Falsely Accused (18 page)

“Yes, the typology,” said Malkin almost dismissively. “But tell me, how did you do it? Make him stop.”

“You want to hear this? Yeah, well, briefly, first we got out a protective order. The guy called anyway, and we had him on the recorder. I got the client to egg him on, insult him, and he got really vile—totally lost control. Threats, obscenity—he really started wailing on how he was going to mutilate her sexual organs. Funny, because he was supposedly this classy guy. Drunk probably. In any case, we take the tape to the judge, and he issues a contempt citation, and the cops pick him up at work. Handcuffs, the whole nine yards. Of course, he makes bail and goes back to the office to straighten things out. I guess he figured he could use the hysterical woman mad with jealousy gambit.”

“And didn't he?” Malkin asked. Her eyes were sparkling, and she had curled herself up in her chair, like a Girl Scout listening to ghost stories around the fire.

“No. Actually, my partner walked into his office while he was out and put a copy of the tape on the office P.A. system. I don't think it did his career much good. He specialized in fashion advertising, and a lot of the heavy hitters in that business are women. Anyway, when he found this out, he threw caution to the winds and went straight for her. To her building, I mean. And he got in.”

“My God! Didn't she have security in the building?”

“Oh, yeah, plenty. But it turned out the doorman was distracted for the moment, and Mr. Nice got up to her apartment by the fire stairs. Fortunately, my partner was there with the client. The guy became violent and had to be subdued.”

“Subdued?”

“Yeah. He broke his arm and his jaw in the struggle. Lost a number of teeth too. He's in the prison ward at Riker's, charged with assault, criminal trespass, and contempt. What is that look for?”

“I imagine that you are referring to the look that we sociologists give to our informants when our informants have chosen to leave valuable information unvoiced. For example, to take the present case, we observe a remarkable and unlikely set of circumstances. The culprit is enraged, the doorman is distracted—by what, we may wonder—the former victim is at home. Strangely enough, she lets him into her apartment, and by another great coincidence there is a guardian capable of subduing the culprit and causing him severe injury. The word setup springs to mind.”

“The police are satisfied that we acted within the dictates of the law,” replied Marlene primly. “Scumbags who get their lumps tend to be even less of a priority than women being stalked, if you can believe that.”

“
I
can, barely,” said Malkin. “So, is making sure that scumbags get their lumps going to be your usual service?”

“Not at all, although I should point out that if some unpleasant and reckless person wants to walk into a doorknob, I don't think it's our obligation to yank it away. I'd like to be able to adjust our service to the degree of risk to the client.”

“I see. That's where the typology comes in, you think?”

“Yes.”

“Okay—briefly, my belief is that there are three separate types of stalkers. What the article called the slobs are blue-collar types with a history of batting the girls around. When the women get tired of it and want to leave, they become insanely jealous. Why would they leave unless they want to screw somebody else? So they stalk, and they sometimes kill, and when they do they often kill themselves too. The sadists are usually white-collar or better, control freaks, who get their kicks out of torturing the ladies, and the stalking is just a refinement of the torture. The strangers are wackos who fix on some woman as part of their twist. Could be a movie actress or a rock star, or somebody they saw on the street that triggers the twitch.”

Marlene broke in. “Yeah, okay, three types—and what I'm asking is, is there, do you have some way of, like, taking some data from the guys—appearance, activities, how they do the stalk and so on— that would let you decide which type they are?” She took a notebook and a pencil out of her jacket pocket.

