Courting Trouble (27 page)

“That’s how I feel.” The clerk clicked backward on the computer, then pointed at the screen. “Here he is. The name Ken Reseda ring a bell?”

“Yes!” Anne answered, with excitement she couldn’t hide. Kevin was born in Reseda, California, she remembered from his file. Ken Reseda had to be Kevin Satorno. “That’s him. Aren’t you so smart!”

“Well, I don’t know.” The clerk smiled under his grizzle. “I can spot an ex-con a mile away. You’d be surprised what you learn, people-watchin’. I see plenty here. Been in the hotel business twenty-five years. I own the place, you know.”

“I assumed. It’s so well-run.”

“And homey,” Mary added.

Judy leaned over. “It’s the fucking Ritz.”

Anne suppressed her smile. “So, do you happen to know if Mr. Reseda is in or not?”

“I wasn’t on this morning, but I’ll check.” The clerk looked at the old-fashioned wooden cubbyholes behind him, then turned back. “His key ain’t there. You were right. He musta went out this morning.”

“Oh, that’s okay. Maybe you wouldn’t mind giving us a key for Mr. Reseda’s room and keeping it our little secret? So we can surprise him when he comes home?”

“I think we can arrange that, my dear,” the clerk said, with a wink. He reached behind the counter and took a duplicate key from the cubbyhole.

“And could you ring his room if he gets back while we’re in there?” Anne knew they were taking a risk, but nobody could be convinced to stay behind in the car as a lookout. “We’ll need a little warning if he shows up, so we can . . . get ready.”

“Powder our noses,” Mary said.

Judy leaned over. “I have to build the cage.”

“Okay. Here’s the key, and I’ll make the call, if I see him.” The clerk held the key just out of Anne’s reach, with lecherous grin. “Any chance I’ll get a
gift
from youse girls in return? I got a good ticker, still.”

Anne laughed it off, or tried to. “I’m not your type.”

Mary chuckled in support. “I’m too expensive.”

Judy leaned over. “I sue people for fun.”

The man’s leer evaporated, and he handed Anne the key with a nervous glance toward Judy. “She’s a little freaky, isn’t she?” he whispered.

“
Super
freak,” Anne assured him, and they teetered to the elevator bank.

The tiny elevator was waiting, open, and the girls didn’t start bickering until they were stuffed inside it with the doors closed. Judy pushed a freshly moussed curl from a mascaraed eye, looking wounded at Anne. “You told him I was a freak!” she said, hurt.

“All I did was play along so we could get past the desk.” Anne couldn’t wait to get upstairs, watching the broken floor-number change to two, but Mary looked increasingly worried.

“Are we really going up there alone? Shouldn’t we call Bennie first and tell her? We said we would.”

“Relax, it’s an empty room,” Anne said. “Also, she’ll stop us.”

“I’m not in love with this,” Mary said, but Anne grabbed her hand as the elevator doors rattled open.

“Come on, we’ll be fine.” She found herself on a covered balcony with a vending machine set against white stucco walls, gone gray with grime. Anne led them to the right because there was no other choice. The balcony had a view of the motel parking lot, the gas station, and a tire dump. “Let’s go.”

“I’m no freak,” Judy muttered, tottering behind. “I don’t want to be a freaky hooker, I want to be a normal hooker.”

“Then why’d you say that thing about the cage?” Anne checked the room key on the fly. It was stamped 247. They were at 240. Kevin was so close; at least his room was. Their platforms scuffed on the gritty tile floor as they clomped past 240, 241, and 242, with Judy still pouting.

“I don’t know. My feet hurt.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I libeled you. I really am.” Anne couldn’t fuss with Judy, not so close to Kevin’s room. Her stomach felt tight.

Mary brought up the rear. “He liked you the best, Jude. I could tell, from the way he looked at you.”

“You think? He said I was a freak.”

“That’s how I know,” Mary said. “Men love freaky chicks. Crazy, freaky chicks. This is why I can’t get a date. I’m too Catholic.”

Judy lifted an eyebrow, and Anne fell silent when she reached the door. She slid the key inside the lock in the doorknob and opened the hollow door, her heart starting to hammer. Even though Kevin wasn’t supposed to be here, she opened the door slowly. She felt suddenly loathe to enter his room, his world, his mind. When the door swung open, Judy appeared beside her and Mary filed in behind, surveying the bizarre scene:

The room was small, with a bathroom to the immediate left, but all of the furniture was covered by papers. There were clippings from newspapers, tabloid headlines, written notes, cards, even stacks of photographs. It looked as if it had snowed inside the room, dropping a white blanket on a saggy double bed against the wall and a cheesy desk with a portable TV on a metal stand. Exacto knives and a Scotch-tape dispenser lay strewn on the thin, worn brown rug, along with snippings of newspaper.

