Building on the foundation of her dislike, a fight won’t be hard to incite. I start with sarcasm, the fool’s wit: “Cute dress, Linda. You going undercover to a flea market?” In the locker room with some of the male cops in attendance, I get laughs. Linda responds with Spanish invective that gets oohs from the same male cops. I descend to the personal: “Is your ass jealous of the amount of shit that just came out of your mouth?”
Fuentes says, “You are dangerously close to totally pissing me off. The consequence will be a trip to either HR or the gym, where we can put on gloves and you will learn I am not to be fucked with, puta.”
“Gloves. HR is for humans, not assholes, like you.”
Like everyone on the force, I learned the basics of martial arts for police, a mixture of judo, karate, Krav Maga, the use of the baton, and some boxing. I was okay at it, but I had no illusions my superficial knowledge was going to make me secure in a physical confrontation with a man twice my size. I had more confidence in my ability to defuse a potentially violent situation with calm, polite persuasion. On foot patrol, I always had a male partner. I was also never too proud to call for backup. And I carried two guns: my department Glock and my Nasty Little Fucker in its ankle holster.
I explain to Sergeant Freeman, the soon-to-be retired veteran who is in charge of the gym, that Fuentes and I need to settle a personal thing.
“Okay with me,” he says.
It isn’t the first time cops have come to the gym to resolve a grudge. But two women lacing up twenty-ounce sparring gloves and headgear is a new event for Freeman, and he will also have to referee the fight. He proposes three rounds, three minutes each. I realize unless I just stand there and put up no defense, at most I will come out of this with a black eye, some cheek bruises. We box our three rounds, neither of us does much damage, and when Freeman calls time at the end of the third round we are both breathing heavily and I still have my looks. Freeman tells us to bump gloves in friendship, we do, and he excuses himself to go to his Little League coaching job. As soon as he leaves, Linda spits on the floor, just missing my Keds, and we take off the headgear and toss it aside.
Halfway through Linda beating the crap out of me, I realize this might be a really bad idea. At first, I thought I was holding my own—she’s having a hard time hitting me, her jabs aren’t connecting, the body shots are weak. Then it occurs to me that Linda was just figuring me out; now that she knows my speed and my defenses, she can really go to work on me. She does. The punches come faster and faster; she slides under my raised arms, pounds my kidneys, and sweeps my feet out from under me. I hit the floor; she delivers a kick in my ribs. Oh, Linda Fuentes, you are a gift: definitely a much better street fighter than me.
“You done, bitch?”
“I think so.”
“You’re fucked up, Karim,” she says, heading for the showers, leaving me, well, fucked up.
But I’m dressed for a stay in Artemis, a shelter for battered women.
My name will be Lucy.
Chapter 23
Artemis Shelter for Women
I roll up my sleeping bag and down another of Amanda’s Tylenols. Phyllis told me I have to be out of the room by nine to make way for the younger kids, who use it for a makeshift school. A doctor arrives. She carries a leather bag.
“Ruth Iskin. I’m at Flushing Hospital,” she says, then cups my chin in her hand, whistles at my bruises, and puts me through a quick exam: blood pressure, chest, eyes, feels around my rib cage, tweaks my nose back and forth. “It’s not broken. Any loose teeth?”
“No.” Mentioning my rubbery molar would just prolong the visit. She applies bandages over my facial cuts, assures me they aren’t serious, tells me it’s just a question of time before the bruises lose color and the scratches heal.
“You take meds?”
“Over the counter.”
“You’ll live.”
“Yeah, right.”
Dr. Iskin packs up and leaves. Sergeant Freeman will surely tell the tale of two women detectives settling scores in the gym, my fight with Fuentes will be public knowledge. I’d like to look like less of a loser when I do return. Phyllis comes back with another woman and introduces me to my first adult resident of the shelter.
“Lucy, meet Sofia. We don’t do last names,” Phyllis says. That’s fine with me. I don’t want her to know mine, either.
