The Girl in Times Square (6 page)

“How did you meet Amy, Miss Quinn?” asked O’Malley.

“We met in an art class at college almost two years ago.”

“Did you become good friends?”

“We moved in together, didn’t we?”

“Don’t get testy with me. I know it’s been a long day. You could have moved in for financial reasons. You could have hated Amy’s guts. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Yes, we became friends, then we found this apartment, and moved in together.” Just to make sure there was no wrong impression, Lily said, “My boyfriend lived with us for a few months.”

“Three of you in that tiny apartment?” O’Malley whistled. “Why did Amy get the larger bedroom then?”

“Why? Because when we were moving in, we drew for it, and
I got the short straw.” She let that sink in—Lily never got the long straw, but sometimes she got the short straw.

“I see. And during your living together, has Amy had many boyfriends?”

“I don’t know. What do you consider many?”

O’Malley raised his eye brows. “What I consider to be many, how is that relevant, Miss Quinn?”

Why was he flustering her! “Like I said, she would see people sporadically, on and off. No one serious.”

“Not a single serious boyfriend?”

“No.” Why was that strange? It wasn’t strange. Amy was always looking for love. She just wasn’t lucky like good old Lily with good old Joshua. But there was a formless memory wedged in of something—Lily didn’t even know what. A sense of something that Lily could not then or now place. She didn’t know if it actually involved Amy, or love, but for some reason she thought so—and cold damp and flashing lights. What a strange thing to think of at a time like this. Lily shook her head to shake off the oddness of it.

“That’s interesting. Because while we were waiting for you to return from Maui, we interviewed a number of people, among them a girl named Rachel Ortiz. Do you know her?”

“Yes, I know Rachel.” Was her response too clipped? Judging from the look on the detective’s face, yes, it was.

“No love lost there?” he asked. “Well, Miss Ortiz stated flatly and for the record that Amy
told
her she had been seeing someone for some time but it was all over with now.”

Lily rubbed her eyes. “Detective, I apologize, I’m jetlagged and exhausted—but I just don’t see how this is relevant.”

“I will allow for your jetlag and tell you how it’s relevant. I see you’re not particularly worried about her disappearance for your own peculiar reasons. But it’s been over three weeks since Amy was last heard from or seen by anyone. It is no longer a simple mishap with dates and schedules, and little things like college graduations. This is a missing person investigation.
Perhaps if we find the person she had been seeing, we’ll find out where she is.”

“I understand, detective, but I don’t know what to tell you—I just don’t know who she was seeing.”

They had been tape recording the whole conversation, though by the sharpshooter look in O’Malley’s eyes, Lily didn’t think an electromagnetic recording was necessary. She signed the missing person’s report, threw away her bloodied cotton wool, took his business card and stepped to the door. O’Malley remained sitting behind the table, his feet up on a chair,

“Still, though, doesn’t it niggle you a little bit, Miss Quinn,” said Detective O’Malley, placing his hands behind his head, “just a tiny bit, that your good friend wouldn’t tell you about her love life? I mean, why would she keep that a secret from you?”

Lily didn’t know what he was getting at, and so she didn’t reply. Did he think Amy wasn’t into boys? Did he think Amy was into her boyfriend Joshua? She didn’t want to think.

O’Malley didn’t get up, telling her to call the station or the beeper number on the card any time if she learned anything, or thought of anything. She left the room without glancing at Harkman. She would have preferred him interviewing her. She would have preferred Robespierre interviewing her.

Home wasn’t nearly far enough to walk off the gnawing sense of malaise around Lily’s nerve endings.

The Noho Star on Bleeker and Lafayette was short people, so Lily came in the following day and worked the graveyard shift, thirteen hours, from eleven in the morning until midnight. Her hours, as per her request, had been increased to fifty. She hoped she could handle it.

When she got home from the precinct the night before, Lily had found Rachel, Paul, and to her greatest surprise,
Joshua
! camped out on her front stoop. They followed her up the stairs to her fifth floor crawl-up. By the third floor, Lily was so out of breath, she had to stop and rest. How did old Colleen do it? When she finally got inside, she collapsed on the futon.

Joshua had been calling the last two weeks, he said, because he needed to pick up his guitar case. “What happened to your hand?” he asked Lily. Unhappily she didn’t want to talk to him in the presence of all those other people.

Paul, small, slender, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, perfectly Italian-looking and calm as a small pond said, “Are you all right, Lil?” Then, “What happened? Where’s Ames?”

