Nice Girls Finish Last (5 page)

What an asshole. Quite honestly, losing my looks is the least of my worries. I am a five-nine, buxom, good-looking redhead, at least I think I am, and if you think you are, it's as good as true. Not to brag about it, because believe me, beauty can be a curse. I know it's not the sort of thing one should complain about, but you see, I'm also very clumsy. My looks draw attention to me, so that many more people are watching me when the spike heel buckles under me in a restaurant and I accidentally mow down a passing salad girl, who sends a giant bowl of iceberg lettuce flying, raining greens on a whole section of diners.

This is not a hypothetical example. This is my karma, beauty without grace. I am Jerry Lewis's nutty professor … in the body of Rita Hayworth.

“You need a haircut too. But that isn't what I wanted to talk to you about. Come into my office,” Jerry said.

I followed him.

“Have a seat,” he said, waving me in and slamming the door so the glass walls of his cubicle shook.

At that point, he put on his eyeglasses, a pure affectation. Tamayo and I had looked through them and found they were plain glass. Jerry wore them because he thought they made him look cerebral.

“We're going to shelve the Congressman Dreyer story,” Jerry said and looked over his glasses at me for a response.

No argument here, I thought, since there wasn't any story as far as I was concerned. Jerry had it on “good information” that Dreyer, a staunch proponent of morality and traditional family values, was having an affair with his secretary, and was holed up with her somewhere in Manhattan. But when I looked into it, I couldn't find anything to substantiate the story. Despite the fact that I despised Dreyer's politics and would have loved to have proven him a hypocrite, I learned nothing except good things. He spent a lot of time with his family, he worked hard, and colleagues past and present said his word was his bond. All we had to go on was that his wife, an antiques collector, had gone to Belgium on a buying trip, the kids were with her parents, and the congressman had gone off on some hush-hush fact-finding trip with his secretary and personal assistant, Lizbeth Greyfarm.

Personally, I think Jerry wanted to fry Dreyer because Dreyer was rigidly anti-porn and anti-strip club, and Jerry was rigidly pro-porn and pro-strip club.

“I still think there's a story there,” Jerry said. “But you're unable to find it for some reason. And we need a story for next Monday night's slot, thanks to your death series bombing out, which threw the whole Special Reports sked out of whack for the year.”

“There's that blind tap-dancing troupe,” I began.

“It's for our adult viewing slot. We need something sexy. Did you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor? A gynecologist?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling a clammy dread flush down my body.

“I was talking to Pete Huculak in security about it and … I think we have a special report here.”

“It's kind of … local, isn't it?” I said politely.

“As a single murder, yes. But wait, there's more. This guy's a gynecologist, right? He's good-looking. Someone handcuffs him to a chair and shoots—”

“Handcuffs him to a chair?”

“He was handcuffed to a chair, then shot in the heart.”

“How do you know this?”

“The cleaning guy who found the body, he called our security before he called the cops. Security shot a videotape of the murder scene.
Exclusive
tape of the murder scene, in other words, and we're going to get a dub.”

That was the clincher for him, because we hate to waste good videotape in Special Reports, especially exclusive videotape.

“There's more. Know what they found on the floor, among other things? A matchbook from Anya's.”

Anya's was an S&M club on the West Side.

“This is a perfect angle,” Jerry said, and his porous, flaccid face could barely contain his glee. I'd worked with him long enough to see the neon signs flashing before his eyes.
GYNECOLOGIST
.
HANDCUFFS
.
MURDER
.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEOTAPE
!

“S&M is big in the nineties. Remember that cover story
New York
magazine did? And it's not just kooks, it's your doctor, your dentist, the guy who does your tax return, the sweet-faced girl who teaches your kids to read, a guy like Dr. Kanengiser. Is the murder linked to this dark world? It doesn't even matter. The victim is linked to it.”

