Nice Girls Finish Last (3 page)

“I don't think I even had a file yet,” I said.

“So, you didn't know him well.”

“No. I didn't know him at all. I spoke to him for maybe ten minutes that first appointment, so … although, he did mention that he was divorced.”

“In what context?”

“He asked me if I was married. I told him I was divorced, and he said he was divorced himself. Have you talked to his ex-wife? That's where I'd look.”

“Yes, both his ex-wives,” Ferber said. “One's in Miami. She's been there for the last two months. The other one was at the movies with her boyfriend.”

“You know Kanengiser was really good-looking, don't you?” I said.

“You think that had something to do with his murder?”

“Good-looking guy like that, divorced, shot in the heart? To me, it says jealous ex-lover or jealous husband.”

Files schmiles. This was a crime of passion. First of all, Kanengiser was shot in the heart, not the head. That, I felt, was significant.

Second, as I said, Dr. Kanengiser was really good-looking. In fact, if you ask me, he was far too good-looking for his job. The first—and only—time I went to see him, one of the other women in the waiting room said, “Your first time with Dr. Kanengiser? You are in for a treat. Wait until you see those blue eyes. Like Paul Newman's.”

Do I care? I thought. The man's a doctor, not an underwear model. But she was right. He
was
very good-looking. A gynecological examination is awkward in the best of times, but it's really awkward, even unnerving, when your gynecologist is good-looking.

(I must admit that while I sat in his office soaking up his chiseled beauty, I speculated about dating him later. But how weird would it be to go out on a first date with a guy who had already stared into your sex organs with a flashlight?)

Because of this, a part of me was relieved when Jerry beeped me before Kanengiser could insert his forearm up me, and even more relieved when my second appointment was canceled. As my friend Dillon Flinder, silver-haired medical correspondent and pansexual adventurer, put it later, “When a guy is that good-looking, it's a fine line between a gynecological exam and what is known on the street as a good fisting.” Dillon has such a way with words.

It was at this point that I realized things could get really ugly, because there's something inherently salacious about Dr. Kanengiser's specialty, and I figured I wasn't the only TV personality to see the guy, as he leased office space in my building. That could give the newspapers and the tabloid TV shows a celeb angle:
GYNO TO TV NEWS STARS GUNNED DOWN
.

I mentioned this to Ferber and he said, “We've sealed the patient files. We won't be telling the news media who his patients were unless one of them becomes a suspect.”

“That's wise.”

“So you weren't there and you didn't see anything,” Ferber said, disappointed.

“I'm sorry. I really wish I could help you. You look so let down.”

“That's okay,” he said. “Yesterday was an unusually bad day, a record homicide day. My partner's in the hospital, she has to have some tests, and I've been working solo since six this morning. … I think I will have that soft drink.”

We were bonding. I blew some dust out of a glass and poured him some seltzer. “So what are we up to so far this year, for homicides. We're over seven hundred, aren't we?”

“Last figure I heard was seven hundred seventy-two,” he said.

“Did they ever catch that ninety-four-year-old man who killed his ninety-two-year-old brother in the Bronx?”

“No.”

“The guy is ninety-four and he has arthritis, how far could he go?”

“I don't know.”

“What about the drifter who killed the woman who took him in? Her name was Felice something, she met him in Madison Square Park and it was love at first sight …”

“Yeah, I know that case. Haven't caught him yet either.”

“You probably already know this, but there was a very similar case a few years ago, same MO. That victim was also killed with selenium in her coffee.”

“Yeah, the Freddy the Freeloader case,” Ferber said. “You know your murders.”

“Well, as I said, I used to be a crime and justice reporter and I've had other brushes with murder …”

“You'd be surprised,” he said. “It's not that common to meet women who like to talk about murder.”

Boy, he was adorable. He reminded me very much of this guy I had a crush on back in high school, a guy with the same dogged, doe-eyed good looks. With that fresh face, he couldn't have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, which is young for a detective, I think. But then, they seem to get a touch younger every year, which worries me a little. I work in television, and it ages you quickly.

