Goodnight Nobody (7 page)

I got home at five past eleven, which gave me fifteen minutes to debrief with Janie, fifteen minutes for research, and ten minutes to get myself to the Red Wheel Barrow for the eleven forty-five pickup.

Typing "Laura Lynn Baird" and "Good Mother" and "book deal" into my favorite search engine caused it to spit out a dozen stories. Laura Lynn had, indeed, landed a deal "said to be well into the seven figures" for a collection of essays on motherhood previously published in
Content,
plus "additional original material." All the articles got all three of her names right, and a few of them even resurrected the scandal of her father's death, but I couldn't find any mention of Kitty Cavanaugh or any cowriter, ghostwriter, or other assistance, anywhere. I jotted down the name of the agent and the editor, Googled their phone numbers, and glanced at the clock: 11:28. My fingers hovered over the telephone.
Screw it,
I thought, and dialed.

Dafna Herzog, Laura Lynn's literary agent, had a raucous laugh that she used midway through my spiel about how I was a neighbor of Kitty Cavanaugh's and that I'd recently spoken to Laura Lynn Baird. "Oh, God," she said, and chuckled ruefully. "My new favorite client."

"I don't mean to pry."

"Pry away," she said, and kept laughing. "I've gotten about twenty calls from reporters already this morning. The dead ghostwriter. What a story!"

"So you knew about Kitty?"

"Let's put it this way. I made an educated guess that Laura had assistance for those
Content
pieces. She's a hell of an advocate--you know?--and of course she's great on TV, but when it comes to putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard..." She chuckled again. "She can do sound bites, but not paragraphs or chapters, God forbid."

"No talent?" I ventured.

"No time," Dafna said. "So I figured there was someone, but I didn't know for sure until I saw it in the
Times.
"

"Laura never told you she'd be working with another writer."

"I guess that was kind of an unspoken assumption on my part," Dafna said. "Which is to say, I didn't ask, she didn't tell."

"And in terms of the financial situation..." I paused, but Dafna outwaited me. Finally I asked, "How much was her advance, exactly?"

"Seven figures, with bonuses," Dafna said. "That's as specific as I'll get."

Fair enough. "Laura Lynn told me that she and Kitty were going to split the money."

"That," said Dafna, "would have been between Laura Lynn Baird and your friend. The deal I negotiated was only for Laura."

Deal only for Laura,
I wrote. "You know, I think your client lied to me," I said.

Dafna practically exploded in laughter. "Well, mazel tov! You just lost your virginity!" she chuckled. "Listen, Laura Lynn was--is--a writer. At least, she'd like to be one. Writers lie. They embroider. They dissemble. Not to put too fine a point on it, they make things up. And what was Laura Lynn going to tell you? I'm a greedy monster who was going to keep it all? Poor thing," she spluttered, "now she's really on the hook. She'll probably have to set up a college fund for the ghostwriter's kids. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Eleven thirty-two. I decided to go for it. "Do you think Laura Lynn Baird could have killed Kitty?"

I braced myself for another hailstorm of laughter. It didn't come. "For the money, you mean?" Dafna asked. "If she thought that Kitty was going to sue her, or expose her somehow? I guess I'd say that people have killed each other for a lot less money than what we were talking about." She paused. "Boy, wouldn't that be some story?"

"Some story," I repeated. "So what happens to the book now?"

"Hard to say. Now that it turns out Laura didn't technically write those pieces by herself, your dead lady's going to get author credit for sure. It'll build interest. Given the--uh--recent events. Anyhow," she concluded, "call back if there's anything else you need." Click.

It was eleven thirty-four. Information gave me the switchboard for
Content,
and the receptionist put me through to Joel Asch's office. "What is this regarding?" she asked dubiously, after I'd introduced myself as Kate Klein from Upchurch, Connecticut.

"Kitty Cavanaugh. She was a friend of mine." I paused, considering, and decided,
What the hell.
"I was the one who found the...who found her. Her body."

"And, so...what is this regarding?"

Good question.
"Well, I know she wrote for
Content,
and that Joel was the one who hired her..." I paused.

"Yes," said the woman on the other end of the line. Her voice sharpened. "But what is this regarding? What do you want?"

"Just to talk to him," I said limply. "To talk to him about Kitty."

"I'll give him the message."

"Thanks," I said, reciting my name and my telephone number. Eleven thirty-seven. I set the phone down and sprinted to the minivan. If I was late again, I was going to get another lecture and another ten-dollar-per-child fine from the school's director, Mrs. Dietl, who had the curling gray hair and warm blue eyes of a cookie-box grandma and the heart and soul of an ATM machine.

