This is the first part of the non-fiction book I am currently working on. I'm publishing it partially because if this much is out there, it will force me to actually work on it and finish it. It's not polished or refined, but you're welcome to read it.
This book is not a technical book like my others. It is an auto-biographical piece about my journal in animal welfare, and the formation of my non-profit animal welfare organization that resulted from a terrible act of animal cruelty. What you see here is only a very small part of what this book will become. It has proven to be physically exhausting to write, especially these first parts that detail the initial crime.
Content Warning: Animal abuse
On the afternoon of October 16, 2001, my good friend and neighbor Jane burst through my door, tears streaming down her face. She was sobbing so hard, I could barely decipher what she was saying, her eyes swollen and red. When I finally got her to calm down enough for me to understand her, she explained between sobs that she just got off the phone with San Diego Animal Control, who had told her that her cat had been stolen and set on fire with a Molotov cocktail.
Jane was in no condition to drive, so we ran to my car and headed for the clinic. She sat in my car, bawling while I drove. I was a pillar of strength, telling her not to worry, and that we shouldn’t panic until we could talk to the vet and see Bert for ourselves. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as we thought. Truthfully, I think what she was saying just hadn’t really sunk in yet. It was impossible. It couldn’t be Bert. It couldn’t happen here in Del Mar. People don’t really do things like that, especially not here.
Jane was originally from Liverpool, England. She had moved to San Diego long before I had, and she was the first friend I had made there. When I moved to southern California from the Bronx, I knew only one person – a friend from highschool who decided to tag along and explore a brave new world.
Upon my arrival in California, I had very little in the way of possessions. I left much of my life back in the Bronx, in the apartment I had been subletting. A company I had been contracted with for quite a while decided to offer me a job in the land of fruits and nuts, so who was I to argue – I had needed a change of scenery anyway. I was tired of the cold, tired of the commute, and tired of having to see my own demons every day.
I didn’t know much about San Diego, and even less about Del Mar. At the time of my move, my company asked me where I wanted to live. I told them I wanted to live close to work, as I was exhausted from driving several hours to and from work every day. I had been working in the Wall Street district for a women’s Internet company, and teaching two web design and computer graphics classes a day in Brooklyn. I got my wish, as my office was less than two short blocks from new apartment.
California was a new start. A place where the air was clean, the beach was close, and I could fall asleep to the sound of the ocean every night. In New York, I used to carry a knife with me everywhere I went. Not that I ever wanted to use it, but I was raised not to be a victim, and I had pulled it more than once to get myself out a jam. I was looking forward to leaving it behind – a good thing too, since they confiscated it at the airport when my company flew me out to interview. (Note to self: do not try to carry a switchblade onto an aircraft.) In my hurry to dig my car out of the snow and make my redeye flight, I had completely forgotten that I had left it in the pocket of my leather motorcycle jacket.
I met Jane my second day in California. She lived across the courtyard from me, and was cat-sitting for a neighbor who had left her the keys to their condo. She had accidentally locked the keys inside the condo, and was frantic about what to do. The couple wouldn’t be home for another week. She had heard I was from New York City, and promptly asked me if I knew how to break into an apartment. (Apparently all New Yorkers know how to do that sort of thing.) I guardedly replied that it depended entirely upon the setup of the apartment, and she pointed to the condo just across from her on the second floor.
As it happened, the condo was on the top floor, and the owners had left the bathroom window open, only a few feet below a flat roof. I asked her for a ladder, and got to work. It was going to have to be a group effort through, so I recruited my friend from high school who had taken the 3,000 mile journey with me. We climbed onto the roof, and holding onto her legs, I lowered Melanie down the side of the building until she could squeeze her torso through the bathroom window. After shimmying her way through, she sauntered out through the front door less than a moment later, jingling the keys as she smiled. We declared victory over a glass of wine, and an unbreakable friendship between Jane and I was born.
All of those things flooded into my head on the drive to the VCA Emergency Animal Hospital, a drive that felt like it took days, but in reality it was only about 20 minutes. I was yanked back into the present by Jane’s gasps for air and cries of utter despair. I once again told her not to worry, driving with one hand on the wheel and the clasping her hand as she cried. Bert was still alive, and I was sure that everything would be okay.
