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  Not, I guessed, a name he mentioned often.

  “No, I'm merely hoping it's an island without men.”

  “You broads are all the same. But when it comes down to it, most of ya don't even know how to change a flat tire.” He was back to that car-fixing theme again. Why didn't he just get a job as a grease monkey? “Nothing makes a women's libber angrier than having to call a man to fix a flat tire.”

  Women's libber? I couldn't believe he'd actually said that. This was the 1980s. Maybe he was destined to spend his life with the Homicide Squad.

  He looked down at his notes again. “You gonna bring me a present?”

  “Whadya want? A Mexican girl slave?”

  “Just my type. Raven black hair, high cheekbones.” He stopped, looked at my face. I knew I was supposed to be flattered, but if I did that, I'd miss my plane.

  “Nah, too much trouble,” he said. “I'll take a bottle of mescal.”

  “With a worm?” I asked, typing as fast as I could.

  “They all have worms,” he replied, eyes flashing.

  “Not on the Island of Women, they don't.”

  A half hour later, notes dumped, story written, my preparations to leave were interrupted by Leisure Suit leaping into the air. . . . “Our Physty's made a miraculous recovery!” he shrieked.

  I darted out of the newsroom.

  “I'll need another Sunday reporter!” Leisure Suit shrieked again. “To cover his dramatic return to the Atlantic Ocean!”

  “Fischkin can do it!” I heard someone snicker in the distance. The unmistakably gleeful voice of Jim Mulvaney, boy reporter.

  Claire followed me into the hallway. “Run as fast as you can, but don't forget to come back!” She put an oversized sombrero on my head. “Stolen from the 110 Taco Bell,” she announced.

  “What was Mulvaney doing?” I asked her. “Trying to ruin my vacation?”

  “No, dummy, he was making a pass at you.”

  • •

  In Mexico, on the beach, I read The Executioner's Song. Nothing relaxes like a cheery dose of Gary Gilmore via Norman Mailer. I was interrupted, though, by the appearance of José Luis Something-or-Other, a handsome, tall, male resident of the Island of Women. He claimed he'd just gotten out of military prison in Veracruz, where he did time for beating up his commanding officer.

  I was amazed at how far my high school Spanish took me. I was not amazed when José Luis Something-or-Other, his story told, his semen spent on the beach one steamy night, had nothing left to recommend him. I returned to Gilmore-Mailer, but the overriding criminal aspect of it all—and the specter of José Luis's combative past—made me imagine I was seeing plaid shirts in the Yucatán sand.

  Mulvaney wants me to take the Mexican out of this book I am not writing about him.

  “But he was real,” I say. “And a telling choice. I left you at Newsday and slept with a thug.”

  My husband views this book as an opportunity for me to let the world know how wonderful he is. I, on the other hand, think it should be a reflection, an exercise in introspection. Over the years, Mulvaney has kept me too busy for much introspection.

  “You already know how it turns out,” Mulvaney says.

  “But I don't know if I was right. I need to know before I go into the twilight of my years, the Ida-Dave phase, if the distractions of this marriage are what has kept me down or made me whole.”

  “You were right,” he insists.

  “We'll have to see how the book turns out,” I reply.

  CHAPTER 12

  Flat Tire

  Tanned but haunted, I returned to Ronkonkoma, where it was snowing. On the drive in, news radio was all over the murder of John Lennon. But that had happened in Manhattan, which we didn't cover.

  In Ronkonkoma, they were still on the whale. Leisure Suit's ebullience notwithstanding, it hadn't budged an inch off the shore of Robert Moses State Park.

  Maybe that whale was just enjoying the publicity.

  I'd tried to convince Leisure Suit to let me look for stories in Huntington, then come in. But he always wanted to see his reporters before they started their day. This was especially true when you came back from a non—Long Island vacation. It was as if he knew what you were really thinking: Could I cover Huntington from Isla Mujeres?

  Mulvaney looked as if he hadn't moved from his Ronkonkoma desk. He'd shed his Physty T-shirt, but the green and yellow plaid he wore was familiar.

  “Isn't that whale dead yet?” I asked him as my own phone rang.

