Command of Silence

by Paulette Callen

  Hester purred, “Hello, Officer Faaay-loh.”

  “Hi, Hester,” he said, keeping his eyes on the street ahead and stepping on the gas.

  I should have taken the subway.

  Chapter 12

  Both officers looked immensely relieved as Officer Faylo stopped the car in front of the station house and let Hester out.

  She made her entrance, murmuring, “I wish I weren’t in this nasty black blazer. Why can’t we wear the blue one sometimes? Black does nothing for my complexion. Why didn’t you let me get my nails done?”

  Come on Hester, we’re working. I need to be out.

  “Chill, Isadora. I just want to say hi. It won’t kill you. Rudy! It’s me, Hester. Long time no see!”

  Rudy didn’t approve of Hester. But he gave her a nod and dialed Gianetti’s number and said pointedly, “It’s Hester.”

  “Go on up,” he said around his wad of gum.

  Hester sashayed up the stairs and through the clutter of desks and chairs, beaming at everyone. Fortunately, the place was pretty empty. The few officers in house that day didn’t pay much attention to her, and she was soon flinging herself into a chair next to Leo’s desk.

  “Hi, Hester. How’s it going?”

  “My God, Leo, why don’t you paint this place?!”

  “I’m a little busy.”

  “Not you personally. Have someone do it. Get some convicts. Bring in a contingent of the condemned from Rikers to slap paint on all the stationhouse walls. This vile, dingy, putrescent green is so offputting. It needs a makeover like on TV.”

  “A trip to the police station isn’t necessarily supposed to feel like a day at the spa. Let me talk to Isadora.”

  “Don’t be rude. Leo, you’ve put on more weight. We’ve talked about that.”

  “Tina tells me the same thing.”

  “Are you sleeping, Leo? You’re not sleeping. Am I right? Look at you. Your eyes would shame a raccoon. Do you want a heart attack, Leo? Is that what you want? Because you are on the heart-attack path. Living on heart-attack row. Am I right?”

  For God’s sake, Hester. Shut up! That was all of us.

  He sighed. “I don’t mean to cut you short, Hester, but I really need to speak to Isadora.”

  Hester turned out her lower lip in a pout.

  Leo was not blessed with patience. “Hester, scram!” He waited a moment then asked me, “What’s with her?”

  “She’s restless. I’ve been working a lot. She hasn’t been out much.” Hester is never out as much as she’d like. She just seemed to be getting her way more.

  “So, what have you got?”

  “I just came from the playground. You know Miriam’s lying.”

  “I know, Shiloh. We have made some contacts in Russia to find out if there’s a connection between the Berkowitz family and Miriam’s family.”

  “Is there?”

  “Nothing shows up, but a lot of paperwork over there seems to get lost. Is it a coincidence that Claudia Keating is of Russian descent and hires a Russian au pair? But Father O’Hagan actually brokered the deal through church contacts. Miriam is Catholic.”

  “Stern? That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?”

  “A couple of generations ago her family converted to avoid a pogrom or something. She is a second-generation, bona fide, practicing Catholic as far as we can tell.So is Claudia.Not second generation, just practicing. The Berkowitzes were Jewish, and as Burkes they remained Jewish but not observant. When Claudia converted to marry Dan Keating, the Burkes apparently didn’t bat a lash over it. There are a lot of coincidences here. We are checking on them all. We haven’t found any connections.”

  More officers had come in and taken their places at their desks. The phones started ringing and two more uniformed cops, one of whom I recognized as Jimmy Stokes, brought in a small, angry woman in cuffs. She was struggling and spitting obscenities. He pushed her down into a chair but couldn’t make her shut up. Jimmy had come to only one of the task-force training sessions with Ray and me. He was the only attendee Ray ever reprimanded during a session and he never came back. He was still a beat cop.