Anne felt instantly as if she had seen the room before, then realized she had. She flashed on the pictures of Kevin’s bedroom at his L.A. apartment, which were shown at his trial, exhibits A through whatever. His motel room was a replica of his L.A. bedroom; pictures, clippings, photos of Anne had littered the place, along with maps to her house and her office, with places where she ate and where she shopped encircled. She felt now as if she was stepping into one of the trial exhibits, and the realization momentarily stalled her.
It was happening all over again.

Mary closed the door behind them, hurried to the window, and moved the sheer curtain aside slightly. “I’ll stay here and look out, in case he comes back.”

Judy walked past Anne to the bed. “What is all this stuff? Legal papers?” she asked, picking one up. “They are. Here’s the last brief we filed in
Chipster.
” She flipped through it in surprise, then set it down in favor of the others. “These are all of the papers filed in the
Chipster
case. Copies of the initial complaint, the answer, even the evidentiary motions, and the complete docket sheet. This is as good a file as ours, and all of it public record.”

Anne willed her feet to move and crossed to the papers littering the desk. Newspaper clippings about Chipster.com lay scattered over the Formica surface, each one carefully razored from the paper. NAKED MAN APPEARS IN COURT, read one subhead, and Anne winced. She sifted through the articles, and it was as if Kevin had scoured all the newspapers; he had all the sidebars on Rosato & Associates and the features on the individual lawyers, as well as the Dietzes. Anne picked one up. It had been printed in color, from the web. How had Kevin managed that? She shoved the clippings aside and buried beneath was a laptop, hooked up to a Hewlett-Packard printer. “Hello. Add receiving stolen goods to the record, ladies.”

Judy had moved farther up the bed and picked up one of the papers. “Look at this. It’s a map of the city with streets circled on it.” She turned on a cheap lamp by the bed and studied the map. “Anne’s house, the office, the courthouse. Weird, but true.”

It sent a chill through Anne. “I don’t want to live through this again.” It came from her heart, speaking out of turn.

But Judy looked up, the map in her hand falling in jointed sections. “I’m not sure this is about you anymore,” she said, her face grave under her exaggerated makeup. “Beth Dietz’s house in Powelton Village is also circled here, and there’s a notation on a circle in the middle of Fifteenth Street. It reads, ‘Beth eats lunch here.’”

“What do you mean?” Anne went over to the bed, where Judy was holding up a photo of the Dietzes leaving the courthouse after a pretrial motion.

“There’s lots of photos here of Beth. Even one from a website that helps people find their high school classmates. He must have researched her and gone in under a fake name.”

“I know that website,” Anne said, scanning the newspaper photos. “You’re right. There are almost as many of Beth Dietz as of me, and he used that site to research me, too.”

Judy was about to set a photo down on the bed when she stopped in mid-arc. “Oh my God, look at this.” She picked up another photo of Beth Dietz and showed it to everyone. This one had a red heart drawn around her face.

Anne froze. She had forgotten until this minute. “He used to do that to my pictures.”

Judy turned. “What’s going on, Anne? Is he in love with Beth now that you’re dead? It looks like he’s switching over or something.”

“Erotomanics do transfer their obsession.” Anne felt a shudder start at the base of her spine, then inch up. “If he thinks he killed me, he may be letting me go. Maybe he’s going to start stalking Beth Dietz now.”

“So he’s in love with her.”

Anne nodded. “Yes, but that’s not the nature of de Clérambault’s. It’s the reverse, remember? What’s happening now is that Kevin is an erotomanic, so he believes that Beth Dietz is in love with him.”

“But she’s married,” Judy said, puzzled, and Anne tried to explain the inexplicable.

“No matter, he’s delusional. No reality destroys the delusion, except for a restraining order. And we know the Dietzes don’t have the best marriage in the world. Maybe Kevin knows that, too. He watched me for a long time before he asked me out. I didn’t find that out until the trial. He’d been stalking me for months without my knowing.”

“Can this happen even if they never met?” Judy asked. “I mean, I doubt that Beth Dietz ever spoke to Satorno.”

