Rosemary Herbert - Front Page Teaser

“I can’t promise the police will never be involved, but I can tell you that at this point, my interest in your cab and driver is a question of grasping at straws. Is the cab here?”

“No, it’s with the jerk-off I was just trying to haul back from the boroughs. What use would the cab be to you, anyway?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. I know the missing woman rode in this cab. And it’s just about the only lead I have. I thought I’d see if she left anything behind in the cab, or maybe retrace where she’d been by looking at cab records. Now there’s the stunner that the cabdriver’s unaccounted for.”

“Not only that. . . ” Jake broke off. “The hell with the other foreigners. I wanna know what Hasan’s up to.”

“That his name?”

“Yeah, Hasan. Sonofabitch calls himself Samir Hasan. OK, how about you go to the corner felafel place and get us a couple o’ coffees? I take mine black. Then I’ll see what I can do.”

As Liz left the office, she heard Jake radio a cabbie.

“Shit!” he shouted. “Why did you have to pick today of all days to follow my orders for the first time? Get your ass in here!”

When Liz returned with the coffee, Jake was standing outside the garage beside an idling cab. “Here it is, spick-’n’-span for the first time in memory.”

“Ah, no! He cleaned the cab?”

“Inside and out!” Jake said, opening the trunk. “What’s this?” he demanded of the driver who could do nothing right.

“Just junk. No valuables.”

Jake joined Liz as he opened the plastic shopping bag. Inside were a small child’s Yankee-insignia sweatshirt, a couple of cardboard coffee cups, and a book of matches. While Jake angrily dismissed the driver, Liz got into the front seat and opened the ashtray. Butts galore. She dumped the contents into a Ziploc bag. Then she looked in the glove compartment. It contained the vehicle’s registration and a grocery list. Nothing more. She pocketed the list.

“Hey, what are you taking from that glove compartment?”

“Just a grocery list. It might have been Ellen’s.”

“In the glove compartment? Why would a passenger’s list be in the glove compartment?”

“Looks like one of your drivers used it to test a pen on.” Liz turned the paper over and pointed to some squiggles. “Would you like to keep it?”

“Nah!” Jake said, tying up the plastic bag and setting it on top of the one untidy item in the room, an overfilled trash container.

“I’ve got just a few more questions.”

“Yeah?”

“Hasan’s home address.”

“Not sure.”

“What?”

“I have one on record, but when he went missing, I found out he doesn’t live there. He’s been feeding me a load of bull.”

“You must be furious. Do you keep a log of trips made by your drivers?”

“Sure. It’s required by law.”

“Can you tell me anything about Hasan’s remaining hours at work before he went missing?”

Jake paged through his log book.

“How do you like that?” he asked. “Right after he made that trip with your gal, he has more than forty-five minutes unaccounted for. Then again, throughout the day, more of the same. No metered rides after 3:00 p.m. on December 16.”

Two days before Ellen went missing.

Jake’s phone rang and he engaged in another adversarial conversation with a driver while Liz waited. “Look,” he said, turning to Liz after hanging up the phone. “I know what you’re going to ask me next. What kind of guy is he? Am I right?”

Liz nodded.

“Well, I don’t know. These Arabs, they have a different language, a different cultcha. I know he smoked in the cab. We got complaints. I know he played Middle Eastern music in his vehicle, too. Hasan sometimes turned in valuables. We logged them in here.” He opened a well-worn logbook to a page headed “December 16, 2000.”

“No, he didn’t turn in anything on his last day at work,” Jake went on. “I know he rarely turned down a fare. He kept that cab moving. Beyond that, the guy was a closed book. Didn’t talk about a wife, kids, sports, anything.”

“What’s this?” Liz asked, pointing to some wiring on the dashboard that seemed to lead nowhere.

“That’s the connection for his two-way.”

“Radio?”

“Yeah. He was always yakking on that thing.”

“Did he use it to communicate with you?”

“Nah. I told you, in the city we don’t dispatch cabs via radio. He used it to talk with his buddies. We allow this, if it doesn’t interfere with the driver’s work. But you have to be licensed to operate a two-way from the cab. He had to remove his when he wasn’t using it so the other drivers couldn’t use it. I got the documentation filed here, don’t worry.”

Like the rest of the office, the filing cabinet was orderly. It held several original documents pertaining to the missing cabbie, and photocopies of each. Jake handed Liz an extra copy of the radio license.

“Take it,” he said.

The document had the same false address that Liz had seen before. But the face in the photo was new to her.

“A dark horse,” Jake concluded. “That Hasan was one dark horse.”

December 16, 2000

The word Shukran was astonishing enough coming from the mouth of that whdah franjiyah, that non-Arab. But the remark, “Ya saqiqati al-habibah aa rifuki kull al-awqat,” was more alarming still.

“My beloved friend, I know you always.”

This is not the “How do you do?” greeting a foreigner might learn from a phrase book. Colloquially correct and properly, if slowly, pronounced, this was the statement of a person conversant in the Arabic language.

That shaqra , that blonde. Help me, Allah, she can indeed speak the language.

Such were the thoughts that drove Samir Hasan, cabdriver, to follow the pair of women into the elevator, even while his cab was idling at the curb. Making sure to turn around and face the elevator door as soon as he entered it, he heard the pale-haired woman ask someone to push the button for the top floor where the Windows on the World restaurant was located. When she awkwardly interjected the word mishmish into some silly conversation about fashion, the cabdriver decided to get out the next time the elevator doors opened and take another one back down to the lobby.

Hardly able to disguise his agitation, Hasan hurried back to his two-way radio to broadcast his panic to a compatriot he only knew as Fa’ud, the same man who had, while assuming the cabbie was alone, radioed a grocery list of highly secret code words.

“ Ladhibhah teena is not enough. How tall is she? How is she dressed? Where is she at this moment?” Fa’ud demanded.

“Why are you asking this? I am telling you the words are no good now. The shaqra heard them but she doesn’t know why we are using them. We must change them.”

“It’s too late. Allah save us. You must take care of her.”

“You cannot be saying. . .”

New York City, December 23, 2000

Liz decided to lose no time in getting back to Boston. But there was something she wanted to accomplish before leaving the city.

Hiring a cab from the garage, she got in the vehicle and opened her envelope containing Ellen’s photos. Squinting to read the print on the shopping bags held by Ellen and Nadia in the photo taken at the New York Public Library, she asked the driver to take her to Florissa’s Gift Emporium on 44th Street.

“Got a street number?” the cabbie asked.

“Sorry, no.”