What's a Girl Gotta Do (15 page)

Louis Levin and a bunch of writers were
sitting together in the back, trapped by Turk Hammermill, who was
probably the only person not discussing conspiracies and
confessions. Louis saw me and waved at me, signaling me to come
over. I shook my head—no way—and went to talk to Mark O’Malley.
O’Malley, a financial reporter who once advised me to “think
geriatric” in my investments, had a theory that fit his special
area of expertise. Jackson had taken the company public in the
early eighties to raise cash, but the only way he could get
investors to buy into his dreams, which seemed farfetched and
quixotic back then, was to give them forty-one percent, with
another thirty percent given in royal grants, i.e., stock options,
to top employees. So Jackson, chairman of the board, held just
twenty-nine percent of the stock, hardly a controlling
interest.

Of course, that was never a problem for
Jackson. He controlled his stockholders, a disproportionate number
of them wealthy feminist widows, with charm. And they were very
loyal. Their loyalty increased as JBS took off and the profits
rolled in. That loyalty helped fight off takeover attempts. But
everyone has a price and the disloyalty price on the stock was
believed to be $50. Fifty bucks, and the devoted suffragettes would
hitch up their petticoats and run for the highest bidder.

At the moment, it was listed on the NYSE at
about 28 ½ . It seemed safe as long as we weren’t ruined by scandal
and stockholder panic, Mark asserted, before taking his drink and
his theory to another group.

Eric Slansky was at the bar. I took a seat
between Dillon Flinder and Eric and ordered a lemon Stoly martini
from Mickey, the barman.

“Hi,” Eric said, flashing his pale blues at
me. “I was hoping you’d be here tonight.”

I suddenly felt a blush was imminent and I
turned away from him, not wanting to reveal myself to him that way,
not at this stage of the game.

“Hey, Dillon,” I said. “Did I interrupt a
heavy conversation here?”

“No,” he said. “We were discussing the line
of people who stood outside Dunbar’s office today, waiting to make
confession.”

“Hell, his memo worked! Who was there?”

Eric jumped in. “According to my sources,
about six people spoke to Dunbar after Joanne’s presser, including
Mark O’Malley and Solange Stevenson.”

“Solange? What could she possibly have left
to confess?” Dillon asked, in his class of ’55 Hahvahd accent.
Dillon Flinder was a second-string medical correspondent who
sometimes drank with me at Keggers. “Now me, I could give Dunbar a
confession that would be worth his while.” He laughed.

Dillon was corrupt, dissolute, and
unrepentant. Get a few drinks in him and he’d tell you all kinds of
scandalous stuff about people, mainly himself, and would be
completely unremorseful for his drunken confessions the next time
he saw you. He considered himself a true scientist and had a
excessive interest in sexual science and an unhealthy interest in
botany. Once over drinks at Keggers he told me that in pursuit of
the perfect sexual experience he had drilled a hole in a watermelon
and then made love to it—his words, made love to it. How was it? I
asked. I shouldn’t have refrigerated it first, he said.

“You know what Mark O’Malley has to confess,
don’t you?” Dillon asked.

I did, but I wasn’t about to say it and
confirm Dillon’s own speculation. Mark was the best-looking man at
ANN, one of the smartest, one of the nicest and—ain’t it always the
way, girls—he was gay. He hadn’t come out because his family didn’t
approve of that sexual preference and because he felt it would hurt
him on his conservative business beat. Man, it wasn’t fair, that
Mark’s private life, which had no bearing on his reporting, could
be forced out like this.

I changed the subject to spare Mark’s ears
from burning, and turned to Eric. “What do you have to confess,
Eric?” I asked.

“Want to give me something to confess?” he
asked, and grinned.

I felt a sudden, powerful pelvic twinge. I
hated that he could affect me this way. I said nothing.

“Well, I don’t have to confess anyway,” he
said. “Obviously, whoever is trying to discredit ANN is gunning for
on-air people. They’re going after the most visible symbols of the
network’s credibility, its reporters and anchors. Nobody knows just
who, though. Was every on-air person investigated, or just some? By
the way, did you get that note I dropped off for you?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “How did you get hold
of it?”

