Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

  Saul and I approach the desk sergeant.

  “My name is Rebekah Roberts,” I say. “I’m here to see—”

  Before I can finish, the officer, a petite woman with elaborately braided hair, picks up the phone and dials an extension: “She’s here.”

  A moment later, Darin comes through a side door, flanked by four other men in ill-fitting suits with badges clipped to their waists. They see me, and then Saul.

  “Katz,” says the tallest of the group. “Come with me.”

  Saul obliges. The tall man holds open the side door, and two others follow Saul through it.

  “You’re okay,” says Darin. It is a statement, not a question. His face is stiff.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “We need to ask you some questions,” he says. Then: “Please.”

  I nod and am ushered out of the reception area, through a waist-high door, and past a row of lockers. Uniformed officers, with their guns on their hips, seem to be lurking around every corner, staring. Everyone is tense. We pass a series of doors with tiny windows—interrogation rooms—and I see Saul and the three men in one. Is that where I’m going? My lower intestines ignite, sending what feels like blue fire through my bloodstream. It’s a funny condition, acute anxiety. It can murmur low in your stomach for days, weeks even, with no apparent cause. Am I worried about school? My boyfriend? Paying rent? I used to lie in bed and try to identify the source, but the feeling defied logic or categorization. My stepmom, also a worrier, maintains that anxiety is our body’s way of keeping us from danger. It’s telling you something, she’d say. Which sounds logical, but breaks down when the feeling buzzes on and off constantly and seems to have little to do with what’s actually happening. I roll my mind back over the last three days. I don’t think I’ve done anything illegal, but I am alone in here. If I am not brave, they will devour me.

  Darin opens a door and motions for me to enter a small break-room kitchen.

  “Please sit down,” he says, gesturing to a folding table and chairs set. The room smells like burnt popcorn and hand soap.

  One of the men stays outside and the other enters with Darin, who shuts the door behind him and then sits down next to me.

  “This is Captain Weber,” says Darin. “This is his station house. He is working the Mendelssohn case.”

  I nod.

  “I’d like you to tell me and Detective Spinelli exactly how you met Saul Katz,” says the captain.

  “I met him Friday, the day they found Rivka Mendelssohn. I had been assigned to go to the Mendelssohn house to get quotes and he was there.”

  “Had you ever met him before?” The captain is leaning toward me. I can see the tiny black hairs growing out of his nose. He has a deeply wrinkled face.

  “No. Why would you ask that?”

  “I’ll ask the questions for now, all right, young lady?”

  Oh boy.

  “Had you ever met him before?”

  “No,” I say. “I said that.”

  The captain looks at Darin.

  “You’re saying you had no connection to Saul Katz before you just ‘ran into him’ at a murder victim’s house on Friday?”

  Now I look at Darin. “What the fuck?” I say. “You’re the ones with a rogue cop. I’m a reporter. I was doing my job.”

  “I’m running a murder investigation, ma’am.” Ha. Young lady to ma’am in less than a minute.

  “Are you?”

  “Is that what Saul Katz told you? That we’re not running an investigation? Did you ask anyone at my department anything about this case at all? Because none of my people have heard of you.”

  “I’ve spoken to DCPI …”

  “Have you? Who, exactly, have you spoken to?”

  I didn’t get the name of the tall man at the scene. Then, he was nothing more to me than DCPI.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as earnestly as I can muster. “I’m not sure what Darin told you, but I met Saul Katz on Friday night. He said he had been called in as a liaison to the Orthodox community on this case. He told me he usually worked in property crimes. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” says the captain.

  “But he’s not a liaison?”

  “He’s not anything anymore,” says the captain. “Except a suspect.”

  “Why is he a suspect?”

  The captain sighs. He is sick of me. “He is a suspect because he is attempting to manipulate the investigation. He is a suspect because he knew the victim. And because if not for the miracle of modern medicine, Saul Katz would be in prison for murder.”

  On cue, Darin hands the captain a folder. “Would you like to see what Saul Katz did to a sixty-year-old man?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer, and of course, I don’t get up. He opens the file and with his fingertips spreads out four 8 × 10 glossy close-up photos of a man in a hospital bed. The man’s face is almost unrecognizable as a face. Both eyes are purple and swollen shut. There are metal rods that look like scaffolding attached to either side of his head, which is shaved; a fresh red surgery scar runs like train tracks up his skull.

  “He’ll never walk again,” says the captain. “Severe brain damage. Saul beat him into unconsciousness. With his bare hands.”

  I’m not sure what to say. Protesting that the man in the pictures may have intimidated witnesses in a felony case seems imprudent.

  “Tell me the truth about your relationship with Saul Katz,” says the captain.

  “My relationship?” And then I realize: he’s talking about my mother.

  “Saul Katz knew my mother before I was born,” I say. “She grew up in Borough Park. Her family was—is—Hasidic. I’m not sure how they knew each other, but they did. But then my mother met my father, and they moved to Florida, where I was born. So I never met him.”

  “I’ll check all this out,” says the captain. “I’d like to talk to your mother.”

