Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  One article noted that Keisha Simpkins, DNP, was in charge of community nursing. Another mentioned that Ileana Tassiopulos, MSW, was director of counseling. Some of the others, clipped from newspapers and magazines, made no mention of Humanitas but reported sharp declines in homelessness and a rise in employment in Western New York. The printed memos announced meetings or concerned internal matters I was in no position to evaluate. But they were on agency letterhead that noted both physical and online addresses and listed staff, including Keisha. The handwritten notes were out of context and even more confusing: inside jokes, happy faces, illegible scrawls, happy hour invites, phone numbers below only first names or initials. One pink post-it note, addressed to K and signed I, stood out: Saw Veronica begging at Timmy Ho’s. We have to help her. Assuming I was short for Ileana and K for Keisha, I put the post-it in my notebook for later.

  It was a few minutes past nine when I opened my Lenovo laptop and went to the Humanitas website. The home page had a photo montage that included shots of smiling children and their mothers, immigrants in various styles of dress, seniors and white-coated professionals engaged in discussion, and the agency headquarters, a refurbished mansion on Delaware near West Ferry. The About page confirmed the mission I had figured out from the other documents. The Who We Are page listed the names, pictures, and mini-bios of those in charge of the non-profit operation and the names of the board of directors, some of whom were prominent in business or politics. I skimmed all the bios but paid special attention to Keisha Simpkins and Ileana Tassiopulos, whose alphabetized listings appeared side-by-side. They had graduated from the University at Buffalo four years apart, but both had started at Humanitas at the same time, eight years earlier. Ileana’s was the only Humanitas name Mona had in her address book. As I studied their adjacent smiles, it struck me that the director of community nursing and the director of counseling were more than workplace friends, which meant I would strike Ileana Tassiopulos off my call-first list.

  After I shut down my computer, I looked again at one of the letterhead sheets that listed key Humanitas staff. I almost missed the name that appeared between Keisha and Ileana. The name had not been on the website: Veronica Surowiec, MD, Medical Liaison. Then I pulled the post-it out of my notebook: Saw Veronica begging at Timmy Ho’s. We have to help her.

  That settled the question of whom to interview first.

  6

  The Humanitas Institute was half a block past the Jesuit high school that sat on land once occupied by the Milburn Mansion, where in 1901 President William McKinley died eight days after being shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition.

  Unlike the Milburn home, many of the sprawling Delaware Avenue mansions once occupied by powerful Gilded Age families had been spared demolition. Over several blocks that stretched from the Gates Circle fountain to downtown, they had been repurposed as high-end law firms, foundation headquarters, charities, charter schools, social services agencies, a few architecture firms, and software companies. The two best known were the massive gray stone Clement mansion, which now housed the American Red Cross and a fundraising arm of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the more compact Wilcox Mansion, now a national historic site because McKinley’s vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, took the oath of office there. The Cardwell Mansion, which a prominent banker had inherited from his railroad magnate father, was a sandstone affair smaller than the Clement but larger than the Wilcox. Set well back from the curb of what was once called Millionaires’ Row, the Cardwell bore a tasteful gold-lettered sign that read Humanitas Institute of Buffalo. With an entrance at one end and exit at the other, a long blacktop drive curved in front of the building but also looped behind it to a parking lot large enough for maybe thirty cars.

  At nine-forty-five and with wipers on intermittent for a light snowfall, I drove into the lot, which was more than half full, and found a spot in front of a VISITOR sign. The main entrance was in the rear, at a point where flagstone steps and a hairpin-turn wheelchair ramp met. I climbed the steps to a door with pebbled plate glass and pushed the green button on a stainless steel intercom box.

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice crackled.

  “I’m here to see Ms. Tassiopulos,” I said, looking up at the white security camera mounted out of reach above the door.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.” I was an ex-army cop but thought I still had a pretty authoritative cop voice. “I’m a detective. I’d like to talk to her about Dr. Simpkins.” Still looking at the camera, I heard a flustered “Oh!” before the intercom went dead. A moment later the door buzzed. I pulled it and stepped into the vestibule to face another door with pebbled glass. I stuffed my watch cap into my jacket pocket, looked up at a second camera, and waited.

  Momentarily, a blue shape neared the door, fractured by the glass but belonging to a woman in a pantsuit. The door opened, and I recognized Ileana Tassiopulos from her picture on the website—olive skin, large green eyes and high cheekbones in a patrician face, and curly brown tresses with blonde highlights. But the wide smile I had seen online was missing, the tense jaw signaling an anxiety that didn’t surprise me.

  “Ms. Tassiopulos,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Gideon Rimes.”

  Her hand was slender, fine-boned. When she shook mine I felt tension in her fingers.

  “It’s about time somebody considered this serious,” she said, stepping aside to let me enter and closing the door behind me. “Is there word of Dr. Simpkins?”

