Same Difference, page 19
Now, that wasn’t the tactic I’d have employed. I use force on occasion, but only when I think I have no other choice, or if someone is threatening me or a person I care about. This was Mank (sort of) roughing up Jules to get him to talk. Later on I would discuss this with Mank and tell him it wasn’t company policy. He wouldn’t care because he was a cop, and I probably would only say something if this didn’t actually work. People make compromises all the time.
‘Back off, man,’ Jules said, employing exactly the attitude I had expected. ‘I’m not giving up anybody I do business with. I have a legit bodega I own on 112th Street and that’s how I pay the rent. So I don’t have to tell you nothing. Back off.’
Mank wisely did stand away from Jules and lower his hands. ‘We mean no disrespect,’ he told Jules. ‘We’re worried about Eliza.’
‘You oughta be,’ Jules said. ‘From what I hear, that girl’s in a whole lot of trouble.’
I didn’t care for that. ‘You mean the cops are after her,’ I said hopefully.
‘No, the cops aren’t her problem. She crossed somebody – and I don’t know who – talking about Damien to people, and now I hear she’s being squeezed for more information. Somebody wants to take over Damien’s business and they don’t want to do it the right way.’
It was worse than I had thought: Eliza hadn’t just skipped out on me at New Amsterdam.
She’d been taken.
TWENTY-NINE
I still couldn’t use my cell phone, buy luckily Mank wasn’t being monitored by any law enforcement agency so he could text Ken. (My brother’s phone was showing no signs of being watched, evidenced by the fact that he’d had it turned on the whole time I was at our apartment and no hostile law enforcement officers had shown up.)
‘Ken says nobody’s come back to the construction site,’ Mank reported.
‘Of course not, because Eliza didn’t just run away, she was taken.’ I thought that had been obvious. ‘She’s not going back there because the choice isn’t up to her.’
Mank looked serious as we walked back to the Lexington line. ‘You think when Jules said she was being squeezed, that someone took Eliza and they’re trying to get some information out of her? That’s ominous, but it’s a bit of a jump.’
‘It fits the facts we have and that’s the frustrating part because Jules didn’t know who might have taken her and that leaves us with no leads to follow,’ I told him. ‘That girl is in all kinds of trouble and it was supposed to be my job to keep her safe.’
Mank stopped in his tracks and it took me a few steps to realize it. I turned finally and looked at him, walking back over to stand right in front of him. Which probably had been the point of his stopping in the first place.
‘Your job, as I understand it, was to find Eliza and see if she wanted to come back to her father’s place,’ Mank said. ‘You did that. She didn’t want to go back. All you need to do is report to Brian Hennessey what you know and your job is done.’
‘Wow. That’s cold.’
‘I’m speaking technically,’ he answered. ‘I understand that you feel a responsibility to ensure Eliza’s safety, and that it might actually entail figuring out who killed Damien Van Dorn, but don’t make this about how you haven’t done your job. You did your job as soon as you walked into the cat’s apartment.’
It all just kind of hit me at once. I’d been operating on adrenaline for long enough now that the reality of the situation felt like being run over by a freight train. I felt myself sort of wilt, my knees to soften up. I didn’t crumple to the ground, thank goodness, but my shoulders sagged and I had to put effort into holding up my head. ‘Mank,’ I said, ‘she needs me and I don’t know what to do.’
Mank reached over and put his arms around me. Some women might have felt that was a condescending mood in a post #MeToo world, but I knew Mank, and it was exactly what I needed at that moment. If he’d been Aunt Margie I would have wanted the same thing. ‘We’ll figure it out,’ he said so that only I could hear him. ‘Come on. You haven’t eaten and that makes a person weaker. I know a place.’
Had Mank been another kind of man, he’d have taken me back to the infamous diner where we’d had our most recent meal together. Sort of. (I hadn’t eaten.) But he wasn’t trying to recreate the dating experience we’d been building then; he wanted to make me feel better. So we took the train all the way downtown and went to Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery on Houston Street. The ultimate comfort food.
