Chapter Twenty-Five
Matthew
He didn’t want to ruminate about the night it had all started but he couldn’t keep himself from thinking back on it. If only he had put the kibosh on the whole thing then.
He shut his eyes and leaned back in his chair, and the image of Tara and him at the Sky Lounge came to mind.
They were having drinks on the top floor of a skyscraper downtown. The place was dimly lit, with velvet-covered booths, dark wood tables, and little white Christmas lights strung all over the ceiling year-round, giving it the effect of stars above your head. A jazz band trio played in the corner.
Tara was sipping a bright pink cocktail that cost Matthew twenty-four dollars.
It was a perfect example of why he felt he needed his salary to maintain or even go up.
If he left the weekend job now he’d likely either have to move down in market size and make significantly less or find some PR job that sounded like the march of death to him.
He and Tara had a fun lifestyle and he wanted to keep it.
They chatted for a while about other things, but then the conversation turned to Faith, as it often did.
“So … she has a stalker, right?” Tara asked.
“Yes, several I think,” Matthew had replied. “But this dude Steve is the worst. He leaves messages on the weather-office voicemail all the time. I’ve seen letters he’s sent her, crazy shit about how much he loves her. Ha! If only he knew her.”
“Can you get your hands on any of these letters?”
“Sure … why?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. You’re sure you can get them?”
“Yeah, we’ve been told by HR not to ever throw away those kinds of letters just in case we need them as evidence, so we keep everything, with the envelopes and return addresses too, and they all go into the PC file, it’s just a drawer in the office.”
“The PC file?” Tara asked.
“Yeah, it stands for Psychos and Crazies. Jack named it that before he retired and it stuck. He had some female stalker who would write in asking him if he wanted to walk backward with her. Jack used to joke that if he ever met this woman in person he’d run away screaming.”
Tara laughed, and Matthew did too, but he was wondering why he himself had never had a stalker.
Although parts of it seemed like a true pain in the rear, it also would show that some woman found him so attractive that she was obsessed with him, which might not be all bad.
It bothered him that he was one of the only TV people he knew who had never encountered such a person.
It also bothered him that despite being on TV in Detroit for a decade he rarely got recognized in public.
“OK, this is sooo perfect,” Tara said, taking a long sip of her drink. The lights of the city twinkled in the background. “You also have access to her promo pictures, right?”
“Sure, there’s a stack for each of us in the office. We take them out on remotes and to festivals and sign them for fans.”
The photos were done professionally every few years, using a studio space the station had set up in a back room.
They lit it well and brought in photographers who did the whole “chin up, chin down, slightly less teeth, more teeth, no teeth at all” thing while snapping away hundreds of shots and angles.
One would be the winner each time and would come to the talent in a giant stack of eight-by-tens, their name and the station logo stamped across the bottom.
Of course Faith’s also had to have “Your Fair-Weather Friend” and the info for the fan club on hers.
Matthew’s, Faith’s, Abby’s, and Chuck’s were all side by side on a shelf in the office.
“Here’s what I need,” Tara said, lowering her voice to a whisper and glancing around the bar to make sure no one could hear them, but the jazz trio was in a long riff and there was no way anyone could have overheard.
“Get me a few of the stalker Steve’s letters with his return address, and bring me a few of her promo photos. I’ll handle the rest.”
“What are you going to do? Are you going to write to him?” Matthew whispered back. He felt an equal amount of titillation and trepidation. These were dangerous waters, more dangerous than hiding a lipstick for a few days. Tara was unpredictable.
“Yup … just a little fun. I have that female handwriting.”
“But what if he writes back or leaves another voicemail thanking her for her letter?” Matthew asked. Nerves crept into his stomach. Tara could be just thinking she was having fun, but it was his career and their future in jeopardy if he was somehow ever caught.
“Hmm … let me think about that,” she said, looking down at her drink and slowly swirling it.
She looked up with a Cheshire cat grin. “I’ll just tell him not to, that management wouldn’t like it if they knew I was corresponding with a fan that way but that he’s so special I have to.
I can keep him on the fishing line for a while. ”
“OK,” Matthew said cautiously. He knew that when she got on a roll there really was no stopping her. “But what is our ultimate goal in this?”
“To make her life miserable, of course!” Tara cackled. “At some point we’ll ramp it up with him and he’ll start showing up everywhere she is—out at station appearances or wherever. She’ll get so freaked out she’ll quit and you’ll be promoted!”
Matthew looked down at his own drink, a dark beer. He felt his stomach tighten. Didn’t the old saying go “Don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned”?
But if he didn’t do it Tara would think he was a pussy. And really her plan had some merit to it. Maybe Faith would get flustered and decide to leave. He knew her contract was coming up and she’d have a decision to make soon. So he looked back up and gave a smile and a nod.
“Woo-hoo! You’re the best, honey!” she cried, lifting her drink for a toast. They clinked glasses and Matthew said he would deliver the goods to her after his next workday.
He knew getting them would be easy, and it was.
He just waited until he was alone in the office, locked the door, and went to the PC file, where the number of letters from Steve dwarfed all others.
There was one declaring that Faith was “three diamonds” but he could make her feel like “five diamonds.”
