Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  Listen, she thinks, let’s either do the mantra or go hide the silverware, okay?

  She swallows a goodly amount of gin, which burns on the way down, strengthening her sense of resolve. Through Understanding, Peace, she thinks. So leave us understand.

  I was not responsible for what happened.

  I know I wasn’t.

  I was not to blame.

  I know.

  I didn’t need to go fuck poor Charlie.

  Daddy’s dearest friend.

  I didn’t need to pursue him like a lioness after a warthog, chasing him into his underground hole, yanking him out by his tail, forcing him to relive with me …

  Stay away from the Incident, she thinks.

  I felt no guilt over what happened.

  The blame was all my father’s.

  I felt only shame.

  Because I wasn’t able to stop it.

  Isn’t that why you make it happen again and again?

  But I don’t.

  Without Bess each time?

  My poor darling Bess.

  It’s what you do, Kate.

  Is that it?

  Oh, yes, that is most definitely it.

  Over and over and over again.

  Thank you, Dr. Hicks.

  She puts down her glass. Deliberately, she goes into the bathroom and runs a hot tub. She pours in a generous amount of bath oil. She slides out of the kimono and steps into the foaming suds.

  Take off the curse, she thinks.

  Take off the curse.

  It was all that kid’s fault in the park, she thinks.

  If he hadn’t stolen my bike, we wouldn’t have met.

  Gloria’s eyelids are shaded with a blue that complements her pale scoop-necked blouse and somewhat darker mini. Her narrow face, the eyes as dark as loam and somewhat slanted, the nose as exquisitely sculpted as Nefertiti’s, today possesses a curiously vulpine look that seems to say I want a part and I will kill for it—but perhaps that’s because she’s just come from an audition. Her mouth is a voluptuous contradiction to the wolf metaphor, Bugs Bunny transplanted onto Brer Fox, its upper lip flaring imperceptibly to reveal a minuscule wedge of faintly bucked teeth, exceedingly white against her chocolate complexion.

  “The show is set in the year 3706,” she’s telling Kate, “in a sort of striated—is that the right word?—society where the robots are in charge and they’re chasing humans. Oh, I get it, it’s Blade Runner, right? Only Daryl Hannah’s Basic Pleasure Model is a Belgian nun, right? Anyway, the humans still wear clothes but the robots wear only body makeup. Which is understandable, since if you’re made of metal, why would you need clothes? The producer asked me if I’d be willing to be a dancing robot who wears just body makeup and these metallic stiletto-heeled pumps. I told him that could get awfully chilly in the wintertime. You know what he said?”

  “What’d he say?” Kate asks.

  “He said, ‘Yeah, well this is still August, honey.’”

  “He wanted you to undress for him, is what that was.”

  “Oh, tell me about it,” Gloria says.

  “Did you?”

  “No, I told him I wasn’t looking for that kind of dancing role. He said ‘Too bad, it’s a featured role.’ I told him ‘Yeah, too bad.’ Who needs that kind of shit?”

  “Really,” Kate says.

  The two women are in a cappuccino joint in the Village. Kate has already told her about the guy who’s been writing letters to her, and how last night she tried to scare him off, which is probably why Gloria went into the long story about the producer wanting her to take off her clothes. Now she tells Kate that she once had a guy phoning her day and night, but this was somebody she knew. Kate tells her, “No, this isn’t anything like that, this is some nut.” She keeps looking around the coffeehouse. Trying to spot anyone paying excessive attention to her. She is uncomfortable out in the city, out of her apartment. He has done that to her. Made her feel that any one of the people here in this place might be watching her as she sips at her latte.

  “Have you told David about it?” Gloria asks.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Is he still coming in next Tuesday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because he told me he’d be back again on the fifteenth.”

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  Gloria says nothing for a moment.

  She sips at her espresso and then looks across the table with those coal-black eyes of hers and says, “That’s too bad. I was hoping to see him again.”

  Me too, Kate thinks.

  Because, yes, now that this lunatic has entered her life she is finding it more and more difficult to suppress what happened during that summer long ago. Which is why she supposes she couldn’t fall asleep last night, even after the hot tub, even after, in fact, she masturbated under the suds.

  You’re right, she thinks, I’m a whore.

  Was that the word he’d used?

  Whore?

  Or was it slut?

  Which?

  But, yes, if David does by some miracle come in next week, she would like Gloria to be with them because if there’s one thing she’s learned over the years, it’s how to restage the Bloody Fucking Incident in a variety of inventive ways. With a bit more practice she guesses she might even be able to forget entirely what happened back there in the Westport house on that August night fourteen years ago. Aluvai, as they say in the trade. But then she might start stuttering again. Or worse. Again.

  But that’s all behind you now.

  Sure, Jacqueline, thank you very much.

  And I certainly hope so, Ollie.

  Still and all, she would like to be together with both of them again.

  You always do this.

  You’re right, she thinks, I’m a cunt, okay?

  Yes.

