“Old enough to feel a lot better when his knees buckled and he hit the floor. Old enough that I had to catch my breath before I taped his wrists behind his back and rolled him over.”
And went through his pockets, and found his wallet, and learned his name.
“Everett Allen Paulsen,” Elaine said, testing the name on her tongue. “It’s like Rumpelstiltskin,” she told Ellen. “Now that you know his name you’ll never have to worry about him again.”
Ellen wanted to know if that was true. Could she stop worrying about him now that she knew his name?
“I think so,” I said, “and knowing his name’s only a part of it. Not just his name, but knowing his home address in Teaneck. His office is on 56th Street just east of Broadway, I’ve got both addresses written down. And he knows I know who he is, and where to find him.”
“After you went through his wallet—”
“I waited for him to come to. He wasn’t out that long, just a few minutes. Then his breathing changed but his eyes stayed shut. I waited him out and eventually he butched up and opened his eyes.”
“And beheld the Masked Avenger,” Elaine said.
“It should have been reassuring.”
“Why? Oh, because if you were going to kill him you didn’t have to keep him from seeing your face.”
I nodded. “But the sight must have scared him.”
“It would have to. He must have thought he’d found his way into a comic book.”
Ellen asked what happened next.
“I talked to him. I told him he could never come to your apartment again, or call you, or make any attempt to get in touch with you. I told him if he ever did any of that, I’d find him and I’d kill him.”
“And he believed you?”
“Maybe not right away. The first thing he did was protest his innocence. He didn’t know you, he never threatened you, and he swore to God and everybody he wouldn’t do it again.”
“ ‘I never borrowed from you a pot,’ ” Elaine said, in an unconvincing Jewish accent. Ellen looked puzzled. I knew the reference, but decided it could wait.
I said, “I didn’t want to listen to it. I put a couple of strips of duct tape over his mouth. That scared him, because it meant we weren’t going to have a conversation. I think he knew what was coming.”
“An unfortunate accident,” Elaine said, answering Ellen’s unspoken question. “Your Mr. Paulsen fell down a flight of stairs.”
“You threw him down the stairs? What if somebody saw you?”
“It’s an expression,” I explained. “Years ago there would be times when a cop took something personally. Hauling the perpetrator down to the station just wasn’t enough. So you’d take it out on him with your fists or your boots, and the explanation for his injuries would be that he fell down a flight of stairs.
“And sometimes,” I remembered, “it was the literal truth. Vince Mahaffey and I caught a domestic in Park Slope, neighbors called it in because of the screams coming from the apartment. Hulking brute of a husband, little mouse of a wife, and he’s done a good job of beating the crap out of her.”
Elaine was nodding, remembering. I’d told her the story, possibly more than once.
“ ‘Oh, it’s nothing, officers. I’m clumsy, I fell down, I tripped over something, it happens all the time, it’s all my fault.’ In other words, no, she won’t press charges. We talked to the neighbor who’d made the call, and weren’t surprised to learn this happened a lot. She almost didn’t call, she said, because there’d been cops there before, and the same thing always happened. The husband denied everything and the wife insisted it was an accident and he never laid a finger on her. So she usually just let it go and tried to tune it out, but this time it was worse than usual and she was afraid he’d actually kill her.
“I said I guessed there was nothing we could do. Mahaffey said, ‘Fuck that shit,’ and went back to the wifebeater’s apartment and hauled him out of there. ‘She won’t press charges,’ he said. ‘You’re wasting your time.’ Mahaffey said maybe she wouldn’t press charges, but he was charging the son of a bitch with resisting arrest. ‘What resisting? What arrest?’ And Mahaffey took him to the head of the stairs and tossed him. He missed more steps than he hit, but he hit plenty and he landed hard, and he was pissing and moaning and yelling that something was broken, and Vince got him to his feet and threw him down another flight. The apartment was on the fourth floor, I remember that, because the bastard went down three flights in all.”
“Your partner threw him down three flights of stairs?”
“Two,” I said.
“But you said—”
“You can blame the third flight on the Masked Avenger,” Elaine said. “Am I remembering it right? He wanted you to have a hand in it, didn’t he?”
“So I couldn’t report him for it,” I said, “but I never would have done that, and I’m sure he knew it. I think it was more that he wanted us to share the act. And he didn’t want me to miss out on something he thought I’d enjoy.”
“And did you? Enjoy it?”
“Enjoy might not be the right word,” I said. “But I have to say it was satisfying. Mahaffey picked him up afterward and cuffed him, and the poor bastard was sure there was more coming, but he just hauled him out of there and we put him in the back seat of the squad car. ‘You want to go around resisting arrest,’ Mahaffey told him, ‘you ought to hold off until you’re a little better at it.’ ”
But I hadn’t pitched Paulsen down a flight of stairs, although the image was not without appeal.
What I did was give him a beating. I used my feet more than my hands, and I left his face alone. I did things that wouldn’t show unless he took his clothes off. I kicked him in the ribs and the groin and the kidneys.
“I had to force myself to do it,” I remembered. “What a lot of people will do is work themselves up, build up a load of hate. The guy they’re working over is the worst man in the world, and they’re doing God’s work by kicking the shit out of him. I couldn’t manage this. He wasn’t an evildoer who had to be punished. He was a problem that had to be solved.”
Elaine: “And this would solve it?”
“If he was completely delusional, like the woman who dropped in on David Letterman, then probably not. Or if he was a stone psychopath who didn’t think in terms of consequences. But he wasn’t quite that crazy. He was fixated on a particular woman in a dangerous way, an unacceptable way.” I looked at Ellen. “He wasn’t going to stop stalking you, and sooner or later he’d find you.”
“But you found him first.”
“And I needed to hurt him, and scare him, and make it clear to him that you weren’t worth the trouble. At one point I paused to kneel down next to him and told him how he was going to behave from now on. ‘You can never call her again,’ I said. ‘You can never go near her apartment. You can never look for her, or hire someone to find her. You can never write her a letter. If you see her on the street, you’d better turn around and walk in the opposite direction.’ ”
“Or otherwise you’d hunt him down and kill him.”
“Yes.”
“And he believed you?
I’d crouched over him, my forearm across his throat. I’d leaned just a little of my weight on him. I could kill you right now, I’d told him, and increased the pressure a little.
“Yes,” I said. “He believed me.”
After a beat she said, “And would you? If he turns up again, if he stalks me, what would you really do?”
“What I said I would.”
“You’d kill him?”
Killing hasn’t been a big part of my life, and I’ve never taken it lightly. I can only think of one instance when it occurred after I’d been able to take time to think about it. The man was named James Leo Motley, and in a sense he brought Elaine back into my life, and for that I might have been grateful to him.