Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

He had outed me, vindictively, one afternoon in a staff meeting. I had flirted without realizing what I was doing, hoping that no one saw my infatuation, hoping that no one understood.

And his outing was cruel, in an upstate old boys’ club, which in the mid eighties wasn’t half as liberal as it thought it was. I wasn’t fired; I was shunned, given cases so obviously tailored to forcing me out of the firm that I should have fled in panic.

Instead, I decided to retaliate. I invited the litigator’s wife to lunch, and instead of dining with her I gave her flowers. I still remember how her eyes lit up, the way she had smiled at me. It was clear litigator boy hadn’t given her flowers in a long time, and she found them special.

And at that moment, I realized I didn’t have it — the balls, the stomach, the cutthroat attitude that made the best attorneys. I couldn’t even avenge myself on a man who had made my job hell.

I couldn’t take that light from that woman’s eyes.

I decided that I couldn’t be miserable for the rest of my life trying to be someone I wasn’t and I gave it all up. I sold my house, my wardrobe, and my life, and came to Manhattan and bought on a whim a flower shop which I made my own.

Flowers saved people; flowers shouldn’t destroy them.

And somehow he — this stalker, this GQ man who was obsessed with another person without regard to that person — somehow he had known who I was, what I believed in, and he subverted it.

He used it to play his little games.

Sometimes with the memory of my past I get a kind of clarity. Not an understanding of who or what I am — I know that deeply now — but a way of seeing the world, the patterns I had learned in law school, the ways that I was supposed to view the world in the adversarial system I had found myself in.

The pattern here, the one that I chose to focus on, was a simple one: In the beginning, this jerk ordered in person. I confirmed it by looking at the various faxes I collected, and it was clear.

Like my bonsai, like Odele’s specially book-bound package, each of those first orders had been difficult, the kind of order that was almost impossible to make over the phone.

And because he wasn’t thinking like a criminal then, Ruth-Anne’s stalker had to have gone into shops he was familiar with. Maybe he had seen me around or talked to me before. I certainly would have flirted with him.

Odele’s store wasn’t far away, and neither were the others he had used. He lived near here, and he shopped near here, and eventually he gained a system, a system that involved stealing credit cards and using them to place the orders.

He had to have started that before he saw me, though, because the average Armani owner has no need to steal funds, and probably can think of a thousand other ways to cover his tracks. Like cash, for instance. Cash required no names, and wasn’t even remarkable. A lot of people paid cash for a bouquet, only to decide at the last minute to have that bouquet delivered.

And there were certainly enough flower shops in the five boroughs to keep a cash-paying stalker in plants for decades.

No, either he had stolen that outfit or—

I paused, frowned, and went back to my video. The graininess worked against me. I had been so concerned with this guy’s face and his expensive clothes that I hadn’t looked at his shoes.

Shoes were always the tip-off. Expensive shoes were much more comfortable than cheap ones, so even if a rich guy had no pretensions, he wore good shoes.

To my disgust, the stalker stayed behind tables and large plants. I couldn’t get a good image of the shoes — until the last few frames.

When he came over to pay for the bonsai, his shoes appeared briefly in the center of the image.

They were black. But I couldn’t tell if they had been polished or not — the tape was too dark. However, these shoes, these so-called expensive men’s shoes, had an interesting feature.

They had thick soles, nearly tennis shoe thickness, which implied rubber.

Only one group of people wore shoes like that with clothes like his. Waiters. Bartenders. Guys who were on their feet all day. Retail employees generally didn’t have to dress up. And if they did, they got the shoes too because it was all part of the package.

Only in restaurants did guys have to wear the clothes without the matching shoes. Restaurants often ordered outfits for their staff, sometimes one or two, expecting them to wear the clothing on the job and near the building. But they never bought shoes. The waiters bought the shoes themselves, and of course, they couldn’t afford the expensive ones. They went to Jersey, shopped in Payless or Wal-Mart or Target, and bought shoes they could afford. Shoes with thick rubber soles so that their feet wouldn’t ache quite so bad at the end of the day.