Last Night Read online

  Crisp’s defenses rise to orange alert: alone with a white girl in the dark in what feels like and looks like and smells like and sounds like and is a shuttered-for-the-night semirevived industrial jetty. Alone here, their footsteps echo. There are no streetlights in this voracious darkness. The smell of ocean, fishy and dank; the rhythmic splashing against an unseen bearing wall; the feeling of slipping away from solid ground. And all of it, all of it colludes to inform him that he’s easy prey. As simple as that. She could be the one with a gun to his head, but he would be the one arrested. He knows this in his bones.

  “I dunno,” he mumbles.

  Glynnie laughs. “It’s okay, really. JJ’s cool.”

  “But this place.”

  Her laugh has the strange effect of both easing his doubts and also alarming him. It’s not as if he doesn’t know her world; he lives half in it, after all. But ever since the hormones hit, the universe has reacted to him as someone he almost doesn’t know himself. “Know your enemy and know yourself,” said Sun Tzu, “and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” (History of Eastern Philosophical Thought, junior-senior advanced placement.) So if he doesn’t know himself, which he doesn’t, not really, won’t his battles inevitably end in disaster? Is that what the Chinese philosopher was telling him? One thing Crisp knows for sure is that life as a young man who is half black and half white is a daily battle. Maybe the real question needs to be: What is the battle predicated on, exactly? He knew when he handed in his final paper that he hadn’t explored the idea deeply enough, that despite the A plus he’d failed the subject, because the truth is he doesn’t understand any of this shit. Which is what he’s thinking as he denies his intuitive urge to flee and continues to walk with Glynnie alongside the low brick building that hulks beside the open mouth of water.

  Glynnie stops at an iron gate, uses her foot to push aside a loose vertical bar, presses herself through the narrow opening. A hundred feet ahead, she comes to a chain-link fence. When she looks around for Crisp she finds him still at the gate, hesitating, and wonders what his problem is, exactly.

  Crisp watches as Glynnie slips through a tear in a raggedy fence. Wondering where she gets her confidence and why he feels so powerfully drawn by it—toggling between She’s fun so relax, just go with it and She’s reckless, just go home—he squeezes himself through the narrow opening in the broken gate. Then he contorts himself through a rupture in the chain link and, without consciously deciding anything, joins her on the other side. He has just begun to contemplate the mutability of free will when she says, “Come on,” and he follows her around to the end of the building.

  Here all pretense of restoration vanishes: brick crumbling, paint flaking over rust. Surrounded now on three sides by water, civilization reduced to distant twinkling shorelines. At an arched iron door flecked with age-old residue of black paint, they come to a stop.

  Glynnie bends down to pick up a stone and throws it at a second-floor iron shutter, and repeats twice—their prearranged signal. She hardly ever misses anymore and thinks of her (former) gym teacher Mr. C.: Wish you could see me now.

  The shutter creaks open to reveal a window without glass and the black face of a boy. Crisp does a double take; this dealer, this JJ, is nothing but a child.

  “Yo,” Glynnie calls up to the window. “Okay if we come up?”

  JJ points to the door.

  Glynnie moves toward the entrance but Crisp just stands there. She whispers, “Coming?”

  “I dunno,” he whispers back.

  “Seriously?”

  The way her dimples pinch reminds him of a girl from ninth grade, the one who gave him a quick flat “No thanks” when he asked her to “hang out some day.” But he heard her loud and clear: No thanks, I don’t hang out with nerds. There it is again on Glynnie’s face—the look that tells him, No matter how smart you are—in fact, because you’re so smart—I can’t stand being near you. It’s enough to make Crisp forget his better judgment and tell himself to loosen up and Don’t be so uptight and Another thing I can learn this summer is how to have some fun. And then, the final hammerblow to his wobbly nail of uncertainty: I’m finally here, in Red Hook, where my father grew up.

  He follows her.

  Glynnie wishes he’d chill: Crisp’s nervous energy is making her nervous. They’re just going to score a little weed. She pushes hard on the left half of the double doors and it screams open the way it always does into a dust-caked entryway with a staircase leading to the second floor of some old factory. Not liking the eerie vibe, she picks up her pace.