“I saw Gil Jerome in the Xerox room. He’d
thrown that copy out to get one of better quality. After he left, I
fished it out of the trash.”

“Well, thanks.” I saw Burke’s head above the
crowd as he squeezed through towards me.

When he finally made it, he said, “Sorry I’m
late. I had to wait for Amy to bring me your keys. I’d forgotten
where I put them. I’d forgotten I even had them.”

“But you brought them?” I said.

Eric’s arm moved across the bar behind me,
protectively. Burke looked down at Eric’s arm and then back up at
me without reacting. Boys, boys.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled them out and
dangled them in front of me. When I reached for them, he snatched
them away.

“How mature,” I said.

“First, I need to talk to you. Privately,” he
said.

I looked at Eric. He looked at Burke
suspiciously. “You want me to wait for you, Robin?” he said.

“No, thanks,” I said.

Eric plunked his money on the bar for Mickey
and slid off his stool. “See you tomorrow then,” he said, and
kissed me full on the lips, quickly, before he left.

Burke said nothing about the kiss as he led
me towards the back. We passed Madri Michaels, who saw Burke and me
together and cooed, “Way to go, Robin!”

“No, no, it’s not what you think,” I said.
Madri’s assumption that this was a reconciliation pissed me off
because I’m not the type of woman who would take a man back that
easily. No, if Burke wanted back in my bed now, he’d have to
perform feats that would make the twelve labors of Hercules look
like child’s play.

“Sure, sure,” Madri said, unconvinced. The
rumor of our reconciliation would be circulating as soon as I left
her sight—and she was Amy’s good buddy.

Fuck it, I thought, as we moved past her,
into a booth papered with Dewey Wins headlines. We sat beneath a
fake green and orange Tiffany lamp. A waitress came over and gave
us menus.

“Have you eaten?” Burke asked me.

“No.” I glanced at the menu quickly.

I ordered a chili burger and a double lemon
Stoly martini and Burke ordered the salad platter and an obscure
local beer. When the waitress left, Burke started rearranging the
condiments on the table, aligning the ketchup, sugar, and napkin
dispenser, placing the salt and pepper in front of them in perfect
symmetry, and putting the small bottle of Tabasco right in front of
the salt and pepper. Then he straightened his paper place mat and
moved the fork from the right side to the left, lining it up at a
perfect ninety-degree angle from the table edge.

Watching him do this, I felt my chest
constrict with a familiar tension.

“Do you have to do that?” I asked, irritated.
“It’s so anal.”

“Do what?”

“Straighten the table.”

“Did I do that?” he asked innocently. Ah yes.
When you’re married long enough, you can annoy each other without
even being conscious of it.

“Forget it. So what do you want to talk
about?” I asked.

“How’s your mother?”

“I can’t believe that is what you want to
talk about, but since you asked: She has her good days and her bad
days. Her bad days are real bad.”

“Does she still believe she’s the queen of
England?”

“She never believed she was the queen of
England, Burke. She believes she ought to be.”

One of my mother’s delusions of grandeur
involved her belief that her mother had mated illicitly with King
George VI during a royal visit to the States that coincidentally
took place nine months before my mother’s birth. My father, bless
his heart, loved her despite this cracked view, and convinced her
of the need for discretion. But occasionally, when she felt she
wasn’t getting the respect she deserved, she would announce her
alleged parentage to any and all. This often happened during
disputes with Safeway checkers and once with a Woolworth
fitting-room attendant, who curtly told my mother she didn’t care
if she was the queen of bloody Sheba, she still couldn’t take more
than three items into the fitting room.

“She has some good days, though?” Burke
prompted.

“When she takes her drugs she’s fine, except
for a few minor lapses. I mean, she talks about my father like he’s
still alive. I hate to call her because she’ll say, ‘Let me get
your father. He’ll want to say hi,’ and she’ll leave me hanging
there indefinitely while she looks for my dead dad. The
long-distance bills are hell. She still asks about you all the
time. Well, she calls you Frank for some reason, but she means you.
So—what is it you really want?”

