The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  Nor am I, I realize. I may be sober, but anger is clouding my brain. I stop in front of the monitor and practice the breathing exercises I learned with Emily at the “Coping with Anxiety” workshop we took together after Whit’s suicide attempt. Breathe in a count of seven—I have to figure out how to get back in Joan’s apartment—hold for a count of four—and take Amanda’s file—breathe out for a count of eight—

  Then there she is, as if I have summoned her, crossing the lobby unsteadily, as if she’s been drinking. She’s wearing a ratty pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and her hair’s a mess, as if she’d been rousted out of bed. She stops at the desk and says something to Hector. Yells something, waving her arms around in the air. She really has lost it. I can see even on the grainy camera that Hector is looking at her like she’s crazy. She’s pointing out the front door as if she wants Hector to go outside with her. He shrugs and gets up and slowly walks out the door—

  —leaving his ring of keys on his desk.

  All I would have to do is run down and grab them then run back up to Joan’s apartment, let myself in, grab Amanda’s file, and hightail it back—

  I’m out the back door before giving myself time to reconsider. This is crazy, I tell myself as I charge down the iron stairs barefoot. I’ll probably get an infection from the filthy stairs and I’m someone who makes the nail salon girl wash out the pedicure tub in front of me before I’ll stick my feet in. Chances are, Hector will be back at his desk by the time I get down to the lobby—

  Or worse, someone will come up the stairs and catch me.

  Which is exactly what is happening. I hear iron grating against iron below me when I’m on the second-floor landing. It sounds like a tomb being wrenched open—

  Like the gates of Cass’s family mausoleum.

  I freeze on the landing, panting, listening to my own thudding heart—

  And then to footsteps coming up. Fast, heavy footsteps that make the iron skeleton of the staircase shake. Someone is coming up and they’re coming up fast.

  I turn and run back up the stairs, glad I’ve been training on the elliptical, only there’s no setting on the elliptical for Sprinting-Up-Iron-Stairs-While-Being-Pursued-by—

  Who? What am I doing? It’s probably just Hector, delivering a package. Why should I care if he finds me on the stairs? I’ll tell him I was going out and wanted the exercise of taking the stairs—

  Barefoot?

  I run up the final stairs, the steady fast footsteps not far behind me. I take in a big breath and hold it. The iron stairs smell like blood. My hands, as they reach for the knob of my own door, smell like blood.

  The knob doesn’t turn. I’d forgotten in my hurried dash out the door that the door locks automatically, and I didn’t bring my own key. The footsteps are still coming, steady as a metronome. A shadow climbs up the wall in advance, sepulchral as the Grim Reaper. I sprint up the next flight of stairs, passing Joan’s door. I consider banging on it and pleading for help, but then I remember she’s not there. Now where? This is the top floor, the penthouse—

  But there are stairs going farther up: a flimsy iron spiral staircase that shakes as I climb, releasing an odor of rust and an even stronger reek of blood. These stairs haven’t been painted over and they’re not lit. Wherever they lead it’s not a place anyone goes anymore. There is a glimmer of light at the top, though, coming through a pane of murky glass wedged into the sharp angle between ceiling and wall. It’s a kind of hatch to the roof. I push at it but all that comes loose are decades’ worth of pigeon feathers and droppings. I sink down onto the top step and wrap my arms around my knees. Below me the drumbeat footsteps have ceased. Is he waiting for me to come down? I’m trapped here, like a rat—

  I am immediately sorry to have thought about rats. I squeeze my knees to keep from crying out and bolting down the stairs and force myself to listen. The grate of iron again, a door opening . . . he’s gone into Joan’s apartment. He’s done what I planned to do: taken Hector’s keys and let himself in.

  So I am not the only one who wants to keep track of Joan.

  Unless he plans to wait inside for Joan to come back and then hurt her.

