BEFORE I WENT TO KAFKA’S, I had to stop at home to change clothes and to feed my dictatorial cat. Louise Bryant greeted me at the door with a contemptuous howl.
“Relax, you’re not starving,” I said to her.
Knowing that tone of voice, she adopted another tactic, kissing ass, rubbing her back against my leg and looking up at me with something almost like affection. If I didn’t feed her soon, she’d move to more punitive action, taking a clawed swat at the back of my leg. Louise Bryant was very Machiavellian.
Louise Bryant came to us, to me, late in her life. It was like this: Burke wanted a baby, I didn’t. Some people are meant to be parents, and some of us, those with long histories of insanity in the family, for instance, are not. In the end it was moot, because it turned out I was infertile. Children just weren’t a realistic expectation without tens of thousands of dollars of costly and chancy in vitro. Burke needed a more fecund field than me (which he apparently thought he’d found in Amy Penny).
So Burke and I compromised on a cat. Actually, we’d decided on a kitten but at the SPCA we changed our minds and took home this ancient, battle-scarred alley cat with a taste for restaurant dumpster food and roses, a strange fear of harmonica music and a less strange fear of thunderstorms. After an unknown number of years as a street cat she took to being a house cat surprisingly well, as though she was born to luxury. But right away, the battle of wills began between Louise Bryant and me over her diet. She refused to eat anything from a can unless I stir-fried it with greens and oyster sauce.
Oddly enough, I do this every night for her. I open a can of Hill’s Science Diet and stir-fry it in a little olive oil with some bok choy. I do this for a cat I’m not even sure likes me.
As soon as I put the plate down for her, she immediately forgot about my existence and buried her face in her food.
I searched through my closet for something sort of chic and sort of bohemian to wear, something that would qualify for Kafka’s. I hadn’t been to Kafka’s, but I’d heard of it. It was the club of the minute, the newest mecca for young, stunning New Yorkers, like Claire. She ran with a gang that always included a lot of really beautiful, pseudo-bohemian actors, models, writers, and cerebral rock musicians who seemed on the verge of huge breaks. They all had respectable success at an early age, appearing in good off-Broadway plays or in small art films by promising young directors and they were very much in love with themselves. One of their number was making a documentary about them and their lifestyle, so whenever you’d see them in clubs, you’d see this cameraman and sound tech in their orbit, recording their every pithy bon mot and existential glance into space.
I shouldn’t be so contemptuous, because the truth is, I’m jealous of them and their easy confidence. When I’m around hot young people I feel kind of cold and old. I often wish I could turn off that deep, dark neurotic part of myself at will and be breezy and shallow when I need to be, such as when I am facing the bouncers at some trendy club, worrying that they won’t let me in.
Fortunately, red hair is very trendy now and I have a long, stubborn mass of it. Club bouncers, who are people I should not want to impress but do, love it and usually wave me right in.
But when I got to Kafka’s, the two borderline IQs at the door made no move to admit me, although I was the only one waiting behind the red cordon.
Housed in what was once a meat wholesaler’s warehouse, Kafka’s was an example of seedy chic, a fashionable bar located in New York’s meat district near the Hudson River waterfront. Ten years before, the neighborhood was the heart of the gay S & M district known as the Meat Rack. Since then, many of the leather bars had gone out of business, but the transitional transsexual prostitutes, half man half woman, the chicks with dicks as they called themselves, still worked the area.
While I stood waiting for the bouncers to let me in, a car pulled up just down the street. There was a baby seat in the back. The front door of the station wagon opened, two long stockinged legs stretched out, and a tall, beautiful transsexual stepped into the spotlight of a street lamp.
As the car squealed away, she slithered back into the shadows of an iron awning to wait for the next trick. I couldn’t even make her out in the darkness, she blended so well into the shadow, no doubt a useful skill in her dangerous profession. But then there was a bright flash of a lighter, which quickly died out. A few minutes later the lighter flashed again, first a yellow flash and then a quick blue-white flash. The lady was a crackhead.
At this point, satisfied that they had demonstrated their power over my social destiny, the bouncers abruptly unfastened the cordon and waved me out of reality and into surreality.
