She left the school and went into the church by the side door, the only one left open at that hour of the day. The high-intensity lights were focused on the Crucifixion mural, the artist himself straddling a plank in the scaffolding as he worked overtime. He was almost finished. With the Lord’s face and one of the women’s restored, Melodosi was studying his work on the other Mary. Even before he looked down at her, Kate knew his half-familiar face to be that of the phantom she had chosen to pursue her.
She moved on to a pew in a darkened place. It had been a long time since she had prayed with her heart and mind, and on her knees. A simple prayer: Lord, I need help. She left the church determined to go to the police with José’s story, but when she reached the street, she saw two nuns waiting to be admitted at the St. Ambrose convent door. She got to them in time to enter the building with them, and very shortly Sister Josephine Reilly came to her in the parlor. As soon as the nun saw who it was, she said, “I know, it’s about José Mercado again.”
“I just have a question,” Kate said. “Was he absent from school this morning?”
“No,” the young nun said. “As soon as I saw him in first class, I sent him to the infirmary, but bad luck that it was, the nurse was out today. I cleaned him up a bit myself between classes.”
“Did he tell you what happened to him?”
The nun gave a great rolling shrug. “I think he said his brother beat him up—was it for talking back to their mother? Who knows with José?”
Who knows indeed, Kate thought.
A week passed before she heard from Morrissey. He called to say he was going upstate to the Trappist monastery on retreat. “Kate …” She could hear the deep intake of breath.
“You don’t need to say anything, Dan.”
“I’m grateful to you for understanding.”
“And I to you, Father Morrissey.”
The Puppet
OVER THE RING OF the doorbell came the cry, “Help me, Julie … Let me in!”
Julie, out of bed before she was rightly awake, pulled on her robe and ran, barefoot, to the front of the shop. It was half-past one in the morning. She unbolted the door and opened it on the latch. Her upstairs neighbor, Rose Rodriguez, was shivering in a silvery dress that glowed in the stark Manhattan street light. Julie let her in, then bolted the door and lighted a lamp.
“I don’t know where Juanita is. She’s not in her bed. I thought maybe she comes to you?”
Julie shook her head. “Sit down while I get my slippers.”
The chair creaked with its burden. In the years Julie Hayes had occupied the shop, the ground floor apartment on West 44th Street, Mrs. Rodriguez had put on weight. Her one child, Juanita, had grown from a string bean to puberty with a sudden promising beauty.
Mrs. Rodriguez pointed at the row of dolls when Julie returned. They sat on a table, their backs against the wall. “They are Juanita’s, no?”
“We’ve been mending them,” Julie said. “Now tell me what’s with Juanita?”
“It’s boys. I know it’s boys.”
You ought to know, Julie thought. It was apparent Mrs. Rodriguez had just returned from an evening out. Her husband wouldn’t know about it. Juanita would. Julie was not a great hater, but she would have been hard put to find a kind word for the woman now twisting off the flashy rings from her fingers. “Where do you think she is? Let’s start with that.”
“She wants to go to her friend Elena’s for supper. I say okay, but you be home by nine o’clock. The whole holiday weekend and she hasn’t done her homework.”
“Did she come home?”
“Julie …” The woman’s face became a mask of contrition. “She has a very good father but not so good mother. You know?”
Julie ignored the ploy for sympathy. “Isn’t it possible she tried to call you? To ask if she could stay overnight? And then stayed anyway when she couldn’t reach you?”
“She knows better. Papa will not give permission. He will kill me….” The woman began to sob.
“Stop that!” Julie shouted. “Let’s call her friend’s house right now.”
“You know her number, Julie?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t even know her name except Elena.”
“Then you can’t do anything till morning. I can call the police….”
“No. No police. They come and ask questions.”
“Yeah.”
Mrs. Rodriguez brushed away green tears. Her mascara was running. “You are right. She stays with Elena, I think. That’s what I tell Papa if he looks and sees she’s not in her bed. A wild man.”
