A Time to Scatter Stones

by Lawrence Block

  “In your ass.”

  “I don’t know why I couldn’t say that just now. Yes, he was going to fuck me in the ass. I said what I always say, that I couldn’t possibly do that with him because his dick was way too big. That usually works, they’re too happy hearing that to care that they don’t get to—God dammit, why can’t I fucking say it?”

  We waited.

  “That they don’t get to fuck me in the ass,” she said.

  “How did he react?”

  “He just grinned and said it wouldn’t be a problem. After the first couple of times I’d be nicely broken in. So I said it was something I really didn’t care for. That I just didn’t like it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That I didn’t have to like it. That all I had to do was take it.”

  “What a prince,” Elaine said. “And then he left?”

  “I walked him to the door. Then he turned around and took me by the shoulders and kissed me on the mouth. I don’t do that.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Except for the Girlfriend Experience, but that was different. I can’t explain how, but—”

  “But it was,” I said. “He kissed you and then what?”

  “I was shocked. I just stood there. And he said he could do that now, because now he didn’t have to worry where my mouth had been.”

  She lost it then, and started to weep. I got out of there and gave Elaine a chance to comfort her in private.

  BY THE TIME I came back Ellen had regained her composure, and Elaine was filling all the cups with tea. I took a sip of mine and said, “Once he was out of there, I hope you moved.”

  “I was out of my apartment within the hour. I threw some things in a gym bag and caught a cab to a hotel. The hotel was too expensive but I had his three hundred dollars, didn’t I?”

  “That couldn’t last long at a New York hotel.”

  “Not even two days. More like a day, what with room service, which I ordered when I got hungry. A Caesar salad and some coffee, and I think they charged me twenty-five dollars for it.”

  “But you didn’t want to leave the hotel.”

  “I didn’t even want to leave the room,” she said. “When room service knocked on the door, I was afraid to open it.”

  “You’re not still at the hotel.”

  She shook her head. “I have some money saved up,” she said, “because I didn’t want to get out of the game and then go hungry. I took whatever cash I had in the apartment, and there’s more money in my account at Chase. So I could have stayed at the hotel, for a while anyway, but I hate to throw money away.” Her eyes locked with mine. “I have to work too hard for it,” she said.

  “What did you do?”

  “After one night in the hotel I called the same real estate agent who’d found me my place on East 27th. That was four years ago, close to five, but he still remembered me. Or at least he pretended to.”

  “You’d be hard to forget,” Elaine said.

  “You’re sweet, but I look in the mirror and what I see is a blank canvas. You know, kind of pretty but basically generic.”

  “That’s all you see?”

  “Pretty much. Who knows, maybe all this shit will put some character in my face.”

  “So it shouldn’t be a total loss,” Elaine said.

  I said, “When did you hear from him again?”

  “He had something to show me that afternoon, a six-month condo sublet on West End Avenue. Fully furnished, down to the linens and towels and the books on the bookshelves, and all I had to do was sign the lease. I moved in right away.”

  Elaine: “I think Matt was asking when you next heard from Mr. Perfect.”

  I nodded. “Because if you didn’t,” I explained, “there wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Oh, right. I was still there in my head with the real estate guy. I don’t know, two days? Three days? The phone rang and there he was.”

  “The phone in the new apartment?”

  “The owners had disconnected it when they went overseas. He’s on sabbatical, he’s a tenured professor at Columbia. Comparative linguistics, and I don’t even know what that is.”

  “You’ll find out,” Elaine told her. “All you have to do is read all the books on the shelves.”

  I said, “He called your cell.”

  “That’s right. That’s the only phone I’ve had in a couple of years, ever since I realized it didn’t make any sense to go on paying for a landline.”

  “So your phone rang and you answered it.”

  She shook her head. “I recognized his number when it showed up on the screen. I let it go to voice mail.”

  “He leave a message?”

  “Not that time. An hour later he did. ‘Can’t get you out of my head, Ell.’ ”

  “But you didn’t take that call either.”

  “No, I’ve never taken a single one of his calls. In fact I never answer the phone, because how do I know it isn’t him using a different phone with a number I don’t recognize? I check my voice mail, and when it’s somebody I want to talk to I call them back, and if they don’t leave a message it’s probably a robocall anyway. My big chance to save on a time-share in Puerto Vallarta.”

  I asked if his messages had changed.

  “At first they got graphic. This was what we would do when we got together, di dah di dah di dah. And then there was a threat, but only the one time.”

  “What kind of threat?”

  “ ‘You’re a very pretty girl but that could change.’ ”

  “But that was the only threat.”

  She nodded. “But from the look on your face that’s bad news. I thought it was good, that the threats stopped. It’s not?”

  “Maybe it is,” I allowed. “But maybe it means he doesn’t want to leave evidence.”

  “Evidence,” she said.

