Restoration Heights Page 6

  Reddick and Sensei spoke occasionally afterward, in the hallway or the lobby of the Y. Their conversations were cordial but brief. Reddick had forgotten Sensei’s real name, and he doubted that anyone called him Sensei to his face.

  “Come on,” Derek said.

  They went to the weight room.

  Several guys were gathered around the squat rack—Sensei, two friends, and an indeterminate number of acolytes, some of whom were merely watching. Sensei had just stood up with what seemed to Reddick like an impossible amount of weight on his back. His legs shook. Two of the guys helped guide the weight back into the rack. Once it was secure, Derek glided into the group; Reddick waited nearby.

  He admired Derek’s social dexterity. It was half innate and half learned, his intelligence and easy charm sharpened by a lifetime crossing barriers of race and class. His mother had bought a house in Bed-Stuy shortly after she arrived from St. Thomas. Derek was two. He and his mother were left alone after his father passed; she made do with a cheap mortgage and a tedious job. For ten years they lived in the basement apartment and rented out the rest, cutting corners, haggling with negligent tenants and crooked repairmen. Then she bought the house next door, and three years after that the building on the corner—home to five apartments and the bodega where she once shopped for their dinner among the dented cans and cellophane. Her diligence and triumph were a road map for her son. After he earned his MBA he lingered in South Florida, working at an investment bank but pouring his time into side projects, real estate and other ventures, ostensibly enjoying the beach and the clubs but really, Reddick suspected, just enjoying the work. He came back a year ago with a sizable nest egg and prospects at a handful of downtown banks, all of which he was postponing until he found and closed on a Manhattan apartment. While he looked, he was staying with his mother, in a brownstone a couple of blocks from the Y.

  He waved Reddick over. He was standing beside a short, middle-aged man with a round frame, huge through the chest and gut, an easy face and tightly clipped hair circling a bare, glistening crown. Like everyone else in Sensei’s crew, he was black. He smiled when Reddick approached. The area around the rack was a slurry of chalk and sweat.

  “So you need a cop, huh?” he said.

  “Reddick, this is Clint.”

  Reddick told him about the alleyway encounter with Hannah, and the Sewards’ response. Clint listened blankly.

  “Let me get this straight. You saw a girl, one time, for two or three minutes—in the dark—and now you’re convinced that she is the missing fiancée of some guy you work for, even though that guy says she isn’t?”

  “I saw her.”

  “You saw someone. And maybe you’ve gone back in your mind and inserted this other girl’s face into your memory. I can’t tell you how often this happens.”

  “It was definitely her.”

  “Is she actually even missing? I’m saying have they or anyone else in her family filed a missing persons claim?”

  “That’s one of the things I thought you could help me out with.”

  “You want me to find out for you?”

  Reddick nodded.

  “Hand me your phone.”

  He wiped his hands before he took it.

  “So you can access police data online?” Reddick asked.

  “Yeah. It’s called Google.” He showed him the web results and clicked on the first hit, the city website. “You can sort by borough.”

  “Holy shit,” Reddick said.

  “It’s the twenty-first century. There are resources for this shit. You don’t have to bug me.” His tone was jovial, teasing.

  Reddick took his phone back. “Her name isn’t on here.”

  “There you go.” That seemed to answer the question for him.

  “But she’s still missing. I mean—I was in their house. I heard them say that she was gone. Isn’t there anything you could do about an unreported missing person?”

  “How exactly could a person be missing if no one was missing her? What kind of sense does that make?”

  “But that’s what I’m telling you. I heard them say it.”

  “Look. It’s been, what, a day and a half? If they haven’t reported her it’s because they found her. Maybe she freaked out and went home to her family. Do you know where she’s from?” Reddick shook his head. “See, you should know that. They are the first people you should have called. Because I have to tell you—it isn’t my thing, but I know—you’re talking about a domestic case and it is almost always just that the person left. Our guys show up at the home, there’s a bag packed, a bunch of empty hangers in the closet, but the poor husband is too shocked to admit that his wife left him of her own free will. Went home to the family or off with another lover or just wanted some time to think. Sometimes it’s the only way to force themselves to have the conversation they need. It’s private, and it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Except that I saw her.”

