The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  I do remember where I’d seen the name of the club before, though. It had been scribbled across the folder on top of Joan’s desk right above that condescending comment she’d made about me. I should have photographed the whole file—or taken it. Still, I had all her digital files on my flash-drive. I could look through them and figure out what Simon had been talking about that was even worse than what was already in Joan Lurie’s story.

  Chapter Eleven

  Joan

  I DON’T SLEEP very much for the rest of the night. The thought of that back door being there for the three weeks I’ve lived here without me knowing makes me feel sick. Enda showing me that the lock is secure doesn’t help any—or his opening it and showing me the dank, dimly lit stairwell that leads down to the basement, especially after my nightmare about the laundry vats. It feels as if some subterranean vault was cracked open when I was attacked and toxic groundwater is seeping into my brain.

  In the morning I make an appointment with the locksmith Enda recommended. I offer to pay a surcharge because it’s the weekend. Then I check my bank balance online and am sickened when I see how much money I’ve gone through. I’m not due another payment until I turn in the book, and I haven’t even started the outline I’d promised to send Etinosa a month ago.

  I look at the folders splayed across the desk, a wine stain on one, that drunken scrawl about Melissa Osgood on another, and cringe. Armchair psychology, Simon would say, is never a substitute for the facts.

  So what are the facts?

  I stack up the folders with the oldest cases on the bottom and the most recent on the top—Amanda, Stephanie, Gwyneth, Pamela, Sandra, Amy, Roslyn. What I should do is read through them all from start to finish, review the facts, look for patterns, figure out what I need to turn this material into a book.

  I open the first folder—Amanda’s—and stare at the pages for a full minute before realizing that they are upside down. Great start, Joan. I remember realizing they were out of order last night but now as I try to organize them I see that some pages are missing. Did I misplace them? I don’t recall the last time I looked at the folder. Am I losing my memory? Am I losing my mind? What if this isn’t from the attack but is a sign of early onset Alzheimer’s? I recall that when my grandmother started losing her faculties we’d find her wandering around the house at night, rearranging the dishes and crockery as if she were looking for the lost bits of her mind in the kitchen cabinets. Was that what was happening to me?

  I shake myself. It’s only from lack of sleep . . . and possible brain damage. Didn’t some celebrity commit suicide because of chronic migraines—

  Stop! I shout.

  “Can I help you with something?” Bot asks.

  I laugh. “Yes,” I tell her. “Find the file ‘Amanda’ on my hard drive and please read it to me.”

  “Looking for file ‘Amanda’ on hard drive,” Bot says agreeably, and then after a pause, “Hm. I’m sorry. There is no file ‘Amanda’ on your hard drive.”

  “Shit,” I say. It’s like the universe doesn’t want me to write this book. I try scrolling through the files in my Documents folder, but the type blurs on the screen. I pick up the next file on the desk—Stephanie—and ask Bot to find that one. She does and offers to read it to me. I have her check the other six files first and they’re all there—as are all the other files for the story. It’s only Amanda who’s missing. It must be mislabeled, I tell myself, there’s no insidious plot to keep me from writing this book. That’s down to my own laziness and procrastination. And that’s going to stop right now.

  I open a new file on my desktop labeled “Book,” and while Bot reads me the files I type in notes, which I’ll be able to have Bot read back to me later. I can do this, I tell myself; I don’t really have any other choice.

  I work until the locksmith, an ancient, stooped man named Lou, shows up to change the locks. I take a break to eat while he works.

  “I just replaced these,” he grumbles as he removes the three locks on the front door.

  “Someone had a key,” I tell him. “I want all the keys delivered directly to me.”

  He shrugs. “You’re supposed to give one to the doorman, but that’s between you and management, lady. I just do the locks.”

  When I ask about the back door he tells me that management doesn’t like to change those locks. I tell him to let me worry about management. He installs a dead bolt over the old lock that can be locked from the inside. When I ask for a lock on the linen-closet door he looks at me like I’m crazy. “Unless you plan on locking someone up in the closet, you don’t need that, and in case of fire, you want quick access to those back stairs. They’re the only way outta here. That’s why the nuns locked them—so the girls couldn’t get out.”

