The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  A few minutes later the detectives led him, a man grown suddenly old, out of his office and over to the loft on Mercer Street. If he’d be so kind, they told him, they’d like to look through Jennifer’s room on the chance her possessions might provide some leads to her killer.

  At about 10 A.M., Alexandra LaGatta, returning home from getting her learner’s permit at the Motor Vehicles Bureau, stooped in front of her doormat and checked beneath it. The key she’d left for Jennifer was still there. Hey, wait a minute, where is Jen? she thought. Inside her apartment, she dialed Jennifer’s number.

  Mr. Levin answered, and at once Alexandra sensed something was wrong. Jennifer’s phone number was different from her family’s, and her phone was in her bedroom. What was her father doing on the line? But even as she was thinking that it was strange, Mr. Levin started firing questions at her. “What happened to Jennifer?” he said. “When did you see her last?” He sounded distraught.

  “Last night,” Alexandra said. She wanted to ask Mr. Levin why he was so upset, but before she could do so, a detective got on the phone. “We’d like to come up and ask you a few questions,” he announced.

  He didn’t say why, but she told him all right. Then, What’s going on? she wondered. What’s happened to Jennifer? Did she get busted for being drunk?

  A few moments later she decided to see if Betsy Shankin had any idea of what was happening. She called her, awakening her out of a deep sleep. When Betsy said she didn’t know anything, Alexandra said, “I’ve got to get hold of Jennifer. Where can I find her? Who was she with last night?”

  “She was with Robert,” Betsy, still drowsy, murmured.

  “Thanks.”

  She’d call Robert, Alexandra decided next. But she didn’t know his number. Was it in Jennifer’s diary? Jennifer had left the little black spiral book in her bedroom last night, and now Alexandra got it out, leafed through the pages, found Robert’s number, and dialed.

  A woman answered. She said she was Robert’s mother and that Robert was taking a shower.

  “Ask him to please call me back,” Alexandra said.

  A few minutes later he did. “Is Jen there?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ve got to find her. Her father is worried about her. He’s really upset. And there are detectives coming up here.”

  Robert was no help. “I was with her at Dorrian’s,” he said. “But she left me to go see Brock.” Then he said, “She’s with Brock.”

  Alexandra felt relieved. “Thanks,” she said and hung up. But right afterward it dawned on her that Brock was still out on Long Island. There was no way Jen could be with him.

  She was getting worried all over again when the doorbell rang and the detectives arrived. They’d made it uptown from SoHo in just fifteen minutes or so.

  She told them what she knew. She said she’d been with Jennifer at Dorrian’s, but that she’d left before her. She said she’d called Robert, who’d reported that Jen might be with Brock. And she gave them Jennifer’s diary so that they could get the phone numbers of her friends.

  But although she helped the police all she could, they wouldn’t tell her anything. Not even why they were asking questions about Jen. “Please tell me,” she begged. “Please tell me what’s happened to Jen.”

  “Her father has to be the one to tell you,” one of the detectives said. “And by the way, don’t call any more of her friends. We’ll call them. We want to judge their reactions.”

  Then they were gone.

  Alone, Alexandra grew increasingly worried. Maybe Jen got hit by a car, she thought. Or raped. Whatever, it was something awful. Picking up the phone, she called Betsy again, just to tell her what she was thinking. “Something really horrible has happened to Jen,” she said when she got her.

  Betsy, who wasn’t alarmed, told her she was going to go shopping. But Alexandra went on worrying. And after a while she dialed her father at his office, told him about the detectives, and said that something must have happened to Jennifer but she didn’t know what.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” her father said.

  Ten minutes later he called her back. “A girl was killed in the park,” he said. He gave her a description of the girl—and then she knew what had happened to Jennifer.

  Her father came home right afterward, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She wanted to talk to her friends. To the people who had loved Jennifer the way she had, the people whom Jennifer had always made smile and laugh and feel happy. But she couldn’t talk to them. The police had warned her not to. She went into her room and just sat there.

  She stayed in the room for hours, not speaking to anyone and not doing anything, and the whole time she stayed there she kept thinking that if only she hadn’t left Dorrian’s early, if only she’d waited till Jennifer was ready to leave, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. Jennifer would have come home with her.

  Marilei, arriving at the Chamberses’ to have lunch with Phyllis, said hello to Robert, and noticed that his face was scratched.

  “What happened to Hrobert?” she asked Phyllis.

  “The cat scratched him,” Phyllis said. “He was playing with it last night, and it dug its claws into him.”

  “Poor Hrobert. He could get an infection.”

  “He’ll be all right. I put peroxide on the scratches.”

  In a few minutes, she and Phyllis strolled over to a coffee shop for hamburgers. Phyllis was chatty. “Robert’s decided to go to Columbia in the fall,” she said.

  “To university?” Marilei’s thin face broke into a wide smile. “Just you wait and see. He’ll make good yet.”

  “Umm,” Phyllis murmured and nodded cheerfully.

  “Detectives,” a gruff voice coming over the house phone shattered Phyllis’s daydreams right after she and Marilei returned from lunch. “Is Robert Chambers at home?”

