Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online

Finch, to walk in Jerry’s shoes a mile before judging him, to understand why he was the scum-sucking ass-kissing sewer-sniffing son-of-a-bitch he was, I just couldn’t quite manage it. All I could manage was the fake smile.
    â€œGet on the horn and call Mistress Anya. Set up an interview. Then try to get one of the ex-wives,” he said, grabbing his suit jacket off the coat hook and walking me out of his office. “I’ll be in executive meetings all day.”
    Grumbling, I returned to my office, where this Confucian gem stared out at me from my blotter: THE RELATION BETWEEN SUPERIORS AND INFERIORS IS LIKE THAT BETWEEN THE WIND AND THE GRASS . THE GRASS MUST BEND WHEN THE WIND BLOWS UPON IT . Of course, how one defines superiority might be a matter of dispute, but if you think too long about things like that, pretty soon you have a bad attitude and all your hard work is wasted.
    So Dr. Kanengiser had a matchbook from Mistress Anya’s club, I thought. That was something we kind of had in common. Because I had her card, in my Rolodex, in two places, under Dominatrices and under Sadism. (Since coming to Special Reports, I had put together a very strange Rolodex, full of Virgins, Sadists, Victims, Embalmers, and, of course, UFO Abductees—listed by both their Earth names and their alien names.) About a year before, we’d interviewed Mistress Anya and five other dominatrices for a quickie report we put together after a New York judge ruled that S&M for money was not considered prostitution under New York law, since intercourse was rarely involved (although, if the dominatrix is feeling charitable, she lets the guy jerk off).
    In New York, Anya was the unofficial queen of the professional whip-snappers. In addition to her club, which bore her name, and a leased-access S&M talk show on cable, Anya was the self-proclaimed head of the Marquis de Sade Society, whose mandate is “to promote sadomasochism,” since apparently there isn’t enough pain and suffering in the world already. She was, as they say, a media slut, who’d go on the air anytime, for any reason, to promulgate her philosophy and attract like-minded souls to her club. Positive publicity, negative publicity, it was all the same to her.
    â€œI’d be delighted to talk to you tomorrow,” she said when I called her, and the way she said “delighted” made it sound like a four-letter word.
    I penciled her into my new Filofax date organizer.
    Five phone calls later I tracked down both of Kanengiser’s ex-wives. Ex-wife number two, Gail Perlmutter-Kanengiser, who was staying with a friend in Miami, had only one question for me.
    â€œHow much will you pay me?”
    We call this the Hard Copy effect. Thanks to tabloid TV’s liberal use of checkbook journalism, it was getting increasingly hard to get people to talk on television for free, unless of course they had a book, a movie, or a political agenda to promote, or an axe to grind. Special Reports may have been sensationalistic, even sleazy at times, but we did not practice checkbook journalism.
    When I told her this, in much nicer language, she hung up on me.
    Next, I called Detective Ferber at Manhattan South, but he was out so they put me through to another detective just assigned to the case, who was also out: Detective Richard Bigger.
    Shit. Well, there was no point leaving a message for Bigger. I knew him from a previous investigation. At that time, he had been paired with Detective Joe Tewfik, who had since retired to become an upstate restaurateur.
    There are good cops and bad cops. Tewfik was a good cop. Although much decorated, Bigger was a weasely, officious, stick-up-the-ass control freak with the sharpest teeth and sorriest mustache I’d ever seen on a Homo sapiens. We had instantly, instinctively disliked each other. It was as if my very existence insulted Bigger. He saw me as some kind of wild-eyed antiauthoritarian bohemian, which is