Boyfriend from Hell (12 page)

“We’ll check this for prints, interrogate him again, quiz some of the cult members, send a message, let it be known this is serious activity,” Santini said.

“If you arrest him, that’ll send a message.”

“This is all completely circumstantial,” Gomez said.

“I write about them, it isn’t complimentary, and I get death threats.”

“It’s harassment. It’s a form of menacing. Whether or not it’s a death threat, that’s harder to say,” Rourke told her. With the false start on the hit-and-run case in his immediate experience, Rourke was inclined to think of other possibilities. “Why don’t you provide us a list of anyone other than Cummings who might have taken umbrage with something you wrote, or something you did, or something you said, people like that.”

“Honestly, it’s Cummings, it’s his people.”

“Would you give us a list, please?”

“I will.”

“This feels very temporary to me, Ms. Delaney. No disrespect intended, but your article is going to become old news and my sense is, in time, this is just going to go away.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

They were silent for a moment or two after she left, knowing they hadn’t been much help.

“We’ll talk to Cummings again,” Gomez said. “Thing is, he isn’t a creep and he’s not easily intimidated. He’s pretty smooth.”

“He’s got like a thousand followers. It could be any one of them,” Santini said. “Do we really have time for this now?”

“No,” Rourke responded. “But maybe by letting them know we’re still on it, we’ll discourage them. Or it could be somebody she might think of. More likely, it’s what I said, this is just going to go away.”

Ronnie, Nancy, and Bob convened at Bob’s apartment. Bob’s first suggestion was that for protection he move back into Ronnie and Nancy’s apartment for a while, or that Ronnie stay in his place, she could sleep on the couch—except none of them could figure out what it would accomplish. The threats were variously dropped off, thrown in her path, and mailed to her. Bob’s physical presence wouldn’t necessarily deter these insanities. She could go away for a while; Nancy offered her parents’ home as a way station. Ronnie didn’t like the idea of hiding, of allowing Cummings and his cult to drive her out of her place, and how long could she stay away? Eventually she would come back, or even if she didn’t, if she moved, she couldn’t disappear. People this deranged would eventually find her if they intended to do her harm. Or perhaps she wasn’t in danger. They all wanted to believe in that possibility, that these people would harass her until they grew bored or found another target for their hostility.

They agreed Ronnie would remain in Bob’s apartment for the next couple of nights. Ronnie would work at Bob’s place and then they would rotate, Bob staying at the other apartment for a few days. Nancy went to retrieve some of Ronnie’s clothing and her laptop. The arrangement they decided upon threw into relief the absence of Richard, in Edinburgh or Munich, working on his career. To be involved with someone who was so impossibly unavailable at a time of crisis like this did not fit her definition of a meaningful relationship. She sent him an e-mail describing the threat and she heard nothing from him for several days. She was back in her apartment, Bob installed there, when she finally received a reply:

My e-mail was down, sorry. This sounds like more of the same petty stuff. Bluntly, if they haven’t harmed you, they’re not going to harm you. I’m sending someone to see you, a private investigator at my expense, Paul Stone. And don’t say no. This isn’t like a too-expensive restaurant. Just talk to him, please.


On 118th Street a woman jogger, thirty-two years old, was heading for Riverside Drive a few minutes after seven in the morning when a double-parked car suddenly accelerated toward her. She was able to see it coming and leaped out of the way as it was about to strike her. She tripped and fell to the ground as the driver momentarily lost control, scraped a parked SUV, and sped away. The near victim was able to see that the car was driven by a Caucasian male. His face, though, was never in full view and she could not describe him. In her shock she was unable to identify the make of car or the license plate. As to the color, at first she said dark blue, then wasn’t sure and thought it might have been black. The incident raised questions within the police department and the media. The first hit-and-run victim may not have been killed by someone who knew her, it may have been someone picking off women.
A SECOND MADMAN OR THE SAME?
was the headline in the
New York Post.

