Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  She found some tissues in the bathroom and brought them to Jasmine, who thanked her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blowing her nose. “I still can’t believe this is happening. When I’m working I can almost forget about it; I’m on my ER rotation and there are so many people hurt and in pain. It’s so frenetic. I can forget about Lily, about what has happened. Isn’t that awful?”

  “No. I think it’s normal,” said Lydia, sitting back down. After all, she’d been doing it all her adult life, using her work to avoid her pain and problems. Better than heroin, she thought. “The brain can only handle so much worry and grief at a time. It needs a way to shift off for a while.”

  Jasmine nodded doubtfully.

  “When the news came about Mickey,” she said with a sniffle, “Lily was just destroyed. I’ll never forget her face or the way she screamed. I was here when her stepfather called. The next few days were kind of this miserable blur. The viewing, the service, the burial.”

  “Was Mariah at the funeral?”

  Jasmine shook her head. “No. I never saw her again after meeting her. I think she left him; that was supposedly one of the reasons he was in so much despair.”

  Lydia nodded.

  “The police said that Lily was sure he hadn’t killed himself.”

  Jasmine nodded, stretched out her legs. “Absolutely positive. In spite of the physical evidence, she refused to believe it.”

  “Was your impression that she was in denial?”

  “I didn’t know what to think,” she said, looking down at her sneakers. “It was all just so stunning. She stayed a couple of days with her parents. She took family leave from the paper and then asked for her vacation to extend her time off. She left for Riverdale about a week after he died.”

  “Did you talk to her while she was up there?”

  “We traded a couple of messages. But we never actually had a conversation.”

  Lydia looked at the young woman in front of her. Her eyes were rimmed red from crying and smudged beneath with blue fatigue from what Lydia was sure was at least a fifteen-hour shift. Something within Lydia wanted to comfort her, to give her a hug and tuck her in someplace. It wasn’t a new feeling, but it was new that she didn’t press it down and become colder to defend herself against the vulnerability it opened inside her. But she didn’t really know how to be like that-even after so many years of interviews like this one, so many weeping, broken people. It cost so much to comfort someone; you had to take on a little of their sadness. Lydia stood up from the couch.

  “Do you mind if I take a look around?” Lydia asked.

  Jasmine shook her head. “Please,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  The hallway from the living area to the bedroom was a gallery of family photos. Lydia flipped on the light and observed a collection of faces captured in the joyous moments of their lives. Lily and Mickey rode on the back of an elephant in a jungle. Lily wrapped her arms around an older woman who had to be her mother; the resemblance was striking as they stood before a birthday cake with many candles. Lily and Jasmine danced in a crowded bar or club with a couple of other sexy young girls decked out for the evening. Mickey’s graduation. Mickey at Machu Picchu. Lily playing soccer, a gangly adolescent with a foalish prettiness to her.

  Lydia walked the brief length of the hall, her boot heels clicking on the hard wood, and gazed at the faces. Near the end of the wall, there was a picture of Mickey holding a professionally painted sign that read NO DOZE. The O’s were little coffee cups and the steam coming from them was comprised of wispy musical notes. Beside him was a strikingly beautiful blonde; her arms snaked around his neck possessively. Mickey’s smile was broad, his eyes crinkled warmly. He was, unmistakably, a happy man. The woman with him had a look to her that Lydia immediately disliked; there was something coquettish, something falsely sweet to her smile. Her eyes were as flat and as dull as a cat’s. Just from the photograph, it was easy to see why Lily had disliked her. Lydia wondered if they’d fought about Mariah, if that had been the rift that had grown between them at the end. Try to convince a young man in love that the gorgeous girl throwing herself at him isn’t the sweet thing he imagines her to be. See how well it goes. He’d have been angry with Lily for it, especially since on some level he would have known she was right. He might have accused her of being jealous, which might also have been partly true.

  “That’s her,” said Jasmine coming up behind Lydia. “Funny, though. I don’t remember that photo on the wall.”

