The Smart One (10 page)

The next day, per Kenny’s instructions, I made a photocopy of the letter Joey had found and drove to Clare’s house with the original. We had arranged to go to the police station together to turn it over to the detectives.

“I called Joey two more times,” she said as she got into my car. “I left messages saying she should meet us here if she wants to come along.”

“Should we wait a few minutes for her?” I asked.

Clare bit her cuticle. “She’s been missing for more than a day.”

“She’s been
incommunicado
for more than a day,” I corrected.

“You’re not worried?”

Until that moment, I’d been more focused on Joey’s relationship with Kenny than whether or not she could be off getting high somewhere. In the past, though, any time Joey disappeared it always meant the same thing, and I had to consider whether she might have fallen off the wagon.

The last time she vanished into the void was the worst. Just before she went missing, we had a fortieth-anniversary celebration for Mom and Dad at a fancy Long Island steakhouse.
Everyone was there—Clare and her family, Grandma Elsie, and me, with a date I’d just as soon forget. After waiting for Joey for an hour, we stopped stalling and placed our orders. She finally showed up when we were about halfway through our entrees. Dad was the first one who spotted her coming into the restaurant. I know because he faced the door and was in the middle of shoveling a forkful of creamed spinach into his mouth when his complexion went blood red. I turned around and saw Joey, looking like she’d risen from the dead and hadn’t bothered changing her clothes. She was junkie-thin, her eyes hollow and dull. An oversized green sweatshirt, stained down the middle, threatened to devour her. Joey’s drugs of choice were crack cocaine and alcohol, and when she swaggered like this, I knew she was high on the latter.

“Joey,” my father said.

“You couldn’t fucking wait for me?” she asked.

I glanced at Grandma Elsie who seemed utterly confused. I looked back at Dad, whose blood pressure was so high I worried the top of his head would blow off.

“There’s no reason to use language like that, Joanna,” my mother said.

“I want a steak,” Joey said.

No one spoke. I think we were all waiting for my father to make the decision. Finally he said, “Sit down, then,” and she did.

The waitress tried to hand Joey a menu but she waved it away. “Just bring me a porterhouse and a shot of tequila,” she said. I doubted she would even eat a bite. The rest of us tried to continue chatting as if we could save the party if we just pretended nothing was wrong. Joey didn’t speak again until we were placing dessert orders.

“What would you like, honey?” the waitress said to her.

“Another tequila,” she said.

“No more alcohol,” my father said.

My sister put her hands on the table as if she was about to stand and make a scene, but she changed her mind. “Okay,” she said. “No more alcohol. Just give me money.”

Grandma Elsie opened her purse and took out a ten-dollar bill.

“Don’t,” my father said.

Joey put her hands back on the table and stood, clearly deciding the time was right for her scene. She faced my father. “Give me
money
.”

“How much do you need,” Grandma Elsie said, holding up the bill.

“Two thousand,” Joey answered, staring straight at my father. “I need two thousand dollars.”

He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Get yourself into rehab and I’ll give you all the money you need.”

Joey waved his comment away. “Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck all of you. Except you, Grandma.” She kissed the top of Grandma Elsie’s head, snatched the ten-dollar bill from her hand, and headed for the door.

“I hope you’re not getting behind the wheel of a car!” my father said, rising.

I’m not proud of this, but at the time I thought,
Let her go. Let her get herself killed so we won’t have to deal with this anymore. We’ll all be better off.

As the weeks went by and no one heard from her, the thought that she might really be dead sent me into an emotional tailspin. I felt guilty for hoping she would die, but at the same time a part of me wondered if the best outcome I could hope for was a quick death. I just couldn’t imagine Joey getting herself sober again.

Then, over a month later the phone rang after midnight, waking me from a deep sleep.
She’s dead, I thought. She’s
dead.
And it was as if the earth had opened and I was falling into a dark hole. My baby sister. I wanted to hold her and tell her I loved her.

But it was my dad on the phone. Joey, he told me, was okay. She had called him from the hospital where Tyrone, whom we all knew, was pronounced DOA. Joey had at last agreed to check herself into a treatment program.

