Buried on Avenue B (7 page)

 

CHAPTER 15

O'HARA GAZES THROUGH
her filthy windshield. Twelve hours before, the sun was in her eyes and the morning in her throat. Now the sun is behind her, warming neck and shoulders, and it's done something even David Blaine can't do. It's made the East River worth looking at. O'Hara rolls down the window and calls Jandorek at the precinct. “How's Kelso bearing up?”

“He's pissed. Thinks you conned him into digging that grave.”

“It's not like I did it on purpose.”

“No,” says Jandorek. “But it's not like you give a shit either.”

“True.”

“Kelso's put together a little task force. He's got me handling Missing Persons and ACS, and Ferguson and Hernandez canvassing the schools. So far not a fucking thing. Which is weird. A little blond-haired kid with a limp, you'd think at some point someone would have called Children's Services on the parents. Right?”

“How long until he goes public?”

“Not long. A couple days, maybe less. Here's what I can't get my head around, Dar. If it's the parents, what kind of parent buries a nine-year-old with a roach clip, a tittie lighter, a pint of whiskey, and a bag of pot? And if it's not the parents, but some bad-seed older kids he fell in with, why didn't the parents report him missing?”

“Maybe because they're very bad parents,” says O'Hara. “Speaking of which, the kid had lines on his teeth called dysplasia. According to Bradley every one of those lines was left by a serious illness or very high fever. Bradley used to see that in the remains of American Indians, or other people who didn't have access to modern medicine.”

“Maybe,” says Jandorek, “we're looking for a Christian Scientist or Jehovah's Witness. My fucking favorites. Or some crazy cult motherfuckers.”

“Or someone living off the grid,” says O'Hara, “but this isn't the Ozarks. It's the East Village.”

“If you ask me,” says Jandorek, “that garden has a little Ozarks in it.”

One last look at the softening sky, and O'Hara heads downtown. She ignores a dozen beckoning bars and walks past the garden, whose gate is secured by a padlock and a patrol car. When O'Hara gets to Henderson's place, he and Paulette are on lawn chairs on the small recessed stoop three steps below the sidewalk. Paulette wears a pretty summer dress. Gus is rocking his signature ensemble: wifebeater, boxers, tube socks, and lace-ups.

“You got yourself a nice spot,” says O'Hara.

“If you like ankles,” says Henderson with a smile, “And I do.”

Henderson seems pretty lucid, thinks O'Hara. Maybe she's caught him on one of his good days. “So, Gus, we dug up that spot under the willow tree. The one you told us about.”

“I didn't tell you about a tree.”

“Paulette said you told her.”

“Do I look like a Paulette?”

“She's Paulette, Gus, and I'm talking to both of you. You remember that photograph of the tree you said I could take?”

“Why, you sold it?”

“Gus, we took a look under that tree, but we didn't find a large black man.”

“Disappointed?” says Williamson.

O'Hara ignores that and turns to Henderson. “That got me to thinking, Gus—remember your old running mate, Charlie Faulk? Whatever happened to him?”

“He killed himself,” says Gus. “Long time ago.”

“That's sad. Do you mind me asking how he did it?”

“He took the train out to Rockaway and walked into the ocean. Told me he was going to do it.”

“His mother said that you told her he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Which is it, Gus—Rockaway Beach or the Staten Island Ferry?”

“What difference does it make? Before he left, he gave me his record collection. He had some great vinyl—Rollins, Monk, Clark Terry.”

“Still have them?”

“Sold 'em that day. Got high for a week. Those were some good times.”

“Weren't you mad at him for rolling over on you on that robbery?”

“Why? I would've done the same thing.”

 

CHAPTER 16

BY THE NEXT
day, the investigation has been broken down into half a dozen smaller ones. O'Hara and Jandorek spend the morning checking in with each, greasing the wheels and nudging them along.

