by Julia Dahl
Iris stands up and puts her arms around me. Even after a night of lying around eating pizza, she smells lovely. Like lavender and milk.
SUNDAY
CHAPTER EIGHT
I don’t sleep well. I wake up around six and my stomach is going. Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was in my dream. I had to carry it somewhere, but I was wearing knit gloves that kept getting caught in the sticky open wounds. My first full thought after I open my eyes is that I have to get out of this. I have to call Saul and make up an excuse and just go back to running where the city desk tells me. I get a pill from my bedside and swallow it. I know, even as I’m trying to figure a way out of it, that my job, or rather, the job I want, the job I’ve trained for, is exactly what I’m being asked to do. Not solving homicides, but telling true stories. Finding sources other people can’t find and using those sources to reveal things other people aren’t revealing is exactly what I’m supposed to do. The story of a homicide being overlooked because a powerful, insular community doesn’t want attention is a great story. The problem is that one thing I’m very definitely not supposed to do is help interested parties further their agendas. We may not have had much in the way of ethics training in school, but I definitely remember that. Agendas are what separate journalists from PR people: they have clients; we have sources, subjects. And solving this murder, at this point, is Saul’s agenda. I need to figure out how to make it mine, too.
I open my eyes again around noon to a chalky white sky. Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was in my dream again. She was lying on the metal slab, but this time she was alive, and I said to her, “Wait, I thought you were dead? How did you survive?” And she said, “It’s all a big mistake, honey.” And then she sat up, suddenly fully dressed, but still bald and bruised and bloody around her face, hopped off the slab, and knelt down to lace up a pair of sneakers. “Do you run?” she asked me. And then she took off, without waiting for an answer.
At about 1 P.M., I get out of bed. Iris has left a note saying she’s at yoga, so I make coffee and pull up the Tribune’s Web site on my laptop. Porn mom is splitting the front page with the latest round of health department raids at city restaurants. Brooklyn’s queen of cannoli, a fifty-year-old steakhouse near Grand Central, two noodle shops on the Upper East Side, and about a dozen other well-known places were shuttered yesterday for failing inspections. I scroll down, past an article about a Yankee threatening to pull out of contract negotiations, another about whether the mayor did or did not imply he might close sixteen firehouses within the year, and another about two Child Protective Services workers who say they were disciplined for “speaking out” about turmoil inside the agency.
Nine stories down, I find her:
POLICE QUESTION GARDENER
IN SCRAP YARD MURDER
By Marisa Hernandez
An illegal alien with a history of arrests was questioned in the murder of an Hasidic woman found Friday in a scrap pile in Brooklyn.
Miguel Arambula, 41, who does yard maintenance at the Borough Park manse where Rivka Mendelssohn lived, has a rap sheet containing citations for soliciting prostitution, public intoxication, and public urination.
“When he drinks he gets into trouble,” said Francine Singer, 54, who lives downstairs from Arambula in Sunset Park. “I hope they send him back to Mexico.”
Police declined to comment on whether Arambula is considered a suspect in the grisly death of the mother-of-four. A police official close to the case told the Tribune that Mendelssohn sustained massive head trauma and was pregnant at the time of her death.
Mendelssohn’s funeral was attended by hundreds of members of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
“It’s so horrible,” said an elderly attendee whose daughter was friends with Mendelssohn. “She trusted a stranger and look what happened.”
—Additional reporting by Rebekah Roberts
A photo of Arambula trying to cover his face as he enters his apartment building runs with the story.
Now I know what Lars meant when he said Marisa got “great stuff” from the neighbors: I hope they send him back to Mexico. Nice. She probably got a whole earful from this lady about her tax dollars and how great people have it in jail. I like to think of New York as a really tolerant, broad-minded place, but sometimes New Yorkers fuck that up.
