Authors: Katia Lief
“Can you put the bathroom light on?” Another old habit from earlier in his childhood: a distant light to glow reassurance from the hallway into his room. A bathroom in our Vineyard house had been similarly situated near his door. I shut his door partway, turned on the bathroom light and got myself ready for bed.
I was lying in bed in the dark, my mind battling what seemed the impossibility of sleep, when the phone rang. My pulse sped as I looked at the lit-up LED screen on the phone’s handset. I was pretty sure Nat was asleep but even so I answered in a whisper.
“Sara!”
“He emailed me, Darcy.” She wasn’t whispering though I was sure her three little ones were all in bed. Her tone was heavy with some kind of resolution. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he wrote. It was
vile
.”
“Oh, Sara, I’m so sorry. He stole my laptop at work today. But listen, they fired him, after he—”
“Kevin says I have to stop.”
“Stop what?” But I as soon as she said it, I knew: her husband had told her to stop being my friend. As her familiar voice continued, as she explained, as the music of her words and tones and emphases filled
my
ear, I began to cry. Silently, though. I didn’t want to burden her with guilt over her decision.
“He threatened my children. We already called the police. Everyone says I can’t be in contact with you anymore – not for a while, anyway. Honey, they know him at the police department here. They were glad he left the island.”
“So am I,” I said, “if it keeps you and the kids safer.”
“
Shit
, Darcy. Get out of there!”
“We’re all settled now. Nat’s happy at school. And Rich, I never had a chance to tell you about our date, but it went so well and I’m seeing him again. And I’ve got an amazing job, I’ll never have another opportunity like this, and I’m in the middle of a really important story—”
“You and Hugo.
Work
– always so important. Isn’t
this
more important?”
“Yes. It is. Absolutely. I went to the police today and I—”
“Kevin’s telling me I have to get off the phone now. Darcy, I’m sorry. I’m going to miss you like you can’t know.”
“I do know. Bye, Sara. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She hung up the phone and I buried my face in my pillow and wept until the sun rose.
How could I live without Sara? She had been my
best
friend for over eight years. Since Hugo’s death, no one had done as much to anchor me.
Joe
. I had never loathed another person as I now did Joe.
He had come into my life like a giant wave and the best I could do, short of running away, would be to hunker down and try to resist his antigravitational pull. Only once before tonight had I thought so much about the forces that seem to come from nowhere to displace you – the night of Hugo’s accident when I floated between life and death in a terrifying freefall, thinking of my father’s final moments, how one moment a person is alive and the next moment they’re not – and now I thought of these forces again. One pushes, the other pulls; and hunkered between them all I could seem to do was hold myself in place. But without Sara, would I be able to?
Somehow I would have to. I was a mother with a child to love, raise, support and protect. I needed to keep Nat happy and safe. I needed to hold on to my job so I could keep a roof over our heads. And I needed to make sure Joe couldn’t get to my son.
In the morning I accompanied Nat to school without trying to manufacture an excuse, and he didn’t seem to need one. I watched him until he was inside the building, waited a few minutes to give him a chance to reach his homeroom, then went inside to the principal’s office.
I knew that parents sometimes dropped in with questions, concerns and problems because Mrs Mazola, the principal, had once sent a memo home asking us not to try and see her without an appointment. She was standing next to a tall beige file cabinet when I walked in, trim in her purple suit. She neither came forward with a handshake nor settled behind her desk to hear me out; just stood there, looking interrupted, as if to discourage me from staying too long. I started by apologizing and quickly got to the point.
“I need to add something to the paperwork I filled out at the beginning of the school year,” I said. “There’s someone who can’t have access to my son.”
“Jan can help you with that.” Her secretary, who sat in an adjacent office with two other administrative helpers.
“I just wanted to make sure you personally understood the importance of this.”
She considered me a moment, her dark eyes settling on my face. I hadn’t slept at all last night and if the way I felt inside – tired, terrified – surfaced at all in my expression, I knew she would take me seriously.
“Custody problems?”
