Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  His New York is a city where you can reinvent yourself if you’re willing to be ruthless. Where doors don’t swing open so much as get kicked down.

  He proceeds cautiously through an underpass that lands him on the sidewalk in front of the terminal.

  Yellow cabs, along with Ubers and Lyfts, snake along the curb. Across the street, a looming window-checkered monolith of an office building makes Crisp want to never grow up. A loud buzz of traffic makes him long to cover his ears. But he will grow up and he doesn’t cover his ears. He has learned by now that head-on is the only direction.

  Standing in front of the building is a trio of beat cops, all staring at their phones, and he feels a wave of relief. Help at last. But then one of them looks over at him with an excited glint, as if she’s spotted a criminal, and he goes cold.

  Of course—his mother would be frantic by now, ringing alarms. Dante might not be the only one looking for him: the cops might be too—but maybe not to help him.

  Has Jerome been found?

  Did anyone see Crisp coming and going from Dante’s apartment?

  Did Glynnie run to her parents and the police and blame him for the murder?

  No, the cops are not your friends, never have been, never will be.

  Just get home.

  The cop detaches her gaze and turns her attention elsewhere, maybe deciding that he isn’t who she’s looking for, maybe for some other reason. He can’t wait around to find out.

  Crisp hurries to the curb and glances into the driver’s window of every car that could be an Uber, piercing the bright reflections to ascertain a face. He searches the eyes of man after man after man, men of every race and age and size and color, none of them his father.

  A scuffed taxi pulls up at the end of the line behind the last car. Anger rises in his chest and he welcomes the familiar spiky feeling. The way it rattles and bursts into his brain like fireworks, its pure energy intoxicating. Anger is better than wishful thinking—he’s known that his whole life. He knew deep down that he’d be disappointed; it was a mistake to entertain any other possibility. This is what his mother and grandparents tried so hard to inoculate him against: this unrequited wanting of his father.

  The taxi driver scrolls down the passenger window, leans over, and asks, “You getting in, or what?”

  Crisp feels a scowl gather and a sharp rejoinder, another insane overreaction, seek form in words…

  What’s your problem?

  Leave me alone.

  Who do you think you are, Travis Bickle?

  He speaks none of it aloud, recognizing in the nick of time that the driver asked him a simple question.

  “Make up your mind,” the driver demands.

  “No, thanks.” Crisp turns and loses himself in the sidewalk crowd and hurries forward.

  At Stone Street, he veers into the first subway entrance he sees, tucked into the side of an old limestone edifice. Plunging downward two steps at a time, he’s thankful that it’s the R train. The R to the B…and he’ll be home.

  * * *

  “Last stop, Brighton Beach,” a metallic voice intones. And again: “Last stop, Brighton Beach.”

  Crisp’s eyes open—brain fogged, head tilted back against something hard and cold, face covered by a newspaper. Disoriented, he lets the paper fall to his lap and suddenly remembers using it to hide behind in case a cop got on the subway. He looks around, wonders how long he’s been sleeping with his head against the window. The B train has come to a rest, the doors are open, people are getting off. He staggers onto the platform and down a long stair that deposits him onto Brighton Beach Avenue, the commercial spine of his neighborhood.

  A uniform at the far end of the block stops walking and seems to look at him, and Crisp’s alarm bells go off again. In the moment the cop pauses to consult his phone, Crisp backtracks to Sixth Street, walking as fast as he can without running, trying not to attract attention.

  He turns the corner from Brightwater Court onto Fourth Street, his block, and sees a lanky man leaning against a light post, checking his phone, glancing up the street as if waiting for someone, checking his phone again. A plainclothes cop this time? He can’t take any chances.

  He pulls back behind the corner and waits it out, until the man reaches both hands into his front pockets, adjusts his pants as if to relieve pressure on his bladder, hunches his shoulders, and walks quickly in the direction of Brighton Beach Avenue.

  Crisp hurries into his building, where, in the lobby, Mr. Biederman is waiting for the elevator as though it’s any other day. Shirtless and potbellied, the old man has started his warm-weather sunbathing right on schedule and will be brown by August. Not as brown as Crisp, of course.

