Day 28

But no matter how many times I knocked no one answered, there was no stray sound in there, no one scurrying about pretending not to be home. It was like knocking on the door of an empty tomb.

Once I got back down to my car I was trying desperately to remember the name of the import business and the strip joints Brad owned, perhaps she was at one of those. I drove to each place in turn but the business was abandoned, I could see through the front windows that everything was a dusty turmoil within. The office looked like it had be stripped of anything usable and left to rot months ago.

My luck at the exotic dancing clubs was only marginally better, at the first two I entered people said sure they knew Brad Smith and Cynthia Rose, but no one had seen either on them in a good couple of months.

The final club I visited was Brad’s biggest and fanciest and I stepped through the door into a world of darkness and degradation. Men sat around in various states, almost as though hypnotized while two women dancing naked and very suggestively together as though they were about to embark on a lesbian relationship. Chants of kiss, kiss kiss, rose from the watchers. The interior of this place was fancy but the action on the stage was part regular stripper act mixed with mostly semi porn action. ‘So classy, Brad..” I mumbled under my breath on the way to the bar.
The bartender told me that Brad had sold all three of his clubs several months back and he didn’t know anyone named Cynthia Rose. When I showed him the photograph I kept in my wallet he gasped and said, “Oh, you mean Tiffany Rockafella? She split, left Brad for another guy and ain’t been seen in these parts for a couple of months. Shame though, because the regulars keep asking for her.”

I left that smoke filled mirrored world with the wildest of suspicions running through my brain and decided that I would go to the main police station in town to file a missing persons report.

But the police were no more help that anyone at the strip clubs had been. The cop that took the report seemed almost reluctant to write it up. He said, “I’ll file this ma’am but the reality is that hookers run away from their pimps every day.”

At his statement I’d blown up, “My sister was not a hooker! How dare you make unfound accusations like that.”

Without a word he turned his computer screen towards me and I saw on the screen that my sister had a long list of arrests through the years for prostitution. It was akin to a spear through the heart, I knew that Cynthia had done exotic dancing for years but not that she sold herself. There were a few drug arrests scattered in for small amounts of pot but she’d never done more than a night of jail time.

I left the Biloxi police station feeling hopeless. No one was worried about a missing hooker and I wept in my car during the drive back to Bay St Louis, knowing that if she’d have been a suburban housewife or career woman it would be all over the news by now.

During the months to follow I took to sleeping for a few hours after everyone in the household had gone to bed, and getting up to cruise the closing strip clubs and casino shift changes, looking for someone that resembled my sister even slightly, a certain way of walking, the carriage of herself, but it was for nothing. I didn’t find her.

Jude tried many times to talk me out of it, pointing out that if Cynthia was still around anywhere in the country that she would eventually find a way to let me know. She’d call eventually. Jude believed she was just off somewhere with Brad having an adventure, perhaps stripping on that trip around the nation’s clubs she’d mentioned that Brad was pushing.

My worry for Cynthia and my obsession with finding her sent me spiraling down into a steep depression. All the things I’d put off dealing with, the death of John Collins and everything that happened, giving up my first baby, being cut off from my family for so long, it all caught up with me and I felt no joy in living. The only emotions I could feel were love for my children and Jude and the blackest emotional pain. I moved through my days on auto pilot and only allowed myself to break down once I got home. I stopped combing the areas underbelly for my sister and I believed her to be dead.

My only pleasures lay in the triplets and with Jude. I had come to deeply love Jude, just as he’d hoped I would. Many times when I took to our bed during this depression he sought to ease my feelings by making love to me. It was a temporary lift. Finally the day came when he insisted I go to one of my supervisors at work and ask to go into therapy myself before he took me down to the Biloxi police station to demand that they do something more.

So I spent my lunch hour several times a week in therapy with a senior therapist and went on anti depressants. It helped, I started to feel more normal and on an even keel even if my sadness over Cynthia Rose’s disappearance never really lifted.

That afternoon that Jude and I showed up at the police station to ask why looking for my sister seemed to have taken a back seat to other types of law enforcement also helped me deal with what was going on. Jude got into something of a hostile argument with the officious and bitter young black man who worked missing persons. The officer had snapped at him that they didn’t have the resources or the man power to chase down every hooker reported missing.

As their voices raised a middle aged man stepped out of a glass fronted office and stared curiously in the direction of the ruckus. He had wavy salt and pepper hair, a stocky build and eyes that looked like they were haunted by having viewed the horrors of this world behind his thick black glasses. He listened to the dispute somberly before cutting off further argument with a briskly spoken, “Detective Jones, in my office, now.”

Jude and I sat there for about ten minutes, unable to hear what was being said but watching through the glass as Det. Jones and this mystery supervisor were clearly arguing about something. Jones emerged and glumly left the office. The other man emerged and invited us into his office, saying he was personally going to be following up on our missing person report.

Cynthia had been missing six months now.

He introduced himself to us as Sergeant Sam Vocci and proceeded to tell us a great deal about the case that we didn’t know. Apparently Brad Smith had a number of aliases and the department had been trying to bust him for years. A year ago the FBI became involved because Brad Smith, real name Joseph Antonio Cosino and he wasn’t from Stamford, Connecticut as he claimed, but from Brooklyn, a product of the streets and almost certainly part of the Mafia. He had a string of arrests and some prison time for drugs and running prostitution operation along with other recent federal violations. He always masqueraded as a Waspy business man in the import business when he approached ladies to add to his stable of hookers.

He pulled no punches and gave us no false hope. He said about my sister’s whereabouts, “If she’s not dead somewhere then he may have sold her into slavery to the South Americans or to one of the Arab sultanates because he’s done that before. What I can do for you is to get search warrants and search that apartment and the businesses of his, we’ll put your sister’s photo, fingerprints and information onto the NCIC and then we wait. We’ll revisit the case every few weeks and work it from every angle but I must warn you that it might be likely that you’ll never know for sure what happened to her. Are you prepared for that possibility?”

Holding back tears I shook my head and said, “I’ve realized that it’s likely she’s dead somewhere and we’ll never know. But I need to know that this police dept has done all it can do before I can live with not knowing her fate.”

We shook hands on it and I found myself trusting this man, Sgt. Vocci. If Cynthia Rose was somewhere out there alive he would eventually find her.

The searches of the clubs and the business offices of Brad Smith turned up nothing. A dead end. But when the cops showed up at Bayswater Biltmore they’d found another man in residence, a man who claimed to be the real owner of the condo, saying he’d been subleasing it to Brad Smith while he was working overseas for a few years. The owner led them to the few possessions left behind by Brad and Cynthia he’d put aside in storage in the basement.

One of the things left behind was the cheap suitcase Cynthia Rose had come to Biloxi with and it held personal possessions from her past, her clothing from when she’d first arrived, long calico jumpers and modest blouses, a favored stuffed animal from childhood and her journals and books.

On a rainy and blustery April day, when the high winds scoured the sands from the beach and the waves lashed about violently Sgt Vocci showed up on our doorstep with the suitcase, handing it over to me and relaying their new information. The condo owner told the police that Brad had left them a forwarding address for Seattle, which turned out to be a strip joint near the Ballard section of Seattle. Seattle PD had arrested Cynthia Rose for prostitution and released her over five months before. The trail grew cold from there, no one knew where they went but now Sgt Vocci knew to start making inquiries at various strip clubs again. NCIC would show them when she was arrested again and he felt certain we’d get a hit, a real lead, soon enough.