In Sunlight or In Shadow

by Lawrence Block

  Of course, Frank would have said that building this place had fed hundreds of families for years. Not to mention the jobs that would not exist right now if people like her did not stay in the expensive rooms at all.

  She waited for an elevator, hovering around a table covered with brochures and timetables for everything from the subway to the trains. She grabbed a few, just so that she would have something to look at, so that the elevator operator wouldn’t talk to her.

  She needn’t have worried. He nodded his hello as she gave him the floor, and then said little else. He didn’t even look at her. When he let her out on her floor, he didn’t even wish her a good day.

  Someone else, someone entitled, would have had him written up for that. She expected he was merely as worn down by the day as she was. Always a crisis, always something going wrong. Always people dying for things that they hadn’t done.

  No one ever said, He hadn’t done it. He never did do it. He couldn’t’ve done it.

  At least, not no one the people in charge listened to.

  She frowned as she unlocked her door, something niggling at her. She closed the door, then picked up the old newspaper she’d grabbed on the train. It was a New York Times from a few weeks ago—before she had gone to Memphis.

  She thumbed through it, remembering something she had seen. She found it in the middle of the paper, just before pages of ads.

  JAIL HEAD ASKS TROOPS AS MOB SEEKS NEGROES

  Riot Feared in Scottsboro, Ala., After Arrest of Nine,

  Held for Attacking Girls

  Lurleen leaned against the desk as she read the article, trying to see between the lines. The nine men were pulled off a box car, charged with attacking two girls. But there was something about a fight with white men, who left the box car at a different stop. The white men telegraphed ahead, and asked that the Negro men be arrested.

  And then the mob.

  She shuddered.

  The sheriff had called for troops, preventing the lynching that the white men had so obviously desired, but these nine young men—still alive a few weeks later—had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

  No wonder the NAACP wanted to appeal.

  She knew, just from looking at the story, that this wasn’t about rape. It was about sharing a box car, breathing the same air. About not acting unequal.

  She glanced at the date. It had happened before she had gone to Memphis, before she saw that box car filled with men of different colors riding together, looking unhappy.

  Before she had her uncharacteristic thought: Oh, that’s going to cause problems. She’d had the thought because it already had caused problems.

  Big problems.

  She had, apparently, scanned and disregarded the story, because in the last few years, she had trained herself not to see stories like that, stories that would have led her to other places, other times.

  She tossed the newspaper on the desk, then pulled off her hat and set it on its already customary place on the dresser. She peeled off her dress and hung it up, so that it wouldn’t get creased.

  Then she kicked off her shoes. She was going to have a nap before she went for dinner, although she couldn’t bring herself to sleep.

  Instead, she grabbed one of the railroad timetables, her hands knowing what her brain had yet to acknowledge.

  The money helped. It did some good. But it couldn’t stem the tide of misery. It wasn’t even a stone in an already-breached dam.

  She couldn’t stop lynchings or those horrid, horrid deaths that had no name. The burning-alive deaths. The shotguns fired at point blank range.

  She didn’t have the courage for that. She really didn’t have courage at all. She had been uncomfortable in the NAACP offices.

  She hadn’t belonged.

  But she could investigate. She had already proven that. She had a knack for getting her own people to admit the horrors they had perpetrated. To brag about those horrors.

  She had usually listened after the deaths. But those young men in Scottsboro, Alabama, they were still alive. Their story could be told and investigated, and maybe, someone else could save them. The legal defense people were already converging. They were “discussing that matter in Alabama,” and if she knew anything about such discussions, then someone would go to the families, encourage them to fight and fight hard.

  To fight, they would need evidence.

  For evidence, they needed someone to talk to both sides—to admit to things that shouldn’t even be discussed.

  She would no longer call such investigations Good Works. They weren’t Good Works. They were Necessary Evils—performed by a woman who had spent too much time with evil herself, a woman who couldn’t properly stand up.

  But she could lie for the sake of the truth.

  She bent over the timetable, looking for a train out of New York, a train that would connect her to a train that would take her to Scottsboro, Alabama. Ironic that she had to come here to realize she needed to travel to her native land once again, that she needed to pretend for another few years, to capture what had really happened so that someone else—someone with actual courage, someone with a heart and a mission—could risk their own life to save other lives.

  She would never be that person.

  She would always hide in the shadows and send reports into the light.

  It was the least—truly the least—she could do.

  Not for Noreen, who had pointed a finger and lied.

  But for the young man at the other end of that finger, holding a book and smiling at a little girl carrying a dolly, treating her kindly, like one human treated another—something so very rare in this world as to be memorable.

  This would be for him, and all the people like him, who became names on a list at best, and postcards at worst.

  She would do what she could for as long as she could.

  Until the money ran out.

