Nice Girls Finish Last (8 page)

Now, I could have forgiven poor Raymond everything, on account of his bad childhood and all, if he hadn't started tormenting three of the most important people in my life—my mother, my dog Ernie, and me—with a cap gun fired at point-blank range. I had to get even. So I would put my hair up in curlers and then jump out at him from behind doors and around corners. Until I got caught, that is, by Aunt Mo, and again tasted the swift and stinging wrath of God's Little Helper.

Raymond is now a very unhappy man with a miserable wife (albeit with naturally curly hair) and three lackluster offspring. The last time I spoke with him, he told me, without solicitation, that he and his wife only believed in having sex to procreate, which by my count meant they'd had sex successfully three times in fifteen years.

See what I mean? Aunt Mo should be more concerned about her own creepy kid, the boy voted most likely to have a body beneath the floorboards.

“I want you to call me!” was the last thing she barked into my machine.

That was the last thing I intended to do.

For the past three years, I'd managed to avoid Aunt Mo when I was back in Minnesota, by planning my visits around her annual Winnebago pilgrimage to the birthplace of Senator Joe McCarthy. But this was trickier. She was on my turf.

Very quickly, I devised my strategy. Avoid Aunt Maureen at all costs. If I absolutely had to see her, do it near the end of her visit, in the company of complete strangers, to minimize the risk of psychological trauma.

The odd thing was, I had been thinking I could use a little more contact with Christianity so I could get a refresher course in forgiveness and tolerance and things of that nature. As the old warning goes, be careful what you pray for, you might just get it. What I got was a whole lot of Christianity, in the form of Aunt Maureen, who wasn't a real fun or forgiving sort of Christian.

I suddenly felt extremely pessimistic. It certainly did seem as though the planets were aligning against me. Kanengiser, Aunt Mo, Jerry Spurdle, Detective Bigger … but then I told myself, these are
not
the jackbooted forces of the cosmos converging on my house to kick the shit out of me. These are challenges, tests that separate the women from the girls.

“Hell, we gotta look on the bright side,” I said to Louise Bryant, who, after eating enough to choke a bear, had climbed into my lap so I could massage her into a state of bliss no human could possibly achieve.

“The bright side,” I whispered again to her, stroking her velvety gray ears.

Sure, I had alienated several segments of the funeral-services industry while working on the death series. Shit happens.

Yes, I had been divorced in an ugly, humiliating, and highly publicized split from my husband, followed by an abortive six-month sexual frenzy with a younger man who had since gone to our Moscow bureau. But while I hadn't yet figured out what went wrong in my marriage—I was still searching through the wreckage for the black box—I was out there dating, at least, back up on the horse as they say. But I wasn't having sex yet, so I guess I was riding sidesaddle.

Financially, I was in okay shape. Louise Bryant didn't like her work much, but she had a career in cat food endorsement and was bringing in a tidy sum that kept her in catnip and had allowed me a couple of great vacations in the last year. (Trivia note: Louise Bryant gets ten times more fan mail than I do. The cat food company employs one whole person just to answer her fan mail.)

All I had to do was ride out the reshuffle, and I could get back on track with the Master Plan, which was: (a) escape Jerry Spurdle/Special Reports, and (b) get back to general news and real stories.

Aunt Mo? Well, if I was vigilant, I could avoid her.

Kanengiser? Nothing I could do for him, poor schmuck. As the Serenity Prayer said, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” So I tried to forget about him, turning on the television and flicking through the channels— a documentary about Polish motocross drivers, a show about Hindi film, stand-up comedy—settling on the Channel 3 news. I caught the end of it, a story about a couple in Co-op City who had adopted three brothers orphaned by a car accident. I was about to turn to the Channel 7 news when I saw a promo for the tabloid show
Backstreet Affair.
They were on the Kanengiser story.

“Kinky gynecologist's ex-wife speaks,” said the bellowing and emotive announcer.

