A Time to Scatter Stones Read online

  “A little practice,” I said, “will make all the difference.”

  WE MUST HAVE SPENT fifteen minutes rehearsing. I sketched out a script for him, and we took turns playing Henry and Paul. By improvising, he learned to come up with responses to anything Paul was likely to say, and as he settled into the role he grew a lot less flustered.

  We finished our coffee, and he put the phone in his breast pocket and checked to make sure he had the right key, and I got my backpack onto my shoulder, then took it off again and asked him if he had a spare roll of duct tape.

  He said, “In this job? That’s like asking a pharmacist does he have any aspirin.”

  He never asked me what I was going to use it for, just gave me a roll, and threw in a scissors without my asking. I added both to my backpack. We went upstairs, walked down the hall to the front staircase, and climbed three flights of stairs. When we’d both caught our breath, he opened the door to Ellen Lipscomb’s apartment. There was a light switch alongside the door, but I left it alone. We had all the light we needed.

  I took him one more time through the conversation he was going to have, and he took a deep breath and made the call, then rolled his eyes when it went immediately to voice mail. But we’d rehearsed this, too, and he said, “This here’s the super on East 27th Street. Call me back real quick.”

  He pressed what you press to end a call, took another deep breath, and right about then his phone rang. He looked at me and I nodded.

  He answered the phone, said, “Super.”

  We could have put his phone on Speaker, but that might have made it harder for him to play his role. So I only heard one side of the conversation.

  “She’s here,” he said. “Your sister. Just a few minutes ago. Rang my bell, said she lost her keys, needed for me to let her in. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know exactly how I could stall her, so might be best for you to get here as soon as you can.”

  He listened, said Uh-huh a few more times, then rang off and asked me how he’d done.

  “From what I heard,” I said, “you could get an Emmy nomination.”

  He grinned at that. “He didn’t seem suspicious at all. Said he’d get over right away. I said just buzz me and I’ll be right up.”

  “So you’d better get downstairs.”

  “What I was thinking. No, you don’t need to do that.”

  What I didn’t need to do was hand him a pair of hundreds, and he was probably right, I probably didn’t need to do it. But maybe it would help keep him from forgetting which side he was on.

  “Said he’s got keys, picked up a spare set of hers. I never saw him do it.”

  “You just saw him take the panties.”

  “God, don’t remind me. I’ll keep an eye on the door, call when he’s on his way. If I can.”

  AFTER HE’D LEFT, I opened the backpack and took out the two items I’d purchased. One was a black silk ski mask, the kind that fits over your whole head, with two small almond-shaped holes for your eyes and a larger one for your mouth. The other was a kitchen mallet with a ten-inch hardwood handle and a head of hard black rubber, one side of the head capped with a toothed disc of cast aluminum for tenderizing meat.

  Waiting was the hard part. I wanted to put a light on, move around the apartment. Instead I donned the ski mask, to check the fit, and promptly took it off again; it was all too good at warming one’s face. I hefted the mallet, swung it gently into my palm, first with the plain rubber end, then with the toothed metal. That was my dress rehearsal, I thought, and waited for it to be showtime.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Fifteen, twenty minutes, and my phone vibrated in my breast pocket. I picked up, and in a hoarse whisper Henry told me our man was on his way. “Didn’t see me,” he said. “Doesn’t know I saw him.”

  He rang off before I could say anything.

  I listened for footsteps. I didn’t hear him on the stairs, but picked up his footsteps as he approached the door. I stationed myself so I’d be behind the door when he opened it.

  He took his time getting the key in the lock. Then he turned it, and then he eased the door open and stepped into the apartment.

  He was a big man, taller and heavier than I, dressed in ironed khakis and a navy blazer. I don’t know what he sensed, her absence or my presence, but the set of his shoulders shifted, and his hands moved at his sides. So he was on guard, and I might only get one crack at him.

  I took it, swung the mallet into the back of his head.

  For longer than I expected, he stood there as if rooted. I’d pulled the punch the least bit, not wanting to shatter his skull, and maybe that had been a mistake. Then, when I drew back the mallet for another try, his knees buckled and he hit the floor and didn’t move.

  “EVERETT ALLEN PAULSEN. He was carrying a New Jersey driver’s license, and it had his name in full. The rest of his ID, mostly credit cards, was all either Allen Paulsen or E. Allen Paulsen.”

  Elaine said, “And he called himself Paul. I wonder what he has against the name Everett?”

  “Or Ev for short,” Ellen said. “Or, I don’t know. Rhett?”

