Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  45

  Eventually, techs arrive to secure the crime scene. They replace the locks on Delfinger’s door and add new keyed ones to the six wall-facing windows. It’s seven in the morning before O’Hara and Krekorian can leave. By then the sun is halfway up on a hopeless December Friday. At the corner of Fifty-second and Second, the newspaper vending machines have been restocked, and dueling covers trumpet McLain’s arrest. MAN WITH A VAN, shouts the Daily News. HELL ON WHEELS, the Post shouts back. But pedestrians hustle by obliviously. O’Hara feels as if the city slipped overnight into a parallel universe—one that is operating on lousy information and false hope.

  O’Hara and Krekorian climb into their Impala and enter the park through Central Park South, grateful that the bitter cold has kept joggers to a minimum. North of the reservoir, Krekorian pulls off the road onto the muddy grass and rolls down his window.

  “You were looking pretty Irish in there,” says O’Hara.

  “Was I? Trees look a lot better to me than people right now.”

  “They don’t fuck up kids.”

  Krekorian looks over the tops of the trees and inhales the cold park air through his nose, trying with each breath to undo the time in Delfinger’s apartment. “There’s something I never told you about my mom,” he says. “She was a junkie too. Not a street junkie like the mother of those two girls, but a proper upper-middle-class, suburban junkie.

  “The worst part,” continues Krekorian, “was I was her favorite. That meant I was the one who got to go to her long list of quack doctors and plead for more quaaludes and vicodin. I used to pick up the prescriptions on the way back from basketball practice. And I was the one who got to hear about what a horrible person and loser my old man was and how she should have married any of the dozens of other better men who had also wanted her. It’s amazing I didn’t become a fag.”

  “You became a cop instead,” says O’Hara. “Same difference.”

  “I figured if an Armenian American housewife from Montclair can turn herself into a junkie, why can’t I become a cop?”

  From the park, they drive to a diner on 102nd and Broadway, where they get a booth by the window and drink coffee until the Radio Shack across the street opens. When it does, O’Hara buys a cheap tape recorder, some batteries and three ninety-minute tapes for forty-three dollars. “Save the receipt,” says Krekorian, before he turns on the flasher and they race up Broadway to Washington Heights.

  This time, Consuela and Moreal are at school, and Entonces looks almost relieved to see them. With O’Hara suspended, Krekorian is the one who tells her she is under arrest for the murder of Francesca Pena. When he reads her her rights, she waves them away with the back of her hand, and makes no objection when O’Hara, hoping to God the thing works, sets up the tape recorder on the kitchen table. No physical evidence connects Entonces to the crime, and with all the trouble she’s in, O’Hara knows her only chance is to bring this in wrapped up like a Christmas present.

  “This is Detective Krekorian, and I’m here with Detective Darlene O’Hara and Tida Entonces, who has just been arrested for the murder of Francesca Pena. Entonces has waived her right to an attorney and is talking to us in the kitchen of her apartment at 251 Fort Washington Avenue.”

  O’Hara whispers a question into her partner’s ear, and Krekorian redirects it to Entonces. “Tida, when did you discover what Pena was doing with Consuela and Moreal?”

  “Five hours before I killed her,” says Entonces, as if already looking back at her life from a great distance. “Francesca had taken the girls for one of their special sleepovers. All that afternoon, before Francesca picked them up, the girls acted nervous and squirrelly. They talked to each other in code, and Moreal teased her younger sister about something scary that was going to happen to her. When I asked about it, they giggled and made faces, and I put it out of my mind. I figured nothing bad could happen to them if they were with Francesca.

  “I went to sleep early, but after less than an hour, I sat up in a panic. Something terrible was happening. I could feel it. There’s a clock beside my bed. It was 11:05. I went into the girls’ room and looked through their drawers until I found the diary I bought for Consuela.”

  “You still have it?” asks Krekorian.

  “Yes. Can I go get it?”

  “Witness requests permission to get a diary,” says Krekorian into the machine. “Detective Krekorian accompanies her as she retrieves it.”

