by Marge Piercy
When she woke, when she turned in a moment of solitude to herself, she felt like someone recovering from a serious illness, an operation, who stares in the mirror at the ravages and cost but who decides to live; who takes what pleasure she can in the small accomplishments and salvage (her own pans and appliances, her own garden tools and baskets) and who experiences daily as she attempts to reembark upon the activities of her life, the difficulties, the losses of her diminished situation.
But she had not been ill; she had been attacked. There was all the difference. Quietly she promised she would not forget, for Torte, buried in Lexington; for Mariela, who woke screaming, who cried every day before school, who never wanted to go to bed but put Sandra María and Daria through an hour of fierce bickering and tantrums every night, because she feared sleep. Daria would not forget; she would never forget. Someday soon she would have justice.
Uprooted, torn from her schedule and accustomed ways, she began putting more energy into SON. She joined the patrols. She went to meetings of the core group and the public meetings.
Monday morning laden with a briefcase stuffed with papers and notes, Daria travelled the subway to Dorothy’s office, not wanting to bother finding a parking space downtown. She was prompt but nobody was there except Dorothy, who met her with a rueful shrug. “Sit down, Daria. Sorry. I called you as soon as his lawyer called me, but you’d already left Allston.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Suddenly his accountant can’t make it.”
Daria accepted a cup of Dorothy’s bitter coffee. “Maybe Ross didn’t think he’d have to meet with me—that I would be quite dead, or at least hospitalized. The Shriner Burn Center?”
“I huffed and puffed at his lawyer. We’re set up for a rematch Friday, same time, here.”
Daria put her head in her hands. “Is this a war of nerves? It’s getting to me.”
“It may be a war of attrition. Have you anything new for me from that detective friend of Tom’s?”
“Donald. Yes.” Daria pawed through her briefcase. “I almost forgot.”
“I may well need this.” Dorothy scanned the report. “Ha! Definite residues of kerosene accelerant found in basement floor.… This may do the trick.” She tucked the report away. “Maybe upping the ante annoyed him. After all, we’re asking for far, far more than we were.”
“We have now suffered far, far more damage than we had. I want those buildings.”
“With this little report, we may have some leverage at last.”
That night, the last of April, she was eating take-out at Fay’s and helping write a press release about the local fires, when Orlando came by asking for Tom, the silent Sylvia in tow.
“He’s in the bathroom,” Fay said. “What’s up? Maybe I can help.”
Orlando would only wait until Tom came out. “Hey, Tomás, that guy with the dirty blond moustache, we seen him again. Not on our roof. Not where they had the fire. But the house past that. Number Seventy-one. We seen him up there poking around.”
“We have to put a patrol on that building. Who owns it?”
“Petris,” Daria answered. “He seems to be putting a parcel together to develop. He hasn’t started working on Sandra María’s old building yet, so he may be waiting till he has more empty and planning to do all of them at once.”
“When was this incident?” Tom asked.
“Last night. Don’t I tell you right away? We have another fire, my old lady’s going to have a heart attack. She’s scared all the time now.… Man, can I talk to you private for a minute?”
“Hey!” Sylvia snapped to life, putting down the People magazine she had been flipping. “What are you going to talk to him about? Orlando?”
“Cool it, girl. None of your business.”
“None of your business, none of your business,” she muttered stalking about the room as Tom and Orlando disappeared into the boys’ bedroom.
“You ought to let me do your hair,” Fay said. “It’s still growing out funny.”
“He made me grow it out. He said he was ashamed to be seen with me with my hair punk. Ha!”
“You ever hear from your brother?” Fay asked.
Sylvia shook her head, glowering. “Nothing. Like everything else.”
Afterward, when Daria was returning to Tom’s—much more comfortable these days than her setup—he said, “The wages of sex on the roof. Sylvia may be pregnant.”
“Didn’t they use anything?”
