Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

Or Marlene guessed her age at about that; she could have been any age from a hard thirty to a light fifty. She was a Latina of some variety, but probably not a Puerto Rican. Her skin had a cinnamon sheen to it, her cheekbones were broad and sharp, and her mouth had that lovely, lanceolate sculpting of the lips that said Mexico. Her eyes, oddly, were gray-blue.

The woman was giving Marlene the once-over too, and Marlene could see that she was somewhat put off and confused by the fancy clothes. Her gaze, however, softened when she examined Marlene’s face, which still bore the yellowing bruises left by Pruitt’s fists.

“Can I pet your cat?” asked Lucy, who had wormed her way past Marlene’s hip.

The woman smiled at this, showing powerful teeth and a flash of gold, and beckoned the child forward. Lucy stroked the cat, who spat briefly and then submitted to a stroking. The woman stood and held out her hand to Marlene. “Mattie Duran,” she said. Her hand was large and rough, with thick, square-cut nails. She was dressed in a black cotton turtleneck under a cover-all garment of vaguely military cut, with many pockets and zips on it. It was also black, which seemed to be the color of choice at the Women’s Shelter.

Marlene said her own name, and Duran gestured her to one of the straight chairs. She sat down again behind her desk and said, “Look, we’re a little jammed now, but I’ll try to help.” She pulled a clipboard from a wall hook and took a pencil from behind her ear. “Where are you living now?”

“In my loft,” answered Marlene, puzzled.

“Is he still there?”

“Who?”

“Your husband, your boyfriend-the guy who beat you up,” said Duran.

“Umm, I think we’re off on the wrong foot. I’m not a client. Professor Malkin suggested I come talk to you, and since I was passing by …”

Duran laughed heartily and tossed the clipboard down. “Oh, yeah, the little professor. You’re that one … in the article. That’s where you got the face. Well, well! Yeah, we should talk … don’t do that, honey, he’ll scratch the shit out of you.”

Lucy had been trying to lift the cat out of his basket, and the animal was making increasingly more aggressive noises.

“He doesn’t like to be hauled around,” explained Duran.

Lucy asked, “What’s his name?”

“Megaton,” said Duran, and then, to Marlene, “You know, we have a playroom upstairs; there’s kids and a bunch of toys. Maybe Lucy would like to go up and stay there while we talk?”

“How about that, Lucy? Would you like to play with the kids who live here?” asked Marlene.

“The ones who’re hiding from the bad men?” asked Lucy.

Duran gave Marlene a quick sidelong glance. “Yeah,” she said to Lucy, “those’re the ones.”

The woman took Lucy by the hand and led her away. She was back in a few minutes. Sitting down again in her chair, she considered Marlene thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “You don’t look like what I thought you would.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, all this …” She fluttered her fingers up and down her chest to indicate Marlene’s careful navy suit and silk blouse.

“I just came from church,” said Marlene, feeling defensive, and absurd because of feeling so.

“Church, huh. A good Catholic girl.”

“I try to be,” snapped Marlene. “You have some kind of problem with that? I have a butch black outfit too, you know; maybe I should’ve come in the right costume, get a little less heat.”

They locked eyes for a few seconds, glaring, and then Duran flashed her golden smile again. “Hey, no offense. I don’t get along with the church, it don’t mean you can’t. Anyway, it was a neat number you did on that piece of shit. In the Voice article, I mean. You want to go into that business, I got a list for you about eight feet long.”

She said it jocularly, but Marlene answered her in all seriousness. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Duran cocked her head. “Say, what?”

“I want to be, I am, in the business. I want to protect women from stalkers.”

Duran’s eyebrows rose and her mouth twisted quizzically. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“No.”

“Honey, most of these ladies don’t have a pot to piss in. How’re you going to make a living off of protecting them from men?”

“Money’s not a problem. Not right now.”

“Rich lady, huh? What is this, a hobby?”

Marlene kept her voice even and responded, “Ms. Duran, I’m not an asshole, and I suspect you’re not either, so could we cut the horseshit? You want to trade working-class credibility, we could be here all day.”

Duran seemed startled for a moment and then grinned and let out her big, hearty guffaw. “All right!” she said. “The girl means business! Okay-what is it-Marlene? Okay, Marlene: what you’re telling me is, you want to run, like, an agency that does protection. You don’t mean like, guarding the victims, because that’s what I do, me and the other shelters, and there’s no way you could afford to put a seven ‘n’ twenty-four guard on more than a couple of women. So what you mean is, you want to take the bastards out.”

“If they commit crimes, if they violate protective orders-”

Duran waved her hand dismissively. “Nah, nah- I mean, take them out. You know damn well you get one of these bastards for assault, he’s away for eighteen months at the most, less for a contempt cite. And when he comes out, what’s the first thing he’s going to do? He’s going to get even with the woman. And he’s going to keep it up until she’s dead. You know that’s the way it is. I can see it in your face.”

“Not all of them are like that,” said Marlene.

“Hah!”

“Yeah, well, if you start with the premise that the solution is wholesale slaughter, you’re finished before you start. But there must be hundreds of thousands of cases of battering in the country and maybe thousands of stalking incidents. We have only about fifteen hundred, two thousand homicides in that class across the country per year, maybe a couple of hundred in the City.”

“That’s some ‘only.’”

“That’s why I went to Malkin,” explained Marlene, unable to keep some sharpness out of her tone. “I was looking for some way of predicting real danger in these cases.”

“So? Could she?”

Marlene shrugged. “Not really. That’s why I came to see you.”

“You think I have some kind of … system?” Duran said, and then laughed. “Hell, girl, I got all I can do to keep this place from closing down, getting women relocated with new ID, getting them jobs or welfare. Christ on a crutch, I get five minutes to think a week, I’m lucky. You think I can figure out which of these wackos is going to do something bad and which won’t?”

“No, not really,” said Marlene with a sigh. “Look, it was just a thought-I’m sort of new at this. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

She started to rise, but Duran waved her back and said, “No, sit. This is sort of interesting. Maybe I should think about the problem more, I wouldn’t be getting my ass in a sling as much as I do.” She glanced at the wall clock. “Look, we’ll shoot the shit, I’ll take you around and show you the setup, introduce you to some of the women. You like hard-luck stories? I can tell you do, a good Catholic girl like you. We’ll have lunch.”

So they did. Marlene met most of the thirty or so women in residence, and heard their hard-luck stories and met and admired their children (almost all the women had children) and, where appropriate, examined their wounds: Donna with the wired jaw, Maria with the separated shoulder, Maureen’s broken nose, and Vickie, whose husband had set his pit bull on her, mangling her knee. Toward the end of the tour, Marlene was feeling more like St. Catherine of Sienna licking her way through the lazaretto than she liked, and had decided that massively viewing misery was not her line of work.