The Other Typist (13 page)

It was a pleasant evening out, and when we left the movie house we decided to walk back to the hotel. Odalie was convinced a walk would do me some good. We strolled along the avenues, threading our way in and out among the cane chairs of the sidewalk cafés. It was perhaps one of the last days of the year still warm enough for outdoor dining, and there was a sort of buzz in the air created by eager patrons desperate to enjoy a last huzzah. Yellowy light spilled out from under each awning, turning the concrete beneath our feet golden and lighting up the faces of men and women who sat eating at the tables with a sort of jack-o’-lantern glow. We walked, unconsciously gathering fragments of conversations and the wafting odors of buttery garlic dishes, enjoying the street in a piecemeal way, like the pigeons who moved automatically along the same path gathering up crumbs. The fatted birds scattered as we stepped among them, then returned at some distance behind us, like a tide coming back in.

As we neared the park the sidewalks grew a bit wider, and I was able to walk alongside Odalie easily. I had a mind to ask her directly, once and for all, to lay some of the rumors about her to rest. I have always admired good manners in people and have adhered to the notion that there are things in this world that are simply none of my business. For all of these reasons and more, I had—up to that point—never asked Odalie a single question about her past. Before it had always seemed intrusive, but now, of course, we were room-mates, and I felt myself more entitled to know about certain things. Moreover, we were sharing our present lives together, and I was growing increasingly conscious of the fact that her past may well indeed affect my future. I screwed up my courage.

“Your friend—Gib, was it?” I said. I was careful not to say
fiancé
,
for the way Odalie had said
enfianced
that night had sounded very tongue-in-cheek, and I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Odalie turned her head sharply at the mention of his name and arched an eyebrow. I gulped and pressed on. “He . . . ah, didn’t say what he did for a living . . .”

“Oh, yes, well,” Odalie said, waving a vague hand in the air. “I suppose you could call him an entrepreneur. Exports and small businesses, you know. The usual things.” The answer didn’t do much to put me at ease. She smiled, but there was a veneer about it. I had the impression I was getting the brush-off, and that this would be the permanent state of things when it came to my attempts to find out more information about Gib. I wondered: Had Odalie’s speculators really gotten it right? I had to consider the very real possibility she was indeed “a bootlegger’s girl,” as gossips at the precinct had declared, and her job at the precinct was merely a means to keep him in the know, as it were. I knew the facts were not in Gib’s favor. There had been so much alcohol at the speakeasy, and so many varieties. Someone had to be making it or at least importing it, or both, and it suddenly struck me that Gib had seemed like the party’s overseer. All night long people had been seeking him out, like guests paying their respects to the host. I thought of asking Odalie in point-blank fashion whether Gib was a bootlegger, but she appeared to sense my struggle to formulate such a question.

“Look,” she exclaimed, pointing as we neared the Plaza. “Let’s take a victoria across the park! I haven’t hired a horse-cab in ages.” She hailed the driver, and before I knew it I was staring into the big chocolate eyes of a spotted gray draft horse who was craning his neck to see over his blinders, as though he hoped to inspect and approve of his prospective passengers before being made to lug them across the length of the park. We climbed in, and I felt the springing bounce of the carriage as it rocked against our weight.

The driver shook the reins and we were off at a slow roll. It was an open cab, and the night air was beginning to acquire a bit of a chill. I pulled my jacket tighter around me and watched the trees move steadily by, the last flames of autumn burning brightly in their branches.

“You really ought to give the Lieutenant Detective an easier time of it,” Odalie said. I looked at her, shocked by this rather bold, unprompted statement. I opened my mouth, but no response offered itself up. Odalie was not looking at me; she was gazing thoughtfully at the passing trees. “He was nice to you, even after you shamed him.”

I was confused. After I’d sent the Lieutenant Detective and his flask away from my desk, he hadn’t spoken to me the rest of the day. “What do you mean?” I asked with a furrowed brow.

“Oh, nothing,” Odalie said, turning from the trees to look at me. “It’s just that he kept deflecting Marie—giving her all those little tasks, keeping her busy and away from your desk.” I shrugged. I did not see how that had anything to do with me. Odalie rolled her eyes as if I were a hopeless case. “If Marie discovers you’ve been drinking, how long do you think it’ll be before
everyone
knows you’ve been drinking?” For a brief second, my blood ran cold in my veins. I had not considered this. Odalie read my expression and a little smirk appeared on her face. She gazed back at the passing trees. “And what Marie knows, the Sergeant certainly knows,” she said, her voice flat and clear and full of warning.

