Come Out Tonight (7 page)

“Hello?” Sherry said, flipping it open.
 
“Yeah, wait a minute.”
 
She walked into the bathroom with the phone.
 
The light went on.
 
“Okay, what is it?” I heard her say through the door.
 
It was a little muffled, so I crept up to the door to listen. I mean, she was my girl.
 
I needed to know who was calling her in the middle of the night.

“We’ve talked about this,” she said.
 
“Over and over.
  
You’re not going to make me change my mind.”
 
There was a silence while she listened to the other voice.

“But there’s something wrong with it,” she said at last.
 
“Can’t you see that?
 
People doing things they don’t remember.
 
Doing things totally out of character.
 
Yeah, yeah.
 
Well, I changed my mind about that.
 
It’s my prerogative. Now I want to bring it up at the Monday conference.”

Then a long, long silence while the other voice had his say.
 
“Stop lying to yourself, Ryan,” Sherry said, finally.
 
“You can’t possibly believe that.”

I heard her click the phone closed, and I ran back to bed.
  
I heard the toilet flush.
 
The light went off.
 
The door opened, and she climbed into bed beside me.

“What?” I asked.

“Shit at work,” she said, before she closed her eyes.

*
    
*
    
*

It wasn’t long after that, that Dr. Mehta told me Sherry was going to have to leave.
 
The insurance company said that if she hadn’t regained consciousness in three months, she wasn’t going to, and there was no use in her enjoying such a high lifestyle of testing and rehabilitation that she had at the hospital.
 
Dr. Mehta recommended a nursing home in the
Bronx
.

“You’re giving up on her!” I shouted at him, but he didn’t even bother to spout statistics this time, just patted me on the shoulder and said there wasn’t much else he could do.
 

I have to admit I made a big scene, yelling that Sherry was locked inside this lifeless body and not able to talk or to get out.
  
They were burying her alive.
 
They were condemning her to no life at all.
 
The nurses started out all nice, but then, when I wouldn’t calm down, and I wouldn’t listen to reason, they walked away.
  
In the end,
St. Vincent
’s allowed me another week to get my shit together and arrange for the nursing home, and then it was so long Sherry.

She went in a wheel chair in the back of a van to an all-right place.
  
The home was clean.
 
The nurses were nice, but harried.
  
But she didn’t get any therapy, and the staff didn’t come in to turn her as much, or to get her out of bed to sit in a chair, or to change her diaper the moment that it was wet.
 
Sherry just lay there, day in and day out, eyes open and eyes closed.
  
I came every day at first, then every other day, and then once a week.
  
I just couldn’t stand seeing her like that.

DONNA

It’s been three months since Sherry Pollack was attacked, and she hasn’t woken up yet.
 
I’d check in from time to time, finding out, for example, that at three weeks she opened her eyes.
 
But, the doctor said when I called him that there was no need to come see her, because she wasn’t conscious. The dichotomy startled me until I thought back to Terri Schiavo in
Florida
.
 
They called it a vegetative state.
 
And despite her opening her eyes, she never did attain consciousness.

The rest I couldn’t remember, so I googled Terri Schiavo, which gave me a long list of articles about the Florida court battle between her parents, who wanted her kept alive at all costs, and her husband, who insisted it was his wife’s wish that she not be kept alive through mechanical means.
 
The husband won, and they removed her feeding tube after fifteen years in a vegetative state.
 
Schiavo slowly died of dehydration without ever attaining consciousness.
 
I wondered whether that would be Sherry’s fate.
  

Henry Jackman called today to say they’re moving her to a nursing home in the
Bronx
, and, by the way, what’s happening with the case.
 
I told him not much.
 
The mayor cut our budgets again, and I’ve been trying to stay on top of my other five cases, only one of which I managed to close, regarding a juvenile, a stolen hand gun and a Korean deli owner.
  
And that goes back two years.
 
“What can I say?” I told him. “I’m working on it.”
 
Needless to say, Jackman wasn’t satisfied.
 
He screamed in my ear for several minutes about how everyone was giving up on her.

He’s right: I
haven’t
been working on it, but I couldn’t tell him that.
 
A subway stabbing a week ago, which left two men dead, has been taking up most of my time.
 
The victims were heading home on the subway from a party.
 
One of the victims threw a bag of trash through the open door toward a trash receptacle, accidentally hitting a man.
 
The man allegedly became enraged and in return stabbed the two men to death.
 
The men boarded the train at Times Square, and were found at West 96
^th
when an officer just happened to get on their car.
 
He got them to the hospital but they both were pronounced DOA.
 
We’ve been searching for the assailant since it happened.
 
It’s been in all the papers.
 
Of course, I had to spend all my time on this case.
 
But go tell him that.

Then, as I was sitting at my desk doing paperwork on the stabbing case, a call came in for me from Officer Vincent McNally asking me to come down to 119 West 96
^th
Street.
 
A woman was strangled in her second floor apartment.
 
I left everything as it was and walked the five blocks to
96
^th
Street
between
Amsterdam
and
Columbus
. It wasn’t hard to miss. There was a police-issue Ford Crown
Victoria
in front, and the entrance to the brownstone was open with McNally standing in the doorway.
 
