Manhattan Mayhem (9 page)

“May I use your pen?”

He handed one to her and then watched her write three words at the top of the pad. She printed them with force, going over each letter multiple times, so that even from across his desk he could see the thick black letters.

She held them up for him to read:

His eyebrows shot up. “I was expecting something more along the lines of, ‘Ride a roller coaster’ or ‘Fly to Paris.’ ” He gestured toward the pad. “That could cause some damage.”

“It could do some good,” she countered.

As she left his office, he asked her to check in every day.

“For pain control? Or to know when I ought to go into hospice?”

“Yes,” he said, and then he hugged her.

She clung to his white jacket for a moment. “Thank you for telling
me
the truth,” she whispered, and then she bravely walked away.

She called him on each of the next three days.

On the fourth morning, Dr. Samuel Waterhouse’s tearful receptionist brought in a newspaper that explained why they wouldn’t get a call that day.

The night before, Priscilla Windsor had been stabbed to death as she walked—running was no longer possible—in the late cool twilight along Riverside Drive. The redbud trees would blossom into mauve by the next morning, but she wouldn’t see them. She had hoped to live long enough to see spring, but she had also been afraid of seeing it, fearing that it would fill her with unbearable longing for more life. On the night she died, the buds were still wrapped tight as tiny boxers’ fists, as if they didn’t want to pound her with the bittersweet pain of seeing them open their petals.

Witnesses saw her stumble near the dog park, saw a person in sweats and a hoodie stoop to lift her up, saw them huddle for a moment, saw him set her upright, saw him prop her against a tree, saw him pat her shoulder, saw him continue on his own run. They thought,
Aw, nice guy.
They smiled toward his unidentifiable back as he ran faster than before. When he turned a corner, they remembered to look back at the woman he’d so kindly helped.

They saw her sway, and then slide down the tree, and not get up again.

“Oh, my God,” a woman said, pulling her dog closer on its chain.

Other people hurried to check on the fallen woman; there was shock when they saw blood, horror at the knife, then confusion as they figured out who among them should call 911. The Upper West Side of New York City was a neighborhood, and even if they didn’t personally
know this young woman, they knew they wanted to help her.

“Are you sure it was a man?” one of them asked as they compared notes on what they’d witnessed. “I really thought it was a woman.”

“But we’re all agreed he was white, right? Or
she
was?”

But they weren’t agreed on that, either. Nor on tall or medium height, or stocky or thin build, or even whether the perpetrator had come up to the woman after she stumbled or had in fact caused the stumble. The hoodie was black, gray, red, or navy. There were fifteen eyewitnesses, and the cops joked later that you’d have thought they were all looking in different directions at fifteen different women being killed by fifteen different perps. One eyewitness swore there might have been two people who stopped to “help.”

It had the earmarks of a random killing by a random crazy person, people said. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the very randomness of it—in a public place, in front of lots of people, on a lovely evening—that made it so frightening. The truth was, they would have felt safer if the killer had specifically, and with malice, set out to kill
this particular woman,
instead of just stumbling onto the easiest person to stab.

Sam Waterford rarely attended the funerals of his patients, and he felt nervous about going to this one. At one such ceremony, years ago, he’d been screamed at by a family, and he didn’t want that to happen again. The family filed a malpractice suit the next day. They lost because he hadn’t done anything wrong. But ever since, he hadn’t wanted to remind other grieving families of his failures, or what they perceived as such.

The church on West End Avenue was packed, reflecting the social status of Priscilla’s parents, who were the head of a famous brokerage firm (her father) and the head of an even more famous charitable foundation (her mother). He paused at the back of the sanctuary for a moment and then walked down the center aisle so that he could slide
between two couples in a pew near the front. When he glanced to his right, he didn’t recognize the stylish couple who had made room for him. But when he faced left, he found a very tanned older woman already grinning at him.

“Dr. Waterford,” she said, “do you recognize me with my clothes on?”

“Mrs. Darnell,” he said, smiling as if he hadn’t heard that joke a million times before. Her first name was Bunny, but he didn’t use it to address her. “How are you?”

“I suppose you’ll find out at my next appointment.”

He smiled again. She was as rich as chocolate torte and as thin as someone who never ate it, which was how she fit into her black Chanel ensemble, a perfect funeral suit.

“Poor thing,” she murmured, meaning, he supposed, the deceased and not him.

Then the organ music swelled, and the service began.

He spent it staring at the family and feeling anxious.

He could see them clearly in profile from where he sat. It was easy to pick out the elegant mother, the portly middle-aged father, the older sister who looked like a harder version of Priscilla.

They are remarkable,
he thought.

In a packed sanctuary filled with the sounds of soft weeping, the air thick with the awareness of tragedy, they sat rigid and dry-eyed. Mr. Windsor did not put his arm around Mrs. Windsor. The mother never looked at her daughter. None of them wiped away a tear. It was hard to imagine anyone disliking Priss, but it appeared that either her own family was holding in torrents of emotion, or else they loathed the daughter and sister they had lost. He had seen this posture before—in hospitals, on the deaths of patients whose families did not love them.

