Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  I look now at the picture. Dad at twenty-five, cocksure, grinning. Holding Mom’s hand to his vest. Her veil is lifted, and though she looks into the camera, the laughter in her eyes is for him. She is twenty-three.

  I clean the glass. It is peaceful in this room. Serene. The air is scented with flowers, and the music plays softly, eternally. The two urns touch at the shoulders, like shy lovers. I’ll bring something next time. A rose. I’ll bring it soon.

  I stand in silence, looking into the niche, until I hear the chime of the closing bell. I touch the glass with my fingers, turn, and walk out to the walkway, then back to the marble steps, down them, and to the lobby. A custodian stands patiently at the door, holding it open. “Thanks,” I say. He nods kindly, his eyes on the floor. He closes the door behind me, and I step down the walk and into the garden. I sit down on a stone bench at the garden entrance and swipe the sleeve of my jacket across my eyes.

  The cell phone is heavy in my pocket. I take it out. I have both her numbers, home and cell. I pick up a stone from the ground. All the ways I’ve thought of her, and what I want most now is to show her the Columbarium. To show her the way their urns touch at the shoulders. Then I want to walk with her along the river walkway. The whole way along it, from the heliport at Thirty-fourth Street up to Gracie Mansion. Walk with her and explain. Her hand in mine. I toss the stone away, shake my head, and stand up.

  She has her man for that.

  I put the cell phone away and start down Third Avenue. I walk to Sixth Street, then head west, the street life thickening here in the Village, the sidewalks a riot of vendors and walkers. The smell of Indian food mingles with the scent of flowers from an outdoor stand, and then both give way to the smell of pot. I continue west, drawn now, realizing for the first time where I’m headed. At the hoop court on West Third Street I pause, my fingers in the fence. Five-on-five, full-court, under the lights. One dribble and then launch a thirty-footer, then turn and cock an ear to the crowd, letting their roar tell you you’ve split the metal nets again.

  I cross the street, and suddenly I’m standing in front of the Waverly Theater. Where all this began.

  I stand just where she stood, the woman I followed. Where she stood waiting for a stranger who had touched her, unbidden, in the dark. I remember the fear in her eyes. Terror. In her apartment I brought it out again.

  I brought it out in all of them. In Melissa Clay. In Diane Silio. In Nina Torring. In Elise. Fear and, finally, pain.

  I close my eyes, here in the middle of the busy sidewalk. It wasn’t enough. I went further every time, and still it wasn’t enough. It never would’ve been.

  It is 9:30. Mimi Lessing is at home, dressing quietly. Thinking of the ties. Wondering if she will have the courage to open the door and walk inside. I touch the cell phone in my pocket, then take my hand away. If I were to call her, I’d tell her not to marry him.

  I open my eyes. I turn away from the theater and walk slowly along West Fourth Street. Nina Torring’s art gallery should be right around here. West Fourth, she said. I look out for it, remembering again her body under the lamps. Her stillness. The gleaming ring in her nightstand drawer. I walk past a tobacconist, a clothes store. Here it is. Tucked between a drugstore and a florist. White Swan Galleries. I walk to the glass.

  She’s had a break-in. The front door and windows are covered in yellow police tape. DO NOT CROSS is repeated all along it in thick black lettering. I start away but then turn back. I walk to the glass again. The gallery lights are out, but there’s enough light from the street that I can see inside. The pictures hang on the wall undisturbed. The room is immaculate.

  I walk into the drugstore next door. The Asian man behind the counter looks up, then back at the video he’s watching on a small TV perched on a crate on the floor. I pick up a lighter from the stand in front of the register and hand him a five.

  “What happened next door?” I ask.

  He rings up the sale and makes change from the register. “Lady missing.”

  “Missing?”

  He nods. “Missing.”

  “How long?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Store close one week.”

  I take the change and the lighter and step back outside. I walk back to the gallery glass. What could he mean, “missing”? I cross the street and start down West Fourth, passing the hoop court again, then the Blue Note jazz club. I walk to Bleecker, then to Sullivan, and turn right, the murmur of the Village dying quickly as I walk down the tree-lined block.

  Three-sixty-four Sullivan Street. Nina Torring’s apartment. I look at the black gate, at the heavy mahogany door. At the flowerpots, filled with rich earth and roses. “My New York garden,” she had said as she took out her keys. Across the street is an outdoor café. The Caffe Lune. I walk over and take a seat at a sidewalk table. A young waitress comes from inside and sets a coaster in front of me.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi. Absolut and tonic, please.”

  “Sure. Lime?”

  “Yes.”

  She walks back inside.

  I stare across the street at Nina Torring’s apartment. The waitress returns with my drink and sets it in front of me. I take a long sip.

  Missing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We have left the city behind us, and the river as well, and now in the darkness the suburbs slip away. I watch the white lines of the Thruway vanish beneath the car, and I listen to the smooth murmur of its engine. And to the only other sound — the soft breathing I know so well.

