by Parnell Hall
The thing is, people always try to make a case for themselves. They always try to put their story in the best light. They always try to justify their actions. They always want you to think well of them. And in this case, could it really be true? I mean, old college chums, dying mothers, and Down’s Syndrome, for Christ’s sake. Did I have to swallow all that? Was it really true?
Or was it a story made up by a hooker to try to justify herself?
You have to understand how I felt. (Right, screw her moral justifications, here come mine). You see, I consider myself a liberal. On the other hand, I’m forty years old. When I was young, sexual equality was not something I ever particularly thought about. I grew up at a time when mailmen were mailmen, and no one was seriously suggesting they be called mailpersons or even mailcarriers. The women’s liberation movement sort of blind-sided me in the late ’60s early ’70s. I’d never realized I was a male chauvinist pig before. In fact, I didn’t even know what chauvinist meant, I had to look it up. But then I bet some of the persons calling me it were only really clear on what pig meant. Be that as it may, when confronted with the women’s liberation movement, I examined it, saw the truth in it, and adjusted my perspectives. I still don’t believe women should be given jobs as firemen if they can’t carry people out of burning buildings, and I don’t believe the department’s standards should be lowered just to give them jobs. But I do believe in equal pay for equal work, and I do believe women have been getting the short end of the stick, which, I just realized, is a horrible way to phrase it under the circumstances.
And, as far as sex goes, I know there’s a double standard, and it’s not right. And I realize now that women are sexual creatures, just like men, and that they have the same, or at least similar, drives and needs and feelings. I know all that, and I believe it.
Intellectually.
But, to be honest, in my heart of hearts, my feeling about women and sex is just the same as it was way back when I was a horny teenager just looking to get laid. And, with all due apologies to Gloria Steinem et al., it is this: any woman who has sex with me is sensitive, intelligent, perceptive and discerning—any woman who has sex with anyone else is a slut.
Now, as Johnny Carson would say, please don’t write in. That’s a one-liner, gang, not a moral philosophy. Please note the presence of tongue in cheek. All I’m saying is, liberal protestations notwithstanding, many men have confused and conflicting feelings about women and sex, and sexually active women tend to make them nervous. And the thing is, there is some ancient male instinct that says when you get on your white horse to slay dragons for your damsel in distress, as long as you’re risking your life for her, you should be able to think of her as sweet and pure and clean.
Particularly if you’re a coward to begin with.
I got a meter on 57th Street between 9th and 10th, and walked over to Broadway to drop off my film at the Photomat. It was crowded, and when I finally got up to the counter, the clerk who waited on me was one I hadn’t seen before. He was young, crisp, efficient. He grabbed my five rolls of film, looked at me, and said, “3 1/2 by 5, or 4 by 6?”
“What?” I said.
“What size do you want? 3 1/2 by 5, or 4 by 6?”
“I want the standard size,” I told him.
“They’re both standard sizes,” he said.
I blinked.
“Well,” he said, crisply. “I’ll fill this out while you decide. Name?”
“Stanley Hastings. I have an account.”
“Fine. Address?”
I told him and he wrote it down.
When he’d finished filling out the envelope he looked up at me. “Have you decided what size you want?”
There was nothing particularly offensive in his manner, but still he had managed to convey the impression that I was an idiot who couldn’t make up his mind.
If I’d been in a better mood, I’m sure I would have been able to think back to all the thousands of pictures I’d identified for my job, and figure out if they were 3 1/2 or 4 inches tall, and 5 or 6 inches wide. But I wasn’t in a good mood, and I didn’t feel like thinking about it.
“I want the size I always get,” I told him.
His look said, “How would I know what that was?” What he actually said, which I found equally annoying, was, “And what size might that be?”
“All right, look,” I said. “I’ve been dropping off pictures here for years, and this is the first time anyone has ever asked me this question. In light of that, what size pictures have they been giving me?”
“Well,” he said. “In that case, they’ve been giving you 3 1/2 by 5.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then that’s what I want.”