Bert was a female cat, a detail that the media would continually overlook in almost every interview I gave months and even years later. She was an indoor-outdoor cat. Jane would let her out during the day, and would take her in at night, to keep her safe from the coyotes and other nocturnal predators that are native to southern California. Anyone walking up the flight of stairs to get to the small courtyard that adjoined the apartments in my building would be given a warm welcome of friendly meowing, whether they wanted one or not. If they sat down on one of the white plastic chairs dotting the courtyard, within moments their lap would be occupied by a tiny black cat that would curl up and fall asleep purring. Bert was small for her age – she was thirteen, but the size of a 6 month-old kitten, being the runt of her litter.
All of the members of our collective feline family were true characters. Ernie was the crabby old goat that no one bothered with, and Tigger was the pretty tabby that no one really saw much of. And then there was Bert. Sweet, beautiful, little Bert. She was named after Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street - Jane couldn't tell that she was female until later on. She decided to keep the name, and subsequently named Ernie, also a girl, to make the pair complete. Ironically, the kittens grew up to be the exact opposite of their namesakes. Bert was friendly and perpetually cheerful, eager to make friends with anyone who wandered onto the property – a personality trait that may well have cost her her life.
During the drive, my mind kept drifting back to the image of Bert sitting on my lap, as she had so many times. It just couldn’t be her. Bert never wandered far. She always came home. I was sure that they’d realize there had been a mistake as soon as we got there. We would walk in and know that it wasn’t really her, but some poor stray that didn’t have a family and people that loved her. Somehow the fact that they got Jane’s number from the charred collar they found at the scene didn’t manage to penetrate my elaborate web of denial.
When we arrived at the clinic, I had completely convinced myself that this cat was not, could not possibly be, our little Bert, so I was actually fairly calm walking through the door. We explained who we were, and the receptionist immediately paled and ran into the back to let the veterinarian know we had arrived. She had tears in her eyes, but I didn’t seem to notice at the time. After a few minutes, she came back out and told us to follow her into a hallway that led to a closed door. I held Jane’s hand as we opened the door and walked into the small examination room. Nothing could have prepared me for what came next.
As soon as we opened the door, the stench of burnt flesh and hair filled my nostrils, almost gagging me. On the middle of the steel examination table was a tiny black cat in a fluffy cat bed. From a distance, you almost couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. She just looked like she was sleeping. It was only once I got closer that I could see that her fur was no longer fur – it was a hard shell that reminded me of the fuzzy coating they spray on cheap plastic toy animals that invariably wears off, exposing the shiny clear plastic beneath.
The cat on the table didn’t move while the vet was talking to us, and I truly have no recollection of what the vet said. As soon as Jane managed to speak, the tiny cat moved, trying desperately to lift her head. It became terribly evident that the cat knew Jane – and that the charred form on the table was Bert. I was trying so hard to be strong for Jane, but the smell and the sight of Bert struggling against her own frail body at the sound of Jane’s voice was too much. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I began to shake. The vet was still talking, but I couldn’t hear any of it. Jane was crying, but softly this time, not the violent sobs from before. She spoke softly to Bert, as if she were talking to an infant, reassuring Bert that she was here now and that everything would be alright.
I walked up to Bert and reached my hand out to pet her, after the veterinarian assured me that Bert was on heavy doses of painkillers and it would not cause her any pain. Her charred fur had formed a hard shell, and her whole body was icy to the touch.
They couldn't bathe her yet because her body temperature was far too low, due to shock. Even though the vet had warned us that she was cold, I was startled by just how cold she was. I could feel it even through the thick blanket they had put over her.
Tiny crumbles of burnt hair came off my on my hand with each apprehensive stroke. It didn’t seem possible that Bert was even still alive, as cold as she was, but her occasional movements, slight and strained though they were, told me she was still with us. All that remained of her whiskers were sizzled lumps around her mouth, and I could see raw patches of skin with second-degree burns in some places on her shoulders, but her eyes were alert and clear, so we were hopeful.