It was a nice early evening, and we decided to order the knishes and sit outside two blocks away where we found the first possible place to sit, the steps of a brownstone that didn’t seem too busy. We opened our bags of food and I, for one, dug in, realizing I hadn’t eaten in about nine hours and Yonah’s are the best.
‘Could she have gone back to the cat’s apartment?’ Mank said, eating from a kasha knish, which is fine but potato is really what it’s all about.
‘Don’t call it that,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to figure out how Rainbow is a cat and not a person, the way everyone talks about her.’
‘Nonetheless, I ran a search and the lease is in the cat’s name,’ Mank said. ‘That indicates to me that the real lessee doesn’t want anyone to know who they are. Records show they pay the rent in cash to the super every month.’
‘It’s legal to put a lease in a cat’s name?’
Mank pursed his lips. ‘It’s not illegal.’
‘Maybe it’s worth going back there, but the last time I went nobody was in the place,’ I said.
‘I texted Ken. He’s on his way there now.’
I looked at Mank for a long moment. He wasn’t being a cop now, but he was using his cop skills to help me because that was the best way he knew. I started to remember why I’d said yes to dinner with him the first time we went out. ‘Thanks,’ I said. I would have said more but that was a really good knish.
‘If Eliza isn’t there, and someone did take her away, the only way to know where to look would be to know who it was that took her,’ Mank said. He was (correctly) avoiding anything emotional in our current situation. He wanted to focus on the task at hand. Making me like him again would come later, I was sure, and I wasn’t that certain it wouldn’t work.
‘If it wasn’t Jules, we don’t have a lot of candidates,’ I noted. ‘It’s not her dad because she’d just be back at his apartment, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t keep her there. It’s not Damien’s mom because that would be too rude for her to consider. It’s not Laura Rapinoe because she doesn’t have a motive.’
‘Could it be a hate crime?’ Mank suggested. ‘A transphobic thing?’
I shrugged. ‘That’s always a possibility. But there’s so much going on around Damien, who wasn’t trans, and the little side hustle he had that I can’t imagine someone just randomly abducted Eliza on the street because she’s trans.’
Mank looked a little embarrassed. ‘That’s fair.’
But it had struck a nerve somewhere in me and I was just starting to work it out. ‘That’s the thing, isn’t it?’ I said. I took the last bite of knish, drank from my bottle of water and stood up.
‘What’s the thing?’ Mank, being male, had downed his knish in about three bites and was already on his feet. He could see the look on my face and realized I was formulating something in the general vicinity of a plan.
‘Damien’s pill business. It was a little side hustle. It wasn’t the biggest enterprise on the upper east side. It was something he was doing to pay the rent and probably only for people he knew.’ I started heading back to the subway and Mank followed along looking intrigued but not at all understanding.
‘So what?’ he asked.
‘So how come it was a big enough deal to get him killed and Eliza kidnapped?’ I said. ‘Who’s so worried about little Damien Van Dorn that they had to kill him and then track everyone involved with him for days?’
Mank caught up with me as soon as the sidewalk was wide enough for us to travel astride. He was having a tiny bit of trouble keeping up with my pace because my legs are demonstrably longer than his.
Some men like that.
‘What do you mean, everyone involved is being followed?’ he said. ‘Eliza’s been taken and Jules said people were following him, but we don’t know if that’s even true. Who else?’
The food had helped clear my head, but it wasn’t doing a thing for my speed. Knishes are wonderful but they’re not the lightest food in the world. I kept moving but I was thinking about it. ‘First of all, Jules is being followed. I saw two guys outside his apartment pretending to be changing a tire, except the tire on the car was fine. Second, there’s Eliza and then there’s me and Ken. We’re all being monitored one way or another and, as evidence, I submit that I can’t turn on my cell phone to call my brother and find out that he didn’t see Eliza at Rainbow’s apartment. And while we’re at it, whose cat is Rainbow?’