I got my film receipts and got the hell out of there. I don’t know why the guy irritated me so much. I guess it’s just that there are so many simple things in life, and somehow people always manage to make them so complicated. Too many options. Too many choices. And it really wasn’t the film thing that was bothering me. It was life in general. The film thing just seemed to set it off.
And I knew it was crazy, what I was thinking, but I couldn’t help it, ’cause I’m human, and you can’t help thinking things, even when you know how ridiculous they are. But, you see, I didn’t know what Pamela Berringer’s story really was. Maybe it was just as she said. But maybe not. Maybe she was just bored. Or maybe she heard time’s winged chariot drawing near and decided to stop being coy. How the hell should I know? But it certainly wasn’t rational to assume she was just a perfectly normal, happy housewife, who would have been just fine if one day a school chum named Jane hadn’t come up to her and said, “3 1/2 by 5, or 4 by 6?”
7.
I DROVE UPTOWN to see Sherry Webber, and in my mind I played the game I always play in these situations: How bad is it going to be? See, the thing about my job as a private detective is it’s pretty routine and pretty dull. The only thing that adds spice to it, if you could call it that, is the possibility I could get killed. That’s not because my job itself is particularly dangerous; it isn’t. It’s just that since many of Richard’s clients are economically deprived, I have to go into some pretty bad neighborhoods to see ’em. And I have to wear a suit and tie. Often, this makes me the only white man in a suit and tie in the neighborhood. In my mind that makes me a target. In the minds of the people in the neighborhood, that makes me a cop. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t much care if a junkie wants to kill me because he thinks I’m a cop come to bust him or because he thinks I’m a mark with some money—in either case I don’t like it.
If you get the idea I’m a coward, you’re right. I’m a big coward, and rightfully so. I don’t carry a gun or any other means of protection, and if anyone makes a move on me, I’m dead. Frankly, there are some neighborhoods that scare the hell out of me.
I’ve been on the job long enough that often just the street address will tip me off to an undesirable neighborhood. Or sometimes the facts of the case will—for instance, if a girl was raped because the back door of her building is unlocked and she lives next door to a methadone clinic, it’s sort of a dead giveaway I won’t be enjoying my visit.
But sometimes the street address and the case info tells me nothing, and I have to go to the Hagstrom map and look it up. Sometimes the index itself is enough— map 11, grid F-13 or 14 is apt to be a fairly bad section of Bedford Stuyvesant/East New York. Sometimes I don’t know until I turn to the actual page, and sometimes I don’t know even then, and won’t know until I get there.
But always in my mind I play the game: how bad is it going to be?
In Sherry Webber’s case I wasn’t sure. West 141st Street is Harlem, but there’s Harlem and there’s Harlem, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t remember anything in the 140’s as far east as the West 100 block. Let’s see, 141st was fairly high for Harlem; did that put it in the Washington Heights area? Could be. I don’t know if it runs that far east. There are no definite boundaries, at least none that I know. So how bad was
it?
The thing that added fuel to my paranoia was all the recent furor about crack. God, I wish they’d stop these drug innovations. I’d just about figured out what freebase was, when suddenly there was crack, which I gather is sort of like freebase only you don’t have to do it yourself, sort of instant freebase. Anyway, the media had gone wild on the stuff. Every day I’d pick up the paper and see “Killer Crack.” Sometimes it would be “Crazed Crack Killer.” The articles were all the same, usually about some junkie who killed someone for twenty bucks ’cause he just had to have a couple of hits of crack. Well, I suppose he did. But the thing is, heroin’s been around for years, and there’s always been junkies willing to kill someone to get a fix, and I really can’t see how crack could be much worse. But you don’t hear anything much about heroin these days. Just crack. Killer Crack. It’s all just a big media hype.
But the thing about a media hype is it works. And I have to tell you, it has made me scared to death of crack addicts. And every time I read in the paper about some crack killing, the first thing I do is check the address and see if it’s some neighborhood I’ve been in. And it usually is.
