Blessed are the Dead (5 page)

 

Chapter 6

L
IKE A
T
ECHNICOLOR
silent-­movie reel, Jasmine appears in my dreams tonight, swinging at a playground. I don't hear her—­only see her laughing. She wears a frilly pink dress, white ruffled socks, and shiny black shoes. Leaning back, her hair falls behind her as she looks up at downy white clouds drifting in the blue sky. Hopping off the swing, laughing, she runs to the monkey bars. She loops her legs and hangs upside down with the skirt of her dress temporarily obscuring her face. The rest of the playground is empty. She gets down and plays hopscotch by herself. She runs and laughs. She never glances my way.

The wind starts to pick up and whips dried leaves around the playground. Tiny dust devils suck up the leaves swirling and twirling inches above the pavement. Dark clouds spread their wings and blot out the sun. Jasmine looks around. Her eyes widen as she stares just over my shoulder. I turn, but there is nothing there.

I wake with my heart pounding.

Within an hour, I'm at her apartment. It's 7:30
A.M.
, right when police say Jasmine left for the bus stop. I want to put myself in her shoes. I want to try to experience what she did every day. I wonder if there will be many other kids at her bus stop. I'm surprised that enough families with children live downtown to warrant a stop.

Because Rosarito is only thirty-­five miles from San Francisco, it's become a magnet for families and yuppies tired of the big city's skyrocketing housing costs. But most families with children flock to Rosarito's northern suburbs on the edge of the San Pablo Bay, with its new, affordable, gigantic track homes.

The downtown waterfront area of Rosarito where Jasmine lives retains an aura of its bordello past when, during World War II, sailors and shipyard workers from Mare Island Naval Shipyard came to gamble and visit prostitutes.

I sit with my car idling in front of Jasmine's building and imagine what it was like on the morning she disappeared. The streets of downtown are preternaturally quiet. It is hard to imagine her leaving this apartment building every morning and walking alone to the bus stop. I'm an adult, but even I experience a shiver of apprehension at the stillness surrounding me.

Before I pull away, I scribble another note on the back of one of my business cards asking Jasmine's mother, Kelly Baker, to call me. I jog up to the door of the Victorian and shove my card into her mail slot—­in case she didn't get the one I left in her door yesterday. I'll keep leaving them every day until she calls.

Back in my car, I gently press down on the accelerator and slowly drive the route I imagine Jasmine walked to the bus stop—­three blocks down and one block over. I inch along with my window down. A few homeless men sit on folded-­up cardboard boxes, leaning their backs against cement walls.

“Hey, excuse me,” I say, and pull over, leaning out my window. “Can I ask you something? Did you ever see a little girl who wore a purple coat walk this way to school each day?”

One man scratches his head before answering. “Yeah, I seen her. She walks by every day.”

“Did you see her on Monday?”

“What day was that?”

“It's Wednesday. That was two days ago.”

“I dunno,” he says at first. “Maybe. Uh, yeah, yeah, actually I probably did see her walk by that day. Hey, do you have any spare change?”

“Sorry, no,” I lie. “Thanks for your help.”

On the road near the bus stop, a group of rough-­looking men stands outside a bar smoking. The smell of the smoke drifts through my open window. I'll go back and talk to them later. I park across the street from the bus stop. I turn off the engine and close my eyes for a minute, rubbing the miraculous medal that hangs around my neck, listening to the noises around me, imagining what it was like to be a third-­grader waiting for the bus on this deserted stretch of road. My fingertip traces the figure of the Virgin Mary etched on the small oval pendant. “Give me the strength to write about this girl the way she deserves,” I say. Except for some distant traffic noises, it is silent.

I open my eyes. This stretch of roadway is eerily deserted. On my side of the street, a big empty dirt lot is strewn with trash. Windblown piles of yellowed cigarette butts crowd the black pavement of the gutter. On the opposite side of the road, a former car dealership has seen better days. Boards cover showroom windows. The only signs of life are a gas station about a block down toward the harbor, a deserted taxi stand, and the bar I passed. After a few minutes, kids start to straggle down the street to the bus stop. I grab my jacket and get out of my car.

“Hey, guys, do you know a little girl named Jasmine? She likes to wear a purple jacket and rides the bus with you?”

The group of girls with giant sneakers and oversize backpacks ignore me, whispering and snickering. Finally, one sneaks a glance my way.

“Nah, the cops already asked us all this. We don't know nothing.”

