Night Work (8 page)

Marlene? Coming to see me in person, instead of returning my call?

No. It wasn’t Marlene. It took me a moment to place her. It was someone I’d just seen recently.

It was the woman who lived next door to the Schulers, down by the creek, the woman with the husband who’d been yelling at her. I knew I’d given her my card and asked her to come see me if she ever
needed help. I just wasn’t expecting to see her again the very same day.

“Hello again,” I said to her. She stood at the edge of the light, not moving. I tried hard to remember her name.

She didn’t say anything. I went to her, and as she held out my card I took it from her. Up close I could see the swelling around her left eye. I knew she’d be wearing several shades of black, blue, green, and purple by tomorrow morning. I’d been there myself, under different circumstances. I didn’t imagine this woman’s husband had been wearing boxing gloves.

“Did he do this to you?”

“What do you think?” she said.

“You can have him arrested,” I said. “I have a friend on the police force. I can call him right now.”

“Do you know why he did this?”

“No. Does it matter?”

“He did this because you gave me your card.”

I stood there. I didn’t have a word to say to her.

“You had to come over and act like a hero,” she said.

“I was trying to help you.”

“Yeah, that worked out great. Thanks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to … I mean, this isn’t the first time, is it?”

“You don’t know anything about me. You had no right.”

She turned away from me. I stopped myself before I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Let me call my friend,” I said.

“Do not call anyone.”

“I have to.”

“I said, do not call anyone.”

“You told me your name this morning.”

She shook her head.

“It’s Sandra.” Thank God it came to me. “I remember now. So tell me, Sandra … Why did you come here? It wasn’t just to be mad at me, was it?”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t turn around to face me.

“Will you talk to me, please?”

I touched her once, lightly, on the arm. She flinched like I was electrified and started walking out the door.

“If he kills me tonight,” she said, without looking back, “it’ll be your fault.”

“Sandra! Don’t leave!”

She opened the door and went out into the night. I chased after her, followed her down the sidewalk.

“Get away from me!” she said when she saw me.

“Stop.”

“Get away!”

She tried to step around me. I wouldn’t let her. She finally started hitting me with her fists. I was ducking and trying to block her punches without hurting her, right there on the sidewalk while the cars went by. Some of the cars started honking.

“Let me go!” she said. I wrapped her up and held her. If I had stopped to think for one second, I might have realized how many laws I was breaking. I was
holding a woman against her will, with a dozen witnesses slowing down to get a good look. It was all gut instinct at that point, on a day that had already slipped away from me.

I wasn’t going to let anything else happen to her. That was the only thing in my head. On this day of all days, I would not let her go back to that house.

“He’ll kill me,” she said in a low voice. She stopped struggling. “He’ll kill me.”

“No, he won’t.” I let go of her. She didn’t move.

“Yes, he will.”

“Do you have any kids, Sandra? Anybody else back at the house we should be thinking about?”

“If I did, you think I’d leave them with him?”

“Okay, then. That makes it easier. We’re going to call Protective Services right now.”

“No. No, we’re not.”

“Yes,” I said. “We are. Come on.”

I led her back inside the gym. Anderson, Maurice, and Rolando were all standing now. Over five hundred combined pounds of manhood, enough muscle and experience to take on a small street gang, but they obviously had no idea what to do here.

“We’re gonna use your office,” I said.

A minute later she was sitting in the office while Anderson kept bringing her tissues and cups filled with ice water. I was on the phone with Protective Services, arranging the emergency pickup. Something they’ll do at any hour, any day of the week. Sandra didn’t say anything.
She stared off at nothing. While we were waiting, Anderson pulled me out of the office.

“What do we do, Joe?”

“They’re on their way over,” I said. “They’ll take her to the shelter.”

“No, I mean what do
we
do? To the guy who did this?”

“Anderson…”

“We’ll go find him,” he said. “You and me, and we’ll bring Maurice and Rolando, let them do something useful for once.”

