While Valerie Is No One, by Pablo D’Stair

Valerie saw Randolph Tate strangle Leonora Talc, sometime quite late at night, while she was walking home with some bourbon, wine, and her rental movies. It was just around from the stairwell of the building adjacent to hers, the building where Leonora lived, the building where Randolph lived, as well. At the time, she didn’t know it was Leonora Talc, exactly; she thought it might have been one of the women who come to Leonora’s apartment for the groups she held, as many of these women looked a bit like Leonora. But it was easily verified the next morning by a brief conversation in the corridor with Daryl as she was leaving for work that it was Leonora who had been strangled.

During her lunch break, Valerie left the store to buy coffee and a newspaper to leaf through. Though she knew there would be no mention of Leonora’s death, her work was two cities away from her apartment. She might go have a drink or two with Timothy, Talia, and Caroline when she got home. They would certainly have things to tell her. They all lived closer to Leonora, were bound to have overheard something about the investigation. She was almost jealous at the thought that they may have spoken to the police. It would be disappointing if they’d said anything that would’ve led straight to Randolph’s capture.

Howard, one of Valerie’s co-workers, came into the coffee shop and sat down at her table. She hadn’t even noticed his approach, her mind wandering. They talked for a while about an issue that had come up during the last inventory, neither of them with any heart, and she watched him not drink his coffee, wondering if he’d ordered it just to have a reason to sit.

“If you witnessed a crime, would you report the criminal to the police?” Valerie asked.

Howard leaned back, finally taking a swallow of his drink, seeming displeased with its taste. “Which sort of crime?”

An idiot question, but she told him she meant a violent crime. She meant if he’d witnessed a mugging or a rape, a murder, what would he do?

“I would report it, yes. Why?” He was cleaning his lips with a napkin, not all that intrigued. But then he looked at her, smiling, wanting to know what she knew and about whom.

She smiled back, telling him this had nothing to do with work. It was just a hypothetical. “You would report it?” she prompted him to continue.

“Yes. I would. I guess I might be hesitant if it was especially violent. I would find a way to do it anonymously, but I think that’s perfectly reasonable.”

“You wouldn’t want to get involved too personally?”

“No.”

“Then why get involved at all?”

He shrugged, obviously not caring. And so when he again asked her why she was asking, she changed the subject.

Howard’s little response was worthless. If something has nothing to do with you, it has nothing to do with you and so should be left at that. It was absurd to hear someone off-the-cuff say they would do something of such gravity with no conviction, no passion, like a ‘Hello’ to a ‘Hello’, a ‘You’re welcome’ to a ‘Thank you,’ completely inconsequential. She made a point of avoiding him for the rest of her shift: If she had started any conversation with him, she would’ve found a way bring it around to this subject, found some excuse to snarl something at him.

***

Over a glass of wine with Caroline, after a delay-ridden train commute back to her apartment building, Valerie again found a way to broach the subject of the murder, this time by asking, ‘Do you think it might have been someone we know?’ and giving a sober look to Caroline, tightening her eyes to indicate she was referring to Leonora.

“Not someone that we know. I can’t imagine it. Timothy thinks it must’ve been one of those women she was always involved with.”

Valerie smiled and took a drink of wine, never liking to go along with what she considered ridiculous gossip about Leonora’s sexuality. She couldn’t picture Leonora involved with another woman, couldn’t think of another woman wanting to put their open mouth to Leonora’s mouth, her skin, to move their hands inside of her.

“If you knew who did it, what would you do?”

Caroline was refilling her glass from the bottle on the small coffee table, several open books left around on top of one another, already a page with a damp blotch from a slight spill. “What do you mean?”

“If you’d witnessed it, would you let people know? Would you turn them in?” She had nearly said ‘Him’ instead of ‘Them’ and so to cover the odd stumble hurriedly repeated the question, now saying ‘Her’ and laying a dark emphasis to the word, clicking out her teeth between the slit of her smile.

