Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Who are we avoiding, Carrie?” Marlene asked gently.

  “Oh, God, this guy. It’s been going on for a month. I’m losing my fucking marbles behind it.” She sighed heavily and moisture pearled on her golden eyelashes.

  “You called the cops?”

  “Oh, right, the cops!” snapped Lanin contemptuously. “The cops do not think this is a high priority. Wait, just pull in front of this red truck.” Marlene brought the VW to the curb. Lanin gazed into the car’s mirrors and looked out the window, checking the street and the nearby cars.

  “Who is this guy? Jack the Ripper?” asked Marlene.

  “Don’t joke! We’re talking somebody with a serious screw loose. Look, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but could you walk me up to my loft? I have a funny feeling—”

  “No problem,” said Marlene, and started to get out of the car. Lanin seemed to notice the big dog for the first time. “He’ll be okay in the car? I wouldn’t want him to get stolen.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Marlene confidently. She popped the rear hatch and massaged the dog’s floppy neck. Sweety sighed and sprayed drool. “Sweety is a doggie-college grad,” said Marlene, ruffling the dog’s ears. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yeah, I sprang for the whole nine yards: obedience, guard, attack. Now that I have some assets, all I need is for this monster to take a chunk out of a citizen. Without good reason, of course. So, guaranteed, anybody who broke into that car, we’d find a neat pile of cleaned bones.”

  Carrie Lanin’s building was a fine old cast-iron-fronted commercial building that had been bought by a speculator a few years back and turned into floor-through condos. Marlene vaguely recalled that Carrie had married some serious money and had done well in the divorce. There was even an elevator, which Lanin summoned with a special cylinder key.

  Lanin uttered a loud wail and then a string of curses when the elevator door slid open at her floor. Marlene pushed forward to see what the problem was. It was apparently the long-stemmed rose wrapped in green cellophane, with an envelope attached, leaning against the metal door to Lanin’s loft.

  “That’s from him, huh?”

  “Yeah, God damn him! That means he’s figured out how to work the elevator.” She snatched up the rose and unlocked her loft door. Marlene put a restraining hand on her shoulder and said quietly, “Why don’t you wait here and keep the elevator? If he figured how to work that, he could have figured your door lock too. Let me just check it out.”

  Lanin’s eyes went wide and she froze, holding the rose in front of her like the prom queen in a horror movie. Marlene went into the loft.

  She was not frightened at all. Rather, she found herself wondering why she was not, and why she was putting herself into this peculiar situation for a woman she hardly knew. She took a breath, cleared her mind, and went in.

  The loft’s main room was a lovely space, full of light from the huge semicircular window facing the street. The floors were shiny oak accented by bright Rya rugs; the furniture was fashionable Danish teak and Haitian cotton. It was an easy place to search: the only private rooms were two bedrooms and a small office-studio. Marlene went through these swiftly, peering under beds and into closets. She had no idea what she would have done had she found an obsessive man lurking there, but, as it turned out, the place was empty.

  “Marlene?” a quavering call from the doorway.

  “It’s okay, there’s no one here. I’m in the bedroom.”

  Carrie Lanin came stomping into her loft, cursing under her breath. Marlene heard the sound of a sink running and the grind of a disposal. She went out to the kitchen, which was a slick number built around a sink-and-cooktop island, and was in time to see the last of the rose disappearing down the sink.

  “What did the note say?” asked Marlene.

  “Fuck if I know. It’s in the trash. Jesus, I need a drink, I don’t care how early it is.” Lanin reached a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s down from an upper cabinet and poured herself a large one over ice. “Want something?” she asked after a deep swallow and a mild coughing fit.

  “Not for me, thanks,” said Marlene. “Where’s the trash?”

  Lanin gestured at a chrome can; Marlene opened it and lifted out the crumpled envelope. “Ecch! What are you doing?” Lanin exclaimed, wrinkling her nose.

  “Just curious. I think, by the way, if you’re going to have any chance of stopping this guy, you’ll want to keep his little offerings.” Marlene smoothed out the envelope and opened it. Inside was a plain card, unsigned and inscribed in black ink, “Love Til the End of time.” The writing was rectilinear and excessively neat, like the inscriptions on a blueprint or circuit diagram.