Matthew knew Faith lived at the Three Diamonds apartment building and he paused for a moment, wondering if that was what Steve was referring to. But no, there was no way this guy could know her address. Matthew dismissed it as a coincidence.
He took that letter and several others, including one that asked if Faith remembered Steve from the Belle Isle Art Fair. Then he grabbed a few promo photos and put everything in a manila envelope, hiding it under some other things in his work bag.
Tara took over from there. She didn’t even tell him about the first letter she sent out until after the fact.
“I did it, I sent letter number one to Steve yesterday,” she announced a few days later.
Soon after, she began really ramping up the chatter with the stalker, to the point where Matthew found it extremely uncomfortable, but Tara thought it was fun. She set up a private email address and took a picture of herself in a bathrobe in the mirror, pretending she was Faith.
“The idiot has no idea it’s not his lover girl,” she said, laughing. “I told him we’ll only take pictures of our bodies, not our faces, and he agreed.”
For weeks she played this guy, taking a picture of her shoulder or leg or a bare foot or her cleavage.
She took one in her underwear and a bra and she might have even gone further in stripping, Matthew wasn’t sure.
He did know that Steve reciprocated with photos of himself, usually in the exact same poses.
Tara showed them to Matthew and they both made fun of Steve for everything from his awful looks to his puppy-dog eagerness.
At the R&B Music Festival one Saturday, Matthew was standing next to Faith in what talent at Channel 9 jokingly called “the bride and groom receiving line” with viewers when he saw a dorky guy in jean shorts, white socks, and a cheap polo shirt that was too tight stop in front of Faith and start to say loudly that his name was Steve and that he was her boyfriend and they traded pictures.
Matthew’s antennae went up. This had to be the guy Tara was conversing with. Although Matthew had never seen the guy’s face, because all of Steve’s photos were from the neck down, this had to be him.
Faith was completely clueless as she tried to appease this viewer in front of her, and Matthew felt a tinge of guilt.
He also wondered if she noticed, as Matthew had, that Steve then stood under a tree not far away from them and watched for the entire rest of the time they were there.
Matthew tried hard not to stare at him too much.
Luckily, the meteorologists all got into the weather vehicle at the end and quickly took off.
He told Tara about it that night, and she checked the private email to see if Steve had written.
“Oh yeah, he’s asking why she ignored him at the festival,” Tara said. “Don’t worry, I got this. I’ll tell him I was trying to keep it secret from you and others.”
Her fingers flew over the keys and she smiled in satisfaction as she hit send. But when Steve responded, he asked for an in-person date again. He had been doing this for a while now.
“How long can you keep this guy at bay?” Matthew asked, leaning over her shoulder at the laptop to read Steve’s email.
“A while. I have a great idea,” Tara replied.
“I’m going to ask him to follow me home and to other stuff instead.
Can you get me Faith’s calendar from the shared one you all have for events?
I’ll ask him to show up at all of these.
This is when Faith will get unnerved by this guy and it will make her want to leave Detroit.
Then operation ‘Matthew to the main met chair’ will be fully complete.
When she leaves the city I’ll write to Steve one more time pretending to be Faith saying ‘I’m so sorry I got transferred to another city and our love will never have a chance to grow’ and then he’ll be out of her hair for good and she’ll be out of ours. It’s just soooo perfect.”
Matthew had never felt fully on board with all of this manipulation, and he certainly didn’t like his girlfriend sending sexy pictures to another man, even if she never showed her face.
But Tara was unstoppable. There was really no way of stemming the tide now, he knew that.
Tara was having too much fun. The whole thing seemed to excite her.
He let out a deep sigh and told her not to go too overboard. She turned her head toward him and gave him one of the more passionate kisses he could remember in a while, and he was jelly for her, as usual.
But just a month later Faith was dead, strangled in her car. Was it possible Steve had followed her on her dinner break and done this? Or was he as heartbroken as the rest of humanity seemed to be and he was innocent, nothing more than a clueless fool?
Now Matthew sat in the office and ruminated over not only the course of events with Steve the stalker but also just the whirlwind past few days.
It had been nonstop since Perry had called Saturday morning to tell Matthew the news.
He had to wake Tara and tell her, and she screamed and even cried a little.
They both had looked at each other with trepidation and Matthew said aloud what he was sure they were both contemplating: “You don’t think? Not the stalker? It can’t be, right?”
“I don’t know,” Tara replied, her face whiter than he had ever seen it. “Let’s not even let our minds go there.”
He had always been nervous that somehow their little game could be traced. Even if Steve was not responsible for Faith’s death in any way—and God, he hoped not—Matthew could be fired if this ever came to light.
It could go any number of ways. The police might never bother them again and they’d be scot-free for life, or the complete opposite: they could be accomplices to a murder.
Or perhaps a middle ground. He could be fired for harassing a fellow employee.
With the amount of harassment training they had to do at work, he knew there was a zero tolerance level for anything like that.
Two of the three options were very, very bad things for their future, and his bowels seemed to shift. He felt like he might have diarrhea coming on.
Why oh why had he ever let it get this far? He should have stopped it long ago. This kind of game-playing wasn’t worth it, and it hadn’t had the desired effect. It didn’t make Faith just turn and run away to another city, it made her dead.