Callahan’s skills at police work are limited, but he’s not color blind. And right now the sod under his feet looks a lot greener than the crabgrass down the hall. Shoving bodies out the way, Callahan fights back down the hall and into the muster room, where he works his way to the podium.
“NYPD can’t be everywhere,” says Lowry, as Callahan whispers in his ear, “but good citizens like the anonymous caller so crucial to this case can be our eyes and ears.”
In the hallway, several reporters at the end of the line overheard Krekorian’s discussion with his sergeant. Now it’s the small-time print and radio guys, whose audience wasn’t big enough to get them past the velvet rope, who are closest to the story. Word of it races back through the line so quickly that even while Lowry stands at the podium, reporters turn their backs on him and rush the back door. In the scramble to locate a small red-haired female detective, few notice Lowry slip out a side door. But it doesn’t escape the attention of observant reporters that when O’Hara is finally brought into the room and set up behind the podium, the same man who five minutes earlier stood beaming beside Lowry now stands just as proudly behind his suspended detective.
47
The cabins are set in a row on the bank of a steep hill. When O’Hara pushes through the door she can smell the damp air coming up from the frozen lake, and the stars and moon are bright enough to read the Post, if they let you read the Post up here. The thermometer beside the door reads minus seven.
O’Hara negotiates the stairs in her heavy boots and heads to the shed. In the far corner she finds the wheelbarrow, backs it out and with the bent wheel jouncing over rocks and frozen ruts, pushes it up the gravel road. Past the last cabin, the gravel becomes a mud trail, which climbs into dark woods, and a quarter mile later opens into a small clearing, whose missing trees are now a stack of logs covered by a green tarp. This is the part of the procedure O’Hara dreads the most, and to reduce the odds of an unwanted encounter with Mother Nature, she noisily stomps her boots and claps her gloves. Then she whips back the tarp like a magician and quickly fills the wheelbarrow with wood. Back at the cabin, Velma, a lush from the Seventy-third in Brownsville, helps her get the logs up the stairs, and Megan, a methhead from Patchogue, feeds them into the cast-iron stove, pausing at every opportunity to smile longingly at O’Hara. O’Hara told her the day she arrived that when it comes to cable, her tastes run to The Sopranos, not The L Word, but like most guests here Megan is practiced in the art of denial. “You see the flames licking those logs,” she tells O’Hara. “That’s how I want to lick you.”
Whatever, thinks O’Hara. Ignoring her butch admirer, she climbs into her bunk, and reaches for the comfort of her mail. She pulls out a card from the desk sergeant, Kenny Aarons. It’s a drawing of a squad car, and beneath it in big uneven letters: “To Dar at the Farm.” The drawing and penmanship are at the level of a modestly talented five-year-old, but the thought of her buddy Aarons putting crayon to paper on her behalf never fails to produce a smile. If she ever makes it back to Bruno and Riverdale, she’s going to have it it framed and hang it in her apartment. O’Hara is thinking about exactly where, when a counselor, named Dougherty, sticks his bearded head into the cabin.
“O’Hara,” he says, “you got a call.”
O’Hara layers up again and steps back into the bright cold. The moonlight, this way too fucking serious moonlight, O’Hara thinks, misquoting Bowie, as she trudges past the neighboring cabins with their chimneys pluming gray smoke. Perched on the hilltop is the largest structure in the facility, whose name is Hanover Woods, but is referred to by every cop who gets sent there as the Farm. Careful not to trip over a table or chair, O’Hara walks through the dark cafeteria and the room behind it with the chalkboard where visitors are subjected to group therapy and initiated into the mysteries of the twelve steps. In a smaller room just beyond that, there is a soda machine and a foosball table and the pay phone. O’Hara picks up the dangling receiver and hears Krekorian on the other end.
“What you up to, K.?”
“Not a whole lot. Sitting in the car with Loomis here, polishing off a slice from Stromboli’s.”
“What’s on it?”
“Sure you want to know?”
“Not really. Tell me anyway.”
“Peppers, meatballs and onions. And a delicate dusting of oregano.”
