Nice Girls Finish Last (10 page)

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he didn't
intend
to hurt anyone, he was kind of helpless about it. He was never good at breaking off with women or telling them how he really felt about them. So he always had several women at a time, and he devoted a lot of energy to keeping them unaware of each other and keeping them from pressing for a commitment. In fact, I think Herm married me, and his second wife, to have some defense against other women, if that makes sense. You can't play that game for long without hurting a lot of people, and getting hurt yourself. I'm over the hurt now, have been for a while. But it took me a long time and a lot of therapy.”

I understood completely. I too had been married to someone who was secretly polygamous, although not anywhere near Kanengiser levels.

“But, to be fair, I played a part in it too and so did every one of his other women. I let him get away with it for a long time. I even facilitated it in some ways because I loved him so much,” she said.

I understood this as well. Getting away with long-term polygamy requires a certain amount of collaboration from the person, or persons, being cheated on. These are the signs of collaboration: you will accept any far-fetched excuse, you will overlook the most glaring clues, and in some cases, you'll save him the time and trouble of having to concoct a lie for himself by figuring out an explanation and presenting it to him on a silver platter when he walks in the door at three a.m. smelling of alien perfume.

I told her this, and she said, “Yes, it requires a lot of imagination. It's pretty easy to explain away lipstick on the collar. It's much tougher to explain away lipstick on the thigh. I kept denying it, until I found his black book and couldn't deny it any longer. The thing contained not only names of his women but sexual details about them! When he came home, I confronted him with it and then made him watch while I burned it in the fireplace. The next day, I saw a lawyer.”

Media claims that Kanengiser was being scouted as a possible GOP state senate candidate were, Qualls said, “Nonsense. He sat on the community board because he wanted to preserve the neighborhood and his property from bad influences. He knew he had no hope of going beyond that because of all his women. I don't think he even wanted to, so the papers have completely distorted that.”

“I saw a speech he made on television …”

“Yes, I know that speech. I heard that same argument when I finally confronted him. Men are not programmed to resist when beautiful women throw themselves at them. He is … was a very handsome man and successful and smart and charming and … he had a lot of genuinely good qualities too, and that attracted attractive women to him, you understand?”

“Oh yeah.” That's why I had that new rule about not dating any more pretty boys.

In my opinion, this was the best stuff we had, although it wouldn't pass Jerry's muster since whips, chains, and tall, Teutonic women in black leather were not mentioned. The best I could elicit from Hanna Qualls on that subject was: “How do I know? There was so much I didn't know about the man that I can't even speculate about what he was or wasn't into.”

The only one of the doctor's ex-girlfriends to talk to us, a glamorous model turned real estate broker named Susi Bure, offered no S&M link either, although she echoed what Hanna Qualls had said. “Did Herm mix up women's names? That was the least of it. I think the man had to have sex so much just to avoid having a conversation, because he could never remember my friends' names, my parents' names, where I worked. … One night in January he showed up at my place with a cake, flowers, and champagne for my birthday. My birthday's in September. There were other incidents too in our two years together. He wanted to be caught. Despite how much trouble he went to, to conceal things, another side of him was giving him away every step of the way.

“The thing that gets me now,” she went on, “is that he always made me feel like it was my fault somehow, that I expected too much from him. Maybe I did expect more than he could give, but I didn't expect as much as I deserved. The thing I learned? If you don't expect much you don't get much.”

Yeah, but if you expect too much, you just get disappointed, I thought.

“One other thing,” Susi Bure said as we were wrapping up. “You know the matchbook that was found?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm sure that wasn't Herm's. He didn't smoke.”

So who smoked? I wondered.

Obviously, the killer. How had the matches come to be on Kanengiser's floor? Had they been in the killer's purse, or pocket, and fallen out when the killer took out the handcuffs or the gun? To me, this said that Kanengiser might have no direct connection to Anya's at all. The only connection might be the killer's connection.

