Boyfriend from Hell (5 page)

“No problem,” Cummings said smoothly. “One of the things we do in this business is answer questions.”

The detectives left the Twenty-sixth Precinct building on West 126th Street and walked the few blocks to the church. The street was quiet, no protesters present across from the church at eleven on this rainy Saturday morning. Cummings told them to come by way of the rear entrance, and the assistant opened the door for them in a black suit, black shirt, black tie, with his chalkish white face, his working outfit.

“Mr. Cummings is expecting you,” he said and pointed to Cummings’s office.

“Your name is?” Gomez asked.

“Cosmo Pitalis.”

“Don’t go anywhere, Mr. Pitalis. We want to talk to you.”

As they moved on, Gomez said, “We should bring him in. Guy who looks like that must be guilty of something.”

Cummings greeted them in his office in a beige cashmere turtle-neck and gray slacks, a sporty look for a satanist. He appeared to have left space within his ideology for a touch of personal vanity. He motioned for them to sit.

The detectives set out the circumstance: Veronica Delaney had been sent a dead black cat in an unmarked box and had, in effect, filed a complaint against Cummings, whom she suspected of sending it.

“I’m supposed to have sent it as a thank-you?”

“You have the motivation, Mr. Cummings,” Santini said. “I read the article. I wouldn’t call it flattering.”

“Now why would I do such a thing? Think about it for a minute. I’m working on getting my organization to expand. Why would I try to intimidate the writer of the first major article about us?”

“How about you’re the leader of a Satanic cult?”

“How about it’s not good marketing. I didn’t send it.”

“One of your people?”

“It wouldn’t have been on my say-so. Gentlemen, it makes no sense whatsoever. She served her purpose. She wrote the article. She probably, and I’m guessing, thinks she put me away. But the public is unpredictable. I’ve actually received a couple of dozen inquiries since it appeared from people looking to sign up.”

He wasn’t going to admit it, even if he had sent it, and they had nothing linking him to the box. Their presence was principally to show the flag.

“Nothing more like this, Mr. Cummings. Criminal charges on a thing like this expand exponentially,” Santini said.

“Absolutely. Nothing more of what I didn’t do in the first place.”

The detectives stood in the corridor with the assistant, who presented them with a chilly indifference. The Dark Angel Church did not welcome New York City police detectives.

“You saw the article in
New York
magazine?” Gomez said.

“I did.”

“The woman who wrote it got sent a dead black cat in a box.”

“So?”

“We don’t approve of such things,” Santini said.

“Do I look like someone who gives a damn?”

“If you sent it, don’t do anything like that again, and if you didn’t send it, don’t do anything like it,” Gomez said.

“Let me go inside and write it down so I don’t forget.”

“Don’t get too cute, wiseguy,” Gomez said. “You’ve been warned. We nail you on this, you’ll do serious time.”

“Noted.”

When they were outside, Santini said, “What an operation. They probably did send it, one of them.”

“We still don’t have anything.”

This was a bit of a cartoon now that Ronnie thought about it, a dead black cat. Scary, yes, but also dopey. She tried to put it all out of mind and started to do some work. She compiled printouts on soccer for her next piece. This was hardly her beat and she wasn’t even sure there was a good story in the soccer bar; still it was going to allow her to become occupied with something other than this insane reprisal. She was at the computer for the rest of the day. Nancy called in and Ronnie assured her everything was all right. Ronnie watched soccer before going to sleep, a first in her life. The following day she went to the soccer place, located on Third Avenue and Thirty-third Street, and ordered brunch at the bar while various soccer games played on a variety of television screens. She fended off a few guys coming on to her, who were really more interested in the soccer when it came down to it, except for one particularly persistent and obnoxious fellow floating in beer with a burgeoning belly to show for his interests, pressing her on why she was there and whom she was rooting for, and finally she said, “You mean, what’s a girl like me doing in a place like this? Writing a piece on blokes like you.”

“You’re a writer?”

“I’m a writer. Doing it for
New York
magazine. What do you do—”

“Mack. I’m an economist with Merrill Lynch.”