  “Except that you say you saw someone who looked kind of like her. In the dark. This is New York, man. You understand we have shit to do?”

  He let his final point sink in, and clapped Reddick’s shoulder.

  “No hard feelings, right?”

  “What if I find something? Some evidence, something that proves she is missing? Will you help me? Off the record so that the Sewards don’t get me fired?”

  Clint shook his head. It was clear he believed he had already made his case. “Listen to me. You are not a cop. You are not even a private investigator. You cannot do this.”

  “But I’ve already started. I just want to know if I can come to you when I find something.”

  “You won’t find something because there is nothing to be found.”

  “Can I come to you?”

  He sighed, finally softened by Reddick’s persistence. “If you have evidence that a crime was committed, it is your responsibility to come forward with that evidence. That’s not me promising anything. That’s not me endorsing this. That’s not me saying I will help you. That’s just your legal obligation.”

  Reddick smiled. “I’ll be back, then.”

  “Evidence, I said. Okay? Evidence.”

  * * *

  “Evidence” meant more than what he could learn talking to people who were at the party—Clint’s insistence made that clear. He needed something tangible, something that proved she was gone, that erased doubts—his own included. An abrupt breakup didn’t explain any of the questions that nagged at him—why Buckley reacted the way he did, why Hannah was dead drunk the night she went missing—but it had the force of being ordinary, the appeal of simplicity. He had to eliminate it—or succumb to it, if her apartment was emptied out, her closets bare. Either way he had to be sure, had to cross it off the list. He walked to the subway.

  Rush hour was tapering off; waiting for an uptown express, he tapped the transit Wi-Fi for more research, read the results on his way up. He wanted to see if the facts backed up Clint’s confident dismissal. He found an article summarizing missing persons data going back half a decade—around half a million reported cases a year, with about 90,000 individuals listed as missing at any point in time. He was surprised to see an even split by gender, an array of ages. Like most American afflictions it hit the poor hardest. Almost all of the cases were eventually resolved. Kids taken by a wayward parent or relative, adults who wandered away from their homes, addled by drugs or dementia, chasing phantoms. Hard-luck runaways dreaming of a better life, sprung from the cage of a violent partner, an abusive parent. In most cases the cause was explicable, layered into the facts of the person’s history—their lives a prologue for their disappearance.

  In some cases they were murdered.

  He closed his phone, got out and walked northeast, to 90th between York and First. It took a numbing twenty minutes at a quick pace, stabbed by the cold, to reach Hanna
h’s building. He eyed it from the opposite sidewalk, six floors of pale brick in the center of a residential street, not as new or well-kept as the prim high-rises on the corner. An iron fire escape, glistening with frost, snaked up its face. Reddick crossed one possibility off his list—that she had come in with her own money, that she wouldn’t have been floored by the ease of Buckley’s lifestyle. This neighborhood was what passed for middle class in the city, the residents floating on expenses that would drown much of the country but that someone like Buckley could manage with the cash he left in yesterday’s sport coat. Reddick thought of Hannah’s clothes, the way she talked—could the girl he met have abandoned the comforts that a marriage to Buckley promised? Perhaps she had never loved him, perhaps it was only ever about his money, and her disappearance was a capitulation to the pressures of this deception. Perhaps she was fleeing the consequences of her own greed. Perhaps she had emptied her apartment, was on the road somewhere, relieved to be free of a lie.

  Her number was 4B. All the windows on the fourth floor were dark, their treatments clustered in pairs—it looked like two apartments per level, splitting the fire escape between them. He guessed she was to his left—from inside the building, facing out, the apartments ascending from left to right, like the alphabet—but there was no way to be sure. The shades were up in the left windows; he tried to see inside, could make out nothing deeper than a cluttered sill—a couple of houseplants, a bowl. There were lights on in the apartment below, vague movements flitting behind soft curtains. He wondered if she knew anyone in her building.