“Orlando thinks it’s not macho to use condoms, and Sylvia, as he explained with real indignation, is a good girl. Good girls don’t admit they know what they’re going to do, so they can’t take precautions. I gave him a sales pitch about condoms, but I doubt I got anyplace.… Kids!” Tom said with intense distress.
Two days later it was their shift, midnight to four, at Number 71. Daria had stood a shift Sunday night with Tom, and they had spent the night talking, mostly about their daughters. It had been a good warm experience, making her look forward to their next patrol, a block of four hours with little to do but chat quietly in between their rounds. Tonight however Tom seemed to take the patrolling far more seriously. He kept shushing her and repeatedly left her at one entrance while he paced through to the other.
“Tom, are you angry at me?” she asked finally.
“How could you think that?”
“I feel as if you’re avoiding me tonight.” Back to the beginning, she thought, when he would discuss nothing personal.
“It’s a hunch, Daria. That he’s coming tonight. I want to get him so bad my hands itch with it. I need to get him!”
It was a passion that excluded her, for Lou was far more real to Tom than to her. She did not hate Lou but rather Ross. Lou had had nothing personal against her. He was merely the tool. Her malice, her anger, her energy slipped past the shadowy figure of Lou to hurl fruitlessly against the walls of law and money and custom that protected her estranged husband. Night after night SON members waited in these buildings where their presence prevented arson, so long as they could keep it up, different batches doing without sleep on different nights. But for Tom to imagine he would ever get his hands on Lou was a useless and perhaps dangerous obsession. Fay was right: they should concentrate on prevention. The landlords would eventually give up and begin to heed the tenants’ demands to make the buildings livable.
She had half dozed off—her watch when she raised her hand read two-thirty—when she heard a loud thump overhead and then voices and someone clattering down the back stairs. She rushed through the house in time to see a man running down the alley.
Yet as she climbed the stairs toward the roof, she heard voices from above. She climbed quietly, yawning to herself, half asleep still and embarrassed that she had dozed while on duty. Tom and one of the tenants, no doubt. They must have prevented another attempt. Next time she was on patrol, she would bring a thermos of hot coffee.
Emerging onto the flat roof of the brick apartment house, she stepped from the shelter on top of the back stairs. The roof was dark, but the moon was at the half and up, casting enough light for her to pick out Tom standing with his fists clenched about six feet from another man, much smaller and slighter than Tom. In the moonlight, the man’s hair looked grey. Tom was facing her and the man—Lou, yes, it had to be—stood hunched forward with his back to her. “You meddling bastard,” Lou was saying in a low but extremely angry voice, a compressed and flattened roar, “who the hell do you think you are, the fucking Lone Ranger? Now get the fuck out of my way and stay out of my way!”
“You’re an alley rat, Lou. You’re just a cheap hangman, Lou,” Tom sang, taunting him with his name.
“Wha?” Lou stood off balance staring.
“Surprised I know who you are? We know all about you. Golden Realty. Louis Henry Ledoux. We’ve been watching you. Easy!” Tom feinted sideways to try to step past Lou, to block him from the exit.
Something flashed in Lou’s hand, dimly in the moonlight. A knife. Tom
backed away, but not before he caught sight of Daria, edging cautiously forward. She shook her head at him to be silent.
“Listen, you bloody big fool,” Lou snarled. “Who cares who you think I am or what you think you know. You get back and stay back or I’m going to carve my initials in your face.” Lou backed toward the stairs and Daria.
Slipping sideways she picked up the brick used to hold the upper door open and let the door shut slowly, keeping it from hitting the jamb. Her heart beat in her throat as if it had blades as sharp as the knife her eyes fixed on, almost feeling it cutting into Tom’s flesh.
“You’re caught and caught good,” Tom said, watching Daria with a puzzled frown. “Put down the knife. You have to talk to us.”
