Authors: Katia Lief
“I love you, honey,” I called after him.
“Love you, too.” He turned and smiled tenderly, just like when he was little. Then he headed off to school.
I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the phone. First I called Sara and we filled each other in, agreeing that Joe had stalked me from the Vineyard to New York. Then I called Elliot at home to let him know that my problem with Joe had escalated and I was contacting the police. He hesitated before responding but soon mustered encouragement.
“Do what you have to do, Darcy. Just keep me informed. First thing on my agenda this morning is to see Paul Ardsley in person. No more delays. This will be dealt with from our side, OK?”
“OK. Thanks, Elliot.”
And then I called the police. I said very little before the officer who answered the phone told me to make my way to the local precinct. She told me something I hadn’t known – that I lived in the jurisdiction of the 84th Precinct – and also that I was “lucky” because they had an in-house stalking expert there.
“Detective Jesus Ramirez,” she said. “Ask for him specifically.”
I fed Mitzi and Ahab, showered and dressed, packed up my laptop and was finally ready to leave when I had another surprise.
In the vestibule between the door and gate, the backside of a bulky envelope faced me from the ground. I stopped short, sucked in my breath; it was as if I had come upon a snake preparing to strike. Sun coming through the curlicue ironwork gate threw a shivering pattern of light on the tan skin of the envelope. Someone must have shoved it through the oversized mail slot after Nat left the house or he would have brought it into the foyer. I bent at the knee and carefully lifted it, turned it.
What had Joe left me now?
But it was only the package of new jeans I’d ordered for Nat last week. The relief I felt was itself sickening, interwoven with a certainty that, if not now, the menace would find me later.
Joe would never leave me alone
; and just as I thought that, a clanking sound outside my front gate sent my pulse racing.
He was here
. I knew it. I dropped the package and swung open the gate to confront him – a thoughtless move that might have cost me some unfathomable price … had it actually been Joe.
It wasn’t. It was Abe Starkman, wearing his yellow helmet, his white bike leaning against my iron fence. He held a vertically bent manila envelope
and
was in the act of bending down to push it through my mail slot.
We stared at each other in shock for different reasons but with one thing in common on our faces: fear.
“I was just going to leave this.” There was a tremor in his near-whisper. Perspiration from his forehead trickled down both temples and was absorbed by the black helmet straps that crossed his face, meeting tightly beneath his chin. His clean-shaven neck looked pinkish raw. Vulnerable. He had not wanted to encounter me. Didn’t want to be seen here. Ached to get away as quickly as possible.
“Are you OK?” I whispered.
He nodded – a polite nod, a refusal to burden me with his personal conflicts, and an acknowledgment that he had made a choice and would take the heat no matter how blistering it became.
When I took the envelope from his hand, I noticed his wedding band, scuffed and time-worn, settled into the flesh of his fourth finger. His eyes, pale and bloodshot, reminded me how much this story meant to him, considering how much he had to lose.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank
you
.”
He turned, righted his bicycle and sped away.
I locked the gate behind me, ripped open the top of the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of loose
papers
. They were contracts and in a quick sweep of my eye I saw references to the Atlantic Yards. I almost forgot about Joe, about where I was going and why, in my relief to have this envelope tucked in my bag beneath my laptop. I would read it over carefully, later, as soon as I had the chance.
Walking over to the precinct on Gold Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, I felt so angry at Joe for putting me through this. I wanted to get inside that envelope, not spend time complaining about some creep who wanted to date me. As I walked, my mind kept returning to the thought that this thing with Joe was nothing. And then I would remember the box and realize it was in fact
something
. I didn’t want it to be, but it was. It was confusing and irritating and if Joe were here now I would have stopped in my tracks, spun at him and shouted, “LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Was
he here? Wasn’t he
always
here? How had I not noticed him for two whole years? Had my move to New York triggered an urgency for him to take action? He
had
taken action: he’d left his lifelong island, left his mother, and followed me to the city. Now I was the only person he knew among millions. Millions of strangers he had no interest in … and
me
, in whom his interest was wildly distorted.
