What's a Girl Gotta Do (12 page)

I was halfway down the airless, dimly lit
hallway when Crystal O’Connor came running out behind me.

“Ms. Hudson? I remember something.” She
stopped, huffing, and then said, “I think.”

“What is it?”

“About a week ago, or maybe more, I’m not
sure—anyway, Griff came back from meeting someone on his case and
there was a blond hair on his coat and I, you know, pulled it off,
automatically. No big deal, right? Well, he grabbed the hair from
my hand and looked at it, and he got this peculiar look on his
face. It was so . . . funny, I mentioned it to my husband.”

“What kind of look?”

“Like he was angry and . . . hungry.”

“Hungry?”

“Maybe not hungry. It’s . . . it’s the look a
cat gets in its eyes, right, when it’s playing with a bird.”

“Do you have any idea who the bird was?”

She smiled. “No.”

“Was he dating anyone?”

“I don’t know, but he had to be getting it
somewhere, right? We all have to get it somewhere.”

“Right,” I said.

I had over an hour before my meeting with
Teddy Boylen, the last survivor of the three Boylen brothers who
founded Boylen Investigations in the 1970s, all ex-NYPD. I took a
cab downtown and drank coffee at Raps Coffee Shop on Seventh
Avenue, wondering how much Griff knew about me, how much was now in
someone else’s hands, and how much of it he took to the grave. It’s
just like Fats Waller said. One never knows, do one?

That’s my problem, or one of my problems, I
hate not knowing. I can’t handle too many unanswered questions in
my life at one time. Because I can’t find answers for those big
Q’s—Is there a God? Why am I here? What happens when I die?—I get a
little obsessed with finding the true answers for those questions
that have answers somewhere. That’s one of the reasons I got into
news. I hate it when answerable questions go unanswered, like when
people get away with murder. It really gets under my skin.

That’s another reason I got into news,
actually. Murder. Six months or so after my father died, someone
walked into a farmer’s home on the edge of my hometown and shot
seven members of a family to death, sparing only a four-year-old
girl who hid in a closet and saw nothing. For several weeks nobody
knew who did it, and for the first time we started locking our
doors, not only at night, which was radical enough, but during the
day. In bed at night, I had trouble sleeping, shooting bolt upright
every time the wind blew through the trees or a dog barked. When I
did sleep, the faces of the dead family, the Sesquins, took over my
dreams.

One of the scariest things about it was that
it seemed so random, so meaningless, and so immense. And it
happened to people everyone in town knew, if only vaguely. The fear
subsided when reporters and TV crews from all over North America
and as far away as England converged on the town to cover the
story, covering it so well that it would have been impossible for
another unwitnessed murder to be committed. The atmosphere of
terror was quickly replaced by a media circus.

There seemed to be no motive for the
cold-blooded slaughter of the quiet, church-going family, and in
the effort to get to the bottom of it, everyone in town was
interviewed by reporters and questioned by FBI. We got used to
being the center of attention very quickly. We felt almost loved,
and we felt safe. After the killer was found, the reporters and the
photographers packed up and left town an I felt their absence
sorely. I think that was when I first began thinking it could
transform me.

Later, in junior high school, my career
decision was reinforced when I discovered that it was okay to go to
the prom without a date if you were covering it for the school
newspaper, and that, under the guise of “reporter,” you could get
away with asking the principal a lot of pointed questions
considered rude, even cause for detention, if asked by “civilian”
students.

A little before seven, Teddy Boylen showed
up. He was an older man, in his sixties. I guessed, with a bright
red complexion and a white-crew cut. He came in huffing, bringing
an aura of cold air with him to the table, where it settled and
dissipated around us. I shivered. After exchanging routine
pleasantries, we got down to Griff.

“Larry Griff left Boylen six months ago,”
Boylen told me. “He didn’t take any of our clients with him, but I
heard he landed a cash cow. I don’t know who it was. I also heard
he was working solo. That told me the job was hush-hush, and that
he was investigating one person or a small group of people.”

“What kind of investigations did Griff do for
you?”