He led me into the second floor apartment to where Jessica Finklemeyer was lying naked on the floor, under an open window.
 
She was a sweet looking thing.
 
Early twenties at most.
 
Damn, this is the part of the job I’ll never get used to.

“Must have come through the window,” the officer said.
 
While they were detailing the room, I noticed something strange: the bed was sheetless, and the sheets could not be found.
  
The victim was obviously strangled during sexual intercourse, and, by the look of her neck, it was done manually.
 
But what did he do with the sheets?

I sent O’Malley upstairs to question the third-floor tenant, but he came down saying no one was there.
 
That made sense, since it was mid-morning.
 
I jotted down the name and decided to get back to him that night.
 
Meanwhile, I visited the first floor apartment of Arlene Fisher.
 
No one was there, until a young girl in short shorts walked in the front door and down the hallway carrying a bag of groceries.
 

“Are you Arlene Fisher?” I asked, showing her my badge.

“Yes. What happened?”

I told her about her upstairs neighbor.

“OhmyGod,” she said, putting down her groceries.
 
“Poor Jessica!”
    

“Do you know if she had any visitors last night?” I asked.

“Well, last night I can’t be sure.
 
But she’s got this boyfriend,” she said, gesturing with her key to her door.
 
“You mind if we go inside where it’s cool?” she asked.

“Sure,” I told her.
 

She unlocked the door, and a blast of cool air came rushing out.
 
“The landlord doesn’t have an electric meter for each apartment, so we pay a flat fee for utilities.
 
Might as well keep the air going if you don’t pay any extra for it,” Arlene explained, chuckling.
 
This bit of opportunism seemed dumb to be telling a police officer, but the breeze was nice.

“Do you know her boyfriend’s name?” I asked, as I walked in.

She thought a minute.
 
“Sorry, no.”

“Could you identify him in a line up?” I asked.

“No, I never saw the guy,” Arlene said curtly.
 
She seemed to be getting nervous.
 
I wondered why.

“How do you know of this boyfriend if you never saw him?”
 
I asked.

“Jessica said something about him once,” she replied.
 
“Anyway I hardly know…knew her. Is that all, Officer?
 

“Well, what did Jessica tell you about him?”

“Nothing really.
 
Just that he was good in the sack,” she said, walking me to the door.

I asked her whether she knew any of Jessica’s visitors, but she said no, that they hardly talked anyway, that she kept to herself most of the time.
 
I wrote Arlene Fisher under the other neighbor’s name, scribbled a few notes, and told her to keep in touch if anything came to mind.

*
    
*
    
*

It was early afternoon by the time I got back to the precinct.
 
I had stopped at a sandwich shop to bring back a tuna on rye with pickle on the side.
 
I’d decided to brown bag it and eat lunch at my desk so I could finish the paperwork on the stabbing case.
 
But no sooner had I got back than I got a call to go out again: a possible sighting of the assailant in the stabbing case.

I stuffed the tuna on rye into the galley refrigerator, grabbed my half-drunk bottle of water and went downstairs, stopping first at the desk to ask Ricardo if he could find the number of the upstairs neighbor and to keep calling till he found him in.
 
I thought I’d go over there on my way home.
 

The day was a total washout.
 
The sighting turned out to be a false alarm.
 
The assailant was still at large.
 
Then Ricardo caught me on the way upstairs to tell me he’d tried calling the neighbor half a dozen times, and no one answered.
 
I thanked him.
 
Maybe I’d go over myself.

But even this had to be put on hold.
 
I was still at my desk finishing that paperwork till ten at night before I decided to call it a day.
 
I got up, picked up my tote, which doubles as a purse-briefcase-lunch box, you name it, and left.

The night was really lovely the way
New York
summer nights can be: still balmy but not sultry, and without the mugginess that covers you with sweat.
 
I walked east on 100
^th
till Central Park West.
 
The windows of the tony two and three-story apartments along the park sparkled with light.
 
What with the real estate downturn, you could get one of those for only ten mill.

A bus passed me on my left, but I’ve never been a bus person.
 
You’re either a bus person or a subway person, and I’ve always been the latter – faster, more to the point.
 
You get on a bus, and it meanders along, stopping every two blocks, wheezily opening its doors, waiting till each one of a long line of passengers climbs the steps and finds her MetroCard.
 
Or worse, yet, stops to count her change, blocking the line-up in back of her.
 
Give me the subway anytime: the rushing mob setting new records of how fast you can get through the turnstile.
 
Sure, you sometimes have to wait for the train, and sure, it’ll stop for no good reason in the middle of the track, while you see the express steaming past you, the train you could have waited for but decided this one was a sure thing, and the other was just a possibility.
 
But on a good day, you slip your MetroCard into the turnstile, rush upstairs to the express, which is already visible down the track. You stuff yourself in – a detriment of course, but if you’re a native New Yorker, which I am, part of the whole
New York
experience, and zoom off to another borough in the time it would take a bus to cover fifteen blocks.
 
Yeah, I’m a subway girl.