“Fish and chips look good,” I say.
Karen looks up, pauses the journey of a skinny fry on the way to her mouth.
“I know you?”
I show her my badge.
“I’m with the Long Island City Police.”
“We have video of the guy throwing the first punch.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re here about the fight last night?”
“No. What fight?”
She relaxes; my natural smile disarms her. Karen gestures for me to slide into the booth.
“I eighty-sixed a customer; he was drunk, homophobic. He called me a lot of names before he tried to hit me.”
“You defended yourself.”
“Had to, with some help from my manager. You’re kind of cute for a cop. On or off duty?”
“On. I know you.”
“You know me?”
“We were in an elevator at the Queens Center mall. You’re a one-percenter, right?”
“So what? It isn’t against the law, last time I looked.”
“No, but I remember because you were wearing a very cool jacket.”
Karen shrugs, smiles. “I still don’t know you.”
I have a notion that she finds this conversation borderline funny, and I do, too, in a surreal way. I’ll keep it going until she tells the truth.
“Can I ask what you were doing there?”
“At the mall?”
“Yes.”
“Shopping,” she says.
“I see. Shopping,” I say.
“Makes sense. It’s a freakin’ mall.”
I nod my head. It may be a coincidence and I only remember her face because I am a cop, and she doesn’t remember mine. I let it go. Then I say, “I’m working on a cold case.”
“Like the TV show.”
“Joey Savone.”
Karen drops her fork into the red plastic basket.
“That is so fucked.” Her face scrunches up, the tears flow. She makes no attempt to wipe them away, and I believe her.
“Three years, it still doesn’t make any difference. Who said time heals all wounds?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Yeah.”
She spears another piece of fish. “What do you want?”
There is a waitress standing at our booth. I order a Stella and some fries. When she leaves, Karen says, “I meant what do you want with me?”
“Everything about her so I can find out who killed her,” I say.
Karen talks to me until she has to go to work. I take notes, drink two more Stellas, and split another order of fries with Karen.
“Joey was messed up. She got beat up by her father. She never knew any better.”
“You broke up with her? Why?”
“We were going in different directions—new friends—I didn’t want to be tied down.”
“How did she take the news?”
Karen smiles wide, flashes rows of white teeth, top and bottom. “Do you like them?”
“I’m blinded by the light.”
“The back ones are mine. Joey left the rest on the floor of our bathroom. It’s what happens when you bang somebody’s face on a toilet.”
“Will you tell me the story?”
At the end, I have no questions. She is thorough and honest. I record it. I have enough to go back to Lieutenant Hagen.
Statement of Karen Marschner
Recorded by Detective Nina Karim, LICPD
“I sometimes think Joey was a punishment for something I did but can’t remember what it was. God made me fall in love with her, like I was never in love with anyone like her. She told me she loved me, too, but at the same time she was one mean person. I once said, ‘I have enemies who treat me better than you do.’ She laughed. I made excuses. She couldn’t handle being gay, so she took it out on me. It happens.
“My shrink said we were in a classic sadomasochist relationship. You know the expression, ‘Sometimes paranoids have real enemies’? I have another one: ‘Sometimes sadists kill the ones they say they love.’ I know how I look. I’m as butch as they come. I attract a certain kind of femme, looking for strong, tough partners. Sometimes they were abused or bullied as kids. Joey wanted to feel secure. I give off that aura. The truth is I’m scared shitless like everybody else. What am I scared of? Using the women’s bathroom, going to a gynecologist, having a waiter call me sir, for starters.
“We met at a lounge in Manhattan, flirted on Facebook, and finally went out. In three months, we were living together in my apartment. Joey took over, paid all the bills, redecorated, decided what stayed—mostly hers; what went was mostly mine. Then she got to work on my friends. Cut them out. That happens in the beginning of any love affair—you don’t need anybody else—but she made it permanent. I didn’t care. I was in love; Joey was enough for me. Then she got critical. Okay, I’m not the neatest person. I assumed Joey had an anal personality, so I tried. I made a real effort at crap like hanging up clothes, folding towels, not leaving dishes in the sink, making sure the toilet bowl was spotless. I was easy. When she complained, I laughed and said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I will do better.’
“It became serious intense verbal abuse, comments about me, my hygiene, looks, weight, body odor, then it turned into a state of permanent pissed off—she wasn’t happy with anything. I started to feel like everything was my fault. I lost my self-esteem, what little I had left. One day she got really angry at something—I can’t remember what—yes, I can. I was in bed, and she came out of the bathroom saying there was an awful smell. I laughed. It was kind of funny, you know. Since when does shit not smell? The next thing I know she’s on my stomach, punching me, pulling my hair, scratching with her nails; it was like having a hundred-fifty-pound rabid cat on me. I protected myself as best I could, grabbed her wrists and talked her down. She apologized, said it wouldn’t happen again. I told her I was going to leave. She cried, begged me to stay, told me she loved me, and things were okay for a while.
