What's a Girl Gotta Do (13 page)

“Yes, I do.”

“Tomorrow I have to appear at a news
conference and admit everything this investigator might have found
out about me. You’d be amazed how many things like that a person
can accumulate in thirty-some years of life. There was this lawn
boy in Madrid—he was just nineteen—and a married man in Baghdad and
on and on and on. You know what I mean.”

“No, but I’d really like to,” I said. A lawn
boy sounded mighty good right about then.

“The media could distort a lot of stuff and
ruin me. You know how we are, Robin. Once we get a taste of blood,
we embark on a feeding frenzy. The free press, God bless it. Until
it’s coming after me.”

“So who was investigating us? And why?”

“I assume it was just Griff, investigating
attractive women like you, like me, to blackmail us. Cash or
trade.”

“So he was blackmailing you?”

“Yeah.” She poured herself another Jim Beam
and came to sit, just down the sofa from me. “He called me, about
three weeks ago, didn’t identify himself, asked me if the words
‘Alejandro’ and ‘armored personnel carrier’ meant anything to
me.”

“Armored personnel carrier?”

She sighed. “One night Alejandro
requisitioned an APC and after dinner, we took it for a spin and
then . . . we had sex in it. Apparently, there was a hidden camera.
A rival general took snaps, and somehow they . . . circulated among
the press corps down there and . . . I guess Griff got his hands on
them.”

“Holy . . .”

“So I was intrigued, to say the least, when
Griff called. I met him at the Royalton bar and he told me he
wanted twenty-five thousand dollars for the report he did on me and
the pictures, which he showed to me. I told him it was going to
take me a while to get my hands on twenty-five thousand, and then
he offered me a chance to work it off. He said he had heard I
swallowed. God only knows what’s in that report.”

“You told him what?”

“That I’d get the twenty-five thousand one
way or another. No way I was going to be this guy’s whore. I’d pay
him the money and get it over with. Just put it behind me. A week
later, he called up and said the price was going up, up to fifty
thousand dollars. Said he was taking a room at the Marfeles the
night of the company party, and he’d contact me there. He told me
to bring the fifty thousand with me or else he was going to turn my
file over to another reporter to expose me.

“Robin, I had cashed my chips, begged and
borrowed, even hocked all my jewelry to get twenty-five thousand. I
didn’t know where to go to get another twenty-five grand. It was a
nightmare. Honest to God, Robin, I have never felt more scared in
my life. Not crossing mine fields in Afghanistan, not dodging
snipers in Sarajevo.”

“You didn’t get the rest of the money,” I
guessed.

She smiled ruefully and nodded around the
room. “I raised another seventeen thousand by selling my furniture
at a tremendous sacrifice. Really. For a fraction of what it is
worth.”

“Then you saw him at the Marfeles?”

“I was supposed to meet him at ten-thirty in
Room 13D, but when I got to his door, I heard voices inside. Griff
said, ‘It’s too late. It’s already on its way.’ Or something like
that. There was someone in there, speaking softly, and I couldn’t
make out if it was a man or a woman. Then Griff said, ‘She won’t
know what to look for until I tell her. So you still have
time.’”

“’She’ being . . .?”

“Me, I thought,” Joanne said. “Anyway, I went
back to my room. Around eleven, I made another try. That’s when I
saw you.”

“Did you go back to his room later?”

“Shortly after midnight. And there was no
answer.”

“You think he intended to give the
information to me?” I asked.

“Judging from the suggestions he made to me,
he probably would have wanted you to give him a blow job
first.”

“Why us? Or is it every on-air person at ANN?
Was Solange being blackmailed?” I asked.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone being able to
blackmail Solange,” Joanne said. Yeah, what could they get on her,
after all? She’d already admitted to being a victim of incest, the
child of an alcoholic, a victim of bulimia, anorexia, lookism,
sexism, all for the edification and emotional benefit of her
television viewers.

“Some people can’t be blackmailed.
Exhibitionists like Solange and unrepentant rascals like Georgia
Jack. And perfectly honest people, of which there are exactly
none,” she said.

“Where are the pictures?” I asked.

Joanne shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is
I saw them, I know they exist, but I don’t know what happened to
them. They’re out there somewhere.” She looked out her panoramic
window at the dark city. “It’s scary, some stranger out there,
holding my intimate secrets.”

