What's a Girl Gotta Do (22 page)

“But the next stockholder meeting is six
months away,” I said.

Others at the bar jumped into the discussion.
Mangecet had been building liquidity since he bought out Pilgrim
Publishing (with its profitable Christian sci-fi line) and that
theme park in Arkansas with the world’s tallest freestanding Jesus
at the entrance. Did he have the liquidity to pay the “disloyalty”
price? Or just to be a spoiler, get enough stock to harass Jack
Jackson and influence his programming and news-gathering decisions?
The Mangecet theory was picking up steam when Mark, ever the
reporter, began to argue against it.

“Jackson, Regelbrugge, and Browner control
fifty-nine percent of the stock,” he said. “I can’t believe
Mangecet would make a move on us now, with only ten percent. But he
might have wanted to exert influence over our news policy.”

“Maybe it wasn’t planned the way it went,”
Mickey, the barman, said.

I hadn’t been aware he was listening as he
shot back and forth with beers. “It coulda backfired on them when
Griff turned double agent.”

I had an additional problem with the Mangecet
theory, which I couldn’t divulge. Why would Mangecet have someone
like Susan Brave investigated? Or me? Maybe he didn’t want me
investigated. Maybe Griff just added me because of that redheaded
thing?

I saw McGravy over in the restaurant, so I
said good-bye to Mark, and went to sit with Bob, who was alone at a
table for two eating a bowl of soup with his left hand while
squeezing modeling clay with his smoking hand.

“Bad day?” I said.

He gave me a look as he squeezed his clay.
Stupid question.

“At least you’re not being demonized by the
tabloid press,” I said.

“Not personally. Have a seat,” he said. “I’ve
had reporters from other news organizations up the wazoo
today.”

“Was anyone else at ANN being blackmailed by
Griff?”

“No one else has admitted it.” An important
distinction. “You know, while this media circus is going on,
there’s flooding in the South, blizzards in the Rockies, fighting
in the Balkans. There’s some kind of flu going around so we have
sick-outs. Now five of our anchors and reporters are on suspension
for ethics violations and three others are at home with the flu.
Goddamn it, I wish I could smoke a cigarette! Did you see the
six?”

“No.”

“A disaster, complete disaster. You know that
young woman from Gallaudet, the deaf university?”

“Chrissie something.”

“Yeah. I brought her on as an intern to run
tapes and write a little. The girl – lady – is a fine writer. So
what does Kevin Peet do with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Puts her into the newsroom assistant
rotation right away and forgets about her. Then the prompter girl –
lady – gets sick, and he grabs the nearest intern, who happens to
be Chrissie, and puts her on TelePrompTer for the six. Puts her on
headsets. Says something to her she can’t understand because she
can’t lip-read that fast, and he takes off. It’s six, the show’s
on, and she’s running the script through the prompter, just trying
to figure it out as she goes along and make the best of it.”

When you’re running prompter, controlling how
slow or fast the script feeds through, you follow the anchor’s
reading for pace, which means you have to listen to him carefully
on the headsets while following the text.

“And?”

“Sawyer Lash is the anchor,” he said.

“Uh oh.”

“He’s reading, and she can’t hear him or see
his face. She starts to speed up the prompter a bit, so he reads a
little faster, and Chrissie’s so engrossed in what she’s reading,
and she reads so quickly that she speeds up the text even more
without being aware of it. Sawyer is reading, faster and faster –
straight from his eyes to his mouth without passing through his
brain. He’s starting to sound like a Looney Tune.

“Finally, the producer gets through to him on
the IFB and tells him to read off the hard copy in his hands. So
Sawyer stops reading – all of a sudden – still live to the nation
and the world, and looks down at the pages in his hands, surprised,
like he thought they were props.” Bob squeezed the clay hard and a
dollop broke loose and landed in his soup with a dull splash.

“He knows they’re not props,” I said.

“Yeah, but he looked like he didn’t know, you
know what I mean? So he read the rest of the story, head down, word
for word off the page.”

“But he’s such a nice guy.”

“Yeah, and we needed someone to jump into the
spot and fill it on short notice, someone with” – he paused and
made a face, like he was quoting someone else – “credibility.”

“Sawyer? Credibility? The guy who referred to
Yeltsin in a phone interview as Doris Yeltsin?”

