Same difference, p.8
Same Difference, page 8
‘Because she’s a girl and wouldn’t be strong enough?’ Merchant asked. Ken looked at me and stifled a laugh.
‘No,’ I told him, and before he could make what I’m sure he would have thought was a hilarious comment, I added, ‘She didn’t have any motive to want Damien dead and she vanished before him, not after. The timeline doesn’t make sense.’
The uniform named Dominguez, having done little more than stand around while we had this scintillating conversation, asked Merchant if he and his partner were still required at the scene. The detective told him they weren’t but to make sure they filed the proper paperwork when they got back to the precinct. The medical examiner and a car to remove Damien would be here shortly, he said.
So the two cops left and, sure enough, the ME was there before their presence in the room had completely dissipated. She wasn’t wearing a white lab coat but you can identify them a mile away. Part of it was the woman’s complete and total indifference to the body on the floor. She just walked over and started taking temperatures and things like that. I don’t care to look at such things, more evidence that I do not share the DNA of two brilliant scientists. Probably.
‘How long do you think he’s dead?’ Brooker asked the doctor.
‘I’ve been here a minute and a half. You want to give me a chance?’ You had to like her style.
‘Sorry.’ Brooker did not roll his eyes. I wasn’t looking at Merchant, but I’d bet you a dollar he did.
‘How do you know about the kid dealing drugs?’ Merchant wanted to know.
I didn’t have any obligation to Laura Rapinoe. She had not asked me to keep her name out of any investigation or communication with the police. On the other hand, she hadn’t known Damien was going to end up dead on a basement floor and I guessed that news wasn’t going to land softly on her shoulders. Still, she was the source of the information.
‘I met a student at New Amsterdam when I was looking for Eliza and she told me Damien was a friend of Eliza’s,’ I said. ‘That led me to look for Damien in his apartment. He wasn’t there but he left those packets of pills behind, and I can add two plus two as well as anybody.’
‘What’s the student’s name?’ Brooker asked. ‘The one who told you about Damien here.’
I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell these two about Laura. Maybe I’d have told Brooker if he was alone but Merchant really didn’t seem like the type who was going to treat women with respect and, besides, I didn’t like him. ‘I’d have to go back to my office and look through my notes,’ I said.
Brooker looked at me as if wondering why my notes weren’t on my phone, which, candidly, they were. ‘Do that. How did you get into the kid’s apartment?’ Was he looking to bust me on breaking and entering?
‘His mother let me in,’ I said. ‘You want her name? Because I remember that.’ It was in the same contacts section as Laura Rapinoe’s, but why would I tell him that?
‘Yes, please.’ I bet this guy was a lot of fun at parties.
I gave Brooker Helena’s phone number and told him I’d look for my mystery source’s name and contact info when I got back to my office. He didn’t ask why the data wasn’t in my phone and I didn’t offer an explanation that he could identify as a complete lie at a later time. When Ken and I were about to leave, I looked back at Brooker.
‘What was that you picked up next to the body?’ I asked.
He blinked. It might have been his eyes were dry and it might have been he didn’t have an answer ready that he wanted to give to me. I was wagering it was the latter. ‘What do you mean?’ Wow, that was worse than my evasion on Laura’s name.
‘I saw you reach into your pocket, pick out a pair of tweezers, take something from the floor next to Damien’s right ear and then put it in your pocket in an evidence bag,’ I said. I was trying not to sound like I was challenging him and, to my ear, doing an awful job of it. ‘What was it?’
‘Oh.’ Like he hadn’t known what I meant before. ‘That was nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Ken said, because he hadn’t been present at school when tact was discussed. ‘You find something next to a murder victim and put it in an evidence bag for later and it’s nothing?’ If Ken had raised his eyebrows any higher they would have left his head completely and hovered waveringly above it.
‘It’s nothing you need to worry about.’ Brooker was wisely turning his attention to me and away from my brother. ‘You’re looking for this Eliza Hennessey. It has nothing to do with her.’
