Nice Girls Finish Last (6 page)

“Why not?” said another voice, that of Hector.

“Don't disturb the crime scene.”

The camera panned around the room, fixing on Kanengiser's body, a side view. Sure enough, Kanengiser's hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was fully clothed. Hector panned around the room some more, zooming in on some papers scattered around, a tipped-over paper-clip dispenser, some litter on the floor.

The camera was still rolling when the police arrived—Detective Ferber, two uniformed officers who both looked old enough to be his father, and a doctor, who said, “He's dead.”

Ferber put on rubber gloves and began picking stuff up with tweezers, dropping items into plastic and paper evidence bags held by one of the uniforms, while the other tried to pick the lock on Kanengiser's handcuffs.

“One nickel, one dime, one matchbook—a place called Anya's,” Ferber said. He was behind the chair when he said it, so I didn't get a clear view.

A few minutes later, the tape ended.

The connection to Anya's seemed pretty tenuous at best. Kanengiser might have bummed those matches off of someone else—although, in connection with the handcuffs, it did look bad. On the other hand, the biographical information faxed over by the American Gynecological Association made him sound like citizen of the year. He had graduated from Harvard Med, did his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian, was active in independent politics on the district level, and had served a term on his community board. At first, I thought that community board thing might lead somewhere, but it turned out the most controversial proposal the board had passed was a rezoning initiative to open certain residential buildings to on-site day-care centers.

A Lexis-Nexis search turned up a few brief mentions of Kanengiser in local stories about district zoning meetings and the institution of a beefed-up neighborhood watch program. There were a lot of stories about doctor killings, however. I weeded through them and came up with three other unsolved homicides: a neurosurgeon killed in a Seattle mugging, a doctor who performed abortions killed in Kansas, and a doctor of physics killed in a carjacking in California. None of them seemed connected to Kanengiser, unless Kanengiser had performed abortions at one time, although nothing in the AGA information indicated that was the case.

So much for my serial killer theory. But the Lexis-Nexis search wasn't completely fruitless. Under the slug “Doc-Killing” was a story that was completely unrelated to Kanengiser, and yet extremely significant to me.

It was the story of Cecile Le Doc of Nice, France.

“A lovely woman,” was the unanimous opinion of her neighbors. “A sweet, submissive, and devoted wife.”

Sweet, submissive, and devoted—until one night after an argument, when Cecile Le Doc beat her husband to death with their eighteen-pound turtle, Henri.

Poor husband.

Poor turtle.

I couldn't resist putting this one aside for the murder scrapbook I entitled “Unusual Weapons.”

Just as I was about to leave for the day, Kanengiser's night nurse-slash-receptionist, Vicki Burchill, returned my call.

The night Kanengiser was killed, she said, a strange man had called, saying that her apartment was on fire. Only there was no fire. Someone had wanted Vicki out of the office. No doubt the same someone who had called the ANN office and left a message with Tamayo to cancel my appointment.

“Were any files missing?” I asked. In that case, it might not be S&M at all, it might be blackmail. Secretly, I hoped it was. Don't get me wrong. Blackmail isn't pretty and because Kanengiser was in the JBS building it could hit pretty close to home. But there was a bright side to it, since blackmail is a touchy subject for any public personality, but more so at ANN, as we'd been stung in the past. That angle alone could be enough to kill this story and get me back onto some good news.

But Ms. Burchill dashed these hopes when she said, “No. We did a complete inventory. Just finished it about an hour ago. So far, nothing's missing.”

That ruled out blackmail. A blackmailer might photocopy things, but for credibility he, or she, needed the original. Damn.

Beyond that, Vicki Burchill had little to offer. She hadn't worked for him long, had no idea if Kanengiser was into S&M, and couldn't for the life of her imagine who would kill him.

“But the person who called you on the false fire story was a man,” I said.

“It
sounded
like a man,” she said. “But the police detective says there are gadgets people can use to disguise their voices on the phone, so I can't even tell the gender of the caller with confidence.”

