What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  “When the revolution comes, and they drag me off as an establishment toady, I hope you’ll come to my defense,” he said.

  “When the revolution comes, nobody will drag anybody off. Everyone will be free,” she said, and she said good-bye and went to rejoin a table of her skank friends.

  “She’s young and Utopian,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m late. Greg had to leave right after the show, had a hot date, and so I had to look after the show postmortem with the crew.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Who is Greg dating these days?”

  “I make it my business not to know what Greg does and who he does it to,” Eric said.

  I nodded. “Eric, do you think Griff might have been investigating women who worked for Greg Browner?”

  “Do you?”

  “I think he was hired to get the goods on Greg through us, women who worked for him,” I said.

  “Robin, I don’t want to talk about blackmail and murder tonight. You make me think you’re kissing up to me to get information.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not kissing up to you for information. Do you think you’re after me because I’m … a challenge of some kind? That conquest thing?”

  “Are you just using me to get even with Burke?”

  We stared at each other and he said, “You know, there have been these small, random events that … I can’t explain this. On December thirty-first, I looked out my window and saw a robin on my fire escape, at least a month early. At the Marfeles, I heard the song ‘Rockin’ Robin’ on the elevator Muzak. Then I ran into you at the party, a Robin I’ve always been extremely curious about. It seems like a … meaningful series of coincidences, if you know what I mean.”

  This was the perfect thing for him to say to me as I have always had a fearful respect for coincidences and omens. Was he sincere, or was I just being played by a Master Playboy, who seemed to know me too well?

  “And when I looked in your eyes as we were dancing, I thought, ‘Yeah, of course. Robin.’”

  Oh, this is the final straw, the next most perfect thing to say to me at this point. I hated that he could do that.

  “You wanna go back to my place?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, before he’d even finished the question.

  We walked to East Houston to get a cab, stopping every few yards to soul kiss. How do I describe what it did to me, kissing this guy on a dark street in a dangerous neighborhood? We got a cab, and as soon as it squealed away from the curb we started making out in the back seat. I felt like I was seventeen and about to lose my virginity. When his hand came up under my blouse, I thought I was going to die.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHEN WE GOT INSIDE HIS apartment, he lifted me up and carried me into his bedroom, almost gracefully, stopping only once to hitch my weight up to a more comfortable holding position. I got the feeling he’d done this before.

  It’s a corny thing, a cliché, but it sure is romantic, and it sure takes care of that awkward transition between rooms when you’re about to fornicate with someone for the first time.

  There were condoms by the side of the bed, thoughtfully placed, noticeable but unobtrusive, so I didn’t have to ask him any awkward questions. That issue settled, we tore each other’s clothes off and were pagan and wicked, several times. Okay, there were a couple of awkward moments, a couple of miscues, but for the most part, the sex was great. After months of celibacy, when my intimate encounters generally involved double-A batteries and Henry Miller, it was refreshing to have good sex with a real man.

  After the second round, we ordered in cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate shakes. Between sweaty gropes, we ate and talked. Eric told me his theory of dysfunctional families, which he claimed improved the species by ensuring migration so that different tribes met, mingled, and mixed genetic material. Dysfunctional families were nature’s way to prevent inbreeding, he said, because if everyone liked their family, they’d never leave their valleys or islands and they’d just inbreed to extinction—or idiocy.

  It made a certain sense.

  I lay there, naked, freshly loved, fed, feeling like maybe, just this once, Fortune had smiled on me, that maybe there was such a thing as Mr. Right and one didn’t have to settle for Mr. Close Enough.

  I could let myself fall in love with you, I thought, as he told me his theory about the future of television, which was that we’d be washed up in a few years because virtual reality was the next thing, the wave. People would live their own sitcoms, instead of just watching them. It’d be like putting yourself in the box instead of sitting outside it because you’d be able to interact with other characters in a 3-D holographic environment with sensory stimuli so you could touch, taste, and feel the imaginary world. Television would become quaint and we’d end up like McGravy, telling stories of the good old days when television was king, when kids had to use their imagination to enjoy a show in two dimensions.

