“Turkey on a Kaiser roll,” he says with a smile. “Lettuce, tomato, little butter, little mustard?”
“Nobody likes a showoff,” says O’Hara as she heads to the refrigerators.
Safely back in room 303, O’Hara cracks an Amstel and stares across the dark park. Uptown, she can follow Bowery all the way to St. Marks, each tenement topped with a distinctly different water tank. Wherever you land, thinks O’Hara, the city absorbs you like a sponge. In less than twenty-four hours, O’Hara has a new subway stop, bodega, sandwich order and view. The only thing missing is Bruno farting on the bed.
O’Hara unwraps her provisions on the desk. As she eats, she adds what she’s learned to her timeline:
8:43 (approx.), writes O’Hara, Pena enters the Second Avenue subway station at Allen Street.
9:06 p.m., Pena gets off the 1 train at 168th and Broadway. She’s running.
9:14 p.m., Pena, with Moreal and Consuela Entonces, reenters 186th, southbound.
Thirty-one of the missing one hundred and eleven minutes are now accounted for, and with a little more time to consider it, Tida’s story about Pena taking her girls out for a quick pre-Thanksgiving meal seems like one more piece of bullshit. If Pena and the girls got back on the subway at 9:14 p.m. and sixty-seven minutes later, Pena was at Tower Records, there’s barely time to eat three slices of pizza and send the girls home in a cab. Why would Pena run all the way uptown for that? That brings it to four lies about this brief stretch of time.
O’Hara deserves to enjoy her sandwich, and she does, along with a second beer. Then she pulls out her cell and scrolls through her received calls until she finds the one she got from Lebowitz that evening while she was going door-to-door on Rivington. The call came in on his cell, and when she calls the number, he picks up on the first ring.
“Darlene, I’ve been worried about you.”
“I messed up, didn’t I?”
“Only if you believe what they write in the papers.”
“In this case, I’m afraid, it’s pretty much true.”
“Then I’m sure you had your reasons.”
“I like to think so.”
“Pena?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m calling. At least something related to her. Did you work on the Tomlinson suicide?”
“Terri handled that one. But since as I had a personal interest in the case, I looked over her shoulder as much as I could get away with.”
“Did Tomlinson have any tattoos?”
“No. Why?”
“I just found out that one of the girls Pena was mentoring had the same tattoo as Pena, same spot and everything. I wondered if Tomlinson did too. Some kind of secret sorority.”
“No tattoos. I’m sure. And there’s something else. I read through her blood work. She had fatal amounts of three antidepressants in her system, plus twenty milligrams of lorazepam. If she hadn’t gotten to a hospital within the hour, Tomlinson would have died whether she jumped or not. I thought you might want to know that.”
“I appreciate that, Sam,” O’Hara says, and realizes she doesn’t want the conversation to end. “I really do.”
“Where are you staying?” asks Lebowitz.
“This boutique hotel on Houston you’ve never heard of. It’s called Howard Johnson’s. Very exclusive, very obscure. Not everyone gets the irony.”
The joke falls flat and is followed by an awkward silence.
“That’s funny,” says Lebowitz finally.
“You sure?”
“You must think I’m a fatal nerd.”
“I don’t. Really. I mean I doubt it’s fatal. Of course you know a lot more about causes of death than I do.”
“That’s funny too,” says Lebowitz, and this time emits a sound very much like laughter. “It’s good to hear your voice, Darlene. Please call again if you need anything else.”
“It’s good to hear your voice too,” says O’Hara, and feels herself smile at Lebowitz’s shyness as she hangs up.
The conversation takes O’Hara back to Bobst Library, not a place she wants to go. Once again she sees Tomlinson’s skinny arms and legs windmill through the air, an image she had somehow managed to avoid all day. O’Hara pushes her attention from Tomlinson to her rival, Evelyn Lee. Maybe in O’Hara’s embarrassment about that staged picture on the Halloween Web site, she wrote off the Tenafly madam too quickly. Lee might not be much of a pimp or a businesswoman, but that doesn’t mean Pena wasn’t poaching. And if Pena had taken one of Lee’s clients private, then at least one of those johns, all of whom swore to O’Hara that they had never seen Holly again after their first magical date, was lying.
