Vanishing Girls (7 page)

I found the set of spare keys Chali had left in our bowl by the front door, in case she ever lost hers; the ring held keys for both her apartment and our house, with a small white feather attached with a string that made it easy to pick out of the mass of other keys. The day she’d asked to leave the keys with us was the day I’d understood how few friends she had in New York. She had come to this country to work, to support her family back home, not to socialize. It was a unique paradigm you saw a lot of in the city: immigrants scrimping and saving, plodding along, always looking to the future. I remembered feeling honored that Chali had trusted us as guardians of her keys; it was the moment I’d realized that she was not just working out as a babysitter, but that our relationship had deepened. I dropped the keys into my purse and headed out.

Chapter 7

I
stepped out of the R train station at Thirty-sixth Street and Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, into a blistering wind. Lifted my scarf, tugged down my hat, and pointed myself down the wide avenue in the direction of Thirty-third Street. It was a grim procession past a bodega, Laundromat, barbershop, funeral home, two bars, and on Chali’s corner a gas station. The utilitarianism of the neighborhood reflected what I imagined to be the flavor of the lives of the people who lived here: hardship, struggle, loneliness, unrelenting work. But the flicker of holiday lights strung around a few of the windows above the stores reminded me that there was always more to what met the eye. Where there were people there were stories, there was life. I thought of Chali and the complexity of the existence she had fled in India, how she had been a child bride to a much older man, how his death had impoverished her but in some ways also freed her. How she had left her beloved daughter behind to start a new life here. How despite the difficulty of that choice, she forged ahead, working steadily and with determination toward a brighter future for them both. You had to admire someone who could do what she did, and as I walked toward her building between Fourth and Fifth avenues, on a block lined with run-down clapboard and a few brick houses, I thought of how much I had come to like and trust and care about her. I wouldn’t have come all the way out here otherwise.

I stopped in front of her building: four stories without a front stoop, faced with a red and green checkerboard meant to evoke brick. Dug into my purse for her keys and looked for her name on the strip of four doorbells. Three other names were listed, and a fourth was blank, for the third floor. I pressed that bell. Waited. After a minute I pressed it again, and when again there was no response I let myself in with Chali’s key.

The building’s front hall was shabby from age but not dirty; someone was keeping it clean and trying, at least, to brighten it up with a vase of plastic flowers and an unframed poster of a Greek village scene. The ammonia smell of cleanser faded as I climbed to the third floor, where outside a single door sat a pair of black boots I recognized as Chali’s. One of the boots had fallen over. I knocked on the door, but at this point I didn’t expect an answer. I slid in the key but before I turned it, the door pushed open—it had been left unlocked.

“Chali?” I stepped partway inside a narrow living room whose bright pink walls were lined with white shelves packed with books. “It’s Karin! Are you here?”

It was so quiet. The feeling that drew me here, the feeling I’d tried to discount as kneejerk anxiety, grew heavier. Standing in Chali’s living room, amid the substance of her private life—the books of literature in English and Hindi, what looked like a manuscript of some kind, a small black notebook with
Addresses
embossed on the front, and countless photographs of Dathi, whom I recognized from a couple of photographs Chali had once shown me—a sensation of dread crackled through me.

I walked through the living room.

Colorful wooden beads hanging in a doorway clattered as I passed through them.

Her bedroom was small, with a white chenille bedspread covering a double mattress on the floor, and half a dozen bright pillows leaning against the wall. A large round painting of a vivid yellow water lily hung above the bed. Across the room, above an old wooden chest of drawers, hung a simple drawing of Jesus Christ. Beneath it, atop the dresser, sat a large framed photo of Dathi and an older woman, presumably Chali’s mother—steel-gray hair in a tight bun, wearing a skyblue sari—facing the bed, where Chali would be able to see it while she rested. Nothing in this room surprised me; this was Chali as I knew her: vibrant, familyoriented, devout. The jeans and sweater she’d worn on Monday were draped over the edge of the mattress; her socks were puddled on the floor. In the corner, near the room’s only window, a door stood ajar.

I crept forward and peered through the doorway. Saw the edge of a toilet. White bathroom tiles, scrubbed clean. A green bathmat.