I was tempted by the idea. I admit it. The four of us could have driven down there and knocked on the door. I could picture the look on the man’s face when he opened it, when he recognized me and saw who I’d brought with me. The old guy wouldn’t worry him much, but the two men behind me, all tattoos and arms busting right out of their shirts … He’d try to close the door on us, but we’d already be on top of him.

“I made a promise to Laurel,” I said. “All those women who came to her shelter … She made me promise to never go after any of the men. No matter what.”

“You saw her face, Joe. You know what she’s gonna look like tomorrow morning?”

“I know, believe me. I’ve seen a lot worse.”

“It’s not right, Joe. I can’t stand the thought of that son of a bitch walking around with all his teeth still in his mouth.”

“If we went down there, it would be assault and battery,” I said. “A felony if it’s bad enough. And it might get that woman killed. If we beat that man half to death, he’d never come back at us. You know that, right? Never. He’d go after her instead.”

“Your Laurel, she told you all that, huh?”

“Yes, she did.”

“This is what she dealt with. Every day.”

“This was her job, yes.”

He shook his head. “What a world we live in, Joe. What a world.”

That’s exactly what I kept thinking for the rest of the night. When the woman from Protective Services came to pick up Sandra, when she got in that car and drove away … I said good night to everybody, went upstairs, and took a shower while Anderson locked up the gym. I put a frozen dinner in the microwave and ate it standing at the window overlooking Broadway. I didn’t play any music.

God, Sunday nights.

When I was done eating I sat on the bed and looked at my picture of Laurel. I traced the outline of her face with my finger.

“I played that wrong from the beginning,” I said to her. She would have known what to do. She would have told me not to go over to that house, not to make a big scene unless I was ready to go all the way with it. Never show up the man when the woman is still in jeopardy. Never force her hand unless you absolutely have to. Unless her life depends on it.

Thinking back now to the very first time I ever saw Laurel, in the Social Services building over on Ulster Avenue. I was dropping off the Christmas presents from my department, lugging those two big bags into her office and dropping them on the floor. The way she looked up at me, like she very much wanted to kill me for walking through that door without knocking. This was no man’s land, after all. The place where women came to escape the opposite sex.

Me apologizing for not knowing the rules. Laurel apologizing for having a bad day and getting mad at the man delivering the Christmas presents. Me offering to buy her dinner so we could both apologize some more.

“Sorry, I’m engaged,” she said to me. Usually words that would stop a man dead in his tracks. Not just engaged, either, but engaged to some hotshot investment bamboozler down in Westchester County. China pattern all picked out and everything.

My whole life up to that point, spent knocking my head against one wall after another, never learning when to quit, my total lack of anything resembling common sense, it would finally pay off. And how.

God, I missed her so much. What was I thinking with the blind date already? That two years was enough time to get over what happened to her? That I could move on with my life like a normal human being?

Without looking at the clock, without thinking about it, I picked up the phone and dialed Marlene’s
number again. I wanted to talk to someone, to hear a live voice. That’s all I needed. The phone rang four times, then the machine picked up.

“It’s Joe again,” I said. “Sorry if it’s late. I was just worried about you, I guess. I wanted to make sure you’re all right. And, um …”

And what?

“And I just wanted to say good night before I went to bed. That’s all. Give me a call if you get in. If you feel like it. Take care. Good night.”

I hung up the phone. Another dazzling display of human smoothness, I thought. She’ll be so impressed with you.

“Leave yourself alone,” I said out loud. “For one night, leave yourself the hell alone.”

I cracked the window open, felt the hot night air come in. As I looked out at the lights on the street I imagined Sandra sitting in a strange room somewhere, in the women’s shelter, the secret safe house where the Protective Services people hide the women from their men. What a foreign new world they find themselves in, this underground railroad, staying inside all day so nobody sees them, waiting for the slow wheels of justice to turn so they can start to have a normal life again. The man arrested, put through the wringer, restraining orders issued and read out loud to him. Or if he’s bad enough, if he’s unforgivable and unredeemable and for some technical reason they still can’t put him in jail … Then they send the woman as far away as possible,
steal her away under cover of night and hope the man never, ever finds her.