  By the time I’d got home Elaine was ready to leave for the Croatian church. Could I make myself a sandwich? Was I okay with that? I was fine with it, I assured her, and when was it her meeting ended? Nine o’clock? Well, could she come right home afterward? And could she bring Ellen?

  I never did fix myself that sandwich. I spent a long time under the shower, most of it with the hot spray hitting me in the back of the neck. I got dressed and sat down in front of the TV, and I guess I must have dozed off. But if I was sleeping it couldn’t have been very deeply, because my eyes snapped open when I heard Elaine’s key in the lock.

  And now the three of us were in the living room, but this time it was I who shared the couch with Elaine, while Ellen Lipscomb perched on my recliner. I took them through my day, and I may have furnished more detail than they needed to hear about my fruitless quest for a nightstick and the kitchen mallet I’d rung in as a substitute.

  I’d have been more concise a few years earlier. An old man’s like an old river, tending to meander, given to lingering in the interesting bends and curves it cuts into the earth. A couple of times I had to remind myself to move the narrative along, that my trip to the Bowery didn’t require a whole disquisition on the history of that venerable thoroughfare, including the spelling of its original Dutch name.

  Still, neither of them looked bored.

  “So I swung at him,” I said, “and if I hadn’t pulled it a little at the last moment I think I’d have killed him.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I knocked him cold,” I said, “but it took a couple of long seconds for his body to get the message. He stayed upright and looked to be bracing himself, getting his feet under him, and if he’d managed to turn around—”

  “He’d have seen a man in a ski mask,” Elaine said.

  “And he’d try to take the mask off, and my head along with it. He was big, and he had to be strong to take that initial blow. And I’m an old man.”

  “Not that old,” Ellen said.

  “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 throu
gh 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.

  But he did so by flying out to Ohio to rape and murder her friend Connie Cooperman, and then he came back to New York and killed a bunch of other people. He capped it by stabbing Elaine, and very nearly killing her. The crew in the Emergency Room saved her, but it was touch and go for a while.

  I wound up in the apartment where Motley had touched down, and he wound up unconscious after I’d almost wound up dead. I hated him, not surprisingly, for what he’d done and what he tried to do. But I didn’t kill him out of hate, or out of a desire to see him punished.

  But I knew that, even if he went back to prison, there would be a day when he got out. And he’d go on doing what he’d been doing, because that was what he did and who he was. There was really only one way I knew to stop him, one way that was sure to work. If there was another, I couldn’t think of it.

  And so I did what I had to do.

  “I don’t think he’ll give you any more trouble,” I told Ellen. “But if he does, yes. I’ll
find him and I’ll kill him.”

  ELLEN HAD TO USE the bathroom, and Elaine went off to the kitchen and started water boiling for pasta. They’d come straight home from the meeting, she said, and hadn’t eaten. I admitted that I hadn’t either.

  “Plus you had an arduous day,” she said, “with all that walking, and then kicking the crap out of whatshisname.”

  “Everett Allen Paulsen,” Ellen supplied. “I guess his last name is where the Paul came from.”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re right about Rumpelstiltskin,” she said. “It’s empowering, knowing his name. You didn’t leave him there, did you? In my apartment?”

  “No. I took off the ski mask, because I’d stopped caring if he saw my face. Then I took the tape off his mouth and got him up on his feet. He couldn’t really walk, he could barely stand up, but I put an arm around his waist and walked him down the stairs.”

  Elaine said that must have been tricky.

  “The Mahaffey method would have been a lot easier,” I said. “I had trouble keeping my balance, so a couple of times we both came close to taking a tumble. And it was a little dicey when we ran into somebody on the stairs. I said my friend had a little too much to drink.”

  “And he believed it?”

  “She,” I said. “Five-seven or eight, slender build, late twenties. Dark hair, eyeglasses—”

  Ellen thought she knew who I meant, but not her name. “She usually has her earbuds in,” she said, “so she probably didn’t hear a word you said.”

  “I got him downstairs,” I went on, “and I walked him to the corner and put him in a taxi. I told the driver a similar story, that my friend wasn’t feeling too well. His main concern was that the son of a bitch would puke in his cab, but I assured him that wouldn’t be a problem, my friend wasn’t drunk, he had this condition from injuries sustained in the service of his country. He’d have spells like this periodically, and the only thing that helped was quiet and rest.”

  “So don’t ask him questions,” Elaine said.

  “I gave the driver Paulsen’s address in Teaneck and a hundred bucks to cover his fare. And off they went.”