Back in her car, O’Hara calls Lee. At this point, Lee is all O’Hara has left, and even that won’t be for long. Once O’Hara’s role in tonight’s catastrophe hits the airwaves, whatever leverage O’Hara has over Lee will evaporate. Lee answers on the first ring, and her bright solicitous tone is encouraging. It indicates she’s still hoping to cooperate her way out of trouble.
“Evelyn,” says O’Hara with all the casualness she can muster, “have Stubbs, Muster and Delfinger gone out with any of your other girls?”
“Off the top of my head, I can tell you Muster has for sure. Hang on a second, and I’ll check the others…. The answer is yes. In fact, I’ve got an Irish girl named Molly who went out with all three. Pick a spot, and I’ll have her meet you there in an hour.”
When Lee hangs up, O’Hara cracks her window and calls Mary Kelly, her third-floor neighbor, who has a key to her place. O’Hara doesn’t worry about calling this late because the eighty-five-year-old widow hasn’t slept two hours in a row in years.
“Of course I’ll take in old Bruns,” says Kelly. “Me and Mister B will have a grand old time.”
“Not too grand, Mary. The last time you took him he turned his nose up at kibble for a month. And no beer in his water bowl. I’m serious.”
“Don’t be a worrywart, Darlene. It’s not becoming.”
At one in the morning, as promised, a very pretty brunette sticks her head into the Rivington Hotel’s second-floor lounge and strides confidently toward O’Hara’s corner table. She has the same petite frame as Pena and, dressed in the latest, darkest denim and a vintage shearling coat, looks as chic as any of the hotel’s guests. “Lovely choice,” says Molly with a generous dollop of brogue. “Best of all, I’ve never worked here.”
“When Lee said Irish,” says O’Hara, “I thought she meant Brooklyn Irish like me.”
“Not a genuine mick from Killarney.”
“Bay Ridge more likely.”
“Well, I’ve been here three years now. I’d take the accent with a grain of salt if I were you.”
O’Hara orders a couple of Irish whiskeys and asks Molly what she remembers about Stubbs, Delfinger and Muster.
“Muster is a proper shit. Quite gorgeous, though, with his bespoke suits and shirts and every hair carefully out of place. Never been to his apartment. I used to straddle him in his office on his midcentury modern desk chair, while he chatted with clients on speakerphone, and his assistant worked next door, completely aware of what was going on, which was half the point, I take it. Until he was done, which was quite quickly, he barely acknowledged I was there, then pointed to a beautiful envelope on the corner of his desk. Elegant handwriting, I’ll say that, particularly for a man.”
“And Delfinger?”
“Very different, but worse in a way. Acting all guilty and neurotic and Woody Allen about what was going on. Do it or don’t, but spare us the drama, thank you.”
“And how about everyone’s favorite anchorman, Hank Stubbs?”
“He did have quite an anchor actually.”
“Really, it’s not a myth?”
“What they say about TV newsreaders? Absolutely not. But I felt quite badly for Mr. Stubbs. He may be the loneliest person I’ve ever met. For someone in my business, that’s saying something.”
“Anything scary about any of them?”
“Not really. They were more scared of me. That’s almost always the case.”
Molly’s observations ring true, but O’Hara is less interested in the johns than in Lee. “Lee told me that Pena went out once with all three men and then disappeared,” says O’Hara. “Do you think Lee suspected that Pena had taken her clients private?”
“Three dates and out, wouldn’t you? Poaching, we call it.”
“Was Lee concerned about poaching?”
“Massively. Do you know how Pena’s body was mutilated?”
“Why?”
“Right after I joined Aphrodite, Lee sent me a loathsome picture of a girl she claimed to have caught poaching.”
“Still have it?”
“No, but I’ll never forget it. It was of a white girl, early twenties, and someone had gone to work on her face with a box cutter. There was cuts from her forehead to her chin and hundreds of black stitches to close them. Amazing she didn’t bleed to death. And in the center of it all, her dead, drugged-out eyes. It was highly effective. Any temptation I might have had for cutting out Miss Lee was gone forever.”
