Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  “Observed him?” Katya says. “You know what’s ironic? That all these places you’re talking about are called ‘House’—the projects, the jail. Even this police station—a station house. As in ‘That’s where people of color are at home.’ My son was arrested on a stupid charge because he’s black—he’s perceived as black. That’s what this is about. All of it.”

  Katya’s outburst stuns Lex, who falls silent, off guard momentarily as the anger just below this mother’s emotional skin finds its place in the nasty reality of American racism. This white woman from Brighton Beach knows bigotry as though she’s lived it because she has lived it through her child; motherhood taught her the muddled pain of watching someone she loves turn racism inward. Katya Spielman’s power is in seeing it, calling it, and shoving it back in your face.

  “I apologize for the insensitive word choice,” Saki says. “As for your son’s arrest on Wednesday, I agree with you that it was—”

  Katya supplies the word: “Bullshit.”

  “Yup,” Lex agrees. “Perception becomes reality, and it isn’t fair or right.”

  Katya says, “Did you know that his father grew up in the Red Hook Houses?”

  Lex leans forward. “No, we didn’t.” He glances at Saki, realizing that he shouldn’t second-guess her; maybe she knew. She shakes her head, No.

  “He was still living there when we met—on a subway.” Half a smile leaks onto Katya’s face before she kills it. “We hit it off right away, despite our completely different backgrounds. We were both looking for a change and I guess we found it in each other.” She looks at Lex. “Do you think Crisp went back there because it’s where his father grew up?”

  “Could be. We don’t know yet.”

  “What were they doing there last night?” Katya asks. “At the Houses.”

  Seeing that Saki is about to speak, concerned that she might blurt too much truth about the little they know about last night—about Green’s criminal past, about the bloody floor—Lex jumps in. “Katya, what we know so far is that they were with a man named Dante Green. He appears to be trafficking in illicit firearms, but that still has to be confirmed.”

  “Firearms,” Katya repeats, hard, like a curse. “Are you saying Crisp was trying to buy a gun? I don’t believe that! That’s another stereotype that—”

  Saki interrupts her. “What kind of cell phone does Crisp use?”

  Katya’s eyes snap to Lex in response to the non sequitur of a question, as if Saki is his partner and he can somehow control her.

  He explains, “We found two phones in the apartment that may not belong to Mr. Green.” Glad to be off the quicksand of racism.

  “How would you know that?” Katya asks.

  Saki answers, “Because they’d been put into a Faraday bag, which is designed to block reception.”

  “Oh my Lord,” Katya moans. “Crisp has a Samsung Galaxy. Was it there?”

  Relieved to finally have some good news, Lex tells her, “No, it wasn’t. We didn’t find anything directly belonging to him in that apartment, Katya.”

  Saki adds, “But we’ll know more when we hear back from the lab.”

  “The lab?”

  “Routine,” Lex obfuscates, wishing Saki hadn’t mentioned that. “Glynnie’s back at home and she’s told us what she knows, which isn’t much. She thinks the world of your son, by the way.” A bit of an exaggeration, but Lex can tell how much it pleases the mother.

  “He’s never had a girlfriend before. Can I ask—what’s her ethnicity?”

  “She’s Caucasian,” Saki says. “My guess is she’s of western European extraction—but again, it’s just a guess.”

  “Glynnie says they’re not dating,” Lex clarifies. “She says they’re friends, that they don’t know each other well but that they were together last night.”

  “I see.” Katya nods. “You said there was another boy. Younger. Who’s he?”

  “We’re wondering that ourselves,” Lex says. “Glynnie didn’t mention him at all—we saw him with them on a piece of security footage.”

  “In Red Hook?”

  “Yes,” Lex says.

  “This isn’t good.” Katya taps a finger on the tabletop, twice, then folds her hands together. “What now? Do you think this gun dealer has my son?”

  “The truth is,” Lex says, gently, “we just don’t know. Listen, Katya, why don’t you head home now? You’d be more comfortable.”

