“So, Marwan,” says O’Hara, “you going to tell me what happened?”
“I was having Thanksgiving at my grandmom’s.”
“You live with her?”
“In Jacob Riis House,” he says, referring to the eighteen-building project where she and her partner, Serge Krekorian, get half their collars. “It was nice until my mom arrived and started begging for money.”
“What happened then?”
“I knew she was just going to use, so I said no,” says Overton, looking down at Bruno and scratching him behind the ear.
“OK?”
“She pulls me into my room and puts her hand inside my jeans, says she’ll take care of me for ten dollars. I was feeling so sorry for myself, I let her. After, when I told her I wasn’t going to give her any money and never wanted to see her again, she runs outside and calls for a cop.”
Imagination-wise, thinks O’Hara, the city never lets you down. Practically every day, it comes up with another fresh, fucked-up twist. And although few of the surprises are happy, O’Hara is usually more fascinated than repelled, and almost always grateful for the front-row seat.
His Thanksgiving tale over, Marwan looks up from Bruno to O’Hara and offers a heartbreaking sliver of a smile. Everything about him looks too small and young, but his eyes are ancient.
4
The next evening O’Hara and Krekorian stand outside Samuel Gompers House, two blocks up Pitt Street from the station, just north of the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. In the sixties, when the neighborhood was undesirable enough for city officials to get away with it, they threw up eight thousand units of public housing between Pitt and the East River, and when they all go condo and their tenants get relocated like Indians to reservations, O’Hara and Krekorian will have to find somewhere else to make their overtime. In the meantime, they’re paying a visit to apartment 21EEE, following up on a domestic abuse, the crime that keeps on giving. Since they’d prefer to arrive unannounced, they’re freezing their asses off waiting for someone to step in or out through the locked door.
Shielding herself from the worst of the wind, O’Hara turns her back on the door and looks across Pitt Street. Facing the projects and their captive populace of thousands are a nasty little Chinese restaurant, a Western Union that cashes child-support payments and a liquor store named Liquor Store, with more bulletproof glass than the Popemobile.
“I haven’t even told you about my latest Thanksgiving fiasco,” says Krekorian, who is built like a fire hydrant, the swarthy skin on his face pulled tight across prominent cheekbones like a pit bull’s. After four years as partners, O’Hara and Krekorian are deeply familiar with the toxic ruts of each other’s dysfunctional lives. She knows that Krekorian only dates black women with two or three kids, and he knows that O’Hara hardly dates anyone, and the two indulge each other by acting as if their emotional cowardice is primarily due to the stress and fucked-up schedules of police work.
By now, O’Hara is well aware of how little regard Krekorian’s family has for his unlucrative line of work. To her own family, O’Hara’s becoming a cop and promptly earning her gold shield is viewed as a minor miracle, particularly after the untimely arrival of Axl. To Krekorian’s parents, who squandered over one hundred thousand dollars to send him to Colgate, where he was the backup point guard on the basketball team for three years, it’s a profound disappointment, bordering on disgrace. At family gatherings his younger brother, an investment banker, loves to underline this fact by talking ad nauseam about all the money he’s raking in.
“What you say this time, K.?” asks O’Hara.
“Not a word, Dar.”
“Wow. I think you had what Dr. Phil calls a moment of clarity.”
“He went on and on about his bonus and stock options and being fully vested, and I just let him.”
“Like water off a duck’s back.”
“Exactly. Not a peep. I just sat there with my mouth shut and waited until it was just me and him in the den.”
“And then?”
“I hit him.”
“Maybe I spoke too soon,” says O’Hara, staring at her shoes, trying not to laugh.
“If he’s going to make me feel bad, I’m going to make him feel bad.”
“Exactly.”
Finally, an elderly Gompers resident ventures forth into the great outdoors, and the two detectives slip in behind him. The elevator is open on the ground floor, and as the doors close in front of them, Krekorian flares his enormous nostrils to draw his partner’s attention to the puddle of cat piss in the corner. O’Hara knocks on 21EEE and announces herself and Krekorian as police.