I’m surprised that the information I gave Lars about Sara Wyman saying she was considering a divorce is absent, but at least her pregnancy made it in. The story makes it seem like an arrest is imminent, but reading between the lines I can see that the only information they actually have is that this man was questioned, and that he has a petty record. My hunch is that Larry Dunn, or whoever was working the Shack, simply got DCPI to tell him that, yes, they’d brought him in for questioning. Being questioned isn’t indicative of anything in itself, but it sure does look bad in the paper.
I met Marisa Hernandez once around Christmas when she relieved me on a stakeout of a livery cab driver accused of sexual assault. We hung out together in the lobby of his apartment building near the mall in Elmhurst. Most of the time you can’t hang out in people’s apartment building lobbies waiting for them to come home, but if the person you’re trying to “get” lives in public housing, the rules change. Technically, you’re still supposed to be buzzed in, but the doors are almost always open or unlocked. And if not, it’s not terribly difficult to find someone to let you in. The men mostly don’t care; you can just follow them inside. Women are more suspicious, but if you say something like “I’m going up to 11B,” they’re likely to let you pass. Best bet is a woman with a stroller; just hold the door for her. Marisa, I found out that evening, was from New Jersey and had been a stringer for a little over two years. She’d gotten married a couple months before and said she went to Sri Lanka for her honeymoon. We chatted for about twenty minutes while I filled her in on which floor the livery driver lived on (five), which entrance he was likely to use (southwest), whether there was any problem with security or ornery maintenance people (no and no).
I call the desk to get Marisa’s cell number. She picks up on the first ring.
“Marisa,” I say, “it’s Rebekah from the Trib.”
“Hey, how are you?”
“Good, sorry to bug you, but I have a question about the Arambula story.”
“Oh God,” she says, sounding exasperated.
“What?”
“Did you see the story?”
“Yeah.”
“That lady didn’t say, ‘I hope they send him back to Mexico,’ like that. She said, ‘If he did it, I hope they send him back to Mexico.’ If!”
“That’s a big if.”
“Exactly,” says Marisa. “That’s exactly what my husband said.”
“Did you get any sense about him? Like, did people seem to think he was capable of something like murder?”
“Not really. Everybody that I talked to who admitted to knowing him—which was only, like, three—said he was a great guy unless he was drinking. But even when he was drinking, they said he’d just get sloppy and, like, take a swing. I asked about the prostitution thing, and nobody wanted to touch that. I don’t think it’s that uncommon, though. A lot of the guys down there are single, they live in these cramped apartments and work and send money home. It’s biology.”
“But people weren’t saying, like, he’s creepy or angry …”
“No. Everybody was shocked when I told them what they brought him in for. You were on the body, right?”
“Right. They had me in Borough Park today, at the funeral.”
“Did you get that she was pregnant?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Great shit.”
“I don’t think they were happy about the anonymous source.”
“Oh, please, like their standards are so high.”
“So are you gonna say anything about the quote?”
“Probably not,” she says. “What’s the point? I’ll just remember I have to be extra fucking clear the next time Lars is on rewrite.
”
I thank her and hang up, which is when I see that I’ve missed a couple texts from Tony. Last night he sent: how’d it go?
And just a few minutes ago he sent a photo. It’s a little grainy, but the image seems to be of a harbor, looking toward the Statue of Liberty.
I text back: where r u? sry I missed ur txt last night; fell dead asleep early
red hook; everything go ok with saul?
ish …
dinner plans?
not yet:
Tony picks me up at eight. He’s wearing cologne, but not too much. I didn’t even think of perfume. We drive to Bay Ridge, where his friend Marie, a chef, and her partner are doing a tasting menu to test out some new dishes. The restaurant is a small, glass-front place off the main drag. It’s almost absurdly cozy inside, the lights low, candles everywhere. Tony takes my coat and hangs it inside his on a hook at the entrance.
“It’s really nice in here,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “They did a great job. Six months ago this was a Chinese takeout.”
A woman wearing a tie comes to hug him.