  Entonces returns, clutching a small white dime-store diary. Embossed on the cover in gold letters is MY JOURNEY. Entonces sits down and flips some pages, stops and reads: “Had fun with M and F and DB. I can’t believe DB is forty-three. He sure doesn’t act it.”

  Entonces turns a page, and when she reads again, O’Hara tries not to see her daughter and Delfinger on the flat screen. “Mister Dinosaur is so cute. I’m so lucky. DB buys us nice things.”

  “I thought the presents came from Pena,” says Entonces, then turns a couple of pages and reads again.

  “DB says I’m his favorite. He likes me even more than M but says the other things I do aren’t enough anymore. I’m scared, but Moreal says it only hurts a little.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” asks Krekorian.

  “Then I lose the girls forever,” says Entonces, looking away. “Children’s Services would blame me, and they would be right. I OD’d three times. Why didn’t I die? My girls would have been better off. Now they have nothing. Now they are nothing.”

  “How about the tattoos?” asks Krekorian for O’Hara. “What did you think about them?”

  “Francesca, Moreal and Consuela, they all got the same one, so I thought it was a good thing. In the back of my mind, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Francesca to get tired of us and move on. The tattoos, I hoped, meant that wouldn’t happen. They’d be sisters forever, no matter what.”

  “What did you think the tattoos meant?”

  “Love. Money. Happiness. All the good things.”

  “What did you do after you read the diary, Tida?”

  “I called Pena and told her I knew what was happening. She told me to meet her at a bar on Rivington. I took a subway downtown, but I didn’t go in. I waited outside. When she left I followed her. At the corner, she got sick. I came up from behind and hit her with a hammer.”

  “You brought a hammer with you?”

  “I brought a lot of stuff,” says Entonces with something close to a smile.

  “You planned what you were going to do before you got downtown?”

  “Mostly, but some things I added while I waited. It was fifteen degrees that night and I was out there for a long time, but I never got cold. There was a construction site around the corner with plywood around it; I opened up a space between two sheets with the other side of the hammer, pulled her inside and dragged her to the back. I taped her mouth, tied her hands and feet and cut off her clothes. They even had a light, so I could see what I was doing. The best part was when she opened her eyes and realized that no one was going to help her.”

  “You raped her with the hammer?”

  “With a broomstick I found lying around. Just like the cops did to Louima. It was the first thing I did. I wanted her to know what it felt like.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “Burned it. In the incinerator down the hall.”

  “How about the man? Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “All I had were his initials, DB. I had to find out who he was, where he worked. Pena told me all that, and I was still waiting for my chance. But if it had to be only one, I’m glad it was her. She found us. Acted like she was saving us, then she turned my girls into whores.”

  “How long did you torture her?”

  “A long time. When she stopped breathing, I was angry.”

  O’Hara takes out her Radio Shack receipt, writes “phone #?” and slides it over to Krekorian.

  “Tida,” says Krekorian, “we checked Pena’s cell phone reco
rds. There’s no call on it from you.”

  “She had two phones,” says Entonces. “a nice orange T-Mobile and a prepaid one like they sell in my neighborhood. I found them both along with two CDs and the keys to her boyfriend’s van when I went through her bag. I kept the CDs for the girls and threw the phones in the sewer.”

  “We only found one of them,” says Krekorian. “The T-Mobile.”

  “Look again.”

  “You used the van to move the body?”

  “She told me he always parked it near Tompkins Square and what it looked like, and I found it in less than five minutes. It was like God was helping me, and it was all meant to happen. I knew about that park by the river and that closed-down bathroom from when I was using. By the time I got home the girls were already there in bed. I knew it was DB, who must have panicked when Francesca didn’t show up, and put them in a cab. But I acted like I didn’t know. I tried to act like I didn’t know anything. That afternoon, I dropped the van in long-term parking at Newark Airport and caught a bus back to the city.”

  “Were you the one who called in the tip?”

  “I had to. Your partner over there was getting too close.”

  “Tida,” says Krekorian. “We got to go downtown now.”

  “Who’s going to be here when my girls come home? Who’s going to be here for my babies?”

