Free Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Page B

Jackson Network Corporation, the Drive-In Channel, an all-sports network, and four floors of commercial space rented to various professionals. Most of the ANN facilities and offices are in the basement, which we share with a subway stop and a bar-restaurant called Keggers. Below us are two levels of sub-basements and two levels of subway tracks. It is a world unto itself.
    To get to the commercial floors, you had to go through a separate entrance, to a separate security desk, to an elevator that only stopped at floors twenty-four through twenty-seven. You could not access the Jackson floors from the commercial elevator, or vice versa, unless you were part of the security, maintenance, or executive staffs, whose key cards and access codes allowed them to override the elevators’ master program. There was just one security guard manning a small desk at the commercial entrance. During the day, all delivery people had to sign in and out, but others went freely up to floors twenty-four through twenty-seven. Only after six p.m. were all comers and goers required to sign in and out.
    I went to work early in the morning so I could check out the security setup for the commercial floors before our interview with Mistress Anya. This was above and beyond the call of my described duty and I almost didn’t bother, but I figured, what the hell, it’s practically on my way. Jerry wouldn’t care. He didn’t even care about Kanengiser’s ex-girlfriends unless they mentioned whips and black leather, which was a damn good thing since most of them wouldn’t talk to us unless we paid them.
    See, to me this story was now about bigger things like double standards and hypocrisy and the yawning chasm between men and women, which occasionally erupted into fight-to-the-death warfare. But Jerry had made it clear. This was not about Kanengiser, it was about the dangers of female-dominant S&M. Tamayo’s theory was that Jerry saw it as a metaphor for the gender wars, feminism run amok, and this was his way of warning the rest of America. Personally, I thought that was rather too profound for Jerry.
    As I got onto the elevator, I noted there was a video camera in it. The commercial elevator was pretty slow, giving me time to listen to a Muzak medley of big band music and scan the morning papers for Kanengiser stories. They were now playing it big. The News-Journal had it on the front page with the headline, GYNO GUNNED DOWN .
    KINKY SEX INVOLVED ? asked a smaller headline below it.
    According to their story, Kanengiser was “eyed as a possible GOP state senatorial candidate in the next election,” which was a typical News-Journal exaggeration. Mostly, the article was a sanctimonious rap about a prominent man and minor local politico allegedly caught in some weird sex murder. The sleazy News-Journal thought it was the voice of moral America and it never let a story like this pass without some puritanical thunder.
    Yeah, I thought, like this is the first time a respectable man died during a sexual indiscretion. Jeez. This was chump change compared to some of the more famous examples, like when Nelson Rockefeller’s ticker gave out in alleged flagrante delicto, or when that Conservative British MP was found dead while wearing black lace lingerie in an autoerotic asphyxiation.
    Or how about the infamous case of Felix Faure, a president of France, who died of a massive stroke while clutching a woman’s head to his lap during an act for which the French are famous. They say his hands had already started to stiffen with rigor mortis before his lover noticed he was dead. The poor woman, who happened to be the wife of his official portraitist, was trapped there until her rescuers cut away enough of her hair to enable her to escape from the dead man’s grasp. She no doubt had a difficult time explaining that haircut— not to mention the lockjaw—to her husband when she got home.
    I got out on twenty-seven. At