“It’s for our adult viewing slot. We need something sexy. Did you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor? A gynecologist?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a clammy dread flush down my body.
“I was talking to Pete Huculak in security about it and .. . I think we have a special report here.”
“It’s kind of... local, isn’t it?” I said politely.
“As a single murder, yes. But wait, there’s more. This guy’s a gynecologist, right? He’s good-looking. Someone handcuffs him to a chair and shoots—”
“Handcuffs him to a chair?”
“He was handcuffed to a chair, then shot in the heart.”
“How do you know this?”
“The cleaning guy who found the body, he called our security before he called the cops. Security shot a videotape of the murder scene. Exclusive tape of the murder scene, in other words, and we’re going to get a dub.”
That was the clincher for him, because we hate to waste good videotape in Special Reports, especially exclusive videotape.
“There’s more. Know what they found on the floor, among other things? A matchbook from Anya’s.”
Anya’s was an S&M club on the West Side.
“This is a perfect angle,” Jerry said, and his porous, flaccid face could barely contain his glee. I’d worked with him long enough to see the neon signs flashing before his eyes. GYNECOLOGIST. HANDCUFFS. MURDER. EXCLUSIVE VIDEOTAPE!
“S&M is big in the nineties. Remember that cover story New York magazine did? And it’s not just kooks, it’s your doctor, your dentist, the guy who does your tax return, the sweet-faced girl who teaches your kids to read, a guy like Dr. Kanengiser. Is the murder linked to this dark world? It doesn’t even matter. The victim is linked to it.”
You know, it’s not that I’m against exploring the totality of human experience, the human condition, as a reporter. After all, in the past year I’d done “Co-ed Call Girls,” “Transvestite Daddies,” and “Over-Thirty Virgins.” But, having learned the dark lessons of the ill-fated “Death in Modern America” series, I was trying to look on the bright side, become a better person, and do a nice series for a change, one that didn’t involve kinky sex, dead people, deranged people, and/or criminals. I wanted to do a series that might endear me to the viewers, help redeem my past sins, and hoist me firmly onto the New Niceness bandwagon. Good news is also part of the totality of human experience.
“What about that blind tap-dance troupe? I could shoot an interview with them tomorrow. Or the deaf bass player ...,” I offered.
“Robin, all bass players are deaf, eventually.”
“Well, the matchbook might not come directly from Anya’s. Those sex clubs and phone-sex lines advertise on matchbooks given out in delis and stuff. It could come from . . .”
“Anya’s matches are only available at Anya’s. I called and asked.”
I’d been debating whether to tell Jerry that I’d seen Dr. Kanengiser, as I didn’t want to inspire any jokes or summon up any images of my genitalia in his mind. But he’d left me no choice. I had to play that card.
“I might not be the best reporter for this piece,” I said. “I had an appointment with him last night. I didn’t keep it, but I did see him once.”
“And so? You knew him well or something?”
“I didn’t know the guy at all. He never examined me. But it still makes me uncomfor —”
“And you’re not a suspect?”
“Of course not.”
“Good, wouldn’t want any more of that Griff trouble we had. So he didn’t examine you and you’re not a suspect. Nice try, Robin, but you can’t get out of this on some ethical loophole. The word around here is, he was a busy boy up there on the twenty-seventh floor. Not all the women who came to visit him were patients.”
“But rumors don’t — ”
“Robin, he’s just a really grabby example of someone who may have been involved in the S&M lifestyle. We don’t need a, lot on him.”
“I don’t mean to be impertinent . . . ,” I began.
Jerry pulled out the lower left drawer of his desk. The drawer stuck slightly, causing his coffee mug, which reads CHIEF MELON INSPECTOR —— WTNA TV & RADIO, and the ACE award for the vigilantism series — the series I did despite the fact that the trophy bore Jerry’s name only — to rattle.
“See these?” he said, motioning to a drawer full of papers. “These are the resumes of all the reporters who want to replace you. You don’t seem to get that what’s good for Special Reports is good for all of us. I’ve carried you a long time in this unit, Robin. You know I have.”