The Rivington Hotel is only three blocks from eeL. At two in the morning, the metal grate is down and Lee’s number gets a recording: “Congratulations. You’re either very smart or very lucky because you’ve found your way to Aphrodite, the city’s most discriminating service for the most discriminating tastes.” O’Hara grabs a lid off a nearby garbage can and walks back to the storefront. She clangs it against the grating, until Lee, wearing a headset, pulls it up over the window and opens the front door.
“What did Molly tell you?”
Ignoring her, O’Hara pulls down the grate and shoves Lee into the tiny office at the back of the store.
“Close that,” says O’Hara, pointing to her computer.
“What is it? What did she say?”
“Was Pena poaching?”
“Poaching?”
O’Hara opens her coat so Lee can see the handle of her gun.
“No. She wasn’t.”
“Then what were you doing at Privilege?”
“Trying to get her to come back.”
“By stalking her? Bullshit.”
“Look, maybe she was poaching,” says Lee, scared. “How could I know for sure?”
“You ever threaten your girls about poaching?”
“No.”
“You don’t send them a photograph of a disfigured girl?”
Lee’s face takes on a strange expression, and her head collapses into her hands. “You want to see the picture, I’ll show it to you. I need to turn the computer back on.”
Soon the picture Molly described so accurately fills the screen of Lee’s laptop. The girl’s face was even more carved up than Pena’s.
“Was this it?” asks Lee. As O’Hara nods yes, her stomach turns. “So this really scared Molly? I’m amazed.”
As O’Hara looks over her shoulder, Lee scrolls to the top of the page and stops on the name of the Web site: rickyshalloweenmakeup.com.
37
“Turkey on a Kaiser roll,” says O’Hara. The swarthy, hollow-eyed man behind the counter listens with the kind of tender smile found at that hour only on someone who reached adulthood in another country. While he assembles her sandwich, O’Hara surveys the refrigerated offerings in the rear, which include a shelf packed with yellow-, lime- and coral-colored waters named “serenity,” “recovery” and “energy.” After the night’s debacles, O’Hara could use vats of all three but opts instead for a six-pack of amber-tinted stress water called Amstel Light. At the counter, she adds two large coffees, then lugs her 3:00 a.m. supper to the car. She eats in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. The sandwich, cold air and coffees will help keep her working. The beers are for later to sleep.
Where she will happen to sleep remains to be decided. Although she would never admit it, the Rivington Hotel is growing on her rapidly. She tries to rationalize this choice by telling herself the how safe it is, since the odds of anyone looking for her there are pretty much zero. Unfortunately, so is the chance of her being able to afford it, but she calls anyway out of morbid curiosity. “Our junior suite starts at $515 a night,” says a man, who otherwise sounds quite reasonable. “That’s a little more than I wanted to spend,” says O’Hara, before washing down the last of her sandwich with a gulp of burned coffee. “I could talk to my manager. Perhaps, we could do a bit better. It is three in the morning, after all.”
“Please don’t bother.”
O’Hara remembers Hotel Suites on Rivington, but she also remembers the aroma of breakfast curry in the manager’s office. Then
thankfully she recalls the anomalous little Howard Johnson’s a couple of blocks north on Houston. She parks the Jetta on a Fifth Street block reserved for cops working out of the Nine, figuring that no one in that precinct would recognize her car and no one else would look for it on a street lined with police cars. At 4:15, she signs for a room at the Howard Johnson Express Inn ($180 a night) and ten minutes later, lets herself into a freezing third-floor double. The room reeks of stale smoke. She has traded the smell of curry for cigarettes.
With Tomlinson dead, and Lee a dead end, O’Hara is essentially starting over. And her case file is on her kitchen table back in Riverdale. All she has to generate new leads is her memory, a six-pack and the rapidly diminishing effect of two large coffees. For a couple of minutes she leans against the brown headboard, sick with panic. Then she gets up and moves to the desk, slides open the drawer and pulls out the single complimentary piece of hotel stationery and the skinny white HoJo’s pen, and begins to put together a timeline of Pena’s last day. Working slowly and steadily, she fills the page with eight entries, each surrounded by an inch or so of empty space.
1. 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.: Pena with McLain at 78 Orchard Street.
2. 8:30 p.m.: P. leaves the apartment.
