Buried on Avenue B (6 page)

 

CHAPTER 13

NO MATTER WHAT
gets put in the ground or dug out of it, big picture, nothing changes. The rear of the ME's office looks straight out at the FDR Drive, East River, and Queens. At 7:30 a.m., the sun, with its dumb-fuck optimism, has risen again, and people are going to work, because the FDR southbound is bumper-to-bumper. O'Hara walks around the building to First, buys a buttered roll from a sidewalk cart, and eats it as she leans against the hood of her car.

Half an hour later, moments after it opened for business, O'Hara is back on her stool at Milano's, and for a second it feels as if she never left. On her left and right, she is flanked by the same even more punctual regulars, and from the wall-mounted TV another vintage black-and-white seeps into the room. The only thing separating her from Groundhog Day is that the pretty brown-haired barkeep has changed classic metal allegiances, or at least her T-shirt. Instead of AC/DC, it's Kiss.

O'Hara's NYPD notepad is in her bag, but for reasons of propriety and self-preservation, she leaves it there, and when the bartender delivers her grapefruit juice and vodka, O'Hara asks to borrow the yellow pad beside the dictionary. Standing between O'Hara and sleep is not only the lingering effect of half a dozen cups of bad coffee but the quantity of still-unprocessed evidence unearthed from the garden, then added to in the fluorescence of the morgue. For the next twenty minutes she filters it through her exhausted brain like the mesh filtered the dirt at the site, and although she doesn't make a mark on the pad, the sight of her pen lying across the long, empty page is as calming as her drink. O'Hara smiles at her memory of Bradley's response when Kelso tried to hustle him along.
Excavating is a destructive process. You only have one chance to do it right.
Although strictly speaking, the analogy doesn't apply to police work, and she may have more than one chance to get it right, a composed and thoughtful start could avoid unnecessary missteps and save her a lot of time. Finally, almost reluctantly, she makes the first blemish on the page—a capital
V
and, a couple sips later,
ictim
. Beneath it, she lists what she knows so far:

Caucasian, presumably male, approximately ten years old

Hair color: blond, nearly white

Height: 4-foot-7

Another sip produces a second heading—“Burial Artifacts.” She divides them into the three categories she observed at the morgue. Under “Currency” she lists:

$20 bill

5-peso coin

25-yen coin

1 subway token—obsolete

1 pearl

1 marble

Under “Tools” she lists:

1 lighter—female torso

1 roach clip

1 Swiss Army knife

Under “Entertainment” she lists:

1 pint of Ballantine whiskey, unopened

1 small bag of weed, sealed

1 audio CD—Coldplay, titled “X&Y”

As O'Hara reviews her work, she considers adding Kelso to the list under “Tools” but decides it's bad form to kick a man when he's down, particularly when you're the one who put him there. Now O'Hara creates a fourth heading—“Clothes”—and beneath it writes:

1 baseball cap, New York Yankees

Unlike most New Yorkers, and cops in particular, O'Hara roots for the underdog. Instead of the Yankees, she pulls for the Mets. Instead of the Giants, she roots for the Jets; instead of the Beatles, the Stones. Her ex-boyfriend, the medical examiner Leibowitz, another Mets fan, said pulling for Steinbrenner's Yankees would be like going to Vegas and rooting for the house. Continuing the list of clothes, O'Hara writes:

1 dress shirt—blue with yellow stripes

1 T-shirt, “The Germs”—clean

O'Hara looks up from her list at the bartender in her long-sleeved Kiss concert tee and wonders if at this point in the history of civilization, it is possible to infer anything about a person from the name of the band emblazoned on her chest. To do so, you'd need to know the exact degree of irony with which the garment is being worn, and to know that, you'd have to interview the wearer. O'Hara doesn't doubt the barkeep likes Kiss. How could anyone not like Kiss? At the same time, it's worn with a bit of a wink. T-shirts for AC/DC, Kiss, and Def Leppard are heavy metal ironic, just as T-shirts for the Stones, Zeppelin, and the Beatles are rock royalty ironic. The Strokes are prematurely obsolete ironic, the Wings and Ted Nugent b-list ironic or, if you're a contrarian, underrated a-list ironic. The only thing you can know for sure is that the T-shirt is no longer just about the band, because at this point, no one is willing to give it up blindly to anyone, not Mick or Keith, and certainly not Gene Simmons.

