The Cold Room

by Robert Knightly

  ‘Yeah, we traced them to an apartment in the Bronx. It took about a week, by which time they and their workers were long gone.’

  I went from my lunch with Capra to a news store on Second Avenue. I showed the owner my badge and asked a few questions about Polish-language newspapers.

  ‘There’s only one with any kind of circulation, Gazeta Warszawa. For Polish immigrants, it’s the paper of record.’

  That was enough for me and I took a ride to the paper’s offices in Long Island City. Though I showed my badge and explained the situation in enough detail to draw pity from a psychopath, Lucjan Bilawski refused to discount his advertising rates.

  ‘First thing, I get lots of calls from desperate relatives. If I ran free ads for every one of them, there wouldn’t be room for the paying customers. Now, in this case, being as this is a murder, we’d run it as a news story if you could prove that she was Polish.’

  I couldn’t, of course, and so I paid out three hundred sixty-five dollars for an ad that would run from Thursday through Sunday. At Bilawski’s suggestion, I laid out the facts in Polish, him translating: murder victim, unidentified, help the police. On the bottom, I left the number of my cell phone.

  Bilawski smiled when he took my check. He shook my hand vigorously. ‘If you decide you want the ad to run past Sunday, you don’t have to come back. Just give me a ring. I’ll take your credit card.’

  TEN

  Icarried Dominick Capra’s revelations through the rest of that week, carried them along First Avenue where grown men delivering food on bicycles flew past me. They worked for tips, these men, gathering in small knots outside the many restaurants, their battered bikes chained to meters and no-parking signs. Everybody knew they were in the country illegally. The Mayor knew it. The City Council knew it. The New York Times knew it. Dominick Capra knew it. Just as all knew there was a less visible army of illegals out there, sewing dresses, cleaning floors, mowing lawns, busing tables in restaurants all over the city.

  But if there’s a government agency prepared to deal with the problem, it isn’t the NYPD. The job, at the direction of a succession of mayors and commissioners, has disavowed the whole business. Illegal immigration, as the job understands it, is a federal, not a local, crime. As for the rest, the debts and the coercion, they don’t blip on the radar screens of working cops. It takes something more – a murder victim, for instance, eviscerated and dumped on a street in Brooklyn – to motivate the NYPD. Or at least one low-ranking detective.

  I can’t say that I recall the days following my lunch with Capra in any great detail, but I have a general sense of Adele retreating, of Plain Jane Doe coming forward. I couldn’t do anything about Adele. She was in charge of the decision-making process. If I pushed her, she’d only move further away, even assuming I successfully concealed a resentment that had already begun to fester.

  The issue was more pressing for Jane. My ad in Gazeta Warszawa was not just another turn of the cards. The newspaper, which claimed a proven circulation of forty thousand, was written entirely in Polish. That meant every reader had to be a Pole.

  Even as I placed the ad, I’d known that the chain of speculations running from Jane’s gold crowns and white fillings to an illegal immigrant from Poland would fall apart if the ad failed to produce a viable lead. A few fillings, a clandestine dump site, a Polish community nearby – it didn’t amount to much. Hyong had told me that white fillings were rare in the West. But what about South America? Or South Africa? And while I was sure the man who carried Jane to the Brooklyn waterfront was familiar with the area, I also knew, as Adele suggested, that he might work in the neighborhood and live somewhere else. And then there was the possibility that Jane had only been in the country for a few weeks, or even a few days.

  Ordinarily, I don’t allow myself to wallow in negativity, not while I’m working a case. After all, any line of investigation can be second-guessed. But I’d laid down a big bet when I placed the ad and most of my chips were on the table. If I busted out, I’d continue to work the case, but the likelihood that I’d ever speak for Jane Doe #4805 would sharply diminish.

  The first response came on Thursday evening, when my cell phone kicked out an amazingly tone-deaf rendition of John Coltrane’s, ‘My Favorite Things’. By then, I had the patter down.

