Revenge of the Cootie Girls Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE ROBIN HUDSON MYSTERIES

  What’s a Girl Gotta Do?

  “Put down the paper right now and go out to buy What’s a Girl Gotta Do.… This is a mystery where you wait on the edge of your seat not for the next murder, but for the next thing that Robin is going to say.… It’s the kind of book you’ll laugh at out loud, or take to work to read around the coffee machine.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “The most uproariously funny murder mystery ever written.” —Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

  Nice Girls Finish Last

  “Witty, irreverent, sometimes bawdy … A rollicking blend of deftly aimed satire and neatly plotted murder mystery.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A hilarious, keenly written romp across the gender divide, downtown Manhattan’s alternative scenes, and the frenetic world of TV news.” —Entertainment Weekly

  Revenge of the Cootie Girls

  “Sexy, irreverent and wacky. Robin Hudson should be Stephanie Plum’s goilfriend.” —Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Top Secret Twenty-One

  The Last Manly Man

  “Offbeat and outrageously funny.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Fast-paced plotting, witty dialogue, fleshed out characters and enough red herrings to distract from the real villains and maintain suspense.” —Newsday

  The Chelsea Girl Murders

  “Quirky characters, tough guy talk, romantic longing and unexpected twists … Hayter [is] writing at the top of her game.” —The Milwaukee Journal

  “What a phenomenally entertaining writer Hayter is.” —The Times (London)

  Revenge of the Cootie Girls

  A Robin Hudson Mystery

  Sparkle Hayter

  To CJW

  and

  The Goils

  Sandi Bill

  Diana Greene

  Marianne Hallett

  “Weird Deirdre” Kirk

  “Right Lisa” Mann

  “Left Lisa” Napoli

  Tamayo Otsuki

  Andrea Peyser

  Kathrine Piper

  Alesia Powell

  Annalee Simpson

  Siv Svendsen

  Eva Valenta

  Lynn “E.” Willis

  and

  my mom, Grace Jacqueline Audrey Bacon Hayter;

  my sister, Sandra Dawn MacIntosh;

  and my niece Jennifer Ann Hayter

  Female friends are the greatest hazard in a working woman’s life, for they cannot be casual.

  —DAWN POWELL, 1944

  Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

  —OSCAR WILDE, “A Few Maxims

  for the Instruction of the Overeducated”

  Readers of NANCY DREW need no assurance that the adventures of resourceful Louise Dana and her irrepressible sister Jean are packed with thrills, excitement, and mystery. Every girl will love these fascinating stories which tell how the DANA GIRLS, like Nancy Drew herself, meet and match the challenge of each strange new mystery.

  —From the inside flap of By the Light of the Study Lamp,

  a Dana Girls mystery by Carolyn Keene,

  Copyright 1938, Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.

  PROLOGUE

  BOY, IT’S HARD to believe now, but not long before the Girls’ Night Out Fiasco, I was complaining about being bored.

  All in all, my job was okay, my cautiously nonmonogamous love life was okay, nobody I knew had been murdered recently, my cat was making decent money as an advertising spokesfeline which I, as her accountant, embezzled freely, and my urge to walk the streets randomly slapping people silly had subsided.

  That’s when the attacks started.

  Most people have panic attacks. Panic was a fairly normal state for me. I had boredom attacks. A voice would sound, You have to do SOMETHING, echoing like Poe’s tell-tale heart. I suppose I was lucky it didn’t say, “If you build it they will come,” or, “Only you can save the dauphin from the English.” Still, this was a voice that disturbed me, and since it didn’t specify exactly what I should do, it sent me all over the place in search of boredom relief.

  Over the course of the next few months, I tried shopping, massages, trendy scenes, drag balls, poetry slams, and sleeping with twenty-five-year-olds. Well, one twenty-five-year-old. But it was all too been-there-done-that. I tried working out my ennui in the employee gym, but, damn, exercise is boring. So repetitive. Everyone had suggestions about how to put the bounce back in my pounce, from bungee jumping to Prozac to magic herbs and candles to Kendo, the art of Japanese swordfighting. Nothing worked for very long.

