Shadows Still Remain (19 page)

Building 972, on the west side of Second Avenue, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second, is a shitty little tenement sandwiched between two generic Irish pubs. At three in the morning, both are still dispensing desperate cheer, and from across the street, where she has been parked for hours, O'Hara can see down the wooden length of the nearly identical and parallel bars. Every twenty minutes, a skinny old scarecrow takes a break from drinking himself to death to have a smoke. When he flicks his butt north, O'Hara notices the new awning of the candy shop three doors up. Is this, wonders O'Hara, where Pena bought the chocolate malt ball Lebowitz picked out of her teeth?

At three-thirty, a car pulls up behind her. O'Hara walks to the open window and places a hand on Krekorian's blocky shoulder. Krekorian responds with the exasperated look a parent gives a beloved daughter who has just gotten kicked out of her third school in a year. “This is it, Darlene. It ends tonight no matter what.”

“Understood,” says O'Hara. “You get the warrant?”

“What do you think I've been doing—getting a foot mas
sage in Chinatown? I just the left the chambers of Judge Carl Kochanski. I told him we had reason to believe this apartment contained evidence of a murder. At three in the morning, that was good enough for Kochanski. He covers midtown east. If it doesn't pan out, maybe our friends Lowry and Callahan don't ever have to hear about it.”

The two cross the street and step into the cramped vestibule. Take-out menus and business cards for locksmiths are stuffed into the casing for the buzzer. Above it, inside a cracked glass box, the names of tenants are spelled out in white plastic letters. The missing
i
and
g
from Higgins and the
k
from Baginski lay on their backs alongside dead flies and roaches at the bottom of the box. For 4C, there's no name.

O'Hara woke the super three and a half hours ago, just to make sure he was around. Now she does it again. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he emerges from the basement and leads them up carpeted wooden stairs smelling of mold. When they reach 4C, O'Hara hands rubber gloves to the super and Krekorian and pulls on a pair herself.

“Like I told your partner, I haven't been in this apartment since Ivers moved in. Never had any reason to.”

“He goes by Stan Ivers,” O'Hara tells Krekorian. “According to our friend here, he's going through a nasty divorce and got the place so his kids would have somewhere to visit him. He says Ivers pays the rent in cash, six months at a time.”

The super stretches a key from a hernia-inducing ring, turns over two bolts and follows Krekorian and O'Hara into the overheated apartment. In the dark, the radiators hiss like
sprinklers, and O'Hara can smell the countless coats of cheap paint cooking in the damp heat.

Behind them, the super hits a switch, and an overhead light goes on in the tiny shabby kitchen just inside the door to their right. There are no signs of cooking. In the sink are a couple of glasses and a dirty ashtray, on the counter an empty bottle of Cuervo and box of Froot Loops. The only thing in the refrigerator is a month-old carton of Tropicana.

“Don't touch anything,” O'Hara tells the super.

Krekorian turns on another light, and their eyes adjust to the blaze of colors in the living room. The room is small and as shabby as the kitchen, but Delfinger has dropped some cash on a bright green couch with purple pillows and a pink shag rug the same color as the Froot Loops. Behind the couch, three teenybopper posters are taped to the wall. O'Hara watches just enough MTV to know that the girl on the left, a diamond glinting in her navel, is Britney and the girl on the right, also wearing a cut-off T-shirt, her jean skirt unbuttoned to reveal her bikini bottom, is Christina Aguilera, but not quite enough to place the pasty rapper between them. From the baby blue tracksuit, fat Rolex and gold chains, she guesses he's some Eminem wannabe. Then she notices the diamond-encrusted dollar sign lighting up the center of the chains and the
DANNY BOY
written in gold script, and when she looks under the baseball cap sees that the face is twenty years too old for an up-and-coming pop star.

“Recognize him?” asks Krekorian.

“Daniel Delfinger,” says O'Hara, “a forty-three-year-old tax attorney, also apparently known as Danny Boy.”

