by Avery Corman
“So when you said that thing about Cummings, about losing his wife affecting his ideology, it’s not a totally benign view of the world you’re carrying around.”
“Can you draw a line from my personal experience to what I believe? More likely, it’s that leap of faith.”
He was pensive; the waiter came for a dessert order and they allowed the somber mood to dissipate.
He wanted her to hear some jazz in a club he liked and they walked for fifteen minutes through twisting, narrow streets to a part of the city where no one else was walking. Muffled sounds of television sets played in apartments, dogs barked, and notably, cats were squealing in a back alley, an unpleasant reminder. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable on this eerie walk.
“Wouldn’t a cab have worked a little better?”
“Walking off the meal. Good for the digestion.”
“Is that what this is? Richard, are we lost?”
“I’m leading the way. A few minutes more.”
The buildings were shabbier the farther they walked, it was not even 10:00 P.M. and they hadn’t seen anyone on the streets for several blocks, and as they turned the corner a half-dozen teenagers in baggy pants, their baseball caps turned around hip-hop style, came swaggering directly toward them, insolent, menacing. She squeezed Richard’s hand tightly. Nobody else was on the street, just the two of them and the teenagers drawing closer. He held her tightly by the hand and walked directly into the middle of the group, staring them down, meeting their insolence with his boldness. They parted and he led Ronnie through, around the corner, and the danger was over.
“Street stuff. A thousand stare downs when I was growing up.”
“That was dangerous, Richard. What are we doing here?”
“Going to hear some jazz.”
They walked another couple of blocks and a neon sign over a doorway announced, BERRY’S JAZZ. He registered no surprise, not a question in his mind that he would find it.
The group in the club was a piano, bass, guitar, and drums, a soft, elegant sound, different from the Dixieland that permeated most of the French Quarter. It took her a while to settle down and absorb the music, ill at ease from the walk there, wondering if he had placed her in danger with his nonchalance. On the other hand, he never gave off the least indication of any danger, and ultimately, there wasn’t a problem; they were listening to jazz, as promised.
With the flight down, the long day, the tension of the nightcap portion, she fell asleep shortly after getting into bed. He aroused her in the night and took her, and in the morning the sex seemed dreamlike.
When he informed her he wasn’t returning to New York with her, but going to Portland, Oregon, to interview a psychologist who specialized in deprogramming cult members, and then was going to conduct interviews with the people the psychologist treated, she was not surprised.
“Who is this for?” she asked.
“Same foundation as the Mexico work. After that there’s a seminar in San Diego. Wish I could be back in New York. Keep working and time will fly, you’ll see.”
The pattern had revealed itself. At this point he was not someone she would be able to count on for a consistent social life. She could count on him for the sex. Not for a Saturday night movie and hamburgers. Unless he happened to be in New York. Unless there wasn’t anyone else. Teasingly, or possibly more than a tease; insistently, she extracted his cell phone number, which she didn’t have, Richard warning her he used it for emergencies largely and didn’t always check his messages. E-mail was the best way to reach him. She had just slept with a man, again, who traveled, and who didn’t answer his phone.
Part of his deal was a car to the airport and they went to the airport together. The driver stopped at her departure area first. “Richard, a question. How many of me are there?”
“That’s too self-deprecating, Ronnie. There aren’t any more of you. I do move around a lot. It’s the nature of my work. I’ll be back in New York in about a week and a half. Call you first thing,” which he emphasized with a serious kiss on the lips.
Nancy was at Bob’s apartment. Ronnie unpacked from the weekend and went out to buy some ingredients to make an omelet for dinner, her mind drifting; the new article, Richard, the sex, the knowledge that he was not someone you would take home to your parents at this stage of the relationship, if it could indeed be called a relationship, assuming one had parents.
As she left the building she noticed at the alleyway, the same alleyway where the cats were tossed in her path, a man in a black raincoat, chinos, and sneakers, with a deerstalker hat, flaps down, lampblack on his face like a deranged commando. In an underhand motion he tossed something in her direction and darted into the alleyway.
“Hey, you!” she called out, and ran toward the alleyway. When she got there he was gone. She walked back to look on the ground to see what he had thrown. It was a two-inch porcelain death skull with hollow eyes.
4
IN A CITY WHERE violence often led the eleven o’clock local news, these harassments of Ronnie Delaney were insignificant. Ronnie read that in the faces of Detectives Santini and Gomez. She brought the death skull to the precinct and the desk sergeant referred her to the detectives. They took down the information at a desk and kept the object, carefully placing it in a glassine envelope.
“It’s Cummings again,” she said. “It had to be one of his people. Who else cares?”
“This is going to be very hard to prove,” Gomez said.
“If you could see your faces. Why should big-city detectives like us bother with this trivial little case? Why don’t we just wait for one of them to kill me and then you’ll have something to work with? Do you have a supervisor? Is this like the phone company where I get to say, I’d like to talk to your supervisor?”
“Absolutely,” Gomez said.
