What's a Girl Gotta Do (10 page)

After work I went to Keggers for a drink and
watched evening new programs on the bar television. Gil Jerome, who
now had Crime & Justice, did a piece on the circumstances of
the murder. Griff had been found facedown in a pool of his own
blood by the night maid. He’d been struck on the front of the head
repeatedly with the murder weapon. Everything had been wiped for
prints except the inside knob on the bathroom door, which yielded
only Griff’s prints. To make matters worse, the cleaning lady, Mrs.
Jessie Good, had vacuumed the bedroom and disposed of the full
vacuum cleaner bag down a garbage chute in the hallway before going
back in to clean the bathroom, where she found the body. The bag,
compacted with trash from other rooms in the bowels of the Palace,
was probably crammed with fiber evidence, evidence lost
forever.

Griff, Jerome reported, had worked for Boylen
Investigations before breaking away to start his own firm. He was
divorced and his wife lived in Florida. No children. There was no
mention of me by name, although there was no mistaking who the
“red-haired woman seen lurking around” Griff’s hotel room was.
After the report ended, the anchorwoman, Madri Michaels, appeared
on camera to read, in a dispassionate voice, the ANN statement
about me, how I’d been questioned but was not a suspect and how ANN
management stood behind me. Yeah, way behind.

“He says it’s personal,” Claire said. I took
the call.

“I’m worried about you,” he said.

“Don’t be. I’m fine. I’m not a suspect. The
tabloids have it all wrong.”

“Oh, I know you didn’t kill the guy. I know
your M.O., Robin, and you are way too sinister to commit such a
clumsy crime. Maybe if the guy had been killed with a lettuce
spinner or a potato peeler. I use sinister in the sense of the
traditional Latin word sini . . .”

“And . . . ,” I prompted.

“And what?”

“And you know that I am basically a good
person with a conscience who could not kill another person . . .
except in self-defense.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Right,
that too,” he said finally. But he was grinning as he said it. I
could hear him grinning.

“Are you still covering this story?” I
asked.

“Of course. It’s my beat.”

“I’m a witness in this case. Don’t you think
it’s a conflict of interest to be reporting on a story in which
your wife is a witness? Channel 3, where Burke worked, wasn’t known
for its strict adherence to ethics.

“You’re just one witness so where’s the
conflict, realistically? Besides, we’re separated and we parted
amicably.”

Parted amicably?

“Anyway,” he said, completing his three-part
rationalization for staying on this story. “You’re not a
suspect.”

“I wish someone would tell the New York Post
that.”

“Robin,” he said. “It’ll pass. How is ANN
spinning the story?”

“Nobody tells me anything around here,” I
said. “What have you heard about it?”

“I don’t’ know. What do you know?” he asked
defensively. The reporter in him was kicking into full gear and he
was protecting his information while trying to get mine. So was
I.

“Nothing.”

“I don’t’ know anything more than you do,” he
said. “Do you know how ANN is going to cover this?”

I didn’t, but I had wondered about that too,
if they’d put a reporter on it or just do it as an on-cam reader. I
couldn’t cover it, even if Jerry would spring me from Special
Reports, because I was a witness in the case, although what I did
on my own time was my own business and I did have a strong personal
interest in getting to the bottom of it all.

I was supposed to be reading up on sperm, but
instead I clipped out all the stories about the case, to read over
and put into my scrapbook later. There was also a blurb on Amy
Penny in the TV Ticker column of the Post. Amy, reiterating her
aspiration to become a “serious reporter,” was going to do a series
of reports on prenatal diagnostics for her show. Great. She had my
husband. Now she wanted to become a serious reporter. I couldn’t
help feeling that this young, beautiful woman was living the life I
was supposed to be living.

I hid out that day, leaving Special Reports
only to hit the ladies’ room and the cafeteria. Claire thought it
would blow over and in the afternoon, when the calls from other
reporters subsided to a dull murmur, I thought maybe she was right.
I wondered what Griff had on me. Did he know about that night in
Paris? Did he know about my father’s death when I was ten. He had
the story of my mother’s arrest in London. Did he know about the
Sesquin murders? Where were pages two and three? And why me, oh
Lord, why me?