  I smiled and rolled onto my stomach to read the titles of the books on the shelf built into his bookcase, a couple of sports bios and several yearbooks. Over his protests, I made him show me his yearbook pictures. Even back in high school he was good-looking, although awfully clean-cut. In senior year Eric Slansky, student council president, lettered in golf and was a Junior Achiever.

  “Prediction: Ambitious Eric goes all the way to the White House, if wine, women, and rock and roll don’t get him first,” read the editorial note below his picture.

  “Golf?” I said. “If I looked at this picture without knowing you, I would have guessed you’d grow up to be the CEO of Omnipotent Industries or something. What were your favorite subjects?”

  “Math and history. I was a nerd back then.”

  “What happened? Wine? Women? Rock and roll?”

  “Life,” he said with mock gusto. “What were you like in high school?”

  “Well, I was on the school paper, the Super Snooper, and I was a cheerleader for a year and a half,” I admitted. “Not a very peppy one. I was kind of the squad black sheep. I quit in junior year.”

  “Why?”

  “I read The Female Eunuch,” I said.

  It was a lie. Actually, my cheerleading career was brought to a sliding halt before a stadium full of my high school peers by a mud slick and an overly ambitious kick. I’d set myself up as the best and then humiliated myself. I was beginning to sense a motif.

  “High kicks, huh?” he said. “Splits?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do a cheer for me,” he said.

  “Make me,” I challenged and we had sex again in a completely different position.

  Afterwards, he insisted on going out to get my favorite flavor of ice cream. This is too good to be true, I thought, as I luxuriated, naked, between his blue cotton sheets. A guy who fucks like that and then goes out on a winter night to get you ice cream afterwards. Yep, if the devil wanted my soul, this is the guy he’d send to fetch it.

  Eric was gone a long time. I got bored and turned on the news. A woman reporter was live on the scene of a Queens grave robbing, which led the show, and she tossed to another live story, this one with ace reporter Burke Avery outside Spencer Roo’s office building.

  “Thanks, Carmela. Buster Corbus has not one, but three alibis for the Marfeles murder,” he said.

  Three alibis, and every one of them a winner—a woman “in the adult entertainment field,” dressed in black lingerie and blue jeans, a timid deli clerk, and a parish priest. Buster Corbus and Spencer Roo were taking no chances. The woman and the deli clerk might not have been credible witnesses, but it was going to be hard to shake the testimony of a man of the cloth, even in this day and age, when we know ministers are flawed men like other flawed men.

  Normally, three such witnesses in a Spencer Roo case wouldn’t be enough to convince me, but the minister really did look saintlike, and the response from the D.A.’s office was somewhat subdued, like they weren’t completely sure of their case.

  I was hyperaware suddenly that th
e killer was probably still at large. To quiet the hum of fear inside me, I made myself a drink and then wandered naked around Eric’s apartment, looking for clues to his real self. He had very old-fashioned masculine decor, a lot of deep blues and blue tartans, wooden decoy ducks and Remington prints. In a corner, a bicycle wheel was propped up next to a tennis racket missing a string. There were balled-up socks scattered about and enough general disorder to make me feel comfortable.

  On the coffee table by the sofa, a P. G. Wodehouse book (The Inimitable Jeeves) was open, text down. I just love a man who reads, especially a man who reads P. G. The sofa still held the impression of his body, and I sat down there and imagined him stretched out, reading Wodehouse. It was a very pleasant image.

  When I went back to bed, I picked up his college yearbook, from his junior year, trying to find the missing link between the upright nerd of high school and the loose, confident supervising producer. Between high school and college, his physical image changed dramatically. The yearbook called him “Tri Kap’s Prez and Partymeister.” He was kind of shaggy looking, and he appeared to be stoned. He was smiling widely.

