Shadows Still Remain
Page 19
In June, after prosecutors were made aware of the mother’s active role in the prostitution of her daughters, Entonces copped a plea that will keep her off Oprah for the next ninety-nine years. O’Hara fell back into the routines of her work, the standard Seventh Precinct bullshit, ameliorated by the dependable ardor and affection of Lebowitz, who is already her longest-running relationship since the heartbreaking, bong-sucking fireman. Despite the satisfaction of seeing Entonces locked up for life, and the novel experience of actually having one herself, O’Hara is still haunted by the case, so much so that she has cashed in three vacation days and flown JetBlue to Chicago on her own dime to try to learn what turned a bright teenage girl into a psychopath.
Delfinger and even Entonces, O’Hara can comprehend. Unfortunately, she’s encountered scumbags like them too many times not to. But Pena, at least the why and how of her, is as much of a cipher as the afternoon David McLain walked into the detective room and reported her missing. So instead of sharing a towel with Lebowitz and Bruno on Jones Beach, O’Hara watches juvenile delinquents jog around a steaming track.
Chicago summers come highly recommended, but the lake breezes don’t reach here. At 6:45, it’s pushing eighty, and the heat takes its toll, particularly on the heavier girls, one of whom veers off the track and pukes in the dust.
“All done, fatso?” asks a heavyset man with a flattop and a pink face. “Then get back out there. This isn’t camp. No one cares how you feel.” When O’Hara pushes off her car and approaches the man from the far side of the chain-link fence, he steers his contempt from the girls to her.
“Didn’t you see the sign?” he asks. “Or can’t you read?”
“I love to read,” says O’Hara. “Got anything to recommend?”
She shows him her shield, then holds up two pictures of Pena: one as a Westfield High School freshman, the other an NYU sophomore. “Recognize her? Her name was Francesca Pena.”
The man looks back over his shoulder to make sure no one is taking advantage of his inattention and slacking off. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s the girl who got murdered.”
“How long have you worked here?” asks O’Hara.
“Too long. Can’t you tell?”
“So you must have known her. She was here in the summer of 2001.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“But you recognized her?”
“I remembered her from the stories in the papers,” says the man, looking over his shoulder again. “When they came out, I couldn’t place the name or the face. But a lot of girls come through here, and in a couple years, at that age, they can look completely different. So I went through the records. Turns out, I wasn’t so dumb after all. She was never here.”
“But she described this place to a T.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” says the man, walking back toward the track. “But she was never here. You don’t believe me, call Juvenile.”
O’Hara drives back to the Econo Lodge and reads USA Today until the municipal offices open at nine. Then she calls the Department of Juvenile Justice, which sends her to its Custody Movement and Control Unit. When the latter confirms that Pena never went through its system, she calls the Board of Education and Elections, the Office of City Archives, the Postal Service, the Office of Public Assistance and the Food Stamp Office, the HIV/AIDS Services Administration and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She often makes up to a dozen calls to each as she gets bounced from division to division, employee to supervisor.
O’Hara works the phone for four hours and gets exactly nothing. There is no record of Pena attending public school in Chicago. No record of her or Ingrid and Edwin Pena having lived there. No record of her parents voting in a city or federal election or receiving public assistance or food stamps. No record of Edwin Pena having been treated for AIDS at a Chicago hospital or succumbing in a local hospice. No addresses. No phone numbers. No utility bills. No certificates of birth or death.
O’Hara puts down the phone and pulls open the curtains. It’s one in the afternoon, and there’s a knot in her neck the size of a golf ball. For ten minutes, she squints at a glaring white parking lot that could be anywhere in America, except the one city she shouldn’t have left. She thinks about Lebowitz and Bruno and feels like an idiot. Then she sits back down on the unmade bed and calls the Seven. The desk sergeant Kenny Aarons picks up.
“Kenny, I need you to run a check on someone, name of Ingrid Coppalano.”
“Dar, where you calling from?”
“Chicago. It’s a long story.”
“Coppalano, as in Francesca Pena’s mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Ancient history, isn’t it, Dar?”
“I know. It’s embarrassing.”
“Give me a sec. This computer’s a piece of crap. Here we go—one arrest—DWI—4/27/99.”
“Where?”
“Beacon, New York.”
“Wonderful. She wasn’t even in Chicago. I should have called you four hours ago.”
“Dar, you can call me whenever you want, day or night. You should know that by now.”
“Kenny, you’re the best. What else?”
“Maiden name, Ingrid Falb. Married Dominic Coppalano in New Paltz, New York. I been hiking around there. It’s beautiful.”
“When?”
“Two summers ago.”
“Not you, Kenny. When did Ingrid Falb become Mrs. Coppalano?”
“Twenty-two years ago and change—5/15/83—in Beacon, New York. Two years later, on 4/5/86, Francesca Falb Coppalano was born, also in Beacon.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“I say something wrong, Dar?”
51
When Aarons’s voice drops off the line, O’Hara feels the need to be someplace cool and dark with a jukebox and a liquor license. The Indian woman at the front desk directs her to a Polish neighborhood of tidy single-family homes, where she parks in front of a tan brick tavern that looks like it was built to survive Armageddon. Inside it’s as dark and dank and lovely as St. Patty’s Cathedral, and Sinatra’s slightly embarrassing cover of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” wafts luxuriantly from an ancient Wurlitzer. Four for four, thinks O’Hara, like Jeter on a good day. With a pleasant lack of urgency she has not felt since the night McLain walked into the Seven, she sips her cold draft.
