'That's what I thought. Sweetie, you know what I've been doing?
I've been stalling.'
'I know.'
'To keep it from being real. But it's real. This came in today's mail.'
She handed me a newspaper clipping and I unfolded it. There was a photograph, a head shot of a middle-aged gentleman. He was wearing glasses and his hair was neatly combed, and he looked confident and optimistic, an expression that seemed out of keeping with the headline. It ran across three columns, and it said, area businessman slays wife, children, self. Ten or twelve column inches of text elaborated on the headline. Philip Sturdevant, proprietor of Sturdevant Furniture with four retail outlets inCanton andMassillon , had apparently gone berserk in his home in suburban Walnut Hills. After using a kitchen knife to kill his wife and three small children, Sturdevant had called the police and told them what he had done. By the time a police cruiser arrived on the scene, Sturdevant was dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
I looked up from the clipping. 'Terrible thing,' I said.
'Yes.'
'Did you know him?'
'No.'
'Then—'
'I knew her.'
'The wife?'
'We both knew her.'
I studied the clipping again. The wife's name was Cornelia, and her age was given as thirty-seven. The children were Andrew, six; Kevin, four; and Delcey, two. Cornelia Sturdevant, I thought, and no bells rang.
I looked at her, puzzled.
'Connie,' she said.
'Connie?'
'Connie Cooperman. You remember her.'
'Connie Cooperman,' I said, and then I remembered a bouncy blond cheerleader of a girl. 'Jesus,' I said. 'How in the hell did she wind up in— where was this, anyway?Canton ,Massillon , Walnut Hills.
Where are all these places?'
'Ohio. Northern Ohio, not far fromAkron .'
'How did she get there?'
'By marrying Philip Sturdevant. She met him, I don't know, seven or eight years ago.'
'How? Was he a john?''
'No, nothing like that. She was on vacation, she was up at Stowe on a ski weekend. He was there, he was divorced and unattached, and he fell for her. I don't know that he was rich but he was comfortably well-off, he owned furniture stores and made a good living from them.
And he was crazy about Connie and he wanted to marry her and have babies with her.'
'And that's what they did.'
'That's what they did. She thought he was wonderful and she was ready to get out of the life and out ofNew York . She was sweet and cute and guys liked her, but she was hardly what you'd call a born whore.'
'Is that what you are?'
'No, I'm not. I was a lot like Connie actually, we were both a couple of NJGs who drifted into it. I turned out to be good at it, that's all.'
'What's an NJG?'
'A neurotic Jewish girl. It's not just that I turned out to be good at it. I turned out to be capable of living
the life without getting eaten up by it. It grinds down an awful lot of girls, it erodes what little self-esteem they started out with. But it hasn't hurt me that way.'
'No.'
'At least that's what I think most of the time.' She gave me a brave smile. 'Except on the occasional bad night, and everybody has a few of those.'
'Sure.'
'It may have been good for Connie early on. She was fat and unpopular in high school, and it did her good to find out that men wanted her and found her attractive. But then it stopped being good for her, and then she got lucky and met Philip Sturdevant, and he fell for her and she was crazy about him, and they went to Ohio to make babies.'
'And then he found out about her past and went nuts and killed her.'
'No.'
'No?'
