Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Only in self-defense.”

  “Have you ever been spanked?” Jim asked.

  “Oh sure. And I’ve spanked. But I’m not into it. I have to know a guy really really well before I’ll spank him,” I said. “What about you?”

  Jim shook his head violently. “No way.”

  We both looked at Mike.

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve done,” he said.

  “This guy was your gynecologist?” Jim asked.

  “Almost,” I said. “Close enough that doing this story feels extra weird to me, know what I mean?”

  Hanging out with Jim and Mike was the high point of my job. I felt like one of the guys because we talked pretty freely about stuff, and we all had different viewpoints and different opinions. Jim was very normal. He lived in Jersey, in a house, with his wife and kid. After eight years of doing sound for Special Reports, he still hadn’t been jaded by the oddities we covered. Every story left him shaking his head in amazement. His was the conservative, family-values point of view.

  Mike, on the other hand, was not normal. No normal person spends five years chasing wars, going from one hellhole to another. Mike was forty-three years old, came from Ireland originally, and had a nine-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, who was American. Mike’s point of view was freewheeling and libertarian, sometimes outrageously so, but he got away with it because he had an Irish accent. When Mike was calm, he had only a trace of Ireland in his voice, but when he got excited, or had a bit to drink, or was talking about home, you could really hear it. “Dem Flynns, de whole fockin’ family’s bank robbers,” he said, when describing some neighbors from County Cork to Tamayo and me at Keggers. He rolled his r’s and said words like smuggler as “smoogler.” Jim and I imitated him a lot.

  Because of my adventure in the men’s room on twenty-seven, we were late getting to Anya’s. Don’t be late, she had emphasized on the phone. She had meant it. When we got there, the haughty maid informed us that Madame was not yet ready, and we would be required to wait in Madame’s minimalist living room.

  “Please set up and be ready to roll when Madame comes in,” the maid said. “She’ll be about ten more minutes.”

  Madame’s living room was a cavern, really, with twenty-foot ceilings and huge floor-to-ceiling windows covered in gauzy white curtains sashed with red velvet. The whiteness of the room was relieved only by the red sashes and a wall of glass and teak cases displaying a lot of medieval iron torture implements.

  “Guess she’s going to make an entrance,” Mike said, strolling over to get a better look at the torture devices. “Wow, look at this weaponry.”

  “Nice disembowler,” I said.

  “When was the last time you had a good evisceration, girl? I mean, a really good one.”

  (Mike was one of the few men who could get away with calling me a girl—although I often refer to myself that “way —and that was because he said it with respect and with that great r-rolling lilt. Ask an Irish guy to say that word, girl, for you and you’ll see what I mean.)

  “You’re sick.”

  The maid appeared and said, “Madame is coming,” and we went back to position. I put in my earpiece, which wasn’t necessary since we weren’t going live. But Mike liked to be able to talk to me while we were shooting, and I went along with it because he had worked with correspondents much better than me and I had to trust his judgment.

  When the maid was sure we were rolling, and only then, Mistress Anya came in, dressed like Kaiser Wilhelm and leading her “slave” Charles around on a leash. Charles, a white man, was dressed head-to-toe in black leather so that only his eyes, nose, and hands were visible. He was on all fours.

  “Sit, Charles,” Anya commanded, and he obediently sat on the floor by the white leather sofa.

  Anya then sat down, took off her spiked Prussian helmet, and smoothed down her short blond hair. With a different personality, she would have been quite sweet-faced. Her face was round and catlike, with big brown eyes and a heart-shaped mouth, but the cold, controlling aura she projected removed all gentleness from her.

  “I’m ready now,” she said, imperiously.

  I showed her the photograph and said, “Did you know this man, Dr. Herman Kanengiser?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure. I don’t recognize the name at all,” she said. “At least, not by that name. But understand that people who aren’t yet completely comfortable with their sexual identity take new names when they enter our world. And many come incognito, in leather masks, for instance. ‘Put a mask on a man and he’ll be honest.’ That’s Oscar Wilde. ‘Put a whip in a woman’s hand, and she’ll be honest.’ That’s me.