Inside, the bar was lit by blue-white halogen lights that shone vertically in cylinders from the floor, like some kind of force field. The place was busy for a weekday, and the beautiful people were three deep around the pale, glowing blue bar. Despite Vogue’s admonition that black was boring, almost everyone wore black as a base, accessorizing with bolder colors.
“Can I get you something?” the bartender, a tall Oriental woman, asked. She had an English accent.
“Vodka martini, dry, made with lemon Stoly, no garnish, on the rocks, lightly stirred,” I said. I love ordering that. Name’s Bond, James Bond. However, the pretension was lost on the bartender, who dutifully and absentmindedly stirred it up and handed it to me in a Lucite glass with a cockroach cleverly embedded in its base.
Down at the end of the bar Claire’s usual gang of friends were hanging out but Claire was nowhere to be seen. One of them, an actress named Tassy something-or-other, waved at me absently, like she knew me from somewhere but couldn’t remember if she liked me or not. I waved back and turned away to spare her having to make the judgment.
Claire was late, which was unusual. It was a quarter after nine before she finally got to Kafka’s. Although the crowd was thick, it parted easily for her as she made her way through the blue-white force field to the bar. Right away, I knew something was wrong.
Claire, who was always perfectly put together, had failed to accessorize.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly. “But I just had a call from one of your old sources. The police are looking for you. They want you to turn yourself in.”
“Turn myself in? Why? What is …”
“I stopped back at ANN to pick up a tape I wanted to watch later and while I was there this woman called,” Claire said. “Desirée.”
That was Nora, a police department flack who used to work at ANN and was a very reluctant source. “Desirée” was her nom de fink. I privately referred to her as Sore Throat.
“They found this guy dead—killed—at the Marfeles Palace. You were seen with him or something. Desirée was vague on details, but it sounds like you’re a suspect, Robin.”
“Oh sweet mother of …”
Words were flashing at me like neon signs: ME. A SUSPECT. FOR MURDER. ME.
For once, I was speechless. Speechless and paralyzed. Even with my rotten luck, this was going too far.
Claire ordered herself a double Dewar’s neat, which she emptied in one large swallow. She rarely drank.
“I’ve got a taxi waiting outside. Do you want to call a lawyer and have him meet us at the cop shop?” She slid her hand over mine and gave it a squeeze. “Or do you want to sit a while and get your bearings on this?”
“No,” I said. “Let’s go.”
When we were in the taxi, I thought of this story I read about Vaclav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, shortly after the Communists fell and he and other dissidents came to power. A year earlier, Havel had been in jail, as had many of his colleagues. Now they were running the country, making decisions on everything from freeing the press to how to distribute a shipment of East German brassieres.
During cabinet meetings, when the absurdity of the situation became too great, Havel would stop the meeting and say, “Let’s all laugh for a moment.”
I love that. I love the idea of a world leader taking a moment away from history for a hearty guffaw. I think it’s good, all-purpose advice. I tried to follow it as the taxi rumbled over the narrow streets towards Manhattan South.
Within the hour, I was sitting at a table in a room at Manhattan South, which looked after everything below Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan, with Detective Joe Tewfik, whom I knew slightly, and Detective Richard Bigger, whom I did not know at all.
I did not call a lawyer, because I felt my best shot was just to go in and tell the damn truth, or as close to the damn truth as I could get. I hadn’t killed anybody, so why did I need a lawyer to speak for me, to conceal my crimes? For $350 an hour at that. I’d had a hard enough time with my divorce lawyer, who kept trying to goad me into going after a big piece of Burke’s earning and inheritance potential. In my settlement meeting, she and I kept saying conflicting things. Finally, we burst into heated argument with each other, while our ostensible “enemies,” Burke and his lawyer, watched, amused, from across the conference table.
I hated the way she made me look, like some kind of pitiful victim, being economically punished for his adultery when he took his income and left our marriage. I am not a victim, I told her. I earn my own living and plenty of men want to sleep with me too. I do not need Burke Avery, got that?
So I didn’t trust a lawyer to tell my side of the story. Besides, I brought the tape recorder I used on stories with me and when I sat down at the table at the cop shop I whipped it out and said, “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”
“Uh—no,” Bigger said, surprised.