  “Hi, Mr. B.” Crisp wills calm into his voice.

  The elevator arrives and they get in together.

  “How’s school?” Mr. Biederman asks in the heavy Russian accent that dominates the neighborhood. “You getting good grades?”

  “I graduated yesterday.”

  “Mazel tov.”

  Biederman gets off on the third floor. Crisp rides all the way up to six.

  The apartment door is double-locked, which typically means his grandparents are out.

  “Hello?” Crisp calls. “I’m home!”

  He’s answered by total quiet, by undisturbed dust floating in a slant of sunlight, by a familiar mustiness he never thought he’d be so happy to smell. At this time of day, his mother would be at work in the city, Babu and Dedu somewhere in the neighborhood—errands and a stroll on the boardwalk ending with a sit-down on a bench to take in the view.

  Crisp’s footsteps clap across the parquet floor to the galley kitchen. On the counter, the old landline his grandparents refuse to part with.

  He knows he should call his mother now, at work, and tell her everything, everything. He could ask for her help and she’d give it in a nanosecond. His mother would know what to do. His grandparents would come home. They would all band together to take care of him just as they always have.

  He could call his mother right now and destroy whatever might be left of her faith in him. Make her feel that all her efforts have come to nothing. That she made bad choices early on, a heritable defect that’s now derailing her only child.

  His stomach curdles, then a stab of hunger.

  Inside the fridge he discovers the remainder of a roasted chicken and potato dinner in a plastic container. He takes a fork and knife from the drawer and devours the leftovers standing over the counter, then drops the empty container into the sink.

  His bedroom door is closed, the way he likes it, his neatly made bed the way he left it Wednesday morning before heading out for the long trek to school on his now forsaken bike—two days ago. Two whole days since he’s rested on his own bed. He lies down and exhales. Allows his eyes to close. Waits for sleep, and waits, but nothing happens; the subway nap must have ruined him for the kind of heavy slumber he is hoping for.

  Finally he sits up and goes to his desk. His computer monitor awakens at the first touch of his keyboard.

  He types Wilson Ramsey and links stack up for the graphic novelist mixed in with random links for other Wilson Ramseys, none with a photo that matches his father. Wilson Ramsey + Mo Crespo brings up a bunch of nonsense. “Wilson Ramsey + Mo Crespo” yields nothing at all.

  For a moment he wonders if he dreamed the whole thing—Glynnie, JJ, Dante, Rodrigo, Jerome, Red Hook, Governors Island, Laura, the mural—wonders if everything about last night was some strange journey of his imagination arcing toward his father. He’s had dreams like that before, bizarre happenings that end with Mo’s discovery and a reconciliation. Last night’s dream merged his father with an icon…no, not a dream…more like a nightmare…a man was killed.

  It occurs to him to plug his own name into a search; assuming his mom did declare him missing, it might have been reported somewhere. He clicks the news heading and his latest school photo appears with—there it is—a missing persons report from early this
morning. Shame curdles through him for what he’s put her through. He’ll call her, right now, he will.

  But then a second link catches his eye, a link joining his name to Dante Green’s.

  He clicks.

  A YouTube video unfurls—posted just hours ago, it’s already been viewed more than nine thousand times.

  A white guy in jeans and cowboy boots, with brown hair tucked behind his ears, approaches Dante, introduces himself, and informs the dealer that he’s under arrest. A bunch of uniformed cops close in and Dante is restrained, handcuffed, and led away under the scrutiny of an energized crowd. The photographer’s jittery lens also captures a yellow house in the distance, half a sign announcing Fort Jay, a cartoon ferry above an arrow pointing to Soissons Landing.

  A sharp exhale as Crisp realizes what this means: Dante is in custody.

  But what about Rodrigo?

  And what about Glynnie and JJ? Where are they? Are they safe?

  No.

  Stop.

  They’ll have to take care of themselves now.

  In the bathroom, in full fluorescent light, Crisp sees himself in the mirror: filthy and red-eyed. He smells himself when he takes off his clothes: sour and rotten.