Dolores Kearns, who came to the precinct and filed a complaint on her boyfriend the day before, takes about a week to come to the door. Kearns wears nothing but a bathrobe, and her ample breasts spill out of it. “It took you ten minutes to put that outfit together?” asks O’Hara, but Kearns is no more put out by the arrival of NYPD than Chinese food.
“I was taking a nap,” she says, music seeping out from behind her.
“With Al Green playing?”
“I haven’t seen Artis since that one incident,” she says.
“That one little incident,” says O’Hara, “where he slapped you around and held a knife to your throat.”
“Like I said, I haven’t seen him.”
“But if you do, you’d call us, right?”
“No question.”
When their shift ends, Krekorian parks their black piece of crap Impala in front of the precinct house and heads to his own piece of crap Montero in the lot. O’Hara runs inside to use the bathroom before her forty-minute ride home. Slumped in one of the filthy plastic chairs just inside the door is a brown-haired white kid in a gray hooded sweatshirt about the same age and loose-limbed build as Axl, and when she gets back down the stairs she can’t help looking at him again. Like Axl, he looks like the kind of shy kid who could sit there all night, before getting up and saying anything to the desk sergeant.
“How long you been here?” asks O’Hara.
“An hour. I need to report a missing person.”
“Who?” says O’Hara.
“Francesca Pena. She’s nineteen, a sophomore at NYU, five foot nine, short black hair, about one hundred eighteen pounds.”
As O’Hara looks down at him in his chair, the kid takes out a well-thumbed snapshot of a very pretty teenage girl with long jet-black hair and bottomless brown eyes. “That’s before she cut it,” he says, touching the picture. “When she smiles, she’s got a beautiful gap between her teeth.”
“She your girlfriend?” asks O’Hara, looking wistfully over the kid’s shoulder at the door.
“Not anymore. Just friends. That’s why I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home Wednesday night. We’re not a couple anymore. That’s cool. But we had planned to spend Thanksgiving together and I knew she was looking forward to it. Now it’s Friday, and she still doesn’t answer her phone.”
“You roommates?”
“No, I’m visiting. From Westfield, Mass. Francesca’s from Westfield too.”
A handsome kid, thinks O’Hara, but with that fatal transparent sincerity that drives girls away in droves. Wednesday night, Pena probably hooked up with someone sarcastic and cutting and didn’t have the heart to tell him she was blowing him off for their Thanksgiving dinner. It’s amazing how many girls disappear at the start of weekends and reappear Sunday night. But O’Hara brings him upstairs to the detective room anyway. Partly, it’s because he’s not Dolores Kearns, and she can’t imagine him two days from now looking through her like a pane of glass. Mostly it’s because she misses Axl.
Without taking off her coat, she sits him down by her desk, turns on her computer and takes down his information. Name: David McLain. Age: nineteen. Address: 85 Windsor Court, Westfield, Massachusetts. Since he arrived in the city, he’s been staying with Pena at 78 Orchard Street, 5B. He gives her the numbers for his cell and Pena’s.
�
�How long you been visiting?” asks O’Hara.
“Three weeks. I’ve been working as a barback a couple nights a week at a place on First and Fifth called Three of Cups.”
“Don’t you want to go to college yourself?” she asks, not sure why she’s talking to the kid like a guidance counselor.
“Maybe. I had a pretty good chance for a soccer scholarship till I let my grades slip.”
With his forlorn expression and downtrodden posture, McLain looks almost as pathetic as Axl after he got dumped by his first real girlfriend sophomore year. People outgrow each other. Sad as hell, but it happens, and for six months, Axl walked around just like this kid, with his head so far up his ass that eventually O’Hara had no choice but to stage an intervention. On a Friday afternoon, the last day before summer vacation, she picked him up at school and just started driving. Chugging Big Gulps and talking, they drove twenty-six hours before they stopped in their first motel. Five days later, they walked up to a guardrail and stared with their mouths hanging open at the Grand Canyon. Looking at McLain, she doesn’t know whether to hug him or kick him in the ass.
“Is staying this long OK with Francesca? She didn’t give you a deadline?”
