Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

“Never.”

  “Boy.”

  “What scares me …”

  “Sure, he knows where you live.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Must’ve followed you home or something.”

  “That’s what I figure.”

  “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one, I don’t know who he is.”

  “But that’s their job, isn’t it? Finding out who he is?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I just don’t know if they’d even bother with something like this. It isn’t as if he’s threatening me or anything.”

  “It isn’t as if he’s exactly stable, either.”

  “He does sound a little nuts, doesn’t he?”

  “A little?”

  “I guess I will call them. If he doesn’t quit.”

  “What makes you think he’ll quit?”

  “Well … I have this idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  Rickie Diaz has been cleared with the night-shift doorman and when he asks for Kate Duggan after the Wednesday night show, he is immediately allowed entrance to the theater and told where her dressing room is. He stands looking somewhat embarrassed and awed as she introduces him to the other kids, all in various stages of feline undress, using his full proud Puerto Rican name, Ricardo Alvaredo Diaz, as she learned it yesterday while outlining her brilliant plan to him. Rickie has now seen the show from a house seat provided and paid for by Kate, from which sixth-row-center vantage point he alternately watched the prowling cats on stage and checked the house for any male who seemed too interested in the particular cat in the white costume. As they come out of the Seventh Avenue stage door at ten-fifty that Wednesday night, hand in hand and trying to look very lovey-dovey, Kate scans the men waiting on the sidewalk for the performers to come out. Most of them are holding autograph books. One of them is carrying a flash camera.

  Rickie is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt detailed with an embroidered parrot in red, yellow, orange, and green, a gift from his uncle in Mayagüez, he tells her later. Kate has asked him to look casual tonight because she herself is wearing what she customarily wears to and from the theater in the summertime, just jeans and a T-shirt, sometimes with a sweater if it’s cool, which this summer shows no sign of becoming. So she’s pleased that Rickie looks not like a theatergoer but like someone who might just possibly be her big, tattooed, longhaired, bulging-muscled boyfriend, which is just what he’s supposed to look like. To reinforce this notion, she reaches up to touch his cheek the moment they step out onto the sidewalk, kisses him quickly, says, “I’m starved, honey,” and loops her arm through his as they begin walking uptown.

  She hopes they are being followed.

  She hopes he is watching.

  The idea is to have him think she’s truly involved with this powerful-looking stud. Get him to believe this is not some defenseless little girl dancing her heart out on the stage of the Winter Garden, but is instead a grown woman clever enough to have chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger as her boyfriend. So watch your fuckin onions, my one true lord and master. Hang up your expensive stationery or Arnie here will break you into tiny little pieces.

  The choice for a crowded delicatessen where he will be able to see them holding hands across their hot pastrami sandwiches and ostentatiously billing and cooing is the Carnegie on Fifty-fifth and Seventh or the Stage between Fifty-third and -fourth. They choose the Carnegie because it allows a slightly longer walk from the theater, with him in close pursuit, they hope. Neither of them appears particularly nervous or suspicious or watchful as they wander hand in hand up Seventh Avenue. The idea is to make this seem entirely natural and unplanned, something that happens all the time, no matter who’s watching them. This isn’t a show here, this is two people madly in love with each other and one of them happens to be six feet two inches tall and by the way tips the scales at two-twenty, get the message?

  Rickie turns out to be a pretty good actor, leaning over the table toward her and taking both her hands in his while they’re waiting for their orders to come, talking earnestly—and somewhat touchingly—of his early youth in a South Bronx barrio where he spent most of his time trying to avoid recruitment by a gang called Los Hermanos Locos, “which means ‘The Crazy Brothers,’ I guess you know.” Steadfastly refusing their admonitions, exhortations, and eventual daily beatings designed to encourage and persuade, he took up bodybuilding as a means of self-defense, hoping to cope effectively with these jackasses unless one day they decided to shoot him, which they didn’t do after he’d gained fifty pounds of muscle and busted a few heads and they lost interest. He tells her all this with a proud look on his fiercely handsome Conquistador face with its high cheekbones and aristocratic nose, tossing his ponytail in utter disdain. Kate is thinking This is someone who can really break someone in half if he so chooses.

