The Girl in Times Square

Detective O’Malley invited her to sit down (she did) and asked her if she wanted something to drink (she said no, though she did). He began without waiting. Drumming a pencil next to his notebook on top of the table, he put up his feet on the chair next to him. “Okay, tell me what you know.”

“Well, nothing.” Lily nearly stammered. What kind of a question was that? “About what?”

“About where Amy is.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Why aren’t you concerned? Her mother is out of her mind with worry. Amy didn’t go to her college graduation. You—didn’t attend either, I take it?”

“Um—no.” She wasn’t going to be telling a stranger, was she, why she had not attended. But the detective knew she was in Hawaii, he knew she couldn’t have attended. Her eyes narrowed at him. His eyes widened in response. They were extremely blue. They seemed to know things, understand things without her opening her mouth. Then why were they staring back at her, expecting an answer?

“Why not?” he asked.

Oh, here we go. “Unlike Amy, I’m not officially graduated.” Lily cleared her throat. “I have some credits still to take.”

“You’re not a senior?”

“Yes. Just not a”—she lowered her gaze to study the complexities in the grain of the wooden table—“a graduating senior.”

“I see.”

She wasn’t looking at him so she couldn’t tell if he saw. Oh, she bet he understood everything. He just wanted to watch her squirm.

“How old are you, Miss Quinn?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Did you two start college late? Amy is also twenty-four.”

“I didn’t start late, I just … kept going.”

He was observing her. “For six years?”

“For six years, yes.”

“And still not graduated?”

“Not quite.”

“I see.” He switched subjects then, as if they were file folders lying on his desk. “So—you didn’t go to your graduation, because you weren’t graduating. Fair enough. But Amy didn’t go either, and she was graduating.”

“Hmm.” That was surprising. Lily had no answer to it.

“Were you and Amy close?”

“We were, yes. Are I mean. Are.” She paused and decided to take the direct approach. “You’re confusing me.”

“Not deliberately, Miss Quinn. So what were you doing in Hawaii?”

“Sunbathing looks like,” said Harkman from behind her.

Detective O’Malley didn’t say anything, but in between the blinks of his eyes, behind his black-rimmed glasses, his flicker of an expression made Lily blush, almost as if … he could see her sunsoaked brown nipples.

Pulling the cardigan closed, she looked down at the table and bit her lip. “My parents. I went to visit my mother.”

“You left when?”

“On the Thursday morning, very early. My flight was at eight. I took a cab to JFK at six in the morning.”

“Was Amy up?”

“No.”

“Was Amy home?”

“I think so. I didn’t check her room, if that’s what you mean.”

“So she could’ve not been home?”

“She could’ve not been, but—”

“So the last time you actually saw her would be …”

“Wednesday night, May 12.”

“Had time to recall some dates since our phone call?”

Lily lifted her gaze. Detective O’Malley’s eyes stared at her unflinchingly from his clean-shaven, calm, angular face, and she suddenly got the feeling that the firm and casual handshake was a ruse, was an affect, that she should be very careful with the things she said to this detective because he might remember every syllable.

“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Initially I had been taken aback by your phone call.”

“That’s understandable. Did she seem normal to you that Wednesday?”

“Yes. She seemed the same as always.”

“Which is how?”

“I don’t know. Normal.” How did one describe a normal evening with Amy? Lily became flummoxed. “She was her usual self. We drank a little, talked a little.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. Everything. Movies. Finals. Really, just … regular girl things.”

“Boyfriends?”

“Mmm.” Lily didn’t want to tell this detective about her pathetic love life, and since that’s all the boyfriends they talked about, she couldn’t tell the detective anything. “We talked about our mothers.”

Detective Harkman stood behind Lily and every once in a while, Detective O’Malley would glance at him for a silent exchange and then look back at her. Now was one of those times.

“Then you left …”

“And I haven’t heard from Amy since.”

“You never called to tell her how you were getting on in Maui?”

“I did, a couple of times, I left messages on the machine, but she never called me back.”

“How many times would you say you called her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe three?”

“Three?”

“Around three.”

“So possibly two, possibly four?”

“Possibly.” Lily lowered her head. She didn’t know what he wanted from her.

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No. I can’t afford one. I don’t know why she doesn’t have one.”

“So you called a few times, she didn’t call back, and you gave up?”

“I didn’t give up. I was going to call again. I was even thinking of calling at her mother’s house.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t remember the number.”

