Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  O’Hara hangs up, and she feels the full weight of the exhaustion she’s held off for days. Without pulling the covers, she stretches out on the HoJo’s bedspread. When the phone rings five hours later, she’s shivering and the sky in the window is black. It takes several rings for O’Hara to realize she’s not at home in Riverdale.

  “Dar,” says Krekorian. “I got bad news. They just found McLain’s van in long-term parking at Newark Airport, and the mattress in the back is covered with Pena’s blood. Lowry is on his way to Orchard Street right now to arrest him.”

  43

  O’Hara’s silence worries Krekorian. “Lowry had a whole department working for him,” he says. “You had me.” When O’Hara still doesn’t respond, he adds, “I’ll go to bat for you with the review board. Every guy in the Seven will. What room are you in?”

  “303.”

  “Promise me you won’t go anywhere. I’ll come over as soon my shift ends. “

  “I can’t believe I lost to that blowhard fuck.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have to watch him parade around here with a stogie in his mouth,” says Krekorian, relieved O’Hara has finally said something. “The guy thinks he’s Bill Parcells.”

  “Close but no cigar. That’s me in a nutshell.” She wonders if some people can be so competitive that they don’t have a chance to win.

  “Lock the door and stay in your room. We’ll figure something out. It might be as simple as you coming in tomorrow and eating a giant plate of crow.”

  When Krekorian hangs up, O’Hara takes the back stairs to the street. She heads a block down Houston to American Apparel, where she buys leggings, socks, a T-shirt and panties, then walks briskly uptown. There’s a New York Sports Club on East Fourth between First and Second avenues, and in the ground-floor window, a dozen treadmills are lined up side by side, a woman running on each. Peering into the brightly lit interior from the street reminds O’Hara of that Hopper painting of the diner she finally saw in person last summer. The women on the treadmills are like the customers at that diner. Although they’re only inches apart, each is stuck inside her lonely city head.

  O’Hara’s discount Riverdale membership doesn’t apply in Manhattan, but the manager cuts her a break. After changing into her new leggings, O’Hara climbs onto a Lifecycle, sets the machine on 3 and starts chugging. Despite the discovery of McLain’s van and the bloody mattress inside, O’Hara doesn’t buy McLain as the killer. Someone in town three weeks doesn’t dump a body in East River Park. There are people living here their whole lives who don’t know it exists.

  After a couple of minutes, O’Hara’s cheeks and the back of her neck turn beet red. Then she starts to sweat. Ten minutes later, her hair and T-shirt are soaked, and she still doesn’t see McLain as the perp, although she concedes to herself that if Pena had trained in the park, McLain could have found out about it from her. She bumps the setting on her bike to 6, then 9, then 11. By the time she hits 14, her thighs are on fire and sweat rolls off her nose.

  When she gets back to her motel room, the hysteria is gone, sweated out like a fever. Still dripping, O’Hara sits at her desk and stares at the timeline on her worked-over piece of HoJo stationery. The only white space on either side is in the upper-left-hand corner of the back page. She uses it to write herself a three-line note.

  Don’t worry what other people think.

  Finish what you’ve started.

  You’ve earned the right to believe in yourself.

  Twenty minutes later, O’Hara sits in her Jetta on Forty-fourth, and stares through her windshield at the red awning of the Harvard Club. She calls the club from the car, and a Pakistani-sounding voice picks up at the front desk. “Got a question,” says O’Hara. “I’m making a delivery first thing in the morning. How early does your service entrance open up?”

  “Six a.m.”

  “Thanks, Captain. And where is it exactly?”

  “The building runs from Forty-fourth to Forty-fifth. The service entrance is on Forty-fifth, just east of a restaurant called Yakitori Taisho.”

  O’Hara drives through Fifth, turns up Madison, then back on Forty-fifth. She double-parks in front of a steel black door and waits. When a uniformed porter steps out and lights up a cigarette, O’Hara gets out of her car, and when he rubs out the sparks beneath his shoe and steps back inside, O’Hara reaches the door before the lock can catch. She holds it barely open for a minute, then steps inside.

