Revenge of the Cootie Girls (29 page)

“Born that way or severed?”

“Not severed recently. But we won't know more until an autopsy is done. Did the man you met have all his fingers?”

“I didn't notice and I think I would have if he was missing a finger,” I said. “Does it look like the John Doe was murdered?”

“This one hasn't been classified yet,” Fairchild said. “Looks like death by drowning. Could be accident, suicide … Even if it is the same guy, I don't know how you can help. You don't remember the car make. You don't remember the license plate number, and you didn't clearly see the faces of the occupants.” She sighed. “Robin, I'm reminded of the dead dry cleaner case. Remember that one? You were convinced you knew him and that there was some clue in your laundry receipt.”

“That was an easy mistake! He even looked like my dry cleaner.”

You wouldn't be a tad paranoid if you'd been involved in several unfortunate murder cases? Whenever a dead body showed up without explanation, I was compelled to find out if there was any connection at all to me, because in the past, if I'd been more alert, if I'd been smarter sooner, I could have saved a life or two, or at the very least, saved myself a whole lot of trouble. The other detectives got sick of talking to me, and Fairchild inherited me. Up to now, she'd been very patient, but today she sounded annoyed. This was what … my ninth, tenth such call in the last four or five months? Hardly excessive, all things considered.

“I really hope this is another of your mistaken hunches, Robin, because my boss will be much happier if you're not involved. If he's happier, I'm happier,” she said.

“I'll be happier too,” I said.

Her boss, Richard Bigger, and I had crossed paths before on homicides, always unpleasantly. He was a stick-up-the-ass guy, what my friend Tamayo would call a “cube,” square squared, Joe Friday without the stylish wardrobe and erudite cocktail conversation.

“Bigger really, really doesn't like you,” she went on. “Among other things, he seems to think you gave his home phone number to a crackpot neighbor of yours … a Mrs. Ramirez who, thank you very much, I have since inherited.”

“Is he still pissed about that? I don't know how she got that number,” I said.

“Mrs. Ramirez also sees murders everywhere,” Fairchild said. “You two should form a club.”

“But I have a history of actually being involved in murder cases. She's just nuts,” I said. “By the way, I hear she has a gun and I'm fairly certain it's unlicensed.”

“I'll have someone from the precinct check it out,” she said.

We both knew nothing would be done until old Mrs. Ramirez shot someone. A uniform would inquire if Ramirez had a firearm, she'd deny it, and nothing would happen. It wasn't like the cops and ATF agents were going to storm her apartment to confiscate a gun from an elderly, churchgoing woman with no criminal record. A thing like that can too easily turn into a standoff and a PR disaster.

“We're ready,” said the morgue attendant, wheeling in a stainless steel gurney. The body was covered with a pale blue sheet.

“Are you ready?” Fairchild asked me.

Just thinking about seeing a corpse gave me a chill, exacerbated by the morgue's heavy air-conditioning, which made me wrap both hands around my take-out coffee cup, trying to suck warmth out of it.

“Yes,” I said.

Fairchild threw back the sheet, revealing the waxy, blue-white face of a bald man I had never seen before.

“Well?” Fairchild said.

“I don't know him.”

“Remember, he was in the water for a while. He's slightly bloated.”

“The guy I saw had brown hair, a lot of it, and a completely different face and build,” I said. “He was wearing a different suit too.”

“Well, good. I'm relieved you don't know him. Thanks for coming down, all the same.”

“No problem,” I said. “It's just such a weird coincidence, the Doublemint gum, I mean.”

“A lot of people chew gum. When I learn more from Brooklyn Homicide, I'll call
you
,” she said, which was her polite way of saying, “Don't call me.”

Though Bigger and Fairchild saw me as some kind of murder fetishist, I was more than happy that the dead guy was a stranger. Not happy for him, poor slob. Whoever he was, he had lived and loved and died too soon. While I was heading to work, it was hard not to wonder about him, who he was and how he ended up dead. And it was hard not to be depressed after a trip to the morgue, with its bright lights, sterility—emotionally and otherwise—the chem lab smell and … what was that other thing? Oh yeah. Staring into the face of a dead man and confronting the chilly darkness of oblivion.