  Le mot juste.

  Exactly what was said.

  “So call me,” Gloria says. “If you hear from him.”

  “I will.”

  “Because I’d really like to do it, you know?”

  At eight minutes before curtain on Friday night, the doorman announces over the P.A. system that she’s wanted on the telephone. It is David calling from Menemsha to tell her how much he loves her and to assure her that he’ll be there on Tuesday, as he’d promised, will she be coming to the airport to meet him?

  “Yes,” she says, “I’ll be there.”

  “My plane gets in at seven thirty-eight,” he says.

  “LaGuardia or Newark?”

  “Newark.”

  “I’ll be there. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Why haven’t you called?”

  “There’s only one car. We go every place together. I just haven’t been alone. There’s always someone with me.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Home. The house. They all went …”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to us.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Five,” the stage manager warns.

  “I love you, David. Please hurry before …”

  She stops herself dead.

  “I love you, too,” he says.

  “Tuesday,” she says.

  “Tuesday,” he repeats.

  And is gone.

  The letter is waiting in her mailbox when she conies down to the lobby on Saturday morning.

  It reads:

  The detective is the same one who ran the lineup for her and David back in July. His name is Clancy …

  “No relation,” he says at once, though Kate doesn’t understand the reference …

  … and he seems happy to see her again, happy to be of assistance to “one of the tribe” as he puts it. Kate has never thought of herself as being particularly Irish, except for her looks, but she’s grateful for the ties that
seemingly bind. Clancy could not look less Irish. He has brown hair and brown eyes and a mouth that seems perpetually set in a skeptical sneer. He also needs a shave. She suspects he had a tough Friday night here in the big bad city.

  The letters she has collected as evidence of whatever crime the lunatic is committing are now on Clancy’s desk, bathed in sunshine on this hot, sticky, what-else-is-new, late Saturday morning. Clancy is sitting in shirtsleeves, the better to promote the image of hardworking cop. A pistol is holstered at his waist on the right-hand side of his belt. He is smoking, of course. He looks like a cop on a television show. Except for the fact that they don’t smoke on television these days. To Kate’s enormous surprise, he opens the top drawer of his desk, and removes from it a pair of white cotton gloves. He pulls on the gloves. They give him a somewhat comical appearance, like a vagabond at a society tea.

  “Has anyone but you handled these?” he asks.

  “Well … yes. I showed them to a friend.”

  “His name?”

  “Rickie Diaz.”

  “How do you spell the first name?” Clancy asks, and opens a thick black notebook.

  “With an ‘i-e.’”

  Clancy scribbles the name into his book.

  “Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “O-kay,” he says, and opens the first of the envelopes.

  He reads the letters in sequence.

  He looks up every now and then and nods across the desk to her.

  At last, he sighs heavily, lights a fresh cigarette, and says simply, “Yeah.”

  She wonders Yeah what?

  She waits.

  “Your typical nut,” he says.

  But this she already knows.

  “Nine times out of ten, they’re harmless,” he says.

  Which is reassuring.

  “But this is a crime,” he says.

  Good, she thinks.

  “What’s the crime?”

  “Aggravated Harassment.”

  She nods.

  He opens the top drawer of his desk again, takes out a paperback book with a blue and black cover. Upside down, she reads the title of the book:

  GOULD’S

  CRIMINAL LAW

  HANDBOOK

  OF NEW YORK

  Clancy opens the book, begins leafing through it.

  “I think it’s two-thirty,” he says idly, though the clock on the wall behind his desk reads eleven twenty-seven.

  He keeps leafing through the book.

  “No, it’s two-forty point three-oh,” he says, and turns the book toward her. “This is the Penal Law,” he says.

  She reads:

  • §240.30. Aggravated harassment in the second degree.

  A person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm, he or she:

  1. Communicates or causes a communication to be initiated by mechanical or electronic means or otherwise, by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm; or

  2. Makes a telephone call, whether or not a conversation …

  “He hasn’t called me,” she says, looking up sharply.

  “Not yet,” Clancy says.

  Which is somewhat less than reassuring.

  … whether or not a conversation ensues, with no purpose of legitimate communication; or 3. Strikes, shoves, kicks or otherwise …

  “The rest doesn’t apply,” Clancy says.

  Thank God, she thinks.

  “What’s Aggravated Harassment in the first degree?” she asks.

  “Has to do with race, color, religion and so on. That’s a felony. Second degree is just an A-mis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A class-A misdemeanor.”

  “Like stealing my bike, right?”

  “Well … yeah.”

  “Then this isn’t a very important crime, right?”

  “I would say harassing someone is important.”

  “Important enough for anyone to pay attention?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “So how do I stop him?”

  “You file a complaint. There’s not much to go on here, but hopefully we can find him.”

  “How?”

  “Well, there may be latents on the letters here. He may have a record, or he may have been in the service, or in government employment, there are fingerprint records we can look at. If we locate him, we check his handwriting against what we have here. Then there are two ways we can go.”