The only exception might be a band so obscure no one's heard of it. O'Hara hasn't heard of the Germs, so maybe they fall into that last category, but who knows? O'Hara takes a sip and adds:

1 pair of jeans

1 pair of sneakers—Converse high-tops, white

(No socks, no underwear)

As O'Hara ponders her various lists, she gets a call on her cell, and for the breach in early-morning Milano's etiquette, a dirty look from the female on her left. “I just learned something else about the victim,” says Bradley. “I want to tell you now because it could be helpful in making an ID. When I cleaned up the bones, there was a major difference between the right and left femurs. The left is bowed and much thicker, the result of a fracture that was never set. After it healed, the victim's left leg was a quarter-inch shorter than his right, which is a lot. It would have given him a noticeable limp.”

When Bradley hangs up, O'Hara adds “Noticeable limp” to the small list under “Victim.” The new piece, which O'Hara shares with Jandorek via text, reinforces something that has already struck O'Hara, which is the disconnect between the caring and the not-caring, the regard and the disregard. On one hand you have a ten-year-old boy in a shallow grave in a community garden with a bullet in his shoulder and a broken leg that was never set. On the other, you have an exactly measured, well-dug grave, a carefully laid-out body that's been re-dressed for burial, and a motley collection of trinkets and refreshments that may have been parting gifts. For a moment, because it makes her feel better, O'Hara focuses on the caring part—on the evidence that at least somebody gave a shit about this kid. In that context, she actually takes comfort in the whiskey and the weed tossed in with the body, because it suggests that despite the brevity of his life and the violence and neglect, the kid managed to make some friends and maybe even have some good times, which is about all anyone can hope for. Suddenly she is overwhelmed with admiration for this plucky urchin with his Yankees cap and his Ratso Rizzo limp and his impish smirk he never surrendered, not even in the grave. It lets her think of a young murdered boy as a kind of survivor, but at the same time, the kid's resilience breaks her heart all the more. The suffering of children is the part of the job that fucks up O'Hara, and everyone else, the most, and she is crawling off to the saddest, bleakest corner of her mind when the bartender appears in front of her.

“Need another?” she asks.

“How'd you guess? But I'm going to resist. By the way, I'm Darlene.”

“Holly,” says the barkeep.

If I don't come up with something to say, thinks O'Hara, I'm going to start crying, and that's even worse form than talking on your cell.

“Holly, you ever hear of a band called the Germs?”

“Of course. L.A.'s first punk band. Produced by Joan Jett. Their lead singer was Darby Crash, who unfortunately killed himself.”

“So the Germs were pretty good?”

“I don't know about that, but they were important.”

“How about Coldplay, what you do you think of them?”

“I think they suck.”

“And how about this new outfit called the Flat Screens? Ever hear of them?”

“No. Any good?”

“Amazing.”

The barkeep has given O'Hara a musical disconnect to go with all the others. Whatever you think about the Germs or Coldplay, they're not compatible. They don't belong on the same playlist, let alone the same shallow, well-dug grave.

“In the spirit of full disclosure,” says O'Hara, “I should probably mention that the lead singer of the Flat Screens is my son.”

“You don't look old enough to have a son who is the lead singer of a band.”

“I appreciate that, although in my case, that's not much of a compliment. I was fifteen when I had him.”

“I used to be in bands myself,” says Holly. “Lots of them.”

“Any I might have heard of?”

“I don't know. Space Mice, Paper Boat, Spungent.”

“You were in Spungent? I saw them twice. The last time at Spiral in '97. It was a great show. What instrument you play?”

“Guitar.”

