Mr. Vitalli’s high-valued stock was partly derived from his attention to detail, as he never neglected the small civilities. He parted his inky hair down the middle with precision and oiled it carefully into place. He carried a silver-handled cane, gesturing with it like some sort of dapper circus ringmaster as he pled his case. When the court reporter unexpectedly halted in her typing and sneezed, Mr. Vitalli bolted with a genteel, catlike grace across the courtroom and waved a white silk handkerchief in her surprised face before the stammering judge was able to command him back to his seat. What’s more, I believe the judge’s reprimand only made the jury pity Mr. Vitalli further, as it seemed like sour grapes that the judge should punish him for only doing what every well-bred gentleman is taught to do.
In my humble estimation, justice was ultimately undermined by two principal tactics. One, Mr. Vitalli was always able to produce witnesses—sometimes multiple witnesses, always female, practically a gaggle of clucking geese—to attest they had seen him out and about at the time of his wife’s death (I ought to say at the times of his wives’ deaths, plural). And second, everyone was charmed by Mr. Vitalli, blinded by those white teeth and dapper manners, they simply could not picture him cruelly and savagely holding a woman underwater to the point of her death.
But the Sergeant and I, we knew better. We could picture him doing the deed with utter clarity, and had developed our own opinions of Mr. Vitalli’s capabilities. There had, after all, been five wives! As wife after wife died in precisely the same curious way, we had interviewed Mr. Vitalli ad nauseam. And in that capacity, we had run through the repertoire of emotions he accidentally allowed himself to show; we had seen him cry crocodile tears, we had seen him sneer, we had seen him worry, we had seen him gloat in the aftermath of not one but two acquittals. We knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Vitalli was, at his core, a true savage.
What’s more: I believe either Mr. Vitalli could not help himself or else he got into a habit of taunting us with the crime scene. The freshly expired wives, you see, were all found in the bathtub in the exact same pose—a coincidence it was too difficult to overlook. With no air in their lungs, they sank to the bottom of the tub, where they lay staring upward in motionless silence, the surface of the water over them like a pane of glass separating the living from the dead. Their arms, which you might imagine flailing in those last seconds of life, were always crossed upon their chests in the manner of a perverse Lady of Shalott. Their ankles were also crossed, and photographs that were made of the five crime scenes conveyed a deeply unnerving, otherworldly ambience. The crowning touch—a bottle of laudanum resting within an arm’s reach of the tub itself—was so conspicuously placed as to seem utterly posed.
By the time of my report, it had gotten so Mr. Vitalli was visiting the precinct at regular intervals, being summoned as he was each time a wife of his turned up blue-faced and unblinking under a tubful of bathwater that had gone cold. I lost count of the times we saw him stroll in, but each time he arrived more dapper and dandified than the last. By the fifth death, Mr. Vitalli had decided to go out of his way to toy with us on purpose, although this development was not terribly obvious right away.
At our request, he came into the precinct voluntarily, or so it seemed. I remember observing him as he walked in the day after his fifth wife had been found. He shrugged out of his overcoat and hung it on the coatrack, a gesture that struck me as bizarrely familiar and at ease. He smiled around the room with a proprietary air. His body language suggested our precinct was in fact his home, and we were all visitors he had invited into the parlor with the glib idea we might amuse him. He was not bothered by bad nerves, or at least if he was, no molecule of his body betrayed as much. Neither did he seem to be grieving for the wife he had just lost. The Sergeant, thinking perhaps to rattle Mr. Vitalli, looked him in the eye and said firmly, “You must be devastated by this loss.” But if intimidation was the Sergeant’s aim, it missed its mark, for Mr. Vitalli merely smiled and put a theatrical hand over his heart.
“Such a fine specimen of a woman as she was,” he replied, neglecting to refer to his late wife by name (I wondered, briefly, if he’d already forgotten it), “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to marry again.” The words dripped with melodrama, and time stood horribly still as it fleetingly appeared he might even accompany the statement with a wink.
In that moment, it was clear to me the Sergeant would’ve liked nothing more than to ball up his fist and knock Mr. Vitalli’s block off, but such a breach of professional conduct would’ve been extremely distasteful to the Sergeant, and he was professional to the very last. The muscles in his jaw visibly flexed as he ground his teeth in anger, but the Sergeant forced a polite smile to his lips and went through the formalities—shaking Mr. Vitalli’s hand, escorting him to the interview room, offering Mr. Vitalli a glass of water as a matter of courtesy. As the Sergeant gave a quick crook of his finger in my direction (the same crook, I might mention, I’d watched Odalie give at least half a dozen waiters over the last week or so), I understood I was to follow the two men. I lifted a stack of typing paper from the supplies table and obediently fell into step behind them.
