Falsely Accused (6 page)

Marlene had a car for this purpose, a beaten-up VW hatch-back, yellow in color, that she had bought in D.C. The vehicle was parked illegally in an alley at the foot of Crosby Street, which Marlene rented at the cost of about ten traffic tickets per year. Marlene knew the beat cops, and took care of them, and only got a ticket when a substitute came on duty, or when there was a ticketing drive on. There was no paper under the wiper this morning, which improved her mood. The dog defecated promptly by the storm drain, which improved it even more.

Then Marlene, the dog, and the child piled in and drove off with a rattle, enveloped in blue stink. Though relatively rich now, she kept the beater, as she maintained that anyone who ran a decent car in the City was a moron. Which she was not.

Eight minutes—east on Canal and south on the Bowery—brought them to the school, to which, in fact, all the Chinese did send their kids. P.S. 1 was about eighty-five percent Asian, the remainder made up of the children of striving Lower Manhattan moms like Marlene, who had worked a scam to get their kids into this font of Confucian order, discipline, and achievement.

A few of these aliens stood out—blond and auburn accents—among the sable tide of little heads that bobbed above the noisy throng milling along the gate and arched entranceway of the venerable building.

“There's Miranda Lanin!” cried Lucy, pointing at one of these, a blondie. She was out of the car in a flash, clutching her homework project but leaving her lunch box on the seat. Sighing, Marlene switched off the car and trotted after her with lunch.

There were Chinese moms at the entrance too, of course, all of them, Marlene noted with shame, better turned out than she was, although nearly all of them worked a job or two, or three, in addition to running a household. She saw Janice Chen and Mrs. Chen and waved. Janice exchanged a rapid trill of Cantonese with her departing mother and then joined Lucy and Miranda on the steps, switching effortlessly to idiomatic American English, a feat that always knocked Marlene out. As the three girls stood chattering and comparing their neighborhood-view projects, Marlene spotted another familiar face.

“Hey, Carrie,” she called.

A pretty blond woman wearing a blue head scarf gave a violent start at hearing her name called, and uttered a sigh of relief, holding her hand dramatically to her breast, when she saw who it was. Marlene had known Carrie Lanin, Miranda's mother, for some years now, in the casual manner of women who live in the same neighborhood and have children of the same sex and age. They had sent their daughters to the same day-care center and play groups and had exchanged pediatrician intelligence. Marlene recalled that she lived in a nice Tribeca loft, without husband, and did something arty with fabrics.

Marlene passed the lunch box to Lucy, who took it without a word, being now immersed in kidworld. A bell rang inside the building, and the children vanished in a murmurous rush.

“Are you okay?” Marlene asked the woman. She was pale and her small features were marked with strain. She seemed to be looking past Marlene down the street, casting anxiously in all directions like an infantry point man seeking snipers.

“Yes,” said Lanin, then “No.” She stared blankly for a moment before her gaze settled on Marlene's yellow VW.

“Is that your car? Could you, urn, give me a lift?” Her blue eyes were red-rimmed and pleading.

“Sure. Get in.”

Marlene cranked the engine and moved off down Henry Street, made a four-corner at Catherine, and headed back up Henry for the Bowery. Lanin sat stiffly in her seat, eyes fixed on the passenger-side mirror.

“Where's your car?” asked Marlene conversationally.

“In the shop. We came by cab.”

“Uh-huh.” They were headed west on Canal. “You're on what? Duane, right?”

“Yeah, 152, off West Broadway.”

Marlene hung a left on Greenwich and turned downtown. The closer they got to Duane Street, the more nervous her passenger became. As they passed Jay Street, she was twitching like a trapped rabbit and craning her neck in an attempt to cover all directions at once.

“Who are we avoiding, Carrie?” Marlene asked gently.

“Oh, God, this guy. It's been going on for a month. I'm losing my fucking marbles behind it.” She sighed heavily and moisture pearled on her golden eyelashes.

“You called the cops?”

“Oh, right, the cops!” snapped Lanin contemptuously. “The cops do not think this is a high priority. Wait, just pull in front of this red truck.” Marlene brought the VW to the curb. Lanin gazed into the car's mirrors and looked out the window, checking the street and the nearby cars.

“Who
is
this guy? Jack the Ripper?” asked Marlene.

