“I hope you’ve got a good lawyer here, Ben, cuz you’re in a heap of trouble,” Ray began. “So, I’ll just lay my cards on the table, and when I’m done it will be your turn. Your confession here today will have bearing not only on your future, but your sister's as well. Capisce?”
Ben nodded.
“Please state for the record that you understand what I just said.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now we have an understanding that the truth will work to your advantage over any bullshit you try to shovel. And my partner over there . . . he is the king of bullshit detection. Now, let me roll this back for you a bit.”
Starting with the discovery of the skeletal remains, Ray summarized both the Trudy Solomon and Renee Carter cases, emphasizing Ben’s connection to both of them. “I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”
Ben glanced sideways at his court-appointed PD, who nodded. “I didn’t kill Renee Carter. And I certainly didn’t kill Ed Resnick. I didn’t even know who the hell Ed was until you just told me.” Ben looked over at Marty. “And that is not bullshit. He’s the guy I described to Will Ford forty years ago, and Will’s the one who didn’t believe me at the time that the guy existed. If he took off with Trudy, I have no fucking idea why.”
“Tell us how you came into the possession of the baby, Ben,” Marty asked, taking a seat across from Ben.
Again, Ben glanced over at his court-appointed PD and the PD nodded. “My sister had nothing to do with this. And I did what I did to save that kid from a life of foster care and God knows what. I get a call out of the blue from this guy I hardly knew who tells me that some prostitute ran away and left her baby in her apartment. He remembered me mentioning how my sister really wanted a kid. Claimed I went on and on about it at a poker game one night. So he rang me up and asked if I wanted this one. That’s it. End of story. I picked up the boy and delivered him to my sister. Every day after that I checked the newspaper to see if someone was looking for the mother and son, and nothing. Maybe I would’ve returned the kid if I saw that someone was looking for him. But nothing.”
“And this guy who called you out of the blue? Does he have a name?”
“Yeah. Lenny. Lenny Berman. A scumbag if ever there was one.”
I CHECKED the rearview mirror. Sally and Ron were two car lengths behind us. Ray and Marty behind them. It took less than an hour to get a search warrant.
“Three times a charm,” Dad said on our third trip to Lenny’s trailer home.
“Do you think Lenny killed Renee?” I asked. “Or for that matter, Ed? Maybe he lied about the last time he saw him.”
“I honestly don’t know what to think.”
The three cars pulled up in front of Lenny’s carport. The Honda nowhere in sight. One by one the headlights cut out. Sally and Ron unholstered their weapons and held them barrel down as they approached the front door.
“Leonard Berman,” Ron yelled, pounding on the door. “Police. Come out slowly with your hands on your head.”
Silence.
Ron pounded the door again. “Leonard. You’ve got nowhere to run. Come on out!” Ron waited ten more seconds before kicking in the door with a single blow. He raised his weapon and crossed the threshold. Sally stepped in behind him. Twenty seconds later we heard Ron yell “clear.”
Sally appeared in the doorway, holstering her gun. “Place has been cleaned out.”
Ray and Marty entered the trailer home. Dad and I leaned against my Prius. Eldridge had warned us not to interfere with the search. Not our case.
“Nice night,” Dad said. “Dark enough to see the Milky Way.”
“Speaking of the Milky Way, you hungry?” The last time we ate anything was two o’clock at the diner and it was now approaching eight o’clock.
“I’m good. I grabbed some granola bars at the station.” Dad reached into his coat pocket and offered me one.
“Thanks. Y’know, it would have been funny if you had Milky Way bars stashed in your pockets.”
Ray stepped out, shaking his head, and waved us over. “Nothing left behind. Clothes gone. Food gone. Even the wastebasket was emptied. Must’ve known we were onto him.”
“So now what?” Dad asked.
“We’ll track him down. When did you last speak with him?”
“Three days ago . . . Thursday. Gives him a bit of a jump on us.”