  I turned to the section on frats, hoping to see more pictures of him. There was only one, and at first I didn’t recognize him. He and three of his “brothers” were in drag for a campy, all-male production of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women done for charity. Eric made, well, not a pretty woman, but a handsome one certainly.

  It was that blond wig that bothered me.

  A blond wig. Like a blond transvestite, I thought. Sure, Mrs. Ramirez was always imagining transvestites and call girls coming to my apartment, but maybe she wasn’t far off the mark that last time.

  Holy shit! Holy Mr. Wrong! I thought as I quickly dressed and got the hell out of there. What a sucker! It all made sense now. Griff would have investigated Eric too, because he worked for Browner and presumably had a lot of dirt on his boss. Well, this answered another question I had: why Eric was so ardently pursuing me. It was plain: He was dating me to find out what I knew, to mislead me. God, maybe to kill me. Of course, I had no proof beyond an old photo in a college yearbook but I had something else—a strong hunch.

  All that talk of Eric’s about family. “What a crock,” I said aloud. After Burke, he probably thought that was the right button to push with me, the solid family-man button.

  Thank God I wanted Ben & Jerry’s Light Reverse Chocolate Chunk, I thought, my favorite flavor, but not an easy one to find. It gave me time to escape. I ran out to the street and got a cab and I didn’t relax until I was back in my apartment, my heavy furniture pushed in front of all the doors and windows.

  That night, I slept very badly at first. Every time a car drove down my dark street, the shadows on my wall changed and grew more sinister, until I had to turn my bedside lamp on. The pipes clanked, the iron fire escape outside my bedroom window creaked, and I was sure I heard a woman screaming in the dark distance.

  I rolled over and tried to reassure myself, but then, from the living room, I heard a small but very alarming noise: Louise Bryant hissing softly at something.

  Slowly and quietly, I picked up my special umbrella and my bottle of cayenne cologne. My umbrella was the telescopic kind that shoots out and opens up with the touch of a button. Strategically aimed, it could disable an attacker quite nicely, at the same time providing a kind of shield. I kept it by the side of my bed.

  Holding my umbrella carefully, I crept towards the bedroom doorway, expecting a psychopathic killer to jump in front of me at any moment. Then, my heart pounding and every nerve in my body on red alert, I inched to the very edge of the wall and heard Louise Bryant hiss again.

  At that, I stopped. In my wide-eyed rigor mortis I could not move my feet. But something inside me took over—my bad temper, I guess. With a quick motion I reached around the corner and flicked on the overhead light, hurling myself into the living room.

  “Ha!” I shouted, brandishing my weapons, umbrella in one hand, perfume in the other. Go ahead. Make my day.

  But there was nobody there. Just my cat holding a cockroach firmly under a front paw and looking up at me, contempt mixed with embarrassment in her cold amber eyes. I felt foolish but nevertheless made myself useful, spearing the cockroach with my umbrella and depositing it in the toilet.

  By now I was wide awake and pumped up on adrenaline, so I took a sleeping pill, watered my poison ivy, and took down my scrapbooks and started pasting Griff stories into them with Elmer’s glue while I waited for the pill to take effect.

  I guess it sounds pretty weird, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve kept scrapbooks of murders. I opened one to an old story about Nannie Doss, the Giggling Grandma, who killed four of her five husbands. Why? She told police she was looking for the perfect husband, presumably by process of elimination. Four down, a billion to go.

  In all, I had twenty-four scrapbooks, each with headings like “Mass Murders,” “Random Murders,” “Family Murders.” Some of these had several volumes, and some, like the one I called “Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back,” consisted of just one scrapbook. The most famous example of the last would be the Papin sisters, lesbian lovers and housemaids who in the 1930s killed their employer and her daughter in a bloody rage of mutilation after a short-circuiting iron blew a fuse one too many times. Jean Genet immortalized them in The Maids.