That face was hard to shake, but I managed to put it out of my mind as I went into the pink and granite Jackson Broadcasting Building in midtown Manhattan. As Wallace Mandervan wrote in his book,
The Natural Leader
, successful men leave their personal troubles and existential angst outside the workplace. No time now to contemplate the certainty of death and the uncertainty of an afterlife; I had to summon up enough of an air of authority to get me through another day as the Boss.

Just getting to my office these days involved a series of obstacles. To get into the All News Network part of the building, you have to go through a security desk ID check, a metal detector, a series of
Star Trek
–style airlock doors, and past Investigative Reports. There was always a risk of running into either Dr. Solange Stevenson—former TV psychologist and now Barbara Walters clone in the Investigative Reports Unit, whom my ex-husband once referred to as six feet of walking saltpeter, because of her great personal charm—or Reb “Rambo” Ryan, whose sartorial role model was Ernest Hemingway.

Fortunately, neither one was around that morning, so I felt safe stopping to see what was new on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway outside the newsroom. The state of Georgia had commissioned a study to select a second method of killing death row inmates, in addition to the primitive electric chair. Some dark-humored ANN wag had posted a contest soliciting suggestions. Topping the list were Batmanesque ideas involving conveyor belts, circular saws, and large, mutant Venus flytraps, along with the simpler, more whimsical methods such as “death by tickling.” Near the bottom, one gentle soul had added, “Old age.”

Someone else had posted a contest to determine the programming for Jack's new nameless worldwide network, formerly Millennial Broadcasting. This was fairly fresh; the only suggestions so far were the 24-Hour Home Video Network and the 24-Hour Test Pattern Network.

Normally, I'd cut through the newsroom on my way to my offices, but at the moment, I was trying to avoid the newsroom gossips and their peasant-king, producer Louis Levin, lest they try to pry information out of me about Jack Jackson, my “benefactor,” as Louis Levin called him in the loaded way he has. So I took the long way, skirting around the newsroom through the warren of feature news offices, science, fashion, medicine, legal, the
Kerwin Shutz
show, to Special Reports, a room of partitioned offices off one of ANN's back hallways.

My miserable employees were waiting for me with questions, complaints, problems, complaints, paperwork, and complaints, which I listened to as I made my own morning coffee (light, four sugars, in a cup that said “Bitch-Boss”).

Karim the tape editor had called in sick—again. The company accountants were getting anxious for the quarterly budget figures. During the night, the cleaning people had rearranged the conference area furniture and Liz the associate producer, who was legally blind and litigious, had almost hurt herself.

“Are you going to look after the cleaning situation?” Liz demanded. She was very aggressive for a blind woman, which would have seemed admirable if I hadn't been on the receiving end of it so much of the time.

“Robin, the cleaning crew must move the furniture back exactly where it was before they started cleaning. Otherwise …”

“I'll write a memo to maintenance. Anything else?” I asked.

Liz always had a long list of complaints. The air-conditioning was on too high. Her Opticon, the text-reading device she used, was not working properly. How come I hadn't done anything yet about the slippery tile outside the ladies' room?

It was hard work wearing two hats, boss and reporter, in the Special Reports Unit, or as the newsroom called it lately, Village of the Damned, because it had become a repository for every outcast employee the network couldn't fire for one reason or another. There was Liz, Karim, the hypochondriacal tape editor, and Shauna, the production assistant who either had really low self-esteem or no personality at all, I couldn't decide. Plus, I had all the interns rejected by the other units.

This cast of characters arrived after Investigative Reports had pillaged my unit for talent. This is the deal. Jack Jackson went to war with media baron Lord Otterrill for control of Millennial Broadcasting after Millennial's head, Reverend Paul Mangecet, went bankrupt. The company mandarins decided that the network had to be sleeker in order to do battle, and there was a lot of talk about Special Reports being shut down in favor of the higher-profile Investigative Reports Unit. Presumably, Human Resources thought they could replace my staff with the misfits and then fire them all indiscriminately in one fell swoop when my unit closed down, thereby protecting the company from lawsuits.

