Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  This early in the morning, sure she’ll catch most of the neighbors in, Saki begins her preliminary canvass with the house immediately to the left. With brownstones she makes it her practice to try both the parlor and ground-floor entrances, since sometimes the buildings are split into multiple units.

  She climbs the stoop and rings the bell, her credentials at the ready. After a few moments, the door is answered by an older man in a robe and slippers, thick silver hair askew. He asks, “Can I help you…detective?”

  Saki launches into a standard query. “Good morning. Sorry to disturb you. I’m asking around about your neighbor Glynnie Dreyfus. Her mother’s worried because it appears she didn’t come home last night. Have you seen her any time in the last twelve hours?”

  The man clears his throat and says, “No, I haven’t seen her for at least a few days. Nik and Mags are good people, and I don’t think Aidan gives them any trouble, but he’s young yet. Glynnie, though? Well, she’ll come around, I’m sure.”

  In the apartment below: a young woman in a business suit with hair wrapped in a striped towel. “Are you talking about that teenage girl who lives next door and blasts her music in the middle of the night with her windows open?”

  Two houses down, a man in shorts and sneakers is locking up his front door. He removes his ear buds long enough to say, “I saw her last week when I thought I smelled a skunk but it was her, sitting on my stoop, smoking weed.”

  Across the street, a mother escorting twin girls to school whispers so her preteens won’t hear, “If my girls talked the way she does I’d ground them for a month.”

  An older woman returning with her cocker spaniel from a walk says, “Glynnie Dreyfus used to be a nice little girl. That’s all I have to say.”

  A trim fortyish man in a well-fitting suit with a briefcase tucked under his arm is dragging his trash cans from the curb to his house. He turns his attention to Saki. “Are you asking about the Dreyfus girl across the street?”

  “I am,” Saki answers. “Her mother’s worried because it appears she didn’t come home last night.” She proffers her identification.

  “She’s missing?” The man’s expression tightens.

  “Not necessarily. Did you see her last night or this morning?”

  “Yes,” he says, pointing to the neighboring stoop. “I saw her last night sitting right there with a black man.”

  She hears the racial emphasis loud and clear, and imagines how he’d describe her. Asian lady. Woman detective. She asks, “What time was that?”

  “Around eight fifteen, eight thirty.”

  “Did you recognize the man?”

  “No, I didn’t. I stopped to make sure she was okay. I asked if there was a problem.”

  “Did she seem like she wasn’t okay?”

  “I couldn’t tell, but—”

  “The man—what did he look like?”

  “Young. Wearing blue jeans. He had that big puffy hair, the way they do.”

  “They?”

  A pause. “Teenagers.”

  “Oh. You said man.”

  “Young man. Could have been Glynnie’s age or a little older. Did he do something to her?”

  “Did they seem like friends?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I was only trying to help. Her response was…obnoxious. I went inside.”

  The neighbor, John Phelps, takes Saki’s card in case he thinks of anything else. He turns and walks swiftly in the direction of the subway around the corner, leaving Saki alone on the sidewalk with a cold feeling she doesn’t like. Across the street, through the vaporous white curtains draping the Dreyfus brownstone’s floor-to-ceiling windows, she can make out the shadowy movements of someone pacing: the mother, worrying a trench into the expensive carpet.

  Saki’s phone vibrates with a call. She answers, “Finley.”

  “This is Pam at ITB.”

  Saki glances at the time. Seventeen minutes since she put in her request to Information Technology. Not bad. “What do you have?”

  “The Instagram post made at seven forty-nine p.m. points to two twelve Court Street, posted thirteen seconds after the photo was taken. After that the signal traces to Red Hook, where it stays until twelve fifty-one a.m., when it stops at sixty-two Mill Street. There’s a big housing project there; it’s always hard to get a signal once someone goes in.”

  “Thanks, Pam.”

  “One more thing. There were significant still periods when the signal stops moving: first on Beard Street near the coastline, then it blanks out in a dead zone somewhere, then on Hamilton Avenue, then at Mill Street.”

  “That’s all between seven forty-nine and twelve fifty-one?”

  “Yup.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Hope that helps.”