“Did she tell you of her plans to visit her mother the weekend you flew to Hawaii?”

“I don’t remember her telling me anything like that, no. Did she go visit her mother that weekend?”

“No,” said the detective. “What time did you call her?”

“In the evenings, I think.”

“Your evenings?”

“What? Yes. Yes, my evenings. Midnight Hawaii time. Before I went to bed, I’d call.”

O’Malley paused before he said, “Hawaii is six hours behind New York.”

Lily paused, too. “Yes.”

“So your midnight would be six in the morning New York time?”

“Yes.” Lily coughed. “I guess I should have been more considerate.”

“Maybe,” O’Malley said non-committally. “What I’m really interested in, though, is Amy not picking up the phone at six in the morning.”

“She could have been out.”

“Out where?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? Perhaps she was sleeping.”

“Perhaps she could have called you back, Miss Quinn. Would you like to know how many times the caller ID showed your Hawaiian phone number on the display? Twenty-seven. Morning, noon and night is when you called her. The answering machine in your apartment had nine messages from you to Amy. The first one was on Sunday, May 16, the last one was after you and I spoke, on June third.”

Lily, flustered and confounded, sat silently. Was she caught in a lie? She did call a few times. And she did leave some messages. But nine? She recalled some of those messages. “Ames, ohmigod!!! I can’t take another day. This mother of mine, call me, call me back, call me.” “Ames, how long have I been here, it feels like five years, and I’m the one who is sixty. Call me to tell me I’m still young.” “Amy, where in hell are you? I need you. Call me.” “I’m going home, home, home, I can’t take another minute. My dad is not here, just me and my crazy mom. If I don’t talk to you I’ll turn into her.” “Amy, in case you’ve forgotten, this is your roommate and best friend Lily Quinn. That’s L-I-L-Y Q-U-I-N-N.”

She was profoundly embarrassed. Strangers, police officers, detectives, these two men, this grown-up man listening to her sophomoric jabberings, her tumult and frustration on an answering machine!

Harkman panted behind her, sneezed once, she hoped it wasn’t on her. Detective O’Malley at last said, as if speaking directly to her humiliations, “Okay, let’s move on.”

Yes, let’s. But Lily didn’t know what to say. Harkman’s gaze prickled the back of her neck. She felt intensely uncomfortable. O’Malley’s hands were pressed together at the fingertips, making the shape of a teepee as he continued to study her. Lily couldn’t take it anymore, she looked away from him and down at her own twitching hands and noticed that a small cut near her knuckle was oozing blood.

“Miss Quinn, are you bleeding? Chris, can you please get this young lady a tissue. Or would you prefer a first-aid kit? When did you cut yourself?”

Lily didn’t want to be evasive, considering the amount of fresh blood that was coming out of an old wound, but she couldn’t tell him when. “It’s an old thing,” she muttered. “It’s nothing.”

Harkman came back with cotton wool and a bandage. Lily dabbed at the cut, feeling ridiculous.

O’Malley said, “You might want to get that checked out.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Well, Miss Quinn, it may seem fine to you, this ability to bleed spontaneously, but you weren’t bleeding when you first came in here, and the bright color of your blood tells me you may be anemic.”

“Yes, I’ve always been a little anemic.” She emitted a throaty laugh. “Never could donate blood.”

He wrote something down in his notebook, not paying attention to her. “I just have a couple more questions, if you think you’re all right to go on.”

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me, did Amy have any enemies?”

“Enemies? We’re college girls!”

“The answer is no then? You can just reply in the negative.”

“No.” In the smallest voice.

“What about a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Was she seeing anyone at all? Casually?”

Lily said, “What kind of a question is that?”

O’Malley stopped looking into his notebook and looked up at her. “I’m not interested in passing judgment. Now was she or wasn’t she?”

“Well, she’s single, so … yes.”

“Did she ever stay overnight somewhere else?”

“Once in a while.”

“How often?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know that either.”

O’Malley exchanged another look with Harkman. What, Lily wanted to exclaim, what are you looking at each other for? What am I not telling you? She glanced back at Harkman herself. She started to actively dislike his eyes, which she realized were like two small, round, ugly drill holes. They were lost on his big, round, double-chinned face, but boy did they manage to bore into the back of her friggin’ head.

“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.

4

Wallets on Dressers

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.”

5

Spencer Patrick O’Malley

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?