What's a Girl Gotta Do (20 page)

“That’s right.”

“I figure he was already dead at that point.
If he was going to tell me something, he took it to the grave.”

“Well, I know this sounds terrible, but I’m
glad he’s dead,” Susan whimpered. “I don’t think he ever would have
given me that information on me.”

“Probably not,” Joanne said. “Sounds like he
was building a harem. Women he could control through
information.”

Susan, who had rather an unfortunate love
life, worse even than mine, launched into her ritual condemnation
of the entire male gender. Men were brutish, lying, hypocritical
traitorous shits, she said, adding, “And they never call when they
say they will,” as though this were the worst offense. “I hate men.
Don’t you?”

“I love men,” I said. “In general, I love
them. We’re just as bad as them and we’re just as good as them, I
think.”

“Some of them can’t accept that, though,”
Joanne said.

“Some of us can’t accept it,” I said.

When dessert came – layers of lime Jell-O
alternating with layers of Cool Whip for $5.95 – we got into the
trickier aspects of the situation.

“So the question,” Joanne said, “is, why
us?”

“Yeah. And is it only us?” I asked. “And who
hired him? Who else from ANN had a room at the Marfeles that
night?”

“A bunch of us,” Joanne said. “Most of the
execs, some ‘talent.’” Talent is the term we use for on-air people,
provoking much mirth among the writers and producers.

“Solange had a room, I had a room … let me
see … Sawyer Lash and his wife stayed there that night, and Greg,”
she continued. “who else? Oh yeah, Pat Lattanzi and Elsie Ormsby
Ward.”

Pat and Elsie were married. They anchored the
6 p.m. together and earlier shows separately.

“That’s it?”

“Oh no, there were others – execs, some
civilians. But I didn’t keep track. I didn’t know at the time it
would be important,” Joanne said. She went on. “Robin, are you sure
Griff didn’t slip you something or tell you something that …”

We went over the events of the evening, where
we were and when, what we saw and when. Of course, it was a New
Year’s Eve party and we were all pretty liquored up, so the details
were blurry. They were particularly blurry for Susan.

“When Griff was killed,” she said, “I was
passed out in a stall in the bathroom. Remember, Robin, after I
spilled that drink on Solange, I went to throw up? I … I was there
until about midnight, when someone found me and put me in a
cab.”

That sounded reasonable enough. I did
remember my last vision of Susan that night, green and weaving, as
she headed to the john. No, I didn’t think she had done it. But
then, how well did I really know her? What were her secrets? Surely
more than a fear of an unlikely Post headline: FLORENCE BRAVE’S
DAUGHTER NOT VIRGIN.

“What about Solange? I heard she ‘confessed’
to Dunbar. Any idea what that was about?”

“She told me she didn’t confess anything,”
Susan said. “She said she went in to give Dunbar advice.” Then
Susan said she had to go. She was cooking dinner for her mother
that night at her apartment in Brooklyn.

We all agreed to honor the omerta and not
speak of our meeting.

As soon as Susan left, Joanne turned to me,
“Think she did it?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t think she’s capable,” Joanne said.
“I hope she doesn’t get mucked up in this in the papers. It’s awful
to be tried in the press. Oh, the irony. When you’re exposed, you
start thinking about all the people you’ve exposed, and how their
stories were warped or distorted by your own bias without your even
being aware of it. And yet, it’s our job to expose hypocrisy.”

“Even though we’re all hypocrites too.”

“It’s the human condition,” she said.
“Strange to find ourselves on the receiving end.”

“Who do you think is investigating us?” I
asked her. She smiled. I couldn’t help noticing how immaculately
dressed she was. I don’t think you could even find a piece of lint
on her. How did she manage it? In my haste that day, I’d thrown on
a big gray shirt and faded black jeans. My hair was loosely tied
back and unkempt.

“Between us, since we’re sworn to secrecy,
Jackson really thinks it’s Paul Mangecet. It makes sense.”

“The holier-than-thou man?” I asked.

