“What were the charges?” the officer asked. Bill looked at him, confused.
“Why were you incarcerated?” he clarified.
So this is one of those guys who just looks smart
.
“I put a knife to my sister-in-law’s mother’s throat.”
Where have I heard that story before, just today?
Jim put his pen down and excused himself. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
Bill sat there, bored, thinking about his kids, his mother, his life.
What would I have done differently?
He
hated business. He would have liked to have been a nurse. He loved his mandatory biology class freshman year. But when he approached his father about it, the old man had a fit.
“Go to medical school, for Christ’s sake! No son of mine is going to be a nurse.” Bill knew he wasn’t smart enough to go to either medical or nursing school. He barely got through college. He just didn’t have the confidence needed to do much with his life outside of what fell into his lap. That included finding his wife.
Anne was his roommate’s sister, attractive but shy. She followed him around, and since he wasn’t aggressive enough to make a pass at her, they hung out together and nothing more. Eventually, they had been together long enough that it was expected they would get married. He went to his brother, Jack, for advice.
“How’d you know that Pam was the one?” he had asked innocently.
Jack felt sorry for his brother; he was still an idealist, no matter what his life had been like. “She fit in with the family. That was the only criteria.” Jack admitted that he was attracted to her as well. But it was more important that a wife would be there by his side through thick and thin. Pam was devoted, if nothing else.
Anne certainly fit the mold. However, where Pam was carefree and accepting, Anne was suspicious and unsatisfied. She hated Bernice’s intrusion into their home life from the beginning. She and Bill fought passionately about it.
It was during one these confrontations that Bill found out how much he liked hitting his wife. There was
nothing better than to haul off and smack her across her smug face. If she wasn’t expecting it, his open hand could send her flying across the room. He rationalized that as long as he didn’t punch her, it was okay. He knew that if he started punching her, he would be unable to stop. He’d end up beating her to death.
Soon even their sex life included violence. He couldn’t get an erection without first hitting her hard; the sound of his hand against her flesh made blood surge into his penis. By the time his father died, he couldn’t ejaculate without hitting her. Foreplay for Anne was getting smacked by her husband. His incarceration was the first time in years when she wasn’t hit on a daily basis. Of course, the hitting would have to resume as soon as they spent any real time together. In spite of their history, Anne was still pissed off at Bill for not wanting to spend time with her.
Maybe she was a masochist
, Bill thought.
Jim returned to the interrogation room with a thick wad of printed paper. There was a wealth of information about this defendant. He had a long history of run-ins with the law, starting with public intoxication during his college years to domestic violence when neighbors called police during a fight the Smiths had late one night. Although the wife refused to press charges, police had documented that handprints were visible on both sides of her face. He had a lawsuit pending in Manhattan for credit card theft. The term he had just finished serving was for attempted murder on Long Island. He had gotten off with a light sentence because his sister-in-law had asked for mercy. Bill was lucky he hadn’t been tried in the city. He’d be in Rikers for much longer.
“Okay, so you tried to kill your sister’s mother, correct?”
Rather than correct him, Bill let it go. He was getting tired. What difference did it make? He’d already been tried on that count; they couldn’t try him again.
“It says here you are getting ready to be tried on credit card theft. Do you want to tell me about that?”
Bill was slumped forward in his chair.
How’d I get to this point?
“There’s really nothing to tell. I was having a meeting with my brother and he collapsed. I took his wallet, and after he died, I used his credit cards. I was desperate.”
Jim thought,
A man would have to be to stoop that low
. “What lead to your desperation?” Jim wanted to know on a human basis why someone with every advantage would end up with unpaid bills, stalking a woman young enough to be his daughter.
“My father drove the family business into the ground, and I didn’t find out how much trouble we were in until after he died, last year. We are totally broke. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my brother giving my mother and I money, we would have lost our houses.”
There was a knock on the door.
Jim got up to open it, and someone outside handed him a sheet of paper. He sat down to read it.
So this is where I heard this story today
. When he was finished, he looked up at Bill. “Your wife is going to be charged with theft as well. She forged some checks your late brother’s wife sent to your mother. Do you know anything about that?”
That was the final straw. Bill would either explode there in police custody or start crying. It was safer to cry.
P
am was so grateful that Andy had helped Sandra out with Bill that she decided she would break down and actually cook for him. It had been a while since she spent any time in the kitchen. What was once a delight for her, cooking for her husband and family, had become drudgery. Her mother gladly took over the task and spent a large portion of every day planning and cooking meals for she and Pam.
“Now, I don’t want you to get used to it, but I thought I might cook dinner for us,” she said to him. They were, once again, sitting on the veranda, reading and drinking iced tea, looking out over the ocean.
Andy laughed. “You don’t have to cook. Let’s go out,” he said.
She shook her head. Later, she would remember that he had tried to change her mind. “No, not tonight. You helped me, and now I want to do something nice for you. I do need to run out, though. Want to come with me?” She was thinking steak on the grill, a salad, and some fresh veggies, if she could find anything in season. “What’s your favorite accompaniment with steak?”
He thought for a few minutes. “Spaghetti with oil and garlic,” he answered.
She tried not to make a face. “A lotta carbs. Where’d that come from?” She had never heard of it before.
“My real name is Andretti. Italian through and through.”
“Why’d you change it?” she asked.
“My dad got tired of people asking him if we were related to the race car driver,” he replied.
“Were you?” she asked, interested.
“Yes.”
They both started laughing.