  As soon as they step into the musty entrance hall, Crisp realizes that they’re inside an abandoned section of the Beard Street warehouses (he once mapped the entire Red Hook waterfront for an eighth grade social studies project on nineteenth-century urban economies). Originally it was a storehouse for southern cotton working its way north through the exchanges and onward to the upstate and New England mills, Mr. William Beard having built his Red Hook Stores warehouse and his Erie Basin to get to it and also having built a false narrative of how an Irish immigrant achieved the American dream when the real story is how he got rich off a corrupt economic partnership between American slavery and northern ingenuity.

  Trailing Glynnie up the stairs, Crisp recalls something else: the combustibility of cotton and constant fires in the warehouses leading to the next industry Beard’s enterprise spawned—women and children picking good cotton from the chars. The fruits of slavery clinging to acceptable cruelty in a march toward the ready-to-wear cotton industry. And here he is, almost two centuries later, following a restless, compelling girl to meet up with another kid doing business in the storehouse, ghostly with cotton fibers that Crisp can practically feel threading themselves into his lungs’ bronchi with every breath. Breathing in history—living history, a teacher once called it. Which one? He can’t remember if it was Amy or Pietr. Because history dies and lives in the same breath, he thinks, feels, his lungs filling with spectral cotton in the echo chamber of his and Glynnie’s steps along a hallway until they come to a doorless entry that leads into an enormous loftlike room.

  In the far right corner of that room, the boy has set up camp. A sleeping bag in disarray. A spate of cast-off furniture: rickety table, single chair, small shelf stacked with textbooks. One of those plaid Chinese bags filled with something soft and bulgy—clothes is what Crisp guesses, interpreting the scene for what it is: a homeless kid running drugs out of his squat. Keeping up, getting by.

  A flashlight turns on to encase the visitors in a cone of transparency, and there they stand, being eyed by a boy three whiskers into puberty. Twelve years old, Crisp guesses, maybe thirteen. In the flood of light, a framed photo atop the shelf shows a younger version of the boy sandwiched between smiling parents, everyone in their Sunday best for the portrait—a memory of love that saddens Crisp so abruptly it takes him aback. At home, his own family must be wondering where he is by now.

  Glynnie throws up her arms in a victorious embrace of the spotlight, hollers “Janjak of the Jungle, we have arrived!,” and bows at the waist.

  “Who’s we?” says a voice that cracks between high and low.

  Glynnie says, “This my homey—”

  Crisp cringes. Please. No.

  “—Crisp Crespo, the Crisco King of Coney, yo.”

  The boy, JJ, Janjak, blue jeans sagging over tighty-whities that look as though they need a wash, approaches with his light still on them, the beam narrowing until he’s so close its source forms a neat bright target on Crisp’s stomach. “Your name’s what?” JJ asks.

  “Titus Crespo,” he answers. “Everyone calls me Crisp.”

  Up close, JJ has a long oval head and a pointed chin. Thick arched eyebrows. A broad unfinished nose. Small cockleshell ears. A mouth that dips naturally into a smile. Tight curled lashes. His skin looks moist and babyish, his hair rakish and in need of a trim. The air between them smells funky, and Crisp wonders where the kid brushes his teeth in t
his hellhole or if he does. What happened to the family in that photo?

  JJ looks at Glynnie. “I told you don’t bring people.”

  Glynnie inwardly cringes, realizing that he’d meant the directive with more seriousness than she’d received it, that for him this probably—no, definitely—isn’t a game. She really is an idiot and this only proves it. She regrets her (now) obvious bad judgment, but it’s too late.

  “Crisp is cool,” she assures JJ. “You don’t have to worry about him.”

  The flashlight glares right at Crisp and his eyes burn. “Turn off that light, unless you’re trying to attract attention from outside.”

  The boy turns it off.

  “Hey JJ, check it out.” Hoping to ease the awkward moment, Glynnie hands him her headphones.

