Over Her Dead Body (3 page)

“I see you were in newspapers once. Why’d you switch to magazines?”

“I loved the pace of newspapers—and that wonderful sense of urgency that goes with it,” I told her. “But you’re limited stylewise. I decided what I’d do was get experience covering news, but then move into magazine journalism, where I had more freedom as a writer.”

Well, aren’t you special?
I felt like screaming to myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I’ve always had a hard time finding that fine line between talking up myself the right amount and not sounding obnoxious.

Mona didn’t seem to mind, however, and my comment led to a discussion of my background. Then she briskly described what the job would entail. She envisioned the person both writing stories and editing filed stories from other reporters. Through the whole discussion she leaned forward, staring at my face too intently—again, just as Robby had warned. She even stared when
she
was talking, as if she had never been informed of that unwritten rule dictating that when you’re the one speaking during a conversation, you should glance away periodically so that you don’t appear to be boring into the other person.

“Your stuff’s pretty good,” Mona said finally, leaning back in her chair. “And on one level you’re the right type to do these stories for the magazine. But you’ve got absolutely no experience covering celebrities. Tell me why I should hire you.”

“Actually, I think that my lack of experience with celebrities would be an advantage,” I told her. “Cops and experts would take me far more seriously than someone who’s usually covering the MTV Music Video Awards. I could also help you give stories the right context. For instance, let’s say you have a situation like you did lately where a male star gets slugged by his wife because she caught him at a strip club and the wife ends up in jail.
Buzz
reported it in this wide-eyed way, as if no one had ever heard of a
wife
slugging her husband. But there’s research these days suggesting that plenty of wives assault their husbands and that it’s a much bigger problem than anyone ever realized. That info could make your story more interesting.

“Plus,” I added, “if I needed contacts in the celebrity world, you’ve got a ton of people on staff who could help me.”

Clearly thinking it over, she stared at me from behind her desk—or at least one eye did. I forced myself to look straight at her nose and not seem too eager. She stood up finally and told me she would let me know.

Two days later I got the call from Nash, introducing himself and asking for a meeting. At the end of it, he told me I had the gig. They would put me on a retainer and I would write the big New York-based crime stories and sometimes edit smaller ones filed by staff writers. If there was a major crime story on the West Coast, I could choose to go to L.A. myself or oversee the coverage using some of the West Coast staff. I would have a desk in the office and should plan on being on-site two or three days a week. After I made certain I would be dealing mostly with Nash, I said yes.

I won’t deny that I took some satisfaction in phoning Cat and announcing my news to her.

“
Celebrity
crime?” she asked, feigning true curiosity. “You mean, like when they steal clothes from a photo shoot or have too much collagen injected into their lips?”

Sarcasm was something she rarely directed my way, but I didn’t let it irk me. I knew she had conflicting feelings about my departure.

I showed up at
Buzz
the next Wednesday. It was an interesting setup. The offices were all glass fronted, and about half of them faced an open area of workstations—a cube farm that looked like the bullpen at a newspaper. The rest of the offices ran along several corridors in the back half of the floor. A big part of the open bullpen area belonged to the art and production departments; a smaller section closer to reception, which included about twelve workstations, was filled with mostly reporters and writers. For some reason it had been nicknamed “the pod.”

Mona’s office was at the very end of the open area, near the art department and a section nicknamed Intern Village, where dazed-looking college students transcribed tapes and kept track of unfolding gossip on the Internet, on sites such as Gawker.com.

As a freelancer I didn’t merit an office. The workstation I was shown to was in a four-desk section of the pod, shared by a hodgepodge of people. Directly next to me, separated by just a head-high gray partition, was a friendly-seeming writer named Jessie Pendergrass—about thirty, I guessed. Just behind us were another writer, Ryan Forster, and a photo editor named Leo something, who apparently spent his days screening paparazzi shots. As Jessie led me down one of the back corridors to show me where the kitchenette was, she explained that she’d recently switched out of “Juice Bar” to cover the music scene and general celebrity stuff and wouldn’t get an office until she was promoted to editor. Leo, she said, should be in the art area but there wasn’t enough room, and Ryan, like her, hadn’t worked his way up to an office yet.

“Are they easy to sit near?” I asked, realizing that I’d have very little privacy.