Laurel did this. It was her calling in life, and how many times did she bring the stress of the job home with her? Enough to make me realize that being a probation officer wasn’t nearly as tough. For every woman she saved, there was a man who felt wronged by it. Until one day, she took the wrong woman from the wrong man …

He’s still walking around out there, whoever it was who killed her. Some ex-husband or ex-boyfriend or ex-whatever the hell else, driven mad by rage and humiliation, to the point that he’d actually track down my Laurel, the woman who ruined his life, and kill her in cold blood. That’s the angle the Westchester PD has been following for the past two years, anyway. They’ve been going over every case, every single man who had ever laid a finger on a woman who ended up turning to Laurel for help. Where else could they look? If it was just some random homicidal lunatic, somebody who happened to see her on the street one day … How do you find someone like that?

I was starting to feel a little dizzy. Definitely way too much alcohol tonight, which I’d probably be paying for tomorrow, when Anderson got his hands on me again. I turned out the lights and lay down on the bed. The room wasn’t exactly spinning, but it wasn’t completely stationary, either. You are such a lightweight, I
thought. What would happen to you if you really crawled into that bottle?

That’s when I heard the noise down on the street, the unmistakable sound of somebody racing a hot car right up Broadway. I found myself hoping that he’d get pulled over, but then the noise stopped, and I could have sworn the car was right below my window.

I got out of bed and looked down at the street. The car was parked, one wheel on the sidewalk, facing the wrong way. The motor was still running. My window was still cracked open, so all I had to do was poke my head out, let the driver know just how big a jackass he was. Then I recognized the car. It was Howie’s civilian vehicle. Before I could process that fact, Howie himself stepped out. He moved quickly, looking like he was about to go around to the back of the building, to the door that led up to my apartment, but then he happened to glance up at my window.

“JT,” he said.

“What the hell’s going on?” I said. “Why are you here?”

“What was her name?”

“What?”

“The woman you went out with,” he said. “What was her name?”

“Marlene.”

“What was her last name?”

I had to think about it for a second. How strange not to remember her last name, this woman I had been so intimate with not twenty-four hours ago.
Did I actually have to go look it up on her profile? I had it printed out, I thought. It was right over here somewhere …

Then it came to me. “Frost,” I said, leaning out the window. “Marlene Frost.”

He looked up at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just long enough for that same feeling to come back to me, from a night two years in the past. The same taste in my mouth, the alcohol and the fear and the iron sickness of knowing you’re about to hear something you don’t want to hear.

“Joe,” he said, “you’d better come with me.”

Howie drove. I sat up front and kept looking at him, expecting him to say something, to start explaining everything, where we were going, why he was driving too fast down the dark streets of a town we had both grown up in.

“Howie,” I finally said. “What happened?”

He took a hard left on Foxhall Avenue, rumbling over the railroad tracks. “I don’t know, exactly. I was only there for a minute.”

“Where?”

“Up here. Next to the cemetery.”

“The cemetery …”

“By the other tracks.”

“It can’t be Marlene,” I said. “I was just—”

I stopped.

“What?” he said.

“I was going to say I was just calling her.”

“When? Just now?”

“Yeah. I called her this morning, too.”

“No answer either time.”

“No.”

“Joe,” he said, using my real first name, something
he never did. To him, I’ve been JT since the fifth grade. “It’s just a guess at this point, okay? We don’t have a definite identification yet. There was no purse, no driver’s license. Nothing positive.”

“Then how—”

“She had these orthotics in her shoes. You know, to correct problems with your feet? Imbalances, or whatever. I know a few runners who wear them.”

“Yeah?”