  Lydia looked at it; it did seem out of symmetry with the placement of the others.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “More than six months ago now.”

  Lydia pointed to a black-and-white shot of a man who looked a lot like Mickey holding a baby. “Who’s that?” Lydia asked.

  “That’s their biological father; I think his name was Graves. Simon Graves.”

  There was an air of melancholy to the photo, an expression of sadness on his face though he gazed into the eyes of his child. Lydia wrapped her arms around herself, as if the mood of the photo could leak into her own heart if she allowed it, and bring memories of the loss-if she even had a right to call it that-she had recently suffered.

  “And this,” said Jasmine, “is their stepfather, Tim Samuels.” He was a big man, with an infectious smile and laughing green eyes. He had strawberry blonde hair, with light brows and lashes to match. He held a young Lily on his hip and had his arm around Mickey, who barely reached his elbow. Lily smiled, staring at Tim Samuels with unabashed adoration. Mickey sulked, his arms folded, the very picture of sullen adolescence.

  “What does he do?” Lydia asked.

  “He owned a private security firm. But he sold it about a year and half ago, made so much money that he decided to retire.”

  “Private security?”

  “Yeah, you know, like bodyguards.”

  “Hmm,” said Lydia. She didn’t remember Lily mentioning anything like that, but they had only had brief discussions about her family.

  In the bedroom, Jasmine sat on the king-sized bed while Lydia sifted through Lily’s drawers. There was a Tibetan prayer flag hanging on the wall but few other decorative touches. A small wooden Buddha wobbled on the dresser top as Lydia opened and closed drawers, finding only tee-shirts, socks, lingerie. Lydia walked over to the closet, opened it, and saw a neat row of clothes ordered by color, mainly black, charcoal, and navy. An equally orderly row of shoes sat at attention.

  “I wish she was messier,” said Lydia, looking around the Spartan space. She was hoping for piles of papers and notebooks, journals.

  Jasmine laughed. “The girl is anal.”

  “Where’s her computer?” asked Lydia suddenly.

  “Her laptop would be with her. She never went anywhere without that thing. All her notes were on that, or her Palm Pilot. Any journal she kept, anything like that, would be on that. I told the police; they asked the same question.”

  “Shit,” said Lydia, disappointed.

  “She had this black laptop bag that was her, like, portable office,” said Jasmine, holding up her hands to indicate its size. “She had a desk at the Post but she kept everything in that bag because she didn’t like to write there. She liked to write at home or at the NYU library-you can still go there if you’re an alum. Pens, notebooks, Palm Pilot, laptop, everything was in there.”

  Lydia took another loop around the apartment but didn’t find anything that helped her. She walked back over to the photo wall and pointed to the picture of Mariah and Mickey.

  “Can I take this?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said Jasmine.

  Lydia removed the picture from the frame and slid it into her bag.

  “Are you going to find her?” Jasmine asked softly.

  “Yes,” said Lydia, sounding more certain than she felt. “I am.”

  He killed her. What the fuck you think happened?” asked the young man with the braids and the oversized Knicks tee-shirt.

/>   He was acting tough, moving around, waving his arms, making a show of his anger for their benefit, but he was barely holding back his tears. Jesamyn and Matt stood quietly in the living room, letting him blow off steam. He was Rosario Mendez’s younger brother. She’d more or less raised him since their mother was addicted to crack and died some years earlier. The apartment was clean, with furniture that looked like it had seen a lot of years, walls that needed some paint, but there was a flat-screen television hanging on the wall, a Sony PlayStation and at least fifty games on the shelves, a stereo and speaker system that looked like it cost more than either one of them made in half a year.

  On the table there was a picture of the young man before them in a cap and gown, standing next to Rosario; both of them wore bright smiles as she reached playfully for his cap. A bassinet sat in the corner, filled with colorful toys.

