JERRY WAS FURIOUS WITH ME because I let the cops have the purse-camera tape without running a dub for us.
“You had the tape and you handed it to a cop?”
“So he’d see I wasn’t the killer. It’s evidence, Jerry,” I said, although I couldn’t be too sanctimonious, since I’d returned to my apartment for the brown envelope before reporting back to work. “They’ll release a dub soon.”
I’d just come very close to losing my life, but, hey, the news must go on.
Claire, because she knew of my involvement more intimately than anyone, reported the story and provided the information that Amy was apparently after the same job Claire had had her eye on, doing on-air reports introducing Greg’s celebrity guests. I was assigned to prepare a “reporter’s notebook” piece for the eight.
I locked my office, told the switchboard to hold all my calls, pulled out the envelope and, from the wad of individually stapled reports, picked out the one on Amy.
The first sheet, the “stats” sheet, showed that Miss Amy Penny was born Michelle Amy Soxhaug, and remained Michelle Soxhaug until she was sixteen. Her mother was married three times and left her between marriages with a reluctant aunt and uncle in Garibaldi, Alabama.
Not the kind of thing that would go over well with the near-miss in-laws, but certainly nothing to kill for.
The third time around, Amy’s mother married George W. Penny, an automotive parts salesman, and Amy moved to Tennessee, where she took her stepfather’s name, had a little nose work done, and went on to become Miss Mason-Dixon Line.
Griff’s report indicated she’d met Browner at a personal appearance she made as TV spokesmodel for that upscale low-dust baby powder at a gathering of ANN advertisers and he’d invited her to interview at ANN. She came in through the “Greg” door, like Madri, and he had discreetly “mentored” her with an eye to bringing her on to his show in a custom-made job. Claire had never had a chance.
Still, I couldn’t see a motive for two murders and an attempted murder—mine.
I read on.
Amy’s association with Greg didn’t end once she got to ANN. Griff had a photo of Amy and Browner in a torrid embrace. Griff also had some medical records, including a full amniocentesis report on a twenty-five week old fetus, for which Amy had reverted to her old name, Michelle Soxhaug. I didn’t understand all the notations, but Griff had summarized the contents:
The fetal blood type is incompatible with the blood type of Miss Penny’s fiancé, Burke Avery, a.k.a. Heinrich Stedlbauer. It is, however, compatible with that of Mr. Browner.
Holy shit. Image conscious Amy Penny was not going to have the daddy she needed—and fast—for her baby if Burke learned this. No wonder Griff picked me to dish the dirt to.
Okay, I only had to read the report on Amy Penny, and the report on Browner, and the report on me, but I read them all. I know I should have taken every irrelevant report and shredded it at once out of respect for my colleagues. But I didn’t. I couldn’t resist temptation.
Larry Griff had covered the waterfront. There were credit reports, summaries of conversations with old friends, ex-friends, neighbors, teachers, employers. The stuff about Joanne and the APC was there, with pictures, which, I regret to say, I lingered over. Susan’s many lovers were listed—including, sadly, Greg Browner, which explained why she didn’t want her boss Solange, Greg’s ex-wife, to know. Madri’s entire sexual history was there, showing that she did, in fact, share a hotel room with “Heinrich Stedlbauer” on several occasions during my marriage.
There was nothing on Solange.
After I read it all, I felt kind of sleazy for invading their privacy. Sleazy, but with curiosity sated. Then I shredded everything but the report on Amy. That I kept.
Claire knocked on the door. “Do you have a script? Jerry wants you to track soon, and I have to re-edit my six o’clock for the eight so I can’t help you.”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
I wrote up my story, leaving out the sordid details about the “innocent” people investigated. Jerry changed the script, I changed it back and tracked it, and the piece made the eight o’clock with two minutes to spare.
Later, Claire and I went to Tatiana’s for omelets and grain to celebrate my continued living and her breakout reporting.
“Jerry’s making himself out to be your savior,” Claire said. “He told me when he saw your message he knew you would never meet me at a steak house. So he called the cops.”
“I had Amy at my mercy before the cops got there,” I said.
“You know Jerry. He’ll milk it forever,” she said. “So—you were wrong about Eric.”
“Claire, I just can’t trust my instincts,” I said. “I’m not fit for dating. I need to take a refresher course first.”
“No, you can trust your instincts, but you don’t. You listen to all these other voices. What was your first instinct about Eric, the very first, honestly?”
“That I really wanted to have sex with him.”
“What was your first instinct about Amy Penny?”
“That I really wanted to punch her lights out.”
“And what was your first instinct about Burke?”
“That he was full of himself, almost sociopathic, but he was really cute.”
“Right on all counts,” Claire said.
“Well, Eric still has some stuff to explain…,” I said.
“So do you, my dear.”
“Yeah.” That’s what happens when you’re too close to a story—right smack in the middle of it, in fact, instead of on the outside looking on objectively. You lose sight of things and you make mistakes.
“Have you talked to Burke?”
“No. I figure I’m one of the last people he wants to hear from right now. You know, when we first split up, I wished horrible things would befall him, but this exceeds my wildest revenge fantasies. It’s really overkill, it’s justice of Greek proportions.”
Poor Burke. He took a medical leave and went to rest at his parent’s country house in the Hamptons. He always loved the ocean. I was going to call him or send a card but I really didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t covered in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. I felt bad for him, though. Poor guy. He used to have such good taste in women.
The purse-cam tape ran all over the news, ours and others, in the next week. Most of the story is out now.
I say most because one never knows when the story is really over. Just recently, I was reading that archaeologists now believe the Philistines weren’t the loutish, barbaric beer-guzzlers their enemies painted them to be. They were actually cultured and refined wine-drinkers with highly evolved arts and technology for their time.
This just in: The Philistines were slandered. Forget what you’ve read. Even back then, there was media bias.
The stock price is up too, slightly. Paul Mangecet is rumored to be gunning for a big Hollywood studio, but his Christian no-load mutual fund still holds ten percent of JBS, and the next shareholder meeting promises to be a media circus.
McGravy made a play to get me back into general news, but Jack Jackson himself vetoed it. “She and Jerry are a bang-up team,” he said. “And I’m going to keep them together. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Claire, however, is up for a weekend reporting spot. Kinda like Ruby Keeler—she went in a producer, came out a star.
Even Louise Bryant has had offers. Get this. Some agent saw my cat on the news, and wants to sign her to an endorsement contract. My cat gets an agent before I do. My cat could make more this year than me. It’s a strange world.