Chapter 19

 

 

Leaving the Club Festival after closing, around 3:30 a.m., cigarette girl Linda Avery slung her purse over her shoulder and began the long walk home. Not well off enough to afford a car, she was too poor to afford a taxi, at least that night.

“That’s the breaks,” she said to herself, and began to apply a little leg action to the journey. Her stepfather used a different term growing up; when she asked him one time to drive her somewhere, he advised her to use “shanks mare,” an old timey term for walking.

Instinctively, she noticed someone following her right away. The first thing she heard were footsteps. She listened carefully to the clip-clop on the sidewalk. She crossed the street in the middle of the block, which gave her the natural opportunity to check both ways while in the middle of the street. As she turned to the right, she saw him.

She could tell it was a man, lurching across the street in parallel with her. She kept her pace and began to think about who it might be as she traversed the street. Linda sees so many people at the club during her shift that she didn’t immediately recognize the man. Then it struck her: It was the same man who had been argumentative with both her and Emily Lou near closing time. It was the man in the trench coat that Emily Lou refused to serve after last call, the same rude man who bumped into her at the club.

After Linda cut across the boulevard in the middle of the block and to the sidewalk on the other side of the street, the man was still following, but getting closer. At last he made a beeline toward her.

“You’re the sweet thing that sells cigarettes,” the man said, clearly drunk and clearly menacing. Filled with alcohol and wanting to return some of the wrath he received from two very aggressive women earlier, he was ready to dish out some punishment. It wouldn’t matter who was on the receiving end, as long as someone got hurt other than himself.

“Sir, I’m going to have to advise you to back away,” she replied. She knew she sounded like some sort of police officer, but she also realized it didn’t matter what you said at this instant, it mattered how you said it.

The drunk, menacing man stumbled forward a few steps, then stopped.

“Lady, don’t get threatening with me,” he spit out.

The cigarette girl knew she had to do something. The street was deserted, and no one was around to help her. All she had to defend herself was her wits.

The man stood there, weaving in place, mumbling something to himself and rummaging through his pockets. It was this last movement that gave Linda the impetus to take action.

Like a football running back, she sprung forward, running at full speed toward the man. She collided with him at a full clip, leaning forward at the last minute and catching the man between the gut and the rib cage. He flew up, back and down into the gutter, stunned.

Linda, who was prepared for the sudden maneuver, continued running in the same direction, back toward the club. She knew Lou would still be there, closing down the joint and checking the day’s take.

She ran through the dark streets, looking behind her as she turned the blocks. She was still in a panic as she reached the front door of the Club Festival. She banged on the front door with her right hand in a fist.

“Lou, let me in, let me in!” she hollered.

He’d heard the hammering on the front door, and at first thought it was some crazy from the street.

But then he heard a woman’s voice, yelling, practically screaming. He ran to the door; he peered through the tiny window and immediately recognized Linda. He hurriedly unbolted the deadbolt and opened the door. Lou let Linda into the club as quickly as he could.

Linda practically fell into the club’s entrance.

At the same time, the man who had been threatening Linda lay in the gutter, stunned. After a few minutes, he began to realize that he’d been made the victim, that the woman he thought he was going to terrorize wasn’t going to take it sitting down. Or, in her case, standing up.

The numbing effects of the booze began to wear off him in a hurry. He got up on his knees at first, then to his feet.

“I’m lucky to have my head still screwed on,” he thought to himself, “after that slamming.”

He stumbled down the street, heading home. It’d been a long day. Hell, it’d been a long night, and he was exhausted.

“Luck of the Irish,” he thought to himself, as he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth to see if he’d lost any teeth. “Luck o’ the Irish.”

Linda was still catching her breath at the Club Festival. Lou let his cigarette girl calm down, got her a drink and put on some quiet music.

Linda, shaken from the experience of being seriously menaced by a stranger, needed some time to relax. She was drenched in sweat, her blond hair matted with perspiration. Her heart was still pounding, her breath quickened.

It all happened so fast.

It was then that she noticed she had lost her favorite blue beret. It must have fallen off during the altercation. The whole incident was dreamlike, almost a fantasy.

Then she started to laugh.

“Lou,” she said, half laughing, “you shoulda seen that sucker go down.”

Lou was glad to help his female friend when she needed it. His philosophy was that with family, you were stuck, but with friends, you pick and choose. Loyalty to friends was more important than loyalty to family, in Lou Brodsky’s world.

“Baby, you know I’m always here for you,” he said, giving her a wink and a smile.

“Thanks, Lou, it’s nice to know you can depend on someone,” she said as she threw back her hair.

