What's a Girl Gotta Do (24 page)

These folksy aphorisms of Amy’s were kind of
her on-air trademark, that and her repeated assertion that she came
from “salt-of-the-earth working people,” despite the fact that she
looked and behaved like an Upper East Side princess.

“You know, my father was a salesman. He
couldn’t give me an expensive college education,” she continued.
She was very defensive about all this. I gathered these were all
the things she wished she had said to Mrs. Stedlbauer – Eileen. “I
had to work my way up. Like you did, Robin.”

It’s true. I didn’t grow up rich. My father
had a college education, but we never had any money. By day he
taught high school math, by night he toiled in the garage, “trying
to make the world safe for children like you,” as he explained it
to me. When he died, he held the patents on two safety valves for
natural gas equipment and this generated enough income for us to
subsist. I have worked since I was fourteen to help support myself
and my mother, and I still send her a check every month.

The Stedlbauers, on the other hand, had
money, money that had been in circulation for longer than my people
had even been in America, which apparently meant something. Eileen
seemed to see me as walking anarchy. She was constantly worried
that I was going to say or do the wrong thing and bring shame upon
my husband, her precious only son. For example, when we left after
Christmas dinner one year, she handed me a book and said, “I
thought you could use this.”

The book was Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, 1948
edition, in which I found this gem: “The whole relation of men to
women, as far as etiquette is concerned, is based on the assumption
that woman is a delicate, sensitive creature, easily tired, who
must be feted, amused, and protected, to whom the bright and gay
side of the picture must always be turned.”

The table of contents had several listings
flagged with red stars and little comments in Mrs. Stedlbauer’s
perfect finishing-school handwriting, such as “formal dinner
settings and dinner etiquette are still relevant today! PLEASE
read, for your sake.”

Jeez. A couple of wrong silverware choices at
the dinner table and a knocked-over glass of ice water and the
woman thought I was Fred Flintstone. I was so offended. I told
Burke I was tempted to show up for the next Christmas dinner
wearing a black leather cat suit, pentagram earrings, and one
extra-long lee press-on nail with which to scoop up cranberry
sauce.

“You know, Amy, I have a book you’ll want,” I
said, and went to get it. “Eileen would want you to have this. They
have to like you now that you’re, you know …”

She opened her mouth to say the word and I
held up my hand to stop her. I didn’t want to hear it again.

“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

“It’s a boy,” she said.

“Eileen and H.A. will enthrone you.”

I walked her out and as soon as she was gone
I went to the phone and called Susan, leaving a message on her
machine.

Then I started thinking about Burke and Amy,
about how I’d trusted him and how I stopped trusting him. It had
been almost a year since I really seriously started to suspect
Burke was cheating on me. You know, the classic signs. He was
working late a lot, he was distant and preoccupied when he was with
me, there were a lot of random hang-up calls at all hours. When I
confronted him, he cut me off indignantly. He was merely
“cultivating a source,” he said, which in one sense could be the
truth, depending on how literally you take the statement and how
dirty your mind is.

Chapter Fourteen

IN THE MORNING, the tabloids were all over
Buster Corbus, alleged union goon, who had a long rap sheet for
burglary, arson, sabotage, and assault with a deadly weapon. Only
two convictions on his record, but with this he would be a
three-time loser, a habitual criminal; another conviction,
especially a murder, and it was a lifetime as a prison
concubine.

Corbus was naturally fighting this with all
his might and had attracted the interest of famous lost-cause
lawyer Spencer Roo. I knew Roo from when I was on Crime &
Justice. The last time I saw him, he was defending this guy accused
of killing his wife with thirty-six hammer blows to her head.
Incredibly, Roo claimed it was suicide. More incredibly, his client
was acquitted, albeit on a technicality.

Complicating matters for Mr. Corbus were two
well-documented and unlucky facts. One of his fingerprints had been
lifted several weeks before from a Marfeles room where the
partially decomposed body of a large rat was found stuffed in a
bathtub drain. Six months before, Corbus himself had been found in
a ventilation duct with wire cutters and burglar’s tools at the
ultrahip neopostmodern Metro Grand Hotel, which had a contract with
one of the same unions as the Marfeles.