“No, I’m a widow.” I hesitated, then plunged in. “I have a stalker; his name’s Joe Coffin. Young guy,
white
, brown hair, early twenties. He can’t get near Nat, OK?”
Mrs Mazola stared at me a moment, reacting to the grim reality of a word –
stalker
– I’d come to detest almost as much as Joe himself.
“Nat’s in what class?”
“Eight-oh-five.”
“OK. You can do the paperwork with Jan and I’ll mention it to the security guards myself. How’s that?”
“Thank you.”
I picked up some takeout coffee at the nearest café and walked to the subway. I had never been so happy to see a rush-hour crowd. I searched every face for Joe. If he was there, I didn’t see him. How many times had he been near me when I hadn’t seen him? But not seeing him now had little effect on my sense of safety; his invisibility was like toxic gas: I
breathed
him everywhere.
When I arrived at my desk, the overnight envelope with our dental X-rays was waiting. I didn’t bother opening it. My eyes were raw with exhaustion. I would do some work, confer with Courtney, then drop the envelope at the 84th Precinct on my way to pick Nat up from school. It would be the most I could wrest out of the day.
Elliot confirmed that Joe had been fired and Security instructed not to let him into the building.
After
yesterday’s episode on the sidewalk, I didn’t doubt that our security guards would take their instructions seriously. Elliot must have seen how wretched I was feeling – I was sure I looked as limp as I felt, especially after Mrs Mazola’s accommodating response to my unannounced visit, even before she knew the reason – but he was kind enough not to mention it.
Courtney didn’t hesitate. “You look like crap.”
“Thanks.”
“Good thing that jerk’s out of here.”
“The problem is he’s still out
there
.” I pointed to the window, half-believing Joe might swoop down from the sky.
“I did some research for you.” She got up to bring me a printout. “Did you know you can hire a stalking consultant? There are whole companies devoted to it. A lot of celebrities hire them.”
MacDonald, Tierney was the name of the firm she’d chosen for me.
“Is this the best one?” I asked.
“Yup. I’ll go with you if you want.”
That earned a smile – so I still had a friend.
“I think you should probably go home now,” she said, leaning down to rub my back. “Get some sleep.”
“But the story—”
“I’m on it. Don’t worry. I’ll get you up to speed tomorrow.”
“I want to know now. What’s happening?”
“OK. Perlotti Industries loops back to the Tarentino family, just like Metro Trucking. I’m still working on Song Song Hauling but it’s kind of feeling like color by numbers now, you know?”
“I looked online but couldn’t find anything unusual with the racketeering trial.”
“Too soon. If there’s any give there, we probably won’t see it until sentencing.”
“Right. Of course. And the bones—”
“Good news on that. Just found out this morning the city moved the barrel out of Pearson. Anand told me. He wasn’t sure where they were taking them. I’ve got some calls in. Today that’s what’s at the top of my list.”
“He’s sure it was the city that took them?”
“Yeah – he knew the guy. And the paperwork was legit.”
“You’re closing in.”
“
We’re
closing in.”
“You’re really good at this, Courtney. Gutsy, focused. I’m thinking I should stick with reporting on the environment.”
“Hey, I’d be the biggest wimp you ever saw if I had some nutcase stalking me. I think you’re handling it really well.”
Did she mean it? It was impossible to know. But it was nice of her to say it.
“All right. I’ll go home. But tonight I’m taking a sleeping pill and tomorrow I’ll be back.”
“That a girl!”
“Woman.” I eked out a smile. “I’m a woman. And so are you.”
Stan, off to the side, laughed quietly to himself and Courtney took it as an invitation to stride over to him and box his ears.
I splurged on a taxi to Brooklyn. The FDR was mostly free of southbound traffic at this hour of the day and we flew beside the East River, a dull green-blue beneath a patchy sky. On brighter days the river sparkled, inspired; but today it was just a gloomy waterway separating two slabs of land. We crossed on the Manhattan Bridge and in moments I was dropped at the precinct door.
As before, the reception officer called up to Jess and I was asked to wait. This time, though, when he came down he was not alone.
“Darcy, this is Angela, my wife.”
