Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  “I’m sure it does,” I said soothingly. “Still . . .”

  “Yes. Still. It is happening, insane or not. And I need . . .”

  “I know. Just tell me, all right?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Do you mind if I . . . ?”

  “Of course not,” I said politely, staying in that role, balm to her fear.

  She got up quickly, left the room. I heard kitchen sounds. I glanced around the room. One empty white wall was dominated by a huge framed poster of the QE II, flags flying, just about to leave port. A set of shelves loaded with what looked like textbooks. One of those high-end mini-stereos—I recognized the distinct Bose wave shape. The floors were highly polished hardwood, the windows framed with mauve muslin curtains, pulled fully open. On an upended white plastic milk crate stood an elaborate phone-and-answering-machine, set up to work cordless as well. The plastic and canvas stuff wasn’t to save money—it was just her taste.

  She came back into the living room, a steaming dark-brown mug in her hands. Took the seat she had before.

  “This goes back almost three years,” she said. “To when I was a resident.”

  A doctor, then, not a nurse.

  “I met him about where you’d expect. In a bar. Only a few blocks from here. You don’t get much time for dating in medical school. You don’t get much time for anything, actually. Most of the other women were married. Or engaged. Or . . . connected in some way. I was . . . lonely. Not so much for a lover, for companionship. There were so many good things in my life, so much to look forward to. And nobody to share them with.”

  As if on cue, a magnificent seal-point Siamese cat pranced into the room. It slinked over to her chair, rubbed against her leg. “Well, not nobody,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Orion?”

  The cat purred.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “Orion is so jealous. You’d think I’d be used to it. . . .”

  Her voice trailed away into silence. I let it go for a few seconds, then I prodded her with: “He was jealous . . . ?”

  “Not at first. I mean, it didn’t come up. Not really. He didn’t want me to see other men, but that wasn’t exactly a big problem,” she said ruefully. “It was kind of . . . sweet that he was so possessive. I wanted to be possessed, I thought. Treasured. Cherished. At first, that’s how it felt.”

  “What does he do?” I asked her.

  “To me? He . . . Oh, you mean work, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a stockbroker. No, that’s not right. A . . . portfolio manager. A ‘player,’ that’s what he always called himself. He would always say he was ‘making a play’ instead of buying something. For a client. He had only a small number of clients. He wasn’t one of those cold-callers, you know, the . . .”

  “Salesmen?”

  “Yes. He made that very clear. It was so important to him. He was a player, not a salesman. He had to study the . . . charts, he called them. Like a gambler betting on a horse. He said there was always money. The same amount of money. Nobody really makes money, that’s what he said. It’s the same money, it just changes hands. Some people win, some people lose.”

  “Did you ever invest money with him?”

  “Oh no. I mean, he never asked me. It wasn’t like that. He did help me with it, though. Money, I mean. Do you know what a SEP is?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “It’s a pension plan for the self-employed. It’s really a wonderful deal. One of the few breaks the IRS still gives. I didn’t have one, and he showed me how to set one up.”

  “With his brokerage house?”

  “No,” she said, an annoyed tone to her voice. “Stan wasn’t after my money. He has plenty of his own. He’s very successful in his business.”

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized.

  “He spent more on me than I was making,” she said, the defensive tone still in her voice. “When we went on vacation, he insisted he pay for everything. He was old-fashioned, he said. The man should always pay.”

  “When did it start to go wrong?”

  “The first time he hit me,” she said, looking down at her hands.

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “Right after we had sex.”

  “He was—?”

  “No!” she interrupted me. “I’m telling it all wrong. It wasn’t a . . . sexual thing. He didn’t hit me after we . . . made love. Or before it either. I just meant, he never hit me all the time we were dating. He didn’t start until we became . . . intimate.”

  “And then it was . . . ?”