Malkin thought about Marlene's question, staring up at a corner of the ceiling and knotting her brows in an appropriately professorial manner. At length she said, “For what I think are your purposes, the answer is no. That is, the typology isn't firm enough to use as the basis for a predictive model. We're talking about a much broader population than we are for, say, serial killers. We can look at a murder set, for example, and say with a pretty high degree of confidence, a serial killer did these and he's going to kill again. In the same way, serials form such a small, tight group that we can make good generalizations about them: white male, twenty-five to forty, middle-class, menial work, lives alone or with Mom, and the rest of it. Stalkers, we're talking about a much, much more ill-defined bunch of people. First of all, the act itself: what's stalking? Driving by the old girlfriend's house a couple of times? How many unwanted phone calls, how many unwanted bouquets do we have to have before we call it pathological? Okay, to start breaking down the problem, I developed these three groups. I don't know if they're
organic
groups or not, whether they're different because there's something really different going on in their heads, or whether the apparent differences are superficial. That's because I don't know enough about the causes and etiology of obsession. Nobody does. There's no … natural history, no close observation over generations, like there were when biology, say, first became a real science. You could say that we're back there where Aristotle was with nature. Some trees are pointed, others are bushy. Some animals have four legs, some two, some none. Okay, given those caveats, let's take the slobs first. Those are
her
names—the reporter's, by the way—not mine. The slob is into romance, big-time. You know what they say, in real love you want what's best for the loved one; in romantic love you just
want
the loved one. The romantic construct is created in the mind, of which the actual woman is the living symbol. The construct offers unconditional, infinite love, transcendent love. It's a substitute for religion, in fact. But the loved one is an actual woman made of meat. She has needs, a personality. Sometimes she has to withdraw from the relationship, from her symbolic role, in service of her own ego. This is a disaster for him. He can't handle the dissonance between his romantic construct and its symbol. Why would she withdraw? he asks, and since he doesn't see her as a real person who might have a perfectly good reason for withdrawing, such as a need to work, or child care, it must be another man who's stealing his possession. So now we're in
Othello.
The escalating violence begins; the escalation is diagnostic, by the way. Shouting, to hitting, to serious injury, maybe. So she leaves, and then the stalking starts. Continued profession of love throughout, another diagnostic. He literally
would
die for her, and he often does, after he's killed her, naturally. In maybe eighty percent of these things we have drugs or alcohol involved. The good news about the slob type is that if you catch it early enough, and you get tough, and you have the right situation, you can penetrate the illusion, establish a considerate, humane relationship. The bad news is that a certain percentage of these guys will never stop until the woman's dead.”

“Or
he's
dead,” said Marlene.

Malkin seemed startled by this, as if it had not occurred to her. She nodded. “Of course. Or he's dead. Okay, sadists. The sadist is rarer. Here the operator is not romance and jealousy, but domination. By the way, we're not talking about consensual sexual games, which is an entirely different bunch of people, the S-M crowd. No, here we have a psychopath and his victim. Often we have a respectable citizen, a taxpayer. We have cold, dispassionate punishment, not hot rage and jealousy. You've been a bad girl and Daddy has to punish you. They have actual torture implements sometimes. The woman has to fetch them from the closet and so on. The rule is control, the woman reduced, once again, to an object, and since that's the case, we don't see quite as many homicides here. What we get is suicide; the woman can't take it anymore, he's stripped her so far down that she really
is
a nothing, and she checks out. Then he goes and gets another one, or maybe he doesn't wait, he goes after the daughter, or somebody else. Here's where you get your bigamists, your secret families. This guy is a narcissist too; he'll stalk because he's into torture, but he doesn't want to deal with any punishment, so he can be turned aside from a particular woman, as you may well have done with your Mr. Seely. If you find a nasty kid tearing wings off flies and you take the fly away from him, he's not going to break his neck chasing after that particular fly. He'll get another fly that's just as good.”

“You think they're not as dangerous as the slobs?” Marlene asked.

“It depends. On the one hand, if you expose the dirty secret, threaten him, the guy will often back down. On the other hand, I suspect that this type shades into a heavier psychopathology and your true serials. They dispense with even the pretense of an actual relationship and move into a stereotyped pattern of stalk, torture, murder, dispose. Jack the Ripper. Ted Bundy. But that type wouldn't come into your purview, would it?”

“I hope not,” said Marlene with deep sincerity. “And what about the strangers?”