“Leo’s a good egg,” she confided. “He used to be more hyper, but he started this nude gay yoga class and he seems much more mellow. Ryan’s a loner. If you develop any insight into him, let me know.”

The office decor was pretty bland—white walls, gray rugs, and gray partitions—though people had made an attempt to personalize their offices and workstations by sticking up pictures and tacky memorabilia. About sixty percent of the staff was female, and nearly ten percent of those seemed to have Johnny Depp photos staring soulfully at them from their cubicle partitions. What I couldn’t believe was the amount of magazines lying around. Tossed on desks and chairs and strewn over the floor were endless copies not only of
Buzz,
but also of our main competition—
People, In Touch,
and
US Weekly,
as well as
Star
and the
National Enquirer.
People were constantly flipping through them for information.

The most amazing part, though, was the noise level. It was so much louder than at
Gloss
—in fact, you would have thought we were covering a war or a presidential election.

I spent the first half hour of the day having Nash’s assistant, Lee, show me the computer system. I was basically familiar with it—just needed a brief refresher course. Nash told me he’d meet with me after the eleven a.m. daily staff meeting, so I spent a little while poring over a stack of back issues of
Buzz,
trying to soak up the style. I wasn’t going to have to use words like glam, bling, or Splitsville in
my
copy, but neither did I want to be too heavy-handed. I also perused the daily “gossip pack,” photocopies of everything from gossip columns to People.com to pages from the British tabs. By the time I finished, I knew far more than I’d cared to about Camilla Parker Bowles.

Every so often I’d glance up to see if Mona was in yet, but her office remained dark. Finally, I overheard someone say that she was making a television appearance and would be in around noon.

The daily meeting was over and done within fifteen minutes. It was run by a stern-sounding managing editor (“We call him the Kaiser,” Jessie whispered) and focused on what stage every story was at. On the way back to the pod, Jessie informed me that Mona tried to hold idea meetings every week with a small group of writers and editors, but time didn’t always allow for it. Cover story meetings happened only with the top-ranking people, and for secrecy reasons, very few people on staff knew what the cover story was until late in the game.

Mona finally arrived for the day moments later, stomping down the aisle along the pod with a frazzled expression, the kind you have on your face when you realize that your car has just been towed. Ten minutes later, she emerged from her office. She had several sheets of copy in her hands, and at first I thought she was headed in my direction. But she veered off into an office right near me.

“Why would you write a fucking lead like this?” she yelled from the doorway at the girl inside. I nearly rocketed out of my seat in surprise.

“I mean, it’s fucking stupid,” Mona continued. “Nobody cares about Maddox and his latest haircut. They want to know who Angelina is shacking up with.”

Ouch. Robby had said she was tough. He hadn’t used the term
she-devil.

Even though I had my head lowered discreetly, I could see that after spinning around, Mona was barreling right toward me now. I wondered if I ought to hurl myself under my desk.

“Why did they put you here?” she asked as she reached my desk.

“I believe it’s the only spot available, but it’s fine,” I told her. I noticed that all around me people’s eyes went to their computer screens, as if she were a wolf or a police dog and they were afraid that making eye contact might trigger an attack.

“Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging and walking off.

Midday a deputy editor e-mailed me to say that a reality TV star named Dotson Holfield had been arraigned that morning in Miami for indecent exposure. She asked that I work with Robby on the story. I had a few contacts in Miami that I offered him, and as I nibbled on a sandwich in his office, he reached one of them.

“What a loser,” he said as he hung up the phone. “Holfield apparently wagged his penis at an undercover cop and told him to call it Brutus. I’ve got the perfect title for the story.”

“Shoot.”

“‘Dotson Holfield Proves He Really
Is
a Dick Head.’”

“See?” I told him. “You
can
write cute.”

“How you doin’, by the way?” he asked.

“Good,” I said, forcing a smile. “I realize I’m not in Kansas anymore, but hopefully I’ll get used to it.”

I had no more
direct
encounters with Mona that day, though I was almost always conscious of her whereabouts. Each time she left her office, it was like a hurricane making landfall. She’d charge over to the art department to demand changes in a layout, complain in Nash’s doorway about some annoying celebrity handler, and stride right over to people’s desks and toss their copy back to them. Around two, I caught sight of her gesturing in annoyance at one of her two assistants behind the glass wall that blocked off their desks from the art department. Jessie rolled her chair over to me.

