by Mike Omer
“And… are you positive about the car’s make?” Mitchell was pretty sure that when people asked Tanessa what kind of car she owned, she answered, “A red one.”
“I know what I saw, Detective,” she said sharply.
“I’m sure you do,” he said, backing off. Maybe she hadn’t been so close to cracking after all.
“Officer Lonnie,” Jacob said warmly as he joined them. “How are you?”
“Hey, Jacob,” Tanessa said, smiling at him. “I’m fine. How’s Marissa?”
“She’s wonderful as always,” Jacob said, smiling back. “Who’s your friend in the car?”
“Just a guy we arrested,” she said. “He shot his computer to death.”
“Really?” Jacob looked impressed. “I should go and talk to him. I’ve always wanted to shoot my computer, but I thought it might be frowned upon.”
“We know the make of the car,” Mitchell said.
“And the color,” Matt reminded him.
“Right! It’s a green Toyota Camry.”
“That’s amazing progress,” Jacob said, rubbing his hands. It was getting a bit chilly. “Let’s alert dispatch. Maybe one of our patrol teams will see it.”
Mitchell called dispatch and gave them the description of the car.
Two hours later, it was spotted.
Chapter Nine
The green Toyota Camry had been abandoned on Yosemite Way, not very far from the scene of the hit and run. It was spotted by the other patrol team on the graveyard shift. They saw the car parked haphazardly, two wheels on the sidewalk. As they got closer, they saw its right front light was smashed, the hood was completely bent, and the front window was cracked. There were smears of blood on the hood and on the front window. They quickly called it in.
A quick check with the DMV found that the Toyota belonged to a Rabbi Baruch Friedman. He had a criminal record, and his file wasn’t one of the thinner ones. He had been incarcerated twice for drug-related offenses, and once for assault. He was “allegedly” a prominent member in one of Glenmore Park’s most notorious gangs, The Hasidic Panthers.
Twenty minutes later, two patrol cars, one of them belonging to Tanessa Lonnie and Sergio Bertini, parked in front of Rabbi Friedman’s house. Wearing bulletproof vests, their weapons drawn, three of them knocked on the front door, while Sergio waited by the back door in case Rabbi Friedman decided to take a hike.
He didn’t. He appeared to be miffed at being woken up so early in the morning, and his irritation grew much more when he found out they were there to arrest him. He called them “Goyim” and “Amalek,” and as the situation escalated he started shouting angrily in Yiddish, which none of them understood.
He was taken to the police department for questioning. His lawyer appeared, angry and bustling, at eight thirty in the morning, asserting that his client should be released immediately.
Mitchell and Jacob started to interview the rabbi at nine.
Both interrogation rooms in the department were pretty much the same: small and cramped, with the floor and the bottom half of the walls painted black while the ceiling and the top half of the walls were painted white; this created a very depressing and stressful yin-yang effect. A lamp hung above the small table, its bulb casting a harsh, blinding light. One of the walls had a one-way mirror, which reflected both the investigators and the unhappy person who was being interrogated.
Mitchell and Jacob sat in front of the rabbi, staring at him. He stared back. He was a wide man with cold blue piercing eyes, and a huge black beard which he constantly touched, as if trying to reassure himself it was still there. The rabbi’s lawyer, who introduced himself as Mel Turner, was a skinny, agitated man, with a pair of round spectacles and a balding head. He rummaged in his briefcase, muttering.
“Rabbi Friedman,” Jacob said. “How nice to see you again.”
“Detective Cooper,” Friedman said. “Who is the little pisher?”
“That would be my partner, Detective Mitchell Lonnie. I’d mind my tongue if I were you, Rabbi. You’re in trouble.”
“What trouble, Detective? Why do you keep barging into my home, scaring my wife and my children?”
“Because” Jacob said evenly, “you keep breaking the law, Rabbi.”
“Feh. I broke no law. I want to go home.” He caressed his beard gently.