On the other side of the park, we dismounted from the horse-cab, Odalie slipped the driver a few coins, and together we walked the few remaining blocks to the hotel in silence. Once home I realized, with little sense of victory, that I was finally entirely sober.

I
have not explained yet about the little lapse in my professional discretion that has fallen under great scrutiny as of late. By this I mean the now-infamous report I filed at the precinct outlining the confessed crimes of a one Mr. Edgar Vitalli.

The advantage of hindsight, of course, is that one finally sees the sequence of things, the little turning points that add up to a final resultant direction. I’ve already mentioned my doctor’s encouragement that I explain my actions with an emphasis on
chronology
. Life is a series of chain reactions, he says, and the relationship between cause and effect cannot be underestimated. And so, of course, I see
now
with utter clarity that the incident with the brooch was one such turning point, and moving in with Odalie was another, but typing up the confession of Edgar Vitalli was the most serious variety of turning point, as it marked the point of no return.

If you ask me do I feel sorry for Edgar Vitalli, I will tell you no. I am quite certain Mr. Vitalli falls into the category to which modern criminologists have given the name serial killers, and it is difficult to feel sympathy for a man like that. I understand now what I did was not right, but I cannot say in all honesty I fully regret the outcome produced by my actions. That I played some small part in Mr. Vitalli’s being condemned gives me some satisfaction. Secretly I am only sorry his ultimate punishment has not yet been carried out. I say
secretly
because I know if I confessed my delight to my doctor I would be deemed an outright monster, so I keep my unrepentant feelings to myself. I am no bloodthirsty heathen, mind you. But like any truly moral person, I like to see justice prevail.

For the sake of consistency and of telling things accurately, I suppose I ought to recount a few of the details that led up to my transcribing Mr. Vitalli’s confession. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin, but it’s probably best to explain a little about Mr. Vitalli himself.

They say some men are simply not the marrying kind. This was not the case with Edgar Vitalli. Mr. Vitalli was perhaps
too much
the marrying kind—as the courthouse records had it, he married five times in four years. Despite the fact Mr. Vitalli was himself a youthful and handsome man, his wives were of a different ilk, all of them older and comfortably widowed. Moreover, this was not the sum total of what his wives held in common. They also shared the curious and uncanny fact they’d all suffered mortal accidents while taking a bath, and that they’d all been thoughtfully relieved of their wealth just prior to their deaths.

I suspect it was Mr. Vitalli’s attitude that made the Sergeant’s blood boil the most. You see, Mr. Vitalli was the worst kind of gutter rat (to use the Sergeant’s vernacular)—the kind slicked down with snake oil. He was a confidence man; not terribly educated, but he had a way about him that suggested he thought himself rather smart. It might even be said Mr. Vitalli fancied himself a genius, for he implied as much on more than one occasion during his interviews with the Sergeant. Everyone who encountered him at the precinct felt instantly sure of his guilt, and all of us were eager to see justice served, and served swiftly. But twice he had gone to trial, twice he had elected to represent himself, and twice he had won over the jury’s sympathies.

During his second trial I was curious to see how such a travesty of justice might occur. I sat in attendance for a day and watched Mr. Vitalli operate on the jury, removing their prejudices with the casual precision of a surgeon removing a patient’s tonsils. With the men in the jury box he played the congenial drinking buddy, an average Joe, blameless for being glad to be free of the nagging, castrating constraints of marriage (
oh,
but he implied,
couldn’t they relate?
). With the women who sat in the court audience, he simply licked the full, roguish pink lips that lurked under his black mustache and smiled with his long, wolfish white teeth as though to say to each of them,
My only crime against the world is I’ve been allotted more than my fair share of charm, and besides, I can’t be blamed for being handsome.
The women appeared to agree and, perhaps as a testament to Mr. Vitalli’s good looks, were even more sympathetic to Mr. Vitalli’s cause than the men were. In the end he labored very little to prove he had not been involved in his wife’s drowning. Instead, he devoted his efforts to proving even if he
had
been involved—
hypothetically speaking, of course (wink, wink)
—he was not to blame. Watching this, it was perhaps the first time I became conscious there existed a distinction between guilt and blame. Mr. Vitalli couldn’t prove himself innocent, but he could prove he was blameless, at least as far as that weak-minded popularity club they called a courtroom was concerned.