You know, it's not that I'm against exploring the totality of human experience, the human condition, as a reporter. After all, in the past year I'd done “Co-ed Call Girls,” “Transvestite Daddies,” and “Over-Thirty Virgins.” But, having learned the dark lessons of the ill-fated “Death in Modern America” series, I was trying to look on the bright side, become a better person, and do a nice series for a change, one that didn't involve kinky sex, dead people, deranged people, and/or criminals. I wanted to do a series that might endear me to the viewers, help redeem my past sins, and hoist me firmly onto the New Niceness bandwagon. Good news is also part of the totality of human experience.

“What about that blind tap-dance troupe? I could shoot an interview with them tomorrow. Or the deaf bass player … ,” I offered.

“Robin, all bass players are deaf, eventually.”

“Well, the matchbook might not come directly from Anya's. Those sex clubs and phone-sex lines advertise on matchbooks given out in delis and stuff. It could come from …”

“Anya's matches are only available at Anya's. I called and asked.”

I'd been debating whether to tell Jerry that I'd seen Dr. Kanengiser, as I didn't want to inspire any jokes or summon up any images of my genitalia in his mind. But he'd left me no choice. I had to play that card.

“I might not be the best reporter for this piece,” I said. “I had an appointment with him last night. I didn't keep it, but I did see him once.”

“And so? You knew him well or something?”

“I didn't know the guy at all. He never examined me. But it still makes me uncomfor—”

“And you're not a suspect?”

“Of course not.”

“Good, wouldn't want any more of that Griff trouble we had. So he didn't examine you and you're not a suspect. Nice try, Robin, but you can't get out of this on some ethical loophole. The word around here is, he was a busy boy up there on the twenty-seventh floor. Not all the women who came to visit him were patients.”

“But rumors don't—”

“Robin, he's just a really grabby example of someone who may have been involved in the S&M lifestyle. We don't need a lot on him.”

“I don't mean to be impertinent … ,” I began.

Jerry pulled out the lower left drawer of his desk. The drawer stuck slightly, causing his coffee mug, which reads
CHIEF MELON INSPECTOR
—
WTNA TV
&
RADIO
, and the ACE award for the vigilantism series—the series I did despite the fact that the trophy bore Jerry's name only—to rattle.

“See these?” he said, motioning to a drawer full of papers. “These are the résumés of all the reporters who want to replace you. You don't seem to get that what's good for Special Reports is good for all of us. I've carried you a long time in this unit, Robin. You know I have.”

“But Jerry, just hear me out—”

“Robin, it seems whenever I listen to you we get into trouble. Do I have to remind you that, because of you, the cryogenics people are suing us …”

“That wasn't my fault!” I said. “Besides, the heads were saved.”

This referred to an incident at the Cryogenics East center, where the heads of some thirty-five people were kept frozen in hopes of being brought back to life some day with bionic bodies. While we were shooting, on an unseasonably muggy day I might add, there was a power failure compounded by the breakdown of the backup generator. Meltdown. The place exploded in panic as the proprietor tried to get LILCO and an emergency electrician on the line and his assistants ran out to the gas station next door to get ice to keep the frozen heads frozen.

It turns out our lighting equipment shorted out the system, which was the fault of our new cameraman, Mike. He wasn't used to operating with American voltage. In any event, as I said, the heads were saved, thus saving my conscience from the added burden of thirty-five rotting human heads.

“Your fault or not, these things always seem to happen when you're around. And I still don't know what you said to offend Max Guffy,” Jerry continued.

“You know how touchy morticians are …”

“The point is, I think you know what side your bread is buttered on, Robin.”

Just for emphasis, he opened that big drawer full of résumés again.

What an asshole, I thought, even as I smiled at him. Try as I might to be like Atticus Finch, to walk in Jerry's shoes a mile before judging him, to understand why he was the scum-sucking ass-kissing sewer-sniffing son-of-a-bitch he was, I just couldn't quite manage it. All I could manage was the fake smile.

“Get on the horn and call Mistress Anya. Set up an interview. Then try to get one of the ex-wives,” he said, grabbing his suit jacket off the coat hook and walking me out of his office. “I'll be in executive meetings all day.”

