by Linda Wolfe
But if she was down on her father and stepmother, she was also down on her mother. Her mother was her best friend, she’d say. But she was irresponsible, more a pal than a parent. Still, she loved seeing her, and one night she and a girlfriend, who were going out for the evening to a club that was in Ellen’s neighborhood, made arrangements to stop by and visit her on their way home.
It was late when they got there. Nearly two in the morning. “She’s up,” Jennifer said. “The lights are still on and there’s music playing.” She knocked on the door.
No one answered, and Jennifer went on knocking. Still no one answered.
Jennifer didn’t give up. She knocked for half an hour. But at last she said harshly, “Maybe my mother passed out from booze.”
After that the girls left and went to Jennifer’s loft, where they stayed awake talking till dawn. Then, just as they got ready to go to sleep, the telephone rang. Jennifer picked it up. “It’s my mother,” she signaled her friend.
Her mother began to talk and Jennifer listened. But a moment later she said, “Fuck you, Mom,” and hung up the phone.
“What did your mom say that made you so angry?” Jennifer’s friend asked.
“She said, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t hear you, but I was wasted,’” Jennifer replied.
Her girlfriend felt sad for her. Poor Jennifer, she thought. She has no adult figure she can count on. No wonder that when she comes to my house, she never relates to my parents, but just talks to them rudely or ignores them altogether.
“Can we go into your building with you?” Robert said to the younger brother of one of his friends. It was not long after he’d robbed the Park Avenue penthouse. He and David, each carrying an empty canvas satchel, were standing in front of the kid’s apartment house on East 72nd Street. The kid was nervous. He’d heard stories about Robert’s exploits. But Robert assured him that he and David weren’t going to steal from anybody in his building. They were going to leap from the roof to a building across the way.
That made it all right. The kid agreed to help them out. He led them into his lobby and past the uniformed doorman.
They all took the elevator together, but the kid got out on his floor. Once he was gone, Robert and David stayed on and continued to the top of the building. But they didn’t try to leap over to the building across the way. Robert was afraid of heights. They just stayed in the kid’s building, making their way onto the terrace that ran behind the penthouse apartments, and, breaking the glass panes in a terrace door, slipped into one of the apartments.
They’d gotten lucky, they saw. The apartment was filled with treasures. They stuffed their bags with silver cups and ashtrays, gold jewelry, a magnum of Moët & Chandon, and a huge soft fur coat. Then, flushed with accomplishment, they hotfooted it outside and tried to hit a second apartment.
They went into it the same way, from the terrace door. But just as they were sizing up the place, they heard a noise. Someone was home! That was the bad part, and it almost ruined everything. They had to run, had to try to reach the kitchen, where there was a window leading back put onto the terrace, before whoever was home spotted them. They managed. They found the kitchen, raised the window, started to scramble away. But just then, just as they were halfway out, a man entered the kitchen. They were so terrified when they saw him that they almost dropped their bags with all the loot from the first place.
Still, they didn’t. They held on and squeezed through the window. Then they jumped onto the terrace and began running, getting as far away from the man as they could.
He didn’t come after them, and a few moments later, their hearts pounding, they were ringing the doorbell of the kid who had let them into the building. Would he escort them out, they asked.
The kid didn’t ask any questions. He said sure and rode down in the elevator with them.
When they reached the front door, the doorman stopped them. “Do you know these boys?” he asked the kid suspiciously, pointing at David and Robert.
“Yes,” the kid said coolly.
The doorman opened the door for them and let them out.
One night at around that time, Jennifer was at Dorrian’s. She saw a good-looking guy at the bar.
“Who’s that?” she asked a girlfriend.
“Robert Chambers.”
“He’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah,” Jennifer’s friend said. “And he’s had this real hard life and all.” Then she lowered her voice and whispered to Jennifer that she felt sorry for Robert because people were always telling stories about him, saying he stole from his friends, and even that he’d broken into some apartment someplace.
A rascal—he sounded fascinating. Jennifer tucked the information away in a corner of her mind.
On the evening of October 9, 1985, David Fillyaw told his mother not to expect him home that night. He’d be sleeping up at Columbia in his friend Peter’s dorm suite, he said. Then he left the apartment, met Peter, and went with him to the Cat Club. They listened to music, had some drinks and some coke, and around 3 A.M. taxied to Peter’s dorm. There they had a few beers, and David did a little more coke. And then Peter said he was sleepy and went to bed.
David wasn’t tired at all. He decided to buy some more beer. He put on his jacket and, reasoning that because it was still dark out he might need some protection, grabbed a cooking knife from the suite’s kitchen and shoved it into his pocket.
He was heading for the elevator when he passed the television room of the dorm. He heard the set, glanced in, and saw a pretty blond girl in a bathrobe sitting there all alone. “Whatcha doing up so late?” he said to her.
“Watching TV,” she answered shyly.
He told her his name, and she said hers was Sarah and that she was studying engineering. “What about you?” she asked.
