What's a Girl Gotta Do (25 page)

“No.” This came out of nowhere. How do you
respond to something like this? God, he was suspicious of me. “No,
I was being nice because I like you and I need to talk to
Greg.”

“Well, he doesn’t like you much.”

“I know.”

“For me, that’s another mark in your favor,”
he said. We had fabulous eye contact for another while as we waited
on the tray line. God, he was cute.

“This is like high school, but with all these
complications,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
Did he mean our little romance was like high school, because if he
did, I knew exactly what he meant. I hadn’t been so afraid of
liking someone since this guy in high school. Or did he mean
standing on line in the cafeteria was like high school? I waited
for him to elaborate as I reached for my plastic cafeteria
tray.

“Do you know what I mean?” he asked.

I barely heard him. “Oh my God!” I said,
flipping over my tray. “I got the death tray!”

There, in big black letters, someone had
written DEATH TRAY.

Eric laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about it.
Greg got it last week. He’s still around.”

A stupid prank, a death tray, something one
of the younger writers no doubt dreamed up. And yet, I’ve always
had this fearful respect for omens.

“What do you think of Eric?” I asked Claire
later, after we screened the finished sperm piece – part one – and
put the tape on Jerry’s desk.

“He’s okay.”

“He’s okay? That’s like saying Michelangelo’s
David is a nice chunk of marble. This guy has … he’s so, so …”
There was no appropriate adjective, so I grunted softly instead.
“He looks me in the eye and I have a pelvic contraction. You know,
the kind that makes you want to cross your legs.”

“And bounce your foot,” Claire said.

“Exactly.”

“Obviously, there is chemistry going on with
you two. Enjoy it. Don’t analyze it. Have fun, be animals, but use
condoms.”

“Hey, I’m going to take this slowly. I’m
going to learn from my experience with Burke.”

“Good,” she said. “But don’t take it too
slowly. I mean, don’t just stand there.”

“But, Claire, maybe he’s a playboy.”

“I don’t think he’s that much of a playboy,”
Claire said. “He’s single, he’s cute …”

“Gorgeous.”

“It’s in the eye of the beholder, but he is
cute and single and so he dates a lot but he isn’t macho about it,
except in a joking way.”

“How do you know?”

“He dated Amanda in Graphics for three months
when Amanda and I were roommates. He seemed like a nice guy, as
guys go.”

Even though Claire’s love life was not
exemplary – she was kind of a heartbreaker – her opinion of Eric
carried a lot of weight with me, and helped assuage my fears. In
the afternoon, he justified my faith even further when he messaged
me: If you come now, I’ll get you in to see Greg. On my way, I
typed back. I told Jerry I was going to the ladies’ room – then
ran, not walked, to the Browner offices.

Frannie had been sent on an errand, and Eric
was waiting for me. He kissed me on the lips.

“Greg’s in there now. I can’t let you in.
You’ll have to sneak in behind my back,” he said. “Understand?”

“Sure.”

“I’m turning my back,” he said. “In fact, I’m
going to the vending machines to get a soda. I’ll give you ten
minutes. Don’t forget, nine-thirty tonight, the Haddock Bar on
Ludlow.”

“I’ll be there ,” I said. I gave Eric a
thirty-second head start before barging into Greg’s office. His
back, or rather the back of his chair, was to me.

“Who is it?” he said, without turning
around.

“Bachelorette number three,” I said.

Slowly the chair turned. “Who let you – what
do you want?” he asked.

“I want to know about Larry Griff.”

Greg was one of those aging men, once
handsome, who thinks he is entitled by way of his years,
experience, and position to a steady supply of nubile young women.
Controllable, nubile young women. As a young man he had had
matinee-idol looks, but he had become cynical looking in middle
age. His lined face had a taut meanness and his lascivious eyes,
once twinkly, had grown cold and glinting. A few more years and
they’d be rheumy. Of course, on television he was “avuncular”. His
healthy, virile head of hair, carefully tinted to leave just enough
silver for authority, was probably a weave, I thought.