Tewfik wasn’t surprised. “Miss Hudson is a reporter. Like Brenda Starr,” he said. “She keeps a record of everything.”
“How do you know Larry Griff?” Bigger asked me.
“Who is Larry Griff? Is he the dead guy?”
Bigger nodded. I thought they might do a good-cop/bad-cop routine, so I planned to be sweet to the bad cop and rude to the good cop, just to muck up their rhythm somehow. But Tewfik was just sitting back watching, letting Bigger represent the duality of man single-handedly.
Lawrence M. Griff, a licensed P.I., Bigger informed me in a tone of voice that implied I already knew all this, had been bludgeoned to death in Room 13D of the Marfeles Palace with a blunt metal instrument. The body had been discovered a few hours earlier by the night maid.
“What do you know about it?” he asked.
“Did this guy have sort of short, gingery red hair?” I asked, knowing even as I spoke that Bigger was sure to say yes.
So I told him everything I remembered. Then I dug into my catch-all purse and after some rummaging, actually retrieved the note Griff had given me. Bigger held the hotel stationery envelope by its edges and handed it to Tewfik.
But I broke my damn truth rule: I did not hand over the other page Griff had given me, the first page of the investigator’s report, and I did not make any mention of it. Because it spoke of my mother’s arrest in London and alluded to her mental illness, I felt it would not help me any as a suspect, nor would it help them except to build a case against me. They had the note and the envelope. That seemed enough.
“What did this guy know about you?” Bigger asked. “How did he lure you to his room?”
“When he spoke to me, on the phone … he knew my childhood nickname.”
Bigger and Tewfik both looked at me expectantly.
“Red Knobby,” I said. “And he knew, you know, embarrassing stuff. Who I lost my virginity to, okay?”
“Was he trying to blackmail you?”
“He didn’t say. I honestly don’t know why he was investigating me or what he expected from me.”
“You are reputed to be bad-tempered and eccentric, some might say a little paranoid,” Bigger said.
“That’s probably true to some degree at least. But I’m not dangerous.”
“Well, witnesses say you threatened an old woman near your apartment building with a tire iron and later raised a knife to your husband.…”
“Look,” I said. “I know I would make a fine suspect, but I didn’t kill this guy. I got a phone call from him, he gave me a note, I went up to the room at the appointed time. He never even answered the door.”
Tewfik took over from Bigger. “Why did you leave your tire iron on the premises?” he asked. “Were you frightened? Did you panic and drop the weapon?”
“Why would I leave the weapon in his room? Give me some credit.”
“I didn’t say it was in his room. I said it was on the premises. How did you know it was in the room?”
He was getting the better of me. I was starting to think hiring a lawyer wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
“I assumed … Look, I didn’t know the tire iron was in the guy’s room. I just assumed when you said premises you meant the crime scene, where the guy was found. It was a lucky guess, really.” I sounded guilty. Shit.
“It wasn’t found in the bedroom. We’re still looking for the murder weapon—but a tire iron would fill the bill.”
“Oh.” I was relieved, yet felt oddly miffed that Tewfik had tricked me into establishing my innocence this way.
“Besides, one of your colleagues who saw you outside Griff’s room said you weren’t carrying your tire iron. You appeared, however, to be carrying a small knife of some sort.…”
“A butter knife. To protect myself.”
Bigger still looked skeptical, but Tewfik smiled at me. Nice-looking man, Tewfik, a one-time Brooklyn hunk who, at forty-five, was settling nicely into middle age. His dark hair was graying and he was getting soft around the edges, but that just made him more accessible and thus more attractive. I’d known him professionally for a couple of years, marginally, through Crime & Justice. Used to have a little crush on him. But, alas, he was married to a cookbook writer and had two kids.
As for Bigger—imagine a weasel, upright in a sports jacket. A nice sports jacket, okay, and he had blow-dried hair, a cop for the Cops TV-show age. But he had a weak, mean mouth he tried to disguise with a feeble moustache that looked like it was just resting and might crawl off his face in search of a sunny rock at any moment.
“So who would want to kill this guy and who would want to frame you? Was somebody out to get you, or did they just see you put your tire iron down and then seize the opportunity?” Tewfik asked.
“I have no idea. Why was this guy investigating me?”
Now that I was off the hook as a suspect, at least for the moment, I had a few questions of my own.
