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Authors: Sparkle Hayter

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BOOK: Nice Girls Finish Last
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All I wanted in the world at that point was eight hours of solid z's—harder and harder to come by lately. Physically, psychologically, and emotionally exhausted, I could have dropped onto my bed in my clothes and high heels. But Louise Bryant was howling for her dinner and she hates to be kept waiting, so I fed her her regular dinner of cat food sautéed with bok choy and oyster sauce, cooled to lukewarm. Ignore her or try something new at your peril.

After brushing my teeth and checking myself for signs of necrotic fascitis, I put on my flannel pajamas and cued up a CD of lullabies and chants sung by monks in a rain forest. I picked up my sated cat and got into bed with her, petting her until she started to purr. Well, petting is probably an understatement. Every night, I gave the old girl the kitty equivalent of a shiatsu massage, just to get her to sleep with me so I wouldn't have to sleep alone.

Once she fell asleep, I curled up next to her, listening to my soothing CD and reciting the Serenity Prayer, putting the day safely behind me. Just as I was about to close my eyes, the phone rang and my answering machine picked up.

“Robin, this is your mother,” I heard.

“Yes, Mom, I recognize your voice,” I said softly, but I didn't pick up the phone. I was too tired.

“I just called to remind you that your Aunt Maureen is arriving in New York today for two weeks,” Mom said, in her guileless voice. “Something to do with her church.”

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that in order to “remind” someone of something, you had to have told them about it previously. And my mother had not mentioned it. I would have remembered. You meet my Aunt Maureen once, you never forget, no matter how hard you try. Aunt Mo is a force of nature. Think Mussolini in a corset and a wig, and you won't be too far off the mark.

No, she did not expect to stay with me,
thank God
. Instead, Mom said, she was staying in a hotel just a few blocks from my place of employment.

Well, this was not good news. I know, I know. Blood is thicker—and stickier—than water and I should have picked up the phone and called Aunt Maureen and asked about her plans, but I didn't. My plan was to avoid her at all costs. If my Aunt Minnie, who lives with Mom, or Aunt Flo, or my father's black-sheep sister Aunt Lucille came to town, I'd sleep on my fire escape so they could sleep in my bed and I'd show them all around town.

But Aunt Mo—no way.

Among her special talents—which had once included rooting out communists in the public libraries and Girl Scout troops of northern Minnesota in the 1950s—was that Aunt Mo knew how to reduce me to my insecurities, so I couldn't risk seeing her. Ironically, I was trying hard to be the kind of polite and obedient young lady she'd wanted me to be, and her presence would be a threat to my Positive Mental Attitude because something about her brought out my rebellious instincts. Maybe it was those monthly letters chastising me for getting divorced and telling me what I could have done to save my marriage, if I wasn't such a pigheaded fool agnostic.

Maybe it was the fact that because of Aunt Mo I hate the taste of Tabasco. When I was a kid staying with Aunt Mo, she'd put Tabasco on my tongue whenever I said a bad word or told a lie. In fact, she put Tabasco on my tongue just as often when I told the truth. This is the part that gets me. She put Tabasco on my tongue even when
she
knew I was telling the truth, if it was an uncomfortable truth she wanted me to keep to myself. It was an early experience in censorship. To this day, when I taste Tabasco, I taste hypocrisy.

I guess that sounds like a petty thing, Tabasco, but all my complaints against Aunt Mo are not petty. After my Dad died when I was ten, Aunt Mo tried to get custody of me, citing my mother's mental illness. (My mother believes she's a member of the British royal family, which, even if true, is nothing you want to boast about to the neighbors.)

My mother had forgiven her for the custody fight. I hadn't.

Thinking about Aunt Mo, I couldn't sleep for shuddering. It took me fifteen minutes just to will away the image of her that appeared every time I closed my eyes. I was able to relax only after replaying my CD twice and imagining myself in a beautiful place with a handsome man I used to love once, a long time ago.

So there I was, perched on the edge of the gentle abyss, when, suddenly, the low-pitched siren of a car alarm went off on the street below, sending me bolt upright.

I hate those fucking car alarms.