  ‘Detective Corbin,’ I answered. ‘How may I help you?’

  ‘This girl who is having her picture in the paper. I believe I am knowing her.’

  ‘Can you tell me when you last saw her?’

  ‘One week ago.’

  ‘That would be on July fourteenth?’

  ‘Yes, on Sunday.’

  And that was the end of that. The question I’d posed was a screening device. Any date after Jane’s body was discovered on July 7th eliminated the possibility of a true sighting. But even if the caller had gotten the date right, I was prepared to add a series of questions about height and weight, country of origin, hair and eye color. Checking false leads was an activity I was determined, for obvious reasons, to minimize.

  I continued to field calls through Friday, through torrential rains on Saturday, and into Sunday morning without getting a hit. Although a few of the calls began by asking whether there was a reward – and concluded shortly afterward – most were from desperate parents. Their collective heartbreak poured through the phone lines, as real to me as the air I breathed. They might have been sitting beside me. And I knew what they wanted, these mothers and fathers. They wanted to be made whole, to be restored. I could not restore them, but I doled out the only solace I had to offer. I informed them, after a few questions, that the murdered girl I searched for was not their daughter. They could go on hoping.

  At one o’clock on Sunday, after a short lunch, I settled down to watch a Yankees-Mets game, an encounter I’d been looking forward to for some time, having been a Yankee fan all my life. But the game was a dud, and by the third inning, when my cell phone went off, I’d had enough anyway. The Mets were ahead, six-zip, having pulverized C.C. Sabathia, while the feared Yankee batters had been limited to a single infield hit. I muted the TV, then pushed myself to a sitting position and took the phone from the end table. ‘Detective Corbin, how may I help you?’

  ‘My name is Sister Kassia Grabski. The girl whose photograph appeared in the newspaper today was here, at Blessed Virgin. I spoke to her briefly.’

  ‘Is that Blessed Virgin in Maspeth, where they have the outreach center?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this point, I was supposed to ask when the conversation had taken place, to screen the call, but several things caught my attention. An authoritative tone, first of all, that conveyed near certainty, and the title, Sister. Then Blessed Virgin Outreach where I’d displayed Jane’s photo to a priest named Stan Manicki. Father Stan had examined the photo carefully before looking up. His eyes, as I recalled them, were large and strikingly blue, dominating a hawkish nose and strong cheekbones. They projected sincerity, those eyes, and maybe that’s the reason I slipped up.

  Honest citizens have a hard time lying to a cop. When they don’t want to answer a question truthfully, they tend to evade it. Father Stan hadn’t said, ‘I’ve never seen this woman before.’ His response had been equivocal: ‘I can’t help you.’ At the time, I’d thought nothing of it.

  Before I could begin to curse myself for a fool, Sister Kassia asked, ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. Maybe you could tell me when you last saw her.’

  ‘On Saturday, June twenty-second.’ Again, the confident tone, the precise date.

  ‘Had you ever seen her before?’

  ‘I’d seen her at mass, many times, but I only spoke to her once, and not to her directly. That was on a Saturday when she came here with the other girls, to confess.’

  ‘To confess?’

  ‘Yes, to Father Manicki. They were chaperoned, as usual.’

  ‘Chaperoned by a man?’

  ‘This time, yes. But some
times they’re accompanied by an older woman.’

  I told myself to chill out, to wipe that smile off my ugly face. The nun’s confident tone might be no more than the natural outgrowth of an assertive personality. ‘Now, you said you spoke to her. Would you describe the circumstances?’

  ‘When the girls came into the church on June twenty-second, I was busy arranging the weekly flower delivery. There were five of them, including the girl you’re trying to identify. Though I had no real plan, I decided to stay inside the church while they confessed, hoping for an opportunity to speak to them alone. That chance presented itself at the very end when their minder left to use the bathroom. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I kept it simple. I spoke Polish, telling them my name, and that if they ever needed help, they should come straight to Blessed Virgin and we’d protect them.’