Lily opened one eye from the futon. “Is that a trick question?”

Rachel, once a kinky-black-haired Puerto Rican fourth runner up in a San Domingo teenage beauty pageant, now a Puerto Rican bleached blonde with hair thinner and straighter
than Lily’s, was making retching noises in the kitchen sink after drinking three-week-old apple juice from the too-warm fridge. Lily couldn’t keep her eyes open. Suddenly there was a tree in front of her eyes, and an animal hiding behind it, and there was a whirl of red color, and patches, and small bits of dialogue, and here came that cold damp and Amy again, and Hawaii, the red flowers, and her mother saying,
everything I go through I go through completely alone
, and here were the sounds of Rachel swirling her mouth out with water, irritating Lily. She wanted them all to leave, especially Joshua. So she kept her eyes closed and pretended they did, and fell asleep, just in that position, on the futon, still sitting up, slightly hunched over to one side, and Amy away, her mother away, her father away, perhaps Amy was with her own father? Perhaps she went down to Florida to visit him? She must mention it to the detective—what was his name? Joshua away, Joshua, who was supposed to be the real deal, now coming for his guitar case, and when Lily woke up fourteen hours later, her body was stiff, the phone was ringing, and her knuckle was seeping blood through the bandage.

Today at work, the jetlag was getting to her. During her break, instead of eating Jell-O with whipped cream like always, she put her head down on the waitresses’ table in the booth in the back and was instantly asleep. She didn’t fall asleep, she went to sleep. When she awoke, Spencer O’Malley sat looking at her from across the table.

“Your hand is still spontaneously bleeding, I see,” he said.

She looked around groggily. His partner was not with him. “Did you come here to tell me that?” She felt disgusting.

“You called me this morning. I thought you might have remembered something important.”

“Yes. Yes.” She struggled to remember anything at all, much less why she called him nine hours ago.

“Something about Amy?”

“Something about Amy.” Lily nodded, rubbing her eyes. He
pushed a glass of water toward her. She drank from it, came to a little. “Her father lives down in Islamorada, I think. Or Cape Canaveral?”

“St. Augustine perhaps?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Yes, that’s where he lives. St. Augustine.”

“Okay then. Maybe she went to visit him.”

O’Malley was quiet. “That’s what you called to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“You must think I just started this job. You’re going to have to do better than that. He was the first one we called. He hadn’t heard-from her. But besides, Miss Quinn, you’re missing the point about Amy. She told her mother she would be coming home. She didn’t. She told her family she would be graduating. She didn’t. Hasn’t called, hasn’t shown up, and no one’s heard from her, not even her father in Islamorada.”

Lily struggled up. “Would you excuse me? My break is over, I think.”

“Break?” said O’Malley. “I think your shift is over.”

“Ha.” She left to wash her face. He was still sitting in her booth when she returned.

“Detective, I really must…”

But he wasn’t moving. “Just two more minutes of your time. There were a few things I forgot to mention yesterday; after all, we had so much to cover. During our search of Amy’s room, we discovered her house keys and her wallet on her dresser, leading us to suspect that she didn’t go far.”

“As I told you, that’s probably true.”

“Was she generally in the habit of leaving the apartment without her wallet or keys?”

“I guess,” said Lily. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” she added, seeing his face. She smiled wanly, but O’Malley didn’t smile, in fact, studied her extra carefully, as if she were a word on the page whose meaning he was trying to decipher. “She used to go running and didn’t like to weigh herself down. She usually took what
little money she had with her. Crumpled up into a ball, or change stuffed into her pants pocket.”

“Where did she go running?”

“Central Park. The reservoir.”

“Far to go for a run all the way from the East Village.”

“Far, but worth it.”

He made a note on his pad. “What about other times? When she would disappear overnight? Did she also leave her wallet and her keys then? Running for days at a time, was she?”

“She was very fit,” Lily said, a feeble attempt at a joke. During those days too, Amy would leave her wallet. Why did Lily strongly
not
want to tell the detective that? “You know I didn’t always notice. I tried not to go into her room when she was gone unless I needed something. So I don’t know if she always left her wallet. I’m sure sometimes she took it.”

“Where’s her driver’s license, by the way?”

“I don’t think she had one,” Lily said hesitantly.

“Really?” With obvious surprise and a glance at her hesitation.

