Boyfriend from Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

LaVey, quoted Richard Smith on “Satan Lite,” and if the license for sex Cummings offered and the balm for victims appealed to people, so be it. She felt she had done a responsible job.
    A few days after the piece appeared she received a note from Father Connolly, her priest when she was a little girl in the Bronx, and who had presided when both her parents died. He wrote, “I saw the article in New York magazine and wanted you to know how very proud I am of you and how proud your mother and father would have been.” She hadn’t come down on the side of the devil and assumed that appealed to a Bronx parish priest, but the note touched her.
    Nancy and her boyfriend, Bob, took her to a neighborhood Italian restaurant to celebrate. Bob was a real estate lawyer, a lanky six feet two with brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a hawk-like, intense face. A former distance runner at the University of Michigan, he sometimes jogged with Ronnie and Nancy in Central Park, slowing his Division I pace to accommodate them.
    He toasted Ronnie. “To our girl, for a major article.”
    “And smart,” Nancy added. “It’s a smart piece.”
    “I don’t imagine Cummings thinks so.”
    “Hear from him?” Bob asked.
    “No, I’m happy to say. He’s probably in the school of ‘say anything you want about me so long as I get a full-page, full-color shot of myself in print.’”
    “What’s next?” Bob asked.
    “New York wants me to do a piece on a bar that’s a hangout for European soccer games on TV. How eclectic is this life?”
    “This is why that doctor couldn’t handle you,” Nancy said. “You’re a major person. You need more than Mr. Right. You need Mr. Fantastic.”
    “Then my odds are poor.”
    “I didn’t mean it that way.”
    “I know. I accept the compliment. We’re all major.”
    Nancy needed to pick up some clothes for the weekend and they went back to the roommates’ apartment. Alex, their ancient doorman, was on duty. A frail man, too small for his doorman uniform, Alex was not the most efficient doorman in New York. Perhaps he was one of the oldest. Alex was famous for forgetting to give people packages or for giving people the wrong packages. For most of the tenants Alex was a source of amusement, their Alex, their opportunity to be kind to the working elderly.
    “Something for you, Miss Delaney,” and he handed over a white box tied with a green ribbon. There wasn’t any indication of who sent it, just an index card with Ronnie’s name written on it inside the ribbon.
    “Do you know who this is from?”
    “I didn’t see anybody. It was left outside the door.”
    “Thank you, Alex.”
    He was pleased. He got the right package to the right person.
    They went up to the apartment, Bob took a can of soda from the refrigerator, Nancy went into the bedroom to collect her clothing, and Ronnie sat at the dining table and opened the box. She saw no card on top of the white tissue inside. Her scream brought Bob and Nancy running into the room. Inside the box was a dead black cat.
    As Nancy sat literally holding Ronnie’s hand, Bob called 911. It took nearly an hour for two police officers to arrive. Bob commented to the women that the leisurely response time was apparently determined by the non-emergency nature of the call; the cat was already deceased. In this period of time Ronnie had moved from fright to something close to rage, positive Randall Cummings sent the box. The police officers asked some preliminary questions, one of them took notes, and the officers went downstairs so that the doorman could be interrogated. He didn’t see anyone leave the box. It was outside the front door and he noticed it sitting there with the index card containing Ronnie’s name. That was all he saw or knew.
    “This is obviously a prank,” one of the officers said when they came back into the apartment.
    “It’s a death threat,” Ronnie said flatly.
    “I’m an attorney,” Bob said, backing her. “Not a criminal