  “He . . . We had an argument. Over something silly. I don’t even remember what it was about. But I remember we were in his apartment. He has a condo. In TriBeCa. Right near the—”

  “What did he do?” I cut her off. She was going to skirt the edges, and I needed her near the center.

  “He just . . . shoved me, I guess. And shook me. He was yelling at me and suddenly he grabbed me by the shoulders and . . . I was terrified.”

  “So he stopped?”

  “Yes. He did stop. And he apologized too. It was the stress of his job. He’s responsible for tens of millions of dollars every day. It’s very intense work, and he has to be in control every minute. His job is a pressure cooker.”

  “And he had to blow off steam every once in a while?”

  “That’s right. That’s what he—”

  “But it escalated?”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times in your line of work.”

  Seeing as she’d been nice enough to upgrade me from thug to psychologist—or downgrade me to lawyer, I couldn’t tell which—I decided to let that one pass.

  “It wasn’t really the . . . violence,” she finally said. “He did hit me, eventually. Even punched me in the face, once. I didn’t have to go to the hospital . . . and didn’t want to, all right?” she continued. “It was . . . humiliating. I had told the other residents that we were . . . together. They don’t train you to ask for help, they train you to give it. And to stay . . . detached.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, it wasn’t okay. I should have stopped it earlier. But . . . I just didn’t. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Smith.”

  “Of course,” she said, in that self-hating tone. Why should this hard-faced man tell her the truth? He wasn’t there to help her. He didn’t care about her. He just wanted the money. “Smith. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. Smith?”

  “Not medically.”

  “Cancer is simply unregulated growth. That’s all it is. The human body has mechanisms within it to regulate growth. When they malfunction, the cancer starts to work. If you don’t stop its growth, it eats the host. That’s what my . . . relationship was. Unregulated growth. He got more . . . controlling every day. At first I . . . liked it. Then I didn’t know how to stop it. It was . . . swallowing me. There wouldn’t have been anything of me left.”

  “The police . . . ?”

  “It wasn’t the violence!” she said sharply. “Not the physical violence. He could stop that. He even . . . did, sometimes. It was the . . . picking away at me. Eating my . . . self. I was too fat. So I lost weight. I was too rotten a dancer. So I took lessons. I always said the wrong thing. I was always . . . embarrassing him, he said. I didn’t really love him, he said that too. So I did . . . whatever he wanted. To prove it to him. I made myself into exactly what he wanted.” She took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before she let it out. “And then I didn’t want to be what I was. But he wouldn’t let me go.”

  “He threatened to hurt you?”

  “Hurt me? Yes, that’s about right. Not kill me. That wouldn’t be his style. You can’t totally dominate a dead person.”

  This wasn’t the story Crystal Beth had told me, but I kept my face bland, asked: “How would he hurt you, then?”

  “He has . . . pictures of me. They w
eren’t a secret. I mean, I knew he was taking them. But . . . you can’t imagine. The things I did. For him, I thought. So I could prove I really loved him.”

  “Still or video?” I said, getting down to business.

  “What?”

  “The pictures. Polaroids, transparencies, black-and-whites, eight-millimeter, camcorder . . . what?”

  “Oh. Both. I mean, he had a regular camera, and a video camera too.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “What else?”

  “Yeah, what else? So he’s got some sexy pictures of you. Maybe that would upset your parents or something, but there’s nothing illegal—”

  “I wrote some prescriptions,” she said, looking down.

  “For . . . ?”

  “For him. Oh! I see what you . . . For tranquilizers.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “And amphetamines. And painkillers.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “I wrote the prescriptions for . . . people who don’t exist. Just . . . names he gave me.”

  “How often—”

  “I did it all the time,” she said quietly. “He needed them for . . . clients, he said. Part of the entertainment package, he called it.”

  “And he’d go to the law? That’d drop his anchor too.”

  “His name isn’t on any of them,” she said. “I could lose my license. . . .”

  “Are you sure he’d do it?”

