Murder in the North Tower

by Greg Smith

  “So…you’re divorced?”

  “We lasted almost a year,” Oak answered with fake wistfulness.

  Aleks’s old friend had aged. Maybe it was the marriage. The kid. Maybe the strain of working for his father-in-law. Or the stress of the divorce. Maybe it was too much California sun.

  Or maybe it was the booze in that flask. And whatever else the big guy was on.

  “So, now you’re here to sell me an Oakwood Strapon?”

  “Stratton Oakmont,” Oak corrected. “Don’t be a doubter.”

  Aleks settled back, allowed his friend to ramble on about selling IPOs, hawking penny stocks, making easy money.

  Stratton Oakmont was the ideal playground for Oak. Peddling IPOs and penny stocks was second nature to him. It wasn’t easy money, it was fucking free money. Like giving a blind man two fives change for a twenty. Oak was rolling in it. Relishing the hedonistic lifestyle it afforded. The lavish parties. The alcohol. The recreational drugs. The women. The never-ending celebration of self-indulgence.

  “Jordan Belfort’s THE MAN, Alpo. Danny Porush? Jewboy genius. He offered to send me to Hawaii if I sold $100,000 in three days. On a private jet. With Gina (Jeye • nuh) girls. Fucking Gina girls, Alpo!”

  “China girls?”

  “Gina. As in vuh-Gina, dude.”

  “And…?”

  “Fuck, I was popping 714s like breath mints for three days. But I’m not that good. And Danny knows it.”

  “714s?”

  “Broker’s best friend, man. Oak’s little helper. Quaaludes. They keep you sharp, aggressive. Wish I woulda had ’em when I was playing ball.”

  So that’s what he’s on, Alek, who’d never taken anything stronger than Tylenol, realized. He knew Oak had an addictive personality. The large man on drugs was like a redneck on a shopping spree in a gun store. Nothing good was going to come of it. He wondered which had come first. The drugs. Or the job that required the drugs. Oak had never needed that when they were working in The Pit. There, the action was the drug of choice.

  Oak broke the momentary silence.

  “The office is nearby, Alpo. You oughtta stop in. Check it out. I can introduce you to Danny. Jordan if he’s around. The rest is up to you.”

  He finished his breakfast, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin onto his empty plate.

  “I know what makes you tick, man. You’d be great at this. You could make a ton of money.”

  Aleks wasn’t taken in by Oak’s sales pitch about Jordan, whoever he was. Or the Jewish genius, Danny What’s-His-Name. The money was the lure for him. He felt he owed it to himself to at least visit the office, see what it was all about.

  Otherwise, come the following week, he’d be peddling hedge funds for Merrill Lynch.

  • • • • •

  CHAPTER 30

 

  Saturday, October 6: Day 25 post-9/11

  October snuck into New York City on quiet cat’s paws three weeks after 9/11. Three weeks of burials, memorials, commemoratives. Three weeks of cleanup at Ground Zero.

  Though he wouldn’t admit she was the reason, after meeting the brown-haired woman from Pulaski, Wisconsin, the jogger stopped each day at St. Paul’s.

  Sheila Cahill was not to be found.

  The jogger had no way of knowing the woman he’d shared a few moments of sorrow with was immersed in a world that revolved around grief and mourning. Like so many of New York City’s newly ordained widows of fireman and policemen killed on 9/11, Sheila Cahill was busy attending a multitude of services. Funerals. Tributes. Remembrances. One more somber than the last. Each morphing into the one following. The heroic honorees almost interchangeable.

  With each ceremony, the bonds among the widows tightened. The group from John’s firehouse had formed an alliance they called “The Dead Wives Society.” It was a club no one wanted to be part of. A confederation they’d been force-fed admission to by circumstance. Sheila didn’t understand the phraseology. They weren’t dead. Their husbands were. Still, it was the vernacular of the day. You were either in a Dead Wives Club, or an Alive Wives Club.

  A Dead Wives Club usurped your identity. Monopolized your time. Preordained your agenda. Sheila Cahill had little control over where she went and who she went with.

  She and the jogger wouldn’t pull up to that traffic light at the intersection of Happenstance and Chance again for more than a week.

