Boyfriend from Hell (11 page)

Richard Smith was a courtly host for the party attended by a couple of dozen people, with employees from Burris’s publishing company helping to occupy the space. Richard was dressed in Armani—blue suit, white shirt, light blue silk tie—the standout-looking man in the room. Nancy and Bob came in with Ronnie, and on seeing Richard for the first time, Nancy whispered, “This is
People
magazine stuff. He
is
amazing-looking.”

Ronnie made the introductions, Richard declaring he was glad to finally meet Ronnie’s friends. Bob was less cheerful than the others, trying to take the measure of this guy, while feeling, in his Brooks Brothers suit, severely out-tailored.

While Richard charmingly concentrated on the guests, Antoine Burris was serving as the co-captain for the event and he made certain everyone’s glass was filled and that the hors d’oeuvres were passed properly by the uniformed waitstaff of four people.

Jenna Hawkins arrived with her husband, Jeb, a former Broadway producer; in his seventies, silver haired, with a red W. C. Fields nose and alcohol on his breath, a man now supposedly engaged in writing his memoirs.

“Great place,” Jeb said to Richard. “So how do you make your money?”

Nancy and Ronnie exchanged smiles on his directness.

“I write, I lecture.”

“On what?”

“Cults, mostly.”

“Cults? We talking about the same thing, cults? People following some crackpot?”

“Right.”

“What’s the most interesting thing about cults?”

“I’d say the way people have a need to be in them.”

“And cults gets you a place like this?”

“Jeb—” his wife interceded. “This is supposed to be a nice party for Veronica Delaney and this is our host.”

“That’s all right, he can handle it.”

“I rent, I don’t own.”

“See, he gave me a good answer. You’re a good-looking guy. Ever act?”

“No, I never acted.”

“If you did, I’d put you right in a production of
Private Lives.
Know the play?”

“I do.”

“Put you right in it. But I’m not active just now.”

“Okay, Jeb,” and she pulled him away.

Laughing, Richard walked over to Ronnie and said, “I think I just lost my chance at another career.”

“Looks to me like you’re doing fine.”

“I’ll say,” and he kissed her on the lips, a proprietary kiss.

Richard made a toast thanking everyone for coming and congratulating Ronnie for her book contract. “To the girl of the moment,” he said, “and the moment is going to last for a very long time.” He introduced Antoine Burris, who told the group he was pleased and honored to be responsible for the first book by an exciting new literary talent. Her inquisitiveness combined with her sophisticated style was refreshing in someone so young, and they were going to do everything they could to put the book on the map.

Ronnie chatted with people from the publishing company as the party rolled on. The art director, a woman in her thirties, brought a date, an advertising account executive in his thirties, aggressive, confident of his own good looks, who took the opportunity when the woman was in the next room to try slipping his business card to Ronnie on the basis of how much he could help her with the book when it came out. He knew everything there was to know about advertising, and might they get together, he was really ending his other relationship. “I’m flattered, but I’m not available. Richard Smith and I …” He got the message although she couldn’t finish the thought.

Richard Smith and I … “sleep together” was the best she came up with for herself.

They didn’t have a plan for dinner after the party and as people began to leave Richard took Ronnie aside and said, “If it doesn’t violate your sense of appropriateness, I’d like to take you to dinner. An Italian place. More expensive than our coffee shop, but it is a special occasion.”

“You got it, but let’s not make a habit of it,” she teased.

“How about every time you start a new book?”

Her face was glowing, with everything, and on the other side of the room watching them, decidedly not glowing, was Bob.

Ronnie came over to Nancy and Bob, who were ready to leave.

“I feel like that guy in
My Fair Lady,
what was his name?” Bob said to them.

“Professor Higgins,” Nancy said.

“Not him. The villain.”

“Kaparthy,” Ronnie responded. “And why do you feel like Kaparthy?”

“Where did Richard say he’s from?”

“New Orleans.”

