“Sometimes the roots give him away. Anyway, it’s too black.”
“If you say so.” To Ellen I said, “Dark brown hair. How long? How does he comb it?”
And so on. I asked, she answered, and I wrote in my notebook.
“Where does he live?”
“He never said.”
“Nothing about his neighborhood? How he walked to the Museum of Modern Art? What train he took to Yankee Stadium?”
“No.”
“How’d he get to your place?”
“By cab, I think.”
“And he went home the same way when he left?”
“As far as I know.”
I picked up a little hesitation. “What?”
“One time he looked at his watch, then took out his phone and did something. I think he was calling an Uber. Or, I don’t know, Lyft. Whatever it was, he did it all on his phone app.”
We kicked that around but it didn’t go anywhere. I asked if he was a native New Yorker.
“He never said.”
“But he said other things, and he said them in his voice. Did he have an accent?”
“Not like a foreign accent, no.”
“Southern? Midwest? Bronx? Brooklyn?”
“He just sounded American,” she said, and thought about it. “He wasn’t from New York.”
“You sound certain, Ellen, and a minute ago you didn’t know what kind of accent he had.”
“I still don’t. Something he said. ‘For all the years I’ve lived in this town.’ He said it like he’d moved here from someplace else.”
Like that narrowed it down, I thought. Half the city’s population had moved here from someplace else.
“Is he married?”
She didn’t think so. “He didn’t wear a ring, and he didn’t have that mark on his finger that you get when you take your ring off. I never heard him say anything that suggested he had someone waiting at home for him. He never mentioned children.”
I was going to ask what he did for a living, but she beat me to it. “I don’t think he has a job,” she said. “I think he’s self-employed.”
“Doing what?”
“Running his own business. I’m just guessing, but he’s used to giving orders.”
“He ever talk about business?”
“No.”
“The pressures of work, anything to give you an idea what his work was?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“How about recreation? He play golf?”
“He never mentioned it.”
“Any other sports?”
“Not as a participant. One day he said he had tickets for the Knicks that night, that somebody had given him courtside seats. But there was nothing that suggested he went regularly, or that he even cared much about the team. Or the game.”
“Tickets. He say who he was going with?”
“No.”
“I don’t suppose he invited you.”
“Why would he do that?”
Elaine: “Maybe he wanted the Girlfriend Experience.”
“No, that wasn’t what he wanted. I’d already given him what he wanted.” She frowned. “Sold him what he wanted. He liked paying. He liked taking the bills out of his wallet and handing them to me.”
“Always the same amount.”
“Two hundred dollars. Always a pair of hundred-dollar bills.”
“Until the other day.”
She nodded. “When he gave me three of them.”
On and on. The details piled up, and a picture failed to emerge. I knew things about Paul, but I could be in the same subway car with him and not know it.
The same elevator, even.
More questions, more responses, and when I sensed we were spinning our wheels I capped my pen and closed my notebook. Ellen said she’d better get home.
“As in West End Avenue,” Elaine said.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere near 27th Street.”
“I’ll go downstairs with you. I could use some fresh air, and that’ll give Matthew a moment to read his notes and exercise his police mentality.”
I wasn’t sure what a police mentality was, or how to go about exercising mine if I had one, but Elaine was back in no time at all. “I tucked her into a cab,” she reported, “and away she went. I didn’t see anybody lurking, but would I have noticed?”
“Probably not.”
“I said I’d see her tomorrow at the meeting. And I told her to call anytime, any hour, day or night.”
“Good.”
“This guy Paul. It’s got to be a power trip, right? ‘You can quit the life but you can’t quit me.’ ”
“Something like that.”
“But if he can’t find her, and she never answers her phone, sooner or later he’ll get tired of it and find someone else who knows the value of two hundred dollars.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well? Won’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“I hope so,” I said, “but I don’t think so, no.”
“Neither do I, but I couldn’t tell you why. He’s never been violent with her.”
“No.”
“Or physically abusive. But his last words to her, or almost, were how next time they’re going to do anal.”
“And he doesn’t care if she doesn’t like it.”
“In fact,” she said, “that increases the appeal for him. I don’t like where this is going.”
“No.”
“If she sees him again, and if she lets him do what he wants to do—”
“She’s not going to see him again.”
“We can’t know that, honey. I don’t know how close the parallels are to sobriety, but—”
“But she could have a relapse.”
“He could find her. He’s already found a way to get into her old apartment, and how do you figure he managed that?”
“Swiped a spare key when she wasn’t looking. Slipped one of his famous hundred-dollar bills to her super. Or found a way into the building—”
“Ringing doorbells until somebody buzzed him in.”
“That’s one way. That would get him to her door, and he might have the talent to get through it. She was in a hurry. Maybe she just closed the door, let the snaplock engage.”
“And didn’t bother to use her key and turn the deadbolt.”
“A lot of snaplocks, especially on doors in old buildings, aren’t all that much of a challenge. You could pick one with a butter knife.”
“ ‘You didn’t take your alligator bag,’ That is so creepy.”
“And if he’s clever enough to pull that off—”
“Then he’s clever enough to track her down?” She made a face. “Maybe he is. Say he could catch up to her, and she could tell herself it was simpler and easier to fuck him one more time than to find some way to get rid of him. And of course he’d insist on anal, because she let him know she doesn’t like it. And they’d do it, and the next thing on his agenda is to find something else that she doesn’t like. And do it.”
“Or she could refuse, and he could rape her.”
“Trust you to look on the bright side,” she said. “Darling, what are you going to do?”
“The only thing to do,” I said, “is find him and stop him. I just wish I knew how to do that.”
“In a movie,” she said, “this is when one person suggests going to the police, and the other person explains why that’s a bad idea.”
“It depends on the movie. Sometimes this is when they do in fact go to the police, and guess what?”
“It turns out to be a bad idea.”
“It has to,” I said, “or there’s no movie. But I’d hand this off to the cops in a hot second if I thought it would do any good.”
“But you don’t.”
“I know how a cop would see it. She’s a working girl, and she had some kind of disagreement with one of her customers, and she’s set on making trouble for him by going to the cops. So he’d take her statement and make a lot of notes and send her home, and he’d forget her ten minutes after she was out the door.”