Backstreet Affair
paid people to talk, and in exchange for a healthy check, the doctor's second ex-wife was only too willing to go on camera in Miami and say Kanengiser was into all sorts of weird stuff. I took it the divorce had not been amicable.

“Herm loved porn. The man was a sex fiend. He wanted me to watch porn with him, and he wanted to do things he saw in the movies. Once, he wanted to tie me up.”

As convincing as she sounded, you just can't trust the ex-wife's version of things. I am an ex-wife, and there have been times when I've made my ex-husband sound like a total bastard, when in fact he is only a partial bastard and has many redeeming qualities.

You especially can't trust an ex-wife getting paid thousands of dollars to say bad stuff about her ex-husband.

Backstreet
also talked to three of Kanengiser's ex-girlfriends, all of whom he had been seeing while he was married. All three had alibis. All three concurred that he was an emotionally crippled shit who had trouble making a commitment and trouble being honest. The words
priapic, liar,
and
woman-hating heterosexual
kept popping up in the interviews.

It is very unpleasant to hear one's gynecologist referred to as a priapic, lying, woman-hating heterosexual.

If all that wasn't bad enough,
Backstreet Affair
talked to
four
women who had been dating him just before he died, all with disguised faces, first names only, all of them with alibis (one poor thing had waited an hour for him at Brasserie Bleu), and all of them certain they were Ms. Right.

After the reporter's stand-up bridge outside Kanengiser's apartment, the report went into a low-quality home video of Kanengiser giving a speech to a state organization of conservative school board members on the need for double standards in school sex-education courses.

Using his expertise as a doctor, he said that “Unfortunately, the reality of the world is that women bear a much larger share of the moral burden. It isn't fair, but that's the way it is. Boys will always be boys, and so if we want to restrain sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy and strengthen the family unit, young girls need to be taught to restrain themselves.”

That's a fancy way of making an old argument: Men can't help themselves, but women can and should, because two wrongs don't make a right. Which is another way of saying: It's not my fault.

Yet, it seemed that Dr. Kanengiser had helped himself to whatever came his way. I guess he was speaking from experience about his own uncontrollable lust.

“Someone has to say it,” this expert on women went on. “The female sex drive is not as strong as the male sex drive and so different rules must apply.”

Obviously, this man had never been a thirty-seven-year-old woman during a full moon with a good dirty book and a bag of Duracells.

What an asshole. If what Channel 3 reported was true, his was a level of promiscuity I hadn't seen in a while, not since the advent of AIDS. This wasn't just an odd romantic adventure, which I've come to believe is very human, for men and women. This was superhuman promiscuity. Boy, what levels of energy and organization were required to manage that? And what tremendous fear of intimacy must have fueled it? How did he keep from calling one girlfriend by the name of another? Kanengiser couldn't have been happy, with his emotional and physical energies dissipated like this.

Two ex-wives, at least three ex-girlfriends, at least four current girlfriends. He must have lived in constant fear of discovery. How did this guy sleep at night? But, of course, he had his alibi ready: I'm a man.

So maybe a better question was, when did this guy find time to sleep?

Poor bastard, I thought, before putting him out of my head for the night. Dr. Kanengiser found out the hard way that when you mess with a lot of women, sooner or later you mess with the wrong woman; that the more sexual partners you have, the higher the odds one of them will be a crazy person. That's the statistic I figure they should teach in sex-ed courses.

7

T
he Jackson Broadcasting System building is a pink and granite skyscraper that takes up a whole block in the East Fifties. In addition to the All News Network, the JBS building houses the Jackson Network Corporation, the Drive-In Channel, an all-sports network, and four floors of commercial space rented to various professionals. Most of the ANN facilities and offices are in the basement, which we share with a subway stop and a bar-restaurant called Keggers. Below us are two levels of sub-basements and two levels of subway tracks. It is a world unto itself.