“You were right. I didn’t want to know.”
Even after the arrest of Entonces and Delfinger and a week of worshipful coverage in the tabloids, O’Hara faced serious disciplinary measures from NYPD for defying her suspension, interfering with an ongoing investigation, and leaving the scene of a crime. The idea of making them go away by checking herself into rehab was actually Maître Dee Dee’s, concocted during O’Hara’s all-night celebration with Krekorian and Lebowitz at the Empire Diner. “Now that you’re a celeb, baby girl, you gots to act like one,” said Dee Dee. “And, besides, from where I’m standing, it wouldn’t exactly kill you to go easy on the sauce for a few weeks.”
Having said his piece, Dee Dee returned his attention to doling out and shaking the contents of O’Hara’s fifth martini, while O’Hara concentrated on groping Lebowitz beneath the counter, and Lebowitz, who was honest-to-God shitfaced drunk for the second time in his life and grinning like an imbecile, did his best to stay mounted on his stool.
“Jewish boys, Dee Dee,” said O’Hara as she ran her nose over Lebowitz’s prominent Adam’s apple. “What makes them so hot?”
“You mean aside from their shlongs?”
“Yeah, Dee Dee, aside from that?”
“Nothing.”
“I heard that,” said Lebowitz, clutching the counter with both hands as if he were riding the roller-coaster at Coney Island.
The next morning, reeking persuasively of gin and vermouth, O’Hara walked into the Seven and sat down across from her favorite sergeant, Mike Callahan. “The reckless behavior and insubordination were only symptoms,” she told him straight-faced, her vicious hangover once again contributing much-needed ballast for her shameless bullshit. “The underlying problem that has to be addressed, and the sooner the better, is demon alcohol.”
“The hardest step is admitting you’ve got a problem,” said Callahan, and although he didn’t believe a word O’Hara said, he was more than happy to play the fool. The way the media had been drooling over his renegade detective, NYPD was as anxious as O’Hara to resolve the matter gracefully. Twenty minutes later, Callahan came back with a proposal. If O’Hara agreed to four weeks at an accredited facility on NYPD’s dime, her slate would be wiped clean—no suspension, no loss of pay, no lost vacation days. The following afternoon, O’Hara was on a bus to the Poconos.
“I have some news,” says Krekorian as he swallows another bite of his slice.
“Is it good?” asks O’Hara.
“Not good or bad. It just is. Delfinger got murdered at Rikers this afternoon.”
“Didn’t those morons have him in protective custody?”
“Yeah—North Infirmary Command—but apparently it wasn’t protective enough. An inmate slit his throat on his way back from the yard. He bled out in ninety seconds.”
“A friend of Tida’s from the neighborhood?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Just some three-time loser already looking at life. Says he did it for the girls. Probably just wanted to feel like a hero. Like Loomis says, Rikers is a self-cleaning oven. And by the way, Loomis sends his regards.”
When O’Hara gets back to her cabin, it’s lights out. She climbs into her bunk and stares into the darkness overhead. The prison yard execution of a pedophile shouldn’t cost her sleep, particularly after the video she sat through. But it does.
She thinks about Delfinger and Entonces in the backseat that morning and the primal fury with which Entonces attacked him after O’Hara introduced him as the “DB” in Consuela’s diary. It reminded her of the time she and Axl watched a bluejay strafe a cat who had wandered too close to her nest. The outsi
zed bird swooped down from the tree and attacked with everything she had: beak, feet and flapping wings.
Looking at Axl that day, O’Hara understood how the mother bird felt, but what O’Hara can’t get out of her mind tonight is the look in Delfinger’s eyes just before Tida pounced. That and the drowning sounds that came out of his mouth instead of words.
48
Three weeks later, an hour before dawn, Rick Helmsford, the ex-cop and recovering alcoholic who runs the Farm, gives O’Hara one last signature hug and puts her on the Trailways back to New York. O’Hara, who hasn’t slept in two days, is out before the bus is back on the highway and doesn’t open her eyes until the corkscrew descent into the Lincoln Tunnel.
