“You’re the man who lost his son,” the man said, very, very kindly.
Phil Needle stood up. “Daughter.”
The man frowned. “I heard son.”
“Rabbi,” said someone new. It was the desk sergeant, now in the room and scratching his head and looking at Phil Needle apologetically. “Not him, Rabbi,” he said. “Through here, down the hall.”
“I heard right inside,” said the rabbi, but he was buzzed in and disappeared through the open door.
“I’m dying,” Marina said quietly. “Are you dying, Phil?”
“There’s a room for you folks too,” the guy said as two new policemen came out to look at them. “Sorry for the wait, but this stolen-boat thing is turning into a circus.”
“And three children,” Phil Needle said, “you said, missing?”
The two men both shook their heads at the desk sergeant. “I’m not sure,” he said, and then coughed a little. “This is investigating officers Jarris and Snelgrave, the primaries on your case.”
“Yes,” Marina said like a ghost. She had been staring at them. “We’ve met.”
“You know them?”
“Yes, Phil. They’re the ones who came to the house.”
But they’re
black!
he did not say. He merely stood up and nodded at them and shook their hands and followed them through the door and down a hallway made too narrow by old beige filing cabinets. He felt happier they were black, really. They would work hard and ruthlessly, twice as hard, due to injustice, to find poor Gwen. Wouldn’t they?
“We’re going to put you in this room for a minute,” said Jarris. “We’ll be right back with the file.”
The room was mostly a table, wooden and pocked, with metal chairs arranged inscrutably as if for a play. Marina sat in one. Phil Needle stood near the mirror, which of course was one-sided, as all mirrors were in police stations, at least on television, at this time in American history. On the other side were stern cops regarding him, surely. Surely Phil Needle was a goldfish in a bag.
“Are you dying?” Marina said again.
“She’s fine, Marina,” Phil Needle pitched. “She’s been rebelling lately, we know that. She quit swimming.”
“Stop saying she’s fine. It’s been more than twenty-four hours.”
Twenty-four hours sounded so much longer than a day. Gwen’s photograph sat in its crinkly bag. “Remember that show I did about the Amish?”
“It wasn’t your show.”
“Well, the episode I produced.”
“You didn’t produce it. They just had you mix some of the sound last-minute.”
“Well, I got a producing credit.”
“Because you read the credits yourself.”
“Marina—”
“You
did
, into the microphone.”
“Marina—”
“How could you even think of such a thing right now?”
The officers came into the room. Phil Needle had not gotten to say what he wanted, but he wasn’t going to talk about the Amish in front of black people. “Hello,” he said, “investigating officers Jarris and Wellgrin.”
“Snelgrave,” said one of them.
“Snelgrave.”
“
I’m
Snelgrave,” said the other one. “We’re very sorry for your distress, and we’re also very sorry there’s been some confusion tonight. Somebody stole one of those boats by the pier, do you know what I mean?”
“What?”
“They use it for a show.
Pirates
!
”
The officers sat down. Jarris was folding a folder, and Snelgrave had a lidded cardboard box, as if he had just been told to clear out his desk. Phil Needle was the only one standing. “Pirates?” he asked.
“Please, sit down, Mr. Needle.”
Phil Needle sat down but kept thinking about it. He couldn’t help it. Just the word was jolty.
“We’re just telling you about the boat because the media will make it sound like that’s all the police are working on. But that’s not true.”
“There are,” Marina said, “three children missing, you said?”
“Let’s concentrate on your child right now,” Jarris said, and opened the folder, which had maybe two pieces of paper in it. It was slender, as slender as Gwen. Perhaps they kept it slender to remind them.
“First, I need to confirm her Social.”
Marina sighed and then numbly spat out nine numbers, a marking system devised by the government at the time, each digit increasingly wavery.
“And she’s how old?”
“Fourteen, we told you.” Marina reached across the table and grabbed Phil Needle’s arm just above the elbow.
“And you’re not sure what she was wearing when you saw her last?”
“No, I don’t know,” Marina said. “She just ran out to pay the taxi. It was so quick. It was the morning.”
“We think we found the driver. If it’s him and if it’s your daughter, he took your daughter to Octavia Street, but she jumped out and ran into an alley.”
The word
Octavia
made Phil Needle think of a pretty girl, but he could not think of where he had met such a person. Marina was frowning.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Jarris looked at his paper. “What part of it doesn’t make sense?”
“Any of it.”
“She paid the driver, he says.”
“The driver must be lying,” Marina said.
“He kept the money.”
“I don’t mean about that.”
“He identified her from the photo, although you said it wasn’t a good photo.”
“She’s hated to be photographed lately.”
“I have a daughter, Mrs. Needle. I know how it is.”
“I brought the best one we have,” Phil Needle said, and put the bag down on the table.
“Thank you for that,” said Snelgrave, and slid it closer to him. “We’re just asking about what she was wearing because we want to know if it could have included gray sweatpants.”
“Gray sweatpants,” Marina repeated.
Investigating officer Snelgrave blinked and frowned, and Jarris made a note. “Yes,” he said. “Is it possible she was wearing gray sweatpants?”
Phil Needle moved paper dolls in his mind. It was possible for anybody to be wearing gray sweatpants.
“From where?” Marina said.
“What do you mean?”
“What brand?”
“Well, let’s look.” Snelgrave tossed off the cover of the cardboard box and overturned it dramatically. Some clothes piled out. A red top. Gray sweatpants. A kind of brown shoe and then another one. Last of all was a pair of panties, small, with strawberries. It was filthy just to look at them, shameful and wrong. The two officers were watching his face.