  “On your phone. Did you keep the messages?”

  “God, I’m so stupid! I deleted every one as soon as I’d listened to it. I wanted to delete them without listening, to keep myself from having to listen to him, but I decided I had to know if he was, you know—”

  “Getting close,” Elaine said. She leaned forward. “Honey,” she said, “you don’t want to let this go any further than it already has. I think the first thing you have to do is get an order of protection against him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. It’s a simple procedure, you don’t even need a lawyer, though you can have one with you if you want. All you do is—look, if you’re afraid it’ll piss him off—”

  “She doesn’t know his name,” I said. They both looked at me, and I said, “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I know him as Paul,” Ellen said. “He never gave me a last name, and as far as that goes I don’t think his first name is really Paul. He was telling me some story, and I referred to him in the third person. ‘And what did Paul think about that?’ Something along those lines. And it took him a beat to get it, as if the name Paul didn’t register.”

  I asked if she had any idea what his name might be. She said she didn’t. Elaine said it was probably Rumpelstiltskin, and was a name an absolute requirement for an order of protection? I said I thought it must be, that I’d never heard of one aimed at John Doe, or To Whom It May Concern.

  Elaine said, “You know, do those things do any good anyway? On Dateline, it seems as though the next thing that happens after somebody gets an order of protection is she disappears, and the whole town is walking through the woods, looking for her and calling her name. Oh, God, honey, nothing like that’s gonna happen to you. I watch too much TV, I was just running off at the mouth.”

  Ellen had gone white, and looked as though she might lose it. But she was hanging in there.

  I said, “The fact of the matter is that an order of protection allows you to press charges against anybody who violates it. It’s not of much use if there’s any actual danger.”

  She asked if I thought there was.

/>   “I think you have to act as though there is. At this point it’s just a matter of phone calls, so it’s not as though he’s actually stalking you, but—”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Oh?”

  “The last call, just this morning. That’s why I panicked and called here. ‘You moved away, Ell. Why’d you go and do that?’ And then he said something about how could I move out and leave the dishes on the table? And didn’t I want to come back for my alligator purse?”

  “And did you leave dishes on the table?”

  “That’s what a hurry I was in. And the alligator bag was on a shelf in the bedroom closet. He had to be in the apartment, he had to go into the bedroom and open the closet door, in order to say that.”

  I asked if the message was still on her phone.

  “God, I’m so fucking stupid . . .”

  Elaine told her she wasn’t stupid, she was scared, and she had every reason to be scared. When I’d left the room earlier, I’d stuck a notebook in my back pocket. I took it out now and uncapped a ballpoint.

  I said, “Let’s figure out what you know about him.”

  “But I don’t know anything! All I know is his first name and it’s probably not even his.”

  I told her she knew more than she realized.

  FOR ONE THING, SHE knew his phone number. Knew it by heart, in fact, but to make sure she checked her phone contacts and confirmed it. The area code was 917, which meant that it was a local mobile phone.

  “I never thought of that,” she said. “Can you track a person if you know his phone number?”

  You can if you’re a cop, or know a cop who owes you a favor. I’d been the first and had known plenty who stayed on the job after I left, but every day my contacts faded further into the past. Everybody I ever worked with had retired long ago, and if their names came up at all it was apt to be on the obituary page. When I was working as a private investigator, I’d cultivated younger cops I met in the course of my work, and made a point of staying in touch with them. But most of them had retired by now, and I’d lost touch with the others.

  All I said was the technology existed, but that it only worked on a registered phone.

  “It might be a burner,” Elaine explained, and defined that as a phone purchased anonymously, with prepaid minutes. You could use it for one specific purpose, and discard it when you were done, and there was no record to connect it to its actual user.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. “Let’s see what else you know about him. How old is he?”

  “I’d say early forties. But I’m not that good at telling a person’s age.”

  “But no less than thirty-five and no more than fifty?”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  “Height?”

  “Six-one, six-two.”

  “Weight?”

  “I don’t know what men weigh. I mean, I don’t know how to guess.”

  “Was he fat? Thin? What kind of body did he have.”

  She brightened; here was something she could answer. “He was carrying a few extra pounds,” she said, “but he was muscular, you could tell he worked out.”

  “Tattoos?”

  “No.”

  “Scars?”

  “None that I noticed.”

  “Facial hair?”

  “No.”

  “Full head of hair? Or was he balding?”

  “He was getting the beginning of a bald spot.” She touched the crown of her own head. “Just the beginning. I don’t know if he was aware of it.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Brown. A dark brown.”

  “Any gray in it?”

  “Not that I saw. Of course I wouldn’t know if Just For Men had something to do with that.”

  “Guys really use that?”

  “Oh, God,” Elaine said. “No, nobody uses the stuff. That’s why every drugstore in America makes a point of carrying it.”

  “I guess what I mean is that nobody I know, no man I know, dyes his hair.”