  ‘Protect them from what?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Would you repeat it?’

  ‘Detective Corbin.’

  ‘Well, Detective Corbin, if you drive out to Blessed Virgin at six o’clock this evening, in time for the Polish mass, you can see for yourself.’

  ‘That, Sister, will be no problem at all. But there’s just one more thing I’d like to know for now. Did you by any chance catch the girl’s name?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. This was my first approach and I spoke to the girls as a group. Not that I see how it matters. I’m certain of my identification because the girl had a curious way of looking at you out of the corner of her eye, just as she does in the photograph that appeared in the paper.’

  ELEVEN

  The community of Maspeth, in Queens, is heavily industrialized, like virtually every other New York community bordering the waters that surround Manhattan. In this case, the water is Newtown Creek, a polluted canal that feeds into the East River. The joke among cops who work near the canal is that a body dumped into the water at sundown will dissolve before morning. I’d never had the good fortune to view a body pulled from Newtown Creek, but I’d been close enough in midsummer to experience the foul odor that seeps from its oily waters any time the temperature rises above eighty degrees. Newtown Creek was an industrial dump site for a hundred years before the first environmental laws were written. Somehow, the near-miraculous rehabilitation of the Hudson and East Rivers has passed it by.

  I drove across Newtown Creek that Sunday afternoon, on Metropolitan Avenue, from Brooklyn into Queens, continuing on through the industrial heart of Maspeth and into a primarily residential neighborhood near Fresh Pond Road. The homes were modest here. Semi-detached and two-family for the most part, they bore flat roofs and were sided in a textured vinyl that made only the faintest stab at a wood-like appearance. But their yards were neatly kept, the tiny lawns mowed, the shrubs carefully trimmed. In one, the path to the front door was framed by a trellis overgrown with pink roses. In another, a woman bent over an enormous hydrangea, cutting the purple blossoms and transferring them to a laundry basket at her feet.

  Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church was as modest and well tended as its neighbors. The stone tower on its northern face rose only a few feet higher than the surrounding homes, and the statue of the Virgin in its churchyard, though crude enough to pass for lawn furniture, was freshly painted.

  There were people gathered outside the church when I walked down the block. As they were universally Caucasian, I gussed they were arriving for the Polish mass, as I assumed there’d already been masses conducted in Spanish and English. The Roman Catholic Church in New York is committed to satisfying the demands of believers from nations as diverse as Rumania and Botswana. In the vernacular.

  I scanned the crowd as I passed the face of the church, looking for a group of young women escorted by a single man, but found only the expected gathering of families. I was headed for a narrow wood-frame addition jutting from the church’s northern face. Blessed Virgin Outreach was run from this building and that’s where I was to meet Sister Kassia.

  The large room I finally entered was given over to a motley collection of couches and upholstered chairs. Hand-me-downs, without doubt, their wildly mismatched fabrics, colors and patterns might have filled a manufacturer’s sample book. The effect was homey, nevertheless, with the chairs and couches arranged in small groupings that afforded a bit of privacy. Sister Kassia was sitting on one of the couches, speaking to a woman who sat next to her. In her late twenties, the woman’s face was swollen and discolored, with one eye closed altogether.

  When I shut the door, the nun turned to look at me for the first time, and I knew, instantly, that I’d been right about her take-no-prisoners attitude. Her nose was pointed, her mouth pinched and turned down at both ends, her chin sharp enough to punch holes in sheet metal. Two deep grooves rolled up and out from the bridge of her nose to echo the sharp hook of her pale eyebrows. Beneath those brows, her hazel eyes were as round as an owl’s. They appraised me without apology.

  Finally, the nun turned to half whisper a few words to the woman on the other side of the couch before crossing the room. Late in middle age and a good thirty pounds above her best weight, she nevertheless moved with grace, coming at me with her shoulders squared, offering her hand for a firm shake.

  ‘Mr Corbin?’ she said.