“Are these hers?”
“You found them?” Marina asked. “How did you find them?”
“Do they belong to Gwen?”
Marina blinked and reached out for them. She picked up the red top and then, with a quick inhale of breath, held it to her mouth before putting it down. “No,” she said. “And these shoes—Tox. I refused to buy her Tox.”
“Why?” Phil Needle asked, but Marina did not answer. She was crying too hard. Her shoulders were shaking like stormy weather, and her
hic-hic-hic
had turned to something wider, from deeper in her chest. To Phil Needle it felt like not enough to pat his wife from his end of the table and so stood up to stand behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, like he was massaging a prizefighter.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
“Where do you think we found these?” Officer Jarris said.
“Those
aren’t her clothes
,” Marina wailed.
“Where did you find them?” asked Phil Needle.
“Tox are
expensive
,” Marina said. “And they’re bad for your feet.
Brutal
on them. I saw an article.”
“These articles were found neatly folded behind a garbage can on the Embarcadero,” Snelgrave said. “Two blocks from your house.”
“And right by the water,” Officer Jarris said.
“But what does it have to do with anything?”
“Exactly,” Jarris said. “Thank you. Exactly my question.”
Snelgrave ran a hand through his hair, but it was so curly and cut so short that it was more like he was patting himself on the head. “As far as I can tell, there are only two reasons a teenage girl takes her clothes off. One of them is to go swimming.”
Marina touched the top. “What?”
“She
is
a strong swimmer,” Phil Needle said.
“We talked to the coach of the team,” Officer Jarris said.
“They’re not hers,” Marina said, pointing at the strawberries.
“Why did they make you cry?”
“Because Gwen is missing,” Phil Needle said. He had to let go of his wife’s shoulders because his hands wanted to strangle someone.
Snelgrave started to put the clothes back into the box. “There’s not much more we can do.” He held up one of the brutal shoes. “Finding a missing teenager can be like finding a needle on a sheet.”
The image of this, a needle on a sheet, was something Phil Needle thought about for just a second. The sheet was undraped, and the naked figure of Alma Levine stretched toward him.
“And it’s especially hard if people aren’t cooperating.”
Marina rubbed her eyes violently. “Who isn’t?”
“Everyone we talk to?” Jarris said. “They say she had a new friend.”
New friend? “We weren’t sure about that,” Phil Needle said, because he had to say something.
“Her friend Naomi Wise said it was a boy. You told us she didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“She
doesn’t.
”
“Would you know if she did?”
Marina looked up at him. Phil Needle could see right into his wife’s nose. “I don’t know,” he said, to the little wet hairs, and then looked at the detectives. “She’s fourteen.”
Snelgrave kept staring at him and put the lid on the box. Phil Needle thought of those clothes, folded on the street, and wondered where she had gone, whoever was wearing them. Had she walked naked through the farmers’ market to the touristy piers? Or the other way, it could have been, past his neighborhood, to the confusing and iffy intersections stretching toward the train station. “Did you check the train station?” he asked.
“Do you think she’s there? Is that where you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you don’t know what she was wearing.”
“And,” Jarris said, “you don’t know who her friends are.”
They stared at him, very hard, and Phil Needle blinked back, whereupon the detectives dragged him into another room in Phil Needle’s mind and beat him until he was willing to do anything to escape further punishment. In this room they just finally sighed.
“Is her best friend Cody Glasserman?”
“No,” Marina said. “
Phil’s
the one who likes him.”
“Stop saying that,” Phil Needle said.
“Is he her lover?”
“Cody Glasserman? Have you seen him?”
“That’s what we want to talk to you about,” Officer Jarris said, and leaned from his seat to open the door. It creaked, and a bunch of Jews walked into the room. One was a tall, graying man who looked not unlike Phil Needle, and then a muscular, long-haired boy with a large nose and curious eyes, and then a weeping woman with a mass of necklaces around her.
“Phil,” the graying man said, and held out his hand. “It’s Steve Glasserman. We met at the Swinner.”
It took Phil Needle the entire handshake to remember that a Swinner was what All-City called their annual swim dinner at a garish Italian restaurant full of ricotta cheese, out by the water. “Steve Glasserman,” he repeated.
“Cody Glasserman has been missing for twenty-four hours,” Officer Jarris said. “It was the swim coach who made the connection.”
Marina stood up and hugged the woman. They cried together in the crowded room. “This is my wife, Deedee,” Steve Glasserman said, “and Cody’s brother, Nathan.”
“Nathan says his brother got a note,” Snelgrave said.
“I’m not sure,” said the boy who must have been Nathan, fiddling with his hair. “He said he didn’t.”
“It must be a swim meet,” Phil Needle said.
“What?”
“I mean, is the whole team gone? I don’t know what I’m saying.”
He sat back down. Everyone was looking. He was a one-cent stamp, struggling and struggling to be of use, and then another man came in who Phil Needle also knew would be useless, even though he was certain he had never seen him before.
“Dr. Donner,” Marina said, and Phil Needle watched her gasp.
“Who?”
“Gwen’s dentist. If you ever took her, if you showed an interest—”
“Took her?” Jarris asked.
“To the dentist,” Marina said.
“What is happening?”
“Dr. Donner’s daughter is also missing,” Snelgrave said. “About the same time as Gwen, but they didn’t call it in until now.”