Invisible City (2 page)

Active crime scenes are different. At an active crime scene, I have a role. I’m not staff at the
Trib
—I’m a stringer. I work a shift every day but have no job security or benefits. Every morning I call in, get an assignment, and run. I work alone, unless a photographer is assigned to the same story, and answer to a rotating assortment of editors and rewrite people whom I’ve usually never met. I have a laminated
Tribune
badge that identifies me as a player on the stage. I get shit about the
Trib
from cops sometimes—they complain about how we played some story, or the editorial page bias—and I can’t always get the same access as reporters with the official press card. But I’m in a much better position at a crime scene or official event than someone from one of the news Web sites that most of the cops have never heard of, or even worse the bloggers—who get nothing but shit.

At a crime scene, the cops secure the area. The reporters arrive. The cops inspect the body and the scene, then occasionally relay some of what they’ve found to another cop, the spokesman cop: DCPI. DCPI, when he feels like it, saunters across the street to the reporters busying themselves getting neighbor quotes (“I never
heard
them fighting” or “This building is usually so safe”) and checking their e-mail on their phones. Crime scenes are a relief for a new reporter. You just follow the herd.

The Indian-looking man at the counter leans on his forearms, watching the scene outside the windows. I approach him.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer, but I think he understands what I’ve said.

“I’m from the
Tribune,
” I say. “They found a body in the scrap yard.”

He nods.

“A woman they say.”

This is a surprise. “A woman? No.”

I nod.

“Terrible,” he says. He is probably in his thirties, but the ashy brown skin beneath his eyes could belong to a man twice his age. He hasn’t shaved in a few days.

The men in the back of the store stop whispering and march toward the boy in the black coat. The tall one says something and they rush out, leaving the boy behind. They walk swiftly toward the scrap yard. I assume they won’t talk to me, so I don’t bother trying to ask a question. I should follow, but I just can’t brave that wind again quite yet. If it were warm, I’d tag along a little behind, nose toward the scrap yard, try to get some detail to give the desk. Before I got anywhere near anything good, of course, I’d be told to get back. Get back with press, they’d say. I guess I’m a better reporter in the summertime. It was never once this cold in Florida, and even under all these layers I feel painfully exposed by the temperature. My bones feel like brittle aluminum rods, barely holding me up, scraping together, sucking up the cold and keeping it. One poke and I’ll crumble to the ground.

The boy takes his hands out of his pockets and carefully places them around the glass of the decaf pot. After a moment he brings his hands to his face, cupping his cheeks with his hot little palms.

“That’s smart,” I say.

He looks up at me, surprised.

“I use my cup,” I say, and lift my coffee. “And it keeps me warm on the inside.”

He nods.

“You work for the newspaper?” he asks.

I look at the man behind the counter. Kids hear everything.

“I do,” I say. I point to the wire newspaper basket by the door. “The
Trib.
”

“My mommy reads the newspaper.”

“Oh?” I say. “Do you?”

The boy shakes his head. His mouth is a thin line. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so serious a child. But, of course, I’ve never seen a Hasid—man, woman, or child—
not
look serious. My mother was Hasidic. She fell in love with my dad—a goy—during a period of teenage rebellion. They had me, named me after my mom’s dead sister, and then she split—back to the black-coated cult in Brooklyn. There aren’t really any ultra-Orthodox Jews where I grew up in Florida, but now that I’ve moved to New York, I see them every day. They live and work and shop and commute inside the biggest melting pot in the world, but they don’t seem to interact with it at all. But for the costume they wear, they might as well be invisible. The men look hostile, wrapped like undertakers in their hats and coats all year long, their untended beards and dandruff-dusted shoulders like a middle finger to anyone forced against them on the subway at rush hour. The women look simultaneously sexless and fecund in aggressively flat shoes, thick flesh-colored stockings, and shapeless clothing, but always surrounded by children. I picture their homes dark and stale, with thick carpet and yellowing linoleum and low foam ceilings and thin towels. Are the little boys allowed action figures and race cars? Does somebody make a knockoff Hasidic Barbie for little girls? Barbie pushing a baby carriage and walking behind Ken. Barbie who leaves her kid.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

The boy hesitates. He lifts his face toward mine and our eyes meet for the first time.