  “Not yet,” the mother says.

  Lex nods, stands. “Want some lunch? We’ll put in an order.”

  “Sure. A sandwich. Tuna.”

  “Lettuce? Tomato?”

  “Fine.”

  Lex calls out for lunch, then settles into Suarez’s desk, turns on the desktop computer, and uses his password to log in to the central system. He and Saki fall silent, reviewing their case files. A new ballistics report catches his attention.

  One of the guns in Green’s collection, a Baby Browning .25, was loaded with a six-round mag—and one of the rounds was used up. None of the other guns were loaded.

  Lex responds to the tech who uploaded the file and orders a rush on the Baby.

  He turns to Saki and tells her his news.

  “You’re expecting to find blowback,” she says.

  “I expect nothing. I hope for everything.” He smiles, but her pensive demeanor doesn’t break. He asks, “What’s up?”

  “Just found out that Glynnie Dreyfus took off again. Seems when I dropped her at the house she never actually went in. Guess there’s a reason teenagers treat adults like we’re fools. She put her key in the lock and pushed open the door—I didn’t think I had to wait to see her go inside.”

  “She got you good.”

  “I checked everything and she’s completely off the grid.”

  “Sneaky kid,” he says.

  “Did you notice that she was wearing different clothes this morning? Last night, in the bank footage, she had on a striped T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. This morning, the T-shirt was white and the jeans weren’t ripped. I got there five minutes after she did—she must have gone straight to her room to change.”

  Lex didn’t think much of it at the time—after a long night out, anyone would want to strip down into something clean. But now he, too, wonders why she did it in such a hurry.

  19

  Hunkered deep in a shadow, Glynnie waits for JJ across the street from his school. Her thoughts twist and knot as she wonders how to tell him what he won’t want to hear: that he was on the bank video with her and Crisp last night.

  That the cops have been asking questions.

  “Never miss a day of school,” he said. “Can’t draw attention or they’ll put me back in foster.” But he needs to keep his profile even lower than usual because this, school, this will be one of the first places they’ll come poking around once they figure out who he is.

  She needs him to know that she, Glynnie, will not be the one to tell them—just so he understands that. But as she’s learned, the Authorities have their wily ways of knowing things, so he should be very careful and he should hide and he should do it now if he wants to stay off the radar and out of the foster system.

  That she can and will help him.

  That she isn’t a total loser.

  That even though she shot Jerome, even though she killed someone, it doesn’t make her a bad person.

  Do. Not. Think. About. That. Now.

  The twist moves from her brain to her stomach.

  She stands with her back to an ornate iron fence and watches as kids stream out of school. It’s a half day early dismissal and the mood is buoyant—the way the little ones run to their mothers, fathers, babysitters, and the larger ones, the fourth and fifth graders, cluster within sight but not earshot of their parents in a perfect balance of protected independence. Innocence on the brink. Observing it from the distance of age and experience—she is a high-school graduate and a murderer now—Glynnie misses that precarious balance.

 
She waits another half an hour after the last student has emerged. Until the teachers have gone. Until a woman who must be the principal because she’s wearing a dress and high heels comes out. Still no JJ. Maybe he had to stay after for some reason, or maybe he likes being the very last to leave—maybe that’s another part of his plan to stay unnoticed.

  Finally, when the janitor locks the front doors with a chunky padlock, she accepts that JJ isn’t coming out. If he isn’t at school, where is he? He isn’t at the squat—she waited there all morning—and he wouldn’t have risked being out and possibly catching the attention of one of the truant officers who lurk the streets between eight and three, salivating to catch you cutting school.