“Of course I would.”

So glib, as though that could ever be all there was to it. “But why would you? Why would you involve yourself just for something you saw?”

Caroline spoke for almost ten minutes without stopping, without slowing, treading over the same few points, holding up fingers in no specific way to mark them each time she wanted to lay a particular emphasis, all the gestures quite limp. Valerie glanced at the wine bottle which had hardly a sliver of liquid left in it, already on her third glass. Caroline mentioned that Leonora had people who were close to her, who would want to know the reason for her death. Who deserve to know, she kept repeating. And Caroline said that if she, herself, were hurt or killed and someone knew who was responsible she would want this witness to come forward, to speak for her, to allow her life the proper completion. She would expect them to was how she actually phrased it.

All sophomoric points, pedestrian, selfish, and sentimental. The only thing Caroline spoke of that struck in a sharp way to Valerie was the statement and who knows who else some monster might hurt, left to go their way.

The two finished another bottle and most of a third, parting on Valerie’s insistence that Caroline needed rest before her upcoming doctor’s appointment.

Walking the corridor, rounding to the stairwell, climbing the four flights, and walking nearly another full length of corridor, Valerie kept guffing, rubbing her eyes, dismissing the first two of Caroline’s points with this or that retort, but finding the third rotting inside her. As soon as she was in her apartment, she poured a quick shot of bourbon, downed it, poured another and stood in the dark, facing the wall, halfway whispering aloud her discussion of the matter.

***

Valerie woke early, wanting to vomit but unable. Instead, she sat by the window that looked out on the common area in front of the building and drank several glasses of water. She was not exhausted, though felt in no condition to do anything but sit around, and made up her mind that she would take a week off from work and visit with her brother, a train trip of nearly an entire day. She stared down at the pavement, stared at a man who was smoking a cigarette by the public telephones, some vagrant who was always around. She stared and thought about Randolph Tate.

It was after dozing in front of the television, the volume muted, waking to blearily watch mouths saying nothing, people involved in some sequence she could not discern, that it occurred to her she should warn Randolph away from doing further harm. Randolph was probably harmless now, she supposed. It was impossible to picture him as some stalking menace, as anything more than a man who had killed Leonora and only Leonora and only ever Leonora. Certainly it would be enough to indicate to him somehow that he was known for his crime, this would satisfy any last qualm, more than fulfill any sense of obligation, however imaginary, that anyone might invent to harass her with. She laughed, mocked herself for sounding like Caroline, like Howard, like the reporter she had read in the newspaper, like anyone. Whether it was enough to sate any conscience, it was all she felt inclined to do.

Sitting to her desk, she laid a clean sheet of paper down, took a thick marker up, and began to write the phrase ‘I Know’, just those two words, nothing else would be necessary. But immediately she crumpled the paper, uncrumpled it, tore it, crumpled the halves, buried them in the wastebasket in the kitchen. She sat down again, knowing it wouldn’t do to leave such a note that anybody might find. Some neighbor could come across it, deduce what it meant, and even if they were just spooked the police could be informed and an investigation, however casual, could uncover everything.

She went through her desk drawer, found a photograph of herself, two years outdated, took a thick black pen and scribbled all over her face. She would leave it in an envelope, affix this to his door. He would understand, even if he doubted his understanding; no matter what words he might come up with to name the photograph, he would understand it plainly enough. She stared at where she used to have a face, a face that hadn’t been smiling, hadn’t been looking coy, just a face captured, a glance to the camera that Martin had pointed at her, snapping his fingers to get her attention. For just a moment she thought it would be best to use some picture from a magazine, or to maybe just scribble a churning black mess out on a page, but this would make no difference. It should be her; even if not her face it should be something that was her.

***

Valerie called out from work, having a pleasant conversation with her supervisor who wished her a good time with her family, waited another hour, this mostly spent in the shower, letting the water drone from as hot as possible to as cold as she could bear, dressed in haphazard clothes picked from the hamper, threw a sweater coat on, and then left her apartment.

