The Ex

by Lutz, John

  The crashing against the door stopped, as if whoever was out there was getting tired and needed a second wind.

  Molly continued working on the grill.

  Finally, its lower right corner broke free.

  She almost couldn’t believe it.

  Whimpering, determined, she leaned her weight against the grill and pushed with her weary arms, trying to bend it outward.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  Deirdre stood outside the unyielding door, glaring angrily at it and gasping for breath. She’d explored the basement and knew the bitch was trapped on the other side of the door. No way out. There might be plenty of time, but Deirdre wanted to get this over with, to get to her prey before some joke of fate interrupted what was about to happen.

  She dragged a forearm across her perspiring forehead, looked around, and smiled.

  Leaning against a wall were some old, rusty tools. One of them was a long-handled pickax.

  Deirdre rubbed the shoulder she’d been smashing against the door, then walked over and grabbed the pickax, hoisted it, and gave a few practice swings.

  Then she returned to the storage room door, drew the pickax well back, and with all her might swung the pointed end at what she knew was a weak spot on the door.

  The satisfaction she felt as the old wood split was almost like sex.

  Molly continued to work frenziedly on the iron grill, glancing behind her as the rusty point of the pick repeatedly punctured the brittle old door.

  She was sobbing now, trembling, working her arms and hands with difficulty. Her palms were bleeding but she didn’t feel the pain, only her terror.

  Deirdre knew she was close.

  She could sense it!

  Over and over she smashed the pointed end of the pickax into the door, seeing the gaps in the wood widen, the cracks turn into fissures that had to fly wide apart soon. Whatever Molly had wedged against the door was squealing with each blow as it jumped and vibrated and slid to the side.

  Her mouth gaping wide to suck in air, Deirdre went into a mad fury of motion. The old door bucked on its hinges. Chips and splinters flew. Ancient nails bounced and pinged off the concrete floor.

  She grinned wildly as she heard the wooden prop on the other side of the door clatter to the floor.

  Wielding the pickax like a weapon, Deirdre kicked what was left of the door open and rushed into the storage room.

  Immediately she saw the iron grill bent wide away from the window.

  The crate directly beneath the window.

  She wheeled insanely in a wide circle, grunting and swinging the pickax like a baseball bat with all her might until it contacted a wooden support beam and stuck, its long wooden handle leaping from her grasp.

  She was alone.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She jumped and spun around.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” Darlene said.

  Deirdre was amazed and outraged. “You followed me!”

  “Of course I did. Because I’m worried about you. You’ve been acting more and more strangely, and now this. Were you chasing someone?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Of course not. I just got here.”

  “I’m not chasing anyone. I came in here because…well, it was an impulse. I like basements.”

  “That’s absurd, Deirdre.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Anyone would say there was something seriously wrong with a person who suddenly entered an apartment building basement on impulse and began beating at things with…what is that thing?”

  “I don’t know. A tool. Some kind of pick. When I saw it, I liked it. So I took it.”

  Darlene glanced around in the dim light. “We can talk about this later. Let’s get out of here now!”

  Deirdre humored her and trailed along behind, but she was still furious.

  With Molly and with Darlene.

  36

  After the terror of her encounter in the apartment building basement, Molly had been in no condition to resist David’s insistence that she see Dr. Mindle.

  She sat now in his spacious office on Lexington near Thirty-eighth Street. It was a restful room with green carpet and drapes, dark woods and black leather furniture, no noise and no sharp corners. All colors seemed to be in the same spectrum. Nothing in the decor jarred.

  According to the lobby directory, there were several psychoanalysts in the building. Maybe it was a co-op and they owned it. Even the elevator had provided a relaxing interlude, plush carpet, soft music, no mirrors to reflect anyone’s interior horror. An “up” experience and a prelude to therapy.

  Molly was seated in a comfortable chair at an angle to Dr. Herbert Mindle’s desk. He was much as she’d imagined from David’s brief description, middle-aged, balding. But unlike her imaginary Dr. Mindle, he had a deep tan and an athletic build beneath his well-cut suit. The tan reminded her of those acquired at tanning salons then augmented by shopping and drinking expeditions during Caribbean cruises.

  He leaned back in his padded desk chair and smiled reassuringly at her. It was the sort of smile shaped by practice at a mirror.

  Molly smiled back at him, but only slightly. There was a faint scent of lemon mingled with something less acrid—Dr. Mindle’s shaving lotion or cologne—in the room, and she noticed now that from time to time the traffic out on Lexington was barely audible.

  He said nothing, so she said, “It was my husband’s idea for me to come here.” Great! she thought. She’d sounded like some sort of codependent, Babsie Doll wimp.

  “I know,” Dr. Mindle said in his easy, conversational tone. “He’s the one who called and made the appointment. He said you finally agreed to talk to me as a favor to him.” He made a steeple with his fingers. Molly was surprised that a real psychiatrist would actually do that. “Despite what’s been happening,” Dr. Mindle said, “and your ordeal in the apartment basement yesterday, you told him again that you didn’t need a shrink.”