  The reception area was paneled, with two women and a man, all of whom seemed to be in their mid-twenties, seated at desktop computers. The woman nearest the door, probably the person who had spoken on the intercom, was a full-figured blonde in a blue sweater. The woman at the desk perpendicular to hers was brown-skinned and bald with hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. The small man at the back of the room had thick black hair and was about the same complexion as my foster sister Mira, whose biological parents had come from India. All three of them looked at me expectantly, as if awaiting my answer.

  I turned back to Tassiopulos. “Is there somewhere I can speak to you privately?”

  She looked at the others. Then she looked back at me and stiffened as if bracing herself. “If you have news, you can share it with all of us.”

  “I don’t have any news yet,” I said, “about Dr. Simpkins or Dr. Surowiec.” I paused to let the second name register, and it did, on all four faces. The seated women exchanged a surprised glance, and the man’s lips parted as he leaned forward. I was almost close enough to Tassiopulos to feel the pull of her sudden intake of breath. “I was hoping you could help me. Now, is there somewhere we can speak privately?”

  “Of course.”

  Without looking at the others, Tassiopulos turned on her heel and led me past their desks. I followed her through a narrow corridor that opened into what once must have been a ballroom but had since been subdivided into cubicles with frosted glass partitions and offices along the far wall. She gestured me into one of the offices and closed the door as I sat in a black plastic shell chair facing the desk. Tassiopulos sat behind the desk and studied me.

  “Detective Rimes, is it? I’m glad the police are finally paying attention to Keisha’s disappearance.”

  I leaned forward to hand her a Driftglass Investigations card, and she slipped on a pair of drugstore reading glasses with a rhinestone-studded frame. She read the card, and I could see the corners of her mouth tightening.

  “I used to be a cop,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find her.”

  “Probably by her parents because the real police still aren’t taking things seriously.”

  I said nothing.

  Clearly annoyed—whether at me or the real police I couldn’t say—she pulled off the reading glasses and set them on her desk. She studied me for a time, long enough for me to notice the flecks of gold in her green eyes, long enough for her to come up with a question that might determine whether the interview continued. “
Mr. Rimes, how does Dr. Surowiec fit into your search for Keisha?”

  “Call me Gideon.” I hoped informality might tip things in my favor. I took out my notebook, peeled the pink post-it from one of the pages, and held it toward her. “Did you write this note to Keisha, Ms. Tassiopulos?”

  She took the post-it and glanced at it. “Yes.”

  “I found it in Keisha’s apartment. My clients are desperate to know what happened to their daughter, and I need a place to start looking. I noticed the name Veronica Surowiec on the letterhead of old memos but not on your website, so I came here first.”

  “Then the answer to my question is that there is no connection.”

  “The answer is, I don’t know—yet. If Dr. Surowiec is the Veronica you meant, there must be a story behind how your medical liaison ends up begging outside a Tim Horton’s. If that story involves drugs, Ms. Tassiopulos, and Keisha disappeared after a drug overdose, I think you should help me figure out if there is a connection, for both their sakes.”

  She was quiet for a long moment. “Call me Ileana.” She folded her hands atop her desk. “How can I help, Gideon?”

  “You’re the only person from Humanitas that Mona Simpkins has in her address book.” I took out my pen and held it above a blank notebook page. “That suggests your friendship with Keisha went beyond work.”

  “Goes. Don’t bury her until we find her body.” She gazed off for a moment and dragged the back of her hand across both eyes. “Yes. I have a few years on her but we were newbies together. We sat next to each other at orientation and struck up a friendship that helped us make sense of Humanitas and what was expected of us. Over lunches those first few weeks we talked a lot about the connections between physical and mental health and eventually we began doing site visits together.”

  “Site visits. What do those involve?”

  “If you’ve been to our website, you know we offer comprehensive support services to a lot of other institutions, from schools to community centers. Sometimes site visits mean meeting with agency heads to review what they do for clients. For example, does this or that immigrant family have access to public transportation or health care? If not, we figure out how to make it possible. Sometimes we meet directly with clients themselves to offer face-to-face help. Is this Alzheimer’s patient getting the support she needs to stay home as long as possible? How does this father’s cancer impact his children’s performance in school?”

  “So you and Keisha were kind of a tag team on physical and mental health.”

  “Yes, on how the two worked together for an individual or family’s quality of life. Sometimes she would do a routine physical and I would do a mental health assessment, and we’d compare notes and come up with a multifaceted treatment plan that worked beautifully. Yes, we were a team, a good one that got better the longer we worked together. Cassidy, the intercom receptionist, used to call us Batgirl and Robin but refused to say who was who.” She smiled then, an almost bittersweet smile that brought color to her cheeks as if she’d remembered something else she was hesitant to share.

  I set my pen aside. “Is there something you don’t want me to write down?”

  She sighed and her smile widened into the one I had seen online.

  “I won’t breach confidentiality by giving you names so you can write whatever you want. Anyway, I doubt this anecdote will help you find Keisha.”

  “But it will tell me something about her, something that will help me understand her better.”

