The pattern here, the one that I chose to focus on, was a simple one: In the beginning, this jerk ordered in person. I confirmed it by looking at the various faxes I collected, and it was clear.
Like my bonsai, like Odele’s specially book-bound package, each of those first orders had been difficult, the kind of order that was almost impossible to make over the phone.
And because he wasn’t thinking like a criminal then, Ruth-Anne’s stalker had to have gone into shops he was familiar with. Maybe he had seen me around or talked to me before. I certainly would have flirted with him.
Odele’s store wasn’t far away, and neither were the others he had used. He lived near here, and he shopped near here, and eventually he gained a system, a system that involved stealing credit cards and using them to place the orders.
He had to have started that before he saw me, though, because the average Armani owner has no need to steal funds, and probably can think of a thousand other ways to cover his tracks. Like cash, for instance. Cash required no names, and wasn’t even remarkable. A lot of people paid cash for a bouquet, only to decide at the last minute to have that bouquet delivered.
And there were certainly enough flower shops in the five boroughs to keep a cash-paying stalker in plants for decades.
No, either he had stolen that outfit or—
I paused, frowned, and went back to my video. The graininess worked against me. I had been so concerned with this guy’s face and his expensive clothes that I hadn’t looked at his shoes.
Shoes were always the tip-off. Expensive shoes were much more comfortable than cheap ones, so even if a rich guy had no pretensions, he wore good shoes.
To my disgust, the stalker stayed behind tables and large plants. I couldn’t get a good image of the shoes — until the last few frames.
When he came over to pay for the bonsai, his shoes appeared briefly in the center of the image.
They were black. But I couldn’t tell if they had been polished or not — the tape was too dark. However, these shoes, these so-called expensive men’s shoes, had an interesting feature.
They had thick soles, nearly tennis shoe thickness, which implied rubber.
Only one group of people wore shoes like that with clothes like his. Waiters. Bartenders. Guys who were on their feet all day. Retail employees generally didn’t have to dress up. And if they did, they got the shoes too because it was all part of the package.
Only in restaurants did guys have to wear the clothes without the matching shoes. Restaurants often ordered outfits for their staff, sometimes one or two, expecting them to wear the clothing on the job and near the building. But they never bought shoes. The waiters bought the shoes themselves, and of course, they couldn’t afford the expensive ones. They went to Jersey, shopped in Payless or Wal-Mart or Target, and bought shoes they could afford. Shoes with thick rubber soles so that their feet wouldn’t ache quite so bad at the end of the day.
And what else did waiters do? They whisked away credit cards in little leather receipt books, discreetly running the cards behind the bar or in a back room so that the restaurant patrons didn’t have to hear the constant chugging of the computerized credit card machine, vomiting out receipt after receipt, authorizing dollars and adding the amounts to a pile of plastic.
An old client of mine used to substitute one credit card for another, giving him a few days of use before the cardholder realized that the platinum Visa in his wallet didn’t have his name on it. Ruth-Anne’s stalker could have done that, or he could have done something even simpler.
If he was a waiter standing in the back of a restaurant, he could have copied the card number, the expiration date, and the name onto his order pad. Then he could have used those card numbers for phone orders with places like florists. We ran the cards, but we never checked that the person on the phone was the actual owner of the card.
We never checked because who in their right mind would steal a credit card and order flowers with it?
At least, that was the assumption. And like all assumptions, it was wrong.
I had a full presentation for Detectives Whittig and Barret when they returned: a print-up of the video image, right down to the shoes, faxes of invoices — all made out to Ruth-Anne Grant, a list of restaurants nearby that required its staff to wear silk suits, and a suggested theory as to what had actually happened.
I actually had her stalker’s name, but I didn’t tell them because I still knew a few things about the law. Any good defense attorney would make it impossible for the prosecutor to use evidence gathered by a citizen like me.
I had made a print of the best video image and showed it around. It only took me a few days to find Ruth-Anne Grant’s stalker. His name was Glenn Haines, and he worked at an upscale restaurant between my place and Odele’s. It was called Chez Nouveau.
Maybe I kept the name for security. Maybe I did it so that I could make certain that Whittig and Barret got the right guy. Or maybe I did it because I had an inclination to take care of the matter myself.
Even though I never did. That had been Ruth-Anne Grant’s mistake. They indicted her on first-degree murder charges the day before I handed over the stalker information. Whittig and Barret seemed so uninterested in catching the stalker that I thought at first they weren’t going to follow up.
But they did — not to find the stalker — but to solidify their case against Ruth-Anne Grant. While I’d been thinking like a defense attorney who would use the information to get a jury to acquit, Whittig and Barret were building a case.
If they could prove that Ruth-Anne Grant had a stalker, they had motive for first-degree murder.
Of course, Whittig and Barret never told me that. They just thanked me for the information, did the additional research, and arrested Haines. Then the District Attorney’s office, always smarter than I wanted to give them credit for, got an earlier trial date for him.
If he pleaded to the charge or got found guilty, they’d have a paper record for Ruth-Anne Grant’s motive.
I couldn’t argue because I got Haines off the street. The only good thing in all of this was that Haines wouldn’t hassle anyone else. His stalking days would end — at least until he got out of prison.
But it hasn’t ended for me.
I dream about Ruth-Anne Grant sometimes. She never speaks. All she does is slam that box of roses down on my counter and then she looks at me, as if I’m the one who stalked her, hurt her, and ultimately destroyed her life.
When I wake up, I try to tell myself that she made the choice. She was the one who didn’t do her research to see if Dwight Rhodes had sent her all those flowers. Instead, she had taken her gun and waited for him in the hallway, shooting him before he could even get close.
Her choice, not mine.
But those thoughts never comfort me. Because I remember how harassment feels, how it makes you so very helpless, and how stopping it seems impossible.
And I know how terror feels — not for weeks and months and years, like she went through, but just for a brief instant, when those teenagers, waving those semiautomatics, came into my store and shouted, Mister, hey, Mister, open the goddamn cash register.
I haven’t been the same since. I still tense when a kid under twenty comes in, and I look over my shoulder when I lock up at night, and I keep my security tapes long past the dates the security company says it’s necessary.
I know what terror feels like, and it makes me wonder what I would do to those kids if they kept coming into my store, never hurting me, always threatening me.
And if I ran into them on the street — or, God forbid, some idiot told me their names — I couldn’t guarantee, even now, that I wouldn’t seek them out and give them a taste, just a taste, of what they gave me.