After work I went to Keggers for a drink and
watched evening new programs on the bar television. Gil Jerome, who
now had Crime & Justice, did a piece on the circumstances of
the murder. Griff had been found facedown in a pool of his own
blood by the night maid. He’d been struck on the front of the head
repeatedly with the murder weapon. Everything had been wiped for
prints except the inside knob on the bathroom door, which yielded
only Griff’s prints. To make matters worse, the cleaning lady, Mrs.
Jessie Good, had vacuumed the bedroom and disposed of the full
vacuum cleaner bag down a garbage chute in the hallway before going
back in to clean the bathroom, where she found the body. The bag,
compacted with trash from other rooms in the bowels of the Palace,
was probably crammed with fiber evidence, evidence lost
forever.

Griff, Jerome reported, had worked for Boylen
Investigations before breaking away to start his own firm. He was
divorced and his wife lived in Florida. No children. There was no
mention of me by name, although there was no mistaking who the
“red-haired woman seen lurking around” Griff’s hotel room was.
After the report ended, the anchorwoman, Madri Michaels, appeared
on camera to read, in a dispassionate voice, the ANN statement
about me, how I’d been questioned but was not a suspect and how ANN
management stood behind me. Yeah, way behind.

Chapter Six

“RENEGADE REPORTER MAY HAVE led double life,
says neighbor,” read the headline in the News-Journal the next day.
Between the stuff on my mother, which they’d managed to dig up, and
Mrs. Ramirez’s ramblings about my late-night orgies, I was looking
more and more like a menace to society.

At the moment, I was doing a pretty good
Jackie Onassis impression, my hair hidden under a black wool scarf
wrapped around my head like a skullcap. Oversized dark glasses hid
my eyes and cheekbones. It didn’t help.

When I went to get my papers, I heard a voice
behind me whisper, “That’s her. She killed a guy.” I turned and saw
two adolescent girls waiting for the bus to parochial school. They
were studying me, not with fear but with interest.

The other news was, they found my tire iron
in a dumpster near the service entrance behind the Marfeles. But
what did that mean? Either it was simply taken out with the trash,
like the bartender suggested, or the killer ditched it there after
wiping it clean. There were no fingerprints except for one
partial—mine—no bone fragments, blood, or hair stuck to it, just
refuse from the Marfeles kitchen, eggshells and whipped cream and
cigarette butts and stuff like that.

I was glad I didn’t have to go straight to
ANN. We had an interview scheduled with a white couple who had an
African-American baby after doing business at Empire Semen. Jim and
Ellis, the sound tech and cameraman respectively, were to pick me
up on the corner of Fourteenth and Avenue B at 8:30 A.M. They were
late, but by 8:50 we were headed out of Manhattan over the
Queensborough Bridge and onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Ellis
turned the car radio to a classic rock station, and we listened to
a rockumentary on the blues guitar, an appropriate soundtrack as we
passed over the rusty, brown industrial clutter of the Brooklyn
waterfront. The show broke for a Dentucreme commercial. On a
classic rock station. How depressing.

“How is the house?” I asked.

“It’s coming along,” Ellis said. For the last
year, Ellis and his wife had been restoring a rundown Victorian on
Staten Island. “It’s almost finished. Cami and I are painting it
next weekend with some friends.”

I leaned my head against the window and
looked out at the neighborhoods that straddled the BQE. There were
all these single and two-family homes out there, clustered together
in neighborhoods. Sometimes I forget that New York City isn’t just
the boxy apartment buildings, skyscrapers, tourist traps, and
garbage of Manhattan. Real people with real families live there
too, with backyards and trees, close to grandparents and uncles and
in-laws, in little steamy houses that just then looked so inviting.
Ellis was describing the six-foot round window they’d put in on the
third floor to exploit the morning sun and I thought, I want to
have a husband and restore a Victorian house and have painting
parties. Then he started talking about a carved oak fireplace
mantel Cami had found at an auction in New Jersey, and I fell into
a deep drowse.