Bert looked so strange, not at all what I could have expected, so denial crept back into my mind. Maybe this really wasn’t Bert, just another small and terribly unfortunate black cat. That was when the vet pulled out the burned remains of a cat collar, and I saw Jane’s phone number engraved on the face.
As the reality of the situation finally began to sink in, my brain was able to process small fragments of the vet’s conversation.
The Good Samaritan who had stumbled across Bert while the attack was happening was also at the vets with us. She had gone to the animal hospital immediately, and had stayed there to see how Bert was doing. At the time of Bert's admission into the hospital, they weren't even sure if the cat had an owner, but Animal Control quickly notified them that Bert had been wearing a collar, and that her owner had been notified. The Good Samaritan, whom we'll call Karen, told us the events that had transpired. She had walked onto the scene of the crime, which was right behind her apartment, to find little Bert engulfed in flames, rolling around trying to put herself out.
There was a young man at the scene, sitting in a red pick-up truck, watching Bert as she frantically tried to extinguish the flames. Karen, seeing Bert enveloped in flames, ran up to the young man, begging for him to help her, and he flatly said no. He then drove around two more times, pulled back up to Karen, and asked if she "wanted to go for a ride", in a manner that struck Karen as exceptionally creepy.
As terrible as Bert looked, I couldn't help but think that she actually looked better than I had expected. The doctor told us that she had a good chance, but that it was a little too soon to say, since under all the charred fur, they couldn't see how extensive the burns were. Her eyes were alert and clear, and she responded to the sound of Jane's voice, so there was hope. At one point during our visit, she tried to stand up, but quickly stumbled and fell. We tried to tuck her arm back under her very gingerly to make sure her IV did not slip out. She looked so terrified.
After a few hours of visiting and paperwork, I took Jane back home. We were horrified at what had happened, but hopeful. Bert wasn't on Oxygen, so we were hoping that her lungs weren't damaged too much from the fire, so we thought she had a pretty good shot. Little Bert had always been a tough cat, so our outlook was as positive as could be expected.
The rest of the day was tense, but hopeful. I printed up some flyers to distribute around the neighborhood, making the neighbors aware of what had happened, to warn them to be sure they had identification tags on their pets, and if possible, to keep their animals inside until we caught the sick sonofabitch who did this. I ran down to Kinko's at about 11:30 after running out of printer paper, and spent another hour or so trying to quietly drop off flyers on the doorsteps of the people within a 9 or 10 block radius. I also emailed the story of what happened to the local newspapers and radio stations. To date, I still never heard back from them.
At midnight, we got a call from the hospital. Bert's kidneys were not responding. Jane headed back down to the hospital. This was a pretty severe turn for the worse. Fear started creeping back into our minds.
Jane spent that night and most of the following day at the animal hospital. She called me every few hours with update on how Bert was doing. I dreaded the phone ringing because every time she had called, the news was progressively worse. Bert's potassium levels were reaching toxic levels, her body temperature had still not come up, her kidneys were still not responding, and they discovered that Bert was bleeding internally. If Bert didn't urinate within 12 hours, they would have to have her moved to Sacramento, where they had the facilities to handle such things. They started a series of blood transfusions to attempt to offset the internal loss of blood. Bert was in an oxygen bubble at this point, and things were looking pretty grim.
I needed to keep myself busy with something other than staring at the phone. I grabbed a stack of the flyers I had printed out the night before and walked throughout my neighborhood, knocking on doors and explaining what happened to anyone who would answer, begging them to keep their pets inside until the suspect had been caught. Some people were concerned and looked grateful for the information, while others practically slammed the door in my face as if I were asking them for money[ALG1] . A few hours later, I returned home, out of flyers and exhausted.
Another phone call - Bert had urinated! And her temperature was up to 98 degrees! Suddenly, there was hope again. It was the first real sign of marked improvement, and we took it and ran. We were thrilled that it looked like our sweet little Bert was going to pull through. Because she seemed to be stabilizing, we could turn our attention towards catching the guy who did this. I talked to the Animal Control officer in charge of the case to find out what I could about the suspect.