  46

  To get out of the neighborhood without a ruckus, O’Hara and Krekorian don’t cuff Entonces until they get her in the backseat, and Krekorian doesn’t hit the siren until they’re off Fort Washington Avenue and swooping down through the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. On the West Side Highway, Krekorian grabs the empty right lane and stays on it, clocking ninety as O’Hara looks out over the guardrail at the black ice bobbing in the lethal water and Jersey City and Hoboken loitering on the far bank. At Fiftieth, the siren clears a lane through the crosstown traffic, and in minutes Krekorian pulls up sharply in front of 479 Lexington. O’Hara offers to sit in the car with Entonces, but Krekorian waves her off. “No need to cheat yourself, Dar,” he says. “With what’s on that on video, Delfinger won’t be crawling through any loopholes.”

  O’Hara rides the elevator thirty-seven floors to the offices of Kane, Lubell, Falco and Ritter, where business is brisk and the meter is running. A large pretty black woman in a headset looks askance at O’Hara from behind a mahogany bunker.

  “I need to see Daniel Delfinger,” says O’Hara. “Immediately.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. He’s with clients.” But forty-three thousand dollars per year buys only so much loyalty, and when O’Hara flashes her gold shield, the receptionist’s eyes light up.

  “Let’s go,” says O’Hara.

  Hips swaying and heels clicking, the receptionist leads O’Hara through a frosted-glass door and down a short corridor. She stops in front of the closed door of conference room 3. “Knock and step inside,” says O’Hara. “I’ll be right behind you. And don’t leave until I do.” The door opens on a long, very expensive-looking table around which a thick white document is being giddily passed from hand to hand like a big fat blunt. A petite smartly dressed brown-haired woman has just delivered a financial quip that plays off the heady tension of the imminent closing, and the tittering gradually comes to a stop as the room processes the unscripted intrusion.

  “Give me two minutes to take care of this,” says Delfinger, jumping out of his chair. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Unlikely,” says O’Hara. She steps forward to meet him in the middle of the room and shoves him hard facedown on the table.

  Initially, Delfinger’s clients are nearly as shocked as he is. But they get over it. As O’Hara cuffs him and reads him his rights, the clients and receptionist wear the same excited close-lipped smiles. They are far more grateful for the work-place drama than put out by the disruption.

  “What are you arresting him for?” asks the brown-haired woman.

  “I’ll leave that to Danny Boy,” says O’Hara as she pulls him off the table by his pinned wrists. But Delfinger, already damaged beyond repair, is barely capable of making a sound, let alone forming a word.

  With the receptionist leading the way like a majorette, O’Hara shoves Delfinger down the hallway and into an elevator. As soon as the doors close, Delfinger’s legs slide out from under him. O’Hara bends to his ear, says “Fuck you” and leaves him on the floor. On the thirty-fifth floor, a man in a suit steps halfway into the car, says “Daniel?” and bolts. Two floors below, a messenger shows no such misgivings and steps casually over Delfinger’s splayed legs.

  When they reach the lobby, O’Hara grabs one of Delfinger’s legs and pulls him across the black marble floor on his ass. Just before Delfinger reaches the curb, Krekorian steps through the door, and yanks him to his feet. He throws him in the backseat with Entonces. Then he hits the siren and pushes through the thick Midtown traffic.

  After a couple of silent blocks, O’Hara twists in her seat to face the two handcuffed passengers. “I need to apologize to both of you,” says O’Hara. “I got so caught up in the activities of the morning, I forgot to do the introductions. Tida, the man on your left is Daniel Delfinger, but his really close friends call him Danny or Danny Boy or simply refer to him by the initials DB. And, Daniel, the woman on your right is Tida Entonces. If the last name is familiar, it’s because she’s the mother of your two girlfriends, Consuela and Moreal.”

