Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  I didn’t answer.

  “Robin, if you’re in there, let me in. I want to help you, Robin. You need help!”

  I held my breath. I could hear chained doors opening down the hall to see what the commotion was.

  “She’s not in there, Dulcinia,” Aunt Mo said. Apparently, Mrs. Ramirez was in the hall with her. “That mustn’t have been her. Well, you’d better call me that car service.”

  And she left.

  Anxiously, I watched out the window for the car service to come and get her, partly out of concern—it wasn’t safe for an elderly woman in my neighborhood after dark and I wanted to make sure she got into the car—but mostly because I wanted to see her leave. The car alarm had stopped.

  There was a man standing on the street staring up at my window. I focused my eyes. It wasn’t Fennell. It was ... Howard Gollis, looking very handsome, I had to say, in black jeans and de rigueur black leather jacket. And just as I realized it was him, he saw my face in the window.

  “Robin! Robin!” he shouted, doing his best Brando-as-Kowalski. “Let me in.”

  I turned out the lights, hoping Howard would take the hint.

  Aunt Mo’s car arrived.

  “I’m sorry about the blindfold, okay?” he shouted.

  He was referring to the time we almost had sex.

  “I thought you’d be into it. I apologize!”

  Aunt Maureen stepped out onto the stoop. I was afraid she’d talk to Howard and he’d mention he’d seen me in the window. I didn’t want to show my face, so I was pressed against the wall, peeking out with my peripheral vision. I couldn’t really see what was going on. But I heard Aunt Mo scream, “Get away from me,” and then the car door closed and the car squealed away.

  I peeked out. Howard was still there, staring up at my window. This was ridiculous. I had no doubt that if Howard ever won my heart, he would immediately feel trapped and break same heart. I saw hints of this our first four dates, and enough other stuff to make me realize he and I were not compatible in the long term.

  Stuff like his next little soliloquy.

  “You shrew! You stupid, heartless bitch! Let me in now!” he shouted. “You can run but you can’t hide. You know you want me.”

  I moved away from the window and turned up my stereo really loud—Mrs. Ramirez be damned—in order to drown him out. Then I called Pete Huculak and left a message with Bianca about Joey Pinks, watered my poison ivy, took a Valium, and went to bed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When I looked out my window the next day, Saturday morning, the guillotine was back. What the hell did this mean? If Chaos Reigns was dropping it “randomly,” how come it was back at this location? It was like lightning striking twice.

  “Not a good sign,” I said to Louise Bryant.

  I called the ANN library and research department, and asked them to do a Lexis-Nexis search on Joseph L. Pinks. They were kind of snippy with me, being overworked and underpaid, as most of us are. As a rule, I conduct my own searches, but it was Saturday, I’d had a shitty week, and I didn’t feel like going in to work just to plug a name into the computer. The cops were on the job, et cetera et cetera.

  Besides, I had a life that morning. I was supposed to meet Claire and Bianca for coffee. They’d both be coming from Jack Jackson’s ANN All-Stars brunch, where I figured they would pick up a lot of inside info on the reshuffle.

  On the way to meet Claire I bought the papers, which had lost interest in the Kanengiser murder in favor of more salacious news about the British royal family. The Joey Pinks angle wasn’t covered at all, but that may have been because the cops ID’d him after the papers went to bed.

  What I was most interested in at that point was the racing results from Belmont the previous day. Sure enough, Robin’s Troubles had won her race by a length. Wow. Too cosmic. Of course, this racetrack triumph of Robin’s Troubles could be interpreted in different ways, karmically speaking.

  I place the occasional bet at OTB. I just wander in when I’m in a serendipitous mood and put five bucks on whichever long shot sounds lucky to me. One time, it was a horse named Hudson Queen, another time a horse named Eric’s Chance. I had put five bucks to win on both those nags, who both trailed the pack in their respective races.

  But then, I never expected them to win. I place bets just because I have a tendency to invest too much faith in omens and coincidences and stuff like that, and I need a quick, cheap reality check every now and then.