“I don’t have to talk to any of you losers.” Lou started forward at Tom. Daria wound up and threw the brick as hard as she could. The brick caught Lou hard between the shoulder blades. Screaming, he pitched forward. Tom fell over him, bringing his boot down on the hand holding the knife. Daria picked up the brick again and pounded the captured hand until Lou’s bruised fingers let go of the knife. Her anger astonished her. Then she seized it and jumped back, out of the way. Tom was wrestling Lou into a half nelson.
Tom said, “That was a damn fool thing to do.”
“It wasn’t!” She was shaking, partly from the aftermath of that astonishing galvanizing wave of anger.
“Well, it scared me.” He grunted with the effort of holding on to Lou, who struggled violently. Lou, cursing mechanically, stared at her.
“Daria, give me the knife. Carefully. Go around wide. Then run and wake Elroy. Between us we’ll walk him over to Fay’s.”
She made a wide detour around the struggling, cursing Lou, squatting with his arms behind him in Tom’s grasp. Tom let go with one hand and took the knife, putting it against Lou’s throat. “I’m on my way,” she said. “Be careful. I’m going to send someone up on the roof with you.”
“Wake up Charley, in number four.”
Forty minutes later, they had Lou in a kitchen chair at Fay’s. “Listen, you got no right to hold me,” Lou snarled. “No right at all.”
“If you’d done a better job Tuesday, we’d be turning you in on a murder charge.” Tom loomed over him. “You’ve been very busy lately, Lou.”
Louis Henry Ledoux was slender, of medium height, with the grey blond hair she recalled, short on his head but longer in his walrus moustache. His eyes were light brown and no orthodontist had ever worked on his teeth: sign of their common class background, Tom and Lou and Daria herself, whose teeth had always been a little apart in front. In her affluent adult life, dentists had often offered to fix that for a few thousand. Lou had the same fault, to a more marked degree. His face was thin, a little compressed to the sharp edge of his nose, the jut of his chin. His forehead was high and his hands long and shapely, one braced on his bony knee, the other cradled against his chest.
“You can’t hold me. I’m suing that lady for busting my hand. I want a doctor. I’m suing you all for kidnapping, and you’re the ones going to be in a shitload of trouble.”
Tom said, “That lady has a gripe with you all right. You burned her out last Tuesday night. Remember that fire in Lexington?”
“My husband Ross Walker gave you the key. You came upstairs and turned off the smoke detector, so we wouldn’t have a chance. Then you went down the basement and set the fire with kerosene.”
Lou stared at her. His mouth opened, then closed and he said nothing. He was not to be broken so easily. She felt cold pricklings of dismay. She walked away to sit on the couch with Fay’s two sons, Mikey and Johnny, who were watching bug-eyed and, on orders from Fay, in utter silence. There was a period of desultory questioning, mostly by Mac. He had taken the time to dress in his usual flannel shirt and jeans with a Harris Tweed sports coat, while Fay was still in her bathrobe. She felt they were all depressed at how resistant Lou was proving. Perhaps their common fantasy had been that all they needed to do was catch him in the act and confront him, and they would have all the evidence they needed to bring their landlords to justice. She kept thinking of her own violence on the roof. She had not felt that galvanizing anger since the girls were small, when Robin had been beaten up by an older boy, when Tracy had been attacked in the park by a Doberman. She felt half ashamed and half amazed at her response to Tom’s danger.
“You really didn’t have to wield that brick back on the roof,” Tom said, still brooding. “I was handling things fine.”
“Bullshit,” Lou butted in, giggling weakly. “She saved your ass.”
Mac planted himself in front of Lou, with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. His high Brahmin voice rasped on her fatigue.
“Mr. Schulman saw you at Number Twenty-seven where you left the gas behind when he interrupted you. He can identify you.”
“That old man?” Lou stared from one to the other. “He couldn’t identify his mother in the dark. It’s all hot air. And I’m suing you for everything you own. Kidnapping, that’s what this is. If you had anything real on me, you’d have called the cops.”