In the dream a car hurtled toward her. She was in her jogging attire. She leaped to get out of the way, as in the news descriptions of the second incident. Ronnie awoke, upset with herself for the dream, for converting her feelings into such mayhem.

In the flow of activity at the station house, the rush to reorder priorities and question anyone in the vicinity of the second incident, Ronnie’s predicament was overlooked. She called the precinct and the next day Gomez returned her call. They hadn’t spoken to Cummings yet, they fully intended to, and given the time delay between her previous incidents, he didn’t think anything unusual was imminent. She had her own personal madman, he just wasn’t one the police were interested in at the moment.

Richard’s private investigator, Paul Stone, a man with a high, thin voice, contacted her. In the absence of any commitment from the police she consented to see him. After several days Ronnie had resumed normal living arrangements, back in the apartment with Nancy except for the times when Nancy stayed with Bob. Ronnie arranged to meet Stone at four in the afternoon at a nearby Starbucks. He would be wearing a beige suit and a yellow tie.

He looked like a jockey, a small, muscular man in his forties, no more than 125 pounds, five feet five, and she assumed his appearance must have helped him in his work if he did any surveillance; he could disappear in a room if you weren’t looking for him. She was interested in how he knew Richard. Stone told her they first met when he was doing work on a missing person who disappeared into a cult in Utica, New York, a cult Richard was researching.

If Nancy were present she would have laughed out loud at what Ronnie said next; Ronnie couldn’t help taking a stab at it.

“And do you know his wife?” she said, supposedly innocent.

“Richard Smith isn’t married.”

“Oh, I thought he was. The way he’s always out of New York.”

“He does travel a lot, but no. Not as far as I know.”

“And he lives permanently—”

“In New York.”

“In New York, right.”

Richard had given him the general outline, Stone asked her to fill in the details and she gave him an accounting, including her last inadequate exchanges with the police.

“They’re all caught up in this hit-and-run business,” he said.

“That’s clear.”

“Ms. Delaney, may I call you Veronica?”

“Ronnie.”

“Ronnie, I’ve been a private investigator for over twenty years. And here’s what my experience tells me. People who would do things like this, they’re crazy.” She thought, That’s a major insight? “From my perspective,” he continued, “it’s a good news, bad news thing.”

“The bad news I know. I’ve been on the receiving end.”

“The good news, as I see it, the likelihood is—this is basically what they do.”

“I’m a writer, and the word ‘likelihood’ is the word I worry about.”

“I understand. These things are designed to frighten you. My guess, because they want to get back at you for what you wrote.”

“So you think it
is
the cult.”

“I do. But they only frighten you if you’re frightened.”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“Somebody who recognizes this is their act. I can provide you with security, up to twenty-four hours a day with rotating people, but the way they’ve tried to come at you, somebody even standing right next to you isn’t going to stop them. Maybe I could’ve run after the person who tossed the cats in your path, or the trinket thing, but this time they didn’t do anything like that, they sent something by mail, so a security person wouldn’t have stopped it.”

“Personal security can’t help, is what you’re saying.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll provide it if you wish, at no expense to you, but no. The biggest problem, and this is where they’re clever, is that it’s practically impossible to pin pranks like this on anybody.”

“Cummings. His people.”

“No evidence. Not like a gun you can trace, or fingerprints, or someone you can ID. That’s why the cops are dragging their feet, also they’re preoccupied.”

“So you’re saying it’s practically impossible to get the person who’s doing this to me. Why exactly are we talking?”

“Well, I am offering security—”

“Which you’re telling me is useless.”

“And
I’m telling you all this can only frighten you if you allow yourself to be frightened. You could put your mind in the place of—this is stupid and I won’t let it get to me.”

An unprotectable, unprovable harassment was directed at her, and these experts, the police and now this private investigator, were telling her to ignore it and eventually she would be left alone.

“I’m not going to let my life be turned upside down by some snake oil salesman in a hood. Thank you. I’ll let you know if I need anything from you.”

She was going to cut this off at the source.

