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We were interrupted by Leisure Suit, who waved his arms apoplectically and ordered Jim Mulvaney to a mob slaying. “Just came over the scanner! Better get there before the News!”

  The fearless cop reporter, stained plaid shirt blowing in a self-made breeze, stomped out the door.

  Leisure Suit sauntered back to my desk, carrying a wet tuna fish sandwich that left a leaky trail behind him.

  “Nice breakfast,” I said. “Better than clams.”

  “Fischkin!” Leisure Suit said, shaking his Coke can in the air. “Mulvaney needs help!”

  Why did I think I would hear those words again?

  “He's with Homicide. You, do the neighborhood.”

  Little Italy came to mind. It would be a long drive. But I was free. Free, free, free at last from the suburbs. Free from Leisure Suit and the wet sandwiches and imported clams of suburbia. I could smell the espresso and cannoli already. And I was still on my tryout.

  “I'll call you when I get to the city.”

  “City?” Leisure Suit asked, pushing another piece of sandwich into his mouth. “What city?”

  “New Yawk,” I said. “Gotham. The Big Apple. Crossroads of the World.” Why would the mob murder anyone on Long Island? And why would the Daily News cover it?

  Mayonnaise dripped on my desk.

  “Uh, we don't cover New York.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “What for?” the editor asked back. He was genuinely puzzled. “I try to go there as seldom as possible,” he added.

  Forty minutes later I found myself covering, if that is the word, a tree-lined street in Huntington, Long Island. Nobody was home at the dead man's house. Nobody was home at any house on the entire street. Maybe the whole neighborhood was a Mafia front.

  Still, I couldn't go back empty-handed. When in doubt, commit a small crime. I opened the dead man's mailbox, took out his letters, and copied down all the return addresses, then put them back. It wouldn't do any good. But on a tryout you had to, at the least, look like you were trying.

  As I drove off I wondered where Huntington's real darker side could be. It had to have one. A small sign said “Police,” and I followed it to a cop shack, a dilapidated outpost with peeling red paint.

  “Got anything about the mob?” I asked the freckled officer.

  “Nope,” he said, peering down my shirt.

  For now, I guessed, this was as dark as it got.

  Back in the Gloomroom, I gave Leisure Suit the list from the mailbox. If only the key to this guy's hit was in his Long Island Lighting Company bill.

  The editor put his hand on his cheek and opened his mouth, as if he could turn any more cartoonish.

  “How'd you get this?”

  “I opened the mailbox, took out the letters, and copied the stuff down.”

  “You committed a federal crime?”

  “Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?”

  Actually, I'd thought it was a misdemeanor.

  He nodded. “Fischkin, I like you.”

  I looked up and saw Mulvaney listening in.

  “Nice shirt,” I said. “New plaid?”

  He gave me a midnight blue stare. “Did ya talk to any cops?”

  “Nah, I saw one in the shack but he didn't know anything.”

  “You didn't ask him anything?”

  “Such as . . . ?”

  I didn't like the turn this conversation had taken. This man Mulvaney had a look of pathological competitiveness on his face that was worse than anything I had seen in Albany. Mulvaney moaned audibly, too audibly. He slapped his hand to his head.

  “Did ya even get his name?”

  “No,” I said. This man wouldn't merely lead you to a dangerous ski trail. He'd do that, then leave you there to die.

  “Why not?”

  “Mulvaney, that cop was Andy of Mayberry. On a good day. Today he might've been Barney.”

  “What's that mean?”

  I couldn't believe that a human being could wear multiple coffee-stained plaid shirts and ask such a question. “Barney Fife!” I said, hoping to illuminate him.

  His face turned red. “No! No! No! Don't you get anything?” His eyes went beyond midnight. “Those cops, they all know something. He just figured you're a rookie and he was putting one over on you.”

  “Mulvaney,” I said. “That's your name, right? I am not a rookie. I covered the guy who's going to be the governor.” I waved my hand and it knocked Leisure Suit's empty Coke can on the floor.

