Someone Is Watching

by Joy Fielding

  Not all men are rapists. Some men are good.

  He turns back.

  “Do you live around here?” I ask.

  He checks his watch. “About a forty-minute run that way.” He points south, then looks back at me, as if waiting for me to make the next move.

  “You’ve been running for forty minutes in this heat?”

  “You grow up in Miami, you kind of get used to it.” He takes a long swig of his water. “You’re very observant.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “You run every day?” I ask, ignoring his question.

  “Pretty much. Can I ask you something now?”

  I nod, hear a baby’s cries as the woman with the carriage draws closer.

  “Are you ever going to come out of those bushes?”

  I try not to smile. “What do you do?” I ask, again ignoring his question and staying resolutely in place, “that allows you to go jogging on hot Wednesday afternoons?”

  “Chiropractor,” he answers, too easily for it to be a lie. “I take Wednesday afternoons off. What about you? Gardener? Landscape architect?” The twinkle is back in his blue eyes.

  “Temporarily unemployed.”

  “From doing what?”

  “I worked for a bunch of lawyers.”

  “Tough crowd. Tougher times. You get laid off?”

  “You could say that.”

  “What would you say?”

  “I prefer to think of it as a temporary sabbatical.”

  He smiles. A nice smile. “Good way of looking at things,” he says. “A glass-half-full kind of approach to life. I like that.” I watch the dimples in his cheeks deepen.

  “Glad you approve.”

  “So, you come here often, Bailey Carpenter?” he asks, and I try not to cringe at the effortless familiarity of my name on his lips.

  Not all men are rapists. Some men are good.

  “No. This really isn’t my neighborhood.” Does he already know where I live?

  “You just come here to walk your dog,” he states.

  “Sometimes. Yes.”

  “Your Doberman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s your dog’s name?”

  I hesitate, trying to come up with an appropriately sinister name for a Doberman. All I can think about is the old woman and her Yorkshire terrier I saw earlier. “Poopsie,” I say.

  “Poopsie? You’re sure about that?”

  “It was meant to be ironic.”

  “You don’t have a dog, do you?”

  I shake my head. “No, I don’t.”

  “And you didn’t lose an earring.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You just like standing around in bushes in the middle of strange neighborhoods?”

  Again I hesitate. The woman pushing the baby carriage draws closer, her baby’s cries louder. “Do you know anything about a rape that happened on this street about a month ago?” I ask suddenly, watching for any change in Colin Lesser’s expression. Why not just come right out and ask? Even if he is the man who raped me, surely he’s not crazy enough to try anything now, not with a witness less than ten feet away.

  “No. I don’t know anything about a rape.” He points to where I’m standing. “Is this where it happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you standing there?”

  The woman with the baby carriage approaches, smiling at Colin and looking warily at me as she continues on her way.

  I am now alone with Colin Lesser. Hopefully, he’s exactly what he seems. A naturally friendly guy, out for an afternoon jog. I watch his lips as they take another sip from his bottle of water, imagine those same lips biting down on my breast.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You winced. Like you had a sudden pain.”

  “No.” More constant than sudden, I think.

  “I’m a chiropractor, remember. I’m very good with aches and pains.” He reaches into the pocket of his shorts, pulls out a business card, holds it out for me to take, then laughs self-consciously. “I always carry a few of these with me.”

  I have to stretch in order to reach it, somehow managing to take it from his hand without allowing our fingers to touch. DR. COLIN LESSER, CHIROPRACTOR, I read, along with the address and phone number of his office, which I can’t help notice is on Biscayne Boulevard, only a few short blocks from Holden, Cunningham, and Kravitz.

  Did he notice me when I was working there? Did he secretly stalk me? Is he the man who raped me?

  Not all men are rapists. Some men are good.

  “You’re looking a little pale. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go somewhere and sit down?” he is asking. “It doesn’t have to be Starbucks.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We could talk about what happened here, if you’d like.”

  “What?”

  “Only if you want to,” he adds.

  “You said you didn’t know anything.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true. I know a few things.”

  I hold my breath.

  “Just not about a rape.” His voice softens. Brackets of concern replace the dimples at the sides of his mouth. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The woman who was raped.…”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “The way you look, the way you’re acting …”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “And I don’t want coffee. I don’t want to go anywhere with you.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me.”

  “Good.”

  “Good,” I repeat. If I say anything else, I’m likely to burst into tears.

  “Well, it was very nice—if a little strange—meeting you,” he says, about to turn away when he stops. “If you ever change your mind about that coffee, well … you have my card.”

  “Enjoy the rest of your run.”

  I wait until he is safely out of sight before exiting the bushes, impatiently brushing away the assortment of leaves that cling to my white cotton pants. A large orange blossom protrudes from my side pocket. Once, not too long ago, I might have tucked it playfully behind one ear. Now I toss it to the ground, along with Colin Lesser’s business card.

  Immediately I scoop up the card again, thrusting it deep inside the side pocket of my pants. Is it possible he is who he says he is?

