by Linda Wolfe
Lighting a joint, Robert stared at the traffic racing down Second Avenue and gave himself over to melancholia. “I’m depressed,” he grumbled. “I’ve got nothing. No job. No money. And Hazelden didn’t help me. I’ve been falling off the wagon.”
“Look, maybe you should go home,” his friend suggested. “I mean, if you hang around here, you gotta fall off the wagon.”
Robert shrugged. Going home was no solution. “Naw,” he said. “I want to hang out.”
He finished the joint, stood outside a while longer, then went back into Dorrian’s.
Jennifer and her girlfriends arrived at Dorrian’s about midnight. They had the half-drunk bottle of champagne from Juanita’s with them, and when they walked in they sipped more of it. The bar was jammed and festive, like a giant cocktail party, and two bartenders were busily pouring drinks. One of them was twenty-two-year-old John Zaccaro, Jr., Geraldine Ferraro’s son, who was awaiting trial in Vermont on charges of possessing and intending to sell cocaine. Jennifer asked Zaccaro for a glass of water, looked around for Robert, and not seeing him, made her way deeper into the room. The friends she bumped into welcomed her extravagantly, hugging and kissing her, and she embraced them back and told them she loved them. But all the while she kept searching for Robert. Two boys grabbed her and planted noisy kisses on either side of her neck, trying to give her hickeys, but she ignored them. Was Robert here?
At last, entering the glassed-in porch at the back of the pub, she saw him in the distance, sitting at a table with some people she didn’t know. He was so handsome. His face, with its cleft chin, so rugged and his blue eyes so dark and enigmatic. At once all her planning drained from her mind. She didn’t kiss him, didn’t address him, just went over to his table and started talking to the group at large. She didn’t know what she was saying. She just said whatever came into her head.
She’s prattling, Robert thought. She’s going on and on about her trip to California, and the suntan she worked on in the Hamptons. Who cares? He made faces while she spoke, and then after a while just ignored her, getting into a conversation with one of the guys at his table.
Jennifer didn’t linger. But although she was hurt by Robert’s response, she decided not to give it too much significance. She’d approach him again and see what happened. Ten minutes later she went back to his table, ordered a drink—a baybreeze, with vodka, cranberry juice, and pineapple juice—and this time she sat down.
Robert rose and left the table.
She didn’t follow him, just got up, too, and talked to people she knew. But memories of the stories she’d been telling about Robert all summer flooded her mind, filling her with shame. All her friends knew she’d been to bed with him. All her friends knew how much she liked him. Even tonight she’d been saying that she wanted to leave the bar with him later and have sex. What would people think of her if he ignored her? And why was he, when they’d been so good together? It occurred to her then that maybe he didn’t know how much she liked him, and that maybe, if she told him, he’d soften toward her. Lots of guys, she knew, needed girls to make the first move. She waited until she saw him standing alone near the back of the bar and approached him a third time, determined to make him pay attention to her.
He was terribly handsome, she told him. And terribly sexy. And then she said saucily, “You were the best sex I ever had.”
She hoped that would carry some weight. Guys loved to hear they were the best. But to her astonishment, he didn’t seem happy to hear her words. Odd—he didn’t even smile. He just looked at her coldly and said, “You shouldn’t have said that.”
Why?
Betsy saw them talking. They were deep in conversation, and the expressions on their faces were serious.
Jo Perry also saw them, and their being together made her angry. She and Robert had agreed to meet at Dorrian’s at ten forty-five, but he’d arrived an hour late. And when he’d finally come, he hadn’t even said hello, let alone sat down with her. He’d gone to the back of the bar and done some coke, a friend told her. And now he was not only still ignoring her, he was talking with another girl. He wasn’t supposed to be doing that; she and he had an agreement about Dorrian’s. If either of them wanted to flirt with someone else there, that was okay, provided they informed each other in advance. He hadn’t said anything of the sort about tonight. Yet there he was, engrossed in conversation with Jennifer. Irate, Jo went over to Robert and began to shout at him. In her hand was a bag containing packages of condoms. “Use these with someone else,” she said, flinging the bag at his face. “Because you’re not going to get a chance to use them with me.”