17
Monday, November 12, 2018
I LIFTED my sleep mask and gradually opened one eye. The sunlight streamed in through the gaps in the blind slats, forcing me to squeeze my eyes shut after detecting the presence of a hangover. It was low grade. Not as bad as I thought it would be. On a scale of one to ten, a four. Sally had invited me out for a drink after our raid on Lenny's place. Two pints of Guinness and a couple of shots of tequila didn’t quite do me in. But I had to call Ray last night to drive me (and Sally) home. “I’d rather be mad than sad,” he says whenever I rouse him out of bed in the middle of the night to get me home safely. Which was no more than four or five times a year.
“Hey, babe,” he whispered. “You okay?”
I groaned and turned into a fetal position.
“Wanna have sex? Heard it’s a great cure for what ails you.”
I thought about his proposition. “Sure. Just give me a sec to empty my bladder.”
When I reentered the bedroom, Ray was sitting up against the headboard reading my old diary.
“Enjoying it?” Truth be told, I had no qualms about him reading my diary. For the most part, it was just the ramblings of an insecure kid. Perhaps he would gain some insight into my deep-rooted self-doubt brought about by feeling rejected by family and friends. Or maybe he would just get a kick out of it.
“As a matter of fact, I am. It’s like a little peek into your preteen mind. And the stuff about your mom . . . that’s some crazy shit.”
“I don’t think she was as mean as I made her out to be. I think a lot of that is the perception of an angry thirteen-year-old.” I leaned over and grabbed the diary out of his hands. “If you want to have sex, we’ll have to stop talking about my mother.”
I straddled Ray, bent over, and kissed him gently on his lips. He moved his hands down my back, cupped my bottom and in one deft move maneuvered me facedown on the bed. Then he straddled me, massaged my neck and back, steadily moving south until he reached my coccyx bone, where he lingered for a few minutes longer. As promised, he spent the next fifteen minutes curing my hangover.
“Mind if I shower before you do?” Ray asked, rising from the bed. “Go back to sleep if you like. I’ll walk Moxie.”
I mulled over getting more shut-eye, but instead reached for my diary. I flipped through to the latter part of that year looking for another reference to the mystery man. Nothing. At the start of eighth grade, in September of 1978, my fury was directed at my mother—her binge drinking, her lackadaisical attitude in trying to reconcile with Dad, her constant harping about my father’s obsession with the Trudy Solomon case, her snide remarks about my frizzy hair (“I hear Dippity-do works wonders”), my skinny frame (“Are you anorexic or something?”), my smattering of pimples (“There’s a product called soap for that mess on your face”). Midway through eighth grade, around February 1979, my attention pivoted away from my mother to my waning friendship with Lori. There were a few good days, which were easy to spot, because my handwriting was fluid and orderly.
“I thought you’d be fast asleep by now,” Ray said, stepping out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his midsection. His hair damp and wild from towel drying. A speck of shaving cream along his jawbone. “Your headache is going to come back if you keep reading that thing. Seems to me you should let the past stay in the past.”
“Says the guy with the happy childhood.”
Ray’s childhood was the complete opposite of mine. Ray was three years younger than me, born in 1968, one year before his parents, Celia and Daniel, married. His parents spent the first year of his life living on
a commune with other unwed couples with young children. They eventually tied the knot at the Woodstock Festival, both just twenty-one. The ceremony, as legend had it, performed by a traveling minister. After the festival, they hitchhiked across America, little Ray in tow. When they came back to the east coast, they decided to settle in Hurleyville, a couple of towns over from where I grew up in Woodbourne—just in time for Ray to start kindergarten. Ray and I attended the same elementary school (grades one through six) and high school (grades seven through twelve), but our paths never crossed because of our age difference. Ray described his parents as free spirits. (“Hippies—the real deal,” he would proudly say.) His mom taught art at the elementary school. He once told me she would kiss all the plants before leaving the house every morning and greet each of them when she came home in the afternoon. Every so often, when we passed a street musician or heard a particular song on the radio, he would tell me the story of how one day he came home from school and found his mother hunched over on the couch plucking a guitar. She’d passed a pawn shop while out shopping and seen it in the window. “It called to me,” she told him. Armed with beginner guitar books, she taught herself to play. At night, she would practice and he would fall asleep listening to her sing songs made famous by Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, Carole King, and James Taylor. His dad was a lineman with New York Telephone and Telegraph. No matter how tired his dad was, he never said no to a game of catch or a math problem to solve. If he was angry, he didn’t curse—instead, he would use euphemisms like fiddlesticks and schnitzels. They marked anniversaries and birthdays and holidays by buying gifts for people less fortunate than themselves.