“But the line had been crossed. I let her get away with physically assaulting me; it was like I gave her permission. If we argued and it got to the point where there was screaming, she would freak, go for me, then say she was sorry. She became more jealous, demanded to see my phone, check my texts, emails. She threatened me, said she would out me to my parents, go to my boss, get me fired. By then she had control of my money. The bank account was in her name. I was dependent on her. I felt trapped: I still loved her; I was in her power. I felt I had no place to go. Then she started talking about suicide. How we should do it together. Joey worked in a doctor’s office. She could get pills. She joked, ‘You go first, I’ll follow. Trust me?’ She said she knew lots of ways to kill a person. She could do it so it would look like a heart attack or stroke. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘do you never hear of doctors in old age homes? They know how to kill themselves.’
“Then she took the abuse to another level. She started harping on how I was a bad person who needed to be punished. Of course, she was the one who wanted to be punished. For being gay. It happens. Yeah, there are homophobic gay people. They hate who they are; they can’t deal with it, so they take it out on their partners. I’m aware of this now, but you should have seen me then. I was her accomplice in my own destruction. When she thought I would leave, she turned on the love; when she was sure I would stay, she turned on the hate. I started doing coke, which gave her another threat about my job. I started to hide money for a place to rent when I left, she found it, and I got a beating that night. There was no escape, no hope, no safety. She always apologized, swore she would change, I bought it; I had no choice.
“Then one day I knew she was going to kill me. It was clear she would do it, probably get away with it. I didn’t know what to do except fill a backpack and leave. You know, I could have been the one. I could have been the abuser. I could have hit her. I was stronger. The trouble was I loved her beyond belief. If I love somebody, I will never put my hands on them. When Joey understood that,
when she felt safe, then she went to work on me. I came to this realization in the shelter. I was getting my own life back. I went back to work, started doing counseling with other gay women victims of abuse. There is plenty of domestic violence in the LGBT community. I learned gay couples experience domestic violence at the same frequency as heterosexual couples; some research says it might be because gay individuals are less likely to report domestic violence. About a year ago, Joey showed up at the shelter with the husband of one of the wives inside—she wanted to kill me and he wanted to kill his wife. I never heard from her after that. I guess it was the last straw.”
For whom? I wonder.
Chapter 20
I text Lieutenant Hagen: I have another person whose partner/husband was murdered. Three women.
I check my own texts. Bobby B suggests a home-cooked meal. That’s code for my home. Lieutenant Hagen’s comes in: See me tomorrow. That’s good news. In my car, I wonder if Bobby can tell the difference between store-bought and homemade pesto. Not in a million years. I have a plan. But there is a voice mail to play back.
“Artie Crews here, the weatherman. I just wanted to tell you we found the cat. My son hid it. He won’t tell me why.”
I should tell Artie that his son likely wanted some attention from his father. Looking for a cat together would have been just that. Artie’s solution was to hire someone, demonstrating once again his indifference to his son. Another thing to do. Instead, I shop for dinner.
I leave the front door unlocked so Bobby can find me in the shower. It is better than cocktails before dinner. He takes off his jeans and T-shirt, climbs in, turns me sideways, soaps me with both hands. I close my eyes. I feel one hand trace a path down my back and the other down my breasts and between my legs. One stops in my butt crack, and the other thumbs against my clitoris with exactly the right pressure—how does he know how to do this? But that is a rational question and I am coming now, so the answer will have to wait. His cock is folded up hard against the side of my thigh, does he lower or push me to the edge of the tub—it doesn’t matter, it was where I wanted to go anyway, so all I have to do is lean forward and take him in my mouth while he clasps my hair. I hold his two hard ass cheeks with skin like a baby’s until he steps back, pulls me up to standing, turns me around, and enters me from the rear. I swear one of these days I will surely pull the pipes out of the wall. We dry each other and wear bathrobes to the table.
As much as he likes the melon and prosciutto, pasta with pesto, and veal scaloppine, Bobby B doesn’t care for my plan. He refuses my request for him to beat the crap out of me.
“It’s not like putting on makeup. Yeah, I could give you black eyes, but I might also break your orbital rim, do damage to the eye itself, tear the optic nerve, fuck up your eye muscles, the sinuses around the eye, and your tear ducts.”
I wince. How could I not?
“You want a punch on the nose? I can break it, but if I don’t hit it exactly right, I could also give you a nasal septal hematoma.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I say.
“How come you don’t?” Bobby replies. He is right.
“What else?”
“You can’t fake the effects of a beating. You will need cuts, scrapes, bruises on your arms, your chest. You fought back, right? He pulled some hair out, you will need some lumps on the back of your head where he slammed you against a wall, a broken rib where he kicked you—when you were down, of course, a couple of punches to the mouth, which means a bloody lip, some missing teeth, usually the front ones. You think I’m going to do that? Get real.”
He takes another helping of pasta.
“This is delicious. Did I ever tell you the story of my only bar fight? I was in a cozy little cocktail lounge on Eighth Avenue after a Knicks game, happy to watch the postgame on TV, have a beer, and . . .”
“And get lucky?”