  “Governor schmovernor. You're a rookie. Nobody in Albany ever taught ya that ya don't talk to a cop without at least getting his name?”

  “I didn't need his name.”

  “Let's try this again.” He pointed his finger in my face. “I assume ya can read, right? All ya gotta do is read the little tag on his shirt right up there. Name. Got it?” His finger had progressed to a spot in the air a sliver above my left breast. The more excited he got, the closer his finger came.

  I guessed what would happen a second before it did.

  “Ow,” I said as he poked my chest. He pulled back but it was too late.

  At least now I could identify what was in front of me: an Irishman trying to flirt. We were in the preliminaries.

  “Hey, Mulvaney, didja go to Catholic school?”

  He stopped. “Yeah, why you ask?”

  “The nuns teach you to feel up girls that way?”

  Leisure Suit picked his Coke can off the floor and cracked a grin.

  “Huh?” Mulvaney said, blushing.

  “Poke and withdraw . . . Vatican II? Right?”

  A few of the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger joined to watch the festivities. More of this and they might finally be able to write their own dirty book.

  “I coulda gotten something outta that cop easy,” Mulvaney said. His voice cracked.

  “Yeah, that's you. The soul of experience.”

  “Yeah, at least I know the basics of reporting. At least I can find a church in Brooklyn.”

  “Huh?”

  “Brooklyn, it's the Borough of Churches. You don't even know that?”

  His type usually claimed it was “a Jew in the Bronx” you couldn't find.

  “Mulvaney,” I shouted, “you're an asshole.”

  “I may be an asshole. But that's not the question of the moment. The question of the moment is . . .”

  This was a man who would leave you to die on the trail and then tell everyone what a great skier he was.

  He raised his voice louder than mine. “The question of the moment is: ‘How could you be so stupid?'”

  My face burned. Leisure Suit slapped his knee.

  I stared at Mulvaney, unable to speak. He was not going to ruin my chance to be a Newsday reporter, even if it was the last thing I wanted to be.

  I went back to my desk. I sat down. I picked up the phone, put it down. I picked it up again, called the precinct and described the cop. I got his name, called the shack. “I'm new here,” I said.

  “I remember you,” the cop replied. We chatted.

  At Mulvaney's desk, I slammed down a piece of paper. The Styrofoam cup that held his coffee vibrated. “This is the cop's name,” I said.

  “What?”

  “This is his home phone number. His favorite color is blue. His mother's maiden name is, incredibly, Crook—and I will never speak to you again for as long as I live, unless, God forbid, I have to dump you notes to make up for your generally marginal reporting.”

  “Huh?”

  “Fuck the notes, I'll quit first,” I said.

  The Short Paperboy

  A TRUE-TRUE NEVER-PUBLISHED STORY

  The Paperboy rode his bike through Jamaica Estates, a lush, distant neighborhood of brick mansions shaded by mature oaks. He flung his product with precision, as he did every afternoon, careful not to hit any of his customers, particularly Mario Cuomo, a famous lawyer who people said might be governor someday.

  The Paperboy never stopped his work to talk to anyone. But
the Taller Boy who appeared, suddenly, on his own bike begged to chat with the Paperboy.

  He'd heard that the Paperboy was the best in Queens.

  “Wish I could learn,” the Taller Boy said.

  The Paperboy puffed his chest. Only his father, the Real Mulvaney, puffed better. He invited the Taller Boy to follow him to each house on his route and he did.

  The next afternoon, the Paperboy delivered his papers alone again, but was amazed by how much he missed the Taller Boy. He wished he had asked him his name.

  Later he pedaled back through Jamaica Estates for his weekly collections and imagined the clanging of new change.

  His customers, though, were surprised to see him, since all of them had paid for their newspapers earlier.

  “Your tall friend,” they explained. “He said you got sick.”

  How, the Paperboy wondered, could he have been so stupid?