  The narrow lobby was brightly lit, the shape of its interior clear through the glass door. Reddick saw the elevator open, a man get off. He jogged across the street, caught the door just as the man was leaving.

  “You heading in?” the man said. He was white, short with sloped shoulders, wavy brown hair pinched beneath a wool cap.

  Reddick tried to look like he belonged. “Yeah, thanks.”

  “No key?” The man was smiling, not quite suspicious.

  “No, I have one, I just—I’m doing Airbnb, and I’m not used to the keys yet. Actually—she didn’t say whether she was allowed to sublet or not, so maybe forget I said that.”

  The guy laughed. “It’s cool, man. Which apartment are you in?”

  “Do you know Hannah on the fourth floor?”

  “The fourth...is she blonde? Kind of a looker?”

  “Yeah, you know her?”

  “No, I’ve just seen her smoking on the fire escape.”

  Reddick shivered. “In this cold?”

  “I guess if you gotta, you gotta, right? Anyway, I’m up on six.” The guy extended his hand and offered his name, Reddick lied about his own, then lied a few more times. Wherever the guy had been heading he wasn’t pressed for time. Reddick nodded along, answered when asked, a plan coming together while he listened.

  After a few minutes he made his move. “So maybe I could ask you, what’s the deal with the roof? She had a picture of the view in her ad, but she didn’t mention how to get up there. Does anyone have access, or just the apartments on the top floor?”

  “It’s for anyone, definitely. There’s a separate stairway up from six. To the left of the elevator. God, if it was just ours I’d never be able to swing my share of the rent. Not that the view is that great.”

  Reddick shrugged. “I’d still like to check it out—you know, first time in New York.”

  “I get it, man. I remember when the city was like that—new and invigorating.” He sighed, affected a weary knowingness. “It just wears you down eventually.”

  “I bet. How long have you lived here?”

  “Almost two years, actually.” He nodded with an air of worn pride.

  Reddick glued his eyes to the guy’s chest, kept his face level. “In this building the whole time?”

  “No. I moved in last spring. Actually—right before the girl you’re renting from did. I remember seeing her carry a couple boxes in, and wondering when the movers had brought the rest of her stuff. I work from home and I hear everything up there. Echoes or whatever.”

  “Well, listen, I’m gonna head up, but I’m glad I ran into you.”

  “Yeah, me, too. If you need anything, just come up to 6A. And make sure you have that key handy next time. This neighborhood is pretty safe but we still like to keep security tight.”

  Reddick smiled. “Will do.”

  The guy left him alone inside the bright lobby. He took the elevator to 4. He had guessed correctly—her apartment was stage right. He knocked on the metal door and waited. Nothing. He knocked again, to make certain, a snare drum tap that he hoped her neighbor couldn’t hear. He pressed his ear against the door. The apartment was quiet as a tomb.

  He went back to the elevator, rode it to six, took the stairs up to the roof. The wind carved through his jacket. A handful of mismatched plastic chairs were scattered around a cracked table, the ensemble blanketed by snow. High-rises circled the building, pinholed with light, straining toward the tar-black sky. If she smoked on the fire escape often enough for that guy to notice, maybe she didn’t bother locking her window. The iron handrails of the fire escape’s ladder curled over the lip of the roof; he grabbed them and descended carefully to the first platform. The icy metal rattled beneath his weight. He crept past dark windows until he reached the fourth floor.

  He tried Hannah’s window gently—it was unlocked. He looked around the block, made sure no one was watching and yanked it open. The bowl on the sill was heaped with ashes and twisted butts. He moved it aside and slipped into the warm apartment.

  When Reddick was thirteen years old he had a friend, Alvin, who was in the middle school band. It was a humid July afternoon, and they were bored; Alvin had wrapped up a summer fund-raiser selling candy the day before, delivering his earnings to the band director’s house, a brick two-bedroom near Crowders Mountain, encased by woods. There wasn’t another home in sight, Alvin said. He had watched the band director stash his money with the rest, in an overflowing metal tin inside his desk drawer—there had to be like three or four hundred dollars, he insisted, an astronomical sum. They’d recruited Alvin’s brother—older, with a license, but bookish and shy—to drive them out. They bribed him with an equal share, told him he could wait in the car while they did all the work.