“First thing in the morning, call the school. Ask for the principal. Whoever you get, find out Elena’s last name, her phone number….”
The woman laid her hand on Julie’s. “Please, will you call? Say it’s for me, Señora Rodriguez. Say I don’t speak very good English. That’s the truth, no?”
“Mrs. Rodriguez …”
“Please, you call me Rose. We are friends, no?”
Julie could not go back to sleep. She listened for Juanita’s father to come home from work, a tired, bemused man who moonlighted on a second job while his wife moonlighted in her fashion. Juanita had grown up a silent, angry child who beat her dolls and pulled off their arms and legs. Now she and Julie were putting them together again with glue and heavy thread, a Christmas project for the really poor. It had taken Julie a long time to make her smile, then laugh, to make her see the dolls as little Juanitas. A lot of her own angry childhood had gone into the making.
Mr. Rodriguez came home. Julie waited for the explosion, the reverberations of which would run through the building. But none came. The woman would have persuaded him the child was asleep in her bed. Julie sat up and phoned the local precinct. The only complaints involving children were drug-related: downtown bookings, parents contacted.
“How about the prostitutes—any young ones?” The wildest possibility.
“They’re all young—and as old as Magdalene,” the desk sergeant said. Then: “This wasn’t a sweep night, Julie.”
Nothing came of inquiries to the local hospitals.
Julie lay back and thought about when she had last seen the youngster. Late afternoon yesterday. Probably when she was coming home to ask permission to go to Elena’s. What was she wearing besides the red, white, and green streamers? Julie couldn’t remember. The Italian colors were for the Columbus Day Street Fair. Nor could she remember Juanita’s ever mentioning Elena. She was only beginning to make friends. So, thank God for Elena. Sleep finally came.
The girl opened her eyes. She seemed to be dreaming of waking up, but she had to be still asleep. She was lying in a huge, strange bed under a blanket with her clothes on. The room was dark except for a patch of gray light in the ceiling. Curled up on her side, her thumb in her mouth, she stared at the light. It looked more like a sheet floating up there, but the flickering lights of a plane appeared and moved quickly out of sight again. She heard the roar go away. It was a skylight in the ceiling, something she had seen only in a movie.
She tried to wake up. She bit her thumb, and when it hurt she knew that she was already awake. Then she remembered what had happened to her before the sleep: the woman and a man in the dirty lobby of an old theater where she had gone to see the puppets. At the fair the woman had told her about them and promised to show her how they worked. She had wanted to learn how to make puppets and how to make them act. The woman said she was a natural. She and Julie might even use the dolls and make their own puppet show. But there weren’t any puppets, and she knew the minute the door had closed behind her that she should never, never have gone there. The woman grabbed her and covered her mouth when she started to scream; the man held her legs and roped them together, then knocked them out from under her, sat on her, pinned her arm down, and must have stuck a needle in her. The place in the hollow of her arm hurt now when she touched it. She distinctly heard him say, “Five minutes.” She tried to scratch and bite.
The man swore at her and the woman said, “For Christ’s sake, Danny, do you want her looking like a battered child?” Her memory stopped right there. Now the important thing was she had to go to the bathroom.
She inched her way to the edge of the bed in the direction she was facing. Something white stood on the floor a few feet from the bed—a bucket, she made out after a few seconds of study. She would have to use it, and maybe that was what it was there for. She crawled to it. It seemed safer to stay close to the floor. She wondered if her shoes were in the bed but didn’t think so. She squatted over the bucket but nothing happened. While she waited she made out the shapes of some scary figures on the other side of the bed—a lot of chalky white people just standing. They seemed to be moving toward her. She tried to cry out, but couldn’t, and her legs were shaking. She was sure she was going to fall. She managed not to, and the figures didn’t come round the bed. They weren’t even moving. Statues? If that was what they were, could one of them be the Blessed Virgin? “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….” She heard her own voice mumbling the prayer, then the beginning trickle of her water, then the gush, noisy in the pail.