“Millennial Broadcasting is doing great, it’s
a money machine for Mangacet. But imagine what a guy like him could
do if he had Jackson’s global reach,” she said. “Only I doubt if
Jackson’s stockholders would sell to an archconservative theocrat
like Mangacet. They’re very liberal and he thinks interracial
dating is unholy and feminism turns women to witchcraft.”

“Yeah, too bad there aren’t really witches.
Too many televangelists in the world, not enough frogs. One twitch
of Samantha’s nose could fix that little imbalance.”

“Oh, I loved Samantha when I was little,”
Joanne said, whooshy and girlish all of a sudden. “I used to sit in
class and if I didn’t like my teachers, I’d pretend I was Samantha,
cast spells on them under my breath. Poof! You’re a bag of
shit!”

“But … back to Mangacet. He could have hired
Griff, and then Griff could have turned on him, played both sides,
for money and for sex.”

I trusted her just then. Later, in the taxi
home, I wondered if I trusted her because she didn’t seem to trust
me. You know, the best defense is a good offense and all that. On
paper, she made a damn good suspect, but in person you couldn’t
entertain the idea seriously because she seemed too … real somehow.
None of the revelations about her were that surprising; she’d made
no bones about her sexual prowess in the past, but, gentledame that
she was, she never named names and left out telling details, like
armored personnel carriers.

When I got home, I pushed all my heavy
furniture back in front of the door and the windows, just in case.
I had considered staying with a friend – for about ten seconds. Due
to my rather careless lifestyle and housekeeping habits, I’ve often
lost friends by staying with them too long.

So friends were out, and I couldn’t afford a
hotel. I compromised by making it impossible for anyone but the
Terminator to get into my place while I was there, although I was
in big trouble if there was a fire.

Actually, it made me feel very cozy, all
locked up like that. I kicked of my shoes, untucked my gray shirt
from my jeans, and listened to my answering machine, Louise Bryant
in my lap. I was hoping for a message from Eric, but he hadn’t
called and despite my fears and doubts, that disappointed me. There
were two hangup calls (I’d had a few the day before too) and
several messages from tabloid reporters who had, like any
persistent journalist, obtained my unlisted home number.

I zoned them out and thought instead of what
Joanne had said about Susan not being capable of killing Griff. In
my experience, we’re almost all capable of killing under the right
circumstances, even if it’s only in self-defense – and self-defense
in the eyes of some people is a pretty broad category.

I doodled on a yellow legal pad, making a
list of all the reasons a person could be incapable of murder.
There weren’t many. I wrote down saintliness and then struggled to
think up another reason someone couldn’t kill under the right
circumstances. Coma, I wrote finally.

And what was it Griff was going to tell me?
What did I need to know in order to find the information everyone
was so anxious about? My head shot up at the next message on my
machine.

“Ms. Armoire, this is Mary Coffield at the
News-Journal. I’d really like to give you a chance to tell your
side of the story before I talk to Robin Hudson. Please call me
at--”

I laughed, because she’d dialed my number and
asked for Joanne, and because reporters always say they want to
give you a chance to tell “your side of the story.” If Joanne did
tell “her side of the story” to an outside reporter like Coffield –
and there was a better chance of her mud-wrestling with Jeane
Kirkpatrick – Coffield would then use that to get at me, or someone
else in the story. “I just talked to Joanne and she told me you did
such and such--”

Then you have to explain, and you get drawn
into it, and she takes your information back to Joanne with a
slightly different spin and so on, provoking the information she
wants for the story she wants to write.

That got me thinking again about that murder
in my hometown, where all but one member of the Sesquin family were
killed. I had been thinking about this a lot lately, how the police
and reporters were sent on a wild goose chase, about how easy it is
to follow your own imagination and lose sight of the truth.

This is what happened: One of the Sesquin
teenage girls was quite beautiful, and the popular theory was that
a rebuffed suitor, a mysterious dark-haired boy, had killed
everyone to avenge his broken heart. It was a wildly popular
theory.

The only problem with it was it drew on an
outright lie. I know, because I’m the one who made it up, who told
a reporter that a week before the killings I’d seen a boy trying to
kiss the beautiful Frances Sesquin behind the Strand Theater, and
I’d seen the girl push the boy away. A dark-haired boy. It was too
dark to see the boy’s face, but I’d distinctly heard him say,
“You’ll be sorry. I’m going to get you.”