By now I was feeling more Blanche DuBois than Mrs. Robinson. It was all I could do not to offer him some milk and cookies and ask him if he'd ever seen a grown-up woman naked. I was going to invite him to look at my scrapbooks—I'd kept scrapbooks of unusual murders for years—but I figured he had other places to go and people to see.

In fact, he had. As soon as he finished his seltzer, he got up and thanked me for my time.

I walked him to the door and when we exchanged cards I noted he didn't wear a wedding ring. Man, I was getting bad. When the moon was full, I was like a she-wolf with her nose in the wind. Maybe it was because the only man in months who had come close to touching me in an intimate manner was now dead, shot in the heart in his office.

“Hope you catch the killer,” I said.

“Yeah, me too,” he said. “By the way, you know there's a guillotine in front of your building?”

“Guerrilla art. We get a lot of it down here.”

“Weird,” he said.

Yeah, that's what I thought when I saw the guillotine, but now it seemed like the least weird thing about my day. What a day. It had just been one thing after another, culminating with news of the murder of someone I knew oh so slightly. Well, where's the bright side to murder, smart girl? I asked myself. That's a toughie, but you know, I found a bright side. At least I wasn't the one who was dead.

When I spoke to my friend Claire Thibodeaux later, she found another bright side. I often fall in love during murder cases. I'd never thought of it before, but she was right. I'd met my ex-husband during the murder trial of mobster Lonnie Katz. I'd fallen for my ex-boyfriend Eric, who always insisted on calling himself my “transitional” man, during the Griff murder case. In fact, shortly after a big murder case in my hometown, when I was a kid, I kissed my first boy.

I don't know why that is. My karma, I guess. Anyway, given my record in things romantic, I wasn't sure falling in love was much of a bright side given the down side, one dead doctor.

When I finally got back to bed, I lay there for a while, awake, thinking about Kanengiser. Whoever had killed him had planned it in advance, and had had the foresight to get the night nurse out of the office and cancel my appointment. So it was someone who had had access to his office and had seen the appointment book somehow, perhaps on a previous visit. Possibly a jealous husband or lover who had come by to pick up his wife or girlfriend at the office, but more likely a woman, a girlfriend and/or a patient of Dr. Kanengiser, I thought.

Then I caught myself. It wasn't any of my business—I barely knew the guy. The cops were on the job. Who did I think I was anyway, Bat Girl? The last thing I needed at the moment was to get mixed up in a messy murder. Sure, it had been fun to chew the fat on old homicides with a young cop. But those days were behind me now. I was a grown-up. In fact, I hadn't looked through my murder scrapbooks in months, since I had decided that my interest in the subject might be unhealthy and abnormal.

Curiosity, I remembered, always got me into trouble. It was curiosity that cost me my coveted interview with avant-garde undertaker Max Guffy, which killed my series, “Death in Modern America,” no pun intended. Well, it wasn't just curiosity. Vodka was also involved. But it was mostly curiosity. The two, vodka and curiosity, were to be avoided, because, you see, my troublemaking days were over.

3

I
t was a sign of my deep state of denial, combined with temporary post-sleep amnesia, that when I woke up the next morning to the sight of the parchment Desiderata poster on the ceiling above my bed, I had forgotten about Kanengiser.

“The headlines at this hour: After years of decline, the murder rate is up in New York,” intoned the very serious voice of the announcer on 1010 WINS All-News Radio. “But air pollution levels are down, and the forecast says, rain all day.”

“Well, there's a mixed message for you,” I said to Louise Bryant. “My chances of being killed immediately and violently are up, my chances of being killed slowly by lung disease are down, and either way, it's going to rain all day.”

Louise didn't even open her eyes. The cat responds to only two sounds, that of the can opener and that of my singing (any song, as long as the lyrics are her name sung over and over).

