Nice Girls Finish Last Read online

  “What happened? I mean . . .” I began to say.

  “I’d rather discuss it in person.”

  “Well, why do you want to talk to me?”

  “Are you up? Can I stop by? I really don’t want to talk about this on the phone,” he said.

  My door is always open to men with warrants and/or badges. Legitimate badges, that is. After getting his badge number and calling him back at Manhattan South to confirm, I told him to come on over.

  I was physically awake but mentally groggy, and had called him back on autopilot. But once I got off the phone, I realized what Ferber had said. He was a homicide cop and he had spoken of Kanengiser in the past tense. That meant Kanengiser was dead. Murdered.

  Because I am a tad self-absorbed, my first thought was entirely selfish: whatever had happened, I wasn’t going to get into trouble for it. My whereabouts all evening long could be attested to by witnesses. After leaving work, I had a meeting with Kerwin Shutz about some vigilante videotape, then drinks with my associate producer Tamayo and my new cameraman Mike. From there I went to my cat’s agent’s office and waited for the Teamsters to bring Louise back from her shoot, which had gone into overtime because of her bad behavior. It’s just the nature of my life that I sleep better at night if I have a good alibi, since this wasn’t the first time I’d had an appointment with someone who later ended up dead. It’s like, my karma or something.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Call it vanity, but because there was a man coming over, I felt I had to fix myself up a bit, get out of the flannel nightshirt and into something respectable, touch up my thick red hair, put on some lipstick. I am not particularly proud of this side of myself, but that’s the way it is.

  Thank God the maid service had been in that day and the place was relatively tidy. The maid service was an important step on my road to maturity. Left to my own devices, my apartment looks like the scene of a thorough Gestapo ransacking, or perhaps a small soccer riot.

  Tidy as my apartment was, it did look like a bookstore’s self-help section had exploded inside it, as I had plastered uplifting, inspirational sayings all over the place. Cut from books, magazines, articles, or comic strips, they were everywhere. My refrigerator exhorted me to THINK POSITIVE! My toothbrush cup preached KEEP THE FAITH, while above my telephone was this from Confucius: TO GO BEYOND IS AS WRONG AS TO FALL SHORT.

  Rather than have to explain this to unexpected company, I took a few of these more conspicuous bromides down.

  A half hour later, Detective Mack Ferber knocked on my door. I was glad I’d preened, because he was good-looking, in a slightly goofy and very appealing way, a bit jowly with droopy brown eyes and curly brown hair. Unfortunately, he looked at least fifteen years younger than me, but I realized he couldn’t possibly be that young and be a full detective.

  “Get you something to drink?” I asked, trying not to sound too Anne Bancroft. “A soft drink, I mean. I know you’re on duty.”

  “No thank you. I’m sorry to have to tell you this way...,” he began, then stopped.

  Ferber apparently wasn’t very good at breaking bad news to people yet. Probably hadn’t been in Homicide long. He sat down on my old blue armchair, perching himself on the edge of the cushion. I shoved a hatbox off the faux-leopard love seat across from him and sat down.

  “Mind if I tape this?” I said, pulling out my microcassette recorder. I always think it’s a good idea to have a record of encounters with authority figures.

  “No ... I guess not.”

  “So what happened to the guy? Is he dead?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I figured, because you’ve been talking about him in the past tense. Gee, that’s too bad. God. What happened?”

  “He was murdered, in his office, sometime between seven p.m., when he made a call to reserve a table at Brasserie Bleu for ten, and ten-thirty p.m. when the body was discovered by a cleaning person.”

  “Wow.”

  “You were the last appointment in his book last night. Did you keep that appointment?”

  “No. That appointment was canceled,” I said, and before he could ask for my alibi, I presented him with the minute-by-minute accounting of my whereabouts that evening, just to get it out of the way.

  “Who canceled the appointment?” he asked.

  “He did. Or his office. I got a message canceling it.”