“Can you guess what that’s about?” she whispered.

“Somebody wrote an unfunny caption?”

“No, I suspect it’s about the chicken salad. Mona has it for lunch every day at two. If the celery content is over thirty-five percent, someone’s ass is on the line.”

I was too speechless to reply. What have I gotten myself into? I wondered. But in truth I hadn’t seen anything yet. At around six-thirty, Mona came trouncing out of her office packed like an Italian sausage into an orange Dolce & Gabbana evening gown and asked an editorial assistant two desks away from me to put concealer on the eczema patches on her back. I had to fight the urge to gag.

“God,” I muttered to myself, “this is going to be murder.”

Six weeks later, to my absolute horror, I turned out to be right.

CHAPTER 2

A
s a crime writer, I’ve often had people remark to me that celebrities are treated differently by the legal system from the rest of us. Cops, for instance, supposedly handle them with kid gloves, and juries show them more leniency. I’m not sure if that’s true—I’ve never seen any hard evidence on it. But there’s one thing I know for a fact. When you commit a crime in New York City and are arraigned in court, you go through a series of humiliations that doesn’t vary no matter how famous you are.

It starts with processing in the police station. That’s where the paperwork is done. Afterward you are transferred to the courthouse at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan and are placed in one of the holding cells in the basement—more commonly known as “the pens.” I’ve never been down there, but I hear they stink to high heaven, especially in summer. The courthouse opens at nine-thirty, and you are eventually brought upstairs to face the judge in one of the two arraignment courtrooms on the ground floor. They call this “producing the body.”

I was considering what a great equalizer arraignment is as I sat in AR-1—arraignment courtroom number one—on a squelching hot Tuesday in July six weeks after my arrival at
Buzz.
The air conditioner seemed to be on the fritz, and four or five large standing fans were making such a loud whirring noise that you couldn’t hear a damn word the lawyers or judge were saying.

The “body” I was waiting to behold was that of singer Kimberly Chance—or, as she’d been dubbed by “Juice Bar,”
Fat
Chance—a twenty-seven-year-old white-trashy singer who had become famous a year ago after winning a reality TV contest called
Star Maker,
a rip-off of
American Idol.
Last night she’d become involved in an altercation with her boyfriend outside a downtown club. When a police officer attempted to break it up, she slapped him across the face—the cop, not the boyfriend. I learned of this development at six a.m. and had arrived in court at nine-thirty. It was now eleven, and though there was still no sign of Kimberly, I knew she’d come through the back door eventually. According to the law in New York, the body has to be produced within twenty-four hours.

Celebrities like Kimberly had been committing crimes at a steady pace this summer, enough to guarantee me two or three days of work a week at
Buzz.
To my surprise, I liked certain aspects of my job more than I’d thought I would. Granted, I was working at a magazine that published articles primarily about the binges, breakups, and botched plastic surgeries of the stars. Actually, “article” is probably the wrong word. Many pages were made up mostly of photos with deep captions or chartlike articles that someone on staff had dubbed “charticles.” But my pieces were generally given more room and ran about the length of a crime piece in
People.
I even sort of liked covering celebrities. Their crimes as a whole just seemed more titillating than those of mere mortals.

And just as Robby had predicted, Mona appeared to be slightly in awe of me. She often sent me e-mails with tips she’d received, or she offered her own take on a story, but she delegated to Nash the job of editing my copy. The former editor of a now defunct men’s magazine that the company had owned, he seemed too old and brainy to be at
Buzz,
but according to rumor he was biding his time until another number one gig opened up. He was a little mercurial—sometimes gruff, sometimes friendly, sometimes even flirty—but he was never a meany. He asked good questions and shortened some of my sentences, making my copy snappier.

I also enjoyed being out in the pod, the epicenter of action. Ryan pretty much ignored me, but I really dug Jessie—and Leo was unintentionally amusing. By week two he’d educated me on the difference between “stalkerazzi” and “cooperazzi” photos. Stalkerazzi were the ones taken against the celebrity’s wishes. Cooperazzi shots looked like those of stalkerazzi, but, according to Leo, the celebrities actually
wanted
you to see them in those situations.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good stuff ended. The atmosphere at
Buzz
was often vile thanks to Mona. Her verbal bullwhipping was never directed at me personally, but seeing others subjected to it was about as much fun as watching someone have his stomach pumped. I’d learned since I started work that there was even a Web site called “I Survived MonaHodges.com.”