  I should, I realize, go downstairs and rouse Hector to call the police, but then why should I help her when she’s ruined my life—

  A wave of shame floods over me. What kind of woman sits by while another woman is hurt?

  The kind you made me, I think, not sure who I mean—Joan or Cass.

  It’s too late anyway. I hear the door below me open and close and then that steady drumbeat of feet going down the stairs as quickly as he came up. Another door opens and closes farther below me. Whoever he is, he’s come and gone, doing Joan Lurie no injury. I am not an accomplice to her harm—just to some theft.

  Of what? Something about what happened at the Hi-Line Club? Who else wants that? And what will they do with it?

  As if in response to my unvoiced questions something falls in my lap. A clot of pigeon droppings and feathers that makes me want to scream. But then I notice something caught in it—a delicate sickle moon that looks like an ivory earring that’s so unexpectedly pretty I find myself picking it up despite the filth it rests in. When I hold it up to the light I see that it’s a fingernail.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Joan

  WHEN I CALL him the next day Simon is skeptical. He doesn’t believe that Caspar Osgood just stopped harassing women three years ago.

  “I think he got more careful. What I hear is that Melissa found out about Amanda and kicked him out. Then their son tried to kill himself and for the sake of family unity she took Cass back on the understanding that he never stray again. My guess is that he changed his hunting grounds. Interns and reporters at the Globe became too risky so he went elsewhere. A man like Osgood doesn’t just stop.”

  For not the first time I hear the animosity in Simon’s voice when he talks about Caspar Osgood. I think of what Melissa wrote in her statement—that Simon held a grudge against him because Cass had been promoted over him at the Times and that he’d initiated my investigation because of that grudge. But that wasn’t true. I’d already had the idea for the story when I interviewed with Simon. Was that why he hired me? I shake the thought away. I’d found Amanda and no grudge had invented the women who told me about what Osgood did to them.

  And I’d been diligent, I acknowledge with relief as I listen again and again to the women’s accounts in the next four weeks. I’d pinned down dates and times and checked them against Osgood’s known whereabouts. I’d interviewed corroborating witnesses whom my sources had confided in at the time the assaults were taking place.

  “You’re not going to get an eyewitness account,” Simon had warned me. “And you shouldn’t expect to. That’s what’s kept harassment accountability in the dark ages—it’s so often an unwitnessed crime. But you can build up surrounding evidence to support the victims’ accounts—contemporary corroborations—people who saw them right after or people they talked to about what happened at the time.”

  That’s what I had done, and I’d been impressed with how effective it had been. Most people tell someone—a roommate, a girlfriend, a coworker—or there was someone who remembered seeing the victim flustered and upset after an encounter. There were so many obvious victims, in fact, that I became exasperated that no one had acted when so many people clearly knew what was happening. But it was always the same story: Osgood was powerful. No one wanted to go up against him. I wasn’t going to let the lack of an eyewitness to an actual assault keep me from exposing Osgood at last.

  Still, when Amanda had mentioned a server who might have witnessed Osgood slapping her and forcing her to perform oral sex on him, I admit I had been eager to find her. I’d called the catering company, Bread & Roses, and asked for a list of the servers for the night in question. When the owner hesitated, I hinted that I worked for Sylvia Crosley at Manahatta, hoping the appeal of a potential review in our Style section might entice her to divulge. She
emailed me the list five minutes later; apparently Sylvia was good friends with the owner of the company.

  I had been able to track down all of them—mostly aspiring writers and actors paying the rent by waitressing, bartending, and doing catering gigs. None of them had remembered any incident like the one Amanda described.

  Did I doubt her veracity at that point? Maybe for a moment. But then she only thought that the server had seen something. Maybe she’d been mistaken. Or maybe the server had forgotten. Several of the servers I had interviewed had trouble remembering the specific night at all, even though it was only a couple of months before. “I was working back-to-back shifts that month,” Maya, a woman with a shaved head and a tattoo of a fork on her arm told me, “saving to finance my band’s tour of South America. Frankly, the whole period is a blur.”