3. 10:21 p.m.: P. uses her Amex card to buy two CDs at Tower Records at the corner of Broadway and Fourth.
4. 10:30 p.m.: P. meets Chestnut, Case and Singh on Rivington, between Bowery and Chrystie.
5. 2:30 a.m.: Chestnut, Case and Singh leave.
6. 3:30 a.m.: P. leaves alone, walking east on Rivington. Ten feet north of the corner of Chrystie and Rivington, P. is struck from behind and dragged into the Atelier construction site. For approximately ninety minutes, she is tortured and raped. Estimated time of death—5:10 a.m.
7. 6:00 a.m. (approx.): P.’s body, wrapped in two shower curtains, is dragged out of the building, loaded into a vehicle and dumped in East River Park.
8. 11/28/05—12:45 a.m.: P.’s body is found in the park in a closed-down men’s bathroom.
As burned out as O’Hara is by her endless night, it takes her more than half an hour to create the timeline. When she’s done, she takes it, along with her six-pack, and stretches out on the bed, where she reads through it slowly again and again. On the fourth reading, she stops at the sixth entry and underlines the phrase “Ten feet north.” Exhaustion, aided by beers one through five, has shrunk the space between her eyelids to a slit. Before they close entirely, she jots “one hour and fifty-one minutes” at the bottom of the page. Then she drains her last beer and carefully places it back in the carton with the other empties.
38
Wednesday at eight in the morning, jackhammers start breaking up pavement on Houston. Jesus Fucking Christ. O’Hara throws on her coat, takes the back stairs down to the lobby and steps into the flat December light. Directly next door to the Howard Johnson Express Inn is a modest storefront bearing the hand-lettered sign YONAH SCHIMMEL’S KNISH BAKERY—ORIGINAL SINCE 1910, and when O’Hara sees the squad car rolling toward her up Houston, she decides that’s original enough for her. In her five years in the Seven, O’Hara has had the pastrami and brisket at Katz and bagels and lox from Russ and Daughters, but never darkened the threshold of Yonah’s, and as she steps through the door, a tray of the eponymous steaming cylinders ascends from the basement oven via a creaking dumbwaiter. O’Hara orders one and a coffee, and in a move that surprises the ancient blond at the register, who doesn’t take O’Hara for a tourist, she drops another fourteen dollars for one of the black Yonah Schimmel Original Knishes T-shirts hanging from a piece of twine stretched across the ceiling.
Back in her room, O’Hara’s first encounter with Jewish comfort food is highly satisfactory. For a potato-eating mick, it’s hardly a stretch. The surge of well-being induced by the warm, sweet starch recalls the unlikely optimism she felt just before she passed out. The last thing she did the previous night was read the timeline, and after a quick search of the room, she picks it up off the floor, where it had fallen behind the desk.
She scans the eight entries and stops on the underlined phrase, “Ten feet north.” It refers to the spot where Narin, the crime scene tech, found several thick drops of Pena’s blood on the curb and sewer drain. According to Narin, this is where Pena was struck from behind, probably as she bent over and got sick, but why had she turned north before she was attacked? Pena’s apartment at 78 Orchard was only a seven-minute walk from Freemans, but had she been heading home, she would have walked east straight across Rivington Park, not turned north. And if Pena was not going home at four in the morning, where was she headed? Even in the harsh light of a sober morning, it’s a promising question. Unfortunately, at least for now, O’Hara has no way of answering it.
O’Hara’s final note, scribbled at the bottom of the page, is “one hour and fifty-one minutes.” That’s the time between when Pena left McLain at her apartment and her next known destination, when she purchased those two CDs at Tower Records. Three weeks after Pena’s murder, those one hundred and eleven minutes have still not been accounted for. What makes that gap in the timeline such a promising area of investigation is that Pena lied about the time twice, first to McLain when she told him she was meeting her friends for dinner, then to her friends when she told them she had just come from the gym.
O’Hara gets up from the desk, and for first time since she checked in, opens the curtains. The third-floor room faces west over Rivington Park, and standing close to the window and tilting her head to the south, she can see the outline of the Atelier towering over its tenement neighbors on the far side. Its steel skeleton looks like an ink drawing. At the base of the construction site, O’Hara can just make out the spot where Pena was attacked.