  Jimmy Stokes was a big guy, and too much beer and too many fast-food burgers had blown him up even bigger. I know there are a lot of big guys who can aptly be described as gentle giants. Jimmy Stokes wasn’t one of them. He was the giant at the top of the bean stalk that everyone fears. No doubt he was an asset with crazed drug addicts and scrappy drunks, but with everyone else, he was overkill.

  Leo raised his voice so he could be heard over the increasing volume of noise in the room. “Oh, we checked bank accounts again. Didn’t find any large deposits or withdrawals that couldn’t be accounted for. We didn’t find anything under Berkowitz. We’re still checking. Feeney! Good. Let’s find a room so we can hear ourselves think. Bring the file.”

  Feeney, Leo’s new partner, approached, trim and sleek in a perfectly tailored gray suit and blue tie. He was young and offered me a smile that was a bit too hearty. I knew Leo had tried to prepare him for me, and he seemed hell-bent on taking me in stride. He gathered up a file and some loose papers from Leo’s desk, and we all headed to the interrogation rooms. As we passed Officer Stokes I said, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he nodded back.

  I looked down into the face of the still protesting woman. Thin and unhealthy looking, she appeared to be older than her voice, her heavy makeup caked into the lines around her mouth and eyes didn’t help. Her hair, yellow straw, was held up with a couple of rhinestone barrettes. With both hands she clutched a small, square, lime-green plastic purse in her lap. She ignored us as we passed, still arguing vigorously with Jimmy and his partner about the injustice of picking her up while walking. “Yeah, street walking,” said Jimmy.

  “Well, where else is a person supposed to walk?” Her speech was Staten Island, straight up. “I was going to the stoah. I decided to let my limousine driver sleep in. So I walked.” I admired her insolence.

  The interview room was lit by one grubby overhead bulb. There were bars on two high, grime-encrusted windows. As we pulled up chairs around a small table and sat down, I asked, “Why do you guys arrest prostitutes, Leo?”

  He shrugged in resignation. “Yeah. It’s a waste of time. Write your congressman.” Feeney looked shocked. Leo ignored him. “So here are the possibilities as I see them.” He pulled his notebook out and referred to it occasionally, although I felt that he had this whole case in its every detail burned into his brain.

  “One. There is no connection between the kidnapping of Anna from the park and Charlotte from the apartment. One child is three years old, one is an infant.They are totally different targets. Infants are usually stolen by crazy people who want a baby for themselves, usually women with baby-hunger, you know, or by people who sell them. The no-connection theory has only one flaw: it defies credibility.”

  “I agree,” I said. Feeney nodded his concurrence enthusiastically. We ignored him.

  “Two. They are connected but only because the second kidnapper saw an opportunity. He, or she, could take an infant, say to sell the day after Anna’s kidnapping, and, they hoped, would throw us off the track by making the two events seem related. That one is actually more plausible the more I think about it. It means we have two kidnappers who are not related, who operate in completely different circles for completely different motives. The connection is simply one of timing and opportunity on the part of the second kidnapper.”

  He glanced at me for a response. I had none, so he continued. “Three.They are related.The same person or persons took both children. But again, motive. With no ransom note, I’m stymied. Maybe there’s a ransom note I don’t know about, but I don’t think so. I think I’d have sniffed it out by now. Or you would have. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then. I have the task force working all the angles, but I don’t see anything here that resembles anything I’ve ever seen before.” He paused, his eyes on me. “So, what do you think? You have powers of pe
rception that flatfoots like me and Feeney here don’t have.”

  “Did anybody notice the garbage cans on the playground?” I asked the question of both Leo and Detective Feeney.

  Feeney replied. “Yes. They’re all over the park.”

  “And they’re mostly all lined with black plastic bags.” I waited for the sun to rise on the NYPD. It didn’t. “That’s how he got her out. He walked out with a full garbage bag slung over his shoulder and nobody noticed. Dressed like a park custodian. They wear sort of green work pants and shirts. They don’t have the spit and polish of a police officer, or the muscle of the sanitation workers. Anybody can look like a park custodian. Anybody at all. You know they’re mostly down-on-their-luck people getting back on their feet, people working for their welfare check, that sort of thing. They’re ubiquitous. They are all over the parks. You see them, but you don’t see them.”