  I hadn’t been overly concerned, but the missing server—as I began to think of her—had troubled me. And there’s something else that bothers me about it now. Luckily I hadn’t deleted the email from the owner of Bread & Roses, and I pull it back up to find the servers’ contact information. I spend a week calling everyone on the list. A few of the young women on the list have moved on, one to voiceover work in L.A., another to a role in The Book of Mormon, and another to law school. Quite a few are still working the catering/restaurant/bartending circuit hoping for the big break that will lift them out of the masses of artistic hopefuls into—

  What, exactly?

  Talking to them reminds me of myself three years ago, when I thought this story would be the making of me. If you had told me then that I’d have a book deal and be living in a swanky apartment with a doorman, I’d have thought my prayers had been answered. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be hiding in that swanky apartment afraid to go out, afraid to pick up a piece of typescript because it might reveal that I really do have brain damage.

  Which is why I leave reading Amanda’s paper file till last. It’s late September and the cooler weather reminds me that summer is over. I’ve barely begun writing my book. I still can’t find Amanda’s folder on the hard drive. So when I finish calling all the catering staff I pick up Amanda’s paper file. I put the pages in order and then I read through the whole interview, ignoring the twitch in my left eye and the creeping pain in my right temple until I get to the part where she says that after Caspar Osgood assaulted her a server came out from behind the planter on the terrace and asked if she wanted her to go to the police with her. None of the servers I contacted was able to verify the account, and when I checked the police records for that night—May 15, 2015—I couldn’t find a police record for Osgood.

  Maybe Amanda and the server went to the police and the police had dismissed the charge so there’d never been a formal complaint or file.

  But why can’t I find the server to corroborate Amanda’s account?

  I could try to contact Amanda to go over her story again, but the last time I reached out to her, just before the story came out, I discovered she was living in L.A. working as a yoga teacher, and she told me that she “just wanted to move on.” Now it occurs to me that she might have been paid off and signed an NDA.

  But why would anyone pay her off after she had given me her story?

  My mind is spinning with the contradictions. I lift my head to look out the window and clear it and for a moment I think there’s a fireworks show over the Hudson River. My view is spangled with bright lights and exploding starbursts, but when I turn around the fireworks are still there in front of me. They’re inside me. I’ve got a full-on ocular migraine. I’ve had them before, but never this bad. My vision looks like a reel of 8mm film that’s burning. I close my eyes and press my palms against them. When I reopen them it’s worse: a heavy-metal light show of pyrotechnics.

  I get unsteadily to my feet and stumble toward the kitchen—or at least I hope in that direction. I can barely see anything. I hold my arms out but I trip over a packing box, crashing to my knees. I crawl to the door to pull myself up, holding on to the doorknob. This is it, I think, I am having a stroke. A clot must have formed when I was hit and now it’s loosened and blocked the blood flow to my brain. A gray darkness is rising, like soapy water, extinguishing the fire bursts—

  I must fall and lose some time because when I come to, I am on the floor. I reach out—

  And touch flesh.

  Someone is in my apartment.

  My attacker has come back to finish me off.

  “Are you all right, dear? Do you want me to call a doctor?”

  Lillian?

  “How . . . ?”

  “Your door was open, dear, and I saw you lying on the floor. Can I get you a glass of water? A cold washcloth? Some tea?”

  I blink and my vision clears, though it’s still blurry—as if a film of Vaseline is coating my eyeballs. But I can make out Lillian sitting on the floor beside me, red sneakers tucked beneath her skirt, straw bag perched in her lap.

  “No, I think I’m okay.” I struggle to my feet, then help Lillian up, her wrists so delicate in my hands I’m afraid I will break them. And yet she came to my aid when she saw me passed out. She could have broken a hip getting down on the floor with me. I lead her over to the wingback chair—or maybe she’s leading me. Her grip on my hand is firm. I leave her on the chair and go to make us tea.