It was then that she noticed she’d probably injured her neck in the impact with her potential assailant. “That’ll be stiff in the morning,” she said to herself.

But for now it was nice to sit in the quiet bar, sipping on a nice, stiff drink. Lou never cheaped out on the drinks. Maybe customers got the watered-down version, but not a friend. Friends don’t give friends watered-down drinks.

“Lou, I gotta get goin’,” she said, expelling the words with a sigh. It was late, the adrenaline had worn off, and tomorrow, as they say, is another day.

“OK, baby, shag your svelte ass on down the road. Do you want me to call a cab?”

“No thanks, Lou, I can hoof it,” she mumbled dismissively. “Whoever it was that attacked me, he’s long gone, and I hope for his sake he doesn’t try bothering me again.”

“You did good, girl,” he said to her. “Did our discussion about protecting yourself on the street we had the other day help at all?”

“I dunno, Lou,” she admitted. “I’m not sure if it did or didn’t, but I appreciate the advice. I guess it helped. It couldn’t have hurt.”

“Well, at least you’re OK,” he said.

“I’m better than OK, Lou. I feel like I did the right thing at the right time, so I guess your talk on self defense must have helped me at least gain a little confidence.”

“Well, I’m glad if I helped.”

“Thanks again, Lou,” she said as Lou unlocked the front door and let the cigarette girl out into the night.

The minute she was out on the concrete, she immediately saw the problem with her decision to try walking home again. What if the same man was waiting around the corner? For a few seconds she thought about turning around, knocking on the door of the club and asking Lou for help. But in a flash, she caught herself doubting her own abilities, shook off the doubt and began hoofing it home.

“Fuck the bastard,” she said to herself. “If he tries anything again, he’ll get another dose of that medicine.”

She walked briskly yet confidently home, taking an alternate route.

As she rounded a corner near her apartment, she was startled by a stray cat running in front of her. She took a deep breath, composed herself again and finished her journey.

Once home, she was too anxious and wound-up to go right to sleep. She changed out of her clothes, and again remembered that she’d lost her favorite beret.

“Damn,” she said aloud to herself, “that’s the only beret I ever liked.”

She got into a comfortable set of PJs and turned on the stereo. The music that came out at first was rock ‘n’ roll, so she changed the channel to the classical radio station in town. Some calming classical guitar music came on. She looked at the clock, and it was 4:15 in the morning. She was thankful to be home, to be alive and to be in one piece. Life in the city was tough, but she was tougher.

Linda contacted the Portland Police Bureau the next day to describe her attack and the attacker.

“So, you’re saying you’re OK?” the woman at the police bureau making a record of the incident asked Linda.

“Yeah,” Linda said, “except for a sore shoulder where I ran into the guy.”

“You know, you could have gotten really hurt doing that. He could have had a knife or a gun, or grabbed you as you flew into him. What I’m saying is you might want to consider other options the next time.”

“Like what?” Linda’s voice was strained and cracked; she was getting impatient with the woman at the other end of the phone. Linda didn’t think the woman was taking the incident seriously enough.

“Like running away from the man, going to a place of business and knocking on a door, anything but confront the man.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not,” said the police bureau representative. “I’m serious. Can you give me a description of the man.”

“I sure can, and so can one of the waitresses at the club where I work.”

“OK, shoot.”

“Well ...” she said, hesitating. Linda began to realize that she did not get a good look at the man either inside the club or outside on the street.

“Don’t tell me you can’t describe him.”

“Yeah, yeah, give me minute.”

“I haven’t got all day, ma’am.”

“Hold on to your horses.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“The one thing I know is that he was wearing a tan trench coat, you know, one of those coats that you see in old fashioned detective movies.”

“I know what a trench coat is, ma’am.”

The woman taking down the information for the report was getting impatient with Linda, but knew that the information had to be recorded properly. It was her job to make sure the incident had all the important details, details which might come in handy in the future, in case of an arrest and ultimate prosecution.

“Other than the trench coat, I’m not positive what he looked like. I know he was a white male, older…”

“How old do you think he was?”

“Maybe late 40s, maybe 50 years old, I dunno.”

After several minutes, the police bureau had a report on an attempted assault by an adult white male, possibly in his 40s or 50s, wearing a trench coat. There wasn’t much to go on, so the police couldn’t do much more than make a record of the incident. Linda forgot to give Emily Lou’s name to the woman taking down the information, and the woman forgot to ask for it.

Linda wasn’t as obsessed by the episode as she was with the robbery where she lost her money and her ID. All she lost this time was her beret.

Trouble seemed to follow Linda of late, but she’d escaped being physically harmed by using her smarts and her wits.

It was a frustrating conversation with the police, and Linda was not thoroughly satisfied with her interaction.