  “Shit.” Leo threw his notebook on the table. “That would be the only way.”

  Feeney asked, “But wouldn’t someone have seen him, or her, putting a kid in a bag?”

  “Not necessarily. The playground isn’t busy that time of day. Most people are where the swings are. I was just there. You have that big Jungle Gym thing in the middle. On the other side of that, if you aren’t paying close attention, and if no one was actually sitting over there…and it’s possible they weren’t, somebody could be working and no one would pay attention to what they were doing.”

  “So, why would Miriam lie… You said she lied… Are you saying she was part of—”

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Feeney!” Leo snapped. “Get a couple of our people to go back and talk to everyone who was in that playground that day and ask them if they remember seeing any park workers or trucks or anything. Then call the parks department and find out who was working that day in that area. Maybe we are looking for a real employee of the parks department, not just somebody posing as one.”

  Feeney scribbled notes in his own notebook earnestly and said, “Right.”

  Leo looked at me. “What else?”

  “There is something strange about this family. I know that the husband just died. Well, within the year. They are all still reeling. But there’s something else. I feel it. Have you ever been somewhere unfamiliar and you heard a sound and you can’t tell what it is or where it’s coming from?”

  Both officers just looked at me, Leo, with his world-weary frustration, and Feeney with a curiosity and puzzlement that was, at the moment, more about me than about the case. I said, “The file said that Claudia’s mother was deceased.”

  He quickly flipped a couple pages over in the file and said, “Yes, she died in nineteen eighty. Heart failure.”

  “Every death is heart failure, Feeney.” Leo’s voice had the effect of a soft crack of a small whip.

  The detective blanched. “We didn’t…I didn’t follow up on that. I’ll…” He was pushing away from the table but I stopped him.

  “Never mind, Detective. She was a suicide. Don’t you find that interesting, Leo?”

  Leo rubbed his hand over his face roughly. “How did you find that out?”

  “I asked.”

  Leo was angry. I knew he was as angry with himself as he was with his junior detective, but Feeney didn’t know that, and he looked worried.

  “Have you ever seen Claudia cry?” I directed this question to Leo.

  “No. People don’t always show their emotions in front of the cops.”

  “How many mothers of missing children have you interviewed?”

  “Too goddam many.”

  “How many of them never shed a tear in your presence?”

  He threw his pen down on the table. “She’s the only one.” It rolled and was stopped by his notebook.

  He’s always throwing things. Why is that?

  Feeney jumped on the idea. “Are you saying Mrs. Keating—?”

  “I’m just saying that there is something special about her. I’m going back this afternoon to speak to her and Miriam alone. The rest of the family won’t be there.”

  Leo reached for his notebook and pen and wrote something. He asked me, “Did you talk to the doormen?”

  “Briefly. Arturo Cole admits that he might not have been there every minute between the time Claudia came in with the baby and the time she reported her missing. Victor wasn’t on duty that day. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there, in or around the building somewhere.”

  Feeney referred to the file again. “So, let’s say the off-duty doorman is lying.Victor Pasqual. He’s married to his high school sweetheart. They live on the main floor of a house in Woodside. His mother lives in the basement apartment and they rent the upstairs to an elderly couple, no relation. He has a five-yearold son. His wife works three days a week at a beauty parlor in their neighborhood. She leaves the son with the grandmother. They go to church every Sunday. He doesn’t gamble or have any expensive hobbies. He goes bowling every other Thursday night with some buddies. They’ve been doing that since high school. The man is stable.”

  “Salt of the earth we walk upon,” added Leo, with grim sarcasm. “Doesn’t mean he isn’t also schtupping the doctor’s wife up in Five-B on his lunch hour.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  I interrupted them. “If the baby didn’t go out the front door that day, maybe it was just taken to another apartment in the building and brought out later.”