I stopped walking halfway through MetroTech Plaza, almost at Gold Street, and looked around.
Office
workers streamed in all directions; my standing still was completely out of synch with the fast rhythm of the morning rush. I didn’t see him anywhere so continued on my way, thinking as I went that I was about to seek help from a man named Jesus … who woulda thunk it?
The 84th Precinct was a squat building sitting on the seam between the “reinvigorated” MetroTech Plaza complex and a grim stretch of housing projects which would qualify as urban blight if they hadn’t been established by the city in the first place. The mid-century urban planner Robert Moses had left his mark on New York in many ways and this was one of them: affordable housing in the form of clusters of brick buildings that looked like stacks of blocks – or prisons. Demolishing them via eminent domain, as the neighborhoods surrounding the Atlantic Yards were being vanquished, would be admitting that the city’s many housing projects had been a mistake. They segregated groups of people from each other and created insular communities where poverty consciousness ruled and despair was the standard atmosphere. It was economic segregation which on its surface looked like racial segregation. Hugo once told me he’d read a study that concluded that environmental activism routinely failed with people who felt hopeless. So it was no wonder that electric street lights shone in broad daylight and garbage was
strewn
all over the streets as far as I could see behind the precinct, as I approached its dirty glass doors.
The lobby was as grim as the outside of the building. Behind a scratched Plexiglas barrier sat a woman in uniform whose job appeared to be reception. I leaned down to the little semicircle opening and said, “I’m here to see Detective Jesus Ramirez.”
“He know you’re coming?”
“No.”
It didn’t seem to matter. She reached him on the intercom and in minutes he came down to greet me.
He was the ugliest man I’d ever seen. Though he was medium height, he managed to give the impression of being squat. He had tiny eyes, a prizefighter’s squashed nose and wide mouth whose fleshy lips came together in the appearance of a pinkish slab. His trimmed black beard covered the entire bottom half of his face and an attempt at hair plugs had failed glaringly, leaving red circles visible through the net of hair covering his scalp.
“I’m Darcy Mayhew.” I offered a hand, which he shook. “I called and was told to ask for you.”
In contrast to his face he had a lovely smile and the smooth, deep voice of a radio host. “Why don’t we talk upstairs at my desk?” He led me to an elevator and when it came stepped aside so I could enter first. Riding up in the elevator with him I
became
aware of his cologne. Musky, reassuring, it triggered a memory: my father, singing “The Circle Game” in his German accent, driving me through an unexpected snowstorm on the way to a friend’s party we would learn was canceled. How was it that this was the same cologne my father had worn decades ago? Two such different people in such different places in such different times.
Detective Ramirez’s graciousness extended through a scuffed hallway and into the detectives unit – a busy room crowded with desks and people on phones or old boxy computers. It reminded me of a low-rent version of a newsroom and I liked it, felt at home here in a funny way. He found a stray chair, which he stationed at the side of his industrial metal desk, and motioned for me to sit down. I did. He then sat in his chair facing the desk whose prominent features were its neatness and a large family photo showing him shoulder to shoulder with a smiling wife with curly black hair, surrounded by five children.
I told him everything. He listened with an expression of growing concern. When I was finished he leaned forwards, clasped his hands on the desktop and said, “Congratulations. You have a stalker. Welcome to the club.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Not at all. I’m sorry – maybe I’m jaded. I’ve
been
doing this for twenty-five years. There’s nothing funny about stalking.”
“So how do I get him to stop?”
Ramirez pressed out a smile, but not a hopeful one. “You take precautions. I can tell you what to do and what not to do. You develop a low profile, you do nothing to encourage him, and we see if this has any effect.”
I stared at him. “That’s it?”
“That’s what I advise. There are other options, like applying for a restraining order—”
“I want one.”
