Safe House

woman, but that was ’cause he used to get drunk. So now he ain’t no alcoholic, and he don’t whale on his wife no more. Everybody applauds, okay? Big fucking insight, right? Let me tell you something, Little Miss Liberal, my old man, he used to beat me half to death and then he’d have himself a few drinks to celebrate, see?”

“I still think people would understand,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “We have good lawyers. We could—”

“Only thing you can do for me is what you promised,” the black woman said, her words just for Crystal Beth, talking past me like I was a piece of furniture, same way she had since we’d walked into the empty bar. “A new set of ID and enough cash to get in the wind,” she said, eyes hard and committed. “I done time before. Short stretches. But some of those girls in there were doing the Book. For what I done last night. Sooner or later, they gonna find him. Right where I left his dead ass. You take your fucking syndrome, honey. Me, I’m taking the Greyhound.”

There were more of them. Some staying in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, some stashed in apartments around the city. Others all around the country, she told me. All races, all ages, all social classes.

“Why did you want me to hear all that?” I asked her later, upstairs in her room.

“So you would know. It’s not just battered women. Stalkers are . . . all kinds. It’s not just a matter of hiding out. Or even fighting back. We have to . . . change.”

“Change how?”

“That’s as individual as the victims. But I know it works. It’s worked for me.”

“When did you—?”

“I change all the time,” she said gently. “But when you showed up in my life, that’s when it really started.”

“I never even met him,” the woman said, striding back and forth before a wall of bookcases, talking like there was a much bigger audience than just me and Crystal Beth, never looking at either of us. Her long pewter-colored skirt was slit to mid-thigh, flesh flashing every time she moved.

I didn’t say anything—I knew the drill by then.

“I wrote a book,” the woman said. “About my life as an actress.”

I knew what kinds of movies she’d made: mid-range Triple-X. Straight-to-video, paid-by-the-day, no-script, fuck-and-suck, basement-studio stuff. But she’d had a following, been a star in that world.

“I appeared on a few talk shows. You know, just to promote the book, right?”

I nodded like all of that made perfect sense.

“First he wrote a fan letter. Not to me—he never had my address—to the publisher. I didn’t even answer it. That happens all the time. They just send autographed pictures back. I never even read the mail.”

She shook her platinum-blond curls. A wig, as top-of-the-line as her dress and shoes. “He kept writing. Angrier and angrier. What did I think, I could just break off with him? I mean, I was never with him. He just got crazier and crazier. Here, take a look. . . .”

The letters were in chronological order, all photocopies. She went from “goddess of perfection” to “filthy fucking cunt” as time went along.

“My shrink said it was ‘erotomania,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means he idealized you,” Crystal Beth said, “and then he constructed a—”

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said, making it clear this wasn’t going to be about anybody but her. “My lawyer said you had a program. I don’t need a program, I need protection. Is that what he does?” she asked, still not looking at me, just pointing in my direction with a long fingernail as plastic as her chest.

“He’s crazy,” the olive-skinned woman with the prominent nose said, looking up at me from the edge of the bed where she sat. Crystal Beth was next to her, their shoulders touching. The little room in the back of the waterfront restaurant was quiet, the factory-thick walls blocking the noise from up front.

We’d ridden over on Crystal Beth’s motorcycle. “You want to drive?” she’d asked me.

“No way,” I’d told her. I’d ridden bikes as a kid, even had one once, an old Harley 74, but I spent more time on the pavement than the tires had and I’d given it up.

“Come on,” she teased. “It’d be fun for you.”

“I’ll have more fun holding on,” I told her, watching that lovely smile flash in the streetlight’s pitiful attempt at illuminating the murky alley.

But there was no smile on this woman’s face, dread mixed in her voice like water in whiskey. “If he ever finds me . . .”

“Why do you say he’s crazy?” I asked her. Not to know, to hear the rest of the story Crystal Beth wanted me to hear.

“He only wanted a daughter,” she said. “For the son of his best friend.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“His best friend has a son,” the woman said, in that patient tone you use with people who aren’t too bright. “So his daughter was going to be his best friend’s son’s wife.”

“How old was the best friend’s son?”

“Five. Almost five.”

“So this wouldn’t happen until . . .”

“. . . they were grown,” she finished for me, like I’d finally seen the light. “First, he made sure I could get pregnant. I had to have tests. Then he kept me locked in the house for weeks. So nobody could have another shot at me, that’s what he said.

“For months, we didn’t have sex. I mean, not like . . . the way you make babies. Just . . . And when he was sure I wasn’t pregnant, he said we could get started. Then we had sex over and over again. And I got pregnant. He checked the amnio—but it was going to be a boy. He took me for an abortion, and then we had to start over. After he beat me up.”

“When did you run?” I asked her.

“When I got pregnant. I was afraid it would be another boy.”

“Was it?”

She giggled, harsh and nervous—a discordant sound, no juice to it. “It wasn’t anything,” she said. “I wasn’t really pregnant. I just thought I was. One of those home test kits. I . . .”

“So why don’t you—?”

“Oh, he’s going to kill me,” she said. Not a prediction, stating a fact. “When he finds me, he’s going to kill me.”

“How come it’s only women?” I asked Crystal Beth later.

“What do you mean?”

“All these . . . people you wanted me to talk to, they’re all women. That’s all you deal with, right?”

“It is now,” she said. “It wasn’t always that way. Men are victims of stalkers too. It’s even harder for some of them, I think. You tell your pals some jealous woman is haunting you, threatening to kill your new girlfriend, they think it’s cool. Women can be just as obsessive as men, just as vindictive.”

“Just as dangerous too.”

“Sure. We had one woman here, a lesbian. It was her lover, her ex-lover, who was after her. And that woman was scary, believe me. But most of the time, people don’t see it that way. Women stalkers are cute. Or pathetic. Even when they cross the line, the public sees them differently. Remember that Betty Broderick woman? The one who—”

“Blew her husband and his new wife away right in their bedroom?”