Nice Girls Finish Last (29 page)

“Are you convinced yet? Are you ready to thank the Lord for saving your life and give your life to the Lord in payment?”

When Aunt Mo put it that way, I almost felt like I had no choice. But then I remembered that, by Aunt Maureen's uncompromising Old Testament standards, all the great guys would be in hell. Doubt suddenly clouded my faith.

“No,” I said. “Not the way you want me to, anyway.”

I was grateful and all, but I had to stand my ground. It's just the way I am.

Other happy Christians were streaming past us.

“Well, I had to try. Do I have a few stories to tell the girls on the book-banning committee when I get back! Thank you for seeing me off,” Aunt Maureen said. “Take care of yourself now, and
be good.”

“Yes, Aunt Mo.”

“It's a shame you can't see your way to the light after this experience but—”

“Have a safe trip, Aunt Mo,” I said. In truth, I just wanted to get her on the plane and get the hell out of there. Otherwise, I was going to be late for my lunch with McGravy and Jerry.

“Just tell me, are you happy, living in this city, doing the work you do, living the life you live? Really?”

“More or less,” I said.

There are a lot of things that make me happy, when I think about it. My cat makes me happy, and my friends make me happy. Even my friends' successes make me happy, when you get right down to it.

Funny, interesting men make me happy too, sometimes. The wall full of hieroglyphs makes me happy. New York City makes me happy, mostly.

Playing practical jokes on Jerry Spurdle and making him suffer, that makes me really happy.

“I'll be praying for you.”

“Thanks, Aunt Mo.”

“Do you know who Philo T. Farnsworth is?” Aunt Mo asked.

“The inventor of television.”

“Do you know what he said about television?”

I shook my head.

“He said: ‘Television is a gift of God, and God will hold those who utilize his divine instrument accountable to him.' Remember that, dear.”

McGravy and Jerry were already there when I got to Cafe Napoli. Jerry, in fact, had already ordered.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said. “I had to see my aunt off, make sure nothing else bad happened to her.”

“Nishe lady your aunt,” Jerry said, with his mouth full of pasta.

“Robin,” McGravy said. “Jerry and I wanted to let you in on the upcoming changes. As you know, the company is undergoing a lot of changes at the moment …”

While Bob spoke, Jerry chowed down on his veal, a healthy chunk of which he shoved into his mouth in one lengthy piece. Apparently he hasn't yet mastered the manipulation of cutlery, so he eats his food like one of those animals that swallows its prey live and whole. He takes a huge chunk of food and stuffs half of it into his mouth and the other half hangs out as he slowly chews, swallows, and pulls more of the overhang into his mouth until it's all absorbed.

“Yes?”

“I know you have your heart set on remaking a career in general news,” McGravy began.

“Ain't gonna happen,” said Jerry, talking with his mouth full.

“What is it, Bob. I can take it. I'm a big girl.”

I was feeling pretty damn lucky to be alive, I must say, and the idea of losing my job was no longer as frightening as it had been.

“Okay. Jerry's going to Berlin for a year. We'd like you to take over the Special Reports unit. I know you wanted out of Special Reports, but this could be a blessing in disguise.”

“I'll be head of the Special Reports unit?”

“At least for a year. Then we'll see where Jerry is, where you are.”

“I get to run the show?”

“You shtill haf to get ratingsh … ,” Jerry said, through a mouthful of partially masticated meat.

“And Jerry will be a half a world away, more or less?”

“There may be a few mandated series,” Bob said. “And you will have to keep the ratings up. But you will have a lot of leeway. And you'll report to me. It isn't general news …”

“It's a blessing in disguise, all right,” I said to Bob. “I'll take it.”

Special Reports unit for a year? Sure. Even if they still expected me to do UFO stories, I could do them my way. Maybe I would do more good series like the one on vigilantism. Maybe I still had a career in news.

“Will I be reporting as well?”

“You could do a few series, just the ones you want to do,” McGravy said. “We're assigning another reporter to work with you.”

“Oh no, not …”

“Dave Kona.”

The supercilious pip-squeak.

“Bob, he doesn't respect me. He'll be insubordinate—”

“Welcome to management,” Jerry said. “Now, wasn't I right? Aren't you sorry you called me an asshole?”

It was fucking stupid asshole, to be precise, I thought. But I didn't say it. I wasn't sorry either.

So Jerry's off to Berlin, Madri's gone to PR, Sawyer Lash is getting another shot at daytime programming as co-anchor of
Gotham Salon,
Dave Kona is coming to work for me, and Claire Thibodeaux has gone to D.C., her last name intact.

Speaking of Claire, about a week after my promotion, a gift arrived from her. Wrapped in tissue inside a black enamel box was a small statue of Saint Clare of Assisi, with this note:

Dear Robin,

Congratulations on your promotion!

Did you know: In the Roman Catholic religion the patron saint of television is Clare of Assisi, the founder of a penitential order of nuns in 12th-century Italy. Her designation as the patron saint of television alludes to an incident during her last illness when, on her deathbed, she miraculously heard and saw the Christmas Mass in the basilica of San
Francesco on the far side of Assist. A woman who has taken a vow of poverty and a satellite downlink rolled into one. ANN's perfect woman.
”

Love, Claire

In the media blizzard over the following few days, it came out that Howard Gollis, comic-artist-writer, was the brains behind Chaos Reigns, the guerrilla art group. Not a group really. Just him and a friend with a pickup truck. So the guillotine wasn't random but was, along with his car alarm concert, a special form of guerrilla art designed to harass ex-girlfriends. The day before I was kidnapped, he'd gone on the road to do stand-up at a bunch of clubs in Pennsylvania. When contacted by police, he told them he'd been shot at one night after seeing me, but didn't connect the two events.