“Chali?” I whispered. I knew she liked to take baths to relax; in fact, she’d mentioned that was what she was going to do Monday night when she got home. She could very well have been in the tub without hearing the bell, or my voice when I’d entered.

“Chali?”

I pushed open the door and stepped into the small bathroom. Beside the toilet was a narrow sink cabinet. A red plastic hairbrush trailing long strands of black hair lay on the edge of the sink. I moved aside to shift the door so I could see the bathtub, but what hit me first, as I took it all in, was the awful smell.

She had slipped down in the bath. Her face was submerged. Her knees, splayed open, jutted above the surface of the water, which was blackish as pungent wine.

And then I saw it: the handle of a knife protruding from the water in the range of where her chest would be. A familiar handle, much like the one I’d seen in the body of the still unidentified woman Sunday night—the hard-to-find Bowie knife that was the signature of the Working Girl Killer.

I backed out of the bathroom. Shaking. Numb. Lightheaded. Sat on the edge of the bed and tried to breathe. But couldn’t because it was true: the fears I had nursed like a genuine neurotic; it was true that something awful had happened to Chali. That she was dead. Like the others. I had come here to disprove that feeling, but instead . . .

Staring into my purse, looking for my cell phone, the prosaic objects of daily life seemed indistinguishable. I leaned into a shaft of sunlight angling in from the window until my brain finally recognized the shiny black edge of my phone. I pressed the M, Mac’s speed dial, and was so rattled to get his voice mail that all I knew was, whatever I said, it was incoherent. Next I pressed B for Billy. I should have called 911 but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I wasn’t
thinking
.

Chali was dead in the next room.

Submerged in her bath, into which her blood had drained for . . . how long? Since Monday night. Thirtysix hours lying cold and alone in her apartment, and no one had known. If I hadn’t come today, looking for her, how long would it have taken before the smell had crept through her bedroom, her living room, underneath the front door where it would have finally summoned her neighbors?

“Hey Karin,” Billy answered.

“He killed her.” My voice was a hollow rasp.

“Whoa—what’re you talking about?”

“
Him
. He was here.”

“Where are you?”

“At Chali’s. I came to find her.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

“I should call 911—”

“I’ll call. You get out of there, Karin.
Now
.”

Moving through Chali’s bedroom was like passing through water: weightless and difficult. The strands of beads crashed behind me like a breaking wave and I stood in her living room, drowning in the certainty of what I had feared.
Chali
. The Working Girl Killer had veered off his own path, bypassed his own logic, murdered someone who was not supposed to have been one of his victims . . . and this time, he had taken the life of someone I knew and cared about . . . drawn me into this now . . . and none of it made sense.

Why?

Why Chali?

And why now?

I found myself standing near a photo of Dathi. I knew better than to touch it—this was a crime scene now—so I leaned in and examined the girl’s face. She had her mother’s big, dark eyes. And her mother’s fine, sloping nose. And her mother’s clever grin, as if on the verge of telling a joke. But the shape of her face was someone else’s; it was wider; the face of the man whom Chali told me had beaten her throughout her teenage pregnancy. Dathi had the shape of her father’s face. But I would have bet, looking at the smiling eyes that were just like Chali’s, that she had her mother’s heart. I leaned closer. Yes: Chali had been lucky: she had had a daughter. But her daughter was not so lucky, as she was now motherless.

How would she take the news? That she was an orphan now, living with an elderly grandmother who couldn’t afford to keep her without the money Chali sent home. The money was the easy part; I could do that myself, and I would. But what about the rest of it? Who would tell these people they had lost someone they loved? Who would have the courage to tell them how it had happened?

The buzzer startled me. My gaze jerked off the photograph and toward the open apartment door. The buzzer rang again and I heard someone rattle the front door downstairs. There was an old intercom unit on the wall by the door. I pressed the button.

“Hello?”

“Police.”

I buzzed them in and then it began: a storm of footsteps up two flights of stairs.

The scene would be documented; Chali’s body would be removed and examined; reports would flow from this devastating morning, connecting the past to a projected future.

What did he want?

Why was he doing this?

Who was next to die?

How could he be stopped from taking another life?

