Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  The following week, when I received another call from a man asking me to find out why his wife had left him, I explained that he had been lucky to call the office on this particular day because I was a moonlighter who specialized in investigations of ladies, and quoted him an ambitious rate. He accepted my reasoning and even sounded relieved to put the matter in my hands. “She says she’s been living with her sister in Astoria,” he said. “But I don’t believe it. She’s never in when I call. I think she’s living someplace else with some man.”

  So I did it: I spent two weeks in my Chevrolet staking out a two-bedroom walk-up in Astoria. The boredom gave rise to strange thoughts, hallucinatory interludes in which I could play out entire alternate lives. When something startled me—a horn blowing, or a child bouncing off the passenger door of my car in pursuit of a rubber ball—I sometimes couldn’t remember anything about the previous ten or thirty minutes. On my second Sunday in the car, a break: the wife paid a visit to the apartment, and I followed her when she left, hanging back a block. She led me to a behemoth apartment building by Corona Park, and I took up my station there for another week, during which time I witnessed her entering the premises with a bearded young man on no fewer than three occasions. I took photos and submitted them to my client. He cried, and then paid my invoice, gathered his hat and rain jacket, and went out desolately into a wet afternoon.

  Thoughts of Jane and the other woman were like wasps. I left early that day.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the next two months I had a couple more jobs like that, which made me dislike myself and other people. I was approached with questions that had a very limited range of possible answers, and none that would make the asker happy. I earned grocery money by upending the minor privacies that people were able to maintain in the busy neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. And then one day in December, the telephone on my desk rang and the woman from my service announced a Mr. Ibarra. A low voice came on the line.

  “Good morning?” he said.

  “Good morning,” I answered, and there was a pause that I hated.

  “I would like to speak to the investigator,” he said.

  “Speaking.”

  There was another hesitation. “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are trained in counterintelligence?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “It’s unusual.” He had a soft accent, and sounded older.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, the matter I’m calling about concerns a child. It’s complicated.”

  “Children are a specialty of mine,” I said.

  “They are?”

  Why not? Perfidious ladies and missing children. “Of course.”

  “Hmm.” He thought it over. “I would need to speak to you in person.”

  “I’m available now for a consultation.” I gave him the address. “Ask the doorman to direct you.”

  Mr. Ibarra struck me at first like an old country doctor at a funeral—sad, tired, aware of his own importance. He wore a gray suit and was accompanied by his wife, a very small woman with a penetrating gaze only partly diffused by cat-eye glasses. She wore a dark-green wool suit, expensively made; a velvet casque was pinned to her white hair. He stood by absently while she settled herself in the smaller of my two visitor’s chairs.

  “We’re looking for our nephew,” he said, when he was also seated. “Our great-nephew.”

  I spread my hands. “I’m listening.”

  “Well,” he said, as if deciding where to start, “our name is Ibarra. We’re Dominican. My wife and I divide our time between our properties in Europe, but most of our family is on the island. The Ibarras are well-known there. Have you ever been to the Dominican Republic?

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” I said.

  “Well. We are a well-known family.” He looked like he was trying to think of another way to make me understand this point, but then he went on. “We have a nephew, Dionisio. He and his wife were not on good terms with Trujillo. After Trujillo was shot, they were not on good terms with the ones who came after him. And then two years ago there was the American invasion.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They were dropping bombs on Santo Domingo. It went on and on. Dionisio and Altagracia were living then at their house in the city with their little son. They couldn’t sleep, the boy was having nightmares. Hundreds of people died at the Duarte Bridge. They were afraid of what could happen. They sent him to New York to be safe. An old friend of the family was living here, and they sent him to her. My wife and I were living in Switzerland at the time. The child’s name is Félix. He was eleven years old then.”

  “Who was the friend?” I said.

  “A good woman. She had been a servant of the family for many years and had retired. Mrs. Esmeralda Villanueva.” He leaned back in the chair. “When the war was over, Joaquín Balaguer became president. Balaguer had all the same grudges as Trujillo. He thought Dionisio had political ambitions. He put him and Altagracia in prison.”

  I looked at Mrs. Ibarra, but she was unchanging and unobtrusive while her husband spoke. I thought of offering her a cup of tea from the hot plate in the hall, but I couldn’t catch her eye.

  “No one has heard a word from them,” Mr. Ibarra said. “We can’t even be sure what prison they are in. And now the boy is missing.”

  “He’s not with the friend anymore?” I said. “Here in New York?”

  “No. When we heard Dionisio and Altagracia had been arrested, we flew to the Dominican Republic to help,” Mr. Ibarra said. “We went to their estate, spoke to their servants. My niece and nephew had tried to be very discreet, but servants always know. The manager of the house told us that they had sent Félix to Mrs. Villanueva. So we came here to find him. But by the time we arrived, they had both disappeared. The house was empty.”

  “Who could have taken him?” I said. “Who else knew he was here?”

