“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” asks O’Hara.
“Head.”
A choking sound comes from Wawrinka’s direction.
“Like I said, I was crazy about him. But he was a sucker for younger women. They all are. It’s vanity.”
Di Nunzio grimaces and puts her hand to the side of her ear.
“You okay?”
“My hearing aid. Sometimes it makes this awful piercing sound.”
“Does it sound like a gunshot?” asks Wawrinka.
“Not really. But it’s excruciating, which is why I don’t wear it half the time.”
“And how’s your hearing without it, Sharon?”
“Without it,” says Di Nunzio, taking her first bite of her own cookie, “I can’t hear a fucking thing.”
CHAPTER 33
JUST INSIDE THE door of the Longboat Key Public Library is a wooden phone booth that must be forty years old. When O’Hara pushes the hinged door shut behind her, a tiny ventilating fan goes on with the light. From the hush of the booth, she looks out at the nearly-as-quiet room, where a male volunteer pushes a cart up and down the short rows. Every few feet, he stops to lift a book from the cart to its old spot on the shelf. He looks like a farmer unpicking fruit and returning it to the tree.
When O’Hara stepped out of Di Nunzio’s apartment and back into the scalding light, she was in need of a quiet place to mull things over alone, and remembered the little library next to the post office behind Publix. Di Nunzio is the most encouraging representative of her demographic O’Hara has encountered since Paulette walked into the precinct and the drumbeat of senescence and dementia began. If Di Nunzio’s recollection of a second gunshot is accurate, it’s the first major break in the case. From the moment O’Hara got the call from Sarasota about the ballistic report, she has been trying to connect the old man and the kid. If two shots were fired that morning in Levin’s condo, it essentially puts the two victims side by side.
But how much stock can O’Hara put in the memory, eyesight, and most of all hearing of a ninety-year-old woman who by her own admission is just about deaf, rarely wears her hearing aid, and when she does is often besieged by rogue sonic blasts? O’Hara can imagine the reaction if it gets out she tried to build a case on something a deaf person heard.
Open on her lap is a sketch pad, purchased from Publix the night before. On the first pristine page she writes:
s. di nunzio: 2 gunshots, a couple minutes apart
green van, black letters
Sarasota Water Authority
O’Hara takes another look through the porthole-sized window. In the center of the room, in front of the librarian’s desk, is an old-school wooden card catalogue. Beside it on a stand is a well-thumbed medical dictionary, and above it, on the wall, the Plaque of Honor, inscribed with the names of volunteers who died in the line of library duty. What does it mean, she wonders, that she now delights in silence as much as the twang of a beat-up Stratocaster and that libraries are up there next to dive bars on her list of favorite places? She knows exactly what it means. She’s getting old.
A fat phone book, as much of an anachronism as the booth itself, dangles from a chain by O’Hara’s knee, and she opens it to the section in front listing municipal agencies. When she can’t find anything close to the Sarasota Water Authority, she uses her cell to call the city’s main information number and asks what agency handles water issues for condos on Longboat Key.
“Sarasota doesn’t handle Longboat,” says the receptionist, “that’s Manatee County. Let me give you that number.”
O’Hara calls it and is connected to the Department of Engineering.
“This is Darlene O’Hara, NYPD Homicide. Can you verify for me if your department sent a vehicle to 5265 Gulf of Mexico Drive on March 3?”
“I’m going to have to put you on hold.”
While O’Hara waits, she cracks the door and compares the two quiets. Then she looks down at her mostly blank page, and starts a drawing that turns into a fairly decent facsimile of the wooden cooking spoon O’Hara found on Levin’s TV stand. It looks like this:
Below it, she writes,
no sign of food/no sign of cooking
Still on hold, and in possession of pen and paper, she lists another unexplained detail:
Bullet entered boy at upward angle
The voice returns, and O’Hara pushes the door shut.
“I checked the logs. We didn’t dispatch anyone to that address that day. We haven’t sent a vehicle there for months.”
“Your vehicles,” asks O’Hara, “what do they say on them?”
“Manatee County.”
“That’s it? You don’t have any vehicles with writing that refers to water?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And the vehicles, are they dark green?”
“Correct. With black lettering.”
“Are they vans?”
“No. We use pickups.”
“Thanks for your help.” It looks like the only thing Sharon got right was the colors.
Speaking of colors, a woman with orange hair and a lavender blouse enters the library. Observed from inside the booth, her silent movements resemble a tropical fish. O’Hara feels underwater too, as if looking out from behind the glass helmet of a little Diver Dan in the corner of a fish tank. All that’s missing is a trail of bubbles.
Is it possible Sharon got it all wrong? Fuck.
That Di Nunzio is such a brave and buoyant piece of work makes O’Hara even sorrier that her recollections don’t check out, but her disappointment is muted by the double cocoon of quiet and the soft whir of the fan overhead. Forty minutes later a tap on the glass from the concerned librarian rouses her from sleep.
CHAPTER 34
AT 1:30 O’HARA meets Wawrinka at a Waffle House just north of downtown, where the letters of the sign look like they’ve been typed directly on the sky. Wawrinka orders three eggs, a short stack, sausage links, and grits, O’Hara a short stack with bacon.