Another went off, emitting intermittent shrieks, then another, and another. I opened my window, stuck my head out, and saw a man running through the Con Ed mist, grabbing the handles of car doors and setting off all their alarms, including one that activated a car horn, which in this instance played the first few bars of the
Godfather
theme over and over. The man ran away. Up and down the dark steamy street, lights turned on and heads appeared in windows.

The insane symphony of car alarms was soon joined by a chorus of loud cursing that rained down on the heads of embarrassed car owners as they went out and turned off their alarms. After fifteen minutes only one alarm remained, the one with the intermittent shriek. Another fifteen minutes and someone started shooting at the offending car until the alarm stopped.

Jesus, there were guns everywhere. Well, this answered one of Life's big questions: Is the whole world nuts, or is it just me?

The car owners were all gone, windows went dark again. The street was quiet now. All I could hear was some man's laughter, increasingly distant and hollow, like someone laughing into a wide-mouthed jar.

When would this day ever end? Louise was awake too, and looking like she might go sleep elsewhere, so I closed the window and went back to bed, giving her another rubdown, playing my CD again, re-reciting the Serenity Prayer, and, finally, gently, falling to sleep.

I was in that comfortable, swimmy limbo, the hypnagogic space between consciousness and unconsciousness, when the phone again rang and I heard my machine pick up.

“Ms. Hudson, this is Detective Mack Ferber of Manhattan South—Homicide Division …”

I reached for the phone.

“Robin Hudson,” I said.

“Oh, Ms. Hudson. Is this Robin Hudson or her machine?”

He sounded young.

“This is Robin Hudson. What's your name again?”

“Detective Mack Ferber … Homicide …”

“And what do you want?”

“Um, Ms. Hudson … did you know Dr. Herman Kanengiser?”

“Um.” I reached past my snoring cat for my alarm clock. Louise Bryant sleeps like an old man, with drooling and little raspy snores, and she gave a full-bodied snort when I moved her.

“Ms. Hudson?”

“Yeah, I know him, kind of,” I said, studying the glow-in-the-dark clock face intently. It was twelve thirty a.m.

Actually, I hardly knew Dr. Herman Kanengiser, which is ironic when you think that I almost let the guy see me naked. Dr. Herman Kanengiser was my gynecologist, sort of. He leased space in the building I worked in, the Jackson Broadcasting building. That, direct insurance billing, and the fact that he took evening appointments made him ideal for a working woman, like me.

It also made it hard to get an appointment. I had finally got in to see him, about six weeks earlier, only to get beeped for an undercover shoot before we even got to the examining table. It took over a month more to schedule a second appointment, which was canceled that day.

“What happened? I mean …” I began to say.

“I'd rather discuss it in person.”

“Well, why do you want to talk to me?”

“Are you up? Can I stop by? I
really
don't want to talk about this on the phone,” he said.

I have a saying. My door is always open to men with warrants and/or badges. Legitimate badges, that is. After getting his badge number and calling him back at Manhattan South to confirm, I told him to come on over.

I was physically awake but mentally groggy, and had called him back on autopilot. But once I got off the phone, I realized what Ferber had said. He was a homicide cop and he had spoken of Kanengiser in the past tense. That meant Kanengiser was dead. Murdered.

Because I am a tad self-absorbed, my first thought was entirely selfish: whatever had happened, I wasn't going to get into trouble for it. My whereabouts all evening long could be attested to by witnesses. After leaving work, I had a meeting with Kerwin Shutz about some vigilante videotape, then drinks with my associate producer Tamayo and my new cameraman Mike. From there I went to my cat's agent's office and waited for the Teamsters to bring Louise back from her shoot, which had gone into overtime because of her bad behavior. It's just the nature of my life that I sleep better at night if I have a good alibi, since this wasn't the first time I'd had an appointment with someone who later ended up dead. It's like, my karma or something.

2

C
all it vanity, but because there was a man coming over, I felt I had to fix myself up a bit, get out of the flannel nightshirt and into something respectable, touch up my thick red hair, put on some lipstick. I am not particularly proud of this side of myself, but that's the way it is. The cop might be cute.

