Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  * * *

  “The Katana is a great and noble weapon. It must be handled with a sense of great responsibility.”

  Leonardo, the leader of the Ninja Turtles, had taken his mask off, revealing Joey’s face to the kids as he showed off the plastic sword he’d brought to the Halloween party.

  “Am I right, Michelangelo?” he called out to Danziger, still wearing his shell and his mask as he tried to organize pin the tail on the donkey.

  “Don’t eat too many caramels,” said Raphael, a.k.a. Kenny Makris, hanging out around the punch bowl, trying to pick up votes for ’92 already.

  “Hey, can we get a picture with everyone and the sword?” Joey asked, trying to rally Kenny as well as Charlie Maslow, who was giving a little too much attention to two little blond girls on his lap in the corner. “Donatello, get your mask on and get over here, dude.”

  Charlie got up and lumbered over, pulling his mask on even as his droopy mouth registered that Joey now had something on him as well. He put his arms around Leonardo and Michelangelo, posing with his fellow crime fighters and six kids going into sugar comas as a Polaroid flash went off and an XL-70 camera slid out the image like a damp, thin tongue.

  * * *

  Someone was behind her. She felt his breath on the back of her neck as cold air from the refrigerator wafted over her from the front. An arm went around her throat. Her feet left the floor, losing one shoe and then the other. A wave of blackness came rushing up at her. There was a sting in the crook of her right arm.

  She tried to fight back, but biology and chemistry were against her. Her vision began to blur as she went into shock, the world already receding. This was all she would ever know and all she would ever be. The last things she knew were the fan in the refrigerator, the lonely hum of the 60-watt kitchen light bulb, and the spinning of the hamster wheel.

  21

  SEPTEMBER

  2017

  The third girl Ronnie Meltzer told them about lived in a trailer that was part of a religious encampment near Jericho Turnpike, in Coram, behind a Kohl’s and a Laundry Palace. She called herself Mary Magdalena Lenape, which kind of figured to Lourdes, since half the locations out here got their names either from the Bible or Indians.

  “You’re talking about this dude they called J,” she said in a smoky rasp. “But really they were all in on it.”

  She was a light-brown woman, maybe close to three hundred pounds, wearing stretch jeans, an XXL “Y’All Need Jesus” t-shirt, and a large white crucifix the size of a cell phone around her neck. Her nappy hair was piled high on top of her head; it looked like it would fall below her waist if she let it down. But she had a way about her, Lourdes thought, a kind of careless gypsy-eyed sensuality that made even an old-school ladies’ man like Bobby Borrelli sit up and take notice.

  “All right, stop, rewind, go to the top again,” B.B. said. “Who is this ‘they’?”

  Magdalena gave a heavy sigh. “I never talked about this before,” she said. “But maybe the Lord sent you here for a reason, to hear my story.”

  She gave Lourdes a beatific smile—one big girl to another hopefully not-quite-as-big girl. The trailer was cramped and stuffy. It smelled like incense, cats, cheap weed, and small children. It felt like a firetrap with too many extension cords and too few sockets. The eyes of Jesus followed you from a 3-D picture among the finger paintings on the fake-wood-paneled walls. There was a yellow bong next to a votive candle by the sink. Unopened bills sat under a plastic vase of traffic-light-red roses on the table. Someone was smoking cigarettes and listening to gospel in a back bedroom.

  It also felt a little bit like home to Lourdes, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “So you were, like, an escort at the time we’re talking about, right?” she said in the high, girlish, not-too-serious voice she employed to get unpleasant facts out of the way.

  “I wasn’t always.” Magdalena adjusted a scarf over a lamp. “I was studying mortuary science at the community college in Garden City and I needed to make some extra money because I was the sole support for my family. I mean, no one grows up wanting to be an escort. But I ran into Ronnie at an off-campus party and he started talking to me about it. He had just dropped out of Hofstra and he was like, ‘You only have to do it once. And if you don’t like it, you never have to do it again.’”