  • •

  Mulvaney's eyes glare a sharp blue. “Go ahead,” he warns. He is crumpling sheets of paper with ferocity. “Just go ahead. Then everyone will know what a bitch you really are.”

  After reflecting on our romance and its history, I have considered writing something other than a book. An affidavit, perhaps. Or a dossier.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two Prophecies

  Despite Mulvaney's attempted sabotage, Leisure Suit hired me within weeks—and assigned me, as threatened, to cover the town of Huntington.

  Still, I could rent an apartment in Manhattan and be there in an hour.

  I was about to do just that, when I received a strongly worded “welcoming letter” from my sartorially splendid editor, urging me to “live where you cover” and detailing the terms of the Gloomroom's “probationary period.”

  The small cottage I found, in a nondescript neighborhood on the western edge of Huntington, was as close as you could get to the city and still be in Suffolk County. Unfortunately, it was still only an hour away from my parents.

  In their semi-detached/attached brick house in the Flatbush-Midwood-Flatlands section of Brooklyn, my parents rejoiced. Compared to Albany, Long Island meant I was coming home.

  “We'll now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to connect,” my mother announced.

  I thought that was supposed to happen at childbirth.

  My mother reminded me that I'd be returning in time to witness what remained of her maiden term as the first woman on the Board of Trustees of Congregation B'nai Israel of Midwood. She'd been appointed by the president, who was, as always, my father.

  “Nepotism,” she'd told me, “can be a useful tool.”

  At Newsday, the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger said that Huntington had a reputation for sophistication. The basis for this, I discovered, was one street in a tiny incorporated section of town, the Village of Huntington, awash in overpriced boutiques and boasting an art cinema that survived on grants.

  Although this street was called Main Street, the real Main Street of Huntington was Route 110, a mammoth north-south thoroughfare, home to shopping centers and mini-malls and finally, at its pinnacle, the Walt Whitman Mall. A small sign indicated a back alley where the poet's house stood.

  For the rest of the summer I searched for anything that could remotely be called a story in the environs of Route 110. When I was lucky, I found one on Main Street. Stories were hard to come by in Huntington. In Albany, of all places, I'd had more stories than I could write, a hoard of features that could run anytime within a span of months, if not years. I'd report them out and then, instead of offering them to the desk, I'd hold on to them for slow news days.

  In Huntington every day was a slow news day.

  Not talking to Mulvaney, though, proved to be easier than I had imagined, since he was never around.

  I heard he was off in the city we weren't supposed to cover, on a mob murder that interested no one except mob cops, mob reporters, and, of course, the mob. Then he was at NYU, taking a weeklong forensics course with a group of Long Island medical examiners. How Mulvaney got into med school, even for a week—even to work exclusively on dead bodies—I couldn't figure.

  The Non-Naked Men said that he had walked away from his college diploma; that he only needed to complete an independent study project on Thomas Pynchon to graduate from some boozed-up party school in Maine.

  “And you don't think he made that up?” I asked them, my first sighting of a “Mulvaney-true” factoid. I doubted that Mulvaney had ever set eyes on a copy of Gravity's Rainbow, unless it replaced a cinder block in a plywood bookcase filled with Fletch novels.

  The Non-Naked Men also told me, with a collective, voyeuristic gleam, that Mulvaney had taken his girlfriend to a mob party, where her primary function was to snap pictures of him and some mobsters that also captured a certain United States senator in the background. So Mulvaney wanted a girl who would make his stories better and take no credit. He even put her dress—reportedly short, tight, and black—on his expense account.

  • •

  When he didn't return from medical school, a notice went up on the bulletin board. He was now permanently assigned to Manhattan.

  “I thought we didn't cover Manhattan,” I said, thinking I was alone.

  “We don't!”

  I turned and saw a woman who looked like she might have once slept with a lot of important men.

  “Only Female Assistant Editor in Ronkonkoma,” she said, introducing herself. “I hope you'll join our sex discrimination suit.”