  Kate waited.

  “We can have somebody talk to him, we’ve got …”

  “Talk to him?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got people here who are very good at this. Take the guy aside, tell him Listen, you want to go to jail, or you want to be reasonable here? Leave the girl alone, don’t bother her no more, that’s the end of it, you don’t hear from us again. But you try to contact her, you write to her, you phone her …”

  “He hasn’t …”

  “I know, I’m just saying. You phone her, you go near her building, you even walk on her block, we’re gonna come after you and put you away. Lots of times, they listen.”

  She is thinking This guy isn’t going to listen to anybody talking to him. This guy is nuts.

  “What if he doesn’t listen?” she asks.

  “You let us know he’s still bothering you, and we arrest him and charge him with the A-mis.”

  She is thinking What if he kills me between the time you talk to him and the time I tell you he’s still bothering me?

  “Each letter he sent constitutes one count of the crime, you see. What’ve we got here, eight, nine letters?”

  “Ten.”

  “Okay, that’s ten counts of Aggravated Harassment. But the most he can get is two years in jail, even though technically there are ten counts of the crime. It’s complicated. If he gets off with less than the max …”

  She is thinking What happens when he gets out of jail?

  “… the judge can grant an order of protection, which if he comes near you again is contempt of court and yet another crime.”

  “I’m very afraid this person will try to hurt me,” she says levelly, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

  “I realize that. But what I’m trying to tell you, Miss Duggan, you’re not entirely helpless in this matter. We can look into it for you, if you want to file a complaint, or there’re people in the D.A.’s Office you can talk to, if you prefer that, the Sex Crimes Unit down there.”

  She is thinking Jesus, what am I getting into here?

  “Do they ever just stop?” she asks. “On their own?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes, if you ignore them, they …”

  “I am ignoring him.”

  “I know that. What I’m saying, sometimes they just get bored or whatever and go away.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be getting bored.”

  “No, he doesn’t, but sometimes they just quit all of a sudden. There are lots of women out there, you know.”

  “Yes,” she says, and nods thoughtfully.

  “So how would you like to proceed?”

  “What I’m afraid of, you see, is if somebody goes to talk to him, he’ll come after me.”

  “Well … I really think that’s a very remote possibility.”

  “But a possibility, right?”

  “Anything’s possible, Miss Duggan. The roof of this building could fall in on us right this minute. That’s a possibility, but a very remote one. I really don’t think this person would try to harm you after somebody from the police talked to him.”

  “But he might.”

  “There’s no telling what crazy people will do, but in my experience …”

  “I’d like to give it some further thought,” she says.

  “Entirely up to you,” Clancy says, with what she detects as a slight dismissive shrug. He opens the top drawer of his desk again, takes from it a large mani
la envelope printed with the words POLICE DEPARTMENT—CITY OF NEW YORK and below that the bolder word EVIDENCE.

  Evidence, she thinks.

  He turns down the flap of the envelope. There are two little red cardboard buttons on the envelope, a red string dangling from the one on the flap. He wraps the string around the lower button.

  “You’d better hang on to these,” he says. “Case you decide.”

  David calls collect on Monday evening.

  He reminds her that his plane will arrive in Newark at seven thirty-eight tomorrow morning.

  “I’ll be there,” she says.

  Hurry, she thinks.

  Please hurry.

  And closes the blinds against the encroaching dusk.

  4: Tuesday, August 15–Saturday, August 19

  David knows at once that something is wrong.

  She stands just past the security gate waiting for him, a black umbrella in her hand, her red hair pulled up under a man’s gray fedora that hides it completely, a black raincoat buttoned to her throat, jeans and yellow rain boots showing below the hem. She looks as if she’s been crying.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Lots,” she says, and kisses him swiftly on the cheek.

  It is pouring outside the terminal. Kate has borrowed a car from one of the “kids” in the show, and it is tiny and cramped, and there is a faint whiff of stale sweat wafting from the backseat, which is littered with leg warmers, leotards, tights, socks, panties, bras and a tangled assortment of unidentifiable soiled or stained garments waiting to be transported to the Laundromat. Or the city dump.

  She begins crying the moment she pulls the car out of the airport parking lot.

  “What is it?” he says.

  In fits and starts and bits and pieces, like a patient dredging up a traumatic experience, she rambles tearfully through the events of the past two weeks and more, starting with the delivery of the first box of roses, “I thought they were from you, well, naturally, the card said I love you, Kathryn,” and then the subsequent flowers, all of them sent to the theater and delivered to the dressing room, four boxes of roses altogether, long-stemmed roses, all with a different florist’s card saying I love you, and then the letters started, ten letters in all, so far. She’ll show him the letters when they get home, Clancy said it’s a crime, the detective, remember? From that time with my bike? I went to see him Saturday. Each letter constitutes a separate count of Aggravated Harassment, but he can only get two years in aggregate, whatever that means, I’ve been so frightened.