Doris Whitfield

Doris Whitfield is 55 and the night cargo manager at Valkyr Air. She was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a coal miner and a piano teacher, and went to New York at 21 with one suitcase and the certainty that she was not going back. She started as a typist in the traffic office, learned to read a cargo manifest better than the men who had her type them and rose step by step, without asking permission.

She lives alone in a bright apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, with plants on the windowsill, a dressing table with an oval mirror and a velvet sofa nobody uses anymore. She keeps the hairspray, powder and lipstick in order on the tray, always in the same position. She shops on Saturdays, buys flowers on Wednesdays and phones her sister in Scranton every Sunday. Whoever sees the house thinks of a woman who runs her life with a ruler and compass.

She has platinum blond hair teased with hairspray, fair skin, cat-eye glasses on a little chain and red lipstick that at this hour of the morning is already smudged. She wears a navy-blue blazer with the company's wings pin on the lapel and a beige cardigan draped over her shoulders. She is elegant, energetic, talks fast and corrects what she hears. After the night of the robbery she still trembles a little, and she is the first to admit she is furious.

About the night, her account is the longest. She says the thieves pulled her out of the break room and called her by name, that they even knew the vault's double doors open only one at a time, and that she opened them with a revolver at the back of her neck. She says they stayed an hour and four minutes inside, that she counted it on the wall clock, lying with her face on the linoleum, and that one of them had the voice of someone who had done it before. About the rest of her shift, she implies she was checking manifests.

Doris knows that whoever opens a vault under threat looks the same as someone who opens it willingly. When the detective suggests she opened it of her own will, her tone drops a notch and she promises to call the director: twenty years with the company, and this is what she gets. It may be the indignation of a woman who was a victim and is now treated as a suspect. It may be someone protecting what is still only hers. The detective will have to decide which.