Suspect,
I thought, zipping out of the driveway and narrowly missing the mailbox, picturing Laura Lynn's corded neck and skinny fingers strangling a can of Diet Coke. I had an honest-to-God suspect.

I pulled out of Liberty Lane, onto Main Street, zipping over a pile of pulpy gray and crimson that had formerly been a squirrel. "Frankie and Johnnie were lovers. Oh, Lordy, how they did love," I sang. "They swore to be true to each other. Just as true as the stars above. He was her man, but he done her wrong." I didn't realize how loudly I'd been singing, or how wide my mouth must have been open, until I whizzed past a police car parked at the corner of Folly Farm Way and noticed the pink-faced officer staring at me. Oops. I shut my mouth and picked up my cell phone, which had started beeping insistently. One missed call. I hadn't heard it ring, but that was no surprise. Upchurch cell phone reception was notoriously crappy, because the town fathers and mothers had refused to permit a tower anywhere near their quaint little country paradise. I punched in the numbers for voice mail and felt my hands tighten on the wheel in a death grip as I heard my name. "Kate," said a voice I hadn't heard in seven years. There was a burst of static, loud noises in the background. "...it's Evan McKenna. We need to talk."

Eight

Janie and I didn't get hired by
People
magazine, but thanks to Janie's persistence, my good grades, and, I suspect, the eventual behind-the-scenes machinations of Sy Segal, we landed jobs as copy editors/ wannabe reporters at
New York Night,
a weekly magazine just shy of being a tabloid whose bread and butter--or gin and tonic--were the drug- and alcohol-fueled antics of young celebrities. Not that we ever got to meet any of these young celebrities, although if Sy had been less insistent on the matter of her employment, Janie could have partied with them all night instead of working all day.

We'd sit at a pair of battered desks with cigarette burns on the tops and mousetraps underneath. Our job was ensuring that the reporters spelled the stars' names correctly and got the histories of their addictions in the right order. "Charlie Sheen!" a reporter on deadline would shout, and it would be up to one of us to come up with the actor's correct age and place of birth, the titles, costars, and grosses (foreign and domestic) of his last three movies and/or television shows, and, most important for
New York Night
's purposes, who he'd been dating, what he'd been taking, and where he'd gone to kick it.

After a few months at the job, we each developed our own reliable sources. Janie had a quasi-phone-sexual relationship with a janitor at an exclusive rehab in Minnesota: she called him Loverboy, checked in with him at lunchtime every day, sent him expensive boxes of chocolates and promised him they'd spend eternity together as soon as her divorce went through.

I didn't have Janie's flair as a writer, or her easy way of cajoling hard-nosed publicists to give up the dirt. I had Mary Elizabeth. She'd been one of the most abusive--not to mention inebriated--of my Pimm classmates. Sophomore year she'd put a maxi pad on my seat in geometry class and let me go around for the rest of the day with it taped to my butt. The year before, she'd told me that Todd Avery at Collegiate had asked for my phone number, and I'd spent a month without straying more than six feet from the telephone as I waited for his call. Two months shy of graduation, she'd gotten expelled for the one-two punch of spiking the girls' basketball team's water bottles with Finlandia and performing unmentionable acts with one of the gym teachers in the broom closet. Mary Elizabeth had eventually gotten it together enough to get a GED, but she'd flunked out of Wesleyan, been asked to leave Penn, and burned through her trust fund before she turned twenty-three, at which point she'd eloped with one of the cloggers from the touring company of Lord of the Dance. At twenty-eight she'd come to her senses and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. The week I'd started at
New York Night,
she'd called me out of the blue, per step nine (making direct amends to those she had harmed). Sensing a shot at a byline, I'd shamed her into calling me each week to confirm details of famous people she'd seen at spas and rehab clinics she frequented.

Our boss was a woman named Polly, who wore glasses thick enough to stop bullets and seemed to live in the newsroom. She was there when we arrived in the morning. She was there when we left at night. Not only had we never seen her leave the building, we'd never seen her in the bathroom either. Janie and I had long discussions about this with Sandra, the mealworm-pale book critic who took great joy in pronouncing any book where the girl got the guy "ridiculous." Sandra had choppy brown hair that looked like she cut it with toenail clippers, an MFA from a prestigious university, and a five-hundred-page manuscript, which, presumably, did not include a happy ending, reposing in a shoebox underneath her bed, beneath letters from the thirty-six literary agents who'd rejected it. The three of us finally agreed that the less we thought about our boss's excretory habits, the better.