Jacob’s voice became frosty. “You were seen running over a young girl in your car, Rabbi. Twice.”
This made the rabbi pause and frown. He leaned back.
“Her name was Tamay. She’s dead,” Jacob added.
“What car?” the rabbi asked.
“Your car.”
“What car, you Shmegegge? I have four cars registered to my name. What car are you talking about?”
“A green Toyota Camry,” Jacob said. “Its license plate is—”
Friedman snorted, smiling behind his huge beard. “I sold it.”
Jacob raised his eyebrows. “It’s still registered in your name.”
“Yes, yes. Some man walks by as I am driving my car, sitting at a red light. He offers to buy my car for six thousand dollars. Cash. I say, sure. He pops his suitcase, counts six thousand dollars, gives me the money, I give him my keys and he drives away. I was going to take care of the registration later.”
“That’s very convenient, Rabbi,” Jacob said, narrowing his eyes.
“Ach! What’s convenient?” Friedman asked, tugging at his beard, nearly ripping it off. “Waking up at four in the morning? Being handcuffed like a criminal?”
“My client has told you he doesn’t own the car,” Turner said. “Unless you have a witness who can positively identify him driving the car, I think we’re done here.”
Jacob ignored him. “Where were you tonight, between one thirty and two thirty?” he asked Friedman.
“Asleep, in my home, of course. With my wife.”
“That’s not a very strong alibi,” Mitchell said.
“Oh,” Friedman said, his voice dismissive, “the young schmuck can talk! How nice. Listen, Detective. I didn’t drive this car, I sold it two days ago. What do you want me to say?”
“I will drag your wife here, Rabbi,” Jacob said. “I will question her in a different room, and if her story is different, we will have a problem. As you would say… Gevalt.”
“Your Yiddish is crap, Detective,” Friedman said, his voice low and angry.
“This is an outrage,” Turner said.
“Shut up,” Friedman told him.
“Rabbi, you don’t need to answer any more questions—”
“Shut up! Shut up, you shyster! Be quiet!”
Turner closed his mouth, a hurt look in his eyes.
“Fine,” Friedman spat. “I was not at home. You happy now? I was out. But I didn’t drive that car. I sold it.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “Where were you?”
“At the Pussy Factory.”
The Pussy Factory was a well known strip club in Glenmore Park. It was said that all the rich and powerful went there occasionally. It was said that the strippers made more in tips in one night than a police officer made in a month. It was said that the owner had dealings with the Yakuza. A lot of things were regularly said about the place, and it was anyone’s guess which of them had an inkling of truth.
Rabbi Friedman said he had been there between eleven and three in the morning. He told Jacob to call them. He said they would remember him.
They did.
“Yeah, he was here,” the shift manager told Jacob on the phone, his voice groggy as if he had been woken up by the call. “Rabbi Friedman? He’s a regular. I saw him last night.”
“Are you sure?”
“How could I not be? The guy made such a fuss about some cheese in his burger. He said it wasn’t kosher. Can you believe it? This guy’s a so-called holy man, a rabbi for Christ’s sake, and he spends four hours in a strip club, gets two lap dances, and then starts worrying about kosher?”
“That… that is extraordinary,
” Jacob said, doing his best to keep the smile out of his voice.
“Burgers have cheese in them, am I right? We never need to worry about what’s kosher. You know why, Detective?”
“Why?”
“Because this is a fucking strip club!”
“So you’re sure he didn’t leave before three?”
“Yeah. Gisele gave him another lap dance, just to calm him down about the whole kosher thing. He gave her a hundred-dollar tip. Shoved it right down the front of her thong. Called her bubala.”
“Bubala, huh?”
“Yeah. She finished the lap dance around quarter to three, so I don’t know. Maybe he left straight after.”
“I might need a statement from Gisele.”
“Sure, drop by tomorrow evening. She starts at seven.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Sure,” the man said, and hung up.
“Looks like the rabbi is telling the truth,” Jacob told Mitchell.