  “This was how long ago?” B.B. leaned across the tiny table.

  “Dunno—early nineties?” Magdalena blinked; for some reason, she’d put on false eyelashes and heavy makeup to talk to them. “I was a lot younger and a lot skinnier then. But you know how that goes, sister. Hard to keep them pounds off. A-ight?”

  They were sitting so close together that Lourdes couldn’t afford to duck-face or even self-consciously pluck at her own belly roll. The scale said she was down to 152 this morning, so what was this bitch talking about?

  “So you got into the life and you ran into this guy J, who was violent with you,” Lourdes said. “Where was this?”

  “North Babylon, of course.” Magdalena fingered her crucifix. “It got that name for a reason.”

  “Okay, and this was an outcall that you went to with a driver or what?” B.B. asked.

  He posed the question with a sort of off-handed impatience that made Lourdes think he’d probably had some personal experience with prostitutes in breaks between the wives and mistresses.

  “Neither,” Magdalena said. “It was a party some of the other girls told me about. We thought we’d all go together and cut Ronnie and the driver out of it for once. I mean, we’re doing all the work.”

  “Absolutely.” Lourdes nodded. “And where was this? Do you remember?”

  “Private house, not too far from Sunrise Highway.” Magdalena half closed her eyes. “I don’t remember what street, but it was near Southards Pond Park.”

  Lourdes shot a darting glance at B.B. The day before they’d found a Newsday story about a woman named Cheri Weiss, age twenty-nine, who had been found raped, beaten, and strangled near the same location in 1992, right after Easter. Much earlier than the other murders they’d been looking into, and still an open case, as far as Lourdes could tell.

  “You know what? I think I might have said too much.” Magdalena, catching the look, let go of the cross she’d been holding.

  “What’s the matter?” Lourdes asked.

  It was her bad, not covering her reaction better. Magdalena had seen the silent exchange and knew it signified complication for her.

  “I know what you’re thinking of,” Magdalena said. “I may be crazy but I’m not dumb. You’re asking me to talk about a violent cop who may still have connections.”

  “It was a long time ago.” B.B. tried his easygoing Tony Bennett smile. “And what we’re talking about isn’t that big a deal.”

  “No?” Magdalena sat up, nostrils flaring. “Then why y’all drive so far from the city to ask about something that happened twenty-five, twenty-six years ago?” She looked from Lourdes to B.B. and then back again. “It must be a big deal or you wouldn’t bother. You’re asking me to go against powerful people who could still come after me. And my family. My neck is on the block. I got my son and five little kids living in this trailer with me, on land we don’t own. Two of my daughter’s while she’s in rehab, and three of my son’s kids. Who’s going to be looking out for us?”

  “Maybe we can help.” B.B. reached out for her arm with his hairy and heavily ringed hand.

  Magdalena looked askance. She knew enough not to trust a man who looked like Bobby. Her eyes went to Lourdes instead, searching for a different kind of assurance.

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” Lourdes said. “There are federal agents on our task force. Maybe we could ask them to help you get in the program to relocate.”

  “You swear you’ll do that?” Magdalena asked.

  “Listen,” Lourdes said. “I come from a religious family too. I was raised to always do the right thing…”

  Dios mío. She didn’t even sound convinc
ing to herself. When her sister disappeared, Lourdes first suspected the reason was to get away from their mother and the other church ladies speaking in tongues with Winstons in their mouths and oxygen cannulas up their noses.

  “Swear on the life of your unborn child,” Magdalena said abruptly.

  “What?” Lourdes gave B.B. an incredulous headshake.

  “You’re pregnant, ain’t you?” Magdalena let her eyes drift gently down to Lourdes’s belly. “If you’re being straight with me, swear on the life of the child you’re carrying.”

  Lourdes’s bottom jaw did a slow circle beneath the upper one. There would be no living with B.B. after this. He was studying her with a distantly amused look, to see how far she’d be willing to go to make this case. But Kevin Sullivan always said a good detective could be whoever he or she needed to be at any given moment. And the courts had long ago affirmed that police had the right to lie to get a statement. But, man, this felt like a deal she had no business offering.

