Shadows Still Remain (15 page)

Wincing at the light and siren pulsing from her dash, O'Hara races onto the West Side Highway and pushes her straining Jetta through southbound traffic. Condos and crumbling piers pass in an eighty-mile-an-hour blur before she swoops down past the Hustler strip club warehouse and the
Intrepid
, a car-wash and Circle Line. She exits at Fourteenth and runs reds from the meatpacking district to Fifth, then south to Washington Square, where she double-parks just east of the library.

Lights still flashing, she jumps out of the car and checks her phone, which she trusts more than her watch: 10:27. She got downtown in twenty-three minutes. Across the street students file in and out of the huge Starbucks. O'Hara could use some coffee, too, but waits on the curb and tries to concentrate on what she'll do when Tomlinson arrives. Where would be a good place for them to talk? What questions should O'Hara open with? She can't afford to repeat the same mistake she made on the phone and show her hand too quickly.

Six minutes later, Tomlinson still hasn't shown. Maybe, as Elkin said, she changed her mind. More likely she just took off. O'Hara leaves a message on Tomlinson's home voice mail,
waits three more anxious minutes, and at 10:36 pushes through the revolving doors into the Bobst Library. Inside, the towering atrium is filled with a voluminous hush. Clicking heels, the whir of a waxing machine and the tinkling of voices are buried beneath fourteen stories of empty air.

On the far side of the atrium, an elevator opens with a ping. A female Asian student wearing fashionable leather boots—two-thirds of NYU's students seem to be Asian girls—steps onto the checkered black-and-white floor of what must be the grandest ballroom in the city south of Grand Central. With the unself-conscious exhaustion that envelops everyone still in the building at this hour, the girl starts out across the gleaming tiles, and in anticipation of showing them to the guard at the door, pulls two books from her backpack. To her right, at the long checkout counter, three students stand sleepily in line.

“Detective,” a female voice calls out from the top of the atrium, “up here.” The Asian student stops in her tracks, looks up and screams as O'Hara, who has already pushed through the turnstile, cranes her neck towards the ceiling. She does it just in time to see a small figure on the highest balcony climb from a chair to the top of the Plexiglas barricade and hurl herself out over the atrium. The body, which O'Hara knows is Tomlinson, hits the polished tiles no more than ten feet west of the girl.

For a certain interval, the imploding pulpy splat of that horrible mismatch stuns the smaller scattered sounds into silence. The Asian girl screams again and collapses, and the sound of
her books and bag hitting the floor reverberates through the room. Then all hell breaks loose: multiple alarms sound, security guards race toward the girl and Tomlinson, and from the sides and the balconies the shrieks of onlookers join the din. Two maintenance workers sprint toward Tomlinson and cast a not quite big enough tarp over her crumpled body and the crimson background flowering beneath it. Amid the screams and scrambling and alarms, O'Hara slips back out through the turnstile and revolving doors.

Outside is a riot of emergency response—ambulances, squad cars and NYU rent-a-cops converging on the southeast corner of Washington Square. O'Hara walks to her car, flicks off the light flashing on her dashboard and pulls away from the curb. She takes Mercer across Houston and after several tight cobblestone blocks, pulls over and turns off the lights.

O'Hara knows that the emptiness of the library will work against her because it will sharpen the focus of the handful of witnesses. Of the small number of maintenance workers, security guards and students in the building, at least one will have heard Tomlinson call out to her before she jumped. And even if O'Hara is wrong about that, detectives will soon discover that Tomlinson received a phone call from O'Hara thirty-six minutes before she jumped, and more than likely O'Hara's hasty exit from Bobst will be captured on video. Lowry and Grimes could be knocking on her door in Riverdale in a couple of hours.

To get her brain to slow down enough to think, O'Hara leaves her car and walks the dark streets in a four-block square. She keeps her eyes trained on the greasy cobblestones for rats,
but only encounters European tourists strolling arm in arm. As she inhales the cold air and stuffs the panic back in its box, she gazes at the well-dressed men and women, their faces flushed from after-dinner drinks.

Back in her car, O'Hara calls Lee. At this point, Lee is all O'Hara has left, and even that won't be for long. Once O'Hara's role in tonight's catastrophe hits the airwaves, whatever leverage O'Hara has over Lee will evaporate. Lee answers on the first ring, and her bright solicitous tone is encouraging. It indicates she's still hoping to cooperate her way out of trouble.

“Evelyn,” says O'Hara with all the casualness she can muster, “have Stubbs, Muster and Delfinger gone out with any of your other girls?”