Officer Humphrey from Animal Control had apparently questioned a young man who fit the witness' description once before during the investigation of a similar crime. He said the man’s statements were erratic and didn't make any sense, other than making it very clear that he didn't like cats. Humphrey informed me that he had a photo of the suspect, and that he would need Karen to come down and take a look at it. I emailed Karen and let her know to get in touch with Officer Humphrey as soon as she could.
At this point, the neighbors I hadn’t gotten to speak to had found the flyers, and Jane and I got several wonderful emails, thanking us for letting them know what was happening and letting Jane know that their prayers with her and Bert.
One of Jane's friends contacted channel 10 news, and they went to the hospital to interview Jane, giving her about 2 minutes on the evening news. All in all, things were looking up. Bert was still in the oxygen bubble, but the media was getting involved, we had a suspect, and Bert's kidneys and temperature were stabilized. We were all pretty sure that Bert was going to pull through. Most of the day was spent on the phone with Jane, neighbors, Karen, Officer Humphrey, and other concerned parties, giving them constant updates on Bert's status.
The evening passed with little news, and the next morning bore no new changes. At about 11 o'clock, Jane knocked on my door once again, in tears. Bert had gone into seizures during the night, and had gone into cardiac arrest, so she headed back down to the hospital.
An hour or two passed with no news, so I finally called the hospital to find out what was happening. The receptionist answered the phone and I asked if I could ask for the status of a patient. She said sure, and asked which one. I told her I was calling about Bert, and there was a long pause. She asked me who I was, and I explained that I was Jane's neighbor and friend, and that I had been the one who brought Jane in on Tuesday. Her voice shook as she informed me that Bert didn't make it. She quietly explained that Bert had gone into one final cardiac arrest, and then passed away.
The entire hospital was in tears. We all were. We cried for so many reasons. The loss of our dear Bert, the inhumanity and incomprehensible heartlessness of the man who did this to her, the fight for life that Bert put forth, broken, terrified, and charred.
Once Bert had passed away, the doctors could do a more extensive exam without the risk of causing more damage. They discovered that Bert had third degree burns over 75 percent of her body. What we had believed to be hardened, charred fur over the extent of her back was actually her skin. Bert put up one hell of a fight, but in the end, the damage was simply too much for her tiny body to endure.
We found some solace in the fact that Bert was no longer in pain, and was no longer frightened. My mind continually drifted back to how she must have felt, starting her day off the same way she had for 13 years, one moment out for a walk in the front yard, doing the things that cats do, and then the next moment being pulled into a stranger's vehicle, driven to a strange place, and then being subjected to such senseless brutality. I kept wondering if she thought maybe she was being punished for something she didn't understand as she lay there. I prayed that was not the case, and I held my own cat tightly, tears flowing freely down my face. I whispered to her that I loved her, and I swore to protect her forever. I realized at that moment that I was not a pillar of strength after all. I felt very weak, as if a strong ocean breeze would tear me to pieces. None of it felt real.
I wouldn’t discover it until much later, but my life changed that day. My eyes had been irreversibly opened to something new and terrible, and I would never again be able to shut them and return to the peaceful ignorance I had enjoyed before.
For weeks after Bert was taken from us, I could barely look at my own cat without feeling the sting of tears welling up, and strangely enough, I didn’t try to stop them, and instead let myself cry and desperately clung to my little girl. Eventually, my sadness turned to anger.
Throughout my life, I was never one to remain idle for very long. There was always a side-project or six to keep me busy – but this was the first time I was truly driven towards something. Growing up, my stepfather was incredibly demanding – anything less than perfection was utter failure. I had always been a bright kid, in the honors classes, president of several of the artsy extra-curricular clubs, captain of the soccer team, and that sort of thing, but because the only goal I was ever given was perfection, I always felt as if I was continually striving towards a goal that didn’t actually exist, and as a result, I felt like I failed at everything. Forever frantically working towards an intangible goal, I would never win – could never win. I had passion, but no focus, until that day. Imagine being in the middle of the ocean, swimming feverishly, arms flailing, without ever knowing whether land was one mile or one million miles away. In retrospect, it seems like reaching land was never even the goal, just swimming until I eventually got too weary and eventually drowned.
