What's a Girl Gotta Do (27 page)

Another slim but spicy volume was “least
Likely Killers.” For example, that upright Midwest preacher who had
an affair with a parishioner and then killed her husband so he
could be with her, all the while preaching Christian goodness to
his unwitting and devoted flock. The upstanding citizen, pillar of
the community turned killer, proving that the primal thump of our
ancestral jungle beats in the heart of all of us. Thousands of
years of religion, hundreds of years of universal public education
and good hygiene, and we still cannot contain that native wildness,
that killer instinct we share with other members of the animal
kingdom. You can dress us up, but you can’t take us anywhere.

A whole scrapbook was devoted just to the
Sesquin murders in my hometown and the big-headed blond boy who
killed them. I even had a clipping of the story that first broke my
take about the dark-haired boy and the fatal kiss. That made me
feel bad, because it reminded me of all the stuff I knew I hadn’t
told the police in the Griff case. I was probably the reason they
hadn’t caught the killer.

In the Sesquin case, it took the police three
weeks to catch the killer, the big-headed blond boy, after hunting
unsuccessfully for the dark-haired boy. And they only caught the
guy when they did because his own mother turned him in. His own
mother, imagine that. On the morning after the murder, she told
police, she found blood on his work boots and trousers. Despite the
utter evil and horror of the murders, she waited three weeks to
turn him in and before she did, she whipped him with a tree branch
until he was black and blue. He told police he was driving down the
road after shooting squirrels when the voice of God told him to go
into the house and kill all those people.

This is the thing. If I hadn’t told that lie
about the dark-haired boy, the police and the media might have
thought to look at the strange, big-headed blond boy down the road.
They might have been able to nab the boy on their own and spare
that old widow woman three weeks of soul-wrenching agony before
having to betray her own son. Things might have been different.

But once the lie was out, there was no
stopping it. Others, older others I’d been taught to respect, took
up the lie as though they’d seen it with their own eyes. Other,
similar incidents of passion gone awry for Frances Sesquin were
cited to support the lie. The mythical dark-haired boy was sighted
all over town. I had only told a couple of people the truth about
that murder.

When I told Burke, his response was: “She
lived with this kid for seventeen years in the woods, and she
didn’t know he was crazy before he killed all those people? It
sounds like she contributed.” He had a point, but I still felt
rotten about it all. I mean, what if, while the police were on
their wild goose chase, the voice of “God” had told him to go into
some other house and shoot up some other family?

I closed the Sesquin scrapbook and picked up
“Straw.” Reading my scrapbooks calms me down. I don’t know why.
Maybe because it makes murder so one-dimensional and abstract, all
written up in black-and-white text that way it doesn’t seem so
scary. Maybe because almost all of the murders in my books were
solved.

Halfway into the Straw scrapbook I started to
feel sleepy and a few minutes later I was test-pattern. Lulled, I
slept deeply in my frayed blue armchair I’ve been dragging around
since college. I dreamt Eric and I were making love in a series of
blue rooms – it was kind of like a dream, kind of like a nightmare
– and I awoke, cold and shivering, early in the morning to my clock
radio, cranked up full to vex Mrs. Ramirez, and the news that Greg
Browner was dead at fifty-five.

Sometime between the time Greg left ANN the
night before and the time his cook arrived in the morning to poach
his egg, someone put two bullets into his head. Into his face, to
be precise, which I thought, given Greg’s vanity, was particularly
vindictive. The news report continued, saying that there were signs
of genital mutilation, and I redefined vindictive. This was a
desperate killer.

I was late getting to work – couldn’t find my
keys, either set, or my Epilady. Eventually I found both sets of
keys, but I never did find the Epilady. When I got to ANN, the cops
were in my office, chatting up Claire. She was on my desk, her legs
crossed, talking to four cops – Bigger, Tewfik, and two uniforms I
didn’t know. It looked like a Marilyn Monroe production number. I
expected her to slide off the desk into their arms, singing.

“Robin!” she said. “Some people to see you.
Isn’t it terrible about Greg? I’ll talk to you later.” And she
left, taking the two uniformed guys with her.

“Where were you last night?” Detective Bigger
asked me.