  The Indian tattoo, he tells her, has nothing at all to do with his Latino heritage—“My family doesn’t go back to any Indian tribe or anything, though there used to be some tribes in Puerto Rico,” rolling the name of the island on his tongue, Pware-toe Ree-coe—the tattoo was just something he decided to have done one night when he was a little drunk.

  “The feathers in the headband ripple when I flex,” he tells her, “I’ll show you later,” which means, she realizes with something of a start, that he later plans to take off the long-sleeved shirt and flex his biceps for her, let the feathers ripple for her, a performance above and beyond the call of duty. But she does nothing at the moment to correct his mistaken assumption, satisfied that whoever may be watching in this noisy, crowded place should be utterly convinced that they are indeed girl-and-boy. She allows herself a few discreet glances around the room, green eyes sidling from patron to patron, idly seeking the pale thin man with the dark brooding eyes, but she sees no one who even vaguely fits that description.

  They have ordered not the pastrami but the hot roast beef sandwiches instead, served with creamy mounds of mashed potatoes and brown gravy and a bucket of sour pickles and cream soda the likes of which she hasn’t tasted since the time some boy, she forgets who, took her to Coney Island shortly after she joined the cast of Cats the first time around. The show has been such an integral part of her life that what’s happening with this lunatic seems almost ironic. The idea that he saw her in the show, knew how to get to her because of the show, knew where to send the flowers and the notes, knew when she’d be coming out of the theater after each performance, knew that all he had to do was follow her to find out where she lived, all of this is very frightening, hey, no kidding?

  But it’s also somewhat eerie, you know? As if everything was somehow preordained. Everything that happened to her before she got into Cats was leading up to the actual moment she first stepped on the stage of the Winter Garden as part of the two-boy, two-girl, so-called “Cats Chorus.” But more than that, she now has the creepy feeling that everything since then has been leading up to now, this very instant, sitting here in a restaurant with a handsome twenty-year-old Puerto Rican who’s here to protect her because her lover—who hasn’t called her in more than a week—is up there in Massachusetts making love to his goddamn wife.

  The idea galls.

  She eats voraciously, as she does after each performance, her hands obligingly freed by her make-believe lover who is telling her about his ambition to own his own fitness studio one day. Working in the bicycle shop is just one of three jobs he has, how about that! He also drives a limo part-time for a company in Queens, and he works weekends in the produce department at Gristede’s. Meanwhile, he’s going to NYU at night to study business administration so he’ll know what he’s doing when he opens his own place after he’s saved enough money to do it. “Start with a small studio uptown someplace, expand to a whole chain of them, I have big ideas, Kate. Lots of the guys in Los Hermanos are either dead or in jail now, can you
imagine what I could’ve turned into if I let them talk me into mugging people, or selling dope or whatever the hell?” Listening to him, Kate is secretly hoping the lunatic out there will actually make his move so Rickie can stomp him into the pavement and end his career. In fact, she’s beginning to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t walk home after they get out of here, but it’s a long way to Tipperary and also to Ninety-first and First. So when at last they’ve finished their coffee and Rickie has paid the bill …

  She whispers, “I’ll settle with you later,” but he pulls a macho face and says, “Hey, come on, willya?”