  A hot shower melts off the dirt and the sweat and even a layer or two of the exhaustion and doubt. He’s home, home. Closing his eyes, he lifts his face into the rushing water. Turns to douse and lather his hair. Then, as he shuts off the faucets and goes to step out of the tub, he notices a stream of red racing away with the water, a pink froth swirling into the drain.

  Out of the tub now he twists in front of the mirror to inspect his back, shoulders, neck, looking for the source of the blood. No cuts. And he doesn’t recall being injured.

  He remembers Glynnie coming away from scrubbing the bloody floor and sitting beside him and the plaintive look in her eyes before she settled her head on his shoulder. Skin on skin, hair mingling.

  He leans over the tub and touches the drain but the blood has washed away.

  Jerome’s blood.

  The blood of the man Glynnie killed.

  His mind lurches back to her. If she did make it home, did she tell the truth or any version of it?

  Is that why the cops are looking for him now? Not because he’s missing, but because he’s become a person of interest…a suspect? Did she tell them something about him, and about Jerome, that isn’t true?

  And what about JJ? Where did he go? What did he do? Wondering why he trusted the boy and his story when for all Crisp knows he could be a sociopathic liar.

  The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how easy it would be to turn the narrative around and pin Jerome’s murder on him. How staying home could make him a sitting duck, passive, ripe for more plucking by a justice system prone to working against him. Black teenager shoots gun dealer in housing project. It wouldn’t even merit a headline.

  He opens drawers until he finds a pair of scissors. He leans over the sink and grabs a clump of fro and cuts as close to his scalp as he can, handful after handful until his head is choppily shorn. In his bedroom, he quickly dresses in clean clothes. Takes a garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and returns to the bathroom to jam in his jeans and T-shirt and underwear and socks, all of it. Scoops the puffs of his hair out of the sink and into the bag. Double knots the bag with shaking hands.

  He cleans the tub with spray bleach and paper towels, then rinses the sink until every snip of hair is washed away.

  He needs to buy some time, to figure this out.

  Sitting at his bedroom desk, he writes his mother a note.

  Hey Mom,

  Been having postgraduation fun with friends and everything’s okay so don’t worry. Had a bite and a shower and now I’m off to hang again. Promise I’ll touch base later. I love you.

  Your son,

  the one and only

  T.C. Crespo

  x o x o x o

  He’s thinking that the light tone and witty flourish at the end might make her smile, and it’s better, anyway, than telling her the truth: Last night, my so-called friend Glynnie Dreyfus lured me and a homeless kid into a terrible situation and now I’m an accomplice to a murder. Oh, and Glynnie’s insane and perfectly capable of pinning the murder on me.

  He tri-folds the note, scripts Mom on its front, then magnets it to the front of the refrigerator.

  He looks at the landline. Picks up the phone. Dials the number he memorized that morning on Governors Island—the one that won’t stop looping through his brain.

  It rings and rings and rings and rings and then, after the fourth ring, instead of a click into voice mail the call is answered.

  A man with a reedy voice says, “Hello?”

  So that is what his father sounds like.

  Crisp doesn’t speak. He can’t. He doesn’t know what to say.

  And then the call is suddenly ended on the other side.

  A wave of emotion pushes Crisp backward onto one of the kitchen stools. The repetitive tone of a dead line natters at the quiet kitchen, and he lets it, lets it hammer at the pulp of his hopefulness in making that call. He replaces the receiver, ending and ending and ending any intention ever to try again, his attention fastened now to who he has to be, what he has to do if he’s going to be better than his father.

  26

  Lex walks into the public information office just as Gus is packing up for the day. Lex’s head is swimming with Wilson Ramsey and The Life of a Boy—the invisible boy the artist chronicled through a series of graphic novels before stopping when the kid was twelve. The more Lex saw, the more he understood that Mo Crespo’s secret life as Wilson Ramsey has been a journey both toward and away from his son. He wonders what Mo found, if anything.

  “Where’s Katya?” Lex asks.

