Chapter 8
EIGHT
Rikki
Maybe it’s the eyes, large and frightened.
Maybe it’s the pathetic way she tries to cover herself with the sad blue towel.
Maybe it’s something deeper, the realization that we are all no more than our lowest common denominator, and that this shivering creature deserves better than she’s getting from my colleagues and me at this time in her life.
Or perhaps I’m just greedy, and I see an opportunity for an exclusive. I am capable of that; I am capable of anything right now.
Before I can question the reason for or the wisdom of my decision, I take Tania Marie by the arm.
Then, before anyone figures out what’s happening, I guide her through the cameras and the questions, with a posture of authority I’ve learned to imitate by being on the wrong side of it since my first newspaper job.
“Let us through, please. Excuse us.”
At least a dozen reporters follow us past the lockers into the main club. We’re in luck. Someone has turned on the light, and several manager types hasten toward us.
“What the hell is going on here?” asks a short-haired blonde with a gym-teacher voice. She flies past us, raging at the reporters. “Didn’t you read the sign? There are no men allowed in here.”
“Run,” I say to Tania Marie, and we bolt to the door. My car awaits on the other side. She scrambles into the passenger side, and I get behind the wheel and take off.
“My clothes,” she wails.
“They’re the least of your worries. Be glad you’re out of there.”
“My cell phone.”
“I’ll go back and get it for you.”
“Damn, thank you.” She wipes her eyes with the towel. “You can’t imagine how it felt to be trapped like that. I’ll be all over the news. Everything will start up again.”
I don’t tell her that it never really stopped.
That’s what it must feel like, being a top news story, the subject of gossip.
Being out of the papers for even one day must seem like the beginning of normalcy once more.
But I know as I glance across at this woman in the black bathing suit and the blue towel, that normalcy is years away, if ever.
When a newsman of Marshall Cameron’s reputation is involved in something as sordid as the Honey Bee Affair, the public will find reason to blame the woman—especially if she’s young, and okay, especially if she has a weight problem.
America doesn’t want its trusted analyzer of the news to stray from his path of dignity.
But if he did, even once, it’s the woman’s fault.
I stop at Hollister Avenue and ask, “Where to?”
“Home,” she says. “I need to get some clothes. Can I use your phone to call my bodyguard?”
I hand it to her. She calls and immediately begins swearing. Hangs up in a huff.
I start driving in the direction of her complex.
“Let me drop you off. Then I’ll go back and get your things.”
“I used a different name at the gym,” she says.
“I can understand why.”
“Now, I can never go back.” Her voice trembles, and she wipes her eyes.
“You probably can, after a day or two. This will quiet down in no time.”
She turns to me in the car. “You really did get a phone call that I was there? You didn’t make it up?”
“I really got a phone call,” I say. “A message, actually, at my hotel.”
“Man or woman?”
“I don’t know. It was left at the front desk. I’ll find out.”
“What did it say?”
“Just that you were at the gym.” And that it was a good photo opportunity, I add to myself. Just enough information to intrigue the Tania Marie spotters.
“And now I’ll be on the front pages of all the tabloids again. And I’ll never have a chance at Killer Body.”
Anguish resonates from her. I have to ask, and not just because I’m looking for a story, “Why do you want it so much?”
“I can’t tell you.” She crosses her arms over the towel. “You might have helped me back there, but you’re still a reporter, and you’ll still screw me over if I give you a chance.”
“You have a low opinion of the press.”
“What would you have if you were in my position? What did I do that was so fucking horrible that you or anyone else wouldn’t have done?”
Fall in love with the wrong man. I’d done that once, just much less publicly than she. “I’m not trying to judge you, Tania Marie.”
“No, you’re just trying to get a story out of me, like everyone else.”
I stop at Patterson and steal a look at her. “Exploiting you isn’t my goal. That’s not the kind of stuff I write. I told you I wanted to know about Julie Larimore.”
“Why her?” She hugs the towel tighter, as if trying to protect herself from what I am asking. My instincts tell me that she might know something.
“Were you friends?”
“Not friends, exactly. No one could get too close to her.”
“How did you know her?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know that I got on the Killer Body program after everything broke loose.”
“After the stories about you and Marshall Cameron?”
“I was trying to take charge of my life. I needed something that worked fast. Someone at Killer Body thought there might be a place for me in the organization—not a position like Julie’s, of course.
