Maybe all he ever wanted from her was exactly what she’d provided all along. Maybe all he wanted was an eternal roll in the hay with a flaky twenty-seven-year-old dancer. Maybe the only difference between him and Stanley Beckerman, after all, was the eight-year age gap between their respective little roundheel darlings. Maybe if he grew an unsightly beard and dressed in clothes he found in a Dumpster, he’d be Stanley Beckerman exactly.
No, he is not Stanley Beckerman.
Nor was meant to be.
“Kate,” he says patiently, soothingly, “the man is a classic...”
“Please don’t give me any shrink bullshit, okay?” she says. “All I know is you won’t take the letters to Clancy...”
“I just told you I would.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Go now.”
“Now? It’s almost midnight.”
“So? Don’t cops work past midnight?”
“I’m sure it can wait till tomorrow morning.”
“Sure. Let him come here tonight and kill both of us...”
“Nobody’s coming here to...”
“...in our own fucking bed!”
“Kate, try to calm down, okay?”
“He knows where I live, he’ll figure out a way to get in here. Even if we double-lock the door...”
“Kate, there’s no way he can...”
“He knows how to do things!”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Is he making sense?”
“He’s a fucking lunatic!”
“Exactly! Suppose he comes here tonight? Suppose...?”
“I’m here tonight,” he says simply.
She looks at him.
She nods.
“Then promise me you’ll go first thing tomorrow.”
“I promise you.”
“Because I want this to end.”
“I’ll go tomorrow.”
“It has to end, David.”
“I know,” he says.
It already has, he thinks.
Here in this office where he has helped so many other troubled people in the past, he sits behind his desk on Friday morning, and tries to determine how best he can help this troubled person who has been a part of his life for the past month and more. He has promised her he will go to the police, but he realizes the danger inherent in such an act. How can he explain that an encounter presumably ended after July’s lineup has apparently blossomed by August into a relationship close enough for him to be running this errand for her?
Kate. From the park. The victim, remember?
He can visualize Clancy’s cold blue eyes frisking him.
Just how well do you know this young girl, Dr. Chapman?
Well... ah... casually. This is a... ah... casual relationship.
The cold blue eyes mugging him.
And yet, it had to be done. David suspects that the man harassing Kate is as harmless as most of the obsessive stalkers out there, but the possibility that he might become truly dangerous makes it imperative that the police go to see her at once. The trick is to alert them without...
Are you afraid he’ll find out you’re fucking me?
Yes, he thinks.
The trick, then, is ending this honorably and decently without creating any problems for himself.
And, yes, of course, without causing unnecessary hurt and additional damage to a person obviously traumatized sometime long ago. And still struggling — despite Jacqueline Hicks’s treatment — to understand whatever the hell happened to her back then.
He looks up the number of the precinct.
He hesitates a moment, his hand resting on the receiver. Then he picks up the receiver and dials the number, and tells the sergeant who answers the phone that he would like to talk to Detective Clancy, please.
“Clancy’s on vacation,” the sergeant says.
“Can you tell me when he’ll be back?”
“Monday morning, eight o’clock. One of the other detectives help you?”
He hesitates for merely the briefest tick of time.
“Thanks, I’ll try him later,” he says, and hangs up.
Reprieve, he thinks.
Oddly, his heart is beating very rapidly.
He sits quite motionless behind his desk.
He picks up the receiver again, dials another number.
“Hello?” Stanley says.
His voice sounds groggy but wary.
“Stanley, would you happen to know where Jacqueline Hicks goes on vacation?”
“Who is this?”
“David Chapman.”
“What?”
“I need Jacqueline’s...”
“Do you know what time it is, Davey?”
“Yes, it’s ten o’clock.”
“Yes, exactly. We’re still asleep, Davey.”
“This is urgent,” David says.
Urgent? he thinks.
Stanley sighs in exasperation. In the background, David hears a very young voice asking, “Who is it, Stan?”
“A colleague,” Stanley answers gruffly. “Just a second,” he says into the phone. David hears muted voices in the background, and then what sounds like drawers opening and slamming shut. He visualizes young Cindy on the black leather couch, watching her analyst stamping around his office naked. He wonders how Stanley is explaining to his wife the peculiar habit he has developed of sleeping at the office these days. He guesses Stanley has never heard of call forwarding. Or perhaps young Cindy Harris doesn’t have her own apartment. Perhaps she still lives with her parents.
“This is two years old,” Stanley says into the phone.
Like your little playmate, David thinks.
“Jackie used to go to East Hampton. I don’t know if she still does.”
“Could I have the number, please?”
Stanley reads it off to him. David writes it down on the phone pad and then draws a picture of the sun shining over it.
“Thank you, Stanley,” he says. “I really apprec—”
“I’ll see you at the lecture tonight,” Stanley says, hitting the word so hard that anyone listening would immediately know there is no lecture. “And, Davey... don’t call me at the crack of dawn anymore, hmm?” he says, and hangs up.
David looks at the East Hampton number with the sun shining benevolently above it.
What am I doing? he wonders.
He dials the number.
A man’s voice on the answering machine says, “No one is here to take your call just now. Please leave your name and number when you hear the tone. Thank you.”
David wonders if everyone in the world has Call Forwarding.
He does not leave a message.
The office seems inordinately silent. For a moment, he wishes for the voices of Arthur K, Susan M, Alex J, resonating against the tin ceiling of the room. He wishes for all the great motion pictures of the past.
He shakes the letters out of Clancy’s manila evidence envelope.
They sit on his desk in slanting sunlight, the thick cream-colored envelopes, the lurid purple ink. He must deliver these letters. He has promised to deliver these letters. But Clancy is away and won’t be back till Monday.
He takes a piece of stationery from the top drawer of his desk. His name and office address are across the top of it. He rolls the sheet of paper into his typewriter and begins typing:
Dear Detective Clancy:
You will remember me from the lineup you arranged for Miss Kathryn Duggan back in July. She’s the young lady whose bike was stolen in Central Park. She was sufficiently troubled and frightened by the enclosed letters to contact me quite unexpectedly and ask that I deliver them to you. She is afraid of going to the police herself because she knows she is being watched. She is further fearful that somehow her telephone conversations will be overheard.