And the thing is, whether I’ve been there or not, I remember the address, and every time I get a new assignment I think back to what I read in the paper and try to figure out what I know of the area.
Now from what I remembered, Washington Heights is a big crack area. So is Harlem. 141st Street is on the border of both, and, as I recalled, the 140’s were particularly bad. So I was apprehensive as I turned onto 141st Street: how bad is it going to be?
Pretty bad. And the further east I went, the worse it got. Half the buildings abandoned and boarded up. The other half looking like they ought to be.
I cruised by my building and checked it out. I do that sometimes when I’m particularly nervous, which is more often than I care to think about. About what I’d expected. A five story walkup in poor repair. Cracked concrete steps up to a closed wooden door. A glass transom overhead, and did I catch a sign of movement in it? I couldn’t tell.
I went by and parked the car. Parking spaces abounded, which was good in that I could get one, and bad in that it indicated that no one in his right mind would want to park here.
I got out of my car, took my briefcase, and walked back to the building. There was no one hanging out on the front steps, but it was cold out, so there wouldn’t be. I checked my notebook. Sherry Webber lived in apartment 51, which probably meant fifth floor, though in a building like this you couldn’t be sure.
I looked up at the transom. Sure enough, there was movement behind it, and I could see the shadowy outline of what appeared to be someone’s hat. Could it? No. You’re imagining it. No one could be that tall. Well, come on, schmuck, you going in or not?
I walked up the steps, put my hand on the knob, and opened the door.
Jesus Christ! My worst nightmare. At least ten people hanging out in the grungy foyer. Ragged, strung-out, weird looking. I’m sure I projected some of it, but some of it I didn’t. The guy with the hat, for instance, was tall enough to be seen through the transom. And some of the others, I know, had a glassy-eyed look that god never intended. They were all staring at me, and though none of them said anything, I could see their minds racing: “A honkey!” “A cop!” “What the fuck?” “Who the hell?” “Shit!”
My impulse was to turn and run, but I didn’t. I’d like to have you think it was bravery, but it wasn’t. It was fear. It was the feeling that gripped me at that moment that if I turned tail, if I showed fear, I was dead. So with all my adrenaline pumping like crazy, I stood my ground, and said real loud and aggressive, “Sherry Webber.”
They stared at me as if I were from another planet, which was what I felt like.
“Sherry Webber,” I demanded again. “She live here?”
There was a moment while they all kind of looked at each other, and then a girl somewhere in the back of the foyer said, “Upstairs.”
I pointed a finger at her. “Thank you,” I said. I pushed by the two guys next to the door and plunged up the stairs. It took an effort not to look back to see if anyone was following me.
At the top of the stairs there were two more guys hanging out on the 2nd floor landing.
“Sherry Webber,” I yelled at them.
They gawked at me. I pushed by ’em, plunged up the next stairs.
Two more guys hanging out on the third floor. Shit. Didn’t any of these people have apartments?
“Sherry Webber,” I demanded.
One of them actually pointed up. I gave a curt nod of thanks and headed up, always putting more and more people between me and the safety outside.
No one on the next floor. Good. I couldn’t take much more of this. At last I had time to look at the apartments. As expected, there were no numbers on the doors. Well, 51 should be 5th floor. One more flight.
Three people on the 5th floor landing. Two girls and a guy. Young. Teens, early twenties.
“Sherry Webber,” I said again.
One of the girls pointed to the back of the hallway. I turned the corner, went there. There were two doors facing me. Numberless. I turned back.
“Which one.”
“That one,” she said.
I couldn’t tell which one she was pointing to. I also thought I heard steps coming up the stairs.
“Which?” I said again, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice.
She pointed again, and this time I could tell. The one to the left.
I turned and banged on it. Shit. Nothing. I banged again, louder this time. Christ, she made the appointment, wasn’t she home?
And then, from deep within the apartment, came the faint voice. “Just a minute.”