They withdrew and a few minutes later returned with a ramrod-straight man of six feet four in plainclothes, wearing a blue Dacron suit, white shirt, and blue tie; another cheerless fellow, and that was all right with her, if he turned out to be competent.
“Ms. Delaney—Lieutenant Ed Rourke. I’m in charge of the detective squad here.”
“I don’t know how much you’ve been told, but I’m being harassed. In a really scary way.”
“Yes, I know all about it. Can I see this latest object?”
Gomez handed him the envelope and Rourke held it up to the light.
“Almost like a Cracker Jacks toy,” Gomez said.
“That is what’s troubling me, the way it’s being trivialized around here. I’m being threatened by unhappy people who worship Satan.”
“Did the man who menaced you, did he look like someone you might have seen when you were working on your article?” Rourke asked.
“He might have been at the church when I was there, I don’t remember seeing him. He looked like a lunatic. Black stuff under his eyes, on some lunatic mission. He might be a member via the Internet. He might be hired for all I know. It’s what I’d like you to find out and bring this stupid thing to an end.”
“If you’re going out of your house to do any shopping, local chores over the next few days, call this number.” He wrote it on a pad. “We’ll have a police car come by to give you protection. We can’t do it forever, but for a while.” He turned to the detectives. “Go back and talk to Cummings again. Tell him he’s a suspect, that he’s aiding and abetting. And we’ll go from there.”
“Thank you,” Ronnie said.
“Detectives Gomez and Santini are from homicide. They’ve been assigned to us on another matter, but because there was, possibly, a death threat here, they’re helping us out. You’ve got the best of the best, and when Detective Gomez says ‘Cracker Jacks,’ I understand what he means. It’s childish, really. Frightening, I grant you, but childish.”
“Except if it’s happening to you.”
After Ronnie left the station house, Rourke said, “I know. This is impossible. But lean on him. Tell him we’ll be q
uestioning him for every violent crime that takes place anywhere in the city for the next five years. He’ll get the idea.”
“If he’s involved,” Gomez responded. “Could be somebody else.”
“Likelihood is it’s one of his screwballs. He can get the word out that he doesn’t want her harassed. Maybe this’ll just go away.”
Everybody with whom Ronnie had professional contact during the course of a day or a week or a month would be going to their offices where other people in their offices would be present. She would be home, by herself, unless she called for police protection while she went out to buy a container of milk. She sent Richard an e-mail:
Came home to find a man outside my building menacing me. Threw a little death skull at me and ran away. It was a good time in New Orleans, but this isn’t good.
No instant messaging back. She checked a couple of times before going to sleep. He did not send a reply.
The dream came again that night, the shattered glass, with an added element, a huge death skull filling the screen of her nightmare, jarring her into wakefulness.
She went into the kitchen for a drink of water and when she turned on the light a mouse darted across the floor. Great. New York slices of life. Maybe she should have owned a black cat, she pondered. She set out glue traps the superintendent of the building had given her on a previous mouse sighting and went back to bed, falling asleep a second time close to 6:00 A.M. and waking with the alarm at 7:15.
She ate breakfast and went right to her computer for the Public Art Fund piece. Nancy came in from Bob’s place to change before going to work and they talked about the weekend. New Orleans with Richard was not the lead, it was the death skull. Nancy suggested that Bob stay over a while; he had spent nights there in the past, and he could just be around in the evenings. Ronnie thought that would be good, as much for the idea of not feeling isolated as for the actual security his being there would provide.
Richard Smith called her Monday morning before nine.
“This is bad stuff. I wish I were there. I’d go right up to Cummings and deck him.”
“He’s a big guy. I don’t think he gets decked easily, but I appreciate the thought.”
“The police?”
“They’re going to watch out for me. For a while anyway. And talk to him again.”
“Good.”
“My roommate’s boyfriend is going to stay over, too, a few nights, I’d guess. Tell me where you are again?”
“Portland, Oregon. Interviewing people. Are you working?”
“I am.”
“Good. Don’t let yourself be reduced to the level of this idiocy. I’m going to be back there soon enough.”
Detective Santini phoned Ronnie to say they interrogated Cummings to make him feel uncomfortable. He denied involvement. They told Cummings if the harassment didn’t stop he was going to bring all kinds of problems on himself; a satanic cult operating in New York City didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the authorities.
The first few days after the menacer appeared she was still apprehensive when she went into the street, even with a police car nearby, then she began to feel imprisoned, uneasy with the need to call for protection every time she went out. This was her neighborhood, her city, she didn’t want her freedom of movement taken away from her, they weren’t going to do that to her. Bob was staying at the apartment and after a few nights without incident, she released Bob of his obligation; she thought it was too disruptive of his life. Rourke called to say they couldn’t continue shadowing her, she should let them know if anything untoward occurred. Richard e-mailed a couple of times, saying he was a little off schedule and would be returning to New York imminently.
