An Officer and a Gentle Woman

by Doreen Owens Malek

  “Something like that.”

  “I understand I have you to thank for my current in-

  “Why did she confess so readily, Mr. Kirby? She seemed to be doing everything to evade capture, and then suddenly she caves in as soon as she is picked up? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s a phenomenon we see occasionally with first-time murderers. Before the act the murderer is fueled by anger or desperation or whatever emotion causes him or her to commit the crime. But once the victim is dead, the situation calms down and the perpetrator begins to think about what he or she did. The murderer may go through the motions of eluding the police, but guilt and remorse and anxiety begin to take over the murderer’s thoughts. By the time this person is arrested the primary emotion he or she is feeling, believe it or not, is relief.”

  All three looked around as Sandler Woods entered the room, followed by two uniformed policemen who were escorting a woman between them. She was handcuffed and wore leg irons with the gray scrubs that were Manhattan Prison issue.

  Alicia looked at Woods and then met her sister’s eyes.

  Alicia had expected to confront her own image, but even with the dyed hair and unattractive clothing, the resemblance was astonishing.

  Amy had cropped her hair to chin length and colored it very dark, perhaps in an effort to disguise herself, but the facial structure, full lips, hazel eyes, and body type were all Alicia’s. Amy looked a little heavier, but perhaps it was just the jailhouse garb. Woods waited until she had seated herself, chains clanking, then glanced once covertly at Lafferty and left.

  Alicia stared.

  “Quite a shock to find out about me, wasn’t it?” Amy addressed her dryly. “I have had the advantage all these years. I’ve always known about you.” carceration. So jacked up about the princess you just couldn’t stand to see her go up the river, huh?”

  “Not for something she didn’t do,” Lafferty replied quietly, in an even tone.

  “Oh, she did it,” Amy said bitterly. “She and all those other Greens who made her the apple of their eyes while I was jettisoned like so much garbage.”

  “The circumstances of your birth and subsequent raising were not Alicia’s fault,” Kirby said.

  “Oh, shut up, gramps,” Amy shot back at him. “I told you I don’t want you here.”

  Kirby rose and said to Alicia, “I’ll call you,” then left the room.

  “You really should let him help you,” Alicia said. “He can explain your situation so that a jury would treat you sympathetically, possibly even influence a judge to give you a lighter sentence.”

  “My situation?” Amy said, with a bark of derisive laughter. “And what is that? Walker’s whore, secret sister to Walker’s wife? I was raised on stories of your wonderful life, my mother would cry when she saw you on the news or in the papers. You were the one she always wanted, the one she missed. I was the slightly less respectable and undesirable duplicate.”

  “I didn’t know!” Alicia said.

  “Oh, and you would have embraced the streetwalker sibling if you had known?”

  “I don’t know what I would have done. But I was never given the chance to decide.”

  “Yeah, my heart bleeds for you. Such a tough life. I’ve been in your houses, seen your antique furniture, your designer clothes. I had to live on pills and salads for a , month to fit into that Adolfo suit I wore when I shot Joe.”

  “He brought you into my house?” Alicia asked her, aghast at the idea.

  “Oh—shocking, isn’t it? Of course not. He would not consider me good enough to walk on your carpets. I took his keys when he was sleeping and had them duplicated, that’s how I got the clothes and the gun. I checked his schedule from that appointment book he kept in his briefcase. I knew when he would be appearing somewhere out of town and you would go with him. It was easy with the town house, since you were never there, but to get the clothes and replace them I had to go to Scarsdale and get past the servants. The day I shot Joe I sent a phony message to get the housekeeper to leave. I dressed up as you and made some excuse to the gardener when I ran into him. He just thought I was you and tipped his hat to me.” She laughed.

  “Why didn’t you ever contact me?” Alicia asked quietly.

