by Avery Corman
Richard Smith and I … “sleep together” was the best she came up with for herself.
They didn’t have a plan for dinner after the party and as people began to leave Richard took Ronnie aside and said, “If it doesn’t violate your sense of appropriateness, I’d like to take you to dinner. An Italian place. More expensive than our coffee shop, but it is a special occasion.”
“You got it, but let’s not make a habit of it,” she teased.
“How about every time you start a new book?”
Her face was glowing, with everything, and on the other side of the room watching them, decidedly not glowing, was Bob.
Ronnie came over to Nancy and Bob, who were ready to leave.
“I feel like that guy in My Fair Lady, what was his name?” Bob said to them.
“Professor Higgins,” Nancy said.
“Not him. The villain.”
“Kaparthy,” Ronnie responded. “And why do you feel like Kaparthy?”
“Where did Richard say he’s from?”
“New Orleans.”
“I was in law school with a guy from New Orleans and he didn’t sound like this guy.”
“He traveled around a lot when he was younger so he can sound like anything.”
“Something I don’t trust about the guy, I’m sorry to say after two vodkas. And he better treat you right.”
“I appreciate the concern. He steered me to this book, so that’s pretty right.”
“Come on, Kaparthy,” Nancy said. “Beautiful party, Ronnie.”
“Thanks, guys.”
Unable to shake his concerns and fueled by the two vodkas, Bob doubled back to find Richard alone.
“Ask you something? You’re from New Orleans?”
“I am.”
“Where did you go to high school?”
“Loranger.”
“And then you kind of moved around, different places, and became a writer and a lecturer on cults?”
“Roughly.”
“Pretty unusual background. Only, I know a New Orleans accent and you don’t have one.”
“Assuming there is one.”
“In my area of the law, real estate, you meet a lot of off-center characters, and you seem a little off-center to me. Like Ronnie was speculating whether you were married—”
“You’re telling me.”
“Are you? Assuming you’re not using an alias, I could find out, you know.”
“Not married. What’s this about?”
“I like her a lot. Kind of a kid sister to me. I don’t want to see her get hurt.”
“Neither do I. Loranger, 1985. As Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.”
On a Tuesday at 7:12 A.M., a woman in shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes, twenty-eight years old, jogging from her apartment building on 115th Street, crossed Riverside Drive on her way into Riverside Park when a car that was double-parked lurched toward her at full speed, slamming into her and sending her flying several feet. The woman crashed headfirst into the side of a parked car, killed by the driver, who sped off. The hit-and-run incident was front page news in the Daily News and the New York Post and the first page of The New York Times Metro section, abetted by an eyewitness account from an elderly woman, a dog walker out on the street at the time, who told police and the media, “It looked like he aimed at her.”
For the police, the elderly woman’s account was important; it didn’t sound like an accident. Unfortunately the woman could offer no further details as to model of car or license plate number and couldn’t describe the driver. She thought it was a man, hence, “He aimed at her.”
Public interest was high on the case, people saw themselves as a possible victim in a similar incident. The police department issued statements on the progress of the investigation to the media and it was a running story in the New York newspapers and on the local television news. Detectives Gomez and Santini were among those assigned to the case, and through typical detective work, the peeling of the onion, aspects of the woman’s life began to reveal themselves. The victim was Jane Claxton, single, a travel agent for Arden Travel on Broadway, a graduate of SUNY Albany who came to New York after college and lived alone. Neighbors remembered a boyfriend recently, and various boyfriends over the years, but descriptions of the most recent one were unclear. Her parents were divorced, her father a car salesman in Schenectady, her mother a waitress in Albany. She was an only child. Her address book was a source of leads and the detectives fanned out, contacting people in the book, many of whom turned out to be clients at the travel agency. The owner of the agency, a woman in her forties, said she was a “good worker,” somewhat shy, and not open to discussing personal matters.
A friend came forward, a woman pharmacist in a local Rite-Aid store, who struck up a friendship with her several years before and they met for dinner about once a week. The woman did identify the most recent boyfriend. She knew they had broken up and he had not been around for two months. He was a clerk in a video store and would-be movie producer. He quit the job without notice three weeks earlier and had not been seen at his apartment on the Lower East Side. Instantly he was the prime suspect in the case. His picture, obtained from a drawer in the victim’s apartment, appeared in the tabloids—Have you seen this man? The friend revealed the victim was a volunteer in a Literacy Partners program at a local library, adding to the mix for the media and for the police, the senseless death of a decent person.
“We’re going all out to find this boyfriend,” Rourke said to the half-dozen detectives in his office. “But let’s not get snookered here. It might not be him. Look for disgruntled customers, did anyone think they were supposed to get a refund or something for a trip they didn’t take kind of thing. You know, somebody who might’ve gone postal. But let’s nail this.”
For Rourke, the case had an additional resonance; his daughter was a couple of years younger than the victim and had just taken an apartment in Brooklyn, living alone, teaching school. It was one of the deaths that gets through to people.