That meant it had everything to do with Eliza. ‘I’m curious why you’re so obviously trying not to tell me what you found,’ I said. ‘Am I a suspect? Do you think that I came down to this basement in the past day or two, strangled Damien with an extension cord and then called the police to come catch me?’
Brooker walked over to his partner, who was standing next to Ken. ‘You’re not the only one here,’ he said. ‘Someone who could do that with an extension cord would have to be really strong.’
Merchant moved behind Ken and I wondered if he was going to try to put a pair of zip ties on my brother’s hands. I was considering this completely as an academic exercise because I’d never seen Ken try to break out of zip ties and wondered if he could. I thought so.
But that turned out not to be the cops’ plan. Instead, they seemed to be relying on intimidation, which was hilarious as they craned their necks to look into my brother’s face. ‘And I’ll bet you’re real strong,’ Merchant said from behind Ken. I couldn’t actually see him but I was fairly sure Brooker wasn’t a ventriloquist and an impressionist at the same time.
‘This really is the wrong kind of porno movie for me,’ Ken said. That’s him being witty.
Merchant hit him hard in the kidney, which would have bothered anyone who wasn’t one of us. Ken didn’t flinch, but did respond by half-turning and grabbing Merchant’s shirt front, then lifting the detective five inches off the floor with one hand.
‘Yeah, I’m pretty strong,’ he said.
‘Ken,’ I told him in as even a tone as I could manage without actually having breath. ‘Put the detective down.’
Brooker made a quick move toward his gun, which was in a holster under his jacket, but I shook my head. ‘No need for that,’ I said. ‘He’s going to be reasonable.’
Ken looked at me, then at Brooker, then at Merchant, who looked like he was being dangled off the edge of the Grand Canyon. He smiled and lowered Merchant to the basement floor. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.’
Merchant took a few seconds – OK, more than a few – to catch his breath, bent over at the waist. Then he looked up and glared at Ken. ‘You are under arrest for assaulting a police officer,’ he said.
‘And we’re going to sue the NYPD over assault of a civilian and call for your immediate arrest,’ I told Merchant. ‘I mean, who hit whom?’ Note the correct grammar there. I pride myself.
‘You have no proof,’ Merchant hissed. They always say that when they’re guilty.
‘I have video on my phone,’ I told him, and held up the instrument in question. ‘When you took a walk behind my brother I figured I’d better document the moment. For posterity, and possibly a grand jury.’
Merchant swiveled to look at Brooker. ‘Did she take video?’ he asked.
Brooker shrugged. ‘I was looking at you. But if I’m asked, I’ll definitely say you hit him before he picked you up like a five-pound bag of flour.’
Merchant’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times as if the words were there but were having an amplification problem. Then he turned and walked back up the basement stairs, went through the door to the lobby, and slammed it behind him.
The medical examiner stood up. ‘He’s been dead about a day,’ she said to Brooker. ‘I’ll need a complete autopsy to tell you anything else important but, if you’re asking, I’m guessing he was strangled and asphyxiated.’
‘Thanks,’ Brooker said. He picked up his phone and said, ‘The body is released for transport.’ I assumed two medical technicians would appear shortly, but I didn’t plan on being around to watch.
‘What did you pick up off the floor?’ I asked Brooker again.
‘Get going before I decide Merchant didn’t hit your brother at all. Didn’t look like he felt anything.’
‘I work out a lot,’ Ken said.
So we left.
TWELVE
As you might imagine, Brian Hennessey was something less than ecstatic over my initial report on the investigation into his daughter’s whereabouts.
I told him everything I knew, which unfortunately included the fact that Eliza’s friend Damien had been found murdered, and that had clearly (and understandably) triggered a father’s anxiety over his missing child.
He had a hundred questions, each one of them appropriate and each one unanswerable: Was Eliza there when Damien died? Had she been with him since she’d gone missing? Where did I think she was now? (He did slip and refer to his daughter by her deadname, but only once and immediately corrected himself.)
