I knew I would get all the elements right. It was Christmas again (I’d disconnected the heater in your car) and you were worried about losing the rather menial lectureship that you had finally landed. After you arrived, with nearly frostbitten fingers (I’d hidden your gloves), I arranged for my cousin to stop by, blow marijuana smoke in your face, shout loudly at you some story about a sports victory, and slap you on the back.
We were having a dinner party (read potential job prospect) and I lied to you about the arrival time of our guests. So you were caught off guard when they came half an hour early. I managed to bum the roast anyway.
Later I made insipid comments and quite frequently had no opinion at all (although four times I managed to contradict you over matters at hand: the brand of the oven, the age of Alexander Dubcek, and the cost of pouring a cement patio last summer). You bickered with me publicly until you remembered where you were and with whom. You were hating me really good by the time your no-longer-potential employer left.
Patrol Officer Laura Deleuse:
It’s easier to take on a violation of a restraining order. These women don’t want to be hassled and have made their demand public record. They don’t cover up for someone that’s causing them corporal injury.
I put personal interest in carrying out violation of restraining orders. One particular weasel was calling a woman twenty times a day at her work. Her boss had sympathy for her, but after a few months it was getting seriously in the way of business. What could he do? She was going to lose her job.
I got to know her, going over there and taking reports quite often. She had a daughter and two kittens. Two kittens! She was just trying to raise her kid, a working mom, and here was some jerk ruining her life. Hanging on her doorbell. Standing outside her window at night. And the stupid bastard had his timing down right. She’d call the station, but he never lingered more than three or four minutes after she’d noticed him. We can’t make it in less than five minutes and he knew it. He was always gone before we made the scene.
So who hasn’t known somebody pretty unstable, even gotten involved with them? You only really find out when you try and pull away. There’s not too much you can do. Get a restraining order.
But if somebody wants to harass you, make your life miserable, if that somebody is making that his career, even with bodyguards there’s not much to be done. But a restraining order is the only way to start.
That’s why I really wanted to get this particular weasel. She called and said he was calling her from a pay phone. He said that he was watching her, that he could see her from where he was. In between calls she reached the dispatch unit, and I just drove up to that lighted booth, recognized him from a mug shot, threw him on the hood, cuffed him up, and case closed.
This particular woman had great documentation; that’s what I tell them all. Write it down: where it happened, when, what was said, how many times he rang the doorbell, whatever. Few think to do that. First of all you don’t want to believe that this person in your life has turned out to be crazy. Then you just want them to go away. It doesn’t inspire you to play secretary.
So when the 418-DV at Del Mar Drive came up again, I wasn’t happy. I was going to get the cold shoulder and the short stockinged legs all over again. But I didn’t have any choice after the anonymous tip from the neighbor had been received.
After the first visit, such types would usually learn to keep their voices to a provocative growl. But this growl had had quite different consequences.
We walked up the Malibu-lighted path. I rang the bell. This time it wasn’t the husband with the big excuse. It was the wife with a little gun.
It hung off her hand like ripe fruit. The elegant chignon had come apart, and hair was falling off her shoulders, pointing in all directions; a ratty knot was caught behind her left ear. Her stocking had been ripped; on one leg it hung nearly down to her ankle, beige cobwebs covering her foot.
She didn’t turn her head to avoid my glance this time. Her face told of a pummeling that was physically painful to see. And the front of her blouse. I took the gun from her; it was easy-it just fell into my hand.
An acrid whiff of gunpowder was in the air, and we ran into the house. We ran past the chintz L-shaped sofa, past the library (a wing chair was overturned), and into the kitchen. We looked down the stairs. He was lying at the bottom.
I ran down to check his pulse, stepping around a pool of sticky blood surrounding his big back. A knife lay close by his side, a large German meat knife.
Even without a pulse (excluding gray matter, or maggot face as even the coroner calls it, and oh, yes, decapitation) we can’t make a death call. Even paramedics can’t pronounce a 187, death on the scene, without pretty obvious physical decomposition. This guy was going to get an ambulance like every other dead citizen,
I wondered which paramedic would be on duty tonight. Dinner dates had stopped because my social skills apparently weren’t up to snuff (meaning her friends didn’t like me). I didn’t like to think her elitism was so compelling. The payoff was still some great compliments I’d garnered.
I went back upstairs and started cuffing our suspect. She was compliant, but I was still glad when it was over and I didn’t have to sort of hold hands with her. She was talking the whole time too. “He pushed me down the stairs,” she was saying. “He threatened me. I had the gun. He laughed. He said I didn’t have the nerve. And he came closer and closer.”
Kevin wasn’t asking her any questions, and spontaneous statements are admissible in court. Didn’t sound like she was incriminating herself in any event. I sat her down and recited Miranda to her anyway. Self-defense would be the case made for her, no doubt. I wondered when the court date would come up and how sleepy I’d be, having to get up in the middle of the day. I remembered the details of my first visit to Del Mar Drive. I remembered how my social skills were never up to snuff. I didn’t feel good about seeing her months earlier, immune to pain, denying that anything had happened to her. So maybe this was the natural consequence, but why did I have to see it, on my beat, tonight? I could just guess which paramedic would be showing up too.