‘You know who’s monitoring you and Ken,’ Mank said. ‘You’re being followed by the New York Police Department.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘And that’s what worries me.’
THIRTY
Because I couldn’t think of a better idea, we ended up at Mank’s apartment. I wasn’t completely comfortable with that, although I’d been there before, because no matter what else he was – and that was a number of good things – Mank was also a cop and we’d demonstrated very clearly that the cops were after me.
‘You think a police officer had something to do with Damien Van Dorn’s death?’ he asked me once we sat down in his small front room. Cops are paid well in New York, but the real-estate market is still what it is in Manhattan. Many officers live in Queens or Staten Island to keep costs low, but Mank liked to be in the middle of things and he wanted to live in Manhattan, about twenty blocks north of where my apartment building was standing. Last I saw of it.
‘I think we at least have to consider the possibility,’ I told him. ‘No matter where I went yesterday, cell phone turned off and operating like it was 1987, there was one face I saw at every stop. And it was Detective Sergeant Louis Merchant.’
Mank flopped on to a chair that I hoped had been sprayed for bedbugs before he’d swiped it off the sidewalk. The place was not exactly ready for a spread in the New York Times style section. ‘I have a hard time believing that. I mean, I don’t know Merchant, but that’s a big leap to make. The department thinks you’re involved in a murder. That’s reason enough for them to be monitoring your movements so they can bring you in to be questioned.’
I sat back and thought about closing my eyes. This had been another in a series of really long days. Luckily the little do-it-yourself battery charger that Ken had sent me the night before had turned out to be really effective, and could be an addition to our arsenal, the ability to charge anywhere. So I sat back but didn’t close my eyes. I was thinking.
‘That’s a reason for the NYPD to be looking for me, but Merchant seems to be taking it personally. He was outside both libraries and the ice-cream store.’ A thought hit me and it wasn’t a comforting one. ‘I can’t say for sure that he wasn’t at the college when I was going back to talk to Laura Rapinoe and Eliza got snatched.’
‘You also can’t say for sure that he was,’ Mank pointed out. ‘Look, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but so far all you’ve got on Merchant is guesswork.’
‘That’s why we’re going to take an hour right now to rest up and then you’re going to find out where Merchant lives so I can pay him a visit.’ I hadn’t even known I was going to say that before I said it.
Mank stared at me, thankfully not in the way that Bendix does. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.
‘I don’t even have to go,’ I said. ‘Seems to me all I need to do is turn on my phone and Merchant will appear at your door.’
‘Not if he has Eliza with him.’
He had a point. I hated that he had a point, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. ‘All right, we go back to Plan A,’ I said. ‘You find out where Merchant lives and I go there.’
Mank stared at me as if I’d suggested I might jump into a pit of asps. ‘You go there? On your own?’
‘You’re a cop. You can’t be spying on other cops unofficially. You could get fired.’ I pointed at the laptop on his desk, which was on a card table in one corner of the room. ‘So go find his address. I bet he lives in Queens.’
Mank walked over to the desk, his face clearly looking for an alternative plan that would get him involved in the hunt, and then stopped after he sat at the keyboard. ‘If I do this there’ll be a record of it,’ he said. ‘I can’t log on to my NYPD account, search for a fellow officer’s home address and not be detectable. If this goes south, they’ll have a clear trail back to me.’
I actually had not thought of that. ‘OK. Don’t do it. Ken always says to start with the simplest online search. Let’s google Merchant.’
As it turned out, Louis Merchant was not in the least interested in keeping his online information private. There were four different mentions in his official biography on the NYPD site (which appeared to have last been updated in 2015) and more personal areas to his apartment complex, whose owner had apparently been the target of a lawsuit Merchant had brought due to the landlord’s refusal to install soundproofing that would have muffled Merchant’s drum practice and stopped his neighbors from complaining to him and the landlord. The lawsuit was settled out of court and apparently Merchant sold his drum kit on eBay.