“Off the top of my head, I can tell you Muster has for sure. Hang on a second, and I'll check the others…. The answer is yes. In fact, I've got an Irish girl named Molly who went out with all three. Pick a spot, and I'll have her meet you there in an hour.”

When Lee hangs up, O'Hara cracks her window and calls Mary Kelly, her third-floor neighbor, who has a key to her place. O'Hara doesn't worry about calling this late because the eighty-five-year-old widow hasn't slept two hours in a row in years.

“Of course I'll take in old Bruns,” says Kelly. “Me and Mister B will have a grand old time.”

“Not too grand, Mary. The last time you took him he turned his nose up at kibble for a month. And no beer in his water bowl. I'm serious.”

“Don't be a worrywart, Darlene. It's not becoming.”

At one in the morning, as promised, a very pretty brunette sticks her head into the Rivington Hotel's second-floor lounge and strides confidently toward O'Hara's corner table. She has the same petite frame as Pena and, dressed in the latest, darkest denim and a vintage shearling coat, looks as chic as any of the hotel's guests. “Lovely choice,” says Molly with a generous dollop of brogue. “Best of all, I've never worked here.”

“When Lee said Irish,” says O'Hara, “I thought she meant Brooklyn Irish like me.”

“Not a genuine mick from Killarney.”

“Bay Ridge more likely.”

“Well, I've been here three years now. I'd take the accent with a grain of salt if I were you.”

O'Hara orders a couple of Irish whiskeys and asks Molly what she remembers about Stubbs, Delfinger and Muster.

“Muster is a proper shit. Quite gorgeous, though, with his bespoke suits and shirts and every hair carefully out of place. Never been to his apartment. I used to straddle him in his office on his midcentury modern desk chair, while he chatted with clients on speakerphone, and his assistant worked next door, completely aware of what was going on, which was half the point, I take it. Until he was done, which was quite quickly, he barely acknowledged I was there, then pointed to a beautiful envelope on the corner of his desk. Elegant handwriting, I'll say that, particularly for a man.”

“And Delfinger?”

“Very different, but worse in a way. Acting all guilty and
neurotic and Woody Allen about what was going on. Do it or don't, but spare us the drama, thank you.”

“And how about everyone's favorite anchorman, Hank Stubbs?”

“He did have quite an anchor actually.”

“Really, it's not a myth?”

“What they say about TV newsreaders? Absolutely not. But I felt quite badly for Mr. Stubbs. He may be the loneliest person I've ever met. For someone in my business, that's saying something.”

“Anything scary about any of them?”

“Not really. They were more scared of me. That's almost always the case.”

Molly's observations ring true, but O'Hara is less interested in the johns than in Lee. “Lee told me that Pena went out once with all three men and then disappeared,” says O'Hara. “Do you think Lee suspected that Pena had taken her clients private?”

“Three dates and out, wouldn't you? Poaching, we call it.”

“Was Lee concerned about poaching?”

“Massively. Do you know how Pena's body was mutilated?”

“Why?”

“Right after I joined Aphrodite, Lee sent me a loathsome picture of a girl she claimed to have caught poaching.”

“Still have it?”

“No, but I'll never forget it. It was of a white girl, early twenties, and someone had gone to work on her face with a box cutter. There was cuts from her forehead to her chin and
hundreds of black stitches to close them. Amazing she didn't bleed to death. And in the center of it all, her dead, drugged-out eyes. It was highly effective. Any temptation I might have had for cutting out Miss Lee was gone forever.”

The Rivington Hotel is only three blocks from eeL. At two in the morning, the metal grate is down and Lee's number gets a recording: “Congratulations. You're either very smart or very lucky because you've found your way to Aphrodite, the city's most discriminating service for the most discriminating tastes.” O'Hara grabs a lid off a nearby garbage can and walks back to the storefront. She clangs it against the grating, until Lee, wearing a headset, pulls it up over the window and opens the front door.

“What did Molly tell you?”

Ignoring her, O'Hara pulls down the grate and shoves Lee into the tiny office at the back of the store.

“Close that,” says O'Hara, pointing to her computer.

“What is it? What did she say?”

“Was Pena poaching?”

“Poaching?”

O'Hara opens her coat so Lee can see the handle of her gun.

“No. She wasn't.”

“Then what were you doing at Privilege?”

“Trying to get her to come back.”

“By stalking her? Bullshit.”

“Look, maybe she was poaching,” says Lee, scared. “How could I know for sure?”

“You ever threaten your girls about poaching?”

“No.”

“You don't send them a photograph of a disfigured girl?”