Just some kind of PR job. I’d lost some weight, and we thought I could be a Killer Body success story. Good for them, good for me.”
“And what happened?”
“Somebody screwed me over, of course. I never even got a chance to meet with Bobby Warren. His people told my people that I wasn’t right for the Killer Body image.”
“Perhaps that’s all it was.”
“No, it was sabotage. Everything was a go, and then it just stopped.”
“Do you think it was Julie?”
“At the time, yes. Then, later, I wasn’t so sure.”
“Why?”
“Nothing you’d understand. You’re not the kind of woman who understands anything she hasn’t experienced.”
“That’s a pat assessment.” I feel as if I’ve been physically attacked. I want to stop the car and tell her to get the hell out and walk her fat ass home if she has such a low opinion of me. Instead, I say, “I expected more of you.”
“I expected more of you, too. I told you I didn’t want to talk about how I met Julie. Why can’t you respect that?” She has a point. I’m crowding her on the one night she doesn’t need to be crowded.
“Okay. I hear you.” I drive for a moment, and the stillness in the car is louder than our arguments have been. “Who else at Killer Body did you have contact with?” I ask to break the silence.
“Just her. And hunky Lucas Morrison. He’s the one who finally said it was a no go. Then, after Julie disappeared, my agent tried them again, just for the hell of it, and it was Mr. Warren who said okay.”
I try to make sense of the scenario. I’ll need to talk to Lucas Morrison again, that’s for sure. And I’ll need to dig up everything I can about Julie Larimore.
“Did they give you any material about Killer Body?” I ask. “Something beyond the usual press kits?”
“I have a ton of stuff.”
“Could I look at it?”
“You can have it. After what happened today, I don’t stand a chance.”
“You never know.”
“Yeah, right.” She leans back into the seat. “I’m starving. Put that in your story, too.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” I say. “This is the right street, isn’t it?”
“Take a left, and I’m two blocks down.” She shudders. “You don’t suppose anyone followed us here?”
“I’ll drive around the block, if you want. I think they got the story they were after.”
“They didn’t want a story. They wanted what they always do.
” She counts them off on her fingers. “They want to look at my thighs, which they hope have grown. They want to look at my butt, which they hope has spread. And they’ll run those fat, ugly photos across their newspapers, so that everyone can laugh at Tania Marie, the honey bee. ”
I can’t argue with her, because she’s right, and, again, I wonder how intriguing this story would be if she were thin.
We reach the gates of her complex which, to my surprise, isn’t some little beachfront condo Mommy picked up for her.
The fact that it’s not makes me like her better.
The fact that I surmised it would be makes me like myself a little less.
“Would you mind if I came in?” I ask. “I would like that information on the company.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t want to see my apartment described in the paper. You’d better wait outside.”
We weave through an entry drive, and I park outside a fenced-in courtyard. Although she hasn’t moved, I can almost feel her anxiety suck the air from the car. My head begins to throb. I can’t imagine how hers must feel.
“Want me to get out first and open the gate?”
“Thanks.” She puts her hand on my arm. “I don’t know why you helped me, but I appreciate it.”
“I told you,” I say. “I want to learn everything I can about Julie Larimore.”
“Well, good luck. No one really knows Julie, not even old Mr. Warren.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
She starts to speak, changes her mind and gives me a grim smile. Finally, she says, “You’re really clueless, you know.”
“Then why don’t you enlighten me?”
She shifts in the seat. “Hey, I was just trying to help you. Don’t give me the fucking third degree.”
“Calm down,” I say.
“I can’t.” She starts to sob. “Do you know how fucked up this whole thing is? Can you imagine how my life is right now?”
I want to tell her it could be worse. That she could have lost a cousin, that her aunt could be demanding results she might not be able to deliver.
That instead of a wealthy, famous mother in San Francisco, she could have a grieving mother in Colorado, a mother who has no answers to the question that haunts her day and night: Why?
I open my car door. “It looks pretty quiet. Try to pull yourself together. You’ll be inside in just a minute.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She tugs at her short bangs. “No one tried to kill you back there.”
“No one tried to kill you, either.” My voice is harsher than I intend, tears close to the surface.
“They did, too. They locked me in the sauna. I nearly passed out.”
A tingle spreads along my arms. Is she overreacting? Imagining something that didn’t really happen?