  “Yes, I swear,” she said.

  As if saying it quickly made it a less binding promise. She heard a sharp intake of breath from B.B., as if he was somehow both pleased and disappointed in her.

  “Why’d you say you’d be going against ‘powerful people’ if you talked about this?” Lourdes asked, eager to get to it.

  “You should’ve seen the house where all this happened.” Magdalena fanned her face. “I was like damn. I saw girls going in and out of like six bedrooms with some of these guys. The cars in the driveway and out on the street were all, like, new model Audis and BMWs. Some of them had those special plates and placards so they could park wherever they wanted.”

  “Pretty observant, aren’t you?” B.B. scratched the side of his mouth.

  “I told you I was studying mortuary science,” Magdalena said. “Before I was a ho.”

  Somehow she packed a quarter century of self-loathing and self-betrayal into the last syllable. An assessment so brutal and unsparing that Lourdes almost grabbed Magdalena’s arm in a show of sisterly solidarity.

  But someone who’d been handled in exchange for money wasn’t going to buy into easy solace from a cop.

  “You saying these were police placards they had in their cars?” Lourdes asked, trying to nail down the details.

  “Of course.” Magdalena stared. “Because a lot of them were cops. Or something else in law enforcement. Or politicians. Or businessmen who had deals with people like you. Come on. You know what this was.”

  Lourdes didn’t need to look at B.B. this time. They both knew they were edging out onto thin, crackling ice now.

  “Do you know what the occasion was?” Lourdes asked.

  “They were celebrating. This J had just gotten some kind of medal or promotion. He wasn’t any Schwarzenegger, if you know what I mean. More like a dumpy average guy who’d been to the gym a lot and made himself into something. He wasn’t in uniform but you could tell how much the others all looked up to him, calling him ‘loo’ and ‘boss man,’ and all that. Giving him cigars and bottles of scotch. And—oh yeah—lines of cocaine.”

  “There were drugs at this party,” B.B. said evenly, as if this was no big deal in and of itself.

  “Definitely.” Magdalena nodded more vigorously. “That’s the secret behind the other secrets. The girls were doing lines as well. It was always like this at these parties. Those guys would be huffing it up, like it was nothing. Like the law didn’t apply to them. And you know that’s not a drug that makes a lot of people more humble or clear about who they are, or what they should be doing. Not that that’s any excuse for what happened. Or what he did to me.”

  “And what did he do to you?” Lourdes asked, instinct telling her not to start taking notes yet.

  “Oh, he just tried to fucking kill me. That’s all.”

  She said the words so lightly and nonchalantly that someone passing through the room in a hurry might not have stopped to take them seriously.

  “And how did that happen?” Lourdes pressed on deliberately.

  Just get the facts on the table, next to the dying flowers and the unpaid bills.

  “It started off fairly normal,” Magdalena said. “Or as normal as you can get at a party like that. He knew what I was there for and I knew what he was there for. So we ended up in one of these big marble bathrooms, doing lines off the sink. Then he came up behind me and started rubbing me. Grabbing my breasts and all. Then he turned me around and put me on my knees. I remember because the marble floor was cold…”

  Lourdes looked over and saw B.B. starting to reach into his pocket for a pad. She shook her head at him but knew what he was thinking. The cold marble floor made the story a little more solid and persuasive: an incidental detail most people wouldn’t even think of inventing.

  “After like five minutes, he still couldn’t get hard in my mouth, so I was like, ‘Forget about it.’” Magdalena curled her fingers in front of her chin, hesitating. “I think my actual words were ‘Looks like you’re not really up for it.’ And that’s when everything changed.”

  “Changed how?” B.B. asked.

  “It was like here’s the big man with the girl on her knees in the bathroom. And he can’t get it up. And then I say something like, ‘Maybe you’re not such a big man.’ And just like that.” Magdalena snapped her fingers. “He switched. It was like he turned into someone else. He got all red, grabbed me by the face, and started yelling, ‘You shut your mouth. You shut your fucking mouth.’ And when I started yelling back at him, he got me by the throat and started choking me.”