Lily averted her gaze, trying to think of the thing that turned her face away from him. Some vague confusion, some vague inconsistency regarding the license, but she couldn’t quite place it, hence the averted gaze. “Amy didn’t know how to drive. We live in New York. I don’t know how to drive either.”

“Interesting,” said the detective, stroking his chin. “Fascinating.” He stood to go. “Well, you’ll forgive me for not sharing in your relaxed and easygoing attitude about your best friend’s whereabouts, but I’m finding it odd, to say the least, that she’s been gone for three weeks, with her cash card, her Visa card, her Student ID, her MetroCard, and her door keys all serenely on her dresser. And she doesn’t know how to drive. So where did she go? When we searched your room, we found your MetroCard there. But we didn’t find your keys or your wallet or
your ATM card. You went to Hawaii and took them with you. That seemed normal to us.”

Their eyes locked for a moment. Detective O’Malley with clear eyes that didn’t miss a thing said, “So where’s your bed?”

“Boyfriend took it.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah, well.”

Presently he slapped the table, sitting back down. “Damn! I just figured it out. I just understood why you are so cavalier about Amy.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course. You are not concerned for her, because she has been disappearing with constant regularity. She would leave her life on the dresser, vanish, and then come back, as if she’d just been for a long run. You thought nothing of it then, and you’re thinking nothing of it now.”

“Incorrect detecting, detective. I
am
thinking something of it now. She’s never been away for three weeks.”

“She would leave her wallet and ID and keys on her dresser, when she went out, and you never asked why?”

Lily didn’t know why she didn’t ask. “I figured when Amy was ready she’d tell me.”

There was a long pause. “Still waiting, are you, Miss Quinn?”

Lily hastily excused herself and went to finish her shift. Everybody at work had noticed that a suited-up detective flashing his badge had come looking for Lily. They asked her, they teased, they prodded, she equivocated, they pursued and pursued. Rick, the manager, watched her carefully and then called her over. “Are you in trouble of some kind?”

“No, no.”

“It’s not drugs, is it? Because…”

“It’s not drugs.”

“He’s a cuuutie,” said Judi, another waitress, pixie and not yet twenty. “Is he single?”

“I don’t know, and he’s twice your age!”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

Spencer came home that night and sat at his round dining table. He lived in a small apartment close to work and in a perfect location—on 11th and Broadway. From his microcosm of a kitchen and adjoining dining area windows, he saw a dozen traffic lights on Broadway, all the way down south past Astor Place. The wet, red lights burst in Technicolor in the gray rain; the grayer the rain, the brighter the reds and greens. From the entry foyer that was his library
and
bedroom he overlooked the courtyard of a small church. Spencer continued to live alone, certainly not for lack of trying on the parts of some of the women he had been with. What attempt has this been for you, detective, to live with another human being, his last girlfriend had asked him right before she left him. He was convinced they had not been living together; shows what he knew. Certainly he was spending a lot of time at her place, and she had been asking him to leave his things, insinuating. He was seeing a social worker now, Mary. He quite liked her—they had been together a year—but couldn’t help feeling that he was really just another one of her more complicated cases. Once she fixed him she would go. Spencer couldn’t wait for that day. He just wasn’t sure: to be fixed or for her to go?

The place belonged to his oldest brother Patrick who had been
a bad boy and was kicked out by his wife, so he bought an apartment in the city, where he could be single on the weekdays and on the weekends have his kids. Soon his wife saw that living alone with the kids was not all she imagined and decided to give the wandering Patrick another chance. And so Spencer sublet Patrick’s apartment that he could barely afford on his NYC detective’s salary. But no one in New York could afford their apartments, so there was no use complaining. He complained only because he was constantly broke.

When Spencer came back to the Suffolk County Police Department after leaving his job as a senior detective at Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire, he stayed in a room above the garage in his brother Sean’s house. But then being a patrol cop on Long Island had become enough for Spencer and besides he wasn’t too crazy about Sean’s wife (she was too tidy for his liking), so he transferred to NYPD. His brother’s wife’s freakish neatness drove him to New York City, that messy kettle-pot of vice.

New York was quite different from changing tires for women on the Long Island Expressway and administering the DUI test fifteen times on a Saturday night. Spencer was first assigned as a detective third grade to the Special Investigations Division of the Detective Bureau. He was one of four local squad detectives working on the Joint Robbery Apprehension Team. He was moved across—at his own request—to Missing Persons after the MP senior detective was at the wrong place at the wrong time and was fatally shot by a perp fleeing the scene of a robbery at an all-night deli on Avenue C and 4th. Spencer thought he might be ready for missing persons again. He was made senior to the dead man’s partner, Chris Harkman, who’d been in Missing Persons for twelve years, remaining at third grade, because as Harkman said, “It’s such a low-pressure job.” He had had three heart surgeries, gout, arthritis, and was set to man the missing persons desk just two more years, long enough to retire at forty-eight with nearly full pay and full benefits.