  The point is, Joey Pinks bought that ticket for a reason. It sounded cosmic to him, because of what he knew or because of what he planned to do to me.

  Thanks to Robin’s Troubles, I got a lot of mileage out of my good news/bad news story when I met Claire and Bianca at Tofu or Not Tofu on Avenue A. This accomplished several tasks simultaneously, as it allowed me to tell, with humor and bravado, how close I’d come to danger for a story, gave me an anecdote, and let me laugh at the whole frightening thing.

  “So the guy has my home address on him. And he’s found dead three blocks from my building,” I said.

  “That’s like one of those ghost stories they told at camp,” Claire said, stopping to sip at her noncaffeinated herbal tea. “You know, the guy with the hook for a hand who escaped from an institution for the criminally insane and has been stalking young lovers and—”

  “And they drive off and the hook’s stuck in the car door,” Bianca finished. Hector was parked in a car across the street, keeping an eye on Bianca.

  “That’s pretty much how I felt when I heard about it, like the punch line to a horror story,” I said. “But it gets better. He had an OTB betting slip for a horse called Robin’s Troubles, and this horse is a long shot. And it wins, pays fifty to one ...”

  “Joey probably thought it was his lucky day. And look what happened to him,” Claire said.

  “Not much of a bright side for him,” I said. “The good news is, your horse finally came in, winning you a small fortune . . .”

  “The bad news is, you’re too dead to spend it. But you, you are so lucky.”

  “I dunno. I think this guy had something to tell me.”

  “Or he was coming to hurt you, Robin! The man tried to kill his mother, right?”

  “Yeah, but this connects somehow to Kanengiser. I know it does.”

  Bianca, who had been sitting quietly during this, flinched visibly when I mentioned Kanengiser.

  “Did you call security?” Bianca asked, looking into her cup.

  “Yeah. They told me I was very lucky. Pete offered me Hector as a bodyguard when he’s through looking after you.”

  “Maybe you should take him up on the offer,” Claire said.

  “Bianca, do you feel safe with Barney Fife as your bodyguard?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “See?” I said to Claire. “I could kick Hector’s ass, easy. So what could some big dumb thug do to him? I could protect him better than he could protect me. But enough about Joey Pinks. Hear anything at the All-Stars brunch?”

  “Yeah. A bunch of Jack Jackson’s stories about how he started out with a small Sunday advertising insert business . . . ,” Claire began.

  “Anything about me?”

  “About your job, you mean? No, sorry.”

  At that point Bianca’s cell phone rang and she took the call. It was Pete, telling her he was almost through at ANN and she should go back to her place and wait for him there. Her master’s voice. She turned to me so Claire couldn’t see and then mouthed the words, “Don’t tell.”

  I smiled and nodded ever so slightly, but the result of her continued paranoia was that it incited my curiosity, which didn’t need any more inciting these days, thank you very much. By now, I was wondering what deep dark thing she didn’t want Pete to know about. With Bianca it could be anything from chlamydia to a past abortion to a yeast infection.

  After making her hasty good-byes, she left.

  “Man, Pete has her trained,” I said.

  “She’s
only twenty-three, twenty-four,” Claire said. “She’ll outgrow it.”

  “I hope so. She could end up rebelling like Mistress Lina, emotional doormat one day, dominatrix the next. Anyway,” I continued, “I feel like I would have been in more danger if this Pinks guy had actually made contact with me, even if he wasn’t after me, know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” Claire said. “You think someone killed him before he could tell you something and now you’re safe because of it. How is that story coming?”

  “It’s a piece of shit, but I don’t care. Do it, get it over with, move on.”

  “So, the less you know about this murder, the less danger you’re in,” Claire said.

  I didn’t like the way that sounded.

  “You think I’m trying not to find out what happened?”

  “Don’t get so defensive. I didn’t say that. Whatever. You’re very lucky anyway,” Claire said.