I nodded. “I used to think it was scary that
some anonymous, lonely fan could be jerking off to my publicity
photo. But this is worse.”

“Yeah, it violates the self, as Solange put
it. It’s like psychological rape,” she said. “The thing is, I’ve
been on the other side of this. I’ve learned other people’s
secrets, dug up dirt without them knowing it. I’ve confronted them
with it. It’s my job. I’m an investigative reporter. But I feel
like I’ve been stung by my own tail, you know what I mean?”

I did. “Did you kill him?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“No.”

“In a way,” she said, “I’m glad this is out.
All this time, I’ve known those pictures existed, and I’ve worried
about their disclosure. It’s a relief in a way not to have to worry
about it anymore. So—I told you about Alejandro, Robin. Why don’t
you tell me what Griff had on you?”

So I told her about Red Knobby, an unpleasant
memory but a relatively innocuous one. This is the deal. I was ten,
and had suddenly become interested in boys, but did not know how to
get their attention. In my reading and my perusal of art books, I
got the idea that what boys liked best was the female form, so I
invited a half dozen of the neighborhood boys into my garage one
day. There, I reclined, Odalisque-like, under a dusty blanket,
facing a semicircle of skeptical boys. I hesitated only a moment,
and flung back the blanket. And there I was, completely naked,
expecting adoration and admiration for my daring exposure, when one
of them, a boy unfortunately nicknamed Stinky Starko, started
laughing and said, “Knobby knees! She’s got red hair and knobby
knees!”

Mortification spread up my alabaster skin
like a fire as the boys began jeering “Knobby! Knobby knees,” and
then ran away from me, like I was poison. It was a damning
commentary on my early sexual presence, and did a real number on my
body image.

For several years, I was known as Red Knobby,
and every time I heard that name I felt exposed, frightened, and
pissed off, in that order. It set my self-esteem back a decade, my
Red Knobby Years, although I got even with those boys. When we were
little, they wouldn’t even talk to me, they’d just make loud jokes
at my expense. But by the time I got to high school, I had turned
into a swan, on the outside at least, and I wouldn’t talk to
them.

Even as an adult, whenever I heard the word
knobby, I would smell creosote and timber and feel a flash of
humiliation. But now that it was out, it seemed like no big deal.
Now I look back on that incident and think, those little boys had a
chance to gaze upon this body, and they focused on my knees. It’s
not a bad body and those boys missed a great opportunity, one I
hope haunts them in their dotage. I think of them when I’m working
out my hostility in the employee gym and am starting to feel the
burn.

But as far as dirty little secrets go, Knobby
and the Starko Affair couldn’t hold a candle to Alejandro and the
APC. With pictures.

Chapter Eight

THE NEWS-JOURNAL was not convinced of
Joanne’s innocence, but while she dominated their story in the
morning edition, they weren’t letting me off the hook yet either.
Using innuendos, they even put forward a conspiracy theory,
involving me, Joanne, and possibly other women, getting together to
rid the planet of a “sleazebag” like Griff, a service-to-our-gender
sort of thing.

“CIRCLE WIDENS—SECOND TV REPORTER IMPLICATED
IN GRIFF MURDER,” read the headline on page three. In the main
story, a “retired homicide expert” said, “The guy was a sleazebag.
I’m surprised some lady, or group of ladies, didn’t blow him away
long before now.” Inset, they had a photo of me leaving Joanne’s
the night before, with the caption, “Hudson leaves after confab
with Armoire.” One plus one equals a conspiracy.

The story was flanked by Kerwin Shutz’s
column, in which he cited Thelma and Louise, Basic Instinct, and
Hillary Clinton for inciting a “wave of violent, vigilante
feminism.” Kerwin moonlighted as the ultra-right-wing questioner on
ANN’s show Ambush and his perennial fear was strong women trying to
take his gun away. Gee, what would Freud say? It kind of made me
wonder what his parents’ marriage was like. I had to laugh, though,
imagining Kerwin Shutz huddling in his survivalist basement on Long
Island, his constitutionally protected semiautomatic
penis-substitute at the ready to fend off a gang of raving
feminists.