  It helps to a point, in that it puts Glynnie in Red Hook for a set period of time. But it doesn’t tell Saki if the young African American man was still with the girl at the bank and, better yet, if anyone at the housing project can identify him.

  She returns to the silver Ford she signed out of the station house lot, buckles up behind the wheel, opens the windows to let in the soft June air. She’s about to start the engine when she thinks to text her fiancé, Russ, to remind him that tonight it’s his turn to make dinner, as he often forgets. But before she can tap in the message, the phone rings in her hand. She answers, “Detective Finley.”

  “DAS here,” a woman says. “Just wanted you to know that the bank footage you asked for is up now. Didn’t say emergency, but I saw it’s a missing persons, so…”

  “Thank you.”

  On her phone, Saki taps the Domain Awareness System app and downloads the bank security footage. A van with music blaring pulls beside her at the end of a line of stalled traffic waiting on a red light. She closes her windows and fixes her attention on the video clip as it reveals four and a half minutes of last night.

  Glynnie approaches a pair of ATMs; she looks nothing like the poised preteen girl in the family portrait. Braless in a striped T-shirt, lank hair, orange flip-flops, lime green pedicure and torn jeans—everything about her oozing rebellion. A young man and a boy, both African American, follow but hang back as she dips her card into the machine on the right and makes the withdrawal. The young man, with his round wide fro, fits the general description from the neighbor and also matches the Instagram post the mother mentioned. The other one, the boy, is slim and nervous in sagging jeans showing his underwear. Saki wishes she could reach into the video and pull up the boy’s pants. He’s too young for this, whatever it is they’re up to.

  A short stack of fifties spew out. Saki counts along, one, two, three, four, five, six, as the girl checks her money, folds it, and slips it into her pants pocket. Six fifties. The three hundred dollars the mother reported seeing in the bank record online.

  What were they planning to do with three hundred dollars? In the projects? In the middle of the night?

  9

  Last Night

  Glynnie glances up from rolling the joint and sees her dealer pointing a pistol at her friend. “What the fuck, JJ?”

  “Cool, right?” The boy turns the gun sideways, displaying it. “It’s mine, a Ruger twenty-two. Just got it from Big Man’s cousin—gave me a break on sticker ’cause, you know.” His eyes flick to Crisp, obviously hoping for approval, and Glynnie sees it—it being the guy thing, maybe even the race thing—and feels a drainage of situational power.

  She gets to her feet, holding the joint between two outstretched fingers (channeling Audrey Hepburn at a cocktail soiree), and asks, “Where can I get one?” She extends her free hand to receive the weapon.

  “I dunno if the cousin’d be cool with that,” JJ says.

  “What,” Glynnie argues, “he’s the one person in America who doesn’t like making a sale?”

  “Yeah, he likes it.” JJ hesitates, then hands her the gun. “Just sometimes it’s hard knowing how he’s gonna be.”

  “This is absurd.” Crisp’s initia
l shock melts into irritation that this conversation is happening at all. “You’re kidding, right, Glynnie?”

  She was, a little bit, at first, but the longer she holds the firearm the more she loves the idea of it. And Crisp’s knee-jerk reaction against it pisses her off a little, truth be told. She asks, “How much?” Last she looked there was about a thousand dollars in her debit account.

  “Mine was two Cs,” JJ says. He translates: “Two hundred bucks. But like I said, I got it on the cheap ’cause I work for Big Man.”

  “An employee discount,” Glynnie says. “That’s cool. I’d do three Cs. This could be fun.”

  “No,” Crisp argues. “It wouldn’t be fun. It would be stupid.” He takes the gun out of her hand and uses the bottom of his shirt to wipe off their fingerprints. It’s heavier than he thought a gun would be. He asks JJ, “Do you really need this?”

  The boy shrugs and looks at his feet—the too-small sneakers with holes cut for his big toes—and something clicks in Crisp. An understanding, or the beginning of one: maybe JJ could use a weapon on hand, given his obvious vulnerability. If the world is out for Crisp, only half black and Ivy League–bound, imagine how fast and hard it will come after this kid.

  He hands the gun to JJ. “You can put it away; you won’t need it tonight.”

  JJ crosses the room into a dark corner. He returns with an abashed “Sorry ’bout that.”