  O’Hara takes the service elevator to the fourth floor and walks down a quiet corridor whose light green carpet and striped wallpaper look like they haven’t been replaced in decades. Room 411 is at the southern end of the building, near the guest elevator. A cart loaded with soap, towels and toilet paper is parked beside the open door. O’Hara knocks lightly and shows her gold shield to a frightened rail-thin maid. According to the big white pin attached to her uniform, her name is Yvonne. She speaks very little English.

  “Did you clean the room this morning, Yvonne?”

  The woman shakes her head. “Estelle,” she says.

  “Is she here tonight?”

  The woman nods and points at her feet.

  In the basement, a female crew of international refugees stand beside an industrial-sized dryer, warming themselves as if around a campfire. Estelle is big and blond and eastern European. “I clean fourth floor every Thursday for year,” she tells O’Hara.

  “Did you see the man staying there this morning?”

  “No.”

  “You sure? He used to come here with a young girl. She was nineteen, slim, short black hair, very pretty. You ever see her?”

  “I never see her or him.”

  “What time do you get here in the mornings?”

  “Six a.m. Work eighteen hours and never see them.”

  “They don’t spend the whole night?”

  “Nothing to clean. The man buys room but never stays. He is perfect customer. I want more like him.”

  O’Hara tries to reach Naomi on her cell but gets voice mail, and doesn’t feel she can risk calling the house if there’s a chance that Delfinger is there. For the third time that day, O’Hara crosses the Triboro and gets on 95, and an hour later rolls back through the white gates of Delfinger’s private neighborhood. She parks a couple of houses beyond his and walks back to his driveway. Compared to the city, the suburban night is three shades darker and ten degrees colder.

  O’Hara stops at the top of the driveway between Delfinger’s Mercedes and his wife’s Lexus. From where she stands, she can see the top and bottom of the staircase in the two-story entranceway and has a direct view of the lamp-lit living room, which looks like an idle stage set between acts. Because the single light is at the back of the room, it takes O’Hara a minute before she sees Delfinger, no more than twenty feet away, standing at the window. For more than five minutes, Delfinger, a glass of red wine in his hand, doesn’t move. He just stands there and stares out at the night, and O’Hara, having seen no evidence of anyone else in the house, starts to panic.

  What if Delfinger found out about O’Hara’s visit this afternoon or her call to Naomi an hour ago? If he killed Pena, he could kill his wife too. To O’Hara’s relief, Naomi Delfinger enters the living room. Cradled in her arms is one of her daughters, and the comfortable way she stands beside her husband convinces O’Hara that Delfinger is not aware of her visit or phone call. Naomi takes her husband’s glass in exchange for a sleeping toddler, and Delfinger carries her out of the room and up the stairs. When they disappear down a second-floor hallway, O’Hara calls Naomi’s cell again. From the other side of the bay window, she watches Naomi jump in alarm and rush into the kitchen.

  “Naomi, it’s Darlene O’Hara.”

  “I know who it is,” whispers Naomi. “Stop calling me.”

  “I’m in your driveway. I need to talk to you.”

  “Are you crazy? Daniel is upstairs. You can’t do this to me.”

  “It’s very important. You got to think of a r
eason to get outside. Quickly, he’s coming down the stairs now.”

  From the driveway, O’Hara sees Delfinger reach the bottom of the staircase. Through his wife’s phone she hears his footsteps on the wooden floor of the foyer and the tiles of the kitchen. “Naomi, it’s eleven o’clock,” he says, his voice as loud and clear as if he’s talking into the phone himself. “Who calls this late?”

  “Andrea,” says Naomi into the phone. “I doubt you left them in my car, but I’ll run out right now and take a look. I insist. It’s no trouble at all.”

  Crouched between the two cars, O’Hara sees the side door open and Naomi run out in her slippers. Even in the dark, Naomi looks different. She’s angry and she’s scared, but not like she was during the afternoon. There’s a glint in her eyes. “You won’t be happy till you get me killed?”

  “I’m sorry to be doing this,” says O’Hara. “But there’s something I need to know. Does your husband keep a place in the city?”