Polly's boss, the managing editor, was a man named Mark Perrault, who was notable only because once a month or so, when the layout guys had caused him to miss deadline again, he'd emerge from his office and attempt to throw his chair across the photographers' desks. Unfortunately, Mark, while not technically a little person, was barely five feet tall and probably weighed less than the chair did. He'd wrestle the chair up to chest level, all the while spluttering "How much
longer
am I going to have to put
up
with this
goddamn fucking incompetence,
" lurch forward a few steps, and then, with a tremendous, whistling
"Argh!"
fling the chair a disappointing foot or two in front of him, while Janie and I would huddle by the vending machine, shaking with silent laughter.

"You know what we should do now?" Janie asked one night, over the hot fudge sundaes at Serendipity 3 she'd insisted on to celebrate her father's most recent divorce.

"What?"

"Move!"

I raised my eyebrows. "Don't you already have a place?" Janie, as I knew perfectly well, lived in her own suite in her father's Park Avenue apartment, an eighteen-room palace with its own elevator that had been photographed for
Metropolitan Home.

"Oh, come on," she said. "We can't live with our fathers forever!"

"I think you living with your father is a little different from what I've got going on."

"Nevertheless," said Janie, pulling a copy of the
Village Voice
from a handbag that had cost several baby alligators their lives. "Look, a two-bedroom in Murray Hill for eighteen hundred a month! We can totally afford that!" She circled it in lip liner, then squinted at the page. "Where's Murray Hill?" Her eyes widened in alarm. "It isn't Brooklyn, is it?"

I struggled for a reference point she'd understand. "It's sort of near Grand Central Station."

"Great! Let's go see it!" She whipped out her cell phone.

"Well, first we have to see if it's even still available, and then we have to make an appointment--"

Janie held up her hand for silence. "Yes, hello, to whom am I speaking? Achmed? Achmed, this is Janie Segal of the carpet Segals."

I shook my head, even though I knew resistance was futile. In the months since we'd met at the
Review,
I'd become Janie's plus-one at all of the fabulous functions she attended. During six months of black-tie bashes at the city's museums and concert halls, and drinks afterwards at bars and nightclubs all over town, she'd never once made me feel like the fat, frumpy sidekick she kept around as a kind of human moat between herself and the guys who were forever asking her if she wanted a beer or wanted to dance or would mind giving them her number. We had fun together, whether we were buying five-dollar earrings at the flea market on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street or dining on braised veal cheeks at a fund-raiser at the Museum of Modern Art, and then singing karaoke in Chinatown afterwards, still wearing our gowns.

Janie finished with Achmed and hung up the phone triumphantly. "We can see it Saturday afternoon!"

I licked my spoon clean and set it on my napkin. "I've actually got plans."

She put down her phone. "Do you have a date?" she asked. "Can I come?"

I stared at her. "Can you come?" I repeated.

"I could pretend to be your sobriety counselor!"

"Janie..."

She pushed aside the melted remains of her nine-dollar sundae. "And when they bring the wine list, I'll be like, 'Oh, no, we won't be needing that!' And I'll say how you really aren't even supposed to be dating, but that your therapist gave you a special dispensation. And then--"

"Janie!" I held up both hands. "No, you cannot come on my date and pretend to be my sobriety counselor." I paused to take a breath. "I don't actually have a date."

"Oh. So what are you doing on Saturday?"

"I'm..." Oof. It was going to sound pathetic out loud, but I plunged ahead anyhow. "I'm going to rent a movie and order Chinese food and help my father pay his bills."

"Oh," said Janie. "Well. That sounds nice." I saw her expression become wistful, and knew that unless I moved quickly to stop it, she'd break into "All By Myself."

"Do you want to come?"

Janie leaned forward eagerly. "Could I?"

"Well, sure."

"And on Sunday we'll pack!"

"We should probably find a place first..."

"Oh, right, right," she said, writing the words "wear comfortable shoes" in the margin of the
Voice.
She tapped her lip liner pencil on the page, considered, then wrote "buy comfortable shoes."

"I'll lend you some sneakers," I said. The next week, we'd both fallen in love with a big two-bedroom apartment in the West Village--"On Jane Street!" Janie said. "So it's, like, meant to be!" It had a bath and a half and a dishwasher, a kitchen big enough for two people to stand in, eastern exposures, and oversized windows that flooded the space with light.

We moved in on a sunny Saturday morning in April, the first warm day of spring. I'd packed my boxes and labeled them Kitchen, Bathroom, Bedroom, and Books. Janie had followed my example, begging free boxes from the local liquor store, and even packing and labeling them herself. The three stacked at our building's front door read Cosmetics, Wrapping Paper, and Bracelets. Not perfect, but it was a start.