  Leisure Suit, elevated by his role as a revered nature editor, was calling from the City Desk Without a City twenty feet away. How much worse, I wondered, will it be when he can do this electronically with the long-threatened but yet-to-appear Message Pending? He must have heard me thinking because he sent me right back to Huntington to cover the new cesspool regulations. It was, literally, a piece-of-crap story.

  Later, back in Ronkonkoma, I wrote three hundred words and left too annoyed to speak to anyone. And by that, I meant anyone.

  To get home I took the L.I.E. for the fourth time that day. Its temperament had not improved either, since morning.

  I got off at Route 110.

  It was just past the out-of-business Times Square Store that my Chevy Nova began sinking to the right.

  A flat tire. The perfect end to a perfect day.

  I saw what I thought was the entrance to Taco Bell but drove, instead, over a median covered with slush. With that, the last bit of useful air rushed from my tire.

  Inside, fake Mexican teenagers served fake Mexican food and I wished for camarones en ajo, like the ones I had eaten only days earlier.

  I didn't have a jack.

  Fortunately I had a quasi-brilliant idea.

  “Mulvaney!” I said into the pay phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know who this is?”

  “Yeah.” He stretched out that one-syllable word.

  “So you're still hot on the whale trail?”

  “Ya got a better story?”

  “I do,” I said.

  A half hour later, he sped into the parking lot of the Huntington Station Taco Bell and slammed on the brakes. He got out and gave me a quick, very quick, kiss on the lips.

  I had never been kissed that quickly before. This surprised me. Although it shouldn't have.

  “Tastes like an unsavory Mexican,” Mulvaney said.

  “You're a terrible reporter,” I replied. “I spent the week with Norman Mailer.”

  “What's the story?”

  “The story,” I said, nodding to my Nova. “First Feminist on Earth Not Enraged After Calling Man to Fix Flat Tire. Front page, right?”

  He rolled his blue eyes. “Only one problem. In the midst of your history-making lack of vitriol, you forgot to tell me to buy a jack.”

  “You don't have a jack?”

  “Wait a minute.” He opened the trunk of his BMW. Amid a dozen used Styrofoam coffee cups, a pile of dirty plaid shirts, and a dog-eared copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four sat a bulky black bag, the kind doctors used to carry when they still made house calls.

  “You steal that bag from Marcus Welby, Mulvaney?”

  “Who's Marcus Welby?”

  “Forget it. Where'd you get the bag?”

  “Medical examiner's school. The coroners all chipped in and bought it for me. In lieu of a degree. It's great in the rain.”

  “It's not raining,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “And you don't have a jack?”

  “Nope. And you don't either.”

  We drove to my cottage, transported by duct tape, nothing more.

  “So how'd you kill your kindergarten teacher?” Mulvaney asked.

  “I did not kill my kindergarten teacher,” I said, and moved closer to the door. “Do you think I'll fall out if I lean against this heap?”

  “Depends whether you're guilty of homicide or not.”

  “I told you, she was reading us a story and she had a stroke.
”

  “What story?”

  “‘Hansel and Gretel.' I think she keeled over when the witch lost.”

  “She identify with her or something?” He pulled me closer to him. “The door could fall off, you know,” he said. “Duct tape is not the world's most secure adhesive.”

  I pulled away. “If she didn't identify with the witch, then she should have.”

  “So you did kill her.” We were at a red light on a dark stretch of Route 25A. Mulvaney switched on his brights.

  “Well, I might have wished her dead once or twice, but I didn't kill her.” For reasons I did not understand, I prepared myself to tell him everything about P.S. 203 in Brooklyn and the meanest kindergarten teacher in history. My mother—and her distinctive fashion sense—was involved, of course.

  Then we rounded a bend and—at what any driver's education teacher would have declared an inopportune moment—Mulvaney leaned over and kissed me, on the lips but slow this time. And long.

  I kissed back, bracing for the crash.

  “Mulvaney,” I said when we were done and still on the road, “do all minor homicides have the same effect on your libido?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Only when I get a confession in the bargain.”