The .22-caliber bullet that fell out of the victim's shoulder is in the ballistics lab in Queens. Once the tests are completed, the results will be transmitted to every city, state, and county police department in the country to see if the same weapon was used in the commission of other crimes, although, considering its modest stopping power, that seems unlikely.

The little bag of weed, stamped “GMS,” is being tested by narcotics, and evidence is running various tests on the artifacts and clothes, looking among other things for hair, fiber, or DNA that might belong to someone other than the victim. To ascertain that, they first need the results on the DNA of the victim, and in the late morning O'Hara gets a text from Bradley, saying the tests, based on a tiny fragment of shaved-off bone, have been completed and confirm that the victim is a Caucasian male.

Also ongoing is a canvass of city grammar schools. Ferguson, Hernandez, and detectives enlisted from other precincts are visiting every grammar school in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, interviewing administrators, going through enrollment lists and old yearbooks, inquiring about a blond-haired kid with a limp in third, fourth, or fifth grade who abruptly stopped showing up or whose parents notified the school that they were moving out of the district. By the middle of the day, they haven't turned up anything. Neither has Missing Persons or ACS, the Agency for Children's Services. The only thing close to a lead is something that turned up on a national database for missing children. In 2003 in a part of Oakland called Alameda, the local children's services agency received several reports of a boy about five, with long blond hair and a limp, left alone in his backyard for hours at a time. When social workers attempted to contact the parents, the family left town.

To escape Kelso's glare, O'Hara heads back to Thirtieth and First Avenue and checks in with Ken Ashworth. Ashworth, who is rotund and has a slight stutter, runs the evidence lab, which is housed on the third floor of the ME's office. “I was about to give you a call,” he says.

Every article of clothing excavated from the grave hangs neatly from a wheeled garment rack at the center of the room, but Ashworth brings her to the far corner, where a crumpled wad of paper is drying under a heat lamp. “I'll break down the clothing in a second. First, I want to show you what we found in the pocket of the kid's jeans. A lot had disintegrated, but I was able to tease apart a couple bits.” Ashworth hands O'Hara a magnifying lens and points his tweezers at a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp. In the middle of a dense graph, she makes out:

“ . . .  
AN 665,
J
UNE 2007, PUBLISHED BY
DC
C
OMICS, 1700
B
ROADWAY,
NY
10019
.” As O'Hara pores over the minuscule typeface, Ashworth makes a noise she takes for his stutter—“
nah nah nah nah nah nah . . .”
Then, she realizes he's singing, but doesn't know what till he reaches the musical punch line: “BATMAN! It's a comic book, Dar,
Batman
number 665, published in June 2007, the same month as the ticket stub.”

In addition to the intoxicants and shitty tunes, thinks O'Hara, the kid was sent off with a little reading material. It was like he was taking a trip on Amtrak.

“Any way of knowing where the comic was sold?”

“Not really.
Batman
is mass-market. They print about a hundred thousand copies per issue. You could buy one anywhere from a newsstand to a CVS.”

“The clothes?”

“From all over the place,” says Ashworth, and pulls a small notebook from his shirt pocket. “The shirt is Gant, manufactured in '74, originally sold to department stores in the Southwest; the jeans are Gap circa '95, sold in California; the T-shirt is a Fruit of the Loom blank from the eighties, which was sold to a classic rock apparel company, who then added ‘The Germs.' Although the clothes weren't new, they were clean, and had been washed before they were put on the victim. Because of that and because they come from such a variety of regions, I'm pretty sure that whoever bought them purchased them together at some vintage store, which unfortunately could be anywhere, since these shops are all over the place. A lot of these places buy the clothes by the pound. They don't even know what's in their own inventories.”

 

CHAPTER 17

AT 8:40 P.M.,
Casey Fagerland sits down with O'Hara and Jandorek at the only table in homicide that fits three. “How can you work here?” asks Fagerland. “There are no windows.”

“We're detectives,” says Jandorek. “Natural light gives us hives.”