  “Which Robert Chambers?” she said.

  “Robert Chambers Senior,” she thought she heard. Robert Chambers Senior? He hadn’t lived at the apartment for years. Still, she buzzed the detectives in.

  A few seconds later they were stepping off the elevator. And then she realized it wasn’t Robert Senior they were asking about but Robert Junior. “We’d like to talk with him privately,” they said.

  She didn’t go to get him immediately. She stood stock-still. And then she demanded to know what business they had with Robert.

  “We’re investigating a missing girl,” one of the detectives, Al Genova, said evenly. He didn’t say “dead.” When you said dead, people got hysterical. “We believe she was an acquaintance of Robert’s and that he may have been with her and some other people last night.”

  Phyllis said she’d fetch her son and showed Genova and his partner into her living room. The two men parked their haunches on a soft couch and waited for the man they’d come to see to appear.

  A few minutes later, he did. But he wasn’t a man. Not really. He was a teenager. A hulking one. About six feet four and two hundred pounds. He had on sneakers, sweat pants, and a T-shirt. And his face was emblazoned with scratches.

  Genova, seventeen years with the Police Department, didn’t blink an eye. “We’re investigating a girl who is missing,” he said, repeating the words he’d used with the youth’s mother. “Her name is Jennifer Levin. Do you know her?”

  “Yes, I know her,” Chambers said.

  “We’re trying to identify as many people as possible who were with her last night,” Genova went on. “So we can find out what her movements were.” Then he asked Chambers if he’d mind coming with him to the precinct house to help investigate Jennifer’s disappearance.

  Chambers said he’d come.

  “Do you have the phone numbers of any of her friends?” Genova asked.

  “Yes, in my phone book,” Chambers said. “I’ll go get it.”

  In his room, Robert got out his black spiral phone b
ook with the numbers of his and Jennifer’s friends. He knew now that what had happened between him and Jennifer was real. He hadn’t when he’d first awakened. Nothing had hurt him. Not the scratches Jennifer had given him, not his fingers, where she’d bitten him, not his right hand, which was beginning to ache him now. No wonder everything that had happened in the park had seemed like a dream. But he was sure now that it wasn’t a dream.

  He didn’t hurry out to where the police were waiting. Instead he dialed Jo Perry, as if he were thinking that if only he’d been nicer to her none of what was happening now would have come to pass.

  “It’s been a bad day,” he said when he got her on the phone. “And it’s going to get a lot worse.”

  “You want to get together?”

  “Yeah. Wait for me at your apartment. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  When he hung up, he reached for a silver rosary he kept hanging in his room and fingered the beads. Just then Marilei barged in. “What’s happening?” she said. “Why are the police here?”

  “A girl I know is missing,” he said.

  “Oh,” Marilei said. “Oh, that’s sad.” Her eyes went to the rosary, which was delicate and small, a woman’s rosary.

  “Take it.” Robert was extending his hand. “I want you to have it.”

  “Oh, no. No. I couldn’t. It’s too beautiful.” But he wanted her to have it. He thrust it at her, picked up his phone book, and started out the door.

  “Where are you going?” Marilei asked.

  “With the police,” he said. “I’m going to help them try to find the missing girl.”

  6.

  The Interrogation

  The Central Park precinct house, erected in 1870, was built as a stable for the horses that were helping maintain the new park by pulling grass-cutting machines and wagonloads of earth and plants. Sixty years later, with animal power long replaced by gas-fueled vehicles, the Police Department inherited the stable. A handsome building, its Victorian lines are still graceful and complex, its walls made of brick and brownstone, its roofs tiled in multihued slate. Inside, however, the rooms are cramped, the floorboards rotting. Few traces of nineteenth-century splendor remain except for a tall receiving desk made of carved mahogany.

  Mickey McEntee was standing beside the desk when Detective Genova and his partner arrived with Chambers in tow. McEntee saw the scratches on the young man’s face, but like Genova, he didn’t say anything. He just led Robert into a room off the reception area—a small room with two banged-up metal desks and a tower of chipped lockers that were plastered with stickers saying, “Police!! Don’t Move!!!” He gave him a chair, perched himself informally on a desktop, and said, “I’m going to ask you some questions about this girl who’s disappeared.” A moment later he glanced down at the young man’s hands. Like his face, they, too, were scratched. Or bitten. There was a deep gouge on the middle finger of his right hand.

  Maybe he shouldn’t question Chambers just yet, McEntee decided. Maybe he’d better read him his rights first. Retrieving a copy of the Miranda warnings from the room next door, he began reciting them. “You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  Chambers nodded yes.

  “You have the right to an attorney if you want one now, or in the future. Do you understand?”

  Chambers nodded yes again.

  McEntee finished the warnings, then asked about the girl.

  Yes, he knew her, Chambers said. They’d had sex together earlier in the summer. And he’d seen her at Dorrian’s last night. But he hadn’t spent much time with her. She’d been circulating through the bar, talking to a lot of different people. “Floating around” was the phrase he used.

  “Did you leave with her?” McEntee, taking notes, asked.