“I had a date, then I went home. Look, I
didn’t kill Greg, but I … know something about it okay?”

I’d figured they would want to talk to me so
before I left my apartment I had taken that sheet of paper from the
dictionary and put it in my purse. I had planned to courier it over
to them. Now I handed it to Tewfik and spilled my guts. I told him
everything I could remember, what Susan had told me and Joanne,
what I had learned about Browner, my hunches, and after some
hesitation, all my suspicions about Eric – the blond wing, the
Browner connection, Eric getting a cab for Madri that night (who, I
hinted darkly, was a co-conspirator), and his long absence the
night before.

“Eric saw me with my tire iron,” I said. “He
commented on it. He even convinced me to put it down and dance with
him.”

“You should have told us all this before,”
Tewfik said.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave,” I lamented.
“I got a bad vibe off this guy Eric from the very beginning, but I
ignored it.”

Bigger was still skeptical. When he looked at
me, it was a look that said, I know who you really are.

“You got an Epilady, Robin?” he asked.

My heart stopped.

“I had one,” I said. Where was it? I thought
about it. Where had I seen it last? By the side of my bed a few
nights before.

“Someone must have stolen my Epilady,” I
said. “Why?”

“An Epilady was used … it was jammed into Mr.
Browner’s genitals and held there with the belt from his bathrobe,”
Tewfik said.

We all cringed.

“Battery-operated?” I asked.

Tewfik nodded. “It was still running when the
first police arrived.”

Lord forgive me, but the first thing I
thought of when he said that was the Energizer rabbit.

“Some angry woman with a bone to pick,”
Tewfik said. Ooh. Bad choice of words. “Or someone trying to make
it look like you did it.”

“The Epilady does have my touch. But me, I’d
maybe attack a guy with it if he was coming after me, but I
wouldn’t do it just to be mean,” I said. “And I hate guns. I don’t
have a gun. You know, you’re much more likely to be killed with
your own gun than someone else’s. Also, there’s too much temptation
on a bad day to deep-throat a .45, you know?”

“We think it was Griff’s gun,” Tewfik said.
“We believe it was taken from his room at the Marfeles by whoever
killed him. We found a carry permit for him, but we never found the
gun in his stuff.”

“I never heard about a gun,” I said, in my
best Girl Scout, officer-sir voice.

“It was one of the details we kept from the
news media to prevent copycats and to weed out the nuts who confess
to everything, ya know, to atone for some unresolved guilt from the
past.”

“Look, detectives, sirs, someone got into my
apartment and stole my Epilady,” I said. “I lost my keys one day
and Eric was in my office that same day, dropping off something.
Remember how I thought someone had been in my apartment because it
was neater?”

“I remember,” Tewfik said. “Anyway, your
downstairs neighbor says she heard you in your apartment around the
time Mr. Browner is believed to have been killed. Of course, she
also says your pimp was there too.”

“She hears my cat and she thinks it’s my
pimp. Like my pimp would be caught dead in that dump,” I said.

“Your pimp?” Bigger said, as though he’d
caught me in a slip, because I should have said a pimp instead of
my pimp, and the solution to the crime could hinge on this. You had
to be very careful talking to him, as he had no sense of humor.

“It’s a joke. I don’t really have a pimp.” I
resisted the urge to say I work solo. I almost said it, but I
caught myself.

“A man is dead,” Bigger said. “You think that
is funny?”

“No, but other things are,” I said. I wasn’t
going to play Ophelia for Greg Browner. I felt bad, in a broad,
philosophical, murder-is-always-bad way, but I never liked him and
couldn’t honestly say I’d miss him.

They asked me some more questions, about my
relationship with Greg and the now infamous incident when I wrote
for Browner and I told him in the middle of the newsroom to go fuck
himself. They told me to “remain available,” as they’d have more
questions for me later.

After they left, McGravy came in, squeezing a
squeezie doll. “Tell me everything you told the police,” McGravy
said, sitting on the corner of my desk Lou Grant-style and looking
down at me. But you know, I just couldn’t. I already felt bad for
ratting out my friends and colleagues to the cops. I mean, I had to
do it, legally and morally, but I didn’t want to rat them out to
the boss-man too, even a boss-man I admired. So I told him only
that I didn’t kill Griff or Browner, and that the Epilady the
police found might have been mine, in which case it had been stolen
from my apartment.