Thanks to Walt and Rudy, O’Hara arrives in a highly sanitized Times Square. What little sleaze is left is sucking on a respirator in and around the Port Authority. O’Hara walks past a working girl in hot pants asleep on a bench, and slips into a concourse bar. At ten in the morning, as a janitor swabs the floor and ESPN reheats last night’s highlights on an overhead TV, she washes out the chalky taste of all those AA meetings with a couple of ice-cold Amstels.
Fortified, she catches a 1 train to Riverdale, and without stopping at her apartment, gets in her car and heads down the West Side Highway. Grateful to have the Hudson on her right once again, she drives the length of the island, rounds the Seaport and takes the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn.
On a quiet street near Fort Greene Park, O’Hara finds the house of Donna and Albert Johnson, the foster parents for Consuela and Moreal before the state returned them to their mother. Eleven Lafayette Street—O’Hara got the address from Nia Anderson at Big Sisters—is a warm, somewhat dilapidated row house, and Donna Johnson, who answers the door in a maroon sweater and black slacks, is a warm, somewhat dilapidated black woman in her early sixties. She deposits O’Hara in a large parlor with enough sofas and chairs to seat thirty, and when she reemerges from the kitchen, has a plate in one hand, coffee in the other.
“You got to try my plum tart,” insists Johnson. “It’s the only good thing I make.” O’Hara, who hasn’t eaten anything good in a month, needs little convincing.
While O’Hara tucks in, Johnson pulls a photo album from a shelf and sits beside her on the couch. “In the last twenty-three years, ninety-one children have lived in this house with Albert and me,” says Johnson, the hand carefully turning the pages clenched by arthritis. “Every one of them had to go through their own little piece of hell to get here.”
Johnson points at a skinny boy about six, who stares defiantly at the camera from the front stoop. “This young man is Arthur Henderson. He was with us five years. Now he works as a computer technician.” O’Hara patiently sips her coffee, as Johnson points out a young girl who just got her high school equivalency, another employed as a teacher’s aide and a third earning twenty-eight dollars an hour unloading planes at Kennedy Airport. “No doctors or lawyers yet. Maybe one day.”
Eventually Johnson’s finger stops under a picture of two young girls, obviously sisters, their hair pulled back in tight braids. The younger one smiles shyly with her arm around the shoulders of her older sister, who raises two fingers behind the younger girl’s head. “This bright mischievous girl is Moreal Entonces,” she says. “And of course that’s Consuela. It’s not easy to look at this picture now, is it? Moreal was eleven, Consuela nine.”
“Donna, what’d you think when Children’s Services returned the girls to their mother?”
“Neither of us could believe it. Albert and I have been doing this long enough to know there’s always going to be a bias for the mother, but Tida had been a junkie for twenty years and clean for six months. It was too soon by at least a year. And the worst part, both girls had turned the corner. After only ten months, they were doing better at school, better at home, better with the other kids.”
“Then why did they do it?”
“I’m not sure, but I know a big part of it was Francesca Pena. She snowed Children’s Services just like she snowed everyone else. And she went after it. She didn’t just vouch for Tida; she wrote letters to her caseworkers and her probation officer, even wrote to our local fool congresswoman. And since those letters were coming from a student at a fancy school like NYU and a young woman who had turned her own life around, they were persuasive.”
O’Hara and Johnson sit and stare at the two young sisters. Although the photo is two years old, Consuela’s face looks hardly different than in the video.
“So what do you think will happen to Tida, Detective? I mean, after the jury decides that what she did was justifiable? Is she going to write a book? Do the talk shows? Am I going to see her on the couch beside Oprah? Is there even a chance she is going to get those girls back again?”
“No,” says O’Hara.
“I wish I could be as sure of that as you,” says Johnson. She wraps one warm fleshy arm around O’Hara and looks at her in mock alarm.
“Girl, I’m getting you another slice right now. You ain’t nothing but skin ’n’ bones.”