8

A
fter our interviews, I stopped off at security to get the elevator tapes from the day of the murder and to find out what, if anything, Pete knew (nothing so far, he told me). While I was waiting in Pete's office for Franco to get the dubs I requested, Kerwin Shutz rushed in, looking red-faced and very agitated. Kerwin always looked red-faced and agitated. Since taking over the eight p.m. talk-show slot, he had used it as a soapbox from which to rail against liberals, atheists, unionists, environmentalists, working mothers, welfare mothers, and single mothers, as well as to plug his book
I'm Right, They're Wrong
and its sequel,
I'm Still Right.

Kerwin slapped something on Pete's desk. It was a bullet.

“Found this on my lawn this morning,” he said. He turned to me, suddenly sweet. “Hello Robin. Sorry to interrupt. I'll just be a moment.”

“I'm busy but I'll be right with you Ker …” Pete said.

“I need a bodyguard!” Kerwin screamed, and stomped out as Franco was coming in.

Kerwin was always claiming that people were shooting at him, and he was most afraid of environmentalists, feminists, and gay activists, or as he referred to them on his show, “tree-huggers, ugly girls, and sissies.” Not the first people I think of when I think of gun-toting nuts. In fact, gun-toting nuts were more likely to agree with Kerwin than to want to shoot him.

“Here,” Franco said, handing me a box of tapes from the commercial elevator, along with a photocopy of a sheet from the sign-out log.

“Thanks,” I said, without looking at him. Those hair-sprouting ears, you know.

Most people disliked talking to Franco because he hardly ever said anything back to you. When he first started at ANN, someone had floated the theory that Franco didn't understand English and was afraid to admit it, but he'd since spoken a couple of times and demonstrated that he understood the language, as long as you didn't use too many big words or non-literal expressions. He was part of the humorless horde. In fact, Louis Levin had put a kind of bounty on Franco, offering two hundred dollars to anyone who could make him laugh in front of witnesses. Tamayo, for one, was doing her level best to win that money. Whenever she ran into Franco, she assailed him with Gomer Pyle jokes she had learned from jarheads stationed at the Yakota base outside Tokyo. It was so bad that now when Franco saw Tamayo, he ran in the opposite direction. That one of our top-ranking Keystone Kops was afraid of a Japanese-American stand-up comic was not very confidence-inspiring.

Also not very confidence-inspiring: the day Hector patrolled the offices, with his typical affected law-enforcement swagger, one thumb hooked into his beltloop, the other hand on his gun, and a Kick Me sign on his back. Until Pete and Franco saw it, which showed you how much respect people had for our Barney Fife.

“These are only the tapes from the commercial elevator. What about the freight elevator?” I asked.

It turned out the other tapes had been sent over to the cop shop without anyone running dubs, so now I had to wait for the cops to dub them for me.

No matter. These were the tapes I was most interested in. They were grainy, black and white, but also time-coded, with hour, minute, and second, which would help match the names in the sign-out book to real people.

Back in my office, I scanned them on fast forward. You couldn't see much when the elevator was full except the tops of people's heads. After I did a quick log of the daytime tapes, I popped in the after-hours tape. Not many people went up and most who did got off on twenty-six or twenty-eight, where there were several accountants' offices. Nothing unusual about that, since it was tax season.

At 9:11:54, a man went up to the twenty-sixth floor. Oblivious to the security camera in the ceiling corner, he picked his nose, examined the result, then wiped it on the elevator wall. Eeuw.

As I was watching this unenlightening tape, Phil the enlightened janitor came by. He took priority in my eyes, so I paused the tape. Every day Phil came in to empty the trash, shoot the shit, and fill me in on the company gossip. An older guy, late sixties, early seventies, who had been in the States for only a few months, he claimed to have spent the last fifteen years working his way around the world as a janitor or handyman. During his life he had had all these near-death close calls, or so he said, starting when he was fifteen (“I looked eighteen”) and served in the British army in North Africa. Rommel's Afrika Korps launched a surprise attack on Phil's unit and when it was over and Rommel had rolled past, Phil got up, looked around, and saw he was the only person still alive. “I felt dead sorry for me mates,” he told me. “But me first thought was, ‘Ha! Rommel, you missed one, you sorry bastard.'” He then made his way back to British lines. Later, he said, he was a fireman in Liverpool and had saved many babies and old women from fires.