“Yakov,” he says. “Yakov Mendelssohn.”

My phone rings. It’s an “unknown” number, which means it’s probably the city desk. I smile at the boy, then turn and walk toward the beer cooler to take the call.

“It’s Rebekah,” I say.

“Hold for Mike,” says the receptionist.

I hold.

“Hey,” says Mike. “Is photo there yet?”

“Nobody’s called me.”

“Fuck. Is the M.E. there?”

“No,” I say.

“Any ID?”

“Not yet.”

“Is anybody at the scrap yard talking? Any workers?”

I haven’t asked. But I can’t say that. “I haven’t found anybody so far. They’ve got it mostly taped off.”

“Well, keep trying. See if you can talk to whoever found the body.”

“Okay,” I say. I know—and Mike knows—that whoever found the body has likely been whisked off to the neighborhood precinct for questioning. But editors in the office often suggest you do things that are essentially impossible on the off chance you get something usable. Once, after the FBI had raided a pharmacy that was selling illegal steroids to cops, I spent an entire day in Bay Ridge looking for people who would admit they’d bought steroids there.

“Look for beefy guys,” advised Mike. “Maybe hang out outside the gym.”

I took the assignment seriously for about two hours. I actually approached several men—one in a tank top with shaved calves, one exiting a tanning salon, one carrying a gym bag—and asked if they’d heard about the raid and if they knew anybody who uses steroids. Not surprisingly, no one did. I finally gave up and just started walking the streets. I struck up a conversation with some men smoking cigarettes outside a bar and told them about my assignment. They laughed and said good luck.

When I called in to report that I’d found nothing, Mike was gone and Lars, a younger editor, laughed when I told him what I’d been asked to do. “Don’t you love assignments like that?” he asked.

I tell Mike I’ll do my best and hang up. When I turn back from the cooler I see that Yakov is gone.

I approach the man behind the counter again. “Cute kid,” I say.

“He is son of owner,” says the man.

“Of the gas station?”

“No,” says the man. “The scrap yard. I watch him grow up, but he never speak to me. None of them do.”

“Them?”

“The Jews,” he says. “You must be special.”

I shrug.

“You say there is … a woman?” He points his chin toward the yard across the street.

“Someone found her this morning. I can’t believe they haven’t gotten her inside yet. Have the police been in?”

“Here? Yes.”

“Did they say anything? Did they ask you anything?”

The man shakes his head.

I drop my coffee in the trash can by the door and step outside. The cold air stings my face. I look down and aim the top of my head into the wind.

There are half a dozen police cars at the entrance to the scrap yard. I linger a few moments at the corner of the administrative trailer, watching as small groups of men—they are all men—rock on their heels, rubbing their hands together and gazing up at the long arm of the steel excavator, still motionless, with torn metal and a frozen limb hanging from its clenched fist. From this close, I can tell the victim is white. Good, I think. That’s one piece of info to give the desk. The
Trib
loves dead white women.

I wait beside the door to the office trailer, studying the men’s interactions to whittle down the number of people I’ll have to approach to get the information I need. A man in a hooded sweatshirt and work boots comes around the corner and I stop him.

“Excuse me,” I say, flashing a smile for a moment, then cringing as the cold sinks into my teeth as if I’d just bitten down on a Popsicle. “Sorry to bug you, but do you work here?”

The man doesn’t look me in the eye, but says, “Uh-huh.”

“Were you here when they found the body?”

“I was in the cab.”

“The cab,” I say, pulling my notebook and pen from my coat pocket. “What happened?”

The man shrugs and looks over my head. “I was just pulling up loads. That barge was supposed to be out hours ago.” He lifts his chin in the direction of the flat boat sitting on the canal, a pile of scrap in a low mound on its belly. “I was just pulling, and Markie started screaming over the radio. Shouting. I looked out the window and saw a couple guys running.”

I’m scribbling as fast as I can, trying to maintain eye contact with the man and write something legible enough to dictate back to the desk. In my notebook, his quote becomes:
pull loads, mark scream radio, look wind saw guys run.
I nod, inviting him to tell me more. “Could you see her from the cab?”

