Bruno drags his owner past a 1960s-era high-rise, then slows to investigate the rusty fence that surrounds some cracked tennis courts. High on the list of things that kill O’Hara about her dog is the power of his convictions. No matter how many times he’s checked out a certain stump or tire or fence, he never phones it in. Every stop and sniff adds to his storehouse of canine knowledge. Every piss sends a message, and every time he scrambles out of the house and into the world it matters a lot, at least to Bruno.
The two skirt the neglected grounds of a once grand Tudor mansion, and rounding the corner, O’Hara catches her first glimpse of the Hudson. As always, she’s delighted that’s she’s seeing it not from a public lookout on the Palisades Parkway but through a small break in the trees on a quiet street half a mile from her home. Still preoccupied by her cruelly inconclusive conversation with Pena’s parents the night before—the father, who answered the phone, could barely get a word out, while the steelier mom clung blindly to what little hope remained—O’Hara follows her dog to the river. She lets Bruno root among the cold, damp weeds a hundred feet from the water before she pulls him out and turns him back toward home. As they climb the steep hill, the burn in her thighs reminds O’Hara she hasn’t been to the gym in a week.
At home, O’Hara saws three slices off a stale baguette and puts on coffee and music. Ten minutes later, when she steps out of the shower, her hair is clean and all the pieces of modest domestic life are in order: coffee aroma wafts out from the kitchen, Bruno sleeps on his side in a circle of sun, and Heart’s Ann Wilson sings “Crazy on You.” When O’Hara moved in with the fireman, every bit of decor, not to mention his collection of piss-poor CDs, was all grandfathered in, and any input on her part was highly discouraged. That’s why, despite the fact that she was almost thirty when she signed the lease, this is the first place that feels entirely her own. The purchase and placement of every stick of furniture, from the overstuffed whorehouse couch (a flea market on Columbus Avenue) to the small kitchen table (a Riverdale yard sale) to the brass floor lamps (IKEA in Elizabeth) represent an unfettered decision of one and give her inordinate pleasure. The same goes for the photographs, including the pictures in the small foyer of her parents and grandmother and Bruno. Her favorite, hanging just above the couch, is of her and Axl, in the midst of their epic road trip. It was taken at six in the morning in front of a motel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Above them the sky is just lightening, and the fifteen-year-old Axl looks so beautiful and nakedly adolescent it almost feels wrong to look at him. As Axl and Pena and Pena’s panicked parents clamor for different parts of her attention, Krekorian calls.
“Dar,” he says. “You caught something big.”
“Do I need to get tested?”
“Give me a call after you’ve seen the papers. I think we need to go in.”
When O’Hara gets off the phone and fans her Monday papers out across the table, the same photo of Pena she has in her pocket stares back from all three. O’Hara is surprised the press jumped on the case so quickly. Being Puerto Rican and working-class is usually enough to keep anyone from getting much ink. But as O’Hara reads the stories, she realizes that Pena, with her wealthy friends and NYU scholarship, has the prospects of a well-off white or Asian kid. Plus, she’s beautiful and light-skinned, and comes with an irresistible backstory.
The Post and News are interested in the potential tragedy as a cautionary tale. A teenage girl stays alone at a bar in the hope of getting laid. Therefore, she has to be punished. The Times concentrates on the poignancy of Pena’s unlikely journey that began long before she got to NYU. Its story on the front page of the Metro section, above the fold, recounts how Pena grew up on public assistance in a notorious Chicago ghetto, lost her drug-addicted father to AIDS when she was eleven and got into enough trouble in her early teens to do two months in juvenile lockup. Desperate to escape the gravity of the inner city, mother and daughter rolled the dice and moved to New England. In Westfield, the mother was remarried, to a local carpenter and small-time contractor, Dominic Coppalano, and took his name, while Francesca kept the Pena of her late father. The terrified man on the phone last night was Pena’s stepfather.
In the depressed former mill town of Westfield, Massachusetts, Pena rewrote her destiny, or at least tried to. She became a competitive runner and a motivated student, won a scholarship to a prep school and two years later a full ride at NYU. According to a quote from the assistant provost and director of admissions, Pena had made so much progress as a student-athlete, the school was planning to propose her as a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship.
O’Hara has read enough of these stories to know they’re written to a curve. When catastrophe lurks, a pretty girl becomes a breathtaking beauty and a B student a future world leader. But it’s the particulars of Pena’s story that get O’Hara’s attention. O’Hara also lost her father at eleven, and although getting pregnant didn’t get her sent to juvenile detention, the special school for fuckups on East Tenth Street wasn’t much better. And then there’s the oddly parallel cross-country trips, Pena’s mother grabbing her daughter and heading east, not long before O’Hara and Axl headed west. And weren’t both mothers attempting about the same thing: to distract their impressionable kids with a change of scenery?
