Butcher (12 page)

An invisible photographer, snapping a shot of Sharon as she walked across the room with her cute little foot-long maroon-and-silver umbrella in hand, could have captured one of those fantasy poses one used to see on the calendars in gas stations. A beautiful, near-nude woman with long, lovely legs and a traffic-stopping pair of high, firm breasts saluting, tiny parasol covering the essentials, a cutesy caption beneath the artwork.

Or catch her with the phone in her hand and wrap the cord around that showgirl body and call it Telephone Trouble. No man could walk past such a pose without doing another take. The ideal female sex symbol, posing coquettishly from all the Vargas, Petty, and Moran paintings; forty years of centerfolds, going back to the era of Mutoscope arcade cards. The eternal cheesecake shot.

Post-feminist-era Sharon stood with bumbershoot, pantyhose, black high heels, and a whole lot of Sharon, surveying the choices in her closet. She began to dress, stepping into her underpants and pulling a bra over the chest that made otherwise mature men turn goofy.

But gorgeously coiffed, marvelously stacked, model-lovely Sharon was many people, as real people are, and none of them was the big-boobed bimbo on the calendars. What you saw, with Sharon Kamen, was most assuredly not what you got.

At that moment her mind was as far from her own sexuality as it could take her, dressing for her job at the Kansas City Emergency Shelter, and thinking about the night before at her father's apartment. Missing her mother, taken by cancer, missing their cozy rural home outside Kansas City, which her dad now professed to loathe.

To others, her dad was inevitably the Nazi hunter, but to her he was the wise, good, and fearless man who represented so many positive things in her life. Others compared him to a Midwest version of Simon Wiesenthal or Elie Wiesel, because their names were known, but he was nowhere near the level of the top luminaries in the field. Aaron Kamen had achieved a degree of notoriety in the heartland by helping to find two low-level war criminals who'd been at the death camps half a century ago. People could not see beyond his notoriety so they often couldn't see the real man, just as they couldn't see the real Sharon for her physical package.

Her dad had enriched her life, to be sure, with his shared philosophy of serving others, with his caring, his genuine belief in man's goodness, and with his deep, challenging desire to help others, which he and her mother had instilled in her. Not only did she love him as a daughter loves her father, she revered him. The latter emotion was not without emotional baggage. It carried a funny ambivalence that swung back and forth between awe and irritation.

There were times she'd give anything to disassociate herself from the overpowering Judaism and Zionist zeal that had shaped such a great part of her life. On the threshold of turning thirty, still unmarried but desired by men since her adolescence, she was torn and confused inside.

This woman, who was so flattered by eye, camera, and mirror, was smart enough to know that mirrors showed nothing. The skin and teeth and hair were wrapping paper. Inside, Sharon was a woman at war with herself,

She worshipped her father but was viscerally antagonized by his unrelenting Jewishness. She knew she believed in God but sometimes she'd watch her father lighting candles and saying the Kaddish, and question why she didn't feel what he obviously felt. Sometimes he behaved as if he personally carried the weight of millions of souls. What gave him the right to impose the dictates of his moral compass or his conscience on her? Also, she found his blind orthodoxy numbing, intolerant, illogical, and judgmental. Temple, she felt, was a guilty irrelevance, and she ignored it. “Israel's rightness,” and the basic implicit wrongness of the Palestinians, was one more piece of dogma that stuck in her craw.

Inside her secret heart this caring, complex, enigmatic woman was troubled by a dark, persistent fear: the daughter of one of America's most prominent Holocaust survivors was afraid she'd become a closet anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew.

Her father had called her at work and asked her to pick up something of hers he'd found in a storage box. His own belongings had remained unpacked when he'd moved following her mother's death. He'd taken the first apartment he'd looked at, and thrown some clothing in the closet and a few utensils and bare necessities into drawers and cabinets, but the rest of the household goods still sat in unopened moving company cartons.

The exception had been his files, which were meticulously arranged and cross-indexed and kept in steel drawers. When she'd dropped by his place after work he'd said he was on the track of “another one,” gesturing at the files and documents that filled the apartment. He was quite animated and in one of his most Jewish moods.