She affixed the envelope, a brick red envelope from one of her sets of stationary to be certain no one could see through it, to Randolph’s door using five strips of tape, wanting to be certain it would not fall or be taken just on the whimsy of someone wanting to give it an easy yank. She lit a cigarette and chuckled, noticing there was enough room to slip the envelope beneath the door, looked at it pinned flat to the blue paint just above the doorknob and decided it wouldn’t matter.

Valerie lingered around outside, the day sour with overcast and a hush of wind. She hardly took notice that she was watching Randolph Tate approach the entrance door she was loitering beside, staring at him, would’ve just stared at him as he walked through the door into the building had he not slowed, puzzled, raised a hand uncertainly and said, “Hello,” his accent peculiar, this the first time she had heard him speak.

“Hello,” she replied. In an offhand way, she asked if he would care for a cigarette.

He accepted the cigarette and hers to light it with, thanking her as he handed it back. “Are you new to this building?”

She shook her head, made a sound like laughing at some silly remark and then asked him if he had heard about what happened.

“What happened?” He was smiling, resting one elbow against the brick of the wall. An odd stance for smoking, Valerie thought. He looked so distinctly foreign, beyond his ethnicity; his every motion perverse and somehow incorrect.

“About the woman who lived here”, she said, making a general gesture with her shoulder to indicate the building. Randolph took a long pause, three more drags from the cigarette, and taking this as a response she asked him had he known her well.

“Not well. She lived very near to me, though.”

“But you knew her?”

“I knew her from walking past, perhaps, but not well”. He let smoke down his nose, stepping out the cigarette but seeming to do so without having meant to. She nearly offered him another, but he said, “It is very upsetting. I do not know what sort of woman she was, but it is a terrible thing to happen in the place where you live. A terrible thing no matter whom.”

Valerie smiled in what she imagined came across as vague sympathy and let Randolph continue through the door with just a nod of his head she did not bother to return.

***

Valerie’s brother, Bernard, was nearly an hour late in picking her up at the train station. Profusely apologetic, he insisted he take her to lunch, immediately, to make up for it. She teased him about the length of his beard and how it was trimmed very unevenly over his lip. He laughed, saying that if he had it his way the beard would have come off long ago; the general rattyness was to make it unappealing to a woman he was seeing.

For two days, Valerie was left to her own devices, Bernard having to work. Each morning he apologized and each morning she told him not to worry, told him she was surprised that he’d managed to get any time off, considering she had just appeared on his doorstep, unannounced. She would watch him take the bus at the corner stop and then would read through magazines, drink enough wine to keep her light but not so much she would get drunk before evening, and she would stand at the windows or the door, but wouldn’t leave the house.

When she told her brother about Leonora, he became very serious and asked her what she was doing to protect herself.

“There’s nothing to protect myself from, Bernard. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“You told me that the man wasn’t caught, yet. How do you know he won’t try to kill, again?”

“I suppose I don’t know,” she said, as though it were a bore, a point she had to acquiesce to or else the conversation would stall out. “But for all I know they might have caught him, in the meantime.”

Bernard told her she was being irresponsible, that it was completely reckless to not take precautions. She laughed, giving him an exaggerated punch to the arm, saying she was dangerous enough in her own right.

“I want you to take one of my guns.”

She laughed a punctuated, piercing squeal, the sound bursting from her suddenly and it took her a moment to compose herself. “Since when do you have a gun? How many guns do you have?”  She made shooting gestures at him, giggling still, breaking his stern expression, but only long enough for him to rough her hair as he stood and told her to follow him into another room.

She agreed to take a gun, but said that she had no interest in his offer of learning how to shoot it. But, he made her go through the motions of loading the gun, readying it, and pulling the trigger a few times, through her protesting, and would not let her alone until she was able to show him she had learned it properly.

“Are you sure you don’t want to fire it, once or twice? We can go in to the basement, no one around here would think it odd.”