At the close of the service, Mrs. Darnell said, none too quietly, “Well! Wasn’t
that
just the oddest funeral you’ve ever attended?”

A woman in front of them turned around.

“Strangest ever,” she said.

Startled, Sam looked questioningly at his patient.

“What? You didn’t notice? They hardly mentioned her! Barely even
said her name! Such a lovely girl, so giving and generous, and not a word about any of that. Nothing about her childhood, or even her education—and she went to fine schools, believe you me. I’ll grant you, too many funerals these days go overboard into a dreadful sea of sentimentality, but this went too far onto dry land. There’s restraint, and then there’s looking as if you don’t give a damn about your own child! When is the last time you went to a funeral where fifteen distant cousins twice removed didn’t get up to speak about how close they were to the deceased, telling all those family stories that nobody else gives a hoot about?”

She was right, he realized. He’d been so wrapped up in theorizing about the Windsors that he’d barely noticed the entire service was nothing but hymns, Scripture readings, prayers, and a quick stiff homily from a minister who didn’t seem to have even met Priscilla. That was explained when Mrs. Darnell gossiped on, saying, “This isn’t even their church, you know. Maybe they couldn’t get in when they wanted to, but I’ll bet you this church now has a nice endowment for a new set of choir robes. Or something. But what an impersonal service! Why, even my church lets people get up and lie flatteringly about the deceased, and we’re Episcopalian!”

They were rising to their feet, along with the rest of the crowd, when a man’s deep voice cried out. “Wait! Wait! I want to say something about her!”

People stopped, stared, looked at each other.

“Uh-oh,” Mrs. Darnell said, looking maliciously pleased.

“She was an angel!” the man said. “Is no one going to tell about how she was an angel? Sit, sit! Let me tell you what she did for me!”

“Pakistani, do you think?” Mrs. Darnell whispered.

People sank down again in the pews, a little anxiously, shooting glances toward the family in the front row. Sam watched the sister turn around to check out the speaker, but she quickly faced forward again, as if her mother, seated next to her, had pulled her back. The father’s left shoulder jerked hard, once, and that was it. The three of them returned to sitting like statues.

“She must have bought a hot dog from me twice a week, every week, for the whole last year,” the man said in a voice that penetrated every corner of the large room. “She said I had the best hot dogs in New York City! And I treated her like I treat everybody—I yelled at her to hurry up, to give me her order, to move along. She smiled at me; I never smiled back. She said thank you, but I never did. Then, the day before she was killed—the day before!—she came early to my stand, and she said …” His voice faltered. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “She said she’d give me
five thousand dollars
if I was nice to all of my customers for the entire day.”

Audible gasps arose from the audience.

“Five thousand dollars!” he said again, sharing the crowd’s astonishment and skepticism—even though it was well known in the city that Priss Windsor had once given away a three million dollar inheritance from her godfather.

“A crazy girl, I thought,” the man confessed. “But five thousand is five thousand, so I said, what would I have to do? And she said, you have to be kind to people, you have to smile at them, and say things courteously. You have to thank them for their business, and you can’t throw things at them!”

He shook his head. “Sometimes, it’s true, I hate it when people pay in pennies and nickels. Sometimes, it’s true, I throw it all back at them.”

He made fast work of the rest of the story. How she gave him half the amount to start, how she had brought a blanket and sat on the grass to observe him, and how she gave him grins and thumbs-up as his courteousness improved throughout the day. And how, at the end of the day, she gave him the rest of the five thousand dollars, and he gave her a free hot dog.

“She was an angel,” he said, turning toward the family whose faces had not turned toward him. “She changed my life that day. My wife says thank you, too!”

There was a low murmur of chuckles.

“I just want to say all that, and how sorry I am that she … I was so
shocked when I saw …”

His voice trailed off, and he sat down.

But then he popped back up again.

“Somebody has to speak for the dead!” he proclaimed. “She says, ‘Be kind.’ Thank you.” He sat down again, flushed with exertion and emotion.

Someone else stood up, a pretty young woman.

“He’s right, Priss really
was
an angel, and she was funny! I was in a taxi with her two days before she died, and right after we got in, the driver laid on his horn something awful. Priscilla leaned forward and told him that she’d give him a hundred dollars if he didn’t honk for the whole rest of the ride—”

There were little explosions of laughter among the crowd of frequent taxi riders.

“And he didn’t! When he let us off, he grinned at her and he said, ‘So what will you give me if I don’t honk for the rest of the day?’ ”

At that, nearly the entire crowd laughed, the kind of heartwarming, affectionate laughter that makes shocked and grieving people feel better.

“What did Priss say to him?” a man called out.

The young woman turned a trembling smile toward him. Her eyes shone with tears. “She said that she and several million people in Manhattan would give him their everlasting gratitude.” Again, the crowd burst into laughter. “And then he said, the driver said, ‘Is it okay if I tap on my horn if I need somebody to move back at a stop light?’ And Priss laughed and said, ‘What? You think fifteen cars behind you won’t beat you to it?’ ”

There was laughing and clapping, but not from the family, Sam noted. Their shoulders did not shake with laughter; they still did not dab tears from their eyes. Whatever was damming them up inside did not give way.