  The boys jimmied the sliding glass back door open by derailing it with a stick. Nothing else went as planned—the desk drawer was empty, the metal tin gone. The band director must have taken it with him that morning, to deposit the money. They discussed looting the place but it turned out that neither boy had a thief’s heart—stealing the fund-raiser earnings had seemed victimless in a way that taking the band director’s own possessions did not. But they didn’t leave. They were snared by the thrill of transgression. They went through the refrigerator, drank his two-liter Sundrop and tossed the empty bottle on the floor, opened drawers in every room, read labels off the army of squat orange medicine bottles arrayed on his kitchen table, invented wild conditions for each one to treat. They sprayed each other with his drugstore cologne. They rummaged through his videocassettes, praying to find an X-rated title. Outside, Alvin’s brother squirmed with fear in the sweltering car. The boys left two hours later, intoxicated by their own daring—the house in disarray, the sliding door cockeyed and misgrooved, their pockets empty.

  They didn’t brag to their friends—they were too afraid. A simmering panic settled in as they waited for news of the break-in to roll through their school, for suspicions to fall inevitably on them, driven by some mistake, some carelessness of execution. It never came, an absence that Reddick read as an affront to the world’s moral order, to the sense of earned consequences enforced by both his mother’s emphatic decency and his adolescent boy’s notion of honor and retribution. It was a lesson. Punishment does not fall on its own; it isn’t a natural law, an inevitable consequence. You can get awa
y with anything if no one catches you.

  This lesson worked both ways.

  Hannah’s apartment was well kept and bland, furnished with chic frugality—an Ikea backbone touched with bespoke flourishes. There were half a dozen prints on the walls, in matched frames. He recognized one of them, an anxious Paul Klee—he had helped crate the original yesterday, in the Sewards’ dining room. An ab wheel rested in one corner, below a slumped yoga mat. A radiator gurgled beneath the window. Reddick checked for a thermostat, found nothing—it was probably controlled by the landlord, its baking heat said nothing about Hannah’s status. He couldn’t risk turning on a light; he waited for his eyes to adjust to the sallow glow drifting in from the street. He listened to his breath, his chest pumping exhilaration and fear in equal measure. The air was dry as old leaves.

  A short bar split the living room and kitchen; he swept both spaces calmly, going over each object with forensic attention. He noted the television remote upended on the couch, casually discarded after switching off the TV. The lack of books, mail or magazines—evidence of a tidy life. The unwashed glasses in the sink, the squat boxes of leftover takeout stacked like children’s blocks in the refrigerator. He took one out, pried open the lid, was splashed by the meaty smell of lasagna. It looked stiff but edible, maybe a week old. He replaced it carefully, noticed a photo of her and Buckley pinched to the refrigerator door by a magnet the shape of a sunflower. The shot was taken at an angle above them, Buckley’s raised shoulder pegging him as the cameraman—a grinning selfie, the two of them not inured by Buckley’s wealth from a couple’s goofy pleasures. Reddick squinted, tried to read details from the background in the dim light. It was an interior shot, anonymous, whatever occasion prompted the photo lost on him. He padded into the bedroom.

  Dark clothing was pooled on the floor, beside her haphazardly made bed. He went to her drawers, thumbed the round pulls through his winter gloves. There were layers to infringement, nuances to the boundaries he crossed as he bulled deeper into the nested dolls of her home and property—what point was far enough, how deep a violation could he justify. He slid the top drawer open. It was full, cramped with airy fabric, sorted and folded, bits of lace hinting at an intimacy that rebuffed him. He shut it and opened the closet, a shallow niche barely deep enough for her clothes; dresses, pants and shirts segregated by type, draped casually over plastic hangers. He slid the closet door closed, returned to the living room.