  “Wireless Beats?” JJ turns them over, inspects them. “Word.”

  “Try ’em.”

  He puts them on.

  She scrolls to an Odd Future song, thinking he’ll like it, and taps Play. But he just stands there, unresponsive. Assuming the volume’s too low, she raises it.

  “Whoa!” JJ yanks off both ears at once. Loud music spills out and echoes in search of a stopping place.

  Crisp wishes she’d turn down the noise on that tinny crap. Can’t she do better than that for this poor homeless kid? A little Coltrane to ease his soul would be more like it.

  “Sorry.” Glynnie lowers the volume as JJ puts the headphones back on, realizing that this is how he listens to music, still as a statue, not making a wave in either time or space. And that, she thinks, is just so sad. After a minute he tries to hand back the Beats but she tells him, “They’re yours,” surprising even herself.

  “Nah.” JJ holds out the headphones. “I can’t work on barter. Just cash.”

  “I’m giving you cash for the weed. That’s a gift.”

  “No joke?”

  “Nope.” Proud of herself now. Seeing how much it means to him. Knowing she can buy herself another set exactly the same and her parents will never be the wiser.

  “Yeah, well, that’s nice. I mean, thanks. But—” He shows them his old flip phone. “—can’t exactly use them with this.”

  “We’ll figure that out,” she promises.

  JJ eyes Crisp. “So, how am I supposed to know this guy isn’t a snitch?”

  “Trust me: Crisco King just spent the night in jail. He’s definitely not a snitch.”

  “For real?” JJ asks.

  Crisp answers, “Unfortunately.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Actually it wasn’t at all,” Crisp says. “Going to jail is not cool.”

  JJ hangs the Beats around his neck and looks at Glynnie. “How much you want this time?”

  She digs into her front pocket and pulls out a ten-dollar bill. “Dime.”

  JJ crosses the space away from his living quarters and vanishes into a shadow. Crisp listens to the boy rustling through something, and watches as he materializes to hand Glynnie a tiny baggie containing a little fist of bud in exchange for the bill. She retrieves a crushed pack of rolling papers from her back pocket, plunks cross-legged on the floor, and proceeds to roll a joint.

  Only Crisp sees, with a whoop of panic that feels like drowning, when JJ pulls a gun from the back of his sagging waistband.

  8

  Friday

  Saki climbs the stoop of the Dreyfus brownstone and rings the bell. She holds her wallet flapped open so the mother, Mags O’Leary-Dreyfus, will immediately know who she is; given that the daughter is still missing, time could prove crucial. She adjusts her sunglasses and waits.

  The door swings open and a blonde woman in a tight designer dress and bare feet looks at the ID and starts talking in the agitated voice from the phone. “You’re the detective! Thank God you’re here! Please, please, come in.”

  Saki follows her into a spacious front hall with a strong floral scent, presumably from the fresh bouquet on the entry table. There’s an orderliness to the place, a hush that seems to amplify the squeaking of Saki’s shoes as she crosses the polished wood floor into the living room.

  Ms. O’Leary-Dreyfus gestures for Saki to sit down on one of the matching armchairs, then sits opposite on the couch. A framed family portrait is on the glass side table: a handsome father in a suit jacket and open collar; the stylish mother with hands clasped over pressed-together knees; a boy of about four, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt; and a blonde girl, pressing out a smile glittery with braces, in a dress and patent-leather flats—Glynnie, presumably, at around the age of twelve.

  Saki begins. “What time did your daughter leave the house last night?”

  “Sometime before seven forty-nine, I guess, because that’s when she posted an Instagram photo with her and a…some guy. They were on Court Street; I recognized the store they were in front of.”

  “Friend of hers? The guy.”

  “Could be, but I really don’t know. He looks young, maybe late teens or early twenties. African American. Long—well, tall—hair.”

  Saki makes a note, and explains to the mother, “We can trace where she was when she posted the photo. She could have taken it another time and posted it while she was at home.”

  “I thought she was home. It’s not unusual for her to avoid us, to not come down for dinner, to just stay upstairs in her rooms. We didn’t think anything of it.”