  “That’s interesting. It seems the night nurse got a call that took her away from the office on a false emergency, and your security people were called away on a false alarm elsewhere in your building. Someone wanted to get Kanengiser alone.”

  “Premeditated,” I said, nodding. “How was he killed?”

  “Shot in the heart.”

  “Poor slob. Damn shame. Seemed like a nice guy too. Did you get the guy who did it? Or the woman who did it?”

  “Not yet,” he said, looking at me strangely. “You’re very calm about this.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “Well, I used to be a crime and justice reporter, a few years ago, and ... I dunno. I’m hard to surprise.”

  Ferber looked at me and smiled. He was starting to grow on me a little, so I crossed my legs, bounced my foot slightly, and reminded myself of my new rule about not dating younger men.

  “Did you know him well?” Ferber asked.

  “No. I’d seen him once about six weeks earlier for maybe ten minutes when my boss beeped me. This was the rescheduled appointment,” I said. “Any idea why he was killed?”

  “Not sure. It was made to look like a robbery. Some files were pulled out, papers scattered on the floor ...”

  “What did he have worth stealing? He told me he bills insurance directly, so he couldn’t have much money around, and it couldn’t be a junkie looking for drugs because Dr. Kanengiser was a gynecologist, and there aren’t too many crazed Ortho-Novum junkies out there.”

  Ferber cleared his throat.

  Before he could say anything, I said, “Of course. He had confidential medical files.”

  Ferber didn’t say anything.

  “Were any files missing?” I said.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “But that’s one theory.”

  “I have several theories. Was there .. . anything in your file someone might have been after?” Ferber asked.

  “I don’t think I even had a file yet,” I said.

  “So, you didn’t know him well.”

  “No. I didn’t know him at all. I spoke to him for maybe ten minutes that first appointment, so ... although, he did mention that he was divorced.”

  “In what context?”

  “He asked me if I was married. I told him I was divorced, and he said he was divorced himself. Have you talked to his ex-wife? That’s where I’d look.”

  “Yes, both his ex-wives,” Ferber said. “One’s in Miami. She’s been there for the last two months. The other one was at the movies with her boyfriend.”

  “You know Kanengiser was really good-looking, don’t you?” I said.

  “You think that had something to do with his murder?”

  “Good-looking guy like that, divorced, shot in the heart? To me, it says jealous ex-lover or jealous husband.”

  Files schmiles. This was a crime of passion. First of all, Kanengiser was shot in the heart, not the head. That, I felt, was significant.

  Second, as I said, Dr. Kanengiser was really good-looking. In fact, if you ask me, he was far too good-looking for his job. The first—and only—time I went to see him, one of the other women in the waiting room said, “Your first time with Dr. Kanengiser? You are in for a treat. Wait until you see those blue eyes. Like Paul Newman’s.”

  Do I care? I thought. The man’s a doctor, not an underwear model. But she was right. He was very good-looking. A gynecological examination is awkward in the best of times, but it’s really awkward, even unnerving, when your gynecologist handsome.

  (I must admit that while I sat in his office soaking up his chiseled beauty, I speculate
d about dating him later. But how weird would it be to go out on a first date with a guy who had already stared into your sex organs with a flashlight?)

  Because of this, a part of me was relieved when Jerry beeped me before Kanerigiser could insert his forearm up me, and even more relieved when my second appointment was canceled. As my friend Dillon Flinder, silver-haired medical correspondent and pansexual adventurer, put it later, “When a guy is that good-looking, it’s a fine line between a gynecological exam and what is known on the street as a good fisting.”

  It was at this point that I realized things could get really ugly, because there’s something inherently salacious about Dr. Kanengiser’s specialty, and I figured I wasn’t the only TV personality to see the guy, as he leased office space in my building. That could give the newspapers and the tabloid TV shows a celeb angle: GYNO TO TV NEWS STARS GUNNED DOWN.