She had just finished when the door opened behind her and sent a splash of light across the room. The man came in and lit a lamp on a table near the door.
“Figured out what that was for, did you? You’re a smart girl.”
She made no sound or move.
“Get back into bed and stay there till she brings your breakfast. I don’t want you messing round the studio. Do you know what a studio is? It’s where artists work.”
If she ran for the door, what would happen? He was too close to it and she couldn’t run. She couldn’t even move. Only her heart bumped inside her.
“Did you hear me? Into bed!”
“No.”
He grinned at her and took the hypodermic needle from his pocket.
She lunged, stumbling, toward the bed.
The guidance counselor, Dr. Alverez, sent Elena Cruz back to her classroom. Julie used the counselor’s phone to call Mrs. Rodriguez and tell her the news was not good. “You’d better waken your husband and then call the police, nine one one. Juanita did not go to Elena’s house at all last night. Elena was at her aunt’s house for dinner. In other words, Juanita has been missing since you last saw her. You simply must call the police.”
“Julie, please!” The woman’s voice rose hysterically.
“I’ll call you later,” Julie said and hung up.
The counselor was watching Julie with an appraising eye. “You know, don’t you, you’re the best thing that ever happened to Juanita.”
“Doesn’t help much now, does it?”
“If there’s anyone she’ll get in touch with it’s you.”
“So if I don’t hear from her, where is she? What’s the worst possibility you can think of, doctor?”
The counselor gave an enormous sigh. “That she was abducted. But if she was, she must have set herself up for it willingly—the lie about dinner at Elena’s.”
“Her mother thinks it’s all about boys,” Julie said.
“I wish it were. Ridiculous of me to say that, but the boys are a lot more interested in Juanita than she is in the boys.”
“Do you know what her home situation is like?”
Alverez nodded. “Her father works long hours. Whatever her mother does while he’s away, Juanita’s ashamed of it.”
“She usually stops at my place on the way home if I’m there. Yesterday she didn’t. I just happened to see her go by. I think she’d been to the street fair. If you’d ask her classmates whether anyone saw her—where and what time—it would be great. When I went out not long after I saw her, I found a flyer stuck in my mail drop. Now I wonder if she put it there. Maybe. You try to think of everything. This was about a rally of the West Side women to close up the porn shops in the neighborhood.”
Alverez smiled. “Well, I can tell you this: If there’s a budding feminist in the sixth grade, it’s Juanita Rodriguez.”
“Take a bite, honey, or I’ll eat it. Didn’t your mother ever say, ‘If you don’t eat it, I will’?”
Juanita did not answer. She was sitting at the table, the big woman between her and the door. It was daylight, but the room was lighted mostly by long tubes in the ceiling. There weren’t any windows except the one in the roof. The man, Danny, was poking around among the statues and moving some boxes. There were paintings, too, one on a three-legged stand and others stacked on their sides. Danny wasn’t doing anything, only moving things around. With his little eyes and skinny moustache he didn’t look to her like an artist.
The woman broke off a piece of the Danish, touched Juanita’s tight lips with it, and then ate it herself. Her fingernails were like dabs of blood, her mouth a red smear. Even her hair was red. She was as old as Mama, a lot older than Julie. Everybody would be looking for her, but where would they look? Papa would shout and whack her mother. Then he’d cry.
“Take some coffee, Juanita. It won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“You promised there were puppets.” Her first words except for the “No” to the needle.
“We do make puppets.”
The man gave a bark of laughter.
“Shut up, Danny. And you’re not supposed to touch any of their things back there. It’s in the agreement.”
“Fuck the agreement.”
“Don’t you talk like that in front of her,” the woman shouted.
“What in hell is going on with you, Dee?”
“Why don’t you go out and look for what you’re supposed to be looking for?”
“Because it’s nine A.M. and nothing’s open yet.” He came out from among the statues and stopped at the table. “The lights in here are no damn good for us. We should’ve known that.”
“Then get some that are! Honest to God, Danny, you’re in New York City.”