  Where had she been when I needed her?

  “As for Mulvaney,” she continued, “he's a police reporter and that's all he'll ever be. Fall in love with him and you'll be entertaining the Suffolk County Homicide Squad until you're a hundred and two.”

  “You must know a lot about entertaining,” I said.

  I felt an arm quickly pull me aside. “She's going to massacre your next story.” Claire Farrell shook her head, and the worn terry-cloth band around her long black ponytail fell off and landed on the dirty checkerboard floor of the Gloomroom. She was beautiful and didn't know or didn't care, always a good attribute. She covered Islip, which was even worse than Huntington. Every time I talked to her, I wished we were in a bar and could order another round.

  “It was worth it,” I said. “I just hope she doesn't think I was defending Mulvaney.”

  “What's wrong with Mulvaney?”

  “Nothing except he's a rude jerk.”

  “Only to people he likes,” she replied.

  “He must have made an exception with me.”

  “Guess again.”

  It worried me that I found this brief remark interesting. “He seems kind of thick. Bullish. He's a caveman.”

  “But he can also figure out the core, the heart and soul of people, even as they're expecting him to be throwing up Budweisers,” Claire noted. “I'd go out with him myself, but he reminds me too much of my brother.”

  “I can't imagine why any woman would go out with him.”

  “You will,” she said. “And you should.”

  I turned back to the bulletin board for other news.

  Newsday was “upgrading”—what kind of jargon was that for a newspaper?—our desk computers so that the paper's “internal network” could transmit electronic messages. We'd be able to talk to the reporters and editors in Garden City without making a phone call.

  Message Pending is what they called it.

  Why didn't they just get touch-tone?

  “Think of the extraordinary ways the reporters here will find to abuse this,” Claire said.

  “I don't know,” I said. “Aren't these the people who didn't write Naked Came the Stranger?”

  Mulvaney claims he can't remember his childhood. Other people, however, including certain teachers and school administrators, say they remember Mulvaney's early years all too well. In his adolescence, his parents, still married to one another, moved from Queens, hopeful that the reputedly elevated atmosphere of the village of Garden City might transf
orm what could best be described as an “unusual” child, who was, to say the least, “not a traditional learner.” But like the Newsday Suffolk bureau, Mulvaney was more Ronkonkoma than Garden City. His high school principal still refers to the fall Mulvaney entered ninth grade as “Black September,” which seems unusually harsh for an educator. By the time Mulvaney was a junior, the principal had implemented an experimental accelerated program to get students—one in particular—out of high school in three years.

  “At least I was interesting in high school,” Mulvaney says. “You were probably well behaved.”

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “if you think anyone well behaved would come within fifty feet of you, let alone marry you, then you are even more delusional than I thought and it is getting worse with age.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Foreplay

  It was a late autumn afternoon, fresh and hopeful, a Saturday. I'd finished my part of the weekend shift and sent my story. As I waited for questions, I calculated, by computer, how many seconds it would take me to get to Manhattan.

  “Transferring phone call to Fischkin!” yelled the clerk at the City Desk Without a City.

  “Meet me at B'nai Israel one hour past sundown!” the voice on the other end ordered. This was not a source but my mother, who had to be kidding. A non-holiday Saturday night and she wanted me in shul!

  “It will be fun,” she insisted. “They're going to arrest your father.”

  I put the phone down. My father was a mild-mannered retired accountant who smoked cheap cigars and cracked dumb jokes. As far as I knew, he had no other vices, except my mother, of course.

  Oh. He also did the books for Stanley Steingut's political club.

  I picked up the phone. “This isn't a financial matter,” my mother assured me, lightheartedness intact. She was a silver blonde with long fingernails usually painted red or pink. Or orange. “It's just Las Vegas Nite.”

  “It's illegal?” I screamed into the phone.

  A gaggle of assistant editors jumped up in unison from the City Desk Without a City. I waved them away.

  “Only a little,” my mother said.