  When I mentioned this to Ferber, he said, “We’ve sealed the patient files. We won’t be telling the news media who his patients were unless one of them becomes a suspect.”

  “That’s wise.”

  “So you weren’t there and you didn’t see anything,” Ferber said, disappointed.

  “I’m sorry. I really wish I could help you. You look so let down.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Yesterday was an unusually bad day, a record homicide day. My partner’s in the hospital, she has to have some tests, and I’ve been working solo since six this morning. ... I think I will have that soft drink.”

  We were bonding. I blew some dust out of a glass and poured him some seltzer. “So what are we up to so far this year, for homicides. We’re over seven hundred, aren’t we?”

  “Last figure I heard was seven hundred seventy-two,” he said.

  “Did they ever catch that ninety-four-year-old man who killed his ninety-two-year-old brother in the Bronx?”

  “No.”

  “The guy is ninety-four and he has arthritis, how far could he go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about the drifter who killed the woman who took him in? Her name was Felice something, she met him in Madison Square Park and it was love at first sight . . .”

  “Yeah, I know that case. Haven’t caught him yet either.”

  “You probably already know this, but there was a very similar case a few years ago, same MO. That victim was also killed with selenium in her coffee.”

  “Yeah, the Freddy the Freeloader case,” Ferber said. “You know your murders.”

  “Well, as I said, I used to be a crime and justice reporter and I’ve had other brushes with murder . . .”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “It’s not that common to meet women who like to talk about murder.”

  He was adorable. With that fresh face, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, which is young for a detective, I think. But then, they seem to get a touch younger every year, which worries me a little. I work in television, and it ages you quickly.

  By now I was feeling more Blanche DuBois than Mrs. Robinson. It was all I could do not to offer him some milk and cookies and ask him if he’d ever seen a grown-up woman naked. I was going to invite him to look at my scrapbooks—I’d kept scrapbooks of unusual murders for years—but I figured he had other places to go and people to see.

  In fact, he had. As soon as he finished his seltzer, he got up and thanked me for my time.

  I walked him to the door and when we exchanged cards I noted he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Man, I was getting bad. When the moon was full, I was like a she-wolf with her nose in the wind. Maybe it was because the only man in months who had come close to touching me in an intimate manner was now dead, shot in the heart in his office.

  “Hope you catch the killer,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. “By the way, you know there’s a guillotine in front of your building?”

  “Guerrilla art. We get a lot of it down here.”

  “Weird,” he said.

  Yeah, that’s what I thought when I saw the guillotine, but now it seemed like the least weird thing about my day. What a day. It had just been one thing after another, culminating with news of the murder of someone I knew oh so slightly. Well, where’s the bright side to murder, smart girl? I asked myself. That’s a toughie, but you know, I found a bright side. At least I wasn’t the one who was dead.

  When I spoke to my friend Claire Thibodeaux later, she found another bright side. I often fall in love during murder cases. I’d never thought of it before, but she was right. I’d met my ex-husband during the murder trial of mobster Lonnie Katz. I’d fallen for my ex-boyfriend Eric, who always insisted on calling himself my “transitional” man, during the Grift” murder case. In fact, shortly after a big murder case in my hometown, when I was a kid, I kissed my first boy.

  I don’t know why that is. My karma, I guess. Anyway, given my record in things romantic, I wasn’t sure falling in love was much of a bright side given the down side, one dead doctor.

  When I finally got back to bed, I lay there for a while, awake, thinking about Kanengiser. Whoever had killed him had planned it in advance, and had had the foresight to get the night nurse out of the office and cancel my appointment. So it was someone who had had access to his office and had seen the appointment book somehow, perhaps on a previous visit. Possibly a jealous husband or lover who had come by to pick up his wife or girlfriend at the office, but more likely a woman, a girlfriend and/or a patient of Dr. Kanengiser, I thought.

