something for yourself, aren’t you?”
“You ought to be a detective yourself, Jake. You’re right. The missing item I’m looking for is the cab itself. And here’s the receipt that identifies it.”
Jake scrutinized the receipt. Then he looked Liz over slowly.
“You a cop?” he demanded.
Liz remained silent until Jake realized his mistake. Obviously, the cab was one of his. And there was something questionable about it.
“This isn’t a real receipt. The paper’s too good and the edges aren’t torn. Who are you and what are you after?”
“A reporter.
“Cut the violins,” Jake said. “
Liz looked away and stood up from the stool.
“Not
“I can’t promise the police will never be involved, but I can tell you that at this point, my interest in your cab and driver is a question of grasping at straws. Is the cab here?”
“No, it’s with the jerk-off I was just trying to haul back from the boroughs. What use would the cab be to you, anyway?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure. I know the missing woman rode in this cab. And it’s just about the only lead I have. I thought I’d see if she left anything behind in the cab, or maybe retrace where she’d been by looking at cab records. Now there’s the stunner that the cabdriver’s unaccounted for.”
“Not only that. . . ” Jake broke off. “The hell with the other foreigners. I wanna know what Hasan’s up to.”
“That his name?”
“Yeah, Hasan. Sonofabitch calls himself Samir Hasan. OK, how about you go to the corner felafel place and get us a couple o’ coffees? I take mine black. Then I’ll see what I can do.”
As Liz left the office, she heard Jake radio a cabbie.
“Shit!” he shouted. “Why did you have to pick today of all days to follow my orders for the first time? Get your ass in here!”
When Liz returned with the coffee, Jake was standing outside the garage beside an idling cab. “Here it is, spick-’n’-span for the first time in memory.”
“Ah, no! He cleaned the cab?”
“Inside and out!” Jake said, opening the trunk. “What’s this?” he demanded of the driver who could do nothing right.
“Just junk. No valuables.”
Jake joined Liz as he opened the plastic shopping bag. Inside were a small child’s Yankee-insignia sweatshirt, a couple of cardboard coffee cups, and a book of matches. While Jake angrily dismissed the driver, Liz got into the front seat and opened the ashtray. Butts galore. She dumped the contents into a Ziploc bag. Then she looked in the glove compartment. It contained the vehicle’s registration and a grocery list. Nothing more. She pocketed the list.
“Hey, what are you taking from that glove compartment?”
“Just a grocery list. It might have been Ellen’s.”
“In the glove compartment? Why would a passenger’s list be in the glove compartment?”
“Looks like one of your drivers used it to test a pen on.” Liz turned the paper over and pointed to some squiggles. “Would you like to keep it?”
“Nah!” Jake said, tying up the plastic bag and setting it on top of the one untidy item in the room, an overfilled trash container.
“I’ve got just a few more questions.”
“Yeah?”
“Hasan’s home address.”
“Not sure.”
“What?”
“I have one on record, but when he went missing, I found out he doesn’t live there. He’s been feeding me a load of bull.”
“You must be furious. Do you keep a log of trips made by your drivers?”
“Sure. It’s required by law.”
“Can you tell me anything about Hasan’s remaining hours at work before he went missing?”
Jake paged through his log book.
“How do you like that?” he asked. “Right after he made that trip with your gal, he has more than forty-five minutes unaccounted for. Then again, throughout the day, more of the same. No metered rides after 3:00 p.m. on December 16.”
Two days before Ellen went missing.
Jake’s phone rang and he engaged in another adversarial conversation with a driver while Liz waited. “Look,” he said, turning to Liz after hanging up the phone. “I know what you’re going to ask me next. What kind of guy is he? Am I right?”
Liz nodded.
“Well, I don’t know. These Arabs, they have a different language, a different cultcha. I know he smoked in the cab. We got complaints. I know he played Middle Eastern music in his vehicle, too. Hasan sometimes turned in valuables. We logged them in here.” He opened a well-worn logbook to a page headed “December 16, 2000.”
“No, he didn’t turn in anything on his last day at work,” Jake went on. “I know he rarely turned down a fare. He kept that cab moving. Beyond that, the guy was a closed book. Didn’t talk about a wife, kids, sports, anything.”
“What’s this?” Liz asked, pointing to some wiring on the dashboard that seemed to lead nowhere.
“That’s the connection for his two-way.”
“Radio?”
“Yeah. He was always yakking on that thing.”
“Did he use it to communicate with you?”
“Nah. I told you, in the city we don’t dispatch cabs via radio. He used it to talk with his buddies. We allow this, if it doesn’t interfere with the driver’s work. But you have to be licensed to operate a two-way from the cab. He had to remove his when he wasn’t using it so the other drivers couldn’t use it. I got the documentation filed here, don’t worry.”
Like the rest of the office, the filing cabinet was orderly. It held several original documents pertaining to the missing cabbie, and photocopies of each. Jake handed Liz an extra copy of the radio license.
“Take it,” he said.
The document had the same false address that Liz had seen before. But the face in the photo was new to her.
“A dark horse,” Jake concluded. “That Hasan was one dark horse.”
