by Lisa Unger
He drove up toward the Ninth Precinct, which was just a few blocks away. It was freezing, blustery outside but an oven in the Caprice. He could feel beads of sweat popping up on his brow. Breslow always had to have the heater going full blast; she was always too cold. He let her have her way because in the summer, she let him keep the AC on full blast since he was always too hot because of his size. All summer, she kept a fleece pullover in the car. But in the winter, for whatever reason, she couldn’t stand to be cold. It made her cranky.
“What did the message say?” asked Jesamyn as they rolled up First Avenue toward the station house on Fifth Street.
“She said that she needed some advice, that she was out of her league ‘big-time.’ ”
“What kind of advice?”
“Lydia Strong said Lily was her student at one point and that they talked now and then about stories she was working on. Strong was like her mentor.”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t talk about her in the past tense. Not yet.”
“Sorry,” he said.
Jesamyn always, without fail, got personally wrapped up in their cases. It made her an incredibly determined and highly effective investigator but it was emotionally draining for her. He’d warned her about it, about the burnout that would eventually take her over. Like he was one to talk.
“But she’s also a private investigator, right?”
“Strong? I think she’s more like a consultant than an actual PI. But I don’t know. Why?”
“Maybe that’s why Lily called her. You know, she’s out there trying to prove that Mickey didn’t kill himself. She wasn’t working on a story. What she was doing was really more like an investigation. Maybe she called Lydia Strong for advice on that. Maybe that’s what she meant when she said she was out of her league.”
“Maybe,” said Matt, not sure where she was going.
They pulled into a spot in front of the precinct. The midnight guys were on their way out. Matt sometimes wished he were still in uniform. It wasn’t easy but there was something simple about patrolling the streets, answering calls. The midnight shift. That was the real job. Especially in a place like the Ninth, affectionately referred to as the Ninth Street Shithouse, because of its reputation as a place you were sent if you were a discipline case or a fuck-up. Its borders were Broadway to Avenue D, Houston to Fourteenth Street. They called it a “B” house because it was a healthy mix between the haves and the have-nots. The projects in Alphabet City were hot enough to keep you busy, but there were a lot of nice, law-abiding New Yorkers, too, living in the gentrified buildings around Tompkins Square, cool lofts on First and Second, the NYU dorms on Ninth and Eleventh. It was a good balance, not too crazy, not too slow. Not like the South Bronx, which was an “A” house where every night was like downtown Baghdad. Or Midtown North, a “C” house, which was basically Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood; you could go months without a decent collar.
“Man,” said Jesamyn, waving to a good-looking young Latino guy getting into his squad car. “I am so glad I’m not in uniform anymore. I was freezing my ass off for years out there.”
“Yeah, but at least patrol, you leave it behind at the end of your shift. Investigations come home with you, get into bed and keep you up all night busting your chops.”
Jesamyn looked at her watch. “Shit,” she said. “I have to pick up the rug rat from my mother’s place.”
“It’s late. Why don’t you let him sleep there?” She did that some nights when they’d made a collar and had a mountain of paperwork to file.
She shook her head, her neat blonde bob shimmering prettily in the light from the streetlamp coming in through the windshield. “No. I need him home with me at night. And I like to get him off to school in the morning when I can, have breakfast together. It’s important, you know.”
He nodded. He knew it was hard on her, being a single mother. But he admired her and envied her a little for it. In a way, it couldn’t be all bad to be needed so much by someone. And Benjamin was a sweet, cute little kid. With a button nose, deep, warm brown eyes, and a pouty little mouth, he looked just like his mom. And he wasn’t much shorter.
“Meet you back here at nine? We’ll head over to the bank offices. See about that security video,” he said.
She looked at him. “I’m not sure what to hope for, you know. If she’s on it and looks okay, we have to drop the case, but maybe she did take off. If not, then-” She stopped. She didn’t have to finish; he was thinking the same thing.
The gentleman his mother had raised compelled Matt to watch as Jesamyn climbed into her Ford Explorer and took off up Fifth Street tooting her horn good-night. It used to make her mad, like he was implying that she couldn’t take care of herself. And it was silly since if it came down to it, she’d probably wind up protecting him as he tripped over his own big clumsy feet. But he didn’t think she minded anymore; they understood each other better after working together for two years.
“How’s it going, Mount?” called the desk sergeant as Matt entered the precinct through the heavy wood doors.
The other cops at the Ninth called him Mount, short for Mount Stenopolis. Very creative bunch of guys. Real geniuses.
“Pretty good. How ’bout you, Sarge? Case of the clap clearing up?”
“Under control,” he said with a smile. “Hear your mother’s still on meds, though.”
He smiled, even as he felt his chest constrict with anger. You don’t insult a Greek guy’s mother. His big secret was that he was sensitive about his mother. That he was sensitive in general. Matt could banter with the best of them, but he knew it got to him in a way it didn’t get to the other guys. He did a good job of hiding it, though.
“You’re killin’ me,” he said.