  Another slim but spicy volume was “Least Likely Killers.” For example, that upright Midwest preacher who had an affair with a parishioner and then killed her husband so he could be with her, all the while preaching Christian goodness to his unwitting and devoted flock. The upstanding citizen, pillar of the community turned killer, proving that the primal thump of our ancestral jungle beats in the heart of all of us. Thousands of years of religion, hundreds of years of universal public education and good hygiene, and we still cannot contain that native wildness, that killer instinct we share with other members of the animal kingdom.

  You can dress us up, but you can’t take us anywhere.

  A whole scrapbook was devoted just to the Sesquin murders in my hometown and the big-headed blond boy who killed them. I even had a clipping of the story that first broke my tale about the dark-haired boy and the fatal kiss. That made me feel bad, because it reminded me of all the stuff I knew I hadn’t told the police in the Griff case. I was probably the reason they hadn’t caught the killer.

  In the Sesquin case, it took the police three weeks to catch the killer, the big-headed blond boy, after hunting unsuccessfully for the dark-haired boy. And they only caught the guy when they did because his own mother turned him in. His own mother, imagine that. On the morning after the murder, she told police, she found blood on his work boots and trousers. Despite the utter evil and horror of the murders, she waited three weeks to turn him in and before she did, she whipped him with a tree branch until he was black and blue. He told police he was driving down the road after shooting squirrels when the voice of God told him to go into the house and kill all those people.

  This is the thing. If I hadn’t told that lie about the dark-haired boy, the police and the media might have thought to look at the strange, big-headed blond boy down the road. They might have been able to nab the boy on their own and spare that old widow woman three weeks of soul-wrenching agony before having to betray her own son. Things might have been different.

  But once the lie was out, there was no stopping it. Others, older others I’d been taught to respect, took up the lie as though they’d seen it with their own eyes. Other, similar incidents of passion gone awry for Frances Sesquin were cited to support the lie. The mythical dark-haired boy was sighted all over town.

  I had only told a couple of people the truth about that murder. When I told Burke, his response was: “She lived with this kid for seventeen years in the woods, and she didn’t know he was crazy before he killed all those people? It sounds like she contributed.”

  He had a point, but I still felt rotten about it all. I mean, what if, while the police were
on their wild goose chase, the voice of “God” had told him to go into some other house and shoot up some other family?

  I closed the Sesquin scrapbook and picked up “Straw.” Reading my scrapbooks calms me down. I don’t know why. Maybe because it makes murder so one-dimensional and abstract, all written up in black-and-white text that way it doesn’t seem so scary. Maybe because almost all of the murders in my books were solved.

  Halfway into the Straw scrapbook I started to feel sleepy and a few minutes later I was test-pattern. Lulled, I slept deeply in my frayed blue armchair I’ve been dragging around since college. I dreamt Eric and I were making love in a series of blue rooms—it was kind of like a dream, kind of like a nightmare—and I awoke, cold and shivering, early in the morning to my clock radio, cranked up full to vex Mrs. Ramirez, and the news that Greg Browner was dead at fifty-five.

  Sometime between the time Greg left ANN the night before and the time his cook arrived in the morning to poach his egg, someone put two bullets into his head. Into his face, to be precise, which I thought, given Greg’s vanity, was particularly vindictive.

  Then the news report continued, saying that there were signs of genital mutilation, and I redefined vindictive.

  This was a desperate killer.

  I was late getting to work—couldn’t find my keys, either set, or my Epilady. Eventually I found both sets of keys, but I never did find the Epilady.

  When I got to ANN, the cops were in my office, chatting up Claire. She was on my desk, her legs crossed, talking to four cops—Bigger, Tewfik, and two uniforms I didn’t know. It looked like a Marilyn Monroe production number. I expected her to slide off the desk into their arms, singing.

  “Robin!” she said. “Some people to see you. Isn’t it terrible about Greg? I’ll talk to you later.” And she left, taking the two uniformed guys with her.

  “Where were you last night?” Bigger asked me.

  “I had a date, then I went home. Look, I didn’t kill Greg, but I … know something about it, okay?”