And now she was missing again. I felt the familiar mix of anger and worry stir in my belly.

“Should we drop by her place?” I asked. For the past several months (with some financial help from our father) she’d been renting part of a small house near the Sound.

“I’ll call her one more time.” Clare reached into her purse for her cell phone.

“Wait a second,” I said, looking into my rearview mirror. “Is that her?”

Clare and I both turned around and peered at the motorcycle approaching. We couldn’t make out who the driver was, of course, but you don’t see too many bikers in Clare’s neighborhood, let alone yellow-helmeted ones. So we were pretty certain who it was. Sure enough, it came to a stop behind my car.

I opened my window. “Where’ve you been?” I said, when Joey pulled off her helmet.

“You know, the usual. Shooting up, turning tricks.”

“Funny.”

“I’ve been calling and calling you,” Clare said as Joey got into the backseat.

“I got your messages. That’s why I’m here.”

“You can’t disappear like that,” Clare said. “We get worried.”

“You have to have a little faith in me.”

Clare gave me a look and I was glad to see there was anger
in it. It made me feel better to know I wasn’t the only one who was pissed off.

“Joey,” I began, wanting to tell her that saying we should have faith was stupid and dismissive and insensitive of all the suffering she’d caused. Instead I said, “We need to talk about the letter,” and went on to explain that we shouldn’t tell the police my suspicions about the handwriting.

“Why not?” Joey asked.

I pulled away from the curb. “Because they might ask if we have any samples of Lydia’s handwriting to compare it to and I don’t want to tell them about the shoebox. At least not until we find it and Kenny can clean his old drugs out of it.”

“He kept his drugs in a shoebox?” Joey said. “What a rookie.”

The parking situation at the Nassau County Police Headquarters in Mineola was so bad I considered turning around and leaving. I never would have imagined crime was such a popular industry on Long Island. Besides the white-collar offenses our stockbrokers became famous for in the nineties—and our few notorious cases, like the Joey Buttafuoco-Amy Fisher mess—I thought it was a pretty quiet region. Criminals, I understood, didn’t like to commute, and tended to limit their nefarious activities to the five boroughs. Ask anyone who’s suffered the Long Island Expressway at rush hour and they’ll tell you it takes patience of biblical proportions to make it past exit 39. If ancient kingdoms had had expressways instead of moats, they wouldn’t have needed canons and armor.

By the time I found a parking space we were four lots and nearly a half mile away from the building.

“Remember,” I said, as we trekked across hot asphalt. “We don’t know anything about the handwriting and we certainly don’t know anything about any shoebox.”

“What shoebox?” Joey said.

Inside, a sergeant at the front desk took our names and called upstairs. A few minutes later, Detective Miller came to get us.

“Hi, Detective!” Joey said, arching her back.

“This way ladies.” He led us to an elevator, and the farther away we got from the front door, the cooler the building felt.

“What’s your first name, anyway?” Joey said to him as we approached the interview room.

He pushed the door open for us. “Sheldon. Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Sheldon!” Joey squealed as the door shut behind him. “I
told
you he was Jewish.”

The room was windowless, with a mirror along one wall and a long rectangular metal table in the middle. A fluorescent fixture overhead cast a sickly light.

“I can’t get used to religion being a criterion for you, Joey,” I said as I sat.

“You had very different standards before,” Clare added.

“What standards?” I said. “Personal
hygiene
wasn’t even an issue. Remember Phil?”

Clare shuddered. “Mom sprayed Lysol after he left the room.”

Joey approached the mirror and cleaned the melting mascara from under her eyes with a fingertip. “Isn’t he dreamy?” she said.

Clare looked horrified. “Phil?”

Joey tsked. “No,
Sheldon
.”

I’m not sure I would have described Miller as dreamy, but he was good-looking enough, with dark, intelligent eyes and an appealing smile. His black-brown hair receded from his forehead enough to add a little wisdom to his otherwise boyish face.

Joey flipped her hair over her head and scrunched it. Then,
to my horror, she stuck her hand inside her tank top to lift her boobs for maximum cleavage.

