He was there again on Tuesday, the man in the blue Volvo. As usual, he spent his time pretending to read a magazine. Every few minutes, however, he'd look across the street at the small two-story building that was both Jill's work studio and her apartment.
This was the fourth day in two weeks he'd been here, and this time Jill was ready for him.
Grabbing her 35mm Nikon with the telephoto lens, she snapped a couple of shots, then walked quickly to the back of the apartment and went down the stairs leading to the alley. She couldn't see his license plates from her window.
The smoky smell of October made her nostalgic for her girlhood. Hallowe'en pumpkins to carve. Costumes to try onshe'd always wanted to be Cinderella. And stories to whisper excitedly among the other kids about which neighbors were secretly monsters and had dungeons instead of basementsdungeons in which evil creatures of every kind imaginable lurked.
Now Jill was about to deal with a real monster.
The Lake View East area of Chicago was, as always, getting a partial face-lift. Lake View dated back to the last century and today its homes and buildings replicated perfectly a charming and more leisurely era. The city planned to keep it that way, too. Today a crew was painting the benches in a small park area a merry green color.
At two in the afternoon, the street was crowded. A lot of artisans had moved in lately, combining living space with working space, so traffic was now more intense. Many of the small businesses used awnings as decoration and to lessen the hot Indian-summer sunlight. The street looked tidy and smart.
The blue Volvo was still there.
Jill walked half a block down the street away from the blue car then turned suddenly and started snapping pictures of it.
She took twenty shots in all, the long-distance lens allowing her to get several clear profiles of the man as he stared at her building, and even the trunk sticker that gave the name of the dealer who'd sold the man the car. She still couldn't get the license number because of the car parked behind it.
The air smelled of gasoline and cigarette smoke and heat. She sneezed. She had terrible allergies.
The man surprised her by suddenly starting his car and driving away.
She took a few more snaps of him as he drove off.
She worried that maybe he'd spotted herbut no, that was unlikely. From where he'd sat, seeing her emerge from the alley was virtually impossible. And her camera position had been completely out of his sight.
Satisfied that she'd gotten everything she'd neededmuch more, in factshe went back inside and got to work.
Jill had souped her first photographs while she'd been on the staff of her high-school paper in Springfield. She had never gotten over the seeming magic of it all.
You had developing tank and printing frame and printing paper, you had printing trays and developer and stop bath and fixer, you had film clips and printing tongs and safelightnothing remarkable about any of these elements when you looked at them individually. In fact, they were all disappointingly mundane.
But if you knew how to use them properly, if you became a skilled technician in the holy gloom of the darkroom, then you truly became a wizard because you could reproduce life as you saw it… and sometimes you could even enhance life and its dramatic effects, as she'd done from the first time she'd ever seen an Edward Steichen black and white photo. The great photographer had died in 1973, but his influence and style lived on in Jill and a thousand other Jills around the world.
She went right to work on the photos of the man and the blue Volvo. All the sights, smells and tiny noises of the developing process buoyed her.
She would find out who the man was and what he wanted, and then she would deal with him appropriately.
When everything was under way, and it was safe to make her call, she stepped outside the darkroom and lifted the receiver on the wall phone. The darkroom was in the rear of the first floor. At the front of the large ground floor was the studio itself. Lights, tripods, cables and props left over from yesterday's shoot littered the floor. She'd done stills for the Down's Syndrome Society, a freebie because she made a very good living and wanted to give something back. The lady from the Society had brought in six children suffering from the condition and each one of them had broken Jill's heart. She turned every photograph into a masterpiece of compassion. This was the kind of work she loved, but in order to do itat least for nowshe also had to shoot portraits of arrogant business leaders, pompous politicians and strutting jocks. Having an original Jill Coffey portrait of yourself was something devoutly to be desired in the Chicago area.
She thought of the old brick convent she wanted to shoot someday soon. It was kind of an old nuns' graveyard, all these ancient, wrinkled, honorable women pushed away even by their own church, and utterly forgotten. Jill wished to capture their sorrow and their isolation. She needed a three-day shoot to do it properly. She also needed a big-money project that would finance her three-day shoot.
'Kate?'
'Changed your mind about dinner tonight, eh? I knew you would.'
Jill hadn't had to identify herself. Best friends didn't need to trifle with such formalities.
'He was here again today,' Jill said.
'The guy in the blue Volvo?'
'Uh-huh.'
'Remember that football player I used to go out with?'
Jill laughed. 'The one who thought Burt Reynolds should try his hand at Shakespeare? What was that title you came up with? ''Smokey and King Lear Go To London'?'
'Well, cultured he wasn't but what he was, was one mean psycho after he'd had a couple of drinks. Maybe I should call him up and have him give you a hand. Two drinks would be all it'd take.'
'He's probably a reporter.'
'Whothe creep in the blue Volvo?'
'Sure, from one of those TV tabloids. Remember three years ago?'
Kate might have forgotten already, but Jill certainly hadn't. One day as she'd been leaving an office building in the Loop, she'd noticed a short blond man with a slight limp. Then she started noticing him again and again over the next few days. Everywhere that Jill went, so went the short blond man with the slight limp.
Only after four days of this, and three useless calls to the police, was Jill able to find out who the man was and what he was all about.
She'd been in Neiman-Marcus and suddenly couldn't deal with him trailing her any longer.
Right there in the middle of the store, with ever so many disapproving matrons looking on, Jill had confronted the man and asked him exactly what the hell he thought he was doing.
A TV tabloid reporter. That was who he was. That was what he was doing.
His syndicated show was doing a piece on My Husband the Serial Killer, about three wives who'd been married to multiple murderers and how they'd coped with the aftermath of their husbands' trials, and their own public shame.
Jill had refused to cooperate, of course. But that had not mattered.
One sunny April morning, as she was sipping her first cup of coffee in her tiny breakfast nook and listening to all the spring-sweet birds, she saw her own image on the 11-inch black-and-white TV set she kept on the kitchen counter.
'Did you know that prominent Chicago photographer Jill Coffey was actually the wife of notorious serial killer Peter Tappley? How do wives of serial killers cope with their lives after their husbands have been put to death?' (Here Jill's photo was joined with the images of two other women.) 'Find out tonight when Hard Facts presents My Husband the Serial Killer.'
They hadn't needed her cooperation.
They'd just gone to a few old friendsand a few old enemiesand gotten most of what they needed.
And what they couldn't get from those sources, they'd simply made up.