“A variety. Insurance, corporate, title
searches, employee background checks, a lot of marital. Sometimes
we did contract work for attorneys. He worked the phone a lot,
worked through the mails. I prefer to work in the field,
one-on-one, face-to-face.”

“Why?”

“It’s a philosophical thing. My generation
used a lot of psychology in detective work. Griff’s generation is
too dependent on high-tech stuff.”

“Were you friends with this guy?”

“Friends? No. But we worked together okay for
a while. He’d been a cop like me. I was NYPD for twenty years, he
was a Philly cop.”

“Why’d he leave the force?”

Boylen laughed. “Taking payoffs, although
they couldn’t make it stick. Griff was always looking for a big
payday.”

“Did he have gambling debts? Drug problems?
Women problems?”

“Women, that’s it, right there! He had a
problem with women. He couldn’t get enough women, and he liked the
real glamorous ones, with . . . good heads of hair—blondes,
brunettes, but especially redheads, like you. But dames . . .
ladies . . .”

“Dames is fine,” I said. “It’s the word I
prefer for my gender, actually.”

He smiled at me. He was a cute old guy with
clear, unflinching eyes. I had a puckish urge to rub my hand over
his snow white crew cut, which I, of course, resisted.

“Dames cost. Dames like that. I mean, you
don’t go dutch with them. You met him, didn’t you?”

“Only briefly,” I said.

“Yeah, I read that in the paper. Anyway, he
never had enough money or enough women. He was greedy, that was his
true problem.”

“Why did he leave Boylen?”

“I think he was blackmailing some of the
people we were investigating for clients. . . .”

“But . . .”

“No proof. Just a strong hunch. Griff was
working for the client and for himself. I figure,
double-dealing.”

A car door opened in front of Raps and a
woman got out. Boylen watched her until she was almost at the end
of the block, then he jumped and said, “Gotta run. Call me if you
have any more questions. Hope you find what you’re looking
for.”

“You too,” I said.

As I left the coffee shop, a bum sang out to
me from the sidewalk, “Got a quarter, lady? When I get rich, I’m
going to marry a pretty young woman like you. Help me out, will
ya?”

Sexist old fart. But I gave him a buck.

So far, I had a whole lot of nothing and not
much choice. I was going to have to break the phalanx of ANN spin
doctors and get to Joanne somehow. Fortunately, when I called
Joanne again, her machine was off and a human being picked up,
saving me having to scheme to get past Joanne’s doorman. Solange
Stevenson answered the phone.

“Robin?” she said. “Joanne is under a great
deal of strain at the moment. I don’t think she wants to see anyone
else tonight.”

There was a noise in the background, and I
heard Solange cupping her hand over the phone to muffle voices.
When the hand was taken away and the fog cleared, Solange said,
“Just a moment.”

Joanne came on. “You’d better come up here,
Robin,” she said. “You know where I live, don’t you?”

Yeah, I remembered. Joanne and I had been
friends for a time, back when we were both writers for ANN’s
flagship news program. Six months after she became a reporter, I
became one, inheriting her weekend spot while she went to the U.N.
full-time. I put in my six months covering dog shows and doing
quirky stories about New York, the kind of stories the network
relied on to flesh out twenty-four hour news on the weekends, which
are traditionally slow news days. Joanne was interviewing
ambassadors and visiting heads of state, doing a lot of thoughtful,
cogent pieces on foreign policy. Before long, she was jetting off
to wars and natural disasters worldwide. “Nerves of steel, heart of
gold,” said Esquire in an infatuated essay in its “Women We Love”
issue. “Gutsy and classy,” said Jack Jackson, when Joanne won her
first Emmy for her Afghanistan reports. I envied her, and resented
her a little, but what I envied most was not her job or her fame,
but her pragmatic, unflagging savoir faire.

Solange greeted me at the door of Joanne’s
apartment and we sat down in the cavernous living room, which was
oddly devoid of furniture. Just a sofa, a chair, a television, and
a liquor cabinet stood in the gymnasium-size room. The
red-and-white Baluch carpet was marked by bright, clean squares and
rectangles where Joanne’s beloved art deco antiques had been.