To the chagrin of the “serious” journalists and Human Resources, Jack Jackson saved Special Reports. Though we had been “saved,” it was with the understanding that this reprieve was temporary, until budget time rolled around again in another month and our status was reviewed. By this time, the serious journalists hoped, Jack would have come to his senses. By this time, I hoped, the Man of the Future series would have aired and been a tremendous success.

This series and all my work on it was all that stood between my staff and the unemployment line. But did they appreciate it? No. It was no good telling my staff how lucky they were to have me as a boss, that it could have been so much worse: They could have worked for Jerry Spurdle. Spurdle, my former boss in Special Reports, had once made me pose as his wife for an undercover report on shoddy sperm banks. I avoided further embarrassment on that story by saying unflattering things on camera about Jerry to a nurse, forcing Jerry to cut me out of the edited piece. Then there was the time he had me pose as a “hopeful customer” of a computerized dating service. In this case, I made myself as unattractive as possible, claiming I was thrice widowed with four kids and my hobbies were tournament whist, Court TV, and making my own muumuus. I was looking for “lucky husband number four” and my personal quote was: “You got any money?” Oddly, I got no takers.

The point is, I was a good boss, relatively speaking, and my staff didn't appreciate me. Jerry would have made fun of all their tics and deformities and threatened them with his big drawer full of “résumés of all the people who want to replace you.”

I'd tried being the “friend-boss,” but that didn't work, because I was so much older than my employees—in their eyes anyway. They were embarrassed to be in the unit, and they took it out on me most of the time. There was not a one of them I trusted, and I suspected someone in the office was responsible for certain rumors about me and Jack Jackson that showed up anonymously in the companywide, computerized rumor file, known as Radio Free Babylon and run by my old friend, producer Louis Levin.

“I'd like you to think again about letting me bring my Seeing Eye dog into work,” Liz said.

“Karim's allergic, but I'll talk to Human Resources about it.” Whenever possible, pass the buck. “Any calls?”

“Yeah, you got a call yesterday, just after you left, from some guy. He wanted to know where your dinner meeting was. You met up with him okay, right? Because I forgot to tell you about the call.”

“Yes. Benny Winter. We met up. Has he called this morning?”

“No, but Jack Jackson called,” said Liz, her voice laden with innuendo.

“Any other calls?”

“A guy named Jason called a couple of times already this morning.”

“Jason? Doesn't ring a bell.”

“Wouldn't leave a number.” She lowered her voice to parody Jason's conspiratorial tone. “‘Phones might not be safe.' Is he a loony?”

“Probably.”

“And a Dr. Karen Keyes called. She's presenting at the women's conference …”

“Not interested. We have two feminists for our series. If you count that file clip of Gloria Steinem, that's plenty. I'm more interested in what men have to say about their future. Anything else?”

“Here's your fan mail, all of it from that village in India.”

“Balandapur.” I didn't get much fan mail anymore, and what I did get came mostly from this little village in south India, where villagers had been watching ANN by satellite in their teahouses. Most of my fan mail talked about my carrot-red hair, which was evidently a great topic of conversation in Balandapur. My fan base used to be comprised mainly of masochists who wanted me to hurt them, but the masochists had all deserted me for meaner and/or more powerful goddesses like Xena, Courtney Love, and, inexplicably, Kathie Lee Gifford.

First thing I did was call back Jack Jackson, Our Fearless Leader, aka Daddy Warbucks due to a more than passing resemblance. Jack was working on a speech he was to give at the end of the women's conference and he was looking for “some feedback from some of my women.”

“What was the thing you told me the night we went barhopping about urinating standing up?” Jack asked.

“Oh, a trick I learned from an old Girl Scout named Julie,” I said. “That's a thing feminists say a lot, the only thing a man can do that a woman can't do is pee standing up. But a little technology—a simple funnel—and you've solved that problem.”