  … they step out onto Seventh Avenue on a night so torrid they could just as easily be in Mayagüez, and then walk up to Fifty-seventh, again hoping he’s following. In any case, he knows where she lives. If he wants to take a cab and be waiting for them there, that’s fine with Kate. All she wants is for him to get the message. The message is blazing in lights a mile high:

  The crosstown bus runs over to First, where they transfer to a bus running uptown. They get off at Ninety-first Street and begin walking toward her apartment on streets rather dark and deserted at this hour of the night. They get there at a little before midnight, and she is surprised to find the doorman actually there at his post instead of out buying himself a hamburger or catching forty winks in the storeroom near the switchboard. He greets her with a cheery “Evening, Miss Duggan,” and she says, “Hi, Domingo,” at which point Rickie bursts into a stream of rapid-fire Spanish, which Domingo answers and they machine-gun it back and forth as if reciting in tandem the history of Queen Isabella and the Spanish Armada while Kate debates whether she should simply shake hands with Rickie or kiss him on the cheek in case he’s someplace watching.

  “Goodnight, Rickie,” she says at last, and reaches up to kiss him, but he turns his head slightly at the very last moment, either by accident or design, and their lips meet. His tongue is in her mouth in an instant, a hot Latin tongue that sends sparks clear down to where she doesn’t want to be feeling anything of the sort. She draws away, and looks at him in surprise, and then says, “Goodnight” again, and goes into the building. He stands on the sidewalk watching her for a moment, and then he shrugs and walks away. Domingo looks a little puzzled, too.

  She has lived in New York long enough to know that a spring latch is worthless on the door to an apartment. Her top lock is a Medeco and the one under that is a dead bolt. She double-locks the door, and then draws all the blinds, the ones on the windows facing the street, and the ones covering the single window opening on the air shaft. “Yes, Hannah,” she says, “hello, sweetie, how are you?” and then goes into the bedroom and slips out of her jeans and T-shirt. She leaves her panties on like an old maid afraid to look under the bed, and takes from the closet a silk kimono Ron bought for her in Fort Lauderdale when they were touring Miss Saigon. The kimono is very long, with a sash that belts at the waist. Its predominant color is a sort of saffron, printed with these huge olive-colored tendrils. It feels soft and smooth and slippery against her skin.

  Barefoot, she starts back into the living room, and, as she invariably does, stops to look at the corridor wall hung with framed photographs. The picture of the Palace Theatre in London, where she played in Les Miz, shows the big marquee on Shaftesbury Avenue, and hanging under that a photo of the stage door around the corner with its stone lintel and chiseled words shamelessly proclaiming:

  Artistes, she thinks and smiles.

  There’s a framed photo of the Operettenhaus in Hamburg, where she played in, guess what, Cats, and all around that are pictures of the various theaters in Denver, Minneapolis, Fort Lauderdale, Washington, and Detroit, from when she was touring Miss Saigon with Ron. The biggest picture on the wall is a framed color photograph of Bess. Her sister is nine in the picture, and she looks happy and beautiful in a yellow sundress, but of course that was before she got so terribly sick.

  She stares at the photo for a long time, and then she sighs heavily and goes into the living room and over to the wall where her stereo equipment is stacked. From one of the metal shelves there, she takes down a bottle of Beefeater’s gin that was a gift from the stage manager last Christmas, and she pours a hefty two fingers into a fat solid-feeling glass she bought at Pottery Barn.

  She carries the glass into the kitchen, cracks a tray of cubes, and drops two of them into the drink. “Cheers,” she says aloud to no one, and takes a good swallow. “Mm, good,” she says, and goes back into the living room and searches through her CDs till she finds Handel’s Water Music, to which she once danced in a recital in Miss Davenport’s dance class in Westport, Connecticut. But that was when you and I were young, Bessie. That was before the Incident, as Jacqueline and I took to calling it after hours of skirting it, and circling it, and finally dealing with it and putting it to rest.

  Maybe.

  Or alternately, the Bathroom Incident, delicately avoiding the more emotionally laden term Trauma.

