Danger meant fear.
And fear brought back all those terrible, distressing memories of a life lived.
The box fan’s tired drone broke the silence.
“Ms.Cohen,” Larkin said evenly, “I’m here because I want to know who Barbara Fuller was when she was alive.”
“What’s it matter?”
“Everyone deserves to be remembered.”
Bridget’s mouth was twisted to one side, and when she parted her lips, it made a sucking sound.Condescendingly, she said, “I suppose you go to all their funerals too.”
—rain and snow and lonely setting suns, pulling overgrown weeds from neglected headstones, wiping debris from abandoned markers, a penny denoting his visitation, paying the passage of the restless dead, speaking their names aloud, remembering all of the city’s forgotten—
Larkin answered, “Something like that.”
Bridget stared at him with those furious brown eyes, but when Larkin met her stare without blinking, without flinching, she was the first to look away.Bridget picked at a fingernail, as if trying to peel the cheap polish.She said reluctantly, “I knew Babs from the old neighborhood—years before the Kitten.”Bridget shook her head and swallowed a few times, like she was struggling to get the words around an unexpected lump.Then she said with forced nonchalance, “She was real sweet.”
“Was this Hell’s Kitchen.”
Bridget looked up.“How’d you know that?”
“I’m a detective, ma’am.”
Bridget turned, yanked open the top drawer of the dresser, and retrieved a pair of black socks.“Her fiancé was a fucking piece of work.Slept all day, drank all night.More than once, he put a loaded gun to her head and threatened to pull the trigger—in broad daylight—but no one did nothing to stop him.Whole neighborhood was afraid of him and the thugs he ran with.”Bridget crouched and put the socks on.“Babs wanted to leave him but….”She straightened.“Don’t know why she didn’t buy a bus ticket and just leave, instead of hiding out on the goddamn Deuce.”
Because every victim of domestic abuse has a distinct upbringing and set of circumstances that their abuser manipulates and controls, Larkin wanted to say.Because until you can recognize a victim’s fear—be it fear of their partner’s retaliatory actions or of their own ability to be successfully independent—recognize a victim’s shame, and recognize that a lack of resources can stop an escape in its tracks, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend why a victim stays.
Just leave, for many, was a Sisyphean task.
“I told other runaways my name was Sam.I was eight.”
And then there were those whose will knew no bounds.
Larkin prompted, “Barbara changed her name to Esther Haycox upon leaving Hell’s Kitchen.”
Bridget didn’t say anything to the contrary as she moved to sit on the edge of the bed, reached underneath, and retrieved a pair of regulation black shoes.
“What year was this.”
“It was a lifetime ago.”
Larkin took a breath to quell his growing agitation.The apartment was too cluttered, too warm, and Bridget too hostile, too challenging, but hewasn’tcoming back again and again and— “Do you know what Barbara’s homicide file says, Ms.Cohen.”And when Bridget looked at Larkin, he said, “Nothing.It says nothing.It didn’t even have her name.She was a Jane Doe until I was able to track down her identity.This woman died a horrific death, alone but for her killer, and for thirty-eight years, no one has cared.I’m trying to correct that.”
“It won’t bring Babs back.”
“No.But maybe it’ll give her peace.”
Bridget sat there, one shoe on, unlaced, considering.Halfheartedly, she said, “I think it was ’79.I know I was out of high school when she left.Babs was a little older than me.”
The date matched Phyllis’s story of having met Esther at the burlesque club the same year, and so Larkin asked next, “Tell me more about her fiancé.”
“Shithead murdering psychopath….Look, you wouldn’t understand—you’re too young and the city’s so impersonal now—but back then, everybody knew everybody in Hell’s Kitchen.Whose kid got to escape and go to college, whose granny had just passed, who might’ve owed cash to Spillane.”
“But then he was murdered,” Larkin said, an echo of Porter’s history lesson.
“Got real bad after that,” Bridget agreed.She tied her shoe.“Westies took over.They had a real hard-on for all the mafia bullshit going on around the city—wanted to be a part of it.Tony was half Italian, on his mother’s side.He gets engaged to Babs, a nice girl from the Irish slums, andbam, suddenly the Westies are wining and dining the fucking Gambino crime family.”
