Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(42)

I open my eyes again around noon to a chalky white sky. Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was in my dream again. She was lying on the metal slab, but this time she was alive, and I said to her, “Wait, I thought you were dead? How did you survive?” And she said, “It’s all a big mistake, honey.” And then she sat up, suddenly fully dressed, but still bald and bruised and bloody around her face, hopped off the slab, and knelt down to lace up a pair of sneakers. “Do you run?” she asked me. And then she took off, without waiting for an answer.

At about 1 P.M., I get out of bed. Iris has left a note saying she’s at yoga, so I make coffee and pull up the Tribune’s Web site on my laptop. Porn mom is splitting the front page with the latest round of health department raids at city restaurants. Brooklyn’s queen of cannoli, a fifty-year-old steakhouse near Grand Central, two noodle shops on the Upper East Side, and about a dozen other well-known places were shuttered yesterday for failing inspections. I scroll down, past an article about a Yankee threatening to pull out of contract negotiations, another about whether the mayor did or did not imply he might close sixteen firehouses within the year, and another about two Child Protective Services workers who say they were disciplined for “speaking out” about turmoil inside the agency.

Nine stories down, I find her:

POLICE QUESTION GARDENER IN SCRAP YARD MURDER

By Marisa Hernandez

An illegal alien with a history of arrests was questioned in the murder of an Hasidic woman found Friday in a scrap pile in Brooklyn.

Miguel Arambula, 41, who does yard maintenance at the Borough Park manse where Rivka Mendelssohn lived, has a rap sheet containing citations for soliciting prostitution, public intoxication, and public urination.

“When he drinks he gets into trouble,” said Francine Singer, 54, who lives downstairs from Arambula in Sunset Park. “I hope they send him back to Mexico.”

Police declined to comment on whether Arambula is considered a suspect in the grisly death of the mother-of-four. A police official close to the case told the Tribune that Mendelssohn sustained massive head trauma and was pregnant at the time of her death.

Mendelssohn’s funeral was attended by hundreds of members of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

“It’s so horrible,” said an elderly attendee whose daughter was friends with Mendelssohn. “She trusted a stranger and look what happened.”

—Additional reporting by Rebekah Roberts A photo of Arambula trying to cover his face as he enters his apartment building runs with the story.

Now I know what Lars meant when he said Marisa got “great stuff” from the neighbors: I hope they send him back to Mexico. Nice. She probably got a whole earful from this lady about her tax dollars and how great people have it in jail. I like to think of New York as a really tolerant, broad-minded place, but sometimes New Yorkers f*ck that up.

I’m surprised that the information I gave Lars about Sara Wyman saying she was considering a divorce is absent, but at least her pregnancy made it in. The story makes it seem like an arrest is imminent, but reading between the lines I can see that the only information they actually have is that this man was questioned, and that he has a petty record. My hunch is that Larry Dunn, or whoever was working the Shack, simply got DCPI to tell him that, yes, they’d brought him in for questioning. Being questioned isn’t indicative of anything in itself, but it sure does look bad in the paper.

I met Marisa Hernandez once around Christmas when she relieved me on a stakeout of a livery cab driver accused of sexual assault. We hung out together in the lobby of his apartment building near the mall in Elmhurst. Most of the time you can’t hang out in people’s apartment building lobbies waiting for them to come home, but if the person you’re trying to “get” lives in public housing, the rules change. Technically, you’re still supposed to be buzzed in, but the doors are almost always open or unlocked. And if not, it’s not terribly difficult to find someone to let you in. The men mostly don’t care; you can just follow them inside. Women are more suspicious, but if you say something like “I’m going up to 11B,” they’re likely to let you pass. Best bet is a woman with a stroller; just hold the door for her. Marisa, I found out that evening, was from New Jersey and had been a stringer for a little over two years. She’d gotten married a couple months before and said she went to Sri Lanka for her honeymoon. We chatted for about twenty minutes while I filled her in on which floor the livery driver lived on (five), which entrance he was likely to use (southwest), whether there was any problem with security or ornery maintenance people (no and no).

I call the desk to get Marisa’s cell number. She picks up on the first ring.

“Marisa,” I say, “it’s Rebekah from the Trib.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Good, sorry to bug you, but I have a question about the Arambula story.”

“Oh God,” she says, sounding exasperated.

“What?”

“Did you see the story?”

“Yeah.”

“That lady didn’t say, ‘I hope they send him back to Mexico,’ like that. She said, ‘If he did it, I hope they send him back to Mexico.’ If!”

“That’s a big if.”

“Exactly,” says Marisa. “That’s exactly what my husband said.”

“Did you get any sense about him? Like, did people seem to think he was capable of something like murder?”