  “Gone,” Gus tells him. “She called her folks and they said her son came home and ate something, left her a note, went out again.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “Something about sorry and been with friends and going out again and yada yada yada. You know how they are, teenagers. I got three.” Gus rolls his eyes.

  “When?” Lex asks. “When did this happen?”

  “Just now—she bolted out of here. Asked me to let you know. I was about to stop upstairs before I left.”

  “Thanks, Gus.”

  “No problem.”

  Gus slaps Lex’s back on his way to the door, just a tap, really, nothing too hard, but it nearly knocks the wind out of him. He feels dizzy. Breath seems to stall in his lungs. He thinks of the packet. Tells himself no.

  Hoping to catch Katya before she descends into the subway, he dials. Her phone rings several times and she answers abruptly: “Lex, sorry I—” The call drops out. She must be in the tunnels already, possibly between stations. A mother, questing.

  He tries again and gets her voice mail. “Katya, I heard Crisp stopped in at home. That’s good news. Give me a call, though, okay? I have a few questions.” Questions he won’t bombard her with on a message, understanding this mother to be a hair-trigger worrier. Her son isn’t home by two a.m.: she jumps to the police. Her son sends texts from a stranger’s phone: she camps out at the station house. Her son dips in for a quick visit and leaves behind a handwritten note: she runs back home.

  Outside the station house, Lex takes a deep breath of the cooling air, hungry for the release you feel at the end of a day, except for him the long sleepless day has gone on since Wednesday and now it’s Friday night. He thinks about the note Crisp left his mother, and despite its promise, he feels a rattle of discomfort but doesn’t know why. Something about this just doesn’t sit right. Unless it’s his delirium playing with him, trying to drive him crazy, to make him invent reasons to stay away from home—to avoid Adam, or the absence of Adam, a little longer.

  The door swings open and Dinardo steps out, bumping a pack of cigarettes on the heel of his hand to slide one up. In one smooth movement he catches the filter with his lips and flicks his lighter an
d sucks so hard the end glows orange, followed by a melodramatic first exhale in the way of die-hard smokers.

  Lex greets the older detective. “Bad habit.”

  “Old dog.” Dinardo shrugs. “He’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Black dude standing across the street. This is my third smoke in two hours and now he’s gone.” The detective flicks his burning ember into the street.

  “No one you know, I take it.” This close to the Walt Whitman Houses, it could have been anyone.

  “Nope.”

  Lex’s phone vibrates—Katya Spielman calling him back. He turns away from Dinardo and answers: “Where are you?”

  “Lex, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken off like that without talking to you first, but my parents told me he was home, or had been home, that he’d left a note and—”

  “Katya, is he back now?”

  “No. But the note—”

  “Your parents saw him?”

  “They were out.”

  Surprised that they hadn’t stayed in the apartment in case their grandson returned, Lex asks, “You still haven’t told them what’s been going on?”

  “I just did.” Katya sighs. “They took it hard.”

  “The note—it’s his handwriting, for sure?”

  “What do you mean, ‘for sure’? Of course it’s his handwriting. Who else’s would it be?”

  “I have to ask.”

  “All right. Yes, it’s his. For sure. Lex, what’s happening on your end? With all that other stuff.”

  All that other stuff. A missing girl. A gun dealer. One dead man.

  “Well, we’ve arrested the gun dealer.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Detective Finley’s out looking for Glynnie. Personally, I’d love a word with Crisp if he comes home again. Will you let me know?”

  “Right away.”

  A word. He wants a paragraph—a chapter, a book—with Crisp.

  Back in the squad room, Lex refreshes the monitor and reviews each page he left open—page after page filled with Wilson Ramsey’s art, just his art, since it appears the man never invented a life to go along with the pseudonym. Lex doesn’t understand why an artist would want to bury himself underground like that, unless he’s hiding. Mo Crespo is hiding behind Wilson Ramsey. Lex’s thoughts jig to Adam—why is he hiding? What is he hiding? Why not talk about whatever’s going on? What’s the point if keeping the secret could itself be potent enough to destroy them?