“Who’s that?” Jasmine jumped to shout, a finger pointed at Ray.
“That’s Ray,” Yolanda said. “He’s my husband.”
Ray smiled again and went back to his comics.
Ray and Yolanda had married when they were teenagers and divorced a couple of years later when Ray was sentenced to eighteen years in a federal penitentiary for his part in a liquor store robbery that went really, really bad. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but that didn’t matter as much as he thought it should have. He did every bit of his time and collected bottles and cans and did odd jobs for his living now. He lived in an SRO on Bruckner, paying his room rent weekly. Yolanda explained all of this while making sandwiches for the three of them. Jasmine listened, wiping sweat from her brow and scratching at her arms and face.
“Where’s he going to sleep?” she asked.
“In my bed,” Yolanda said.
“I don’t like this. I don’t want him here. No offense,” Jasmine said, turning to Ray. He shrugged and moved on to the sports pages.
Jasmine’s reaction to coming down off whatever she had taken the night before was mild, but she was twitchy and everyone including her knew that if she had the chance, she’d go out and get high again.
That night in bed, Ray and Yolanda talked in voices low enough to hear the creaking of the floorboards if Jasmine got any bright ideas.
“She’s not Rosita,” Ray said.
“I know that.”
“And she never will be.”
“I know that too.”
“And no matter what you do for this girl, you’ll never get Rosita back.”
“Shut up and go to sleep,” Yolanda said. When he had done as she told him, she got out of bed, put on a robe, and went out to the living room to watch Jasmine sleep.
Twice more that same week, Jasmine slipped out of the apartment. Both times Ray and Yolanda found her before she could do herself any harm.
“You can’t do that, baby girl,” Yolanda said both times. “These streets are bad. This is New York. They’ll eat you up and they won’t even spit out the bones.”
Each time, Jasmine cried and complained, cursed and argued, but she said she understood and promised never to hit the streets again.
The third time, Ray and Yolanda were too late. They walked along Tiffany all the way down to the docks near Viele Avenue. Homeless people sometimes hung out there since you could fish, but there were none that night. Just a vehicle with its lights on.
“What kind of car is that?” Yolanda asked. She had stopped in her tracks a hundred feet away and grabbed Ray’s elbow.
“That? That’s a Porsche.”
“Oh no.” Yolanda went off at a sprint toward the car. The driver noticed her and pulled out fast.
“License plate, license plate!” Yolanda yelled out.
Ray ran into the street and squatted to get a better look at the rear of the car as it pulled away. When it had turned a corner and disappeared, he jogged over to Yolanda’s side.
Yolanda sat amongst the weeds on the crumbled concrete of what had once been a sidewalk and cradled Jasmine’s head on her lap and soothed her brow. She wept. The small girl’s body was naked and broken. The beating had been more vicious than before, and by the time Ray and Yolanda had arrived, the life had been shaken and battered out of her.
Ray didn’t know what to say. He told her he had gotten the first three letters of the plate: YOD. Yolanda began to wail, and the sound grew.
“Yoli. Yoli, that’s not Rosita, Yoli,” Ray tried. He thought this might at least be some tiny consolation. He should have kept his silence.
“I know that!” Yolanda roared at him. “I know who she is… Just call 911.” She used a hand with blood on it to point out a pay phone across the street.
Ray jogged across and did as he was told, then jogged back.
“Yoli, let’s get out of here. I called the police, they’re coming.”
“Go,” she told him.
“Yoli, I can’t get mixed up in something like this. You know I can’t. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’ll stay by myself.”
“Yoli…” He wanted to remind her that her past wasn’t spotless either and that she couldn’t afford a dead girl’s blood on her hands when the police came by, but he couldn’t bring himself to say any of it. “Yoli,” he said again, but she wasn’t listening anymore, just looking into the face of the girl she had known as Jasmine, and when he heard the sirens in the distance, he jogged away. “Yoli!” he called out over his shoulder, but she didn’t move.
The officers who arrived first on the scene put Yolanda in handcuffs. They asked a few questions, and when she told them she’d prefer to talk to the detectives, they shrugged. Yolanda had put her light jacket on the girl, covering most of her body. She knew that the first officers on the scene probably wouldn’t move it, and if they got a look of the girl’s nudity, there might be jokes and talk that she wouldn’t be able to stand to hear.
The officers called in a second time for the detectives and crime scene people and quieted down for the wait. After what seemed like an hour, Yolanda heard more sirens approaching. Crime scene technicians set up lights and took pictures and searched halfheartedly through the underbrush.
Later still, two detectives arrived on the scene. Both men were white and middle-aged. Both wore light trench coats and dark ties. One, “DiRaimo,” he identified himself, was heavy and the other detective called him “Fats.” The other, “Hamilton,” was thin by comparison, but his face was lined with deeper grooves and wrinkles and his teeth hadn’t recovered from smoking days.
“So what happened here?” Hamilton started. He seemed impatient, like he just wanted to take Yolanda in as a suspect.
Yolanda told the whole story, starting with the first time she met Jasmine, and Hamilton wrote some of it down. DiRaimo interjected a couple of times to ask for clarification — for instance, how did Yolanda know the girl’s name? After a short conference between themselves and a consultation with some of the crime scene technicians and a talk over the radio, the detectives came back with one last question.
“The dispatcher says this was called in by a man. Any idea who?” Hamilton asked.
Yolanda shook her head. “But if a man called it in, then he’s a hero. Now go and get those rich white boys I told you about.”
The detectives kept her a while longer and got all her information before letting her go. DiRaimo walked her a few yards away from the scene.
“You’ll be around?” he asked, even though she had already been told it would be better for her if she stayed easy to find.
“I’ll be around. You gonna catch those guys?”
DiRaimo wanted to say yes. With a license plate, it should be easy to find the owner of the car, but there was a long distance between finding the owner and finding whoever was in it the moment Jasmine died. And even if they found that out, the young men could just as easily say that they saw Yolanda at the scene. There were clear footprints on the body and they didn’t match Yolanda, but that wasn’t the greatest evidence. Since the dead girl had been a pro, even the blood and semen on her was going to be useless. He believed everything Yolanda had said, but the most he was hoping for was to scare the young men. A stern talking-to from an assistant district attorney. Who knew? Maybe they could be tricked into saying something stupid. Of course, with wealth came lawyers, so this was unlikely, but anything was possible.
“We’re going to try,” he told Yolanda. She rolled her eyes, and he didn’t blame her. She went her way home and DiRaimo headed back to his partner.