“We’ll call the cops all right,” Fay said, gathering her fuzzy pink bathrobe around her. Daria wished that Fay’s hair were not up in pink rubber curlers. “Very, very soon we’ll call them. You’re the fall guy, Lou. You’re caught dead to rights. We got you placed by two witnesses at the fire at Number Sixty-nine. We caught you with the goods at Number Seventy-one. And Mr. Schulman saw you, when you left your gasoline behind, at Number Twenty-seven. Plus you practically left your calling card out in Lexington, didn’t you?”
“Why would I go around this neighborhood setting fires? You think I’m some kind of nut? Some kind of pervert? Listen, I’m a landlord myself. I own buildings here.”
“Including the one you torched on Brainerd,” Tom said. “We know you’re paid by the landlords. I bet when the DA subpoenas your bank account, they’ll figure out exactly what you were paid per fire. I hope it was a lot, considering what you’re about to go through.”
“He’s a loser, what he called you up on the roof,” Daria said, walking back over. “Whatever they paid him, he’s going to do a long time in prison for it.”
There were so many of them gathered around him now, Lou was forced to turn and turn again in his chair to face them. He leaned back, forcing a grin. “You’re a team of hot air artists. You got nothing on me. No proof. And I’m going to take you for everything you got when I sue, if you own anything to begin with.
They had almost no hard evidence. Daria turned away again to prevent him from reading her aura of doubt and fear. She had attacked a man she didn’t even know tonight, perhaps broken his hand. That would look great in the papers. Beating a man with a brick. Perhaps he really could sue her. What did they have on him besides suppositions? It was close to four in the morning. Mikey and Johnny had dozed off on the couch, leaning together. Fay was making another pot of coffee and even Mac was looking wilted. How long could they hold Lou? Why didn’t he just walk out? He seemed afraid to try, perhaps because there were after all seven of them against him, if he counted the sleeping kids.
Elroy strutted up to Lou, putting on a swaying walk. “Poor honey pie, nothing much. Just witnesses up the ass. Witnesses linking you, in person, star billing, to four different fires, for starters. You don’t know how we been following you since that fire at Number Sixty-nine when you were seen, honey, by two witnesses, live ones. We followed you home to Belmont. We know how you been fighting with your wife and gave her that shiner. We know what you been buying and we know what you been selling. Now your little store’s closed down.”
“We’ll pick up the kid later,” Mac said, reenergized, resuming center stage. “Come on, make it easy for yourself.”
“You don’t know who he is. What kid?” Lou tugged his moustache.
“I know how to find him,” Tom said. “He hangs around that Spanish grocery. I know the kids in this neighborhood. Orlando will know his name. We should have hi
m on deck inside twenty-four hours.”
“We had a description of him from Mr. Schulman,” Daria said, on a gamble. “And I got a look at him last night when he ran down. It didn’t take us long to find you once we had a description, did it?”
“You haven’t been following me.” Lou looked from one to the other. “What kind of bullshit is that? You’re lying. You couldn’t follow a parade down the street.”
“I even saw Walker meeting you outside that coffee shop on Mass Avenue and giving you money. In Back Bay,” Daria said.
He was staring at her with eyes that widened rather than narrowed with suspicion, making him look oddly boyish with roof tar on his cheek, a bruise darkening the skin under one eye, his hand held before him crumpled. “My hand really hurts. I bet you broke my hand.”
She had to push, she knew it. They had to break him tonight or they would never have another shot. “Is that the hand you write those nice neat elegant notes with? Linen weave paper you like. Yours, Lou.”
His breath seemed to stop. He was staring hard. She met his gaze and held it. It was unpleasant, it was almost vile to hold his gaze and hold it on and on, a contact far too intimate. Something very cold was being exchanged.
She went on in a lighter voice. “Want to know something funny, Lou? Before we figured out who you were, for a while I thought you were Ross Walker’s girlfriend. I was reading all those notes and thinking they were for little rendezvous. But then he’d set himself up a nice alibi—have folks over for a big dinner party catered by yours truly. All those notes, Lou. You sure liked to write them.”