Revenge of the Cootie Girls (26 page)

So I remain skeptical, because another thing I learned from this is that hindsight isn't 20/20.

Mary MacCosham and I had coffee, decided we still hated each other's guts, and haven't spoken since. The last I heard, she was in rehab back in Minnesota, trying to get her life together so she can make another attempt to get custody of her kids.

I feel sorry for Mary. What must it have been like for her, growing up with that android of a mother, never being able to live up to her mother's standards? Mary wasn't perfect, of course, and she had to feel inadequate. She knew she had secret cooties. What better way to distract attention from her cooties than to project them onto other kids?

Speaking of which … Dr. Solange Stevenson's book
The
Pippi Longstocking Complex
is zooming up the best-seller lists, despite rumors that the books are bound by Bangladeshi orphans. After reading her book, I've decided that I don't want to get in touch with my inner grown-up—she's a drag—but instead want to get in touch with my inner old woman. You know, figure out what kind of old woman I want to be. I know I don't want to be like Solange Stevenson, or Strip Joint Goldie, or Granny. Probably my inner old woman is just me, but older.

It took a while for me to get back into the New York groove. I felt kind of alienated from it, and yet I knew deep down I couldn't live anywhere else for any length of time. I mean, for someone like me, a cootie girl, where else is there?

I realize that the longest love affair I've ever had in my life is with this goddamned city and its goddamned citizens. When I first came here, I was infatuated. The Madness. I took a chance based on an illusion. But beneath that false love was the seed of a genuine love, true love. Now what I have for New York is like married love, kind of a warts (cooties)-and-all thing.

As for True Love between human beings, I'm revising my opinion upward in a cautious, noncommittal kind of way. I still have a couple of occasional boyfriends floating around out there, but I don't seem to have as much time for them anymore. And none of them quite measure up to Mike.

Of all my boyfriends, Mike is definitely my favorite. After the Halloween fiasco, he gave me the most interesting presents.

I love getting presents, and these are especially good.

One is a Waziri dagger, with a carved bone handle inlaid with real semiprecious aquamarine and lapis lazuli. It is gorgeous.

The other is much simpler, and yet much, much more sentimentally valuable. It's a nineteenth-century Lee Enfield rifle, hatefully captured from a dead British soldier and lovingly cared for through many generations by an Afghan family. Mike saved the present generation's lives, and the rifle was their present to him. Funny that he'd want me to have something so special to him, isn't it? I can't figure it out.

Though I've always hated guns, I love this one. It's not very efficient, not like, say, a Kalashnikov or an M-16. But it's fraught with human history and so classically formidable-looking that all one has to do is wave it to get attention.

Right, gotta go now. The microchip in my buttocks is beeping with a message from Shadow Traffic. There's a traffic jam at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue, right around Macy's—and nobody to direct it. Sounds like a job for a girl with a rifle.

But before I go, I want to leave you with the big lesson I learned from all this, said best by Yogi Berra in a commencement address in 1996:

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Robin Hudson Mysteries

CHAPTER ONE

It was a hot July evening in New York, the steamy post–rush hour, and in addition to the harried office workers streaming away from their offices toward subways, midtown was crawling with feminists and bees.

The feminists were arriving to set up for a corporate-sponsored conference on women's rights, ten days of symposiums, films, art shows, and rock bands, culminating with a big bash the last day.

Why the bees came here was still a mystery. The local media made a big deal out of the fact that the bees flocking to New York City were country bees seeking flowers, as opposed to our native New York City bees, who are lazy and tend to congregate around doughnut shop Dumpsters.

Why would so many tens of thousands of bees suddenly, spontaneously, decide to make a—forgive me—beeline for Manhattan? Not that New York doesn't have a great deal of greenery for enterprising bees to feast upon, tucked away in a million window boxes and rooftop gardens as well as in a couple of parks. But it takes a lot more work to find pollen sources here than it would in a rural field of clover, and the hazards of city life—pollution, taxicab windshields, and marauding youth gangs—meant there was also a great deal more risk involved for these greenhorn bees.

But as one newspaper pointed out, bees follow their queen, and evidently some queens had a taste more for the risky city than for the bucolic country life.

A couple of confused bees evidently had a taste more for me, or maybe just for the floral notes in my scent, L'Heure Bleue, which I had sprayed on a little too heavily as I was leaving my office. In addition to dodging large groups of women pulling wheeled suitcases and walking abreast, I was dodging two bees as I crossed Third Avenue, heading toward Wingate's restaurant. Once people saw the bees, they gave me a wide berth. Couldn't help thinking how handy these bees would come in during management meetings, salary negotiations, and Saturday night movie lines.

Because of the bees, and because, as usual, I was completely self-involved, I didn't notice right away that there was a man in a hat following me until I heard him say, haltingly, “Ex … cuse …”

I turned and gave him a quick glance, decided from his rolling eyes that he wasn't talking to me and tuned him out, though I put my hand in my jacket pocket and grabbed onto my pepper spray because I've been stalked before and learned the hard way that—duh—it's better to be safe than sorry. I was in a hurry. I had places to go, people to meet, a butt to kiss.

Kissing butt with grace is one of those adult skills, like telling believable lies, that are almost essential to success. There's an art to it. As the old line goes, when you can fake sincerity you've got it made, but it's not an area of expertise for me. In fact, I was pretty lousy at it and normally I'd rather hammer a railroad spike up my nose than kiss ass. But in one of those compromises grown-ups are required to make every now and then, I was on my way to meet with a flack for the anthropologist Wallace Mandervan and lay a big wet one on his rosy behind. This was especially humiliating—I wasn't going to kiss Mandervan's ass, but the ass of a snotty proxy who would then report back to the man himself.