It was as if this tragedy was the compass I had needed all along, and through the course of the next few years, I would learn to swim with purpose. At the time, I couldn’t see that far ahead. I buried my despair over what happened, and redirected my attention towards solving the problems at hand: finding the suspect and helping Jane pay the $5,000 veterinary bill that resulted from Bert’s three-day struggle for life. Jane had been forced to open a line of credit to pay for Bert’s treatment, and on a researcher’s salary, it would take years for her to pay it off. While I thirsted for justice, I also needed to find a way to help Jane put this behind her.
The passing of a beloved family pet is hard enough, but to watch an innocent life extinguished so brutally, and so senselessly, is unimaginable. Seeing that charge on her credit card statement every month would force her to relive this terrible ordeal over and over for the next five years. She had been through so much already. Jane lived a modest life. She wasn’t one to buy expensive clothes or fancy dinners, and she certainly didn’t have several thousand dollars tucked away under her mattress for the day a monster would visit Del Mar. While Bert fought for her life in the veterinary clinic, decisions had to be made along the way, but how does one decide when someone you love has become too expensive to keep fighting for? How she would afford it never even entered our minds– we’d figure something out. If Bert had pulled through, I probably would not have been so determined to find a way to pay the bill off, but putting myself in her shoes, I couldn’t imagine having to open a credit card bill every month and have to relive those three days.
The first thing I did after Bert died was to create a one-page website that explained what had happened, recent news articles about the case, updates on the case, and a downloadable version of the flyer that I had papered the neighborhood with. E-mails and letters continued to pour in.
After speaking to Officer Humphrey, the mystery man in the red pick-up truck seen with Bert during the attack finally had a name - Paulo Marques, a handsome nineteen year old Brazilian citizen with a history of loosely documented acts of violence against animals, and unsurprisingly, against the women in his life. As it turned out, Bert’s case was not the only one he was a suspect in. Another cat, named Bear, had been taken from a home in Ocean Beach earlier in October, and was also discovered burned in Pacific Beach, not far from where Bert was found. There were other cats attacked in the area around the same time, but authorities had little to connect Marques to those cases, so our focus was on Bert and Bear.
In the beginning, Officer Humphrey was wonderfully communicative. He would constantly update us on how the investigation was progressing, which at least made us feel as if it were going somewhere. Somewhere along the line, something changed, and he stopped talking to us. I suspect that one of the other victim’s owners was telling the press too much, and since he couldn’t immediately determine who was talking, he stopped communicating with all of us. All we knew was that Marques was facing a misdemeanor charge of cruelty to animals, but that they hadn’t managed to track him down yet.
Before he cut off communication with us, Officer Humphrey told me that when he went to Marques’ house to question him, Marques wasn’t at home, but the woman who answered the door seemed very skittish and easily startled at loud noises - a behavior often seen in women who are in an abusive relationship. This was the first clue we had that there might be more than animal abuse in Marques’ recent history – a pattern we would see repeat itself as we continued to investigate.
Humphrey also told me that he had questioned Marques before, about another cruelty case, and although Marques did not confess to the attack back then, he made it quite clear at the time that he “hated” cats.
The case was not cut and dry by any means. Although we had a witness that saw Marques watching Bert as she rolled around desperately trying to extinguish the flames engulfing her body, there were no witnesses who actually saw him throw the Molotov cocktail. She arrived at the scene literally seconds after that critical moment, but those few seconds made the difference between having a material witness and having someone who witnessed a guy being a jerk, but not a criminal. No one even saw him with a black cat in his truck that day. Whatever fingerprints there may have been on the bottle were unrecoverable due to the extreme heat once the bottle exploded. Every shred of evidence we had was circumstantial. We knew this was the monster that tortured Bert, but we had no way to prove it, and with no witnesses able to prove intent, we had no hope of a felony charge. No smoking gun – only the smoldering remains of our beloved friend.
