O’Hara likes to think of her couch as a raft on which, like Huck, she floats downriver through an evening, book and beverage in hand, lumpus furrus at her feet, and every item of potential necessity (remotes, cell, laptop) safely stowed within reach. Despite all the grief she gives Krekorian for being a college boy, O’Hara is usually working her way through three books at once, and spaced along the backrest, like baited fishing poles waiting to catch a bite, are Mortal Causes, a Scottish mystery, Garbage Land: On the Secret Truth of Trash and 102 Minutes. Tonight she concentrates instead on her stack from Kinko’s, and out of respect for the still-vivid memory of her hangover, sips water instead of something red or brown. When the phone rings, it’s Nia Anderson, director of Big Sisters, returning the call O’Hara left on her machine. “Sorry I missed you,” she says. “Everyone’s so depressed, we closed at noon. Besides, we’re all going to the memorial tomorrow.”
“I saw the candles and the cards,” says O’Hara, “and the big picture on the wall.”
“That was taken last month from our night at Bowlerama. Her little sisters are Moreal and Consuela Entonces.”
“Did Pena connect with the girls through Big Sisters?”
“That’s right—through our mentoring program. Pena began spending time with Moreal and Consuela while they were still living with their foster parents, Donna and Albert Johnson, but we introduced her to over a dozen girls and families before we found the right fit. What makes all this so horrendous and demoralizing for Big Sisters is that until three days ago, this was our great success story. Francesca didn’t just mentor the daughters, but she inspired their mother, Tida Entonces, a recovering heroin addict, to get clean and earn them back. That’s something everyone else had just about given up, including Tida. Maybe Tida manages to stay clean and the girls will be able to remain on track, but right now it all feels terribly precarious and beyond sad.”
Anderson’s heartbroken voice shames O’Hara off her couch and back across Spuyten Duyvil into Washington Heights. Entonces and her daughters live at 251 Fort Washington Avenue and 170th Street, a dark, forbidding building between 170th and 171st, a block west of Broadway. The neighborhood tilted Dominican twenty years ago. For the fifty before that, it was as Jewish as the Lower East Side once was, filled with German refugees whose old men and women never entirely lost their accents or regained their footing but whose children and grandchildren more than made up for it. The Dominicans aren’t doing badly either. In less than twenty years, they have the toughest gangs in the city and control the bulk of the drug trade.
Tida Entonces is a large woman in a housedress and slippers. She leads O’Hara down the dark hall of an ancient railroad flat, seats her at the Formica-topped table in a fluorescent-lit kitchen, and pours her a coffee. The ravages of a twenty-year heroin habit are plain to see, but so is the intelligence in her eyes, the pretty shape of her face, the flicker of sensuality at the corners of her mouth. That might be the one bonus of getting hooked early. If somehow you can get clean, there might still be a little time left on the other side, and when her daughters, Moreal and Consuela, slip in and out of the room in a sad, shy daze, O’Hara can see that the squandered beauty of the mother has already started to bloom in her girls. Anderson described a fragile family that was just getting their legs under them, and it’s reflected in the condition of the apartment, which is desperately spotless. For Tida Entonces, good housekeeping is not optional. The system is slow to take children from their mother and slower to return them, but when they have been lost once, the benefit of the doubt is gone forever, and losing them a second time is excruciatingly easy. As long as Entonces is lucky enough to have her children, she will be subject to unannounced visits from Children’s Services. One failed drug test or the slightest evidence of backsliding, and her kids will be gone forever.
Entonces looks up from her coffee and attempts a smile. “I’d say Francesca was like family, but that’s being too nice to my family. They never lifted a finger for any of us, but a young woman I had known two weeks decided she was going to save me. Even then, it was hard. After a twenty-year habit, I had all these excuses lined up in my head like toy soldiers—about why my life was hopeless, and why it was OK to keep using. Suddenly, those excuses were gone.”
“How much time did Francesca spend here?” asks O’Hara.
“One weeknight she helped the girls with their homework. Then, every other weekend, she’d take the girls to a movie or a museum. Once, as a special reward, she even invited the girls to sleep over, then took them out to breakfast in the Village Sunday morning. ‘We didn’t have breakfast, Mommy, we had brunch,’ they said. Everything she did was about showing them that there’s a bigger world out there.”
“When was the last time she was here?”
“Homework night was usually Monday or Tuesday. Because of the holiday she hadn’t come since the Saturday before Thanksgiving. That’s when she took them to the Museum of Natural History. See that?” asks Tida, and points at a plastic model dinosaur on the kitchen counter. “Francesca bought that for them on their last trip.” Beside the dinosaur is a small white bag you fill yourself with a little plastic shovel at candy shops, and O’Hara remembers the chocolate Lebowitz found in Pena’s teeth. “How about the candy?” asks O’Hara.
“From Francesca too. She was always bringing little treats by the house and giving them out as rewards.”
“How did your neighbors feel about what Francesca was doing for your family? Any jealousy?”
“Nothing I noticed,” says Entonces.
“How about the young men in the neighborhood? Any of them seem particularly interested in this beautiful girl? Anyone ever ask her out?”
“She was way above their kind.”
“Wouldn’t keep them from asking. Some of them must have been interested.”
“When she visited,” says Entonces wearily, “Francesca was just another pretty Hispanic girl. Believe it or not, there are lots of girls in this building just as pretty or prettier. The way she dressed and acted, no one knew she went to a fancy college or was so successful in her life. It wasn’t anything you could tell by looking.” Entonces stares into her coffee as if searching for something.
“Maybe she taught you enough already,” says O’Hara. “Maybe you had her long enough to make it on your own.”
“Detective, I’m thirty-three years old. If I look a lot older, and I know I do, it’s because I was a junkie for so many of them. My best friend died in my arms, and I’ve seen people get shot dead standing closer to me than you are right now. But I’ve never been this scared.”
24
Practice is making O’Hara a better liar. At 6:05 a.m. Monday, when she calls in sick for a third day, she eliminates the folksy flourishes and gratuitous colloquialisms and presents the untruth as simply as a piece of sushi. Then she pulls on stockings, her best dress and heels, and drops Bruno and a stack of CDs on the front seat of the Jetta. Pena’s memorial starts at eleven, and MapQuest estimates the 218-mile trip from Riverdale to Westfield, Massachusetts, at five hours and ten minutes. I-95 is empty and the sun barely up as she motors past the exposed backsides of Stamford, Norwalk and Westport. They make such good time, they stop at a McDonald’s near New Haven. There they both enjoy a breakfast burger, and afterward, the sight of Bruno squatting and extruding on the manicured sod beside the microphone causes the driver of a dark green Tahoe to roll up his window in midorder and tear out of the lot in disgust. O’Hara’s cell rings as she’s cleaning it up.
“What’s going on?” asks Krekorian.
“Same old shit,” says O’Hara. “Me and Bruno are on our way to Westfield for Pena’s memorial, and the beast just dropped a McTurd by the express lane.”
“Thanks, Dar. I get it. And I got something for you. This morning, I decided to go back a couple months in Pena’s phone records, see if anything pops out. The first week in October, about the time she got her tattoo, she received twenty-one calls from Deirdre Tomlinson, the as
sistant provost of admissions at NYU. Nine were from her office, the rest from Tomlinson’s home or cell. All of them were three seconds or less, half were hang-ups.
“That’s interesting. At her office yesterday, Tomlinson took an instant dislike to me.”
“Oh yeah. Sure it wasn’t the other way around?”
“No.”
“One other thing.”
“What’s that, K.?”
“When you have the flu, it’s very important to drink plenty of fluids.”
Saint Benedict–Our Lady of Montserrat Parish is a crucifix-topped 1970s A-frame with the spiritual gravitas of an International House of Pancakes. O’Hara grabs one of the last seats toward the back and anxiously scans the packed house. She’s worried that Homicide sent a team to scope the room for possible perps, or even worse, that Lowry himself made the trip. But the only cops O’Hara sees are the contingent of gray-haired brass sent by the commissioner to demonstrate NYPD’s commitment and concern. They’re strategically deployed in the fifth row—far enough upfront to be visible, close enough to an aisle for a quick exit—and to her relief, they don’t include anyone who might recognize a lowly detective like herself. In the middle of the front row are Ingrid and Dominic Coppalano. The wife drapes one arm around her shorter, darker husband, and from their relative size and complexion, O’Hara speculates that Ingrid Coppalano is the type of woman who keeps marrying the same man. Five rows behind them, O’Hara spots Dr. Deirdre Tomlinson and at the end of the same row, a man she recognizes as the president of NYU. O’Hara had hoped to talk to someone from Pena’s time in Chicago, but in the whole church there are only three or four Hispanic faces, and all of them appear to be students from the second, sunnier, half of Pena’s life, part of the large, well-scrubbed group who arrived in buses provided by NYU and Miss Porter’s. The priest didn’t know Pena or her family well and has the rare grace not to fake it. It’s not necessary. A simple recounting of Pena’s short life is enough to fill the room with sobbing.
When the priest concludes his service, O’Hara lets the crowd clear, then makes her way toward Tomlinson, who is still crying in her seat. “This is more than I can handle, Detective,” she says. Working a funeral is questionable form, but unlike her colleagues, already halfway through their first round at the nearest tavern, O’Hara came here to learn something, not pay phony respects and tie one on. “Dr. Tomlinson, since we’ve got a quiet moment, I need to ask you about something my partner just brought to my attention. Going back through Francesca’s phone records, he found that one week in early October, you called her over twenty times.”
“I may have called that many times,” says Tomlinson. “but I never spoke to her once. And she never returned my calls.”
“Why were you trying to reach her?”
“I had a terrible feeling she was in trouble. I should have told you when you came to my office. I’m sorry.”
“What made you think something was wrong?”
“Francesca had changed. It wasn’t anything specific, but I could see it. When someone like Francesca turns her life around, the temptation to lose focus is enormous. A huge goal has just been achieved. You’re nineteen, on your own in a great city.”
“What are you talking about? I read her transcripts. Some of her grades could have been better, but I didn’t see any backsliding.”
“Maybe it was all in my head,” says Tomlinson, on the brink of losing it. “I hope to God it was. Because that’s what I told myself when I stopped calling. Now, it’s obvious I didn’t do nearly enough. I shouldn’t have called twenty times; I should have called a thousand. I should have gone to her apartment and knocked on her door. I should have made her an appointment at Student Counseling and seen that she kept it. But what did I do? Nothing.”
Tomlinson is gesturing so erratically that O’Hara fears a scene and backs off. She leaves the chapel and takes the stairs to the basement, where a modest spread has been laid out, and a long line snakes along three walls of the room as people wait their turn to offer condolences to Pena’s parents. As in the waiting room at the ME’s office, the stepdad appears eviscerated by grief. As her husband teeters beside her, Ingrid Coppalano handles the required interactions with neighbors and students, and only the efforts of an attentive relative keep Dominic Coppalano on his feet. With the other cops gone, O’Hara joins the line and reintroduces herself. “I’m Detective Darlene O’Hara from the NYPD. We spoke on the phone and met briefly at the medical examiner’s office. You must have been tremendously proud of your daughter.”
“You saw the turnout,” says Coppalano. “They came by the busload.”
“It was amazing.” says O’Hara.
“And it’s not just the number,” says Coppalano fiercely. “It’s the quality.”
“Is there anyone here from your time in Chicago?” asks O’Hara.
“Just me. When Francesca and I left Chicago, we vowed to never look back. Only forward. Detective, do you know that my daughter didn’t just get into NYU? She was also accepted by Harvard and Yale.”
“No, I didn’t,” says O’Hara. “That’s very impressive.”
She clasps Ingrid Coppalano’s hand one last time and smiles sadly at her husband, who doesn’t seem to see her standing in front of him, then joins the crowd filing from the church. The southern New England afternoon has turned bitterly cold, and an icy wind blows through O’Hara’s thin dress coat as she hurries toward her car and leashes Bruno for his walk. On the far side of the street, across from the entrance to the parking lot, a gaunt figure in an awful plaid suit stares forlornly at the church. Only when Bruno tugs inquisitively in his direction does O’Hara recognize David McLain.
25
“David,” asks O’Hara, “why are you paying your respects from across the street?”
“Because I wasn’t welcome inside.”
“Francesca’s family, they think you were involved in her death?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” says McLain, a beat-up ten-speed lying at his feet. “Her mom disapproved of me from the beginning. I can’t really blame her. Francesca was going someplace. She didn’t need someone like me. Thanks anyway for the lawyer. She got me released yesterday morning. I hitchhiked here last night.”
McLain says he’s heading back to the city, and O’Hara offers him a ride. First, he has to stop at home, and when his bike won’t fit in the trunk, O’Hara and Bruno trail behind him in the Jetta as McLain, doing nearly thirty with his hands in his pockets and tie flying back over his shoulder, leads them through a modest but tidy suburban neighborhood. In the middle of a curve, McLain casually pulls one hand from his pocket and points to a white mailbox with COPPALANO painted across it. Behind it is a small ranch house, a pickup in the driveway. After McLain crests a hill and crosses Main Street, the houses and yards get shabbier. He leads them past a rundown garden apartment complex and a boarded-up grammar school, then, pedaling furiously, turns off the road into a trailer park, where he drops his bike in the dirt and runs into a double-wide on green cinder blocks. O’Hara looks at the trailer and junk-strewn yard, puts it together with Ingrid Coppalano’s bizarre comments about her murdered daughter’s college acceptances, and isn’t surprised McLain wasn’t welcome at the memorial. Three minutes later, still in his pathetic suit, McLain steps out of the trailer toting a Hefty bag of clothes. Behind him, a woman waves from the doorway. “Shouldn’t I say hi to your mom?” asks O’Hara. “Please, let’s just go,” says McLain. “She’s half in the bag already.”
On the highway, O’Hara asks McLain what he knows about Francesca’s life in Chicago. “Next to nothing,” says McLain. “She never talked about it, and I got the feeling the whole subject was off limits.” The sun drops quickly, and except for the occasional snore from McLain and sigh from Bruno, the car falls silent. McLain is all arms and legs, and seeing him folded into the front seat makes O’Hara think of Axl and their great road trip of 2003. The week is so precious to O’Hara because it’s the only
example of bona fide parenting she’s got to hold up and hang on to. As she ferries her sleeping passengers toward the city, she thinks about Tomlinson’s hysterical premonitions and Ingrid and Francesca’s shotgun exit from Chicago. She wonders if there was something about mother and daughter’s old life that couldn’t be outrun.
It’s not quite seven when O’Hara pulls to a stop in front of a fire hydrant on Fifty-first and Ninth across from the building where a friend of McLain’s has offered his couch. McLain groggily thanks her for the ride and grabs his clothes. O’Hara, exhausted and hungry, scans the block for a cheap restaurant. There’s a falafel joint on the corner, Chinese two doors down, and as she reaches into the backseat for her coat, McLain steps back out of the apartment building. When he runs across the street and walks briskly down the avenue, O’Hara drops her police placard on the dash and follows him on foot. McLain weaves through the thickening crowds of the theater district, but thanks to his ridiculous suit, O’Hara has little trouble keeping him in sight. At Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue, she follows him down into the subway and onto a packed 1 train; four stops later, she follows him off at Twenty-third Street, where McLain turns west and picks up the pace. His long, loose strides eat up the wide crosstown blocks, and O’Hara curses her wobbly heels. By Tenth, she’s a block behind, and when she reaches the isolated garages and storage spaces just short of Eleventh, McLain has vanished.
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