  “Choking you?” B.B. raised his hands. “Like this?”

  “Yeah, like that.” Magdalena raised her eyes, as if she was somewhere other than this trailer for a few seconds. A different girl with a different body and a different name.

  “It was all so fast. It was like a frenzy.” She started to breathe hard, like it was happening right now. “He’s getting on top of me, crushing me with his full weight, and I’m struggling to breathe. I try to yell but no sound comes out. No one can hear me. The music is too loud anyway. He lets go for a second and I start to scream my head off. Then he grabs me again, by the windpipe. He’s trying to kill me for real now. I’m thinking, I’m really going to die in this marble bathroom.”

  Her hand went to her throat and tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “And he’s getting off on this. I can tell from how he’s breathing and moving on top of me. And I’m starting to black out and lose control of my body because I’m not getting any air. And the last thing I’m thinking is, God, if you let me out of this, I swear I’ll turn my whole life around. I’ll dedicate my life to you and becoming a better person. And then, right at that second, there’s a knock at the door and I hear one of the other girls who brought me to the party, yelling, ‘Lemme in. I gotta pee.’ It was like Jesus pressed on her bladder at just the right moment.”

  “And what did this J do when he heard that?” Lourdes said, realizing she’d been starting to sweat as if the trailer had gotten more humid while she was sitting there listening.

  “He got up.” Magdalena let her breath out. “I guess he figured he was trapped and had no choice. How would it look if he opened the door to leave and there’s a dead girl? So he gets off me and I start to say something. So he takes a wad of dollar bills and tries to stuff them in my mouth.”

  “In your mouth?” Lourdes did not dare to look at B.B.

  “Yeah, in my mouth. To shut me up. And remind me that I’m just a whore. Like one way or another, he’s gonna shut me up, even if he has to pay for it. But by then I’m all balled up in a corner sobbing with my arms in front of my face. So he just drops the money on the floor and walks out. Like nothing happened.”

  Lourdes nodded slowly. It could just be a coincidence. She’d heard of men sticking money in all kinds of places. But she heard B.B. exhale and knew for once they were on the same page. Thinking about how the stones in the Rockaway victim’s mouth hadn’t been in the media, so Magdale
na couldn’t have heard about them.

  “Did you ever learn this officer’s real name?” B.B. asked, maintaining a deadpan expression.

  “No.” Magdalena grabbed a Kleenex to dry her eyes. “But I know he stayed a big man on the job for a long time. I used to see him around the First and the Fourth Precincts, telling other cops what to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lourdes nodded, trying to stay neutral. “So you were still in the life, after that?”

  “Yeah…” Magdalena sighed and left the crumpled tissue on the table. “It took me a long time to keep my promise to Jesus. I had to go through a lot of other men, a lot of drugs, and a lot of money to find my way back to Him. Took me the better part of my life, in fact. But He never stopped watching over me. Or else I wouldn’t be here, talking to you.”

  Lourdes put the heels of her palms against her eyes, spent from just the effort of taking this all in.

  “But you want to know something?” Magdalena exhaled, like she was free from the burden. “I don’t put it all on J or whatever they call him.”

  “Why not?” B.B. asked.

  “Because all the other men who were there knew what was up,” Magdalena said. “They saw me come out of that bathroom with tears in my eyes and marks on my throat. They knew he’d tried to hurt me and no one said anything. None of the other cops. None of the lawyers. None of the politicians. And none of the businessmen. I even had to call my own cab to get out of there.”

  “Wait a second—how do you know what these other guys did for a living?” B.B. put a hand up to redirect her.

  “I’ve seen their faces on the news since then, over the years,” Magdalena said. “But don’t ask me about names. I’m not so good with those. I smoked and snorted a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have. And now I can’t remember shit, except my verses from Bible study.”