We lugged the boxes into the elevator, down the hall, and into our new digs. Janie had brought along a CD of Abba's greatest hits. She plugged in my boom box, popped in the Abba, and blared it loud enough for the whole building to enjoy.

I'd gotten almost all of my things into my little room in half a dozen trips, so I was helping the movers drag Janie's boxes off the sidewalk, while Janie, outfitted in specially purchased overalls, work boots, and a T-shirt that read "You Wish," stationed herself in the kitchen. From there she could keep an eye on the movers unpacking her china for eighteen, wait for 1-800-Mattress, and supervise the installation of the all-new stainless steel appliances she'd ordered, even though we were only renting and Janie had freely confessed that she knew how to cook only microwave popcorn and toast with melted Emmentaler cheese on top.

It was a perfect afternoon. The sky was blue, and the sliver of the Hudson I could see between the buildings was sparkling. It looked like everyone in New York City, or at least everyone in the Village, was out and about, carrying balloons, pushing babies, licking ice cream cones, and many of them felt compelled to comment on our stuff.

"Moving day!" a dozen of them had said. Or, "Howdy, neighbor!" Or, "Don't hurt yourself with that," as I struggled to lift a box Janie had labeled Other Boxes and thought to myself that telling someone not to hurt herself was not even close to offering to help her. By five o'clock that afternoon I'd vowed that the next person to say something stupid was going to get a piece of my mind. So when a deep male voice remarked, "Are you moving into four-B?" into my ear, I straightened my aching back and said, without turning around to look at who that voice belonged to, "No. I'm actually committing the crime of the century. Don't tell anyone, okay?"

"Your secret is safe with me," the voice promised. "In fact, I've got a guy on Eleventh Avenue who can move this stuff for us. We'll split the profits and run off to A.C."

"A.C.?" I asked.

"Atlantic City, baby," the man said.

I put my hands against the small of my back and turned around, smiling in spite of myself at the thought of hightailing it down to New Jersey. The man smiling back at me was tall, with close-cropped dark curls, flashing green eyes, and a cleft in his chin. "They'll never find us," he promised. I felt my face flush as he knelt down and started flipping through the compact discs in one of the milk crates I'd scavenged from my former bedroom. He plucked out a copy of Billie Holiday's
Commodore Master Takes,
then one of
The Essential Ida Cox.
"Are these yours?"

I nodded. Then I cleared my throat. "Yes."

He looked at me closely. "You got
Blues for Rampart Street
?"

I nodded again. "I've got everything," I said, wishing I'd found time to put together an ensemble like Janie's, instead of wearing an old Spoleto Festival T-shirt and my least-flattering jeans.

"You like the blues."

"I like girl singers," I said. "All those sad old songs..." My voice trailed off while he flipped rapidly through my CDs and whistled in appreciation before plucking one and brandishing it at me. My heart sank as I saw Debbie Gibson's face staring back at me.

"Electric Youth?"
he asked.

"It was the eighties!" I protested.

He shook his head and hefted the crate under his arm.

"Come on, I'll help you."

I picked up Janie's box of boxes and followed him onto the elevator. He had strong shoulders, sinewy forearms, and a pale strip of milky skin under his hairline, like he'd just had his hair cut.

I hit the button for the fourth floor. "Hey, we're neighbors," he said. His smile widened. He was looking at me like he'd known me my whole life...or, I thought, feeling my cheeks heat up again, like he'd already seen me naked, and liked what he'd seen.

Oh, God.
I raised my eyes, studying the lit numbers far too intently as he started whistling "Wild Women Don't Get the Blues." I imagined hitting the emergency stop button and how, once the elevator stopped moving, the lights would somehow magically dim, and my neighbor would reach for me, his fingers just skimming my shirt. "Come here," he would say, in his deep voice, in a tone that wouldn't permit refusal, and I'd step into his arms, and I'd press my face to his chest, inhaling the sweet scent of his skin as he slid his hands down my back while nibbling at the side of my neck, saying...

"Hey."

I blinked, shook my head, and found the elevator doors open and the handsome guy staring at me. "It's our stop."

"Oh, yeah! Right! Four-B, that's us!" At the apartment door we both reached for the doorknob at the same time. I almost fell into the foyer and Janie's antique iron headboard.

"So what's your name?" he asked.

"It's Kate." I swallowed hard. My throat felt dusty, and I'd apparently forgotten the rest of my name.