She was reminded that you never really knew in bars. She conducted an interview with him—why he came to the place, what the scene was like for him, what he felt about soccer, why it hadn’t caught on in the United States with the same passionate fans as in Europe. She bought him a beer as a courtesy for the interview and this seemed to indicate to Mack she was going to have sex with him, imminently, since he began to fill the air with sexual banter. She wondered if his approach ever worked.

“I’m only in this for the quotes,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind. But this is the tough part. For the fact-checkers, I have to ask you for your phone number. Can you give it to me without assuming anything?” He wrote his number on a piece of paper.

“You could call me,” he said, sensing it slipping away. “I’m a different guy during the week.”

“You’re not a bad guy now. I’m just a preoccupied girl and not for you. Thanks for talking to me,” and she walked out of the place, returning home to transcribe her tapes. A good day’s work, Mr. Cummings. You can’t touch me.

Santini and Gomez ran cross-checks on similar unwanted gifts and found nothing relevant. Various perverse actions, largely in the rejected lover category; rotting flowers, cheese, bowel movements sent as “gifts,” but no dead black cat purveyor. They visited Ronnie a few days later.

“This would be impossible to prove,” Santini said, as they sat in Ronnie’s living room. “We suspect it’s them. That doesn’t do it.”

“Cummings said, basically, it isn’t in his business interest to do such a thing,” Gomez added. “Look, they’ve been warned. My guess is, they got off on what they did and that’ll be the end of it.”

“You shouldn’t be able to do something like that,” Ronnie said, “but journalists, and I’ll call myself that, have gone through worse. I’m on to my next piece.”

“Good. We’re here if you need us,” Santini said.

“But it wouldn’t hurt—” Gomez started to say.

She finished Gomez’s thought, “—to not open any packages I’m not expecting.”

She worked for the rest of the morning on the soccer bar piece and then met Nancy for lunch. Ronnie gave her an update on the detectives’ findings, that they found nothing, and she was going to proceed as if it never happened.

As she approached the apartment building on the way back from lunch she heard a piercing squeal and hurtling into her path were three black cats. They ran past her, scattering in different directions. The air seemed to go out of her lungs from the shock. They had been thrown from the alleyway adjacent to the building. She ran to the alleyway to see if she could find the perpetrator. No one was there. She ran a few steps and stopped; what was she going to do, confront a crazy person?

In the apartment she called the number the detectives had given her, and within the hour they were sitting in the living room, the detectives writing down the details.

“So much for your theory that this is over,” she said.

“We’ll ask around. Maybe someone saw something,” Santini said.

“And we’ll talk to Cummings again.”

“Didn’t get you anywhere the first time.”

“We’ll give him the message again,” Gomez said.

“Where are we? These people worship Satan. I want to make sure that doesn’t get lost here. Am I in danger, or am I just being harassed by truly stupid people?”

“You said it,” Gomez responded. “It’s stupid. Black cats. I mean, come on.”

After they left she went to her computer to work. When she stopped to think about the incident she reminded herself that journalists were known to have been victims of dangerous acts. Throwing cats in her path, or sending her a dead one, was a trivial retaliation. Then she concluded the danger wasn’t these acts, rather it was that someone out there was capable of doing such things.

Nancy wouldn’t be home for the next couple of nights, she was going with her boss to an awards ceremony in Boston for a client, and Bob would check in, Nancy told her. Ronnie settled into bed and it took her a long time to fall asleep. At some point she didn’t even want to check how late it was. Her largest thought was that in the time of these events, interchangeably stupid and frightening, she had no family, her friends had their own lives. She was alone.

T
HE UNBROKEN SUCCESS, THE
smooth stream of well-praised articles written from college days on through freelance life in New York, the substantial assignments for someone relatively young, hit a goalpost with the soccer bar piece. Her editor at
New York
magazine sent it back twice for rewrites, eventually paying her a kill fee and rejecting the piece. Nancy offered that it was a mismatch of writer with the material, she didn’t have a feel for soccer or a soccer bar. Ronnie agreed, but conceded, unhappily, that she had been thrown off stride by the harassment. No other incidents occurred in the several weeks since the scrambling cats. It still lingered in her mind, though—her sense of aloneness at a time of stress, and the images, those creatures, that somebody would do such bizarre things to intimidate her.