“And who else was he investigating? I mean, he asked me to meet him at the Marfeles, where ANN was having its New Year’s party. Coincidence? And when he gave me that note it was before nine thirty and he wanted me to meet him at eleven. So maybe he had the goods on somebody else at ANN.”
“Who?” Bigger asked.
“I don’t know. I’m asking you guys. He could have the lowdown on anybody—or everybody. Everybody has secrets.” I smiled at the aloof Detective Bigger. “What are your secrets?”
Bigger didn’t answer.
They reviewed my account of the evening before letting me go. I tried to find out what they knew about Griff, so I could maybe find out who the hell was checking me out. But they were on to me and wouldn’t go into specifics.
“We may have to ask you some other questions,” Tewfik said.
“My door is always open to men with badges and/or warrants,” I replied.
Claire was waiting for me outside in the hallway, staring at herself in a window, and she didn’t see me when I came out. If you ask her she’ll deny it, but looking at herself is kind of a hobby of hers. Compliment Claire on what she’s wearing and she looks down with some surprise, as though she never really gave a single thought to what to wear while she was dressing, she just “threw this on.” She likes people to think her beauty is effortless, like if she really worked at it, really applied herself, look out—she’d be dangerous.
But I know the truth. When she walks past any vaguely reflective surface—a mirror, a window, a polished piece of granite—she can’t resist looking at herself. Not only does she look at herself but, liking what she sees, she smiles at her reflection, like she shares a secret joke with it or something. Claire, a one-woman mutual admiration society.
“God, you’re ugly,” I said.
She jumped a little in her skin. “I didn’t see you come up. How did it go? Do they have a case against you? Should I bring you an eclair with a file in it?”
“I’m not a suspect. Just a witness.”
When we walked out the door into the street, lights flashed in our faces, blinding me temporarily. I heard voices shouting at me as the shadowy figures before me filled out and regained detail.
“Did you kill Larry Griff?” someone called out. Another voice called, “Why did the police want you, Robin?” It was a New York Post reporter I knew vaguely. There were a bunch of them.
Christ, I was in the middle of a gang bang, the vulgar term the news media uses to describe a mob of journalists descending upon an unsuspecting victim. I’d been part of the mob before, but never the object of its affections. It was frightening.
Claire pushed me back into the building. We said nothing. I was willing to spill a lot of stuff for the cops, but I wasn’t fool enough to speak with the news media. Inside, a uniformed cop, drooling over Claire, directed us to a little-known exit.
Murphy’s Law. One step out the door we ran right into my devoted husband, who was staked out with his crew on the sidewalk.
“Burke,” I said.
“Robin! What are you doing here?” he asked. “Where’s your crew?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Are you here on the story?” he said, guarded.
“What story?”
“What story are you here on?” he asked. A dialogue between reporters, all questions and no answers.
“You’re here about the Marfeles Hotel murder, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re on this story too. Kind of a funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Or an accident of nature, like when masochists marry each other.”
“Robin, can’t we please be friends, or colleagues?” he said. “Do we have to fight?”
“I’m sorry. I always mean to make nice, Burke …”
“I know you do …”
“… but then I remember what a slimy piece of shit you are and I can’t help myself.”
“For Christ’s sake, Robin, it happens,” he said.
“Yeah yeah yeah. Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
He took a deep breath. His eyes looked glazed and unholy in the blue-white of the streetlight.
“Yes,” he said. “Life’s a bitch and people fall out of love with some people and into love with other people. Quit making a federal case out of it.”
His camera crew was watching us, amused. Claire acted as if she wasn’t listening and pretended to be engrossed in her reflection in a car window.
We were in public and I should have held my tongue at that point, but I didn’t.
“So, what?” I said. “So just because people have been falling out of love for centuries, just because people have been cheating on their mates and lying to their mates since the beginning of time, that makes it all right? Yes, it is a federal case, in the United State of Robin and Burke. Fucking right, it’s a federal case. It’s treason.”
“I can see there’s no reasoning with you,” Burke said. He changed the subject. “I heard they had a suspect up there. D’you see him go in?”
“No,” I answered truthfully. The suspect Burke had heard about was me, and I loved that he didn’t know it.