Or it could be the killer just paid some bum to make the call.

It was a dead end.

All I'd found were dead ends. After a day of dead ends, it's Miller Time. I put the tape log on Jerry's desk, and went to meet McGravy.

5

“I
t's good to see you, Robin,” Bob McGravy said.

“It's good to see you too, Bob.” I ordered a light beer and slid onto a barstool next to him.

Bob is the vice president in charge of editorial content at the network, a man with sterling journalistic credentials. He worked for Edward R. Murrow and CBS during their golden era. He's also the guy who hired me and, with legendary assignment editor Lanny Cane, taught me television news, or at least tried.

More importantly, McGravy had been largely responsible for building ANN's reputation from laughingstock to network of record. But ratings were replacing reputation on a number of fronts, and McGravy had declining influence over the network at large. Nowadays, they used him mainly as a fireman, flying him from bureau to bureau to solve one problem or another.

“I don't see enough of you these days. I'm so busy. Been too long.”

“Even longer since we came to Buddy's,” I said.

This place took me back. Great place, Buddy's, an authentic, unpretentious New York bar Bob had introduced me to years before, back when he still drank and I was a young, promising reporterling who figured she'd be the Moscow correspondent by the time she was thirty-seven. Here, McGravy and his old newshound friends had turned me on to vodka stingers and whetted my appetite for the roguish nature of the business with their bawdy newsroom stories.

Buddy's has been around since World War II and, judging by the photos of the original establishment, the decor hasn't changed much since 1944. The hardwood floors are worn down and the red vinyl in the semicircular banquettes has been patched over a few times. McGravy and I like it for its old New York flavor, for its habitues with red carbuncular noses, lots of tattoos, and names like Billy One-Eye, Spider, and Fat Pat, for its two kinds of wine, Mountain Chablis Red and Mountain Chablis White, which come in cardboard boxes with spigots.

“Can't stay long, Robin. I have a date with Candy and then I have to pack for another road trip tomorrow,” McGravy said, taking a judicious sip of his soda with lime.

In the past few years, he had given up drinking and smoking, although he held on to his red meat, refined sugar, saturated fats, and love of forty-ish former chorines named Candy and Frosty, grande dames of the lash-fluttering class. What can I say? Some men just like those real girly girls, you know, the kind with the feather-fringed dressing gowns and little fluffy dogs they carry around like handbags. McGravy loved 'em, and they loved him back, and they took good care of each other. It's nice when it works out, you know?

“It's good to have you back, Bob,” I said. “Even if you're only in town briefly.”

“I wish I could say it's good to be back. I leave for two weeks,” he said, “and the place goes wacky. Someone is shooting at my anchormen, ratings are down twenty percent, and cutbacks are coming.”

“Maybe they'll shoot enough anchormen and you won't need to make any cutbacks,” I said. “Sorry. My sick sense of humor.”

Bob didn't even smile. Instead, he took off his horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes in a fatigued, battle-weary way.

“Listen Robin,” he said after putting his glasses back on and nervously patting the white comb-over that hid his bald spot. “I asked you to meet me for a reason.”

All the good nostalgic feeling left me suddenly and I felt a sick chill. He asked me here for a
reason.
This was it, the talk I'd been dreading, the one where I'm told the company appreciates my years of service, but their needs have changed and there's no room left for me in the new order, that I'd be “happier elsewhere” but they'd keep me on the payroll in some blow-job position until my contract expired. Naturally, this delicate task would be entrusted to McGravy, because he knew how to handle me.

I took a gulp of my light beer and, fortified, said, “What is it?”

“There are people who think you're unstable. I'm sorry to …”

“What ‘people'?”

“It's not important. I was asked to speak to you because someone has been playing pranks on some of the executives, and your name came up when they were making their list of suspects.”

No doubt my name was near the top of their list, along with Louis Levin's. I'd heard about these pranks and was insulted anyone would suspect me of perpetrating them, since they were so amateurish. For example, someone sent away for Rogaine information on behalf of our less hirsute executives, and someone dropped VD pamphlets into the mailbox of an executive who had recently left his wife. Pathetic and downright mean.