“I know. We’re going to become a
laughingstock. Entertainment Tonight is doing a story on Sawyer’s
screw-ups and the cult following Sawyer now has among college
fraternities. They use his show as part of a drinking game.” Every
time Sawyer fucked up, stuttered, or mispronounced the name of a
foreign capital, you had to drink. If he mispronounced the name of
an American city (he liked to pronounce La Jolla, California,
phonetically, for instance), you had to drink twice. Ratings were
up.

“Such a nice guy, and not a speck of dirt on
him,” McGravy said, digging back into his soup. I guess he’d
forgotten about that lump of clay. I was about to remind him, when
Burke appeared.

“I have to be running,” McGravy said quickly,
wiping his mouth with his napkin and then pushing himself back from
the table. “Left my flak jacket in the office. I’ll talk to you
later, Robin. Nice to see you, Burke.”

In the last week, I’d seen Burke more than
during any other week since the first days of our marriage. I was
starting to realize how little I actually enjoyed being in his
company. I was starting to feel kind of happy that he’d left
me.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Burke said.
“The police have picked up a suspect in the Griff murder.”

“Who?” “Buster Corbus, a union goon, a
troublemaker hired to harass Eloise Marfeles,” Burke said.

“Really?”

“Apparently, Marfeles interrogated every
member of the staff on duty that night as well as a union informer
or two, and got a tip that this goon was hired to sabotage the
lights and plumbing in the rooms on the thirteenth floor, while
everyone was at the party. Marfeles had your ANN folks up there for
publicity, and these renegade union guys were going to take
advantage of it.”

“Wow,” I said. “Eloise, not only a hotel
queen, but a crime fighter as well.”

“Well, the publicity is bad. She’s been
putting a lot of pressure on the cops to solve this case, bossing
them around, nagging them, berating them. I guess she decided to
get the goods on her own. I bet the woman’s got a wicked touch with
an electric cattle prod,” he said, and laughed. “My scoop on this
should be airing, oh, about now. I told you it wasn’t really a
conflict of interest.”

“Please! It’s still an enormous conflict.
Perhaps not at Channel 3 but …”

“Can I sit down?”

“Sit at a table that hasn’t been bussed yet?”
I asked.

“You aren’t being fair,” he said deliberately
and uncomfortably, ignoring the postmeal slop on the table, just to
show me. Still, when the busboy came and cleared the mess away,
Burke’s jaw unclenched and his shoulders relaxed. With his thumb
and forefinger, he nonchalantly flicked a cracker crumb off the
heavy laminate table.

“You know, it’s a good thing we’re getting
divorced,” I said, watching him. “If we’d stayed married, I swear
they would have found you one day face-down in your poisoned
spaghetti.”

“Aw, be nice, Robin,” he said in his sweetest
voice, the kind of voice you use to reassure wild animals. “

So, tell me, why did this union goon kill
Griff?”

“It’s speculation but they believe the guy
went into the room, maybe through a heat duct, thinking Griff was
at the party with everyone else, and surprised him. What do you
think?”

“I think you can make a case against anyone
if you try hard enough. I have firsthand experience with this now,
unfortunately. So the cops get a suspect and Eloise Marfeles gets
to screw the unions. Happy ending,” I said.

“You prefer the feminist conspiracy theory?
Or the religious right?” The waitress came and we ordered
drinks.

“No, I hope they’ve got the guy, really,” I
said. “But it still doesn’t answer a big question I have on my
mind. Who hired Griff?”

“Joanne told Amy she thinks Griff was trying
to build a harem of submissive professional women,” Burke said,
laughing. “Submissive. Imagine including you.”

“Yeah, it seems like a lech of his caliber
would go after babes – young, dewy models – instead of dames –
troublesome women journalists in their thirties. No, it makes more
sense to me that Griff was working for someone else, and just using
this as a sideline, to make a few bucks and get his pole greased,
but who was he working for?”

“Mangecet?”

“I just can’t put Mangecet and Griff together
in my mind.”

“Yeah, Mangecet strikes me as the kind of guy
who’d have his own in-house investigators, clean-cut guys with a
mission,” he said, and stopped. He didn’t want to give anything
away to me, so he changed the subject.