Shortly after the visit from Humphrey, Marques left a series of threatening messages on Officer Humphrey’s voicemail – a break we couldn’t have been happier to receive, since making terrorist threats against an officer is a felony. We would have preferred a charge of felony cruelty to animals, of course, but faced with only a misdemeanor, this felt like manna from heaven. His own stupidity and inability to handle conflict led to a felony charge, which was a far cry better than a simple misdemeanor.
The media ran a few more very brief stories on the case, and then it faded from view. Weeks passed without any arrests, and we grew frustrated. It felt as if progress was stalling out. I had grabbed a photo of Marques from one of the news websites that covered the case and added it to the flyer I had created along with the announcement of a reward for information.
San Diego Animal Advocates stepped in and offered a $5000 reward for information that would lead to Marques’ capture and conviction, and a local radio personality, Jer of the Jeff and Jer morning show, added another $2000. We had learned earlier from Officer Humphrey that Marques lived in Pacific Beach, the same town where Bert was found in October.
The man I was dating, who would later become my first husband, was a private investigator named Louis Garcia. He ran a background check on Marques, and we managed to come up with a specific street address. Around that time, a concerned member of the public with ties to the Navy, whom we’ll call Jim, had contacted me via e-mail, expressing an interest in helping us with whatever grassroots efforts we might be planning. We picked a day to get together, and decided that we needed to canvas the neighborhood ourselves. Louis and I headed down to Marques’ neighborhood, to meet up with Jim and get started.
In the fifteen minutes it took to drive to Pacific Beach from my apartment in Del Mar, I sat quietly in the car, nervously thumbing through the flyers over and over, despite the fact that I had pored over them for hours already and knew every detail, every word, by heart. I looked at the picture of Marques over and over. He was smiling in the photo, his skin the color of caramel. He had a thin face, and looked nothing like what I imagined.
Very early on in our lives, we are taught by books and movies that bad guys look like bad guys. In fairy tales, the protagonist is often a monster with glaring eyes and pointed teeth, an ugly troll with craggy features, or a hideous witch with a bent and warty nose. How could this be the man who tortured Bert? What was done to Bert was clearly the act of a sociopath, and this man looked so… normal.
I suppose I should really have known better. My own father, a striking man with high cheekbones, standing an astonishing six feet five inches tall, used to beat my mother (whom he dwarfed by almost two feet in height) and my sister. He was quite handsome in his early twenties, with a chiseled jaw line and sparkling blue eyes, and certainly didn’t look like a man that would choke a pregnant woman up against a refrigerator until her fetus was hypoxic – and yet my mother spent the remaining months of her pregnancy wondering if I would be born mentally retarded due to lack of oxygen. So, I suppose I did know better, but still expected him to look more like the monster I knew he really was.
Instead, what I saw on those pieces of paper was a good-looking, shirtless teenager, with smiling eyes and a carefree – almost bashful – grin. He looked as if he could have just come in from the beach with friends, pausing for just a moment to reluctantly permit a quick snapshot.
Pacific Beach is known for being one of the party towns in San Diego. Settled right on the beach, there were clubs, restaurants, and surf shops as far as the eye could see in the downtown area, and long roads lined with giant palm trees and clear blue skies in the more residential areas. As an outsider, PB felt like true Southern California, or at least the image of Southern California that had always come to mind when I would hear others talk about it.
Louie and I met Jim in the parking lot of the post office, situated close to the cluster of Brazilian restaurants and bars, and very near the address we had tracked down for Marques. We had a game plan, although the plan had my stomach tied up in knots. The first thing we did was to go door to door, asking the local Brazilian businesses if they would let us post our flyers. We were hopeful that the words “$7000 REWARD” in bold, inch-high letters would catch the eye of some of the locals and entice them to talk. Someone had to know something. From what I could glean from my discussions with Officer Humphrey, this kid was cocky, and we were betting on the possibility that he bragged to some friends about having killed another cat and gotten away with it. Friends may take care of friends, but $7,000 is a decent score for a teenager. I had no problem going door to door –- God knows it wasn’t the first time I hit the pavement to knock on doors since Bert was killed – it was the second part of the plan that made me just a little nauseous. I was to knock on Marques’ door to try and see if he was there, and if he was, we would call the police and have him arrested. If he wasn’t home, I was to play the role of a cute twenty-something that Marques had met last week, and see if I could get any information out of whoever answered the door. We knew he didn’t live with family, and I had gotten the impression that he lived with friends, so playing the cute girl card was one of our only options.
