Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“Did you ever invest money with him?”

“Oh no. I mean, he never asked me. It wasn’t like that. He did help me with it, though. Money, I mean. Do you know what a SEP is?”

“No,” I lied.

“It’s a pension plan for the self-employed. It’s really a wonderful deal. One of the few breaks the IRS still gives. I didn’t have one, and he showed me how to set one up.”

“With his brokerage house?”

“No,” she said, an annoyed tone to her voice. “Stan wasn’t after my money. He has plenty of his own. He’s very successful in his business.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized.

“He spent more on me than I was making,” she said, the defensive tone still in her voice. “When we went on vacation, he insisted he pay for everything. He was old-fashioned, he said. The man should always pay.”

“When did it start to go wrong?”

“The first time he hit me,” she said, looking down at her hands.

“Which was . . . ?”

“Right after we had sex.”

“He was—?”

“No!” she interrupted me. “I’m telling it all wrong. It wasn’t a . . . sexual thing. He didn’t hit me after we . . . made love. Or before it either. I just meant, he never hit me all the time we were dating. He didn’t start until we became . . . intimate.”

“And then it was . . . ?”

“He . . . We had an argument. Over something silly. I don’t even remember what it was about. But I remember we were in his apartment. He has a condo. In TriBeCa. Right near the—”

“What did he do?” I cut her off. She was going to skirt the edges, and I needed her near the center.

“He just . . . shoved me, I guess. And shook me. He was yelling at me and suddenly he grabbed me by the shoulders and . . . I was terrified.”

“So he stopped?”

“Yes. He did stop. And he apologized too. It was the stress of his job. He’s responsible for tens of millions of dollars every day. It’s very intense work, and he has to be in control every minute. His job is a pressure cooker.”

“And he had to blow off steam every once in a while?”

“That’s right. That’s what he—”

“But it escalated?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times in your line of work.”

Seeing as she’d been nice enough to upgrade me from thug to psychologist—or downgrade me to lawyer, I couldn’t tell which—I decided to let that one pass.

“It wasn’t really the . . . violence,” she finally said. “He did hit me, eventually. Even punched me in the face, once. I didn’t have to go to the hospital . . . and didn’t want to, all right?” she continued. “It was . . . humiliating. I had told the other residents that we were . . . together. They don’t train you to ask for help, they train you to give it. And to stay . . . detached.”

“Okay.”

“No, it wasn’t okay. I should have stopped it earlier. But . . . I just didn’t. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. . . . ?”

“Smith.”

“Of course,” she said, in that self-hating tone. Why should this hard-faced man tell her the truth? He wasn’t there to help her. He didn’t care about her. He just wanted the money. “Smith. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. Smith?”

“Not medically.”

“Cancer is simply unregulated growth. That’s all it is. The human body has mechanisms within it to regulate growth. When they malfunction, the cancer starts to work. If you don’t stop its growth, it eats the host. That’s what my . . . relationship was. Unregulated growth. He got more . . . controlling every day. At first I . . . liked it. Then I didn’t know how to stop it. It was . . . swallowing me. There wouldn’t have been anything of me left.”

“The police . . . ?”

“It wasn’t the violence!” she said sharply. “Not the physical violence. He could stop that. He even . . . did, sometimes. It was the . . . picking away at me. Eating my . . . self. I was too fat. So I lost weight. I was too rotten a dancer. So I took lessons. I always said the wrong thing. I was always . . . embarrassing him, he said. I didn’t really love him, he said that too. So I did . . . whatever he wanted. To prove it to him. I made myself into exactly what he wanted.” She took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before she let it out. “And then I didn’t want to be what I was. But he wouldn’t let me go.”

“He threatened to hurt you?”

“Hurt me? Yes, that’s about right. Not kill me. That wouldn’t be his style. You can’t totally dominate a dead person.”

This wasn’t the story Crystal Beth had told me, but I kept my face bland, asked: “How would he hurt you, then?”

“He has . . . pictures of me. They weren’t a secret. I mean, I knew he was taking them. But . . . you can’t imagine. The things I did. For him, I thought. So I could prove I really loved him.”

“Still or video?” I said, getting down to business.

“What?”

“The pictures. Polaroids, transparencies, black-and-whites, eight-millimeter, camcorder . . . what?”

“Oh. Both. I mean, he had a regular camera, and a video camera too.”

“Okay. What else?”

“What else? ”

“Yeah, what else? So he’s got some sexy pictures of you. Maybe that would upset your parents or something, but there’s nothing illegal—”

“I wrote some prescriptions,” she said, looking down.

“For . . . ?”

“For him. Oh! I see what you . . . For tranquilizers.”

“So . . . ?”

“And amphetamines. And painkillers.”

“So . . . ?”

“I wrote the prescriptions for . . . people who don’t exist. Just . . . names he gave me.”

“How often—”

“I did it all the time,” she said quietly. “He needed them for . . . clients, he said. Part of the entertainment package, he called it.”

“And he’d go to the law? That’d drop his anchor too.”

“His name isn’t on any of them,” she said. “I could lose my license. . . .”

“Are you sure he’d do it?”

“He would do anything,” she said, her voice tense with the calm certainty of the doomed. “Anything at all.”

“Like cancel your credit cards? Or steal your mail?”

“He never did that,” she said, a puzzled tone to her voice.

“Your cousin said that—”

“My cousin? I don’t have a cousin? Who . . . ?”

“Crystal Beth.”

“Crystal Beth? She’s not my cousin. I met her when I was volunteering at the center. And when the same thing started to happen to me, I . . .”

“Yeah, I guess it’s just a word she uses. ‘Cousin.’ Like ‘sister,’ you know? It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “What you want is for him to stop, right?”

“Yes!”

“You understand, there’s probably no way to get the pictures back. Not all of them. They could be anywhere.”

“I know.”

“And the scrips. You already wrote them. There’s already a record. The best you can get is that he goes away, leaves you alone. That’s enough?”

“I told Crystal Beth. I already made all my mistakes. All I want is for him to leave my life.”

“Give me what you have on him,” I said.

She had a lot, but it wasn’t much. Volume, not substance. The photos were a help, but she didn’t have a spare set of keys to his apartment. Or his car.

What she had was mostly “Dating Game” keepsakes. Only thing, she finally figured out, she was the game.

Like the pimps say, it’s all game.

She gave me the letters too. At first they were lovely little hollow things. On creamy stationery with his name embossed in florid script. Handwritten with a fountain pen in a self-assured flowing hand. Bullshit homilies. Talk-show clichés. Recycled garbage.