“Did you see Amy today?” he asked.

“Yeah.” “Well? What did you think?”

“My teeth ached afterwards.” But even I was
getting tired of this adversarial stance. It was wearing me out.
The problem wasn’t Amy Penny, I told myself grudgingly. The problem
was Burke Avery. And Robin Hudson.

“We were doomed. We always knew it,” I
said.

I saw Eric come in and walk to the bar. He
looked at me but didn’t wave. Burke followed my glance to Eric and
back and said, “You and Eric have something going?”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw the way he looked at you,” he said.
“Did you sleep with him?”

“I’m allowed to now. I think I’m going to
like this single stuff.”

The last sentence was barely out of my mouth
when Burke grabbed me by both shoulders, looked at me with an
expression of terror, and kissed me hard.

I was so surprised by this move that it took
me a moment to recover but when I did, I was decisive. I pushed him
back across the table and slapped his face. The slap was
unnecessary, but I didn’t know if I’d ever have another justifiable
opportunity, so I seized the day.

“You’re an engaged man,” I said. “You can’t
kiss me anymore. You waived that privilege.”

“I know,” he said, contrite. “I know. I’m
sorry. I lost my head. I still have feelings for you and, and … I
guess I got lost in the moment.”

“Are you trying to completely confuse
me?”

“No! It’s hard getting divorced. I mean it
when I say I still have feelings for you. I feel kind of mixed up
too,” he said. “All week I’ve been debating whether I really wanted
to end it. I mean, divorce is so … final.”

I was at a loss for words momentarily. I
looked around while I got my thoughts together. Now Eric had his
back to me, but he was looking into the mirror behind the bar and
his reflection was staring at me.

“When you were with me,” I said very slowly,
spelling it out, “all you wanted was other women. Now that you’re a
hair’s-breadth away from being single again, you think you might
want me?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I want you, but
I don’t want to be married to you. I wish we could date every
Friday night or something like that.”

I arched my left eyebrow and opened my mouth
to comment on this childish, utopian vision of his, a world where
all women loved him and were willing to share him freely.

Before I could say anything, Burke said, “I
know that’s stupid. You don’t have to tell me. It’s just,
everything has happened so fast this year. You know, you and me,
then Amy and me. Before you know it I’ll have a family and a big
house. I’ll never again be the person who lived in the East Village
with a buxom redheaded wife. It makes me feel kind of … sad.” He
smiled at me, certain that I would find this somehow charming.

“You always wanted a family and a house, with
lots of trees and streets where your kids could bicycle in
safety.”

“I did,” he said. “I still do. I’m just
having a weak moment.”

Have it somewhere else, I thought, but I
didn’t say it aloud, a sign I was getting soft. “Look, I appreciate
your telling me the stuff about Griff.”

“I knew you’d want to know,” he said.

“That was thoughtful.”

“Let me see you home, make sure you get home
safely.”

“No, thanks, I’m sober and besides, I’m not
going straight home.”

I slapped a five on the table for my drink
and got up. Burke got up too. He leaned over and kissed me again,
this time on the cheek. We said good-bye and, to vex him, I walked
over to Eric.

“Did you hear about Griff?” I asked. “They’ve
got a suspect.”

“Just heard,” Eric said. His tone was
clipped.

“So I guess Browner isn’t going to confess to
anything?”

“Doubt it,” he said. He raised a long-necked
bottle to his lips and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed. It turned me
on. He looked away.

Well, it’s been a long time, but this
man-woman stuff was starting to come back to me. If he doesn’t call
and he gives you the cold shoulder when you run into him, do not
chase, because it will make you look really foolish. Looking
foolish was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.

“I figured you’d want to know,” I said, my
chill, clipped tome matching his. “See you.” I turned to go. He
turned away too.

Chapter Thirteen

KISSING BURKE MADE ME FEEL SORT OF SICK
INSIDE, a feeling intensified by the presence of several young
couples in love on the subway ride home. Antiromantic epithets
formed in my head as I watched them, and I had a sudden urge to
warn them; Stop! Go back! Abandon yourselves to meaningless sex!
But just then the Susan Brave light flashed on in the back of my
brain, the light that warns me I am crossing a line from cynical
single to bitter spinster. I checked my thoughts.