  Yeah, I thought positively, I was lucky the guy was killed. That was a bright side. But then I thought of what the IRA had said in a communique to Margaret Thatcher after she escaped unharmed from a bomb blast in her hotel in Brighton.

  “You were lucky,” the IRA said. “We were unlucky. But remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.”

  “It’s not just fear or whatever. There are so many leads away from the S&M angle, but Jerry insists on doing that angle. He has a ‘hunch’ . . .”

  “And he has exclusive videotape.”

  “And several publicity-hungry dominatrices,” I said. “But, Claire, what if he’s right and I’m wrong? Maybe I’m the one who can’t see the truth ...”

  “Without knowing all the particulars, between you and Jerry, I’d bet you’re right ninety-nine percent of the time.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow I go ‘in and edit a story, most of which will be devoted to spurious S&M demonstrations, and I have no idea who killed Kanengiser or why, and now I have a whole new corpse thrown into the works.”

  “Aw, sometimes I miss getting down and dirty in Special Reports,” Claire said nostalgically.

  Claire had changed the subject slightly. These murders loomed rather larger in my eyes than in hers. Hard to get people like Claire, who’d been to Rwanda, and Mike, who’d been to every major war zone in the last five years, worked up over a couple of dead guys in Manhattan.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It must be a drag, interviewing those pesky ambassadors and national leaders all the time.”

  “No, really. Special Reports was kind of fun in its way, because we didn’t have to take what we did so seriously. We got a lot of laughs out of that sperm-bank story. And when we did the AOA on Satan? A classic.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “But you got out. It’s easy to look back on it and laugh, now that you don’t have to do it anymore.”

  “You know, a friend of Jess’s is looking for a speechwriter. It just occurred to me that—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’d be a great gig, a new city . . .”

  “You think I should change careers? Have you heard something? I’m on my way out, aren’t I? If you’ve heard something, Claire, you have to tell me. Why did—”

  “God, Robin. Calm down. You mentioned earlier that you were thinking of changing careers and you were just bitching about how awful Special Reports was. ... I remembered Senator Kiedis was looking for a speechwriter. The point is, there is life beyond television news, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Despite Claire’s impassioned insistence that she knew nothing about my fate, I was not reassured. I felt that people were sending me veiled messages to prepare me for the blow, either because they were too polite to give it to me straight, or because they worried about my reaction if the news came at me full force.

  “By the way, how was your date with Fennell?” Claire asked.

  “Sheer hell. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Wasn’t he at the ANN All-Stars brunch this morning?”

  “No, he didn’t show.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He’s a pig, an asshole, a boozer. He fell off the wagon last night. He criticized everything. He forced a kiss on me . . .”

  “God, Robin. Why do you date these guys? There are lots of great guys out there.”

  Yeah, and Claire had dated all of them already. Claire was a serial monogamist. I think that’s the popular term for someone who dates a lot of guys, but always one at a time. Mind you, she’d been with her current boyfriend, Jess, one of the few freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives, for a record seven months, so despite her checkered romantic record she felt qualified to give me advice.

  “Why do you bother with people at ANN? You have to start dating outside the family,” she said.

  “When I started in television, Bob McGravy told me that it was going to turn my life upside-down and I’d never have regular hours. If I wanted a social life, he said, I had two choices: date within the company or date the short-order cook who works the night shift at International House of Pancakes. Besides, I did date outside ANN ... I dated, and married, Burke Avery.”

  “Well, that’s still within the news business, just a different network.”

  “And I dated this comic, Howard Gollis, and this guy in Seattle . . .”

  “And you dated Eric Slansky, and you dated Reb Ryan ...”

  “You promised not to mention Reb Ryan. And in my defense, I didn’t know about the Haiti incident when I dated him. You know, I’m not the only one overly impressed with Reb’s awards and honors,” I said testily. “Bianca dated him, and so did Susan Brave. Who knows who else succumbed to his overblown reputation.”

