After Etan Read online

  As long as there’d been hours still left in the first day, though, hope had remained that Etan had run away, was hiding out with a friend, was en route home. But even as police helicopters made use of the dawn’s light to comb rooftops, as launches from the NYPD Harbor Unit searched the water around the Hudson River’s retaining walls in a swath from Greenwich Village south to the tip of Manhattan, Butler had lost the previous day’s optimism. In law enforcement, there are a whole slew of hour markers to choose from—the first nine, the first twelve, the first forty-eight—beyond which chances for recovery drop precipitously. But for a child this young, once a night had passed, it marked the beginning of the end of denial.

  Bill Butler was a twenty-four-year veteran of the New York Police Department. He was a bluff block of a man. His many years of moderate drinking to drown out memories from his job hadn’t marked his face with clear signs of dissipation, except perhaps for the watery blue eyes now concealed behind square-framed brown tortoiseshell glasses. Eyes lined by all those memories, by the squint of unapologetic chain-smoking, and ready laughter.

  But for Butler, like most cops, missing children were the cases you couldn’t tough out. Butler had six of his own, all old enough to fend for themselves. Two were in the Police Academy, another planned to enter. They were past the age that engendered this kind of panic. Once a parent, though, you’re forever in tune with it.

  Butler reread the single page of his DD5—Detective Division Form Number 5, “Report of Ongoing Investigation.” Cops called them “the fives,” and were supposed to write up a new one after each new development. Butler was among the few who scrupulously did. It could make him feel he had something to show for himself, especially when that was all he had to show. This was one of those times. His single page didn’t do much to convey the man-hours hundreds of officers had poured into the previous twelve.

  There were rougher parts of the city than this one where kids disappeared regularly, to turn up again soon afterwards. There weren’t a lot of children living in this downtown section of Manhattan. The First Precinct was a weekday precinct, covering not just SoHo but the Wall Street area. Off hours, the Financial District rolled up so tight, it looked like the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Add the empty streets of the holiday weekend and the First could focus all its resources into the hunt for a missing six-year-old.

  Butler rubbed his grainy, half-slitted eyes one more time and put away his reading glasses. He grabbed his detective’s standard-issue trench coat to insulate him from the drizzle and headed back up to the Patz loft. When he arrived there, he learned he’d just missed the dogs.

  Sometime after 8 a.m. on Saturday a state police truck had pulled onto Prince Street and wedged itself between the cop cars lining the block. Two large bloodhounds were led out the back of the caged half of the van. Julie offered up Etan’s size six pajamas, which the dogs eagerly inhaled. Then, one at a time, each set off at a run down the street. But with twenty-four hours and light rain separating the trail from Etan’s last sighting, police weren’t counting on a lingering scent.

  The animals looked productive, racing up the block between the bus stop and the Patz loft, only to race back. This prompted the first in an infinite number of theories that could never be proved—that Etan had missed the bus and walked back to his home; too short to reach the buzzer, he had wandered off again. Then the dogs crisscrossed the surrounding blocks, traversing a good portion of SoHo; in and out of nearby Eva Deli, the Bruno Bakery, and the local fruit stand. They stopped outside Gem Lumber on Spring Street, one block south and a few blocks west of Etan’s Prince Street home, entered and went to the counter, exited, then later came back. The state police handler was confident—Gem was part of the boy’s route.

  Butler made notes on the dogs’ path and checked in with Stan and Julie, who looked as though they hadn’t left the front room in the intervening hours. They were clearly dazed, two smallish, slim figures unmoving in the harsh morning daylight streaming in through the windows above them. Stan’s angular face was unshaven, stubble now picking up where his long sideburns left off, covering faint acne scars. Julie’s face was more expressive than her impassive husband’s; the small twitch by the right side of her mouth was more pronounced than Butler remembered it from the evening before. The parents sat side by side on a worn couch, its brown and white polka dots covered by a yellow sheet, placed there to take the abuse of muddy prints from tiny sneakers and grubby hands. It was now littered with phone books and scribbled pages of notes—names of people called, still to be called. The two talked quietly before Stan went back to take his place with the uniformed officers at the table by the door, to answer more questions.