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER is the author of five novels including the bestselling The Death Artist and the Nero Award–winning Anatomy of Fear. He is the co-author, contributor, and illustrator of The Dark End of the Street, editor/contributor of La Noire: The Collected Stories, The Marijuana Chronicles, and the New York Times bestselling serial novel Inherit the Dead. His stories have been included in such publications as Ellery Queen Magazine, The Strand, and numerous collections. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center and serves on the board of Yaddo, the oldest arts community in the U.S. Santlofer has been profiled in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Newsday, USA Today, has been the subject of a Sunday New York Times Magazine “Questions For” column, and has been written about and reviewed extensively.

  Also a well-known artist, his work is included in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Newark Museum. A longtime Hopper fan, Santlofer’s portrait of Edward Hopper was included in his 2002 exhibition of “Art about Art and Artists.” He lives and works in NYC, where he is Director of Crime Fiction Academy at the Center for Fiction. He is currently at work on a new crime novel and a fully illustrated adventure novel for children.

  Night Windows, 1928

  29 × 34 in. (73.7 × 86.4 cm). Gift of John Hay Whitney. The Museum of Modern Art, New

  York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

  NIGHT WINDOWS

  BY JONATHAN SANTLOFER

  There she is again, pink bra, pink slip, in one window then the next, appearing then disappearing, a picture in a zoetrope, flickering, evanescent, maddening.

  Yes, that’s the word: maddening.

  Then he thinks of another: delicious.

  And another: torture.

  He hadn’t expected a replacement so soon. The last one, Laura or Lauren, her name hardly matters, gone now four or five months, not like he’s not counting. They’re all replaceable, one as good as the next. Though he liked t
he last one, her innocence—and taking it away. He tries to picture her but her features are already blurred, like she was a watercolor and he’d run a moist finger across her face, smearing her features, erasing her, creating her then destroying her. Exactly what he did. What he always does.

  The woman in pink bends over, her rear end aimed right at him, and he would laugh but she might hear, might look across the alley and spot him, the man in the window opposite, the man in the dark, and he’s not quite ready for that. The meeting has to be planned. And it will be. Soon.

  The woman stands up, turns and leans on the window ledge, her blond hair backlit, and he thinks: The gods have sent me a new one.

  That last one was lucky to have known him, a rube like her, easy to manipulate, almost too easy. He’d broken her in; just plain broken her.

  So how did she have the strength to get away?

  No matter. He was tired of her anyway, her whiny voice, her all too eager need to please.

  This new one looks perfect, the way she glides past the windows oblivious to the fact that she is being watched.

  This one will be easy.

  He wipes sweat from his upper lip and stares at the three bay windows shining in the dark, his own private theater. He lets out a deep breath and a curtain in her window billows out, as if it is breathing along with him.

  Ahhhh . . .

  The dark covers him, a veil; he can see her but she sees nothing.

  He watches her bare feet on the ugly green rug, the same rug. This new one hasn’t bothered to change it. He feels a tingle in his toes and a tug in his groin remembering his own bare feet on that rug, and the last one’s ankle, cuffed to the old steel radiator.

  Heat oozes in through the window he’s opened for a better view, soggy warm air that dissolves around him into the apartment’s central air conditioning, half his body cool, the other half sweating, as if he’s in the middle of a weather pattern, cold front meeting warm, a storm brewing deep inside him. He reaches for the bottle, pours more Scotch into his tumbler, the ice mostly melted.

  He spots the small metal fan behind her, rotating but not doing much good, he’s sure of that, though he likes it, the way it blows her slip and her hair and it means her windows will remain open in this heat.

  He brings the Scotch to his lips, the liquor sharp on his tongue but smooth in his throat, and he stares across the dark as if it’s something physical, a runway that transports him directly into her apartment, can feel his eyes, like hands, on her body, soft then hard, harder till it hurts.

  The woman moves away as if she feels the pain, the pink of her drawn into the back of the apartment, away from the window.

  He waits.

  Pictures the apartment he knows well, the drab interior, cramped bedroom, cracked tiles in the bathroom, tiny kitchen, the outmoded fixtures.

  He can see the naked radiator in the living room, the apartment old and not yet renovated, an anomaly in this city. Of course he owns his brownstone, four stories, turn of the century, a backyard he never uses. He’d bought it during the economic downturn, though it was expensive, now astronomical, even by his standards. Still, not the kind of place he ever imagined he’d be in, had always lived on the Upper East Side, in high-rise doormen buildings. But he’s grown to like it here, the privacy.

  He finishes his drink and pours another, impatient, Scotch spilling onto his hand in the dark.

  What’s she doing? What’s taking so long?

  He checks his watch; thin gold face on a thinner gold mesh band. Damn it, she’s going to make him late for his business dinner.

  Come on. Come on.

  Is she taking a shower, a pee? He imagines both, wishes he were there to watch. Knows he will be soon.

  He lights a cigar, no one around to tell him not to, not wife number one or two, so long gone they’re not even bad memories, or that one from a couple of years ago who dared to say his cigars were a disgusting habit. Well, he showed her disgusting habits, didn’t he?

  A picture of his father—a big man smoking a cigar—sparks in his brain, the man’s face florid with blood-filled rage, looming toward him with a belt or a fist or the smoldering tip of a cigar, though it’s possible he’s made it up or these images were supplied by his mother, who said his father had died when he was five, a lie he discovered years later though he never saw the man again.

