What's a Girl Gotta Do

What's a Girl Gotta Do by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: What's a Girl Gotta Do by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online
Authors: Sparkle Hayter
Besides, I want to talk about Greg and
reporting and I want to do it away from the radar ears of
journalists.”
    “Kafka’s then,” I said, and went back to the
computer.
    For another hour, I scanned the wires for
interesting murder stories, and then went off to find McGravy.
    The early evening, after the day shift was
gone, was the best time to catch him in his office. I found him
there carefully winding one of the twenty or so windup toys on his
desk: lizards, wind-up sushi, kangaroos, robots, chattering teeth,
and so forth, all of which seemed to be moving. More tactile
replacements for cigarettes.
    “The great thing about quitting smoking,”
McGravy said without looking up at me, “is that you can get away
with all kinds of childish behavior under the banner of quitting
smoking. I don’t think I’ve had so many toys in my life, or enjoyed
them so much.”
    Not exactly dignified behavior for the
network vice president in charge of editorial content, God bless
him. Although he blames this behavior on giving up the toxic weed,
calling this his second childhood, the truth is it’s more of a
recurring childhood, and quitting smoking is just his latest
excuse.
    He looked up at me now, pushing his glasses
up the bridge of his nose, and laughed this grumbling kind of
laugh. “What can I do you for?” he asked.
    “Jerry Spurdle . . .”
    McGravy rolled his eyes. “Now what?”
    “He sickens me. He wants to go undercover on
this sperm bank story. He wants to donate sperm.” A pair of walking
sneakers were winding down on his desk and he picked them up and
rewound them before answering. To his side, a marching baseball
walked off the edge and fell into the wastepaper basket, where it
flailed its legs helplessly against the trash. McGravy bent over
and retrieved it, then rewound it and sent it towards the other
edge.
    “Sperm,” I reminded McGravy.
    “Well,” he said, rewinding the chattering
teeth. “It might be necessary and there’s no way it can cause the
kind of problem colon cancer did. You have to learn to bend,
Robin.”
    “Bend, or bend over? Bob, it’s too hard for
me to work for him,” I said, weariness in my voice, trying to
appeal to his respect for individual personality. “He makes me so
mad I want to pound him into the ground sometimes. It takes seven
major muscle groups just to hold my tongue. Can’t you get me out of
there?”
    “No, Robin, I can’t. My hands are tied,” he
said, gesticulating with a toy duck. “Jerry wants you in that unit,
and what Jerry wants, he gets. I’m sorry, Robin.”
    “Jerry wants me there?” I echoed. “What a
sadist.”
    “Some people who know your temper, Robin,
might say he’s a masochist,” Bob said. “He knows you’re smart and
can get the job done. The fact is, you’re not exactly a hot
commodity right now, and he is. As long as he keeps his overhead
low and his profit high, he’ll be Dunbar’s fair-haired boy and
he’ll get what he wants. You know Jerry has turned a huge profit in
Special Reports ever since he took it over.
    George Dunbar, the president of ANN, had been
hand-picked by Georgia Jack Jackson for his ability to squeeze
dollars from dimes, and he loved Jerry Spurdle. Puzzled by Jerry’s
success, the J-school grads down in the newsroom came up with two
theories about how he’d made it to his position: Either he had
color videos of network executives performing sexual acts with
members of endangered species, or he performed those sexual acts on
network executives himself.
    But I knew the truth. While the journalists
of the network disdained him, the accountants loved him because he
was cheap and the salesmen loved him because his series were easy
to sell to sponsors. He made them that way; he aimed the shows at
the sponsors as much or more than the viewers. He knew a famous
maker of tampons and sanitary napkins would appreciate the
concentrated female audience tuning into a series on Hollywood
hunks, for instance. Spurdle

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