Falsely Accused (20 page)

And, of course, there was Lucy. Quite apart from her own beliefs, Marlene had made a solemn commitment when her family's parish priest had agreed to marry her to a non-Catholic that she would raise her child in the bosom of Rome, and she intended to do so. Happily, St. Pat's had an excellent Sunday school, where she deposited Lucy while she attended the service. The girl had taken nicely to the Sunday ritual (her only bitch being the necessity for unnatural cleanliness, and the wearing of a succession of darling dresses, lace-collared velvets or elaborately ruffled muslins, lovingly purchased by her mother and a supporting body of female relatives), Lucy having reached the age where theology was of interest.

This morning, entering the car in a glory of dark velvet, camel-hair coat, and wool hat, Lucy asked Marlene, “How come God has three names?”

Marlene shot her daughter an inquiring look. It seemed unlikely that Sister Theresa, who ran the junior Sunday class, had exposed her charges to the mysteries of the Trinity.

“What do you mean, dear?” asked Marlene.

Lucy counted the persons off on her fingers. “One is Jesus Christ, right? Two, is baby Jesus. Three: Harold.”

“Harold?”

“Uh-huh. AreFatherwhichArtnHeaven,
Harold
Be thy name.”

“Ah, mmm, I think that's ‘hallowed,' baby. It means blessed. Also, Jesus Christ and baby Jesus are the same person.”

At this Lucy gave Marlene a disbelieving look. She said, “I'll ask Sister Theresa,” and withdrew into what seemed like religious contemplation for the remainder of the ride.

Throughout the service, Marlene made a greater than usual effort to open herself to divine guidance. A faint headache was, however, the only result. Afterward, the sermon was on one of Father Raymond's two favorite themes: the need to support the foreign missions as a front line against the spread of godless communism (the other being the Evils of Unsanctified Sex). The featured mission today was the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, this particular Sunday being the feast day of St. Antony Claret, its founder.

Marlene let the words wash over her, hardly hearing, as one waits for a TV commercial to end. Fr. Raymond was, on this Sunday as usual, dull but thankfully brief, and Marlene was inclined to reward the brevity at least with the acknowledgment that St. Antony C. was the devil of a lad and his Charetians deserved at least a sawbuck. She reached into her wallet when the collection started, yanked forth a bill, and saw that her fingers had also plucked out the very slip of paper upon which Professor Malkin had written the name and address of Mattie Duran. A sign, was Marlene's first thought, and then she carefully put that thought aside. But she gave twenty dollars to the mission when the plate came around.

After church, Marlene found herself driving east on Houston. Lucy glanced out the window, recognized the route, and asked, “Are we getting knishes?” A swing by Yoneh Schimmel's for a bag of the tasty bricklike pastries was a frequent coda to their Sunday devotions.

“Maybe later. I want to stop off someplace first.”

“Where?”

“A place. It's a women's shelter I want to take a look at. It won't be a long visit.”

“What's a women's shelter?”

“It's a … sometimes there are bad men that like to hurt women and kids, and this is a place they can run to and hide.”

“Are we going to hide there?”

Marlene laughed and gave her daughter a squeeze. “No, silly! Daddy wouldn't hurt us.”

“If he did, Uncle Harry would shoot him with his gun,” said Lucy matter-of-factly. “Then I would take care of him, and you could hide in that place.”

This comment produced enough distraction from the task of driving to have caused a serious accident on any day but Sunday. As it was, there was a squealing of brakes and a honking of horns.

“Good plan, Lucy,” said Marlene upon recovery, to which her darling returned a glance both blank and sweet.

The East Village Women's Shelter was on Avenue B off Sixth, occupying the whole of a store-fronted six-story tenement. The former shop windows had been covered with steel plating, painted black, upon which the institution's name was neatly lettered in white. There was an
iglesia
on one side of it and a shoe-repair shop with a traditional hanging shoe sign on the other. Most of the businesses on either side of the street—stores selling salsa records, cheap clothing, and furniture on credit—had their corrugated steel shutters down, and these were covered with graffiti, much of it gang spoor. There were graffiti on the
iglesia
too, but none on the women's shelter—not a one, despite the blank, smooth expanse of black steel.