To get to the commercial floors, you had to go through a separate entrance, to a separate security desk, to an elevator that only stopped at floors twenty-four through twenty-seven. You could not access the Jackson floors from the commercial elevator, or vice versa, unless you were part of the security, maintenance, or executive staffs, whose key cards and access codes allowed them to override the elevators' master program. There was just one security guard manning a small desk at the commercial entrance. During the day, all delivery people had to sign in and out, but others went freely up to floors twenty-four through twenty-seven. Only after six p.m. were all comers and goers required to sign in and out.

I went to work early in the morning so I could check out the security setup for the commercial floors before our interview with Mistress Anya. This was above and beyond the call of my described duty and I almost didn't bother, but I figured, what the hell, it's practically on my way. Jerry wouldn't care. He didn't even care about Kanengiser's ex-girlfriends unless they mentioned whips and black leather, which was a damn good thing since most of them wouldn't talk to us unless we paid them.

See, to me this story was now about bigger things like double standards and hypocrisy and the yawning chasm between men and women, which occasionally erupted into fight-to-the-death warfare. But Jerry had made it clear. This was not about Kanengiser, it was about the dangers of female-dominant S&M. Tamayo's theory was that Jerry saw it as a metaphor for the gender wars, feminism run amok, and this was his way of warning the rest of America. Personally, I thought that was rather too profound for Jerry.

As I got onto the elevator, I noted there was a video camera in it. The commercial elevator was pretty slow, giving me time to listen to a Muzak medley of big band music and scan the morning papers for Kanengiser stories. They were now playing it big. The
News-Journal
had it on the front page with the headline,
GYNO GUNNED DOWN
.

KINKY SEX INVOLVED
? asked a smaller headline below it.

According to their story, Kanengiser was “eyed as a possible GOP state senatorial candidate in the next election,” which was a typical
News-Journal
exaggeration. Mostly, the article was a sanctimonious rap about a prominent man and minor local politico allegedly caught in some weird sex murder. The sleazy
News-Journal
thought it was the voice of moral America and it never let a story like this pass without some puritanical thunder.

Yeah, I thought, like this is the first time a respectable man died during a sexual indiscretion. Jeez. This was chump change compared to some of the more famous examples, like when Nelson Rockefeller's ticker gave out in alleged flagrante delicto, or when that Conservative British MP was found dead while wearing black lace lingerie in an autoerotic asphyxiation.

Or how about the infamous case of Felix Faure, a president of France, who died of a massive stroke while clutching a woman's head to his lap during an act for which the French are famous. They say his hands had already started to stiffen with rigor mortis before his lover noticed he was dead. The poor woman, who happened to be the wife of his official portraitist, was trapped there until her rescuers cut away enough of her hair to enable her to escape from the dead man's grasp. She no doubt had a difficult time explaining that haircut— not to mention the lockjaw—to her husband when she got home.

I got out on twenty-seven. At this hour—it wasn't nine a.m. yet—the twenty-seventh floor was like a ghost town. I was the only person on the floor. As I approached Kanengiser's door, now crisscrossed with yellow police crime-scene tape, I heard the muffled sound of a phone ringing somewhere, plaintively, unanswered. Kanengiser's office was between that of Gordon Hurd, Podiatrist, and those of Lewisohn, Murray and Whitehall, Certified Public Accountants. Walking the length of the gold-flecked linoleum hallway, I counted two dentists, a pediatrician, a ladies' room, a men's room, a cleaning closet, and a freight elevator. There was an alarmed exit to the stairwell. There were no video cameras on the twenty-seventh floor.

It was so quiet I could hear the elevator whooshing up in its shaft.

I checked out the ladies' and, yes, men's rooms to see where someone might hide. At first, it looked impossible to hide in either of the bathrooms, but there were ventilation ducts big enough for a skinny person to squeeze into. Other than that, there wasn't anywhere to hide. Surely the police would have checked the other offices and the cleaning closet after the body was discovered.

When I was still in the men's room, I heard people getting off the elevator, their voices echoing through the hallway.

I heard them approach. I didn't want to be seen leaving the men's room—wouldn't help my reputation at all—so I ducked into a stall. The door opened and two men walked in. I crouched on top of the toilet.