they were like Russians or Slavs or something. But he never got nasty with anyone here. And he tipped well.”
“He grabbed me once,” Samantha said. She indicated one of her wrists. “I had a bruise for a week.”
“When you say he’s
“What do you think I mean?” Di said.
“Fine. So what happened?”
“The man calls up for an appointment,” Di said. “He wants to come over at five and I say, you can see Cassie then, but he says no, he wants Julie. He’d never asked for her before. I told him okay, but she won’t be here until six. He says he’ll wait.”
I looked over to one side. Samantha had her arms wrapped around herself and she was crying again.
“So he shows up at quarter to six. I put him in here, this room. When Julie shows up, I tell her he’s here, waiting for her. She drops off her stuff in the back, changes, and goes in. Cassie’s with me in the back. We’re watching some game show, shooting the shit.
“Then maybe five minutes later, we hear the door slam. And suddenly Julie’s screaming. I don’t mean screaming like she’s yelling
Samantha sobbed.
“So we run out. And he’s standing here, inside the room, with one hand on the doorknob. Julie’s on the floor.” She stepped over to the doorway, next to the light switch. “Right here. Face down. He’s got one of her wrists in his right hand and he’s holding her arm up, like this. And her hand’s bloody. The wall, too. The door. His shirt.”
“What did you do?” I said.
“What did I do? I stood there. And he looked me in the face, and Cassie behind me, and he slammed the door again. He held Julie’s arm up and stuck her hand here—” she touched the doorframe “—and he slammed the door on it. You could hear the bones break.”
She waited for me to say something. I said, “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah. It is. When the door swung open again, he’d dropped her arm and had a gun out, pointing at us. I remember Cassie saying ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘She knows why.’ ”
“You let him go?” I said.
“The man had a fucking gun! I had pepper spray!”
“You call the police?”
“The fuck do you think the police care if a girl at a massage parlor gets her hand broken? No we didn’t call the police. We grabbed a cab and took her to the emergency room.”
“And then Cassie quit?”
Di shook her head. “It’s not like that. This isn’t Proctor and Gamble. You don’t quit. She just stopped coming. And we stopped expecting her.”
“No I didn’t,” Di said. “The electric company wasn’t going to quit sending me bills. The A&P wasn’t going to quit charging me for baby food. I’ve got two jobs and I don’t have the luxury of quitting either of them.”
“But you also didn’t step up into Cassie’s place. Isn’t that what normally happens in this business? It’s more money.”
“Not for me,” Di said, and shot an apologetic look toward Samantha. “I’ve got to hold my daughter with these hands.”
In a broken voice Samantha said, “What are you going to do?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. She was asking me.
I got up off the table. “I’m going to find out who killed Dorrie. I’m going to make sure he never hurts another woman.”
“If it’s E.T.,” Di said, “you better have a gun yourself.”
“I don’t like guns,” I said.
“You like living?”
“Some days,” I said.
Monday morning it was in the papers. Up at Columbia, everyone was talking about it. The News 7 van and the Channel 2 van were parked on the cobblestones where FDR once walked. Two-man camera crews were doing stand-up interviews in front of the statue of Alma Mater, students saying how surprised they were, how sad it was. They hadn’t known Dorrie, had nothing useful to say, but weren’t about to miss a chance to get their face on television.
I told Lane what the police had told me, and he told the rest of the writing program staff. Over the course of the morning it filtered out to the students in the program and one by one they came by my desk in the center of the main area on the fifth floor to tell me how sorry they were. I thanked them. They went away.
This being September, work was light—the incoming class had been admitted, grades for the summer session had been filed, and it was early enough in the semester that midterms and course drops were still months away. There were phone calls to answer and mail to open, but not a ton of either and it was just as well. I couldn’t have kept my mind on it if there had been. There were classes I was supposed to attend, but they’d go on fine without me.
Each time I closed my eyes, and sometimes when I didn’t, I saw Dorrie lying in the bathtub. And though I hadn’t seen it, I imagined the scene Di had described, Julie’s hand viciously getting crushed in the door, presumably as some sort of punishment. Was there a connection? It seemed likely. Dorrie had witnessed the attack on Julie, and now she was dead. But Di had witnessed it, too. Did that mean she was next on the killer’s list?
It was a hard conclusion to avoid. But that didn’t mean it was right. Certainly Di was banking on it not being right, since she’d told me she planned to keep showing up for work at Sunset Entertainment and pocketing the tax- free nine dollars an hour they paid her. At least, she’d told me, she rarely had to see the customers—she got to do her job over the phone, behind a closed door. But a closed door wouldn’t stop the man who had mangled Julie’s hand. And even a locked door hadn’t kept Dorrie’s killer out of her apartment.
At eleven, when his first class let out, Stu Kennedy stopped by my desk and slowly let himself down into my guest chair. His movements were exaggeratedly careful these days, like a drunk picking his way down a flight of stairs. Sometimes in the evenings it was because he was, in fact, drunk, but not at eleven in the morning, and never in the office. He seemed to be exerting enormous effort just to sit still.
“My boy,” he whispered, inching his hand unsteadily across the desk toward me. “I heard.”
I reached out and pressed his hand, which trembled under mine.
“John,” he said, “I very much hope you don’t blame yourself. I believe you did her quite a lot of good. That she decided to do this, to end her life, it...it isn’t your fault.”
“No,” I said. “I know that.”
“She had come awfully far, you know. Some of the work she was writing for me now was quite fine.”
He pulled his hand away, rummaged in the accordion-file portfolio he always carried with him. He took two manuscripts out and laid them down in front of me. “I thought you might like to see her most recent chapters,” he said. “We hadn’t gone over these yet, but I thought...well, I thought you would appreciate seeing them.”
Each of the manuscripts was perhaps a dozen pages long. I knew what they were, though I hadn’t read them; she’d told me about the assignment when he’d given it to her in January, and I’d done what I could to help her with it. You only had to look at his own books about growing up in Bristol to know that family history was one of Stu’s favorite topics, but it had been a difficult one for Dorrie. Her relationship with her mother was strained at best, and my suggestion that she write about her father instead had worked out about as well as she’d predicted it would. She’d ended up writing about her sister, who of course she’d never known, and since her mother wouldn’t tell her much, she’d been reduced to inventing everything from whole cloth. That was fine with Stu—it just meant a little less truth and a little more judicious lying—but I know it frustrated her.
I took the manuscripts and thanked him for them.
“Do you think there will be a service?” he asked.
