CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
“Did you want to sit?” Bridget asked, barely audible over the drone of the fan while motioning to the love seat on Larkin’s right. It was a checkered white-and-green monstrosity right out of Country Living , and the side closer to the window was faded from years of direct sunlight.
“Thank you.” Larkin unbuttoned his suit coat and sat. He watched Bridget resume her position before the dresser, crouched to see her face in the small mirror as she began applying eyeliner again. “Tell me how you knew Barbara.”
“It’s like you said—she worked at the Kitten Klub.”
Although Larkin had Doyle’s confirmation that his mother had worked at the club, the fact was, Doyle would have only been a baby, and the statement could be viewed as hearsay. He needed that evidence to come from Bridget’s own mouth. “Did you work there as well.”
Bridget set the eyeliner pencil aside. She opened the mascara tube and viciously shoved the wand in and out, creating a suction-like sound. “So what?”
“It’s not a character judgment, merely a request for clarity.”
Bridget stopped and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were narrowed, her mouth pinched. “Lemme see that badge again.”
Larkin stood, removed his wallet a second time, and took a few steps forward, shield extended. Unprompted, he said, “I’ve been an officer for ten years.”
“I’ve known a lot of cops in my life,” she began, pointing the wand at Larkin. “None of ’em look like you or talk like you.”
“And I assure you, none ever will.”
“You a fag?” Bridget asked next, her tone not exactly cruel, but a sort of critical curiosity, suggesting she’d not experienced any sort of societal enlightenment since the ’80s, when that kind of vocabulary was tossed around like no other adjectives were available for use.
In response, Larkin merely snapped his wallet shut and tucked it back into his pocket.
“Just because you’re like that don’t mean you can’t be corrupt like all those other dirt bags.”
“May I sit back down.”
Bridget huffed, shrugged, and opened the mascara again.
Larkin returned to the love seat. “What were the dates of your employment at the Kitten Klub.”
“Let me check my diary,” Bridget said sardonically, making a face in the mirror as she brushed the wand over her lashes.
“I understand this was nearly forty years ago, but please be as precise as possible.”
“Where were you forty years ago?” she countered. “Sucking on a silver spoon and shitting your diaper?”
“I was still in the planning stage.”
Bridget set the mascara aside before turning around. “So daddy wasn’t even humping mommy when Babs died, but the best cop for the case—” She gestured at Larkin, as if explaining her circumstances to an onlooking and sympathetic audience. “—is a fucking fetus.”
Bridget Cohen’s rap sheet had been a paint-by-numbers portrait of a time when women turned to the streets in search of freedom, only to find out too late that Times Square was just a prison with bright lights.
The neighborhood’s boundaries forced its inmates to work live sex shows to survive, to seek drugs to cope, and to turn tricks when rent money was spent on that newly found addiction.
Bridget had been chewed up, spit out, and there’d been no system, however flawed, in place to help.
She’d carried some kind of childhood trauma into adulthood—feelings and thoughts she avoided at all cost by engaging in increasingly risky, self-harming behaviors—and she’d become so hardened, so deadened over time, that being presented with Barbara Fuller’s name and memory was triggering fear, and having to confront such an uncomfortable emotion was making Bridget angry .
It was distressing to be able to draw parallels between Bridget and Doyle, but Larkin could see, with naked clarity, the same avoidant behavior, the same unresolved anger.
The difference, however, was in their response to emotional vulnerability.
Doyle gave. He gave his entire heart and then more.
He’d stepped in front of his own generational trauma to protect his daughter, had taken those knives in the back while undoubtably meeting her innocent little smile with one of his own, and even though Abigail was gone now, Doyle didn’t know anything but being gentle.
Because vulnerability meant understanding.
Understanding meant acceptance.
And Doyle needed, more than anything, to be wanted.
But Bridget…. She’d lost custody of her child after nine tumultuous years of motherhood, and had never sought him out in the aftermath.
Not an inquiry into his well-being, his education, nothing .
Larkin was confident, even without the proof seen in her bachelor pad living conditions, that Bridget had no healthy relationships.
She wasn’t intimate with anyone, she likely had no close friends, didn’t interact with neighbors, and was probably that person on her shift—the one other employees dreaded working with.
Because for Bridget, vulnerability meant danger.
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 he wasn’t coming 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, and bam , suddenly the Westies are wining and dining the fucking Gambino crime family. ”
“What was Tony’s last name.”
“Vargas.”
“ What ?”