“But Jerry, just hear me out—”
“Robin, it seems whenever I listen to you we get into trouble. Do I have to remind you that, because of you, the cryogenics people are suing us . . .”
“That wasn’t my fault!” I said. “Besides, the heads were saved.”
This referred to an incident at the Cryogenics East center, where the heads of some thirty-five people were kept frozen in hopes of being brought back to life some day with bionic bodies. While we were shooting, on an unseasonably muggy day I might add, there was a power failure compounded by the breakdown of the backup generator. Meltdown. The place exploded in panic as the proprietor tried to get LILCO and an emergency electrician on the line and his assistants ran out to the gas station next door to get ice to keep the frozen heads frozen.
It turns out our lighting equipment shorted out the system, which was the fault of our new cameraman, Mike. He wasn’t used to operating with American voltage. In any event, as I said, the heads were saved, thus saving my conscience from the added burden of thirty-five rotting human heads.
“Your fault or not, these things always seem to happen when you’re around. And I still don’t know what you said to offend Max Guffy,” Jerry continued.
“You know how touchy morticians are . . .”
“The point is, I think you know what side your bread is buttered on, Robin.”
Just for emphasis, he opened that big drawer full of resumes again.
What an asshole, I thought, even as I smiled at him. Try as I might to be like Atticus Finch, to walk in Jerry’s shoes a mile before judging him, to understand why he was the scumsucking ass-kissing sewer-sniffing son-of-a-bitch he was, I just couldn’t quite manage it. All I could manage was the fake smile.
“Get on the horn and call Mistress Anya. Set up an interview. Then try to get one of the ex-wives,” he said, grabbing his suit jacket off the coat hook and walking me out of his office. “I’ll be in executive meetings all day.”
Grumbling, I returned to my office, where this Confucian gem stared out at me from my blotter: THE RELATION BETWEEN SUPERIORS AND INFERIORS IS LIKE THAT BETWEEN THE WIND AND THE GRASS. THE GRASS MUST BEND WHEN THE WIND BLOWS UPON IT. Of course, how one defines superiority might be a matter of dispute, but if you think too long about things like that, pretty soon you have a bad attitude and all your hard work is wasted.
So Dr. Kanengiser had a matchbook from Mistress Anya’s club, I thought. That was something we kind of had in common. Because I had her card, in my Rolodex, in two places, under Dominatrices and under Sadism. (Since coming to Special Reports, I had put together a very strange Rolodex, full of Virgins, Sadists, Victims, Embalmers, and, of course, UFO Abductees—listed by both their Earth names and their alien names.) About a year before, we’d interviewed Mistress Anya and five other dominatrices for a quickie report we put together after a New York judge ruled that S&M for money was not considered prostitution under New York law, since intercourse was rarely involved (although, if the dominatrix is feeling charitable, she lets the guy jerk off).
In New York, Anya was the unofficial queen of the professional whip-snappers. In addition to her club, which bore her name, and a leased-access S&M talk show on cable, Anya was the self-proclaimed head of the Marquis de Sade Society, whose mandate is “to promote sadomasochism,” since apparently there isn’t enough pain and su
ffering in the world already. She was, as they say, a media slut, who’d go on the air anytime, for any reason, to promulgate her philosophy and attract like-minded souls to her club. Positive publicity, negative publicity, it was all the same to her.
“I’d be delighted to talk to you tomorrow,” she said when I called her, and the way she said “delighted” made it sound like a four-letter word.
I penciled her into my new Filofax date organizer.
Five phone calls later I tracked down both of Kanengiser’s ex-wives. Ex-wife number two, Gail Perlmutter-Kanengiser, who was staying with a friend in Miami, had only one question for me.
“How much will you pay me?”
We call this the Hard Copy effect. Thanks to tabloid TV’s liberal use of checkbook journalism, it was getting increasingly hard to get people to talk on television for free, unless of course they had a book, a movie, or a political agenda to promote, or an axe to grind. Special Reports may have been sensationalistic, even sleazy at times, but we did not practice checkbook journalism.