  “I didn't confess to anything,” I said as I leaned back on the door.

  On the cold rocky beach down the street from my cottage, an entire bottle of Mexican mescal disappeared. Even in the dark I could see Mulvaney's eyes as he shook the worm out of the bottle, bit it in half, and put the other half in my mouth. We tried to identify stars, then the winds started so we went inside and fell asleep. I woke first. It was still dark. “Newsday makes us work too hard,” I said as I pulled down the zipper on his pants.

  “I'm kind of attached to someone,” he said. I ignored that and kept doing what I was doing, since the idea of Mulvaney attached to anyone except himself was unimaginable.

  Still, I had never seen a man look so blatantly triumphant when faced with a woman, undressed.

  We bought a jack on the way to work, stopped at the Taco Bell to put the spare on my car, and eventually walked into the Gloomroom separately. We didn't need to tell one another that it would be a good idea to keep the romance a secret. We worked with people who, like us, spent their lives reporting other people's miseries, victories, mistakes, and emotions. That we had just slept together would be one more story, dissected unmercifully. We knew, too, that we were fooling ourselves if we thought no one would find out. Newspapers, even Long Island newspapers, were a lot like Brooklyn shuls when it came to secrets, which is probably why I felt so comfortable working as a reporter. Everyone at B'nai Israel knew my father had fixed Stanley Steingut's books. And within four hours of our arrival that morning, everyone at Newsday Ronkonkoma—except Leisure Suit, of course—had guessed that I had slept with Mulvaney.

  After we filed our stories, he walked the four feet to my desk and waved Islanders tickets in my face. I assessed how long I'd be able to stand the sight of grown men crashing into one another, grabbed my knapsack, and threw in a book by Erica Jong. But not Fear of Flying.

  The romance was no less complicated than the flirtation, even though we avoided my parents. On Long Island, during that winter and the months that followed, we lived a bicoastal existence: my North Shore cottage; his South Shore bungalow, with a few delightful forays to Pier 92 in Rockaway, Mulvaney's father's favorite hangout, owned by his best friend and bartender, Dan Tubridy.

  Pier 92 was lodged between a broken-down bait shop and a McDonald's and had no sign, as if the Tubridys refused to acknowledge that Prohibition had ended. But inside there was an oak bar with a stunning view of Jamaica Bay. I liked Dan Tubridy so much that I wondered if my parents' new police captain had lied about being a Tubridy cousin, despite the name on his shirt. Maybe he just hoped he could be one.

  The Real Mulvaney, Mulvaney's father, wasn't a bad guy either, not once he explained that he didn't believe in defending brutal cops as much as he believed in defense, period. Was he more real than his son, though? That I couldn't imagine.

  Mulvaney, my Mulvaney, lived in Long Beach, a faded resort on the Atlantic Ocean. In its heyday it was home to Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, and the silent screen stars Vernon and Irene Castle. By the 1980s the longtime locals had to be satisfied with Mulvaney and a bevy of deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients, who filled what were the once grande-dame hotels on the boardwalk. One day Woody Allen invaded one of those broken-down mansions, sent the patients to their rooms, and made a movie. “Woody Allen went to my high school,” I informed Mulvaney.

  “Oh yeah? Did he ever visit?”

  “Yep,” I said, lying.

  Mulvaney's bungalow was a disaster area, too. He kept house like a fugitive or a refugee. Everything he owned was thrown on the small living room floor, ready to be grabbed in case of a quick getaway. He had no affinity for closets or even drawers, and I knew that I would never live with him without hiring a maid. If I had to spend my life cleaning up after Mulvaney, I would never get any of my own work done.

  Mulvaney is pouring red wine for me. He knows I like the way he pours.

  “Remember this song?” he asks as a Rosemary Clooney CD plays.

  “I remember the whole jukebox,” I say. I can, in fact, see back twenty years to the bar where he found it, a dive in Huntington, near the Long Island Sound. Mulvaney spotted the jukebox in a corner of the cloakroom. When he plugged it in, it worked.

  In the depths of his being, Mulvaney is an investigative reporter and that is how, a decade ago, he won his Pulitzer Prize. It wasn't for investigating foreign countries. Although what he looked at was certainly foreign to him.