  “Stopping him? What do you mean?” Lanin took another sip and, as the light dawned, she suddenly pointed her finger at her guest. “Oh, I remember now, you’re some kind of cop … no, something to do with raped women—”

  “I was an assistant D.A. I used to run the rape bureau.”

  “But you know people!” said Lanin excitedly. “You can pull some strings …”

  Marlene shook her head. “No—hold on, Carrie! My string-pulling days are over. In any case, even if I was still with the office, there probably isn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do. Being an annoying asshole is not against the law—unfortunately, maybe, but there it is.”

  “But, Marlene, the guy won’t leave me alone! He calls me every night, sometimes more than once. He uses up my answering machine tape playing ‘Twist and Shout’ over and over—”

  “Why ‘Twist and Shout’?”

  “Oh, because it was ‘our song.’”

  “Was it?”

  “Was it?” Lanin’s voice rose to a screech. “Was it? Marlene, I don’t even know this son of a bitch. It’s all in his head!”

  “Wait a minute—he just, like, seized on you on the street?”

  Lanin sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “You want the whole story? You got an hour?”

  As it happened, Marlene’s calendar was free for at least the next eight months, so Lanin made some coffee and Marlene sat down on the Haitian cotton sofa, and Carrie Lanin settled herself on the bentwood rocker across from her, sipping from a steaming mug enriched with a tot of sour mash bourbon and told her tale.

  “I went to high school in Jersey—Englewood Cliffs. I was sort of a player in high school—captain of the cheerleaders, junior prom queen—like that. People knew me. Okay, a couple of months ago, it must have been before we went to the beach, like June, I’m in Gristede’s on Sixth, picking up some things, when this guy comes up to me in the dairy department. ‘Carrie Tiptree?’ he says—my maiden name, right? He holds out his hand and says his name’s Rob Pruitt, he went to high school with me. So I sort of smile back at him. Of course, I don’t remember him at all. I mean, if I ever actually saw him, he was just a face in the crowd. So we started chatting, he carried my packages for me, and I thought, okay, a pleasant guy, chance meeting, nothing special to look at but neat. I mean, he didn’t have red eyes and fangs. After I got home, I was curious, so I dragged out the old yearbook and looked him up.”

  She paused, and Marlene asked, “He was there? In the yearbook?”

  “Oh, yeah. Want to see?” Without waiting for an answer, Lanin went to the bookcase and brought back a volume bound in maroon imitation leather and marked CLIFFHANGER in faded gold. She riffled through it and handed it, opened, to Marlene.

  “That’s him—Robert T. Pruitt, no nickname, no friendly little tag line, one extracurricular activity,” said Lanin.

  “The rifle team,” read Marlene. She examined the tiny photograph: Pruitt was a close-faced youth who looked more than usually stupid in his academic cap. Dark and unruly hair squirted out from under this headgear, and the retoucher had not been entirely able to disguise a bad case of acne.

  “See? A geek,” said Lanin.

  “Is he still geekish?”

  “No, and that’s what sort of threw me. He looks regular, normal. I mean, he
had a neat haircut, and he was wearing, like, chinos, Nikes, and a white shirt. And it made me feel sort of sad—I mean, high school is such hell. I was in and he was out, and I guess the in-crowd just doesn’t think about what it’s like for the nothing people, the ones who aren’t rich, or bright, or gorgeous, or funny. So, uh, I don’t know whether it was guilt or what, but he asked me for my number and I gave it to him.”

  “And he called, of course.”

  “The next day. Asked me out for dinner that Friday. In retrospect, needless to say, I should’ve heard the alarm bells going off. But I figured, what the fuck, right? New York is not exactly full of straight guys dying to buy nice meals for thirty-one-year-old divorced ladies with kids. Plus, he was at least presentable, and there was that expiation thing, being a little princess in high school and ignoring kids like him. And he lost the pizza face—I figured he deserved something for that, too. So, Friday, he arrives at the door, dead on time. He’s still got the chinos and the white shirt, but now he’s wearing a leather jacket, not the cool kind, but the kind that looks like a sports jacket. It’s like brand-new and shiny. And he’s got a fucking Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates and a huge purple orchid in a plastic box.”