It was embarrassing to Robert to have Jo chew him out. People were listening. Some of them were laughing. Jennifer was laughing. Not only that, now she was talking to some other guy. Flirting with him. She pissed him off. It was her fault that Jo was yelling at him in front of everybody. Her fault, because if she hadn’t come over to him, Jo wouldn’t have seen them and gotten so furious.
When she stopped shouting and walked away, he shrugged and ignored both Jo and Jennifer.
Why was he being so standoffish? Why, when she’d let him know how much he’d pleased her? Jennifer, utterly wretched, ran through the merrymaking crowd and grabbed Alexandra LaGatta and told her how Robert had brushed her off. She was on the verge of tears, and she wailed, “Oh, my God, now look at what’s happening between us.”
It’s probably all for the best, Alexandra thought. She’d never cared for Robert, and she didn’t like Dorrian’s all that much either. The way she saw it, the place was filled with a bunch of kids who didn’t know what to do with themselves except drink and drug and chase after one another. The guys were insecure, so they went after every girl they saw, and that made the girls insecure, so in retaliation they went after every guy. The place was like a circle, with everybody trying to make out with everybody else, and she’d never heard of people who hung out at Dorrian’s being faithful to one another for longer than a week. If that.
“Forget Robert,” she told Jennifer.
But Jennifer didn’t want to. When Alexandra lost interest in her plight, she sought out Betsy and implored her to intercede with Robert. “Tell him I want to talk to him,” she said. “Tell him to meet me outside in twenty minutes.”
Betsy delivered the message. But Robert listened to the words indifferently. “I don’t want to deal with it,” he said.
Jennifer tried afterward to put him out of her mind. She circulated through the bar with Edwina looking for new good-looking guys. But most of the guys she met were so unappealing that when they asked for her phone number, she gave them a false one. She played a trick on Edwina, who had casually left her wallet lying around on a table, by removing the credit cards from the wallet. But although she’d meant it as a joke, a lesson to Edwina not to be careless, Edwina got angry, and that spoiled the fun. She took part in an ice fight, letting herself be captured by a group of boys and dragged under a table. But a bartender broke up the fight. She went out of doors for a while with Alexandra LaGatta. But Alexandra got into an intimate conversation with a guy. Jennifer, a fifth wheel, went back inside.
Robert was still there. He looked just as handsome and sexy as ever. Maybe it had been a mistake to give up on him, she began thinking. Persistence had always been her strong suit, and maybe if she stuck to it, stayed at Dorrian’s long enough, she’d be lucky. Most people paired off when the bar closed, and if there was no other girl waiting for Robert when closing came, he just might feel lonesome and she just might end up in bed with him after all.
At around two thirty, when Alexandra LaGatta came back inside and said she was ready to go home now, she told Alexandra she didn’t want to leave yet, because Robert was still there. Alexandra took off, promising to leave the key to her apartment under the doormat, and Jennifer lingered on.
There was a problem with her plan, though. Jo Perry, the girl who had yelled at Robert and said he’d stood her up, was still hanging around, too. Was she waiting for
Robert? Or was she really through with him, the way she’d said she was. Unsure, Jennifer went to Jo’s table, sat down, and engaged her in conversation. She kept the conversation light. She didn’t say why she’d come over. But she did hint at her reason. “I have a problem,” she said. “I know this nice girl. And—and I want her boyfriend.”
Jo didn’t know what nice girl she was referring to and didn’t ask. Jennifer let the subject drop. But in the end it didn’t matter, because later, at around a quarter of four, she realized that Jo wasn’t waiting for Robert. She was going home.
The bar was pretty empty by then. Only a dozen or so people were left. Jennifer stayed put. And then at last her plan began working. Robert came over to her.