  Jim Mulvaney won a Pulitzer Prize for closing down a Southern California fertility clinic.

  He proved that its doctors had stolen eggs from the female patients they had failed to impregnate, then inserted them in the wombs of other, hopefully luckier, women.

  And so one day Mrs. Smith spotted Mrs. Jones at the supermarket, looked at the new Jones baby—which she did not know had been conceived with her eggs—and said:

  “If I could only have a child, it would look like that.”

  Mulvaney discovered all this with only one week of medical school under his belt. And without ever watching one episode of Marcus Welby.

  Mulvaney is also an investigative romancer. I'd always hoped for a man who would sing to me. But that is not Mulvaney. He charms by finding things. Or by reminding me what he once found.

  “I'm not trying to force you to do this book about me,” he says. “But if they make a movie and a book, then you'll have enough money to write about whatever you want.”

  How many writers have heard that before?

  CHAPTER 13

  Teamwork, Part One

  Mulvaney, his head propped on my pillow, a cup of black coffee he'd made himself steaming on my night table, dialed the first Suffolk police precinct.

  “Hullo, Sarge. How ya doin'? Whodayathinkitis? Any good murders last night? Nope. Okay. Thanks. Bye.”

  Hang up. Dial. Repeat with next precinct.

  Resting was not something Mulvaney did, even in bed.

  He talked as fast as he walked, and a juicy homicide made his day.

  A prominent victim was good, a celebrity suspect better, although even an Everyday Joe with the right, distinctive, nonboring act of desperation could do the trick.

  I got back into bed. “I'm sorry nobody killed anybody, Mulvaney.”

  “Better no homicide than a dull one. There's nothing worse than boring desperation.” He put a hand up my thigh. “Time wasted when I could be checking out the mob.”

  Storywise, he'd had plenty of boring desperation lately. A loose alliance of Long Island car thieves—not a mob although they wished they were—had captured the attention of Leisure Suit. This was no coincidence. The editor had just bought a new Mazda. “I don't do car theft,” Mulvaney had told him. But to no avail.

  The Mazda was red and as so
uped up as its owner. “Do you think Leisure Suit has a girlfriend?” I asked Mulvaney.

  The phone rang. He picked it up. Indignant, he handed me the receiver.

  Well, it was my bed.

  “Barbara! I hope you speak Spanish!”

  I sighed. The PR man from Huntington Hospital was not, I knew, calling with an untimely fatality, an uncured illness, or even a bad accident. Happiness was all you got from this guy, even if he did work for a medical facility.

  “Spanish? It's one of my languages!” I told him as he described a potential non-story with agonizing precision.

  In the cavern that was my walk-in closet, I slipped on a pair of jeans, wondering if I couldn't do this one by phone. Mulvaney watched as I zipped up. “Since when do you speak Spanish?” he asked.

  “Un poquito en escuela,” I said, confessing to him yetagain.

  • •

  According to the PR man, there'd been a nonfatal fire in a “commercial/residential building”—an apartment over a store—followed by a commendable civilian rescue and the nurturing medical care that is so typical, he noted, of Huntington Hospital.

  Still, he didn't want anyone to know he'd told me this.

  I parked my Nova in the lot. The hospital was not on Route 110, as one might expect, but nestled behind it, proving that in Huntington, everything—even health care—played second banana to retail. Halfway to the emergency room I ran back to the car, opened the hatchback, pulled the plastic off a recently dry-cleaned blazer, and put it on to cover the notebook in my rear pocket.

  Inside, the receptionist studied her clipboard.

  “Is Amalia here?” I asked.

  “Amalia Sanchez?”

  A banner—“Huntington Hospital Is a Happy Hospital”—fluttered on the white screen behind her. Beyond it, I heard a patient moan. Under the banner, there was a poster:

  “Join Us as Our Happy Hospital Celebrates Sir Oliver Cromwell Day at the Huntington Yacht Club.”

  This didn't sound like a good idea, naming a fund-raiser after one of the major tyrants of the seventeenth century.