Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  “But if society starts to under—”

  “Society ain’t close to that, girl,” the black woman said. “And society ain’t shit either. Society’s all about control. Male control.”

  “It was the women’s movement who got those laws passed,” Crystal Beth said, using her “Let’s-all-be-calm” voice.

  “The women’s movement? You mean my sisters?” the black woman replied, sarcasm clogging her throat. “Pack of stupid bitches, chumped off again. Let me tell you something, baby. This whole ‘battered woman’s syndrome,’ that’s just another way of saying we crazy, that’s all. Man kills someone trying to kill him, only question is . . . was it gonna go down like that? Understand what I’m saying? Only thing the jury got to believe is that the other guy was gonna do it, just got beat to the draw, right? What we need some fucking syndrome for?”

  “So a jury can understand how—”

  “Oh just stop it, okay? Your man beats on you enough times, hurts you enough times, you know when he’s gonna do it again. Could be the way he starts talking, could be as soon as he’s had a few beers, could be a phone call from his goddamned mother . . . could be the way he starts breathing, all right? Point is, you know. Only thing is, that ain’t enough. Not for the cops, not for no DA and damn sure not for no jury. Man says: ‘Motherfucker went for his pocket. I know he always packs a piece, so I drilled him before he could get me.’ Now, that sounds righteous. That one will fly. Woman says: ‘Every time he start talking about how dirty the house is, I know, next thing coming, he’s gonna start beating the shit out of me.’ Now, that one’s worth nothing, see? Nothing at all. Your man tries to kill you that first time, you kill him right then, you might be okay. But if you let him do it a few times, then you stuck. You let him beat on you and beaton you and . . . one day, you know you can’t take another one. You know, soon as he wakes up from that drunken sleep, you’re gonna get hurt so bad, you just . . .”

  “I underst—”

  “You understand shit, girl. You ever sit in on one of those lame-ass groups? You know, like for battered women? I did that, once. Fucking fool stands up and says, like, he used to beat on his woman, but that was ’cause he used to get drunk. So now he ain’t no alcoholic, and he don’t whale on his wife no more. Everybody applauds, okay? Big fucking insight, right? Let me tell you something, Little Miss Liberal, my old man, he used to beat me half to death and then he’d have himself a few drinks to celebrate, see?”

  “I still think people would understand,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “We have good lawyers. We could—”

  “Only thing you can do for me is what you promised,” the black woman said, her words just for Crystal Beth, talking past me like I was a piece of furniture, same way she had since we’d walked into the empty bar. “A new set of ID and enough cash to get in the wind,” she said, eyes hard and committed. “I done time before. Short stretches. But some of those girls in there were doing the Book. For what I done last night. Sooner or later, they gonna find him. Right where I left his dead ass. You take your fucking syndrome, honey. Me, I’m taking the Greyhound.”

  There were more of them. Some staying in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, some stashed in apartments around the city. Others all around the country, she told me. All races, all ages, all social classes.

  “Why did you want me to hear all that?” I asked her later, upstairs in her room.

  “So you would know. It’s not just battered women. Stalkers are . . . all kinds. It’s not just a matter of hiding out. Or even fighting back. We have to . . . change.”

  “Change how?”

  “That’s as individual as the victims. But I know it works. It’s worked for me.”

  “When did you—?”

  “I change all the time,” she said gently. “But when you showed up in my life, that’s when it really started.”

  “I never even met him,” the woman said, striding back and forth before a wall of bookcases, talking like there was a much bigger audience than just me and Crystal Beth, never looking at either of us. Her long pewter-colored skirt was slit to mid-thigh, flesh flashing every time she moved.

  I didn’t say anything—I knew the drill by then.

  “I wrote a book,” the woman said. “About my life as an actress.”

  I knew what kinds of movies she’d made: mid-range Triple-X. Straight-to-video, paid-by-the-day, no-script, fuck-and-suck, basement-studio stuff. But she’d had a following, been a star in that world.

  “I appeared on a few talk shows. You know, just to promote the book, right?”

  I nodded like all of that made perfect sense.

  “First he wrote a fan letter. Not to me—he never had my address—to the publisher. I didn’t even answer it. That happens all the time. They just send autographed pictures back. I never even read the mail.”

  She shook her platinum-blond curls. A wig, as top-of-the-line as her dress and shoes. “He kept writing. Angrier and angrier. What did I think, I could just break off with him? I mean, I was never with him. He just got crazier and crazier. Here, take a look. . . .”

  The letters were in chronological order, all photocopies. She went from “goddess of perfection” to “filthy fucking cunt” as time went along.

  “My shrink said it was ‘erotomania,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  “It means he idealized you,” Crystal Beth said, “and then he constructed a—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the woman said, making it clear this wasn’t going to be about anybody but her. “My lawyer said you had a program. I don’t need a program, I need protection. Is that what he does?” she asked, still not looking at me, just pointing in my direction with a long fingernail as plastic as her chest.

