Don't You Forget About Me: Pam of Babylon Book #2

by Suzanne Jenkins

  Bill had nothing to hide. There was no reason to withhold anything. “I got out of jail this morning.”

  Jim put his pen down and looked at him. How did I miss this news when I did the background check on this guy? “What were the charges?”

  Bill looked at him, confused.

  “Why were you incarcerated?” he clarified. So this is one of those guys who just looks smart.

  “I put a knife to my sister-in-law’s mother’s throat.”

  Where have I heard that story before, just today? Jim put his pen down and excused himself. “I’ll be right back.”

  Bill sat there, bored, thinking about his kids, his mother, his life. What would I have done differently? He hated business. He would have liked to have been a nurse. He’d loved his mandatory biology class freshman year. But when he approached his father about it, the old man had a fit.

  “Go to medical school, for Christ’s sake! No son of mine is going to be a nurse.”

  Bill knew he wasn’t smart enough to go to either medical or nursing school. He barely got through college. He just didn’t have the confidence needed to do much with his life outside of what fell into his lap. That included finding his wife.

  Anne was his roommate’s sister, attractive but shy. She followed him around, and since he wasn’t aggressive enough to make a pass at her, they hung out together and nothing more. Eventually, they had been together long enough that it was expected they would get married. He went to his brother for advice.

  “How’d you know that Pam was the one?” he had asked innocently.

  Jack felt sorry for Bill; he was still an idealist, no matter what his life had been like. “She fit in with the family. That was the only criteria.” Jack admitted that he was attracted to her as well. But it was more important that a wife would be there by his side through thick and thin. Pam was devoted, if nothing else.

  Anne certainly fit the mold. However, where Pam was carefree and accepting, Anne was suspicious and unsatisfied. She hated Bernice’s intrusion into their home life from the beginning. She and Bill fought passionately about it.

  It was during one of these confrontations that Bill found out how much he liked hitting her. There was nothing better than to haul off and smack her across her smug face. If she wasn’t expecting it, his open hand could send her flying across the room. He rationalized that as long as he didn’t punch her, it was okay. He knew that if he started punching her, he would be unable to stop. He’d end up beating her to death.

  Soon even their sex life included violence. He couldn’t get an erection without first hitting her hard; the sound of his hand against her flesh made blood surge into his penis. By the time his father died, he couldn’t ejaculate without hitting her. Foreplay for Anne was getting smacked by her husband. His incarceration was the first time in years when she wasn’t hit on a daily basis. Of course, the hitting would have to resume as soon as they spent any real time together. In spite of their history, Anne was still pissed off at Bill for not wanting to spend time with her. Maybe she’s a masochist, Bill thought.

  Jim returned to the interrogation room with a thick wad of printed paper. There was a wealth of information about this defendant. He had a long history of run-ins with the law, starting with public intoxication during his college years to domestic violence when neighbors called the police during a fight the Smiths had late one night. Although the wife refused to press charges, police had documented that handprints were visible on both sides of her face. He had a trial pending in Manhattan for credit card theft. The term he had just finished serving was for attempted murder on Long Island. He had gotten off with a light sentence because his sister-in-law had asked for mercy. Bill was lucky he hadn’t been tried in the city. He’d be in Rikers for much longer.

  “Okay, so you tried to kill your sister’s mother, correct?” Jim scratched his head.

  Rather than correct him, Bill let it go. He was getting tired. What difference did it make? He’d already been tried on that count; they couldn’t try him again.

  “It says here you’re getting ready to be tried on credit card theft. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  Bill was slumped forward in his chair. How’d I get to this point? “There’s really nothing to tell. I was having a meeting with my brother, and he collapsed. I took his wallet, and after he died, I used his credit cards. I was desperate.”

  Jim thought, A man would have to be to stoop that low. “What led to your desperation?” Jim wanted to know on a human basis why someone with every advantage would end up with unpaid bills, stalking a woman young enough to be his daughter.