But his address was plainly listed, and it was on Staten Island, not in Queens. The worst possible location for a Manhattanite because the best way to navigate Staten Island is by car, and we generally don’t have those, no matter what the traffic around the Holland Tunnel might suggest.
‘Do we even know that Merchant is the one who has Eliza?’ Mank said as we got out of the subway near the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry dock. ‘Or that he’d be stupid enough to take her to his own apartment?’
‘He was stupid enough that we found his address just by googling his name,’ I pointed out. Mank nodded to concede the point. ‘If you’ve got a better idea, I’d be tickled to hear it.’
He stood there, obviously trying to form a better plan in the next six seconds, then gestured with his hands, a kind of shrug, to indicate he had nothing. ‘You can’t even keep in touch,’ he said. ‘I’d give you my phone but that wouldn’t help.’
‘I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you remember? I’m a musclebound freak.’
Mank reached over and embraced me, which I was not expecting. ‘If Eliza’s there, turn on your phone,’ he said quietly in my ear. ‘You’ll be surrounded by cops in minutes.’
‘Every girl’s dream.’
He stood back and looked at me as if I were embarking on a trek down the Amazon rather than a free ride to another borough of the city that was twenty-five minutes away. But I knew how he felt.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said, and started on to the ramp. I was, naturally, unarmed, but if there were metal detectors I couldn’t be sure the USB port on my left side might not cause trouble. Fortunately, there was no such security in place that night – apparently it’s intermittent – and I was on the boat and on my way in just a few minutes.
There’s not much to the ferry; you just stand there (or sit on a bench) and wait to get to the least-remembered borough of New York City. Staten Island itself most closely resembles its closest neighbor, New Jersey. It’s basically suburban. But it’s bigger than you think it is and I had to flag down a cab at the Staten Island side, glad that I still had some of the cash Ken had supplied in his grocery bags.
Merchant’s address was near Old Town, a historic area of the island that was about as close as you could get to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which would take you into Brooklyn. It was, in short, a ridiculous place to live for a cop who worked in the Bronx. I couldn’t imagine what Merchant’s daily commute must have been like.
I got the cabbie (not an Uber driver because I still couldn’t use my phone) to drop me off a block from Merchant’s building. If the man was holding Eliza hostage in his apartment, I really preferred not to give him advance warning I was on my way. I asked the driver to wait at least a half hour for me and gave him twenty dollars. There was no way I’d hail a cab here without my phone. I hoped the driver was trustworthy.
But that was a lot of ifs. IF Merchant had killed Damien. IF he had abducted Eliza. IF he had chosen to take her to his apartment. IF they were still there.
I was starting to feel like I’d jumped at the easiest possible solution and was operating more on hope and less on smart deduction.
The building was not a large one, not even as big as the one I lived in. It appeared to have as many as six apartments, one of which I would bet belonged to the landlord/super. You’d think a guy who lived in the same building as Louis Merchant would have been tickled to make renovations that would have made his drumming less audible. But then, Merchant had gotten rid of the drums, hadn’t he?
It was the usual issue with getting inside the locked building. Nobody had supplied me with a nice heavy soda bottle keeping the door open this time. I figured that Merchant wouldn’t have seen me coming. If I could buzz his downstairs neighbor and get inside, I wouldn’t have alerted the man I’d come to see. And oddly, that happened.
From the mailboxes marked outside, I gathered that Merchant lived on the second floor in Apartment E. That turned out to be one flight up and down a corridor.
It seemed stupid but my first move was to knock. Yes, that might have given Merchant some advance warning and he could hide Eliza if she was there, but kicking in his door would have been louder and probably afforded him the same opportunity. There was no answer so I waited. A little.