  “Make it strong with plenty of sugar,” Lillian calls from the living room. “My mother always said that’s what you needed when you’d had a shock.”

  “That must have been scary seeing me on the floor,” I say, bringing us two mugs of hot, sweet tea.

  “Oh,” she says, taking her cup, “I’ve seen worse. I saw a man get knifed at the Stork Club.”

  “Really? How awful,” I say, settling down next to Lillian. “That must have been terrifying. Were you there on a date?”

  “No, I was working there. After Tommy’s trial I was let go from the steno pool at the courthouse. The office manager said, ‘We can’t have girls associated with the underworld working here.’” Lillian wickedly mimics the snooty office manager’s voice, but I can hear the shame behind the impersonation. “She wouldn’t even give me a reference. Rose said I could fill in for her at the Stork Club to tide me over and make a few extra dollars. She said all I’d have to do is pour drinks and smile . . . well, I was very naïve back then. I could tell right away that the men expected more than a smile. This one fellow kept pulling me into his lap and pinching my behind. I got so mad I slapped his face. I thought he would slap me back, but Eddie Silver laughed and said the mork got what was coming to him and that they should all keep their hands off me. Can’t you see she’s a nice Catholic girl, he said, an Irish rose. You see, it was easier just to wear Rose’s nametag. We looked enough alike—two dark-haired Irish girls—that the manager wouldn’t even notice Rose was gone. Eddie Silver didn’t notice any difference. He called me My Irish Rose from then on.”

  “From then on? Wasn’t Eddie the one who gave your brother Tommy the gun?”

  Lillian takes a sip of tea and looks uncomfortable. Perhaps I’ve overstepped my bounds. I’ve forgotten again that Lillian isn’t a source to be interrogated. And who am I to judge her for doing what she had to do to stay alive?

  “I hadn’t forgotten that,” Lillian says. “And I wouldn’t have given him the time of day, only the night Benny the Book got knifed at the Stork Club we all got brought down to the station and Frank was there. I was surprised because Frank was assistant DA in Brooklyn, and this was Manhattan, but he was there because his boss had been building a case against Eddie and he got a tip about the incident at the club. When he walked in I was so ashamed for him to see me mixed up in such a sordid business.”

  “But you were an innocent witness,” I pointed out.

  “I suppose . . . but I was wearing one of Rose’s dresses and it was . . . well, it made me look cheap. By then I realized what being a ‘hostess’ at one of those private parties really meant and Frank wouldn’t know I’d just been filling in. I saw how surprised he
was to see me—and then how something changed in how he looked at me. I wanted to explain, but he just walked right on by, like he didn’t want anyone to know he knew me. I sat in that station for hours, freezing in that skimpy, ridiculous dress, blood all over me—”

  “You were that close to the man who was knifed?”

  She nodded. “I was right behind him. This fellow leaned in like he was gonna tell a joke and then he was gone and Benny the Book was on the floor bleeding his life out. That’s why they brought me down, because they thought I could identify the attacker, but I was leaning down to light Benny’s cigarette and I didn’t see the man who knifed him. I tried to tell them that, but no one would listen . . . until Frank called me into a room. It was just him and a stenographer there to take down my statement. I looked at that stenographer, in her nice neat skirt and blouse, and I thought I could probably type faster than her. I wanted so much to be her instead of this floozy with blood all over her. I started out telling Frank I’d just been filling in for my friend Rose—I pointed to my name tag—and the stenographer said, ‘Should I correct the witness’s name, sir? We have her name down here as Rose O’Grady.’

  “Frank didn’t answer. He just stared at me. Then he asked the steno girl to go get me a cup of hot coffee. ‘Can’t you see the poor girl’s freezing?’ he said. He took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders . . . and while he was doing that he leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t tell them your real name. Just go along with being Rose.’