  Delfinger looks at O’Hara in horror, but all he can get out of his throat is a gurgling noise. By then it doesn’t matter, because Entonces is attacking him like a schizo street cat, spitting and biting and scraping his face with the edges of her cuffs. “Why can’t folks get along?” asks Krekorian. “Beats me, K.” When Krekorian finally pulls over, Delfinger’s glasses are broken and his face is in shreds. Krekorian stops the car and gets in back between the two of them, and O’Hara drives the rest of the way downtown. She gets on and off the FDR and turns onto Pitt Street. Cars and TV vans from half a dozen local networks are double-parked all the way up the hill, and milling in front of the precinct house are some twenty reporters from small papers and radio stations who lacked the clout to get inside.

  “K., you make a call while I was dragging down Delfinger?”

  “Not me.”

  As O’Hara works her way down the street, a piece-of-crap Impala exactly like theirs approaches 19½ Pitt from the opposite direction. When the homicide detective Patrick Lowry climbs out, the locked-out reporters surround his car and besiege him with questions.

  “Is McLain your man?” “Have you got a confession?” “Does McLain have an alibi?” O’Hara and Krekorian realize the media crush has nothing to do with them.

  With Lowry serving as a 360-pound decoy, O’Hara and Krekorian easily slip Entonces and Delfinger in through the back door. Even inside, the precinct is overwhelmed by reporters. O’Hara and Krekorian are able to get their two suspects to the fingerprint machine without anyone noticing except the desk sergeant, Kenny Aarons.

  “What the hell you doing here, Darlene?” asks Aarons. “I thought you were suspended. We miss you, by the way.”

  “Just helping my old partner out on something.”

  “And what the fuck might that be?” asks Aarons. He eyes the two perps, one of whom is covered in blood.

  “Give us a couple minutes, Kenny,” says Krekorian. “We can’t talk right now.”

  The new computerized fingerprint machine works only slightly worse than the old one. Despite the fact that Delfinger keeps sliding to the floor and Entonces has to be continually restrained from attacking him, they eventually get them both printed. As they wait for the machine to spit out copies, Krekorian wanders down the hall and sticks his head into the muster room. A podium has been set up in front, and Lowry towers over it, facing the standing-room-only crowd.

  “How’d you find the van?” a reporter calls out from the back.

  “We got a tip,” says Lowry. “John Q. Public doing his job.�
��

  “Have you charged McLain yet?”

  “No. We hope to by the end of the day.”

  “Why’d he do it, Detective?”

  “Why do people ever do these things?”

  “Dewey, I mean Lowry, is making his victory speech,” Krekorian tells O’Hara when he gets back. By now, a couple dozen more scrub reporters have pushed and connived their way into the precinct. Those who can’t get into Lowry’s press conference in the muster room are backed up in the corridor. The end of the line is so close to the fingerprint machine that Delfinger is practically bleeding on their cheap suits.

  As O’Hara and Krekorian try to figure out the best spot in this bedlam to park their suspects, the familiar figure of Sergeant Callahan pushes toward them through the clogged corridor. Callahan is not as happy to see O’Hara as Aarons. “You picked a hell of a day to come in and play detective again,” he says. “But I don’t even know why I’m talking to you, O’Hara. Your career is over.” And then to Krekorian, “This isn’t doing yours any good either.”

  “Sarge,” says Krekorian, “before you go down in flames with Dewey in there, we got to tell you something.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Dewey is the guy who ran for president against Truman in 1948.”

  “I know who Dewey is, you condescending college asshole.”

  “This is Tida Entonces,” says Krekorian. “An hour ago we got her taped confession to the murder of Francesca Pena. She killed her because Pena was pimping her eleven- and thirteen-year-old daughters to this piece of shit over here, named Daniel Delfinger.”

  “What makes you think she’s telling the truth?”

  “For starters, she’s the one who called in the tip on the van. It wasn’t some eagle-eyed civilian like Lowry is telling them. It was her. She got the keys off Pena when she attacked her and knew exactly where the van was parked because she drove it there. Your choice. Stick with Lowry if you want, but this thing is tighter than a squirrel’s ass. And one other thing, Sarge: I’m just an extra pair of hands here. This is all O’Hara, and when these reporters are through with her, she might decide to run for mayor.”