O’Hara should have known Callahan would call reporters, but it never occurred to her that they would bite so enthusiastically. Now that they’ve decided Pena can sell papers, it’s become the kind of case that can launch a career. But not for long. If Pena’s disappearance is upgraded to a homicide, she and Krekorian will only get to work it for seventy-two hours. Then it will be turned over to Homicide South, and for O’Hara and Krekorian, it’s back to burglaries and domestic disputes, Astrid with her stroller and fake kids and Dolores in her bathrobe.
7
Krekorian lives twenty miles up the Palisades in the Rockland County town of New City, or as he likes to call it, Jew City. He picks up O’Hara on his way in, and they get to Freemans at 2:30 p.m., several hours before it’s due to open. Although O’Hara finds the place a lot easier to take empty, the daylight isn’t kind to the decor and reveals how little money was spent to achieve its faux-antique effects. The oil-stained mirrors and dusty paintings that at night suggested the lodgings and funky heirlooms of a hard-partying disinherited count look like sidewalk trash during the day, and the animal heads on the walls look like roadkill.
“Two things you can’t avoid, Dar,” says Krekorian, nodding at a glassy-eyed elk.
“Death and taxidermy.”
“I guess someone forgot to tell Wesley Snipes.”
They sit at the bar and sip their coffee, while in the open kitchen a line chef sautées onions and a busboy pulls oversized plates from a dishwasher. Over the next hour, the waitresses and other kitchen staff trickle in, the employees getting prettier and whiter the closer they get to the customers. The maître d’ arrives, sporting a natty tweed blazer a couple of sizes too small, and soon after the weekday bartender, Billy Conway. “She was too pretty not to remember,” says Conway, who actually looks like a bartender, with the thick shoulders and forearms of an ex-jock. “She and her friends had a couple spots at the bar. After they left, she moved to a table and stuck it out by herself to the bitter end.”
“When was that?” asks O’Hara.
“About three-thirty. Because of Thanksgiving, we closed a little early.”
“She leave alone?”
“Yeah.”
“No one followed her out?”
“There was no one left to follow her. She was the last one here.”
“She talk to anyone beside her friends?” asks Krekorian.
“Right after her friends left, a guy came over and tried to chat her up, but got cut off at the knees.”
“You ever see him here before?”
“First time. About five feet ten, bad skin, long hair, at least fifty. One of those ugly Euro guys some girls can’t get enough of.”
“Little old for this p
lace, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but we get a couple trawlers just like him every night. Polanskis we call them.”
“Speaking of age,” says O’Hara, “all four of those girls were under twenty-one.”
“They had IDs; I looked at them myself.”
“You should have looked harder. Polanski, how’d he take getting shot down?”
“Quite well. I don’t think he was going to leave the country. Besides, she did it so fast, it was like laser surgery. If I wasn’t right in front of them pulling a draft, I wouldn’t have noticed. He finished his drink, put down a generous tip and left. Paid cash, or I’d look for the receipt. Then she took her Jack and Coke and sat down at that table.”
“You remember every drink you pour four days later?” asks O’Hara.
“The reason I remember is because she and her friends had been ordering one labor intensive cocktail after another, stuff that’s a pain in the ass to make. As soon as they left, she switched to something simple. I was relieved. The other reason I remember is because it confirmed something I already thought, which is that she didn’t fit in with her friends. They seemed like brats. She didn’t.”
“Anything else stand out about the night?”
“How about a beautiful girl, the night before Thanksgiving, closing down a place alone. Isn’t that weird enough? And it wasn’t like she was drinking herself blotto. It was more like she had nowhere to go.”
O’Hara takes Conway’s cell number, and she and Krekorian walk back down the alley, where on second viewing even the graffiti looks bogus. Despite being filthy, the piece-of-crap Impala is a welcome sight, probably because it’s the only place in the Seven where they feel entirely comfortable. Krekorian starts the car and cranks the heat, and they sit in silence, giving each other the space to think. A soft rain has begun to fall, and at 4:30 Rivington is already deep in shadows, the last bit of light falling out of the sky like a boxer taking a dive.
“Something’s off,” says Krekorian. “Pena tells her girlfriends she wants to stay and check out this hot prospect. Then, the minute he comes over, she shoots him down.”
“I hate to be the one to break it to you, K., but a girl can change her mind at any time. Maybe Polanski looked even older up close. Maybe he had a creepy voice. Or worst of all, maybe he smelled bad.”
“According to Conway, she didn’t let him get three words out. At three a.m. people aren’t that fussy.”
“They are if they look like Pena.”
“Then why didn’t she leave? Why’d she stay and order another drink?”
Slushy rain slobbers all over the roof, and O’Hara tracks a fat brown droplet down the windshield. In front of them on the curb, a tall Nordic girl wearing a purple and white NYU windbreaker, maybe a member of Pena’s track team, steps up to a light pole and tapes a picture of Pena over the sticker for a band called the Revolutionary Army of California. When the student moves on, Pena’s brown eyes stare down at them from the pole. O’Hara thinks of that mangy elk head on the wall.
“I say we have another talk with your buddy McLain,” says Krekorian.