  Keeping her head down, Glynnie walks away. She spots a taxi, hails it, and tells the driver to take her to Fairway market in Red Hook. She crouches low in the backseat, trying not to be seen. And then, like a lightning strike, the twist in her stomach returns, too intense this time to breathe away. She closes her eyes and waits it out, willing herself to stay focused on what she needs to do…if only she knew what it was. Crisp would have an idea; he’d probably have a few ideas. She wonders if he got away from Dante and Rodrigo, maybe even got his phone back. It can’t hurt to try.

  Sitting forward, she asks the driver, “Actually, can we make one stop? Do you know if there’s a phone store on the way?”

  Minutes later they pull up in front of a sliver of a store nestled on a shabby commercial street at the edge of the Houses.

  “Mind waiting?” she asks. “I’ll be right out.”

  “It’s your money.”

  The shop door opens with a clatter of bells. A man in a blue polo shirt with Metro PCS embroidered in the vicinity of his heart looks up from whatever it is he’s doing behind the counter. Boredom flickers out of his eyes as he assesses her.

  “Good afternoon,” he greets her. Tight cornrows capping his skull. A diamond stud glistening in his left front tooth.

  She approaches the counter. “I need a throwaway kind of phone.”

  “You want a burner?”

  “Um, yes. One that has Bluetooth.” So she can give the phone to JJ and he can use the Beats—but first, she’ll make her call. “I’m paying cash.”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “Just give me the phone, okay?”

  “How you gonna activate it with cash? You need a number, buy some minutes—got to put a card on for that.” He squints at her, then lowers his voice as if they’re not alone. “What smart people do,” he winks, “is they buy a debit Visa with cash. That way the burner don’t trace.”

  “You sell those?”

  “This look like a dollar store to you?”

  “Fuck.”

  “How many minutes you looking for?”

  “I don’t know—five? Ten?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I have a cash debit in my pocket. I’ll sell you ten minutes, for…thirty bucks? Plus you buy a phone from the store, make this visit official.”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “New or reconditioned?”

  “I seriously don’t care at all.”

  He steps into a back room and reappears with a reconditioned Alcatel Fierce smartphone for forty-nine dollars plus the thirty dollars for a burner number and ten minutes of data and talk from his personal card. She probably won’t need that much but it doesn’t matter. He uses his card to load time onto the new phone. She zips open her purse and hands over a hundred dollars cash, then hurries out.

  “Your change!” he calls after her.

  “Keep it.”

  Riding in the taxi, Glynnie slouches in the backseat and hops online to search for Crisp’s cell number. It doesn’t take long to find it.

  A gruff not-Crisp voice answers, “Yeah?”

  Dante.

  She hangs up.

  Then she redials.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Dante barks.

  “I want to talk to Crisp.”

  “Princess!”

  “Is he there? Why are you answering his phone?”

  “Cause he got my phone, bitch.”

  “Put him on. Asshole.”

  “She got bite.”

  “Where’s JJ?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “You’re in big fucking trouble, Dante.”

  “Me? Wasn’t me pulled the trigger on that pretty shooter.”

  “Give me Crisp!”

  “You want him? Join the fucking club—took off with my phone and I want it back.” He hangs up. As the taxi pulls up in front of Fairway, the phone rings and she ignores it.

  The driver quips, “Good luck with your boyfriend troubles.”

  “He is so not my boyfriend.” She pays in cash and slams the door to drown out the guy’s laughter.

  She’s almost at the dead end of Van Brunt and the broken gate, about to squeeze through, when it occurs to her that Dante could trace her location. She fingernails off the phone’s plastic back, pries out the SIM card (she’ll buy JJ another one), drops it onto the sidewalk, grinds it under her heel. With the brainless phone dropped into her purse, she slips through the gate and then the chain link and hurries to the squat.

  She places the phone on top of the small bookcase, beside the St. Fleur family photo, so JJ will see it when he returns. Then she burrows into the corner where he’s piled a dusty blanket and bare pillow, and waits. What if he never comes back? What if she never leaves? Her stomach hurts again, thinking that. She had no idea a person’s life could unravel this fast.