Ronnie and Nancy talked about it. Nancy had parents in Wilton whom she saw about once a month; either she went there or they came into New York; she had an older sister in New Jersey, who had two little girls, three and four, Nancy’s star nieces, and she saw them all at least once a month. Ronnie, on the other hand, only had Nancy and Bob, and she didn’t know in which ledger to enter Richard Smith. She identified with the victim, too—Ronnie, someone on her own, just trying to make it in New York.
Richard was gone again, having left the day after the party, to Edinburgh this time, an international conference: “Cults, Superstitions, and the Fear of the Unknown.” Ronnie thought it an overripe name for what he claimed was going to be a serious conference. From Edinburgh he was going back to Munich.
She wrote an e-mail to him expressing her uneasiness about the death of the hit-and-run victim and he wrote back:
Read about it here. A random act. You can’t take anything from it. It’s endemic to life itself.
She replied:
That’s a bit grim. Something like that is inevitable?
He replied in turn:
Dark things sometimes happen. It’s one reason why some people turn to religion for reassurance. And when their needs are very acute, they lean too heavily on religion and become enveloped by it, possessed by it. So here’s the thought for you. When they are possessed, and you can put possessed in quotes if you’d like, are they imagining the possession or are they people especially sensitive to the angel of darkness by their need, and therefore open to the possession? This is a longwinded way of saying to you, the woman’s death is terrible, I don’t mean to minimize it, but it is part of the overall, sometimes dark, yes, sometimes inevitable rhythms of life, and that relates to the relevance of the wonderful book you’re going to write.
What the hell was he talking about, she wondered. A perfectly decent woman was murdered by a psychopath and Ronnie identified with the woman for obvious reasons of geog
raphy and social class and singledom. Richard was intelligent, no question; however, all those conferences and lectures had taken him over, she decided. The man certainly could be overly academic. A “don’t worry, honey, it’s not about you,” would have been fine. She e-mailed back:
Thanks. Enjoy your time.
There was no immediate reply and that was all right. She preferred having him in bed to having his e-mail.
Two days later, on a Saturday morning, she went for a jog around the reservoir, a test, her first time since the race, checking herself along the way to stay alert, conscious, and wondering if you do black out, how do you possibly know that you blacked out if you are blacked out. She played with that puzzler while giving herself signposts, now I’m passing the pump house, now I’m passing the tennis courts, I’m fine, I’m running normally. Another time around and she jogged back to the building.
She picked up the mail, a few bills, flyers, and in the batch was an envelope with her name and address and no return address. She sat at the dining room table and opened the envelope. It contained the author’s portrait of her from the article she wrote in Vanity Fair. The picture was cut in two pieces. The head had been decapitated.
6
THE TWENTY-SIXTH PRECINCT WAS on a war footing with a high-profile hit-and-run death, its detectives emotionally invested in solving the crime. The bereaved, people who knew the woman, or those who read or heard about her, were leaving flowers at the sidewalk in front of her building, a little shrine. And then came a setback for the police. The main suspect, the former boyfriend, was in Los Angeles and had been at the time of death, documented by eyewitnesses. He had been in plain view working as a production assistant on an independent movie being shot in Venice, California. The police had nothing now, no substantial leads; no one else apparently saw anything that morning and they were starting over, running the list of people whom the victim knew.
In this atmosphere, Ronnie Delaney walked into the police station with her cut-up head shot, something so unrelated to the immediate concerns of these detectives that Santini and Gomez, and even the more politic Rourke, looking over his detectives’ shoulders, barely reacted.
“This is unfortunate,” Rourke said.
“These aren’t isolated pranks, it’s a campaign. I want you to arrest Randall Cummings.”
“We don’t have enough to do that, Ms. Delaney,” Rourke said.
“We’ll check this for prints, interrogate him again, quiz some of the cult members, send a message, let it be known this is serious activity,” Santini said.
“If you arrest him, that’ll send a message.”
“This is all completely circumstantial,” Gomez said.
“I write about them, it isn’t complimentary, and I get death threats.”
“It’s harassment. It’s a form of menacing. Whether or not it’s a death threat, that’s harder to say,” Rourke told her. With the false start on the hit-and-run case in his immediate experience, Rourke was inclined to think of other possibilities. “Why don’t you provide us a list of anyone other than Cummings who might have taken umbrage with something you wrote, or something you did, or something you said, people like that.”
“Honestly, it’s Cummings, it’s his people.”
“Would you give us a list, please?”
“I will.”
“This feels very temporary to me, Ms. Delaney. No disrespect intended, but your article is going to become old news and my sense is, in time, this is just going to go away.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
They were silent for a moment or two after she left, knowing they hadn’t been much help.
“We’ll talk to Cummings again,” Gomez said. “Thing is, he isn’t a creep and he’s not easily intimidated. He’s pretty smooth.”
“He’s got like a thousand followers. It could be any one of them,” Santini said. “Do we really have time for this now?”