While O’Hara gazes over the leafless trees, a crosstown bus hisses to a stop beneath her. In front of the glass shelter, at the corner of Forsyth and Houston, is a vending machine for the Post. SHE JUMPS is the headline in the window, and as intended, it gets O’Hara to race down and buy a copy. It isn’t until she’s back in her room that she finds the sidebar on page 11 headlined COPS ANXIOUS TO QUESTION DETECTIVE WHO FLED THE SCENE. Illustrating the story are a pair of video stills of a woman who looks a lot like O’Hara pushing in and out of the revolving doors of Bobst Library.
The pictures are too small and blurry to cause any problems with good Samaritans on the street, but obviously Lowry and Callahan and everyone else in the Seven know who it is. This is confirmed by the six new messages on her home answering machine: four from Callahan, one from Lowry and one from a detective she’s never heard of, who’s working the Tomlinson suicide. O’Hara deletes the messages and tosses out the paper. At this point, the only thing that can save her ass is finding Pena’s murderer. Thinking about anything else is a waste of brain cells.
O’Hara showers, pulls on her new black T-shirt. It’s a little tight, but at least it’s clean, and, sinking her chin into the collar of her parka, she steps back into the raw morning. She passes her favorite knishery and the Sunshine Cinema, turns right on Eldridge and east again on Rivington. Directly across the street from the Rivington Hotel, she steps down into a basement-level vintage clothing store called Edith Machinist.
O’Hara has been aware of this place, like HoJo’s and Yonah’s, for years but never come close to walking in, and has never bought a “vintage” or, as she would describe it, a used piece of clothing in her life. As with Schimmel’s, however, she sparks immediately to the displayed items, their unique character and un-crass beauty, and she can see the affection that went into every choice. The bags hanging from pegs on the side wall look like the portraits of a dozen singular women and the boots arranged in a half circle on the floor up front like the class of whatever huddled for a reunion photo. O’Hara slips off her parka and tries on a big-buttoned navy peacoat. The dark blue sets off her fair skin and still-wet hair, and the snug fit looks so stylish that the haughty salesgirl, who had written off O’Hara with one look at her rubber-soled shoes,
abandons her breakfast to help.
“That looks great on you,” she says. “And your T-shirt is so cute I can barely stand it.” Mixing and matching from three different decades, she finds O’Hara a gray cashmere sweater with black stripes, a braided leather belt with circular brass buckles, and to be worn with her jeans stuck into them, a pair of oxblood Bally boots. To cover her telltale red hair and freckles, O’Hara tops the ensemble with a blue Nordic ski cap and big fat Gucci shades. Total cost: $290. Upgrade in her style quotient: priceless.
By the time O’Hara steps back onto the street, she looks so chic she can barely recognize herself, let alone be mistaken for a cop. With her old clothes dangling from her arm in two crisp bags, she blends right in with the skinny shopping machines walking in and out of the Rivington Hotel or sitting in the window at Moby’s little tea shop. Although her new look attracts little extra attention from male pedestrians, her female rivals are all over it, icily checking her out from cap to boots.
Feeling conspicuous yet invisible, O’Hara walks down Orchard until she’s facing the street from Pena’s old stoop. If she’s going to be able to fill in those missing one hundred and eleven minutes, O’Hara needs to retrace Pena’s steps after she left her apartment for the last time. Since left leads south toward Chinatown, and Pena’s next known stop, Tower Records, is north of Houston, O’Hara starts with the calculated guess that Pena began by turning north up Orchard. If O’Hara is correct, she should be able to prove it, even nineteen days later. Almost every shop on the street has a video camera mounted above the door, and a few of them probably even work.
After coming up empty at a bookstore, whose prominently displayed camera is a fake, and a bodega, whose tapes only go a couple of days back, O’Hara tries her luck at Joe’s Drapery, a substantial enterprise occupying a large building at the southeast corner of Orchard and Delancey. When a salesman with a bad rug hurries over, O’Hara fends him off with her shield and explains what she’s after.
Shadows Still Remain Page 13