“Robin, word on the street is Griff turned
some kind of information over to you the night he was killed. What
can you tell me about it?”

Word on the street. Burke liked to talk as
though he were Hildy Johnson, as though he were plugged into every
water-front bar and hood hangout in the city.

“They say lots of things on the street. Not
all of them are true. Who told you Griff turned info over to
me?”

“Someone saw a guy fitting his description
handing you something during the party.”

“Who?”

“A source,” he said. “Then Joanne said he
threatened to turn info on her over to another reporter, and I put
two and two together . . .”

The waitress brought our food and drinks. I
bit into my burger.

“Seriously, can you tell me what he gave
you?”

I had a mouth full of food, so no, I couldn’t
tell him just then. I purposely chewed very slowly, making him
wait, and then I said, “If I knew, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell
you Burke. We’re rivals now.” I emptied my martini and waved at the
waitress to bring me another.

We’d met on a story, Burke and I, the murder
trial of a mobster named Lonnie Katz who was believed to have
killed a dozen men with no penalty, but got in hot water when he
killed a woman. A woman he was married to at the time. A woman with
a suspicious mother. When Lonnie tried to buy his mother-in-law’s
silence with a bookmaking concession, Ma turned state’s evidence
and sent Lonnie away.

Burke was at WOR at the time and we started
dating. I always thought that was kind of romantic, meeting on a
murder.

“If he gave me anything, don’t you think I
would have turned it over to the cops?” I said.

I was thinking about that sheet I hadn’t
given the cops, the one that was all blacked out. Once I’d kept it
from them, I couldn’t hand it over without making them suspicious,
even if it wasn’t relevant. Guilt for this omission was starting to
weigh heavily on me. The page hadn’t seemed important to anyone but
me. But was it? Did it contain some clue? I wanted to leave, go
home, look at the sheet again, but I was midmeal and Burke was on
my case.

“We used to tell each other everything once
upon a time,” he said wistfully.

Jeez. This guy just didn’t get it. He cheated
on me. He left me for a younger woman. He did all this while I was
in the midst of a professional crisis. I was no longer required to
like him.

“We used to trust each other once,” I said.
“The rules have changed slightly.”

“Let’s not fight.”

“But we’re so good at it,” I said. “It seems
like from the moment we got married we fought. We’re such
opposites. Given all this, Burke, what made you marry me? Just out
of curiosity. I’ve been wondering.”

“What makes a man throw himself on a grenade
to save his buddies?”

“That’s funny.”

“How about this then.” He grinned. “What
makes a man who is standing at the edge of an abyss looking down
want to jump into it?”

“Oh, that’s a much nicer analogy.”

“It’s the thrill of the fall,” he answered
for me. “When I was falling in love with you, it was the greatest
time of my life. But sooner or later, I had to hit solid
ground.”

“You’re doing a great job of getting into my
good graces with all this fawning flattery,” I said.

“You know what I mean. When we lived together
in that big apartment in your funky neighborhood, I never knew what
the next day would bring, and it was exciting in a way.” He averted
his eyes. “But I can’t live with you. You wear me out. I want a
peaceful home life, a normal wife, and . . . and children, a house
in the burbs, once in a while, maybe, a home-cooked meal. That’s
not such a radical concept outside New York. You don’t really want
me back anyway, do you?”

“I want somebody,” I said. “But I don’t think
it’s you anymore. Good thing, since you’ve found your beauty
queen.”

“Well, Amy and I may be very compatible, but
she’s no Robin Hudson,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Amy . . . she doesn’t make me laugh like you
do. You really made me laugh and I never realized how nice that was
until it was gone. Sometimes I really miss you.”

“Nice try,” I said. “But flattery will not
get you any information I might have.”

“I wasn’t flattering you . . . I was opening
up to you.” He smiled and flashed that endearing Correspondent’s
Squint. It softened me up. By now I had decided to reduce his
sentence to eleven heroic labors.

“You’re one in three billion, Robin,” he
said, and signaled the waitress to bring more drinks. “ I think we
should try to be friends. To be honest, it’s too exhausting
fighting you, it’s debilitating being married to you, and
friendship seems the only other option you’ll consider.”