It’s a good thing O’Hara isn’t feeling rushed, because there’s a fair amount to haul aboard. Starting with the most fundamental, Francesca Pena was not Francesca Pena. She was Francesca Coppalano and no more Puerto Rican than Bruno. She never watched her father waste away from AIDS because he’s still alive, and when she arrived in Westfield, Massachusetts, for her first year of high school, she wasn’t fleeing a Chicago barrio, simply moving from Beacon, New York. If a girl wants to reinvent herself, the first year of high school is apparently the most propitious time to do it, since colleges and prep schools aren’t particularly interested in anything earlier. She would have needed fake middle school transcripts for her first day in Westfield, but how much scrutiny are they going to attract? “You don’t by any chance serve food?” O’Hara asks the barkeep halfway through her second draft. Ten minutes later, he places a beige plate, circa 1960, in front of her on the bar, and O’Hara sees her luck is holding. On it are three slices of dark rye, two fat blackened sausages, a mound of potato salad and a dollop of sharp mustard. Not until her plate has been wiped clean by her last crust of bread does she consider how what she’s just learned might have helped push Tomlinson over the edge.
She remembers Tomlinson’s reluctance to surrender Pena’s application and her anxiousness to get it back. Had she too discovered Pena was a fraud? If so, O’Hara can appreciate her alarm. What if everyone found out that Tomlinson, with her Ethiopian sculptures carved out of dung and Romare Bearden print, couldn’t tell a chica from the barrio from a brat from Putnam County? For someone whose career was based at least in part on the politics of race and whose unwritten job description was kee
ping it real, that could be a serious problem. But the possibility that Tomlinson was fooled to the end appeals to O’Hara even more. It would mean that despite all Tomlinson’s worst intentions, the woman was truly color blind.
O’Hara doesn’t order a third beer. Instead she leaves a twenty-dollar tip for her twelve-dollar tab and drives back to the airport, where she watches travelers trapped between cities shuffle through the hushed limbo like zombies. With a two-hour wait for the next flight to New York, O’Hara buys a paper and camps out in Starbucks. There her mind circles back to Pena, and to her dismay she realizes that despite a truckload of revelations, she isn’t an inch closer to understanding Pena and how she became who she was.
She recalls the wretched figure of Dominic Coppalano at the medical examiner’s office and again at the memorial. What kind of father, she wonders, would let himself be expunged from family history to improve his daughter’s chances of getting into college? Probably one so desperate to undo the undoable, he’d agree to anything.
After walking the equivalent of ten city blocks, O’Hara finds a screen listing departures. JetBlue’s got a flight to Boston in forty minutes. If she catches it, she could be in Westfield tonight. Maybe with one last detour she could find out what the old man did to his daughter. Did he abuse her himself? Did he sell her to his friends just like Pena did with Consuela and Moreal? The gate is nearby and the line moves briskly enough for O’Hara to stand a chance, but as she nears the head of it, doubt, in the form of Kenny Aarons’s voice, undermines her resolve.
“What the hell you doing, Dar?” he asks. “I thought we both agreed this was ancient history. Who cares what Dominic did to Francesca, and if by some chance you find out, are you then going to want to know what his old man did to him? You’re a cop, remember, not a fucking social worker. Start unraveling all this crap, you won’t be done till you’re back in the trees, swinging hand over hand with the chimps.”
Aarons’s persuasive monologue is interrupted by a female voice from behind the counter. “Ma’am?” says an attendant. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” says O’Hara after a pause. “Yes, you can.” And hands over her ticket and license.
O’Hara switches her flight, but not to Boston, and four hours later steps out of the terminal into a soft dusk. She has never been to this city before, but something in the air, simultaneously charged and laid-back, appeals to her immediately. She even likes the funky ten-year-old cabs lined up on the curb.
She slides into one, and on the way downtown, the radio plays a promo for an upcoming show at the rock-and-roll museum. She imagines a vast granite edifice like the Metropolitan Museum, but instead of Egyptian monuments and paintings by the masters, permanent exhibits for Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC and gives the new city huge props for that too. But soon the detached observations of a tourist are replaced by an unbearable tension, and by the time the cab pulls off the highway her palms are as sweaty as the guiltiest suspect’s.
The cab winds through a neighborhood that resembles the Lower East Side on quaaludes. The twenty-something pedestrians move so languorously she can understand why there’s a coffee shop on every corner. The cab drops her off at the address she keeps in her wallet, and she is buzzed into a scruffy six-story building. She rides the elevator to seven and knocks on the door. After an excruciating wait, a tall young man with a full red beard and a freckled forehead opens the door, and O’Hara, who barely reches up to his chest, throws her arms around him and doesn’t let go. The name of this startlingly handsome young man is Axl Rose O’Hara. Darlene O’Hara is his much too young mother. And like Entonces said, a mother has her rights.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For letting me hang out with them and so generously sharing their stories from on and off the job, thanks to Detectives Keith Flannery, George Taylor and Steve Nieves from the 7th Precinct Detective Squad, Detective Irma Rivera from Manhattan Homicide South and Detective Donna Torres from Homicide North. For crucial guidance and support, my editor, Claire Wachtel, and agent, Todd Schuster. And for bearing up under the stress and tedium, my wife, Daina Zivarts.
About the Author
PETER DE JONGE has coauthored three New York Times bestsellers with James Patterson: Beach Road, The Beach House, and Miracle on the 17th Green. He has been a reporter for the Associated Press and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in Best American Sports Writing, National Geographic, Harper’s Bazaar, Details, and Manhattan, Inc. He lives in New York City.
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Credits
Jacket photograph © Henry Haberman Collection/Images.com
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SHADOWS STILL REMAIN. Copyright © 2009 by Peter de Jonge. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-187012-5
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
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51
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
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Peter de Jonge, Shadows Still Remain