  “She knew he would kill her one day. She told me, ‘He’s gonna kill me, Baby. Make sure he doesn’t get away with it.’ ”

  His name was Baby Boy Mendez, legally. Rumor was that his mother hadn’t given him a name when he was born and never reported any other name she might have come up with before the city deadline. So Baby Boy stuck. Something about it made Jesamyn sad for him… that and the fact that he was just eighteen years old. He seemed much younger. But he wouldn’t be going into the child services system. And, if he wasn’t careful, the street would get him.

  He moved in close to them, arms outstretched. He had a desperate energy to him, which caused Jesamyn to put her pad and pen down on the table behind her to keep her hands free.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” he said, getting in their faces a little. “Just walk around asking a lot of stupid fucking questions, right.”

  Mount put up his hand to move Baby Boy back a step. “You’re going to need to calm down, son. And step back. You’re in my space.”

  Mount’s size intimidated even the toughest thugs they ran into. And Baby Boy just sank into the couch like someone had let the air out of him.

  “No one’s going to help her,” he said, his voice catching. “You’ll nose around for a few days, then disappear. She was pregnant, man.”

  “Mr. Mendez, Alonzo was beating your sister?” asked Matt.

  “Hell, yes, he was beating her. How many times I have to tell you guys the same shit. Pregnant with his baby and he was still smacking her around. She just kept going back to him.”

  “Is there any chance she took off to get away from him? That she went into hiding?” asked Matt.

  Baby Boy looked at him angrily. “Not without me,” he said, his voice going shrill. “She wouldn’t leave here without me.”

  “Okay,” said Jesamyn, holding up her hand in a calming gesture. “I’m sure that’s true. But if she had taken off, can you think of anyplace else she might have gone? Was there another boyfriend, close friend, a relative out of state?”

  He put his head in his hands and shook his head. “We never had no one else, just each other and the little guy on the way, you know?”

  Jesamyn noticed that he shifted between referring to his sister in the past and present tense, as if he were struggling with hope and despair.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” asked Matt.

  “Saturday night. I was heading out with my boys. She was staying home. The baby was making her tired. Alonzo kept calling, wanted her to go to the clubs. She kept telling him no, she didn’t want to. He kept calling. After a while, she stopped answering the phone. As I was leaving, I heard him say on the answering machine, ‘I’m bringing the Escalade to come get you, bitch. You best be ready.’ That’s how he talked to her, man. And she just took it.”

  “No signs of struggle here at the apartment?”

  “Shit,” he said, drawing the word out. “I already told the police all of this.”

  “As I mentioned, in the absence of any solid leads on Rosario, we’re reinterviewing people to see if there’s something we missed the first time around,” said Matt.

  The kid sighed heavily, frustration and anger coming off of him in waves. He leaned back on the couch.

  “No, it was neat and clean the way she liked it. All the lights were out. The clothes she was wearing when I left were folded on her bed. I figured she just changed and went out to avoid a fight.”

  “What was she wearing when you left?” asked Jesamyn.

  “Some, like, gray baggy nightgown thing. Ugly as shit but she said it was comfortable.”

  “Okay,” said Jesamyn, jotting it down. “Is there anything else about that night that you remember?”

  “I remember thinking I should stay home with her. That’s what I remember,” he said, the tears rolling now. “I should have stayed home with her.”

  He started to sob and Matt moved over to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. It was kind of a risky thing to do but the kid had no visible reaction. After a minute, he looked up at Matt.

  “I haven’t seen anything on television about her, you know that? That pregnant white girl in California? You couldn’t turn on the television without seeing her face. I haven’t seen one picture of my sister anywhere. A Latina girl from the projects goes missing, no one cares.”

  Matt and Jesamyn stood silent for a second. There was no use arguing about it; they all knew the truth.

  “We care,” said Matt finally. And Jesamyn knew how deeply he meant it. She loved him a little bit for that.