“Where you been?”
“The Longboat Key library, right behind Publix.”
“I know where it is, Darlene. What the hell you doing there?”
“Thinking about two gunshots and a green van.”
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those pervs whose mind only works in public.”
“Like those cretins at Starbucks?”
“Yeah, fingering the devices on their laps and loitering outside the bathroom for strange.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
Their petite waitress, working name Samantha, delivers two coffees, and Wawrinka’s eyes follow her butt back into the kitchen.
“I could eat that baby girl for breakfast and still have room for three eggs, a short stack, sausage links, and a cup of grits.”
“Connie, you sure talk a whole lot of shit. Any of it true?”
“Nah. It’s pretty much all talk.”
Wawrinka really is a guy, thinks O’Hara.
“I also made a couple phone calls,” says O’Hara. “I found out there is no such thing as the Sarasota Water Authority.”
“I could have saved you the roaming charge,” says Wawrinka. “Besides, Longboat is under Manatee County.”
“And they didn’t send a vehicle to Banyan Bay on March 3 either. Or anytime in March.”
“And they don’t use vans, they use pickups, although they are green with black letters. So maybe Di Nunzio’s memory is as lousy as her hearing. Sharon’s not exactly a spring chicken.”
Samantha returns with their food, and O’Hara waits for her glutes to recede from view.
“Actually,” says O’Hara, “Sharon is a spring chicken. In fact, the springiest fucking chicken of all time. And not only does she remember the van from the Sarasota Water Authority, but she remembers seeing it made her a
nxious about her drinking water. That’s not just one memory, it’s two, and they make sense together. That’s a pretty complete and coherent little nugget to spin out of thin air.”
Wawrinka responds by bursting a sausage with her fork, and O’Hara does her best to conceal her disappointment that Wawrinka’s sausages look about twenty times better than her three strips of undercooked bacon.
“You think the van was a fake?”
“What I’m saying is that Sharon Di Nunzio has earned some credibility. And if she wasn’t ninety and deaf with a fucked-up hearing aid, we wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss what she had to say, and I wouldn’t be making calls to discredit her.”
“You’re saying we’re ageists?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Because every single thing Sharon says checks out with what we’ve already got. For starters, she heard two rifle shots.”
“Claims to.”
“Well, we got two bodies with bullets in them from the same ancient twenty-two, and we didn’t tell her anything about the second victim. The two gunshots corroborate what we already had. She should have heard two shots. It only makes sense that there were two shots. And although we don’t know anything about the whereabouts of the kid, or anything else, there is no evidence the old man had traveled to New York in the months before he died, and if he did, it’s highly unlikely he would have taken his trusty rabbit gun, so Sharon’s memories bolster the scenario that already makes the most sense, which was that the kid was shot in Levin’s place along with Levin that morning.”
“Except there was no blood. No evidence of anyone else there.”
“But now there is. Two gunshots and a van that wasn’t there by the time the cops and EMS arrived. If they got the kid out of there quickly, there wouldn’t necessarily have been any blood. It’s a twenty-two. There was barely any of Levin’s blood either, and he was lying there for over an hour. I understand that had also to do with where he shot himself, but still.”
O’Hara looks at Wawrinka for some sign of approval, and although she sees none, takes comfort from the fact that Wawrinka hasn’t put anything in her mouth in twenty seconds.
“If the kid was shot at Levin’s place that morning, and it certainly looks that way to me, he had to get there and he had to leave and he had to travel eleven hundred miles north so that he could end up buried in a hippie garden in the East Village. And since you can’t get a bleeding kid on an airplane, the van makes sense too.”
“You might be able to get him on a bus. There’re some sketchy bus lines down here.”
“Not likely,” says O’Hara. She flashes on the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo dies on the bus just short of Miami and Jon Voight closes his eyes.
“You’re saying someone went to all that trouble to create a fake van?”
“It’s not that hard.”
Wawrinka’s lack of enthusiasm is chipping away at O’Hara’s confidence.
“I don’t know what happened at Levin’s place that morning, or why a kid would be there, but something went very south.”
“And whoever was there took off with the kid?”
“Yeah. And if you leave Levin’s place in a van with a kid who’s been shot, what are you going to do next?”
“Take the kid to an ER.”
“That would be the right thing to do, but considering where he ended up, I don’t think anyone took him to a hospital. According to the ME in New York, who traced the line of the bullet from where it hit the first rib to where it ended up in his shoulder blade, it might have barely nicked the kid’s lung. With prompt medical attention, the kid could have been fine. So if a perp just left someplace where two shots had been fired, in a van with writing on it that even a ninety-year-old can remember six months after the fact, and a kid inside bleeding all over it—”
“Now he’s bleeding—”
“He would have started to bleed soon. If I was the perp or perps, what I would do, first chance I got, is dump the van.” O’Hara looks across the table again, but Wawrinka is concentrating on her nearly empty plates. “And I say we find it.”
Wawrinka drags her last bite of sausage through the maple syrup and pops it in her mouth.