  “Ah, well, that wasn’t part of the deal, you see. In order to keep collecting those checks, mama was supposed to keep quiet and never say a word about you or the Greens. I wasn’t supposed to know about you. But when she saw the news pictures of the gorgeous princess at the debutante balls and coming out parties she just could not contain herself. She sort of...slipped.”

  “And you never contacted Alicia because you wanted the money to keep coming,” Lafferty said.

  “Why not?” Amy demanded angrily. “She owed me! Her whole highfalutin’ family owes me! I am as much a Green as she is.”

  One of the uniformed officers shifted position and Alicia glanced at him.

  She had been so absorbed in Amy’s story she had forgotten he was there.

  “But why did you kill Joe?” Alicia asked, going back again to the central question. “Why?”

  “Because he thought he could dump me! Just like the Greens dumped me when I was born. He used me as long as I was docile and played house with him for a price, but when I started getting ambitious he wanted to cut me off without a dime.”

  Alicia glanced at Lafferty.

  “What happened?” Lafferty asked. “How did you start getting ambitious?”

  Amy looked down at the scarred table and sighed. “There’s a longevity problem in my business. You start getting a little older, the top services won’t take you on, you have to take bigger risks with new clients, the johns want younger girls.... I had just about reached the limit of my marketability, so to speak.”

  “And so?” Lafferty asked.

  “I wanted to start my own business. I’m good with clothes and fashion, I really am. I wanted to open a store. I know what appeals to the upper crust, I have been servicing their husbands long enough. I could have done it.”

  Alicia felt the sting of tears in her eyes. The plaintive tone in her sister’s voice was painful to hear.

  “And you hit Walker up for a loan?” Lafferty asked.

  “He laughed at me!” Amy said, the outrage in her face explaining what had motivated her to kill her lover. “He told me to peddle it elsewhere if I wanted a nest egg, I was getting a little long in the tooth for him, anyway.”

  The silence in the room was deafening. The two cops looked at each other and then looked away.

  “I would have paid him back, I wasn’t grifting. It was a sound business investment! He wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “And so you decided to kill him,” Alicia said.

  “Not then. It took a while. I saw you on the news with him about a month later and realized that if I nailed him and framed you for it I would be in the clear. I could pay you back for having the life I should have had and get back at him at the same time. It was perfect.”

  “Life with Joe was no picnic,” Alicia said quietly. “You of all people should know that.”

  “Oh, yeah, that must have been tough. I sympathize. But you survived it, didn’t you? With heirloom pearls intact. And now you have Mel Gibson here to console you.”

  The door to the hall opened, and Woods stuck his head into the room.

  “Time’s up,” he said briskly. “Miss Lassiter is due back in lockup now.”

  “We’ll need just a few more minutes,” Lafferty said to him coolly.

  Woods looked at him and flushed slightly. He shut the door with a bang.

  Lafferty glanced at Alicia and winked.

  “Are you sure you won’t have Mr. Kirby as your lawyer?” Alicia asked Amy.

  “No dice, honey. Take your guilt somewhere else,” Amy replied shortly.

  “I would like to come and visit you,” Alicia said.

  “Why? So you can thank me for getting rid of Joe for you and paving the way for cutie blue eyes here?”
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br />   “We’re sisters,” Alicia said awkwardly.

  Amy snorted. “What? You think you’re going to do old-home week with me now? It’s a little late.”

  “I’d like to know about my biological mother, Deborah Lassiter.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Trust me.”

  “Will you at least put me on your visitors’ list?”

  Amy looked at her hard and then turned her head. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  The door to the hall opened again.

  Alicia rose, shooting Lafferty a look that warned him not to bait Woods anymore.

  “I’m ready to go,” she said quietly. She looked at Amy. “I’ll be back,” she said.

  Woods was watching as they closed the door behind them, and then he walked away without a word.

  “I wish you would stop antagonizing him,” Alicia said.

  “Don’t worry about it. He won’t do anything. Having my unfortunate incident to hold over his head is like having money in the bank.”