I headed downstairs, eager, even desperate, to get out of there. Ben needed to be picked up in an hour, so I had a ready excuse. But by the time I reached the first floor, I’d realized that I was the closest thing Chali had in New York to next of kin. In fact, if she had any relatives at all in the U.S., I was unaware of it. I had to wait.

I would never make it back to Ben’s nursery school by noon. And neither Mac nor my mother was well enough to step in and help.

I stood outside the building in the freezing cold while the police did their work upstairs and neighbors gathered to find out what was happening. I pretended to know nothing; they probably thought I was a reporter, the way I was working my BlackBerry. It took a few calls but I was able to arrange for Ben to spend the afternoon at Open House; the school allowed morning kids to extend into the afternoon session, which started with lunch and a nap, for an additional hourly fee. Ben had been begging to stay for lunch for weeks now; I could ask him, later, if he liked his “surprise” and see how it went over. The deli down the street would deliver a grilled cheese sandwich and an apple juice. So now I had until five o’clock, if I needed that much time.

When Mac called me back, a few minutes later, his baffled tone told me he knew something was wrong. “Your message sounded, well,
drunk
.”

“I’m at Chali’s.” I didn’t know where to begin.

“What’s going on?”

“She’s dead.” I burst into tears. “
He
killed her.”

The chasm of silence that followed was fraught with shock; and Mac’s whisper, when he finally spoke, was raw, emotional. “What happened?”

I told him what I had seen. Explained that Billy was on his way. And that the local cops had already arrived.

“Where’s Ben?”

“Staying late at school; I called and arranged it.”

“Okay, good.” Mac coughed. “What’s Chali’s address? I’ll be there as soon as I can; just hold tight.”

“You’re sick, Mac, and the last thing I need is you catching your
death
out here in the freezing cold.” Hammering hard on that haunted word; knowing he would hear me loud and clear:
Do not even suggest doing something that will make you sicker, because if I lose you, too
 . . .

“It’s just the flu—”

“People die of the flu every year.” I could see him shivering in the frigid afternoon, growing paler, hotter, weaker.

“You’re freaking out, Karin. Take a deep breath and—” He must have shifted, possibly stood up too quickly, because something fell over and crashed. “
Shit
.”

“I swear, Mac, if you show up here, I will kill you.” It came out fast and sharp. I ended the call before he had a chance to argue. Slipped the phone into my purse. Jammed my hands into my pockets to keep them warm and waited for the detective who had caught the case.

Twenty minutes later, a blue sedan that looked like a police-issued unmarked vehicle if I’d ever seen one pulled up next to a delivery truck with
Trevello Bros.
scripted across the side, and double-parked at a careless angle. It was the way he parked that told me the detective had arrived. But then he got out of the car and I thought maybe I was mistaken. I had to remind myself that plainclothes cops in the city didn’t dress like the ones I used to work with in the suburbs. Here they covered a distinctly different set of territories, and blending in didn’t always mean pressed chinos or pants down low. This guy just didn’t look like a cop to me, with his skinny jeans, suede desert boots, short leather jacket, black goatee, purple-tinted glasses, and trendy driver’s cap on what you could see was a clean-shaven head. He leaned back into the car and brought out an orange take-out cup labeled
Gorilla Coffee
that erupted in steam when he took off the top. I watched him take three sips before even lifting his eyes to Chali’s building, an indifference that irked me for a moment before I realized it probably wasn’t apathy so much as preparation. He had probably already heard the stats on this case: immigrant murdered in a downtrodden neighborhood. For a lot of cops I knew, that was a cue for
don’t bother caring
. But I reminded myself that I didn’t know this guy and shouldn’t judge him before he even opened his mouth.

I watched him cross the street before approaching him. As soon as I moved forward, he stopped abruptly and stood there looking at me.

“Didn’t mean to surprise you like that,” I said. “I just wanted to introduce myself before you went inside.”

“You the lady that found her?” He had a chalky voice, as if he smoked, or used to.

“Karin Schaeffer. She worked for me.”

“What makes you think you need to talk to me?”

“Aren’t you a detective?”

“Didn’t think it was that obvious.”

“I used to work on the force . . . but not here. In New Jersey.”

A little smile crooked up one side of his goatee. He reached out to shake my hand, a gesture I appreciated, despite the thick pinky ring that bit into my palm. “Retired?”

“From the cops. You bet.”