  It was a pleasant day. That first Saturday of October. The jogger had taken an early break from The Pile, arrived at St. Paul’s before noon. The chapel was busy, as it always was. Cots, massage tables and food stations lined the walls. People, food, supplies and memorial paraphernalia covered every square foot of floor space. Tables were piled high with boxes of candy, cookies, fresh fruit, energy bars. And cigarettes. An item the tall man found oddly ironic. Though he realized many did, first responders, especially firefighters, smoking seemed a contradiction.

  Volunteers at St. Paul’s soothed workers’ aching muscles. Patched and bandaged their tired, damaged feet. They nursed. Massaged. Fed. Counseled. Kept the volunteers’ bodies and souls intact. Returning them, again and again, to The Pile. What had begun as a place for rescue workers to rest and recover from their labor at Ground Zero had become a sanctuary of safety and support. A haven of hope. A place of preservation.

  The jogger moved outside, surveyed the shrines to the fallen that overpopulated the wrought-iron fence surrounding the Chapel grounds. He stopped briefly at Mikey’s picture, remembered hearing Sheila’s voice that day they’d met.

  “That’s my-my-my-Mikey.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. As though the memory voice had been real. As though he expected to see the brown-haired Red Cross volunteer from Pulaski, Wisconsin, standing behind him. Disappointed she wasn’t, he closed his eyes, remembered how Sheila had buried her face in his flannel shirt that day, clung to him like a vine attaching itself to a tree trunk for support. He’d basked in the satisfaction of knowing he’d provided her the comfort she’d so desperately needed.

  “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

  The jogger opened his eyes. This time, the brown-haired Red Cross volunteer from Pulaski, Wisconsin, was standing there. As though his mere thoughts had invoked her presence. She approached, wrapped herself around his arm like a vine attaching itself to a tree trunk for support. The jogger smiled broadly, put an arm around the brown-haired woman’s shoulders, presented her with a quick, gentle squeeze.

  “Pulaski.”

  He whispered the greeting.

  “Oshkosh.”

  Sheila crooned in response.

  She’d missed the tall man. She felt a strong connection to him. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, she longed to spend more time with him.

  “Whataya say we get outta here?” she suggested impulsively. “Let’s just go somewhere. Get away from all this. Ground Zero has been my entire existence ever since…” She waved a hand absently. “Well, ever since that day.”

  The tall stranger understood what she meant. He felt a similar sentiment.

  “Whataya have in mind? A walk? The zoo, maybe?”

  “Sure, we could just walk,” Sheila agreed.

  She closed her eyes, pictured herself walking along a beach. She could almost smell the ocean air, feel the hard-packed, water-chilled sand beneath her bare feet where the ocean and the beach embraced. The sand became a boardwalk. Her bare feet caressed the smooth, sun-warmed wood.

  She was suddenly no longer thirty-four-year-old Sheila Cahill, nee Zimmerman, the recently widowed Red Cross volunteer working a shift at St. Paul’s Chapel across the street from the site of the most horrific attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. She’d transported backward through time. She was twelve-years old. She wore pigtails. A summer crop of freckles had spread across her nose, run amok onto the skin under her brown eyes. A stray or two surfacing on her cheeks. She wore denim clam diggers. Pants that ended just below her knees. A polk
a-dotted Daisy Mae halter top covered what were still pre-pubescent buds. She was on a family outing with her parents. An aunt, uncle and cousins visiting from Wisconsin in tow. They were at the ocean. On the boardwalk. At…

  Sheila Cahill had a sudden reckless thought.

  “You know where I’d really love to go?” she said excitedly. “Coney Island! I haven’t been there in years.”

  The jogger considered the notion of just heading off to Coney Island on a whim with this woman he barely knew.

  “Coney Island? In October?”

  The woman he barely knew had made up her mind.

  “Nathan’s and some of the other attractions stay open year-round. It’s Saturday. Some of the rides may still be running.”

  The jogger hadn’t been aware it was Saturday. One day on The Pile blurring into the next.

  “C’mon, Oshkosh. Whaddaya say? Huh? It’ll be an adventure!”

  An adventure, the tall man thought. Why not? It’s not like I have to be anywhere.