  “I feel sorry for her,” Alicia said. “I know she’s done terrible things, but you can tell she’s intelligent just by listening to her. I’m sure she would have been kind, too, if life had treated her better. What a waste.”

  “Alicia, lots of people have hard lives, much worse than your sister’s. They don’t collect blackmail money and become call girls and murder their clients. Or frame their sisters for their crimes.”

  “You don’t understand. I do feel partly responsible for what happened to her, whether it makes sense or not. Do you know if her bail has been set?”

  “Honey, she isn’t going to make bail. She confessed to first-degree murder last night. There won’t even be a hearing, trust me. She isn’t going anywhere.”

  “So, I’ll see her in jail,” Alicia said.

  Lafferty pulled her into his arms and kissed her, startling a legal clerk who was walking past them with a stack of folders. “Forget about your sister for a moment. I have some good news.”

  “Oh, tell me,” Alicia said, sighing, resting her head against his shoulder. “After the last hour I could use some good news.”

  “I’m going back to work in two weeks.”

  Alicia drew back and looked at him. “Oh, Mike, that’s wonderful. I am so relieved. I was afraid that your career would suffer because of me.”

  “So let’s go out and celebrate. What do you say?”

  Alicia glanced back at the room that contained her sister, who would not be celebrating anything anytime soon.

  Then she smiled at her lover.

  “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  A week later Alicia was discussing Claire’s lessons with her tutor when Maizie tapped on the door of the den and said, “Mrs. Walker, may I see you for a moment?”

  Alicia excused herself and went into the hall.

  “What is it?” she said to Maizie, who was standing by the ormolu table near the door. “You look worried.”

  Maizie handed her an envelope. “This was just delivered by messenger,” she said.

  Alicia glanced at it. “This is Michael’s handwriting,” she said, puzzled.

  Maizie nodded.

  “Why would he do this, send something by messenger? Why wouldn’t he call me?”

  “I don’t know, but I think you had better read it.”

  Alicia turned the envelope over in her hands. “Maizie, please tell Mrs. Delahanty to return to Claire’s lessons. Make my excuses and tell her I will get back to her.”

  Maizie left, and Alicia ripped open the envelope, scanning the handwritten lines anxiously.

  “I wanted to wait until the charges against you had been dropped and I knew you were in the clear,” Mike began. He went on to say that he needed her to think about their relationship and make sure she wanted it to continue now that she was free. It was understandable that she had grown dependent on him during her recent troubles, but now that she could return to her old life he wanted her to consider whether he was right for her. He had tried to talk to her about this subject the day they visited her grandmother, but after Alicia’s negative reaction then, he had decided to put it off until her life was not complicated by an impending indictment. It was obvious that her children were her primary concern and it might be better for them... Alicia stopped reading in the middle of the page and skipped down to the bottom. She saw the last line, “so I will be taking some time away from you to let you consider what you want to do. I’ll be gone until I start work again. Think about this, Alicia. It’s the rest of your life.”

  It was signed simply, “Mike.”

  Alicia crumpled the note in her hand and stuffed it in her jeans pocket. Her expression was sad and thoughtful as she sat on the maple bench in the hall.

  So Mike had doubts, he had just suppressed them after his outburst about their differing backgrounds at Hannah’s house. He had focused on obtaining Alicia’s freedom and allowed her to concentrate on the same objective without bothering her with sensitive discussions about their lifestyles or her family.

  But obviously he had not forgotten, or changed his mind.

  Alicia had concerns, too, but they weren’t about how much money Mike earned as a cop or how many houses her family owned.

  She was worried about her kids.

  Claire had been traumatized by what little she’d seen the night she walked in on her mother and the policeman in her kitchen. Alicia needed time to talk to both Claire and Joey about her desire to continue her relationship with Lafferty, now that she was free and their official connection was at an end.

  Apparently, Lafferty was giving her that time.

  Maizie walked into the hall and saw Alicia’s troubled face.