“I was in law school with a guy from New Orleans and he didn’t sound like this guy.”

“He traveled around a lot when he was younger so he can sound like anything.”

“Something I don’t trust about the guy, I’m sorry to say after two vodkas. And he better treat you right.”

“I appreciate the concern. He steered me to this book, so that’s pretty right.”

“Come on, Kaparthy,” Nancy said. “Beautiful party, Ronnie.”

“Thanks, guys.”

Unable to shake his concerns and fueled by the two vodkas, Bob doubled back to find Richard alone.

“Ask you something? You’re from New Orleans?”

“I am.”

“Where did you go to high school?”

“Loranger.”

“And then you kind of moved around, different places, and became a writer and a lecturer on cults?”

“Roughly.”

“Pretty unusual background. Only, I know a New Orleans accent and you don’t have one.”

“Assuming there is one.”

“In my area of the law, real estate, you meet a lot of off-center characters, and you seem a little off-center to me. Like Ronnie was speculating whether you were married—”

“You’re telling
me.”

“Are you? Assuming you’re not using an alias, I could find out, you know.”

“Not married. What’s this about?”

“I like her a lot. Kind of a kid sister to me. I don’t want to see her get hurt.”

“Neither do I. Loranger, 1985. As Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.”

On a Tuesday at 7:12
A.M.,
a woman in shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes, twenty-eight years old, jogging from her apartment building on 115th Street, crossed Riverside Drive on her way into Riverside Park when a car that was double-parked lurched toward her at full speed, slamming into her and sending her flying several feet. The woman crashed headfirst into the side of a parked car, killed by the driver, who sped off. The hit-and-run incident was front page news in the
Daily News
and the
New York Post
and the first page of
The New York Times
Metro section, abetted by an eyewitness account from an elderly woman, a dog walker out on the street at the time, who told police and the media, “It looked like he aimed at her.”

For the police, the elderly woman’s account was important; it didn’t sound like an accident. Unfortunately the woman could offer no further details as to model of car or license plate number and couldn’t describe the driver. She thought it was a man, hence,
“He
aimed at her.”

Public interest was high on the case, people saw themselves as a possible victim in a similar incident. The police department issued statements on the progress of the investigation to the media and it was a running story in the New York newspapers and on the local television news. Detectives Gomez and Santini were among those assigned to the case, and through typical detective work, the peeling of the onion, aspects of the woman’s life began to reveal themselves. The victim was Jane Claxton, single, a travel agent for Arden Travel on Broadway, a graduate of SUNY Albany who came to New York after college and lived alone. Neighbors remembered a boyfriend recently, and various boyfriends over the years, but descriptions of the most recent one were unclear. Her parents were divorced, her father a car salesman in Schenectady, her mother a waitress in Albany. She was an only child. Her address book was a source of leads and the detectives fanned out, contacting people in the book, many of whom turned out to be clients at the travel agency. The owner of the agency, a woman in her forties, said she was a “good worker,” somewhat shy, and not open to discussing personal matters.

A friend came forward, a woman pharmacist in a local Rite-Aid store, who struck up a friendship with her several years before and they met for dinner about once a week. The woman did identify the most recent boyfriend. She knew they had broken up and he had not been around for two months. He was a clerk in a video store and would-be movie producer. He quit the job without notice three weeks earlier and had not been seen at his apartment on the Lower East Side. Instantly he was the prime suspect in the case. His picture, obtained from a drawer in the victim’s apartment, appeared in the tabloids—Have you seen this man? The friend revealed the victim was a volunteer in a Literacy Partners program at a local library, adding to the mix for the media and for the police, the senseless death of a decent person.

“We’re going all out to find this boyfriend,” Rourke said to the half-dozen detectives in his office. “But let’s not get snookered here. It might not be him. Look for disgruntled customers, did anyone think they were supposed to get a refund or something for a trip they didn’t take kind of thing. You know, somebody who might’ve gone postal. But let’s nail this.”