Like the living room, the bedroom looks directly into the soot-covered wall of the neighboring building, and with all the windows closed tight, the radiator hiss is louder and the paint smell stronger. A flat-screen TV, stereo and a DVD player face a platform bed. The bright green bedspread and stuffed animals, including a nearly lifesize Pink Panther, are reflected in the screen. In the corner stands a tripod and on the night table are a couple cellophane packets from the candy shop. One is empty, the other half filled with green jelly beans.

O'Hara and Krekorian search for the camera that goes with the tripod. They scour the closets, cabinets and drawers, as well as the dirty space beneath every piece of furniture, and soon both are sweating profusely. When there's no place else left to look, O'Hara walks over to the small video player, on the stand beneath the TV, hits
EJECT
, and a small cartridge pops out. “Turn off the lights,” she says. “Maybe we don't need the camera.”

When O'Hara turns on the TV and hits
PLAY
, Consuela's face fills the screen. The high-definition close-up shows the down on her cheeks and neck, along with every pre-adolescent blemish. When the lens pulls back, Consuela bounces on the bed on her knees. Like her pop heroes, she wears a cut-off T-shirt and the same low-riding jeans she had on in her mother's apartment two days ago. The stuffed dinosaur and kangaroo sitting behind her against the headboard look like spectators.

“Show us your new tattoo, Con,” says the off-screen adult voice of Daniel Delfinger. Consuela stops bouncing and turns around to let the camera zoom in on the patch of red skin
just above her jeans. Inside it is a crude amateurish copy of the tattoo Francesca got in Williamsburg. “Does it still hurt, baby?” asks Delfinger.

“A little,” says Consuela. Her high-pitched voice sounds even younger than eleven.

“What do the letters stand for?” asks Delfinger, a lawyer leading a witness.

Consuela twists her shoulders until she almost faces the camera and reaches her left arm around her waist. Then she points a chipped red fingernail at the
T
, the first of the six letters inside the heart, and says, “This.” Slowly moving her finger from
H
to
B
to
D
and
B
, she says, “Hynie…Belongs…to…Danny…Boy.”

“Is it true,” asks Delfinger with a nasal trill, “what the tattoo says?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know?”

“Because it is.”

“Are you ready to prove it?”

Consuela turns away from the camera, and an off-screen female voice very much like hers says, “It's OK.” When Delfinger's naked body steps into the frame, O'Hara realizes the voice is Moreal's and that she is the one aiming the camera.

It takes twenty-three minutes for the video to play out, but the heat and the smell and knowing that they're standing in the room where the film was made make it feel many times longer. O'Hara makes it to the end by concentrating on her timeline on that piece of HoJo stationery, running it through
her mind again and again like a voice-over as she finally fills in the rest of those missing one hundred eleven minutes.

“Eight-thirty p.m.,” says O'Hara to herself, “Pena leaves McLain at her apartment and walks north up Orchard. She passes Joe's Drapery and Adrienne's Bridal Shop, turns west on Houston in front of American Apparel and walks down the stairs into the Second Avenue subway stop. She catches an F train to Thirty-fourth Street, runs to Penn Station and catches a 1 train uptown. At 9:06, she gets off at Broadway and 168th Street. Eight minutes later, she, Moreal and Consuela enter the 168th Street station on the downtown side, and just over an hour later Pena buys two CDs at Tower Records at Broadway and East Fourth. But first she delivers her two little sisters to 972 Second Avenue. At 10:30 Pena meets her girlfriends at Freemans, and when they leave, she stays. Not, like she tells them, because she wants to hook up or because she's avoiding her old boyfriend, but because she's waiting until it's time to pick up her girls.”

As O'Hara fills in the last empty spaces in her timeline, something else occurs to her. When Pena was stripping and hooking, what she was really doing was trawling for johns for Consuela and Moreal. If the bent was there, one date was enough for her little-girl routine to draw it out. “Mister, I see you like to pretend you're doing little girls. How would you like to do the real thing?”

The video answers a lot of questions, but not who killed Pena. According to the time code in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen, the killer couldn't have been Delfinger. He was here doing something else.