She talked with him for a long while after that. She sat at the bar with him and, toying with the ice cubes in her glass, spoke to him seriously and intimately. While they were talking, a fistfight broke out between some of the remaining patrons, but she ignored the commotion and concentrated on Robert. And then, just as she’d hoped, he said he wanted her to leave with him.
She should have been overjoyed, but she wasn’t. A feeling of uneasiness came over her, and she couldn’t make up her mind to go. She needed advice, she decided. And noticing that her friend William was still there, tried to get it from him. “I’ve been talking to Robert,” she said, cornering William. “And, I don’t know, a couple of things he said worried me.”
“Naw, Robert’s okay.” William shrugged. “He’s one of us.”
“Should I leave with him?”
“Yeah, if that’s what you want to do.”
She did want to leave with him. She’d been thinking about him for weeks. Or was it years? She knew he’d had lots of girls in his life. And she knew the sort of girls they were—the ones who always got to see their names in print on club invitations, the ones who had perfect skin and bodies thin as rails and who wore little black cocktail dresses to parties and the dun-colored uniforms of fancy East Side academies to school. But he’d chosen her. Made her body feel loved and the rest of her feel something for which she’d always yearned. Feel that she belonged.
She went back to Robert.
About four thirty, looking proud and exhilarated, she stood up and, with Robert beside her, began saying her goodbyes.
“We know what you’re gonna do,” Betsy, who was still there, teased.
She gave Betsy a wink.
“Where are you going?” Betsy asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Then she tossed her hair bravely and slung her jean jacket over her left shoulder. Robert opened the door for her, and she sailed through it.
PART II
Woman
Down
5.
The Body in the Park
The air was chilly and the sky still dark when Pat Reilly awoke at 5 A.M. She turned off the alarm, then sank back beneath the bedclothes, thinking she just might stay where she was and skip exercising this morning. But after a few minutes she got out of bed, ate a hurried breakfast, and went downstairs, where she straddled her streamlined racing bike. She worked such long hours at her job—she was a mutual funds trader—that if she didn’t exercise now she wouldn’t be able to do it all day.
It was still too dim to ride safely in the park, so she pedaled downtown along Fifth Avenue. But a few minutes past six, when the sun began to rise, she turned the bike, headed uptown, and entered the park.
She was moving fast when, right near the boathouse at 72nd Street, a brown car came hurtling toward her, traveling in the wrong direction on the one-way road. Who is this lunatic? she wondered, and tried to peer into the car. But the windows were tinted and she couldn’t make out the driver.
She kept a wary eye out for danger after that. You couldn’t be too cautious in the park. Not if you were a biker. Because it wasn’t just traffic you had to worry about. It was predators who accosted you for your equipment. Pedaling, she kept glancing to either side of the roadway to make certain no one was lurking in wait for her.
She was just passing Cleopatra’s Needle, behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art, when something caught her eye in the trees to her left. There was someone there. Someone sprawled on the ground. Just a bag lady asleep, she told herself, and kept on going. Then she did a double take. It wasn’t a bag lady. It was something else. She braked the bike, got off, and began walking timorously toward the spot that had captured her attention.
When she was about forty feet away from a tall elm tree, she saw clearly what she’d glimpsed from the road. It was the body of a young woman, naked except for a few clothes bunched up around her neck and waist and a jean jacket tossed across one of her arms. Her limbs were contorted, and she was lying motionless beneath an overhanging branch. Pat stopped walking. She didn’t want to get any closer. If the woman was still alive, she wouldn’t know how to help her. And if she was dead, she didn’t want to see what it was that had happened to her.
She ran to her bicycle, leaped onto it, and rode frantically back to the boathouse. There were telephones there. She’d call the police.
She tried one. It didn’t work. She tried a second. It didn’t work either. Someone had pulled out the wires. She tried a third. Broken, too.
Frustrated, Pat jumped back on her bike, raced it out of the park, and found a phone on a street corner.