“Hello and welcome to our safe home.” Sofia has a soft Slavic accent that suggests she could be anywhere from Slovenia to Ukraine. She owns fashion model beauty, straight blonde hair that frames her face with luminous skin, high cheekbones, and perfect teeth. I feel small and beefy in her presence.
“Sofia is our resident teacher.”
“Just the little ones,” Sofia says. She gets a better look at me and my injuries, shakes her head. “You are lucky to be here. Excuse me, but I have to get the room ready for the children.” She parts a curtain on one wall, revealing a blackboard, and for the first time I notice another wall is covered with maps, children’s artwork, pop-star posters, and a bookcase with two old iMacs on the top shelf. Sofia empties a plastic carton with pencils, crayons, sketch pads, and books onto the table. A moment later, three children come in from the kitchen: two boys and a girl.
“Everybody say hi to Lucy, our new arrival,” Phyllis says.
I get a disjointed “Hi, Lucy.” The older boy gives me a handshake. “Ben. I’m nine.” The younger one mumbles, “Frankie,” and walks past me. The girl says, “My name is Tiffany and I’m seven.”
Sofia says, “Frankie?” Frankie, buried in a book, doesn’t look up. Phyllis leads me into the kitchen, where we pour coffee. “Frankie is Amanda’s brother. He’s quiet, withdrawn. He could go to school with Amanda, but he won’t leave the shelter, won’t really talk to anyone. Can’t blame him. We all try to bring him out, but he’s tough. Sometimes I wish we could get an abused wife who is also a trained child therapist. If you see an opportunity to talk to him, feel free.”
“Sure.” I don’t tell her I have a lot of experience with traumatized nine-year-olds. I failed with one: Sammy, my brother.
“We do homeschooling here. The older kids sometimes go to local schools if we feel secure about them leaving. Sofia and I teach; the other mothers pitch in according to their skills. When you get settled, we can always use help.”
“I was a teacher for a while. Math and English, junior high.”
“Perfect.”
I have value to Phyllis. That’s good. And like all effective lies, it contains some truth.
There was a waiting period after my written and physical tests for the Long Island City Police to complete my background checks, interview my references, confirm my financial disclosures. I was told it might take a couple of months. While I was in this limbo, I ran into a high school friend at a Peet’s. We grabbed our coffees, found a table, and caught up. I went first. I don’t remember what I told Nancy—certainly not that I was waiting to become a cop, I must have said I was between jobs, not in a relationship, and yes, I was okay. Nancy told me she was vice principal at Better Beginnings Charter School.
“Would you be interested in doing some teaching? We’re always looking for people. You could substitute. The teacher leaves a lesson plan; just follow it. Pays a hundred dollars a day.”
“Sounds tempting. But I don’t have any experience.”
“It’s a charter school, Nina, you don’t need experience. Fill out some paperwork, leave your phone number, and when one of our teachers is sick, you come in. The kids are well behaved. It’s easy.”
She was right. It was that easy. I taught off and on for six months, and when I got my acceptance into the Police Academy I resigned.
Phyllis says,”You can also help kids one-on-one.” She looks back at the three children at the table. “Our classes tend to be small.”
“Can I get some stuff out of my car? Clothes, toilet articles.”
“There’s a protocol for anybody leaving the shelter. We need to be c
areful about maintaining our own security. We are wary of husbands or boyfriends waiting outside.”
She leads me out of the kitchen door into the yard between the two houses. “First rule, we never use our front doors.” She steps up to the side door of the adjacent house and punches a code into a lock. We enter into a kitchen. “There’s a gaggle of locks. Same code, but we change the code every week. It’s a pain, but you’ll get used to it. We make it a game for the children—‘Who knows the code?’—so they can remember. We try to keep the single women here; the women with kids live in the bigger house. A friend owns the house behind this one. She lets us use it as a conduit to the street outside. We’ll go through her backyard, into her house, then you can go out her front door into the street. You come back the same way. It’s not foolproof, but if anybody is watching the front door of the shelter, they won’t see anybody entering or leaving.”
