What's a Girl Gotta Do (7 page)

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 seen 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 slipped 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 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.

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 room. 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.