  A flash of pink, like a brushstroke of paint in her window, and he sits forward, head jutting like a turtle from its shell. Then she’s gone but the pink of her lags in his mind, and he thinks of meat, tender veal, juicy pork, saliva gathering in his mouth like a dog.

  He drags on his cigar, holds the smoke in until he’s about to cough, then lets it explode, a gray cloud in front of his face. When it clears she’s there again, farther back in the apartment, unhooking her bra beside a lamp that bathes her body in a soft gold light. He squints through the smoke trying to make out details, but cannot. She’s an impressionist painting. Shimmering. Beautiful. Something he wants to put in a frame and hang on a nail, or in a cage, or strap to a wall.

  Then she’s gone again, and he thinks about the last one, young and pure, and how he stripped that away, watched the purity slake off her like old, dead skin.

  He looks at his watch, he’s got to get going, can’t really be late for this dinner, a client from Dubai. But then the pink is back, clear and close to the window, the silky material of her slip sliding around her thighs in slow motion, something old-fashioned about it, a slip, and her figure too, rounder and curvier than the fashionably starving women he usually sees, picking at salads while their fish, always fish, goes cold, two-hundred-dollar meals wasted on women who do not eat, beards for dinners with businessmen from Dubai.

  He stares at her and blinks as if taking pictures, wishes he’d kept his old 35mm Nikon with its telephoto lens, imagines himself Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, and he’s watching a murder—how great would that be?

  The pink lady—his name for her—bends over, then she’s up and practically twirling and for the first time he notices that farther back, half hidden in the shadows, is a mirror, something new, something he does not remember being there before, and for a moment he thinks she must surely see him reflected in it, and he pulls back, cigar smoke trailing him.

  Of course it’s impossible, he’s too far away and let’s face it, he’s a vampire—just try to catch my reflection! He barks a laugh and if it were not for the street noise—buses, taxis, sirens—she might have heard him, might have averted everything that is to come.

  And maybe she does. Because she stops twirling, comes to the window and looks out.

  His breath catches in his throat and he pulls further back into the soupy darkness.

  Is she looking for me, at me?

  He can’t tell where she’s looking, her face dark, backlit, her hair a pale halo.

  Then she’s gone. He should get going too, and is about to get up when she’s back, almost but not quite lost in the hazy interior light, opening her apartment door. Then the lights snap off and the windows go dark.

  He could race to catch her as she leaves but he sits there, in the dark, smoking his cigar and sipping the last of his Scotch, forcing himself to wait. He likes this part, the part where they don’t yet know him, but he knows them.

  Three weeks and two days. A dozen more performances. The way he sees them, little plays, vignettes, the pink lady performing, just for him.

  But enough. It’s time. He can’t put it off any longer without going crazy.

  And it’s easy. He sees when she comes and goes, lights on, lights off, sees her getting dressed for work and undressed when she comes home. Sees her go out on dates and come home alone. Always alone. And he likes that. He would never be interested in a tramp.

  He’s followed her twice to the same restaurant, watched her through plate glass, eating alone, using a book for a prop, looking lonely, shy—a good sign, something he can work with.

  He checks the time. She will be home soon,
and he is prepared, dressed as if for work, designer summer suit, hair in place but not slicked back like some Wall Street wolf, one thick lock, gray-streaked, casually arranged to fall across his self-tanned forehead. A splash of expensive English cologne, subtle and masculine, something to tickle the nose if she gets close, and he will make sure she does.

  Lights flicker on in the triple-screen theater across the alley, hot, blinding, for a moment the world has gone phosphorescent. Then it cools and she is there, strutting across the living room in a business dress, plain, straight lines, dark blue. She disappears into the bedroom, and he waits. A few minutes later she is back in the living room, wearing a tank top and white jeans, then she is out the door.

  And so is he.

  On the street, nerve ends tingling though his heartbeat is low—it never goes above eighty—he catches his reflection in a storefront’s glass, pleased, an attractive man, anyone can see that, and successful; he wears the attributes of wealth easily but impossible to miss.

  He rounds the corner and there she is. Sky-blue tank top, white pants, blond hair snatching the fading summer light as she comes out of her apartment building, as if out of a movie, his movie, the shape of her, details coming into focus, his skin crawling with anticipation, brain a low buzz as he follows her down the crowded city street and into the restaurant, where she is seated alone at a table for two, the place a faux French bistro, half empty. He snares the table beside hers, orders a glass of Malbec, and watches her over his menu, as if she is performing on the edge of it, a mini-stage he has created just for her.

  She orders white wine, Chardonnay, takes a sip and he notices it’s the same color as her hair. When she orders the niçoise salad he waits until the waiter, a young man with oily hair and an equally oily French accent, stops at his table, then says with a nod in her direction, his voice loud enough so she will hear, “I’ll have the same as she’s having,” and when she looks over he smiles and she smiles back, and that’s it, the hook in her cheek, the rod in his hand and he is starting to reel her in.