‘There’s not very much I can tell you except negatives,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know where Eliza is, but I can tell you that there was no evidence I saw indicating she’d been there when Damien was killed. I don’t know whether they even saw each other after she left. I’m looking into some possibilities but at the moment I don’t have a very solid lead. I’m sorry.’
‘You said he might have been selling drugs,’ Brian said. ‘Eliza doesn’t do drugs. Never.’
I considered reminding him that a parent never really knows what their child might be doing past the age of four, but felt that remark would have had no positive effect on Brian and, besides, was kind of a mean thing to say. So I didn’t. ‘Nobody is suggesting she does,’ I said, which so far had been mostly true. ‘I don’t know that there’s any connection there at all.’
We were sitting in Brian’s ‘study,’ a small corner of his apartment that crammed bookshelves and desk into a space probably meant for a modest easy chair. New York is like that, and this was Queens. Manhattan is far worse unless you’re a billionaire.
‘Do you know what drugs he was selling? I know something about pharmaceuticals.’ Brian had worked for a trade magazine in that area.
‘I’m hoping to find out later today,’ I answered. I knew how that sounded.
‘It seems to me that most of what you’re telling me adds up to you not knowing much of anything,’ Brian said, perhaps not meaning to sound the way he did, but summing things up accurately. ‘Another day has gone by and I still don’t know where my daughter is, Ms Stein.’
Did he want to fire me? It was his prerogative, and I’d been fired before. But I wanted to find Eliza Hennessey, maybe needed to find her to prove to myself that she hadn’t ended up like Damien Van Dorn. A dead body attached to a missing person is not a great omen, but the fact that she wasn’t lying next to him in that Bronx basement gave me some hope that Eliza was still out there somewhere, maybe hiding from her father, maybe from someone much worse. I had to be the one who kept looking.
‘We’re putting in our best effort, believe me, Mr Hennessey,’ I said. ‘If you think another agency can do a better job, I won’t suggest that you shouldn’t hire them.’ A little passive aggressive maybe, but I thought it was fair.
Hennessey looked at me carefully, probably weighing the pros and cons of keeping Ken and me on the case. ‘I’m not interested in firing you,’ he said after a moment. ‘I just want to know what you’re doing now to find Eliza.’
It was a good question. ‘I’m looking into some angles, including the drug business Damien might have had,’ I said. ‘Those things tend to work in networks.’ Before he could object, I added, ‘Eliza wouldn’t have had to have been directly involved for someone to have noticed her and maybe seen her in the past few days. You said she has some friends. Rainbow, you said was one name. Michaela. Gerry. Any way you can add last names to those? How they were connected? Was it through high school? At New Amsterdam?’ (I already knew that Michaela O’Brien was three thousand miles away at UC Berkley and Gerry Freed was living in London, so I really wanted more names from Brian.)
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Gerry I think was from high school, and Michaela was from summer camp a number of years ago. Rainbow was just a name I heard her talking about. Maybe they’re from college.’
‘Can I see Eliza’s room?’ I asked. I’d already seen Damien’s apartment and was hoping Eliza’s bedroom would be more helpful in pointing toward her current whereabouts.
Brian led me down a short hall to a closed door. I waited for him to open it and walked in doing my best not to touch anything but to take it all in.
I hadn’t known what to expect, or even what to look for in Eliza’s room. I knew that Eliza had always been Eliza, but she hadn’t always been keen on sharing that information. She’d come out as a trans woman to her father only a few months ago.
But the room was that of a teenage girl, now a young woman. The linens weren’t pink, exactly, but they favored pink accents and there was a stuffed elephant leaning on a pillow on the bed, perhaps meant to be a joke, that was pink. No posters on the walls, but a copy of a young adult book about a trans woman called If I Was Your Girl on the nightstand. Another book, titled My Life in Transition, was among those on a shelf in the headboard.