Had he had surgery? It was hard to tell if
he’d had a lift or a tuck, as he was already in full on-air makeup,
although his show was several hours away. Today he had an excuse as
he had been sitting for a lighting designer, but Greg wore his
on-air makeup all day every day, having it touched up several times
before air. He claimed this was in case a catastrophic story broke,
like a presidential assassination or a nuclear attack, and he was
needed to go back to the anchor desk to inform and reassure an
anxious nation. That may be, but I think he just like the way he
looked in makeup.

Browner took long time to respond.

“What did he have on you, Greg?” I
prodded.

Not a muscle in his face moved.

“Who hired him to investigate you?” I
asked.

Greg smiled a little and gave me a look, a
victorious and condescending look. This guy was good. “You are a
ranting madwoman, Robin,” he said. “And I am not going to get
caught up in one of your wild intrigues. Now, I have work to do. If
you don’t leave, I’ll call security and ask them to remove
you.”

“I’m going,” I said. “But I think I’m right.
He was blackmailing you and the women who worked for you. Do you
have an alibi for the time he was murdered?”

Greg reached down to his phone and
speed-dialed security. “This is Greg Browner. There is a crazy
woman screaming accusations at me …”

I was in enough hot water; I didn’t need the
added indignity of being escorted out of my own workplace by
security. I left voluntarily.

Before returning to Special Reports, I
stopped back by Susan’s office and barged in.

“Robin, I’m really busy now …,” she said,
looking up from her desk.

“Did Greg ever sexually harass you?”

“My employment relationship with Greg is
nobody’s business,” she said.

“Aw c’mon,” I said. “He fired you from his
show. Was that after he sexually harassed you?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Where were you when Griff was killed,
roughly speaking?”

“I told you,” she said, whining. “I was
throwing up in the bathroom.”

“That’s strange. Because when I went to the
ladies’ room a little while later it was empty. That was shortly
before Griff died. There’s something you’re not telling me,” I
said. “What is it?”

She sighed deeply, like she was deflating,
took her glasses off and wiped the lenses. I noticed she had the
words for the Mary Tyler Moore theme song framed and on her wall.
Both verses.

“Well, I was pretty drunk that night -,” she
began. “This is really embarrassing.”

“Go on.”

“I went through the wrong door and passed out
in a stall,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “In the men’s
room.”

“Oh. Anybody see you there?”

“Yeah. Dillon Flinder found me a little
later, around eleven or twelve, I guess.”

“You’re sure?”

“I told you,” she said, displaying some
backbone. “I was puking in a stall in the men’s bathroom, and then
I passed out there. Look, ask Dillon Flinder. My glasses had fallen
in the toilet. I had vomit in my hair. I couldn’t fake that. I was
a mess when he found me.”

Actually, she could have faked being that
much of a mess, under the right circumstances and with the right
incentive. But I went to ask.

Dillon didn’t see or hear me come up behind
him at his desk, where he was hunched over, trying to cut a
cantaloupe with a letter opener. Thinking of his watermelon, I
smiled.

“Bringing that to room temperature?” I
asked.

“Ah, Robin,” he said, removing his bifocals
and self-consciously running his fingers through his gray hair.
“This is my dinner, dear heart. It is far too small for
self-gratification. Only a watermelon can accommodate me. And what
can I do for you?”

Dillon had such a classy vulgarity, you
couldn’t help but be charmed.

“Did you find Susan in a stall in the men’s
room n New Year’s Eve?”

“Oh yes! Poor kid,” he said, tsk-tsking. “She
was so drunk she went into the wrong bathroom.”

“You know, I don’t understand how she could
make that mistake,” I said. “I’ve been in a few men’s rooms – well,
boys’ rooms actually, and it was years ago – but there’s usually a
long line of urinals. You can’t miss them.”

“If you’re holding back a gallon of Jonestown
Punch while diving for a toilet, everything else tends to be a
blur. I’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“But are you sure she was drunk?”

“She was passed out when I found her. I’m
positive that woman was seriously inebriated, but I’d rather not go
into detail. It would be unchivalrous.”

Even the satyr of medical news had his good
side. So Susan had an alibi. And apparently so did Madri, or at
least Amy Penny believed it. But something else she’d said was
eating at me: Eric had helped her and Madri get a cab. How
come?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask him about it
because I’d promised to trust him. Jerry came back later and
ordered a complete recut of “Sperm, Part One,” and wanted it and a
script for part two (or “Son of Sperm,” as Claire called it) on his
desk first thing in the morning.