Marlene observed this and thought it significant. She parked and ushered Lucy up to the door, which was solid, also black, and equipped with a peephole. She rang the buzzer. A voice emanating from a little box affixed to the doorframe asked her business. She said she wanted to see Mattie Duran. The voice told her to wait, and she was aware of being observed through the peephole.

Shortly she heard clankings, as of heavy locks being disengaged, and the door opened. In the doorway was a young woman in her late teens, with a long, thick braid in her black hair and a suspicious look on her face; the face, which was thin and biscuit brown, had darkened channels cut under the eyes, as if by corrosive tears. She was dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans. This person looked Marlene up and down, and was clearly unimpressed, although she smiled and said hi to Lucy. Without another word she barred the door with a dead bolt and a police lock and turned away, allowing Marlene to follow her if she would.

A short corridor made from plywood led to a glass door. Marlene and Lucy followed the teenager through it and into a room carved out of the center of the former retail store. The room was clearly an office: four unmatched filing cabinets stood along one wall, and another wall held a corkboard covered with messages. Two battered steel desks in the center of the room were occupied by a pair of women, one black, one white, who were talking on telephones. Another phone rang unanswered. There were grubby toys strewn in odd corners. The place smelled of cooking soup.

“She's in there,” said their guide, pointing at a door.

Marlene knocked and, in response to a vague noise from within, opened it, revealing a tiny office, no larger than an apartment bathroom. It contained a rack of steel shelving overflowing with stuffed manila files, a scarred wooden desk, one leg of which was missing and replaced with phone books, a miscellany of straight chairs in dubious repair, and, affixed to the walls, an office clock, a calendar, much inscribed, and a color reproduction of one of Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, with mustache. On the desk was a rough-looking, large black Persian tomcat, nesting in a wire basket full of what looked like official manifold forms. Behind the desk was a swarthy woman of about forty.

Or Marlene guessed her age at about that; she could have been any age from a hard thirty to a light fifty. She was a Latina of some variety, but probably not a Puerto Rican. Her skin had a cinnamon sheen to it, her cheekbones were broad and sharp, and her mouth had that lovely, lanceolate sculpting of the lips that said Mexico. Her eyes, oddly, were gray-blue.

The woman was giving Marlene the once-over too, and Marlene could see that she was somewhat put off and confused by the fancy clothes. Her gaze, however, softened when she examined Marlene's face, which still bore the yellowing bruises left by Pruitt's fists.

“Can I pet your cat?” asked Lucy, who had wormed her way past Marlene's hip.

The woman smiled at this, showing powerful teeth and a flash of gold, and beckoned the child forward. Lucy stroked the cat, who spat briefly and then submitted to a stroking. The woman stood and held out her hand to Marlene. “Mattie Duran,” she said. Her hand was large and rough, with thick, square-cut nails. She was dressed in a black cotton turtleneck under a cover-all garment of vaguely military cut, with many pockets and zips on it. It was also black, which seemed to be the color of choice at the Women's Shelter.

Marlene said her own name, and Duran gestured her to one of the straight chairs. She sat down again behind her desk and said, “Look, we're a little jammed now, but I'll try to help.” She pulled a clipboard from a wall hook and took a pencil from behind her ear. “Where are you living now?”

“In my loft,” answered Marlene, puzzled.

“Is he still there?”

“Who?”

“Your husband, your boyfriend—the guy who beat you up,” said Duran.

“Umm, I think we're off on the wrong foot. I'm not a client. Professor Malkin suggested I come talk to you, and since I was passing by …”

Duran laughed heartily and tossed the clipboard down. “Oh, yeah, the little professor. You're
that
one … in the article. That's where you got the face. Well, well! Yeah, we should talk … don't do that, honey, he'll scratch the shit out of you.”

Lucy had been trying to lift the cat out of his basket, and the animal was making increasingly more aggressive noises.

“He doesn't like to be hauled around,” explained Duran.

Lucy asked, “What's his name?”

“Megaton,” said Duran, and then, to Marlene, “You know, we have a playroom upstairs; there's kids and a bunch of toys. Maybe Lucy would like to go up and stay there while we talk?”