“You don’t think I did it, do you?” I
asked.

“No, Robin, I don’t think you did it. But you
yourself told me once that everyone is capable of committing murder
under the right circumstances.”

“But I didn’t,” I protested.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just such a
goddamned mess, Robin. Greg’s dead. I was just talking to the guy
yesterday, and now he’s dead.”

“He was an asshole,” I said, and reminded him
of that bad-smell story he told me about the asshole who died and
nobody missed him.

“Being an asshole isn’t a capital crime,” he
shot back. “Although Greg was an asshole, a real asshole. Robin, if
I tell you something, don’t blab it around.”

I nodded.

“The cops wanted me to comment on some
disturbing things they found in Greg’s apartment. There was an
anonymous letter that Greg appears to have written, detailing every
sexist thing Jack Jackson ever did or said, and every all-white
club he ever teed up at. You know, Jack is an outspoken supporter
of women’s and minority rights on one hand, and on the other, he’s
a golfaholic and he’s been kind of a rascal with the ladies. He’s
got a past. He’s made no secret of it. But, written up that way,
all out of proportion, it made him look really bad.”

“Greg wrote an anonymous letter about Jack
Jackson? Why?”

“Well, they also found a mailing list – JBS
stockholders, who, as you know, are notorious for their …
egalitarian point of view,” he said. “That’s not all. It looks like
Greg hired Griff.”

“How do they know that?”

“They found your name and Eric’s in a
Reporter’s Notebook in his desk. It said ‘Check out Robin Hudson
and Eric Slansky.’ They asked me if this could have been a
work-related message. I don’t see how it could have been. It looks
like Greg was going to try to undermine Jackson and set himself up
as the stockholders’ savior when Mangecet attacked.”

“A palace coup,” I said. “But he would have
had to shut up the women who had dirt on him, just in case one or
all of us pulled an Anita Hill after all these years.”

“Yes. Ironically, Greg has strengthened
Mangecet’s hand. Now we look like a den of thieves, liars, and
murderers,” he said. “Mangecet will look like Sir Galahad at the
next stockholders’ meeting.”

“Bob, what if they don’t catch this killer?
Almost half of New York murders go unsolved, and that includes some
famous ones. I could be next. I’m not being paranoid this time,
Bob, I swear.”

“Maybe you should stay with a friend.”

“And expose my friend to danger?”

“Then go to a hotel,” he said. He crushed the
squeezie doll’s head between his thumb and forefinger and then
flung the head into my wastepaper basket.

“Griff was killed in a hotel. Browner lived
in a fancy doorman building. But maybe I’ll be lucky, maybe I’ll be
arrested.”

“I’ll see what I can get the cops to do,” he
said. “To protect you tonight, not arrest you. I gotta run, though,
Robin. On top of everything else, we have to figure out what we’re
going to do during Greg’s hour tonight. The cops were beginning to
grill the supervising producer just before I came to see you.”

“Eric? Oh,” I said, trying not to give
anything away, feeling awful. “So who’s hosting Greg’s tribute?” I
asked quickly.

“Lash. I’ll speak to the cops for you,
Robin.”

I guess I was expecting a little more
concern, but Bob saw me as only one of many problems at the moment,
not the least of which were a dead, traitorous talk-show host, a
suspected killer on staff, and a big flood in Mississippi.

I knocked on the wall, but Claire wasn’t
back. I was all alone. What was I going to do? If Eric was the
killer, if he’d taken my keys from the office that day and had
spares cut, then I couldn’t go back to my apartment without
changing the locks. The cops might be finished questioning him at
any moment. He could be there waiting for me when I got home. I
wouldn’t feel safe in a hotel or at a friend’s house. Where would I
feel safe?

I could stay here, I thought.
Twenty-four-hour news. Always someone here. I could sleep at a pod
in the newsroom and wear the same clothes the next day and … But
for how long? I mean, who knew how long it would take the cops to
sift through Greg’s apartment for the one hair or fiber that was
going to ultimately lead to a killer, maybe.