In addition, the paper listed all these
tenuous connections Corbus apparently had to the union, which in
turn had tenuous connections to the Genovese crime family. It also
included the interesting fact that Griff was naked when he was
found. The paper speculated that he had been coming out of the
bathroom after a shower when Corbus surprised him.

Anyway, while Griff’s client remained a
mystery, the Marfeles story seemed to be tying itself up in one
convenient, tidy knot. There was no jinx at the Marfeles, Eloise
Marfeles asserted to the newspapers. It was all just union mischief
and sabotage, which went terribly awry with the murder of Larry
Griff. Hotels don’t kill people, people kill people.

On the way to work, I stopped at the main
post office, where Susan had met Griff. Crystal O’Connor and Teddy
Boylen had both mentioned that Griff worked a lot through the
mails. I wondered if he had a post office box, and if there was a
key out there somewhere that would open the box and spill out all
our sins and secrets.

But if there was a p.o. box, it was under a
false name, an alias I didn’t know. I’d stumbled down another dead
end.

It was all very frustrating. I was bursting
with information I couldn’t reveal, from people to whom I had sworn
an oath of secrecy. Trying to keep track of what I was allowed to
talk about and what was classified was hard. Under other
circumstances, I could take a bit of information from one person
and bait a hook with it, use it to get more information from
someone else, until all the bits and pieces added up to something
resembling a clear picture.

It was going to be tricky.

Trickier still was going to be getting away
from Jerry to look into the murder. As soon as I got to work he
ordered me into edit with Claire to finish the first part of our
sperm bank series, or “Sperm – the last Frontier,” as Claire
referred to it.

“Don’t come out until you’ve got a finished
tape to hand me,” he said. “You’re my girls today.”

My girls. I just love that macho, proprietary
crap. I take to it like a fish to battery acid. I was about to say
something but Claire grabbed my arm and gave me a slow-lidded blink
that said, let it rest.

So I went to lay down my track – the
voice-over narration – and took it into edit, where Claire was
waiting with Hosea, a dreadlocked virtuoso with a Sony edit
bay.

“You shouldn’t let Jerry get to you,” she
said. “He’s just trying to get your goat.”

A production assistant poked her head in and
the frantic sounds of a newscast under construction blew in. In
another edit room a reporter was yelling, “Back it in!” A feed room
producer screamed, “We lost the feed!”

“Stevenson promo tape?” the P.A. asked. “Oh,
wrong edit room.” She closed the door and shut out the
cacophony.

“I just don’t want my goat to get got,” I
said, picking up the narrative thread precisely where Claire had
dropped it. “Especially by Jerry.”

Hosea laid my track down and then we inserted
the sound bites, which Jerry had chosen. When we began to cover the
rest with video, Claire said she’d look after it and sprang me to
check out the Griff story, promising to page me by my pseudonym
when she was done, or if Jerry came by.

I fled down the hallway to the wing where all
the features and talk show offices were, stepping lightly past
Sports to avoid Turk Hammermill.

I didn’t have much luck. Madri Michaels was
home with the flu and Susan was too busy to talk. She was at work
on a new segment for Solange’s show called Group, featuring a
therapy group she and Solange had “auditioned” in order to get a
good cross-cultural, cross-generational, cross-gender mix of
neurotics. Twice a week and on the weekend highlights show, Solange
would run these ten-minute minidocumentaries following the group
through a year of therapy. It was expected to be a big ratings
grabber, as viewers became involved with the participants and their
real-life soap operas.

So I went to the Browner offices, but Greg’s
secretary, Frannie Millard, wouldn’t let me past to see Greg.

“He doesn’t like you,” she explained, as
though the reasons were self-evident. “He might fire me if I let
you through.”

“Tell him it’s about Larry Griff.”

“Well, I can’t do that right now,” she said.
“He isn’t even in his office. He’s tied up in a meeting.”

Frannie had worked for Greg at least ten
years and was very efficient. She was also sixty-three, heavy, and
had a hairy chin, so I immediately ruled her out as a suspect. She
wasn’t Greg’s type.