  “We don’t know,” Mr. Ibarra said.

  “They gave him a different name,” Mrs. Ibarra said abruptly.

  “The housekeeper at the estate said she thought they had taught the boy to go by a false name in New York,” said Mr. Ibarra. “But she didn’t know what it was. My nephew and his wife told no one.” He reached into his jacket and brought out a photograph, which he laid on my desk. The edge had been cut with a pair of scalloped scissors. A young boy, dark eyes, the smoothness of a studio photo; more the idea of a child than a child.

  “What a handsome little man,” I said, pained. He looked small for his age.

  “He’s fourteen years old now,” Mr. Ibarra said.

  “Do you have a more recent photo?”

  “No, of course not.”

  I sighed. “This will be difficult, without even a name.”

  Mrs. Ibarra was suddenly bawling. Mr. Ibarra and I both looked at her, startled. “The poor thing,” she said, and I gave her a handkerchief from my pocket. Mr. Ibarra leaned toward me, around his hunched, weeping wife. “We’ll pay a retainer,” he said.

  I went that same afternoon to the address they gave me for Esmeralda Villanueva, confidante and nursemaid to the Ibarra family for forty years. She lived at 72 Webb Street in Sheepshead Bay. I drove my rattling Chevrolet there and parked at the end of Avenue X. Sheepshead Bay was a little Venice of clapboard houses, interrupted by pockets of woods; as I walked I came across the water without warning, an ordinary street dead-ending in a cluster of sailboats. I doubled back, past a delicatessen and a high-fenced lot behind which I heard the shuffling and snorting of horses. The house on Webb Street was battered but tidy, a wood-frame box with colorless siding, perched at the edge of the water. A curtain lifted and dropped next door, and I made a show of going up and knocking on the door, standing expectantly there on the porch, knocking again. The front door of the neighbor’s house opened.

  “There’s nobody living there,” said a woman in a housedress.

  I had put on a hat and gloves before I left, to giv
e the impression of a saleslady. “I’m looking for Mrs. Villanueva.”

  “She died.” The woman leaned back in the doorway, with some satisfaction. “It was terrible.”

  “Oh, no.” I covered my mouth with my hand, a gesture that surprised me by being genuine. “What happened?”

  “Are you from the city?”

  “No, no. Avon,” I said. “She was a customer.”

  “It was a heart attack. I saw them wheel her out.”

  “What about her boy? Poor thing—now I can’t think of his name . . .”

  “Bobby, I think it was.”

  “He’s a sweet boy. Bobby Villanueva, was it? What happened to him?”

  The woman was edging back inside. “Couldn’t tell you,” she said. “We weren’t on friendly terms. There was a tree in her yard that leaned into mine.”

  “A tree?”

  “It’s cut down now,” the woman said, and let the door fall shut behind her.

  I briefly considered knocking on her door to ask more questions, but the guise of a saleslady wouldn’t support it. Instead I glanced up and down the empty street, then leaned close and looked through the window, shading the glass with my hands. A living room crowded with furniture. No one had come to clear it all away. I stepped down off the porch and picked my way around to the side yard, past a stack of bricks under a tarp and a cluster of garbage cans. Through the windows, more furnished rooms, untouched. In the backyard, a stump. I imagined the triumph of the neighbor, watching the tree come down. I walked back to my car and sat for a while, thinking. Shaken that what had looked like intrigue was only an ordinary awful death, which suggested awful, simple explanations for the disappearance of the boy—that he’d been left alone, and had been taken advantage of.

  I lay awake for a long time that night with Félix on my mind. Who could he know in this city? Where could he have gone? Or was he taken? Trujillo had had CIA backing. President Balaguer had it now, having landed on top at the conclusion of the Dominican Civil War. Had they found Félix, even out there in Sheepshead Bay, his every connection to his family broken or concealed?

  At two o’clock in the morning it all came to me at once. Are you from the city? the woman had said. I hadn’t been thinking the right way. I turned over and slept soundly.

  In the morning I took the telephone directory to the kitchen table and found the number for the Bureau of Child Welfare. A faint secretarial voice answered at the main switchboard. “Child Welfare,” she said. “How may I direct your call?”

  “I’m looking for a child who was taken into care,” I said. “He had no relatives.”

  “You’re inquiring about adoption, ma’am?”

  “No, I’m looking for a child. A fourteen-year-old boy.”

  “Your child was removed? Speak to your caseworker, ma’am.”

  “No. He’s not my child. I’m a neighbor. He was living with his grandmother and she died. I just heard. The city took him away. I’m trying to find out where they took him.”

  “Hold, please.”

  I waited. The vine that had traveled across the top of the window over the kitchen sink was leafless now, and I could see the sky above the house at the back of mine.

  There was a click, and then a firmer voice. “Intake unit.”

