Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

“Miss Hudson,” Jack said, smiling. “You still work here?”

  Was he kidding? It was hard to tell with Jack. Even given the fact Jackson never watched the crap we put on the air, I figured he’d know I still worked there. This was a bad sign.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  This was only the fourth time the Great Man had spoken to me. The first time was when I was a young newswriter and still smoked, and he wandered into the newsroom after midnight and caught me smoking at my typewriter.

  “Did they change the rules about smoking in the newsroom?” he asked.

  “No sir,” I said.

  “Then don’t smoke,” he said, and strode away.

  Once, he saw me in the hallway and said, “Hello, sweetheart.” Yet another time, he complimented me on my dress at a company shindig, just before I dropped a plate of lasagna down the front of it. What a fine impression I’d been making.

  “Robin is the reporter working on the Kanengiser story,” Jerry said.

  “Jerry and I have been talking about some interesting changes in your unit,” Jack said, slapping his right arm around Jerry’s shoulder paternally. For some reason, he seemed to have genuine affection for Jerry,

  “Oh yes?” I said.

  “The research shows viewers are getting turned off by so much sex and sensationalism, that they want a little more ‘good news,’” Jackson said. “Jerry’s completely in sync with me on this one. Has some ideas about blind tap dancers, a free clinic on Twenty-fourth Street, some welfare mothers who .. . What did they do?”

  “They formed a baby-sitting cooperative with the help of a social worker so they could all go back to school,” Jerry said, avoiding my eyes.

  Actually, there was more to it than that. They shared a group house, shared all the chores, pooled their food aid, and bought healthy foods in bulk. Three of the six women in the experiment were off welfare, and two others were just about to get their GEDs. I know, because I wrote up the story proposal.

  “Maybe you can come up with a few ideas too, Robin,” Jerry said. Our eyes locked. He was challenging me to say something.

  Oh, what I wouldn’t have given just then for an eighteen-pound turtle named Henri.

  Around five p.m., when I was reeling from my topsy-turvy day, Mike wandered in, holding a videotape.

  Okay, I thought. I’ll just act like nothing happened Sunday morning, make a joke about it if he brings it up. It isn’t that I didn’t like the guy, you understand. It’s just I didn’t want him to assume I expected more from him and for him to then get defensive about it. My third date with Howard Gollis, for example, he abruptly gave me a completely unsolicited speech about what a freedom-loving guy he was and how he wasn’t ready to see anyone exclusively. Well, I hadn’t asked him to. And that had been before our ill-fated attempt at sex.

  “Hello, Robin,” Mike said. “That was fun the other night, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled in a very nice way.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He said no more about it.

  “Sorry I didn’t get this to you sooner, but I had to stop off at security.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, someone took a shot at me last night. Would have got me, but I hit the sidewalk in time to duck the shot. Sixth sense, you know, from all the wars.”

  “That’s odd. Do they think it’s the sniper?”

  “Yeah. Unlike Reb, I recovered the bullet, so once they finish the ballistics testing, they’ll know for sure.”

  “Did you see the guy?”

  “Fleetingly. A flash of green, and then all I saw was the gray of the sidewalk.”

  “I thought he only shot at people who were on the air. Hmm. Maybe it is someone with a grudge against the company and maybe it is connected . . . but then . .. How would Anya’s figure into it? See, Mike. This is what I mean. There are too many guns around, and too many of the wrong people have them.”

  “I’m glad I have one. I only wish I’d got a shot off at the guy who shot at me. Let’s look at the tape,” he said, clicking the remote control and starting the video.

  “I saw the tape yesterday and you’re right. Charles was twitchy. But I don’t think it’s—”

  “I took shots of two different shoots, then did a split image of the two times we shot ‘Charles.’ “

  I looked at the monitor. The second Charles was a little longer in the torso and a bit wider around the waist than the first Charles, but not so much that you would notice without seeing them side by side.

  “See the front right paw . . . hand, on the first Charles,” Mike said, freezing the frame and zooming in.

  There was a thick red scar on his very white hand, one conspicuously absent from the second Charles. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is the connection between Kanengiser and Anya’s.”

  “How so?”

  “Because that first Charles, I bet his real name is Joey Pinks. That’s the guy the cops found, dead, with my address on him and that OTB slip. Joey Pinks had a scar on his hand like that.”

  “Holy mother,” Mike said.

  “Now it’s a story,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “We should go back and talk to Anya again. Confront her with this tape. Get it on camera.”

  “You’re right.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “I’ll lie,” I said. “I’ll say the video is fucked and we need to shoot her one more time, and this time, we’ll give her more time.”

  “Okay,” Mike said. “Beep me when it’s set.”

  Anya was brusque with me on the phone, and reluctant to “trust” us to do a proper job if we came back.

  “How do I know you won’t be dragging loudmouthed do-gooders around with you?” she asked.

  It took a lot of bullshitting to get her to agree, but finally, she did, which made me wonder: If she was the killer, would she have agreed at all? Of course, in her world, things were out of kilter. Maybe this was part of her cover. How the hell did I know?

