Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(37)

“I talked to a woman, a social worker; she said Rivka might have been thinking about a divorce.”

“Do you have a quote?”

“Not exactly…”

“Name?”

“Her name was Sara Wyman.”

“Age?”

Again, I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t thinking about the newspaper. I was thinking about what she could tell me. “She wouldn’t give it.”

“What else?”

“She said, ‘Rivka was a passionate, intelligent woman who cared deeply for her children and her friends.’ She also said she ran an organization for new mothers. Boro Park Mommies.”

“That all?”

Here we go. “Actually, I talked to a detective, but he didn’t want his name used.”

“What did he say?”

“He said she was pregnant.”

“Great. We can definitely use that.”

“He also … um, from the funeral home, he said that her body was really, um, beat up. Head wounds.”

“Okay. Who’s this from?”

“You can say a police official with information about the case.”

“Anyone else from the funeral? You said there were hundreds of people there.”

“I talked to one woman who said Rivka Mendelssohn used to babysit her and was sort of a confidante.”

“Do you have a quote?”

I’m reaching. “She said, ‘Rivka liked to walk and listen to music.’ She said when she heard she’d died, she thought maybe she’d been hit by a car on one of her walks.”

“That’s the quote: She liked to walk and listen to music?”

“Yeah.” It is, without a doubt, a lame quote. A big part of this job is hearing the quote. People say a lot of shit, and most of what they say is either unprintable or unimportant, or both. At the Trib, because the articles are short, they like explanatory quotes—quotes that narrate what happened—instead of supplementary quotes, which add color or context to the action. So, if I was covering, say, an old lady whose geriatric scooter was hit by a garbage truck traveling in the bicycle lane (as I did in September in the West Village), the desk would love me to get someone to say: “She was scooting along toward the Y like she always does after lunch, when this garbage truck came barreling through the light. I don’t even think he saw her.” If I were working at the Times, they would write the information in the first sentence using their own language, then use “I don’t think he even saw her” as the quote. In college, most of my professors said that narrative quotes were lazy, that it was the writer’s job to succinctly tell the reader what happened. That quotes should be “gems.” But as with much of what I learned in college journalism classes, this does not apply at the Trib.

“That’s it?” asks Lars.

“She also said Rivka was questioning.”

“Questioning? What does that mean?”

“Like, questioning … her faith?”

“Is that a quote?”

“No, she didn’t exactly explain, but…”

“What’s the woman’s name?”

“She wouldn’t give it. You can say a friend.”

“Too many unnamed quotes. I can’t use them.”

“Sorry … she also said Rivka Mendelssohn had lost a baby recently, but I couldn’t confirm that with the family.”

“She lost a baby and she was pregnant?”

“According to the people I talked to.”

“All right,” he says. “The desk wants to run something on the gardener being questioned. Did anybody else say anything about the gardener?”

“No.”

“Marisa got some great stuff from his neighbors. Apparently he’s a drinker. And he has a couple arrests for fighting, one for exposing himself.”

“Do they really think he might have done it?” It doesn’t make sense to me that a drunk who doesn’t speak English could pull off getting Rivka Mendelssohn alone long enough to tie her up, kill her, and get her dead body into a scrap pile on her family’s private property.

“How should I know?” says Lars. “Do you have anything else? How the family is taking the news, maybe?”

“Um…” I’m trying to think back. “You can say the family is very shaken up. I talked to her son for a minute on his way home; he was crying. He said the father had told him his mother was sick.”

“Sick?”

“That’s what he said.”

“How old was he?”

“I’m not positive. Around nine or ten.”

“That doesn’t help me. Did you get a name?”

I’m not going to give them Yakov’s name.

“No.”

Lars sighs. “Anything else?”

“I guess that’s it. Is Cathy around?”

“Greg!” he shouts. “When does Cathy come in?” Pause. “Tomorrow.”

Before I can even say thanks, he hangs up.

I look through the glass window at Saul, and suddenly I feel very tired. All I want to do is go to sleep. I can still smell the inside of that room where Rivka’s body was. I wonder if I’ll still smell it at home. Tomorrow. Forever. Saul is on his phone. I wish I had kept the letter instead of giving it to him.