“Don't joke! We're talking somebody with a serious screw loose. Look, you're going to think I'm crazy, but could you walk me up to my loft? I have a funny feeling—”

“No problem,” said Marlene, and started to get out of the car. Lanin seemed to notice the big dog for the first time. “He'll be okay in the car? I wouldn't want him to get stolen.”

“I wouldn't worry about that,” said Marlene confidently. She popped the rear hatch and massaged the dog's floppy neck. Sweety sighed and sprayed drool. “Sweety is a doggie-college grad,” said Marlene, ruffling the dog's ears. “Aren't you?
Aren't you
? Yeah, I sprang for the whole nine yards: obedience, guard, attack. Now that I have some assets, all I need is for this monster to take a chunk out of a citizen. Without good reason, of course. So, guaranteed, anybody who broke into that car, we'd find a neat pile of cleaned bones.”

Carrie Lanin's building was a fine old cast-iron-fronted commercial building that had been bought by a speculator a few years back and turned into floor-through condos. Marlene vaguely recalled that Carrie had married some serious money and had done well in the divorce. There was even an elevator, which Lanin summoned with a special cylinder key.

Lanin uttered a loud wail and then a string of curses when the elevator door slid open at her floor. Marlene pushed forward to see what the problem was. It was apparently the long-stemmed rose wrapped in green cellophane, with an envelope attached, leaning against the metal door to Lanin's loft.

“That's from him, huh?”

“Yeah, God damn him! That means he's figured out how to work the elevator.” She snatched up the rose and unlocked her loft door. Marlene put a restraining hand on her shoulder and said quietly, “Why don't you wait here and keep the elevator? If he figured how to work that, he could have figured your door lock too. Let me just check it out.”

Lanin's eyes went wide and she froze, holding the rose in front of her like the prom queen in a horror movie. Marlene went into the loft.

She was not frightened at all. Rather, she found herself wondering why she was not, and why she was putting herself into this peculiar situation for a woman she hardly knew. She took a breath, cleared her mind, and went in.

The loft's main room was a lovely space, full of light from the huge semicircular window facing the street. The floors were shiny oak accented by bright Rya rugs; the furniture was fashionable Danish teak and Haitian cotton. It was an easy place to search: the only private rooms were two bedrooms and a small office-studio. Marlene went through these swiftly, peering under beds and into closets. She had no idea what she would have done had she found an obsessive man lurking there, but, as it turned out, the place was empty.

“Marlene?” a quavering call from the doorway.

“It's okay, there's no one here. I'm in the bedroom.”

Carrie Lanin came stomping into her loft, cursing under her breath. Marlene heard the sound of a sink running and the grind of a disposal. She went out to the kitchen, which was a slick number built around a sink-and-cooktop island, and was in time to see the last of the rose disappearing down the sink.

“What did the note say?” asked Marlene.

“Fuck if I know. It's in the trash. Jesus, I need a drink, I don't care how early it is.” Lanin reached a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's down from an upper cabinet and poured herself a large one over ice. “Want something?” she asked after a deep swallow and a mild coughing fit.

“Not for me, thanks,” said Marlene. “Where's the trash?”

Lanin gestured at a chrome can; Marlene opened it and lifted out the crumpled envelope. “Ecch! What are you doing?” Lanin exclaimed, wrinkling her nose.

“Just curious. I think, by the way, if you're going to have any chance of stopping this guy, you'll want to keep his little offerings.” Marlene smoothed out the envelope and opened it. Inside was a plain card, unsigned and inscribed in black ink, “Love Til the End of time.” The writing was rectilinear and excessively neat, like the inscriptions on a blueprint or circuit diagram.

“Stopping him? What do you mean?” Lanin took another sip and, as the light dawned, she suddenly pointed her finger at her guest. “Oh, I remember now, you're some kind of cop … no, something to do with raped women—”

“I was an assistant D.A. I used to run the rape bureau.”

“But you know people!” said Lanin excitedly. “You can pull some strings …”

Marlene shook her head. “No—hold on, Carrie! My string-pulling days are over. In any case, even if I was still with the office, there probably isn't a whole hell of a lot I could do. Being an annoying asshole is not against the law—unfortunately, maybe, but there it is.”

“But, Marlene, the guy
won't leave me alone
! He calls me every night, sometimes more than once. He uses up my answering machine tape playing ‘Twist and Shout' over and over—”

“Why ‘Twist and Shout'?”

