by Renee James
“Are you with some law enforcement agency, Ms. Logan?” she asks.
“No, Mrs. Stevens,” I say. “I’m a private citizen. I had a run-in with one of your neighbors a while ago and I’m just trying to find out if I need to worry for my safety.”
“Which one would that be?” I know she knows. She probably knows I know she knows.
“Georgio Demopolis,” I answer. “He lives across the street.”
“In the crack house,” Mrs. Stevens mutters. Her afternoon tea demeanor gives way to something much baser. Her flawless complexion, made perfect by the artful application of foundation and blended shades of color to highlight the best of her bone structure and hide the rest, splits into creases of age and anger as she speaks.
“I don’t mean to intrude on your privacy,” I begin, “but I was hoping you could talk to me off the record about what sort of person Mr. Demopolis is?”
“Why do you want to know?” She’s suspicious. Women of her station have to be careful about those with whom they associate, and about what.
“Someone is stalking me and I’m trying to find out if he could be that person.”
“I wouldn’t know if he is or isn’t.” Mrs. Stevens says the words in a huff, like I’m wasting her time.
“Of course not,” I say. “Could you just tell me what sort of person he is? Do you know if he’s violent?”
“He’s in a drug gang,” Mrs. Stevens says. “They both are.”
She says it like everyone knows—everyone but me.
I’m speechless. I bought what Greco was selling, and even before that, I saw him as a small-time thug, maybe a guy who collected debts for small-time hoods.
“I had no idea,” I say.
Mrs. Stevens emits a high-society harrumph and glances out the front window to the hovel across the street. She looks back at me, her chin held at an aristocratic height. “Really, Ms. Logan, it’s so obvious.”
“Have there been police raids?” I can picture the Stevenses watching the squads line the street from their priceless palace, dismayed by the presence of such barbarians in their midst.
“Of course not. They’re paying off someone. All the gangs do that, you know.” Mrs. Stevens has pity in her voice for my naiveté. She speaks to me like I’m in a class for slow learners and she’s the teacher.
“Oh.” It’s all I can say for a moment. “Do they have a lot of dealers coming by, then?”
“I couldn’t say,” Mrs. Stevens responds. “I don’t know how they run their business.”
“But you’re sure they’re in the drug trade?”
“What else could it be?” she asks. “They don’t come and go at normal working hours. That man is obviously a Negro and she’s white. People like that, it’s either drugs or prostitution for them.”
I briefly consider telling her that Greco is white, but it would be a waste of time. In fact, the whole visit has been a waste of time. I’ve learned a great deal about Mrs. Stevens and nothing at all about Greco.
I make my good-byes as pleasantly and quickly as possible and make my way back to the salon with the certain knowledge that this venture has been a total bust.
Two surprises greet me at the salon. My noon appointment just canceled, and a man I only vaguely recognize is waiting to see me.
He approaches me, a huge, obese man who rolls more than walks, shifting his weight heavily to each side. I recognize him but I can’t place his name. No problem, he’s in sales. He smiles and extends a hand. “Hi, Ms. Logan, Albert Larson here. Good to see you again.”
“Mr. Andive’s nephew?” I ask it, but it’s a statement.
He nods with a salesman’s enthusiasm, like this is the highlight of his day and should be mine, too. Usually I’m okay with that. In fact, I admire the energy. But not today. Especially not after tea with Mrs. Stevens. I have no patience left for idle conversation.
“What can I do for you?” I ask.
“You can have lunch with me.” He says it like it’s the greatest idea since the Ten Commandments.
“No.” I just say it and head for the office.
He catches up. “Please, Ms. Logan. I think I can help you.”
“With what?” I stop at the door to the office. I don’t want him coming in.
“Well, the girl at the desk said you’ve been having trouble with break-ins.” His fleshy face fills with a smile. “I work in security. Residential, retail, commercial. Let’s get a sandwich, and I’ll tell you what I think you should do.”
“How do you know what I should do?” I ask.
“Well, the lady at the counter told me what happened. She let me see your security system, and I can get you an upgrade at a great price.”
His boyish enthusiasm is taking a little of the edge off my fury at the receptionist for showing a stranger our security system. But just a little. I need to have a talk with her.
“What’s a great price?” I ask.
“My cost, plus installation labor,” he says, that beaming smile still on his face.
“Why would you do that for me?”
“Well,” he says. “You were friends with my uncle. You came to see him at the hospital. It’s the least I can do.”
“We weren’t friends—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“Friends, acquaintances. The point is, you came to see him.”
“Really, Albert, it wouldn’t be right.” I don’t want to tell him that his uncle was a goon and rapist, and I surely don’t want to tell him that it was I who had him turned into a lump of human waste. I’m also not convinced about Albert’s motives. I search his face for some kind of hint about what he’s pursuing here. In our previous encounter, he came on like a horny guy wanting to satisfy his curiosity about sex with a transsexual. There’s been a run on that in my life lately, and I’m tired of it. But his face gives away nothing. It’s the large, fleshy front of a large, fleshy orb that sits atop a very large, fleshy body. He has pale skin and wide blue eyes that project a sort of unworldly innocence, punctuated by a smile that arcs too wide across his face, the work of an artist creating a friendly, dim-witted character for a children’s book. He must have been tormented unmercifully as a schoolboy, a fat, dull boy who would fail at every sport and game. As I regard him, it occurs to me he might still be a virgin.