O’Hara looks inside the desk drawer for a second piece of HoJo stationery, but the cheap bastards only give you one. So she turns the timeline over, divides the back of page into three columns—one for Stubbs, Delfinger and Muster—and writes everything she can recall about those three interviews. When she’s done, the only one O’Hara feels comfortable ruling out is Stubbs. Although, in retrospect, there’s something off-putting about the way Mayer had all the paperwork waiting for her so nice and neat, and someone with halfway decent Photoshop skills could probably have forged them all, Stubbs’s alibi still feels solid. She can’t see Mayer risking that town house or anything else for a client, and besides, Stubbs was the only one of the three who came to her. Coming forward makes sense as a gamble to save a career. It doesn’t make sense if you killed someone.
The other two alibis, however, are paper thin, and O’Hara is disgusted with herself for having accepted them so readily. Beacuse O’Hara was convinced Delfinger couldn’t be the killer, she let him slide on a calender and an E-ZPass statement, and the only thing propping up Muster’s alibi is a highly dependent subordinate who desperately needs the job. As O’Hara tries to add to her memory of those last two interviews, the phone rings.
It’s not her phone. It’s the hotel’s, and against her better judgment, she picks up. “Someone’s on his way to your room,” says the overnight man at the front desk. O’Hara looks at her watch: 12:15. It’s got to be Krekorian, just released from his four-to-midnight. But the footsteps in the hall are too light for Krekorian, and the knock on the door too tentative for a cop. O’Hara looks through the peephole, and she sees the dark, unruly hair of Sam Lebowitz. She can’t see his face because he’s staring at the carpet. Thrilled to see him and anxious to put him out of his misery, she pulls him into the room and kisses him on the mouth. Then she runs her tongue across his ear. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
O’Hara hands Lebowitz an Amstel and jumps into the shower, washing her hair with the tiny bottle of shampoo on the ledge, and when she steps out of the bathroom her wet red hair and freckled thighs bracket a black Yonah Schimmel Original Knishes T-shirt. Gazing up at her, Lebowitz’s face registers a level of excitement several times higher than anything he had experienced in his first thirty-two years.
“You drank all that by yourself?” asks O’Hara, pointing at the minuscule space at the top of his beer.
“It’s the curse of sobriety,” says Lebowitz. “My family has suffered from it for generations.”
“Not mine,” says O’Hara.
O’Hara pulls Lebowitz out of his chair and starts kissing him in earnest, and as she pulls off his shirt and unbuttons his jeans, sees something in his eyes and posture so immutably seventeen, she knows already she will never tire of fucking him.
“Sam, I got to say, you look even better without your clothes.”
“In high school, I was getting picked on a little. My old man bought me a set of weights.”
“That’s not what I meant, Sam.”
42
On Thursday morning Muster’s Amazonian receptionist unlocks the oxidized steel door, and O’Hara, knish and coffee in hand, follows her into the fascistically minimal waiting area. O’Hara is desecrating an art object table with her breakfast grease when Muster arrives
for work in a six-thousand-dollar bespoke suit and three-dollar Canal Street sneakers.
“What happened to you?” he asks. “Queer Eye? You look fabulous.”
O’Hara flips him the bird, with Brooklyn nonchalance, and leaves it flapping in the breeze until Muster keeps stepping. A couple of minutes later, Christina trudges through the door. O’Hara follows her to her cube, where she collapses in her Aeron and lays her head on her desk.
“Remind me one more time,” says O’Hara, “why you’re working for this asshole.”
“I’ve got very little experience and not much work of my own to show. If Juergen wants me to pick up his lunch and listen to him getting blown, and apparently he does, my choices are to deal or crawl back to my parents in Los Angeles. Believe me, I’m not doing that.”