She managed to stop herself from laughing at the thought of her brother, all alone, in his basement, shooting a gun at nothing, at no one, the bang and then the silence. She wondered if it felt dull or fulfilling and how often he got up to that.

“I want to go to the movies, tomorrow,” she said, Bernard closing the gun in its box and counting out some amount of bullets for her to keep. He nodded his head and absently said okay, wincing like he’d lost count.

***

The night before her return trip, she woke in the grip of an extreme anxiety, paced the room and then snuck down to have a drink of vodka, as quietly as she could, filling a tall glass and going back to her room with it. She hadn’t thought to call anyone for the entire week, the time had just slipped past and now it occurred to her that Randolph may have been arrested in her absence. In fact, the more she thought about it, it may have been the photograph she’d left that could have prompted things. Randolph may have confessed. She regretted the theatrics of it, the red envelope and the tape, the dank, accusatory feel of her face obliterated under the thick ink. It seemed years and years ago, now, and she could not convince herself at all that things would be as she had left them, that something pivotal hadn’t happened, that things hadn’t gotten away from her. She went as far as picking up the telephone and dialing her own telephone number, listening to her answering machine message, letting the beep sound and the hush of her being recorded fill her ears.

Bernard asked her if she was feeling well enough to travel, even offering to hire a car if it would suit her better, not having to deal with the crowds and the air of the train. She very much wanted to take him up on the offer, but she knew it would play out oddly, her saying yes I would like that would lead him to think she really was ill and then he would insist she stay and that a car could be hired tomorrow, as the train trip was nearly that long, either way and she would not be able to stop herself protesting which in turn would cause Bernard, her brother and aware of too many lines to her face and just what they meant, to ask her what was actually the matter.

“I couldn’t sleep last night and drank to put myself out.”

“Did you?” He was grinning and so she just acted embarrassed and gave him a shove, allowing him to tease her until he drifted in to talking about something else.

In the toilet on the train, she removed the gun from its box, pulling the trigger a few times before loading it. She rested the gun on her bare knee, her eyes stuck in its direction while she urinated. After some time, she found she’d been drifting off, that she was chilly from having been sitting bent forward so long, pants down and a strand of drool was nearly ready to drop over her lower lip.

For a few minutes, she calmed herself by reasoning that Caroline or Talia would have called her had someone been arrested for Leonora’s murder. Certainly if Randolph had killed himself, which was another possibility, that information would get out soon enough and someone would have contacted her, as everyone knew she was just with her brother for no reason in particular, a telephone call wouldn’t interrupt that and even if it was an interruption such news would be considered important enough to breach etiquette.

But there remained the chance Randolph had turned himself in quietly, no news or fanfare. There remained the possibility that he’d written a confession and then driven to some quiet place to end his life in familiar comfort. With Leonora’s room empty, likely rented out again already, none of her friends would know a word of it. She felt ashamed for having left, guilty that she may have let so much vanish without her.

***

The third message on her machine was from Randolph. There was no actual message, no words, just a long silence that she first thought was the call she’d placed to herself, but then a moan of warmth ran through her and she knew it must be him. After another two messages, it was Randolph, in silence again. She wondered how many times he’d called her without letting the machine pick up, tried to think of his face and could not.

She was jarred by the sound of her own voice in a whisper from the machine.

“Valerie. This is Valerie. You cannot sleep. You should sleep. Valerie, you cannot sleep anymore, Valerie.”

She didn’t recall speaking when she’d called. She played the message back twice, erased it and realized that her eyes were watering.

She sat on the sofa, placing Bernard’s gun on the table, chewing on the skin beneath the tip of her thumb. She looked out her window, staring intently at the lit window of the building across the way, waiting for some movement, stood there for ten minutes before she realized there was no point in it, that the window meant nothing.