Lee's face takes on a strange expression, and her head collapses into her hands. “You want to see the picture, I'll show it to you. I need to turn the computer back on.”

Soon the picture Molly described so accurately fills the screen of Lee's laptop. The girl's face was even more carved up than Pena's.

“Was this it?” asks Lee. As O'Hara nods yes, her stomach turns. “So this really scared Molly? I'm amazed.”

As O'Hara looks over her shoulder, Lee scrolls to the top of the page and stops on the name of the Web site: rickyshalloweenmakeup.com.

“Turkey on a Kaiser roll,” says O'Hara. The swarthy, hollow-eyed man behind the counter listens with the kind of tender smile found at that hour only on someone who reached adulthood in another country. While he assembles her sandwich, O'Hara surveys the refrigerated offerings in the rear, which include a shelf packed with yellow-, lime- and coral-colored waters named “serenity,” “recovery” and “energy.” After the night's debacles, O'Hara could use vats of all three but opts instead for a six-pack of amber-tinted stress water called Amstel Light. At the counter, she adds two large coffees, then lugs her 3:00 a.m. supper to the car. She eats in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. The sandwich, cold air and coffees will help keep her working. The beers are for later to sleep.

Where she will happen to sleep remains to be decided. Although she would never admit it, the Rivington Hotel is growing on her rapidly. She tries to rationalize this choice by telling herself the how safe it is, since the odds of anyone looking for her there are pretty much zero. Unfortunately, so is the chance of her being able to afford it, but she calls anyway out of morbid curiosity. “Our junior suite starts at $515 a night,”
says a man, who otherwise sounds quite reasonable. “That's a little more than I wanted to spend,” says O'Hara, before washing down the last of her sandwich with a gulp of burned coffee. “I could talk to my manager. Perhaps, we could do a bit better. It is three in the morning, after all.”

“Please don't bother.”

O'Hara remembers Hotel Suites on Rivington, but she also remembers the aroma of breakfast curry in the manager's office. Then thankfully she recalls the anomalous little Howard Johnson's a couple of blocks north on Houston. She parks the Jetta on a Fifth Street block reserved for cops working out of the Nine, figuring that no one in that precinct would recognize her car and no one else would look for it on a street lined with police cars. At 4:15, she signs for a room at the Howard Johnson Express Inn ($180 a night) and ten minutes later, lets herself into a freezing third-floor double. The room reeks of stale smoke. She has traded the smell of curry for cigarettes.

With Tomlinson dead, and Lee a dead end, O'Hara is essentially starting over. And her case file is on her kitchen table back in Riverdale. All she has to generate new leads is her memory, a six-pack and the rapidly diminishing effect of two large coffees. For a couple of minutes she leans against the brown headboard, sick with panic. Then she gets up and moves to the desk, slides open the drawer and pulls out the single complimentary piece of hotel stationery and the skinny white HoJo's pen, and begins to put together a timeline of Pena's last day. Working slowly and steadily, she fills the page with eight entries, each surrounded by an inch or so of empty space.

• 1. 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.: Pena with McLain at 78 Orchard Street.
  
• 2. 8:30 p.m.: P. leaves the apartment.
  
• 3. 10:21 p.m.: P. uses her Amex card to buy two CDs at Tower Records at the corner of Broadway and Fourth.
  
• 4. 10:30 p.m.: P. meets Chestnut, Case and Singh on Rivington, between Bowery and Chrystie.
  
• 5. 2:30 a.m.: Chestnut, Case and Singh leave.
  
• 6. 3:30 a.m.: P. leaves alone, walking east on Rivington. Ten feet north of the corner of Chrystie and Rivington, P. is struck from behind and dragged into the Atelier construction site. For approximately ninety minutes, she is tortured and raped. Estimated time of death—5:10 a.m.
  
• 7. 6:00 a.m. (approx.): P.'s body, wrapped in two shower curtains, is dragged out of the building, loaded into a vehicle and dumped in East River Park.
  
• 8. 11/28/05—12:45 a.m.: P.'s body is found in the park in a closed-down men's bathroom.
  

As burned out as O'Hara is by her endless night, it takes her more than half an hour to create the timeline. When she's done, she takes it, along with her six-pack, and stretches out on the bed, where she reads through it slowly again and again. On the fourth reading, she stops at the sixth entry and underlines the phrase “Ten feet north.” Exhaustion, aided by beers one through five, has shrunk the space between her eyelids to a slit. Before they close entirely, she jots “one hour and fifty-one minutes” at the bottom of the page. Then she drains her last beer and carefully places it back in the carton with the other empties.