And it wasn’t simply that she was a tyrant. What really incensed the staff was that she was always upending things, like a toddler in a high chair who’s suddenly unhappy or bored with the SpaghettiOs and flips the bowl upside down. She would tear up pages of the magazine just before we went to press so that they’d have to be done all over again.

Even when she wasn’t being difficult, she was just plain weird. She had this bizarre obsession with food, which led to all sorts of chaos. For instance, she swore that the French fries at the McDonald’s on Ninth Avenue were the best in the city, and she frequently dispatched one of her two assistants all the way over there to purchase them.

Surprisingly, I rarely saw much of Robby other than at daily meetings, where he tended to keep his head low. His office was around the corner from the pod, near the entrance from reception, and he was generally there when I hightailed it out of the place at night. One day when I was using the copier near his office, I overheard Mona drop one of his stories on his desk and bark, “This sucks, do you know that?”

At first I told myself to give it time, that eventually I’d be able to ignore Mona and just focus on what I liked about the job. But I was near the end of my rope and had adopted a different strategy: to hang in through the publication of my book in the fall. Having the connection to
Buzz
would be an enormous advantage and would surely help me line up some press interviews. I would just have to do my best to not let Mona get under my skin.

It was actually Mona who called with the news about Kimberly. She had phoned me once or twice at home before, but never this early in the morning. As soon as I heard her say my name, I felt this large, prickly pit begin to form in my tummy, as if a porcupine had managed to wedge its way in there.

“Did you hear the news?” she asked bluntly. “Kimberly Chance was arrested last night.”

Had I
heard
the news? Did the woman think I kept a police scanner in my bedroom?

“No, I didn’t hear,” I said. The truth was always best with Mona, because, as I’d suspected on the first day I’d met her, she could smell a lie the way some people could smell a dead mouse in the walls. “What for?”

“Hitting a policeman,” she said. “They say she’s going to be arraigned today. What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means she’ll be going before the judge to plead—guilty or not guilty. I’ll go down for the arraignment.”

“Can you go
now
?”

“The courts don’t start till nine-thirty,” I explained. “Should I give Robby a call? He’d probably want to be there since it’s his turf, too.”

There was a long pause.

“No, I need him at the office today.”

Before she hung up, she gave me a cell phone number for Kimberly that she had managed to get God knows where.

I hadn’t planned on working on
Buzz
stuff today, so this was going to create havoc with my schedule. Not only would I have to spend a good chunk of my morning in court, but I needed to gather some background material on Kimberly so I could put her situation in perspective. Still in my underwear, I did a quick Web search. It was mostly stuff about her appearance on the
Star Maker
show. Though it would involve traveling in the wrong direction, I decided to stop by the office and comb through some back issues of the magazine. I knew that Kimberly had garnered lots of ink in
Buzz
since she’d won the contest, especially in “Juice Bar,” but I’d never bothered to read any of it.

Other than Nash’s assistant, there wasn’t a soul in sight when I arrived. My guess was that plenty of people had probably been there closing the issue until the wee hours of the morning, and it was unlikely that anybody would surface before eleven. The eleven o’clock daily staff meeting was held at two on the day after closing.

After helping myself to the coffee in the kitchenette, I made my way to the room where they stored the back issues and grabbed an armful. To my total surprise, Jessie was sitting at her desk when I returned to my workstation.

“What the heck are you doing here at eight-fifteen?” I asked, smiling. Over the past few weeks, I had grown pretty fond of Jessie—and her flip sense of humor—and I hoped our burgeoning friendship would survive my tenure at
Buzz.

“I have to get this damn Yoko Ono interview out of the way, even though it’ll be buried in the back of the magazine. Want to know something funny? She was wearing Stella McCartney sunglasses when I met her and didn’t have a clue. What about you? I thought you weren’t even coming in today.”

I explained the wrench that Kimberly Chance had hurled into my plans.

“Oh yeah, I heard about it on the radio this morning,” she said. “Are we sure the contest she won wasn’t
Slut Search
?”

“How was the close last night?”

“More bearable than some. The high point was when Mona sent that new assistant of hers, Amy, out for this kind of Jamba Juice called Endless Lime. The girl went to every Jamba Juice in Manhattan and arrived back three hours later—empty-handed! It turns out they only sell that kind in California.”