  “I take it you didn’t find her to say good night.”

  “She hates it when we do that. So we don’t.”

  “You’re sure she didn’t come back in and then go out again early in the morning?”

  “Her bed’s still made. The housekeeper was here yesterday and Glynnie never makes her own bed. And she was definitely out at twelve twenty-three in the morning because the bank shows she withdrew three hundred dollars.”

  “Bank ATM or store?”

  “Chase. The branch on Hamilton Avenue, on the border of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.”

  Saki makes another note, then says, “Tell me about your daughter.”

  “She’s a typical teenager, I guess.” Mags O’Leary-Dreyfus rolls her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head briskly as if trying to discharge a demon from her thoughts. Saki makes a mental note of that. “She’s not easy, but she’s got real potential. She graduated from high school last week, and to answer your next question, no, she was not a good student. And to answer your next question, no, she isn’t going to college next year. We’re working on that.”

  “Summer plans?”

  “Outward Bound.”

  “She happy about it?”

  The way the mother’s smile cracks hard on her face, the answer is clearly negative.

  “You’re sure she’s not at a friend’s place?” Saki asks. “The unidentified friend’s, maybe.”

  “I called everyone—that I’m aware of, I mean. For all I know…” The mother stops talking. “I guess she could be with him or some other friend she never mentioned. I mean that could be possible.”

  Saki explains, “Because your daughter is eighteen, Ms. O’Leary-Dreyfus—”

  “Mags, please.”

  “Mags, your daughter’s not a minor,” Saki continues. “She has the right to go where and do what she wants, which means—”

  “Exactly.” Mags sits forward suddenly, her eyes bright with anxiety. “That’s the problem.”

  “Yes, I understand, but legally we’re limited because of her major status.”

  “What?”

  “Status as a major, not a minor.”

  “Oh.” Mags delivers a stare that’s familiar to Saki—when someone starts to realize that she might be (and in fact is) somewhere on the spectrum. The mother clears her throat. “So what does this mean? Do I just sit here and wait?”

  “You don’t have to sit here. But we do have to wait a little longer before it’s reasonable to determine that Glynnie is missing not of her own volition.”

  “Will you please take off those sunglasses?”

 
“I apologize. I forgot I had them on.” She folds the glasses and tucks them into her collar. “When it comes to young adults, we often find that they return on their own. The rule of thumb is twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re saying wait until tonight to start worrying?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re telling me not to worry right now?”

  “Not actively. Not yet.”

  “But she’s my child. I am worried. How can I not worry?”

  “I understand,” Saki says in a tone she hopes expresses sympathy. “Let me worry for you,” she tries. “We also find that sometimes an investigator can get farther than parents can with the person’s friends.”

  “The person.” Mags throws up her hands. “Fine. I’ll make a list of all her friends that I know of. But I’m not going to the office today. I’m canceling all my appointments and waiting here for Glynnie because I am worried.”

  “Of course you’re worried.” Saki’s voice is toneless, probably sounds as if she doesn’t mean it, though she means it more than she can express. She hands the mother her card. “I’m going to get started right now finding your daughter. Here’s how you can reach me.”

  Mags proffers her own card. “What should I do now?”

  “Wait here in case she comes back. Keep your phone close.”

  Saki rises and walks a squeaky tempo back to the door. Mags follows. Standing at the top of the stoop, the detective struggles to hold eye contact but the intensity of the mother’s gaze makes it difficult.

  Averting her eyes, Saki says, “I promise to stay in close touch.” Family members always like to hear that, even though to her it seems like stating the obvious. She excuses herself and walks down the stoop. When the Dreyfuses’ front door closes, she exhales.

  Standing on the sidewalk, Saki takes out her phone and starts the search with two official requests: first, to the Information Technology Bureau for cellular location tracking on her subject, and second, assuming that Chase Bank’s Hamilton Avenue location has a security camera in place, as most do, to the magistrate for a warrant for last night’s footage around the time of Glynnie’s withdrawal.