“I never get lucky in bars. Let me tell the story. Two young guys are at a table drinking martinis, minding their own business. At the bar, there are three guys looking for trouble. Their dumb-ass backward caps say they are Nets fans, pissed their team lost. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn they’d bet heavily on the game. They are in their twenties, a volatile age. The two guys at the table look gay—ah, fuck it, they are gay and Ivy League, wearing Ralph Lauren, slight of build, like I said, minding their own business. For some tribal or economic reason, this is infuriating to the three Nets fans. It starts like high school. They toss peanuts at them, each one accompanied by a little taunt. I can’t remember exactly—it was in the neighborhood of What are you gonna do about it, faggot? The two guys are prudent, put some money on the table and leave. The three assholes decide to follow them outside and make shit happen. So I go outside, too. Now we are all standing on the street. There is going to be a fight. I hate these motherfuckers, and it’s three of them against me.”
“Wait. What about the couple?”
“They’re smarter than me. They saw a cab and jumped in. So I say to the Jersey boys, ‘See you later.’ Or something like that.
“‘No way. You’re next, asshole,’ one of the Jersey boys says.
“I back up against the side of the building so I can’t be jumped from behind.
“‘You sure? You really want to fight me? On concrete?’
“They nod.
“‘You guys have health insurance?’ I ask.
“‘Huh?’
“‘Look, I have no doubt you guys can take me, but it won’t be easy. I’m an ex-cop. I’m not armed, but I am fairly dangerous, and a really dirty fighter. So, if we get into this, at least one of you is going to lose an eye, maybe a lot of teeth. I know how to break an arm at the elbow before I go down. Last time I looked, a broken arm is about fifty thousand, an eye a hundred grand, and I don’t have to tell you what a broken jaw costs, besides having to sip food through a straw for three months. So I just want to know if you are fully insured.’
“They look at each other, at me. I am frighteningly calm. They calculate their potential losses. I wait another moment and tell them we should say good-bye.”
“And?”
“We said good-bye.”
“I like that story. I get your point. Are you sleeping over?”
Chapter 21
Lieutenant Hagen swivels her chair around and turns on her coffee machine. She opens a flat box. Inside are rows of capsules.
“Would you like one?”
“I’m partial to the blue.”
She starts the machine and says, “Do you know how many women were in the shelter over that ten-year period? A hundred? Two hundred? You do know most women leave shelters within the first month?”
She hands me the coffee. The thin cup is hot to my fingers.
“I would like to go undercover. Check in. Snoop around, see what’s up.”
“You’ll have to find a way to get in.”
“I have a couple of fake identities left over from my undercover drug days. I’ll need an abusive spouse, a couple of restraining orders, some bruises, and my own ingenuity.”
“What if they find out you’re a cop?”
“Let them. The worst they can do is kick me out.”
“You hope.”
“I want to keep this between us. If anyone asks, I’m on special assignment from you, and it’s nobody’s business in the station.”
Chapter 22
My “fictional husband” will be a detective in a nearby police department, in and out of AA for years, a poster child for failure of its Twelve Steps. He is convinced his drinking is under control. When it isn’t, he blames it on me, usually followed by a violent rage that results in him beating me. We have a ten-year-old son who wets his bed and tells me to stop making Daddy mad. Lately my husband has been talking of taking his own life and assuring me he won’t go alone. I am scared and move out with my son. He finds me, pleads for reconciliation and couples’ therapy, demonstrates sobriety, introduces me to his AA sponsor, then waits for me, drunk, forces h
is way into my apartment, rapes me, or tries to and can’t perform, which makes him angrier, and I get another beating for being a frigid, cock-shrinking bitch. My son is still living with his father, but I fear for his life—and mine. Bobby B has a cousin, a clerk in the municipal court, who will produce a restraining order and backdate it. The restraining order doesn’t mean anything to my husband. He has been beating me off and on for two years now; it’s getting worse, life-threatening.
Now all I have to do is get Detective Linda Fuentes on board. It isn’t hard. We haven’t liked each other for a long time. The animosity began when we were both working on a robbery homicide. The killer walked into a dry-cleaning store on Queens Boulevard with an armful of dirty shirts in which he had hidden a handgun. As the owner was counting out the shirts, the robber showed him the gun and told him to empty the cash register. The owner had his own gun under the cash register, but the guy with the shirts shot first and killed him. He ran out, leaving his shirts behind. Two of them had little green paper laundry tags, so it was just a question of tracing the tickets to another laundry, going through receipts. We had the name of this idiot in two days.
Higgins and I found him a week later. The problem was that the sole witness to the murder was a Salvadoran tailor working at his sewing machine who used to date Fuentes. She not only failed to tell Lieutenant Hagen she knew the witness, she started seeing him again. Possibly the trauma of the killing reignited their passion. This was a major conflict of interest, a cop sleeping with a witness. It could seriously jeopardize the prosecution. Somebody informed Hagen, and she went ballistic, assembled the three of us in her office, and took Fuentes off the case. Fuentes always thought I’d ratted her out, but it wasn’t me. There was no convincing Fuentes otherwise.
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