Since then, it had been one adventure and close call after another.

I didn't really believe he'd been the only survivor of a ferry sinking in Bangladesh, or that he'd walked away from a small plane crash in the Himalayas, or that a cobra had come up the loo in Calcutta and tried to “bite me bum.” (What a nightmare, huh?) I wanted to believe all his stories, though. They were entertaining and weirdly truthful, and I liked his philosophy. “I'm just too silly to die, I guess,” he always said.

“Glad to see you back, Phil,” I said. “Over that flu?”

“Oh yeah. It's tough on a man me age. Imagine, all the things I survived, to get nailed by a microbe or a virus.”

“Heard anything from the executive suite?” I asked.

Since the recent custodial cutbacks, Phil had been emptying the poobah trash upstairs as well as that of some of the features offices at ANN.

“Madri Michaels is being taken off the air, pushed into a PR job,” he said. “Bianca de Woody is to replace her.”

An allergic reaction to having her lips cosmetically plumped had taken Madri off the air for a while. It took two weeks for the redness and swelling to go down, and in that time Bianca de Woody had made the seven p.m. slot her own. Anchor-woman Madri Michaels was no friend of mine. Still, I felt bad for her, and I felt bad for me. Madri was just a year older than me and she ranked slightly higher in the newsroom food chain.

“Heard anything about this murder on twenty-seven?”

“Spoke to the guy who found the body. A cleaning man. He's pretty shook up about it still,” Phil said.

I'd spoken to the cleaning guy, Dom Lecastro, too, through an interpreter as Mr. Lecastro didn't speak much English. He'd only just started doing the twenty-seventh floor, didn't know anything about Kanengiser, and hadn't seen anything.

“I'm cleaning the north wing on thirty-five tonight,” Phil said on his way out of my office. “All the Xerox rooms are on that side. Should be able to get something for you tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

There was a commotion outside the door, and Tamayo's voice saying, “I'm going. You don't have to push.”

I went out and saw her flanked by two security guards.

“We caught her smoking in a cleaning-supply closet near Sports,” said one of the guards to Jerry, who was shaking his head.

There were few places you could still sneak a smoke at ANN. A couple of people had been caught on video smoking in the stairwells and one of them was fired because it was a third offense.

Okay, take a high-pressure place like a newsroom where people are staring at bad news for hours on end, add job insecurity, big egos, and troubled marriages, then ban smoking so the whole place is having a nic fit. And what do you have? Endless good cheer and camaraderie. You bet.

“I'll look after her,” Jerry said, taking custody. He and Tamayo went into his office.

“Are you nuts!” he shouted at her. I pressed my ear to the glass. I heard him open that big drawer full of résumés.

“See these?” he said. “These are the résumés of all the people who want to replace you. …”

What an asshole.

After Jerry finished chewing her out, Tamayo brought me my mail and my faxes. She was such a startling presence. Maybe it was that shock of white-blond hair atop that semi-Japanese face, or maybe it was just her anarchic personality coming through.

“I can't remember what I did with your phone messages,” she said. “Can I give them to you later?”

“Listen,” I said. “This is really important. If a woman calling herself Maureen Hudson Soparlo, also known as ‘Aunt Maureen' or ‘Aunt Mo,' calls, I'm not here.”

“Ever?”

“Ever. If she calls, I'm out on a story, won't be back until really really late, if at all.”

“Got it,” she said.

“Write it down, okay?”

Tamayo's heart wasn't really in her job—her dream was to be a full-time stand-up comic—and she didn't do a very good job in Special Reports (although she was a crack comic). Often absentminded, she'd wander off in midsentence. She'd take milk from the minifridge in our conference area and forget to close the door. By the time it was discovered, Jerry's liverwurst would be spoiled. She'd lose phone messages and forget to pick up tapes.