  “He would do anything,” she said, her voice tense with the calm certainty of the doomed. “Anything at all.”

  “Like cancel your credit cards? Or steal your mail?”

  “He never did that,” she said, a puzzled tone to her voice.

  “Your cousin said that—”

  “My cousin? I don’t have a cousin? Who . . . ?”

  “Crystal Beth.”

  “Crystal Beth? She’s not my cousin. I met her when I was volunteering at the center. And when the same thing started to happen to me, I . . .”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s just a word she uses. ‘Cousin.’ Like ‘sister,’ you know? It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “What you want is for him to stop, right?”

  “Yes!”

  “You understand, there’s probably no way to get the pictures back. Not all of them. They could be anywhere.”

  “I know.”

  “And the scrips. You already wrote them. There’s already a record. The best you can get is that he goes away, leaves you alone. That’s enough?”

  “I told Crystal Beth. I already made all my mistakes. All I want is for him to leave my life.”

  “Give me what you have on him,” I said.

  She had a lot, but it wasn’t much. Volume, not substance. The photos were a help, but she didn’t have a spare set of keys to his apartment. Or his car.

  What she had was mostly “Dating Game” keepsakes. Only thing, she finally figured out, she was the game.

  Like the pimps say, it’s all game.

  She gave me the letters too. At first they were lovely little hollow things. On creamy stationery with his name embossed in florid script. Handwritten with a fountain pen in a self-assured flowing hand. Bullshit homilies. Talk-show clichés. Recycled garbage.

  The philosophers say “Whatever will be, will be.” My darling, all I know is that we will be. Together.

  But the temperature dropped as he got closer to what he was. The last one was computer-font typed on plain paper. Using what the chump probably thought was an untraceable laser printer.

  Broken promises make broken people, you dirty miserable fucking lousy bitch.

  All you ever need to scan someone who plays above ground is the usual registration paper. A Social Security number can do it. Or a driver’s license. Or whatever. It’s easy. Some of that government ID stuff. And some cash.

  Wolfe pulled the records for me in forty-eight hours, sneering “amateur” as she handed them over. I asked her, since I was protecting a battered woman and all, if she didn’t want to cut me some slack on the fee. She didn’t, but she threw me one of her beautiful smiles as a bonus.

  The ex-boyfriend looked good on paper. Went a little deep into his platinum AmEx every once in a while, but nothing radical. He’d overpaid for his condo like every yuppie twerp who bought before 1988 and his BMW M3 was leased, but he was pulling a heavy salary and a yearly six-figure bonus too; so, even with semi-annual runs to St. Bart’s, Armani on his back, Patek Philippe on his wrist, regular heavy restaurant tabs and the occasional limo down to Atlantic City, he was well inside the margin.

  On paper, anyway.

  Sometimes you get lucky. Like if a mark has a Jones for strippers and he puts all the lap-dances on his credit card so he can take his fun as a tax deduction. Or if you find big holes in the financial records—the kind of holes coke eats in your nose after a while. Nothing like that with this boy, though.

  Doesn’t matter. When you’re looking to hack somebody up, a machete works as good as a modem.

  A few more days, and we had him boxed. He left his BMW in the condo’s garage and took a cab to work every day. Nobody else lived in his apartment. No girlfriend. No roommate. No out-of-town guests staying over. No dog.

  “I work alone, home,” the Prof said sharply. “No way I’m taking that maniac with.”

  “Mole’s no maniac,” I told him.

  He gave me a look of profound pity.

  I switched gears, looking for traction. “Look, Prof, the Mole’s the only one who can rig the guy’s machinery, you know that.”

  “That’s us today, the fucking IRA?” he asked sarcastically. “We don’t need to make his room go boom, right? You wanna ice the motherfucker, we could just give the job to your boy Hercules, get some use outa that chump.”

  “I’m not talking about blowing him up,” I said quietly, ignoring the jab. “This is gonna be . . . subtle, okay?”