“It isn't just the pranks, Robin. It's a history of behavior the executives think is … odd and insubordinate.”

“Bob, everyone is odd, some people just hide it better than others. And I have been on my best behavior the last couple of months. I did most of the work on that vigilantism series … I nailed Nicky Vassar …”

“And all that is taken into account. God love ya, Robin. I'm sorry about this. I didn't want to bring it up at all, but …”

“It's okay.” Actually, I was relieved it wasn't the “happier elsewhere” speech—yet.

“I just want you to keep up that good behavior, okay?” he said, and I nodded.

“Seriously.”

“I'm taking you seriously.”

I had planned to complain to McGravy about the sensational, gratuitous, and spurious story Jerry was making me do, but this didn't seem a propitious time to whine.

“Bob, am I going to be affected in the reshuffle?” I asked. “Is that why I have to be on my best behavior?”

“I can't tell you that, Robin,” he said. “You know I can't.”

“I am going to be affected, aren't I?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Please don't let them send me to Nutrition News, Bob. Or take me off the air.”

“Robin, I can't discuss the content of our editorial meetings. Don't ask me again,” he said. “So how's life with Jerry? Are you behaving yourself?”

“I'm trying to behave myself, but Jerry gets worse every day. He goes out of his way to provoke me—”

“Yeah. But the guy knows how to get ratings, that's for sure.”

McGravy said this with a kind of grudging respect for ratings I'd never seen in him before. If anything, he had always disdained ratings, and felt that the network's mandate was the story first. For years, he had waged a one-man crusade against the tabloidization of broadcast news, a Sisyphean mission in the age of Amy, Tonya, and O.J. Although ANN was not nearly as tainted as some of the networks, it had fed at the trough too often and too noisily for McGravy's tastes.

Special Reports was always the first hog at the trough. Yet, despite that, Jerry's star was rising at ANN. While the rest of the network struggled for ratings and ad revenue, Special Reports was effortlessly generating huge piles of money for our fearless leader, Georgia Jack Jackson, who greatly appreciated this moneymaking. Jackson was fighting off a slow, persistent takeover attempt by televangelist Paul Mangecet and needed all the cash he could raise. The pressure was on.

“It makes you wonder what we'll do for ratings,” McGravy said. “How much is the media unconsciously manipulating events in order to get the best possible story? How are we influencing the outcome in order to grab viewers? To what depths will we lower ourselves to ensure our economic survival?”

I took that last rhetorical question rather personally, as I had done some pretty sleazy stories for Jerry and so knew a little about the depths to which one might stoop.

“This is me you're talking to, Bob,” I said. “The woman who once posed as a sperm-bank customer. The woman who broke the exploding cheek-implant story. Who kept a straight face when a timid church secretary from Kansas told me she'd been gang-banged by aliens who got her drunk aboard their spaceship.”

Things are apparently pretty much the same all over the universe.

“I know you didn't want to do those stories. I wasn't passing judgment on you.”

Wearily, Bob sighed and punched me lightly in the shoulder. He had bigger problems on his mind.

“Are you learning to roll with the punches a little bit, Robin?”

“I'm being a very good girl,” I said. “Thanks for the Cab Calloway tape, by the way.”

“It's a real pick-me-up in the morning, isn't it? ‘Jumpin' Jive, makes you nine foot tall when you're four-foot-five,'” he sang. He emptied his glass. “Always cheers me up. I gotta go, Robin. Just remember, whatever happens, it could be a blessing in disguise.”

“Wait! What does that mean? Is that some sort of … warning?”

“Robin, nothing's set in stone yet. Just remember, a blessing in disguise.”

Inspirational saying number 246: It's a blessing in disguise.

Naturally, this worried me. If it was already a done deal and they just weren't ready to tell me yet, then I wanted to know in time to, as Tamayo put it, “take the short sword”—quit before they bounced me off the air.