  Marlene could not suppress a snort of laughter.

  “Yeah, you’re laughing,” said Lanin, whose mood had much improved. “As a matter of fact, I thought it was pretty funny too, at first.”

  “Sorry,” said Marlene. “So then what?”

  “So then, after I put the goddamn orchid in the fridge, we went out. He’s rented a limo for the evening. With a driver. Okay, to be brutally honest, this is not something that happens to me a lot. I’m dying of curiosity. So I try to pump him on the ride up, what does he do, where does he live, what’s happened since high school. He’s not saying. What does he do? A little of this, a little of that. He lives ‘uptown.’ Actually, it turns out he only wants to talk about me, and what happened to the people in my crowd back then. So I perform, I bullshit away, but meanwhile, I’m thinking, uh-oh, please let this guy not be in the dope business, because that’s all my ex needs to hear, I’m keeping company with Mr. Coke, it’s court again and maybe good-bye, Miranda.”

  “Where did he take you?”

  “Elaine’s. Where else? Of course, there’s a line outside, and when our limo pulls up, they’re all gaping. The doorman looks at us funny, but he lets us past— I guess a limo is a limo. Also the geek’s got reservations, which means he’s not a regular, but we go up to the maitre d’ and Rob says he wants us to have a banquette table, where all the celebrities sit. The guy smiles and shakes his head, and then Rob pulls out a roll of bills, Marlene, I swear it was the size of a pastrami sandwich and solid twenties, and he starts peeling them off one by one onto the maître d’s little lectern. And the guy’s embarrassed, you can tell, but all the same, he can’t take his eyes off the pile of bills.”

  “So you got the good seats?”

  “Oh, yeah, the best. Burt Reynolds was at the next table. And we saw Bill Murray and a bunch of people from Saturday Night Live. I was looking for Woody and Mia, but they didn’t show.”

  “Poor you,” said Marlene. “Let me understand this: you are running away from this guy? This is your problem?”

  “Oh, God!” Carrie wailed, “I knew you were going to say that. Okay, listen to the rest of it. There we are, and, to be frank, I’m pretty excited. I mean, the Bread Shop on Duane Street is my usual speed since the divorce, and I’m trying to get a conversation going. But there’s nothing coming from him. Zip. He’s not looking around. He’s barely interested in his food. He’s just looking at me, as if he’s finally achieved this big dream and I’m just some kind of trophy. The geek bagged the prom queen? Right about then the little buzzer started to go off: wronggg! wronggg! And after that all I could think about was, this guy must have blown a grand tonight, he’s going to expect his money’s worth, being, as I now realize, the same old geek but with money, and how the hell am I going to keep him out of my panties?”

  “And did you?”

  “Oh, yeah. As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. We get back here. I turn to him, grab his hand, give it one shake, say ‘thank you very much for dinner, Rob,’ and I’m gone. And he took it, didn’t say a word. So, I pay the sitter, have a bath, go to bed. Around three a.m. the phone rings. I let the machine take it. In the morning, I see the blinker and I play the tape. It’s him, and it’s weird. In this voice, ‘Hi, it’s me.’ Like we’ve been married for six years, and then he starts talking about what a great time we had and how he’ll be around to pick me up at eight, and a lot of other crap about how he always knew I liked him in high school but he had to get his shit together before he was worthy of me, and how, way back when, he was in this place, this joint we used to hang out at in high school, Larry’s, and somebody played ‘Twist and Shout’ on the jukebox and I looked at him and he knew that our love was real. It was incredible. It just went on and on like that, and then he played the song.”

  “What did you do?” asked Marlene.