  I recall another nice-looking man, another invitation, another business card. That morning in court the day I was attacked. Does Owen Weaver wonder why I never called him? Has he thought about me at all? Has he heard about what happened to me? Could he be the man responsible?

  Not all men are rapists. Some men are good.

  I look up at the two apartments that are the most likely places for someone to have had a good view of everything that happened that night. One is the apartment where I thought I saw the curtains stir earlier in the day. Can I really do this? Am I crazy?

  I’m taking control, I remind myself as I edge closer to the cream-colored building.

  I’m not crazy.

  — TWENTY-TWO —

  The inside of the building has definitely seen better days. Unlike the exterior, which has recently been given a fresh coat of paint, the interior is musty in both appearance and odor. The air conditioning system, if indeed there is one, is more loud than effective, its fan circulating air that is more stale than cool. The lobby is right out of the fifties: old-fashioned green-bamboo-stalk-patterned wallpaper on a white background, once-stylish wicker furniture, a wool carpet that is all green and pink swirls. Despite the happy colors—or maybe because of them—the lobby feels sad, as if it knows its best days are behind it, an over-dressed, forty-year-old chaperone at a high-school dance.

  I approach the director
y beside the locked set of glass doors leading to the interior elevators and scan the names of the residents, debating whether or not to press all the buzzers in the hope that someone will be foolish enough to buzz me inside without asking questions. Amazingly, despite everything we know, or should know, or think we know about crime and how best to prevent it, this old trick still works at least fifty percent of the time. I am jiggling the door handle, wondering how long it would take my niece to dispatch the lock, when I see a pair of elderly gentlemen exiting one of the two inside elevators and walking toward me. I make an elaborate show of pretending to talk to someone on the intercom as they draw closer. “Allow me,” the first man says, holding the door open for me, and bowing to reveal a prominent bald spot interrupted with wisps of fine, white hair.

  I slip inside. “Thank you.”

  “Have a nice day.”

  “Who was that?” his companion mutters as the door closes behind me.

  I walk to the elevators before anyone can challenge my right to be here. The doors close, and the elevator begins its squeak-filled ascent. Seconds later, it stops on the second floor. I lower my head as the doors slide open, then watch two pairs of swollen ankles shuffle inside, accompanied by a cane and a walker. I move to the rear of the elevator. The doors close on the now full cab. The elevator resumes its jerky climb.

  “We’re going up? Why are we going up?” a woman says, accusingly. “Sidney, did you press up?”

  “You’re standing right beside me, Miriam. When did I press anything?”

  “Then why are we going up?”

  “I pressed it,” I admit, feeling strangely guilty, and lifting my eyes to see two puzzled, old faces staring back at me.

  “My wife and I wanted to go down,” Sidney says.

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I’ll be getting off in a few seconds.…”

  “You never look,” Miriam scolds her husband. “Now we have to go all the way up. We’re going to be late.”

  “We’re just going for a walk,” Sidney counters. “How can we be late?”

  Their bickering has the curious effect of relaxing me, distracting me from the task at hand. Although not for long. By the time we reach the sixth floor, my nerves have returned.

  “Have a nice day,” I say as I step off the elevator into the sixth-floor corridor.

  Miriam sighs. “For God’s sake, Sidney,” she says, “press the damn button, or we’ll be here forever.”

  I follow the corridor around the side of the building that overlooks the street until I reach the far end. The narrow hall smells of cooking, a riot of pungent oils and spices that clings to its off-white walls and radiates off the worn green carpet. The hall has the same amount of minimal air-conditioning as the lobby, and by the time I reach the last two units, dots of sweat are staining the front of my T-shirt.

  I stand in front of apartment 612, silently rehearsing what I’m about to say as I ring the bell. A middle-aged man with a comb-over of wiry salt-and-pepper hair and a matching full beard opens the door. He is wearing a short-sleeved navy-and-white shirt over a pair of baggy gray pants, and when he narrows his gray-blue eyes, the bushy unibrow above them rearranges itself into a wiggly line, like a worm on a hook. “What are you selling, young lady?”

  “Who is it, Eddy?” a woman calls from inside the apartment.

  “That’s what I’m about to find out,” he calls back. “You aren’t one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses, are you?”

  “No. My name is Bailey Carpenter.” I have decided at the last minute to use my real name. There seems no reason not to.

  A woman materializes at Eddy’s shoulder. She has pale skin and shoulder-length, Alice in Wonderland–styled blond hair. Her lips have been plumped to twice their normal size, and her already narrow face has been pulled tighter than a drum. She looks more amphibian than human, like an animated fish in a Disney cartoon. “Who is it?” she asks her husband, her face betraying no emotion whatsoever. “We always vote Republican,” she adds before I can say anything.

  “Good to know,” I say. “But actually, I’m looking into the attack that happened in front of your building about a month ago.”

  “You mean the rape?” The woman reaches for her husband’s arm.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re with the police?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  “Because we already told the police everything we know,” Eddy says.

  “I was wondering if we could go over a few of the details again.”