“You forgot parsnips!” she says, like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
“Parsnips!” says Tony, slapping his forehead with his hand. “Rebekah, this is Marie. She owns the place.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says. “We try! This guy spent all afternoon shopping with my sous chef and forgot parsnips.”
“I hear,” I say, trying to seem as cheerful as she is.
“We actually called a car,” she says. “Sent a busboy out for them at five.” She shakes her head, amused. “We’ve got you two by the window,” she says, gesturing to a table in the corner. Cops and soldiers, I’ve been told, like sitting in the back corner of restaurants so they can survey the room and no one can sneak up on them. For a journalist, though, the window is what you always want. Especially in New York—a million stories a minute rush by, and no one faults you for staring out a window.
“I love sitting by the window,” I say.
“Good,” he says, and smiles.
The moment we sit down, a waitress appears with two flutes of champagne. I’m trying to stay in the moment, but something about drinking champagne seems wrong. Miriam isn’t celebrating. Neither is Chaya, or Yakov.
Tony tells me a little about Marie—they grew up on the same block and both their dads died when they were in high school. Marie’s dad in a construction accident, Tony’s dad of cancer. After a few minutes, the waitress reappears to explain tonight’s meal, which will be six courses, paired with wine. Some of the words she says are new to me: amuse, terrine, langoustine, and béchamel.
She sets down the “amuse,” which comes in the same kind of spoon they give you with hot-and-sour soup at a Chinese restaurant.
“This is a butternut squash soup with sage and toasted pumpkin seed. Enjoy.”
Tony and I slurp our spoonful of soup. It is very, very good.
I drink more champagne and look out the window. It’s a busy night in Bay Ridge. Bundled-up couples and groups are hurrying from one place to another, laughing and rowdy.
Tony’s phone rings. He looks at it, then silences the call.
“So,” I say, because I can’t get it out of my mind, “I saw a dead body again yesterday.”
“Another one?”
“The same one, actually, but close up. I saw her at the funeral home. There was no autopsy,” I say quietly, looking around me. No one is paying attention. “And now she’s in the ground.”
“No autopsy?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Saul says no. I saw her taken away by the Jewish van, then I saw her in the basement of the funeral home, like, twelve hours later.”
Tony considers. “Did Saul know the dead woman?”
“Not well. He said he’d only met her once.”
I finish my champagne, and the waitress brings a glass of red wine and the appetizer. It is beef carpaccio, which I know enough to know is raw beef. The wine is warm and bites my tongue like pepper.
Tony’s phone rings again. He pulls it out and silences it again.
“You can get it if you want, I won’t be offended.”
“Thanks,” he says. “It’s okay.”
After the carpaccio, I get up to go to the bathroom. When I come back, Tony is standing up. His face has changed.
“So, I have to go,” he says.
“Really?”
“This is obviously embarrassing….”
“Are you okay?” I reach out and put my hand on his arm.
He lowers his voice. “Let’s not make a big deal.” He gestures toward the entrance. “Can we talk outside?”
Without a word, he gets both our coats, helps me on with mine, and opens the door for me to go outside.
“What’s going on?” I say again.
“It’s my mom,” he says. The color has left his cheeks entirely. “She’s … I have to go home.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll come with you.”
Five minutes later, we pull up to a two-story house. An ambulance and two police cars, one marked and one unmarked, are parked outside. A medic stands over a woman sitting in the back of the ambulance. He appears to be bandaging her arm. Another woman, younger, maybe the ambulance lady’s daughter, is standing in front of the open doors talking on a cell phone.
Tony skips up the steps and through the front door. I follow, slowly. Inside, two uniformed officers are pointing their guns at a wild-haired woman standing on a sofa wielding a hammer. She is wearing a pair of pink sweatpants and a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. My appearance causes her to turn her head toward the door, her eyes sparkling with a combination of menace and elation. Everyone else in the room is tense—but she’s having a ball.
“She has to drop the hammer, that’s number one,” says one of the plainclothed cops.
“Mom! Drop the hammer!”
