Remy closed his notebook. “Maybe we’ll try this some other time, Ms. Rogers.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, and then turned back to the TV. She reached for her remote control and the sound came up, the guy in coveralls: “…abrasive substances will work, although traditional sandpaper is still…”
Remy started for the door, but paused. “Why did she live all the way up here?”
Ann Rogers jerked her thumb across the remote control, barely able to contain her disgust. “What do you want from me? Are you trying to get me to confess or something?”
“No,” Remy said, “I was just wondering…” What was he wondering? “March worked in the financial district-”
“Yes. You know she did. That’s why she died, you fuckhead pervert scumbag.”
Remy ignored her. “And she lived all the way up here? In this building? On a paralegal’s salary? That doesn’t make any sense. She could have found the same space over the river for a third the price. Where’d she get the money for this?”
Ann Rogers seemed calm, suddenly. Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” she said.
Remy held his hands out. “What am I implying?”
“Aren’t you implying something?”
“Honestly,” Remy said, “I have no idea.”
Ann Rogers reached for the remote control, cocked her arm and threw it at-
THE GUY standing in the doorway was in his late thirties, the fat settling between knees and shoulders, a week’s growth coming in gray. Expensive haircut. He wore black slacks and a black T-shirt. He was barefoot. “Yes?”
Remy removed his hand from the doorbell and looked around. It was a nice house, two stories, blue-gray, with a square patch of new sod in front and a kid’s bike leaning against the Lexus in the driveway. He looked down the block. Every house was the same, as far as he could see, like dominoes, each one with an American flag tipped from the porch.
“Can I help you?” asked the guy.
“…I don’t know.” Remy’s badge was in the hand he’d used to ring the bell, so he showed it to the man, hoping one of them would know how to proceed. “Um, I’m sorry, but… do you… where am I?”
The guy just stared. “Englewood Cliffs.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What can I do for you?”
Remy looked down. In his other hand was the planner he’d found at The Zero. G. Addich’s day planner. Ah. “What’s your name?”
The guy pulled back just a bit. “Tony Addich. Why?”
“Oh. I found this.” Remy held out the thick black book. “I’m glad you’re all right. I didn’t know if you-”
Addich stared at the planner as if it were a ghost.
“It looked like there were a lot of meetings in there,” Remy said.
The man didn’t say anything.
Remy tried to appear nonchalant, as if they were sharing a laugh waiting for the subway. “It’s funny. When I found this, I thought to myself… what did we do at all those meetings? I used to have a lot of meetings, and now… I have no idea what we talked about.” He tried to laugh this off, just two guys talking about how important things can suddenly become trivial, but the whole thing came out shallow and raw.
The man just stared at the planner. “That’s my father’s,” he said. “Gerald Addich. How did you get it?”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Remy. “Is your father-”
“No. He’s not here right now.”
“But he’s…”
“He’s fine. He’s at a senior citizen function. I think they went to a casino.” Tony Addich took the planner and looked through it. He shook his head. “He used to work for the city, in the sixties. He’s retired now. Suffers from dementia.”
“Yeah,” Remy said. “But see, I found this at-”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tony Addich, and he closed the door in Remy’s face.
Remy stood on the porch for a minute. He looked around the neighborhood again. Should he knock on the door again? Ask who his father knew named Remy? All of a sudden he wished he’d kept the-
GRAY DUSK, smoke-tinged and heavy, crept up from the horizon. Remy was standing outside Famous Ray’s on Sixth, trying to decide if he was hungry, when he noticed a picture of March Selios with a phone number below it. The window in front of this Ray’s was being used as a makeshift bulletin board, covered with desperate flyers, the whole storefront papered with pictures of the missing, arranged in crude rows like a mockup of a high school yearbook. This was a different picture of March, one he’d never seen before, but it was definitely her, smiling politely in a living room somewhere, maybe when she was younger. Remy stood in front of the window and looked past the reflected glass into the flatness of all those photographs, March Selios among her people, like members of a lost tribe, their images trapped forever on the inside of this window. Each picture was glued or printed on a sheet of paper with a description of the missing person and phone numbers to call. Some of the notes were pleas for mercy, as if the missing had been kidnapped and might be released if the kidnappers found out they had two children, or had just overcome cancer; others were even more emphatic, punctuated with exclamation points and descriptions of the kindness of the person, their hardworking drive, their love of family, and punctuality – as if these things could somehow help in identifying them. The corners of the pages were beginning to curl. There were victim walls like this every few miles in the city now. They sprouted up in parks and at hospitals, on schools and on subway platforms – anywhere people could think to tape up pictures. As soon as one photo went up, people rushed from their apartments and houses to fill the entire wall with pictures. There could be no single photograph of the missing; every wall had to be covered, every space filled. And as a survivor, you had to stop and look at the pictures because that was what was required of you. Of course, these weren’t missing people anymore; they were dead people now. Everyone knew they were dead. There were no stories of people from these walls being found alive (and stilclass="underline" the dream of amnesiacs wandering suburban hospitals) and yet Remy stopped and looked anyway, and as the walls made this quiet shift from the missing to the dead, he looked at them differently, mentally riffling the faces and pausing on the familiar – a glimmer of recognition and hope – until he remembered that he’d just seen that face on the wall in Washington Square, or at St. Vincent’s, and eventually Remy came to wonder if maybe he hadn’t known them all, every one of these people, and when he stepped away from the walls, he sometimes saw those faces on the passing bodies, in the stares of strangers – such looks of sorrow and bewilderment, such gazes of disbelief and betrayal.
He noticed distinctions on the walls, too, that he couldn’t help making. Remy had read once that America was a classless society, but the walls of missing and dead disproved this. These walls were testaments to class, and even though the pictures were all jumbled, Remy could mentally break them into three strata. The first: bankers, lawyers, brokers, executives and their assistants, mostly white, some transplanted browns, mostly in suits or tuxedos or dresses, or photos from their weddings or their college graduations or company Christmas parties. Some of the younger ones, like March, were in casual clothes: with family or, more often, outdoors, hiking or vacationing in some canyon or on a beach in the Caribbean. These people were always smiling in their death photos, not exactly as though they were happy, but as if they’d been told at some point that they had nothing to complain about.
The second class was comprised mostly of firefighters, a few cops, and these were nearly all men, or boys, most with mustaches, in old xeroxed pictures, in uniforms, in their official portraits, shaggy sideburns or military haircuts. They were rarely smiling, but had an eager severity. They were ready. If they were pictured in candid shots, their faces were invariably washed out, as if the photographers were always too close… too proud. These people all had a look that Remy had seen on the faces of people who died too young – as if they’d known – a look that said this was simply more than they bargained for, that they had only wanted a life in which they made a little bit of money and lived comfortably. They seemed like good people: white, black, and Latino, all with that look of someone who had just arrived somewhere. Remy could imagine thought bubbles above their heads: It will be easier for my kids.