A brown, late-­model Oldsmobile pulls up with a loud thumping bass, and two boys with long legs unfold themselves out of the backseat. In the passenger seat, a man with bloodshot eyes looks me up and down as he takes a pull off what looks like a whiskey bottle. The kids at the bus stop are gazing down at their feet. I try to act nonchalant and fiddle with my phone but am holding my breath. Finally, the car screeches away, and the sound of the pounding music grows faint.

The other kids have gone silent. They watch as the two older boys stare me down.

“Nice tits,” one says. He can't be older than twelve.

“Didn't your mama teach you not to talk to women that way?”

“I ain't got no mama, bitch.”

There's nothing to say to that. I lean against a low, wooden fence, watching the kids roughhouse and smoke cigarette butts they find on the ground. A few minutes later, the school bus arrives. I don't leave until it pulls away.

I
HEAD BACK
to the bar and park out front, careful not to get too close to the line of nearly a dozen motorcycles parked perpendicular to the sidewalk. Nobody is out front anymore. Inside, I struggle to see in the sudden darkness. The first things I notice are steps leading down. I freeze. I can't move another inch. I don't do underground. When I was six, I found my father's body in our basement, three days after Caterina disappeared. I haven't stepped foot underground since.

A gurgle of fear courses through my stomach until my eyes adjust, and I realize that the dark, windowless bar is not in a basement. There are only two steps leading down.

The damp musty smell of stale alcohol in the bar also sharply brings me back to the day I found my father's body. He smelled just like it does in here. His neck was bent oddly, and there was an empty bottle nearby. When I told my mother this, she said I was seeing things—­that I had an overactive imagination. That's the same thing she said whenever I told her my father was acting funny when she was at work, stumbling and talking strange.

The doctor said his heart went out, she told me, and doctors don't lie.

The door of the bar closes loudly behind me, jolting me from my memories, and suddenly I'm hyper alert as the low murmur of conversation comes to a halt. The only sound is the squeak of a chair as someone turns toward me.

Once my eyes adjust, I spot about ten men on barstools and another dozen or so seated at tables nursing drinks and watching the morning news. Several of them have leather biker jackets and grimy jeans with knit-­stocking hats, probably just off their midnight shifts down at the harbor. I draw myself up to my full height of just over five-­six and head to the bar. The click clack of my high-­heeled sandals seems obnoxiously loud in the silence. I stumble in the darkness and hear a snigger of laughter but pull back my shoulders and continue.

“Excuse me,” I say, walking right into the middle of the group. “I'm with the
Bay Herald,
and I'm doing a story about a missing little girl. Did any of you see her on Monday, the day she disappeared?”

Silence. The men only stare. I wait.

“How 'bout you come sit on my lap for a few minutes while I think about whether I saw her or not?” one man finally says, and they all burst into laughter.

Then another deeper voice. “How about you get the fuck out of here and mind your own goddamn business.”

Suddenly, the silence takes on a life of its own, crackling with expectation. His words make my gut wrench in fear, but I force myself to look his way.

The man looks like his huge frame is going to snap the barstool in two. He has a scuffed leather jacket with biker gang patches covering it, and a long moustache curls up at the ends above his sneer. He is not facing me but continues watching me through the mirror at the bar.

“What the hell makes
you
think you can walk in here and start asking
us
questions?” he asks. The air is tense. I'm not the only one holding my breath.

I take a big gulp of air, and, as every eye in the place watches, I walk right up to the burly guy. I slide onto the empty barstool right beside him, meeting his eyes in the mirror.

“Well, funny you should ask. See, I was driving by and saw all the bikes out front, so I figured this would be a good place to get a drink.” I then turn toward the bartender. “I'll have whatever my friend here is having, and you can go ahead and pour him another one on me.”

The bar erupts in hoots and hollers, and the guy on my other side gives me a hearty pat on the back that almost knocks me off my stool.

An hour later, my new friend Burt and I part ways with promises to meet again close to Christmas so I can do a ride-­along and story about his motorcycle club's Toys for Tots program.

The door swing shuts behind me as I walk blinking into the sunlight.

Drinking our beers, Burt had told me that the guys had been talking about Jasmine when I walked in. Nobody remembered seeing her.

“We don't really pay much attention to ­people walking by,” he had told me. “Usually, it's only kids going to school or maybe some little old lady with her grocery bags waiting for a cab.”

T
ODAY, WHEN
I
knock, the older woman in Jasmine's building peeks out and lets me in. She looks me up and down, holding her cat to her chest.

