Safe House (7 page)

“I never know how to do this,” she said, moving down the hall over a carpet runner the exact color of slag. “When I go downstairs to get something. If I lock up behind me, he won’t be able to get in my apartment. But then, if he’s in the building, I won’t have time to unlock everything before he gets me. But if I don’t lock up, he can be inside. Waiting for me. That would be . . . worse, I think.”

She pulled a ring of keys from the lab coat. One lock was above the doorknob, another was set higher, a big deadbolt with a heavy strike-plate around it. She opened them both, pushed the door aside to let me pass.

The apartment opened into the living room. “Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a futon couch covered in plain white canvas. “Can I take your coat?”

“That’s all right,” I told her, slipping it off, folding it over my forearm and dropping it next to me as I sat down.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I . . . I’m not sure where to begin.” She walked in a little circle, then abruptly sat down on a straight chair made out of a single piece of white molded plastic. She tugged at the hem of her lab coat, pulling it down across her knees as she looked across at me. Her eyes were scars.

“Pardon the cliché,” I said gently, “but at the beginning is always best.”

Her dull mouth twisted in what might have been a smile. “I’m sure. I expected . . . I don’t know. Someone who . . .”

“Some kind of thug?”

“No! I mean, Crystal Beth said you would be . . . I guess I just don’t have any . . . image of this. It all seems so . . . insane anyway.”

“I’m sure it does,” I said soothingly. “Still . . .”

“Yes. Still. It
is
happening, insane or not. And I need . . .”

“I know. Just tell me, all right?”

“Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”

“I’m sure.”

“Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“Of course not,” I said politely, staying in that role, balm to her fear.

She got up quickly, left the room. I heard kitchen sounds. I glanced around the room. One empty white wall was dominated by a huge framed poster of the
QE II,
flags flying, just about to leave port. A set of shelves loaded with what looked like textbooks. One of those high-end mini-stereos—I recognized the distinct Bose wave shape. The floors were highly polished hardwood, the windows framed with mauve muslin curtains, pulled fully open. On an upended white plastic milk crate stood an elaborate phone-and-answering-machine, set up to work cordless as well. The plastic and canvas stuff wasn’t to save money—it was just her taste.

She came back into the living room, a steaming dark-brown mug in her hands. Took the seat she had before.

“This goes back almost three years,” she said. “To when I was a resident.”

A doctor, then, not a nurse.

“I met him about where you’d expect. In a bar. Only a few blocks from here. You don’t get much time for dating in medical school. You don’t get much time for anything, actually. Most of the other women were married. Or engaged. Or . . . connected in some way. I was . . . lonely. Not so much for a lover, for companionship. There were so many good things in my life, so much to look forward to. And nobody to share them with.”

As if on cue, a magnificent seal-point Siamese cat pranced into the room. It slinked over to her chair, rubbed against her leg. “Well, not
nobody,
” she said. “Isn’t that right, Orion?”

The cat purred.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Orion is so jealous. You’d think I’d be used to it. . . .”

Her voice trailed away into silence. I let it go for a few seconds, then I prodded her with: “He was jealous . . . ?”

“Not at first. I mean, it didn’t come up. Not really. He didn’t want me to see other men, but that wasn’t exactly a big problem,” she said ruefully. “It was kind of . . . sweet that he was so possessive. I
wanted
to be possessed, I thought. Treasured. Cherished. At first, that’s how it felt.”

“What does he do?” I asked her.

“To me? He . . . Oh, you mean work, right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a stockbroker. No, that’s not right. A . . . portfolio manager. A ‘player,’ that’s what he always called himself. He would always say he was ‘making a play’ instead of buying something. For a client. He had only a small number of clients. He wasn’t one of those cold-callers, you know, the . . .”

“Salesmen?”

“Yes. He made that very clear. It was so important to him. He was a player, not a salesman. He had to study the . . . charts, he called them. Like a gambler betting on a horse. He said there was
always
money. The same amount of money. Nobody really
makes
money, that’s what he said. It’s the same money, it just changes hands. Some people win, some people lose.”

“Did you ever invest money with him?”

