What's a Girl Gotta Do (11 page)

Jerry was right about the old guy and he was
wrong. He was wrong about the scene to use too. The scene where
Zander raged against the child while the mother drew the child
closer to her, their heads in coats, best illustrated the tragedy
of Empire Semen. If you ask me.

“Don’t let your personal feelings color your
news judgment,” Jerry said.

“What do you mean?” I asked defensively. What
did he know about me?

“I mean, you’re at that age, Robin, your
biological clock is ticking and you ladies get goofy around babies
at this age.”

“Yeah, right, it’s all hormonal,” I said. I
popped the tape and went into my own office to log it. Jerry had it
partly wrong again. My biological clock wasn’t ticking, but my
personal feelings probably were mucking around with my objectivity,
since I was infertile. I’m not sure I want to be a mother, I’m not
sure I’d make a good one, and I’m not sure what kind of world I’d
leave to a kid. But I wish to hell I had the choice, that’s
all.

Claire was scoping out Empire Semen that
morning, posing as an interested customer. Casing the joint, as she
called it, in preparation for our undercover shoot that week. I had
hoped my newfound notoriety might exempt me from going undercover,
but Jerry figured a wig and prop glasses borrowed from JNC’s weekly
sketch comedy show would render me unrecognizable. Going
undercover, in disguise, was all the more distasteful to me.

But not everything was grim. I logged into
the computer and there was an E-mail message from Eric.

“My place, Saturday,” it said. “Fritz the
Cat, a bottle of vodka, and thou.”

“I’m busy Saturday,” I typed back. It was one
thing going for a drink with him at Keggers, surrounded by
colleagues, but Saturday night would be a date, and I wasn’t ready
for a date. I could envision too many things going wrong on a date,
like I might open my mouth to say something and belch, or break
something valuable. Or worse. I remembered one dismal date, when I
was just out of college, and I decided to try the direct approach
on a guy I was lusting after. My plan was to put a little Sinatra
on, dance a little slow dance with him around the living room, and
then put my hand assertively on his crotch. Just cop a feel. But as
I was reaching for his groin, I slipped and, to keep my balance, I
grabbed the nearest object. Which happened to be his crotch. I
grabbed hard and he screamed. That really killed the mood. He let
me make him an ice bag—to go— and he never called me again.

“It’ll be fun,” Eric messaged back.

“Busy,” I typed.

“Quit chasing me, Robin. You’re embarrassing
yourself,” he answered. While I pondered my response, he said, “In
the woods? In a midsize car in the woods? In winter?”

Yes yes no, I typed back. Jeez, he said all
the right things. That’s what scared me most.

I picked up the phone and dialed his
extension. “Eric, I have kind of a lot on my plate right now,” I
said. “Between Burke, ANN, and the News-Journal.”

“I can’t do anything about Burke and ANN, but
the News-Journal will have forgotten about you by tomorrow, I’ll
bet you anything. Joanne will take the front page tomorrow,” he
said.

“Joanne?” There was a long silence on his end
of the phone. “Joanne Armoire?” I said.

“Yeah. She’s at Manhattan South now, being
questioned. There’s an ANN lawyer with her. You didn’t know?”

I didn’t know, but suddenly I understood why
Dunbar and the other mandarins were so concerned the day before.
They weren’t worried about me, or my reputation. They were worried
about Joanne, a star.

“What else do you know?”

“Just that it has something to do with Griff.
I mean, I could speculate, but that isn’t good journalistic
practice,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” I said, and began to
speculate. Joanne must have been the other ANN person he was
investigating/blackmailing. Why, and what was the connection to
me?

“Want to know what the rumors are?”

“No—and yes.”

“A conflict of interest issue. That she had
an affair with a man she was reporting on.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Don’t know, although I’ve had a helluva lot
of fun today running through the list of her interviewees. Boris
Yeltsin, Yitzhak Shamir, that Afghan commander Massoud, that
Argentine general, to name a few.”

