Boyfriend from Hell (8 page)

“Except if it’s happening to you.”

After Ronnie left the station house, Rourke said, “I know. This is impossible. But lean on him. Tell him we’ll be questioning him for every violent crime that takes place anywhere in the city for the next five years. He’ll get the idea.”

“If
he’s involved,” Gomez responded. “Could be somebody else.”

“Likelihood is it’s one of his screwballs. He can get the word out that he doesn’t want her harassed. Maybe this’ll just go away.”

Everybody with whom Ronnie had professional contact during the course of a day or a week or a month would be going to their offices where other people in their offices would be present. She would be home, by herself, unless she called for police protection while she went out to buy a container of milk. She sent Richard an e-mail:

Came home to find a man outside my building menacing me. Threw a little death skull at me and ran away. It was a good time in New Orleans, but this isn’t good.


No instant messaging back. She checked a couple of times before going to sleep. He did not send a reply.

The dream came again that night, the shattered glass, with an added element, a huge death skull filling the screen of her nightmare, jarring her into wakefulness.

She went into the kitchen for a drink of water and when she turned on the light a mouse darted across the floor. Great. New York slices of life. Maybe she should have
owned
a black cat, she pondered. She set out glue traps the superintendent of the building had given her on a previous mouse sighting and went back to bed, falling asleep a second time close to 6:00
A.M.
and waking with the alarm at 7:15.

She ate breakfast and went right to her computer for the Public Art Fund piece. Nancy came in from Bob’s place to change before going to work and they talked about the weekend. New Orleans with Richard was not the lead, it was the death skull. Nancy suggested that Bob stay over a while; he had spent nights there in the past, and he could just be around in the evenings. Ronnie thought that would be good, as much for the idea of not feeling isolated as for the actual security his being there would provide.

Richard Smith called her Monday morning before nine.

“This is bad stuff. I wish I were there. I’d go right up to Cummings and deck him.”

“He’s a big guy. I don’t think he gets decked easily, but I appreciate the thought.”

“The police?”

“They’re going to watch out for me. For a while anyway. And talk to him again.”

“Good.”

“My roommate’s boyfriend is going to stay over, too, a few nights, I’d guess. Tell me where you are again?”

“Portland, Oregon. Interviewing people. Are you working?”

“I am.”

“Good. Don’t let yourself be reduced to the level of this idiocy. I’m going to be back there soon enough.”

Detective Santini phoned Ronnie to say they interrogated Cummings to make him feel uncomfortable. He denied involvement. They told Cummings if the harassment didn’t stop he was going to bring all kinds of problems on himself; a satanic cult operating in New York City didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the authorities.

The first few days after the menacer appeared she was still apprehensive when she went into the street, even with a police car nearby, then she began to feel imprisoned, uneasy with the need to call for protection every time she went out. This was her neighborhood, her city, she didn’t want her freedom of movement taken away from her, they weren’t going to do that to her. Bob was staying at the apartment and after a few nights without incident, she released Bob of his obligation; she thought it was too disruptive of his life. Rourke called to say they couldn’t continue shadowing her, she should let them know if anything untoward occurred. Richard e-mailed a couple of times, saying he was a little off schedule and would be returning to New York imminently.

The Art Fund piece was completed and submitted and she waited to hear about any possible changes. She was eating Chinese food in bed, channel surfing, and on the screen, hooded and glaring, was Randall Cummings. He was being interviewed in a television studio by the same woman reporter who came to the church when Ronnie was there, the peppy Sonya Brill. Why he would be given airtime was answered for Ronnie by the cloyingly friendly manner in which he was being interviewed. Cummings had made a pass at Ronnie, which he didn’t seem to expect would work. Something evidently worked there; Sonya Brill had ventured into the occult on a personal basis, Ronnie surmised. The woman was carrying on brightly as if Cummings were an actor in a newly released movie—it was great fun making it, we all had a good time on the set, and we hope the public will really, really like it.

“And you feel people who join your cult are helped?”