Determined not to allow further damage, she made queries on a couple of pieces to
Vanity Fair
and
New York
magazine, and while waiting to hear, accepted a modest assignment from the City section of
The Sunday New York Times
on upscale retail in the meatpacking district; as she described to Nancy, “Something to keep on trucking.”

Ronnie and Nancy brought in pizza for dinner and were catching up—Nancy had been at Bob’s apartment the past few nights—when the phone rang and it was Richard Smith.

“I’ve been out of town and just got back to read your piece on Cummings. Terrific job.”

“Thank you.”

“And thanks for the mention. I was wondering if I could buy you dinner to celebrate. Are you free Monday night?”

“Well, I really am past celebrating. Somebody was harassing me after it appeared. And I’ve moved on.”

“Are you okay?”

“It stopped, but it put the whole thing out of the celebration mode.”

“Let’s just call it dinner then. Two professionals. Balthazar at eight?”

She loved Balthazar in SoHo, too pricey under normal circumstances, a special event place for her. But who was this guy, she didn’t know anything about him other than his author’s credentials.

“Could you hold on a sec?”

She went back inside to Nancy.

“Richard Smith, the amazingly good-looking guy, wants to take me to Balthazar for dinner.”

“Is that a problem?” Nancy said.

“Think it’s inappropriate to ask for a résumé? I know,” answering for herself, “it’s just dinner.”

She got back on the phone.

“One question. You’re not married, are you? We have kind of a house rule around here to not have dinner at Balthazar on Monday nights with married guys.”

“Not married. See you at eight.”

“See you.”

He was at the table when she arrived, wearing what seemed to be his signature outfit; blazer, sports shirt, jeans, and loafers; a different sports shirt, beige this time, white the first time—and what did it mean that she remembered the shirts he wore. He
was
amazingly good-looking, she noted, and in a teenage way, rated him as the best-looking guy who had ever sat across a table from her. She wore a simple black dress, but her best black dress, with pearls, a true serious-date outfit.

“Bet you’re the prettiest writer to ever expose a satanic cult.”

“A narrow field, I’m sure.”

“What is this harassment about?”

Over drinks she told him about her travails and he listened thoughtfully.

“You’ve got the police on it. And Cummings realizes you’ve got the police on it. My guess is, it isn’t Cummings personally. Probably someone in the cult who thinks he’s doing him a favor.”

“However it evolved, it happened.”

“This is probably the level of their acting out. Something like this happened to me about five years ago. I was giving a lecture on cults at the University of Colorado at Boulder and mentioned a group living in a satanic commune nearby, called them ‘hippie holdovers,’ and the next morning when I went to my car in the motel parking lot, the window was smashed and some kind of blood was splattered on the seat.”

“That’s ugly.”

“But that was it. Nothing else happened. So with Cummings, they may have taken their best shot.”

“Who accumulates cats? You think they have a cat wrangler?”

“Main thing is, you wrote a super piece. There are always risks. Write about a powerful person, you might get sued. You’d be better off with stray cats.”

They ordered dinner and talked about their respective careers. He described himself as having been at a newspaper in South Dakota originally, where he did a series on a local satanic cult. As he read more about the subject he began to write and then lecture on cults and satanism and found this niche.

She traced her background for him, from college to the present. He offered that she was doing the right thing for her talents, which he could see were in evidence, and she shouldn’t be derailed by unworthy people. He was notably at ease with himself. None of the jittery, if I don’t get laid in the next hour my entire life is a failure, or how can you be working such an odd side of the street, as with her recent encounters with men. She felt she was in Michael territory, in this person’s easy acceptance of her profession. Physically he was not Michael, though, he was dramatic. The hostess came over several times to check on their table, the Brad Pitt treatment.