  Until, that is, I started meddling in the rich and interesting lives of my insane girlfriends. That’s what got me mixed up with my neighbor Sally in the spring, prompted me to take on an intern in the Special Reports unit that fall, and led to the revival of Girls’ Night Out, a semiregular frenzy of female bonding with whichever of my goilfriends was around. One thing leads to another, and another, and another.…

  Girls’ Night Out by definition wasn’t about networking or consciousness raising or art appreciation or sensitive female bonding. It was about laughs, plain and simple. The whole idea was to go all night, being goofy and having fun, to “get silly,” as Phil, my super, had advised me during my ennui. After a hard week doing budgets, managing people, being managed, raising kids, or investing zillions of dollars for clients, it’s fucking Miller time, man.

  In theory, at least. Maybe I was getting old. When I was younger, I’d go all night, from juke joint to juke joint, raising hell all over town. But every year it gets a little harder to do that.

  My name is Robin Jean Hudson and I am the executive producer of the Special Reports unit at the prestigious All News Network, which sounds a lot more high-falutin’ than it actually is. Though we try to do a few classy pieces every year, our bread and butter in Special Reports is UFO abductees, weird cults, crop circles, Satan, and abnormal sexual practices, sometimes all of the above at once.

  Ever since my former boss, Jerry Spurdle, went to Berlin to be the bureau chief and avenge two world wars, I’ve been boss in the unit. As it turns out, I am good at bossing. Who knew? I am divorced, childless, and I live on New York’s Lower East Side—excuse me, East Village—with my cat, Louise Bryant, of Aloof and Fussy Cat Food fame. She is part of their hero-cats ad campaign because she once saved my life, even though she didn’t mean to. She was just pissed because she hadn’t been fed.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the accidents, happy and otherwise, that send one’s life spinning in a completely different direction. If my mother hadn’t disobeyed her father back in 1957 and gone out with my dad in his dad’s Packard to look for Sputnik in the night sky, I wouldn’t even be here. I am very grateful to my mom and dad, and his dad, and the entire Soviet postwar space program, most of the time.

  On top of all the accidents, there are the dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions we make every day that have an impact on the future in ways big, small, minuscule.

  For example, a simple thing like taking French in high school could have radically changed my life. I almost took French in high school, but at the last minute I changed my mind when I saw Doug Gribetz was signing up for Swedish. Since I had been in puppy love with Doug Gribetz since kindergarten, from the first time I looked up over my Lincoln Logs and saw him looking back, I decided to try Swedish as well, though I was too scared to speak to him in any language. After a week, he transferred out of Swedish. French was filled by then, so I stuck Swedish out for the semester, just barely passing. Nothing against our fine Scandinavian brothers and sisters, but Swedish is a language I can’t speak without feeling goofy and cracking up,
so I didn’t learn very much. And I didn’t go back to French until I was thirty and planning a vacation to Paris.

  A little decision like that, and it made such a difference. But it wasn’t just French, or boredom, or my bad-tempered cat, that facilitated the events of the last Girls’ Night Out. There were a lot of twists and turns along the way that contributed. If my boyfriend Chuck hadn’t forbidden me to go to the beach for spring break in 1979, things would have been different. If I hadn’t been so docile with Chuck, I would have gone to the damned beach anyway.

  And maybe I would have had more self-esteem and I wouldn’t have been so docile, so grateful for Chuck’s attention, if it wasn’t for Mary MacCosham and the cooties.

  Damn. That’s a heavy thought. Because of cooties, lives were saved, and lives were lost.

  1

  NORMALLY, I feel a little thrill when I return to New York, which starts as the plane begins its descent into the airport and the little houses and gardens of Long Island and Queens come into view. It picks up steadily on the drive into the city and fully inflates when the skyline of Manhattan suddenly looms over the Calvary Cemetery in Queens. There’s something about that juxtaposition of the gleaming skyline and the vast cemetery that almost always gets me where I live. I don’t know why.