He lumbered up the three flights to his office, taking two steps at a time with ease. At his desk, he checked for messages on his voicemail, found none, and pulled out Lily’s file. He looked up at the picture he had pinned to the corkboard over the desk in his cube. Whoever had taken the picture had captured her essence. There was a sweetness to her, but also a kind of wisdom in her black eyes. Her smile was warm, her heart-shaped face open and friendly. A storm cloud of jet-black curls framed her face. He felt an ache looking at her, knowing that the clock was ticking.
Maybe, if he was honest with himself, that was why he’d finally gone to see Lydia Strong. Maybe part of him was hoping that she’d take an interest, so if tomorrow turned out to be the last day they’d be able to devote any real time to Lily, someone else would pick up the trail. If there was a trail to pick up.
Somewhere on another floor a phone rang and rang. He could hear Marilyn Manson music coming from the gym on the floor above him and the heavy clink of someone doing reps. There was an unpleasant smell in the air like someone had burned popcorn in the microwave oven again. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight.
He’d spend a couple of hours going over the file again, see if they missed anything. Then he’d grab a few hours on one of the bunks, shower and change here in the morning. He always kept a clean set of clothes in his locker because he spent a lot of nights at the precinct. After all, it wasn’t like he had anyone to go home to.
Three
The day dawned bright and cold but Lydia barely noticed as she surfed the web looking for information on Lily and Mickey Samuels. She’d been up half the night thinking about it, keeping Jeffrey awake with her nervous energy. Around four, she gave up on the idea that she might go back to sleep, headed to her office, and booted her computer. She logged onto LexisNexis and plugged in the name Mickey Samuels and came back with nothing. She tried “Michael Samuels” and got three listings. Scrolling through them, she discovered that only one of them related to Lily’s brother.
The Riverdale Press ran a brief piece on Mickey’s suicide, which basically confirmed the details Matt Stenopolis had given her the night before, without adding much more.
Local C
afé Owner Ends Life
The body of Michael James Samuels, 28, was discovered yesterday by a local resident as he arrived to work at the Walmart on Broadway. Police have ruled the death a suicide, Samuels having died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Jessup Irving, 65, noticed a car parked at the far reaches of the empty lot and went to investigate.
“I saw someone sitting there so still. It just seemed odd to me, early as it was. Not yet seven.”
As he approached the car, he made a gruesome discovery.
“I just started praying,” said Irving. “Then I took my cell phone and called 911.”
The discovery of gunshot residue on Samuels’ right hand and powder burns at his temple confirmed what police had surmised at the scene, that the death was a suicide. Police say there is no evidence of foul play. Friends reported that Samuels had lately been depressed and acting erratically due to a recent breakup and the fact that business was slow at his recently opened coffee shop and performance space called No Doze. Neither Samuels’ family nor ex-girlfriend could be reached for comment.
“It just goes to show that guns and alcohol don’t mix well,” said Irving, commenting on the discovery of a half-consumed bottle of whiskey in Samuels’ car.
“Words to live by,” said Lydia out loud as she read, lingering on the photograph of Mickey Samuels. He was a good-looking guy with high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, and an expansive smile he had in common with his sister. There was that same brightness to him, the same wide-open, happily expectant look to his face that she had always liked about Lily. It was hard to imagine him sitting alone in a dark car with a gun and a bottle of JD, thinking that the barrel looked brighter than the rest of his life. Lydia made a note on a pad of paper by her keyboard: Girlfriend?
She tried searches on Google and Yahoo as well, but came up with nothing. She wasn’t that surprised. People had strange attitudes about suicide and it wasn’t covered much in the media, unless the deceased was a celebrity or the case could be tied into a larger story on, for example, the failure of a controversial anti-depressant or something like that. Otherwise people seemed to want to avoid the topic. Maybe because there was so much guilt and anger involved for the people left behind, such a sense of disconnect from the loved one who’d chosen death instead of life with them.
There was a larger piece on Lily in the Post. It talked some about her education, her career, her grief over her brother’s death. The article reported that she had packed a bag on October 15th after taking a week off from work and headed up to Riverdale. Local residents reported her asking questions of residents and business owners, spending time in her brother’s apartment, at his coffeehouse that had been closed since his death. And like Detective Stenopolis had said, no one had seen her after October 22nd. Residents of Riverdale who had contact with her just assumed she had given up and gone home. It was October 30th, her mother’s birthday, before anyone reported her missing. The article ended with a mention of a ten-thousand-dollar reward offered by the family for any information leading to Lily.
There was a sidebar about missing persons statistics in the United States. Apparently, in California alone in 2003, more than thirty thousand people had disappeared from their lives voluntarily. Meaning that they packed some things, cashed out their accounts, and without a word to anyone in their lives, just left. Five hundred eighty-five disappeared under suspicious circumstances with significant evidence of a stranger abduction. And 247 were missing, the circumstances of their disappearance totally unknown. Nationally, in 2001 more than eight hundred thousand adults and children were counted as missing by the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Nearly a million people gone by accident, foul play, or design. Just gone.