As we settled into the close quarters of the interview room, the Sergeant continued making polite conversation with Mr. Vitalli, who was voluble enough when it came to small talk. But then the mood shifted and the Sergeant segued into discussion of the crime itself. At that point Mr. Vitalli promptly transformed himself into a stone, simply sitting in silence and smiling as though he were the cat who’d caught the canary. He’d decided to clam up, as was his right. It was all a taunt: going out of his way to come in to the precinct only to stubbornly—not to mention smugly—refuse to answer anything directly related to his wife’s death. The Sergeant, I could tell, was incensed. He wheedled, he threatened, he cajoled. As for me, I sat alert at the shorthand machine, tensed and ready to take the confession Edgar Vitalli refused to issue from his lips. This darkly comical state went on for the better part of a half an hour, until finally the Sergeant abruptly slapped his hand with tremendous violence against the wooden desk, causing both Mr. Vitalli and myself to flinch defensively. His eyes smoldering, the Sergeant leaned in until his forehead almost touched Mr. Vitalli’s.
“Blast you! Get the hell out of here, man,” the Sergeant growled through clenched teeth. Mr. Vitalli made no move to go, and I could see the Sergeant’s mustache trembling. His chair scraped the ground with a bone-aching screech, and he stormed out, flinging the interview room door open with such force, I thought the glass pane would surely break as the door struck the wall.
For several seconds I remained frozen, mostly still shocked by the Sergeant’s use of profanity (I had never heard him blaspheme before). Slowly I became aware of the fact I had been left alone in the room with Mr. Vitalli. Involuntarily my gaze flicked in his direction and a chill raced over my skin. Once you had glimpsed behind the curtain of Mr. Vitalli’s charm, he was like that—there was something so profoundly absent from him that simply looking at him could make your skin crawl. I was instantly sorry I had glanced in his direction, for now he turned and caught my eye. A smile crept into his obscenely babylike, salmon-colored lips, and his black mustache twitched.
“Heavens. I had no intention of upsetting the good man,” Mr. Vitalli lied in a falsely naive voice. I ignored this comment and gathered up my things from the stenographer’s desk to go. “Do you think he’ll ever forgive me?” Mr. Vitalli continued, the inflection of farcical glee in his voice growing bolder. “I’m so heartbroken over my wives, you see, and do so enjoy my social calls with the Sergeant.” He reached out a hand, and suddenly I became aware he was about to take my wrist. For a split second, I was truly terrified—but only for a second, for almost as immediately another feeling came over me, a feeling I’m not sure I can adequately describe. Just before his hand reached me, my own hand sprang to life and clamped around his wrist with a viselike force. With a
vicious aggression that seemed to come from elsewhere, I yanked him by the wrist and pulled him toward me so that we were staring eyeball to eyeball.
“I know you’re used to playing the bully, and bullies often have trouble opening their ears and listening, but you’d better listen to me now like you’ve never listened to anyone in your life,” I hissed. My voice sounded strange; I didn’t recognize it as my own. And yet, I felt a twinge of inner pleasure as I realized I had now captured Mr. Vitalli’s full attention.
“You may be an animal with no control of himself,” I continued, “but believe me when I tell you, even animals get what’s coming to them, and it’s only a matter of time before the Sergeant puts you out of your misery.”
The air between our locked eyes was thick with a tension that was palpable; it was as if we were staring at each other through an invisible brick. My hand—still moving by virtue of what seemed like an independent volition—squeezed even more tightly around Mr. Vitalli’s wrist. His eyes widened, and suddenly I felt a trickle of something warm and wet. I glanced down and realized my fingernails had drawn blood. Four tiny red half-moons glimmered along the length of his wrist, and just as abruptly as I had snapped into my trance, I abruptly snapped out of it. I dropped his wrist and looked at the blood on my fingertips.
“Oh!” I stammered. “Oh!” I looked again at Mr. Vitalli and saw that his frightened expression was now developing into something else. It was genuine, it was familiar, and with a shock I realized it was the slow smile of a person recognizing an old friend he hasn’t seen in a long while. I ran from the room, straight down the hall, and plunged through the hinged door of the ladies’ room.
I did not see him leave. Even now, I do not know if Mr. Vitalli showed himself to the precinct exit, or whether he ever told the Sergeant about the little incident that transpired between us. Once in the ladies’ room I remained there, trembling, for some time. I opened the faucet tap and let it run, plunging my hands under the bone-achingly icy water, driven by a half-mad hope that the pain of the cold water would wash away something more than those drops of Mr. Vitalli’s blood. At some point I became cognizant that someone had entered the ladies’ room and was standing behind me. Like a startled animal, my eyes flashed at the dark presence in the mirror, ready to do full battle with Mr. Vitalli if need be. But to my relief it was only Odalie. Her elegantly penciled brow was furrowed, and suddenly I felt a wave of shame. I shut off the tap and let my throbbing, frozen, blue-veined hands drip in the sink. My joints hurt, my skin stung. I reached for the dirty rag of a towel that hung on the towel bar and blotted them dry. When that was done, I stood there, fiddling, not sure what to do. I felt Odalie’s eyes running over me.