  “Seven p.m.,” she said.

  That was a bad time. It meant Mike and Jim would be on overtime, and I couldn’t authorize overtime, only Jerry could. But I didn’t know where Jerry was and I had no choice.

  “Seven p.m.,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” Tamayo said to me, obviously amused by my situation.

  “What am I going to do? I finally get a break in this stupid story, which, incidentally, I didn’t even want to do, and Jerry says it’s over. Then he takes credit for the stories I re-searched on the blind tap-dancing troupe and the welfare mothers . . .”

  I stopped myself. One of the best pieces of advice I know comes, funnily enough, from Brenda Starr, the glamorous redheaded woman reporter from the comic strip. I once cut out a panel in which Brenda is leaving a movie theater weeping after some painful thing in her personal life, and she says, “Reporters don’t have time to dawdle over their own grief. Our lives are devoted to telling the stories of other people’s misfortune.”

  Fuck it, I thought. I beeped Mike. When he called back, I told him I couldn’t reach Jerry so we couldn’t go ambush Anya.

  “Let’s do it anyway,” Mike said.

  “I can’t authorize the overtime, Mike.”

  “Just a second.” When he came back on, he said, “Jim and I, we’ll do it off the clock.”

  These are words you never hear from New York crews. But then, Mike was a maverick, and Jim, well, Jim idolized Mike.

  “God bless you and all your ancestors, Mike. One other thing.”

  “Yes, my queen,” Mike said.

  “Bring your gun.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The club was closed Sundays and Mondays and nobody answered our knocks and hollers at the front, so we went around to the back. The door was open.

  “She’s expecting us,” I said, leading the way up the back staircase, which was narrow and painted blood red. By the time we got to the fourth floor, I was pan
ting. Anya’s office door was open, but the lights were out. I knocked. There was no answer.

  “This is weird,” Jim whispered. Mike had his trigger-hand in his pocket, holding his gun.

  Suddenly, my beeper went off. We all jumped and then a shot rang out. Mike had shot a hole in the pocket of his jacket

  “Jesus, calm down, Mike,” I said.

  “Sssh,” he said.

  The hamburger shift was just starting up at the meat processing plant next door and, except for the low, distant grumbling of their machines, it was very quiet. You’d think, if there was someone else present, they would have reacted to the gunshot.

  Jim and Mike looked at me, questioning. I shrugged, and pushed the door open.

  “Anya,” I said. She was sitting in shadow at her desk.

  She didn’t answer. I reached in and turned on the light.

  Anya was looking straight ahead.

  She was handcuffed to her chair.

  Her chest was covered with blood.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What is it?” Mike said, pushing past me into the room.

  “I think . . . she’s dead.”

  “Sssh,” Mike said. “Hear that?”

  Jim and I strained our ears. We heard nothing, but Mike really did have a sixth sense, the senses of a wild animal, because a moment later we heard footsteps coming up the back staircase.

  “Jim, put the camera on the desk and start rolling,” Mike said. “Then get behind the desk. You too, Robin.”

  I crouched behind the desk and pulled out my hot glue gun to cover Mike. The footsteps got closer. Mike was behind the door, holding his gun. The footsteps came to the doorway and stopped.

  “Anya?” said a woman’s voice.

  “I have a gun on you. Come in with your hands in the air,” Mike said.

  A moment later he said, “She’s unarmed.”

  Jim and I came out from behind the desk.

  It was Carlotta, her lieutenant, and she’d just seen Anya dead at her desk.

  “What did you do?” she said.

  “We didn’t kill her,” I said. I could imagine what she thought, seeing Mike with his gun and Anya dead in the chair, as if she’d just stumbled upon a mad news crew. “She was dead when we got here.”

  Carlotta sighed deeply and sat down. “It has to do with Joey, doesn’t it?” she said.

  Jim called the cops and I got Carlotta a seltzer from the mini-bar in Anya’s office.

  “Should we close her eyes?” Mike asked. Anya was still sitting in her chair staring ahead.

  “I don’t think we should touch her. Wait for the cops,” I said. I turned to Carlotta. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes yes,” she said, shortly.

  “Why did you come by just now? The club is closed tonight, isn’t it?”

  “She wanted me here for your interview. Because Charles wasn’t available today…”

  “The second Charles.”

  “Yes.”

  “The first Charles, that was Joey Pinks,” I said.

  “Yes,” Carlotta said.

  “He’s dead, you know.”

  “He is?”

  “Anya didn’t know that?”

  “No. she was looking for him. She thought he’d contacted you.”

  “I think he was trying to tell me something when he was killed. So he left her?”

  “Yes, shortly after you interviewed them the first time.”

  “Why didn’t she tell us?”

  “She didn’t want to,” she said.

  “Why? What was she hiding?”

  Carlotta looked up. “She was hiding Joey. He skipped out on his parole in California… he’d been in jail for forgery … she didn’t want to give him away to the police and she didn’t want him giving himself away by getting involved in this murder investigation. So he ran away. Anya hoped he’d come back soon.”

