The Girl in Times Square

“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 (#ulink_d12d8959-9b05-5e04-b254-f76417fa1684)

Wallets on Dressers (#ulink_d12d8959-9b05-5e04-b254-f76417fa1684)

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?”