“Just, let’s sit down for twenty minutes, and I’ll lay out a system for you,” he says. “After that, you can think about it and let me know. If you aren’t interested, no problem.”
I sigh. God, I really wanted to do hair today, all day. Wrap a perm. Cut a graduated bob like Mrs. Stevens’. Do an updo, something big and tall and sexy. Anything to get my mind off the stalker.
“Okay,” I say. “Twenty minutes, then that’s it.”
Albert is grinning like a fool, his eyes fixed on mine with a kind of glee, as though we had just climbed Everest together. Several brochures lay on the table between us. He has spent the last fifteen minutes giving me a dissertation on what equipment I need to thwart any future break-ins. I haven’t understood anything about it, but at least he isn’t trying to get me into bed.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” I say. “I’ll need some time.”
“Of course,” he says. He takes a few bites of his sandwich, pausing in between to be conversational.
“So, how did you know my uncle?” he asks.
The question I’ve been dreading even more than a sexual overture or inquiries about my genitalia. There’s no good answer to this, not an honest one.
“We weren’t friends, Albert,” I say yet again. “I didn’t really know him. More like, I knew about him.”
Albert interrupts his chewing to give me a big smile. “That sounds mysterious.”
“If you live long enough, you learn to accept the unusual as the usual.” It’s bullshit, but maybe it will get us into a philosophical discussion. Anything but my relationship with Andive.
“What about your ho
me?” Albert asks. It comes out of the blue.
“What?” The change of subject is so abrupt I don’t know what he’s talking about. I hope it’s not his opening seduction line.
“Do you have a good security system in your home?”
I shake my head no. I finally realize this man just wants to make a sale. He’s not interested in sex with me, maybe not with anyone. He’s just trying to make his numbers for the month, pay the rent, go to a movie. The American dream.
“That’s even more important than your salon,” he says. He relates several anecdotes of recent home invasions where single women were raped and in one case, beaten to death.
“They all lived in nice neighborhoods, knew their neighbors, and never saw it coming,” says Albert. “We can give you a system that will alert the police the second anyone comes in uninvited. The police take this very seriously. They send a squad and while it’s in transit, they call. If you don’t answer and tell them it’s a false alarm, the cops will be there in a minute or two and the bad guy will run.” He ends with another arching grin, sure proof of a happy ending if I sign up for a system right now.
I’m interested. Even when he was pitching me on the salon security system, I was thinking I needed something like that at home, where I’m alone and vulnerable. I tell him I’m interested, then I tell him about the attacks on my home.
“I wish we had met sooner,” he says. He smiles again, a sympathetic smile this time. I wish we’d met sooner, too. And I wish I weren’t so judgmental about people. I idly wonder how many nice men I haven’t met because I dismissed them without getting to know them.
We talk price and set an installation date for next week.
24
CECELIA SAYS WE’RE driving because she’s too arrogant to ride the elevated train. It makes a good punch line and it fits her humor perfectly, but we’re driving because she insisted on coming, too, and because it’s hard for her to be on her feet all day. My beloved friend and mentor is beginning to feel the effects of a life well lived. Her knees have been a nagging issue for the past ten years. She has gotten another five years out of them by reducing her weight and watching her diet and exercise, but they need to be replaced. She hopes to limp through winter on them, then replace them both at the same time next spring.
I have signed on as her caregiver for the several months she will be in painful recovery, but only on the condition she not describe to me again the process by which they will saw off the old before installing the new. She has painted this image for me repeatedly, maybe to inure herself to the horror, or maybe to watch Bobbi squirm.
“I still think Lover Boy is the one,” she mutters. The Saturday morning traffic on Clark Street is a noxious blend of mayhem and madness, stop and go, cars swerving in and out of parking places and alleyways.
“I’m sure he’s not,” I reply. “It turns out, he’s not such a bad guy.”
“Maybe you could buy him off with one of those anatomically correct inflatable women.”
“Don’t be so judgmental.” I tell her about my chat with him, how he seemed like a nice guy, intelligent, just kind of lost in the way a lot of people flounder after a marriage ends.
“He called you a cunt.” Cecelia says it with vehemence, her blue eyes flashing, her brows raised in exclamation.
“I had just rejected him,” I say. “I wasn’t nice about it. Besides, I consider ‘cunt’ high praise when directed at me. It’s such a nice break from ‘prick.’”
“You’re just being gross.”
“I am. And you’re enjoying it.”
“Am not,” says Cecelia.
“Are too.” We do several rounds of sibling chatter. It erupts between us periodically. We enjoy it way more than we should, but I think it’s a kind of compensation for the fact we didn’t get to grow up together, let alone as little girls.
The Michigan Avenue Barnes & Noble is swarming with activity when we walk in. It’s a beautiful Saturday morning in the most beautiful time of the Chicago autumn. City and suburban dwellers are out and about. Meeting here was Melissa’s idea, but I liked it right away. Bookstores have always been places where people like me are welcome.