“I thought it was a guy, because of the hair.”

“The hair?”

“Well, not the hair. There’s no hair. She’s bald.”

I stop writing. “Bald?”

The man nods and lifts his eyes to the crane. “Her head was … I could see it.”

“What could you see, exactly?”

“I saw her foot first, then, well, once I saw the foot and I knew, I could tell. Her color, she didn’t match the scrap.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I fucking picked this lady up. I didn’t fucking see her in the pile and I closed her in the hook and … I was thinking, I don’t know. I was thinking how cold she was.” He shivers and wipes his hand across his face.

I need more. I need him to say something like, “I couldn’t believe it—I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Wow,” I say. “I mean, could you even believe it?”

He shrugs and shakes his head. That’ll do.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask.

“Almost a year.”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“A dead body in the pile? No.”

“Can I ask your name?”

He hesitates. “Nah, I think … I think that’s enough.”

“Are you sure?” The desk frowns on anonymous quotes. “Even just a first name?”

He shakes his head. Last ditch, I smile and lean in a little. “Are you
sure
? It would really help me out.”

“I think I probably helped you out already.”

“What about … Markie?” I say. “Do you think he might talk to me?”

“Maybe.”

“Could you maybe point him out for me?” I’m smiling again, cocking my head, trying to make my eyelids flutter.

He looks around, his hands deep in his pockets. He nods his head toward a group of Hasidic men and workers huddled at the wheels of the excavator.

“Don’t tell him I gave you his name.”

“How can I tell him?” I ask, trying one last time. “I don’t even know your name.”

He nods. No smile of recognition. Just a nod. I wait another moment, then say thank you and turn toward the crowd at the base of the scrap pile, which is more like a mountain range than a mountain. It spans hundreds of feet along the canal, rising and falling in peaks and valleys of broken steel. The scale of the piles is dizzying. Mack trucks parked at the base look like plastic Tonkas in their shadow. The grapple is shaped like that claw you manipulate to grab a stuffed animal in those impossible games in the lobby of Denny’s. I stuff my notebook in my coat pocket and my phone rings. It’s a 718 number.

“It’s Rebekah,” I say.

“Becky, it’s Johnny!” Johnny, the photographer from Staten Island, is the only person in the entire world who has ever referred to me as Becky more than once. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the scrap yard.”

“Where? I’m here. I’m in the Camaro.” Johnny and I have worked a couple stories together. I turn around and see his silver Camaro parked across the street, near the air pump at the gas station. Johnny once told me that he “owns” Staten Island. On one of my first stories, he told me to follow him in my car to a subject’s house; then he slid through the end of a yellow light on Victory Boulevard. I gunned through the red, annoyed. Later, in the parking lot where we were scoping for a recently released sex offender, he leaned against my car and said I should be more careful going through reds. They got cameras, he said. Did you see a flashing light? I said maybe and he said he’d take care of it. Write down ya’ plate number for me. I’ll ask a buddy. I wrote down my number and gave it to him; he wrote “Rebecca” beside the numbers. I didn’t correct his spelling. I never got a ticket, though I doubt that had anything to do with him.

I catch his eye across the street and walk over to his car. My former car, a 1992 Honda Accord, died when winter came. It had never seen snow. I sold it to someone for two hundred dollars. On my first day working after it was towed away, I had to tell the desk when I called in before my shift that I couldn’t drive. I worried I might be out of a job. At my interview, Mike specifically asked if I had a car. A good stringer is an asset—we run around the five boroughs to crime scenes and press events, knocking on doors, bothering neighbors; we can get the information or the quote or the photo that sells the story—but a stringer with a car is considered an even bigger asset. Stringers with cars can get to Westchester to sit on big houses owned by sloppy, greedy politicians or doctors or professional athletes. Stringers with cars can knock on doors in Long Island for four hours and get back in time to get a quote from someone in Queens before the first edition deadline. But when I stopped having a car, nobody seemed to care. My guess is that Mike simply forgot I’d ever told him I had one.