“So what you’re saying is that if a ninety-year-old deaf woman is all we got, that’s all we got, and we go with it until someone better comes along, like, an eighty-five-year-old who uses his hearing aid.”
“Basically.”
“Fair enough, but I hope you’re not doing this just because Sharon is the Helen Gurley Brown of Longboat Key and still likes to give head at ninety.”
“And still gets wet too.”
“That is something, I’ll give you that.”
In the neighboring booth, a man clears his throat, and a trucker’s cap clocks a half turn. “Ladies, no disrespect to Sharon or Helen, but we’re eating lunch, and we’d like to keep it down.”
CHAPTER 35
O’HARA FOLLOWS WAWRINKA back to the Sarasota PD, where Wawrinka fires off a dispatch to every municipal, county, and state law enforcement agency within five hundred miles. She inquires if any of them have recovered an abandoned green van with black writing, believed to have been the getaway vehicle in a homicide on Longboat Key March 3 and presumed to have been abandoned later that day or soon after that.
“Feels like writing a personal,” says Wawrinka as the two eye the blank screen. “Dropping a hook into the ether and waiting for a nibble. Ever try it?”
“No,” says O’Hara, and thinks of those night fishermen casting their lines off the bridge into Sarasota Harbor.
“Why not? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Almost too easy.”
O’Hara feels the conversation moving toward that awkward silence, which she’ll be expected to fill with a recap of her checkered relationship history, including her breakup with Leibowitz, his not wanting another child, et cetera. To avoid that, O’Hara wanders to an empty desk and turns on the computer.
“Getting right to it?” asks Wawrinka. “Rare Irish beauty looking for stud . . .”
Instead of Nerve or Match, or whatever, O’Hara brings up Mapquest. For the starting location, she types in the address of Ben Levin’s condo: “5265 Gulf of Mexico Drive, Longboat Key, Florida 34228.” For the destination, she types “East Sixth Street and Avenue B.”
In seconds, it generates a map of the Eastern Seaboard. It affixes a red A just south of Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico and a red B in NYC, and connects them with a blue worm. The preferred route runs northeast in a wiggly diagonal through the top half of Florida from Tampa to Jacksonville, continues on the same approximate line past Savannah, Raleigh, and Richmond, detours around Washington, then turns more sharply east toward Trenton. Before the worm slithers into the Hudson and emerges in Lower Manhattan, the bulk of nearly twelve hundred miles are on 95 North or its extensions 295 and 495. The estimated driving time is 23.9 hours.
Despite the warp speed with which the map and route were spat out, the map itself has an analogue grammar-school concreteness that takes O’Hara back to a Brooklyn classroom. O’Hara returns to the present and refocuses on the route. She sees a green van with the boy bleeding inside it as it travels north through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. How far did he make it? When did the van become a hearse?
As O’Hara studies the route, she imagines the van morphing from one vehicle into another and that gives O’Hara a thought. After printing out the map and the directions, she walks back to Wawrinka’s desk. “Anything?”
“No.”
“I think looking for the van was the wrong approach.”
“Ye of little faith,” says Wawrinka. “It’s been twenty minutes.”
“I mean looking for it directly. If we’re right and they dumped the van, they had to steal another car. Instead of just looking for the van, let’s look for a car that was stolen around that time, somewher
e north of Tampa. Depending on how good of a job they did getting rid of it, the van could be hard to find, but someone gets their car stolen, they’re going to report it right away.”
“Good idea. The kind of thing I look for in a partner.”
Unlike the query for the missing van, hits on stolen cars pour in immediately. Like Wawrinka’s would-be paramours, there are almost too many. In the first hour, they get over forty, mostly around Tampa, but few are promising. They are the kind of expensive rides that always get stolen—Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, ’Vettes. Most have been recovered since, and in any case are an unlikely choice for someone trying to stay under the radar. As the hits come in, O’Hara plots their locations to see their proximity to the blue worm. Then she plugs the location of the theft into Mapquest to determine the driving distance from Sarasota, and checks whether that is consistent with someone heading north from Longboat Key.
At 9:00, they break for some surprisingly decent Mexican. When Wawrinka gets back to her computer, an e-mail is waiting from the state police barracks in Monroe, South Carolina. A white 1993 Volvo station wagon was reported stolen by Alfred Vanderbrook, eighty-three, of 1560 Western Highway, Walterboro, South Carolina, at 11:05 p.m. on March 3, or about twelve hours after the van left Levin’s parking lot.
“A nondescript vehicle like that is what we’re looking for,” says O’Hara. She types in the address of the home from which the car was stolen and sees that it’s 450 miles, or an estimated seven hours and nineteen minutes, north of Longboat Key. Allowing for a couple brief stops, the time required for the perp or perps to find their new target, and for the victim to notice the car was missing, location and timing both work. And when O’Hara goes back on Mapquest, she sees that Walterboro is less than four miles from I-95.
Location, timing, kind of car, are all pretty much perfect, thinks O’Hara, while still trying to maintain a realistic degree of skepticism for what she knows is a Lotto-esque long shot. The age of the car theft victim—that feels right too.
Buried on Avenue B Page 13