  Soon the chloroform will wear off. It pained me to use it, to see her beautiful eyes dilate in terror as I pressed the soaked cloth to her face. But I had no choice. The work we have before us tonight requires privacy, and space. And so I cut loose from the posts the silk ties that bound her hands, and dressed her on the bed in the clothes she had folded neatly and laid on the chair by the window. I gathered together the items that had seduced her — the tape player, the lamp, the blindfold, and last of all the four ties — and slipped out the door and walked across the parking lot to the car. I drove the car into the space in front of room twenty, then surveyed the lot around me. It held only other cars. Thirty yards away, through the window of the motel office, I could see the desk clerk sitting with his back to me, the phone to his ear. I activated the front-desk Øre, and his casual voice came through the car speakers. A personal call. I stepped from the car and opened the far back door, the one that faced only the ice room and the fence. I slipped back into room twenty.

  It took only seconds to carry Miss Lessing to the car door and ease her into the backseat. She slept there beneath a quilted blanket until we had passed safely through the toll plaza and onto the Thruway we travel now. A short while ago, in the far corner of the John Jay Memorial Rest Area, beside a thick bank of trees, I watched the last of the few cars disappear back onto the open road. Working carefully in the dark, I moved Miss Lessing to where she rests now. Beside me.

  Her hands are tied behind the passenger seat with one silk tie, her ankles bound in front of her with another. She is more delicate than I have ever imagined. Her complexion is pure, her body light and graceful. Looking at her slender neck, at her face tucked into her chest in sleep, I see again the innocent young woman of a year ago. And I can almost convince myself that there has been some mistake.

  I grip the wheel tighter and look back at the road.

  Just hours ago I sat three blocks from the Century Motel, listening through the car stereo as Jake Teller canceled the reservation to room twenty. I closed my eyes in gratitude and touched my head gently to the top of the steering column. She had refused him. I drove to her block and parked in front of La Boheme, from whose window I had watched her on so many evenings. I lowered the car window to let in the cool night air, and I activated her apartment Øres.

  And heard, twenty minutes later, Miss Lessing ask the operator for the street address of the Century Motel.

  I stared into the car speakers. And as I
sat there, the truth sinking in like slow poison, Kreisler began to play. “Caprice Viennois.” I looked out the window at the block I had learned to see through her eyes. At the delicate stonework of the prewar building, the watercolors in the window of the art gallery. At the slate of wines on the chalkboard at Vine. Kreisler played on, her favorite violin refrain approaching. I turned off the car stereo and sat for a few minutes in the nighttime quiet. Then I started the car and pulled away.

  I had just enough time to rent and prepare the room. And then to park again a few blocks from the Century Motel. I sat in the driver’s seat, my eyes closed, listening to the silence of room twenty. Ten o’clock came. Silence. 10:01. 10:02. 10:03. Could it be? Through the car speakers came the soft, damning click of the motel-room door. She had come.

  She stirs. I look over quickly. She lifts her face from her chest, whispers something, then gives in again to the soft pull of unconsciousness. I reach with a gloved hand and touch her cheek. She stirs again, her light perfume reaching me. Now she is still. I look back at the black road.

  The others were never pure. Not the young florist and not the waitress who succeeded her. Claire was her name; she poured espressos and lattes at a First Avenue café. A young woman who wore light colors, even in winter, and kept a place in her heart for the older customers. “Go sit,” she would say. “I’ll bring it to you.” A young woman who spent her breaks curled in the café corner, reading Kerouac and Burroughs.

  A young woman whose boyfriend, I soon discovered, brought cocaine to her each Friday night. Cocaine she could not afford on a countergirl’s salary, so she paid him another way. As I listened.

  We drive now past dark, forgotten commuter towns. Ardonia. Port Ewen. Saugerties. We are sixty miles from our destination. An hour, no more. I look again from the road to her clear, smooth face.

  The others were never pure. Miss Lessing was. She stirs again, with more authority now, wetting her lips, shaking her head once, slowly. I look back at the dark Thruway.

  She will soon be again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Another?”

  “No, thanks.”

  The waitress smiles and walks back inside. I leave a five for her in the bill tray, step through the gate and out onto the sidewalk. I look across the street again, at the dark mahogany door of Nina Torring’s apartment building. I wonder if her husband is in there, waiting by the phone. My old teammate, Nick Simms. Maybe that’s it. Maybe she left him and won’t call. I start up Sullivan Street, toward Bleecker. Just before the corner I turn around and look back, but I see only the empty sidewalk and the dark trees that have been planted every twenty feet.

  I turn onto Bleecker, glad for the lights of the Village again. A breeze brings the scent of pesto out the open door of an Italian restaurant. In its window are loaves of bread, arranged like flowers. I step to the curb and wave down a cab.

  “Eighty-first and Amsterdam,” I tell the driver. We make our slow way west through the crowded Village, then up the West Side Highway, and now across again. “Right here is fine,” I tell him at the corner of Eighty-first Street, and step out into the cool spring night and walk the half block to my apartment. On the front steps I look at my watch. 10:30. Mimi is home by now, or else with her fiancé. If she ever went to the Century Motel at all.

  I let myself into my building and climb the three flights to my floor. I walk down the short hallway to my apartment door and slip my key into the lock.

  “Jake Teller?”