8
They decide to leave the car where it’s parked and walk to Pena’s Orchard Street apartment, O’Hara glancing at her Casio so she can time the trip and see how long it might have taken McLain to get back and forth from Freemans. At 5:03, the sun’s gone and few lights have been turned on to replace it, and when they reach Chrystie, the steel skeleton of a condo in progress called the Atelier looms behind them. To the east, all is black, as if the night had taken the old neighborhood by surprise.
They cross dark, skinny Rivington Park between a rubber-coated jungle gym and an overgrown garden, the damp air smelling of night and greasy egg rolls. Then two more dark blocks to Allen, past a Chinese nursing home and a boarded-up synagogue whose windows are shaped like the tablets Moses, the first cop, brought down from the mountain. The synagogue can’t be more than a hundred years old, but here, where a century is as good as a millennium, it’s an ancient ruin.
On Orchard, lights have been strung overhead to announce the start of the Christmas shopping season. As O’Hara and Krekorian take it south, the Indian owners in the doorways whisper “very good price” and draw their attention to the racks of seventy-nine-dollar leather coats lined up on the curb. Even ten years ago this neighborhood was filled with bargains, its small narrow stores so stuffed with inexpensive merchandise it poured out onto the streets. These two blocks of Orchard between Rivington and Delancey are all that’s left, an anomaly in a neighborhood whose only purpose is to provide a backdrop of authenticity for fake dive bars, pricey restaurants and whitewashed boutiques.
Seventy-eight Orchard is halfway between Broome and Grand, on the east side of the block. Less then eight minutes after leaving their car, they step into a vestibule papered with Chinese menus and hike the old tiled staircase, the marble so worn it looks like soft dough.
The door to apartment 5B is unlocked and slightly ajar. When they knock and step inside, McLain looks up at them from a tiny couch. He has a paper cup in his hand, half a bottle of Jack between his hightops, and the room reeks of pot. The rich bouquet reminds O’Hara of the fireman, and although in weaker moments she still feels pangs for the treacherous stoner, she also misses the pot. For some unfair reason, the NYPD routinely tests for marijuana and the FDNY almost never does, so maybe she and the fireman were doomed from the beginning.
“Throwing yourself a party?” asks Krekorian.
“No,” says McLain. “Just getting wasted.”
“How long you been at it?”
“What day is it?”
“Monday, Chief.”
“A while.”
“Is there a bed in this place?”
“I’m sitting on it.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“I don’t.”
“When you did?”
McLain nods at the purple sleeping bag on the floor.
“Your old girlfriend slept on the couch, and you slept beside her on the floor? That sounds like fun. And you did that for almost a month?”
“It’s her place. She didn’t have to let me stay at all.”
“She ever bring home guys?”
“Twice.”
“She make you watch?”
“She called from the street. I took a walk.”
“An eight-hour walk?”
“Went down to Battery Park and watched the sun come up. I recommend it. It clears the head.”
“Ever occur to you that your old girlfriend was trying to tell you something? Rub your nose in it so bad, you’d take the hint and leave on your own?”
“It’s possible. But I don’t think so. She was looking forward to spending Thanksgiving together as much as me.”
“So that was the fantasy? You roast a nice turkey, and she realizes what a mistake she’s been making.”
“Basically.”
On the way up the stairs, the two agreed that Krekorian would ask the questions and O’Hara would look around, but McLain’s responses are so guileless, Krekorian can’t get any traction, and the place is so small and sparsely furnished, there’s very little for O’Hara to look at. Against the wall behind McLain is a small table with two chairs, a dresser and a column of textbooks, but except for the iPod dock on the table and a small pile of wadded-up bills on the dresser, there’s not a single personal effect. It looks like Pena moved in over the weekend, not four months ago. More troubling to O’Hara, however, is the fact that there’s no trace of McLain’s Thanksgiving feast.
“David,” asks O’Hara, “you ate the turkey yourself?”
“Too depressing. I threw it out.”
“How about the pots and pans?”
“I washed them.”
“David, I need a list of everything you bought that night at the grocery store.”
McLain slowly stands, toppling his bottle of Jack with his right sneaker, and at the same time that he reaches under the cushion of the couch
and pulls out a scrunched-up menu like those all over the vestibule, he catches and rights the bottle with his left sneaker. This feat of stoned and drunken athleticism that impresses even Krekorian, a former hard-partying college point guard. The menu is from Empire Szechuan on Delancey, and running down the right side is McLain’s twenty-one-item list in small precise green letters.
“Keep it,” says McLain.
“You remember the total?”
“$119.57,” says McLain, refilling his Dixie cup.
“Got a pretty good memory,” says O’Hara.
McLain gives O’Hara permission to look into the barely filled closets and drawers, but they are no more revealing than the blank walls and furniture tops. The only thing of interest, at least to Krekorian, is a Nike sneaker box that Krekorian pulls out from under the couch. When he brings it to O’Hara in the bathroom, he dramatically opens the lid on two vibrators, a dildo and other novelty items.
“What’s the big deal?” says O’Hara. “A girl’s got to have her toys. If something were to happen to me, I’d appreciate it if you’d go to my place and throw out the box under my bed.”
Shadows Still Remain Page 3