Fagerland is a large woman in her mid-forties with straight brown hair and a pleasant, open face. She is the president of the Community Garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B. When O'Hara contacted her, she told her that they were working on a missing person case involving a member of the garden.

“Casey, you bring a list?”

“Three,” says Fagerland. “I made copies. But I got to warn you, it's long. There are somewhere between eighty-seven and a hundred and twenty active plots right now, and most are shared. Every name should be on here, but I can't swear that every address, e-mail, and phone number is up-to-date.”

“How many names?” asks Jandorek.

“Over two hundred.”

“Jesus. And they all got keys?”

“ 'Fraid so.”

“What kind of people we talking here?” asks Jandorek. “I've seen the garden. It's pretty funky.”

“Democracy is messy,” says Fagerland. “You got two hundred people sharing a quarter of a square block, and every one of them gets a vote.”

“Based on the gate,” says O'Hara, “I assume the garden has been around since '83.”

“That's right—twenty-four years. Let me give you some history. Originally that part of the city was a salt marsh, an arm of the East River. The only inhabitants were birds. The first tenements went up in 1845.”

“Case,” says Jandorek gently, “we're going to need it condensed. We don't have time for the full Rick Burns.”

“Fast forward to the 1980s,” says Fagerland, “a very shaky period in New York real estate. Like now, but much worse. A quarter of the buildings in the East Village, the landlords stopped paying their mortgages and taxes and walked away. At Sixth and B were five buildings and a parking garage, all abandoned, and after the junkies took over and turned them into a shooting gallery, the city tore them down.”

So that's Henderson's connection, thinks O'Hara.

“Suddenly, you've got seventeen thousand empty square feet. People walking by would throw garbage over the fence. Around this time, a hippie chick named Joanie, who is still a member, noticed seeds sprouting from the garbage. She climbed over the fence, laid out a circle of stones, and created the first garden.”

Like
Spinal Tap
, thinks O'Hara, minus the smoke machines.

“This was the era of East Village radicals,” continues Fagerland, “squatters and homesteaders. People were taking over buildings, fixing them up. They became the first members of the garden, and though most got priced out of the neighborhood, they still make up the core. To give you an idea, the annual dues for a plot is twelve dollars a year. At Starbucks, that's two Frappuccinos.”

“I'll take the Frappuccinos,” says Jandorek.

“That's one kind of person we're interested in,” says O'Hara. “A little off the grid, homesteaders, homeschoolers.”

“I can give you names,” Fagerland, “half a dozen come to mind—but they're older. Their kids are grown. The ones with kids now, are bankers and lawyers. They send their kids to private schools.”

“What's the attraction of the garden for them?” asks Jandorek.

“Community has become trendy. At least in the East Village. Maybe they think it will help get their kids into college. For all I know they're right.”

O'Hara scans the list and stops at “Malmströmer.” There are four of them—Lars, Marjetta, Inga, and Christina.

“I met Christina Malmströmer at the garden,” says O'Hara. “She only mentioned her father.”

“Her mother, Marjetta, died in '96. Breast cancer. It was awful. Lars was left with two teenage girls. The older, Inga, was about seventeen; Christina, fourteen. Inga, who looked like a model, started hanging out all night, smoking pot, etcetera, and the old man didn't handle it well. Maybe he threw her out of the house, or maybe she ended up running away, but as far as I know, she hasn't had contact with the family since.”

“How about the old man?” asks O'Hara.

“Very tall, very handsome, very Scandinavian. Came here in his teens as a carpenter's apprentice and did well. Owns a hardware store and a couple buildings on Sixth Street he bought for nothing when they were giving them away. He lives on the top floor of one of them, where he grows some of his own food. He keeps an eye on Christina with his binoculars.”

O'Hara puts a mark next to Lars.

“The Malmströmers,” asks O'Hara. “Are they all blond?” At the garden, Christina's hair had been pulled back and stuffed under a large sun hat.

“Lars has been gray as long as I've known him. Marjetta and Inga were blond. Christina has brown hair.”