On 129th Street across from the Dark Angel Church the protest group assembled, sometimes two or three of them, five at the maximum, holding placards for the benefit of passing motorists, pedestrians, or the occasional people in and out of the church during the day. The wording of their signs proclaimed,
GO TO HELL, DOWN WITH SATAN, SATAN WORSHIPPERS GO HOME,
and
WHO BELIEVES IN THE DEVIL BELIEVES IN EVIL.
The last, more biblical than the rest, missed the point as far as the cult members were concerned; they wanted to believe in evil. The protesters were middle-class whites who knew each other from the First Calvary Roman Catholic Church in Staten Island and they commuted by public transportation, ferry and subway, taking up their positions according to a sign-up schedule maintained by the group leader, John Wilson. He was six feet one, gawky, and wore too-short chinos and inexpensive checked sport shirts. His brown hair was thinning to baldness, his face sallow. A bachelor of forty-six, he was a dealer in religious artifacts he sold from home, a two-bedroom apartment he rented in the rear of a private house. His place was a kind of religious shrine, but with shipping boxes. He had neither female nor male relationships of a sexual nature, seldom went to the movies because he deemed them immoral, and devoted himself to his work and his Catholicism. He sold, by a combination of Internet and mail order, crucifixes, statuettes of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and religious paintings imported from a wholesaler in Rome. He first became aware of Cummings and the Dark Angel Church while surfing the Internet. He attended a mass to see the Devil’s handiwork firsthand and was outraged. Wilson reported back to a couple of the churchgoers and the idea was born to create a protest vigil.

Alice Bayers, a stout woman of five feet two, forty-eight, a widow, was the self-proclaimed strategist. She had worked as a volunteer on behalf of local politicians and was a regular viewer of
Meet the Press,
which she lorded over the others in promoting her intelligence. She devised the concept of a vigil during the day, when they would most likely be seen, and in order to be economic restricted night protests to Saturday nights, the church’s time for mass. Wilson would have liked a more vigorous union-on-strike schedule, the others objected, and it was agreed they would take up their positions for a few hours during the day and on Saturday nights, provided the weather was dry and not too cold.

Beattie Ryan, sixty-five, a retired mail carrier, a beefy woman of five feet six, and a horse player, was designated weather marshal. She liked to boast she could stand on the street for long hours because of her powerful leg muscles developed in her work and from long days at the track. Lacking her physical abilities, the others carried lightweight folding chairs to the site and, although she claimed not to need one, Beattie Ryan brought one with her, as well.

Peter Askew, fifty-three, a recent alcoholic, and Martin Beale, fifty-eight, his mentor in Sunburst, the recovery group at the church, were two of the other loyalists, both army veterans from Vietnam on disability. Askew was five feet eleven, with a belly over his belt, currently unemployed, which freed him up for standing his post. Beale, five feet seven, did odd jobs in carpentry, and came and went as a protester according to his available work.

Discussions between the police and the protesters established ground rules: no use of hand-held public address speakers, no physical contact with cult members; the right to protest, but not to impede people from entering and leaving the church. Their position was across the street from the front entrance to the church, they were able to use the rest-room in a nearby gas station, and the police left them on their own during the day, save for a periodic drive-by from officers on duty. When the church was in session and the interactions between cult members and the protesters might escalate, two police officers were assigned to the protest site. Apart from shouting matches between opposing parties, which had become routinized street theater, violence did not occur.

Cummings lived in Yonkers and drove in each day, parking at a designated spot behind the building, out of the sightline of the protesters. When he did appear in front at the conclusion of a mass he was greeted by insistent booing, the protesters unaware that they were unwittingly bestowing a form of celebrity status on their enemy.

“We need literature,” Alice Bayers, the political strategist, declared one day when they were in their spot. “Something we can give out to people who pass by.” The group at the time consisted of Wilson, Askew, and Beale.

“We also need a name,” Wilson said, looking to assert his position in the group. He was the leader, he organized it, and he didn’t want Alice Bayers usurping his position in the bureaucracy. “How about the Anti-Dark Angel Church Group.”