49
From Fort Greene, O’Hara takes the BQE to the Grand Central, gets off at Astoria Boulevard and follows Twenty-third Avenue into a huge chain-fenced parking lot at the edge of the East River. At the end of the lot, a guard waves her onto an unnamed two-lane bridge, and she drives for more than a mile out over the water. LaGuardia Airport is so close on her right, the roar of landing planes is deafening and she can see a pier of lights directing pilots to runway 13/3.
In the watery tissue between the boroughs, ten miles from the Statue of Liberty, is Rikers Island, the nation’s largest penal colony, built by the city on a 415-acre island of trash. Over the bridge, O’Hara heads down an eerily quiet street lined with aging brick jails, most of which have sprouted at least a couple of cheap modular additions. With its own power plant, bakery, chapels and hospitals, it’s a world apart, and as Delfinger’s violent demise illustrated, it’s run by the inmates as much as the guards.
The island has ten jails. O’Hara parks near the Rose M. Singer Center, the only one that holds women. As she walks in from the parking lot, she can hear a newborn crying in the nursery, some lucky infant who got dealt a hand right up there with Moreal and Consuela and Marwan. Entonces has just finished a meeting with her public-appointed attorney in one of the closet-sized rooms near the visitors’ lounge, and the guards have kept her there rather than return her to her cell. When O’Hara steps in, Entonces, wearing dark green scrubs, sits uncuffed at a small metal table.
“You look different,” says Entonces.
“Been away.”
“Me too.”
“That’s too bad about what happened to Danny Boy,” says O’Hara.
“A crying shame.”
“You put up a bounty?”
“Didn’t have to lift a finger. Place like this is full of volunteers. From what I hear, guys were fighting over who got to do him.”
“Still,” says O’Hara, “getting to him in only two days is pretty quick.”
Entonces shrugs. “You expect me to be sorry? Send flowers to his family?”
“Remember Moreal and Consuela’s foster mom in Brooklyn, Donna Johnson?” says O’Hara. “I visited her this morning. A very nice woman. Bakes a helluva plum tart.”
“Good for her.”
“She told me the only reason you got your daughters back was Pena went to bat for you with Children’s Services.”
“She’s right. Till Pena came along, I was just another unfit junkie mom. Who was going to listen to me?”
“And Pena didn’t stop at phone calls, said Johnson. She told me Pena wrote letters, lots of them. And visited your caseworkers and met with your probation officer. I wondered why she went to so much trouble.”
“We all know why,” says Entonces, looking away from O’Hara at the colorless cement walls, smelling of sweat and disinfectant. “So she could take my beautiful children and turn them into whores. So she could sell my babies to people li
ke Delfinger.”
“And because she knew you’d go along with it.”
“What are you saying? That twisted bitch played me like everyone else.”
“Why go to all that effort to get them away from a place where they were finally safe and doing well, unless she knew for a fact it was going to be worth her while? That’s what Delfinger was trying to tell me in the car, before you attacked him, wasn’t it? The night you killed her, you probably swung by his place and picked them up yourself.”
“You’re crazy. Like I told you, he put them in a cab.”
“Maybe. But how much of Delfinger’s money was going to you, Tida? A quarter? A third? Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. Well, maybe at first. You could buy yourself a TV, some clothes. But not for long. And why should you get a cent less than Pena? Why should Pena get a dime? Moreal and Consuela were your daughters. Your flesh and blood. You carried those girls for nine months. You brought them into this world and could have died doing it, and some Puerto Rican yuppie shows up at the last minute and takes all the money? It was like you were getting screwed all over again, just like you have your whole life.”
“Then you get it,” says Entonces, turning from the wall and staring directly at O’Hara for the first time since she arrived. “I’m their mother. A mother has her rights.”
50
On a sticky morning in late August, O’Hara leans against her rented Mitsubishi and watches gawky adolescent girls stagger around a cement track. The track, which is cracked and gouged and might once have been green, is behind the Arthur Alvarez Center for Juveniles. The facility, cut off from a treeless neighborhood of warehouses and outdated factories by a double-height barbed-wire-topped fence, is as bleak and institutional as Pena described.
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