When I told her this, in much nicer language, she hung up on me.
Next, I called Detective Ferber at Manhattan South, but he was out so they put me through to another detective just assigned to the case, who was also out: Detective Richard Bigger.
Shit. Well, there was no point leaving a message for Bigger. I knew him from a previous investigation. At that time, he had been paired with Detective Joe Tewfik, who had since retired to become an upstate restaurateur.
There are good cops and bad cops. Tewfik was a good cop. Although much decorated, Bigger was a weasely, officious, stick-up-the-ass control freak with the sharpest teeth and sorriest mustache I’d ever seen on a Homo sapiens. We had instantly, instinctively disliked each other. It was as if my very existence insulted Bigger. He saw me as some kind of wild-eyed antiauthoritarian bohemian, which is so unfair. That was the old me.
If Bigger was now on this case, that meant it was going to be even harder to get information, as Detective Richard Bigger was not media-friendly. He hated the media, but he especially hated me. Maybe because he had once been in my apartment on police business and had come in contact with my poison ivy plants. How was I to know he had a poison ivy allergy that made him suffer doubly the effects of the plant?
By the time I came back from lunch, the Kanengiser murder had been eclipsed by breaking news, company rumors, and other urgent things, such as Franco’s hairy ears, which everyone was now starting to notice.
The “exclusive” videotape that security had shot at the murder scene was on my desk with a note. Jerry wanted a tape log on his desk by the end of the day. The last thing I wanted to do at that point was look at a murdered man, but it was my job, so I popped the tape into the deck and sat back in my chair, a yellow legal pad propped in my lap.
The tape had been shot from the doorway into Kanengiser’s inner office, where the body was found.
“Don’t go in,” said a voice off-camera. It sounded like Pete Huculak.
“Why not?” said another voice, that of Hector.
“Don’t disturb the crime scene.”
The camera panned around the room, fixing on Kanengiser’s body, a side view. Sure enough, Kanengiser’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was fully clothed. Hector panned around the room some more, zooming in on some papers scattered around, a tipped-over paper-clip dispenser, some litter on the floor.
The camera was still rolling when the police arrived—Detective Ferber, two uniformed officers who both looked old enough to be his father, and a doctor, who said, “He’s dead.”
Ferber put on rubber gloves and began picking stuff up with tweezers, dropping items into plastic and paper evidence bags held by one of the uniforms, while the other tried to pick the lock on Kanengiser’s handcuffs.
“One nickel, one dime, one matchbook—a place called Anya’s,” Ferber said. He was behind the chair when he said it, so I didn’t get a clear view.
A few minutes later, the tape ended.
The connection to Anya’s seemed pretty tenuous at best. Kanengiser might have bummed those matches off of someone else—although, in connection with the handcuffs, it did look bad. On the other hand, the biographical information faxed over by the American Gynecological Association made him sound like citizen of the year. He had graduated from Harvard Med, did his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian, was active in independent politics on the district level, and had served a term on his community board. At first, I thought that community board thing might lead somewhere, but it turned out the most controversial proposal the board had passed was a rezoning initiative to open certain residential buildings to on-site day-care centers.
A Lexis-Nexis search turned up a few brief mentions of Kanengiser in local stories about district zoning meetings and the institution of a beefed-up neighborhood watch program. There were a lot of stories about doctor killings, however. I weeded through them and came up with three other unsolved homicides: a neurosurgeon killed in a Seattle mugging, a doctor who performed abortions killed in Kansas, and a doctor of physics killed in a carjacking in California. None of them seemed connected to Kanengiser, unless Kanengiser had performed abortions at one time, although nothing in the AGA information indicated that was the case.
So much for my serial killer theory. But the Lexis-Nexis search wasn’t completely fruitless. Under the slug “Doc-Killing” was a story that was completely unrelated to Kanengiser, and yet extremely significant to me.
It was the story of a Madame Le Doc of Nice, France.
“A lovely woman,” was the unanimous opinion of her neighbors. “A sweet, submissive, and devoted wife.”