But Spencer wasn’t ready to retire. He didn’t mind coasting
and, like Harkman, would have coasted also, but it just so happened that he, by accident or fate, or by virtue of his own nitpicky character and peculiar memory, found a boy who had been missing since 1984, living years later in a crack den off Twelfth Avenue and 43rd Street. The kid was picked up by the narcs, but when Spencer saw his name on the books—which he checked daily and religiously—he recognized it. Mario Gonzalez. Spencer obsessively checked the photos and the names of every person detained by the NYPD exactly because of a case like Mario Gonzalez. Turned out the boy—who had been twelve when he had disappeared—did not want to be found by his inconsolable parents, but that wasn’t the point, for in his department Spencer was a hero. He was promoted to lieutenant first grade—and put in charge of the entire MP division—while Harkman, by virtue of being partnered with him, got a second grade promotion and a raise. That the boy killed himself a few weeks after being found didn’t dampen anyone’s joy at a, finding an MP that long gone, and b, finding an MP
alive.

After that, results were expected of Spencer in a department that was notoriously low on results. It wasn’t like other departments in special investigations where the detectives were constantly getting patted on their backs for jobs well done, collars made, perps caught—in credit card and con games, larceny and extortion, airline fraud, arson and art theft—and especially homicide. If only Spencer cared a whit about the other divisions he might have been a captain already.

But Spencer’s heart, for reasons unfathomable to him, remained with finding people that had been long missing. No, not even that.
Looking
for people that had been long missing.

Since Gonzalez, he had found six or seven more hopeless cases and become somewhat of a mythological maverick at the department—a favorite of his chief, Colin Whittaker, and a homeboy of the homicide division next door with whom he was loosely associated. “Give it to O’Malley,” the saying around the station went. “He’ll find anything.” He became tight with a couple of
guys in homicide, one particularly, Gabe McGill, whom Spencer liked so much he wished he could be partnered with him, except Spencer didn’t want homicide, and Gabe didn’t want MP.

The apartment was dark. He hadn’t turned any lights on, and that was just the way he liked it in the first few minutes after he got home from work. Work was frenetic and boisterous, and the apartment was blissfully mute; work had glaring fluorescent light contrast, and the apartment was soothingly dark. Only the changing traffic lights from Broadway flickered through the open windows. Spencer poured himself a J&.B—blended with 116 different malts and 12 grains—and kept it in front of him as he palmed the glass with both hands, turning it around and around like a clock, counting the seconds, the minutes of time passing, looking at the drink, smelling it. He threw off his shoes. He took off his shirt and tie. He used the bathroom, he came back to the table. The drink was still there. Spencer was still there. He sat in the dark, facing the open windows and palmed the drink again.

He had interviewed the panicked mother, the people this Amy McFadden girl waitressed with at the Copa Cobana, her clique of friends, all confounded but eager to help. He searched the apartment, he checked her bank records, her credit card accounts, the Department of Motor Vehicles.

And then he met Lily.

The girl seemed so self-possessed, so unconcerned—and so tanned. No histrionics, no whining from this girl; he liked that. Unlike the other one, Rachel Ortiz. She was an emoter. But Lily had herself and the matter in hand. Unlike the mother, Lily was not unduly anxious. She should talk to Amy’s mother, calm her down. Perhaps Lily was right. Perhaps her missing roommate would just show up.

Lily was smooth and chocolate bronzed and young, her little spaghetti strap tank top, her short, short denim skirt. Fleetingly he imagined her lying on the white sand in Maui, all moist and hot from the sun, eyes closed, on her back, browning, burning, topless.

Spencer needed to pour the drink back into the bottle. He never drank on the days he worked, because Spencer knew that his mind played tricks on him when it told him he could do it, could have just one, when it intellectualized and rationalized the glass in his hands. He imagined bringing the whisky to his mouth and downing it in three deep swallows. No dainty swilling, smelling, sipping of the blended malt for him in a quaint dram.

If life had taught Spencer Patrick O’Malley anything it was that the missing never just showed up, and there was no such thing as having just one.