“Oh no. I mean, he never asked me. It wasn’t like that. He did help me with it, though. Money, I mean. Do you know what a SEP is?”

“No,” I lied.

“It’s a pension plan for the self-employed. It’s really a wonderful deal. One of the few breaks the IRS still gives. I didn’t have one, and he showed me how to set one up.”

“With his brokerage house?”

“No,” she said, an annoyed tone to her voice. “Stan wasn’t after my money. He has plenty of his own. He’s
very
successful in his business.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized.

“He spent more on me than I was making,” she said, the defensive tone still in her voice. “When we went on vacation, he insisted he pay for everything. He was old-fashioned, he said. The man should always pay.”

“When did it start to go wrong?”

“The first time he hit me,” she said, looking down at her hands.

“Which was . . . ?”

“Right after we had sex.”

“He was—?”

“No!” she interrupted me. “I’m telling it all wrong. It wasn’t a . . . sexual thing. He didn’t hit me after we . . . made love. Or before it either. I just meant, he never hit me all the time we were dating. He didn’t start until we became . . . intimate.”

“And then it was . . . ?”

“He . . . We had an argument. Over something silly. I don’t even remember what it was about. But I remember we were in his apartment. He has a condo. In TriBeCa. Right near the—”

“What did he do?” I cut her off. She was going to skirt the edges, and I needed her near the center.

“He just . . . shoved me, I guess. And shook me. He was yelling at me and suddenly he grabbed me by the shoulders and . . . I was terrified.”

“So he stopped?”

“Yes. He did stop. And he apologized too. It was the stress of his job. He’s responsible for tens of millions of dollars every day. It’s very intense work, and he has to be in control every minute. His job is a pressure cooker.”

“And he had to blow off steam every once in a while?”

“That’s right. That’s what he—”

“But it escalated?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times in your line of work.”

Seeing as she’d been nice enough to upgrade me from thug to psychologist—or downgrade me to lawyer, I couldn’t tell which—I decided to let that one pass.

“It wasn’t really the . . . violence,” she finally said. “He did hit me, eventually. Even punched me in the face, once. I didn’t have to go to the hospital . . . and didn’t
want
to, all right?” she continued. “It was . . . humiliating. I had told the other residents that we were . . . together. They don’t train you to ask for help, they train you to give it. And to stay . . . detached.”

“Okay.”

“No, it
wasn’t
okay. I should have stopped it earlier. But . . . I just didn’t. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. . . . ?”

“Smith.”

“Of course,” she said, in that self-hating tone. Why should this hard-faced man tell her the truth? He wasn’t there to help her. He didn’t care about her. He just wanted the money. “Smith. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. Smith?”

“Not medically.”

“Cancer is simply unregulated growth. That’s all it is. The human body has mechanisms within it to regulate growth. When they malfunction, the cancer starts to work. If you don’t stop its growth, it eats the host. That’s what my . . . relationship was. Unregulated growth. He got more . . . controlling every day. At first I . . . liked it. Then I didn’t know how to stop it. It was . . . swallowing me. There wouldn’t have been anything of me left.”

“The police . . . ?”

“It wasn’t the violence!” she said sharply. “Not the
physical
violence. He could stop that. He even . . . did, sometimes. It was the . . . picking away at me. Eating my . . . self. I was too fat. So I lost weight. I was too rotten a dancer. So I took lessons. I always said the wrong thing. I was always . . . embarrassing him, he said. I didn’t really love him, he said that too. So I did . . . whatever he wanted. To prove it to him. I made myself into exactly what he wanted.” She took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before she let it out. “And then I didn’t want to be what I was. But he wouldn’t let me go.”

“He threatened to hurt you?”

“Hurt me? Yes, that’s about right. Not kill me. That wouldn’t be his style. You can’t totally dominate a dead person.”

This wasn’t the story Crystal Beth had told me, but I kept my face bland, asked: “How would he hurt you, then?”

“He has . . . pictures of me. They weren’t a secret. I mean, I knew he was taking them. But . . . you can’t imagine. The things I did. For him, I thought. So I could prove I really loved him.”

