Following Polly

by Karen Bergreen

  At least Charlie’s not a neat freak.

  I’m wobbling in Charlie’s not-so-state-of-the-art desk chair as I manage to check out a pile of photographs. Some of the faces look familiar; they’re the women that he met at Eat Here Now.

  “What’s your name?”

  I look up at him, careful to maintain my balance.

  “Alice,” I say softly.

  “Alice what?”

  “Teakle,” I tell him. I can tell by his response that he doesn’t recall my name at all.

  “Well, Alice Teakle, could you please tell me why you have been stalking me?”

  I really wouldn’t characterize my behavior as stalking, but I don’t want to argue with Charlie.

  “I need your help.”

  Charlie laughs at me.

  “You need my help?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  It’s clear that Charlie doesn’t believe me, but he’s willing to hear me out.

  “The police are after me. They think I killed someone, and I didn’t.”

  “The police think you killed someone?”

  Pause.

  “Yes.”

  Pause.

  “So why didn’t you call a lawyer? Why did you come to me?”

  I answer him very clearly.

  “You’re a lawyer and you know Kovitz.”

  “Phil Kovitz? How do you know Phil Kovitz?”

  Charlie raises his voice.

  “He may be in charge of my case. He thinks I’m a killer.”

  Charlie leans into me and puts both of his hands on the arms of the desk chair. It stops wobbling.

  “Don’t lie. How do you know Kovitz?”

  “I don’t know him. He came to my house; he took me to the station.”

  Charlie’s hands are a hair’s breadth away from my neck.

  “You’re lying to me. You aren’t wanted by the cops. How stupid do you think I am? Who are you really? Don’t lie to me. I will kill you.”

  I believe him.

  “My name is Alice Teakle. I gave you beads.”

  Recognition.

  “What?”

  “My name’s Alice Teakle.” I’m saying the words faster than I can think them. “I gave you beads at Pennington and Litt. They think I killed Polly Dawson.”

  “Polly Dawson? Why would you kill Polly Dawson.”

  His opening statement.

  “They think I did it. Kovitz is already ironing my prison wear.” I’m not fully ready to disclose their flimsy evidence. “But I didn’t do it. There’s no changing his mind. I saw you and Kovitz having lunch at Mee-Hop a few weeks ago, and now I’m hoping you’ll believe me and get Kovitz off my back. I thought you could convince him. I don’t know him. You know him.”

  Charlie doesn’t say anything. He steps back. I hope that our Mamet-like exchange has ended.

  “Is it okay if I use your bathroom?”

  “Sure. It’s over there.” A weary Charlie points to a closed door.

  ________

  I’ve scrubbed myself to the best of my abilities in Charlie’s guest bathroom sink. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of visitor traffic here. I take a deep breath and explore my surroundings. There are no towels unless you count two disposable and dusty American flag hand towels on the sink. Either Charlie’s a major patriot or the last time he visited his second bathroom was on July Fourth, the year to be determined. The only thing in the medicine cabinet is a three-inch Ace comb. I run it under hot water and attack the knots in my hair, one by one.

  I’m tempted to use an unopened toothbrush, which is sitting on a little shelf next to the mirror. But that would be stealing, and I want to come off as someone with integrity so that I can offset the fact that Charlie found me going through his garbage less than an hour ago.

  I return to the room, my face raw from scrubbing and my hair wet, unsnarled, and unclean.

  It turns out that Charlie remembers that I left the beads.

  “It was so odd,” he calmly explains to me. “I came to work, and there was a jar of beads sitting on my desk. I had no idea how they got there.”

  “You didn’t remember our conversation about the bead district?” Indignant, I forget for a moment that I’m defending my life.

  “Only vaguely. Months later I was heading to a meeting in the West Thirties and I saw bead stores with little jars in the windows just like the one on my desk, and I had a flash in my head—a woman telling me about the bead district. But I couldn’t recall who I was talking to.”

  I know this is ridiculous given my situation, but my feelings are hurt.

  Charlie gets up from the couch, and leans toward me at the desk.

  “If this makes you feel better…”

  He leans lower into me and puts his hand by my leg.

  I’m really uncomfortable. I’ve gotten used to my smell by now, but I know it must be awful. Is Charlie giving me a belated thank-you kiss for the beads?

  No. He opens the drawer by my leg and pulls out the jar of beads I had purchased for him eight years before.

  I’m moved. I’m trying to figure out how to tell him that without sounding utterly ridiculous when Charlie interrupts me—

  “Now tell me why you’re living on the street.”

  I try to tell him everything from the beginning. My first account is spotty. I omit the following Polly part. I tell him how someone has framed me for Polly Dawson’s murder. I tell him about the planted museum pin and the matchbooks from the Four Seasons and Lever House. But when I get to the story about Otto & LuLu’s I can’t seem to do it without explaining that I had followed Polly to that store. So I tell him the truth.

  “Well, I had this little habit.”

  “What kind of habit?”