  I turn to see a man step down into the hallway from the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors. He looks about fifty, and he is wearing a gray suit jacket, neatly cut. He stretches his legs, as though he’s been sitting there for some time; as he walks toward me, he reaches into his jacket and in one quick, easy motion comes out with a police badge. I’ve never seen one up close.

  “Yes, I’m Jake Teller,” I say.

  “I’m Detective Crusin. Can I ask you a few questions? Five minutes, tops.”

  “About what?”

  “A missing woman.”

  I look at him. Beneath his glasses, his dark eyes are sharp. “Let’s go inside,” I say.

  We step into the small kitchen, and I close the door behind us. We stand facing each other.

  “You want something to drink?” I ask him.

  “Yes. Water, please.”

  I step past him, take a glass from the cupboard and some ice cubes from the freezer. Nick Simms. Nina told him. As I fill the glass at the sink, I can feel the detective taking in the place. The messy living room, the open door to the bedroom. I turn to see him pulling out one of the low-back chairs from the kitchen table. I hand him his glass of water, and he sets it on the table, next to the iron, which still stands upright. He sits down, and I sit across from him.

  “Did her husband give you my name?” I ask him.

  “Husband?” he says, a hard edge to his voice. “Her doorman gave me your name.”

  I feel a touch like cold steel in my spine.

  “Doorman?”

  “Clete Reynolds.” He watches me closely. “Your old friend.”

  “Elise?” I say. “Elise is missing?”

  He sits quietly for a few seconds, his hands resting on his legs.

  “Not legally. Not yet. But she missed her mother’s fiftieth-birthday party last night, a party that she helped plan. She missed class this morning. No one can reach her.”

  “If she’s not miss —”

  “I went to school with her father.” His voice is tight. He takes a pen and a small notebook from his suit jacket. He pages through the notebook, then looks back at me. “The doorman thought Elise might be with you.”

  I shake my head. “I saw her last Friday night. That’s it.”

  “You’re not her boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “She told the doorman you are.”

  “We had one date.”

  “Last Friday.”

  I nod.

  “What did you do?”

  “We went to a bar.”

  “And then?”

  The speed of his questions is disarming. I almost reach for his glass of water, which sits untouched on the table. Instead, I stand and walk to the refrigerator. I take out a can of Coke and open it. “After the bar, we went to her place,” I say, my back to him. I walk to the chair and sit down again.

  “Just the two of you?”

  I pause. “Her roommates were away.”

  “The two of you were alone?”

  I look at the table, then at the iron. On its metal face I can see threads of white silk. This guy knows whatever Clete knows. I meet his eyes again.

  “A friend of mine came up for a little while.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  I look away again, then back at him.

  “I can’t tell you her name, Detective.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  He lowers the notebook to his leg and looks hard at me.

  “A girl is missing,” he says.

  “Not legally.”

  His eyes flash, and then he smiles grimly.

  “She probably went away for the weekend,” I say.

  “Probably. That’s what I told her parents.” He runs a hand through his slick hair, then reaches for the glass of water and turns it slowly. Then he clips his pen onto the notebook and slides the notebook back into his suit jacket. “Do you have a business card?” he asks quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  I take out my wallet, find one, and hand it to him. He turns it in his fingers, and then he looks out into the living room for a few seconds, and finally back at me.

  “Last Friday night, Mr. Teller, Elise’s neighbors… heard things.”

  Somehow I hold his eyes. He waits for me to say something. I’m quiet.

  “What do you think they heard?” he asks.

  Again I’m quiet. Ten seconds, he waits. I can hear the soda fizzing softly
in the can. Finally, he takes out a card of his own from his jacket pocket and lays it on the kitchen table.

  “When you figure it out, I suggest you call me. Because if Elise isn’t in class Monday morning, I’m going to come by” — he looks down at the card I gave him — “Hyson, Levay, and I’m going to take you into your boss’s office and ask you some pretty hard questions.”

  He lets his words sink in, then stands up and slides the chair carefully back under the kitchen table. He walks to the front door and unlocks the deadbolt. He turns around.

  “Who did you think was missing, Jake?”

  “No one.”

  “No one,” he says. He nods, then opens the door and leaves.

  I listen to his footsteps reach the stairs, start down them, fade, and disappear. I sit still for a few minutes, then stand and walk slowly to the sink. I dump out the Coke and rinse the can carefully with hot water. I set it on the counter. I walk into my bedroom and sit down on the bed.

  Elise Verren is missing. And Nina Torring.

  I go to the dresser and find on top of it the phone number for Anne Keltner. Mimi Lessing’s maid of honor. The first seduction I let her witness. I lift the cordless phone from its wall mount and dial her number. Two rings, and then her voice.

  “Hi. I’m not here. Say the right things, and I’ll call you back. Bye.”

  Her voice is playful, assured, as it was at the Roosevelt Hotel in the first moments. The beep of her answering machine sounds and I cut the call. I walk out into the living room to the far window. I push it open and step out onto the fire escape. The night air is a relief. I lean on the black railing and look down at the street below. I watch the flowing lights of the taxis, listen to the rising nighttime murmur of the city.