“No,” Rourke responded. “But maybe by letting them know we’re still on it, we’ll discourage them. Or it could be somebody she might think of. More likely, it’s what I said, this is just going to go away.”
Ronnie, Nancy, and Bob convened at Bob’s apartment. Bob’s first suggestion was that for protection he move back into Ronnie and Nancy’s apartment for a while, or that Ronnie stay in his place, she could sleep on the couch—except none of them could figure out what it would accomplish. The threats were variously dropped off, thrown in her path, and mailed to her. Bob’s physical presence wouldn’t necessarily deter these insanities. She could go away for a while; Nancy offered her parents’ home as a way station. Ronnie didn’t like the idea of hiding, of allowing Cummings and his cult to drive her out of her place, and how long could she stay away? Eventually she would come back, or even if she didn’t, if she moved, she couldn’t disappear. People this deranged would eventually find her if they intended to do her harm. Or perhaps she wasn’t in danger. They all wanted to believe in that possibility, that these people would harass her until they grew bored or found another target for their hostility.
They agreed Ronnie would remain in Bob’s apartment for the next couple of nights. Ronnie would work at Bob’s place and then they would rotate, Bob staying at the other apartment for a few days. Nancy went to retrieve some of Ronnie’s clothing and her laptop. The arrangement they decided upon threw into relief the absence of Richard, in Edinburgh or Munich, working on his career. To be involved with someone who was so impossibly unavailable at a time of crisis like this did not fit her definition of a meaningful relationship. She sent him an e-mail describing the threat and she heard nothing from him for several days. She was back in her apartment, Bob installed there, when she finally received a reply:
My e-mail was down, sorry. This sounds like more of the same petty stuff. Bluntly, if they haven’t harmed you, they’re not going to harm you. I’m sending someone to see you, a private investigator at my expense, Paul Stone. And don’t say no. This isn’t like a too-expensive restaurant. Just talk to him, please.
On 118th Street a woman jogger, thirty-two years old, was heading for Riverside Drive a few minutes after seven in the morning when a double-parked car suddenly accelerated toward her. She was able to see it coming and leaped out of the way as it was about to strike her. She tripped and fell to the ground as the driver momentarily lost control, scraped a parked SUV, and sped away. The near victim was able to see that the car was driven by a Caucasian male. His face, though, was never in full view and she could not describe him. In her shock she was unable to identify the make of car or the license plate. As to the color, at first she said dark blue, then wasn’t sure and thought it might have been black. The incident raised questions within the police department and the media. The first hit-and-run victim may not have been killed by someone who knew her, it may have been someone picking off women. A SECOND MADMAN OR THE SAME? was the headline in the New York Post.
In the dream a car hurtled toward her. She was in her jogging attire. She leaped to get out of the way, as in the news descriptions of the second incident. Ronnie awoke, upset with herself for the dream, for converting her feelings into such mayhem.
In the flow of activity at the station house, the rush to reorder priorities and question anyone in the vicinity of the second incident, Ronnie’s predicament was overlooked. She called the precinct and the next day Gomez returned her call. They hadn’t spoken to Cummings yet, they fully intended to, and given the time delay between her previous incidents, he didn’t think anything unusual was imminent. She had her own personal madman, he just wasn’t one the police were interested in at the moment.
Richard’s private investigator, Paul Stone, a man with a high, thin voice, contacted her. In the absence of any commitment from the police she consented to see him. After several days Ronnie had resumed normal living arrangements, back in the apartment with Nancy except for the times when Nancy stayed with Bob. Ronnie arranged to meet Stone at four in the afternoon at a nearby Starbucks. He would be
wearing a beige suit and a yellow tie.
He looked like a jockey, a small, muscular man in his forties, no more than 125 pounds, five feet five, and she assumed his appearance must have helped him in his work if he did any surveillance; he could disappear in a room if you weren’t looking for him. She was interested in how he knew Richard. Stone told her they first met when he was doing work on a missing person who disappeared into a cult in Utica, New York, a cult Richard was researching.
If Nancy were present she would have laughed out loud at what Ronnie said next; Ronnie couldn’t help taking a stab at it.
“And do you know his wife?” she said, supposedly innocent.
“Richard Smith isn’t married.”
“Oh, I thought he was. The way he’s always out of New York.”
“He does travel a lot, but no. Not as far as I know.”
“And he lives permanently—”
“In New York.”
“In New York, right.”
Richard had given him the general outline, Stone asked her to fill in the details and she gave him an accounting, including her last inadequate exchanges with the police.
“They’re all caught up in this hit-and-run business,” he said.
“That’s clear.”
“Ms. Delaney, may I call you Veronica?”
“Ronnie.”
“Ronnie, I’ve been a private investigator for over twenty years. And here’s what my experience tells me. People who would do things like this, they’re crazy.” She thought, That’s a major insight? “From my perspective,” he continued, “it’s a good news, bad news thing.”
