Victims (13 page)

“Mr. Stein,” she said, “I am not a teenager. Saturday night is not by definition my big night. I have worked more Saturdays, Sundays, holidays than I care to remember. I’ll meet you on Barclay Street. There are some reports I have and—”

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. That way you can listen to the tape of my interview with this bus driver, Palermo.”

He speeded up the tape until the part where the two men had gotten down to business: Mike Stein’s voice soft, easy, good guy, trust me, and Palermo relaxing and telling Stein whatever he wanted to know. Stein and Miranda sat in his car on Barclay Street and let the tape run out.

“So. What do you think of this guy—finishing his route while the girl sat there and bled to death. What the hell do you make of a guy like that?”

Miranda shrugged. “What would you have me say, Mr. Stein?”

“How about what you feel? Tell me what you feel when you hear this guy, picture him swinging that bus right past the girl and—”

“I think that if we don’t go up to the Rollands’ apartment, we might cause them to miss their TV program. Yes?”

The door opened so abruptly after their first touch on the doorbell that it seemed the woman, Mrs. Rolland, had been standing just inside, waiting for them.

“Well. Right on time. Practically,” she said. “Come on in, then.”

Miranda tripped over a pair of shiny brown men’s shoes which had been set next to a pair of freshly whitened women’s shoes, on one side of the long narrow hallway.

“Not to worry,” Mrs. Rolland said in an annoyed tone. She indicated that they should continue to the living room while she just stopped for a moment and lined up the shoes the way they were supposed to be lined up.

They stepped carefully on the heavy plastic path that had been laid out over the immaculate light-gray wall-to-wall carpet. Follow the yellow brick road.

The room had the unlived-in coldness of a photograph in a moderate-priced supermarket-sold magazine: proof that you could live nicely on a tight budget; it might be inexpensive, but it could be shiny and well preserved, clean and protected. In the dim haze from the lamps in the room, all surfaces glowed from vigorous application of furniture polish. There were little handmade doilies under the lamps. All the lampshades were just as fresh and clean inside their cellophane wrappings as on the day they were bought. There were heavy custom-made clear plastic slipcovers over most of the upholstered furniture. The recliner chair was slipcovered with a floral fabric, and extra material was set at places of greatest anticipated wear. There was a neatly crocheted rectangle where the head might rest should anyone be daring enough to touch head to chair. It seemed unlikely.

A TV magazine from the
Sunday News
had been slipped under a spotless glass ashtray on the cocktail table. There were no books, newspapers or magazines anywhere.

Mike sat on the fabric-covered chair that was offered to him. It was too damn hot to even think about sitting on heavy plastic, custom-made or not. The humming of an air conditioner came from the bedroom. The two living-room windows, fronting on Barclay Street, were hidden behind heavy-weight drapery. The air was oppressively stale, with lingering whiffs of lemony cleaning oils and spray-ones and paste-up room deodorizers.

Mrs. Rolland jerked her thumb at Miranda, her eyes on Mike Stein. “Who’s she?”

“I’m sorry. This is Detective Miranda Torres.”

Mr. Rolland murmured something; Mrs. Rolland blinked, then turned her attention back to Mike.

Miranda regained the blank, polite expression that in some strange way rendered her nearly invisible.

“As I told you on the telephone,” Mrs. Rolland told him, “you’re lucky we’re here at all. We’re still on vacation, both of us, from our jobs. Had to cut the vacation short by three days.” She jutted her chin at her husband but didn’t look at him. “His father. Heart attack. Third one.”

“I’m sorry,” Mike offered. Mrs. Rolland shrugged. She seemed to be waiting for an obvious question. He guessed right. “Where did you go for your vacation?”

“Disneyland. Down to Florida.” Her expression changed. She was beaming.

“Second time we’ve been there,” Mr. Rolland added. His wife shot him a quick look and Mr. Rolland didn’t say another word.

“Well, would you like something cool to drink?” She poked her husband with her elbow. “Get them some of that lemonade I made.”

“No, thank you,” Mike said. Miranda echoed him.

Mr. Rolland didn’t know what to do. He looked from Mike to his wife, started to rise, sank back, tried again.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, sit down. You heard him say no, didn’t you?”