The Art Fund piece was completed and submitted and she waited to hear about any possible changes. She was eating Chinese food in bed, channel surfing, and on the screen, hooded and glaring, was Randall Cummings. He was being interviewed in a television studio by the same woman reporter who came to the church when Ronnie was there, the peppy Sonya Brill. Why he would be given airtime was answered for Ronnie by the cloyingly friendly manner in which he was being interviewed. Cummings had made a pass at Ronnie, which he didn’t seem to expect would work. Something evidently worked there; Sonya Brill had ventured into the occult on a personal basis, Ronnie surmised. The woman was carrying on brightly as if Cummings were an actor in a newly released movie—it was great fun making it, we all had a good time on the set, and we hope the public will really, really like it.
“And you feel people who join your cult are helped?”
“Absolutely. We show results. People are looking for answers in these troubled times, and for many of them, we have the answers.”
“And they tell you this?”
For Ronnie it was starting to look like an infomercial.
“Yes, they do. We don’t live in an especially moral society. All I’m doing is empowering the little guy with Satan.”
Sonya Brill smiled at him warmly. Ronnie could have thrown a shoe at the television set, thinking here was a man who condoned, if he did not actually take part in himself, a series of stupid, loathsome acts designed to retaliate for an article Ronnie had written, and he was being given a forum for his self-promotion.
“A recent article in New York magazine was somewhat critical of you and your cult, Mr. Cummings. Did you happen to see it?”
“I glanced at it. The writer came with preconceived notions, a definite bias. Doing some dirty work to further her career.”
The compliant Sonya Brill concluded the interview by allowing Cummings to plug his Web site along with the cult’s phone number.
New York magazine accepted the Public Art Fund piece and during the editorial process the fact-checker double-checked a quote by calling Tony Weston, the artist Ronnie interviewed for the article. Weston used this as an opening to call Ronnie and invite her to dinner, leaving a message on her answering machine. Richard kept promising he would be back in New York, holding her off with brief, uninformative e-mails. Under house rules, if you didn’t sleep with more than one man at a time, did this apply to Richard, since Ronnie was still hard-pressed to define whether they were actually sleeping together? If a tree falls in the forest … How could you be sleeping with someone who wasn’t there, and if he were there, was he really there if he traveled this much?
“Beats me,” Nancy said. They were eating dinner at home on a Monday night. “It has all the contours of just a pure sexual relationship.”
“Or a sexual relationship with a married man.”
“Think he’s married?”
“Maybe. And he comes to New York on business.”
“So then he’s a liar and an adulterer,” Nancy said.
“He claims, no. But I’d like to be sure. You can’t have an affair with a married man.”
“It has been done.”
“It’s anti-feminist,” Ronnie said lightly.
“Ah, I should have known that.”
“What I seem to have here is an unreliable sexual relationship. The ‘unreliable’ is the relationship, not the sexual. You know, this is clarifying,” she teased. “I’ll give him a little more time. It’s not like he doesn’t e-mail me—every once in a while.”
Richard finally called to say he was in New York, three weeks since New Orleans, nonchalant about the time lag, breezily telling her that he was very eager to get together, he had something exciting to tell her.
“You’re getting a divorce.”
“What? I’m not married, Ronnie. Where did you get that from? Can we have lunch tomorrow at Aureole? One o’clock. I’d say dinner, but I can’t wait.”
“Lunch it is.”
Proof of marriage, she supposed, was the marriage license, or commonly, the wedding ring. What was proof of not-marriage, the man’s word?
He was waiting near the front door of the restaurant in his blazer and jeans.
“Great to see you,” he said, kissing her. “I have interesting news,” as they were led to
a table.
He kept her in a little bit of suspense while they ordered drinks; no alcohol for her in the middle of the day and he also declined, both settling on iced teas.
“Here it is. My publisher, a man named Antoine Burris, very smart, very elegant type of fellow, loved your piece on Cummings, which, of course, I told him to look at.”
“Good of you.”
“It’s really a publisher-editor job he has, small press, interesting projects, good marketing. They took my book and got it onto the trade paperback bestseller list, so they must know something.”
“It was a good book.”
“Still, there are a lot of good books. So—he has a taste for the offbeat. And what he’d like to do is a book on the history of satanic possession. There isn’t a good contemporary one. And he wants you to write it.”
“That’s very nice of you, Richard. However—”
“It’s too soon for a ‘however.’ This is terrific stuff. You have everything from stories of convents in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France where the Devil swept through possessing nuns like an epidemic, to the world today where possessions in one form or another are constantly showing up.”
“However, I have never written a book.”
“Nobody has, until they do.”
“And an additional however, I don’t believe in satanic possession. Try hysteria. Delusional behavior. I think a shrink would be better suited.”
“No, he loved the tone of your piece: bright, appropriately skeptical.”
“Do you have any proof you’re not married?”
“Would you not jump around?”
“You’re really not? You’re just inconstant because of the nature of your lecturing, conferencing, researching, et cetera?”
“Absolutely.”
“Tell me about this trip.”
He gave her an accounting and she said, “The thing about you, is that you seem so smart to me, your beat could be anything. I just don’t think you fit, physically, with your subject matter. Great blazer, light salad for lunch, what are you working such a dark side of the street for?”
