Meeting Mr. Smith

Meeting Mr. Smith (Not his real name)

As I was approaching thirty, I had a boss who was very concerned that I was not married and, even worse in her eyes, didn’t seem at all concerned about my status. Because we worked in Human Resources, we knew a lot of basic information about every employee—enough for her to screen for suitable mates for me. 

“Mr. Jones seems nice,” she would say. Coyly. 

“He’s very nice, just not my type.”

“Mr. Williams is very polite and is going to medical school.”

“He is very pleasant but I think he’s interested in the head librarian.”

“Mr. Smith is single and always pleasant when I see him.”

“There’s something not right about that guy.”

She brought up Mr. Smith quite a few times and I always had the same response: “There’s something not right about that guy.”

I didn’t have any facts to support my claim. I didn’t actually know Mr. Smith although I saw him on almost a daily basis. He was a nice looking man about my age. From what I could tell, he and his coworker from their small department ate together at the same time and place every single day. Then, they sat for a few minutes in the lobby and watched. Everything and everybody. He even watched me. Not in a lascivious way. Not in an amused way. Not in threatening way. His face remained expressionless. I concluded he simply liked to watch. I found something about that creepy. My reaction was always the same even if I was only talking to myself. “There’s something not right about that guy.”

We never spoke until . . . 

One Friday afternoon, Mr. Smith stopped by HR on his way out the door. He needed to check something. I’ve long since forgotten what. He came into my office sporting a warm smile and exuding an appropriate level of charm that appeared genuine and not at all fake or creepy. His conversation was pleasant. He made me laugh. He stayed a little longer than necessary but not long enough to become a nuisance. When he walked out the door, he had won me over.

I told my boss: “You know, Mr. Smith? I was wrong about that guy. He’s perfectly nice.” And, then, I left for the weekend and I imagine she went home relieved at prospect of wedding bells in my future.

So I guess you think you know how this story ends. You guess that just as in any romance novel, my bad feelings turned to love, we married and lived happily ever after. Guess again.

I never saw Mr. Smith after that Friday. I might have noticed that he wasn’t at lunch on Monday but my attention was focused on finding out what was going on that kept my boss, her boss, and his boss behind closed doors for most of the morning. 

Luckily, the secret did not remain a secret for long, Over the weekend, Mr. Smith had been arrested for rape and assault. 

A week before my reaction would have been “I told you so.” But I’d been charmed. And, now I was shocked. Had there been some sort of mistake? In my seventies mindset, I wondered if he had been too aggressive, misread some signal or if a girl had changed her mind. After all, the seventies bar scene was crazy. But then I learned about the breaking and entering charges. Note the plural.

It took years and the invention of the Internet before I learned the rest of the story. In the months before his arrest, Mr. Smith had committed a series of attacks in the western suburbs of Philadelphia each one escalating in terms of violence. There were at least a dozen victims. They had not met Mr. Smith at a bar. They had not invited him into their homes. They had never seen him before. He had broken into their houses or apartments and raped each of them inflicting more and more physical damage than on the previous victim. One of his last victims after a required hospitalization testified that he was a monster. 

He claimed stress at work had caused his actions. He admitted he didn’t handle stress well. He offered alternative recommendations for sentencing to keep him out of jail. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. 

On the rare occasions I drove by the jail that was his home, I wondered how his life was going behind those walls. After twenty-five years I assumed he had been released. I was wrong. He had survived prison for only six years. I couldn’t discover whether he died from natural causes—unlikely in a man his age—or suicide or murder. 

My brain worried that I had bought into his charming act so easily. On an emotional level, I felt only sadness that my initial reaction had been so accurate. I’d been right. 

There was something not right about that guy. 

 

© 2024 Jane Kelly