“Not yet. I help out. I buy groceries. I clean up.”
“Where’d you sleep?”
“On the floor in my sleeping bag.”
He’s as loyal as Bruno, thinks O’Hara. But who knows? Maybe he got kicked one too many times.
“When was the last time you saw Francesca?”
“About eight-thirty Wednesday night. She was meeting friends for dinner. Then they were going to have drinks at some new trendy place. Don’t know which one.”
“You know the names of her friends?”
“No. Never met them. I’m pretty sure she’s ashamed of me. One is the daughter of a famous artist.”
“So what did you do after she left?”
“Shopped for our dinner.”
“Where’d you buy the stuff?”
“A twenty-four-hour supermarket on Avenue A around Fourth Street.”
“What time you get there?”
“About one a.m., maybe a little later. I think I got the last turkey in NYC. Then I got up at seven the next morning and started cooking.”
“Who taught you to cook, your mom?”
“You kidding me? My grandmother.”
You walked right into that one, thinks O’Hara, and for a second feels as bad as she did about Axl’s suburban Thanksgiving.
“Keep the receipt for the groceries?”
“Why would I do that?”
5
Saturday, O’Hara and Krekorian focus their crime-solving talents on a pocketbook, net contents seventeen dollars, snatched the night before at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Delancey. When they get there, the manager has the whole caper cued up on video, and it plays like something out of Oliver Twist. The victim, African American, approximately thirty-five, sits at a table enjoying her coffee and the latest Patterson, when the five-foot, two-hundred-pound Astrid Canozares waddles through the door, a stroller in front and two hyperactive kids in tow. While the kids distract the mark, Canozares tosses the woman’s pocketbook into the stroller, then mother, kids and infant, suddenly no longer hungry, exit the premises. O’Hara and Krekorian know the stroller is empty and the kids on loan because they’ve arrested Canozares three times in the last six months.
“The hardest-working obese kleptomaniac on the LES,” says Krekorian.
“Hands down,” says O’Hara.
Even though they know where Canozares lives, and the family that supplies the prop and extras, it takes all evening to track her down and another four hours to run her through the system. O’Hara and Krekorian share the collar, and because it’s her turn, O’Hara gets the overtime, which is the only real point of the exercise, turning seventeen stolen dollars into an extra $176 on O’Hara’s next pay stub. It’s a long slow night, and O’Hara spends much of it thinking about David McLain and Francesca Pena, more worried about the lost boy than the missing girl.
Sunday, her shift starts at four, and in the dismal early dusk, the short thick precinct house, with its slits for windows, looks medieval. O’Hara tells herself she won’t take the girl’s disappearance seriously until the end of the day, but when she calls McLain and finds he still hasn’t heard from Pena, she takes out her coffee-stained list of hospitals and ERs and starts making calls: Beth Israel and St. Vincent’s in the Village, NYU, Cabrini and Lenox Hill, St. Luke’s Roosevelt near Columbia, Mount Sinai in East Harlem and Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights. Pena hasn’t turned up at any of them or in Hoboken or Jersey City, and near the end of their shift, she and Krekorian drive up to NYU to have a talk with Campus Security.
All O’Hara has to offer is that Pena spent the night with several classmates, one of whom may be the daughter of a famous artist, and Peter Coy, the new kid at Campus Security they got working the holiday weekend, can’t do anything with that. O’Hara asks him to call Larry Elkin. Elkin is a former detective from the Seven, who retired from NYPD the day after he clocked his twenty years. A month later, he took a cushy security job at NYU. Now, still in his forties, Elkin collects one and a half salaries, and when he retires again, will do it on two pensions. If his kids are smart enough to get in, he might even get a break on tuition.
Elkin knows the friend, not Pena. “Uma Chestnut,” he says when Coy hands her the phone. “Daughter of Seymour Chestnut. You may not give a rat’s ass about contemporary sculpture, O’Hara, but NYU does, particularly when they go for fifteen mil a pop. First day of the semester, we get a list of every student whose parents’ net worth is north of fifty million dollars. Someone says boo to Junior or Little Princess, we come running with our Tasers and mace. The amazing thing, Dar, is how fucking many of them there are, thirty, forty, in every class.”