  She nodded. “I was just thinking about one of the early visits that helped us bond with each other. We paid a home visit to an elderly couple in one of the assisted living facilities—I won’t say which one. They were both in their early eighties and in pretty good shape. A lot of walking. Swimming in the pool. Nine holes of golf once a week for him. Yoga classes for her. That sort of thing.” Even though we were in her office with the door closed, she leaned toward me and lowered her voice a bit. “We’re sitting in their living room, doing a wellness check, when out of the blue the woman says, ‘We don’t screw like we used to. Two or three times a week for fifty years, and now he’s tired all the time and won’t come near me and sometimes I have to rely on BOB to go to sleep but I like to be kissed and BOB can’t kiss me.’”

  “No names,” I said.

  Ileana shook her head. “Not her husband. B-O-B. Battery-operated boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I was brought up in a very proper Greek family.” Ileana sat back, palms flat on her desktop. “I was nobody’s prude and had graduate-level sexuality training and my own fair share of experiences before and after marriage, but the idea of elderly people having sex and actually talking about it and vibrators—well, yes, it caught me off guard. But not Keisha. She never blinked and eased right into a dialogue about variable hormone levels and possible physiological problems and ways they might approach communication. It was a couple’s therapy session that gave the therapist in the room a moment to find her footing.”

  “Sounds like a smooth move.”

  “It was, and we got to the heart of the problem too, sort of. One of his golf buddies had died some months earlier, and the rumor that ran through the retirement community was that he had died in flagrante with his wife. Our guy didn’t understand how much he’d taken the rumor to heart and withdrawn from his own sex life. Once everything was on the table and we got them talking, they got into a rhythm that made things better. Not three times a week but enough times a month the wife was happy.” She looked off again, and her smile lessened but did not disappear. “That couple had this weird table lamp that looked like it was made out of that famous Remington horse sculpture.”

  “The Bronco Buster?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. For years, whenever things got dicey, one of us would look at the other and say, ‘Ride her, cowboy!’ and we’d almost fall off our chairs laughing.” She wiped her eyes again.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For cutting my fear of assisted living by ninety percent.”

  She laughed and sat forward, and I felt confident she would cooperate with me, not only in this interview but in any follow-ups.

  “So Keisha was—is—quite good at what she does,” I said. “Self-assured, sympathetic to the needs of others, and enough of a generalist to address those needs on many fronts.”

  “One of the smartest, kindest, most careful and balanced women I’ve ever known.”

  I locked eyes with Ileana and made no move to pick up my pen. “Therefore not at all the kind of person one would expect to have a drug problem she could keep secret, at least not secret from you.”

  “Exactly. If you used to be a cop, you must know something about drug use patterns. Sure, the desire to get high cuts across all ages, races, and classes, with alcohol and pot being the most common drugs of choice. But most users of illicit drugs begin in adolescence and drift into irregular and casual use by their late twenties. Younger users try opioids for a different kind of high but a lot of older users start with prescription painkillers.”

  “The road to heroin is often paved with oxy.”

  Ileana nodded. “Keisha is older but has had no accidents, surgery, or pain management issues that required a scrip. Now before you tell me about health professionals who find their maintenance levels and use for a long time, let me tell you about Veronica Surowiec. Yes, she was a medical doctor who worked here and developed a drug habit in the wake of her only child’s death and her husband’s abandonment. She lost everything, and her life spiraled out of control astonishingly fast.”

  “She never found her maintenance level.”

  “Not for lack of trying.” Ileana took a deep breath. “Look, I’m a therapist trained to recognize the signs of addiction and indicators of addictive personalities. When Veronica’s life started going off the rails, I saw it before anybody else because it fit her personality. Brilliance and persistence got her through medical school at the t
op of her class but these assets turned into something else after her losses. She turned to methamphetamines for the euphoria. She started with Desoxyn, which she prescribed for accomplices who gave the pills back to her.”

  “I take it this was in the days before New York required all scrips to be electronic?”

  “Yes. Veronica resisted my help, and by the time everybody else noticed her dilated pupils and flushed skin it was too late. She had begun to cook her own and stopped coming to work regularly because she screwed up so much.”

  “Did she ever do time in rehab?”

  “Not that I know of. When I reported her to our superiors, they took their own sweet time. When they finally got around to her she was too far gone. She was a liability. They had no choice but to let her go. Now she’s homeless and snaggle-toothed from meth mouth and begging for drug money outside coffee shops.”

  “Your note said, ‘We have to help her.’ Did you try to help Veronica?”

  “Yes. First, we looked for her in all the usual places.”

  “The usual places?”

  “Various shelters. Homelessness is way down in the Buffalo area but still a big enough problem we have several places street people go, for two hots and a cot, especially this time of year. Keisha and I spent several nights looking for her this fall, waiting outside this or that shelter as people drifted in. Twice we saw her but she ran from us. Her sneakers against our high-heel boots? No contest there. The last time I saw her face to face was outside the Walgreen’s two blocks from here, about three weeks ago. She was high then but she still recognized me. Breaks my heart to know she’s out there somewhere, broken and alone—and invisible, because that’s what the homeless are, people we choose not to see.” For a moment Ileana’s expression made me think she might wipe her eyes again but she didn’t.