  “We’ve interviewed everyone in the building and we searched every apartment several times. We had a team of officers do that the same night. We sealed the building till it was done and came up with nothing but a lot of folks embarrassed over their housekeeping, a lady with too many cats and a couple with four dogs—their lease only allows two. They are all bassets. Nobody knows they have four. They just think the same two dogs get a lot of walks. But basically nobody copped an attitude. Everybody was happy to help when they realized two children were missing. I did suggest to the cat lady that as the cats start dying of old age, she not replace them.”

  “How many did she have?”

  “Seven. But they all looked healthy so I’m not calling animal control. A lot of older people who have lived there for years and years are more frightened than anything else. They remember when their kids were young and played outside in the street and in the halls. Those days are over. There’s one old lady rents a room to a Columbia student. We checked them both out. The old lady can hardly get around anymore and the student is pre-law, from Wisconsin. She is seldom there and when she is, she has her nose deep in a book. Not much of a social life on or off campus. Couples, families, roommate situations. And everyone with children of their own are scared pissless. I don’t blame them. Oh, and we found one place with handcuffs still attached to the bed.”

  Feeney grinned and blushed like a kid who had just stumbled across his first stash of condoms.

  “We determined it was consensual shenanigans between the gal and her boyfriend. We also checked financial records to see who’s in debt. They all are, except the lady with the cats, Claudia Keating and Victor Pasqual. Being in debt to your eyeballs is no longer a suspicious circumstance. It is the American way of life, or at least, a New Yorker’s way of life. Pasqual and the cat lady, therefore, seemed suspicious for their solvency.”

  “Anybody have medical expenses, someone in a hospital bed, or a relative in a care facility?”

  “Not that we discovered.We did check that, though.” Feeney seemed anxious to prove they hadn’t overlooked anything else obvious, like the cause of Claudia’s mother’s death.

  Feeney went on.“We’re still looking at the doormen,even the ones who weren’t on duty that day. All the doormen have access to keys and are familiar with the building—the back stairways, the utility rooms and laundry rooms, that sort of thing. Any one of them could have hidden somewhere and probably gotten out without being seen. Someone, even the janitor, could have gone up to the apartment while Claudia was out. Hid there, or in a utility
room on the floor or any other floor, waited for her to come home, snuck in, took the baby, and then hid out again in some room somewhere till the next doorman came on shift. A baby that small could be carried in a tote or something. New Yorkers are always loaded down with bags and backpacks—it’s a security nightmare.”

  “Isadora, you want coffee? I need some coffee.” Leo rarely called me Isadora. I nodded. I’d been warned about the station house brew, but I needed some.

  Feeney offered, “I’ll get it. How do you take it?”

  “Light. No sugar.”

  Feeney left.

  “You’re very hard on him, Leo. He doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “I never wanted him on the task force, let alone as my partner. But his old man has political connections so I couldn’t say no. He came in cocked like a cheap pistol—and as full of himself as a bag of shit.”

  “More than you were when you started?”

  He grinned at me, then he conceded, “He might make a good cop if I ride his ass hard enough.”

  I was certain that if ass-riding were a way to make a good cop, Feeney would end up the best.

  Leo got serious. “Tell me why you said we shouldn’t look for Charlotte.” He had wanted Feeney out of the room for this.

  “I have a feeling. That’s all.”

  “Do you think she’s still in the building?”

  “No, not really. I just wanted to be sure you had covered that possibility.”

  “We did. I can’t officially close the file on her without something more than your feeling. You know the statistics and so does everyone else. It’s a cold trail. After this many days…”

  Feeney returned with a mug of black coffee for Leo, light for me and a mug of tea for himself. We dropped my unhelpful intuition for the moment and let the junior detective launch his own theory. “This has been gone over before…What if the nanny’s child isn’t really missing?” Feeney eagerly proffered his own theory. “What if she’s faking the whole thing? Let’s say she sold the baby—she’ll pick up her own kid, collect her money and join her boyfriend Pavel in Palm Springs.”