  “I will say that a great many physicians, lawyers, judges, and other professionals, even policemen, are members, unofficially, of our society. We have quite a few clients from Wall Street in particular. If this doctor had a matchbook from Anya’s, it means he probably visited the club.”

  “He doesn’t ring any bells?”

  “No,” she said, without even glancing a second time at the photo.

  “None at all?”

  “No.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Where were you the night before last?”

  “At the club, as I am most nights,” she said, with clear annoyance. “I understood from Mr. Spurdle that I was going to get a chance to talk about the society.”

  Well, if Mr. Spurdle said it was so, who was I to quibble? I didn’t know what else to ask her, so after that I just let her roll with her spiel about the Marquis de Sade Society and S&M—also known as B&D, for bondage and discipline.

  I already knew rather more than I wanted to about S&M. My most devoted fan, Elroy, is a masochist who fantasizes about me hurting him. In his last letter, he had listed the many things he was willing to do to win my heart. For example, and I quote, “I would shave my body with a dull razor and then sit in a vinegar bath just to win the privilege of licking the sweat from your feet.”

  Creepy, yes. But what harm had he actually threatened to me, other than to give my feet a good licking, an idea more disgusting than dangerous?

  “Love and sex and pain and punishment are all inextricably bound up together,” Mistress Anya was saying. “We’re just more honest about it than most people, and more economical in the way we express it. Love needs rules, it needs a leader and a follower. Our love is about trust. The slave trusts me and gives me complete control, and I love him and punish him accordingly.”

  “How long have you had Charles here?”

  “A month and a bit,” she said. “So far, he’s been a very good boy.”

  If Charles had had a tail, it would have been wagging.

  “Is there longevity in these sorts of relationships?”

  “Of course. I was with my late husband for eight years, until he passed away. Before Charles, I had Werner for three years.”

  “What happened with Werner?”

  “I had to ask him to leave,” she said shortly.

  The “slave” Charles was looking up at me with that same needy look a dog has. It was so weird that he was acting like a dog. Mike must have been thinking the same thing because he whispered in my earpiece, “Is he allowed up on the furniture?”

  This was a challenge. Whatever turns your crank, as they say. It’s not that I have anything against kinky in theory, if you know what I mean, but when I’m confronted with it in real life I have a hard time keeping a straight face.

  “Why did you ask Werner to leave?” I didn’t really care, but I sensed this subject bothered her and I felt like yanking her chain a bit.

  “He drank from the toilet,” Mike whispered in my ear.

  “He violated my trust,” Anya said, then expertly changed the subject.

  “When we’re role-playing,” she went on. “Words like no and stop mean ‘yes’ and ‘don’t stop.’ So we have control words for when one really does want to stop, words that cannot be confused. Every master and slave hav
e their own words. Charles and I use blender for ‘no’ and ‘artichoke’ for ‘stop.” Another couple we know use bassoon and Venice.”

  She picked up a sturdy, oversize table-tennis paddle.

  “Now, Charles likes to be paddled, as opposed to whipped,” she said. “I must stress it is important that people not try this at home without proper instruction. At the society and at the club, we teach neophytes how to hit without leaving bruises or damaging internal organs.”

  “How erotic. Hose me down,” Mike said in my ear.

  “The best point for paddling is an area of the rump we know as the sweet spot. Shall I demonstrate?” she asked, and Charles got off his haunches and began unbuttoning the square leather flap that covered his ass.

  “Oh please, artichoke!” Mike whispered.

  “That’s all right,” I said, quickly. “We’re more interested in the philosophical aspects of your relationship.”

  I couldn’t get into this. I could barely handle the regular low-grade S&M all lovers enjoy/suffer. I just wanted to get the hell out of here before Fido started licking his own genitalia.

  Mistress Anya stood, ordered Charles the slave to heel.

  “Come to one of our meetings,” she said to us. “And do come by the club. I’ll make some inquiries about this doctor.”

  She led her crawling sycophant away.