  “I’m looking for a child I know,” I said. “He was living with his grandmother, but she died a few months ago and I haven’t been able to learn where he is now. I heard the city took him in.”

  “How do you know this child, ma’am?”

  “I was a neighbor. I thought he might like to see a friendly face. I feel terrible about his grandmother.”

  There was a short silence. “We don’t share that kind of information, outside of the family.”

  “But he doesn’t have any family.”

  She sighed. “What’s the name?”

  “Bobby Villanueva. His grandmother was Esmeralda Villanueva. She died a few months ago. He’s fourteen years old.”

  “Robert Villanueva?”

  “Probably. But I’m not sure, she only ever called him Bobby.”

  “You’re not sure of the name? Ma’am, do you know how many children there are in foster care in this city?”

  “I’m sorry.” I searched around for a feeling that would be useful. “I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to get ahold of him. She was all he had. They lived at 72 Webb Street in Sheepshead Bay—does that help?”

  “Well,” she said. “I can check the log for that address. That’s all I can do. But they don’t always get the addresses right in the log.”

  “I would so appreciate it.”

  “Hold, please.”

  For ten minutes, and then fifteen, and then twenty, I listened to the uneasy hum on the line. Tethered to the wall by the telephone cord, I made coffee and thought about toast. It hardly seemed worth the effort. My appetite was an idea I’d had once and reconsidered. The woman came back on the line.

  “There’s no one by that name, but there’s a boy with that address who came in on the sixth of September.”

  That put some color in my cheeks. “What was the name?”

  “Robert Calendar. He was taken by Catholic Family Services.”

  “Taken?”

  “Children don’t stay here. This is intake. They get transferred. I’ll give you the phone number.” She read it off. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, thank you.”

  It had to be the same boy. I called the number for Catholic Family Services and explained what I was after.

  “We have children all across the city,” said an irritated woman in the administrative office. “We run eleven programs. You don’t know where he is?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “If you’ll just give me the numbers for the eleven programs, I’ll call them myself.”

  To my surprise, she did this, reading them off in a tone that began to slide toward remorse. Once I had them all written down she said apologetically, “If he’s fourteen, he’s probably at Saint Jerome.”

  “What’s Saint Jerome?”

  “The campus up in Westchester. That’s where they take all the older boys.”

  “Thank you.”

  I called Saint Jerome and got a secretary on the line.

  “He would have come in just a few months ago,” I said. “He was picked up by the Bureau of Child Welfare on the sixth of September.”

  “There’s no one here by that name.”

  I took a deep breath, to control my voice. “Was any fourteen-year-old Dominican boy admitted to your program in the last three months?”

  “I’m not playing detective, ma’am. There’s no Calendar boy here. I’ve just looked at the registration list.”

  “His grandmother’s name—”

  “There are four hundred boys here. You’re wasting my time.”

  I tried the other numbers I’d been given, just in case. No one had ever heard of Robert Calendar, or knew the addresses the boys had come from, or even the boroughs. At the last three numbers on the list, the telephone only rang and rang.

  When I finally hung up, the winter sun was coming in strongly through the back windows and the quiet of the kitchen had resolved into buzzing and ticking. I felt tense. I made oatmeal and ate half of it. I walked absently in circles, tidying up, and then stood still and closed my eyes. An old smell was in my nose: ammonia and boiled meat. The grates bolted over the windows. The powdered eggs. Waking at three o’clock in the morning, not knowing where I was, and then remembering.

  I had taken my mother’s car one bad night when I was seventeen and driven it to my aunt’s house in Baltimore, and my mother had called the police. I spent thirty days in juvenile detention at the Maryland Youth Center. Many of my fellow delinquents were released to reformatories that were run by Child Welfare, to wait out the months or years until they reached the age of majority and could be left to their own devices. It was a transitional place, the Maryland Youth Center, a locked room where we waited while
the world decided what to do with us. My mother sent me to a boarding school once my thirty days were up. I never lived at home again.

  Jane and I were together six months. The Maryland Youth Center was one of the things I had never told her. There were others. For her part, she had taken a deep breath the third time we went out and told me everything she could think of about herself, her mother and father moving from rental house to rental house in the frozen counties around Albany, a little brother in the army, two collie mixes napping in a childhood kitchen. Getting lost on a Girl Scout camping trip and coming home so covered in poison ivy that they had to take her to the hospital. High school boyfriends. She sent her parents friendly letters from the city every two weeks, saw them three times a year. Never quite told them a lie. They never asked about men.

  She didn’t understand why I hardly spoke to my mother. All her life, she had managed other people easily. The difficulty between me and Elizabeth Kelly looked to Jane like a problem that could be solved with the same cheery rigidity she had used when her landlord had seen her coming up the back stairs with me late one night and had threatened to terminate her lease. She had gone down to the lobby with him and spent twenty minutes politely refusing to understand what he was saying, until he gave up in embarrassment and frustration. He never raised the issue again, and we were more discreet after that.