“Oh, because it was ‘our song.'”

“Was it?”

“Was
it
?” Lanin's voice rose to a screech. “
Was it
? Marlene, I don't even
know
this son of a bitch. It's all
in his head!
”

“Wait a minute—he just, like,
seized
on you on the street?”

Lanin sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “You want the whole story? You got an hour?”

As it happened, Marlene's calendar was free for at least the next eight months, so Lanin made some coffee and Marlene sat down on the Haitian cotton sofa, and Carrie Lanin settled herself on the bentwood rocker across from her, sipping from a steaming mug enriched with a tot of sour mash bourbon and told her tale.

“I went to high school in Jersey—Englewood Cliffs. I was sort of a player in high school—captain of the cheerleaders, junior prom queen—like that. People knew me. Okay, a couple of months ago, it must have been before we went to the beach, like June, I'm in Gristede's on Sixth, picking up some things, when this guy comes up to me in the dairy department. ‘Carrie Tiptree?' he says—my maiden name, right? He holds out his hand and says his name's Rob Pruitt, he went to high school with me. So I sort of smile back at him. Of course, I don't remember him at all. I mean, if I ever actually saw him, he was just a face in the crowd. So we started chatting, he carried my packages for me, and I thought, okay, a pleasant guy, chance meeting, nothing special to look at but neat. I mean, he didn't have red eyes and fangs. After I got home, I was curious, so I dragged out the old yearbook and looked him up.”

She paused, and Marlene asked, “He was there? In the yearbook?”

“Oh, yeah. Want to see?” Without waiting for an answer, Lanin went to the bookcase and brought back a volume bound in maroon imitation leather and marked
CLIFFHANGER
in faded gold. She riffled through it and handed it, opened, to Marlene.

“That's him—Robert T. Pruitt, no nickname, no friendly little tag line, one extracurricular activity,” said Lanin.

“The rifle team,” read Marlene. She examined the tiny photograph: Pruitt was a close-faced youth who looked more than usually stupid in his academic cap. Dark and unruly hair squirted out from under this headgear, and the retoucher had not been entirely able to disguise a bad case of acne.

“See? A geek,” said Lanin.

“Is he still geekish?”

“No, and that's what sort of threw me. He looks regular, normal. I mean, he had a neat haircut, and he was wearing, like, chinos, Nikes, and a white shirt. And it made me feel sort of sad—I mean, high school is such hell. I was in and he was out, and I guess the in-crowd just doesn't think about what it's like for the nothing people, the ones who aren't rich, or bright, or gorgeous, or funny. So, uh, I don't know whether it was guilt or what, but he asked me for my number and I gave it to him.”

“And he called, of course.”

“The next day. Asked me out for dinner that Friday. In retrospect, needless to say, I should've heard the alarm bells going off. But I figured, what the fuck, right? New York is not exactly full of straight guys dying to buy nice meals for thirty-one-year-old divorced ladies with kids. Plus, he was at least presentable, and there was that expiation thing, being a little princess in high school and ignoring kids like him. And he lost the pizza face—I figured he deserved something for that, too. So, Friday, he arrives at the door, dead on time. He's still got the chinos and the white shirt, but now he's wearing a leather jacket, not the cool kind, but the kind that looks like a sports jacket. It's like brand-new and shiny. And he's got a fucking Whitman's Sampler box of chocolates and a huge purple orchid in a plastic box.”

Marlene could not suppress a snort of laughter.

“Yeah,
you're
laughing,” said Lanin, whose mood had much improved. “As a matter of fact, I thought it was pretty funny too, at first.”

“Sorry,” said Marlene. “So then what?”

“So then, after I put the goddamn orchid in the fridge, we went out. He's rented a
limo
for the evening. With a driver. Okay, to be brutally honest, this is not something that happens to me a lot. I'm dying of curiosity. So I try to pump him on the ride up, what does he do, where does he live, what's happened since high school. He's not saying. What does he do? A little of this, a little of that. He lives ‘uptown.' Actually, it turns out he only wants to talk about me, and what happened to the people in my crowd back then. So I perform, I bullshit away, but meanwhile, I'm thinking, uh-oh, please let this guy not be in the dope business, because that's all my ex needs to hear, I'm keeping company with Mr. Coke, it's court again and maybe good-bye, Miranda.”