With savings and pensions, they were able to retire at fifty-nine. And they knew exactly what they wanted to do. “Get on the road, like the old days,” they said. That was eleven years ago. One morning, they set out in their Subaru to shop for a recreational vehicle at an RV dealership in Vermont. They put a down payment on a thirty-nine-foot Fleetwood Discovery, and according to a credit-card receipt found in his dad’s jacket, celebrated at a nearby restaurant. They left the restaurant at eight o’clock, and at ten o’clock a drunk teenager plowed into the Subaru. Head-on. The nineteen-year-old driver died instantly. As did Ray’s parents. The sole survivor, the drunk man’s girlfriend, was in a coma for weeks. Ray was still married at the time. To a woman named Angie. His daughter, Samantha, was nine. He withdrew from his marriage and plunged himself into his work. (“The grief felt insurmountable,” Ray said.) It wasn’t long before Angie found herself in the arms of another man. He’ll tell you he didn’t know how he did it, but Ray managed to attend all of Samantha’s dance recitals, school plays, and parent-teacher conferences. (“If I didn’t, I knew my parents would scold me when I got to heaven,” he said to Samantha years later.)
Ray’s savior was the drunk guy’s girlfriend, Marisa. Two years after the accident, she came to see him. To apologize. Marisa knocked on the door, probably expecting to be yelled at or shooed away. But he invited her in. She explained to Ray it took two years of therapy to finally work up the courage to face him and ask for forgiveness. She was consumed with guilt, felt she hadn’t done enough to dissuade her boyfriend from getting behind the wheel.
She said to Ray, “I knew he was drunk. I was tipsy myself. I knew he shouldn’t be driving. My parents always said I should call them if I was ever in this situation and they would pick me up. That they would rather be mad than sad. That they wouldn’t judge me or punish me. But I didn’t call them. I didn’t—”
But before she could finish, Ray wrapped his arms around her and they sobbed as if the accident had occurred the day before, raw and vivid in their minds.
They started a program called “Better Mad Than Sad,” which became part of the local drivers ed curriculum. Parents joined their kids for a fifty-minute session in which parents pledged to pick up their kids or their kid’s friends, no questions asked, no judgment passed. Years later, a study proved this program prevented scores of teenagers from getting behind the wheel drunk. It also saved Ray’s life, metaphorically speaking. A few years ago, he created a foundation in his parents’ name—a one-thousand dollar scholarship awarded annually to two high-school seniors who had taken part in the program.
I sometimes thought I was drawn to Ray because he had such an idyllic childhood. When we first got together, I pressed him constantly on his family life, and tried to imagine his mother as my mother. Would a loving, caring mother have made a difference? Would I be less cynical, more affable, less stoic, more trusting? My therapist would say, “Don’t blame your mother for your perceived shortcomings. You can either play the victim or take responsibility for the way your life turns out. You make your own choices.” Did we?
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and steadied myself. Turns out sex was not the cure for what ailed me. I needed two Advil and a hot shower.
OUR FACETIME meeting with Carlos the Bartender-slash-Building Muralist had been postponed a few hours. Someone defaced one of his murals in Brooklyn and he needed to do a bit of repainting. An emergency, he said, because a production company planned to shoot a music video in front of it that very night.
