“I would say harassing someone is important.”
“Important enough for anyone to pay attention?”
“Oh, sure.”
“So how do I stop him?”
“You file a complaint. There’s not much to go on here, but hopefully we can find him.”
“How?”
“Well, there may be latents on the letters here. He may have a record, or he may have been in the service, or in government employment, there are fingerprint records we can look at. If we locate him, we check his handwriting against what we have here. Then there are two ways we can go.”
Kate waited.
“We can have somebody talk to him, we’ve got...”
“Talk to him?”
“Yeah, we’ve got people here who are very good at this. Take the guy aside, tell him Listen, you want to go to jail, or you want to be reasonable here? Leave the girl alone, don’t bother her no more, that’s the end of it, you don’t hear from us again. But you try to contact her, you write to her, you phone her...”
“He hasn’t...”
“I know, I’m just saying. You phone her, you go near her building, you even walk on her block, we’re gonna come after you and put you away. Lots of times, they listen.”
She is thinking This guy isn’t going to listen to anybody talking to him. This guy is nuts.
“What if he doesn’t listen?” she asks.
“You let us know he’s still bothering you, and we arrest him and charge him with the A-mis.”
She is thinking What if he kills me between the time you talk to him and the time I tell you he’s still bothering me?
“Each letter he sent constitutes one count of the crime, you see. What’ve we got here, eight, nine letters?”
“Ten.”
“Okay, that’s ten counts of Aggravated Harassment. But the most he can get is two years in jail, even though technically there are ten counts of the crime. It’s complicated. If he gets off with less than the max...”
She is thinking What happens when he gets out of jail?
“...the judge can grant an order of protection, which if he comes near you again is contempt of court and yet another crime.”
“I’m very afraid this person will try to hurt me,” she says levelly, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.
“I realize that. But what I’m trying to tell you, Miss Duggan, you’re not entirely helpless in this matter. We can look into it for you, if you want to file a complaint, or there’re people in the D.A.’s Office you can talk to, if you prefer that, the Sex Crimes Unit down there.”
She is thinking Jesus, what am I getting into here?
“Do they ever just stop?” she asks. “On their own?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes, if you ignore them, they...”
“I am ignoring him.”
“I know that. What I’m saying, sometimes they just get bored or whatever and go away.”
“He doesn’t seem to be getting bored.”
“No, he doesn’t, but sometimes they just quit all of a sudden. There are lots of women out there, you know.”
“Yes,” she says, and nods thoughtfully.
“So how would you like to proceed?”
“What I’m afraid of, you see, is if somebody goes to talk to him, he’ll come after me.”
“Well... I really think that’s a very remote possibility.”
“But a possibility, right?”
“Anything’s possible, Miss Duggan. The roof of this building could fall in on us right this minute. That’s a possibility, but a very remote one. I really don’t think this person would try to harm you after somebody from the police talked to him.”
“But he might.”
“There’s no telling what crazy people will do, but in my experience...”
“I’d like to give it some further thought,” she says.
“Entirely up to you,” Clancy says, with what she detects as a slight dismissive shrug. He opens the top drawer of his desk again, takes from it a large manila envelope printed with the words POLICE DEPARTMENT — CITY OF NEW YORK and below that the bolder word EVIDENCE.
Evidence, she thinks.
He turns down the flap of the envelope. There are two little red cardboard buttons on the envelope, a red string dangling from the one on the flap. He wraps the string around the lower button.
“You’d better hang on to these,” he says. “Case you decide.”
David calls collect on Monday evening.
He reminds her that his plane will arrive in Newark at seven thirty-eight tomorrow morning.
“I’ll be there,” she says.
Hurry, she thinks.
Please hurry.
And closes the blinds against the encroaching dusk.
4: tuesday, august 15 — saturday, august 19
David knows at once that something is wrong.
She stands just past the security gate waiting for him, a black umbrella in her hand, her red hair pulled up under a man’s gray fedora that hides it completely, a black raincoat buttoned to her throat, jeans and yellow rain boots showing below the hem. She looks as if she’s been crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Lots,” she says, and kisses him swiftly on the cheek.
It is pouring outside the terminal. Kate has borrowed a car from one of the “kids” in the show, and it is tiny and cramped, and there is a faint whiff of stale sweat wafting from the backseat, which is littered with leg warmers, leotards, tights, socks, panties, bras and a tangled assortment of unidentifiable soiled or stained garments waiting to be transported to the Laundromat. Or the city dump.
She begins crying the moment she pulls the car out of the airport parking lot.
“What is it?” he says.
In fits and starts and bits and pieces, like a patient dredging up a traumatic experience, she rambles tearfully through the events of the past two weeks and more, starting with the delivery of the first box of roses, “I thought they were from you, well, naturally, the card said I love you, Kathryn,” and then the subsequent flowers, all of them sent to the theater and delivered to the dressing room, four boxes of roses altogether, long-stemmed roses, all with a different florist’s card saying I love you, and then the letters started, ten letters in all, so far. She’ll show him the letters when they get home, Clancy said it’s a crime, the detective, remember? From that time with my bike? I went to see him Saturday. Each letter constitutes a separate count of Aggravated Harassment, but he can only get two years in aggregate, whatever that means, I’ve been so frightened.
Bursting into tears again, trying to choke the tears back while David listens in amazement to the recited contents of the letters as she’s memorized them, the voice of a man obsessed if ever he’s heard one, and he most certainly has heard plenty of them. Once again, he listens to the familiar symptoms, altered to accommodate the scenario with Kate, the expected shift from reality to fantasy, Kathryn becoming Victoria, Victoria becoming a kitten and then a pussy, the repetitive fixation on the slang expression for the vagina, the slavish supplication, the reversal of roles so that he now becomes lord and master, the possessiveness and jealous rage, the abusive language and escalating obscenity, the initially veiled threats, the later open sexual invitation-cum-threat, the final threat against Rickie...
“Rickie?” he says. “Who’s Rickie?”
“The kid from the bike shop,” she says.
How’d he get into this? David wonders.
“How’d he get into this?” he asks aloud, and turns to her in puzzlement, his knees banging against the dashboard in this goddamn toy car. He should be listening to this in the limo she promised, he should be holding her in his arms while somebody else drives, telling her he’s here, assuring her that everything will be all right.