  “He’s crazy,” the olive-skinned woman with the prominent nose said, looking up at me from the edge of the bed where she sat. Crystal Beth was next to her, their shoulders touching. The little room in the back of the waterfront restaurant was quiet, the factory-thick walls blocking the noise from up front.

  We’d ridden over on Crystal Beth’s motorcycle. “You want to drive?” she’d asked me.

  “No way,” I’d told her. I’d ridden bikes as a kid, even had one once, an old Harley 74, but I spent more time on the pavement than the tires had and I’d given it up.

  “Come on,” she teased. “It’d be fun for you.”

  “I’ll have more fun holding on,” I told her, watching that lovely smile flash in the streetlight’s pitiful attempt at illuminating the murky alley.

  But there was no smile on this woman’s face, dread mixed in her voice like water in whiskey. “If he ever finds me . . .”

  “Why do you say he’s crazy?” I asked her. Not to know, to hear the rest of the story Crystal Beth wanted me to hear.

  “He only wanted a daughter,” she said. “For the son of his best friend.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “His best friend has a son,” the woman said, in that patient tone you use with people who aren’t too bright. “So his daughter was going to be his best friend’s son’s wife.”

  “How old was the best friend’s son?”

  “Five. Almost five.”

  “So this wouldn’t happen until . . .”

  “. . . they were grown,” she finished for me, like I’d finally seen the light. “First, he made sure I could get pregnant. I had to have tests. Then he kept me locked in the house for weeks. So nobody could have another shot at me, that’s what he said.

  “For months, we didn’t have sex. I mean, not like . . . the way you make babies. Just . . . And when he was sure I wasn’t pregnant, he said we could get started. Then we had sex over and over again. And I got pregnant. He checked the amnio—but it was going to be a boy. He took me for an abortion, and then we had to start over. After he beat me up.”

  “When did you run?” I asked her.

  “When I got pregnant. I was afraid it would be another boy.”

  “Was it?”

  She giggl
ed, harsh and nervous—a discordant sound, no juice to it. “It wasn’t anything,” she said. “I wasn’t really pregnant. I just thought I was. One of those home test kits. I . . .”

  “So why don’t you—?”

  “Oh, he’s going to kill me,” she said. Not a prediction, stating a fact. “When he finds me, he’s going to kill me.”

  “How come it’s only women?” I asked Crystal Beth later.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All these . . . people you wanted me to talk to, they’re all women. That’s all you deal with, right?”

  “It is now,” she said. “It wasn’t always that way. Men are victims of stalkers too. It’s even harder for some of them, I think. You tell your pals some jealous woman is haunting you, threatening to kill your new girlfriend, they think it’s cool. Women can be just as obsessive as men, just as vindictive.”

  “Just as dangerous too.”

  “Sure. We had one woman here, a lesbian. It was her lover, her ex-lover, who was after her. And that woman was scary, believe me. But most of the time, people don’t see it that way. Women stalkers are cute. Or pathetic. Even when they cross the line, the public sees them differently. Remember that Betty Broderick woman? The one who—”

  “Blew her husband and his new wife away right in their bedroom?”

  “Yes. She had been stalking him for the longest time, but nobody ever stopped her. And even after the murders, the first jury actually hung. . . . They didn’t convict her.”

  “Next time they did.”

  “I know. But that’s not the point. If she had been a man, if the situation had been reversed, the first jury would have only been out fifteen minutes. And what about that woman judge, right here in the city? She stalked her ex-lover for years, did all kinds of horrible things to him, even got confidential court records on his wife. And what happened to her? Nothing! They didn’t disbar her. Didn’t even suspend her. She got ‘censured,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Well, I know what it means—the rules are different.”

  “But if you think male stalking victims get even a worse break than women, how come you don’t—?”

  “It . . . didn’t work out. The mix wasn’t right. It got too . . . complicated, keeping men and women in the safehouses. There were . . . relationships.”

  Like you and Vyra, I thought.

  “And when some of those didn’t work,” she continued, “it affected—maybe ‘infected’ is a better word—the whole process. We can’t help everyone. Not even all the women. Or children. So we decided to stay narrow, keep a tight focus. One . . . of us was always saying that. Focus. That’s where power comes from.”

  The kenpo guy? I thought. T.B., the bouncer at Rollo’s. Want to tell me about that too, you sweet-voiced little liar?

  “And there is one difference,” she continued around my thoughts, “between men and women when it comes to stalkers.”

  “Which is?”

  “The women always think it was their fault, somehow. They always think that. Even when they didn’t contribute to the . . . ugliness in any way, they blame themselves. ‘What was it about me that made him pick me out? What did I do to set him off?’ That’s one of the hardest things to overcome.”

  “Women always blame themselves?”

  “I think so. In some way. I never met one who didn’t.”

  “I’ll bet Lorraine doesn’t,” I said.

  Crystal Beth’s eyes snapped, ready to rumble. “Because she’s gay?”

  “No. But she hates men, doesn’t she?”

  “She does. But if you think she doesn’t blame herself for that too, you don’t know her.”

  “So there’s no role for men in your . . . movement?”