  But that Halloween, the LaGuardia control tower kept my plane circling for over an hour, and after I’d seen the little houses for the twenty-seventh time the thrill was completely gone. The traffic on the ground was even worse, backed up all the way from the goddamned airport. The city/cemetery panorama was frozen in front of me for an hour, and lost its luster in about half that time.

  It took one long, horn-slamming hour just to get to the midtown tunnel, and another forty-five minutes to get through it. By the time we got to the Manhattan side my cab driver, who had painfully observed the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s new politeness guidelines when I got into the car, was banging his fist on the steering wheel and swearing like a longshoreman’s parrot. I don’t mean to throw stones, because I’ve employed the odd cussword or two when the occasion demanded it. In New York, cussing serves a healthy purpose, often venting and/or replacing anger. Better a sturdy Anglo-Saxon expletive that has stood the test of time than a punch in the nose, I always say.

  But cussing wasn’t helping this guy one bit.

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to calm him down.

  “No, it’s not okay,” he said. “I have a curse on me!”

  Why this curse was put upon him I never learned—he kept breaking off into his native language—but I did gather that an enemy had cursed him. And what a curse. Because of it, his face was changing into someone else’s, his penis was receding into his body, and he couldn’t seem to escape bad traffic.

  Right, gotta go now, the microchip in my buttocks is beeping, I thought, but didn’t say, though I generally believe one good insane comment deserves another.

  Instead I said, “Everything will work out,” because I was trying to be more mature and nurturing and all that, now that I was a semirespectable executive.

  That’s when he flipped.

  “It will work out? I have a curse on me! How can it work out? I’VE HAD IT! This is the last straw!” he screamed. He threw his door open and took off running.

  I sat there in the back seat, thinking he’d come back, you know. The guy picked a jim-dandy time to have a nervous breakdown. This crazy cabbie was even worse than the one who believed Korean greengrocers were involved in a conspiracy to spread rumors that he was homosexual.

  Cars were honking behind me. For a split second there, I wanted to bolt screaming from the cab myself. But, no, I told myself, calm down. You’re a problem-solving grownup. This obstacle can be overcome. I called the cab company on my handy cellular telephone.

  The line was busy.

  What choice did I have? Schlep my two big suitcases a mile to and from the subway? Not after the day I’d had. Find another cab? Ha! I had a better chance of finding Bob Dole in a Lollapalooza mosh pit than another free cab in a Manhattan traffic jam.

  So, despite a longtime driving phobia, I got behind the wheel and I headed home, wondering, What else could possibly go wrong today?

  You’d think, after everything I’d been through, I’d know the answer to that one, seeing as my life is ruled by only one immutable law: Murphy’s.

  The funny thing is, if I had been thinking with my genitalia instead of with my brain, I wouldn’t have taken the cab from hell. At the airport, a nice-looking man offered to share his cab with me, but out of the corner of my eye I saw another cab coming up so I declined, thinking I’d save time and energy by taking my own cab. Instead of going back to Manhattan with a handsome and chivalrous companion, I rode back with a man under a curse who then deserted me in the trenches.

  I would have thought it was some kind of sign or omen, except I no longer believed in that crap.

  If you’ve ever driven in Manhattan you know what a rough ride it can be. There are no rigid traffic lanes, and traffic laws are considered to be optimistic suggestions rather than anything actually enforceable. You never know when the guy in the far-right lane next to you will abruptly decide to make a left-hand turn, or when someone will dart across the middle of the street. Pedestrians routinely cross against lights, leisurely taking their time even when they see a car coming. Most of the time, the cars don’t even slow down, they just honk and trust the pedestrians will scatter in time. On my way home, I almost mowed over a blind woman and a man wheeling a shiny steel hot-dog wagon down the street.