  During the night, the makeshift command post had drifted across the hall to the next-door neighbor’s apartment. Fred Cohn, an iconoclastic defense lawyer, lived there with his wife, Suzanne, but they were away and the apartment had clearly been annexed, thanks to the passkey Stan Patz possessed as de facto super of the co-op.

  Looking in the door and already anticipating another long day into night, Butler wondered whether the couch in Cohn’s apartment would accommodate his six-foot-two-inch frame. One officer was on the phone in there too, and another was finishing a makeshift breakfast.

  Butler had heard some of the other cops wondering out loud where Cohn was this weekend, and he too was curious about just when the couple had left town. Was it before or after Etan disappeared? The eight-hour gap between when the boy left home and when the alarm was raised made alibis so much easier.

  Fred Cohn had spent his career representing anti–Vietnam War protesters and other high-profile radical left clients. His antiestablishment bent didn’t automatically make him suspicious, but it caused speculation. The detectives planned to track down the lawyer today, because during the school bus strike, Cohn had frequently dropped off Etan at school on the way to his nearby law office. The cops hoped his route could provide a clue to the direction Etan would have headed on foot if he’d missed the bus. Plus, the theory went, a rabble-rousing lefty lawyer who was often alone with a six-year-old and was conveniently out of town was someone to talk to. Just on principle.

  Back at the Patz loft, the officers sitting with Stan continued to add to the lists of friends, acquaintances, anyone who might have had a connection to the family. Maps of the neighborhood, both commercial and hand-drawn, were laid out on the work table near the phone, which rang continuously. Access to much of the area’s real estate was going to be especially tough because of the holiday weekend and the shuttered commercial spaces. In the meantime, authorities were focusing on the people who lived and worked in those buildings, particularly those who knew Etan and his parents.

  Etan.” Stan Patz mechanically corrected another officer yet again. “Sounds like A, Y, T, A, H, N.” There were many different ways to say his son’s name, but even taking into account the hint of New England accent that still permeated Stan’s broad vowels, there was no misinterpreting the pronunciation of his family name. “Not Patz, like ‘cats’; Patz, like ‘hates.’ ”

  The last word was stuck in his brain. Throughout the long night, cops had been asking if anyone hated his family. “Any enemies? Someone who might want to hurt you?” It was a perfectly logical question, and Stan was trying to focus, but he had never even thought about it. “No,” he kept repeating, over and over, even as he considered it anew each time they asked. There was no one.

  The other questions—about himself, about Julie—they weren’t pointed, really, not yet. But any moment now he expected a high-wattage lamp to be shined in his face. He doubted such a light would even register, though. He felt an overwhelming numbness for which he was vaguely thankful, because it protected him from all other sensations. Certainly hunger—he had no idea when he’d last eaten, probably the hamburger that had delayed his arrival at the loft the day before.

  Julie hadn’t eaten either. She’d tried to, aware that she needed her strength so she could help. But it was no use. Even if
she went through the motions of chewing the food, she couldn’t swallow it. She was also having trouble walking, her legs shaking so much they threatened to give way. Her mind was racing, and as the police asked their questions, she fought to reach back into her memory, to make sense of any detail that might provide a clue. But all she could think of was what her son might be going through.

  Three blocks away, Jack Lembeck sat and watched his son Jeff’s face and waited for the boy to wake up. Jeff was Etan’s best friend. His was the name sewn into the back of the jacket Etan had been wearing the previous morning. Jeff and Etan swapped clothes regularly, and it was not lost on Jack that the two six-year-olds were interchangeable in most ways. Except that Jeff was sleeping peacefully just inches away.

  Finally, Jeff opened his eyes. Jack didn’t want to tell him what had happened, didn’t want to allow those kinds of fears to enter into his son’s head, let alone be the one to put them there. But maybe Jeff could offer a clue, and Jack couldn’t just sit still anymore, he needed to do something. So after a few minutes, he quietly told Jeff that Etan hadn’t come home the night before. Jeff got a small, scared look on his face, and Jack said, “We’re going to go look for him now.” The six-year-old was motionless for a moment, then jumped up and headed for the kitchen. He said, “We have to bring him some food and water. He’ll be hungry.”