‘I’m going to wait in the living room,’ Brian said. He wasn’t crying but the room was clearly more than he could handle at the moment. He didn’t wait for me to answer and walked away from the door.
That was better. If I had questions I could ask them when I rejoined him in the other room. Without him looking over my shoulder, I could be more dispassionate and thorough in my search. If there was a journal or a diary I wanted to know about it and I didn’t want to have an argument about reading it. Politeness isn’t a given in the detective business.
There was no journal. A thorough search – a seven on the scale of ten – didn’t turn up anything of interest at all. All pertinent information is kept on one’s phone these days, which is probably not as efficient as it seems. Makes it so much more difficult to leave behind clues to your favored getaway location.
But then there were those extra three points on the scale. I didn’t want to tear the room apart and ‘toss’ it the way cops or especially nasty searchers (i.e. criminals) will do, but I did look under the bed, between the mattress and the box spring, under the area rug, inside the ‘secret’ cubby in the closet (covered over with a dress on a hanger and nice try, Eliza, but I’m a professional) and then in the desk drawers. Those were too obvious, but you never know.
The key, I decided, was to try to get into Eliza’s mindset, something that is often a useful tool for an investigator. But I didn’t have much – OK, no – experience as a trans woman. Still, I had experienced being a teenaged girl. Those days were a while back but not so far that I couldn’t tap into the feelings when I wanted to. Assuming she had been under considerable stress, I knew what to do in order to emulate Eliza.
I lay on the bed, flung my left arm across my forehead, and stared at the ceiling. And sure enough, an idea presented itself. There was a light fixture hanging from the ceiling and it had a bowl underneath the light bulbs that would, if girls had some commonalities, be a great place to hide something. It’s where I would have secreted anything I didn’t want Ken to find.
I didn’t need it but I was sure Eliza must have had something she would stand on to reach the fixture if she intended to hide something there. And even if she didn’t do so now when she was approaching twenty, it was a decent bet that Eliza had hidden something in the room because teenage girls like nothing better than to have a secret.
Sure enough, there was a little stepstool, just one step, something a very small child might have used to reach the bathroom sink and a teenager would find impossible to abandon. It was sitting right next to the closet door and had not gathered much dust. The room had been cleaned fairly recently, but some surfaces were cleaner than others and the stool was one of them. So Eliza had hidden something away, and the light fixture seemed the most likely place in which to do so.
Hoping I would not find plastic bags holding Damien’s blue pills, I reached up for the bowl and put my hand inside. The ceiling fan was not running, of course, but still presented an obstacle of sorts. I’m feminine but not dainty, to say the least. Getting my arm between blades of the fan to reach the inside of the light fixture’s bowl was not my most graceful move ever.
I managed. I know you were worried.
First contact didn’t yield anything, but this wasn’t my first light fixture. I walked the perimeter of the bowl, dragging the blades of the fan with me, and on the far side felt something touch my fingertip. Something small and, if my sense of touch wasn’t failing me, metal. Like a lapel-size pin maybe. I was surprised I hadn’t seen it in the bowl, but the only lamp turned on in the room was the one on the nightstand so the object’s presence hadn’t been that obvious.
But it would have been in direct sight of someone lying on the bed and staring up, like Eliza. Tapping into my angst-ridden teenage years had paid off after all.
Carefully I raised the little object out of the bowl of the light fixture and, making sure I didn’t drop it, brought it down to chest level for examination.
It was indeed a small metal pin, probably meant to be worn on a shirt or a jacket. It bore the symbol of a rainbow. It also bore a thick coating of dust, thick enough to convince me it had been somehow lost there (maybe a young Eliza was throwing it in the air and missed?) and never retrieved. This search was turning out to be a bust. But maybe I needed to know more about Eliza’s friend Rainbow.
Having searched the room one and a third times I knew where to find the one indispensable source of information for a recent high school graduate: Eliza’s yearbook. I pulled it off the shelf over her desk and started to scan through it thoroughly but as quickly as I could. It’s not easy to pull that off, but I’m good at what I do.