“Absolutely. We show results. People are looking for answers in these troubled times, and for many of them, we have the answers.”

“And they tell you this?”

For Ronnie it was starting to look like an infomercial.

“Yes, they do. We don’t live in an especially moral society. All I’m doing is empowering the little guy with Satan.”

Sonya Brill smiled at him warmly. Ronnie could have thrown a shoe at the television set, thinking here was a man who condoned, if he did not actually take part in himself, a series of stupid, loathsome acts designed to retaliate for an article Ronnie had written, and he was being given a forum for his self-promotion.

“A recent article in
New York
magazine was somewhat critical of you and your cult, Mr. Cummings. Did you happen to see it?”

“I glanced at it. The writer came with preconceived notions, a definite bias. Doing some dirty work to further her career.”

The compliant Sonya Brill concluded the interview by allowing Cummings to plug his Web site along with the cult’s phone number.

New York
magazine accepted the Public Art Fund piece and during the editorial process the fact-checker double-checked a quote by calling Tony Weston, the artist Ronnie interviewed for the article. Weston used this as an opening to call Ronnie and invite her to dinner, leaving a message on her answering machine. Richard kept promising he would be back in New York, holding her off with brief, uninformative e-mails. Under house rules, if you didn’t sleep with more than one man at a time, did this apply to Richard, since Ronnie was still hard-pressed to define whether they were actually sleeping together? If a tree falls in the forest … How could you be sleeping with someone who wasn’t there, and if he were there, was he really there if he traveled this much?

“Beats me,” Nancy said. They were eating dinner at home on a Monday night. “It has all the contours of just a pure sexual relationship.”

“Or a sexual relationship with a married man.”

“Think he’s married?”

“Maybe. And he comes to New York on business.”

“So then he’s a liar
and
an adulterer,” Nancy said.

“He claims, no. But I’d like to be sure. You can’t have an affair with a married man.”

“It has been done.”

“It’s anti-feminist,” Ronnie said lightly.

“Ah, I should have known that.”

“What I seem to have here is an unreliable sexual relationship. The ‘unreliable’ is the relationship, not the sexual. You know, this is clarifying,” she teased. “I’ll give him a little more time. It’s not like he doesn’t e-mail me—every once in a while.”

Richard finally called to say he was in New York, three weeks since New Orleans, nonchalant about the time lag, breezily telling her that he was very eager to get together, he had something exciting to tell her.

“You’re getting a divorce.”

“What? I’m not married, Ronnie. Where did you get that from? Can we have lunch tomorrow at Aureole? One o’clock. I’d say dinner, but I can’t wait.”

“Lunch it is.”

Proof of marriage, she supposed, was the marriage license, or commonly, the wedding ring. What was proof of not-marriage, the man’s word?

He was waiting near the front door of the restaurant in his blazer and jeans.

“Great to see you,” he said, kissing her. “I have interesting news,” as they were led to a table.

He kept her in a little bit of suspense while they ordered drinks; no alcohol for her in the middle of the day and he also declined, both settling on iced teas.

“Here it is. My publisher, a man named Antoine Burris, very smart, very elegant type of fellow, loved your piece on Cummings, which, of course, I told him to look at.”

“Good of you.”

“It’s really a publisher-editor job he has, small press, interesting projects, good marketing. They took my book and got it onto the trade paperback bestseller list, so they must know something.”

“It was a good book.”

“Still, there are a lot of good books. So—he has a taste for the offbeat. And what he’d like to do is a book on the history of satanic possession. There isn’t a good contemporary one. And he wants you to write it.”

“That’s very nice of you, Richard. However—”

“It’s too soon for a ‘however.’ This is terrific stuff. You have everything from stories of convents in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France where the Devil swept through possessing nuns like an epidemic, to the world today where possessions in one form or another are constantly showing up.”

“However, I have never written a book.”

“Nobody has, until they do.”

“And an additional however, I don’t believe in satanic possession. Try hysteria. Delusional behavior. I think a shrink would be better suited.”

“No, he loved the tone of your piece: bright, appropriately skeptical.”