  Thank God other cabbies, seeing me struggling, let me cut in, and I was able to get to some clear space on Second Avenue. But, man, were my nerves were jangled when I finally pulled up to my apartment building on East 10th street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—excuse me, East Village. I felt real empathy for the AWOL cabbie.

  After I unloaded my bags from the trunk and dragged them to the steps of my building, I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. As a rule, I like to get in and out of my building quickly to avoid my ancient neighbor Mrs. Ramirez, who is always trying to provoke me into a fistfight. Due to a fairly strong societal taboo against elder abuse, I try my damnedest to avoid her. But, luckily, she was in Puerto Rico visiting her even more ancient mother, so I had the luxury of lingering on my stoop.

  There is something calming about my street at this time of day. It was the blue hour, the hour after the sun sets and the sky begins to darken. There was just enough light left to illuminate the deep color of the sky and give the air around me a grainy texture and a blue tinge. The windows seemed milky and people on the street were starting to darken into silhouettes.

  The days were getting shorter, but it was also unseasonably warm and humid for the end of October. We’d been having freak weather in New York for a couple, maybe three years. This, according to my neighbor Sally, was one of the signs of the coming apocalypse, though the people out on the street didn’t seem to see anything ominous in the warm weather. There were a lot of people outside enjoying it, sitting on their stoops, yakking, playing music. Two men sat in folding chairs and watched a black-and-white television set on the hood of a low-slung car. The TV was tethered to a tenement apartment on the second floor by a series of extension cords.

  Above them, a woman hung her head out a window and hollered for her kid, Ronnie. In the distance, another mother called her kids. It was dinnertime, and the mothers were calling their children in, like we were in some small town, not on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My sometime boyfriend Mike once said it reminded him of Pakistan, where muezzins in different mosques sing the evening call to prayer, first one, then another, then another, their overlapping songs echoing throughout the hills.

  In about an hour the kids would all be out on the street again, extorting candy from people and doing God knows what, and the small-town resemblance would end. When I was their age, kids used to toilet-paper houses and go on undercover garden-gnome-switching operations on Hallowe
en. But, then, unlike a lot of kids in my neighborhood, kids in my day didn’t have guns, so our entertainment options were more limited. And we didn’t get as much candy.

  “Welcome back, luv,” said my super, Phil, going out as I was going in. “’Ow was your trip?”

  “Great until today,” I said, giving him the highlights. Even before the cursed cabbie, it had been a pretty shitty day. I’d been on the West Coast on business for my network and for Womedia, a women’s service organization I had joined. I had to fly back via Denver, transferring planes, the second of which aborted its first takeoff because of an air-pressure problem, which was finally fixed with, according to passenger rumor, a piece of stick and duct tape. There was a crying baby on the flight from Denver, and the guy next to me complained about it in a stage whisper through clenched teeth the whole time. “Why doesn’t she shut him up?” he said about 150 times, and, “They shouldn’t allow babies on passenger planes.” I almost asked him how they were supposed to fly—in little carriers with the dogs and cats in freight? Crying babies don’t annoy me for some reason, but guys who complain about them drive me up a wall.

  “Well, at least your day ’asn’t been boring,” Phil said. “I ’ear you saw your ex-’usband and ’is fiancee in L.A.”

  “Where did you ’ear that?” I said, imitating his working-class English accent.

  “I hhhheard it on E! this afternoon,” he said.

  That’s the problem with having a famous ex with a famous fiancée. Someone sees you with them at Spago and the next thing you know it’s on the airwaves.

  And what a great decision that was, staying an extra night in Los Angeles to have dinner with my ex and his beautiful fiancee, whom I liked, of course, because who wouldn’t like an amusing, pretty, charming, and age-appropriate woman, and with her own career as an independent filmmaker to boot. Naturally, I was thrilled that Burke, my ex, was marrying this gem, and not, say, some semiliterate dullard in itchy clothes.