  “Okay, okay. Get a sense of humor,” Claire said.

  Claire was straining to be sympathetic. It was hard for her, since everything was coming up roses, more or less, in her ‘life.

  “Come on,” Claire said. “Let’s go shopping, look at men, and talk about me for a while.”

  It was a beautiful day, clear, brisk but not too cold. There were a lot of people out on Avenue A, which is a kind of bohemian-punk-anarchist-criminal main street. St. Mark’s Place used to have that honor, but it became a bit too commercial. All manner of humanity drifted past us on the cracked sidewalk, old people, young people, white, Hispanic, black, Asian, people with green hair and pierced eyebrows and lips. Even the street people in mud-colored clothes who sold trinkets and old magazines on the sidewalk seemed benign.

  It was good to be out.

  “I love New York,” Claire said. “I’m going to miss living here. . . . You’d be surprised how many people outside New York hear me say that and look at me like I’m crazy.”

  “My Aunt Maureen thinks it is the most wicked place on earth.”

  “What does she think about this neighborhood?”

  “I don’t know. I’m avoiding her. But I can imagine what she thinks. She’d look around this neighborhood and see only the disorder and the decay, the squats, the homeless.”

  I know how New York looks to people like Aunt Maureen, but I think it’s the greatest city in the world. Not the center of the universe, but a microcosm of it. I love my neighborhood, the mix of people, the guerrilla art and the weird folk art, the way kids string old sneakers up in trees in the spring. I don’t know why they do it, and I never saw them doing it, but come spring and the trees are full of old shoes. On Ninth Street, the squatters adorn their buildings with odd but beautiful things, like upside-down mannequin legs painted in bright colors that form a fence around the roof of one building. I even love the vacant lots full of glinting colored glass and rusted automobile carcasses, and the peeling layers of posters on the walls of abandoned buildings, the homeless guys who sleep in Tompkins Square Park during the day because the city closed the park at night after the squatters’ riots of 1988. I don’t know why I love it all. It just moves me in ways I can’t explain, that’s all.

  “What’s this?” Clai
re asked, stopping to look at a graffitied wall, covered with symbol slang—little minimalist drawings almost impenetrable to grown-ups. This, and clothes with real bullet holes in them (factory-shot and shipped to the stores in this condition) were the two latest trends among our local youth.

  “I love this wall,” I said. Every week someone added to the hieroglyphs. I sensed a story was building on the wall and found it very frustrating not to be able to decipher it. I wondered if there was some inner-city Rosetta stone out there that would crack the code. I’d asked a couple of neighborhood kids, who had snickered and told me nothing. It was then I had realized I was part of the “older generation.”

  Even though I didn’t understand what the wall said, it moved me, maybe because the only symbol I recognized was a heart.

  “It’s so odd,” Claire said. “And strangely beautiful.” While we were standing at the wall, both charmed and puzzled, the mysterious and insanely handsome man walked by in the opposite direction. It sounds weird, but I felt him before I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I saw him see me looking at him, and I closed my eyes until he passed.

  Even that moment of peripheral eye contact gave me a powerful charge, and when he was gone its absence made me feel suddenly exhausted, sleepy. This was ridiculous. Was this the so-called thunderbolt? Or a dangerous attraction?

  Claire had been talking to me about the devolution of language, but I stopped hearing her. This guy had an effect on me. When he was around, all I saw was him, and all the noise around me turned to white noise.

  “Wow,” said Claire. “Who was that?”

  “Huh? Oh. The guy who moved in upstairs.”

  “Whoa. You had excellent eye contact. Who is he?”

  “Wim Young. He’s an actor or artist or something like that. That’s all I know. I don’t know. He keeps to himself. But I keep running into him . . .”

  “Haven’t you talked to him?”

  “No, I ...”

  “Honey, what is wrong with him? There’s a guy for you.”

  “He makes me nervous. . . . He’s ... I don’t know. I’m not ready for him. He plays the guitar a lot.”

  “So what? This could be true love.”