Mr. Vitalli’s high-valued stock was partly derived from his attention to detail, as he never neglected the small civilities. He parted his inky hair down the middle with precision and oiled it carefully into place. He carried a silver-handled cane, gesturing with it like some sort of dapper circus ringmaster as he pled his case. When the court reporter unexpectedly halted in her typing and sneezed, Mr. Vitalli bolted with a genteel, catlike grace across the courtroom and waved a white silk handkerchief in her surprised face before the stammering judge was able to command him back to his seat. What’s more, I believe the judge’s reprimand only made the jury pity Mr. Vitalli further, as it seemed like sour grapes that the judge should punish him for only doing what every well-bred gentleman is taught to do.

In my humble estimation, justice was ultimately undermined by two principal tactics. One, Mr. Vitalli was always able to produce witnesses—sometimes multiple witnesses, always female, practically a gaggle of clucking geese—to attest they had seen him out and about at the time of his wife’s death (I ought to say at the times of his
wives’ deaths,
plural). And second, everyone was charmed by Mr. Vitalli, blinded by those white teeth and dapper manners, they simply could not picture him cruelly and savagely holding a woman underwater to the point of her death.

But the Sergeant and I, we knew better. We could picture him doing the deed with utter clarity, and had developed our own opinions of Mr. Vitalli’s
capabilities
. There had, after all, been five wives! As wife after wife died in precisely the same curious way, we had interviewed Mr. Vitalli ad nauseam. And in that capacity, we had run through the repertoire of emotions he accidentally allowed himself to show; we had seen him cry crocodile tears, we had seen him sneer, we had seen him worry, we had seen him gloat in the aftermath of not one but two acquittals. We knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Vitalli was, at his core, a true savage.

What’s more: I believe either Mr. Vitalli could not help himself or else he got into a habit of taunting us with the crime scene. The freshly expired wives, you see, were all found in the bathtub in the exact same pose—a coincidence it was too difficult to overlook. With no air in their lungs, they sank to the bottom of the tub, where they lay staring upward in motionless silence, the surface of the water over them like a pane of glass separating the living from the dead. Their arms, which you might imagine flailing in those last seconds of life, were always crossed upon their chests in the manner of a perverse Lady of Shalott. Their ankles were also crossed, and photographs that were made of the five crime scenes conveyed a deeply unnerving, otherworldly ambience. The crowning touch—a bottle of laudanum resting within an arm’s reach of the tub itself—was so conspicuously placed as to seem utterly posed.

By the time of my report, it had gotten so Mr. Vitalli was visiting the precinct at regular intervals, being summoned as he was each time a wife of his turned up blue-faced and unblinking under a tubful of bathwater that had gone cold. I lost count of the times we saw him stroll in, but each time he arrived more dapper and dandified than the last. By the fifth death, Mr. Vitalli had decided to go out of his way to toy with us on purpose, although this development was not terribly obvious right away.

At our request, he came into the precinct voluntarily, or so it seemed. I remember observing him as he walked in the day after his fifth wife had been found. He shrugged out of his overcoat and hung it on the coatrack, a gesture that struck me as bizarrely familiar and at ease. He smiled around the room with a proprietary air. His body language suggested our precinct was in fact his home, and we were all visitors he had invited into the parlor with the glib idea we might amuse him. He was not bothered by bad nerves, or at least if he was, no molecule of his body betrayed as much. Neither did he seem to be grieving for the wife he had just lost. The Sergeant, thinking perhaps to rattle Mr. Vitalli, looked him in the eye and said firmly, “You must be devastated by this loss.” But if intimidation was the Sergeant’s aim, it missed its mark, for Mr. Vitalli merely smiled and put a theatrical hand over his heart.

“Such a fine specimen of a woman as she was,” he replied, neglecting to refer to his late wife by name (I wondered, briefly, if he’d already forgotten it), “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to marry again.” The words dripped with melodrama, and time stood horribly still as it fleetingly appeared he might even accompany the statement with a wink.