  “I knew that note wasn’t good news,” Maizie said wearily. “What’s wrong now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe everything, maybe nothing. Maizie. what’s the name of the child psychologist who saw your nephew when he was acting up in school?”

  “Mary Phelps, she’s in Midtown. I’ll get the number for you from my sister.”

  “Thanks. I think it’s important for the three of us to get in to see her as soon as possible.”

  As Maizie walked toward the telephone, Alicia glanced at the instrument sitting silently on the teak desk.

  If it rang now, she knew it would not be Mike.

  Ten days passed with agonizing slowness, during which Alicia and her children had three sessions with Dr. Phelps. Claire was resentful, Joey was confused, and Alicia was stymied. The therapist insisted that Alicia should not sacrifice her own happiness with Lafferty because her children would have a difficult adjustment to make; the purpose of the sessions was to help them make the adjustment, over time. Alicia did as Mike asked and did not contact him, but she missed him so terribly that his absence was like a physical pain. She missed him in her mind, she missed him in her bed, she missed him in her world. She was still afraid to trust him, to trust anybody, but decided finally that getting hurt again was just a chance she would have to take. The alternative, a life without Lafferty, the life she was currently living, was just too painful. By the time she was ready to accept that Phelps was right and maybe she could have both—the man she wanted and stable children—she was almost wild with longing for him.

  Finally she could take the separation no longer. On the tenth day she awoke filled with resolve. She waited until the kids were busy with their tutors, then took the station wagon because the gas tank was full and floored the accelerator all the way into the city. It was a miracle she didn’t get a speeding ticket. She left the car double-parked and ran up to the squad room, where she jogged past a bunch of staring cops and found Charlie Chandler at his desk eating a tuna fish sandwich.

  “Early lunch?” she said to him.

  Charlie did not respond. He was frozen with his sandwich in midair, a look of stunned amazement on his face.

  “Tell me where he is,” Alicia said.

  “Uh, I, uh...what?” Charlie said, then swallowed.

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sp; “Lafferty. Where has he gone? I know that you know where he is, so don’t try to bluff me.”

  Chandler glanced around the room, where Alicia’s entrance was still the subject of intense interest. He didn’t reply.

  “Charlie, I am going to plant my feet here and scream bloody murder until either you tell me where he is, or the guys in the white coats come and cart me off to Bellevue. Now which is it going to be?”

  “You’re tracking him down again, aren’t you?” Chandler said to her. “Why is that?”

  “Because he’s running away again. He has some idea that we’re not right for each other for the long haul, or that our relationship will harm my kids. I had some doubts, too, but now I’ve cast them to the winds. I’m not going to have a chance like this again, and I won’t throw this one away.”

  “He thinks a lot,” Chandler said, nodding. “You got to know that about him.”

  Alicia closed her eyes. “Is it something else, Charlie? Is he trying to let me down gently by telling me that it’s because he’s concerned for me? Is he trying to get rid of me?”

  Chandler stared at her and put his sandwich down. “Lady, that is the last thing he is trying to do. Trust me. He’s completely crazy about you.”

  “Then tell me where he is.”

  Chandler shook his head. “He’ll kill me.”

  “I doubt it. He hasn’t killed you yet.”

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “He’s on my brother-in-law’s houseboat over in Jersey—Weehawken. I’ll give you the directions.”

  Charlie ripped a sheet of paper from the pad on his desk and scribbled a few lines, then stood up and read them aloud to her, looking at her inquiringly.

  “I’ll find it,” Alicia said, taking the slip. She threw her arms around his neck impulsively. “Thank you so much, Charlie. I won’t forget this.”

  “Neither will Mike. I’ll pay for it when he gets back.” Chandler was turning crimson.

  Alicia grinned at him and ran past the onlookers who were observing her exit. When she got back to her car it was still there, wedged in behind a yellow cab, but if it had been towed she would have hired one.

  Nothing was going to keep her away from Lafferty this day.