Eventually, techs arrive to secure the crime scene. They replace the locks on Delfinger's door and add new keyed ones to the six wall-facing windows. It's seven in the morning before O'Hara and Krekorian can leave. By then the sun is halfway up on a hopeless December Friday. At the corner of Fifty-second and Second, the newspaper vending machines have been restocked, and dueling covers trumpet McLain's arrest.
MAN WITH A VAN
, shouts the
Daily News.
HELL ON WHEELS
, the
Post
shouts back. But pedestrians hustle by obliviously. O'Hara feels as if the city slipped overnight into a parallel universe—one that is operating on lousy information and false hope.

O'Hara and Krekorian climb into their Impala and enter the park through Central Park South, grateful that the bitter cold has kept joggers to a minimum. North of the reservoir, Krekorian pulls off the road onto the muddy grass and rolls down his window.

“You were looking pretty Irish in there,” says O'Hara.

“Was I? Trees look a lot better to me than people right now.”

“They don't fuck up kids.”

Krekorian looks over the tops of the trees and inhales the
cold park air through his nose, trying with each breath to undo the time in Delfinger's apartment. “There's something I never told you about my mom,” he says. “She was a junkie too. Not a street junkie like the mother of those two girls, but a proper upper-middle-class, suburban junkie.

“The worst part,” continues Krekorian, “was I was her
favorite.
That meant I was the one who got to go to her long list of quack doctors and plead for more quaaludes and vicodin. I used to pick up the prescriptions on the way back from basketball practice. And I was the one who got to hear about what a horrible person and loser my old man was and how she should have married any of the dozens of other better men who had also wanted her. It's amazing I didn't become a fag.”

“You became a cop instead,” says O'Hara. “Same difference.”

“I figured if an Armenian American housewife from Montclair can turn herself into a junkie, why can't I become a cop?”

From the park, they drive to a diner on 102nd and Broadway, where they get a booth by the window and drink coffee until the Radio Shack across the street opens. When it does, O'Hara buys a cheap tape recorder, some batteries and three ninety-minute tapes for forty-three dollars. “Save the receipt,” says Krekorian, before he turns on the flasher and they race up Broadway to Washington Heights.

This time, Consuela and Moreal are at school, and Entonces looks almost relieved to see them. With O'Hara suspended, Krekorian is the one who tells her she is under arrest for the murder of Francesca Pena. When he reads her her rights, she waves them away with the back of her hand, and makes no ob
jection when O'Hara, hoping to God the thing works, sets up the tape recorder on the kitchen table. No physical evidence connects Entonces to the crime, and with all the trouble she's in, O'Hara knows her only chance is to bring this in wrapped up like a Christmas present.

“This is Detective Krekorian, and I'm here with Detective Darlene O'Hara and Tida Entonces, who has just been arrested for the murder of Francesca Pena. Entonces has waived her right to an attorney and is talking to us in the kitchen of her apartment at 251 Fort Washington Avenue.”

O'Hara whispers a question into her partner's ear, and Krekorian redirects it to Entonces. “Tida, when did you discover what Pena was doing with Consuela and Moreal?”

“Five hours before I killed her,” says Entonces, as if already looking back at her life from a great distance. “Francesca had taken the girls for one of their special sleepovers. All that afternoon, before Francesca picked them up, the girls acted nervous and squirrelly. They talked to each other in code, and Moreal teased her younger sister about something scary that was going to happen to her. When I asked about it, they giggled and made faces, and I put it out of my mind. I figured nothing bad could happen to them if they were with Francesca.

“I went to sleep early, but after less than an hour, I sat up in a panic. Something terrible was happening. I could feel it. There's a clock beside my bed. It was 11:05. I went into the girls' room and looked through their drawers until I found the diary I bought for Consuela.”

“You still have it?” asks Krekorian.

“Yes. Can I go get it?”

“Witness requests permission to get a diary,” says Krekorian into the machine. “Detective Krekorian accompanies her as she retrieves it.”