  “Oh, not drugs or anything if that’s what you are thinking.” I can tell it is, because Charlie suddenly looks relieved. “I had taken to”—I gulp—“following Polly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d been following Polly around for a few weeks.”

  “Why?”

  How do I tell him the answer to this when I myself am not sure? Because I’m curious. Because I’m nosy. Because I wanted to see if I could.

  “For sport, I guess.” I then tell Charlie that I’d decided I no longer wanted to follow Polly on the day she was killed.

  “You want me to believe that you followed Polly Dawson around because it was fun and that she happened to get killed the day you thought it was no longer fun, but that you happened to find the body?”

  He cross-examines well.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know about me and Kovitz?” Charlie is once again suspicious. “Were you following me?”

  “No. Believe it or not, Polly was having lunch in Mee-Hop when you were having lunch there. Do you remember? It was about two and a half weeks ago. It was a deceptively beautiful day. Everyone was underdressed because the sun was so strong but the temperature could not have been higher than thirty degrees. You were wearing only a light Windbreaker. It was royal blue.” I come close to telling him that that particular blue suits him. “I recognized you and was hoping you wouldn’t recognize me because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I was also hoping you wouldn’t recognize Polly, but she was pretty well disguised.”

  “How did you know that I was eating with Kovitz?” At least he’s not alluding to my accurate recollection of his attire.

  “I saw his badge, and it said Kovitz. I remember little details like that.”

  “Did you happen to hear our conversation?”

  “No way. I was too focused on Polly.”

  “I see. So you weren’t following me at all?”

  He’s actually getting it.

  “Yes. It was just Polly, and then I ended up on the unfortunate end of a really bad coincidence.”

  “Is this something you do all the time?”

  “Oh, God no.”

  “You mean you’ve never done it before?”

  “Well…�
�� I’m about to deny it, but I decide to go for broke. After all, I’m in his apartment, sitting on his couch, and I’ve already gone through his garbage. “I went through a phase in my adolescence.”

  “What was in it for you?”

  This question is a little much for a relationship that started five minutes ago.

  “I don’t know. I wish I could tell you.” I look at him, asking for understanding. “It turned out to be really interesting. One afternoon, I was walking home and I saw the Clover School mafia. They were the girls who always beat us in field hockey. I guess I must have been bored because I just started following them.”

  “Because you were bored?”

  “I’m not defending it. You asked me and I want to be truthful. Should I go on?”

  Charlie hesitates but I can see that he’s curious.

  “They kept darting in and out of stores, laughing, cracking each other up. They’d be in a store for two minutes and they’d come running out. I finally followed them into this boutique called Divertissement. They were stealing. Each one took a container of chocolate-chip-flavored lip gloss from the counter.”

  “Chocolate chip lip gloss?”

  “You’ve never been a twelve-year-old girl.”

  “And was that the only time?”

  I’d been so lonely that I actually followed happy families on occasion. But I am not about to be quite that honest.

  “No.”

  He pauses for a second.

  “Then why have you been following me around for the last week?”

  I pause.

  “That was stalking.” I’m a tad more impudent than I want to be. “Not in the bad way. I was waiting for the perfect moment to ask your advice about Kovitz.”

  “What advice is that?”

  “How can we convince him that I didn’t kill Polly Dawson?”

  “We?”

  “Well, I couldn’t do it myself, but maybe we could team up like Remington Steele or something. He would think you were solving a crime but in reality I would be. Do you have a snack?”

  “What is Remington Steele?”

  “What is Remington Steele? Where were you from 1982 to 1987? The TV program about the brainy PI who, for some reason, was not taken seriously by potential clients and the authorities. So she made up a fictitious boss, Remington Steele. And then a charming, handsome thief assumes the name Remington Steele for himself, and pretends he’s her boss and she ends up doing most of the actual detective work.”

  “I never watched that. And I’m not sure I see the comparison.”

  Only that I loved Pierce Brosnan, the star of Remington Steele, and I love you. But I can’t tell him that.

  “Well, I would do all the work to clear my name, and you could be my ambassador to the authorities, like Kovitz. And you’d get all the recognition. You could be famous.”

  I realize from Charlie’s sunken expression that he has no desire to be famous.

  “Or you could get me a snack.” I say it as a joke, but I’m actually famished.

  “What makes you think that I can convince Kovitz?” Charlie heads back toward the kitchen.

  “First, you know him.”

  I’m shouting to compensate for the volume produced by what sounds like a flurry of opening and closing cabinets in what I think has got to be his kitchen. “Second, he doesn’t think you’re a criminal. Third, you’re a lawyer, and have at least some experience in the convincing department. I’m not so good.”

  Charlie comes back in the room. In one hand he has a canister of Pringles and in the other, a warped wooden bowl. He plops them on the table. “You want me to be your lawyer?”

  I can’t tell if he is asking me or accusing me.

  “Well, I—”

  “Do you want me to be your lawyer?”