I called the supervisor on the radio; the sergeant would make notifications. The on-call homicide inspector and the on-call photographer would come, and I’d go to the hospital with her, for a quick checkup before she got booked on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice.
After I’d shot you (it was so easy-you came after me like Attila the Hun, rattling your saber, roaring epithets), I felt so relieved. It was simple to pull that trigger. I aimed for your heart, but I think I ended up shooting you in the head. Your body actually fell on me (I’d run to the bottom of the stairs, “away from you” as I’d explain later). So there you were, staining my silk blouse with your blood and gray matter, pinning me to the floor.
I pushed you off me, keeping hold of the gun. I waited a few minutes, standing over you, looking at your back, not believing that I wouldn’t have to follow your orders anymore, not believing you were actually dead, and knowing that this sort of shock response would be the most believable to the police. Later they’d take me to the hospital (I think I had a broken rib) and then to the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice (I’d done my homework; I knew just what would happen to me).
I would explain to them how the fight started in your study. I would say that I grabbed the gun there, but actually I had already gotten it that afternoon. I wasn’t going to take any chances when I finally had you ready with rage.
But the story began almost a year ago, my dear. When you, the doctor, at my most vulnerable and trusting moment (I had thought I was losing my mind), had sat next to me on the couch and caressed me, talking to me about trust and transference!
Since you were my only reality check at the time, I was pretty disconcerted. I ran out of your office. After a few days I decided that my reality check deserved to be researched.
It was only later that I decided on revenge.
Public records revealed t
hat you had been arrested once on charges of assaulting a woman you were living with; but she dropped charges. I remembered the name of the building receptionist who had left shortly after I started treatment. She was somewhat bitter over sexual misconduct on your part and mentioned that you had gone out with one of your former patients. I got her name and called her.
And then there was your first wife, a woman perhaps even angrier than I was. You’d never abused your doctor-client privilege with her, but I found out after interviewing her personally that she had suffered mental and physical torment before getting out of the marriage with no alimony and the minimum of child support. You were late with the checks too. She didn’t know about the distraught ex-client who had you arrested but later dropped charges. But she did know about the whole life insurance policy you’d taken out at thirty, when your practice was booming, when you were making five, even pushing six digits a year. And I knew that an insurance policy more than two years old was incontestable to the beneficiaries, which at the moment included your son. And could include a new wife.
As we talked it over, your former wife and I, we decided to call your other former patient. The one who had suffered the broken jaw and the cracked ribs when she suggested she’d turn you in to the Board of Medical Quality Assurance. And that’s when we all agreed. We weren’t going to turn you in. We were going to turn you over.
Patrol Officer Laura Deleuse:
I hate going to court. I hate standing up in front of people. And I hated remembering that night.
I had to sit through a bunch of testimony for the defense before my turn came up. Seems the guy had beaten up a woman who was an ex-client, and there was an ex-wife who had some gruesome stories. Locked her in a closet while he beat the kid. Public humiliation, rape, we got to hear it all. And a chorus line of doctors attesting to the multifarious wounds of the defendant. It didn’t make me want to get up and go to work the next day either.
So it was open and shut. With him coming down the stairs at her like that, imminence wasn’t even a remote improbability. But that’s not why I didn’t want to remember that night. It was the paramedic who strolled up the driveway, hung out waiting for the photographer, and pretty much ignored me, walking right past me like I was a tree. I got her out of earshot, when she was busy inspecting her manicure, and said, “Hi, remember me? The one you had an affair with last week.”
“Yeah.” She looked up, and some kind of recognition played across her face. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I was there.”
Sometimes her social skills weren’t too good either.
Do I have any regrets? No. Well, maybe only one. I was a bit hasty in organizing our victory lunch. Lee, your ex-wife, was there, and Rachel, the girl friend (she’s not only going to get her jaw fixed, she’s going for a facelift, and a Ph.D. in media studies). Lee and I always wanted to learn Italian, so we’ll buy a villa on Capri (we chose one already, through an estate agent). You see, what we didn’t count on was that “accidental death” clause that includes self-defense and awards a double policy. We’ve well endowed every charity that remotely tugged on our heartstrings.
I was a bit worried about being hasty with the luncheon. After all, we were supposed to have set eyes on each other only in court. And there we were, chatting away like old friends (after all, they’d seen me through bruises, and beatings, fixed me up-and sent me back). We were drinking champagne, high on the knowledge of total financial security for life, jubilant that we’d done it ourselves (we’d never had a conflict about the split either) when I saw her. That police officer, She was behind a pillar, lunching, in fact, with the sour-faced paramedic that had scooped up the gray matter around your head. I did something I’d never done before. I looked her straight in the eye and raised my champagne glass to her. She spotted me and her eyes swept with mounting recognition across the faces of my luncheon companions. I saw her process the whole thing; she seemed to freeze. But then slowly she turned her back (the whole time I was thinking about my research, double indemnity, double jeopardy, and insurance companies that are not mandated to recollect), and as she turned around I saw what was in her hand. A champagne glass, and she raised it toward me.