It was around 6:15 A.M. She dialed 911 and reported to an operator what she’d seen. But she couldn’t describe the exact location. She’d help direct the police toward it, she promised the operator; she’d wait on the side of the road near the elm tree.
At 6:21 A.M. Sergeant Anthony Michelak and Police Officer James McCreary, whose job it was to provide security for the park’s early morning athletes, were parked in a patrol car alongside the reservoir when a voice penetrated the static of their radio. “Woman down,” the voice sputtered. “Woman down at Eighty-first and East Drive.” It was police lingo for a woman in need of assistance.
“Let’s go!” said Michelak, who was a certified emergency medical services technician. “Let’s see what’s happening.” Seconds later he and McCreary were careening along the bridle path. Then they turned onto the joggers’ road and began heading south.
Before they reached 81st Street, they passed Pat Reilly sitting along the roadway. She saw them and gestured toward the trees. McCreary, who was driving, swerved in a U-turn. As he started the turn, he noticed several people clustered at a stone wall behind the Museum. They were standing, except for one young man who was sitting down. McCreary paid no attention to the spectators. He finished his turn and parked the car.
Michelak jumped out. In the distance he could make out a figure lying under a tree. He hurried toward it, determined to provide the required assistance. But when he reached the figure, he hesitated, wondering if the woman could be assisted. Her neck was covered with a welter of garish red bruises and she appeared to have been strangled. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe some shred of life still lingered within her. Deciding to check, he reached to take her pulse. But although he’d been trained to take it at the carotid artery, he knew better than to touch the woman’s bruised neck. Instead, he placed his hand beneath her heart. It was completely still.
Michelak went to the car and told his supervisors that this wasn’t an assistance site. It was a crime scene. He asked for detectives and an ambulance. By then more spectators had gathered. He opened the car’s trunk, took out a long sheet of brown wrapping paper, and gave the dead woman some semblance of privacy from the rubberneckers across the road.
Susan Bird, a lawyer in her forties, was one of the rubberneckers. She’d been running near the Museum with a friend when she’d heard sirens and noticed the police car pull over onto the grass. She stopped moving in order to take in the activity across the way. A young man was also watching, sitting on a low stone wall and staring intently at the police. “What’s going on?” Susan asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It looks like they found
something.” Susan thought him odd. His face had strange vertical scratches on it, and he seemed almost indifferent to her presence. “Like what?” she said, forcing herself on his consciousness. “What could it be?”
“I think they found a body,” he murmured.
A body? Susan’s mind immediately filled in a scenario. A runner had died. Had a stroke. That’s what happens when you get to be forty and exercise too vigorously. You fall down in the park and die, and nobody finds you till morning. “Have you gone to check?” she asked the young man worriedly. “I mean, have you done anything?”
“Well, no,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because if I did, the cops would chase me away.”
A strange thing to say, Susan thought. Police in the Midwest, where she was raised, didn’t chase away concerned citizens. Still, she didn’t go across the road to ask what had happened. The policemen over there were busy removing a length of brown paper from something lying on the ground and replacing it with a sheet. She saw a leg. Whatever had happened, it was all under control now. Susan, no longer keen to linger, walked away.
The friend she’d been running with left at the same time. As they headed out of the park, he said to Susan, “Did you see the scratches on that guy on the wall? How deep and regular they were?”
“Yeah,” Susan said. “Like he got scratched by a machine. What kind of industrial accident would you have to be in to get those kinds of scratches?”
Where’s Jennifer?
Alexandra LaGatta asked herself that when her alarm clock woke her at 6:30 A.M. But she wasn’t particularly worried about Jennifer. Jennifer probably figured I’d forget to leave the keys under the mat, she thought. So she went home. Or maybe to Robert’s. Whatever, I don’t have time to think about Jennifer now. Because the boy I left Dorrian’s with last night is in my bedroom. I’d better get him out before my father finds out. I ought to get myself out, too. Go down to the Motor Vehicles Bureau, like I was planning to do, and get my learner’s permit.