  Jack and Jeff gathered supplies, foraging around the loft, a 4,000-square-foot open space that was once a cardboard-box warehouse. They wrapped up some crackers, poured Juicy Juice into a bottle, and packed it all into a backpack. Then they wheeled their bikes into the elevator, down six flights to Broome Street, two blocks south and one block east of the Patz loft, and set off. Jack gave Jeff strict instructions to ride only one bicycle length ahead of his dad. With one eye glued to the small figure poised on his stubby yellow banana-seat bike, Jack searched for a glimpse of another blond head.

  Jack let his son guide him through the streets as they pedaled around to the boys’ familiar haunts. They headed toward West Broadway, then wound back east, working their way south. This was SoHo—the thirty-seven-block neighborhood “SOuth of HOuston.” Dotted with warehouses and galleries, parts of SoHo were not yet legally zoned for folks to raise their families. The days were just about over when shades were drawn at sundown to hide signs of life after regular business hours. But this was still a fairly makeshift community, where a greeting shouted from the street would be followed by sock-wrapped keys hurled from an upper floor, then a ride up a freight elevator.

  SoHo was the bastion of a new generation of New York artists and poets. Jack’s good friend, the unorthodox portrait artist Chuck Close, lived a block west of the Patzes, jazz great Ornette Coleman a block east. Composer Philip Glass had a child in Julie’s playgroup.

  Jack himself was a painter-slash-messenger, although of late he’d been lucky enough to support himself with his art. Now his messenger days, learning the nooks and far corners of lower Manhattan, served him well as he and Jeff pedaled south.

  As they rode, the news was spreading to other residents of SoHo, the ones staying home for the long weekend, who began to mobilize on a larger scale. The SoHo Cooperative Playgroup, another neighborhood preschool, was scheduled to hold its annual picnic that afternoon and instead transformed into the Etan Patz Action Committee. Independent of the police search, some twenty people had organized themselves, and without access to Stan Patz’s photography files or any random prints of Etan, they tapped the skills of their artsy members to produce a flyer with Etan’s drawn likeness. They photocopied thousands of sheets, then split up to post them around town. Volunteers took stacks and stood on the street, handing them out to passersby.

  Sometime early in the day, the Patzes’ upstairs neighbors Barry Ensminger and his wife, Sylvia Law, arrived from upstate, turned around less than a day into their Memorial Day weekend getaway. Barry and Sylvia’s two-year old son Ben was Ari Patz’s close friend, as close as toddlers in parallel-play could be. The boys easily wandered up and down the back stairs from one apartment to the other—sometimes it felt like they all lived in one big house. Ben was in Julie’s daycare, one of those children sent home early the day before when Etan was discovered missing.

  Sylvia and Barry had left New York on Friday, soon after they had picked up Ben, to spend their long weekend at a friend’s country home. They had driven off still debating whether they should leave town at all. But Etan was surely just at a friend’s house, or, they thought, pretending to run away. We can always come back if we’re needed. Early Saturday morning, they got a call from Sylvia’s sister Judy, who often housesat at the Prince Street loft. “Come back. They haven’t found him.” Sylvia and Barry packed Ben back up and drove home.

  Now the couple walked down the stairs to the third floor and found Stan crouched over the front room desk, flanked by two officers and pages of lists. Julie sat immobile on the balcony, chain-smoking. Her gaze never left the street below.

  Stan and Julie were both so distracted that they didn’t register their neighbors’ return, but there was a quick exchange of hugs and tears. “I can’t believe this,” said Sylvia. “I must have walked right past Etan and Julie yesterday morning, on the street, on my way to work.”