  I stare right back at him. “Are you really old enough to remember when there were nuns here?”

  He smiles, happy that I’ve challenged him. “They were still here when I was a kid and my father did all the locks for them. I remember him coming home and saying that the place gave him the heebie-jeebies—all them young girls trapped up here like pigeons in a coop. ‘What’ll happen if there’s a fire,’ he asked the nun. Do you know what that nun said back to him?” Lou lifts his bushy eyebrows at me. “‘God’s will,’ that’s what the nun told my father. So don’t you worry so much about someone comin’ in. This is a good neighborhood. You worry about getting yourself out.”

  After he leaves, I settle back into work. I keep thinking about those girls locked away up here—like pigeons—and for what? How many of those girls, I wonder, got “in trouble” because they were the victims of sexual assault? How many were the mistresses of rich men who shunted them off when they were done with them? Instead of being paid off or fired, like so many victims of sexual assault today, a word in a constable’s ear was all that was needed.

  A sharp knock startles me out of a daydream so vivid that for a moment I imagine it’s a policeman at the door come to arrest me—

  For what? I chide myself. What do I have to feel guilty about?

  It’s not a policeman. It’s Lillian Day, in the same beaded cardigan, plaid skirt, red sneakers, and straw bag. In addition, she’s holding a china plate full of Milanos.

  “Am I disturbing you?” she asks. “Is now a good time for tea?”

  I think of the morbid woolgathering I’d been doing at my desk and tell her, “Yes, this is a perfect time for tea.”

  I SEAT LILLIAN in the wingback chair by the window and take the desk chair for myself, placing two mugs of tea and the plate of Milanos on the desk between us. It feels a little as if I’m being interviewed as Lillian asks me questions about what it’s like to be a reporter and I tell her about the style stories I wrote for Manahatta.

  “How very glamorous! You’re just like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday!” she cries, her eyes bright. “But tell me what you mean by a Brazilian?”

  I explain and she hoots, kicking up her red sneakers in the air. “Oh my, I wonder what the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Help would have to say about that. I got in trouble in the eighth grade for wearing lipstick, which I’d only done on a dare from my best friend, Rose, who’d ‘borrowed’ it from her aunt who danced in vaudeville. Rose said this color would be pretty on me so I tried it and then scrubbed it off, but Sister Dolores had keen eyes. ‘What have you got on your face, Lily Anne O’Day?’”

  Lillian’s voice is so unlike her own that I shiver.

  “That was Sister Dolores,” she adds in her own voice. “Our Lady of Sorrows, we called her. We were all dead scared of her—except for Rose, who stood right up in class and said, ‘It’s my fault, Sister Dolores, I made Lily put on that lipstick because I thought the color suited her. I thought we’d gotten it all off.’ From the look Sister Dolores gave her, you’d have thought poor Rose had desecrated the statue of the Virgin Mary. ‘Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me,’ quoted Sister. And then she made both of us stay
after school.

  “When I saw my mother come in her best white blouse, freshly ironed, and Sunday skirt and shoes, newly polished, I felt sorry for all the work I’d put her to. Sister Dolores told her she should take better care of my upbringing and not let me spend so much time with questionable company—meaning Rose—and running in the streets with the boys. Of course”—Lillian leans closer to me, her eyes shining—“I did play with the boys on the street. I was the best Ringolevio player on our block, and Rose and I fought all the bullies who picked on the littler kids. But Sister Dolores made it sound like I was doing something . . . dirty. My poor mother, she had a weak heart from having had rheumatic fever as a child and wasn’t very strong, but she worked her fingers to the bone keeping us clean and fed. She listened to it all with her head bowed, but in the end she spoke up for me. ‘My Lily Anne is a good girl, Sister; she won’t take any harm from her friend or from a few games in the street with her brothers.’” Lillian (born Lily Anne, I gather) smiles wistfully at the memory, but the smile quickly vanishes.