Phyllis unlocks the neighbor’s back door. “Same code.” We enter into a kitchen. A woman’s voice calls out, “I’m in the living room.”
“Say hello to Myra Eisenson,” Phyllis says.
Myra, a fortyish woman in a housecoat, waves to me from her desk, barely taking her eyes off the two large computer monitors that display stock charts, graphs, and real-time market quotes.
“She’s a day trader,” Phyllis says.
“I never go out,” Myra says.
Myra’s front door leads to Eightieth Street. There is a small video monitor on the wall displaying rotating views of the doorstep and the street. Phyllis studies the monitor, opens the door.
“Where’s your car?”
“It’s around the corner on Northern Boulevard.”
“I’ll wait here for you.”
I walk to my Prius, checking to see if I am being followed, look at messages on my other phone, send texts to Bobby and Lieutenant Hagen: I’m in. I collect my bag and return to Myra’s house. Phyllis lets me back in, and we retrace our steps back to the Artemis compound. Lieutenant Hagen and I have devised a cover story that will get me out of the shelter during the day. Before we go into the main house, I spin the tale to Phyllis.
“I have a job. My husband doesn’t know about it. I’d like to keep it.”
“Is it safe?” Phyllis asks.
“I do freelance editing for a woman who takes on more work than she can handle. I’m like a ghost. I work out of her apartment on one of her computers. She pays me cash. She knows I’m hiding, but she doesn’t know where. I park in an underground lot and always make sure no one is following me. I take an elevator to a higher floor and walk down two flights.”
Phyllis nods. “Smart.”
“I saw it in a movie.”
“Okay. Just be careful coming back. I’ve been thinking,” Phyllis says. “There’s a cot in the basement you could use. You’ll be more comfortable there. It’s kind of dark, but you’ll have privacy; you won’t be in the way when the kids are around.”
She takes me down through a door in the kitchen. It wouldn’t qualify as a finished basement, but it’s clean. There are faded rugs on the floor, the walls are whitewashed, a metal Ikea single cot for sleeping. There is a lingering smell of cleaning chemicals, heating oil, and the coal that preceded the oil. A small toilet closet has a yellowed sink basin. If I were who I pretended to be, a battered woman on the run, it would be just fine, but I am playacting, and I already miss my own bed with Bobby B in it. Upstairs is activity, life: I hear footsteps, chair legs scraping, dulled voices of women and children, TV, doors slamming. It’s familiar. I realize I am back in my own house, living in my own space, in my father’s old medical suite, in the house but not part of it.
“I’ll take it.”
Chapter 24
In the basement room of the shelter, I imagine life upstairs resembling a college sorority: a comfortable house, a flag with Greek letters unfurled from its second-story balcony, home to women living together, dedicated to sisterhood, companionship, and study groups. Phyllis is the housemother with an apartment on the ground floor: a sitting room office and a small bedroom.
“My door is always open,” she tells me.
The women in this sorority don’t go to classes, football games, have sex, drink alcohol, and smoke weed at parties with boys becoming men. Here in the shelter are women who, in different ways, have experienced men as people who abuse, beat, and sometimes try to kill them. In this sorority, I sleep in the basement. I wake up, climb the stairs, and emerge into another life: I have coffee with the women who have just seen their children off to school, or are assembling the ones who are being homeschooled because their lives are at risk from homicidal fathers or vulnerable to kidnapping by less-than-homicidal fathers. I learn that daddy and husband are often not terms of endearment. In this ordered and tremulous environment, we go over kitchen and housekeeping duties. There are schedules and timetables posted for whose turn it is to buy food, cook, or clean.