  “I got out of town is what I did. I called up my friend Beth in Southampton and said it was life or death, and I grabbed the kid and took off. Okay, we get there, we swim, around six we’re out on the deck in our bathing suits having a drink, when the doorbell rings and in walks Pruitt, like we planned it all. Beth gives me a look, but what could I say to her? So I take him aside and give him a piece of my mind. It’s like talking to a wall. He just smiles. He says he just wants to be with me. So I leave. He follows me, of course. He’s been following me ever since. I go out on a date, for dinner, he’s sitting at a table in the back, staring. Once I ran up to him on the street and started screaming at him to leave me alone. People were staring at me. He just kept smiling, like it was a lovers’ spat, for Christ’s sake!”

  She finished her drink in a gulp. “I’m going crazy.”

  Marlene said gently, “Okay, let’s look at this realistically. So far, except for this trespass today, which we can’t really prove, he hasn’t done anything criminal. I say that because you’ll have to nail him for an actual crime in order to get him to stop.” She halted—something had passed over Carrie’s face. “Or am I wrong—has he done something else?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a guy I see, Don Grier, nothing earthshaking, just a nice friendly relationship. Anyway, I saw him last week, Saturday. Sunday somebody blew up his car—sneaked into his garage and stuck a signal flare in the gas tank.”

  “You think it was Pruitt?”

  “Um, yeah, actually I do. I mean, Don’s a production manager at Vogue. You think somebody at Mademoiselle was trying to send him a message?”

  “You tell the cops about this?”

  “I told Don. God, Marlene, the embarrassment! I think he told the cops. They weren’t impressed, apparently. He hasn’t called since then, by the way.”

  “Who, Pruitt?”

  “No, Don. Pruitt calls every night. What?”

  Marlene had involuntarily creased her face into a concerned frown. She said, “I think you could have a serious problem here, Carrie. This guy, if he did the car arson, well, we know he’s capable of committing a felony. If he did one, he could do another.”

  “What, you mean I could be in danger?”

  “It’s a possibility. We had cases like this when I was at the D.A. Stalking cases. Sometimes the guy’s just a pathetic asshole, and he gives up or gets drunk and forgets it, or drifts away or lands in jail. Or it could happen that the guy decides that if he can’t have you, nobody else can.”

  Lanin had gone deathly pale. “You mean, he could, like attack me?”

  “Yeah, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay? I said I couldn’t pull strings, but that’s not completely true. I know cops, actually one cop in particular, who’d be willing to help out. Let me take a day or so to look into it, see if this bozo has a sheet on him, find out where he’s coming from. He knows a lot about you, and our first step is to find out something abo
ut him.”

  “But what’ll I do meanwhile?” Lanin cried.

  “Nothing different from what you’re doing now. I’d suggest you keep your social contacts limited, especially with guys—not for your sake, for theirs. And let me pick up and drop off Miranda for a while. You should stick close to home and work until we can get this sorted out. You should get your phone number changed too.”

  “Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe this is happening. You’re sure you want to get involved.. . ?”

  “Oh, no problem,” said Marlene lightly. “I was looking for something to pass the time. I’m pregnant.”

  Lanin’s mouth opened, then closed, and then opened again to let out a spluttering laugh, not that far from hysteria. “Congratulations!” she said, and giggled.

  “Thank you,” said Marlene, and then, “Could I use your bathroom?”

  Marlene left Carrie Lanin’s shortly after throwing up the remains of her light breakfast, did some quick food shopping, carefully averting her eyes from the display of meat at DiAngelo’s, and returned to the loft, where she immediately put in a call to Harry Bello at the D.A.’s office. Bello was a former Brooklyn homicide detective whom Marlene had recruited to work with the Rape Bureau when she had been in charge of it. He was also Lucy Karp’s godfather. Bello agreed to check out Robert Pruitt. He didn’t ask any questions or require any covering small talk to get him in the mood to help. That was one of the nice things about Bello, who did not have that many other nice things about him.

  At two-thirty, she left to pick up the two kids at school. Carrie Lanin had called ahead, and Miranda was waiting with Lucy in the schoolyard. As she put the kids in the car, she noticed a man leaning against an old blue Dodge Fury. He was looking at them, or rather, he was looking at Miranda, because when she ran back to the chain-link gate to pick up a paper she had forgotten, shoved into the links of the fence, the man’s eyes followed the child.