Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“I don’t really socialize much with my peers. I can’t stand most of the stuff they talk about. I can’t relate to it. I mean, I hope they’re having fun. I guess they are.”

He was a swimmer. He said he spent hours and hours in the pool doing laps. He had a bit of a crooked smile.

“I’m a little obsessive.” He laughed. “If a person can be a ‘little’ obsessive.” He was drinking a cup of herbal tea. He stared into it a moment, then looked back up at me. There was a visible ache deep behind his eyes.

“I was teaching Margaret how to swim. She said she’d always wanted to learn.”

I TRIED GETTING AHOLD OF TOMMY CARROLL ON MY WAY OUT TO Brooklyn, but he wasn’t in. Neither was Stacy. The skies had opened up, the rain slapping sideways in a gusty wind. Despite the first wave of the evening rush, I made decent time. As I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the clock on the Watchtower Building read 4:53. If Angel Ramos was sticking to his pledge, dangerous ground was shifting somewhere out there. My having not heard anything from Carroll told me that either nothing was happening, or if it was, I was out of the loop.

Fair’s fair. He didn’t know what I knew, either.

Margaret King had been raped and severely beaten when she was seventeen. The attack had taken place in Prospect Park. Bill couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that the attack took place in the same part of the park where Margaret ended her life sixteen years later. As would happen after her suicide, the seventeen-year-old Margaret had been spotted by a morning jogger. The attack had taken place in the winter-February-and Margaret’s prone body had been frosted with a thin layer of snow. The jogger had called 911, and Margaret was taken to New York Methodist Hospital, where her injuries were treated. She wasn’t lucid at first, and when she finally did come around and begin to grasp what was taking place, she denied that she had been raped. Vehemently. When asked if she was saying that the sex had been consensual, she attempted to deny that she had been involved in sex of any sort. In this case, the doctors knew best, or at least better. A sexual-assault counselor was brought to Margaret, and the woman promptly had one of her eyes very nearly gouged out by the frightened seventeen-year-old girl.

I drove down the ramp at the end of the bridge and turned onto Atlantic, then at Court Street, I took a right. Five o’clock. I turned on the radio, then changed my mind and turned it off. I preferred the silence. I needed it. To think.

MARGARET KING WAS COMPLETELY UNRELIABLE. AT FIRST SHE CLAIMED that she had not been attacked at all. Not just not raped, but not even attacked. Later she changed her story. She said that she had been hit by a car and that the car hadn’t stopped and that she’d staggered into the park and passed out there. Later, she said it was a van. Then a city bus. At one point, she even said that she had fallen out a window and crashed through a skylight.

“Margaret had a lying problem,” Bill had told me during our talk at the Underground. “She said she was always lying, always making things up, always exaggerating. She said she couldn’t help herself, she lived half in the real world and half in a bunch of fantasies. Heck, maybe not even always half and half. Falling through the skylight? She said she actually laughed later, when her nurse friend told her the details of the story. Margaret didn’t even remember telling it. She said she remembered the little details, the made-up details, but she thought they had come from a dream. She was… she was a real troubled person. I guess from the very beginning.”

Bill had taken a long look at the ceiling before going on. “Who knows? She’s dead now. That’s real. But maybe she lied all along. I mean, she did. She lied when she never mentioned anything about being a goddamn nun.”

Bill’s voice had remained calm and cool and steady, even as he described how he had gradually found himself being drawn closer and closer to Margaret King. She was fourteen years older than he. He said she was pretty. He said she could be silly, girlish, even a little flirtatious. He said he worked to keep his feelings subdued and to keep his fantasies from getting out of hand. He knew that he was essentially a loner and that he was responding-or trying to keep himself from responding-to the simple attractions of an older woman with whom he shared a destructive drive. He considered himself an intelligent person, and he figured he had things in hand.

He didn’t.

Margaret’s story, as told to me by Bill, was that she had eventually conceded the obvious to the authorities and was willing to state that, yes, she’d been accosted while walking alongside a wooded area of Prospect Park, then dragged amid the trees, where she’d been beaten and raped and left in a tangle of bushes. She was humiliated by the experience. She also gave so many conflicting descriptions of her attacker that the police ultimately had nothing to go on. An investigation was launched, but nothing ever came of it. Margaret’s attacker went untouched.

Bill’s story was that he was keeping Margaret King afloat in the Columbia pool one afternoon in late September when a jolt went through him. Margaret was on her back, her arms outstretched. Bill was supporting her, with one arm in the small of her back and one hand lightly prodding the back of her knees to keep them afloat. Except for the two of them, the pool was empty. Bill said he was walking her slowly around in little circles while she-eyes closed-chattered away at him, mainly about her early childhood. Like Bill, Margaret had been an only child. The stories had a certain embellished ring to them, and Bill suspected that once again, Margaret was making them up. Her stories in the basement of St. Paul’s sometimes touched on her early life, and those too often sounded exaggerated and fantasized. The versions she was telling in monologue while being supported in the swimming pool had the same unreliable tone. Bill told me that he honestly didn’t remember what had prompted him, but Margaret had just concluded a whopper about a family vacation to Greece, where she and a little Greek boy named Spiro had hitched rides on the fins of dolphins in the Mediterranean, when the next thing he knew, he was bent over Margaret and kissing her strongly on the mouth. She responded. He slid his hand up from her back to support her head and keep it from bobbing beneath the water, and she curled her body and let it float into his. The kiss went on for what felt like ages. Bill had continued stepping along the bottom of the pool, and eventually the two bumped up against the side of the pool. They finally came up for air. Several minutes later, the two were wrapped together on the floor of the steam room of the men’s locker room, lying atop a mountain of towels that Bill had grabbed from the laundry bin outside the showers. They made love in a short, violent burst, then remained on the towels, clinging to each other for several minutes afterward while the hot mist spewed from the steam room’s floor jets, several feet away. Bill said that Margaret had cried and cried and cried.

It was, let there be no doubt, a hell of a story.

RUTH KING’S LEGS LOOKED LIKE BOWLING PINS. THE SHORT WOMAN filled the doorway as if she were blocking the way of something inside that wanted to get out. For reasons probably buried in some fairy tale I was told in my diaper days, I imagined scores of highly animated mice fleeing the house, swirling past the woman’s boxy black shoes like little Pamplona bulls. The woman had a wide face and eyes set far apart, as if she had been stretched at the ears. Her hair was a fine nest of mousy brown going gray. Her dress was also brown and a little shiny. I fully expected a large hairy wart to sprout on the side of her nose.