“Again, it makes no difference. It was an erotomanic who stalked Madonna, and Martina Hingis. And Meg Ryan. The man who killed that TV actress, Rebecca Schaeffer? He had de Clérambault’s.”

“That’s so scary,” Mary said. She came over and patted Anne’s shoulder, but Anne wasn’t sure whether she was comforting her or drawing comfort from her.

Anne surveyed the scene, knowing the implications for Beth Dietz as clearly as if she were clairvoyant. It would start with e-mails, visits, then roses, notes and cards, phone calls and gifts, and surprise knocks on the door at all hours of the day and night. And it could end with a gun. Anne struggled to compose herself. “As long as Kevin Satorno is at large, Beth Dietz’s life is in danger. The question is, what do we do about it?”

“We tell the police,” Judy answered. “No question.”

“We also tell Beth Dietz,” Mary added. “No question.”

Anne held up a hand like a traffic cop. “Correction. We make sure the cops tell Beth, and I’ll tell Matt, too. I still play dead until Tuesday. We don’t need Kevin enraged right now, for my sake or for Beth’s.”

“Agreed,” Judy said, and Mary was shaking her head.

“This is strange. We’re going to save Beth Dietz’s life, and she’s suing our client. The line between good and evil is shifting.”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” Anne said, though she knew it was just the random part, from her fake-jogging. “As relieved as I am that Kevin may be letting me go, I still wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy.”

Judy smiled. “You know what that makes you, Murph?”

“A fool?” Anne guessed.

“A hooker with a heart of gold,” Mary answered, and they all laughed.

Minutes later, the lawyers had closed the door to Kevin’s motel room and were scuffing down the corridor and piling into the elevator. Mary flipped open her cell phone, as they’d agreed, and pressed in the office number. “Bennie, guess what?” she said. “We found Kevin’s apartment. He’s at the Daytimer Motel in Pennsauken under the name Ken Reseda.”

The elevator was so tiny, Anne could hear Bennie yelling, “HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THAT? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TAKING CARE OF MURPHY! WHERE IS SHE?”

Mary cringed. “We’re all together, and it’s kind of a long story. We called you as soon as we were sure it was him. We think he started stalking Beth Dietz. You wanna call the cops or should we?”

The elevator opened onto the first floor as Bennie shouted, “WHERE ARE YOU, DiNUNZIO? TELL ME YOU’RE NOT IN JERSEY!”

“Me? Where am I?” Mary tottered past the reception desk. “Uh, at a car wash?”

Judy burst helpfully into car-wash noises. “
Ppppshhhhhh! Pssssshhhhh! Ssshhhhhhh!”

A car wash
? Anne couldn’t believe it. It was the lamest lie she’d ever heard. It was the lamest lie in the bar association. She was almost embarrassed to be in its presence. These girls were crying out for her expertise, but now wasn’t the time for a lying lesson. She handed the room key to the surprised desk clerk on the way out. “Thank you for your help,” she breathed, in character.

“Why you leavin’? Reseda ain’t back yet.”

“He’s a superfreak,” Anne answered, and wiggled out the door behind the others. She would have asked the clerk not to tell Kevin they’d been there, but he’d be arrested as soon as he hit the lobby.

She finally had him.

T
here was almost no traffic heading into the city, and the Beetle zoomed up the steep slope of the Ben Franklin Bridge, carrying three happy hookers. Wind blew off the Delaware River, setting everyone’s moussed hair flying, and Anne felt almost high as they sped to the top of the bridge.

They had done it. They had found Kevin. He would be arrested, tried, and imprisoned for good. The nightmare would finally be over for her, and for Beth Dietz, who didn’t even know it had started. For Willa, there would be mourning and justice. Tomorrow would be Monday, the Fourth of July. There would be fireworks and ketchup bottles that burped. And Anne was beginning a love affair; one that felt like the real deal, as they said in Philadelphia. She smiled inwardly, with only one regret. “I wish we could have stayed and seen him get arrested.”

Mary’s hair blew crazily around. “Me, too, but Bennie wanted us out, pronto. It wasn’t safe for us to stay. She called the cops on the other line and they’re on their way. And we have to be back at the office, for you to meet with Gil. We’re already late.”

“Also we could have gotten arrested for indecent exposure,” Judy added. As she drove, she wiped off her makeup with Dunkin’ Donuts napkins.