  “Sure. Let’s go. Coney Island it is!”

  Sheila talked almost incessantly during the subway ride. Mostly about growing up on the family farm in Wisconsin. Medium-size farm. Large-size family. Three brothers, three sisters. Her in the middle. She told the stranger about moving to New York City. About life as an FDNY fireman’s wife. About how her kid brother, Mikey, ten years her junior, had found being a volunteer firefighter in Pulaski boring, had followed her to New York City to become an FDNY fireman like his brother-in-law.

  “He was so handsome. So charismatic,” she said dreamily. “He was only twenty-four years old, Oshkosh. He had his whole life ahead of him.”

  Mikey.

  The name evoked image after image of the man who would always be her kid brother. The pictures flashing through her mind like a slideshow. Starting slowly, accelerating as it progressed.

  Mikey as a newborn resting in her ten-year-old big-sister arms. Mikey stumbling forward, taking his first steps. Mikey on his tricycle. Mikey in his pedal-powered fire engine. Mikey heading off to his first day of school. Eight-year-old Mikey and two like-aged cousins dressed up like firemen for Halloween. Mikey playing Little League baseball. Mikey playing hockey. Mikey in his football uniform. Mikey with his prom date. Mikey graduating from high school. From the academy. Mikey as a twenty-four-year-old firefighter. Mikey riding in the pumper, responding to a fire at the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday morning.

  The show ended abruptly as the last picture turned to black and white visual static.

  “I took him on his first roller-coaster ride,” Sheila reflected. “It was a rickety, scary-as-hell, carny-built Wild Mouse at our county fair. One of those where only two people can fit in each car. Mikey was only ten and it scared the bejesus out of him. We rode that Wild Mouse a dozen times that night!”

  The jogger smiled warmly.

  “If I’d had a big sister, I’d have wanted her to be you. It was just me and Binyak.”

  Sheila wanted to kiss the tall man for saying exactly what she needed to hear exactly when she needed to hear it. She smothered him in a tight embrace, pulled away, waited for him to take his turn on the memory-go-round.

  The jogger stared out the smudgy subway window, perhaps engrossed in a slideshow of his own.

  “Oshkosh and…Binyock was it?” Sheila prompted.

  The jogger glanced at her with eyes that were bloodshot from lack of sleep, rimmed pink from the irritation of working on The Pile. Sheila’s own questioning eyes begged him to confide in her.

  “We’re twins. Did I mention that?”

  The brown-haired woman grasped his hand, hoped he would keep talking. Instead, tears formed in his tired eyes, began falling like…like…

  Like those people jumping from the Towers! she thought dismally.

  It just wouldn’t leave. That day. The horror. It monopolized her every thought. Like a shadow on a sunny day at the beach. It was inescapable. Dark. Sinister. Menacing. Threatening to pull her in. Determined to make her part of it.

  She clutched the jogger’s arm with both hands as though it was an anchor. Securing her. Tying her down. Keeping her safe from the shadow. Being with the tall stranger made the shadow disappear. Though they’d been forced together by horrific circumstances, she felt no anguish in the tall man’s presence. No sorrow.

  Neither said a word for several minutes. Sheila cuddled against the stranger’s arm, relishing the comfort she got from contact with another human being. The jogger took comfort in providing safe haven for the distraught woman.

  “Hmm. Oshkosh,” she whispered into his sleeve, snuggling intimately, like a complacent bear settling in for its long winter nap.

  The name troubled him. He was disappointed with himself for deceiving the brown-haired Red Cross volunteer from Pulaski, Wisconsin. He decided he couldn’t continue to mislead her, gently attempted to ease her off his arm. When she resisted, he let her be.

  “Look, Sheila, I, uh, I have a confession to make.”

  Sheila’s heart plummeted. He’d addressed her by name. Which meant this had to be serious.

  “You’re married,” she said with dread certainty, refusing to emerge from her den of comfort.

  “No. It’s not… That’s not it. I, uh…I’m not really from Wisconsin,” he unexpectedly revealed. “And, uh, I’m not Russell Kummerhall.”

  Sheila came out of her sanctuary, looked from the tall man’s face to his name tag back to his face, her expression perplexed.