Sweet, submissive, and devoted—until one night after an argument, when Madame Le Doc beat her husband to death with their eighteen-pound turtle, Henri.
Poor husband.
Poor turtle.
Just as I was about to leave for the day, Kanengiser’s night nurse-slash-receptionist, Vicki Burchill, returned my call.
The night Kanengiser was killed, she said, a strange man had called, saying that her apartment was on fire. Only there was no fire. Someone had wanted Vicki out of the office. No doubt the same someone who had called the ANN office and left a message with Tamayo to cancel my appointment.
“Were any files missing?” I asked. In that case, it might not be S&M at all, it might be blackmail. Secretly, I hoped it was. Don’t get me wrong. Blackmail isn’t pretty and because Kanengiser was in the JBS building it could hit pretty close to home. But there was a bright side to it, since blackmail is a touchy subject for any public personality, but more so at ANN, as we’d been stung in the past. That angle alone could be enough to kill this story and get me back onto some good news.
But Ms. Burchill dashed these hopes when she said, “No. We did a complete inventory. Just finished it about an hour ago. So far, nothing’s missing.”
That ruled out blackmail. A blackmailer might photocopy things, but for credibility he, or she, needed the original.
Beyond that, Vicki Burchill had little to offer. She hadn’t worked for him long, had no idea if Kanengiser was into S&M, and couldn’t for the life of her imagine who would kill him.
“But the person who called you on the false fire story was a man,” I said.
“It sounded like a man,” she said. “But the police detective says there are gadgets people can use to disguise their voices on the phone, so I can’t even tell the gender of the caller with confidence.”
Or it could be the killer just paid some bum to make the call.
It was a dead end.
All I’d found were dead ends. After a day of dead ends, it’s Miller Time. I put the tape log on Jerry’s desk, and went to meet McGravy.
CHAPTER FIVE
“It’s good to see you, Robin,” Bob McGravy said.
“It’s good to see you too, Bob.” I ordered a light beer and slid onto a barstool next to him.
Bob is the vice president in charge of editorial cont
ent at the network, a man with sterling journalistic credentials. He worked for Edward R. Murrow and CBS during their golden era. He’s also the guy who hired me and, with legendary assignment editor Lanny Cane, taught me television news.
More importantly, McGravy had been largely responsible for building ANN’s reputation from laughingstock to network of record. But ratings were replacing reputation on a number of fronts, and McGravy had declining influence over the network at large. Nowadays, they used him mainly as a fireman, flying him from bureau to bureau to solve one problem or another.
“I don’t see enough of you these days. I’m so busy. Been too long.”
“Even longer since we came to Buddy’s,” I said.
This place took me back. Great place, Buddy’s, an authentic, unpretentious New York bar Bob had introduced me to years before, back when he still drank and I was a young, promising reporterling who figured she’d be the Moscow correspondent by the time she was thirty-seven. Here, McGravy and his old newshound friends had turned me on to vodka stingers and whetted my appetite for the roguish nature of the business with their bawdy newsroom stories.
Buddy’s has been around since World War II and, judging by the photos of the original establishment, the decor hasn’t changed much since 1944. The hardwood floors are worn down and the red vinyl in the semicircular banquettes has been patched over a few times. McGravy and I like it for its old New York flavor, for its habitues with red carbuncular noses, lots of tattoos, and names like Billy One-Eye, Spider, and Fat Pat, for its two kinds of wine, Mountain Chablis Red and Mountain Chablis White, which come in cardboard boxes with spigots.
“Can’t stay long, Robin. I have a date with Candy and then I have to pack for another road trip tomorrow,” McGravy said, taking a judicious sip of his soda with lime.
In the past few years, he had given up drinking and smoking, although he held on to his red meat, refined sugar, saturated fats, and love of fifty-ish former chorines named Candy and Frosty, grande dames of the lash-fluttering class. What can I say? Some men just like those real girly girls, you know, the kind with the feather-fringed dressing gowns and little fluffy dogs they carry around like handbags. McGravy loved ‘em, and they loved him back, and they took good care of each other. It’s nice when it works out, you know?
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