“Well, there was that tall guy …,” Claire interrupted, then stopped, acting as though she’d almost let the cat out of the bag.
Burke smiled, thinking he had weaseled this out of her with his masterful reportorial technique.
“White guy?”
“Not as white as you,” I said.
Let him harass big, swarthy guys all night. I was tired and wanted to go.
Before I left he extended the olive branch. “It was nice seeing you again, Robin,” he said. He almost got me with that voice of his, that great damn, deep, slightly gravelly voice that made me want to cross my legs and bounce my foot.
But then I realized his motives. Sure, he wants us to be friends, I thought. It’d make his life so much simpler. There’s nothing Burke hates more than a loose wire, especially one that carries high voltage, like me. Why the hell should I go out of my way to make his life easier when he’d made mine so crummy?
So I said nothing. I smirked and turned and left with Claire.
“Do you feel like you need to be alone, or would you like to go somewhere and talk?” Claire said, as we hailed a cab.
“To tell you the truth, Claire, I’m starved. Do you want to grab something to eat?”
“Sure. I know a great vegetarian restaurant near here.”
“How about Old Homestead? Expand your horizons.” Old Homestead was a minor New York landmark, an old steak house off Fourteenth Street.
She just laughed.
Claire and I were friends and colleagues who liked and respected each other and agreed on almost everything. But food was one of those areas where Claire and I just didn’t agree. I still ate red meat, although not more than once a week, but Claire had opted out of the food chain and ate only fruits and vegetables, which included large quantities of green leafy things, lots of seaweed stews, and whole platters of cooked grain.
The restaurant she took me to, Tatiana’s, was one of those converted diners so popular among the Unrepentant Yuppies of New York City. It gleamed of chrome and neon and looked like an art deco railway car that might break loose from its moorings at any moment and go careening down First Avenue. It was upscale vegetarian—no leftover hippies with ponytails, jeans, and acoustic guitars in this joint.
They knew Claire at the door, but then she never took me anywhere where they didn’t know her.
“You’ll like the food,” Claire said as we opened our menus. “Besides, they have eggs and dairy so you can have a cheese omelet if you like.”
Frankly, I find vegetarian restaurants are to a gourmet dining experience what Christian theme parks are to Amsterdam nightlife, but I try to stay open-minded. A waiter came over and reeled off the night’s specials, which included tofu fritters served in a pool of sorrel essence and a ground millet mousse in a light orange sauce, which is what Claire ordered. I ordered the cheese omelet.
“Are you worried?” she asked me.
“Naturally. Whoever killed that guy is still out there, and might have some information about me I’d rather people didn’t know.”
“Think maybe it’s just that fan of yours, Elroy?”
“Nah. He’s been my fan for five years now. God, come to think of it, that’s one of my longest relationships with a man. Anyway, he doesn’t want to hurt me, he wants me to hurt him. Now, Christine Muke, she’s got a whole harem of disturbed fans.”
Christine was one of our prime-time anchors, an aristocratic-looking black woman with a voice so sultry “men in the deep arctic instinctively mop their brows when they hear it” (TV Guide).
“Remember that guy in brown polyester pants with rubber bands around the cuffs?” I asked. “The one who claimed if he and Christine didn’t merge—”
“Fuse. He said they had to fuse together or else the planet would blow up.”
“Yeah. I dunno, maybe Elroy did hire Griff. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but then who else would be so interested in my past? And was it just me this guy Griff was on to?”
While we waited for our food, I played the tape of my interrogation for her. “You think someone at ANN killed the guy, don’t you?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But I think he had the goods on someone else and that’s why he picked the Marfeles Palace that night.”
“Well, like you told the cops, he could have been investigating anybody, or everybody. But why?”
“And why me? It’s not like I have power or money—or influence for that matter, not while I’m in Special Reports.”
“Well, you’re off the hook with the cops, anyway,” she said. “Too bad the news media was there.…”
“Enough about my petty problems. They’re too depressing,” I said. “You wanted to talk about that reporter spot?”
“It can wait. The Browner job may not come to pass anyway. I would like to get away from Jerry, but I like working with you. We’re a good team.”