  “Of course there is,” she snapped. “If you knew some of the things . . . some of them have done for us . . . But they need their own movement, men. For stalkers. They need to band together too.”

  “So why did you show me all this?”

  “So you’d like me better,” she said, her voice solemn.

  “This is how it went down,” the man said, gesturing toward a chest-high stack of yellowing newspapers in the corner of the L-shaped studio apartment. I measured the place by moving around, casually touching things. A good burglar knows his own measurements better than a fashion model: I can stretch out my arms like I’m reaching for something, take a few strides, spread my fingers on a table, sit in a chair . . . and I’ll be able to come back and do your place in the dark.

  “What?” I asked him, not caring, but needing him to talk.

  “Nineteen eighty. If Carter rescues the hostages from Iran before the election, he wins in a walk, okay? Now, who’s cutting the defense budget? That’s right . . . Jimmy Carter. And who’s gonna give the military everything they could ever want? Sure, Ronnie RayGun. So what happened? The generals got together and crashed that copter in the desert. What’s a few American lives compared to the military’s greater good?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They never tell you the full story. In the newspapers. How come they always say ‘raped and sodomized’? What does that really mean? Did she have to blow him or did she take it up the ass? You see what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you said you had a message for me. From Lydia?”

  “It looks bad,” Crystal Beth said. She was standing next to the easy chair, one tiny high-arched bare foot on the padded arm, my right hand on a folded towel she’d laid across her knee. “I think there’s some bone showing,” she muttered, looking through a rectangular magnifying glass she held in one hand.

  I tightened my fist. The pain shot through all the way to my shoulder.

  “Hold still,” she told me. Her voice was calm, but her forehead was beaded with sweat. She swabbed the knuckles of my hand with alcohol. I felt it burn clean. “I think I can . . .” she muttered, delicately picking at my hand with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers. “Yes!”

  She held up a tiny white chip.

  “I have to look under it now,” she said softly, going back to my hand with the tweezers. “Just hold on.”

  The pain wasn’t bad enough to let me go somewhere else. I concentrated on the rise and fall of her breasts under the white T-shirt. On the roundness of her bare arms. On her smell.

  “It’s clean,” she pronounced. “And it’s only flesh, not bone. It must have been a piece of tooth you got stuck in there.”

  “That makes sense,” I grunted. Thinking about the freak opening the little closet and showing me his invention. An oblong length of wood, maybe a yard square and two inches thick, with U-shaped metal hooks screwed in at the corners. A length of heavy chain was anchored to the front with a massive eyelet screw. “This is for her punishment,” he told me, eyes foamy behind the reading glasses he was wearing, showing me how the collar would fit over Lydia’s neck, how the chain would go all the way down her back to between her legs and loop underneath, where it would be reattached to the eyelet screw. “I can make it as tight as I want,” he hissed, pointing to a ratcheting knob on the front of the board. “After she spends a couple of hours in this every day, she’ll never disobey again.”

  The next thing I remember, he was on the floor, strange sounds coming out of the red-and-white mess that had been his mouth.

  “This won’t hurt,” Crystal Beth said, holding a clear plastic spray bottle. She squirted some reddish mist all over the raw wounds across my knuckles.

  “What is that stuff?” I asked her.

  “Fibrin sealant,” she said. “Biologic glue. It’s made from proteins found in blood. Stops the bleeding real quick. It helps heal too.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “It’s not available here. They use it in Europe. The FDA is holding back on approval. It’s made with blood. . . . I guess maybe they’re worried about AIDS.”

  The spray was turning to a kind of jelly right before my eyes. Damaged tissue. Merging. Coming together. Healing wounds. Protecting. I looked at my damaged h
and. And saw my family.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” she told me. “This isn’t European stuff. It’s made right here. Lorraine makes it.”

  “Where does she get the blood?”

  “From me,” Crystal Beth said solemnly. “Now you have some of mine.”

  “He’s coming,” Vyra whispered into the phone. “Now.”

  I got there first. Dressed like a lawyer hurrying to an afternoon cocktail with his mistress before catching the 6:09 out of Grand Central to Westport. Nobody in the hotel lobby looked at me twice. And if the security people had questions, I had the answer in my pocket—a key to a small room on one of the lower floors. That gave me a place to duck into if I needed it. And another way into the hotel, through the underground parking garage.

  Vyra was wearing one of those simple black dresses that would cost a workingman a month’s pay. A long thin gold chain around her neck. Plain black patent leather spikes with a tiny row of gold rivets up the back of each heel.

  “You going out?” I asked her as I walked through the door.

  “Why? You think I look nice?”

  “You look great,” I told her. “Like you put on some weight.”

  “That’s a compliment?” she wanted to know, hands on her hips.

  “Sure.”

  “It’s my butt, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “My butt. It’s . . . flat. You like them when they stick way out. Like . . . hers.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh stop it! You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I never really . . .” I said lamely.

  “Sure. Well, it doesn’t matter. Different men like different things.”

  “And women don’t?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said seriously. “I mean, not as much, anyway. I never met a woman who only liked blonds, the way some men do.”