One night a couple of weeks ago, after a show at Tipitina’s, Maureen had stopped in a bar called Ms. Mae’s for a late-night drink or three. There she’d bumped into a couple of off-duty cops, Wilburn and Cordts, guys she knew from her district. Day-shift guys.
They should’ve avoided each other, everyone in her district knew about her suspension, but the hour was late and the drinks had been flowing. Who could possibly be watching them in a dive bar like Ms. Mae’s? Maureen bought a round of whiskey shots. She bought another. She asked if any good stories floated around the station. The only interesting thing, Wilburn told her, was that in the past two weeks, three calls had come into the Sixth from women worried they’d been followed home from the Irish Garden.
Didn’t she live right by there? Cordts asked.
What had been done about it? Maureen asked.
The guys told her that responding officers had put the calls down to scaredy-cat girls and clumsy young guys too full of hormones and drink. That bar was a pain in the ass, you know that, they said, the way it dumped drunk meatheads into the neighborhood every night.
But the Irish Garden’s owner was ex-NOPD, Wilburn said with a shrug, a former detective who’d taken early retirement under a cloud five years ago.
Brutality! Cordts coughed into his hand.
Wilburn threw him an elbow. Anyway, he said. Circumstances made it hard to look at the bar as a trouble spot. The place was protected. There was certainly no going in there asking questions. The cops who took the calls had followed procedure and taken reports at the scene, Wilburn said, as was their duty.
Maureen had said nothing, had asked no more questions, instead lighting cigarettes for the three of them, and buying herself one more drink for the walk home before she left.
The story of those frightened women stayed with her after that night. Her coworkers’ easy dismissal of those incidents, not only the officers who had responded to the calls but also the men who had told her the story, ate at her, scratching at her brain.
Against her better judgment, the next time she saw Preacher in the park, she had asked him about the calls. Were she to take matters into her own hands—and a plan was already forming—and if she got caught doing it, having tipped off Preacher that she knew of the incidents would put both of them in a tough spot. So don’t get caught, she told herself.
Preacher told her each woman had made it safely back to her apartment, shaken but untouched by her pursuer. The first and second callers had both quit talking in the middle of their interviews, having convinced themselves in recounting the events while surrounded by impatient police officers and nosy neighbors that perhaps they had overreacted. But maybe not, Maureen had thought, because the third caller had complained of the man banging on her building’s front door for several minutes after she had gone into her apartment and called the police.
She’d said he wore a ring. That she remembered the sound of it, would for a long time, the metal banging on the thick glass on the front door as he slapped his palm hard against it.
Maureen knew that if three calls had come in, then half a dozen other incidents had gone unreported. And that the stalkings had been happening for more than a couple of weeks. Other women hadn’t called the police.
Women too frightened or tired or intoxicated. Women with a few pills or a bag of weed in their underwear drawer who didn’t want cops in their house, or who didn’t want to stay up another hour or two or three waiting for those disinterested, irritated cops to show up in the first place. Or worse, women who didn’t call because they were conditioned to believe the threat existed only in their heads, or to believe that, because of the late hours they kept or the booze or the pills or the weed or because of what was, or wasn’t, between their legs, they’d brought it on themselves. That they had it coming to them. Whatever it was that had happened to them. They believed that being made afraid didn’t rise to the level of a crime. That they were silly.
They believed what boyfriends and, unfortunately, some of their girlfriends told them—that they’d scared themselves into seeing threats where none existed, that they were paranoid, like anyone really knew what that word meant. Or brainwashed. That they should doubt their deepest, primal natural instincts for self-preservation so as not to be embarrassed.
It was part of the problem, Maureen knew, the hard part of trying to convince people to see threats, to be wary, to be hard targets. If you oversold the message, people saw danger so often that they stopped seeing it altogether. They stopped believing in it. Nobody wants to believe they should be afraid. And too many people, thought Maureen, thought that acting careful and living afraid were synonymous, that being wary of your surroundings constituted a character flaw.