It was raining all right. Through the water-smeared window, the street was a blur of gray people going to work, moving like blobs of mercury on glass, rushing past the guillotine on the sidewalk without even seeing it. What a great day to stay at home and be unconscious, I thought, but I couldn't call in sick. A bad flu season had eaten up my sick days for the year by February. If I took another day, especially for mental health reasons, it would end up as another black mark on my permanent record.

“Dr. Herman Kanengiser, gynecologist and member of the District 27 community board, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his midtown office last night. Police say they have no suspects at the moment,” said the guy on WINS.

Oh yeah, I thought. Dr. Kanengiser.

I'd been feeling all right, but being reminded of the murder brought me down. I turned off the news—too depressing—and put on a tape of bouncy, pick-me-up tunes to fortify me as I showered, checked myself for signs of necrotic fascitis, and worked myself back into that excellent state of denial.

Perhaps my bathroom mirror said it best when it sloganeered:
AVOID UNPLEASANTNESS
.

There would, however, be no avoiding the Kanengiser murder. When I got to work, the whole place was buzzing with it. Normally, the murder of a nonfamous doctor would cause barely a ripple in the ANN newsroom. Oh, it might attract some prurient interest and inspire a few sick “dead gynecologist” jokes among the dark-humored newsroom drones, but otherwise no one would notice. When you're trafficking in news from places like Sarajevo, one dead doctor in New York doesn't mean much. Life is cheap in Casablanca. Unless of course it happens in your building.

MURDER ON
27, screamed a poster on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway leading to the newsroom. Democracy Wall is where we post employee news, gossip, jokes, weird letters from fans, and odd but true news stories. It “belongs” to the workers.

I skipped the terse bulletin about the murder and scanned the wall instead for news of the executive meetings, rumors about the reshuffle. There was nothing.

“Did you hear about the murder…,” producer Susan Brave said, coming up beside me at the wall.

“Can't talk now,” I said. “I'm late.”

I was, in fact, running late for a mandatory security meeting that morning.

“You've probably already heard that a doctor on the twenty-seventh floor was shot and killed last night,” Pete Huculak was saying when I walked into the conference room and took a seat in the back next to Dillon Flinder.

Pete was the security chief for Jackson Broadcasting and its affiliated enterprises, which included ANN and the JBS building itself.

“I don't want you to be alarmed. Our security is very good. The security for the commercial floors was pretty relaxed—the tenants wanted it that way so their customers could come and go freely—but something like this couldn't happen in the broadcast facilities,” Pete said.

A skeptical murmur swept the room. True, after the World Trade Center bombing, our founder, Georgia Jack Jackson, had installed
Star Trek
airlock doors leading into and out of the broadcast facilities, as well as a vast system of video surveillance cameras, all of which gave the place a combination biosphere-prison farm atmosphere.

Despite this, there had been a number of security breaches and other disturbing incidents that put everyone a bit on edge. First, shortly after the new security force came aboard, someone had taken advantage of the transition to swipe a bunch of purses, including mine. Our TV psychologist, Solange Stevenson, had been menaced by an elderly Kansas widower who showed up at ANN, waved an unloaded hunting rifle, and complained that Solange was sending him secret messages (on that special frequency they shared) accusing him of homosexuality. Someone had broken into anchorwoman Bianca de Woody's dressing room and stolen her wig, two pairs of her shoes, and her spare underwear. And Kerwin Shutz, ANN's right-wing talk-show host, had been getting these perplexing phone calls that sounded distinctly like someone farting for about a minute before hanging up.

(Contrary to a popular rumor, I did not make those calls.)

As if that weren't bad enough, ANN's senior war correspondent, Reb “Rambo” Ryan, recently “grounded” after a disturbing incident in Haiti, claimed someone had taken a potshot at him as he was walking down Eighty-fourth Street.

Pete couldn't do much about that, but we all felt he could do more about building security, which was why the on-air “Talent” had got together and demanded this meeting. The death of the doctor the night before gave it added urgency.

Pete and his personally assembled army of fifty company cops marked the third step in the year-long fortification. Keeping nutty fans and nutty terrorists out, not to mention busting cigarette sneaks who defied the company-wide ban on smoking, was a tough job.