He no longer calls.

Gary Grivett also had been shot at after seeing me. The report had been stuck at the precinct level and was never connected with the Manhattan South investigation, until now.

“I thought it was just one of those New York things,” Grivett said to the
News-Journal.
“I had no idea it was because of Robin.”

As it turned out, Kanengiser hadn't kept a black book. Like me, he had kept everything in a locked computer file, having learned not to leave a paper trail after ex-wife Hannah Qualls found his old black book. The file contained names, addresses, phone numbers, and sexual details, along with personal information about the women he was sleeping with so he could print out a cheat sheet and avoid making the mistakes he had made with Susi Bure.

Bianca broke down one night at Keggers and confessed to Claire and me that Kanengiser had treated her for a case of vaginal warts. To her, it was some kind of big-deal dark secret.

Hector recovered from his injuries, just a few brain cells shy of where he was before. Now, he has the sympathy of the newsroom. He's kind of a hero. Like Forrest Gump.

My super died, alas. He was very old. But there was an opening for a super, and I mentioned it to Phil. He loved the idea, and since he moved in the water pressure is great and the elevator works again. Everyone likes him, even Mrs. Ramirez. I like to imagine she has a crush on him—to her, he's a younger man—that they have some torrid December-November romance going on. But it seems a long shot. Phil had me over for tea and “biscuits” in his basement apartment in our building. He had it done up quite nicely. We showed each other our scrapbooks. It turns out he really did survive Rommel and plane crashes and he really did save people's lives when he was a fireman in Liverpool. His first wife was an American girl he met in London just after the war. That's how he got his green card.

And I finally found out what Wim Young, the mysterious guitar-playing man, did for a living.

One night, I ran into him on the stoop and this time he smiled at me and spoke.

“Saw you on the news,” he said.

I no longer feared him, so I chatted him up a bit. He asked me if I wanted to go get something to eat. As we were walking down the dark, deserted street, it suddenly struck me where I had seen this guy before.

America's Most Wanted.

I could see the episode so clearly. He was the guy who killed his girlfriend
and
his boyfriend after robbing them both blind.

Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire, I thought. I escaped Elroy, only to land in the clutches of some other killer. This is a new nightmare. I was about to become a future episode on a real crime show. I could see the mediocre actors reenacting it, hear the narrator: “… On the night of April eighteenth, reporter Hudson met a man outside her apartment building …”

We were walking down Avenue A, he was talking about having been in Florida recently—which is where the crimes took place—and I abruptly turned and screamed my lungs out, right in his face.

It turned out this guy was the
actor
who
played
the bad guy on
America's Most Wanted,
in a segment shot on location in Miami. So what he was seeing was not the classic response of a threatened woman, but a nut, who, in the middle of a civilized conversation, started screaming like a banshee when she heard the word “Florida.”

Damn shame. He's good-looking and interesting and close by. I still see him sometimes, on his way out at night to meet friends or go to the theater. But he hasn't asked me to go anywhere since then. Our eye contact has gone from amazing to wary. He thinks I'm a crazy person.

But, as Aunt Maureen might say, were she a better sort of Christian, when God closes a door, he/she opens a window. Two days after I gave the guitar-playing man tinnitus, Mike asked me to a movie. I know he's one of those devilish Irishmen, and he's a gypsy, and he has the blood of twenty-seven Pakistani dogs on his soul. I know he's in news and I vowed not to get mixed up with any more newshounds, but what the hell. Ya takes yer chances or ya don't get laid. We could have a lot of laughs together.

I'm having dinner with my ex-husband next time he comes to New York. I mean, I'd never marry him again even if he wanted to marry me again, and he doesn't, believe me. But he's single, I'm single, and there's still chemistry there, so who knows what might happen?

You never know. You know?

I'm supposed to go watch Detective Mack Ferber's softball team play, and Eric's coming back to New York on home leave in the summer. The guy upstairs might get to know me better, and decide I'm not too crazy. I don't have to make my mind up right this minute.

So this is the dark side: I'm not Diane Sawyer or Joanne Armoire or Claire Thibodeaux and I never will be. I'm a middle-aged woman in a youth-obsessed culture whose on-air prime is in the checkered past. I'm divorced, with no steady boyfriend, and friends who flit in and out of my life. I live in a bad neighborhood in a crazy city and a crazy world where people go along all nice and peaceful, and then suddenly beat their husbands to death with an eighteen-pound turtle. And someday, I'm going to die.

But there is a bright side: I'm not Aunt Maureen, or Anya, or Cecile Le Doc, and I never will be. For that matter, I'm not Diane Sawyer. Her life looks good to me, from here, but all lives have their sorrows and, not knowing what hers are, I'm not sure I'd want to trade.

True, I live in a bad neighborhood. But it is a bad beautiful neighborhood and I live in an interesting downtown building that, thanks to Mrs. Ramirez's spying and my poison ivy, is peculiarly safe.

My on-air days may be numbered, but I am now the boss, which definitely has its downside, given my staffing—an absentminded anarchic comedian and a supercilious pip-squeak reporter. But I have more control. My friends flit in and out, but that keeps us all fresh and interested in each other and independent. No steady boyfriend, true, but on the other hand, I'm a Free Woman and I get to sleep with any attractive, interested man I choose to sleep with. I suspect this is one of those freedoms it is better to have than to use, but maybe not. I'll get back to you on it.

And, duh, someday I'm going to die.

But I'm not dead yet.

ARTICHOKE

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