On some mornings, I help Sofia teach. Frankie allows me to correct his math problems but refuses to engage in any conversation. Then I leave, having memorized the present code, making sure to go out the side door across the yard, into the adjacent house, into Myra’s house, and out her front door. I walk to my car, unfollowed and safe, drive to police headquarters, and resume my work as a homicide detective. Linda Fuentes and I maintain a correct professional relationship. The other detectives are indifferent to my fading bruises; a gym fight between cops is not a big deal. Fuentes and I are just two of the boys. And no one, so far, no one seems to care about my erratic coming and going. If anyone wants any further information, I’ll tell them to ask Lieutenant Hagen. No one does. I spend the morning dropping off hit-and-run victim Daniel Huang’s clothes to Libby Murphy at the NYPD Crime Lab in Jamaica. I ask her to search for paint fragments in the fibers. Libby promises me results, possibly that afternoon. She is outraged about the son of a bitch who not only hit Daniel, but robbed him, too. On my return to HQ, I find another three cases on my desk in which the victims obtained restraining orders from their abusers. Two were married, one had a boyfriend, and none of them were anywhere near a women’s shelter when they were killed. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons they were easy to kill. Lunch is a takeout pho bowl from Tuk Tuk, a Vietnamese cafe. At four o’clock, Libby Murphy calls.
“I found paint fragments on Daniel’s hoodie.”
“Make and model?”
“White Toyota—a delivery van, I’d say. There were also traces of red exterior paint. A flake contained part of a number that means the van was pimped out with logos or ads. So look for a new Toyota that delivers something. Like flowers or booze.”
“Thanks, Libby. We’ll find it.” I download the list of licensed auto body repair shops in Queens. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of unlicensed shops. The Iron Triangle, bordered by 126th Street and Willets Point Boulevard, contains more than two hundred independent body shops. It will be a long and arduous search, but we’ll find the van and its vile driver. I will be obsessive.
When I return, I park my car in Myra’s driveway and wind my way back into Artemis.
I’m in my basement room, trying to scrub yellow stains out of the sink, when Phyllis knocks and calls out from the top of the stairs, “May I come down?”
“Sure.”
She descends the stairs, a coffee mug in each hand. She hands me one and sits on the bottom stair. “Can you stand a few more questions?”
“Like what?”
“Your name. Your real one.”
“Look, I told you I’m married to a policeman. My trust level is pretty low, so for now my name is Lucy. You can kick me out or let me be anonymous.”
“You’re not the first woman who has been here escaping an abusive cop husband. I don’t trust them, either. In my experience, cops are the most dangerous abusers; they know how to get away with it. If your husband is a cop, you are high risk, not only to yourself, but also to us, so you have to be doubly careful. Understand?”
“You don’t have t
o tell me. The last time he beat me, I called 911. Two of his buddies showed up. We know them socially. I know their wives; our kids play together. You know what? He said we got into an argument. I was violent and attacked him. He had to restrain me. That’s coded language. Cops know what it means. They refused to arrest him, said we should go to marriage counseling. If I filed a report, I would ruin his career. I told them he was going to kill me. They told me to calm down; they would talk to him. I’m finished with the police.”
“I don’t blame you for your reluctance to open up right now. I’d still like to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay.”
“Who knows you’re here? Have you told anyone?”
“No.”
“Do you have outside support? Family?”
“I have a sister in Rochester. She’ll call me when her husband isn’t around. I’m not welcome there thanks to mine. He was awful to them, too. They couldn’t stand him.”
“What about friends?”
“I’ve crashed, hid out, slept on couches. My husband knows who they are and where they live. If I go to any of them, I put them in danger. I won’t do that.”
Phyllis looks at me, her eyes steady behind the delicate octagonal granny glasses, her head slightly cocked, her good ear aimed waiting for more. I know the stare. I’ve used it in interrogations to make the suspect talk. I’m not playing the game. But I want to keep it friendly, so I sneeze.
“Bless you,” Phyllis says.
I got her to speak first.
“Our mission is to create a safe, supportive environment for women in danger. Safety, outside and in. You can’t tell anyone where you are. You have to respect our rules inside. We are all responsible for one another. That means rules, too many, so we aim to strike a balance between ones that keep us safe and those that create another oppressive environment.”
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