“Really?” says O'Hara, and as she studies Holly's face, tries to square it with her decade-old memories.

“Yeah, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I looked a lot different, and played under a different name.”

“Oh, yeah? What was your nom de rock?”

“Richard.”

“No shit? Well, thanks for sharing. Now that I know you're a rocker, it puts you in a whole new light.”

 

CHAPTER 14

O'HARA WALKS BRUNO,
grabs a few hours of sleep, and returns to the ME's office in the early evening. One look at Bradley's eyes, and she knows he never left. His pupils are the size of nickels.

“Jesus Christ,” says O'Hara. “What are you on?”

“Adderall,” says Bradley, “same thing that got me out of Davenport, Iowa, and into Harvard. Makes me feel young.”

“You started taking that shit in high school?”

“Best thing I ever did. In two months, I went from fuckup to National Merit scholar. I didn't need more attention, a role model, or a good talking-to. I just needed a little support from big pharma. Let me show you a couple things before it wears off.”

O'Hara follows Bradley to a counter where the dental X-rays are illuminated by a light box. “I was about a year off,” says Bradley. “Your first molars come in about six, and you can see he's already got those. He's also got some of the second—the crowns—and the roots are beginning to form, but they are usually all the way in by ten, so this puts him closer to nine.

“The X-rays show something else that's consistent with the unset fracture in his leg. See the horizontal lines across his front teeth? If you tilt the X-ray, you may see it more clearly. Each of those lines, which is a form of dysplasia, was left on the teeth after a serious illness or high fever. The last time I saw lines like that was just after I left grad school. The state of Tennessee hired me to relocate an Indian burial ground to make way for an interstate. Because they didn't have inoculations or antibiotics, almost every Indian who reached adulthood had survived multiple illnesses. These lines would show up in their dental X-rays again and again.”

Maybe she wasn't wrong, thinks O'Hara, to see the boy as a survivor. “Does that mean he was abused?”

“I don't think so. With chronic abuse you get malnutrition and retarded development and growth rates. I don't see that, but I don't think he got even routine medical attention. And there's one other thing,” says Bradley, turning from the X-rays to the table where the skeleton is laid out. “When I cleaned these up, I found these small brown oval shells. They're maggot casings, which had to have been left by insects before the body was buried, because they wouldn't have had access to it afterward. Before the body was buried, it had to have been lying aboveground for some time, which also explains the advanced state of decomposition. You see this kind of insect activity in the spring, so I would estimate that the body was buried in late spring, early summer, around the date of that movie ticket.” Bradley rips open a bag of peanuts and throws a handful into his mouth. His dilated eyes go blank as his jaw reduces the nuts to powder.

Among the lesser-known side effects of Adderall, thinks O'Hara, is that it turns you into a squirrel.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. After I cleaned the bones, I took a closer look at the hole in the scapula, where the bullet had been lodged.” Bradley brings O'Hara to the other end of the table and points at the indentation in the brownish shoulder blade. Then he picks up a new .22-caliber bullet—the original has already been sent to the lab—and shows, when he tilts the bullet at a slightly upward angle, how neatly the tip fits into the depression. “When I saw that the bullet hit the shoulder at this angle,” says Bradley, “I looked to see if it hit anything else first, and found defects on the third and eighth ribs consistent with a glancing impact with a small sphere. The bullet hit here and here and then finally was stopped by the shoulder. I had a medical examiner come by and take a look. She thought the bullet would probably have pierced a part of the lung. Depending where, it could have killed him quickly, or he could have hung for days.”

“You're saying the bullet was traveling upward?”

“Yeah. Kind of surprising, considering the victim was four-foot-seven.”

“The bullet couldn't have ricocheted?” asks O'Hara.

“I don't think so. The shell would have been far more damaged if it had hit something hard enough to reverse its direction.”

“I guess the city doesn't test you for stimulants,” says O'Hara with undisguised jealousy.

“There's only one forensic anthropologist, Darlene—me. When there's only one of somebody, they don't test them for Bo Diddley.”