  “Yes,” says Naomi, her breath turning to steam in the cold. “I always knew he was cheating. Finally I hired an investigator. He found the place six months ago. Daniel still doesn’t know I know. But I think he realized he was being followed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the apartment this afternoon?”

  “I already told you too much.”

  “Naomi, I need that address.”

  44

  Building 972, on the west side of Second Avenue, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second, is a shitty little tenement sandwiched between two generic Irish pubs. At three in the morning, both are still dispensing desperate cheer, and from across the street, where she has been parked for hours, O’Hara can see down the wooden length of the nearly identical and parallel bars. Every twenty minutes, a skinny old scarecrow takes a break from drinking himself to death to have a smoke. When he flicks his butt north, O’Hara notices the new awning of the candy shop three doors up. Is this, wonders O’Hara, where Pena bought the chocolate malt ball Lebowitz picked out of her teeth?

  At three-thirty, a car pulls up behind her. O’Hara walks to the open window and places a hand on Krekorian’s blocky shoulder. Krekorian responds with the exasperated look a parent gives a beloved daughter who has just gotten kicked out of her third school in a year. “This is it, Darlene. It ends tonight no matter what.”

  “Understood,” says O’Hara. “You get the warrant?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing—getting a foot massage in Chinatown? I just the left the chambers of Judge Carl Kochanski. I told him we had reason to believe this apartment contained evidence of a murder. At three in the morning, that was good enough for Kochanski. He covers midtown east. If it doesn’t pan out, maybe our friends Lowry and Callahan don’t ever have to hear about it.”

  The two cross the street and step into the cramped vestibule. Take-out menus and business cards for locksmiths are stuffed into the casing for the buzzer. Above it, inside a cracked glass box, the names of tenants are spelled out in white plastic letters. The missing i and g from Higgins and the k from Baginski lay on their backs alongside dead flies and roaches at the bottom of the box. For 4C, there’s no name.

  O’Hara woke the super three and a half hours ago, just to make sure he was around. Now she does it again. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he emerges from the basement and leads them up carpeted wooden stairs smelling of mold. When they reach 4C, O’Hara hands rubber gloves to the super and Krekorian and pulls on a pair herself.

  “Like I told your partner, I haven’t been in this apartment since Ivers moved in. Never had any reason to.”

  “He goes by Stan Ivers,” O’Hara tells Krekorian. “According to our friend here, he’s going through a nasty divorce and got the place so his kids would have somewhere to visit him. He says Ivers pays the rent in cash, six months at a time.”

  The super stretches a key from a hernia-inducing ring, turns over two bolts and follows Krekorian and O’Hara into the overheated apartment. In the dark, the radiators hiss like sprinklers, and O’Hara can smell the countless coats of cheap paint cooking in the damp heat.

  Behind them, the super hits a switch, and an overhead light goes on in the tiny shabby kitchen just inside the door to their right. There are no signs of cooking. In the sink are a couple of glasses and a dirty ashtray, on the counter an empty bottle of Cuervo and box of Froot Loops. The only thing in the refrigerator is a month-old carton of Tropicana.

  “Don’t touch anything,” O’Hara tells the super.

  Krekorian turns on another light, and their eyes adjust to the blaze of colors in the living room. The room is small and as shabby as the kitchen, but Delfinger has dropped some cash on a bright green couch with purple pillows and a pink shag rug the same color as the Froot Loops. Behind the couch, three teenybopper posters are taped to the wall. O’Hara watches just enough MTV to know that the girl on the left, a diamond glinting in her navel, is Britney and the girl on the right, also wearing a cut-off T-shirt, her jean skirt unbuttoned to reveal her bikini bottom, is Christina Aguilera, but not quite enough to place the pasty rapper between them. From the baby blue tracksuit, fat Rolex and gold chains, she guesses he’s some Eminem wannabe. Then she notices the diamond-encrusted dollar sign lighting up the center of the chains and the DANNY BOY written in gold script, and when she looks under the baseball cap sees that the face is twenty years too old for an up-and-coming pop star.

  “Recognize him?” asks Krekorian.

  “Daniel Delfinger,” says O’Hara, “a forty-three-year-old tax attorney, also apparently known as Danny Boy.”