I was tempted to log into the computer and
send Shutz a message, something facetious like “You are next on our
Sworn Enemies of Feminism List,” but he’d probably take it
seriously and it would end up in the News-Journal the next day as a
“threat.”

Claire gave me the day’s memos and my phone
messages when I got in. I went into my cluttered office and read
through them. Two calls from Elroy and three calls from Burke. He
was trying to cultivate me as a source, I guess, the shameless cad.
In the message space on one of the pink slips was written, in
quotation marks, “Hey, Holden, gimme a call, willya?” Holden was
his pet name for me, as in Holden Caulfield and William Holden, who
starred in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.

I crumpled it up rather gleefully, shot it
into my wastepaper basket, and turned on the TV to catch Joanne’s
live presser (I’d been forbidden to attend in person). It was about
five minutes before the ten hour—Joanne was coming up in the first
block of the next show—so I watched Sawyer Lash, the network’s
worst anchorman, misread a story on B-films. He kept saying
“marital” for the word “martial.” “A new marital-arts action film,”
he said, as the screen filled with shots of two ninjas kicking the
shit out of each other. At the end of it, Sawyer stopped reading
and cocked his head slightly, like a hound. I could almost hear the
producer screaming at him through the IFB in his ear.

“I’m sorry, that was a martial-arts film, not
a marital-arts film,” Sawyer said, and then teased Joanne’s live
presser at the top of the hour before the show went into terminal
break, network ID, and commercial. I love live television.

At a table in Studio C, Joanne sat before a
bouquet of black microphones, flanked by Jack Jackson, George
Dunbar, and the court eunuchs cringing behind her. The look on her
face was perfect—neither chastened nor arrogant, but serene. I knew
this serene look of hers and you couldn’t argue with it for long.
It gave her a kind of mysterious authority.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, and went
into her prepared statement. Basically, she said the same things
she told me, more or less. She denied any connection to Griff’s
murder, admitted to Alejandro and the APC, but left out the lawn
boy and the married man and all the colorful others, taking care of
them with the blanket statement that she was a single red-blooded
female in her thirties with a sex drive and a sex life that were
nobody’s business.

“But,” she said, “my brief relationship with
Alejandro was a huge mistake in judgment, creating the appearance
of a conflict of interest. I take my profession seriously, and I
realize I have violated an ethic we hold dear. I deeply regret my
mistake, and I have learned from it.”

Before taking questions, Georgia Jack came to
the mike. “I want y’all to know, Joanne here is a better reporter
today for have erred and repented.” Jack had done a brief turn as a
preacher before being defrocked for moral turpitude in 1961.
“Today, she gave me her resignation, but I wouldn’t accept it.
She’s taking two weeks off, without pay, in contrition. I stand
behind her one hundred percent. All this sniffing around ladies’
petticoats for secrets and love letters is gutter behavior. And I
have something else to say. Someone is trying to discredit ANN’s
integrity and I am going to find out who.”

Then he opened up the floor to questions. In
one fell swoop, Jack Jackson had spun the focus away from Joanne
and on to some outside force threatening ANN. If you want to debunk
one conspiracy theory, give ‘em another. From there on, all the
questions had to do with which shadowy force was trying to ruin
ANN—the religious right, the radical left, rival broadcasters, the
Democrats, the Republicans, the print media, sinister foreign
powers? Jackson hinted of vague, suspicious things, and promised
that when he knew something, they’d know something. A reporter then
asked Jackson if he had anything he wanted to confess. Jackson said
that with all his sins, he’d have to do it in installments, the
reporters didn’t have that much time, and in any case, most of his
sins weren’t PG and couldn’t go out on the airwaves.

When they broke for commercial, I scanned the
day’s memos. The first, from Jack Jackson, iterated that he
believed in freedom of speech and association, he believed in
Joanne Armoire’s integrity, and he believed in the integrity of his
employees. The second, from Dunbar, urged anyone who might have
some secret that could compromise his or her objectivity to come
talk to him about it, so that ANN could share the burden. I’m
paraphrasing, but basically it was a call to confession. Voluntary,
of course. And Bob McGravy, now head of ANN’s in-house Ethics
Committee, had written a memo restating ANN’s policies and ethics
quite righteously, but also gently reminding us that we are all
flawed and should not pass judgment too quickly. Typically, he
ended it with a bit of poetry: