“O’Hara,” he finally says. “Every girl in America has a tramp stamp over the crack of her ass. Let me guess—you do too? And what about the rape? Or should I say rapes? Were they misdirects too? A piece of advice, Red, and it’s on the house: don’t quit your day job.”
O’Hara grabs the printout off Lowry’s desk and humps downtown at a pissed-off, block-a-minute pace. She has no idea of her destination until she finds herself clambering down the steel steps of Three of Cups. The place is packed but there’s a single empty stool at the end of the bar, and O’Hara is just settling into her spot when the bartender hoists a rusty old cow-bell over her head, rings it a couple of times and announces last call. It’s the same bartender who was working the other night, and O’Hara wants to ask her if she’s familiar with the oeuvre of a band called Last Call Brawl, but decides that ordering three Maker’s Marks and backing them up with three shots of Jaeger is pushing her luck sufficiently.
“I said I’d buy you a drink,” says the bartender with a smile. “Not six.”
“Don’t worry, I’m buying. And yes, they’re all for me.”
“Been a long day, hon?”
“Yeah.”
If something sad and slow were coming out of the speakers, O’Hara might do something embarrassing, like cry. Thankfully and somewhat appropriately, it’s Humble Pie front man Steve Marriott screaming “30 Days in the Hole” like sixty would be better. And when it’s followed by Skynyrd and Zeppelin, O’Hara wonders where this place has been all her life. When it comes to drinking, and it usually does, O’Hara and Krekorian give the Lower East Side and East Village a wide berth. In the case of the former, they’re abiding by the graft-fighting rule that forbids cops to patronize establishments in their own precinct, but cops ignore the rule every night and it’s been ten years since anyone gave a shit. The real reason is those hipster bars, with their iPod mope rock, make O’Hara feel old and fatally uncool.
But this place plays the shimmering metal of her all-too-brief adolescence, with no apologies for the fact that it once got played on a million car radios and in one-hundred-thousand-seat arenas. Obscure doesn’t always mean good, and mainstream doesn’t always mean bad. At least it didn’t back then. And if Axl Rose, Steve Tyler and Robert Plant are barely three degrees from Spinal Tap, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. If you ask O’Hara, ridiculous hormonal posturing is half of what’s good about rock and roll.
The first Guns N’ Roses single, “Welcome to the Jungle,” comes on. O’Hara, halfway through her second Maker’s Mark, is transported eighteen years to a Brooklyn basement where a defiant fifteen-year-old girl was getting naked with Jimmy Beldock, a beautiful, charismatically pockmarked fuckup with too much balls to do anything but front a band.
O’Hara was born in 1971. Eleven years later, her father, who drove a truck for Boar’s Head, keeled over from a heart attack. The next four years, her mom moved her and her brother every year, not when the neighborhoods got worse, but when they got too good to afford. That’s when O’Hara started acting out, and by the time she got to Beldock’s basement, she was exhilaratingly out of control, a precocious red-haired teenager and would be groupie-ready to party with anyone having the slightest connection to a band.
O’Hara feels like she discovered sex and rock and roll on the same night. To her, sex isn’t like rock and roll. It is rock and roll. It’s why she got preggers listening to Zeppelin in Beldock’s basement, and why, when nine months later, three months after Guns N’ Roses’ first record, Appetite for Destruction, hit the stores, she gave birth to a sixteen-inch, seven-pound red-haired boy, she saddled him forever with the name Axl Rose O’Hara. And, thank God, he doesn’t hate her for it.
Axl’s unheralded arrival—no one had a clue he was in transit until the school nurse made O’Hara pull up her hippy blouse eight days before she gave birth—got O’Hara kicked out of high school and sent to a special school for fuckups, where all she had to do to collect her GED was show up and not get into fights. It also forced to her to calm down and start pulling her weight. Her first job was at a midtown travel agency, and the first thing she learned when she got there was that she was exceptionally competent, something no one had bothered to tell her in high school. Two weeks after she started, her boss gave her a promotion, and she’d probably be running the place or one just like it if her uncle, a retired transit cop, hadn’t talked her into taking the police exam.
As O’Hara rattles the ice in her last drink, she wonders if the last eighteen years of semi-respectability have been a smoke screen. Maybe that arrogant piece of shit Lowry is right, and fundamentally she’s still the same fuckup and loser the world declared her at sixteen. Maybe her “appetite for destruction” was never sated, and all it took was a little push to veer off the tracks again.
On the other hand, maybe she’s been playing it too close to the vest, and what her life really needs is another infusion of rock. At the far end of the bar next to the door is a postersize blowup of that famous photo of a thirty-two-year-old Keith Richards wearing a T-shirt that reads, WHO THE FUCK IS MICK JAGGER? No disrespect to the Stones and Sir Mick, but O’Hara’s got a question a bit closer to home. Who the fuck is Darlene O’Hara?
22
Breaking in a new box of Advil is rarely attempted under happy circumstances. With the kind of hangover O’Hara wakes up with late Sunday morning, it’s a gruesome exercise. By the time O’Hara rips apart the box, pries off the cap, deflowers the aluminum foil and plucks out the last shred of cotton plug, she’s grateful her service revolver is in the bedroom. “Still feel like crap, Sarge,” she says into Callahan’s voice mail after she’s washed down a handful. “Must be the goddamned flu.” The first part is certainly true, the second unlikely, and O’Hara hopes the gratuitously colorful goddamned doesn’t give her away. She couldn’t have just said “the flu.” It had to be “the goddamned flu.” Fortunately Callahan isn’t much of a detective. That’s why he’s a sergeant.
Gelcaps and coffee clear out enough space in O’Hara’s head for her to rough out a working plan. If the killer knew Pena well enough to be connected to her by a tattoo, finding him is just a matter of learning more about Pena. You can cut out a tattoo but not every trace of personal history. As long as O’Hara keeps slogging forward, she’s going to stumble on him eventually. She clears her kitchen table and plows through six days of unread papers, clipping every story about the murder and jotting down the name of every person with something to say about it.
Two stories quote a Dr. Deirdre Tomlinson, NYU’s assistant provost of admissions. O’Hara calls her office, expecting on a Sunday afternoon to get another machine, but is startled by a booming theatrical “Tomlinson here!” Although Tomlinson was about to head home, she agrees to wait for O’Hara in her office. Based on the dramatic phone presence, O’Hara pictured a matriarch of some heft and vintage, but the woman who leads O’Hara into the parlor floor of a redbrick townhouse on Washington Square North is rail-thin and in her late thirties, her long skinny legs emerging from a chic tweed skirt and disappearing into knee-high equestrian boots. The unkind descriptor that pops into O’Hara’s mind is “Condi with a ’fro.”
“Francesca’s death is a tragedy for her family and a catastrophe for this university,” says Tomlinson, directing O’Hara to the high-backed chair facing her desk. “It’s also a great personal loss. If there’s anything I, or the university, can…do.”
Despite her relative youth, Tomlinson’s office is enormous. It’s adorned with a dazzling array of African-centric art, and when Tomlinson sees O’Hara’s eyes roving from piece to piece, the former literature professor plays the patronizing docent. “That photograph of a beautiful Kenyan woman was taken twenty years ago by a wonderful photographer named Irving Penn, and the small figures on the shelf are Ethiopian and fashioned, believe it or not, from cow dung. The collage of course is a Romare Bearden, one of our great late artists. It belongs to the university, obviously, but I get to look at it every day.”
Cow dung is about right, thinks O’Hara, and does her best to keep her eyes from rolling out of their sockets. “It sounds like you knew the victim quite well,” she says.
“I recruited her to NYU. The dean at Miss Porter’s alerted me to Francesca when she was only a junior, and I visited her there as well as at her home in Westfield.”
“Do you spend that kind of time on all your applicants?”
“Hardly. But Francesca was an exceptional young woman, and NYU wasn’t the only school to recognize that. We had to beat out Stanford and Duke and half the Ivies. The good half.”
As Tomlinson talks about Pena’s lost potential, O’Hara revisits the elegant black-and-white photographs, and the ebony sculptures made of cow shit, and it all comes together. At the elite forty-thousand-dollar-a-year colleges, a qualified minority like Pena is the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, the one they all fight and drool over, and at NYU, Tomlinson is the designated drooler. “I’m going to need her entire file,” says O’Hara. “Everything you got, from application to transcripts.”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you those. It would directly violate our confidentiality agreements.” For the first time since O’Hara arrived, Tomlinson smiles at her instead of down at her.
“This has to be a PR disaster for NYU,” says O’Hara, taking her time and almost enjoying herself despite the throbbing in the back of her head. “One of your most promising students has just been murdered. Not only that, she was raped and horribly mutilated. Every parent who is thinking of sending their kid here must be getting seriously cold feet. I know I would if I was in their position. Well, how do you think those parents will feel when they learn that the school and its administration aren’t cooperating fully with the investigation?”
“Detective,” says Tomlinson, teeth bared in what might be mistaken for a smile. “Do you always have a problem with women of color?”
Some folks, thinks O’Hara, don’t waste any time pulling the race card. Particularly ones who refer to themselves as “women of color.” Sounds like a bad soul band.
That’s not to say Tomlinson is entirely off base. You don’t grow up like O’Hara, broke and Irish in Bay Ridge, without a little redneck in you, and probably more than a little. And it doesn’t help that Tomlinson is taller, skinnier and better dressed, with a Harvard PhD on the wall, compared to her own dime-store GED. But does Tomlinson really think O’Hara is going to admit to it? And what would it mean anyway? O’Hara doesn’t say a word, just smiles back, and five minutes later, when she leaves Tomlinson’s office and heads across Washington Square, there are two large folders under her arm.
In the gray afternoon light, the park looks nothing like it did during the snowy vigil. Both the grounds and demographic seem far shabbier, and no one in sight has anything to do with the university. Rosy-cheeked college kids have been replaced by people with not nearly enough money and way too much time, and the matinee crowds that have gathered around the malodorous dog runs skew heavily toward the gimp and insane. Dodging small-time pot dealers and clipboard fanatics, O’Hara walks the east-west length of the square, picks up a venti at Starbucks and enters Elmer Bobst Library, the redbrick edifice on the southeast corner. With its fourteen-story atrium, the balconies have become the favorite jumping-off points for student suicides—two in the last fifteen months—and as O’Hara crosses the checkerboard marble floor said to hypnotize the susceptible, she notices the Plexiglas barricades the school has built on every floor to thwart them. After she identifies herself as a cop, a guard tells her about the reading rooms on even floors. She gets off at twelve and takes a seat at an empty mahogany table, carefully placing her coffee on the carpet beside her feet. Floor-to-ceiling windows face north over the park toward Midtown, and far below through the leafless branches she can see the grid of sidewalks where a homeless man is moving in tight manic circles, the twelve-story remove turning schizophrenia into modern dance. To her right is a shelf lined with parliamentary papers documenting the British slave trade from 1866 to 1877 and by the entrance a cast-iron bust honoring an old dead rich guy named Charles Winthrop, whose estate must have picked up the tab for the room. O’Hara’s high school years were a waste of taxpayers’ money, and since then she has spent more time in dive bars than libraries. That ratio, however, might be subject to change, because the tranquillity, quiet and good lighting are all deeply appealing, and not just because she’s hungover. While her young, well-heeled neighbors text and IM each other, steal music off the Internet and check the value of their trust fund portfolios, O’Hara puts her phone on “silent,” takes a long sip of coffee and cracks the first folder. Soon, she is the only person in the room who is learning something.
Pena’s application lays out the essentials of a two-part life that are as starkly different as the upper and lower halves of her own body. Her first twelve years were spent in Chicago, the next six in a small New England town, and her essay explains how she got from one to the other. In blue script, raw and ill-formed for a high school senior, she recounts how her father, Edwin Pena, a longtime junkie, tested positive only after finally beating his heroin habit, and died three years later on a cloudless spring morning. And just as O’Hara spiraled out of control when her father died young, so did the twelve-year-old Pena. Six months later, she was sent to a boot camp for troubled teens. Every morning started with a two-mile run, and Pena discovered her gift for endurance. Pena’s mother knew a woman, more acquaintance than friend, who had moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, and that fall, determined to escape the old neighborhood, mother and daughter abruptly pulled up stakes. The only link between Pena’s two lives was her new sport. In her first three races at her new high school, Pena finished eleventh, fifth and third, and the self-confidence earned on the track spilled over to the classroom. Two years later, the barrio girl reinvented as a student-athlete won a scholarship to a tony prep school for girls called Miss Porter’s. At the end of the essay, Pena describes how events in her life sparked an interest in early adolescence, particularly that small window of opportunity, when a still impressionable young person can go up as easily as down. O’Hara knows high school seniors will say or write anything if they think it will get them into college. They’re worse than drunk guys trying to get laid, but apparently, Pena actually meant it. Although her grades weren’t as high as O’Hara thought would have been necessary to be considered for a Rhodes scholarship—one A-minus, four Bs and even a C—six of the twelve courses she took or was taking at NYU were in the psych department. Attached to her transcript is a proposal for independent study, already approved, based on her volunteer work as a mentor to two at-risk Dominican sisters, thirteen and eleven, who, like her, are the daughters of a recovered junkie. Pena, it appears, was a girl on a mission, the rare student who arrives on campus knowing exactly what she intends to do, and then follows through. But O’Hara knows that things are rarely as clear as they seem to a headstrong teenager. Not everyone can be saved, or even wants to be. Missionaries find that out all the time, sometimes by getting killed.
As O’Hara weighs the significance, if any, of Pena’s sharply focused application and transcripts, a particularly annoying hip-hop ring tone shatters the silence. After much too long, a male student at the table beside her casually flips opens his cell “What up, dawg?” he says. O’Hara, who to her own surprise is already feeling proprietary about the thought-conducive quiet in old Winthrop’s room, leans forward in her chair and whispers, “No talking in the library.” Unfortunately, O’Hara’s respectful reminder is ignored. So is the second, and the third is blown off from behind with a dismissive wave.
O’Hara quietly gets out of her chair and walks over to the next table, where the student, about the same age as Pena, is still on his phone, still barking at his dawg. When he bothers to look up from under his gray fedora, he is stunned to see that a beautiful red-haired woman has taken the seat across from him. O’Hara stares directly into his eyes and smiles. Then she opens her coat
and beckons him to peek inside. Now he sees the gold detective shield clipped to her inside pocket, and perhaps just below it, the black rubber handle of the .45 sticking out from its leather holster. “No fucking talking in the library,” she whispers again, although at this point it’s no longer necessary, and nodding at the likeness of Winthrop by the door, returns to her table.
When O’Hara finally descends from the twelfth-floor reading room, the lights have come on in the park. Checking her cell, she sees that Tomlinson has left three increasingly urgent messages, and by the third seems almost as agitated as the out-patient still turning tight circles in the deepening dusk. In a moment of weakness, O’Hara walks back around the park and deposits the folders directly into Tomlinson’s skinny arms, although the assistant provost would have been less relieved had she known about the stop at Kinko’s along the way.
23
The portion of 106th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam is a block going two ways at once—Caribbean nannies rolling $1,200 strollers west toward the co-ops and teenage moms dragging toddlers east toward the projects. No big mystery how it’s going to turn out. Soon the only dark babies in the neighborhood will be adopted ones from Haiti and Ethiopia, but for now the rents are still cheap enough for Big Sisters to afford a storefront. The sign on the door says it’s open Sundays, but it’s closed for the night when O’Hara rolls up, her karmic reward for stopping to photocopy all those files. Although Big Sisters is closed, there’s enough light from the street to see that it’s run on a shoestring. Inside there are just a couple of old desks, a bulletin board, some beat-up chairs. When a truck stops on the corner, its headlights briefly illuminate a card table covered with candles, cards and flowers and above it a blown-up picture of Pena with her two little sisters. All three wear nice going-out clothes and beaming smiles. It’s the third picture O’Hara has seen of Pena, but the only one in which she looks happy. On her way back to Riverdale, O’Hara grabs a slice near Columbia. Then she collects Bruno for his evening walk. As she trails the happy beast down the sidewalk, she calls Krekorian and leaves a lengthy message, filling her partner in about her visit to Lebowitz, Bad Idea Tattoos and Tomlinson. It’s eight o’clock by the time she makes it back up the stairs to her beloved whorehouse couch.
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