At the end of another hard day, all I wanted to do was go home, take off my clothes, and kiss the ass of a mad Irishman I'd been neglecting lately. It was Wednesday, and Mike, the mad Irishman, was leaving the next day. I'd been all set to leave my office at the stroke of five, and then Benny Winter, Power Publicist, called and said he could meet me for dinner tonight, and tonight only, to discuss getting Mandervan for my Man of the Future series.

Just as I was about to go into Wingate's, I heard, “Miss … miss,” behind me.

That's when I really noticed the man, an older guy, maybe in his sixties, wearing a dark brown suit with a matching hat, walking erratically. Before I could get into the restaurant, the man had moved in front of me and stopped, barring my way, while the bees buzzed above me. A strange look crossed his face. He walked a few steps one way, stopped and turned around, walked a few steps the other way, and stopped again. He looked around himself, scared, as if he was trying to recognize his surroundings and couldn't. It was almost like he was drunk, but he didn't smell of liquor. Then he looked down at his feet and took a few more tentative steps away from me, still looking down, as if his feet might remember the way home and all he had to do was follow them.

If it wasn't for the feet thing, I would have thought he was just your garden-variety loony toon and abandoned him right there. Call it coincidence, whatever you like. My witchy neighbor Sally calls it my Alzheimer's-finder karma. Three times in as many years, I'd happened upon someone who had Alzheimer's and helped them find their way home. Two of them did the same thing with their feet. (The third kept smelling his hands, one after the other, as if they smelled bad. They did not. He had worked for many years in the Fulton Fish Market.)

The other times this happened, I was free and able to help the lost people, do my bit for my fellow man and feel like a big hero afterward. But I was in a hurry now—Benny Winter was a notorious stickler for punctuality—and I resented this stranger's intrusion upon my time. How I wished I could just look away, move past the lost man, and put him out of my mind. How well I know that no good deed goes unpunished, that stopping to help a disoriented stranger can cost you your life. It's a heartless city sometimes, but you have to look out for yourself. Since I'd started this new thing, Taking the High Road, one of the central questions of life—my life, at least—had been: How do you walk out the door and be a good person without getting the shit kicked out of you?

On the other hand, if I didn't help this poor slob, something terrible might happen. Even if it didn't, I'd worry later and feel guilty—and construct terrible fantasies about what had happened to him—all because I would not take the time to help in my hurry to kiss up to some jerk in order to further my career.

“Do you have a wallet?” I said, sighing, as I danced about to avoid the bees, which he was completely oblivious to.

He felt his pockets, but turned up nothing except a half package of Doublemint gum. His eyes rolled back and then rolled forward again. He took off his hat and handed it to me.

This was the second hat-wearing lost man I'd encountered in my life. The last one, Dr. Seymour Gold, a retired thoracic surgeon with Alzheimer's, had his name and address written into the inside of his hat by his wife.

Before I had a chance to look inside this man's hat, a thin trickle of blood dripped down the side of his head.

“Did you fall?” I asked, as I wiped the wound with a tissue from my pocket. The cut was about a half inch long and not very deep.

The man gurgled a bit but said nothing.

“Want me to get you to a doctor?” I asked.

“P-p-p-pa-p-per …” he stammered, clumsily patting his pockets.

I handed him my notebook and a pen and he feebly wrote. The handwriting was very shaky but it looked like 7 Mill Street.

“It's an address,” I said. “Is this where you live? Do you want to go to a hospital …”

A limo with smoked windows had pulled up beside us, and I was distracted for a moment, hoping maybe it was Benny Winter, and I wasn't late at all, and then hoping it wasn't, because I wasn't sure what he'd make of this tableau, me doing my bee-dodging Saint Vitus's dance in front of a man with a head wound. But nobody got out of the car.

“Ahhhhh,” the lost man said, and then he gurgled again.

“I'm sorry, I don't know what you're trying to say, or what to do. Let me call someone.” I dug in my purse for my cell phone.

“Dumb,” he said.

“You're dumb? Are you a mute? Or practically a mute? You want to write some more?” I asked, holding out the reporter's notebook.

He didn't take it. Instead, some realization dawned on him and he suddenly turned, walking quickly away, the limo following him down the block.

I was about to follow also when two men got out of the limo. They wrapped the lost guy in an embrace and put him into the car. Before I could call out, “Wait! Your hat,” they all drove off, to my great relief.

I used the hat to wave the bees away as I opened the door to Wingate's, ducked in, and closed it. One of the bees managed to follow me inside, causing a few moments of arm-flailing panic among a group of stout, well-suited men who had been exchanging business cards in the foyer. Big, strong men, probably captains of industry, reduced to a Jerry Lewis dance number by a little bee, until the maître d' and I were able to maneuver the bee to the door and wave it outside with the hat and a menu.

Needless to say, this did not endear me to the maître d', who gave me a dirty look, as if I had brought the bee in on purpose. Like it was my pet bee and I was walking it.

While the maître d' escorted me to Benny Winter's table, I checked the hat to see if the guy's name was inside it so I could return it to him, but there was just a store name, Harben Hats, Fifth Avenue, New York.

“I specifically asked you not to be late,” Benny Winter said, not rising from his chair.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting down. “This lost man stopped me and I was trying to help him. I think he had Alzheimer's …”

“Did you get his name? Perhaps you can return the hat,” Winter said, as though the whole thing bored him. He was completely deadpan all the time, which is weird but effective. He was very pale too. Though I could not get past seeing him as a flunky, he was one of the best publicists money could buy. In addition to working for some of the world's biggest corporations, he had worked effectively for various nasty countries with nasty agendas who wanted to hang on to American foreign aid or obtain American weapons (often used against Americans later).