In that moment, it was clear to me the Sergeant would’ve liked nothing more than to ball up his fist and knock Mr. Vitalli’s block off, but such a breach of professional conduct would’ve been extremely distasteful to the Sergeant, and he was professional to the very last. The muscles in his jaw visibly flexed as he ground his teeth in anger, but the Sergeant forced a polite smile to his lips and went through the formalities—shaking Mr. Vitalli’s hand, escorting him to the interview room, offering Mr. Vitalli a glass of water as a matter of courtesy. As the Sergeant gave a quick crook of his finger in my direction (the same crook, I might mention, I’d watched Odalie give at least half a dozen waiters over the last week or so), I understood I was to follow the two men. I lifted a stack of typing paper from the supplies table and obediently fell into step behind them.

As we settled into the close quarters of the interview room, the Sergeant continued making polite conversation with Mr. Vitalli, who was voluble enough when it came to small talk. But then the mood shifted and the Sergeant segued into discussion of the crime itself. At that point Mr. Vitalli promptly transformed himself into a stone, simply sitting in silence and smiling as though he were the cat who’d caught the canary. He’d decided to clam up, as was his right. It was all a taunt: going out of his way to come in to the precinct only to stubbornly—not to mention smugly—refuse to answer anything directly related to his wife’s death. The Sergeant, I could tell, was incensed. He wheedled, he threatened, he cajoled. As for me, I sat alert at the shorthand machine, tensed and ready to take the confession Edgar Vitalli refused to issue from his lips. This darkly comical state went on for the better part of a half an hour, until finally the Sergeant abruptly slapped his hand with tremendous violence against the wooden desk, causing both Mr. Vitalli and myself to flinch defensively. His eyes smoldering, the Sergeant leaned in until his forehead almost touched Mr. Vitalli’s.

“Blast you! Get the hell out of here, man,” the Sergeant growled through clenched teeth. Mr. Vitalli made no move to go, and I could see the Sergeant’s mustache trembling. His chair scraped the ground with a bone-aching screech, and he stormed out, flinging the interview room door open with such force, I thought the glass pane would surely break as the door struck the wall.

For several seconds I remained frozen, mostly still shocked by the Sergeant’s use of profanity (I had never heard him blaspheme before). Slowly I became aware of the fact I had been left alone in the room with Mr. Vitalli. Involuntarily my gaze flicked in his direction and a chill raced over my skin. Once you had glimpsed behind the curtain of Mr. Vitalli’s charm, he was like that—there was something so profoundly absent from him that simply looking at him could make your skin crawl. I was instantly sorry I had glanced in his direction, for now he turned and caught my eye. A smile crept into his obscenely babylike, salmon-colored lips, and his black mustache twitched.

“Heavens. I had no intention of upsetting the good man,” Mr. Vitalli lied in a falsely naive voice. I ignored this comment and gathered up my things from the stenographer’s desk to go. “Do you think he’ll ever forgive me?” Mr. Vitalli continued, the inflection of farcical glee in his voice growing bolder. “I’m so heartbroken over my wives, you see, and do so enjoy my social calls with the Sergeant.” He reached out a hand, and suddenly I became aware he was about to take my wrist. For a split second, I was truly terrified—but only for a second, for almost as immediately another feeling came over me, a feeling I’m not sure I can adequately describe. Just before his hand reached me, my own hand sprang to life and clamped around
his
wrist with a viselike force. With a vicious aggression that seemed to come from elsewhere, I yanked him by the wrist and pulled him toward me so that we were staring eyeball to eyeball.

“I know you’re used to playing the bully, and bullies often have trouble opening their ears and listening, but you’d better listen to me now like you’ve never listened to anyone in your life,” I hissed. My voice sounded strange; I didn’t recognize it as my own. And yet, I felt a twinge of inner pleasure as I realized I had now captured Mr. Vitalli’s full attention.

“You may be an animal with no control of himself,” I continued, “but believe me when I tell you, even animals get what’s coming to them, and it’s only a matter of time before the Sergeant puts you out of your misery.”

The air between our locked eyes was thick with a tension that was palpable; it was as if we were staring at each other through an invisible brick. My hand—still moving by virtue of what seemed like an independent volition—squeezed even more tightly around Mr. Vitalli’s wrist. His eyes widened, and suddenly I felt a trickle of something warm and wet. I glanced down and realized my fingernails had drawn blood. Four tiny red half-moons glimmered along the length of his wrist, and just as abruptly as I had snapped into my trance, I abruptly snapped out of it. I dropped his wrist and looked at the blood on my fingertips.