Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

first round. I needed space between visits with grieving parents. The next name was Ileana Tassiopulos, whose job title at Humanitas neither Winslow nor Mona knew. She was followed by Fatimah Howze-Kelly and Bianca Dawkins, Keisha’s two best friends since sixth grade. Fatimah was a florist with a shop in the Kensington-Bailey area, and Bianca was a manager at Hunnicutt Jewelers in the Walden Galleria. The last two names were Sonny Tyler, a former boyfriend for whom Mona had only a cell number, and the Reverend Dr. Felton Markham of Sermon on the Mount Church.

I planned to call Tassiopulos, Tyler, the minister, and the Williamsons before I went to see them, but I would introduce myself unannounced to the two best friends. If Keisha had gathered her stash and fled, she might have been in contact with one or both of them. Caught in an unguarded moment, they might reveal something important. But it was too early for the flower shop or the mall to be open, too early even to begin making phone calls.

I opened the file folder and began to look through the papers I’d stuck inside. The articles and memos painted a picture of the Humanitas Institute as an independently funded agency that provided health and human services for the public good. Humanitas maintained both formal and informal partnerships with the public schools and selected charter schools, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, women’s shelters, clinics, substance abuse treatment and counseling centers, immigrant and refugee assistance centers, housing assistance centers, daycare centers, senior citizen centers, and employment agencies. They offered supplementary vaccination services, home health visits and emergency room follow-up, after-school tutoring, individual and family counseling, and job placement.

One article noted that Keisha Simpkins, DNP, was in charge of community nursing. Another mentioned that Ileana Tassiopulos, MSW, was director of counseling. Some of the others, clipped from newspapers and magazines, made no mention of Humanitas but reported sharp declines in homelessness and a rise in employment in Western New York. The printed memos announced meetings or concerned internal matters I was in no position to evaluate. But they were on agency letterhead that noted both physical and online addresses and listed staff, including Keisha. The handwritten notes were out of context and even more confusing: inside jokes, happy faces, illegible scrawls, happy hour invites, phone numbers below only first names or initials. One pink post-it note, addressed to K and signed I, stood out: Saw Veronica begging at Timmy Ho’s. We have to help her. Assuming I was short for Ileana and K for Keisha, I put the post-it in my notebook for later.

It was a few minutes past nine when I opened my Lenovo laptop and went to the Humanitas website. The home page had a photo montage that included shots of smiling children and their mothers, immigrants in various styles of dress, seniors and white-coated professionals engaged in discussion, and the agency headquarters, a refurbished mansion on Delaware near West Ferry. The About page confirmed the mission I had figured out from the other documents. The Who We Are page listed the names, pictures, and mini-bios of those in charge of the non-profit operation and the names of the board of directors, some of whom were prominent in business or politics. I skimmed all the bios but paid special attention to Keisha Simpkins and Ileana Tassiopulos, whose alphabetized listings appeared side-by-side. They had graduated from the University at Buffalo four years apart, but both had started at Humanitas at the same time, eight years earlier. Ileana’s was the only Humanitas name Mona had in her address book. As I studied their adjacent smiles, it struck me that the director of community nursing and the director of counseling were more than workplace friends, which meant I would strike Ileana Tassiopulos off my call-first list.

After I shut down my computer, I looked again at one of the letterhead sheets that listed key Humanitas staff. I almost missed the name that appeared between Keisha and Ileana. The name had not been on the website: Veronica Surowiec, MD, Medical Liaison. Then I pulled the post-it out of my notebook: Saw Veronica begging at Timmy Ho’s. We have to help her.

That settled the question of whom to interview first.

6

The Humanitas Institute was half a block past the Jesuit high school that sat on land once occupied by the Milburn Mansion, where in 1901 President William McKinley died eight days after being shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition.

Unlike the Milburn home, many of the sprawling Delaware Avenue mansions once occupied by powerful Gilded Age families had been spared demolition. Over several blocks that stretched from the Gates Circle fountain to downtown, they had been repurposed as high-end law firms, foundation headquarters, charities, charter schools, social services agencies, a few architecture firms, and software companies. The two best known were the massive gray stone Clement mansion, which now housed the American Red Cross and a fundraising arm of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the more compact Wilcox Mansion, now a national historic site because McKinley’s vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, took the oath of office there. The Cardwell Mansion, which a prominent banker had inherited from his railroad magnate father, was a sandstone affair smaller than the Clement but larger than the Wilcox. Set well back from the curb of what was once called Millionaires’ Row, the Cardwell bore a tasteful gold-lettered sign that read Humanitas Institute of Buffalo. With an entrance at one end and exit at the other, a long blacktop drive curved in front of the building but also looped behind it to a parking lot large enough for maybe thirty cars.

At nine-forty-five and with wipers on intermittent for a light snowfall, I drove into the lot, which was more than half full, and found a spot in front of a VISITOR sign. The main entrance was in the rear, at a point where flagstone steps and a hairpin-turn wheelchair ramp met. I climbed the steps to a door with