“Hypothesis,” he'd said loftily, sitting her down in the only available chair. “A space vessel lands and aliens disembark. Sentient beings who profess to be extraterrestrial evangelists from a planet beyond our solar system.

“They prove to the satisfaction of the scientific community that theirs is a civilization technologically superior to any dreamed of before.” Her dad's accent became thicker as his excitement grew. “They espouse a religion parallel to Judaism that completely negates the precepts of all other religious beliefs. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, they all go out the window, you see? Their version of the Talmud proves that there is but one religion, let's hypothesize. The question is this: precisely what does that discovery do to the nature of man's faith?"

“I don't know,” she said, shaking her pretty head and shrugging.

“It does ... absolutely ... nothing!” He lit up as if he'd just won the lottery.

“I don't get it."

“Of course you don't. But it wouldn't hurt you to think about it some, eh?” They talked some more and she left him in the opening stages of his latest rat hunt. He'd given her a box of her old 45-rpm records. For this she'd driven across town.

As she dressed for work she thought about the seventies oldies that had now migrated from his closet to hers. Billy Paul's “Me and Mrs. Jones,” which she'd played until the grooves had worn flat. Joni Mitchell. Steely Dan. For some reason the records depressed her even more than her father had.

Her dad's elevator stunk of urine and he didn't even have the sense to move a sofa from the house. Why couldn't he simply retire like everybody else's father? Why did he have to be the big Nazi hunter?

Then she pictured him taking her to shul and her heart was instantly so full of love for him she almost wept. Sharon realized once again that among the conflicting emotions she felt for her very special father was a core-deep, abiding, undiminished pride. So the calendar girl finished dressing, repaired her makeup, and went to work, the lyrics of old tunes in her head—"A Free Man In Paris."

Kansas City Emergency Shelter

“
Y
ou know, I didn't do anything to provoke him. I would never flirt like that in front of him. Honest.” It hurt Sharon to look at the girl. “But he got so worked up. When we left the party he called me names and stuff all the way home, telling me I was a whore and that I made a fool out of him in front of his friends. And Duane was calling me all these names and I guess I talked back to him so he hit me. You know, like in the stomach.

“I fell down and I knew I was hurt real bad. I tried to get him to take me to the hospital and he wouldn't do it. He said the cops would investigate and because of his record he'd be thrown in jail. He said I wasn't hurt that bad, but I was bleeding and everything. I tried to call a cab and he knocked the phone out of my hand and started hitting me in the face.” Stacey Linley. A twenty-two-year-old womanchild.

“Did Duane know he'd caused you to miscarry, Stacey?"

“Yes, Miss Kamen, I told him. I'd passed tissue in the commode. He joked about it. Said it was a Kansas abortion. He thought it was real funny to call it that."

“You know you're lucky, Stacey. I don't suppose I have to tell you."

“I know.” Her face was a mottled collection of dark purple-blue and black bruises, but it was nowhere nearly as swollen as it had been in the police photos taken at the hospital.

“Okay, hon, first things first,” Sharon said gently. “We want to get you safely relocated.” The young woman was clearly frightened. “Just as we talked about on the phone, first we have to go to the Circuit Clerk's office and file the papers, right?"

Stacey Linley looked down at the floor. Sharon could see a tear in the corner of one of her blackened eyes. The bruises went down under the clothing. She'd been very lucky indeed.

“We can't put it off, Stacey,” Sharon said, a bit more firmly.

“I don't want to."

“You don't?"

“I don't have to, do I, Miss Kamen?” She'd asked in the softest possible voice.

“I told you what you have to do, honey. I'll be right there with you."

“I just want to get away from Duane.” The tear trickled down her cheek.

“That's what I want for you, too. We want all the law we can get on our side. We want you protected, right?"

The Linley girl only shrugged.

“Stacey, Duane is very dangerous. Look at what he did to you. You have to deal with that.” It was unusually still in the office. Sharon was aware of the thrum of the outside traffic, her clock, a door closing loudly in the foyer, a phone ringing, the small refrigerator in their makeshift lounge.

“Can't you make them put him in jail and keep him there until I can get away safely?” She sniffed back the tears.