  Then I caught myself. It wasn’t any of my business—I barely knew the guy. The cops were on the job. Who did I think I was anyway, Bat Girl? The last thing I needed at the moment was to get mixed up in a messy murder. Sure, it had been fun to chew the fat on old homicides with a young cop. But those days were behind me now. I was a grown-up. In fact, I hadn’t looked through my murder scrapbooks in months, since I had decided that my interest in the subject might be unhealthy and abnormal.

  Curiosity, I remembered, always got me into trouble. It was curiosity that cost me my coveted interview with avant-garde undertaker Max Guffy, which killed my series, “Death in Modern America,” no pun intended. Well, it wasn’t just curiosity. Vodka was also involved. The two, vodka and curiosity, were to be avoided, because, you see, my troublemaking days were over.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a sign of my deep state of denial, combined with temporary post-sleep amnesia, that when I woke up the next morning to the sight of the parchment Desiderata poster on the ceiling above my bed, I had forgotten about Kanengiser.

  “The headlines at this hour: After years of decline, the murder rate is up in New York,” intoned the very serious voice of the announcer on 1010 WINS All-News Radio. “But air pollution levels are down, and the forecast says, rain all day.”

  “Well, there’s a mixed message for you,” I said to Louise Bryant. “My chances of being killed immediately and violently are up, my chances of being killed slowly by lung disease are down, and either way, it’s going to rain all day.”

  Louise didn’t even open her eyes. The cat responds to only two sounds, that of the can opener and that of my singing (any song, as long as the lyrics are her name sung over and over).

  It was raining all right. Through the water-smeared window, the street was a blur of gray people going to work, moving like blobs of mercury on glass, rushing past the guillotine on the sidewalk without even seeing it. What a great day to stay at home and be unconscious, I thought, but I couldn’t call in sick. A bad flu season had eaten up my sick days for the year by February. If I took another day, especially for mental health reasons, it would end up as another black mark on my permanent record.

  “Dr. Herman Kanengiser, gynecologist and member of the District 27 community board, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his midtown office last night. Police say they have no suspects at the moment,” said the guy on WINS.

  Oh yeah, I thought. Dr. Kanengiser.

  I’d been feeling all right, but
being reminded of the murder brought me down. I turned off the news — too depressing — and put on a tape of bouncy, pick-me-up tunes to fortify me as I showered and worked myself back into that excellent state of denial.

  Perhaps my bathroom mirror said it best when it sloganeered: AVOID UNPLEASANTNESS.

  There would, however, be no avoiding the Kanengiser murder. When I got to work, the whole place was buzzing with it. Normally, the murder of a nonfamous doctor would cause barely a ripple in the ANN newsroom. Oh, it might attract some prurient interest and inspire a few sick “dead gynecologist” jokes among the dark-humored newsroom drones, but otherwise no one would notice. When you’re trafficking in news from places like Sarajevo, one dead doctor in New York doesn’t mean much. Life is cheap in Casablanca. Unless of course it happens in your building.

  MURDER ON 27, screamed a poster on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway leading to the newsroom. Democracy Wall is where we post employee news, gossip, jokes, weird letters from fans, and odd but true news stories.

  I skipped the terse bulletin about the murder and scanned the wall instead for news of the executive meetings, rumors about the reshuffle. There was nothing.

  “Did you hear about the murder . . . ,” producer Susan Brave said, coming up beside me at the wall.

  “Can’t talk now,” I said. “I’m late.”

  I was, in fact, running late for a mandatory security meeting that morning.

  “You’ve probably already heard that a doctor on the twenty-seventh floor was shot and killed last night,” Pete Huculak was saying when I walked into the conference room and took a seat in the back next to Dillon Flinder.

  Pete was the security chief for Jackson Broadcasting and its affiliated enterprises, which included ANN and the JBS building itself.

  “I don’t want you to be alarmed. Our security is very good. The security for the commercial floors was pretty relaxed— the tenants wanted it that way so their customers could come and go freely—but something like this couldn’t happen in the broadcast facilities,” Pete said.