Angela was tiny, small-boned like a bird, with huge brown eyes and curly black hair to her shoulders. She held the hands of two small children, both boys, who looked to be about three and four years old. One had the ill fortune of having inherited his father’s looks.
“And this is Ramón and Victor. Say hello to the lady, boys.”
“Hi, lady!” one said, and both giggled.
Angela tugged their hands. “Be polite!” Then, to me, with a magnificent smile, “Five kids later and no one listens to me. What’s with that?”
“I listen to you,
mi corazon
.”
I knew a little Spanish from school; he had called her
my heart
.
“Five kids,” I said. “That’s impressive.”
“You’re married long enough, the kids, they just happen.”
“How long have you two been married?”
“Nineteen years,” she answered. “Together twenty-five.”
“That’s a long engagement.”
“I never wanted to marry this man! But he’s a good man, he works hard. He broke me down. What choice did I have?” She beamed at Jess and it seemed to me that she saw his face without the ugliness. Time did that: stripped away the mirage of a person’s outer layer.
She released her sons’ hands and came closer to me, raising one toughened manicured hand to angle my face so my ear was close to her mouth, and then she whispered: “I came to him just like you and he saved my life. The newspapers, they all wrote it up. You’ll find it on the Google if you look. I was Angela Maria Cortez then.”
“That for me?” Jess reached for the envelope with
the
X-rays I held in my hand. He seemed uncomfortable with his wife’s sociability toward me; I was a case, after all, not a friend. But Angela had taken our chance meeting to give me something she seemed to feel was important. Obviously Jess had told her about my situation and there was something she wanted me to know. I was curious now.
As soon as I got home I did as she’d said and looked her up on “the Google”. Angela Maria Cortez brought up half a dozen links but paired with Detective Jesus Ramirez it brought up only one: a Wikipedia entry about New York City’s most notorious stalking cases. I logged into LexisNexis and a list of the articles she’d mentioned filled the screen.
Angela Maria Cortez was eighteen years old when a family friend decided he had to have her. He wasn’t a friend, exactly; he was a cousin of a neighbor who attended many of the Cortez family celebrations in Queens. The cousin, Raul, a thirty-year-old carpenter who also lived in Queens, tried the normal route and asked Angela out on a date. She had dinner with him once and decided he wasn’t for her. “He was strange,” she said later, when people became interested in writing about her, “kind of touchy-feely all the time and I didn’t like it. He was a lot older than me and he wanted to move it along too fast.”
After turning down Raul’s invitations, Angela began to find things on the porch of her parents’ home where she still lived. Bouquets of flowers, boxes of candy, books; the usual love tokens. He wouldn’t stop giving her things, wouldn’t stop calling, wouldn’t stop waiting for her outside her job at a local dry cleaners. But then the gifts took on a threatening tone. Racy lingerie, pornographic videotapes, a pair of handcuffs, a package of raw beef. So she went to the police, where her case was assigned to Jesus Ramirez, a newly minted detective with no experience handling stalkers. Stalking, in those days, wasn’t even counted as a crime.
Detective Ramirez followed a combination of procedure and common sense, and helped Angela file an Order of Restraint against Raul. A day later, arriving at the Cortez family home to bring Angela a copy of the order signed by a judge, Detective Ramirez, who was armed, came upon a surprise.
Waiting on the porch after the doorbell went unanswered, he heard what he thought were sobs inside the house. Coming up quietly to a front window, he found the curtains closed. Strange, since it was early afternoon. But there was a small opening between the edge of one curtain and the window frame through which he was able to catch a glimpse of what was happening inside. Enough of a glimpse to make his blood freeze.
Angela was tied to a chair, hands behind her, feet strapped to opposite chair legs. Raul stood in front of her with his pants lowered to his ankles. His back was convulsing and though Ramirez couldn’t see exactly what was happening he was able to guess, and it sickened him. The handle of a hunting knife stuck out of one pocket of Raul’s pants, collapsed on the floor by his feet.
In the time it took Ramirez to take a porch chair, smash it through the window and dive into the living room, Raul had his pants back on and the knife poised at Angela’s throat.
“Get back!” Raul shouted.