“Do you have any proof you’re not married?”

“Would you not jump around?”

“You’re really not? You’re just inconstant because of the nature of your lecturing, conferencing, researching, et cetera?”

“Absolutely.”

“Tell me about this trip.”

He gave her an accounting and she said, “The thing about you, is that you seem so smart to me, your beat could be anything. I just don’t think you fit, physically, with your subject matter. Great blazer, light salad for lunch, what are you working such a dark side of the street for?”

“Because it’s fascinating. And you’d find this book fascinating. Look into it a little. I can recommend some things to read. And—what’s this? My publisher just walked in.”

“Oh, Richard, this is too obvious.”

“Talk to him.”

Antoine Burris was a broad-shouldered man in his fifties, five feet eleven, bald, wire-rim glasses; wearing an expensive gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie. After the introductions he occupied a seat at their table.

“An honor, Ms. Delaney. As Richard must have told you, I loved, no, respected your article, which is better than loving it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Burris.”

“Publishing being what it is, if I put this out with agents, in the morning I’d have two hundred writers recommended. But you’re my first choice, based on what I’ve read; the perfect fit of style with material.”

“This is all very flattering—”

“There was a marvelous book years ago,
Possession and Exorcism
by Traugott Oesterreich. William Blatty, when he wrote
The Exorcist,
was an admirer of it. But we don’t have anything that’s contemporary and smart. I know you can write. What I would need, from my end, is an outline, which we would pay you for, naturally. I don’t want you doing any work without being paid. Your agent is …”

Nancy’s boss, Jenna Hawkins, intervened on fees for a couple of Ronnie’s articles. Ronnie assumed Hawkins would handle a book deal for her, should she decide to proceed.

“Jenna Hawkins.”

“Excellent. Have her call me. Let’s go into business.” He shook hands and departed.

“Do you have somebody else coming in, to complete the salesmanship?

“I think it’s a wonderful opportunity. If you could come by at seven tonight, I could get you started on some things to think about.”

After she said good-bye to Richard at the restaurant Ronnie went to the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, where the computer indicated far more books in the collections than she ever would have imagined, the material catalogued in library terminology as “demoniac possession.” She took notes and was going to return with her laptop since several of the books were noncirculating volumes. She called Nancy and asked if she could drop by the office if her boss had a few minutes to spare.

Jenna Hawkins was in her late sixties, five feet seven, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. She had been an agent for forty plus years, with a wide-ranging client list from best-selling authors of popular novels to historians of such things as Chinese agricultural practices, a nine-hundred-page book Nancy was obliged to read as her first project when she went to work there. Ronnie described the lunch and the guest appearance by Antoine Burns.

“Very professional, to offer to pay for your time on the proposal. They did do a good job on your friend Richard Smith’s book. A little strange, though, some of their titles. A book on satanic possession is right in their sweet spot, which tells you something about them. What really counts here—is this something that interests you?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t take possession seriously. What is to be taken seriously, is that some people do.”

“I think that’s the crux of it. If you can write a book and tell the way people have behaved
in
possession and
around
possession, you’d have something.”

“Let me think some more.”

“You have to ask yourself if you want to stop writing articles for a while, lose out on getting the immediate gratification—which we know you get, everybody who does it gets it—for a longer lead time with a book.”

“Shouldn’t we find out the money?” Nancy offered.

“Yes, let’s see what we’re talking about. Who is this Richard Smith? Is it serious, Ronnie?”

“I’m not sure who he is, so I wouldn’t say it’s serious.”

“Well, he may have helped put a serious offer on the table, so that’s serious support anyway.”

Richard led her into the living room, poured some wine, and brought out some of the volumes he thought she would be interested in looking at, as well as a printout of titles she might consider exploring. He thought they could have a kind of working dinner, going over the material, and he ordered a meal from a French restaurant nearby. This fascinated her. She thought in terms of pizza and Chinese take-out. The idea of ordering a real meal—salad, lamb chops, dessert—from a restaurant would never have occurred to her.