  Molly stared at him. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty for insulting your profession?”

  Dr. Mindle smiled tolerantly. “No. It happens all the time. I’m used to it. Besides, maybe you really don’t need a shrink.”

  Molly drummed her fingertips silently on the padded chair arm. “David said you and he worked out at the same gym.”

  “That’s right, we do.”

  “Friends? Weightlifting buddies?”

  “You could say that.” Dr. Mindle’s smile changed to one of amused understanding. “I’m charging you for this visit, Mrs. Jones.”

  Molly let herself relax and settle back in the chair. “Good. I feel better now.”

  “That’s the idea, Molly, making you feel better. I can’t solve your problem in a short time. That is, if I can solve it at all.” Another soothing smile. “If you have a problem.”

  “David thinks I do.”

  “Well, he might be right.”

  “He told you everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he told you more than he told me.”

  Without changing expression, Dr. Mindle stood up and walked out from behind his desk. He went to the window and faced the view of office buildings and searing blue sky. His voice was so soft she had to strain to understand his words. A stratagem, no doubt.

  “This city, Molly, is a monster. It doesn’t eat people alive all at once, but it eats them. Some of them from the inside.”

  Molly quietly watched him, a classic, inverted-triangle male figure silhouetted against the light. Pigeons cooed softly on a nearby ledge. Traffic hummed.

  “You agreed to come here to see me,” Dr. Mindle continued, “so it must be that you admit to yourself at least the possibility that none of this is true. That no one is stealing your clothes. That no one tried to kill you.” His padded Armani shoulders rose in a subtle shrug. “Just the possibility, mind you.”

  Molly felt anger rise in her. She held up her hands, scraped and blistered from frantically bending and
twisting the iron grill over the storage room window. “Exhibit A, as they say in court.”

  He turned around to face her. His expression was mild, composed. He barely glanced at her hands; the mind was his province. “We’re not in court, Molly. But if we were, the prosecution would say that you acted out and deliberately splintered that storage room door then injured yourself escaping from someone who thought you were a prowler. That apartment building isn’t in a crime-free neighborhood. Nowhere in New York is crime-free.”

  “But suppose Deirdre was really there. And trying to kill me.”

  Dr. Mindle faced the window again, slipping his hands into the pockets of his suit’s pleated slacks. “What would be her motive?”

  “What if she’s trying to steal my life?” Molly said. “To take my place with my husband and son? To become me?”

  “Then I’d say she should be here and not you. But you’re the one whose husband is concerned with your actions lately. And they’ve disturbed him enough to talk you into coming here.”

  “Well, don’t we usually put away the people who disturb us, rather than the people who are disturbed?”

  “Sometimes,” Dr. Mindle said. “Though not nearly as often as we used to, I assure you. And it seems to be you and no one else who sees yourself as a candidate for confinement. I see before me a badly frightened young woman, but not one who’s necessarily mentally ill. Fear can exist in perfectly normal people and still have no basis in reality. Sometimes when we remove the fear, reality again becomes clear.”

  Molly sighed and stood up. Slick word games she didn’t need. “You’re trying to bullshit me, Doctor.”

  He turned toward her and smiled. “That’s my job, bull-shitting you. It’s also my job to be honest with you. It’s a balancing act. And you have to be honest with me at least some of the time. We might get somewhere that way.”

  Molly knew the hopelessness of what he was saying and felt the familiar desperation and fear take control of her. “We might,” she told him. “But like you said, Dr. Mindle, it would take time.”

  Her right knee and hip still ached from her ordeal in the apartment building basement. She tried not to let her pain show.

  Limping slightly, she strode from the office.

  The receptionist in the anteroom glanced up at her and smiled. “A man just poked his head in here and looked around to see if anyone was waiting to see the doctor. Might he be with you?”

  “No,” Molly said. “No one is with me.”

  37

  It was dark when Lisa Emmons left the movie and made her way along East Fifty-seventh Street toward the subway stop. Beside her in the street, light traffic hissed along in the dampness of a recent drizzle. The remnants of the audience that had left the theater with her and walked in the same direction were thinning out, going down side streets or getting into cabs. Lisa’s mind was still on the movie—a satisfying drama about three independent women who got even with the abusive men in their lives then formed an investment company and became millionaires—when she was aware of someone walking behind her, whistling the theme song from the movie.

  Lisa slowed her pace and glanced back, then stopped and turned all the way around. The sidewalk wasn’t crowded. There was no one within fifty feet of her. A panhandler who’d appeared from somewhere was standing half a block away with a cup and a cardboard sign. A short man with puffy dark hair was bustling away in the opposite direction. It was possible that he was the whistler. Even the beggar might have followed and whistled the tune. He didn’t necessarily have to have seen the movie; he might have picked up the melody from some other member of the audience who’d walked past him.