For Rourke, the case had an additional resonance; his daughter was a couple of years younger than the victim and had just taken an apartment in Brooklyn, living alone, teaching school. It was one of the deaths that gets through to people.

Ronnie and Nancy talked about it. Nancy had parents in Wilton whom she saw about once a month; either she went there or they came into New York; she had an older sister in New Jersey, who had two little girls, three and four, Nancy’s star nieces, and she saw them all at least once a month. Ronnie, on the other hand, only had Nancy and Bob, and she didn’t know in which ledger to enter Richard Smith. She identified with the victim, too—Ronnie, someone on her own, just trying to make it in New York.

Richard was gone again, having left the day after the party, to Edinburgh this time, an international conference: “Cults, Superstitions, and the Fear of the Unknown.” Ronnie thought it an overripe name for what he claimed was going to be a serious conference. From Edinburgh he was going back to Munich.

She wrote an e-mail to him expressing her uneasiness about the death of the hit-and-run victim and he wrote back:

Read about it here. A random act. You can’t take anything from it. It’s endemic to life itself.


She replied:

That’s a bit grim. Something like that is inevitable?


He replied in turn:

Dark things sometimes happen. It’s one reason why some people turn to religion for reassurance. And when their needs are very acute, they lean too heavily on religion and become enveloped by it,
possessed
by it. So here’s the thought for you. When they are possessed, and you can put possessed in quotes if you’d like, are they imagining the possession or are they people especially sensitive to the angel of darkness by their need, and therefore open to the possession? This is a longwinded way of saying to you, the woman’s death is terrible, I don’t mean to minimize it, but it is part of the overall, sometimes dark, yes, sometimes inevitable rhythms of life, and that relates to the relevance of the wonderful book you’re going to write.


What the hell was he talking about, she wondered. A perfectly decent woman was murdered by a psychopath and Ronnie identified with the woman for obvious reasons of geography and social class and singledom. Richard was intelligent, no question; however, all those conferences and lectures had taken
him
over, she decided. The man certainly could be overly academic. A “don’t worry, honey, it’s not about you,” would have been fine. She e-mailed back:

Thanks. Enjoy your time.


There was no immediate reply and that was all right. She preferred having him in bed to having his e-mail.

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, she went for a jog around the reservoir, a test, her first time since the race, checking herself along the way to stay alert, conscious, and wondering if you do black out, how do you possibly know that you blacked out if you
are
blacked out. She played with that puzzler while giving herself signposts, now I’m passing the pump house, now I’m passing the tennis courts, I’m fine, I’m running normally. Another time around and she jogged back to the building.

She picked up the mail, a few bills, flyers, and in the batch was an envelope with her name and address and no return address. She sat at the dining room table and opened the envelope. It contained the author’s portrait of her from the article she wrote in
Vanity Fair.
The picture was cut in two pieces. The head had been decapitated.

T
HE TWENTY-SIXTH PRECINCT WAS
on a war footing with a high-profile hit-and-run death, its detectives emotionally invested in solving the crime. The bereaved, people who knew the woman, or those who read or heard about her, were leaving flowers at the sidewalk in front of her building, a little shrine. And then came a setback for the police. The main suspect, the former boyfriend, was in Los Angeles and had been at the time of death, documented by eyewitnesses. He had been in plain view working as a production assistant on an independent movie being shot in Venice, California. The police had nothing now, no substantial leads; no one else apparently saw anything that morning and they were starting over, running the list of people whom the victim knew.

In this atmosphere, Ronnie Delaney walked into the police station with her cut-up head shot, something so unrelated to the immediate concerns of these detectives that Santini and Gomez, and even the more politic Rourke, looking over his detectives’ shoulders, barely reacted.

“This is unfortunate,” Rourke said.

“These aren’t isolated pranks, it’s a campaign. I want you to arrest Randall Cummings.”

“We don’t have enough to do that, Ms. Delaney,” Rourke said.