“Don’t hassle me, Dee. You’re the one jumped the gun, though I’m damned if I see why. Little Miss Perfect here.” He caught a handful of Juanita’s hair and pulled her head back—not roughly, but not gently either. He looked at her from her eyes to as far down as he could see and then let go. He poked his finger at the woman’s face. “Just don’t get too fond of her. She’s a puppet, remember.”
Julie, after several phone calls, reached an organizer of the antiporn rally. She promised an item in the Our Beat column and then told of the missing youngster. “It’s a long shot, but if you were handing out flyers at the street fair yesterday, I wonder if you saw her.”
“I wasn’t there myself, but there was an incident at the fair that might have involved your young person. Let me give you the number of Sue Laughlin. You mustn’t take her literally if she makes it sound like gang rape. That’s just Sue.”
A chorus of infant and toddler voices rang through Julie’s conversation with Sue Laughlin. “I thought the girl was older—sixteen, maybe. And she did volunteer. Anyway—shut up, Jamie. Can’t you see Mommy’s on the phone?—anyway, she was handing out our flyers when this gang of young jocks started to tease her—‘What’s pornography, Juanita?’ That sort of thing.”
“Did they call her by name? It’s important.”
“How would I know her name if they hadn’t? Then one of them snatched the flyers from her and they all clowned around throwing them into the air. And what did she do? She grabbed an umbrella from a concession stand and began thrashing the mischief out of them.”
Gang rape, Julie thought.
“They ran off and the guy selling the umbrellas tried to make her buy the one she’d taken. I was going to say something, but a woman who’d been watching the whole thing said she’d buy the umbrella.”
“Did you know the woman?”
“No. I don’t think she’s from the neighborhood. There were hundreds of people, you know.”
Julie felt herself tighten up. “Did she speak to Juanita?”
“I couldn’t say for sure. I just wasn’t paying attention aft
er that.”
“Could you describe the woman?”
“A big, solid woman, well dressed but flashy, too much makeup, red hair …”
Julie reached Detective Russo at precinct headquarters with her bits of information. Dominic Russo and she were old friends so he could say frankly that he would give it what time he could, but from her parents’ report the youngster sounded like a runaway. The case would go to Missing Persons within twenty-four hours. “We’ll give out her description at roll call and put it on the bulletin board. But you know how many kids hit the streets every day.”
“Yeah.”
“Most of them come home in a day or two.”
“Some don’t ever. I’ll keep in touch, Dom.”
“Don’t I know that,” he said.
Julie went upstairs to see the Rodriguezes as soon as they got home. Juanita’s father was sitting in the kitchen, his head in his hands. He looked up at her when she laid her hand on his shoulder. His eyes were wet. “Why she do this to us? Why?”
Julie, to reassure them of the girl’s resourcefulness, told them how Juanita had confronted the boys who were taunting her. Mrs. Rodriguez turned and stormed at her husband, “Men are pigs. You’re all pigs!” It ought to have been funny, Julie thought, but it wasn’t.
Juanita sat on the bathroom stool in a silk robe that was much too big for her. She had taken a shower she hadn’t wanted and washed her hair on the woman’s command. She hadn’t wanted to take off her clothes, but she was afraid the woman might make her, and might come into the bathroom with her. She hadn’t done that. She only made Juanita hand out her jeans, jacket, and sweat shirt, her bra, panties, and socks. She hadn’t seen her sneakers since they brought her here.
She knew now that this was a loft. The bathroom was fancy-new. So was the kitchen, which didn’t have any doors. The living room ran all the way from the studio—the room with the big bed and the statues—to what must be the front of the building. Street noises seemed to come from there, and there must be a very big window with heavy curtains covering it. Threads of light showed at the top and at the floor. A Castro convertible bed, where they must have slept, was open. The woman, who said she must call her Dee, told her the big door was to the elevator and was kept locked. Juanita was pretty sure there had to be a fire escape. But where?
In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By Page 6