  “My father drove the family business into the ground, and I didn’t find out how much trouble we were in until after he died, last year. We are totally broke. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my brother giving my mother and me money, we would have lost our houses.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  Jim got up to open it, and someone outside handed him a sheet of paper. He sat down to read it. So this is where I heard this story today. When he was finished, he looked up at Bill. “Your wife is going to be charged with theft as well. She forged some checks your late brother’s wife sent to your mother. Do you know anything about that?”

  That was the final straw. Bill would either explode there in police custody or start crying. It was safer to cry.

  Chapter 9

  Pam was so grateful that Andy had helped Sandra out with Bill that she decided she would break down and actually cook for him. It had been a while since she’d spent any time in the kitchen. What was once a delight for her, cooking for her husband and family, had become drudgery. Her mother gladly took over the task and spent a large portion of every day planning and cooking meals for her and Pam.

  “Now, I don’t want you to get used to it, but I thought I might cook dinner for us,” she said. They were sitting on the veranda, reading and drinking iced tea, looking out over the ocean.

  Andy laughed. “You don’t have to cook. Let’s go out.”

  She shook her head. Later, she would remember that he had tried to change her mind.

  “No, not tonight. You helped me, and now I want to do something nice for you. I do need to run out, though. Want to come with me?” She was thinking steak on the grill, a salad, and some fresh veggies, if she could find anything in season. “What’s your favorite accompaniment with steak?”

  He thought for a few minutes. “Spaghetti with oil and garlic.”

  She tried not to make a face. “A lotta carbs. Where’d that come from?” She had never heard of it before.

  “My real name is Andretti. Italian through and through.”

  “Why’d you change it?”

  “My dad got tired of people asking him if we were related to the race car driver,” he replied.

  “Were you?” she asked, interested.

  “Yes.” They both started laughing.

  “Well, Detective Andretti, you are having steak and spaghetti tonight. I’m intrigued now. We are both Italian…but my people have been here so long we don’t even eat pasta. I have three sisters, and it was too fattening.”

  “Right,” Andy said, “Fabian. It never sunk in. Any relation?”

  “No!” They laughed again. The best part of her relationship with him was the laughter. They enjoyed being together.

  “Two Italians. I have no Italian traditions at all. Does your family?” Pam asked.

  “Oh God, yes. We used to have the meal with seven fishes on Christmas Eve, Mass every Sunday without fail, and macaroni with gravy for Sunday dinner. My wife was very old school; we had the same thing every single day of the week. I looked forward to meals each night because I knew what she was going to cook. She would change the old recipes occasionally, so we never got tired of it.”

  “I guess I’m surprised that she was so old fashioned because of the makeup being delivered to the house,” Pam replied. She was really interested in hearing about Andy’s wife.

  “Right, she
was a stickler about her appearance.” He looked at Pam and smiled. “Like you. You are very attractive, do you know that?”

  “Yes, well. Move on. You’re making me nervous.”

  “She loved to cook authentic Italian. It was more a hobby for her than a chore. She went to classes, had every book written on it. She made her own pasta, everything always from scratch. But she didn’t do breakfast or lunch. Just dinner. ‘Eat up!’ she would say each night. ‘This is all three meals!’ My girls were whizzes at fixing their own breakfast from the time they were four. They made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school. I’d help them when I was home, reminding them to eat fruit, drink milk. ‘No one in this house is starving,’ she would say if I criticized her. Now, of course, we miss dinner. None of my girls are interested in cooking. We give the pizza joint down the road good business.”

  “I’d like to meet your children someday. Do they know you’re seeing someone?” What if they hated that he was dating?

  “They’re thrilled! ‘Dad!’ they would say to me. ‘Get out and see people!’ But you have to understand that there’s not a big choice of women out there. When I met you, I thought, ‘You better go for it. She is a once-in-a-lifetime woman!’”