The cases of police detectives Carlos Cruz and Jay Goldstein have entertained readers for several years, and such excellent novels as A Single Stone, A Case of Loyalties, and Primary Target are among the best books of their type. The last-named combines an excellent puzzle with strong political commentary. In addition, MARILYN WALLACE is the editor of the very successful Sisters in Crime series of anthologies. Ms. Wallace resides in San Anselmo, California.
THE CUTTING EDGE
Marilyn Wallace
If I weren’t Rico’s mother and if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, I probably would have reacted differently to Catherine’s two-sentence note, and to the invitation. Someone slipped this under the gallery door. What do you make of it? her curlicued scrawl asked.
The note was paper-clipped to an invitation to the opening of Porterfield’s, her new art gallery on West 51st Street. Thursday, December 4. Seven to nine P.M. Meet the artists, etc. I was familiar with the text not only because Rico was one of the artists but because my New York office, Happenings East, was coordinating the event.
It wasn’t until I turned the invitation over to look at the image on the other side, a montage portrait of the three artists each standing in front of one of their paintings, that I noticed a gash running from the right edge in toward the center of the card. It cut right across the picture of Rico. The edge of the cut appeared to be smeared with dried blood.
Dried blood? Surely I was imagining that.
Like my attempts to persuade him to finish his undergraduate studies, any implied threat would only make Rico-full of promise, so damned stubborn-more determined to pursue painting. My shudder of fear was his frisson of excitement. So what else was new?
I showed the card to David. After twenty-five years of marriage, we still count on each other to put a new spin on things. He held it close to the light, touched his finger to the cut.
“Why don’t you call Rico and see what he thinks? I’d guess it’s probably just a tear, a coffee stain, nothing to get worked up about.” He kissed my cheek; he seemed more concerned about my worrying than he was about Catherine’s note.
I granted the possibility that someone had slipped the note under the gallery door, that it had caught on a splinter, that perhaps coffee or something-wine, paint-had been spilled on it. But my anxiety level continued to rise as I dialed Rico’s number and listened to the phone ring and ring, unanswered.
I’ve never been very good at waiting and that seemed to be all I could do: wait for Rico to answer the phone, wait for Thursday when David and I were scheduled to fly to New York for the opening. David was just starting a four-night piano gig at Yoshi’s and couldn’t get away earlier.
By nine o’clock, despite David’s calm assurances, I had convinced myself that my New York staff needed my help. After all, the final mailing had to be done, the wine and hors d’oeuvres ordered, the work hung. I turned over the details of the California events to my Happenings West staff and bought a night-flight ticket from SFO to JFK.
I sat by the window, watching for those staccato glitters of light that are the small towns of nocturnal America. I tried to occupy my mind with one of Monk’s atonal melody lines that resolves itself three bars later than I always expect it to, and with keeping the plane in the air by the strength of my will.
After a while, convinced that the plane would be fine on its own, my mind was free to tend to other things. I thought about my friend Catherine. After struggling for twenty years to gain critical or commercial recognition for her own paintings, she had given up. A mother for the first time at forty-two, she spent a year at home with Michael before she decided that if she couldn’t paint, at least she would make a place for herself in the art world and open a gallery.
Images of Rico kept intruding. I remembered the moment I first held him and l
ooked at his red, wrinkled fade and knew that my most difficult task as the mother of this miracle would be to learn how to let him go. I pictured his delight when he uncurled his fingers from mine and took three steps on his own. I recalled the pained confusion when he found out that two of his seventh-grade friends forgot to ask him to go to the movies with them.
Somewhere over Nebraska, I demoted the torn invitation to a prank perpetrated by some bored art-scene crisis junkie. No one would want to hurt Rico-why should they? I put on the earphones and let the jazz channel distract me the rest of the way across the continent.
The gray mist that hung over the city welcomed me home, the light so familiar that I wanted to embrace it. I headed for the first cab in the long yellow line and got in. Murray Feldman, number 3905467, nodded when I gave him Catherine’s Brooklyn address. I needed to hear what she thought before I laid my mother-worries on Rico. The cab careened into the Kennedy exit maze.
“Take the Van Wyck to Atlantic Avenue,” I said.
Murray grumbled and pulled into the proper lane and I closed my eyes, happy to be cm the ground.
Sooner than I expected, the cab turned left onto Tenth Street and pulled to the curb in a squeal of brakes, I squinted to see the meter through the dingy plastic shield.
“That’s twenty-four and sixty-eight,” the cabbie said. “If you’da took the subway, you coulda bought a new pair of glasses,”
I love New York.
I peeled a ten and a twenty from the roll in my wallet and waved away Murray’s change. He flashed me his best you-ain’t-a-bad-tipper-for-a-broad smile.
“Hey, you have a nice day, lady,” he said with enthusiasm,
I groaned. The city was deteriorating, losing its old abrasive edge. At least Park Slope, a neighborhood of brown-stones and gaslights and brave little window boxes, hadn’t changed much. Even though David and I moved to California two years earlier, I had insisted on keeping the Happenings East office open. Brooklyn still felt like home.
A Woman’s Eye Page 25