I stared at the two whiteboards in my dining room. I had bought a second one when the single case morphed into two—the disappearance of Trudy and the murder of Ed. But now there was a third case. Eldridge had put Ray and Marty on the Renee Carter case, but the connection, however tenuous, was enough to warrant my inclusion. Ray promised to keep me apprised of any new developments.
I called Dad to let him know Carlos couldn’t speak to us until later in the evening. The minute I hung up, my phone rang, and thinking it was Dad calling me back, I answered without looking at caller ID.
“Hi Dad, forget something?”
“Um, hello?” A woman’s voice. “Is this Detective Susan Ford?”
“Yes, sorry, thought you were someone else.” I pulled the phone away from my ear to look at the number. It was local.
“It’s Joyce. Joyce Solomon. I have a favor to ask of you.”
JOYCE AND Jake were seated in the front section of the coffee shop, along the windows that offered a view of Broadway, the main thoroughfare that ran through the town of Monticello. It was eleven thirty, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Two men sat at the counter reading newspapers. Three mothers and three baby strollers were tucked into a back corner of the cafe.
Joyce and Jake sat across from each other, so I sat down next to Joyce. There was something familiar about Jake, but I was pretty sure I’d never met him. He rose slightly to shake my hand. If he stood up straight, he would tower over me. I was thinking six-two, six-three. Dark, looping curls framed his boyish face, making him appear younger than his forty-one years. He was handsome, with almond-shaped eyes, hazel with flecks of green. His cleft chin was deep and long, rendering the illusion of an upside-down heart. His hawkish nose gave him an aristocratic air. He definitely came from a gene pool of good looking people.
When Joyce called this morning, she said Jake wished to speak with me. The night before, she had told him everything. He had questions. Questions she couldn’t answer, and she hoped that I might be able to fill in the blanks. I told her we still knew very little. But she insisted.
“What is it you want to know?” I asked.
“I would like to know more about this woman, Renee Carter, why I was in her possess—” he cleared his throat, “why I was with a with her, if she was not my birth mother, and also the circumstances surrounding her death.”
“At this time we don't have information regarding your birth parents or how you came to be in Renee’s apartment. There is an investigation underway. As for her death, well, she was shot and buried along the highway in Ulster County. There was a small cross made of sticks and string near the remains. That usually indicates remorse and some kind of relationship or connection between the killer and the victim. In this case, between Renee and whoever caused he
r demise.”
“Interesting,” Jake said. “Go on.”
“Either the murderer or an accomplice contacted your uncle and offered up the baby—you, that is—knowing that Joyce desperately wanted a child. We are chasing down a lead now.” I turned to Joyce. “Do you know a Lenny Berman?”
She shook her head.
“Did she have any relatives or friends?” Jake asked. “Someone you can speak to? Maybe someone who knew my birth parents?”
“Detective Ray Gorman is looking into all that. I’m sorry to say that the police did not do a thorough job of investigating her disappearance. They assumed she simply left the area. Have you thought about doing a DNA search? That’s how we found you. Your arrest for a bar brawl a few years back put you in our system.”
“Oh yeah, that. I was just breaking up a fight, although no one believed me at the time. I always thought I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now I’m beginning to think I was in the right place at the right time.” He turned to Joyce and then back to me. “If it wasn’t for my DNA on file, I would have never found out the truth.” Joyce lifted her hand to place over Jake’s curled fist, but he inched his hand away. “How do I go about doing a DNA search?”
“I’ve never done it, but I have friends who have. They ordered a DNA test kit from a company called Ancestry. You simply spit in a tube, mail it back, and they analyze the results. If you have relatives who’ve done it, you can find them through the site if they’ve opted to make their results public. My friend found a number of distant cousins.”
Jake gulped down the last of his coffee. “Well, it’s something to think about.”
The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon Page 14