Mr. Rolland sat down.

Mrs. Rolland was tall, long-boned and thin with the look of a woman who had once been tremendously fat. She sat in a certain way, held her arms across her body as though expecting to find more flesh to hide than was there. She had a haggard face with empty folds of skin at the neck, surprisingly fine clear skin, and eyes magnified by the thick lenses of her rimless glasses. Perhaps she would look kinder with a few more pounds of flesh; being thin gave her a mean, pinched look. She pursed her lips a few times and checked her husband to make sure he wasn’t out of line in any way.

Mr. Rolland looked like a man who had been skinny all his life. He had the gawky look of a schoolboy, the kind who stayed on the edges of the playing field, trying not to get in anyone’s way, praying the action didn’t reach the backfield. When his wife shifted slightly, he turned to her apologetically, then pulled himself away to make more room. Under her breath, in a low, harsh voice which carried, Mrs. Rolland said to her husband, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you dummy, sit still.”

Mike set up his tape recorder, asking permission to place it on the cocktail table. “This okay here?”

“Yes, yes.” She watched with worried eyes.

“Thank you very much for this cooperation.” He spoke quickly and softly into the microphone, naming the persons present, time, place, date. “Just ignore this thing. It’s very sensitive and can pick up from anywhere in the room. Now. Your living-room windows face on Barclay Street?”

Mrs. Rolland got up from the couch the way a severely obese person would.

“Come see for yourself.” She moved the heavy light-colored drapes to one side, yanked up the Venetian blind and showed him her spotless, shining view onto Barclay Street. The windows were directly above the lamppost where Anna Grace had sat dying. The Rollands had second-story center seats to the event.

“You really had a good view of what went on.”

“Oh yes. Oh yes. Better than some of those down the block, who claim to have seen so much, I’ll tell you. And I’ll tell you this too. This kind of thing—” she waved her hand toward the window, dropped the blind back into place, adjusted the drapes—“well, back home, where I come from, well, there just aren’t any of these... these street kinds of people lurking around waiting to just pounce on people. Never used to be in good old Forest Hills either, right, Fred?”

“Well, no, really. But...”

Mrs. Rolland glared at him. “Fred is
from
Forest Hills. Born and bred. And his mother and father before him. Regular natives, that’s all I ever heard, Forest Hills, Forest Hills. Of course,
they
live in the Gardens, which
is
another world.” She jutted her chin toward the windows. “A few blocks, but another world. And they’ll leave their house to his younger brother. Because his brother has four children.
That
qualifies
him
for the house. Well, never mind all that,” she said, as though someone else had brought up the subject. “That’s water under the bridge, isn’t it? But where
I
come from, those people, street muggers and such...Well, enough said.”

“Where
are
you from, Mrs. Rolland?”

She turned to Miranda and considered carefully, then, as though admitting some deep and wonderful truth, something that would give her, among them, status, “I was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. That’s where
my
people still are. Fred had his job here, you see, all set when he got out of the Army. And
his
roots were here and that house in the Gardens. He
is
the oldest son. For all the good that ever did us.”

She resettled herself on the couch, and Fred moved away carefully.

“You had a clear view of everything that happened Wednesday night?” Miranda asked.

Mrs. Rolland leaned forward. She began to speak rapidly, and now and then, as she slowed down, Mr. Rolland tentatively interjected bits and pieces of information and observation.

They had been watching a movie on their VHS recorder. They heard a loud sound, like a scream, but they weren’t too sure. They turned the movie off for a minute; it was time for some lemonade anyway. They heard the sound again, so Fred went to the window, pushed the drapes aside, pulled up the blinds and opened the window.

“Lets out the cool air, you know, so we keep it closed tight. It’s amazing how cool the whole apartment is, with just the bedroom air conditioner.”

“For Pete’s sake, Fred, they’re not interested in any of that. Well, Fred couldn’t make sense at all of what was going on down there. ‘I’m not sure what it is I’m looking at.’ That’s
exactly
what he said.” She shot her husband a scornful look. “Now, how can you look at something and not be sure what it is you’re looking at, I’d like to know. So I looked, and I can tell you, it looked pretty clear-cut to me.”