  “No. She was in the vestibule of Dorrian’s when I left. She said she was going across the street to the Korean deli. To buy cigarettes. I don’t know where she went after that. Maybe to her boyfriend Brock Pernice’s.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Went to a doughnut shop on Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington. Then went home. Watched The Price Is Right on television, and a movie, I forget its name, about some kid who was all fucked up.”

  “How’d you get those scratches on your face?”

  “My cat scratched me.”

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “I was sanding floors for a woman who lives upstairs from me, and the sanding machine jumped around and cut my fingers.”

  This guy’s really cool, McEntee thought. So cool that even though he’s clearly been in a hell of a serious struggle, he’s not even the least bit nervous. McEntee kept at him, but he felt his first homicide investigation was going nowhere, that even if Robert had killed Jennifer, he wasn’t going to crack.

  An hour or so after Robert’s departure for the precinct house, Phyllis grew concerned about his absence. She’d expected when he left the apartment with the two detectives that he’d be back soon or, failing that, would call. Why hadn’t she heard from him? Dialing Dorrian’s Red Hand, she asked Jack Dorrian, the proprietor, whom she had occasionally telephoned in the past when she was looking for Robert, if he knew anything about what was going on.

  “Phyllis, haven’t you heard?” Dorrian said to her cautiously. A police officer was standing at his elbow.

  “Heard what?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you hear the news?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Well, a girl has been found dead in Central Park.”

  She didn’t see the connection at first. “What has Robert got to do with that?” she asked.

  “I hope to God nothing,” Dorrian said.

  Around four in the afternoon, Jennifer’s grandfather Arnold Domenitz and her uncle Dan Levin entered the lobby of the morgue and were assigned what the medical examiner’s office ceremoniously calls a death counselor, a case worker whose job it is to shepherd the relatives of the dead through the identification process. Jennifer’s body had just reached the building. All afternoon it had been in the ambulance, one of several bodies the driver had had to pick up, each in its turn, from various locations around the city.

  The death counselor asked Domenitz and Levin about their relationship to the dead girl and how well they had known her, then gave them reassurances about what they would be seeing, promising there’d be no other bodies in view and that they wouldn’t be exposed to unnecessary gore. The counselor also promised that the identification process would be quick and easy. “You will be taken down a set of stairs,” the counselor explained. “You will be shown the face of the deceased. We will try to minimize the amount of whatever else you must see. There will be a doctor present. There will be a mortuary assistant with you. And I’ll be with you.”

  The routine assurances never altogether calmed the relatives of the deceased, and consequently the medical examiner’s office frequently got complaints from people who felt they’d been treated insensitively.

  They hadn’t been, morgue staffers believed. That was just their perception. The problem was Quincy. On Quincy, people identified their dead relatives on a closed-circuit televison screen. The Manhattan ME’s office didn’t have closed-circuit television. It was too expensive, and the identification wasn’t very good. People were always not recognizing bodies they knew very well, or thinking a perfect stranger was a friend. Manhattan didn’t even have a glassed-in viewing area, the way Brooklyn and Queens did. Manhattan just took the families to a window first and showed them through the glass what they were about to see, so that when they actually saw the dead bodies of their relatives, it wasn’t really so much of a shock.

  It worked out that way with Levin. The grandfather and uncle looked at the body, said who she was, and left. There were no complaints.

  Balding John Lafferty of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad and silver-haired Lieutenant John Doyle, the squad’s commanding officer, had, between them, more tha
n forty years’ experience in the arcane labor of crime detection. Hearing of McEntee’s travails with Robert, they decided as the afternoon was drawing to a close to talk to Robert. They’d use a technique young McEntee couldn’t. They’d be avuncular. It might relax Robert, make him let his guard down. Together, they went into the room in which he was sitting.

  Doyle spoke first. “Where’d you go to school?” he asked.

  Robert mentioned Choate.

  “I had a niece who went there,” Doyle said. “She started around three years ago. Maybe you knew her?”

  Robert said he hadn’t.

  Lafferty thought Choate was in Vermont, so he asked how the skiing up in Vermont was.

  He’d enjoyed it very much, Robert said.

  Doyle asked him about his other schools. “How’d you like Boston University? What kind of a school is it?”

  “Very Jewish,” Robert commented. Then he said he’d partied a lot while he was up there and received poor grades.

  The conversation rambled on. The detectives didn’t record it. Robert wasn’t a suspect. Not officially. “What kind of a name is Chambers?” Doyle asked.

  “Irish.”

  “Really? I always thought it sounded more English.”

  “No, it’s Irish.”

  “Are your mother and father from Ireland?”

  “No. But my grandmother is.”

  “What part of Ireland?” Lafferty interjected.

  “Donegal, I think,” Robert said. He pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable.

  Doyle’s ear was offended. “Donneygaal,” he said. “Donneygaal.”

  “Donegal is where my father comes from,” Lafferty said. “Maybe we’re related. What town did your grandmother come from?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You ever been to Ireland?” Doyle asked.

  “No,” Robert said, the senseless lie leaping to his lips.