“You don't have any money, Stacey. Nowhere to run to. No resources. Nothing. How can you get away?"

“Like I said on the phone, I have a girlfriend. She'd loan me a few dollars. I could take a bus somewhere. Anywhere. How could he find me?"

“Look,” Sharon said, “you're twenty-two. You don't have any money. I spoke with your friend and she said she could loan you about twenty dollars. You can't travel far enough to hide if this guy decides he isn't ready to call it quits and makes up his mind to find you. Not looking like this."

“I could wear lots of makeup and dark glasses. Just get on a bus...” Her TV fantasy.

“I've been through this a hundred times, hon. These guys can get very persistent about tracking people down. Duane's obviously violent. His record of prior arrests has to be considered. You need to go over with me to the Circuit Clerk. We'll file an ex parte. He won't be able to touch you, come near you, go anywhere near the apartment—"

“You don't know him,” Stacey Linley whined. “He's not gonna care about a piece of paper. It'll just make him mad.” Even through the discolored meat of her face, Sharon could see she was attractive. So many who came into the Kansas City Emergency Shelter were good-looking, bright, decent women. But they'd been called whores, ugly sluts, tramps, worthless, stupid bitches, and no-good mothers so many times they'd begun to believe it themselves. It was what her father termed the concentration-camp mentality, the breaking down of one's esteem, the first step on the road to domination.

Sharon Kamen was a caring and loving woman. She'd been part of the shelter since it originated. She was twenty-nine, and it was really the only job she'd ever held. She loved it and, at times, hated it for the frustrations. The Linley woman had been a referral from the Missouri Coalition's crisis team. They'd recommended Sharon immediately house this outpatient in the domestic violence ward they maintained for the extreme abuse cases.

“Thing is, we hit him with that ex parte and if he so much as looks like he's going to cross the line the police will drop him like a rock for us. We'll have all the law working in our favor. Right now this bozo is out and, for all we know, stalking you. I'll go there with you when we file. We'll come right back here so you'll be safe tonight. They're empowered to serve him as soon as we go over there."

“Serve him? What do you mean?"

“I tell the judge, they drop the ex parte on him, somebody from KCPD or County serves him with it. That's his formal notice. One violation and they'll have to lock him up and throw the key away."

The younger woman didn't bother to conceal what she felt.

“But why don't they ... why didn't they keep him in jail? They had him locked up."

“He posted,” Sharon said. “But he won't be running to the bail bondsman next time to post some nickle-dime bond. It won't go that way. I'll see to it.” She could hear a commotion in the hall.

“I'll go with you, but can't I stay here for a few weeks until he gets tired waiting?"

“You can spend the night tonight but, no, Stacey, I have a full house. We have battered wives with children. Child abuse cases. But don't worry, I'll try Safe Haven for you, and we have some private homes, too. This happens to be our busy time,” she smiled.

“Your busy time?” Stacey Linley at the moment looked all of fourteen.

“Believe it or not, battering seems to be seasonal. Stress and whatnot, I suppose. Partying, things like that."

“Merry Christmas,” she muttered.

“Knock, knock,” a large, powerful man said. He had a lopsided grin on his unshaven face.

“You'll have to leave.” Georgia, the shelter's secretary-receptionist, was trying to hold his left sleeve, hoping to restrain him. He jerked his arm away from her grasp.

“Telling more lies about me, Stacey?"

“No, baby.” The young woman began whimpering, begging him, “I wanted to—please, baby—” The hard fist failed to catch her fully but it smacked the side of her head, knocking her from the chair. He shoved the receptionist backward and as Sharon tried to grab the telephone to dial 911 he reached over and tore it from its connection, throwing it across the room, where it came apart in a crash of glass, wood, and broken plastic, the phone and a picture frame exploding like a gunshot.

“Georgia, call the police—” she tried to say, springing up to try to protect Stacey Linley, but he was strong and fast. He backhanded her and she fell across the desk.

“You're coming home where you belong,” Duane told the sobbing, bruised woman on the floor.

Sharon pushed herself up, her head abuzz, vision cloudy, fists balled to fight. “Don't you touch her again.
Georgia!"