranco was standing in the doorway, wearing his uniform and a hunting cap with ear flaps, which explained how Aunt Mo had missed those hairy ears in her description.

But how had he …? Well, of course. During Hector's shift, Franco must have called him from a nearby pay phone, had him call me. When I got into the car with Hector, Franco shot Hector and knocked me out. Franco could have taken my bag very easily. Franco could very easily switch the freight elevator tapes in security. Franco was not named Franco, and so he needed fake ID to work at ANN. That's where Joey Pinks would have come in.