Very slowly and meticulously—as if she were cautiously stepping around a murky puddle—Odalie approached and took the towel from my hands. I felt my grip loosen and the rough texture of the flour sack towel slip through my fingers as she pulled it away. She paused, and I summoned the courage to look up and meet her gaze. Then she took a corner of the towel and rubbed something from my cheek. I glanced in the mirror as she rubbed my face with the cloth and suddenly understood there had been a splotch of blood drying on the apple of my right cheekbone. I must’ve touched my face sometime after hurting Mr. Vitalli but before washing my hands in the sink, and had not been aware of doing so. Odalie wiped it clean and handed the towel back to me. She took a lingering look at me and smiled. Then she turned and exited the ladies’ room without having ever uttered a word.
10
In looking over my notes, I see now where I got the idea that ultimately led to my undoing, and how Odalie herself planted the rather subtle and innocuous first seed. In many ways, the trouble truly began with those typos I’ve already mentioned. She was always making them, and now I see how it was a clever way for her to test me, to determine whether or not I was paying close attention and to find out if I would report her mistakes, correct them myself, or simply let them stand. And of course, the greater intimates we became, the more I became inclined to do the latter.
It escalated slowly at first. Over time, simple typos evolved into entire rewordings—the sort of thing that might still be chalked up to carelessness, yet not attributable to something as unconscious and mechanical as a broken typewriter with a couple of stuck keys. She was developing a very curious habit of, well . . . I suppose I might phrase it as translating things. And I could not know her motivations. When she transcribed reports, the Lieutenant Detective’s handwriting focused on one set of details and Odalie’s typing appeared to prefer another. Also, I supervised her a few times in the interrogation room and had observed the disparity between the suspect’s words as they were spoken aloud and the words Odalie tapped out on the stenotype.
I did not know what to make of this new development at the time, but being that Odalie and I were getting along so well (not to mention that by moving in with her I had in some respects cast my lot in with hers), I was slow to make much of a fuss over the odd embellishments that increasingly appeared in her reports. Because they were usually about minor details and did not change the overall accuracy of the confessions, I often let them stand. Did it really matter, I asked myself, as long as the right people went to prison in the end? It didn’t seem immediately apparent to me that anyone might be injured by this practice. My doctor here scoffs when I claim to have once been so naive, but it’s true to say I was. (Come now, you are hardly the naive type, he says to me.) Of course, this was before I saw how bending the truth leads to breaking it, how Odalie would eventually twist the truth one way, and I another.
But all that came later.
In the meantime, the darkest day of winter came and went and yet somehow we barely took notice. Odalie and I spent our evenings insulated by the bright cheery interior of that white wedding cake of a hotel. We lay on the plush emerald lawn of the wall-to-wall carpet in the sitting room, sprawled out over the latest fashion magazines (Odalie even received all the Paris magazines; of course, between the two of us she was the only one who could read French, but I nonetheless enjoyed the illustrations). Sometimes when she was feeling particularly friendly, Odalie practiced a minor form of hypnotism on me, buffing my nails or brushing my long hair as we sat by the fireplace (she claimed to miss her own long hair, though her insistence on regular trims at the beauty parlor to keep her bob fashionably short and sleek would suggest otherwise). I can still hear how the smoldering logs in the fireplace popped and crackled arrhythmically, like bones cracking. Thinking about it now, I see I let myself get far too comfortable; we were spoiled, wasteful girls. We opened the valves on the radiator pipes to their fullest and walked around in nothing but our slips. We ate pretty little French pastries so pristinely decorated with ganache and gold leafing, the disarray inflicted by a single bite almost broke the heart. (At the time, I remember thinking of Helen and her sad penny candy, and for a moment I almost wished she could share in our bounty.) Above all else that winter, I came to learn that with enough money and modern steam heating, a balmy summer day could be created in just about any season. Together Odalie and I made summer year-round.
Two or three times a week, we visited a speakeasy or a private party of an equally lively nature. We tramped delicately over packed snow, wrapped in fur coats with the collars turned up, our hair wiry and untamable with the cold electric air of winter. Odalie clipped earrings to the fatty lobes of our ears—pendulous diamonds, as it was “our duty to out-sparkle the snow,” she declared in her seductive, charming way—and these icy baubles swung jauntily just above our coat collars, grazing the fuzzy edge of the upturned fur. Once inside, it was always the same: Odalie pushed me around the room, introducing me to people with an air of gleeful whimsy—much like a young girl dancing with a broom—although I’m happy to report I never again consumed as much alcohol as I did on that first night.
And yet the feeling of astonishment I’d experienced upon my first speakeasy visit never completely left me
. Each time Odalie led me into an otherwise lackluster shop front or a dubious-looking lunch counter and a cellar door or obscure passageway opened up to reveal yet another lush, boisterous party concealed within, I found myself just as overcome with surprise and curiosity as I had been on that first day. Absurd though it may sound, I could not determine whether it was always the same speakeasy or several different ones. What I did know was that the same set of people were frequently in attendance—more or less—despite the fact the location sometimes changed. And of course Gib was always somewhere to be found, standing square-jawed and stoic in the center of it all. In those days, I guessed he was the host of these parties. Or a front man of some sort. Slowly but surely, Gib and I began to develop a surly sort of rapport with each other. Or at least as much of a rapport as a person can have with someone who views you as a constant competitor.
The Other Typist Page 13