  Apparently, the interview was now over. I couldn’t help but be awed, and somewhat frightened, by the control this woman had over everything in her life. It takes a tough bitch to promote sadomasochism, I guess.

  “Jesus,” I said, back in the crew car. “That is one scary woman. Was it just me, or did you get the feeling she was hiding something? Like, she’s skinning dalmatians for their pelts in the back bedroom or something.”

  “I thought she was almost attractive,” Mike said. “But that slave gave me the cold quivers.”

  “That’s because he was so doglike,” I said. “And you don’t like dogs.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like them. I don’t like that they run in front of my vehicle.

  Mike had run over twenty-seven stray dogs while he lived in Pakistan covering the Afghan war. By accident, he added, but I was skeptical. Twenty-seven dogs in two years is a lot, even in Pakistan.

  Mike was good-looking in a pleasant, non-threatening way: curly brown hair, freckles, twinkly eyes. He really knew how to make me laugh when I couldn’t muster a laugh on my own, and, of course, he had that great accent. I’d just start to like him, as a man I mean, and then he would tell me about something like the twenty-seven dogs in Pakistan and it would turn me right off.

  “Those control words . . . ,” I said.

  “All couples have control words, or phrases,” Mike said. “One code word that means ‘stop whatever you’re doing.’”

  “Good point,” I agreed. “Burke used London on me if he thought I was acting crazy, and I used his real name on him. We had a lot of code words.”

  “My wife and I don’t do that,” Jim said. Jim either had the world’s strongest, happiest marriage, or he was still in the denial phase.

  The next person we interviewed, Kanengiser’s first ex-wife, Hanna Quails, was an expert on that phase. A petite and pretty management consultant, Quails sat in her office and told us, “Herm had a problem being honest with women. Women loved him, and assumed a commitment on his part that he didn’t intend. I can’t blame him completely.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because he didn’t intend to hurt anyone, he was kind of helpless about it. He was never good at breaking off with women or telling them how he really felt about them. So he always had several women at a time, and he devoted a lot of energy to keeping them unaware of each other and keeping them from pressing for a commitment. In fact, I think Herm married me, and his second wife, to have some defense against other women, if that makes sense. You can’t play that game for long without hurting a lot of people, and getting hurt yourself. I’m over the hurt now, have been for a while. But it took me a long time and a lot of therapy.”

  I understood completely. I too had been married to someone who was secretly polygamous, although not anywhere near Kanengiser levels.

  “But, to be fair, I played a part in it too and so did every one of his other women. I let him get away with it for a long time. I even facilitated it in some ways because I loved him so much,” she said.

  I understood this as well. Getting away with long-term polygamy requires a certain amount of collaboration from the person, or persons, being cheated on. These are the signs of collaboration: you will accept any far-fetched excuse, you will overlook the most glaring clues, and in some cases, you’ll save him the time and trouble of having to concoct a lie for himself by figuring out an explanation and presenting it to him on a silver platter when he walks in the door at three a.m. smelling of alien perfume.

  I told her this, and she said, “Yes, it requires a lot of imagination. It’s pretty easy to explain away lipstick on the collar. It’s much tougher to explain away lipstick on the thigh. I kept denying it, until I found his black book and couldn’t deny it any longer. The thing contained not only names of his women but sexual details about them! When he came home, I confronted him with it and then made him watch while I burned it in the fireplace. The next day, I saw a lawyer.”

  Media claims that Kanengiser was being scouted as a possible GOP state senate candidate were, Quails said, “Nonsense. He sat on the community board because he wanted to preserve the neighborhood and his property from bad influences. He knew he had no hope of going beyond that because of all his women. I don’t think he even wanted to, so the papers have completely distorted that.”

  “I saw a speech he made on television . . .”

  “Yes, I know that speech. I heard that same argument when I finally confronted him. Men are not programmed to resist when beautiful women throw themselves at them. He is ... was a very handsome man and successful and smart and charming and ... he had a lot of genuinely good qualities too, and that attracted attractive women to him, you understand?”

  “Oh yeah.” That’s why I had that new rule about not dating any more pretty boys.