I remembered a past conversation between
Joanne, Solange, Claire and me. We started off speculating about
how certain newsmakers sounded in orgasm and then went into our
dreams, wherein we discovered we all had recurring erotic dreams
about newsmakers. I told of my dreams about me and John Sununu and
me and Bishop Desmond Tutu, doing the wild thing in the back of a
Chevy at a deserted Exxon station under the silvery city moon.

Solange told of a dream involving a remote,
snowbound cabin, leather restraints, and Supreme Court Justice
David Souter. We all laughed and Joanne described a vivid fantasy
about Boris Yeltsin. Now I wondered if . . . .

“So, Saturday?” Eric said.

Oh, I knew his type. I had seen it before—the
ardent, earnest pursuit, the promises made to ensure the conquest,
the conquest, the sudden drop-off in interest, the claustrophobia,
that painful, overwrought farewell scene. . . . But hell, the
conquest was the easy part, the part I had control over, right? It
was simple. I would not surrender. Nothing painful could happen, if
I didn’t let it. If he didn’t get his conquest, things would not
progress to that painful, overwrought farewell phase of the game.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Nobody wins and nobody
loses.

Shit. I knew he was just looking for a
conquest, but he was so persistent, and it was so flattering. How
we come to love our flatterers.

“Saturday,” I said.

Joanne didn’t come back to work that day.
Apparently, half of ANN’s executive committee was at her place on
Central Park West, devising scandal control strategy. I tried to
call her, but her machine picked up. In the afternoon, a press
release went out: Joanne Armoire would be holding a news conference
the next afternoon to discuss her involvement in the “Griff
Case.”

I called Nora and Tewfik at the cop shop to
see what they knew about the forensics on Griff, but they wouldn’t
tell me anything, due to my peripheral involvement in the case.
Although Tewfik seemed sure I didn’t do it, not everyone in the
department was as eager to rule me out. Or so he said.

Jerry had a meeting with network sales that
tied him up for the rest of the day so I made a couple more phone
calls and then cut out early to do a little investigating on my
own.

On my way out, I ran into Amy in the hallway.
At first, she looked like she was going to scurry away in the
opposite direction, frightened, as she usually did. But Burke had
apparently told her my bark is worse than my bite. She pulled
herself straight, fixed the appropriate smile on her face, and came
towards me.

“I’m so happy you’re not in trouble with the
police anymore,” she said sweetly. It was a strange greeting.

“Glad to hear you’re happy,” I said
dryly.

“No, I mean it. I want you to know, I have a
lot of respect for you.”

“You should, but you don’t,” I said, not
softening. I wasn’t going to fall for this I’m-OK-You’re-OK rap she
and Burke were trying to put over on me. It wasn’t okay. “Maybe
that crap worked for you as Miss Congeniality, but it doesn’t work
with me, okay? It’s crap. You committed adultery with my husband
behind my back, and then smiled at me in the hallway. The least
courtesy you could do me now is not to feed me a bunch of bullshit
about how much you respect me. Okay?”

“No matter what you say, I will always like
and respect you,” she said adamantly.

Madri Michaels, who had been listening, came
up behind Amy and put her hand on Amy’s shoulder for support. They
were “friends,” if it was possible for Madri to have friends. It
was maybe more of an “enemy of my enemy” bond between the two
women. Madri had dated Burke, until he dumped her for me. In my
defense, let me say that I met him independently of her, during a
murder trial, and didn’t know at that time he was her boyfriend.
Not that it would have made any difference. She’s trying to be
adult about all this,” Madri said, to explain Amy’s stubborn
niceness. Right. “Amy, if it makes you feel any better, I hate
Burke far more than I hate you,” I said. I didn’t want to get
sucked into some stereotypical cat fight over him, playing the
scorned woman role, when clearly he was the cause of much pain for
all three of the women present. I didn’t buy this crap that men are
just horny imbeciles who can be led by their dicks by any woman
with a good grip. Burke wasn’t “stolen,” he came and went
willingly.

“Look, you’re right,” I said, jabbing my
finger in Amy Penny’s face. “We shouldn’t be enemies. We have too
much in common. We’ve shared my husband. Someday, after Burke has
ditched you for someone new, let’s the three of us—you, me,
Madri—go have pedicures and lunch. We’ll be like a club. But until
then, I do not want to see you, and you can’t make me be nice to
you.”