“Joey,” I whispered. “For heaven’s sake—that’s a one-way mirror!”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well, if they’re watching, I may as well give them something to see.”

She stood up and grabbed her shirt from the bottom.

“No!” I yelled, but she just laughed as she lifted her shirt and flashed whoever might be on the other side of the glass.

“Sit down!” Clare said, covering her face in embarrassment.

“Hey, I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”

“You’re trying to get Miller’s attention,” Clare said.

“So what if I am?”

“There’s a right way and a wrong way,” Clare said.

I pulled my chair toward the table. “You girls realize they can probably hear every word we’re saying?”

“I have nothing to hide,” Joey said.

I let out a snort. “Clearly!”

We were all laughing when the door opened and Miller entered with another officer.

“Ladies, this is Detective Dunn,” he said.

“Were you watching us from the other side of the glass?” Joey asked, still smiling.

“Should I have been?”

“Depends what you like to see…
Sheldon
.”

Dunn snickered. Miller retained his composure, which I suspected was his way of flirting with Joey. He seemed pretty damned sharp and probably knew exactly how to play her. His aloofness seemed to be working like an aphrodisiac on my little sister. Not that her libido needed any help, but still. I started to get a feeling about these two.

“Can I get you ladies a cup of coffee?” Dunn asked.

We politely declined, and the detectives sat down at the table opposite us. My mood shifted right back to somber.

“I understand you have something to show us,” Miller said.

“I was trying to,” Joey answered with a grin. “But you weren’t watching.”

I was growing impatient. “Enough already,” I said. “This is serious.” I took the wrinkled blue letter out of my purse, flattened it on the table, and pushed it across to Miller.

He took a pencil from his pocket and dragged the letter to him with the eraser end. “What is this?”

I looked at my hands, feeling stupid for not having had the sense to keep my fingerprints off it.

“I found it in Renee Waxman’s bureau drawer,” Joey said. “Stuffed inside a tampon box.”

Detective Dunn, who had puffy cheeks and looked like an African American version of actor Paul Giamatti, tilted his head to the side so he could get a look at the letter. “Why were you looking through her drawers?” he asked Joey.

“It was just after we got the industrial drum out from under the house,” she explained. “We were all covered with mud and I was going to borrow something to wear.”

“And you thought you’d find something to wear inside a tampon box?”

“I was just being nosy,” Joey said. “Mrs. Waxman is too old to need tampons, so I thought she might be hiding something in there, and I was right.”

“She’d make a good detective,” Dunn said to Miller.

Joey cocked her head cutely. “I’m good at a lot of things.”

Detective Miller kept a serious expression and read the letter without touching it. Then he pushed it to his partner with the pencil eraser. After Dunn read it, they exchanged the subtlest of looks.

“Why didn’t you turn this in earlier?” Miller asked.

“We didn’t think of it,” I said.

I held my breath, waiting to see if they accepted the explanation.

“Why do you think Renee Waxman saved this letter?” Miller said. I exhaled. It seemed like he was directing his question to Joey, and she answered.

“My guess? She probably found it somewhere and never even told him she had it. She might have been waiting for the courage to confront him about it.”

“That’s a long time to wait,” Miller said.

“Mrs. Waxman was always very timid,” Clare said.

Dunn pushed the letter back to Miller, who used the pencil to move it into a plastic bag.

“Is Sam Waxman a suspect?” Joey said.

“We’ll ask the questions,” Miller said.

Dunn nodded and got right down to business, asking me when I first noticed the industrial drum under the house and if it had ever been moved. He also wanted to know why we had brought it to the curb, and I told him all about the Goodwins and how I was helping to take care of the selling the house. He took notes, although I was sure they had already obtained this information from my sisters and Kenny. Then he asked a question that seemed out of left field.

“What do you know about Sam Waxman’s manufacturing business?”

My sisters and I looked at each other, surprised.

“He made plastic flowers,” I said, trying to remember what I knew.

“He did,” Clare corroborated. “And those foam blocks they stick them in? He made those too.”