  Or the whistler might have ducked into a nearby all-night deli or entered the shop Lisa had just passed that had an assortment of jade figurines displayed in its lighted window.

  There was no way for her to know for sure. That was one of the problems with a city like New York that lived late into the night; there were too many possibilities.

  Her heart beating faster, Lisa continued on her way. She thought, for only a few fleeting seconds, that she heard the whistling again. A sound of the night that might have been the trailing notes of a faraway emergency siren, or an echo from blocks away. Sound carried that way sometimes in the nighttime canyons of tall buildings, the way images sometimes appeared out of their proper place in the desert.

  She began walking faster. There had been a monotonal quality to the whistling that was oddly threatening and made her afraid to look behind her again. Yet without looking, she was sure she was being followed.

  A cab turned the corner and drove toward her. She ran a few steps, her arm raised.

  But despite the fact that the cab’s rooflight showed it to be available, Lisa saw a passenger slumped in back, and the cab accelerated and spattered droplets of rainwater on her as it sped past.

  A horn blared at her, and she realized she was standing off the curb, almost a yard into the street. She hurriedly moved back up onto the sidewalk just as a string of cars roared past.

  The blare of the horn and her sudden action had jolted her mind. She was angry with herself now. This was absurd. She wasn’t exactly alone—this was midtown Manhattan and there were other people on the streets. She had done nothing and had no reason to be afraid of anyone.

  Holding her breath, she stood and stared back in the direction she’d come from along the wide, shadowed sidewalk. There were two women walking away from her, holding hands. Lovers? Mother and daughter? Merely fast friends?

  A tall man in baggy pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up emerged from the shop that sold jade. He glanced her way, then drew something from his pocket and appeared to be studying it. Two business types in suits and ties walked past the man toward Lisa. She stood and waited while they passed. “…should never have traded so much to get him,” the man on the left was saying, gesticulating with his right arm.

  Lisa didn’t move. She continued staring boldly at the man still standing in front of the shop with the jade.

  He glanced at her again, slipped whatever he’d been holding and looking at back into his pocket, then walked away in the other direction.

  Lisa walked on, feeling better.

  But she decided she didn’t want to go down into a subway station. The subways were better these days, safer and more brightly lighted, but still they gave her the creeps. Though she regretted spending the extra money, she’d take a cab.

  Even as she made the decision, the traffic light at the next intersection changed and several cabs turned and drove down the street toward her.

  She moved back into the street and waved an arm to hail all of them. It was the first one that veered in her direction and came to a rocking stop before her. She climbed in and gave the cabby her address, then settled back into the soft seat and closed her eyes. She knew that if she wanted to, she could keep them closed until she felt the cab stop in front of her apartment, where she’d be safe.

  She’d been home for fifteen minutes and was sitting on the sofa, sipping a cup of orange-flavored tea, when the phone rang.

  When she picked it up and said hello, a woman’s voice said, “You were followed from the movie.”

  Lisa felt the night’s earlier fear come alive and leap into her throat. “Who are you?” she asked in a choked voice.

  “I’m somebody who saw you followed from the time you left the theater until you got into a cab. It’s okay, though. No one followed you home.”

  Lisa was angry now, but still afraid. She looked down and saw goose bumps on the backs of her pale hands. “Why are you telling me this?”

  The woman gave a short laugh, as if the answer to Lisa’s question should be obvious. “To warn you, of course.”

  “Then tell me more. Say who was following me. If you know.”

  “That really wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Then why are they following me?”

  “You’re perceived as a threat to this person.”

 
Lisa’s mind worked furiously but came up empty. “No. I’m not a threat to anyone!”

  “I said it was a perceived threat.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “An acquaintance of mine has talked to me about you. This person is dangerous.”

  “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “I can’t tell you. I don’t want anyone to find out we’ve talked.”

  “How could anyone find out?”

  “You might tell them.”

  “Don’t be absurd. If you help me, why should I do anything that would hurt you?”

  “It would be an accident.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “You might call again,” Lisa said. “If you do, how will I know it’s the same woman?”

  There was silence for such a long time that Lisa thought the woman might have hung up without her hearing the distinctive double click of the connection breaking. Then the voice said, “My name’s Darlene, Lisa.”

  “What about a last name?”

  “No. I’ve warned you because I saw it as my duty. I’ve fulfilled my obligation. That’s enough.”

  “I promise I won’t—

  But now Lisa did hear a sharp double click that might have been a hang-up, then only a thrumming silence.

  “Hello,” Lisa said tentatively into the void.

  The phone company took her voice and didn’t give it back.

  38

  They’d argued much of last night about her visit with Dr. Mindle. Perhaps that was why David had phoned this morning and suggested in an apologetic tone that they meet for lunch.

  Molly had left Michael with Julia and was caught up on her work, waiting for another assignment from Traci, so she left the apartment at eleven-thirty and walked toward the subway.