Yes, we were, but I harbored few illusions about it lasting very long. Claire assisted me, but she was looking far beyond me and one day would cheerfully and politely leapfrog over me. Claire was great at finding the story, the right people to interview, those proverbial pictures worth a thousand words. She was fantastic in the edit room, putting sound and pictures together, and she had two important attributes I lacked, confidence and poise.
Our food came. “Mmm, little chicken embryos whipped into a froth and fried,” I said. “Speaking of Spurdle, you know what McGravy told me today? Jerry wants me in Special Reports.”
“McGravy’s right. Jerry’s not doing you a favor by letting you live out your exile there. He’s got personal reasons,” she said wickedly. “He likes you.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. I give him shit all day long.”
“He’s in love with you,” Claire said, matter-of-factly.
“Give me a fucking break.”
Claire smiled. I think she was enjoying my discomfort with this idea.
“He’s in love with you, Robin,” she said. “He thinks he can bring you around, like in some Tracy-Hepburn flick where the spunky career woman at war with her boss realizes she’s really in love with him and falls into his arms and French kisses him in the last scene and …”
“Oh! Stop! That’s so gross. Don’t say French kiss and Jerry in the same sentence when a girl’s trying to eat!”
“Sorry.”
“Ugh, ugh,” I said, trying to spit the very idea out before it attached itself to my subconscious.
“Well, anyway, they live happily ever after and have sex every night and breed little Spurdles,” Claire continued.
“Stop!”
“What do you think Jerry’s like in bed?” she went on mercilessly.
“Oh jeez. Oh God. Ick. What’s he like in bed? Ugh. Like chiggers, maybe.”
“Okay,” Claire said. “What about this? If you had to either have sex with Jerry Spurdle or else do a really gross thing, what’s the worst thing you’d do before you’d have sex with Jerry?”
Claire often came up with peculiar riddles involving a choice between two or three hellish options. Another of her riddles was, would you rather look good and smell bad, or smell good and look bad?
“I’d rather eat live insects by the handful,” I said. “Of course, unlike you, I am a meat eater.”
Claire shrugged. “I think it’s kind of sweet that someone as disgusting and venal as Jerry Spurdle can still entertain a romantic fantasy.”
“Oh God. It really bugs me to think that I am in Jerry’s fantasies. I wonder what I do in them. Ugh. Something truly foul, I’m sure.” I put down my fork, my appetite irretrievably spoiled. “If I have a sex dream about Jerry tonight, Claire, I am going to blame you.”
She leaned back and laughed.
I have romantic fantasies too—in fact I think a minimum of four are required just to get through the average day—but mine do not include Jerry. I have to admit a bit of inverted sexism, in that I often look on men as sex objects. I can’t help it. When I meet an interesting man, I automatically wonder what it would be like to have sex with him. Men are not only sex objects, but they are sex objects also.
The thing is, I still sort of believed in love. I was kind of agnostic about love, actually, but I hadn’t lost hope completely. I was waiting for the feminist wet dream, Spencer Tracy. And while I was waiting, great looks and a great bod could tide me over nicely. But Spurdle was not Spencer Tracy and I’d be hard-pressed to find any Hollywood counterpart for Jerry that walked on two legs and had opposable thumbs.
Later, as I rode home from Tatiana’s in a creaky taxicab with bad shocks, I thought about how I’d married the wrong man, which meant maybe the right man was still out there somewhere.
So was the killer.
When I got home, I turned ANN on to keep me company while I brushed Louise Bryant. The Greg Browner Show was on—the Hawaii version, a taped repeat of the evening show that played during prime time in Hawaii. It made for good white noise.
“Topeka, Kansas, on the line. What’s your question for Jack Kemp, Topeka?” Greg said in his warm way.
“Greg, my husband and I think you should run for office in ninety-six.”
Browner got several calls like this every night. Some of the Perotist carpetbaggers, who had wandered in the wilderness for many months since their man’s defeat in ’92, had tried to get Browner to pick up the Independence banner. But Browner refused to run, elevating himself above the fray and giving his show-ender commentaries greater credibility.
But for every call of support he got, he got one like his next call.
“Yeah, Greg, this is Barry from Union City, New Jersey. I want to know if Jack Kemp would support a national holiday to honor Howard Stern’s penis?”
Live television. You gotta love it.