  “What details?” the woman asks suspiciously, although again, her face remains resolutely placid, revealing nothing. “Like we told the police, we didn’t see anything.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing. I take it the police haven’t caught the guy yet.”

  “Not yet, no. Your balcony overlooks the bushes where the attack occurred,” I venture.

  Eddy glances over his shoulder toward the interior of the apartment. “Yeah, but we weren’t on the balcony when it happened.”

  “We were watching TV,” his wife says. “Criminal Minds was on.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything?”

  “Heard a car alarm going off.” Eddy shrugs. “Apparently that was after it was all over.”

  “What about your neighbors?”

  “As far as we know,” Eddy’s wife says, “nobody saw or heard anything.”

  “Have you noticed any of your neighbors behaving in a suspicious manner?”

  Eddy chuckles. “Well, they’re all pretty peculiar.”

  “Eddy,” his wife scolds.

  “I was wondering if you think there’s a chance that …”

  “What? That one of the residents in this building could have raped that woman?” She shakes her head. “Have you seen the people who live here, Miss Carpenter? They’re all a hundred years old! We’re the youngest people in the building by at least three decades.”

  I take a step back. I’m not going to learn anything here. “I’m sorry I bothered you. Thank you for your time.”

  “You should talk to Mrs. Harkness next door,” Eddy mumbles as he’s closing the door.

  “Eddy, for God’s sake,” his wife says. “Stop making trouble for that poor woman. She has enough on her plate.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Harkness?”

  “Woman in the next apartment. She’s got the same view as we do.” He sticks his head out the door. “Plus she’s got this weird grandson who practically lives here,” he whispers.

  “Eddy!”

  “There’s something off about that kid and you know it,” he shouts.

  Eddy’s wife appears in the doorway’s narrow crack. I can see the anger in her eyes. “We can’t help you,” she says, reaching past her husband to close the door in my face.

  I stand there for several long seconds, trying to digest what I’ve just been told. It seems this Mrs. Harkness not only has a view that overlooks the area where I was attacked, she also has a grandson whom her closest neighbor considers “off.” Do the police know about him?

  Seconds later, determined to ignore the pounding in my chest and the warning bells going off inside my brain, I am ringing the bell for apartment 611. I can hear several people arguing inside and am straining to make out what is being said when the door opens.

  A robust-looking woman of about seventy-five stands before me. She is approximately my height, with a slim build and large, inquisitive brown eyes. Her hair is short, blond, and curly, with a halo of gray roots sprouting up around her temples. She wears a velour hot-pink tracksuit with the words JUICY GIRL prominently displayed across her equally prominent bosom.

  “Mrs. Harkness?”

  “Yes? What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry to be disturbing you.…”

  “Just watching my soaps.” She waves toward the TV in the living room behind her. “They can wait. Nothing ever happens anyway. What can I do for you?” she asks again. Behind her, I can feel cold air blasting.

/>   “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “About?”

  “About the rape that happened in front of your building about a month ago.”

  Her smile disappears; her shoulders visibly tense. “I’ve already spoken to the police.”

  “Yes, I know. There are just a few things I’d like to go over with you.”

  Mrs. Harkness looks toward her feet. She is wearing a pair of white sneakers, and I try not to notice the subtle white Nike swoosh sewn into the canvas. My breathing becomes more constricted, as if someone is standing behind me, squeezing my chest. The pressure makes my ribs feel as if they’re about to crack open. “I have nothing to add to what I’ve already told you.”

  She assumes I’m with the police, and I don’t bother to correct her. “Sometimes the more times we go over something …,” I say, borrowing one of Detective Marx’s favorite phrases.

  “I’m quite positive I don’t know anything,” Mrs. Harkness insists.

  I’m equally positive she is lying. She has a pretty obvious tell, tucking some invisible hairs behind her right ear and pursing her lips with each fresh falsehood.

  “I was asleep when it happened. Didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything.”

  “Would you mind if I had a look from your balcony?” I ask, already half-inside her apartment before she can stop me.

  “I don’t understand what good that will do.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Well, all right.” She deliberately looks the other way as we walk past the closed door at the end of her hallway. Why? Is someone there?

  Her apartment is freezing. Most older people prefer being too warm to being too cold. I wonder if it is her “weird grandson” who likes things so frigid. I also wonder where he is now, if he is the one behind the closed door at the end of the hall, if he knows anything about my attack, if he is, in fact, the one who attacked me. I decide I should probably get the hell out of here, but of course I do no such thing. I’ve come this far. It would be crazy to leave now. And I’m not crazy.

  A beige leather sectional and matching armchair are grouped in front of the high-definition TV mounted on the far wall beside the door leading to the balcony. To the left of it are a small dining area and tiny galley kitchen. I note a can of Coke and a half-empty bottle of beer in the middle of a glass coffee table as I cut across the living room. A thin, blue blanket is folded up on one pillow of the sofa and a stack of magazines beside it rests on the floor, the top one bearing the title Motorcycle Mania. “You like motorcycles?” I ask.