Grumbling, I returned to my office, where this Confucian gem stared out at me from my blotter:
THE RELATION BETWEEN
SUPERIORS AND INFERIORS IS LIKE THAT BETWEEN THE WIND AND THE GRASS
.
THE GRASS MUST BEND WHEN THE WIND BLOWS UPON IT
. Of course, how one defines superiority might be a matter of dispute, but if you think too long about things like that, pretty soon you have a bad attitude and all your hard work is wasted.

So Dr. Kanengiser had a matchbook from Mistress Anya's club, I thought. That was something we kind of had in common. Because I had her card, in my Rolodex, in two places, under Dominatrices and under Sadism. (Since coming to Special Reports, I had put together a very strange Rolodex, full of Virgins, Sadists, Victims, Embalmers, and, of course, UFO Abductees—listed by both their Earth names and their alien names.) About a year before, we'd interviewed Mistress Anya and five other dominatrices for a quickie report we put together after a New York judge ruled that S&M for money was not considered prostitution under New York law, since intercourse was rarely involved (although, if the dominatrix is feeling charitable, she lets the guy jerk off).

In New York, Anya was the unofficial queen of the professional whip-snappers. In addition to her club, which bore her name, and a leased-access S&M talk show on cable, Anya was the self-proclaimed head of the Marquis de Sade Society, whose mandate is “to promote sadomasochism,” since apparently there isn't enough pain and suffering in the world already. She was, as they say, a media slut, who'd go on the air anytime, for any reason, to promulgate her philosophy and attract like-minded souls to her club. Positive publicity, negative publicity, it was all the same to her.

“I'd be delighted to talk to you tomorrow,” she said when I called her, and the way she said “delighted” made it sound like a four-letter word.

I penciled her into my new Filofax date organizer.

Five phone calls later I tracked down both of Kanengiser's ex-wives. Ex-wife number two, Gail Perlmutter-Kanengiser, who was staying with a friend in Miami, had only one question for me.

“How much will you pay me?”

We call this the
Hard Copy
effect. Thanks to tabloid TV's liberal use of checkbook journalism, it was getting increasingly hard to get people to talk on television for free, unless of course they had a book, a movie, or a political agenda to promote, or an axe to grind. Special Reports may have been sensationalistic, even sleazy at times, but we did not practice checkbook journalism.

When I told her this, in much nicer language, she hung up on me.

Next, I called Detective Ferber at Manhattan South, but he was out so they put me through to another detective just assigned to the case, who was also out: Detective Richard Bigger.

Shit. Well, there was no point leaving a message for Bigger. I knew him from a previous investigation. At that time, he had been paired with Detective Joe Tewfik, who had since retired to become an upstate restaurateur.

There are good cops and bad cops. Tewfik was a good cop. Although much decorated, Bigger was a weasely, officious, stick-up-the-ass control freak with the sharpest teeth and sorriest mustache I'd ever seen on a
Homo sapiens.
We had instantly, instinctively disliked each other. It was as if my very existence insulted Bigger. He saw me as some kind of wild-eyed antiauthoritarian bohemian, which is so unfair. That was the
old
me.

If Bigger was now on this case, that meant it was going to be even harder to get information, as Detective Richard Bigger was not media-friendly. He hated the media, but he especially hated me. Maybe because he had once been in my apartment on police business and had come in contact with my poison ivy plants. How was I to know he had a poison ivy allergy that made him suffer doubly the effects of the plant?

By the time I came back from lunch, the Kanengiser murder had been eclipsed by breaking news, company rumors, and other urgent things, such as Franco's hairy ears, which everyone was now starting to notice.

The “exclusive” videotape that security had shot at the murder scene was on my desk with a note. Jerry wanted a tape log on his desk by the end of the day. The last thing I wanted to do at that point was look at a murdered man, but it was my job, so I popped the tape into the deck and sat back in my chair, a yellow legal pad propped in my lap.

The tape had been shot from the doorway into Kanengiser's inner office, where the body was found.

“Don't go in,” said a voice off-camera. It sounded like Pete Huculak.