A minute, hell! I looked over my shoulder. They were all looking at me. And those were footsteps on the stairs.
“Who are you?” the guy said.
At that moment two other guys, both fairly young, appeared at the top of the stairs.
“I’m not here to bust her,” I said. “I’m from her lawyer’s office. I’m on her side.”
“A lawyer,” he said. “No shit. What the hell she need a lawyer?”
“She broke her leg. She’s got money coming.”
“Oh, yeah, money,” he said.
Two more guys came up the stairs just in time to hear this. I didn’t want them to think I had money for her.
“I mean we’re going to get it for her,” I said, stupidly. “From the insurance company.”
He frowned. “She got insurance?”
“No, no,” I said. My mind had given way, and I was about to explain the whole process of litigation to these guys, but at that moment the lock clicked back and the door opened. I whirled around in immense relief that immediately evaporated as I discovered the door had opened a mere two inches on a safety chain. From within came a maddeningly cheery sing-song, “Who is it?”
“Mr. Hastings from the lawyer’s office,” I said. I was trying for crisp efficiency. The result was something akin to an hysterical shout.
The door slammed shut. My heart sank. Wrong apartment! It’s not Sherry Webber, and she didn’t call Rosenberg and Stone, and she isn’t expecting me, and I’m stranded out here, and everyone’s staring at me, and I’m about to do something slightly unprofessional like scream, or faint, or pee in my pants, and—the lock clicked back again and I suddenly realized she had just closed the door to take off the safety chain.
Standing in the doorway was a plump, sixtyish woman with a full-length cast.
“Sherry Webber?” I said.
She smiled. “Yes. You’re the lawyer, aren’t you?”
I didn’t figure it was a good time to explain I was merely a private detective employed by the lawyer.
“Yes,” I said, practically knocking her over in my haste to get into the apartment. I pushed by her, and then actually helped her close the door, just so I could make damn sure it was locked.
I followed her into the kitchen, and we sat
down at the kitchen table. I opened my briefcase, took out a sign-up kit, and pulled out a fact sheet. As I took a pen out of my jacket pocket, I realized I was hyperventilating and having trouble breathing.
So did she. “You all right?” she said. “You out of breath?”
“That’s a lotta stairs,” I told her.
She nodded. “Yes. Lotta stairs. That’s where I got hurt.”
It was indeed. Sherry Webber’s case was simple and straightforward. She’d been coming down the stairs from the 3rd to the 2nd floor, tripped on a cracked step, fallen, and broken her leg. I wrote down the facts of the case, had her sign hospital release forms to get her medical records, a request for the police report, and a retainer. The retainer, of course, was what it was all about. By signing it she authorized Richard Rosenberg to act as her attorney, and, in the event he received any money for her by way of a settlement, to retain one-third of it as his fee.
The signup took about fifteen minutes. When it was done, I whipped out my Canon Snappy 50 and took pictures of her broken leg. The pictures were always the end of the signup. That’s because, if the client doesn’t sign the retainer, there’s no reason to waste the film. So after I take the injury pictures, I’m done.
Except for the Location of Accident pictures. See, Richard has a rule that, if the accident occurred at the same location as the interview, I have to take the accident pictures as part of the signup. That’s because Richard is cheap, and he doesn’t want to pay me for taking the accident pictures as a separate assignment. So I had to take pictures of Sherry Webber’s stairs.
I didn’t want to do it. My Canon Snappy 50 is not the world’s most expensive camera, but it retails for close to 100 bucks. I had a feeling if I whipped it out in front of the guys on the stairs it would look like half a gram of coke to them. Was I being paranoid? Damn right, but paranoid people get killed too. I would have liked to have taken Sherry Webber downstairs with me to point out where she fell, but with her in a hip-length cast that seemed unnecessarily cruel. And what the hell kind of detective was I anyway, taking a sixty year old woman with a broken leg along for protection? So I just wished her well, gave her Richard’s business card, and went out to take the pictures myself.