  The rhythmic crash of the tide outside the window seems to get louder. She covers her ears with her hands but it doesn’t work. Then she spots the Beats lying on the floor and puts them on. Unconnected to a source of sound, they deliver an exquisite silence that blunts but doesn’t stop her grinding thoughts:

  Did Crisp survive the night?

  What happened to JJ?

  Is there any chance the police won’t find out about Jerome?

  Just how much trouble is she in now?

  Searching her purse for the single-serve Advil she’s carried around all year is useless with all the crap inside, so she upends the bag onto the floor. Everything tumbles out: tampon, hairbrush, Tic Tacs, bills, coins, MetroCard, paper-wrapped wads of gum, a spent pack of rolling papers, a crumpled napkin, and more stray beads than she’d realized had escaped the tiny plastic Ziplocs she’d gathered on her forays to craft stores this past week. She locates the worn packet of ibuprofen and dry-swallows the pair of pills, then starts putting things back into her purse.

  With pinched fingertips, she picks up one of the red skulls she bought at Beads of Paradise, sets it in the palm of her hand, looks at it. A flare of shame: What an ugly, stupid gesture. She feels like a different person than the girl who decided on such a mean-spirited gift for her mother.

  One by one, she plucks every bead she can find off the floorboards and gathers them in her fist. Then she walks to the open window and rains the beads out into the universe. Standing there, watching them vanish into the bright sunlight, waiting for them to ping off the concrete below but hearing nothing, she remembers that she’s still wearing the headphones.

  She lies down in the middle of the floor and discovers that the Beats cancel more than noise; they also cancel time. She lets herself drift until she’s in a field of wildflowers with a dry blue sky and a big yellow sun overhead, the warmth soaking into her skin, the air sweet.

  20

  Saki bends down and does her best friendly smile when the little boy, presumably Glynnie’s brother, opens the front door. Straight brown hair with bangs fringing over his eyes. He takes a step backward, and blinks. She likes him.

  “Are your parents home?” she asks.

  The boy turns around and shouts, “Mom!” Then he resumes looking stonily at the detective.

  “My name is Saki. What’s your name?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” he says. “I’m Aidan, though.”

  �
�You shouldn’t talk to strangers. That’s absolutely right.”

  “Then why are you talking to me?”

  A rustle of sound carries Mags into the foyer. She lays a hand on Aidan’s shoulder and he presses close to her as a much younger child might. “Go finish your algebra,” she instructs, and he spins away to dash up the stairs.

  “Algebra?” Saki says. “Isn’t that high-school work?”

  “Aidan’s advanced.” The mother’s matter-of-fact tone shifts to bitter. “Detective, how on earth did you lose track of my daughter?”

  “I didn’t lose track of her. I delivered her home. I saw her walk up your front stoop.”

  “And then you drove away.” Mags folds her arms over her chest and looks at Saki as if daring the detective to admit she just ran over a favorite pet.

  “Correct.”

  “Well that was a stupid thing to—”

  A crashing noise draws both of their attention. Mags quickly steps away. Saki closes the front door behind her and follows the sound into the living room.

  The glass coffee table is overturned, the objects that were on it scattered. Nik Dreyfus lies on his side, holding his right shin and wincing in pain. The room smells of alcohol and Saki sees that an amber liquid—whiskey, she guesses—has spilled onto the white rug. A toppled glass has come to rest in front of the sleek black face of a fireplace embedded into white stone. Mags hurries to right the table and replace everything.

  “At least nothing broke,” she says, ignoring her husband.

  “Mags,” Nik moans, “give me a hand.”

  She obliges, letting him use her as leverage to achieve something akin to a standing position.

  Saki says, “Glynnie changed her clothes earlier when she was home.”

  Mags answers, “So?”

  Nik tries to get to a chair and stumbles again, this time kicking the leg of the side table. The framed portrait of the happy family falls flat.

  “Jesus, Nik!” Mags hurries across the room to right the frame.