I didn’t tell this lie out of malice. I told
it for two reasons, one noble, one ignoble. First and most
important, I wanted to steer suspicion away from my mother, who had
been a little less sane than usual after my dad died, causing some
talk after the murders. Second, I wanted to please the nice
reporter who was interviewing me in front of the Central Café. And
he was pleased. This was just what the national news desk in New
York wanted. A beautiful girl. A spurned lover. A fatal kiss.

With shock and fascination, I watched the lie
grow greater and greater as respectable grownups corroborated and
enlarged my story, which made the front page of every major
newspaper in the state and led the local newscasts, further
legitimizing it.

I imagine this must have been a difficult
time for dark-haired boys to get dates, but maybe not. I’d guess
the parents in town weren’t keen on their daughters meeting
dark-haired boys during this period, but that may have enhanced the
allure of dark-haired boys. If parents forbid a teenage girl to
date someone, she almost always sneaks out and dates him secretly,
and with a great deal more enthusiasm than if the parents approved.
Add to that the outlaw love factor, the possibility that any given
dark-haired boy in town was the love-crazed killer.

But I’m only speculating about how my lie
enhanced or changed the social lives of dark- haired boys in my
home town. I know it had other, unhappy effects, but I try not to
think about that too much. I mean, I didn’t do it alone. A lot of
townspeople, many of them grownups, fed the lie. I was just a kid.
What did I know? Why did they listen to me?

Chapter Twelve

WHEN I GOT TO WORK ON MONDAY my keys were at
the lost and found, turned in Friday night by an anonymous
Samaritan, so I relaxed a little. I told Claire about my
“fastidious burglar” and she laughed, both of us completely unaware
that all hell was breaking loose around us.

It was Jerry, that baying hound – no, braying
ass – of hell, who bounded in late that morning to tell us about
the upheaval all over the network. It seems a lot of people, not
knowing who Griff was or whether he had investigated them, were
preemptively confessing.

At the end of their morning shows, Pat
Lattanzi and Elsie Ormsby Ward had each read brief statements in
which they admitted taking junkets paid for by travel
organizations, ones they had reported on in the past. They then
announced their own one-month suspensions, pending further
disciplinary actions.

“The rumor is they confessed to the junkets
to cover up some serous swinging in the late seventies,” said
Jerry, always ready to promulgate truth. “But they have an airtight
alibi for the time of death.”

Mark O’Malley, award-winning business
reporter, issued a press release stating that he had spent the
weekend with his family informing them of his homosexuality and,
with their support behind him, he was now coming out to the viewing
public. “No one should be forced ‘out,’” he said. Although he had
no knowledge of an investigation into his affairs, he went on, he
felt in the interests of honesty he should come out now and not be
forced out by scandalmongers later.

Mark also had an alibi for every moment
between nine-thirty and eleven. Part of his alibi, Jerry informed
me, was Jack Jackson. Another part was Burke Avery. Seems Mark and
Jack were chatting when Burke finally got up the nerve to approach
the great man.

“And you’ll want to watch Gotham Salon this
morning,” Jerry said, waving his melon-inspector coffee mug at me.
“It’s on in, oh, about a minute. But don’t get too caught up in it.
I want a script for the first part of our sperm series on my desk
by six.”

“Why do I want to watch Gotham?”

Jerry just smirked, but he didn’t have to
tell me. I knew.

“Excuse me,” I said, going to my office.

Claire followed me. “You really want to be
alone for this, or just away from Jerry?”

“Just away from Jerry,” I said. “Come on
in.”

I flicked on the monitor and sat back to
watch as Amy, visibly distraught, told her viewers she wanted to
come clean about some things and called on them for understanding.
And then she got my respect, because she came right out and said,
“I have committed a sin and broken a commandment I was raised to
believe was sacred. I have committed adultery.”

Whew! Claire and I looked at each other. Amy
really was coming clean, but as admirable as that was, I wasn’t
keen on watching my dirty laundry exposed to even more complete
strangers in TV land.