“Still or video?” I said, getting down to business.

“What?”

“The pictures. Polaroids, transparencies, black-and-whites, eight-millimeter, camcorder . . . what?”

“Oh. Both. I mean, he had a regular camera, and a video camera too.”

“Okay. What else?”

“What
else?
”

“Yeah, what else? So he’s got some sexy pictures of you. Maybe that would upset your parents or something, but there’s nothing illegal—”

“I wrote some prescriptions,” she said, looking down.

“For . . . ?”

“For him. Oh! I see what you . . . For tranquilizers.”

“So . . . ?”

“And amphetamines. And painkillers.”

“So . . . ?”

“I wrote the prescriptions for . . . people who don’t exist. Just . . . names he gave me.”

“How often—”

“I did it
all
the time,” she said quietly. “He needed them for . . . clients, he said. Part of the entertainment package, he called it.”

“And he’d go to the law? That’d drop his anchor too.”

“His name isn’t on any of them,” she said. “I could lose my license. . . .”

“Are you sure he’d do it?”

“He would do anything,” she said, her voice tense with the calm certainty of the doomed. “Anything at all.”

“Like cancel your credit cards? Or steal your mail?”

“He never did that,” she said, a puzzled tone to her voice.

“Your cousin said that—”

“My cousin? I don’t have a cousin? Who . . . ?”

“Crystal Beth.”

“Crystal
Beth?
She’s not my cousin. I met her when I was volunteering at the center. And when the same thing started to happen to me, I . . .”

“Yeah, I guess it’s just a word she uses. ‘Cousin.’ Like ‘sister,’ you know? It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “What you want is for him to stop, right?”

“Yes!”

“You understand, there’s probably no way to get the pictures back. Not all of them. They could be anywhere.”

“I know.”

“And the scrips. You already wrote them. There’s already a record. The best you can get is that he goes away, leaves you alone. That’s enough?”

“I told Crystal Beth. I already made all my mistakes. All I want is for him to leave my life.”

“Give me what you have on him,” I said.

S
he had a lot, but it wasn’t much. Volume, not substance. The photos were a help, but she didn’t have a spare set of keys to his apartment. Or his car.

What she had was mostly “Dating Game” keepsakes. Only thing, she finally figured out, she
was
the game.

Like the pimps say, it’s
all
game.

She gave me the letters too. At first they were lovely little hollow things. On creamy stationery with his name embossed in florid script. Handwritten with a fountain pen in a self-assured flowing hand. Bullshit homilies. Talk-show clichés. Recycled garbage.

The philosophers say “Whatever will be, will be.” My darling, all I know is that
we
will be. Together.

But the temperature dropped as he got closer to what he was. The last one was computer-font typed on plain paper. Using what the chump probably thought was an untraceable laser printer.

Broken promises make broken people, you dirty miserable fucking lousy bitch.

A
ll you ever need to scan someone who plays above ground is the usual registration paper. A Social Security number can do it. Or a driver’s license. Or whatever. It’s easy. Some of that government ID stuff. And some cash.

Wolfe pulled the records for me in forty-eight hours, sneering “amateur” as she handed them over. I asked her, since I was protecting a battered woman and all, if she didn’t want to cut me some slack on the fee. She didn’t, but she threw me one of her beautiful smiles as a bonus.

The ex-boyfriend looked good on paper. Went a little deep into his platinum AmEx every once in a while, but nothing radical. He’d overpaid for his condo like every yuppie twerp who bought before 1988 and his BMW M3 was leased, but he was pulling a heavy salary and a yearly six-figure bonus too; so, even with semi-annual runs to St. Bart’s, Armani on his back, Patek Philippe on his wrist, regular heavy restaurant tabs and the occasional limo down to Atlantic City, he was well inside the margin.

On paper, anyway.

Sometimes you get lucky. Like if a mark has a Jones for strippers and he puts all the lap-dances on his credit card so he can take his fun as a tax deduction. Or if you find big holes in the financial records—the kind of holes coke eats in your nose after a while. Nothing like that with this boy, though.