  Elaine said I was wrong, and named the cashier at the Flame. I asked which one, and she said he worked weekday afternoons, wore horn-rimmed glasses. I said, “Marvin? He dyes his hair? How can you tell?”

  “Sometimes the roots give him away. Anyway, it’s too black.”

  “If you say so.” To Ellen I said, “Dark brown hair. How long? How does he comb it?”

  And so on. I asked, she answered, and I wrote in my notebook.

  “Where does he live?”

  “He never said.”

  “Nothing about his neighborhood? How he walked to the Museum of Modern Art? What train he took to Yankee Stadium?”

  “No.”

  “How’d he get to your place?”

  “By cab, I think.”

  “And he went home the same way when he left?”

  “As far as I know.”

  I picked up a little hesitation. “What?”

  “One time he looked at his watch, then took out his phone and did something. I think he was calling an Uber. Or, I don’t know, Lyft. Whatever it was, he did it all on his phone app.”

  We kicked that around but it didn’t go anywhere. I asked if he was a native New Yorker.

  “He never said.”

  “But he said other things, and he said them in his voice. Did he have an accent?”

  “Not like a foreign accent, no.”

  “Southern? Midwest? Bronx? Brooklyn?”

  “He just sounded American,” she said, and thought about it. “He wasn’t from New York.”

  “You sound certain, Ellen, and a minute ago you didn’t know what kind of accent he had.”

  “I still don’t. Something he said. ‘For all the years I’ve lived in this town.’ He said it like he’d moved here from someplace else.”

  Like that narrowed it down, I thought. Half the city’s population had moved here from someplace else.

  “Is he married?”

  She didn’t think so. “He didn’t wear a ring, and he didn’t have that mark on his finger that you get when you take your ring off. I never heard him say anything that suggested he had someone waiting at home for him. He never mentioned children.”

  I was going to ask what he did for a living, but she beat me to it. “I don’t think he has a job,” she said. “I think he’s self-employed.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Running his own business. I’m just guessing, but he’s used to giving orders.”

  “He ever talk about business?”

  “No.”

  “The pressures of work, anything to give you an idea what his work was?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “How about recreation? He play golf?”

  “He never mentioned it.”

  “Any other sports?”

  “Not as a participant. One day he said he had tickets for the Knicks that night, that somebody had given him courtside seats. But there was nothing that suggested he went regularly, or that he even cared much about the team. Or the game.”

  “Tickets. He say who he was going with?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t suppose he invited you.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Elaine: “Maybe he wanted the Girlfriend Experience.”

  “No, that wasn’t what he wanted. I’d already given him what he wanted.” She frowned. “Sold him what he wanted. He liked paying. He liked taking the bills out of his wallet and handing them to me.”

  “Always the same amount.”

  “Two hundred dollars. Always a pair of hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Until the other day.”

  She nodded. “When he gave me three of them.”

  ON AND ON. THE details piled up, and a picture failed to emerge. I knew things about Paul, but I could be in the same subway car with him and not know it.

  The same elevator, even.

  More questions, more responses, and when I sensed we were spinning our wheels I capped my pe
n and closed my notebook. Ellen said she’d better get home.

  “As in West End Avenue,” Elaine said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere near 27th Street.”

  “I’ll go downstairs with you. I could use some fresh air, and that’ll give Matthew a moment to read his notes and exercise his police mentality.”

  I wasn’t sure what a police mentality was, or how to go about exercising mine if I had one, but Elaine was back in no time at all. “I tucked her into a cab,” she reported, “and away she went. I didn’t see anybody lurking, but would I have noticed?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I said I’d see her tomorrow at the meeting. And I told her to call anytime, any hour, day or night.”

  “Good.”

  “This guy Paul. It’s got to be a power trip, right? ‘You can quit the life but you can’t quit me.’ ”

  “Something like that.”

  “But if he can’t find her, and she never answers her phone, sooner or later he’ll get tired of it and find someone else who knows the value of two hundred dollars.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well? Won’t he?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I hope so,” I said, “but I don’t think so, no.”

  “Neither do I, but I couldn’t tell you why. He’s never been violent with her.”

  “No.”

  “Or physically abusive. But his last words to her, or almost, were how next time they’re going to do anal.”

  “And he doesn’t care if she doesn’t like it.”

  “In fact,” she said, “that increases the appeal for him. I don’t like where this is going.”

  “No.”

  “If she sees him again, and if she lets him do what he wants to do—”

  “She’s not going to see him again.”

  “We can’t know that, honey. I don’t know how close the parallels are to sobriety, but—”

  “But she could have a relapse.”

  “He could find her. He’s already found a way to get into her old apartment, and how do you figure he managed that?”

  “Swiped a spare key when she wasn’t looking. Slipped one of his famous hundred-dollar bills to her super. Or found a way into the building—”