Amy Penny took a deep gasp, exploded into
sobs, and then ran away.

Madri turned to me. “Do you have to be so
cruel? What good does it do anyone to be a sore loser?” Her face
was lit with indignation.

Five years before, when Burke and I started
dating, she spread the rumor that Burke picked me because I was
willing to do all sorts of filthy things in bed she would never do.
Madri’s so out of touch, she thought that old sexist epithet “slut”
would disable me, not realizing that her rumor only enhanced my
reputation and hurt hers. Come to think of it, it was shortly after
that rumor took off that Eric began flirting with me.

As for the filthy things I was supposedly
willing to do, I’m not sure which filthy things she was speaking
of. What I’m willing to do depends a lot on who I’m going to do it
with. With Burke, the sex was never very far from the ordinary,
although we sometimes let our cat watch.

Chapter Seven

I FOUND GRIFF INVESTIGATIONS in two rooms on
the second floor of a dusty old building on Thirty-fourth Street,
right above the Conway’s Discount store. Larry Griff’s secretary,
Crystal O’Connor, a classic petite with a lot of frosted brown
hair, was packing up her office supplies.

“Like I told the police, I hadn’t been with
him long,” she said. He just opened the office six months ago,
right? And, like, he didn’t talk about his cases much. He was real
. . . secretive.”

“He must have kept files on his clients.”

“Whatever information he had on clients he
took with him wherever he went because he, like, didn’t trust
anyone, not even me. And the cops took all his books and stuff
after he died,” she said.

Into the box went a framed photo of a guy,
probably her husband, a stuffed bunny, the aging Polaroids of her
and two girlfriends on vacation on a beach with palm trees—all of
them with dark tans and white smiles—a black plastic pencil cup, a
tape dispenser, a box of labels, two rolls of white correction
tape. She hesitated at the cut-glass bowl full of M&M’s, then
offered me some.

“Please, help me eat these. I don’t want to
pack them and I hate to throw them out.”

I took a small handful. “What books did the
cops take?” I asked.

“Oh, phone books, Who’s Who, stuff like that.
Oh yeah, and he had a picture of you on his office wall.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Standing with a microphone in front of
a courthouse or something. You were wearing a long coat. It was a
black-and-white picture.”

That would be my publicity photo, which
public relations sends to news outlets and fans. Anyone who wanted
one just had to write in and, except for those sent to residents of
penal institutions, no record was kept. Cheery thought.

“Did he have a photo of Joanne Armoire?” I
asked.

“I don’t know who she is,” Crystal said. “I
know he had yours and he had a thing for you. Like, he’d sometimes
ask me to call ANN and find out when your special reports were
going to air. He never asked me to call for anyone else, right?
When you were on, he turned on the TV in his office and locked his
office door.”

“Do you know anything about his
investigations? Anything at all?”

She shrugged, apologetic. “What can I tell
you? I know he did most of his work on the phone, but sometimes he
had to go out. Sometimes, he’d call someone and say he was Craig
Lockmanetz, a reporter doing a story about ANN. I only know this
because he always took his callbacks as Lockmanetz on a separate
phone line. I had to answer it People’s News Service.”

“You don’t know the names of any of the
people he was investigating, or who hired him?”

“All he wanted me to do was answer the phones
and do minor, routine paperwork. He even picked up the mail himself
at the main post office. I wish I knew more. But I don’t. Like,
this is a hardship for me too. Now I have to find another job, and
I know I’ll never get another easy job like this one. My husband
hurt his back three months ago, so . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s tough all over, right?” She
rolled the last M&M around the glass bowl and then offered it
to me. I took it and she put the bowl in the box and closed it up.
“I wish I knew more, you know, because I asked Mr. Griff to let me
help him more, to teach me the business. But he wouldn’t.”

“Did he tell you why he wouldn’t?”

“Top-secret project,” she said with a smirk.
“Or so he said. For a guy who poked around for other people’s
secrets, he sure kept his. I didn’t even know he was, like,
divorced until I read it in the paper.”

“Well, if you remember anything, will you
call me?” I gave her my card and we said good-bye.