  “He tried to kill his mother. That’s what he did time for. The forgery thing too, but …”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Anya didn’t know that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why did she harbor a fugitive? Why did she risk herself for Joey Pinks?”

  “She loved him,” she said, surprised, as though it were self-evident. “She loved taking care of him. He was a sweetheart, a real sweetheart, at least, that’s the Joey we knew. He tried to kill his mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “What was the connection to Kanengiser?”

  “I’m not completely sure, but I think it may have had something to do with Joey’s brother, or half-brother, Vern,” Carlotte said. “Joey came out here looking for Vern and couldn’t find him at first. He was hanging around the S&M clubs looking for him, and that’s when he met Anya.”

  “Did he find Vern?”

  “Yeah. Anya was afraid Joey had done some work for him, forgery, before Joey skipped out on parole in California… Anya had met him. Vern.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know what he looks like?”

  “No.”

  “What do you know about Vern? What did Anya say about him.”

  “Well, he’d moved here, to New York, a few months ago, and Joey came here about a month ago. Hadn’t seen his brother in some time, I gathered.”

  “Do you know Vern’s last name? If he was a half-brother, he might not have the same last name.”

  “Half-brother or stepbrother. I don’t know his last name. I’m trying to remember if Anya said anything else about him. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Who is the second Charles?”

  “Oh, that’s someone else’s slave. He just filled in when you were filming. He’s actually a veterinarian from Staten Island.”

  “Anya borrowed a slave. Wow. Did Anya mention a little black book?”

  “No.” She gazed sadly up at me, and suddenly this bitch-in-training looked scared and vulnerable. “I’m going to get into trouble, as an accessory after the fact or something like that, aren’t I?”

  There was a stampede of footsteps coming up the stairs. The cops had arrived, Bigger and Ferber and a bunch of uniforms.

  “Trouble just follows you around,” Detective Richard Bigger said to me.

  “I follow it around.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Ferber said, pulling me away from my crew. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

  We ducked into one of the rec rooms.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  I looked around. There was one leather chair, a hard bench, and a spanking horse in the room.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know who or what has touched this furniture.”

  Ferber smiled. “We beeped you. Did you hear us?”

  “You’re the one who beeped me! Why?”

  “We got the ballistics report back on some of these shootings. The bullets removed from the doctor, Fennell Corker’s knee, and Joey Pinks, they match, as does the bullet”—he checked his notes—”turned in by Kerwin Shutz. We’ve got another bullet your security office sent over today that looks like it might match too.”

  Mike’s bullet.

  “So there’s a link between the ANN sniper, Kanengiser, and Pinks. Looks like this woman is the third murder victim,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the link between all these people?”

  “Robin, the link we find is you,” he said.

  At first, I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s ludicrous . . .”

  “Reb Ryan was shot at the night after he went out with you. Fennell Corker was shot at the night he went out with you. Dillon Flinder was seen leaving a bar, walking arm in arm with you, the night he was shot at. Dr. Kanengiser was killed the night he was supposed to examine you.” He referred to his notes.
“Your cameraman Mike was shot at after being out with you.”

  “I never went out with Kerwin.”

  “That’s funny. He says you did go out.”

  “Well, we didn’t. Dillon and I hang out a lot, but we don’t date. So sure, you can make a connection between anything if you try hard enough . . . ,” I said. “They probably all had take-out from Tycoon Donut. Or something else. Like all these men, except Joey Pinks, worked in the JBS building. Maybe it’s someone with a grudge against Jack Jackson. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of disgruntled and/or demoted employees or former employees running around.”

  “Yeah, we thought of that. Still, it seems a big coincidence, in light of your cameraman being shot at . . .”

  “But I didn’t date Dr. Kanengiser. The others in the JBS building were shot at; he was killed.”

  “Er, you didn’t date Dr. Kanengiser, but since he was a gynecologist, the killer may have assumed he saw you . . . touched ...”

  “We never got that far. Jerry beeped me and the examination ended . . . prematurely.”

  “But the killer wouldn’t know that.”

  I thought about this. Reb had been shot at but wasn’t hurt. Like a warning shot. Fennell had kissed me, and he had got it in the knee. Dillon . . . Kanengiser . . . Mike . . . well, it made some sense. And Joey Pinks had wanted to tell me something about it. He could have gone to Backstreet Affair and received money for his knowledge, but he had come to find me ... because I was involved? He had died because he knew who the killer was, maybe his own brother. The family that slays together . . . Anya had known who the killer was too, and now she was dead.

  “You know, nobody knew I went out with Reb,” I said. “Not that I know of. Well, a couple of close friends . . .”

  “You might have been followed and the sniper saw you with Reb.”

  “Possible but doubtful.”

  The date had been very covert, conducted like a CIA operation.

  “Did you have it written down somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I did. In my old Filofax calendar. It was in my old purse, which was stolen at ANN about a month ago.”

  “That could be the diary you were talking about.”

  That would mean it had been no accident my bag was stolen.

  “Who else was in your Filofax?”