After several hours of feverish work, Claire
and I turned in our projects and got ready to go home. I put on my
coat and stuffed my briefcase with articles on Mangecet. I couldn’t
get a cab downtown to the Haddock Bar so I took the bus to East
Houston and walked the rest of the way. East Houston was a long
stretch of shuttered shops punctuated by the grainy yellow light of
the occasional bodega. The sidewalks beneath me were black and
buckled and there were little groups of junkies on every
corner.

There must be a lot of good, cheap smack
around, I thought, because the junkies were friendlier than
usual.

“Hey beautiful lady,” a stringy and gaunt
Hispanic guy said to me. “Jus’ seein’ you makes my night.”

He had that lightly glazed, low-lidded look
junkies have when high. I smiled a benign I’m-OK-you’re-OK smile,
knowing as I do that when junkies are high they’re too happy and
dopey to pose a serious threat.

“How ya doin’?” I asked.

“Better now that you walked by with that
smile. That smile knows somethin’.” He said to his friends. “What
is it you know, pretty lady?”

I was down the block, ten paces past them
now. I turned around and shrugged, smiling, and then kept walking
away from them. Ludlow was just ahead.

Ludlow had a powerful sub-rosa feel. Thanks
to some shifting earth pattern, the street was tilted just
slightly. There was a man’s suit in the recess of a slumlike, sooty
building, as though the man who was inside it had vanished in his
tracks – puff – beamed up to the mothership from where he stood,
leaving the suit behind in a crumpled pile on the dark
sidewalk.

The purple, blue, and orange neon lights of
hip “skank” spots like the Haddock Bar radiated into the dark
street while the glowing yellow sign of the EAT HERE café flashed
on and off, slowly. The whole shadowy scene had the texture of a
dream, peaceful in a sinister way, like the quiet places in
nightmares.

I walked into the Haddock, wondering why Eric
wanted me to meet him here. Something suddenly seemed very fishy.
The Haddock was perfect, though, for my mood of impending darkness
and despair. It was an anarchist artist bar. I’d chitchatted with
junkies and now I was hanging out at an anarchist bar with plastic
skulls on the walls. I was too cool. On an impulse, I bought a pack
of Marlboros for more nihilist kitsch. I hadn’t smoked in two
years.

At the bar, a black bartender wearing Dexter
glasses asked me what I wanted. A morphine drip, I thought, but
said, “Absolut Citron martini.”

To my left, two men, one American and the
other French, were discussing women. “She said wait for me, don’t
change, be patient,” the French guy said. From this one sentence I
constructed a scenario, unable to hear what the other guy said
because the music cranked up at that point. But easy to infer: his
lady left him, it wasn’t a clean break, she’d gone off on an
adventure and now he was sitting in the Haddock on Manic Depressive
Night telling his girlfriend troubles to another single guy. Boy,
did that get me down.

A pretty woman with unruly brown hair slid up
on the other side of me and bummed a cigarette.

“Did you pay your taxes yet?” she asked out
of one side of her mouth as she lit the cigarette and inhaled.

“For this year or last?” I asked. It was only
January.

“For last year. I paid mine today. I had to
fucking borrow money to pay my fucking taxes – to support a
government and a system I fucking despise!” She spat out the word
despise.

I didn’t know what to say except a deadpan,
“Bummer.”

“Yeah,” she said. She was about twenty-four
or twenty-five, with a powerful middle-class aroma to her. Her
hair, while messy, was washed, violating a main fashion tenet of
skankness. Her clothes, frayed and self-consciously grubby, were
subversively chic and carefully put together.

Skank is anarchy, but it’s bourgeois anarchy.
The fact that she made enough to have to pay taxes said something
about how she fit into the class struggle. Also, the drinks weren’t
cheap at the Haddock. No starving artists sharing a cheap bottle of
vinegary wine in this joint. I was drinking Absolut, the guy next
to me was nursing Chivas, the anarchette was drinking Dos
Equis.

Eric came up behind her.