As soon as she heard the cop’s question Sadie Espinoza knew, in her heart of hearts, that her cousin was almost certainly gone forever.
“Yes,” she answered, her blood thudding in her ears. “I knew Itzhak Espinoza-Dorfmann. He was my cousin. What’s happened?”
The cop took so long to answer that she checked to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. “We’re not certain,” he began, then explained that Itzie’s neighbors had grown concerned when they noticed his mail piling up. They called the building manager. She came over with a passkey. The door had a security bar engaged. They called Cincinnati PD for a welfare check. The cops battered the door down. No Itzie, dead or alive. No sign of trouble. No unlocked windows. No other doors. Just a note.
Sadie’s heart dropped. “A suicide note?”
She heard the cop perk up. “Did Mr. Espinoza-Dorfmann show signs he might harm himself or others?”
Sadie didn’t know how to answer. Itzie wasn’t precisely self-destructive. Certainly not maliciously so. But he was like a high-torque table saw with zero safety features: it’ll get the job done, but might take your finger or destroy itself in the process.
“What’s the note say?” Sadie asked.
“Don’t know. It’s sealed. The old man mailed it to you, care of his own address. Wrote on the outside ‘If I’m found missing, call Sadie Espinoza’ and this phone number. We can’t open sealed and postmarked mail without a warrant. We don’t even know if getting a warrant is warranted. Old lady on the ground level said there was a young Black guy who used to come and go all the time, but she hasn’t seen him either. Right now, that guy is our main person of interest—”
Sadie rolled her eyes. “The ‘young Black guy’ is Itzhak Espinoza-Dorfmann.”
The cop might have heard, but did not listen. “Hopefully this Black kid can shed some light on what’s happened to Mr. Espinoza-Dorfmann. In the meantime…”
Unbidden, Sadie recalled a conversation she and Itzie had in their twenties, when he admitted that he hadn’t known he was Black until he was five. “I know that sounds insane,” he’d said as she’d cackled with laughter. Itzie was absolutely, unambiguously Black; he looked like an extremely nerdy Wiz Khalifa. “But it’s true. I knew I was ‘dark,’ but it never occurred to me that I was ‘Black.’ My dads raised me as their own, raised me a Jew. I’d never met a Black Jew—or even heard of one. I didn’t think you could be both.”
The cop had kept talking while Sadie took her side quest down memory lane, but she snapped back when he asked for her to give him permission to open the note Itzie’d taken pains to be sure no one would open but her.
“Do I have your permission to open it?” the cop reiterated.
“No. You don’t.” This clearly annoyed the cop. “I’m on a roof, in the middle of a home inspection,” Sadie added. “But I’m nearby. I’ll wrap this up and come there myself.”
It only took Sadie fifteen minutes to finish up and get to Itzie’s apartment, a converted brownstone stitched into Cincinnati’s patchwork of gentrification. Parking on his block—where $2,000-per-month apartments surmounted trendy draft kombucha cafés—was impossible. Parking one block over—where an affable hobo peed on the ancient ashes of a fire-gutted chili parlor—was easy.
The cop was waiting on Itzie’s stoop.
“Ms. Espinoza?”
“Officer—” She squinted at the name tag over the right breast of his Kevlar vest, then paused. The cop sighed.
“It’s pronounced how it looks,” he said, heading into the building. “Like ‘Picket,’ with a g instead of the ck.”
“And you became a cop?” she asked his back. He offered no answer, simply trooped across the tiny hex-tiled foyer and up the beautifully restored stairs, asking his own question:
“You’re from that stupid ghost real estate show?”
Sadie offered no answer either. Their questions were equally stupid: Officer Pigott obviously became a cop, despite his last name. She was clearly “that dumb bitch” from Haunted House Home Inspectors. In fact, she’d recently returned to Us Weekly’s “top 10 most hated people on TV,” even though HHHI had been off the air for nearly five years. She had Netflix to thank for that.
Itzie’s place was on the second floor. The battered door stood open, a single strip of police tape symbolically barring the entrance. Sadie ducked under the police tape. Officer Pigott followed, making no attempt to stop her.
The place was still a cluttered mess: open books arrayed across sofa and floor, fast-food wrappers overfilling the kitchen trash, a scatter of half-disassembled chairs from ÖLEI, that ready-to-assemble wonderland of fast-fashion furniture and Swedish home decor. But Itzie’s place didn’t smell like anything, which was unnerving. Every house smells, and all those smells are signs: new paint and varnish (hiding water damage?), mildew (from a long-ignored leak?), fresh lumber (shoring up bad steps?), cats and cigarettes (ugh).
Last week Itzie’s apartment had smelled like unwashed Itzie and neglected kitchen trash. Today Itzie’s place smelled like nothing at all. It seemed absolutely and eternally vacant. That brought it home: Itzie was gone beyond gone. She bit the inside of her lower lip, using the pain to stifle a rising sob.
Sadie’s eyes immediately went to Itzie’s lovely oak Art Deco dining room table, which he’d restored himself, and the tacky-ass ÖLEI Nölmyna chair still sitting at its head. The genuine class of his prized table made the Nölmyna’s bullshit Scandinavian minimalism—with its cheesy bentwood birch arms and gray plastic mesh seat—really pop. An envelope lay squared up on the table in front of the chair, like a single place setting. It was addressed to her. She snapped it up and tore it open.
The letter was short; she read it at a glance.
“What’s it say?” Office Pigott asked.
“Itzie sends his warmest regards,” she said, holding up the note for the officer to read, careful to do so in a manner that in no way implied she was handing it over. It read, in full:
Dear Sadie:
If you are reading this, then
(who I assume called you)
2. I sat in the chair
3. The chair is yours now (sorry)
I am at this moment transferring the rights of the PROPERTY (1 chair) to you in all respects. I hereby certify the transfer of this PROPERTY in good condition in your name, and which can be used immediately.
The letter was then signed and dated. The date was five days ago.
“Do you mind if we take this letter as evidence?” Officer Pigott asked. She pulled it back.
“Yeah, I mind. First off, Fourth Amendment. Second, this is my receipt for my chair.”
“You’re not taking any chairs,” the cop said. She already knew she couldn’t take the chair—no one could—but this still made her blood boil. “Your mail is your mail,” he added, “but you aren’t removing anything from an active crime scene.”
“Active crime scene!” She was boiling over now. “What’s the crime?!”
The cop hooked his thumbs into the armpits of his Kevlar vest. “We don’t know. But a man is missing.”
“And you aren’t going to find him if you’re looking for a little old White man who doesn’t exist! This is so fucking typical!”
The cop sighed. ...
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