“You're back, huh? I guess you aren't going to go away, are you?” She gives a heavy sigh. “My name is Adele. Would you like to join me for a cup of tea?”

The woman's white hair is again pulled back in a bun, but this time her housecoat is pink—­with matching slippers. Once again, I am struck by the glint of intelligence in her bright eyes. She gestures for me to sit on a flowered couch with little doilies on the threadbare arms. A gaudy lamp on an end table casts a circle of light. A kitchenette is visible behind a bar-­type counter, and a bed with a folded afghan is pushed against the opposite wall.

She shuffles behind the counter, and cups clink as she prepares the tea. The cat rubs up against my legs, trying to get my attention. Seeing that Adele's back is turned, I nudge it away with my foot.

“That little scamp there is Dusty.” I jump guiltily, but Adele is still facing the other way. “He doesn't usually like other ­people. But then again, I don't really like many ­people, either, so we get along just fine in that regard. Of course, I don't get many visitors nowadays anyway. He's all I have in the whole world now.”

“You don't have any family around?” I ask, and reach for the delicate china cup she hands me.

“No, I never did marry,” Adele says, settling into her recliner. “I was too busy as the office manager in San Francisco at the Letterman Hospital—­you know the one that used to be at the Presidio? I worked my way up from an errand girl.”

“My job keeps me busy, too,” I say. “I don't even have time to take care of a pet.”

“I bet plenty of young men wish they were your pet, my dear!”

I blush.

“Please don't be embarrassed,” she says. “You might not believe it from looking at me now, but I had quite the time as a single woman in the fifties. That's another reason I never married.”

She hands me a framed picture. The photo was taken at a party, and Adele is wearing a deep-­cut red dress and holding a martini glass. Her voluptuous figure and bright blue eyes remind me of Elizabeth Taylor.

“Wow, you were smokin', Adele.”

“Yes, I do believe I was, wasn't I?” She smiles and places the picture back on the end table.

As much as I like visiting with Adele, I'm there for a reason.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about Jasmine or her parents?”

“Well, I'm fairly certain the stepfather has lived here for quite some time, but I recall the mother and child only moved in within the past year,” she says. “I do my best to pay no mind to most ­people in this building and most of what goes on. With some of these sorts of ­people, it's prudent to mind your own business.”

I nod. There were definitely some unsavory characters behind some of these apartment doors. A little old lady wouldn't stand a chance. As we talk, the cat makes his move. He comes and stands obstinately against my black pant leg, shedding its gray hair all over me and pressing obnoxiously against my calf.

After a few more minutes of chitchat, I glance at my watch and stand. “Adele, it's been great, but I better go.”

I tell Adele I'll come visit her again. She seems pleased. I can tell she is lonely although she doesn't let on. But I recognize it, knowing the feeling well.

 

Chapter 7

“I
CAN'T BELIEVE
you put this on the front page of your paper,” the caller said. “That article by Gabriella Giovanni actually made my wife throw up her breakfast.”

I am still oddly proud of the morning Kellogg forwarded me that message from an angry reader. And that wasn't even a story about death. That one was about the bust of a company that supplied ice-­cream trucks. Apparently, the treats were made in a grungy bathtub in the back of a store. Investigators would never have discovered the squalid factory if a boy hadn't bit into an orange cream pop and gotten a mouthful of maggot.

You can't be a crime reporter and have a weak stomach.

­People will call up and complain about much less than that, though, so I'm not entirely surprised to find that someone is bitching about my story before I even walk in the door of the newsroom this morning. This time, it's not just some crazy or irate reader. This time it's the mayor.

My story about the school bus stop sparks outrage from Rosarito residents, who then called the mayor and the newspaper. I hear about it immediately. My first phone call is from the executive editor. Susan Evans must have spotted me walking in. Apparently, the mayor of Rosarito didn't like my description of downtown and called Evans demanding a correction.

“The whole point of the story was that it is not a safe place for a third-­grader to be walking to the bus stop by herself,” I tell Evans over the phone. “He can argue all he wants, but the downtown area is dilapidated. My story was one hundred percent accurate.”

I should know better than to argue with her. Sometimes I have problems with authority. But only with authority figures I don't respect. It's hard to disguise my disdain for a woman with the news sense of a ferret.

“We're starting to be concerned with your coverage of this story,” she says in her prim and proper voice. “The publisher was not pleased that the
Tribune
scooped us on the initial story—­in our own coverage area. I don't understand what the problem is. As a reporter, it is crucial to have sources in the area you cover. That is why we are the local paper of record. ­People turn to us for news of what happens in their community. If they have to read the San Francisco paper for their news, we are going to lose them as subscribers. And if we lose subscribers, we lose advertisers. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that if we lose advertisers, we don't have a paper.”