  The Handel is soft and soothing and suited to the hour, which she knows is late. She lowers the volume. Drains her glass. While she’s standing there, she pours herself another one. Standing there with the drink in her hand, she visualizes herself as a skinny twelve-year-old in leotard and tights, drifting across the large open room that was Miss Davenport’s second-floor studio, mirrors lining one entire wall, windows on the other, flowing, floating to the sound of Handel’s violins, richly romantic when she was twelve, but sounding somewhat stout and stately now. She sips at her fresh drink. Twelve years old. A spring recital. Faint breezes wafting through the open windows. Sweaty little girls drifting. Everything so beautiful at the ballet, “Thank you, Chorus Line,” she says, and raises her glass in a toast, and sips at it again. Everything so beautiful. But that was before the summer of our discontent, wasn’t it?

  The telephone rings.

  Don’t be my fucking father, she thinks.

  She goes into the bedroom and picks up the phone on the bedside table.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s me.”

  “Rickie,” she says, relieved, “hi.”

  “I just got home. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “No trouble from the nut?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe we scared him off, huh?”

  “I hope so,” she says, and sits on the edge of the bed, and takes another sip of the gin. “That was very kind of you,” she says. “What you did tonight.”

  “I just hope it worked.”

  “We’ll find out, I guess.”

  “Oh sure. By the way,” he says, “we were so busy trying to fool him, I never got to tell you how much I liked the show.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You really are the prettiest cat in it. Whatever it was he said in his letter.”

  “Prettiest kitty,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “You’re also a very good dancer,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll bet he sees every performance, don’t you think? Judging from the letters?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably standing downstairs right this minute. Looking up at your window.”

  “Well, I hope not.”

  “Probably jacking off in some doorway,” he says. “Where do these nuts come from, anyway?”

  The Incident is suddenly upon her full-blown.

  “There used to be a kid lived in my building,” Rickie says, “he used to throw bricks down from the roof. Just at anybody passing by. My uncle comes to visit us one day, this crazy bastard on the roof throws a brick down at him. He runs up the roof, my uncle …”

  A hot summer night at the beginning of August.

  A Sunday night.

  Thirteen-year-old Kate is standing in front of the misted bathroom mirror, drying herself in a large white puffy towel.

  “… gave me the shirt, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “My uncle in Mayagüez. The one who told the kid to stop
throwing bricks off the roof or he’d throw him off the roof. He’s the one sent me the shirt I was wearing tonight. With the parrot on it. Did you like it?”

  “Yes, it was very nice.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool.”

  Eleven-year-old Bess is submerged in the tub in a sea of white suds.

  “He used to be a doorman on East Seventieth, he retired last October, went back to the island. He’s got a house down there, a pool, anything a person …”

  Downstairs in the living room, her father is listening to his records.

  Gently …

  Sweetly …

  Ever so …

  Discreetly …

  Her hand suddenly begins shaking.

  “Rickie,” she says, “excuse me, but I have to go now.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing, I’m all right.”

  Her hand is shaking so hard she’s spilling gin all over the front of the kimono.

  Open …

  Secret …

  Doors.

  “Kate?” he says.

  She can see her sister in the tub, precociously budding, thin and tan and supple, her sweet dear innocent Bess.

  “Kate?”

  You always were his favorite.

  “I’m okay,” she says.

  She can’t stop trembling.

  “There’s nobody there, is there?”

  Yes, there’s everybody here, she thinks.

  “No, I’m just very tired.”

  “I can imagine. I’ll let you go then.”

  Her father’s words.

  But he doesn’t.

  Ever.

  “Can I call you again sometime?”

  “Yes, fine,” she says.

  No, don’t, she thinks.

  “Goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight,” she says, and hangs up, and drains the glass, and goes back into the living room to refill it. The orchestra is into the “Hornpipe” section. She turns off the stereo. The apartment goes suddenly still.

  If David were here, she thinks, he would know how to deal with this, right? A fucking shrink? But David isn’t here. If Jacqeline were here, she too would know how to deal with this. She dealt with it ad infinitum and ad nauseam over the years, didn’t she, so she would certainly know what to say now to soothe the savage beast, something Handel’s venerable music apparently did not have the charms to accomplish.