  “The Mole ain’t . . . mobile, brother. We run into some shit, he’s gonna still be there when it’s over.”

  “Max’ll go in with you.”

  “And I will be outside, Father,” Clarence put in.

  “No you won’t,” the little man snapped. “I told you—”

  “Yes, you have told me many things,” the young gunslinger said calmly. “And I have always listened. With love and respect.”

  “Ahhh . . .” the Prof surrendered.

  I plugged the cellular phone into the scrambler box sitting on the Plymouth’s front seat. Gave the “Go” to the crew as I watched the mark climb out of the yellow cab in front of the World Trade Center, where he had his office. I lit a cigarette and waited, giving him time to get to his desk, to his direct line. By the time he sat down, his life would be invaded.

  “Anytime I want, Stanley,” I hissed into the cell phone when he picked up, my whisper-of-the-grave voice on full menace.

  “What? Who is—?”

  “It don’t matter, Stanley. You been fucking with the wrong people. You been a problem, punk. The people I work for, they don’t like problems.”

  “Look, whoever you—”

  “Keep quiet, Stanley. Keep real quiet. You know how it is. Something’s wrong with you, you see a doctor, right? And the doctor writes you a prescription. Me, I’m the prescription now, understand?”

  “If that little—”

  “Stanley, don’t make me tell you again. It’s over. That’s the message. There’s no more. You got no motherfucking idea how bad a mistake you made. You got one chance. Real simple choice. Go fucking away, got it? No phone calls, no letters, no nothing. You do anything, anything at all, we do you. You got twenty-four hours, Stanley. Then it’s over. Or you are.”

  “That’s one sick motherfucker,” the Prof said, handing over a little wooden box of six-month recovery medals from AA. Now I knew where the player met his prey—he was a Twelve Step stalker, a shark in a pool of victims. I wondered what Crystal Beth’s client had never told her. Or Crystal Beth never told me.

  “You get the—?”


  The Prof pulled a white leather photo album with thick padded covers from under his long coat without a word.

  “Find any scrips?” I asked him, not looking inside the white covers.

  “Only a few. But he had a heavy pill stash. It was all like you called, Schoolboy.”

  “You switch the pills?”

  “One for one. Perfect match.”

  “Righteous. The Mole get his work done?”

  “Oh yeah. Only took a few minutes. Soon as that piece of shit opens the line, it’s Nightmare Time.”

  By the next day, it was over. A private courier had come to the woman’s apartment. I’d left Max on watch just in case Stanley wanted more than a package delivered, but the courier handed it over without protest once I calmly explained to him that I was the doctor’s “representative.” He asked me for a signature on his receipt form. I looked at him until he stuffed it back in his pocket and walked away.

  We opened the package inside a box the Mole has for stuff like that, using a computer-controlled robot arm to do the work. No explosive surprises. I kept one piece out, reassembled the rest and gave it to Clarence to drop off.

  Back in my office, I opened the secrets of the white leather album with a surgeon’s scalpel. The negatives were just where I thought they’d be, inside the cover, repasted so fine you’d never spot the seam if you weren’t looking for it. The pictures were all of the woman. And him, I guess, from the waist down. About what you’d expect. Weren’t worth much unless her next fiancé wanted to marry a virgin. Not even erotic, unless you liked ropes and ball-gags and mirrors. Just trophies from an ugly hunt. I placed them flat on a piece of thick glass, used a box-cutter to shred them down, made a little bonfire in a stone jar, lighting a cigarette from the flames licking over the open top. It tasted good. The negatives needed something better, and I’d take care of it soon. I know a guy who works in a crematorium. Nights.

  “It was all here,” she said on the phone when I called later, a wave of happiness bubbling under the surprise in her voice. “Everything. My letters. The . . . gifts I’d given him. Even the last of the . . .”

  “I know. The one he hadn’t used yet.”