I don't answer. I don't write stories to get advertising.

She lets out an exasperated sigh. “I'd like to see an interview with the parents. Isn't that standard when a child goes missing? And yet, we don't even have that.”

What the hell? It's only been three days since Jasmine disappeared. Nobody else had the bus-­stop story. In fact, the
Trib
didn't have anything new in its story today. Andy Black just rehashed the basics and said detectives were still following leads. Evans knows nothing about being a police reporter. She knows nothing about being a reporter, period. A degree in marketing does not make someone a journalist.

“Nobody has been able to interview the parents,” I say.

She ignores me, and continues, “Have you tried to talk to the girl's classmates or teachers? How about some neighbors? We know nothing about this little girl.”

“I've tried —­“

“Obviously, not hard enough,” she interrupts. “Now, I have a meeting to attend, but put it on your story board to do an article in the
near
future about how Rosarito is experiencing a rebirth and how the mayor has really done a lot for the city.”

I feel the indignation creeping up my back and don't mince my words.

“That sounds like something for the
advertising
department, not the metro section,” I say with a sneer. “Maybe the mayor wants to take out an ad. Because that doesn't seem like news to me. More like propaganda.”

That did it. The silence stretches on for what seems like forever. Then I hear Evans take a breath.

“With your attitude, I'm not confident you will be able to do the story justice so I will assign the story to May. I know she'll do a lovely job. She always does.”

I don't answer. Fine. Have your little suck-­up write it. I don't care.

But she's not done. It goes from bad to worse, and it's all my fault.

“And, if covering the missing-­girl case is too much, we'll have May take that story over, as well, so you can concentrate on some of the stories you've been missing on your beat. Maybe this is too much for you.”

She hangs up before I can answer. Good, I think, go ahead and take me off the story. That will work out perfectly. I pack up my bag and head to Rosarito.

Adele lets me in, but has nothing new to say about Jasmine and her family. After some biscotti and tea, I head down the hall. Jasmine's parents don't answer their door, so I scribble another note on the back of one of my cards and stick it in the doorjamb.

At the police station, Lt. Kathleen Roberge agrees to see me but says the department has nothing new to report—­investigators are following up on leads. I feel like I'm spinning in circles.

On the way back to the office, my mother calls, but I let it go to voice mail. I don't have time to talk to her. I need to come up with something new to keep Jasmine's story in the paper and get Evans off my back.

At my desk, I make a list of what to do: I need to interview the parents. I need to talk to Jasmine's principal and classmates or friends. Most of all, I need to get a source within the Rosarito Police Department who can slip me some information about the investigation or at least point me in the right direction.

I call nearly every cop I know, but nobody knows anything about the Jasmine Baker case. I leave another message for Detective Donovan, then dial Moretti.

“Did you get a chance to put in a good word for me with your Rosarito buddy?”

“Yep, called him right away. But I don't know if he'll talk. Doesn't trust reporters. Had some bad press on some stuff a few years back and really got raked over the coals.”

“Yeah, I kind of heard something about that. But that's like saying all cops are the same. You can't classify all reporters into one category.”

“I know that, kiddo. But I don't trust other reporters, besides you. You think I'd talk to that prep-­school pipsqueak at the
Trib
like I do to you? No way.”

I laugh at his description of Black.

I spend the rest of the day trying to dig up anything new on Jasmine. I do get a small quote from the principal at Jasmine's school saying that the entire school is keeping Jasmine in their thoughts and prayers. Her statement is prepared, and she refuses to elaborate on it, saying privacy laws forbid her from saying more. I pull together a ten-­inch story, which includes the principal's quote and rehashes what we already know about Jasmine's disappearance.

By the end of the day, I've also written about a burglary in Concord and tips to avoid starting a fire in your home with candles. A waste of a day.

“Evans is chomping at the bit for a scoop,” Kellogg says as I leave. “You better dig up something.”

At first I laugh at the cliché Kellogg uses because Evans truly does remind me of a horse, but then I'm worried. If Kellogg feels the need to warn me, I might be in trouble. I fall into bed worrying about being taken off a story because the editors don't think I'm doing a good enough job. I'm surprised to realize I want this story.

I'm the one who should tell Jasmine's story. I'm the one who can tell it best. I need this story, but it is going to slip through my fingers if I don't do something. I need a break—­a big one.