“Well, Detective Andretti, you are having steak and spaghetti tonight. I’m intrigued now. We are both Italian…But my people have been here so long we don’t even eat pasta.”
“Right,” Andy said, “Fabian. It never sunk in. Any relation?” He asked, smiling.
“No!”
They laughed again. The best part of her relationship with him was the laughter. They just enjoyed being together.
“Two Italians. I have no Italian traditions at all. Does your family?” Pam asked.
“Oh God, yes. We used to have the meal with seven fishes on Christmas Eve, Mass every Sunday without fail, and macaroni with gravy for Sunday dinner. My wife was very old school; we had the same thing every single day of the week. I looked forward to meals each night because I knew what she was going to cook. She would change the old recipes occasionally, so we never got tired of it.”
“I guess I’m surprised that she was so old fashioned because of the makeup being delivered to the house,” Pam replied. Andy confessed that he didn’t cancel the delivery of makeup she had ordered after her death. Every month
for two years, a package was delivered. Pam was really interested in hearing about Andy’s wife.
“Right, she was a stickler about her appearance.” He looked at Pam and smiled. “Like you. You are very attractive, do you know that?”
“Yes, well. Move on. You’re making me nervous.”
“She loved to cook authentic Italian. It was more a hobby for her than a chore. She went to classes, had every book written on it. She made her own pasta, everything always from scratch. But she didn’t do breakfast or lunch. Just dinner. ‘Eat up!’ she would say each night. ‘This is all three meals!’ My girls were whizzes at fixing their own breakfast from the time they were four. They made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school. I’d help them when I was home, reminding them to eat fruit, drink milk. ‘No one in this house is starving,’ she would say if I criticized her. Now, of course, we miss dinner. None of my girls are interested in cooking. We give the pizza joint down the road a good business.”
“I’d like to meet your children someday. Do they know you are seeing someone?”
What if they hated that he was dating?
“They are thrilled! ‘Dad!’ they would say to me. ‘Get out and see people!’ But you have to understand that there is not a big choice of women out there. When I met you, I thought, ‘You better go for it. She is a once-in-a-lifetime woman!’”
Pam got up and went to his chair, grabbing his hand. “Come on, you are making me nervous again! Let’s go to the grocery store.” She pulled him up from his chair, and they left the house. They were making their own traditions.
She and Jack had never gone to the grocery store together.
By dinnertime, Sandra was starting to recover after her frightening encounter. She ate her sandwich from Zabar’s. But she felt like a prisoner. She had needed to get out of the house and connect with another human being and because of asshole Bill, was unable to. Now that the fear had abated, she found herself wondering what Bernice was doing, if she had heard the news about the police picking up her son again. Wisdom told Sandra to do nothing; someone would contact Bill’s mother soon enough with news.
A new, harder to define emotion was what she was feeling for Pam, who had seemed to move on with her life at precision speed and was spending a glorious day at the beach with Detective Andy. When no invitation had been issued for the beach that weekend, Sandra had mixed feelings. On one hand, she needed to take care of business at her apartment. Being away every weekend like she had been doing since Jack died meant playing catch-up all week. She was always one step behind, not having grocery shopping done, or dry cleaning picked up, or her apartment cleaned, all the things that women who worked long hours struggled with. But when she was there alone, those tasks didn’t seem so earth shattering. She could pick up a few things from Zabar’s or put a load of laundry in each night. It didn’t all have to be done at once, did it? How had she become so dependent on Pam? It was ridiculous, really. They had nothing in common but Jack, and he was dead. If he were still alive, they would be archenemies.
She went down to the lower level and picked up the remote, switching the TV on. It was then that she noticed something different, something out of place. Looking up at the exit door to the backyard, she saw the safety chain still in place. The dresser was still in front of the window, and the arrangement of glass bottles she had put on the top of it in case someone tried to get in were undisturbed. It was a smell. The smell of a man, clean, but his sweat musky and just this side of unpleasant. She reached for the light switch and turned the overhead lights on.
“Hello?” She could barely get it out. She walked to the bathroom door and reached in for the light, switching it on. Empty. The staircase to the upstairs elongated exponentially. She ran for it, which was ridiculous because there was no one there. When she got to the top of the stairs, she hesitated.
What if someone had been in my bedroom the whole time?
Her heart was beating wildly in her chest. She repeated the same procedure in each room, reaching in, feeling for the light switch, turning the light on, and searching, under her bed, in her bathroom and closet. There was no sign that anyone had been there. But the smell lingered. She peeked out the curtain to the back in case someone with BO was in her yard. It was empty.
That fucker has succeeded into making me paranoid and frightened
. At that moment, her buzzer went off. She nearly jumped into the ceiling. The intercom was in the front hallway, so she ran out to it, pushing the buzzer and speaking a frightened hello. If it was Bill again, she was definitely buying a gun on Monday. As it turned out, gratefully, wonderfully, the police had come to take her statement. She had completely forgotten about it. She didn’t say anything
more, just pushed the unlock button. Seconds later, there was a knock on her door. She peered out the peephole, and there were two men in plainclothes standing at her door.
“Can I see some ID?” she asked. Without hesitation, both men put their picture IDs up for her to see. She unlocked her door, taking the chain off and opening up for the police. “Sorry, come in,” she said.
“It’s good to cautious,” the older of the two said. Sandra thought it was strange that policemen always traveled in pairs of differing ages. As they walked by her into the apartment, she sniffed them. Just in case. The smell in her downstairs wasn’t them. The younger man caught the sniff and looked at her in a strange way.