Thank God the maid service had been in that day and the place was relatively tidy. The maid service was an important step on my road to maturity. Left to my own devices, I live amid clutter. Okay, clutter is another understatement. Left to my own devices, my apartment looks like the scene of a thorough Gestapo ransacking, or perhaps a small soccer riot.

Tidy as my apartment was, it did look like a bookstore's self-help section had exploded inside it, as I had plastered uplifting, inspirational sayings all over the place. Cut from books, magazines, articles, or comic strips, or handwritten, they were everywhere. My refrigerator exhorted me to
THINK POSITIVE
. On a lampshade was the message
CHOOSE HAPPINESS
! My toothbrush cup preached
KEEP THE FAITH
, while above my telephone was this from Confucius:
TO GO BEYOND

Rather than have to explain this to unexpected company, I took a few of these more conspicuous bromides down.

A half hour later, Detective Mack Ferber knocked on my door. I was glad I'd preened, because he
was
good-looking, in a slightly goofy and very appealing way, a bit jowly with droopy brown eyes and curly brown hair. Unfortunately, he was also a lot younger than me. He looked at least fifteen years younger, but I realized he couldn't possibly be that young and be a full detective.

“Get you something to drink?” I asked, trying not to sound too Anne Bancroft. “A soft drink, I mean. I know you're on duty.”

“No thank you. I'm sorry to have to tell you this way…,” he began, then stopped.

Ferber apparently wasn't very good at breaking bad news to people yet. Probably hadn't been in Homicide long. He sat down on my old blue armchair, perching himself on the edge of the cushion. I shoved a hatbox off the faux-leopard love seat across from him and sat down.

“Mind if I tape this?” I said, pulling out my microcassette recorder. I always think it's a good idea to have a record of encounters with authority figures.

“No … I guess not.”

“So what happened to the guy? Is he dead?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I figured, because you've been talking about him in the past tense. Gee, that's too bad. God. What happened?”

“He was murdered, in his office, some time between seven p.m., when he made a call to reserve a table at Brasserie Bleu for ten, and ten-thirty p.m. when the body was discovered by a cleaning person.”

“Wow.”

“You were the last appointment in his book last night. Did you keep that appointment?”

“No. That appointment was canceled,” I said, and before he could ask for my alibi, I presented him with the minute-by-minute accounting of my whereabouts that evening, just to get it out of the way.

“Who canceled the appointment?” he asked.

“He did. Or his office. I got a message canceling it.”

“That's interesting. It seems the night nurse got a call that took her away from the office on a false emergency, and your security people were called away on a false alarm elsewhere in your building. Someone wanted to get Kanengiser alone.”

“Premeditated,” I said, nodding. “How was he killed?”

“Shot in the heart.”

“Poor slob. Damn shame. Seemed like a nice guy too. Did you get the guy who did it? Or the woman who did it?”

“Not yet,” he said, looking at me strangely. “You're very calm about this.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Well, I used to be a crime and justice reporter, a few years ago, and … I dunno. I'm hard to surprise.”

Ferber looked at me and smiled. He was starting to grow on me a little, so I crossed my legs, bounced my foot slightly, and reminded myself of my new rule about not dating younger men.

“Did you know him well?” Ferber asked.

“No. I'd seen him once about six weeks earlier for maybe ten minutes when my boss beeped me. This was the rescheduled appointment,” I said. “Any idea why he was killed?”

“Not sure. It was made to look like a robbery. Some files were pulled out, papers scattered on the floor …”

“What did he have worth stealing? He told me he bills insurance directly, so he couldn't have much money around, and it couldn't be a junkie looking for drugs because Dr. Kanengiser was a gynecologist, and there aren't too many crazed Ortho-Novum junkies out there.”

Ferber cleared his throat.

Before he could say anything, I said, “Of course. He had confidential medical files.”

Ferber didn't say anything.

“Were any files missing?” I said.

“We don't know yet.”

“But that's one theory.”

“I have several theories. Was there … anything in your file someone might have been after?” Ferber asked.

BOOK: Nice Girls Finish Last
9.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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