  “Later, when I got into trouble, Sister Dolores came to see me here. ‘I suppose your poor mother was wrong about you not taking any harm from the streets,’ she said. ‘It looks to me like the streets have had their way with you. You’re past saving now. You’ll never get to see your mother in heaven.’”

  “What a terrible thing to say.” I lay my hand over Lillian’s cool, dry hand. She looks at me with eyes shining like the sea. “And what did she mean about your mother? Was she . . . had she died?”

  Lillian nods, her eyes brimming. “When I was seventeen I was standing in the kitchen with my mother, watching her stir the oatmeal on the stove, and she fell down to the floor. My father ran to get help, but by the time he came back with the policeman—why not a doctor? I wondered—she was gone. My father took to drink after the funeral and couldn’t watch the boys. He went to live in a boardinghouse. My aunts Gert and Viola offered to take us children to their house in Coney Island, but they were too old to watch over a crew of rambunctious young boys, so it was decided I would leave school to look after my brothers.”

  “It was decided?” I repeat. “My editor Sylvia always says to watch out for the passive voice; it usually means someone is evading blame.”

  Lillian smiles. “Your editor is right, but I don’t know who you’d say was to blame here. My father was too far gone in his cups to have much of a say. My aunts between them didn’t have more than an eighth-grade education. What difference did it make to a girl—and a poor one at that—to finish high school? It wasn’t like I’d be going to college. I’d taken a steno class and could take down two hundred words a minute. And I was very pretty. I’d have no trouble getting a job when the time came.”

  “When the time came?”

  She looks sad again. “I wasn’t much good at looking after the boys. They missed our mother and their friends from the old neighborhood. Coney Island had a rough crowd—gangsters and hoodlums on every corner who preyed on young boys. They got into trouble and then the Children’s Society came and said the boys weren’t being looked after properly . . . that I was negligent.”

  “You were only seventeen,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I burned the oatmeal in the morning and never could get their shirts white the way our mother could. I went walking on the boardwalk with Rose, who was my only friend who’d make the trip from Bay Ridge to visit me, instead of making sure the boys came straight home from school. The Children’s Society took the boys to St. Vincent’s Home. My aunts said maybe it was for the best . . . but it wasn’t. When I went to visit them on Sundays they cried and begged to come home. It was worse when they stopped crying. Tommy got this hardened look about him, like he was trying to keep from crying every minute of the day, and Joe was so angry he snapped at everything I said. Bill, the youngest, tried to smile and please everyone around him like he hoped someone would take him home if he were just good enough. Someone finally did. A couple from New Rochelle wanted to adopt him and my father signed the papers without telling me. I thought my heart would break then, but Bill probably ended up better than Tommy and Joe.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Well, you see, back in those days, the Syndicate ruled Brooklyn. They were everywhere, taking protection money from every candy store and flophouse, taking their share off the goods that were unloaded on the docks. The biggest mob in Brooklyn was Murder Inc., run by Albert Anastasia and Louis Buchalter. They sent thugs like Abe Reles to kill anyone who didn’t pay their protection money. They needed young boys to make their pickups and deliver messages. They got them from places like St. Vincent’s, where the boys had no one to watch after them and were willing to do anything for a couple of dimes to buy candy and cigarettes. Tommy started working for them first, and then Joe, running numbers for the bookies. Whenever they got picked up I’d go down to the police station and explain to the desk sergeant how hard the boys had it since our mother died. I got to know all the policemen. What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this? they would tease, and I wish all the mugs we collared had sisters pretty as you.”

  She looks up and meets my eyes. I have a sudden, sharp vision of a young Lillian, hair swept up off her face in victory rolls, smart in padded shoulders and seamed stockings, walking bravely into a Brooklyn police station, trading on her beauty for her brother’s freedom. “Did you mind?” I ask. “About the . . . teasing.”