Every business we walked into, I half-expected to see Marques there, sitting at the bar with a drink, or laughing over French fries with his buddies. I’m not sure if it was the fear of walking right past him and not noticing, missing the opportunity to have him apprehended, or the fear of finding myself face to face with him before I had mentally prepared myself for it, but each time we walked into a new place, I would furiously scan the room, almost in a panic, to see if he was there. In the short time it took to explain to the business owner why we were there and ask if we could hang a flyer, my eyes would dart to the door every time it opened and someone walked in, waiting for the time it was him. It never was.
Overall, the business owners were great, and seemed glad to let us hang our posters. Once we ran out, it was time to knock on Marques’ door.
Once we found his apartment building, our first task was to scope out the layout in the area around his apartment to figure out how we would do this with Louie and Jim close-by in case there was trouble, but hidden from view while I was actually at the door. As we walked up the stairs to the floor his apartment was on, we met an attractive blonde woman in her early twenties. Trying to be very casual, I asked her if she knew Marques. The look on her face was as if a bad taste was suddenly in her mouth and her eyes flashed with anger. I asked if she knew which apartment he was in, and she confirmed the apartment number our research had turned up. She examined Louie and Jim, who were following behind me, and bitterly asked if we were cops. I answered that we weren’t. “That’s too bad,” she replied. I asked her why she felt that way, and she explained that she was his ex-girlfriend, and followed with a barrage of expletives to describe him.
Taking the chance that she might give us more information if she knew our intentions, I mentioned that he was wanted by the police in a series of animal cruelty cases. Her expression didn’t change when she flatly said “I’m not surprised – he killed my cat.” She described a relationship fraught with abuse, that ended with Marques putting her kitten in the freezer, where it died a slow, agonizing death before she was to discover it later that day. I asked if she had ever filed a police report, and she said no. She was afraid of what he would do to her if she had. We got as much information out of her as we could, but she was clearly on her way out and eventually decided she had to go. I thanked her for her time, and we continued up the stairs.
Louie was a Puerto-Rican from Park Slope, Brooklyn before it was gentrified, and although he stood a modest five foot seven inches, I knew that he’d have my back. I didn’t know Jim very well, but as an older man who had served in the military for a good portion of his life, I was confident that he would be there for me if I got into trouble.
I am not what you would call a fearful person, and had been accused of having more balls than brains on more than one occasion during my youth – but I was genuinely scared. Despite the two men who would be waiting around the corner of the hallway, less than twenty feet away, my stomach knotted and my fists clenched.
I stood in front of that door for at least five minutes, staring at the peeling green paint while gathering my courage, imagining every possible scenario and analyzing exactly what I would do in each. What I would say, how my body would be positioned, the pitch and timber of my voice – it all rushed past me in a blur, along with a flood of questions, each one raising my anxiety level and making the knot in my stomach tighten and grow larger. What if I stammered? Would they know it was a set-up? Would they try to hurt me? If so, how? If they didn’t use any weapons, I was fairly sure I’d be able to handle it, but what if they had a knife or a gun? Would I actually be able to smile at whoever answered the door throughout this façade? A microcosm of possible, although wildly improbable scenarios unfolded in my head, each one more frightening than the one before it. I felt nothing but anger and fear, and was terrified that my rage would be apparent the moment someone answered the door. What if he answered the door? Would I be able to look this monster in the eye and refrain from loosing my fury upon him? I imagined my hands tightening around his throat while I screamed “She was innocent, you fucking bastard! What did she ever do to you?” Oh God – what if I lost it? I think I was more afraid of what I would do than what the person behind the door of apartment 4b would do. My mind kept jumping back to Bert, barely moving on that cold steel examination table, and the pungent smell of her burned flesh flooded my senses all over again. Anguish and rage welled up inside me and I felt my eyes begin to sting.