Entonces returns, clutching a small white dime-store diary. Embossed on the cover in gold letters is
MY JOURNEY
. Entonces sits down and flips some pages, stops and reads: “Had fun with M and F and DB. I can't believe DB is forty-three. He sure doesn't act it.”

Entonces turns a page, and when she reads again, O'Hara tries not to see her daughter and Delfinger on the flat screen. “Mister Dinosaur is so cute. I'm so lucky. DB buys us nice things.”

“I thought the presents came from Pena,” says Entonces, then turns a couple of pages and reads again.

“DB says I'm his favorite. He likes me even more than M but says the other things I do aren't enough anymore. I'm scared, but Moreal says it only hurts a little.”

“Why didn't you call the police?” asks Krekorian.

“Then I lose the girls forever,” says Entonces, looking away. “Children's Services would blame me, and they would be right. I OD'd three times. Why didn't I die? My girls would have been better off. Now they have nothing. Now they
are
nothing.”

“How about the tattoos?” asks Krekorian for O'Hara. “What did you think about them?”

“Francesca, Moreal and Consuela, they all got the same one, so I thought it was a good thing. In the back of my mind, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Francesca to
get tired of us and move on. The tattoos, I hoped, meant that wouldn't happen. They'd be sisters forever, no matter what.”

“What did you think the tattoos meant?”

“Love. Money. Happiness. All the good things.”

“What did you do after you read the diary, Tida?”

“I called Pena and told her I knew what was happening. She told me to meet her at a bar on Rivington. I took a subway downtown, but I didn't go in. I waited outside. When she left I followed her. At the corner, she got sick. I came up from behind and hit her with a hammer.”

“You brought a hammer with you?”

“I brought a lot of stuff,” says Entonces with something close to a smile.

“You planned what you were going to do before you got downtown?”

“Mostly, but some things I added while I waited. It was fifteen degrees that night and I was out there for a long time, but I never got cold. There was a construction site around the corner with plywood around it; I opened up a space between two sheets with the other side of the hammer, pulled her inside and dragged her to the back. I taped her mouth, tied her hands and feet and cut off her clothes. They even had a light, so I could see what I was doing. The best part was when she opened her eyes and realized that no one was going to help her.”

“You raped her with the hammer?”

“With a broomstick I found lying around. Just like the cops did to Louima. It was the first thing I did. I wanted her to know what it felt like.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Burned it. In the incinerator down the hall.”

“How about the man? Why didn't you kill him?”

“All I had were his initials, DB. I had to find out who he was, where he worked. Pena told me all that, and I was still waiting for my chance. But if it had to be only one, I'm glad it was her. She found us. Acted like she was saving us, then she turned my girls into whores.”

“How long did you torture her?”

“A long time. When she stopped breathing, I was angry.”

O'Hara takes out her Radio Shack receipt, writes “phone #?” and slides it over to Krekorian.

“Tida,” says Krekorian, “we checked Pena's cell phone records. There's no call on it from you.”

“She had two phones,” says Entonces. “a nice orange T-Mobile and a prepaid one like they sell in my neighborhood. I found them both along with two CDs and the keys to her boyfriend's van when I went through her bag. I kept the CDs for the girls and threw the phones in the sewer.”

“We only found one of them,” says Krekorian. “The T-Mobile.”

“Look again.”

“You used the van to move the body?”

“She told me he always parked it near Tompkins Square and what it looked like, and I found it in less than five minutes. It was like God was helping me, and it was all meant to happen. I knew about that park by the river and that closed-down bathroom from when I was using. By the time I got home the girls
were already there in bed. I knew it was DB, who must have panicked when Francesca didn't show up, and put them in a cab. But I acted like I didn't know. I tried to act like I didn't know anything. That afternoon, I dropped the van in long-term parking at Newark Airport and caught a bus back to the city.”

“Were you the one who called in the tip?”

“I had to. Your partner over there was getting too close.”

“Tida,” says Krekorian. “We got to go downtown now.”

“Who's going to be here when my girls come home? Who's going to be here for my babies?”