Malkin stretched and performed an elaborate shrug. “Who knows? They're even rarer; there's practically no data. I think we're looking at a variant of the slob, except the relationship is
entirely
in his head. Sometimes they'll fixate on a movie star or a singer and follow her around. Or him: John Lennon. These guys are generally disorganized individuals, drifters. But sometimes not. I happen to think that a lot of rape comes out of this kind of psychology.”

“Me too,” said Marlene. “I think these guys sometimes become what we used to call ‘gentleman rapists.' They assault the woman and then they want to make polite conversation, like they were on a nice date. Some of these guys actually have made dates with the women they raped and we grabbed them when they showed up with candy and flowers. Go figure.”

“That's what I try to do,” said the professor, smiling. “And you've just had the lecture, in short form. I give a course on patterns of sexual pathology at the New School. You saved yourself ninety dollars.”

“It would've been worth it,” said Marlene. “I appreciate the time.” She put away the notebook she'd been using.

“And now you're going back to your crusade?”

“Is it a crusade? Unfortunately, you can't smite everybody who might be wicked. The law frowns on it. And by the time they've shown their worst, the woman's dead. How many is it getting to be now?”

“Nationally? Between thirteen and fifteen hundred, year in and year out. Slain by their loved ones. Do you know who Simon de Montfort was?”

Marlene started. “That was from left field,” she said. “Hmm. Crusader type? Not a sweetheart as I recall.”

“No. He was in charge of the crusade that suppressed the Cathar heretics in southern France. Thirteenth century. The story is his men asked him how they could separate the heretic captives from the good Catholics, and he said, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.'”

“Sounds like my kind of guy,” said Marlene lightly. It was the wrong tone; Professor Malkin was giving her a peculiar look, admiration mixed with a horrified avidity. The humor had drained out of her face. Marlene had to look away. She wants me to kill them, thought Marlene, and imagined what it would be like to spend all one's time as the clerk in the abbatoir, the keeper of the rolls in our mild, domestic Belsen, immersed in case histories, in the horror stories of implacable men, of perverted love, of tortured and slaughtered women. Kill them all. Marlene did not have to plumb too deeply to reach those same feelings; she had to suppress a shudder.

“There's somebody I think you should meet,” Malkin was saying as Marlene snapped back to attention. “If you're going to be a crusader, you should meet the others.” She riffled through a Rolodex and wrote something on an index card.

“I didn't know there were others,” said Marlene, taking the card. “And I'm not sure I'm a crusader.” The name on the card was Mattie Duran, and the address was the East Village Women's Shelter, on Avenue B.

“You and Mattie should have a lot to talk about,” said Malkin confidently. “She's quite a character. They call her the Durango Kid.”

When Marlene left the professor's office and walked out into Washington Square, she was thinking that Professor Malkin probably considered Marlene quite a character too. A wave of regret passed over her, and she suddenly felt ridiculous: her outfit, her recent activities, her plans, all seemed at that moment absurd. She cursed under her breath, put her head down and her hands in her pockets, and strode off down the street, kicking the damp piles of fallen leaves. Respectable people moved out of her way.

Karp said, “Would you please state your name for the record?”

“You know who I am,” said the district attorney, Sanford Bloom. He smiled his famous perfect smile at his lawyer. His lawyer smiled too. Bloom's lawyer was named Conrad Wharton, and he smiled with the purse-lipped pucker of an old-fashioned kewpie doll, which, with his puff of colorless hair and round pink face, he disturbingly resembled. He was not a particularly good lawyer (it was Karp's opinion that the D.A. would not know a good lawyer if one bit him on the ass), but Wharton had once been Bloom's administrative chief and hatchet man, and Bloom, for whatever reason, trusted him. Besides that, Wharton probably disliked Karp with an intensity greater than that of any other person in the state of New York, not excluding the several score people Karp had sent to Attica for murder. Karp thought that this was a big part of why Bloom had chosen Wharton. He wanted to piss Karp off. He wasn't taking this deposition or the case very seriously.