He said he didn’t actually go to Columbia, but he had this good friend who did and that he often stayed in his suite. Then he asked her if she wanted to do some coke.
She sounded interested, he thought, so he suggested they go to her room, and they did. But once they were there, it turned out she didn’t want any coke, and anyway, that wasn’t what he wanted now either. He wanted to kiss her. He told her so, and she let him put his arms around her, and he gave her a kiss, and she kissed him back. Then he began fondling her body. It felt terrific, but he’d gotten himself so stoned he couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t have sex. Maybe if he held her for a while longer, though, he’d be able to, he hoped. So he started feeling her all over, and she didn’t seem to mind, and he was just starting to think that maybe he was going to be okay, maybe he’d be able to do it, when all of a sudden she said, “No. I don’t want to have sex.”
He couldn’t believe it. “I thought you did,” he said.
“No. Just get out.”
“Get out?”
“Yeah.”
It made him mad. “What’d you bring me here for?” he demanded. And then he gave her a piece of his mind. Called her an asshole and a few other things.
She went wild. Slapped his face. He wanted to slap her back, but he didn’t, just told her again what he thought of her. But that didn’t settle her down. She lifted her arm and struck him again. Then everything went haywire. She wouldn’t stop hitting, so he pushed her down onto the bed, and before he knew it he’d grabbed her bra and tied up her hands with it, and then he pulled the knife out of his jacket and thrust it into her, and then he thrust it in again and he heard her cry out, but he couldn’t stop and he did it again. He sliced her in the liver and he perforated her lung, but it was like someone else was doing it to her, like he wasn’t even there. He stabbed her at least six times, and then, as if he were hearing the soundtrack of a movie or something, he heard the shrieking and knew he had to get out of there.
He left her, crawling on the bed and screaming, and ran down a staircase to Peter’s suite. Peter was asleep, so he didn’t wake him. He just peeled off his bloody shirt, threw the shirt and the knife in a corner, and lay down on a
mattress on the floor. He lay there, and he got drowsy, and after a while he just went to sleep.
Pat Fillyaw heard from David at about five that afternoon. The police had searched the dorm for Sarah’s attacker and had found David, his hands still bloody, asleep in Peter’s room. They’d taken him to a station house, and he’d confessed. But when he called Pat, he didn’t tell her what had happened. He just said, “Mommy, please don’t hate me. I’ve done something terrible.” And then he told her he needed a lawyer.
She called her father. “David’s in some sort of trouble,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. It’s on the news.”
“The news?” Pat’s heart tumbled to her shoes even before her father told her about the stabbing. When he finished, she couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be David who’d done that. But it was. She didn’t believe it, but at the same time she knew it was true. She started sobbing, and what was strange about her tears, she would remember long afterward, was that they weren’t just for David, but for this girl, this Sarah. Why, she kept thinking as the tears poured down her cheeks, did women always have to suffer at the hands of men?
“Mommy, can’t you get me bail?” A week later, in the visitors’ room at Rikers Island, the infamous and overcrowded prison in the middle of New York’s East River, David was mournful.
“They’re not letting you have bail. You know that,” Pat said to him sharply. She was worried that Sarah, who was still alive, might die of her wounds. “Anyway, what for?” she sighed. “So you can take my clothes and my money and clean me out of everything we’ve got in the apartment?”
“So I can come home. I’m homesick.” David sounded as if he really meant it.
Pat softened. “You know,” she said lightly, “that if they gave you bail, you’d be on the first boat to China.”
David burst out laughing.
Pat laughed, too. And the visit made them both feel better.
Jennifer didn’t go out on the town all the time. There were evenings she had dinner at home with Steve and Arlene, nights when she babysat for the children of friends of theirs, weekend afternoons when she went to family gatherings. At one of these gatherings, both her mother and Arlene were present. It was a reception in honor of her sister Danielle. Danielle had just returned from Hawaii, where she’d gotten married. She’d married one of her high school teachers.
Jennifer thought he was cute. And she was proud of her big sister for becoming a bride.
Her own romantic prospects were not very promising. By that late autumn of 1985, it seemed to her friends that she had become a specialist in rejection. She kept getting crushes on unsuitable guys, only to reap disappointments and repudiation. Still, she never stopped falling in love. And she never fell in love without falling, afterward, into despair.
The pattern was apparent even with Brock. She kept resuming her connection to him, then a fight would happen, and he’d tell her he wanted to break up. She’d say fine, she never wanted to see him again anyway. They’d part. And then, although the relationship was so tempestuous that her closest girlfriends couldn’t understand why she wanted it at all, she would once again start seeing Brock.
In November he was back in the picture. She went with him to a reggae concert at Radio City Music Hall, and then to a sweet sixteen party at the home of Margaret Trahill, a new friend.
She looked grown up that night, her body sleek in a snug Betsey Johnson number that laced up the back. Margaret’s mother thought the garment inappropriate. All the other girls were wearing decorous little cocktail dresses. “Jennifer looks vulgar,” she said. “Sluttish.”