“How about that, Lucy? Would you like to play with the kids who live here?” asked Marlene.

“The ones who're hiding from the bad men?” asked Lucy.

Duran gave Marlene a quick sidelong glance. “Yeah,” she said to Lucy, “those're the ones.”

The woman took Lucy by the hand and led her away. She was back in a few minutes. Sitting down again in her chair, she considered Marlene thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “You don't look like what I thought you would.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, all this …” She fluttered her fingers up and down her chest to indicate Marlene's careful navy suit and silk blouse.

“I just came from church,” said Marlene, feeling defensive, and absurd because of feeling so.

“Church, huh. A good Catholic girl.”

“I try to be,” snapped Marlene. “You have some kind of problem with that? I have a butch black outfit too, you know; maybe I should've come in the right costume, get a little less heat.”

They locked eyes for a few seconds, glaring, and then Duran flashed her golden smile again. “Hey, no offense. I don't get along with the church, it don't mean you can't. Anyway, it was a neat number you did on that piece of shit. In the
Voice
article, I mean. You want to go into that business, I got a list for you about eight feet long.”

She said it jocularly, but Marlene answered her in all seriousness. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Duran cocked her head. “Say, what?”

“I want to be, I
am,
in the business. I want to protect women from stalkers.”

Duran's eyebrows rose and her mouth twisted quizzically. “You're not kidding, are you?”

“No.”

“Honey, most of these ladies don't have a pot to piss in. How're you going to make a living off of protecting them from men?”

“Money's not a problem. Not right now.”

“Rich lady, huh? What is this, a hobby?”

Marlene kept her voice even and responded, “Ms. Duran, I'm not an asshole, and I suspect you're not either, so could we cut the horseshit? You want to trade working-class credibility, we could be here all day.”

Duran seemed startled for a moment and then grinned and let out her big, hearty guffaw. “All right!” she said. “The girl means business! Okay—what is it—Marlene? Okay, Marlene: what you're telling me is, you want to run, like, an agency that does protection. You don't mean like, guarding the victims, because that's what I do, me and the other shelters, and there's no way you could afford to put a seven ‘n' twenty-four guard on more than a couple of women. So what you mean is, you want to take the bastards out.”

“If they commit crimes, if they violate protective orders—”

Duran waved her hand dismissively. “Nah, nah— I mean,
take them out.
You know damn well you get one of these bastards for assault, he's away for eighteen months at the most, less for a contempt cite. And when he comes out, what's the first thing he's going to do? He's going to get even with the woman. And he's going to keep it up until she's dead. You know that's the way it is. I can see it in your face.”

“Not all of them are like that,” said Marlene.

“Hah!”

“Yeah, well, if you start with the premise that the solution is wholesale slaughter, you're finished before you start. But there must be hundreds of thousands of cases of battering in the country and maybe thousands of stalking incidents. We have only about fifteen hundred, two thousand homicides in that class across the country per year, maybe a couple of hundred in the City.”

“That's some ‘only.'”

“That's why I went to Malkin,” explained Marlene, unable to keep some sharpness out of her tone. “I was looking for some way of predicting real danger in these cases.”

“So? Could she?”

Marlene shrugged. “Not really. That's why I came to see you.”

“You think I have some kind of … system?” Duran said, and then laughed. “Hell, girl, I got all I can do to keep this place from closing down, getting women relocated with new ID, getting them jobs or welfare. Christ on a crutch, I get five minutes to think a week, I'm lucky. You think I can figure out which of these wackos is going to do something bad and which won't?”

“No, not really,” said Marlene with a sigh. “Look, it was just a thought—I'm sort of new at this. I'm sorry I wasted your time.”

She started to rise, but Duran waved her back and said, “No, sit. This is sort of interesting. Maybe I
should
think about the problem more, I wouldn't be getting my ass in a sling as much as I do.” She glanced at the wall clock. “Look, we'll shoot the shit, I'll take you around and show you the setup, introduce you to some of the women. You like hard-luck stories? I can tell you do, a good Catholic girl like you. We'll have lunch.”