“You're quite the authority on Lars and his brood,” says Jandorek.

“I dated him for about ten minutes, after his wife died, when all this was going on. The single dad raising the kids alone, I've always been a sucker for that one. And I felt bad for the girls, particularly Christina. Now her father is hyperprotective, but then—with the illness of her mother and the drama with her sister, and her father working day and night to keep his business afloat—she was lost in the shuffle. Christina used to be such a vibrant girl. She's never really been the same.”

“So what happened?” asks Jandorek. “I mean with you and the big Swede?”

“Too Nordic for me. I think of myself as a warm person, but I couldn't thaw him.”

“You know anything about his life since?”

“He never remarried. He spends a lot of time in his basement workshop. One day I got it into my head to visit him there. It was weird—like I walked in on him with another woman—but I'm sure he thinks I'm a weirdo too.”

“Any people not on this list with keys?” asks O'Hara. “Maybe off-the-grid types?”

“We hired a guy to trim the trees. He was an itinerant worker. I guess you could say he lived off the grid. He did some work on the willow itself, shoring it up.”

“When?”

“Three years ago.”

Too long, thinks O'Hara. Doesn't fit the time frame. “How about the shows on weekends?” she asks, recalling the flyers taped to the trees. “What kind of performers do you get?”

“Bad ones mostly. Folksingers, stand-ups, puppeteers, poets, spoken word. A circus troupe performs every year called Circus Amok. They're actually very good, run by a woman named Jennifer Miller, who happens to have a beard.”

“She also happen to have a key?”

“Probably. I've seen her in the evenings now and then, smoking a joint.”

“What's her circus like?” asks Jandorek.

“It's for kids mainly. But it's a queer circus—every one in the company is gay or transsexual, and everything is turned on its head. The strongman is a big butch dyke. While balancing on the rope, the slackliner changes out of his pants into a dress and heels. And the MC is Jennifer with her black beard. She comes out juggling on her unicycle and shouts, “What the fuck! It's Circus Amok!”

“You call that a kid circus?” says Jandorek.

“Kids love it—they have a treasure hunt where kids dig up little bits of foreign money.”

“What kind of money?”

“Lira, yen, pesos. It changes every year.”

“Any of the performers have children?” asks O'Hara.

“Not sure. Possibly.”

“This Miller,” asks Jandorek. “She has a real beard?”

“Like the old-time freak shows,” says Fagerland. “In fact, she performs in a sideshow on Coney Island.”

“Any other nutjobs and deviants?”

“We had to ask one member to stop turning tricks in the garden. It's never easy to get people to behave.”

When Fagerland leaves, O'Hara and Jandorek stay put under the buzzing fluorescent bulb. “Lars,” says Jandorek, “a broken-down junkie, and a broad with a beard.”

“The bearded lady is pretty interesting,” says O'Hara.

“Because she has a beard?”

“A woman with a beard is interesting, no question. But I was thinking about the grave. With all those different kinds of money and trinkets tossed in, it seemed like a group effort, everyone contributing something different.”

“A potluck funeral,” says Jandorek.

“An off-kilter circus troupe fits that pretty well. And a kid growing up in one might not have time to go to school, which could explain why there's no trace of the kid in the system.”

“I can see that,” says Jandorek. “And you got the yen and pesos from the treasure hunt—but I like Lars. He's big, he's weird, and he's got a family of blonds, one of whom is already missing. Bradley told you, that grave was laid out and dug like a jewel box, and this guy was a carpenter.”

“Jesus was a carpenter,” says O'Hara.

“So was Karen till she lost her appetite. One other point in Lars's favor. There are a hundred and ten plots in that fucking garden, and his family just happens to have the one next to where the kid was buried. What are the odds of that?”

“One out of a hundred and ten.”

“You sure you're not autistic?”

“How about I head to Coney Island, and you see what you can learn about the Swedish Family Malmströmer.”

“Works for me. Speaking of which, I thought Fagerland was kind of cute.”

“I noticed.”