  Her eyes narrow. “I got used to it. You see, I thought that as long as I stayed on the right side of the tracks I’d be all right.”

  “The right side of the tracks?”

  She nods. “There were a lot of pretty girls in Coney Island back then and some of the very prettiest went with the toughs—they dressed the best and had the most money to spend. Once you went with a mobster, though, well that’s who you were. A mobster’s girl. If you lost one, there was always another waiting. That’s what I told Rose. She left school, too, that year because she said it was no fun without me. Really, I think it was because she couldn’t stomach living with her stepfather any longer and needed to get out of the house. She became a hat-check girl at the Stork Club and started going with a fast bunch of fellows. ‘Watch out,’ I told her, ‘or you’ll end up like the Kiss-of-Death Girl.’”

  “The Kiss-of-Death Girl?” I ask, intrigued. The name sounds like something from an old noir movie.

  Lillian’s eyes shine. “Evelyn Mittelman. All her fellows had a way of dying, usually at the hands of her next fellow. Rose and I saw her around Coney Island, but she wasn’t much to look at by then. None of those girls were in the end, once they started using dope and getting knocked around.”

  Lillian’s still the same sweet old lady who brought cookies for tea, swinging her red sneakers, but something darker is in the room with us. There’s a tension in the air, as if we’re both poised on a precipice.

  “But you,” I say as softly as I would to a woman standing on a high window ledge, “you stayed on the right side of the tracks.”

  A sad, faraway smile forms on her face. “For a while, at least. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re stepping over a line, especially when you’re all by yourself on the other side. Tommy started running errands for a thug by the name of Eddie Silver. He’d come by with presents for me—real silk stockings, which were hard to find because of the war, and chocolate because he knew I had a sweet tooth. He only wanted to show me what a big man he’d become, but it scared me to see how deep he was getting in with those toughs. One day I saw he was carrying a gun, and when I asked him where he’d gotten it he said that Eddie Silver had given it to him for protection. ‘Whose protection?’ I asked him, ‘his or yours?’ Rose told me I shouldn’t be so hard on Tommy. This is what you had to do to get along in the world today. She had started wearing fancy clothes I knew she couldn’t afford on what she made as a hat-check girl, and she was spending time with that same thug, Eddie Silver, who used to throw around a lot of money at
the Stork Club. She said her fellows gave her presents but I was afraid . . . well . . .” Lillian blushes.

  “You thought she was working as a prostitute.”

  Lillian nods. “She got picked up by the cops that summer. I went down to the courthouse to speak up for her like I’d done for the boys, but when I tried, the judge said he didn’t need to hear one tart speaking up for another. She was sent here to the Magdalens for a month. I visited her . . .”

  She looks around my apartment, and I remember her saying that first day that her friend Rose had given her the key for my apartment. I had thought she meant the former tenant, but now I wonder if she wasn’t thinking of her childhood friend Rose. “She lived here?” I ask. “Where my apartment is now?”

  “Oh no!” Lillian says. “This was the infirmary. She was here when I came because she’d burned her hand in the laundry. Her bed was right here by the window. ‘How do you like my penthouse view?’ she joked when I came to see her, like she was in a suite at the Plaza. But for all her joking I could see that this place had already changed her. Her eyes were flat and she kept plucking at her blanket with her poor bandaged hands . . .”

  Lillian plucks at the knitted afghan over the arm of the chair in unconscious imitation of her friend as she goes on. “I gave her the locket my mother had given me on my confirmation.” Lillian touches her own locket and I wonder if she’s confused. If this is the locket she gave Rose, why does she still have it? “It’s the flowers of the Virgin Mary, you see, the Lily and the Rose, so I told Rose it was meant for both of us and it would keep her safe until she got out. But when she got out she was changed, harder, like being in here had made her think she was as bad as the nuns said she was. I didn’t spend as much time with her anymore after that. I had gotten a job in the steno pool at the Brooklyn Courthouse. That’s where I met Frank.”