  I nodded my head. If she didn’t want it known that I was a cop, that was okay by me. ‘Why don’t you just call me Harry,’ I suggested.

  ‘Fine. Now I’m going to need a few minutes here. I have to get Flora settled.’

  ‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to Father Manicki before the mass got started.’

  That brought her up short and she paused to reassess the big cop who towered above her. I met her gaze without flinching, the message I wanted to send quite simple. When Sister Kassia picked up the phone to call me, the entrance to the maze had closed behind her. There was no going back.

  ‘Father Stan’s in the sacristy, putting on his vestments.’ She pointed at a door to my right that fed into the church. ‘He won’t be happy to see you just now.’

  ‘Father Stan’s not gonna be happy to see me any time,’ I said. ‘Most likely, he was against your calling me at all.’

  She smiled then, a thin and grudging smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. ‘You’re very astute, Harry, but don’t judge Father Stan too harshly. Our position here is very delicate. It seems the archdiocese approves of Blessed Virgin’s outreach to the undocumented, as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.’ I couldn’t help but think of the bosses in the Puzzle Palace. They didn’t care if you ignored a suspect’s civil liberties, as long as you didn’t get caught.

  ‘Tell me, Sister, does the parish offer this Polish-language mass on a weekly basis?’

  ‘Every Sunday.’

  ‘And Father Stan, does he usually conduct the mass?’

  ‘Almost always.’

  ‘These women you spoke of, can I assume they show up?’

  ‘Most of the time, they do.’

  ‘I see. Now, I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t know the customs all that well. But does the priest who performs the mass go outside to greet his parishioners as they leave the church?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister.’

  I discovered Father Manicki in a small room at the end of a narrow hallway. He was standing before a closet that held a variety of robes and brightly colored vestments. There were two children in the room with him. I would have made them for altar boys in an earlier era, but these two were of mixed gender, the girl a foot taller than her companion.

  Father Manicki turned to me when I knocked on the open door. He raised a hand to slow me down, then instructed the children to wait outside. When they were safely gone, he closed the door behind them.

  ‘What do you mean, barging in here?’ he demanded. ‘I’m preparing to celebrate a mass.’

  But I wasn’t about to be bluffed, not this time, not by the hawk’s nose, the square jaw, or the firm set of his mouth. At first glance, Father Stan mi
ght have passed for a bare-knuckle prize fighter, but there was something else in his blue eyes, a sense of regret that I knew I could exploit should the need arise.

  ‘I didn’t come here to accuse you,’ I said. ‘But I want you to tell me, right now, whether you recognized the girl in that photo. I want a confirmation or a denial.’

  His jaw tightened momentarily – perhaps he wasn’t used to being challenged – but then he suddenly deflated, his gaze dropping to the carpet. ‘Try to understand,’ he said. ‘Those young women are virtual prisoners.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I’ve looked into the eyes of the men who escort them.’

  When I didn’t argue the point, he continued. ‘And like all prisoners, if they attempt to run away . . . well, you know what happened to the girl you want to identify.’

  ‘No, I don’t, Father. I don’t know what happened to her. If I did, I wouldn’t be here asking for your help.’

  ‘But don’t you understand? Everything I learned about her life came to me through the confessional, so it’s just as I said when you first approached me. I can’t help you.’ He held up Plain Jane Doe’s photo. ‘In the Catholic Church, the seal of the confessional is absolute. I’m helpless here.’

  The room was very spare, a plain chest of drawers, several ladder-back wooden chairs, a small table. Except for a large crucifix above the door, the walls were undecorated. Father Manicki turned his eyes to the crucifix at that moment, to a stylized Christ whose arms and legs were too long for his emaciated torso, who wore, in lieu of a crown of thorns, an actual crown, as if already risen. ‘This girl,’ he continued without turning around, ‘she’s beyond help. But the other girls are still at risk. You may think that you can ride to the rescue, perhaps arrest the men who watch over them. But even if you’re successful, it won’t help.’

  ‘Why is that?’