“Those people don’t give a shit about me,” she said to herself. “I’m a statistic to them.”

Her frustration was enough to put her into a depressive state. She still had a few hours before heading to work, so she took what she liked to call a “lay down” and napped for an hour.

She dreamed a devilishly weird dream, unlike any other.

She dreamed that her brother Joe developed an inoperable cancer and had been told by the doctors he only had a few weeks to live. In the dream her brother decided that if he was going to die, he was going to take a few people with him. Her brother Joe had made up his mind to go on a violent killing rampage, and to “take out” any of the people in his past that had wronged him.

Before her brother could begin his killing rampage, Linda awoke from the dream in a cold sweat. She lay in bed contemplating the nature of her dream, trying to make some sense of it. She couldn’t. She decided not to attach any significance to it, since there didn’t seem to be any meaning to the dream.

But the dream about her brother did inspire her to call him. It being the middle of the afternoon, he’d be at work. She couldn’t remember his work telephone number, so she looked it up in her address book. She decided she’d pull a trick on him; hell, he was her brother, if she can’t pull his leg, whose leg could she pull?

She got out her cell phone and dialed his number. He answered after the second ring.

“Joe Avery.”

With her voice disguised, Linda was ready to pounce.

“Mr. Avery?”

“Yes, this is Joe Avery.”

“Mr. Avery, this is the American Red Cross. We’re calling to see if you’d be willing to come down to our North Portland center and donate blood.”

“I’d like to,” Joe said, “but last year, when I tried to donate blood, you folks checked my blood and found out I was anemic. They said it’s because I don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables.”

Linda was completely caught off guard by her brother’s confession. She intended to pull a prank, but instead found out more than she wanted to find out about her brother’s medical condition.

“Joe, this is Linda.”

“Linda, what the hell are you doing? I know you aren’t working for the Red Cross!”

“I called to pull a joke, but I guess it backfired. I’m really embarrassed. I’m sorry I’m bothering you.”

“Sis, you really take the cake, you know it? Here I am at work, busy as hell, and you have nothing better to do than give me grief. What is wrong with you?”

“Jeez, Joe, lighten up, there’s no harm done.”

“Sis, you can really be a royal pain in the ass, you know it?”

“Sorry, Joe, I’ll go away now. I don’t know what got into me. Maybe it was what happened last night.”

“Huh? What happened last night?”

“You don’t want to know. I’d better go and stop bothering you.”

“No, no, you brought it up. Tell all.”

Linda gave a thumbnail sketch of the turmoil with the man in the trench coat.

“So you’re OK?” Joe said. “Did the man get hurt when you ran into him?”

“I didn’t stick around to find out. Why would I care if he was hurt? Why are you more concerned about him than about me?”

“Come on, sis, I was only curious. So you’re OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’d better go now.”

“Well, I’d like to say it was fun talking with you, but it wasn’t.”

“Fine, Joe, I’ll talk to you later.”

Linda hung up and sat in her apartment steaming over Joe’s seeming lack of sensitivity. After a few seconds she remembered that it was she who called him, in an attempt to pull a practical joke.

“I guess I’m just another woman giving Joe a hard time,” she said aloud to herself.

She thought back on all his trouble with the female sex. She thought she knew her brother, but his history of abusing women perplexed Linda. He had never picked on her as children. Where did he get his aggressive nature?

Linda lay back down on the bed to catch another few winks before hoofing it to the workplace. Her interactions with other humans hadn’t been very positive today, and she hoped that she might find refuge at the Club Festival. She knew she would. Lou had been so supportive of her, so kind to offer a shoulder to cry on. But it was more than that. Lou had provided some good information on defending herself on the streets, and she appreciated that. There were many things to be thankful for, and one of them was Lou Brodsky.

Linda’s cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Are you Linda Avery?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got your beret.”

“What? Who are you? Where’d you find it?”

“My name is Seymour. I live in Southeast Portland, and I was riding my bicycle through downtown Portland early this morning when I saw this beret hanging on a parking meter. I usually wouldn’t touch anything like that, but it somehow drew me to it. You’ve got your name and phone number written on the inside.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

“How can I get this thing to you?”

“Gosh, it’s nice of you to offer to help. I work at the Club Festival in downtown, and I’ll be at work in a few hours. You could drop it off there with anybody.” Linda gave the fellow the address of the club.

“OK, sounds good. I’ll see if I can stop by tomorrow and drop it off.”

“Hey, thanks a million.”

“No problem.” He hung up the phone. He did drop the beret by the next day, dirty but otherwise intact. Sometimes there’s a bit of good news to accompany the bad.