  “Nah, I get it.” There’s so much Crisp wants to say right now, but face-to-face with this homeless kid squatting alone in an abandoned warehouse, he doesn’t have the heart to argue his principled belief that modern America would be better off with not fewer guns but none at all.

  Glynnie decides not to push the gun thing for now, not with Crisp so all up in his attitude about it. She lights the joint, takes the first drag, then hands it to JJ. He sucks hard and then offers it to Crisp.

  The smoke coils into Crisp’s lungs and in moments his brain starts to unwind.

  They pass the joint among them.

  Glynnie’s stomach grumbles. “Anyone else hungry?”

  “I could eat,” Crisp says. “What’s around here for food?”

  “There’s pizza on Van Brunt,” JJ suggests. “Or sometimes I get those meatballs at IKEA.”

  The moment he suggests the Swedish specialty, Glynnie’s mouth ignites with a craving for the salty sweet mash of cheap ground meat and lingonberry sauce. And those giant milk chocolate bars they have at IKEA—she could get one of those too. “I’m in.”

  “Me too.” Crisp hasn’t had IKEA meatballs since he was in sixth grade, when his mother took him to size a new bed because he’d outgrown his old one. A gustatory memory flares from his tongue—that smoky, meaty deliciousness with the bright red sauce that perfectly, perfectly counterbalances salty with sweet. Stoned, feeling magnanimous, Crisp insists, “JJ, you’re coming with us. My treat.”

  The boy smiles. He puts on the Beats, Glynnie cues up a song she hopes he’ll like, and the three fast friends head into the night.

  At the end of Beard Street, the monolithic building looms blue and yellow and uplit.

  Inside the superstore’s mazelike showrooms they link arms and stumble and sing “I’m off to see the wizard!” as they dance-step along the floor arrows that turn the giant space into a board game of ardent consumerism. Crisp laughs when that passes through his mind and then lets the thought go like a helium balloon. Good-bye. I don’t need you. On the rare occasions that he’s gotten high he has wondered why he doesn’t do it more often. (And then the next day, foggy brained, woolly mouthed, he knows why he doesn’t.)

  They follow JJ’s lead when he stops to look into a corner bedroom display: burnt-orange walls, mahogany furniture, faux bearskin rug stretched across the floor, round mirrors hung asymmetrically behind a bed plush with a comforter and masses of pillows. Dresser displayed with a glass lamp and a potted cactus. Desk with a short stack of book facsimiles, task light and swivel chair tucked at the ready. Off each item hang orange tags, crowded with umlauted words, measurements, prices.

  Enchanted by the sudden thought that she has miniaturized and can now actually enter a dollhouse room, Glynnie starts the invasion: skipping into the display, beelining to the dresser, opening every drawer, announcing, “Empty! Empty! Empty!”

  Crisp stands at the threshold, watching as JJ tentatively enters this facsimile of a home before getting comfortable, stretching long atop the bed, closing his eyes. Finally Crisp joins his friends and sits on the desk chair, feeling it crimp beneath his weight; he doesn’t dare swivel for fear of crushing one of its plastic parts. Even stoned he knows this isn’t for real, that if he breaks it he’ll buy it, and he’s already burdened by that hundred-dollar ticket he can’t pay.

  “Don’t mess around in there!” A woman has joined them in their secret world, her buzz cut, yellow IKEA shirt tight over a bloated middle, and long paper measuring tape hanging from a belt loop telegraphing an odd but convincing authority.

  Back in the maze, they arrive at the searing-bright cafeteria. They get their food (using up Crisp’s entire twenty but he’s glad to do it) and sit together at the first available table and bend over plates to dig into their heaps of gravy-slathered meatballs and fries and oh yes that sweet, sweet sauce.

  After a while, Crisp, sated, begins to feel a modicum of brain power return. He looks across at JJ, a gelatinous drop of scarlet glistening in the corner of the boy’s mouth, and asks, “How’d you get to be homeless?”

  JJ’s gaze rises to meet Crisp’s, taking the measure of this older teenager, this young man, who wandered into his life out of nowhere on the arm of a customer. Crisp feels the intensity of the boy’s process, its importance, and allows himself to be considered. And then, after a long minute, JJ answers, “I’ll tell you, but not here.”