“What about Eric? Is he in?”

“He’s on a conference call to Los Angeles and
can’t be disturbed,” she said.

“Well can you …,” I began.

The phone rang.

“Excuse me,” she said, in a please-leave tone
of voice.

I was going to track Madri down, but when I
left the Browner offices, I saw Jerry steaming down the hall
towards me. In the next second I heard, “Paging Josephine Tey,
Please call the operator…”

I turned around. At the other end of the
hall, Turk Hammermill stood, a big book of baseball stats under his
right arm. I opted for Jerry.

“You were supposed to supervise this edit,”
he said.

“Don’t you trust Claire?”

“More than you,” he said. “That isn’t the
point. The point is, I told you not to leave that edit room until
this piece was done.” He followed – or rather, herded – me back to
Special Reports, where he confined me to my office and made me log
a graphic medical tape on sperm to find suitable wallpaper video
for part two of the series.

Fortunately, I still had my computer terminal
and my telephone. As little white spermatozoa shucked and jived
across my TV screen, I logged on to the computer and started a
Nexis search for newspaper and periodical articles about Paul
Mangecet.

Then I called Spencer Roo. He claimed to have
airtight alibis for Corbus. He was just having a little trouble
locating them. While I was talking to him he almost had me
convinced but as soon as I got off the phone I began to doubt. This
was, after all, Spencer Roo, who once used a “nicotine fit” defense
for a client who went berserk and killed his wife and all her
terriers.

I was starving, but I was “grounded,” under
office arrest, and Jerry was keeping an eye on my door from his
office so I couldn’t escape. Finally, he went out to a lunch
meeting with some Japanese advertising guys and I was able to flee
to the company cafeteria, or Bad News Café, as the writers called
it, a large room painted in toxic-waste colors with sludge
green-brown walls and surface-scum yellow furniture. Rumor had it
Dunbar consulted a cut-rate colorist, who determined that these
colors would discourage long lunch breaks by creating an
uncomfortable atmosphere. The menu, it was said, was designed to
reflect the same principles. And, I might add, the same colors.

Eric was there, about ten people ahead on the
line for trays. He was talking to Claire, who was getting a diet
soda. At first when we saw each other, he turned away, then turned
back to me, puzzled. Claire smiled, got out of the way, and Eric
came over.

“Hi,” I said, guarded. He just looked at
me.

“What?!” I said.

“You were supposed to call me,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” Yeah, the best defense is a good
offense, I thought, but then I realized he was right. I remembered.
He’d asked me to trust him, to sleep on it, to call him the next
day – and the next day Susan called and I got all caught up in that
…

“Oops,” I said. “I forgot, I was preoccupied
…”

“Sure, Well.”

“No, really. I was wondering why you hadn’t
called me. God, I’m sorry, I really am. Eric, it’s been a long time
since I dated, and when I did, it didn’t matter so much
somehow.”

“It’s okay,” he said, like it was just
academic anyway, of no personal interest. “Saw you with Burke.
Things going well with you two?”

“With that sociopath? No. Why would you think
that?”

“He kissed you.”

“And I slapped him. You saw that too, didn’t
you?”

“Yeah, but I thought it demonstrated a kind
of passion for him.”

“It wasn’t a passion slap. It was an easy
shot, a punitive slap. I saw the opportunity and I took it.”

“I heard a rumor you and Burke were hot and
heavy again.” But he smiled. He believed me.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Madri Michaels.”

“She is such a troublemaker, man,” I said. We
had fabulous eye contact for a moment.

“So – are you going to trust me?”

“Sure,” I said. Having mistakenly doubted
him, what else could I say?

“Say it.”

“I trust you.”

“Want to do something tonight?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“I’d invite you to join me for lunch, but
Greg and I are working with a new lighting designer this afternoon,
so I have to get my lunch to go.”

“Speaking of Greg, I need to talk to
him.”

He bristled. “Uh-huh, that’s why you’re being
so nice,” he said. “You want to talk to Greg.”