When I awoke, we were on the off ramp and he
was talking in a low voice about Cami. “I’m monogamous and couldn’t
be happier with my sex life,” he said to Jim. “I’m sexually
gratified by my wife and proud to say it.”

Oh, I want a sexually gratified man who
boasts about it, I thought.

The Zander Tarsus family insisted on being
interviewed with coats over their heads, despite our promise to
“gauze” their faces and electronically alter their voices. They
didn’t trust us, so they sat on their sofa—a man, a woman, and a
little brown baby—with coats over their heads. Below the shoulder,
they looked just like people, with chests and arms and legs. Above
the shoulder, they were coatheads. It was like an evil haberdashery
experiment run amok.

Zander, who had come to America as a teenager
from some dark Carpathian principality just after the second world
war, was clearly the king in this modest castle, which smelled of
paprika and roses. He was much older than his wife, who spoke with
an indeterminate Old Country accent, and he directed her like a
child and spoke for her while she sat silently, holding the
baby.

Two years before, he told us through his
coat, he’d had prostate trouble and, afraid he would be infertile
after his operation, he had banked some sperm at Empire Semen. The
operation had, in fact, made him “unable to sire children,” as he
put it, so Marina—Mrs. Zander Tarsus—was impregnated with his
stored seed. Or so he thought, until she delivered the
African-American child.

“Look, I don’t care what color people are,”
Tarsus said. “They can be white, black, green—hell, they can be
striped if they want!” He laughed, like he thought this was
original and hilarious. “I don’t care, but people should be with
their own. Their own, you see? This is not my son. This is some
other man’s son. I paid for some other man’s son, a Negro man. I am
expected to pay now and in the future, for some other man’s son!
Where is my son? Where is my own?”

He was very dramatic and impassioned, and
there was a note of deep betrayal in his voice. I felt for him, I
did. I mean, his family line was finished if his sperm couldn’t be
found. There would be no son, no heir. The Coathead Dynasty ended.
But it was extremely prickish of him to speak of his huge
disappointment, his great dishonor, in front of his speechless
wife, whose skin was moist and whose hands were trembling, and
especially in front of the child. It wasn’t the wife’s fault, it
wasn’t the child’s fault, and yet he aimed much of his anger at
them.

“At least you have a child,” I offered,
hoping to elicit a more humane response from the guy.

“I have no child!” he shouted, his arms
waving wildly from beneath his coathead. “I, me, Zander, have no
child! You understand?”

Next to him, his wife pulled the child closer
to her as he raged. I felt a pain in my chest. The baby clung to
her, his head concealed by a tiny blue parka. I looked at Zander to
see if he had noticed his wife’s quiet gesture. It was hard to
tell, with a coat over his head and all, but he didn’t seem to.

I had this powerful urge to take the woman’s
hands and say, “Leave him now and don’t look back. Take your baby
and be a free woman!” But the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. This was still a strange country to her. Single mothers
born and raised in America have a hard enough time of it—what would
it be like for her? Zander Tarsus probably wouldn’t pay child
support for “some other man’s son” and she’d probably be doomed to
living in poverty. So she was better off economically if she stayed
with this old ungrateful control freak. Boy, that made me mad.

I was fuming by the time I got to ANN. “The
guy’s an asshole, Jerry,” I said, as I showed him the relevant
parts of the interview.

“Robin, put yourself in his shoes,” Jerry
said. “I’m trying, Jerry. He’s growing old and he’s afraid of that,
and now he has lost his last best hope for some kind of
immortality, offspring.”

“But the way he treated that baby, the way he
spoke to and about his wife . . .”

“Look, the story isn’t about Zander Tarsus.
It’s about Empire Semen. The only thing we need from Zander Tarsus
is a bite that illustrates the extent of Empire’s alleged
wrongdoing.” He rewound the tape to isolate the bite he thought
best, in which Zander Tarsus recounted his father telling him, the
day he set off for America, that he was going to the U.S. to make a
life not just for himself, but for his children and their children.
It was like an AT&T commercial. I half expected the scene to
cut to Zander holding baby Zog, dialing grandpa Zog in the Old
Country to tell him of the birth. Happy, snappy, sappy music
up.