  “Can’t help you with that.”

  “You’re not in touch?”

  “We are not in touch.”

  “Is she deceased?”

  “Could be. I have no idea. She left us when I was six months old. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  The captain pauses a moment. “I see,” he says. “I assume Saul Katz will tell me the same story.”

  “It’s the truth,” I say.

  “Something Katz seems to have trouble with,” says Darin.

  The captain gets up.

  “Before you go,” I say, “could you tell me where you are in the investigation into the Mendelssohn murder?”

  The captain raises a bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrow.

  “Have you interviewed her husband? Or her boyfriend?”

  “Her …?” The captain catches himself before finishing his sentence and positively revealing that he had no idea the woman whose death he is supposedly investigating had been having an affair. I don’t even try to hide my smile.

  “Maybe you should ask Saul Katz,” I say.

  I peek at Darin, who is looking down, shaking his head.

  “No comment, then?” I say, leaning down to my bag and taking out my notebook and pen.

  The captain opens his mouth then closes it. Then opens it again. “You know I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”

  I scribble no comment—ongoing invest into my notebook.

  “And just so I’m clear, you haven’t interviewed the victim’s lover or husband?”

  The captain is losing patience. “Like I said, I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.” He gathers the photographs of the man Saul assaulted and tucks them under his arm. “You are free to go for now. But we may have questions for you later.”

  “I can’t wait,” I say, feeling mildly triumphant.

  “Your friend Saul Katz is in a lot of trouble, miss.” This guy really loves his diminutives. “From where I’m sitting, he has at the very least interfered with a police investigation. And if I discover you and he so much as stood in line for coffee together before last Friday,
you may have, too. We take obstruction seriously, and I have no problem indicting a reporter. Your paper doesn’t hold nearly the weight it thinks it does. And you can feel free to tell your bosses I said so.”

  “Will do,” I say.

  The captain leaves, and for a moment, Darin and I sit in silence.

  “Don’t blame Tony,” he says finally. “I didn’t really give him a choice.”

  “You’re worried about your friend,” I say. “That’s a nice quality.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?” he asks, sounding exhausted. “I can’t tell. I thought you’d take it better from him than me.”

  “Take it?”

  Darin exhales and shakes his head. “Look, I don’t feel bad about this. What Tony told me about a detective taking you to the funeral home was a red fucking flag. No two ways about it. And it took one phone call to confirm he was who he was.”

  A phone call I never made.

  “Can I ask you a question, off the record?” I say.

  “You can ask,” he says.

  “Do you really think Saul Katz murdered Rivka Mendelssohn?”

  “I’m not going to answer that,” he says, standing up.

  “I don’t remember reading anything in the newspaper about an NYPD detective who nearly killed a man,” I say. “I’m guessing that somebody convinced that man’s family not to press charges. Most people don’t just get suspended from their jobs when they commit what looks to me like aggravated assault.” I’m out on a limb here, but if I’m not in legal trouble—which I can see now that I am not—then I have a real story. About a police cover-up and a compromised murder investigation. And maybe another story about Shomrim’s relationship with the NYPD. And maybe another about witness intimidation in the community.

  But Darin doesn’t bite.

  “Here’s my card,” he says instead. “We are investigating this murder now, Rebekah. That I can assure you.”

  “Now?” I say. “So you weren’t before.”

  Darin doesn’t respond. He holds open the swinging door for me to leave, then follows me to the exit and opens the door to the cold.

  I’m not outside a minute when my phone rings. It is UNKNOWN

  “It’s Rebekah,” I say.

  “Rebekah! What the fuck is going on?”

  It’s Larry.

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  “I’m in Brooklyn.”

  “You need to get to Midtown. They want us both in the office.”

  “Why?”

  “Because somebody high up in the department told Albert Morgan that he had a reporter trying to pass off the ramblings of a suspended cop as inside information. You can think of how to explain it on the subway.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The newsroom is quieter now at nearly eight thirty at night than it is in the middle of the day. The desks in the gossip and Sunday sections are empty. All but one of the five TVs above the spiral of cubicles that makes up the “city desk” are tuned to sports. Mike sees me as soon as I walk through the heavy glass doors from the elevator bay. He is very unhappy.

  “We need to talk,” he says quite a bit louder than he needs to. He is red-faced and his breathing is shallow. “Albert Morgan has a reservation at Eleven Madison Park with his family tonight, but he is coming here before to personally ask you what the fuck.”

  Mike always struck me as the gentle giant type. Big and soft and harmless. He’s never even raised his voice at me, unlike Lars, who barks and insults with glee. But clearly, he is shaken by Morgan’s summons. He hired me and he runs the day shift stringers, so he’s probably concerned Morgan will blame him for not supervising me properly.

  “Sorry,” I say, just as Larry Dunn walks in.

  Larry is in his fifties and his thin blond hair is turning white. He is wearing black orthopedic shoes and a yellow Livestrong bracelet around one wrist. Marisa told me a couple months ago that one of the editors had cancer. Maybe it’s Larry.