  Pam got up and went to his chair, grabbing his hand. “Come on, you’re making me nervous again! Let’s go to the grocery store.” She pulled him up from his chair, and they left the house. They were making their own traditions. She and Jack had never gone to the grocery store together.

  ~ ~ ~

  By dinnertime, Sandra was starting to recover after her frightening encounter. She ate her sandwich from Zabar’s. But she felt like a prisoner. She’d needed to get out of the house and connect with another human being and, because of asshole Bill, was unable to. Now that the fear had abated, she found herself wondering what Bernice was doing, if she had heard the news about the police picking up her son again. Wisdom told Sandra to do nothing; someone would contact Bill’s mother soon enough with the news.

  A new, harder to define emotion was what she was feeling for Pam, who had seemed to move on with her life at precision speed and was spending a glorious day at the beach with Detective Andy.

  When no invitation had been issued for the beach that weekend, Sandra had mixed feelings. On one hand, she needed to take care of business at her apartment. Being away every weekend like she had been doing since Jack died meant playing catch-up all week. She was always one step behind, not having grocery shopping done, or dry cleaning picked up, or her apartment cleaned, all the things that women who worked long hours struggled with. But when she was there alone, those tasks didn’t seem so earth-shattering. She could pick up a few things from Zabar’s or put a load of laundry in each night. It didn’t all have to be done all at once, did it? How had she become so dependent on Pam? It was ridiculous, really. They had nothing in common but Jack, and he was dead. If he were still alive, they would be archenemies.

  She went down to the lower level and picked up the remote, switching the TV on. It was then that she noticed something different, something out of place. Looking up at the exit door to the backyard, she saw the safety chain still in place. The dresser was still in front of the window, and the arrangement of glass bottles she had put on the top of it in case someone tried to get in were undisturbed. But she hadn’t noticed earlier that the window had been jimmied; she could see a crack at the bottom where someone had attempted to open it before realizing the lock was in place. She figured it out in seconds after seeing the window. It was a smell. The smell of a man, clean, but his sweat musky and just this side of unpleasant. She reached for the light switch and turned the overhead lights on.

  “Hello?” She could barely get it out. She walked to the bathroom door and reached in for the light, switching it on. Empty. The staircase to the upstairs elongated exponentially. She ran for it, which was ridiculous because there was no one there. When she got to the top of the stairs, she hesitated. What if someone has been in my bedroom the whole time? Her heart was beating wildly in her chest. She repeated the same procedure in each room, reaching in, feeling for the light switch, turning the light on, and searching under her bed, in her bathroom and closet. There was no sign that anyone had been there. But the smell lingered. She peeked out the curtain to the back in case someone with BO was in her yard. It was empty.

  That fucker has succeeded in making me paranoid and frightened. At that moment, her buzzer went off. She nearly jumped into the ceiling. The intercom was in the front hallway, so she ran out to it, pushing the buzzer and speaking a frightened hello. If it was Bill again, she was definitely buying a gun on Monday. As it turned out, gratefully, wonderfully, the police had come to take her statement. She had completely forgotten about it. She didn’t say anything more, just pushed the unlock button. Seconds later, there was a knock on her door. She peered out the peephole, and there were two men in plainclothes standing at her door.

  “Can I see some ID?” she asked. Without hesitation, both men put their picture IDs up for her to see. She unlocked her door, taking the chain off and opening up for the police. “Sorry, come in,” she said.

  “It’s good to be cautious,” the older of the two said.

  Sandra thought it was strange that policemen always traveled in pairs of differing ages. As they walked by her into the apartment, she sniffed them. Just in case. The smell in her downstairs wasn’t them. The younger man caught the sniff and looked at her in a strange way.

  “I noticed the smell of a man in my basement a few minutes ago, and it scared the heck out of me.”

  “I’m Tom, and this is Jim,” said the younger man. “So was it us?”