  “Any news?” Barry asked Stan, although he already knew the answer from Stan’s face. Barry quickly moved on. “What can we do?” Stan’s slight shrug and look of mute helplessness prompted Barry to speak, despite his misgivings. Both he and Sylvia were lawyers—Sylvia a professor at New York University’s law school, Barry an adviser to Carol Bellamy, then New York City Council president. In the car on the way down from Woodstock they had come up with the one offering they could make.

  “Have you thought about press?” Barry probed gently. “I know a lot of the guys in Room 9.” Room 9 was the notorious City Hall press office, filled with hard-charging, modern-day Hildy Johnsons and Lois Lanes.

  Both Stan and Julie looked alarmed. “Oh God,” said Stan. “This place has already been invaded. I don’t know if I can handle a crush of reporters.” Both he and Julie looked as though one light touch in the wrong direction would topple them.

  “It’s a trade-off,” replied Barry. “You give them something they need—access to a human interest story, putting a bit of your lives out there. Which will be awful, agreed. But you also give them a photo of Etan, and a reason for New Yorkers to help look for him. It’s not an easy choice.” He paused, letting the idea sink in. “But I don’t think you can say no. I can get to a bunch of these guys, talk them through this, and you can limit what you let out there.”

  Stan looked at Julie. He couldn’t think straight. Bringing in the press would be an irrevocable acknowledgment that this was a crisis. He turned to Detective Butler, now standing beside him. Stan hadn’t yet grasped that Butler was going to be a mainstay on the case; for now he was just another large, blurry shape in a dark suit who exuded authority.

  “I think you should do it,” Butler said. “I don’t usually want the press involved. But this is one of those times where you can let them work for you. Especially if he knows people personally, you may be able to hold on to a little control.”

  “Do it,” said Stan. “Just ask them to be careful with Julie.” Barry moved to go back to his fourth-floor rear apartment and a clear phone line. “I’ll come with you,” said Stan, and the two walked together on the stairs. “If you’re going to get the press in, I think I have to call Massachusetts. I’ve been hoping I wouldn’t have to, but I don’t want my mother to hear this on the news.”

  Stan Patz and his two brothers had left the Boston area decades earlier, but it was still home, where Stan’s parents and extended family lived within a few miles of each other.

  He dialed the number to his parents’ Hyde Park house, steeling himself to hear his mother’s voice. She was the one who always picked up the phone.

  “Mother, it’s Sim.” Sim was what Stan’s grandmother had always called him, the name he went by to those who
knew him best. “You better sit down,” he said.

  It wasn’t until Stan Patz hung up the phone that he finally felt a wave sweep over him that almost knocked him to the floor. Reporting the news, saying the words “Etan is missing” to his parents had done the same thing as agreeing to call in the press. When he had to say it aloud to someone outside the insular Prince Street, it finally became true. He realized that’s why he had put off the call as much as anything else. But this new truth was fleeting, thank God, as he willed away reality and headed back downstairs. Julie couldn’t see this. He couldn’t afford to feel it. Barry Ensminger lifted the phone and started his round of press calls.

  Even before Ensminger had broached the prospect of the press, those wheels were already in motion, and sometime in the afternoon the TV crew trucks began to pull up, one local station after another. In a story like this one, you didn’t really need to go looking for media attention, it quickly found you. By early morning, the previous night’s police detectives had typed up an “unusual”—a brief on any out-of-the-ordinary incident that might attract the public interest. The report was sitting on the chief of detectives’ desk when he came in, and he passed it on to the office of the deputy commissioner for public information.

  “Whadyagot?” asked New York Channel 5 weekend crime reporter John Miller when he checked with the news editor as he did every Saturday and Sunday morning.

  “This came over the teletype from DCPI. Missing kid, they’ve set up a command post at his home.”

  “Where’s he missing from?” Miller asked. Even if it hadn’t been a quiet holiday weekend, Miller knew the story was a no-brainer as soon as he heard that a white kid from a seemingly intact family in a gentrifying neighborhood hadn’t been seen in twenty-four hours. If a black kid from the projects were missing, he wouldn’t have automatically disqualified it as news, but the cold hard fact was that the more unusual the details, the newsier it got. He told the camera crew he’d meet them downtown and took off in his own car.