Elkin tells Coy where to find the contact numbers, and O’Hara leaves messages for Chestnut on answering machines at three addresses. While they wait for her to call back, she and Krekorian eat a couple slices in the front seat of the Impala and watch shaggy-haired college kids get dropped off by their parents after their first long weekend home.
“You look like them ten years ago, K.?”
“I don’t know what I look like now.”
“It’s called denial.”
What O’Hara looks for and can’t find in the faces of the students is fear, not only the physical alertness that animates young faces in the projects but a fear of the future. These kids don’t seem to have ever doubted that there’s a spot waiting for them somewhere in the world. That alone makes them so different from herself at a similar age, she could be staring into a diorama at the Museum of Natural History.
When Chestnut calls back an hour and a half later, they’re back at the precinct house, their shift nearly over. She tells O’Hara that she, Pena and two other students, Erin Case and Mehta Singh, spent Wednesday night at a place off Rivington called Freemans. The three friends left at about 2:30 a.m., but Francesca, who was interested in a guy, decided to stay. “Can you describe him?” asks O’Hara. “Not well—he was at the other end of the room and the place was packed—but I can tell you that none of us liked him. He was older, close to fifty, and looked a little rough around the edges. Mehta and Erin practically begged her to leave.”
O’Hara and Krekorian drive to Rivington, double-park and walk down a short alley formed by the backs of several small tenements, and although the buildings themselves look real enough, the density of gritty urban signifiers (graffiti, fire escapes, etc.) is suspiciously high, and all are spotlighted. At the unmarked entrance, they push through a thick velvet curtain into a restaurant/bar art directed like the set of a nineteenth-century period play. Oil-stained mirrors, blurry battle scenes and portraits of soldiers, their gilded frames chipped and warped, hang from wainscoted walls. Displayed among them are the mounted heads of bucks and moose and a large white swan with collapsed wings that appears to have just been sh
ot out of the sky. The place is too far from Washington Square to be an NYU hangout, and the crowd is older. Like a lot of the people roaming the Seven at night, they are enjoying that languorous ever-expanding limbo between college and employment. At midnight on Sunday, the place is packed. Krekorian clears a path to the bar and gets the attention of the ponytailed bartender. He only works weekends but retreats into the open kitchen and returns with a very nervous Hispanic busboy, who was on that night. Because O’Hara assumes the kid is working illegally, she doesn’t ask his name, just shows him the freshman Facebook picture of Pena they got from Coy.
The busboy recognizes her immediately. He points at a table at the other end of the room. “She sat over there. It was late. I was already cleaning up.”
“Was a guy with her?”
“No.”
“You sure? We heard she hooked up.”
“She sat alone for a long time. She was the last person to leave.”
“Was she drunk?”
“I don’t think so. She looked serious.”
When O’Hara gets back to the car, she makes the two calls she has been dreading for different reasons all evening. The first is to Pena’s parents in Westfield, Massachusetts. The second is to her useless sergeant, Mike Callahan.
6
Thumbing the photograph of Pena in her coat pocket, O’Hara follows Bruno’s jaunty ass down the steep porch steps and doesn’t correct him when he tugs hard to the right. For nearly five years, ending in her late twenties, O’Hara lived with a fireman in Long Beach in Nassau County, and even though he was kind of a mess and his lips spent more time attached to his bong than her, O’Hara adored him and counted herself happy. At least until the morning she got a call from his other girlfriend, also NYPD, who informed O’Hara that she was about to have his kid. A week later, determined to escape the incestuous grip of Long Beach, with its bars for firemen and bars for cops and bars for both, she rented the top floor of a white clapboard house on 252nd Street in Riverdale, just west of the Henry Hudson Parkway. On days off, she treats Bruno to a longer and more interesting walk, and when Bruno realizes it’s one of his lucky days, the sawed-off mongrel pulls like a rottweiler, steam snorting from his nubby black nose.
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