“I have something for you,” he said. “Can I drop it by? Will you meet me on the street?”
“Sure,” she said. “Are you on your way?”
“I’ll be there in two minutes.”
She was waiting in front of her door on Great Jones Street when he pulled up, shivering in her leather jacket and jeans. He pushed the door open for her and she climbed inside.
“Big car,” she said. He figured her for one of those liberals who thought no one should be driving an SUV.
“I’m a big guy,” he said. She smiled.
He handed her the folder and told her what he’d learned from Thelma Baker that morning. Over the next five minutes, he related the salient features of the case, which wasn’t much.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked when he was finished.
Lydia Strong had burned him earlier. What she’d said about him caring more about his ego and protecting his turf than about Lily. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want her to believe that.
“I’m out of time. And so is Lily. Like you said, you have better resources than I do. I can’t give you my case file; besides, there’s nothing of much use to you there.” He nodded toward the folder. “Those are the first real leads I’ve had in two weeks and I don’t have time to follow up on them. Lily deserves someone to look into who was driving that car.”
Lydia looked at him. “She does. And I will. Do you want me to keep you informed?”
“Please,” he said with a nod. “Please do. I wrote my cell phone number in there. Don’t call me at the station. And I have a copy of that list. I’ll be following up on my own time, as well.”
“Just one question,” she said. “How much time did you spend looking into Mickey’s life?”
He shook his head slightly. “Her brother. Not much, really. Why?”
“Just wondering. There was a girlfriend. She and Lily didn’t get along.”
He shook his head. “I’ve been looking at Lily’s life, retracing her steps, talking to the people that knew her best. I did some cursory looking into Mickey’s life up there but I never met a girlfriend. Never came across anything that led me to believe his suicide and Lily’s disappearance were connected.”
She was quiet for a second but turned her gray eyes on him. She said slowly, “Other than that’s the reason she went up there in the first place.”
He thought about it a second. Then, “Right. But if I got hit by a car on my way to the grocery store, you wouldn’t go to the grocery store looking for the driver of the car that hit me.”
“Unless the driver was trying to stop you from getting what you were looking for at the store,” said Lydia.
He’d never thought about it that way. “Well,” he said, for lack of anything better coming to mind.
After a second: “Well, thanks, Detective. You’re doing the right thing for Lily.”
Something about the way the light from the streetlamp hit her then made her look very young-too young to be who she was. The light glinted off her blue-black hair and made her pale skin luminous. There was a simmering intensity to her that he recognized, a fierce desire to put the pieces together. He saw those things in her and he respected her for it. He didn’t know enough about her to know what put the fire in her. He’d heard rumors about a murdered mother but he didn’t know whether that was the truth or not.
She got out of the car then without another word, tucking the folder under her arm. He watched her cross the street. She was about five-six, five-seven with strong, straight shoulders. She walked with the confidence of a woman who knew how to take care of herself. She was lean but with a fabulous fullness about her hips and breasts. She looked strong, fit but he knew her body would be soft, womanly. So many women seemed emaciated to him lately, as if they were being strangled by this terrible need to be thin. His mother had always said, “A woman who can’t feed herself, can’t love herself. And if she can’t love herself, she can’t love you.” He’d always thought it was kind of this funny mix of old and new world values; but that was his mother. Meanwhile, his cousins with their lusty Mediterranean bodies were forever battling their natural shape and curves, trying to fit into a society that wanted women to be as small and quiet as possible. He loved them for their big personalities, their passions, and their full bodies. They were some of the most beautiful women he knew.
He waited until Lydia was inside the door and then he pulled out into traffic.
He took the phone from his pocket and dialed. He listened as the phone on the other end rang, praying he wouldn’t get voicemail.
“Hello,” purred a warm female voice.
“Katrina,” he said, and the taste of her name on his tongue aroused him.
“Is that you, Mateo?” She sounded breathlessly glad to hear from him. But that was all part of the show, wasn’t it?
“Are you busy?” he asked.
“Never too busy for you,” she said softly. “When can I expect you?”
What did he want?” asked Jeffrey as she walked back into her office. He was sitting on her couch, sifting through articles Lily had written in the last year pulled from LexisNexis. He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. They’d been reading for hours. They weren’t sure what they were looking for exactly. They just wanted to know where Lily’s head had been at before her brother had died. Lydia sat back down beside him and he dropped his arm around her shoulder. She rested against his body.
“He wanted to give me this,” she said holding up the manila folder.
“What is it?”
“Apparently, the woman who greeted Lily at the bank the day she closed her accounts noticed a black SUV waiting outside for her. She said that Lily seemed concerned about it, kept looking behind her at the vehicle. The woman got a partial plate. These are the results of the search he did.”
“Anything interesting?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, opening the folder and settling in. She flipped through the pages, reading the listings of the twenty-eight drivers who owned black SUVs.
“It’s a pretty straight and narrow crew,” said Lydia after a second, her eyes still on the file. “No criminal records, no DUIs, no warrants. A couple of parking tickets-” She stopped talking abruptly and held up one of the driver’s license photos Detective Stenopolis had printed.
“What is it?”
The woman in the photo had short-cropped black hair and a full face. It was a black-and-white photograph so Lydia couldn’t determine the color of her eyes, but they looked dark. Something about the expression on her face jolted Lydia. She got up quickly and went over to her bag and sifted out the photograph she’d taken from Lily’s apartment.
She sat back down and held the photograph up next to the printout and compared the two.
“It’s the same person,” said Jeffrey, staring over her shoulder.
“Are you sure?” she said. The printout was poor quality and the light in the office was low.
“Yeah, look at the cheekbones, the shape of her eyes. She was younger and heavier when the driver’s license photo was taken, but look at the nose. It’s definitely the same woman.”
Lydia examined the features of her face and saw that he was right. The license photo was taken nearly two years earlier. Either she’d altered her appearance since then for some purpose or she was just one of those people who constantly wanted a new look.
“Jasmine said that Lily and Mickey knew her as Mariah.”
“Well, the DMV knows her as Michele LaForge.”
“This address is in Riverdale,” she said, turning her eyes to him.
He looked at her a minute, and she waited for him to say something. She saw a kind of resignation in his eyes and she knew what he was thinking. After a year of relative peace following a period of terrible fear and chaos, their quiet life was about to get a shake-up again. They both knew it was inevitable; it was what they did. It was how they lived. And small, or maybe not so small, parts of each of them wouldn’t have it any other way. He put a hand to her face and kissed her lightly on the mouth.
“We’ll go up there in the morning,” he said.
“Jeffrey, what if-,” she said, letting the sentence trail. There was a parade of what ifs in her mind; their march would keep her up all night.
He nodded solemnly. She didn’t have to tell him what she was thinking.