Margaret defended Jennifer. “Nobody,” she said to her mother, “knows as much about style as Jennifer.”
Sarah, with all those wounds in her, didn’t die. For that, Pat Fillyaw would ever afterward be grateful. The girl was hospitalized for weeks after David stabbed her, but by mid-November it was clear that she would soon be well enough to return to Columbia and resume her engineering studies.
It was David about whom Pat was worried now. A few weeks after his arrest he had begun talking about killing himself, and he’d sounded so determined to do so that he’d been transferred from prison on Rikers Island to the forensic unit at Bellevue Hospital. There, Pat visited him every day, sitting with him in a crowded lounge and trying to make small talk. But no matter how hard she worked at cheering him up, he remained distant and blue.
She believed in her mother’s heart that he was suffering from remorse. He’d told the police the night they arrested him that he hadn’t meant to hurt Sarah, that he’d been so stoned he’d been out of his mind. “It was like it wasn’t me there,” he’d said. “It was not something I would have done in a sober or conscious state.” Now he was sober. Conscious. The horror of what he had done must surely, Pat was convinced, be flooding him hourly with guilt and shame.
He may have felt those emotions. But the charges facing him were in themselves severe enough to warrant depression. He had been indicted for attempted murder, and there was talk that he might be indicted, too, for the East 72nd Street burglaries. The police had been speaking with the boy who’d let him and Robert into the building, and by now had gotten both their names.
On a gray November afternoon David took a belt from a hospital bathrobe and concealed it in his pocket. An attendant noticed the belt and took it away from him. But at six in the evening he got hold of another belt. He tied one end of it around his neck and attached the other to a window lock.
He was found with his feet still on the ground. But nevertheless the hospital placed him on a suicide watch, and attendants monitored him round the clock.
Jennifer could tell her mother anything, Joan Huey noticed at around that time. They were as close as friends. Best friends. That was because Ellen was so warm, so giving. She’d moved to Manhattan, gotten an apartment not far from Steve and Arlene’s loft, and she’d take Jen and Joan out to dinner in restaurants, fun places where there were crayons and paper tablecloths you could draw on. Jen’s father was fun, too. But he was strict. Gave Jennifer curfews. Grounded her when she came in late. “Don’t you wish you lived with your mom?” Joan asked Jennifer.
Jennifer’s answer surprised Joan. She said that if she lived with her mom, she might not have the curfew problem, but she liked having a curfew. Wanted discipline. Then she said, “Anyway, at my father’s, I’ve got my own room. At mom’s, I’d have to share her bedroom.”
“My partner and I would like to come over and have a few words with you,” Detective Theresa Enterlin said to Robert over the phone early in December. Robert said his mother was out, but that it was all right with him if the detectives stopped by.
Enterlin and her partner went over to East 90th Street and took the elevator to the Chamberses’ floor. It deposited them right in the foyer of the apartment. Nice touch, Enterlin thought. She had been on the force for thirty years, seen all sorts of people and places, but still was amazed at the plushness of the Upper East Side. This place looked especially nice. Meticulously neat and tasteful. There were antiques, a couch with really puffy cushions, a cut-crystal chandelier. Classy, Enterlin told herself. Nothing from Seamans here.
When Robert showed her and her partner to a seat, she began asking him questions. “A paper with your name on it was found outside the terrace of a burglarized apartment on Park Avenue,” she said. “Any idea how it got there?”
Robert had been missing a registration receipt from Hunter College. But he hadn’t realized he’d lost it the day he and David did their first burglary together. “Can’t imagine,” he said.
Enterlin moved ahead. “What were you doing at 245 East Seventy-second Street the day two apartments there got burglarized?”
East 72nd Street? Robert knew better than to deny that he’d been there. His friend’s kid brother, the one who’d let him and David into the building, had told him he’d talked to the police. “I was there,” he said. “I was with my friend David Fillyaw. But I didn’t steal an
ything. David did all the stealing.”
Enterlin noted this down. Then she said, “How come you were along with him?”
“He forced me to come. He threatened he’d hurt my mother or my girlfriend if I didn’t help him get into the building, and I was scared to say no.”
Enterlin laughed. “Why should you be scared? You’re a big, tall fellow, and David’s small. Half your size.”
“Yeah,” Robert said, “But you never know what they can do.”
Enterlin knew he meant blacks. He had a black friend, but that didn’t seem to keep him from making racist remarks.
“They have gangs,” Robert went on. “I’m still afraid of David. Even though he’s in jail now.”
Enterlin didn’t buy his account. But she had five grandchildren and hated to see kids in trouble. She let him talk on, and after a while he said that in any event nothing particularly valuable had been stolen. “Just a few pieces of silver and a ratty-looking fur coat.” He made a disdainful face. “The collar was ripped and the fur was shedding. It came out in bunches without even being touched.”
There wasn’t enough evidence to arrest the boy, Enterlin decided. But when she got back to her precinct, she recommended that the case be kept active.