“See, that’s why I’m here. Without you, Muster has no alibi. Considering everything he’s holding over you, can I really believe you two were here all night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Every girl draws the line somewhere. I draw mine between having to listen to someone cum and providing them with a phony murder alibi.”
Instead of a cube, Naomi Delfinger is sequestered in a ten-thousand-square-foot postmodern in a leafy neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s on a private cul-de-sac where every third house is a teardown, the original fifties-era homes razed to make way for bloated suburban palaces. The new ones, like Delfinger’s, tower above the tree line, as naked and out-of-scale as the Atelier.
Unlike her house, Naomi Delfinger is homely in a modest way. She is petite, small boned and plain, with faded brown hair and oversized tenebrous eyes. After O’Hara tells her she’s an NYPD detective investigating a murder, Delfinger walks her through a two-story entrance decorated with studio portraits of her three daughters, and brings her into a huge kitchen with two of everything—ovens, dishwashers and refrigerators. They sit at a sunlit table looking out on a tarp-covered pool.
“Your girls are precious,” says O’Hara.
“They were such a gift, particularly at my age.”
Delfinger, who looks to be in her early forties, pours coffee and puts out cookies, which despite the double set of appliances, look and taste as if they’re missing several crucial ingredients. “My husband told me about your visit,” says Delfinger, and O’Hara tries to conceal her disappointment.
“Not many husbands would.”
“Daniel said she was an exceptional young woman with a bright future. He told me you spoke to everyone at his office.”
“Did your husband say what Pena did for the firm?”
“He said she was an intern and that she had planned to apply to law school in the fall.”
“She was a call girl, Mrs. Delfinger. Your husband met her through an escort service called Aphrodite.”
Since her first glimpse of Delfinger’s wife, dwarfed by her immense front door, O’Hara saw her as a woman hanging by a thread and prescribed pharmaceuticals. Now Naomi Delfinger’s eyes harden with resolve. “You drove all the way out here to tell me this? Is this how you get your kicks? If not, I don’t see the point, because other than making me very unhappy, it doesn’t change a thing. It certainly doesn’t change the fact that my husband got home early Wednesday afternoon and didn’t leave the house all weekend.”
“When did he arrive?”
“About two. But I’m sure he told you that already.”
“Was there anyone here other than you who can confirm that?”
“No, only my husband and me.”
“No houseguests?”
“It was just the five of us, and quite wonderful,” says Delfinger, enunciating each syllable with painful precision. “Daniel is a very hard worker. Having him home five days in a row is a rare treat.”
I bet it is, thinks O’Hara. “Your husband told me the place was packed with relatives—your parents, your sisters, their husbands and children.”
“Detective, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Being kicked out of kitchens by lying women is getting tiresome. To buy a little time, O’Hara sips her coffee and reaches for another tasteless cookie. A photograph of Delfinger, the chubby teen in that Coney Island playground morphed into a patriarchal dweeb, smiles at her from one of the refrigerators, three young daughters in his arms. Only the rich and the poor still breed this indiscriminately, thinks O’Hara. The oldest looks four, tops, the youngest about a year, and the way everyone is bundled up against the cold, the shot had to have been taken recently. O’Hara looks at the smallest child again and estimates her age between eight and ten months. If it’s the smaller number, she must have been born close to the date Delfinger met Pena.
“Your youngest looks like a real firecracker,” says O’Hara. “I’m guessing an Aries.”
“Very good, Detective,” says Delfinger. “And according to anyone who knows anything about astrology, Tovah is the classic Aries, through and through.”
Naomi Delfinger smiles, in spite of herself.
“Mrs. Delfinger, would you like to hear the date of your husband and Pena’s tryst?”
“What I’d like is for you to leave. I’ve asked once politely. Now I’m asking again. Please.”
“April eleventh,” says O’Hara. Delfinger’s face freezes, as if she’s just been struck. O’Hara keeps talking, anything to stay in the room a little longer. “When I had my son, I didn’t even know who I was yet. I was barely sixteen. I got kicked out of high school and was branded a fool and a slut, the perfect combination. It was quite the little scandal, even in Brooklyn.”