The network mandarins had all left, but
Solange stayed behind. It wasn’t surprising, as she loved misery
and was always ready to dispense her venomous psychobabble to
“help” a friend.

“Are you getting enough sleep? You look
terrible. I’m worried about you,” she said to me. She does this all
the time, preemptively disarming you with a quick succession of
blows to your self- esteem. I always look “terrible” to
Solange.

“I’m fine. I’m having a bad week, but I’m
fine, really.”

“Are you sure? You really look tired out.
It’s understandable, I mean, you’ve had a hellish year, between the
belch and Burke and Amy . . .”

“So you keep reminding me,” I said.

“Look, I’m just speaking out of concern for
you.”

Was she? She certainly said that like she
meant it, but hell, who likes to be told over and over how terrible
they look, how bad their luck is, how miserable their life is?

“Your husband’s worried about you too,” she
said. Oh, below the belt.

“You spoke to Burke about me?” I asked.

“Well, it was just a little remark of
friendly concern on his part, that’s all. Actually, he called to
pump me for information on the Griff murder, but I didn’t have any,
so we talked about other things.”

She made it sound so chatty and intimate.
Burke must have flattered her ass off, I thought, in his insidious
way. The truth was, Burke could never stand Solange. “Here comes
six feet of walking saltpeter,” he said to me once when he saw her
approach at a party. But, of course, now he was cultivating a
source.

Joanne came in wearing a black silk robe that
set off her fair hair and skin and sat down across from me. Her
eyes were red, but her expression was almost serene, like she’d
been refreshed by weeping. She turned to Solange.

“Thanks for coming by, Solange. It means a
lot to me that you did.”

Solange, who never picked up on my bare-faced
hints to butt out of my life, picked up on Joanne’s cues all right.
“Any time. I should be running along now, but call me if you need
anything. If I’m not home, have my service track me down.”

“Thank you,” Joanne said, reaching behind her
to squeeze Solange’s hand. When Solange had left, Joanne said, “It
was Alejandro De Marco.”

“Who?”

“The Argentine general. He’s the one I had
the affair with. When I did that series of reports on Argentina’s
military adapting to democracy.”

“You slept with him and then you did a story
about him? Why?” It was clearly a conflict of interest.

“Why? Hmmm.” She paused to formulate her
answer. “He was sexy and smart and exotic and enigmatic and,
frankly, I felt that having sex with him would give me valuable
insights into his personality. I guess it sounds egotistical, but I
felt sure I could detach myself emotionally and retain my
objectivity.”

“Did you?” “More or less.”

“And did you gain valuable insights?”

“Yes, more about my own self than his. But I
don’t think it really compromised my objectivity. It was after I
finished the first piece, which was critical of him and his
political ambitions. The second and third pieces were no less
critical.”

“But weren’t you scared you’d ‘disappear’
into a mass grave somewhere?”

“Not really. The disappearances had stopped
by then. Besides, a little danger is an aphrodisiac. You know, it
is probably more dangerous to date in New York City. I don’t want
to go into the whole long story tonight, but I figured you were
burning with curiosity about who it was.”

“I thought it was Yeltsin.”

She laughed. “No, not Yeltsin. I don’t make a
habit of sleeping with the people I report on. I’ve never done it
before, but Alejandro . . . he was intriguing and . . . it was
right after I broke up with Marty and that was so painful.
Alejandro seemed like a good way to be bad and get even with Marty
in some way. Does that make sense?”

Marty was the cameraman on her foreign
stories and her longtime boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend. He was very
macho, very glam. They still dated sometimes—and slept together,
I’m sure. Before Burke left me he had held this relationship up as
a model.

“Completely,” I said.

“It was a mistake, though,” she said,
standing up and going to a liquor cabinet to pour herself a shot of
Jim Beam. “Want something?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ve been trying to decide all day if I am
going to survive this or not.”

“You’re a survivor, Joanne,” I said. Joanne
was too strong and in control to surrender.

“This kind of thing could be distorted by the
news media,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about all the things
I’ve done that could be taken the wrong way if seen in a negative
light. You understand.”