  He says it more softly this time.

  “I don’t know if I want that exactly. I was thinking of you as a conduit to Kovitz. I can’t afford a lawyer. I can’t afford a MetroCard.”

  Charlie glances at the mound of papers on his desk. “How about we trade services?”

  I don’t get it. Does he need a casting assistant? I empty the chips into the misshapen bowl.

  “I’m not sure I follow you. Pringle?” I reach out to him with the bowl in my hand.

  “You don’t need to follow me.” He ignores the chips completely. “I want you to follow other people.”

  Is this the point where I remind Charlie that following was what got me into trouble in the first place? And that despite my decline in well-being, my mental health may be taking an enormous leap forward. Do I go that far?

  “What kind of people?” I query as I try to elegantly place some Pringles in my mouth.

  “Streetwalkers.”

  I think I know where this is going and I nod, my mouth full, so that Charlie can continue with his request.

  “I need you to check out some prostitutes for me.” His face reddens. “Not in the way you might think. You see, I think they’ve been paid off in a conspiracy against my father.”

  “Your father?” I ask as if this is the first I’ve heard about the scandal.

  “Yes. My father has been the COO of Kelt Pharmaceuticals for twenty-three years. And he’s good at it. When he started, the company was worth just under a billion dollars, and now it’s worth forty-seven billion. Now everybody wants his job. The younger people in the company are greedy, and they’re trying to pass their greed off as concern for the company. Because the finances are what they are, and because my father likes his job, they have to attack my father personally. What they’re doing is sick.” Charlie’s anger peaks, and then he stops speaking.

  “What are they doing?” I ask as gently as I can.

  “They fabricated a story to embarrass him.” Charlie lowers his voice.

  “What kind of story?” I take another handful of chips.

  “They say my father frequently visited prostitutes.”

  He pauses. This must be so difficult for him. Of course Charlie doesn’t want to be famous. His family is already infamous.

  “They said he violated some sort of morals clause in his contract. They used a whole team of so-called investigators to manufacture a case against him. They presented him with the package of evidence and he refused to leave. More recently, they have called in law enforcement so they could make all of this stuff public and humiliate him. He was told that all sorts of charges were pending against him. He left the office in disgrace.”

  “Is he going to go to prison or anything?”

  “No. Surprise, surprise. The second he quit his job, the charges were dropped. Apparently there was not enough in the company’s paperwork to go forward with any of it.”

  “But if he didn’t do anything criminal—”

  “The trumped-up solicitation is a crime. And the mere suggestion that he has been with hookers demonstrates that his judgment is impaired and he’s unable to lead the company. It’s completely ridiculous. My father’s totally depressed—even worse than when my mother died. And I want to help him.”

  “Can’t you get your law firm to hel—” I want to tell Charlie how sorry I am that his mother died, that I lost my father at eight. That I know his pain.

  “I have no more law firm. My biggest client was Kelt Pharmaceuticals. I brought them in—not my father’s idea, but I had gotten to know their general counsel through him. And when Kelt got rid of my father, they hired a new law firm. So Pennington and Litt had no use for me. The managing partner told me I should ‘keep a low profile for a few months—maybe take a vacation until this whole thing blows over.’ My name would be bad for business.”

  “Unbelievable,” I say, although I’ve known all this for weeks.

  “All because of the greed of these guys.”

  “So what are you doing?” I ask.

  “Well, I want to nail these guys.”

  I’m almost finished with the chips and am still hungry.

  “Does this have anything to do with your me
eting with Kovitz?”

  “Yes. I knew him way back. We worked together when I was an assistant in the United States Attorney’s Office before I started at Pennington and Litt. We were buddies. And when my father got railroaded, I asked him to look into it.”

  “And did he?”

  “The problem is that Kovitz is a New York City cop. Somehow the guys at Kelt handed this over to the FBI because there was some interstate activity, and Kovitz is having a really hard time getting the feds to talk to him. Those guys are arrogant.”

  “So is Kovitz helping you at all?”

  “In a limited way. He did a few background checks on all the women they say my dad hired. Stuff I couldn’t get.”

  I look at the heap of papers on Charlie’s desk. It’s topped with the poor copies of the photographs.

  “Are those the women you took out to lunch?”

  Charlie shoots me a look. He suddenly remembers that less than two hours ago, he was ready to kill me.

  “Yeah.” He pauses and decides whether I am worthy of this next level of information. He decides that I am. “I’m trying to figure out why they’re lying. Why they told the investigators that my father did this.”

  “Are you sure that he didn’t?”

  Charlie looks at me as if, well, as if I accused his father of maintaining a whore habit.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “What have the hook—I mean the women said?”

  “They told me that they were professional escorts and that they were paid by my father to have sex with him.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I asked each of these women if they had any agreement with the government or the scumbags at Kelt in terms of testifying against my father if this were to move forward in any way. And what a coincidence. They all do. It seems that prison isn’t in their cards if they pin the blame on my dad.”