She set Bernard’s gun on the top of some books on the shelf near the kitchen, taking a dish towel from the counter to cover it. She walked around the apartment, looking at the towel there, and she made this or that adjustment to the placing, not able to satisfy herself. After a little more than an hour, she decided to leave the gun there without the towel, threw the towel into the trash without thinking, began undressing for a shower.

While she stood in the water, not washing, she thought over and over that she heard the telephone. She had left her light on; it would be obvious that now she was at home. She stood naked at the sink and brushed her teeth, challenging herself to keep her eyes closed, to turn her head down, to turn her head up, face the mirror, count twenty and open her eyes, but she was only able to go through with it once out of the half dozen times she attempted.

Pouring herself some wine, she sat to the sofa and watched part of some movie, tilting her head to look at the window and then at the door, the telephone rested on the sofa arm. Her eyes grew bloated and she wanted the light off but didn’t feel like standing. When the telephone rang, she looked at it and sighed, reaching for it in a pretend of melancholy while feeling nothing but the desire to be away someplace else, that and a petty regret at not having already done this, at having waited until now when it could’ve been over and done.

“Hello?”

“Is this Valerie?”

At the sound of his voice she found herself growing frustrated, put upon. “I’ve been away. Have you been calling me? Are you still here, Randolph?”

After a pause, a finished glass of wine at a long swallow, the face on the television changing from this to that to this to a camera arcing over a woman lolling on a bicycle, Randolph said please as though he might be some child wishing to himself.

***

Valerie watched Randolph Tate smoke three cigarettes, sort of wondering why he’d left the building through the side door to have to come around to the entrance down below her window, but really it made perfect sense to her. If Randolph had just come to her door it would’ve been far more off-putting. She went to the door and unlocked it, decided against leaving it ajar, relocked it and went to the sink, washing her hands with soap and drying them against the fabric of the back of her shirt.

Entering the apartment, Randolph moved right past her, a slush of clothing, walked the length of the room and took a seat in her desk chair, turning it out so that he faced the sofa, the squat of the room center. He looked at her, but kept turning his eyes down. Only after a moment did he say something, but Valerie could not hear and, irritation in her tone, she asked him, “What?”

“It was you in the photograph. But I didn’t know.”

She shrugged and told him he wasn’t really supposed to know. “I don’t care that you know, but I don’t think I really thought you would know.”

“You want me to confess.”

She blinked, looking at him, his face quizzical and after a minute she shook her head, mouth a bit of a twist. “No. I don’t want you to confess.”

“I killed that woman. Leonora. That woman who I would see in the hallways.”

She held up a hand, swallowing wrong and coughing, motioning him not to go on while she coughed, let saliva collect, enough that she could swallow the rough of the cough away.

“My mother will be dead, soon. She is very sick. I cannot be away from my mother while she dies.”

She shook her head and started to talk again, only able to get as far as repeating that she did not want him to confess.

“I promise you I will. Valerie, I promise you I will. When my mother dies. I will tell everything. I can tell you, first. I promise you.”

He was nearly in tears and looking now just at his slick folded hands, lightly shivering, dangled between his spread legs. He was whispering things, now, or else his breathing was just odd, foreign words or foreign breathing.

Valerie didn’t move quickly to where she had set the gun and when she picked it up she turned, took a pause but not a hesitation, leveled the barrel as best she could in Randolph’s direction, said his name and in almost the same instant depressed the trigger. From where she was standing, it looked as though the bullet had struck his arm, causing the tweed of his sport coat to pop a small circle, but the bullet must have pierced straight through. After she took a few breaths, Randolph’s body slowly leaned forward and fell from the chair to the floor in an awkward pile. He looked, she thought, something like a bit of old rope that had been coiled once, but had now come part way undone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pablo D’Stair is the author of novellas The Unburied Man and The People Who Use Room Five, and he is the founder of Brown Paper Publishing (http://www.brownpaperpublishing.net/) . Read Nik Korpon’s review of the novellas here : http://www.outsiderwriters.org/archives/4129