“I know you do, but let me explain something. When it comes to stalkers, restraining orders have limited effect in reality. More often than not they can actually make things worse. Especially if there’s not much going on in their lives and they don’t have much to lose. The order’s just one more door for them to break down to get to you, only if they’re the type to get angry that you sought action against them, the rage … well, do you have any idea how many women we’ve found murdered with a restraining order in her purse?”
I felt the blood drain out of my face at that remark – out of my heart and my veins, out of my soul. Realizing he’d been insensitive, he tried to correct himself.
“What I mean is this. When you take out a
restraining
order, the law is we have to inform your stalker about the order, and that’s where we run into trouble. These guys are obsessive. They’re determined. They hear restraining order and in their twisted brains two things typically happen: they’re challenged, or they’re enraged, or both. Sometimes, if the guy’s not a career stalker, he might back off. But that’s only sometimes.”
“Career stalker?”
“Someone who’s done this before.”
“Joe has, I think.”
Ramirez nodded wearily. “You could get yourself a restraining order. It’s up to you. But you need to understand the possible consequences. Personally, at this point, I wouldn’t recommend it.”
I felt like a cancer patient being asked by my doctor if I wanted a treatment that might kill me. What I wanted was an authority to tell me what to do, to take over the Joe problem and use his expertise to make it go away. Apparently, that wasn’t going to happen.
“One thing you should know,” he said, “and here’s the catch-22, is that without a restraining order in place, if things escalate, it’s harder to prosecute. The courts are dicey when it comes to stalking – some judges take it seriously, some don’t. Mostly it’s a state by state thing. It wasn’t even considered a crime until nineteen ninety.”
“But it
is
a crime now?”
“Absolutely. The trick is feeling out if and when it’s the right time to put an order in place. When these guys hear
Order of Restraint
and they read all that fine print, it’s like the heavy hand coming down on them. You said you’ve got your personnel people at work dealing with it – that might be a more gentle solution, easier for him to swallow. It might shame him into pulling back. I’m telling you, some of these guys get scared of themselves and back off. Others don’t. In your case, it’s been, what – a week?”
“Two years, my friend said, based on the stuff in the box.”
He considered that, leaning back and stroking his beard with a stout hand. “I’ll get in touch with the Martha’s Vineyard police, see if he has any priors, mental disorders, if anyone’s had a restraining order on him before. And I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the box. Can you ask your friend to send it?”
“I will.”
“And you said you have a kid?”
“Nat’s thirteen.”
“Has he been bothered by this Joe guy?”
“No. Joe only seems interested in me.”
“Good.”
I half smiled and he matched my reaction with a small chuckle; there was nothing
good
about this.
“So what are the statistics?” I asked. “How bad
is
this?”
“Honestly? It’s too soon to tell. If he keeps up what he’s doing, he’s a little leaguer, a bug in the room, basically. Here’s how you find out what you’re dealing with: you don’t talk to him, you don’t look at him, you don’t smile at him, you don’t give him the time of day. You do not answer the phone, ever, when he calls. You never respond to notes or emails or whatever. If he leaves you stuff, you act like you never got it. If he gets in your face and you can’t avoid him, you tell him, point-blank, you’re not interested. You don’t give him a single loophole to think otherwise. If you see him following you again, you turn in the opposite direction.”
“I’ve been doing most of that since the middle of last week,” I said. “But he isn’t stopping. And it terrifies me when I see him.”
“I understand. But for now, it’s what you’ve got to do. We watch and see if it escalates and then revisit the idea of an order – unless you decide you want one now.”
It kept coming back to that. He would not tell me what to do; I had to decide on my own.
“So you recommend that I basically do nothing?”
“No, not nothing.”
Bending down, he opened a low cabinet and pulled out a battered manila file folder. He withdrew
a
form titled “VICTIM STALKING WORKSHEET”. Together, we filled out all the information, which was a distillation of everything I’d told him, the bare facts without the irritation or the fear. Then – and this shook me – he led me to another room where he took my fingerprints and photographed me front, back and both my profiles. It was obvious why he wanted these records: to identify me, just in case … I couldn’t even think it.