  Like the living room, the bedroom looks directly into the soot-covered wall of the neighboring building, and with all the windows closed tight, the radiator hiss is louder and the paint smell stronger. A flat-screen TV, stereo and a DVD player face a platform bed. The bright green bedspread and stuffed animals, including a nearly lifesize Pink Panther, are reflected in the screen. In the corner stands a tripod and on the night table are a couple cellophane packets from the candy shop. One is empty, the other half filled with green jelly beans.

  O’Hara and Krekorian search for the camera that goes with the tripod. They scour the closets, cabinets and drawers, as well as the dirty space beneath every piece of furniture, and soon both are sweating profusely. When there’s no place else left to look, O’Hara walks over to the small video player, on the stand beneath the TV, hits EJECT, and a small cartridge pops out. “Turn off the lights,” she says. “Maybe we don’t need the camera.”

  When O’Hara turns on the TV and hits PLAY, Consuela’s face fills the screen. The high-definition close-up shows the down on her cheeks and neck, along with every pre-adolescent blemish. When the lens pulls back, Consuela bounces on the bed on her knees. Like her pop heroes, she wears a cut-off T-shirt and the same low-riding jeans she had on in her mother’s apartment two days ago. The stuffed dinosaur and kangaroo sitting behind her against the headboard look like spectators.

  “Show us your new tattoo, Con,” says the off-screen adult voice of Daniel Delfinger. Consuela stops bouncing and turns around to let the camera zoom in on the patch of red skin just above her jeans. Inside it is a crude amateurish copy of the tattoo Francesca got in Williamsburg. “Does it still hurt, baby?” asks Delfinger.

  “A little,” says Consuela. Her high-pitched voice sounds even younger than eleven.

  “What do the letters stand for?” asks Delfinger, a lawyer leading a witness.

  Consuela twists her shoulders until she almost faces the camera and reaches her left arm around her waist. Then she points a chipped red fingernail at the T, the first of the six letters inside the heart, and says, “This.” Slowly moving her finger from H to B to D and B, she says, “Hynie…Belongs…to…Danny…Boy.”

  “Is it true,” asks Delfinger with a nasal trill, “what the tattoo says?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I know?”

  “Because it is.”

  “Are you ready to prove it?”

&n
bsp; Consuela turns away from the camera, and an off-screen female voice very much like hers says, “It’s OK.” When Delfinger’s naked body steps into the frame, O’Hara realizes the voice is Moreal’s and that she is the one aiming the camera.

  It takes twenty-three minutes for the video to play out, but the heat and the smell and knowing that they’re standing in the room where the film was made make it feel many times longer. O’Hara makes it to the end by concentrating on her timeline on that piece of HoJo stationery, running it through her mind again and again like a voice-over as she finally fills in the rest of those missing one hundred eleven minutes.

  “Eight-thirty p.m.,” says O’Hara to herself, “Pena leaves McLain at her apartment and walks north up Orchard. She passes Joe’s Drapery and Adrienne’s Bridal Shop, turns west on Houston in front of American Apparel and walks down the stairs into the Second Avenue subway stop. She catches an F train to Thirty-fourth Street, runs to Penn Station and catches a 1 train uptown. At 9:06, she gets off at Broadway and 168th Street. Eight minutes later, she, Moreal and Consuela enter the 168th Street station on the downtown side, and just over an hour later Pena buys two CDs at Tower Records at Broadway and East Fourth. But first she delivers her two little sisters to 972 Second Avenue. At 10:30 Pena meets her girlfriends at Freemans, and when they leave, she stays. Not, like she tells them, because she wants to hook up or because she’s avoiding her old boyfriend, but because she’s waiting until it’s time to pick up her girls.”

  As O’Hara fills in the last empty spaces in her timeline, something else occurs to her. When Pena was stripping and hooking, what she was really doing was trawling for johns for Consuela and Moreal. If the bent was there, one date was enough for her little-girl routine to draw it out. “Mister, I see you like to pretend you’re doing little girls. How would you like to do the real thing?”

  The video answers a lot of questions, but not who killed Pena. According to the time code in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen, the killer couldn’t have been Delfinger. He was here doing something else.