  “I, uh…I just wanted to help,” was all the jogger added.

  He made no attempt to explain why he’d needed false credentials to volunteer at Ground Zero. Nor did he offer to disclose his true identity. While the brown-haired woman was relieved to hear the tall man wasn’t married, she was disturbed at the news that he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  “Why are you telling me this now? Why didn’t you say something before?”

  The tall stranger smiled wryly.

  “Would you have come all the way out here. To Coney Island. On the subway. In October. With someone you didn’t know?”

  Sheila eyed him suspiciously for a moment before grasping the irony of what he’d said. Whether he was Russell Kummerhall or John Doe, she’d made the decision to get on the subway and spend the day at Coney Island with a man she didn’t really know anything about. A man she’d met only twice.

  She burst into loud laughter. An emotional release, perhaps. Or maybe she was nervously laughing away the possibility that this tall stranger had singled her out with the intent to do her harm. Though she didn’t believe that. She wasn’t frightened. Wasn’t the least bit concerned for her safety. The man had been volunteering at Ground Zero, for chrissakes. Only an especially devious psychopath would take advantage of that situation. Your average creep didn’t do that.

  Whoever he was, she told herself, she’d made some kind of connection with the tall, handsome stranger. They’d shared a moment or two.

  “Hey, you don’t owe me anything, Mister Whatever-your-real-name-is,” Sheila said, after her laughing jag had subsided. “Just tell me you’ re not from Minnesota. Or, worse, Ohio. Tell me you’re not a Buckeye,” she joshed.

  His allegiance falling to the Big East, the tall man had little interest in Midwest sports rivalries.

  “I’m not even a Big Ten fan,” he said unemotionally.

  Sheila broke into a new fit of laughter. She found the stranger’s dry sense of humor enchanting. Undaunted, she fearlessly elected to continue on the impetuous journey with the now nameless stranger. She felt more like a reckless teen-ager than a desperate, foolish, middle-aged widow who’d naively traipsed off with a potential murderer.

  The subway train shuddered to a halt at the Stillwell Avenue station. As they left the terminal, the tall stranger and the brown-haired woman expected to be greeted by the familiar red and white Philip’s Candy stand. Both remembered Philip’s candied apples, cotton candy, chocolate-covered bananas/strawberries/pret
zels, hot cashews, chocolate malteds, peanuts for feeding seagulls and so much more. They were unaware that Philip’s had closed its doors on Easter Sunday that year. Had subsequently been torn down to make way for a multi-million-dollar overhaul of the antiquated terminal.

  They didn’t let the absence of the Coney Island landmark dishearten them, however. Or the eerie emptiness of the amusement park. They strolled the Boardwalk. Visited the Coney Island Museum. Enjoyed a ride on The Cyclone. Finally, stopped for a Nathan’s Famous.

  “So, you’re not from Oshkosh,” Sheila said as they enjoyed their hotdogs. “Where are you from? If I may be so bold.”

  The jogger stopped chewing, stared straight ahead. For a moment, Sheila thought she had been too bold. That she may have crossed some imaginary line of intrusiveness.

  “I’m actually from right here. From Brooklyn. Binyak and I grew up about five-six miles north. In Kensington.”

  “Really. You musta come here often then. As kids.”

  “Once or twice a year. More often as teen-agers.”

  He had a flash memory of riding The Cyclone with Nikki and Binyak. Taking turns riding with her. Finally getting the front seat together.

  He finished his hotdog.

  “Hmm. I’d forgotten how good a Nathan’s Famous really is.”

  He wiped his mouth, balled up his napkin, tossed it into a trash bin five feet away, holding his hand high in an exaggerated goose-neck position.

  “At the buzzer… It’s good! And the crowd goes wild.”

  He winked at Sheila.

  “Midwood Hornets. Conference champs. Two years running. ’83 and ’84. Binyak and I were all-conference.”

  By the end of the day, the tall stranger who was not Russell Kummerhall from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and brown-haired Sheila Cahill from Pulaski were well-versed on each other’s childhoods. The trials and tribulations of their adult lives would only be shared in the weeks ahead.

  For the longest time they would continue to be Oshkosh and Pulaski to each other.

  • • • • •

  CHAPTER 31