Smoke (9 page)

“What are some of the things you remember her mentioning?”

“She was talking about how he was hanging around with a weird group of people, friends of this girl he was seeing.”

“Do you remember her name?”

She closed her eyes for a second, as if trying to recall. Lydia noticed for the first time how pretty Jasmine was. With her hair back and her baggy scrubs, her beauty hadn’t been obvious at first. But in the bright sun coming in from the window, Lydia admired her fair golden skin and inky black hair, the delicate lashes on her wide eyes. When Jasmine opened her eyes again, Lydia saw that they were light hazel, with the slightest tease of green.

“I met her when we went up to visit over the summer,” she said slowly. “I think it was Mariah. I don’t think I ever got her last name. She was beautiful, with this really long blonde hair, bombshell body. There was something cold about her, something sneaky. But Mickey was smitten. Big-time.”

Lydia flashed on Lily’s message.
“I’m out of my league. Big-time,”
she’d said.

“He was always looking to throw himself into something. When he was a trader on Wall Street, it was his religion. He lived and breathed the
Journal
. When he got into the martial arts, it was his obsession. Then it was Buddhism. Lily always called him a ‘seeker.’ She said he was always looking to belong somewhere but that he always felt like he was on the outside looking in. Lily always thought that it was the death of their father that made him like that. Lily was only two when their dad died, but Mickey was seven. Old enough to feel the loss. Mr. Samuels, their stepdad, loves them both; he was always good to them. But Lily never remembered her biological father; Mickey did. I think there were some challenges for Mr. Samuels in taking on the role of father for Mickey.” She shook her head, chewed on the cuticle of her thumb. “I hate myself for not being more present. I should have listened better.”

Lydia saw the tears start again before Jasmine put her head in her hands. She felt a familiar, helpless sadness opening within her. It was a terrible empathy she’d always had for the people who’d lost loved ones. She saw their pain, their fear, that slick-walled abyss of grief within them, and it connected with the space inside her that still grieved the murder of her own mother.

“Go easy on yourself, Jasmine,” she said softly. “It’s too easy to blame ourselves. And it doesn’t help anyone.”

She nodded but didn’t look up from her hands. Lydia gave her a minute. She got up to find a tissue for Jasmine and looked around the apartment. It was the apartment of a person who worked a lot, didn’t have much money and spent most of her time in the space sleeping. It was neat, tasteful, but didn’t have the charisma and energy of a more home-centered person. The fixtures were generic; even the simply framed posters on the wall—Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, some erotic bloom by Georgia O’Keeffe, the inevitable Robert Doisneau print of
The Kiss
where a couple are lip locked in a crowded Paris train station—were on the walls of a thousand other apartments all over the city.

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.”

H
e 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?”