  “Where?”

  “Home.”

  “Home?”

  “The place I sleep. My crib. Whatevs.”

  Glynnie burps and says, “I feel a little sick now.” Suddenly the meatballs don’t seem as good as they tasted in the moment.

  * * *

  They sit on the floor facing one another in the dark glassless window lit by the moon, ocean lapping just outside.

  JJ says, “My folks got deported back to Haiti.”

  “When?” Crisp asks.

  “Last year. ICE came when I was at school. Sent my folks back to Port-au-Prince that day.” He settles his eyes on the portrait of his family, pressed together, smiling. “Had a couple foster families, but…” He looks away from the photo as if what happened next is something his parents can’t hear.

  Crisp grows sad as JJ recounts the memory of kissing his mother, Esther, good-bye for the last time. He can practically taste the nooks and crannies, slides and tilts of the mother’s Haitian accent as the boy repeats the last words he heard her speak: “I will see you outside school at three o’clock.”

  And the father, Kervens, advising, “Stop at every light, traffic or no,” in a tone lush with discipline and love.

  It was the first time JJ was allowed to walk to school alone, and the last time the St. Fleur family would be together.

  No one came to meet him after school.

  His first foster father sexually abused him.

  His next foster family seemed to forget he was there. Then his case worker stopped checking in. He’d fallen through the cracks.

  “That’s when I moved in here,” JJ tells them. “No one bothers me. I get good grades. A lot of food gets tossed in the dumpster by Fairway every night. For pocket money, I do a little selling for Big Man.”

  “But the last foster family,” Crisp says. “Didn’t they tell anyone you were gone?”

  JJ shrugs. “I showed up at my old school for the first day of seventh grade, signed the mom’s name on all the papers, kept on going, and never heard a thing about it. I stay under the radar. Never miss a day of school—can’t draw attention or they’ll put me back in foster.” He grinds his jaw. “I can�
�t have that.”

  Glynnie pivots to her knees, throws her arms around JJ, slight, bony, skin so soft, and whispers, “It’s okay.” Why did she never think to ask him that question: “Why are you homeless?” Now she knows that he’s not JJ, her kid dealer but Janjak St. Fleur, beloved son of Esther and Kervens. Homeless, abused, neglected, surviving by his wits.

  “What about your parents?” she asks him. “Are they coming back?”

  “I hope they trying.”

  I hope they are trying, Crisp thinks, but keeps the correction to himself. Janjak St. Fleur needs an offhand correction like he needs a hole in the head (as Crisp’s grandmother, Babu, would say). The boy’s story fills the space with a palpable loneliness. Crisp knows well the sensation of abandonment, how it gradually erodes you until you realize that part of you is missing, how you look and look for the one piece that fits. He wouldn’t recognize his own father if he passed him on the street, and it isn’t as if he hasn’t wondered what the man looks like now, that one man, a stranger lost among a billion faces. No one can replace JJ’s parents, and until Esther and Kervens St. Fleur return (if they return), what the boy needs is practical help.

  Crisp leans into the tight circle and asks, “You’re done with seventh grade, right? Then eighth grade at the same school?”

  “Got another week of school, then I’m done. And yeah. Same school next year.”

  “And then what?”

  “High school.” An intonation of duh is heavy in his tone.

  “Does your school go through twelfth?” Crisp clarifies, knowing that few public schools do.

  JJ answers, “Eighth.”

  “Then you’re going to have to come up with a list of high schools.”

  “A list?”

  “It works like this.” Crisp lays out each thread of the process, carefully weaving them together to create a baroque tapestry of the New York City public-high-school selection process. The endless tours and research. The prioritized list of twelve “regular” schools, due by December. The specialized exam for entry into the exclusive “top” schools. Auditions for the “talent” schools. Essays. Interviews. It was like applying to medical school, but Crisp’s mom had made a spreadsheet that kept him organized and on track. Together, they parsed and mastered the complexities of the system and launched Crisp toward a potential future that (if he could just get to Princeton) would be the polar opposite of JJ’s, given the odds against him. This boy who is black as night, who dumpster dives for food, who sells drugs for expenses, who is completely alone—he won’t stand a chance.