“I was hanging a picture,” she says defiantly.
“Drop the hammer, ma’am,” says the one of the uniformed cops, shifting his balance, his gun still trained on her. “Nobody has to get hurt here.”
“Drop it, Mom!” screams Tony, his voice cracking.
She drops it.
The two uniforms rush to her and place her in handcuffs. She sits on the sofa.
“Was anybody here?” Tony asks the cop in plainclothes, who seems to be the ranking officer. “Who called?”
The cop jerks his head toward the street. “Neighbors. She was banging and they came over. She went at them.”
“Are they pressing charges?”
“I don’t think so.” The cop looks exhausted. He is wearing a blazer and pants that don’t match. His tie is brown; he probably keeps it in his car. “But they could. She’s gonna need stitches.”
“I don’t even know what to say, man,” says Tony. “I’m sorry.”
Tony’s mom, who fifteen seconds ago resembled a character in a horror movie, is now sitting on the couch, looking totally bored. She sees me; I am a stranger in her home, but she does not ask me a question. She does not even really acknowledge me. I decide to step outside. Neighbors, some at their windows, some in coats on the sidewalk, are all gawking. I know that if the same thing were happening on my block, I’d be the first one at the window with my binoculars, disdaining and enjoying the dysfunction simultaneously. I catch the eye of one of a trio of women two doors down. One is on her phone, probably narrating the scene for some relative. She sees me and I make an aggressive face, like, mind your business, bitch. She reacts only slightly, then turns and faces the other way. Nothing like straddling the moral fence, Rebekah, I think.
The uniformed officers come outside first. One talks into the radio on his shoulder; the other unlocks the cruiser and gets in the driver’s seat. They start up the car after a minute and drive off. The medics shut the ambulance doors and idle in their cab. I go back to the front door and see that Tony and his mom have both disappeared from t
he living room. Brown tie is sitting on the sofa, while his partner talks on the phone.
“Come on in,” says brown tie. “Tony’ll be out in a minute.”
“I’m Rebekah,” I say, extending my hand.
“Darin,” he says. “All your dates end like this?”
“You’d be surprised,” I say, referring to nothing, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Me and Tony went to school together. Mrs. Caputo wasn’t always like this. Tony’s great with her, but eventually something’s gonna happen we can’t fudge on the write-up.”
“You’re a detective?”
“Just since Halloween,” he says. “Third grade.”
“Do you like it?”
He shrugs. Perhaps “like” was the wrong word. His partner snaps closed his phone with finality.
“We’re gonna write it up as an EDP,” the man says. He’s older than Darin, could be forty. Could be fifty. “I’ll double-check with the neighbors that they aren’t pressing charges again. But next time, she’s gonna have to go in. He’s on top of the meds?”
Darin nods. “I’ll make sure.”
The partner leaves, and Tony reappears, looking exhausted. There are sweat stains on his crisp white oxford. Darin gets up and Tony shakes his hand. “Thanks, man,” he says.
“Don’t,” says Darin. He’s a good-looking guy, sort of. Broad shoulders, trim. Too trim, maybe. He’s got ginger-colored hair, cut short and thinning.
Tony looks at me. He’s embarrassed.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I think the question is, are you okay.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
Darin sighs. “You got any beer, man? I could use a beer.”
*
Two hours later, Tony and Darin and I are half-drunk on cans of light beer. My stomach is so bloated, I can barely bring myself to rise and pee. Tony lives in the basement of his mom’s house. It’s nice, actually. There’s no mildew smell or draft like you usually get in a basement. It’s warm and wood-paneled, with a flat-screen TV and carpet. There’s even a fireplace. Tony didn’t have any cut wood, but there was a peat log upstairs. He lights both sides and after a while the two flames meet in the middle. It burns silently, odorlessly. The bathroom is tiny; not more than a closet, really. When I sit on the toilet, my knees are inches from the shower door. It is remarkably clean for a bachelor pad.