“When did people clear out of here?”

“Most people got out of here by twelve. The cover story was on freaky beauty rituals of the stars, so needless to say there was no breaking news that had to be incorporated.”

“What freaky rituals
do
they like?”

“Well, apparently Chris Judd gets butt facials.”

“Eew, please—I’m still drinking my coffee.”

I let Jessie return to work while I combed the issues looking for items on Kimberly. In the very beginning there had been a brief lovefest between her and the magazine, like a fling between conventioneers. She’d appeared on the cover after winning her honor, and there were a few glowing tidbits in the weeks immediately following, especially as her single went platinum. But before long she was making regular appearances on the “Fashion Follies” page, dressed in outfits that you might expect to see on waitresses at an international smorgasbord: There was the Swiss miss getup—a ruffled skirt and laced bodice that she wore with her hair in fat pigtails—as well as a disastrous turn in a muumuu that may have caused Paul Gauguin to turn in his grave. In a whole other vein was the dress she wore to the Grammys. It was huge and puffy, as if she were stockpiling something underneath. The caption read: “News Flash! We’ve Located the Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Kimberly’s sartorial indiscretions weren’t the only things that
Buzz
had chosen to spotlight. Over the past months there were several photos of her coming out of hotels early in the a.m., generally with what appeared to be a bad case of beard burn. And last, but hardly least, was the diet. Not long after winning her title, Kimberly had begun packing on the pounds. At one point she announced that she was going on Atkins. “Juice Bar” immediately began running a regular box called “Kimberly Countdown.” It started with her at 160 pounds, and in the following weeks the arrow always indicated an uptick rather than a decline in her weight. That was when the famous “Fat Chance” nickname was introduced to
Buzz
readers.

“Can I interrupt?” I asked Jessie. “Why have we picked on Kimberly so much? She seems pretty harmless to me.”

“You’ve just stumbled upon what I call the ‘white underbelly phenomenon.’”

“Say that again?”

“Mona despises weakness. The stronger you are and the more confident you seem, the more she leaves you alone. Just look at the way she treats you and me. But if she senses any vulnerability, any white underbelly, she can’t resist the urge to sink her teeth in it. At first she liked Kimberly. Apparently Mona was kind of an underdog herself growing up—you don’t get to be homecoming queen when one of your eyes is almost in the side of your head—and so she was fascinated by Kimberly’s rags-to-riches story. When Kimberly started to chub up, when she proved she couldn’t limit herself to four Krispy Kremes a day, Mona went in for the kill. I hear she even came up with the name Fat Chance herself.”

“Jeez, I haven’t been to the gym once yet this week,” I said. “Do you think she’s going to come up with a name for
me
?”

“Yeah, yours is going to be Golden Girl,” she said. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

I was pretty sure she meant it as a compliment, but I didn’t know her well enough to be one hundred percent sure.

With little time left, I stuffed the back issues under my desk and headed downtown on the subway to Centre Street. There were already at least a dozen reporters packed in benches in AR-1, and as I sat there staring at the scuffed brown linoleum, even more showed up, along with a fair share of rubberneckers. At twenty after twelve, Kimberly finally emerged from the door to the right of the judge’s bench.

She looked like hell. Granted, no one would be much of a fashion plate after a few hours in the pens alongside druggies and hookers, especially in a heat wave, but she seemed to have weathered it especially poorly. Her hair, which had recently been dyed a shade of red you’d find only in a lipstick, had formed into a ratty mass on top of her head, looking exactly like hump hair, and she had a mean set of raccoon eyes. She was wearing a silvery blue baby-doll dress, which I suspected had actually been sold as a top.

Her lawyer, on the other hand, looked pretty spiffy, a high-powered babe in a crisp white suit. Because of the fans, I could make out only every few words, but I got the gist of what was going on. Her lawyer asked for a conditional discharge, stating that Kimberly was a law-abiding citizen with no prior charges, who something or other, and had struck the officer unintentionally during a fight with her boyfriend and greatly regretted what had happened. The judge listened with just a little less boredom than she’d displayed during the previous cases. It was determined that Kimberly would plead guilty to harassment in the second degree, which was a violation and not a crime, and as part of her conditional discharge would par-