The rabbi did not want to talk to a sketch artist; he just wanted to go home to his wife and children. He carried around his hurt pride like a scepter, brandishing it at will. Mitchell and Jacob tried to remain patient. Or, if Mitchell had to be honest with himself, Jacob tried to be patient, while Mitchell did his best not to hit Friedman’s bearded face.
“A woman is dead, Rabbi,” Jacob said, for what felt to Mitchell like the hundredth time.
“Ach, what do you want from me? Every time a woman dies, I need to do something about it?” Friedman sat by Jacob’s desk, shoveling kreplach into his mouth. Jacob had ordered the kreplach from a Jewish restaurant Detective Hannah Shor knew. It was the only reason Friedman was still there.
“She was hit by your car,” Jacob said. “You sold it to someone. We need to know what he looked like.”
“I don’t know what he looked like! What do you want me to say? He looked like a goy. I wasn’t driving the car.”
“We know that. We would be glad if you could help us find the man who did.”
“I can’t. I don’t remember.” Another kreplach was swallowed by the cavity within the black beard, never to be seen again. Mitchell sank into happy fantasies in which he set the rabbi’s beard on fire.
“Okay,” Jacob said. “If you don’t remember, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“That’s right.”
“I hope,” Jacob said slowly, “that a search warrant for your house and office will provide us the information that we need.”
“Eh?” Friedman’s left eyebrow rose.
“Well, maybe there’s a paper about the sale somewhere in your house. Or maybe it’s in your office.”
“There is no paper.”
“Well, I want to make sure,” Jacob said. “I think the judge will agree that it’s the right thing to do. A woman died, after all.”
“Ach! You police! Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“We just want to find the man who hit the girl.”
“Fine! I’ll talk to your artist!” Friedman said, and began to mutter in Yiddish.
While Jacob called the artist, Mitchell went over to the evidence room and signed for Tamay’s handbag and its contents. He returned to the squad room and went through the box. The purse had held a few basic cosmetic products, a phone, and a small purse with some change and a driver’s license. He examined the license for a few seconds. Her full name was Tamay Mosely. She had been smiling slightly when the picture was taken.
Tanessa had gone to break the news to Tamay’s parents, and had updated Mitchell about it that morning. Tamay didn’t have a car of her own; she had used her parents’ car occasionally. Mitchell thought to himself it was a pity she hadn’t driven home last night.
He sighed and put down the driver’s license, then picked up the phone, which was mainly what he was interested in. He had requested the night before that the phone be charged for a few hours, so he could check it in the morning. He saw with some satisfaction that it had a full battery. Even better, it had no screen lock and, with only a swipe, the device’s many secrets were available to his fingertips.
It was a well-known fact in the squad that if you really wanted a thorough check of someone’s digital life, Mitchell was your guy. He had a knack for locating and cross-referencing social network accounts and e-mail accounts, extracting endless information about the person’s friends, habits, and secrets. With Tamay’s phone and his own computer, he could now start to process her life.
She was an incredibly popular girl. Her Facebook account, which she mostly ignored, had over three thousand friends. Most of the action in her digital life revolved around Twitter and Instagram, and she had nearly ten thousand followers on each. He quickly found out that she had been a singer in a moderately successful indie rock band called Black Bees, which regularly played at The Wild Pony, the bar where she worked. Glancing through her phone’s photo gallery, he noticed a guy who appeared in her selfies lately, mostly hugging her, probably a boyfriend. He also found a few partially nude photos she’d taken of herself, which he did his best to ignore, uncomfortable with the invasion of her privacy.
He heard Friedman yelling at the sketch artist in the background. “No! A bigger nose! What is the matter with you? I can draw better than this!”