  You were good with him,” she said in the car, as they pulled out of their space. They’d come back to the Caprice, surprised to see that it hadn’t been vandalized in any way. Often when you parked a patrol car, marked or unmarked, in the projects you came back to find it covered with eggs or spray paint, maybe vegetables, whatever was handy.

  “He’s a kid. She was basically his mother,” he said. “I feel for him.”

  Baby Boy was the last of three reinterviews they’d done that afternoon and Mount was consistently kind and respectful, in spite of the abuse that was hurled at them. The next-door neighbor called them “pigs” under his stinking breath when they’d come to the door. A lot of cops would have reacted, but Mount kept calling him sir, speaking in that mellow way he had. Rosario’s best friend Angelica had taunted Mount about his height, wondering out loud if everything about him was so big. Mount had turned bright red but kept his respectful, easy manner. Jesamyn wondered, did it roll off of him or did he hold it inside?

  “You’re a big softie,” she said, patting him on the knee.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky, painting it a light pink and orange visible above the building tops.

  “I gotta get moving,” she said, looking at her watch. “I told Ben we’d have dinner together tonight. Want to join us?”

  “I’d love to, but I think I’m going to see what came back on that partial plate.”

  She nodded. She knew Lily Samuels had never left his mind the whole afternoon. The case was with her, too, but not in the same way. It was weighing on Mount’s heart.

  “Don’t sleep here again tonight, okay?”

  He nodded. “I won’t.”

  She didn’t believe him.

  The search Matt ran on the partial plate and description came back with twenty-eight hits. Twenty-eight black SUVs with license plates beginning with H57 in the New York area. He made a quick scan of the list, plugged a couple of the names into VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program database administered by the FBI, and through the New York system. None of the owners came back with any warrants or criminal records. Nothing else obvious popped. The only thing that caught his attention was a black Navigator belonging to a Michele LaForge that had a couple of outstanding parking tickets. He pulled up her license photo, didn’t recognize her, but printed it anyway for the file. It was nothing; he knew that. He had nothing. Two weeks ago he could have followed up with every one of these people. Just poked around, saw what shook loose. Now, he’d be lucky if he could get to one or two a day over the next few weeks.


  He rubbed his eyes when the computer screen started to swim. His frustration, the lack of sleep from the night before, and a totally shit day were taking their toll. It was time to go home.

  “Sorry, Lily,” he said to her picture. He was wiped, no good to her or anyone. That was the thing about this job; you could just go and go until you dropped. You never felt right about going home to bed when someone was missing. You could never feel okay about just relaxing, chilling in front of the television, letting your mom cook you some dinner. You did it, you just never felt good about it. At least that’s how he felt. Jesamyn had something important in her life, Benjamin. Something that was equally important, more important than the job. She went home at the end of the day without guilt. He envied her that.

  Last year he’d been diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer. His doctor, who’d been treating him since he was fourteen years old, had issued a stern warning about stress and its effects on the body, short and long term. So he’d quit smoking, stopped eating fast food, and took the medication his doctor prescribed. For a while, he’d even worked out, but that hadn’t lasted. He had started to feel that burn in his stomach again two nights ago. It was like an existential alarm. When he was pushing himself too hard, he got a painful warning.

  He slid the file under his arm and lumbered down the stairs.

  “Go home will ya’, Mount,” said Ray Labriola, a narcotics guy who passed him on the stairs. “You’re making the rest of us look bad.”

  “I’m taking off,” said Mount, looking at his watch. Nearly nine. “Have a good one.”

  “You too, brother,” said Ray.

  The night was cold as he stepped outside, the street strangely quiet. A wind blew the fallen leaves around him as he walked to his brand-new Dodge Ram pickup. He slid into the comfortable leather interior with ease. It was the first vehicle he’d ever owned that didn’t feel like a ridiculously small clown car to him. He felt almost normal in it. He turned the car on and all the dials and digital readouts glowed a nifty red and blue. Tiny ram heads lit up in various places. He loved his new car. He let the engine warm up as he took the cellular phone from his pocket.