“You have no reason to remember this,” says Delfinger, “but April eleventh was a gorgeous spring day. New York Hospital had given us the loveliest hospital room I’ve ever seen. It looked straight over the East River. And Tovah was so easy, nothing like the first two. Dr. Shwab said ‘push,’ and out she came, as if she couldn’t wait another second. My goodness, what a precious little girl. Daniel was so happy and proud. But of course he had to go back to work. At least that’s what he said. The next day he gave me a ring from Tiffany’s. Pena must have been his gift to himself.”
“Me, it took thirty-six hours to squeeze out Axl. I haven’t worked that hard since, and don’t plan to. That’s right, getting knocked up wasn’t the only harebrained thing I did. I also named the kid Axl, after the singer for Guns N’ Roses, who turned out to be such a knucklehead. If I wasn’t going to name him something reasonable like Matt or Joe, I could at least have gone with Slash.
“People said I should put him up for adoption. It’s not like I couldn’t see their point. I was sixteen and running wild, going out and getting boxed every night, and in the nine months since I missed my period, I’d barely given the gink a single thought. I wore big blouses and put it out of my mind, pretended it wasn’t happening. Like they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt. But when the time came, I found out giving away my kid was not something I could do. Surprised me as much as anyone else.”
Delfinger shakes her head as if she knows where this is going and it doesn’t apply. O’Hara keeps right on talking. “I’m not saying I’m a hero. To be totally honest, my mother raised Axl far more than I did. The point I’m trying to make is that you think you can’t get through something, and it turns out you can. In fact, it can be a blessing.”
Naomi shakes her head again, but much more feebly. To O’Hara, it looks like she’s disintegrating.
“Axl got me kicked out of high school, disgraced my family and got all my girlfriends on the pill. He was also the best thing that ever happened to me. Maybe the only really good thing.”
“That not what I mean,” says Delfinger, staring at her hands. “I mean, no, Daniel didn’t come home Wednesday night. Wednesdays he works late, stays in the city and rents a room at the Harvard Club. I assumed the night before Thanksgiving would be an exception, but I was wrong. He called that afternoon and said that if he didn’t stay late, he’d have to work the weekend, then called a
gain about eleven p.m. and said he was too tired to drive. He didn’t get here until Thursday morning. You want another nice detail that says a lot about my devoted, sentimental husband? Guess what room he rents at the Harvard Club—411. I thought it was because it was Tovah’s birthday. Detective, I have three kids under the age of four, I’m forty-one and never had a job. What am I going to do?”
It’s midafternoon when O’Hara backs out of the driveway and maneuvers through the obstacle course of bumps and gates that keep drivers to the posted fifteen miles an hour. Once past the white gates and sentry box, she finds a classic rock station playing ZZ Top and Alice Cooper. She cranks it full blast and sings along, shouting out the choruses as if her life depends on it. When that station turns to shit, she finds one just as good at the other end of the dial and sings along to vintage Mary J. Blige until tears stream down her face.
In the city, she parks near the Ninth Precinct again on Fifth Street, and although it feels disloyal to her overworked counterman, detours to a Polish diner on Avenue A for beef stroganoff over egg noodles. For dessert, she has a couple drafts at the dive bar next door.
Back in 303, she’s calmed down enough to leave a long exhilarated and largely coherent message on Krekorian’s cell. She catches him up on Consuela’s tattoo and her visit to suburbia and the admission by Delfinger’s wife that her husband was lying and never came home the night of the murder. “It was one lie after another from that cheeky fuck. He said the house was full of relatives, total bullshit. And after his whole little charade about tossing his online E-ZPass statement and then magically finding it in his recently deleted mail, it turns out he drove all the way up to Riverdale and went through the toll just to cover his tracks, then turned around and came back downtown on Broadway to avoid the toll. I swear to Christ, K., I’m so close I can taste it.”
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