Mitchell filtered the commotion out, diving deeper. Tamay’s list of contacts was more interesting. These were the people she was really in touch with, as opposed to the thousands of social networks friends and followers. There were about four hundred names there, but recent call logs and message logs mapped out about fifty whom she had been in regular contact with. These were probably friends, other employees in the bar, and family. He made a note of the names, underlining the most prominent ones. He matched them with their social network profiles, checking out their posts, looking for anything that intersected with Tamay’s posts. There were some photos of her singing on stage, some comments of adoration. Her boyfriend seemed to be at almost every gig she had. Some deeper digging gave Mitchell the answer as to why that was: he was one of the bartenders at The Wild Pony.
Now both the sketch artist and the rabbi were shouting. Jacob was trying to broker peace. The sketch artist had been offended somehow, something about his artistic merit. Friedman was threatening to walk out the door.
Mitchell knew there was no point in trying to help. This was just the kind of thing Jacob excelled at, and Mitchell should focus on what he did best. He put on his headphones, played an album by Franz Ferdinand to block out the noise, and kept on digging.
Her texts and private messages came next. Some tame sexting with the boyfriend. She had Snapchat, and he assumed the juicier content happened in there. Messages to and from her band mates. She messaged with her mother as well, though not with her father. Some promotional messages: a sale at a random online store, a used car salesman offering a hot deal on a car, a message claiming it could help her stop smoking within two weeks.
Her e-mail had some fan mail, and he took his time reading those. Fans could be obsessive—they could, potentially, be deadly—but he saw nothing that seemed alarming. Other than that, it was pretty much the usual: e-mails of confirmations of subscriptions and users, the occasional spam mail that somehow sneaked through the ever-watchful filters. Nothing seemed relevant. Her sent mail was not very illuminating either. He only read four months back. Her e-mail archive went back years, but when you were rooting through someone’s digital life you had to know where to stop.
He lifted his eyes, saw Friedman and Jacob shaking hands. The sketch artist was gone, hopefully having managed to draw something that satisfied the rabbi. Would the sketch be helpful? Would it perhaps match one of the faces Mitchell had just seen in the thousands of online photos he’d gone through?
Something was bothering him. He had seen something that snagged in his brain. It itched in his mind, like a mosquito bite in the subconscious. What was it? He scanned the topics of her last e-mails, trying to pinpoint whatever it was that had raised the alarm. No. It wasn’t an
e-mail.
He frowned, his hand playing distractedly with the ring box in his pocket. It felt foreign to his touch, almost as if it belonged to a different life. He scanned the private messages again.
The last message was from Tamay’s boyfriend, asking if she was awake. She wasn’t. She never would be again. The message before it was from the car salesman. Mitchell suddenly noticed the time stamp of the message - 01:15 a.m. A message from a car salesman in the middle of the night? Mitchell opened it and scanned it once more, his mind finally registering what should have been obvious from the first second: There was an image of the car the salesman was advertising. It was a green Toyota Camry.
It was the vehicle that had run over Tamay Mosely twice only thirty minutes after the message had been sent.
Some hours later, Mitchell realized he and Pauline had scheduled a date for the evening—dinner at their favorite restaurant, Raggio Di Sole. This date, planned a week in advance, was supposed to have started five minutes ago. He jumped out of his seat and dashed out of the squad room in a state of acute panic.
He couldn’t find his car, and whirled around in the parking lot in desperation. Once he found it, he realized he had left the car keys on his desk. He took off in another hysterical dash, berating himself. He barged back into the squad room, nearly knocking Hannah down, grabbed the keys, and zipped out of the room again.
Finally, inside the car, he pulled out of the parking lot way too fast and almost ran over an old woman, who angrily thumped his hood with her cane.
There was traffic. Of course there was traffic. He began forming excuses in his mind. He could blame rush hour. That was his best bet. With a bit of luck, he’d encounter an accident or a blocked road, which he would be able to maneuver into his excuse.
He reached the restaurant twenty-five minutes past the time they had set. He explained breathlessly to the hostess he was joining a table reserved for Pauline. The hostess said that though the table had been reserved, Pauline had not yet arrived. Mitchell took a moment to process the information. Finally, he asked where the table was.