Melissa Gains waves to us from a small table in the far corner of the store’s coffee shop. We’ve never met, but picking out Cecelia and me from a crowd of bookstore customers is as easy as identifying the tallest buildings in the Chicago skyline. We join her, exchange greetings, and fetch coffees.
Melissa is a pretty woman in her early forties. She has a lively, friendly face with a quick smile and wide blue eyes. When she described herself on the phone, she apologized for being overweight and talked about how hard she had tried to thin down. She didn’t have to explain herself to me. When I assess a woman’s appearance, I often ask myself, if I could have had her body rather than mine, would I have wanted it? In Melissa’s case, the answer is yes. She has a kind of beauty that defies the stereotypes. It’s in her spirit, mostly, but she also has beautiful eyes and lips, her smile is white and perfect, and her skin is flawlessly smooth and has a radiant glow. As for her weight, she’s plump, not obese. She’s more self-conscious about her body than I would be, which says a lot about how our society judges women.
“Thank you for seeing us,” I begin. She used to work for Mark Mendelson. I don’t know how Cecelia found her, and Cecelia isn’t saying. I explained what I was after on the phone when we set up the meeting, but I go over everything again, just to be sure.
“I’m being harassed by someone,” I say. “More than harassed—intimidated. And I’m trying to find out who it is. One possibility is Mark Mendelson. We had a brief relationship that ended on unfriendly terms. I was hoping you could share some insights into what kind of person he is.”
Melissa’s animated eyes cloud ever so slightly and she drops her gaze from my face to the tabletop. “I’ll try,” she says. She seems conflicted.
“What was it like, working with Mark?” I ask. My approach is to start with open-ended questions to see what comes out, then get to my specific issues.
Melissa turns her coffee cup in a circular pattern with her fingers, deep in thought. “The work was great,” she says. “The thing about Mark was, he gave you responsibility and freedom. He didn’t micromanage my assignments. I had total freedom to develop creative messages. He rejected some, sent others back for more work, but he wanted my work, not work I did trying to be like him.”
She finally looks up at me, glances at Cecelia, then looks back at me.
“He was a good boss that way.”
She leaves it there. I wait a moment for her to continue, but she doesn’t.
“But you left,” I say. “Was there another side to him?”
Melissa nods her head slowly, as if expressing a reluctant “yes.” It takes her a few seconds to speak. “He had this Jekyll and Hyde thing,” she says. “Most of the time he was this free spirit kind of guy, lighthearted, joking, fun to be around. Fantastic artist. God, some of the things he produced were unbelievable.”
She contemplates her coffee cup again, lost in thought.
“But?” I ask.
She looks up at me and smiles a sad, apologetic smile.
“But he could turn into someone else. Out of nowhere sometimes. It could be scary.”
“What scared you?” I ask.
She takes a deep breath and looks around the coffee shop, then at Cecelia, then me. “This is off the record, right?”
I nod, yes.
“Just between us?”
“Yes, Melissa,” I promise.
“Because I need a good referral from him for my next job,” she says. “And, you know, I’m not qualified to judge.”
“I understand,” I say. “I’m just trying to see him through some other person’s eyes. I won’t repeat your words to anyone, and neither will Cecelia.”
She nods her head again, her eyes on the table, then she looks up at me and begins. “Part of it was, sometimes he’d go into a black funk. You cou
ldn’t talk to him—he’d just stare at you like you were an alien. He could be like that for a whole day.”
She twirls her cup for a moment in silence.
“And sometimes, he’d just explode. He threw things, slammed his fist on the desk, screamed curses at the top of his lungs.” Her body language is even more frightening than the scenes she describes. Her muscles are taut, the animation that makes her face so lovely evaporates, her lips become tense.
“What would make him that angry?” I ask.
Tears trickle down her cheeks. She lowers her head, as if to keep us from seeing her distress. Cecelia dabs at her tears with a dainty handkerchief and puts it in her hand. She examines the cloth slowly. It has a lacy border and the scent of lilacs and seems as fragile as Melissa’s spirit at this moment. I feel awful about putting her through this and start to put an end to the interview.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve intruded too much. Let’s talk about other things.”
“No,” she says. “You need to know this.” She takes another deep breath. “There wasn’t any one thing that set him off. A couple times, it was business—losing an account, having a client reject our work, things like that. Sometimes it was personal. He got mad at someone. Like when someone gave notice. Or . . .” Her voice trails off.
I arch my eyebrows as if to say, “Or what?”
“Or when he had an argument with his girlfriend.” She sips some coffee. “He was having an affair with one of the women on the staff. It was pretty rocky. She thought he was cheating on her, and he treated her like . . .” Melissa struggles for words. “Like, he was polite, but it was like he owned her. They had arguments right there in the office and it got creepy. The last one, she accused him of cheating, he denied it, then she pulled out pictures, I guess of him and another woman. He goes ballistic, screaming and shouting. He said she had no business prying into his life. He slammed things around and scared us all silly. He actually threw a stapler across the room and broke a computer screen.”