  “No. Here, have a seat.” She pointed to the round table off her galley kitchen. It was at a window that overlooked a blind alleyway. There were several birdfeeders hanging in a Tree of Heaven. She had made her own view.

  Tom glanced at her, taking in that view as well. She was so pretty. “Do you want us to take a look around first?”

  “Would you mind? I don’t need to tell you that I was nervous about that jerk coming to my apartment, and then to notice that someone was here…” She shuddered, remembering the hair rising up on the back of her neck.

  Jim put his arm out in a show me the way movement. They went down to the lower level and searched under the bed, behind the couch, in the bathroom again, and nothing. They went out the back door and searched around the concrete patio and the blind alley, but saw nothing suspicious. In spite of the negative search, Sandra could not relax. She felt certain someone had been in her house, or lurking outside of the window, while she was upstairs or before she got home and, in the hurriedness of locking herself in, she hadn’t noticed the odor. The men followed her back upstairs, Tom keeping his eyes averted so he wasn’t overtly staring at the young woman’s ass.

  She automatically went into the galley kitchen and put the teapot on, gathering mugs for three people. They asked her about the neighborhood, how long she had lived there, chatty questions, safe conversation that slowly helped put Sandra at ease. Soon they would begin questioning her about the creep who was waiting for her to come home.

  Carrying a tray with the tea things in, Sandra was happy for the company and proceeded to put mugs in front of each man. They were watching her, enjoying the view. Even the older man, Jim, seemed oblivious to anything but Sandra moving around her kitchen. It brought a smile to his face. His wife would say, “Keep dreaming, buster.”

  “Coffee or tea?” she asked, breaking the reverie. “It’s instant, if that’s okay.” They both took instant coffee. She went back to the kitchen and brought out a box of Krispy Kremes. “Didn’t expect this, did you?” she said, responding to the shocked look on their faces. She put little plates in front of each man and got one for herself.

  “What happened today?” Tom asked her. He reached into the box of donuts and took a glazed one for himself, which would amount to an extra thirty minutes on the elliptical machine.

  Sandra
told them about the confrontation at Bernice’s and then how Bill must have followed her home, missing that she went into Zabar’s. She could tell that both men were curious about her relationship with the Smiths. She decided to let them ask questions, and she would give them what they needed and no more. She wasn’t about to appeal to their curiosity.

  “So do you have a history with Bill Smith?” Jim asked. “It’s only relevant as far as him stalking you.”

  Sandra debated whether to tell them about Jack. She decided it was important because of the way he had died, but then remembered that if Bill were in custody, they would probably follow the trail of charges and see that he had one for assault. “I am a friend of the family.” She decided that any more information than that was irrelevant. “As far as a relationship with just Bill goes, no.”

  “Is he interested in having a romantic relationship with you? I’m trying to establish why he would come here,” Tom said. He was also interested in finding this out for his own personal knowledge.

  “He’s trying to borrow money from me.” Then she thought that the business thing might be important. “I am part owner of a business that used to belong to his brother. He was hoping we would field clients his way. That’s not going to happen, and I think he’s holding a grudge.”

  Tom was writing down this information.

  “You may have to consider filing a restraining order against this man,” Jim said. “He sounds pretty desperate. The truth is he might be going back to jail because of his high jinks today. In that case, you will be safe. But if he gets out, we need to think of your safety, and I think a restraining order with a unit assigned here might be a good idea.” He looked at Tom for confirmation, who’d be willing to spend the night if necessary, but kept that to himself.

  “Absolutely. If you like, you could come downtown with us. We can walk you through the process,” Tom agreed.

  “The sooner you take care of it, the better. The event just happened today, and filing right away shows the impact Bill Smith has on your well-being. Feeling unsafe is very subjective; no one can refute it.” He was fighting with himself not to take another donut, and lost. He reached into the box and took another one. “Okay, I think we’re about done here. If we stay much longer, this box will be empty.” He tried not to lick his fingers.