There was also a single-page website someone had set up, probably the parents, with a picture of Lily and the word MISSING emblazoned across the top and a number to call. There was the offer of a $10,000 reward. The paragraph gave a brief description of Lily, mentioning how she was last seen by her family three days after her brother’s funeral. She left their house, supposedly to go back to her life and her job. She returned to the city, only to pack a bag and ask for some time off work. No one who loved her had seen her since that day.
Lydia leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. She reached for her coffee cup and drank from it even though it was stone cold now. The milky gray light of morning was coming in through the tall windows and she could hear the street noise starting to rise as the city woke up for business. She liked it here in her little cocoon surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, her leather couches and warm chenille throws. She liked the writing life; it was safe.
Her work as a true crime writer had led her to consult with Jeffrey’s firm long before he made her a partner. And though she sometimes felt more like an investigator than a writer, the word was her first love. That was the place she could put order to the chaos she found in the world. That was the place she tried to do so, anyway. But her book was finished. She would turn it in today and it would be months before her editor took a scalpel to it. She would have a little time on her hands.
A low-level anxiety started to bubble beneath the surface of her skin as she looked around her office. Over the years, Jeffrey had dubbed this feeling “The Buzz.” The feeling she got when something needed investigating or was not quite what it seemed. She had that feeling now about Lily. And then, of course, there was her thing about lost girls.
Shawna Fox, Tatiana Quinn, even Wanda Jane Felix, who was lost in another way. She carried little pieces of all of them with her, the cases from her past, the girls she couldn’t help in spite of her best efforts. When she thought of them, which was more often than she would admit, she had the feeling you might have if you dropped a diamond down a sewer. As if through your own clumsiness you lost something so precious to someplace so dark and labyrinthine that it could never be found. Of course, intellectually, Lydia knew she was in no way responsible for what had happened to her lost girls. But that didn’t help her to manage her sadness over their fate and the vague if onlys that occasionally haunted her.
Of course, Lily was not a girl. She was a woman and a writer, not so unlike Lydia. And she was a friend.
“I guess I don’t have to ask what you’re doing,” said Jeffrey, walking into her office. He placed a hot cup of coffee on her desk and took his own cup over to the couch where he reclined, throwing his feet up onto the coffee table and looking at Lydia with an expression that reminded her that he knew her better than anyone. The mystery was gone. She was an open book.
“You don’t know everything,” she said.
“Hmm.”
She raised her coffee to him. “Thanks,” she said with a smile.
“My pleasure.” Then, “The detective said that Lily Samuels had quite a bit of cash on her.”
She knew he’d been thinking about it, too. “Yeah,” she answered with a shrug.
“So maybe she’s just taking some time out to get her head together. Her brother just killed himself, you know. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found at the moment.”
“Do you think she’d really do that to her mother, who was still reeling from Mickey’s death?”
“People do weird things when they’re grieving… especially after a suicide. It’s a painful, solitary time.”
“Still. My experience with Lily is that she is a remarkably sweet and compassionate person. It seems out of character.”
“But you really don’t know her that well, right? I mean you said yourself that it was more of a mentoring relationship than a friendship, which means that she looked up to you and probably wanted to impress you. Maybe you only saw what you wanted to see.”
“I don’t think so, Jeffrey. I really don’t.”
He stood up. “Well, I’ll have Craig copy that voicemail message and email it over to Detective Stenopolis. I’ll give Craig our login and password; he can dial in from the office.”
“Actually, can you just have him copy it
onto a CD?”
He gave her a look. “Then we’d have to deliver it to the Ninth Precinct.”
She smiled sweetly. “I can take care of that.”
He shook his head and couldn’t keep himself from returning her smile. “Well, Lydia, that’s awfully considerate of you.”
“You know me. Always happy to help.”
“He’s not going to tell you anything,” warned Jeffrey.
“We’ll see.”
No matter how stressful her life became, the smell of her son’s hair could soothe her. Baby fine, silky blonde, and infused with the aroma of the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo she’d washed it with all his life. Of course, sometimes it smelled like spaghetti or Play-Doh but those were just variations on a theme.
Jesamyn Breslow tried not to stare at Benjamin as he ate his Cheerios with bananas, because she didn’t want to be one of those mothers who was always mooning, stroking, adjusting. But she just loved to watch him, his peaches-and-cream skin, his cute little feet. He wasn’t quite at the point where he was squirming away from her hugs and kisses. He still threw his arms around her and told her he loved her. But she’d seen the little boys at school, just a year or two older than Benjamin, endure their mother’s affections with stoic misery. She knew those days weren’t far away. Her nephew, her brother’s son, had been the most loving child until the third grade. Now his parents were looking around for the pod that contained their real child, eager to be rid of the alien that refused good-bye kisses and suddenly insisted that the bathroom door be closed and locked.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” Benjamin asked. She’d been zoning out, staring into her own bowl of Cheerios.
“Nothing. I’m just tired, babe,” she said, touching his head. She looked into his face. Even she knew it was a tiny mirror of her own face, with shades of his father in his mischievous eyes and irresistible smile.
“How can you be tired? You just woke up,” he said, spreading out his hands.