“Well, yes, I guess so,” Fred said.

“Oh, you guess so.” She leaned over and pinched her husband’s arm. Not hard, not meanly, just a pinch, something between them. Something was going on: some signals; something personal. Miranda was as still and calm as a statue, but there was an awareness in her lack of motion. She sensed an elusive something between Mr. and Mrs. Rolland.

“What did you see, Mrs. Rolland?” Miranda asked.

“Well, there they were. This girl. Small thing in a light-colored dress, sleeveless, and this man, seemed to be wearing a white suit or light colored suit, maybe seersucker or something, or silk maybe. I don’t know. At first, it looked like...they were...now, I know this will sound funny.” She smiled, put her hand over her mouth, then, “Like they were
dancing.”

“Funny sort of dancing, I said to Flora,” Mr. Rolland volunteered. “Seemed to me the girl was trying to pull away.”

“Oh, sure,
now
it seems that she was trying to pull away, but that wasn’t what you thought then, and you
know
it.”

Mr. Rolland made a strange sound. Deep in his throat, he was either coughing or laughing. It was hard to tell. “Well, it looked like she was pulling away from him and then it looked like, at one point, she...grabbed hold of him. You know.”

“Grabbed hold of him?”

“Well, it seemed that way,” Mrs. Rolland said. “In a very personal way, if you take my meaning. She sort of reached down and...” The woman covered her mouth with a long red hand and shrugged. “Funny what it looked like from up here. When you realize what it really was. I guess she was trying to fight him off, to hurt him, of course, but it sure seemed like those two were sort of, well...”

“Playing some sort of game. That’s what it seemed like,” Mr. Rolland said with conviction.

There was an abrupt silence. The Rollands glanced at each other and then at Mike and then at Miranda.

“You mean,” Miranda asked, “it seemed to you that this was some kind of mutual sexual encounter? That the woman was taking part, willingly, in some sort of game?”

Mrs. Rolland reached over and pinched her husband’s arm and he smiled.

“Well,” he said, “it was a little hard to tell from up here.”

“But...did you hear the woman scream? Did you hear what the man was saying?” Miranda asked.

Mrs. Rolland shrugged and smiled. “Oh, well, it sounded like a whole lot of gibberish to us, of course. I guess you’d know, being it was
your
language, but we only understand English. Been good enough for us up to now, so I guess we just aren’t going to bother to learn Spanish in order to read directions in the subway and voter information and such. They’re printing it all up in Spanish, you know. I guess that makes it easier for you people,” she said to Miranda.

“Yes.
Gracias.
It makes it easier for my people. Your people are very kind to my people.”

Her voice was so flat, her face so expressionless, that Mrs. Rolland was at a loss. She nodded a few times, then smiled, not sure of herself.

“At what point, Mrs. Rolland,” Mike said, getting her attention before Miranda might say anything else, “at what point did you think something
was wrong?
At what point did it seem that the young woman was crying out for help? Or that she was in trouble? Surely, her screaming must have told you that something was wrong?”

The Rollands exchanged glances. Mr. Rolland shrugged and deferred to his wife.

“Well, we just didn’t watch anymore. I mean, it just seemed that these two people were...well, it didn’t seem our business, you know. We didn’t know, of course, that the girl was in trouble. Who knows nowadays? Look, these people, those people Wednesday night, maybe it was what we thought at first and then something went wrong. It could have been, you know. People nowadays...”

Miranda stood up and crossed the room to the cabinet containing their video collection.

“Did you switch the movie back on your VHS? What picture were you watching?” She read aloud, in a singsong voice,
“Chains of Conquest; Whips of Night; Boys Will Be Boys; Prince of the Torture Palace; Boys on Ice; Schoolboys and their Chums; Girls and Girls Together; Girl at Play...
” Miranda shook her head. “I don’t get it. What are you people into? Looks like you just enjoy the hell out of everything and anything.”

She reached for a tape, shook her head, dropped her hand. “I’m glad I don’t see a dog around here. Please, lady and mister, don’t try
any
of
that
with a
small
dog. Promise!”

There was an intense silence when Miranda finally stopped speaking. Mike Stein was more interested in Miranda than in the Rollands’ reaction. She had come slightly unglued.