  In my opinion, this was the best stuff we had, although it wouldn’t pass Jerry’s muster since whips, chains, and tall, Teutonic women in black leather were not mentioned. The best I could elicit from Hanna Quails on that subject was: “How do I know? There was so much I didn’t know about the man that I can’t even speculate about what he was or wasn’t into.”

  The only one of the doctor’s ex-girlfriends to talk to us, a glamorous model turned real estate broker named Susi Bure, offered no S&M link either, although she echoed what Hanna Quails had said.

  “Did Herm mix up women’s names? That was the least of it. I think the man had to have sex so much just to avoid having a conversation, because he could never remember my friends’ names, my parents’ names, where I worked. . . . One night in January he showed up at my place with a cake, flowers, and champagne for my birthday. My birthday’s in September. There were other incidents too in our two years together. He wanted to be caught. Despite how much trouble he went to, to conceal things, another side of him was giving him away every step of the way.

  “The thing that gets me now,” she went on, “is that he always made me feel like it was my fault somehow, that I expected too much from him. Maybe I did expect more than he could give, but I didn’t expect as much as I deserved. The thing I learned? If you don’t expect much you don’t get much.”

  Yeah, but if you expect too much, you just get disappointed, I thought.

  “One other thing,” Susi Bure said as we were wrapping up. “You know the matchbook that was found?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sure that wasn’t Herm’s. He didn’t smoke.”

  So who smoked? I wondered.

  Obviously, the killer. How had the matches come to be on Kanengiser’s floor? Had they been in the killer’s purse, or pocket, and fallen out
when the killer took out the handcuffs or the gun? To me, this said that Kanengiser might have no direct connection to Anya’s at all. The only connection might be the killer’s connection.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After our interviews, I stopped off at security to get the elevator tapes from the day of the murder and to find out what, if anything, Pete knew (nothing so far, he told me). While I was waiting in Pete’s office for Deputy Franco to get the dubs I requested, Kerwin Shutz rushed in, looking red-faced and very agitated. Kerwin always looked red-faced and agitated. Since taking over the eight p.m. talk-show slot, he had used it as a soapbox from which to rail against liberals, atheists, unionists, environmentalists, working mothers, welfare mothers, and single mothers, as well as to plug his book I’m Right, They’re Wrong and its sequel, I’m Still Right.

  Kerwin slapped something on Pete’s desk. It was a bullet.

  “Found this on my lawn this morning,” he said. He turned to me, suddenly sweet. “Hello Robin. Sorry to interrupt. I’ll just be a moment.”

  “I’m busy but I’ll be right with you Ker . . .” Pete said.

  “I need a bodyguard!” Kerwin screamed, and stomped out as Franco was coming in.

  Kerwin was always claiming that people were shooting at him, and he was most afraid of environmentalists, feminists, and gay activists, or as he referred to them on his show, “tree-huggers, ugly girls, and sissies.” Not the first people I think of when I think of gun-toting nuts. In fact, gun-toting nuts were more likely to agree with Kerwin than to want to shoot him.

  “Here,” Franco said, handing me a box of tapes from the commercial elevator, along with a photocopy of a sheet from the sign-out log.

  “Thanks,” I said, without looking at him. Those hair-sprouting ears, you know.

  Most people disliked talking to Franco because he hardly ever said anything back to you. When he first started at ANN, someone had floated the theory that Franco didn’t understand English and was afraid to admit it, but he’d since spoken a couple of times and demonstrated that he understood the language, as long as you didn’t use too many big words or non-literal expressions. He was part of the humorless horde. In fact, Louis Levin had put a kind of bounty on Franco, offering two hundred dollars to anyone who could make him laugh in front of witnesses. Tamayo, for one, was doing her level best to win that money. Whenever she ran into Franco, she assailed him with Gomer Pyle jokes she had learned from jarheads stationed at the Yakota base outside Tokyo. It was so bad that now when Franco saw Tamayo, he ran in the opposite direction. That one of our top-ranking Keystone Kops was afraid of a Japanese-American stand-up comic was not very confidence-inspiring.