Sensing that my over-active imagination was bringing me to a state of near-panic, I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, trying to calm down. I blinked back my tears, and breathed again, feeling the heat slowly retreat from my face and neck. I had to be calm for this to work. I imagined what I must have looked like, standing at the door, face blotchy and flushed, eyes wide and more than a little crazy. I thought to myself “Good lord – if I saw a lunatic looking like that at my door, I damn sure wouldn’t open it.” For a split second, the face of the crazy cat lady from the Simpsons television cartoon popped into my head, and I laughed nervously, breaking the tension enough for me to get back to work.
I slowly brought my hand up to knock on the door, my palms sweaty and my throat tight. I knocked on the door and held my breath. I heard movement inside, so I knew I wasn’t going to be let off the hook, and as scared as I was, I was glad for that. The door opened, and a young Brazilian man answered the door, the strong scent of Marijuana hanging in the air and wafting from the apartment. It wasn’t Marques. I gasped with both relief and frustration, and hoped the man at the door hadn’t noticed. I forced a smile, flipped my hair in as flirty a manner as I could muster and asked if Paulo was home. The young man at the door gave me a look up and down and then asked me who I was, and I explained that I had met Paulo on the beach a few weeks prior and he had given me his address and told me to stop by sometime. I explained that some friends and I would be going to a party that night, and I wanted to invite him to join us. Although I didn’t know anything about the kind of woman Paulo usually dated, meeting his ex-girlfriend on the stairs told me that he did at least occasionally date American women, so appealing to the teenage stud-factor seemed like as good of an approach as any. I was hoping the equation of cute girl + cute girl’s friends might buy me some info.
The teenager at the door scrutinized me for a moment, perhaps deciding if I was telling the truth. I suddenly felt like a Jehovah’s Witness, and shuffled my feet nervously: heel-toe, heel-toe, making a clacking sound that echoed through the empty hallway linoleum. Ever since I could remember, I always loved the sound of high heels on a hard floor. I used to pretend to tap dance just to hear the noises my low-heeled shoes would make, but I grew up a soccer player, not a dancer, since physical grace was not something I was blessed with. Even into adulthood, when I was nervous or uncomfortable, I would find myself clacking the heels of my shoes back and forth against the floor.
The young man disappeared from the doorway after he instructed me to wait a moment. The door was left slightly ajar, and I got a small glimpse of the interior. Once again, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but through the 3 inch gap between the doorframe and the door itself, nothing looked unusual: a little messy and not overly decorated, exactly as one might expect in an apartment shared by several teenage males. While he was away from the door, I could hear him speaking to someone else in the apartment, but I couldn’t make out what was said.
When he returned to the door, he quickly told me that no one named Paulo Marques lived at that residence, and abruptly slammed the door in my face. I knew this to be a lie for several reasons, not the least of which being the information from the police and background search – but perhaps more obviously, he wouldn’t have had to confer with someone else inside the home if no one named Paulo lived there[ALG2] . Just as the door was slamming closed, I put my hand against it and asked if he knew where I could find Paulo, forcing a flirtatious smile. He told me that Paulo had moved away, and then the door clicked shut.
I exhaled sharply and wiped the sweat from my palms off on my skirt. Damn. Despite all of the womanly charm I could muster, it seemed we were no further along now than we were before we started. Taking a deep breath, I headed back down the hallway, turned the corner and joined Jim and Louie. Even if they hadn’t been just a few yards away, listening in the shadows, the look of utter disappointment bordering despair was evident. Louie hugged me, and Jim told me not to worry.
Years later, as the specific details of the case would begin to grow fuzzy and faces would begin to fade, the one thing I would always remember with absolute clarity would be the feeling in the pit of stomach the day I stood at that door, praying he’d answer, and in the same breath praying he wouldn’t.
At the time, I felt a little foolish for being so scared. I was just knocking on a door, right?
[ALG2]Try to find the original excel spreadsheet to verify timelines, addresses, etc. These details have gotten fuzzy. Specifically, Paulo’s address, who he lived with, the date of our canvassing, etc.