  “We’re supposed to wait in his office,” says Mike.

  “You first, boss,” says Larry.

  Mike ushers us past sports and art to a part of the twelfth floor where I’ve never been. Albert Morgan’s office is smaller than I’d imagined the managing editor would get. There are two windows that face the building next door, but the rest is unremarkable. Standard, sturdy dark wood executive desk; leather wingback with all the ergonomic details you pay an extra grand for. Albert Morgan is the first black managing editor of the New York Tribune. He won a Pulitzer in the early 1990s—the Trib’s first and only—for a series of reports and columns about race relations and the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings. There is a plaque on the wall commemorating the award, next to a photograph of him holding a giant fish beneath a banner reading, MARTHA’S VINEYARD STRIPED BASS AND BLUE FISH DERBY, 2001. On the wall behind his desk is an antique map of China.

  There are only two chairs in the room, other than Morgan’s behind the desk. Mike and Larry and I all stand, waiting.

  Albert Morgan enters the room and immediately orders that we “sit down.”

  Mike sits. Larry hesitates, gesturing to me. I appreciate the courtesy but nod for him to sit. I need to stay standing; I think it will make me seem more in control.

  “Sir,” I say, before he’s even got his coat off, “let me tell you what happened.”

  “Wonderful! Someone who gets to the point. Go.”

  I take a deep breath; I’ve been practicing a succinct version of the last three days on the train. The quicker I get it out, the quicker I know if I still have a job. And, if I’m lucky, the quicker the brick in my stomach begins to dissolve.

  “Mike sent me to a crime scene on Friday. A dead body in a scrap metal yard in Brooklyn. I talked to DCPI and workers and even to the victim’s son—though I didn’t know he was her son at the time. Later that night, Cathy had me go to the victim’s house in Borough Park. There were several police cars out front, including the Shomrim.”

  Albert has thrown his coat over the back of his enormous leather chair. He is standing with his arms crossed over his chest, his face expressionless. I wait for him to ask me what the Shomrim is, but he does not. “Keep going,” he says.

  “One of the cars had uniformed officers in it, one had plainclothes. They were detectives. I asked them about the case but they wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Larry sits down. We make eye contact and he nods, like, you’re doing okay. Mike is biting at his cuticles and looking at the carpet. I continue.

  “Then another detective arrived. He had a badge. At least it looked like a badge. And he went directly to the uniformed officers and spoke with them. And they spoke with him. So I assumed he was a detective. I went to question him and … he recognized me.”

  “Excuse me?” Morgan’s tone is teetering on exasperation.

  “He knew my mother. I look like her.”

  “Get to the part where you explain quickly, please.”

  “He said he was in property crimes but that because he was Orthodox and had grown up in the community he was sometimes called in as a liaison. The problem is that he wasn’t actually working the case at all, because he’d been suspended from the force in December for … assaulting a man.”

  Mike shakes his head. “Jesus.”

  “But everything he told me has been right on,” I say. “Are the police actually denying she was pregnant?”

  “No,” says Larry. “In fact, I’ve been told off the record that it’s true.”

  “Off the record?” asks Morgan.

  “Brooklyn South commander gave it to me an hour ago.”

  Morgan turns to me. “What else did this … What’s his name?”

  “Saul Katz.”

  “What else did Saul Katz tell you?”

  “He told me he didn’t think the police were going to do a real investigation.”

  “What made him think this?”

  “He said the community was obsessed with keeping unpleasant things under wraps. He said ther
e was a kind of don’t-ask-don’t-tell thing going on between them and the police. He said Aron Mendelssohn, the dead woman’s husband, was a major benefactor of Shomrim and that he would make sure they pinned this on someone outside the community, or just let people forget about it.”

  “Didn’t they bring in a gardener?” Morgan asks.

  “They questioned a gardener and released him,” I say.

  “No arrests?”

  “No,” I say. “And at the scene the M.E.’s office let the Jewish van take the body straight to the funeral home.”

  “Larry, there was no autopsy?”

  Larry shakes his head. “The funeral home might make a report.”

  “Has anyone seen a report?” asks Morgan.

  “I’ve seen the body,” I say.

  Everyone looks at me.

  “You mean at the crime scene,” says Mike.

  “No,” I say, “I got into the funeral home on Saturday. I saw her after they’d … prepared her.”

  “Let me guess,” says Larry, “Saul Katz got you in.”

  I nod again. Larry looks impressed. Mike looks annoyed. Morgan is still wearing a poker face.

  “She was savagely beaten,” I say, trying to impart the graveness of her injuries with my inflection. “Someone hit her in the face and the head and the neck repeatedly with something. They shaved her head and stripped her and dumped her in the scrap pile. She’d be on her way to China if not for dumb luck.”

  “Okay,” says Morgan. “Ms …?”

  “Roberts. Rebekah Roberts.”

  “Ms. Roberts. You’ve obviously done some good work on this. You’ve also made some pretty major fucking mistakes. Are you a New Yorker?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m from Florida.”