Shadows Still Remain (20 page)

To get out of the neighborhood without a ruckus, O'Hara and Krekorian don't cuff Entonces until they get her in the backseat, and Krekorian doesn't hit the siren until they're off Fort Washington Avenue and swooping down through the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. On the West Side Highway, Krekorian grabs the empty right lane and stays on it, clocking ninety as O'Hara looks out over the guardrail at the black ice bobbing in the lethal water and Jersey City and Hoboken loitering on the far bank. At Fiftieth, the siren clears a lane through the crosstown traffic, and in minutes Krekorian pulls up sharply in front of 479 Lexington. O'Hara offers to sit in the car with Entonces, but Krekorian waves her off. “No need to cheat yourself, Dar,” he says. “With what's on that on video, Delfinger won't be crawling through any loopholes.”

O'Hara rides the elevator thirty-seven floors to the offices of Kane, Lubell, Falco and Ritter, where business is brisk and the meter is running. A large pretty black woman in a headset looks askance at O'Hara from behind a mahogany bunker.

“I need to see Daniel Delfinger,” says O'Hara. “Immediately.”

“I'm afraid that's not possible. He's with clients.” But forty-three thousand dollars per year buys only so much loyalty, and when O'Hara flashes her gold shield, the receptionist's eyes light up.

“Let's go,” says O'Hara.

Hips swaying and heels clicking, the receptionist leads O'Hara through a frosted-glass door and down a short corridor. She stops in front of the closed door of conference room 3. “Knock and step inside,” says O'Hara. “I'll be right behind you. And don't leave until I do.” The door opens on a long, very expensive-looking table around which a thick white document is being giddily passed from hand to hand like a big fat blunt. A petite smartly dressed brown-haired woman has just delivered a financial quip that plays off the heady tension of the imminent closing, and the tittering gradually comes to a stop as the room processes the unscripted intrusion.

“Give me two minutes to take care of this,” says Delfinger, jumping out of his chair. “I'll be right back.”

“Unlikely,” says O'Hara. She steps forward to meet him in the middle of the room and shoves him hard facedown on the table.

Initially, Delfinger's clients are nearly as shocked as he is. But they get over it. As O'Hara cuffs him and reads him his rights, the clients and receptionist wear the same excited close-lipped smiles. They are far more grateful for the work-place drama than put out by the disruption.

“What are you arresting him for?” asks the brown-haired woman.

“I'll leave that to Danny Boy,” says O'Hara as she pulls him off the table by his pinned wrists. But Delfinger, already damaged beyond repair, is barely capable of making a sound, let alone forming a word.

With the receptionist leading the way like a majorette, O'Hara shoves Delfinger down the hallway and into an elevator. As soon as the doors close, Delfinger's legs slide out from under him. O'Hara bends to his ear, says “Fuck you” and leaves him on the floor. On the thirty-fifth floor, a man in a suit steps halfway into the car, says “Daniel?” and bolts. Two floors below, a messenger shows no such misgivings and steps casually over Delfinger's splayed legs.

When they reach the lobby, O'Hara grabs one of Delfinger's legs and pulls him across the black marble floor on his ass. Just before Delfinger reaches the curb, Krekorian steps through the door, and yanks him to his feet. He throws him in the backseat with Entonces. Then he hits the siren and pushes through the thick Midtown traffic.

After a couple of silent blocks, O'Hara twists in her seat to face the two handcuffed passengers. “I need to apologize to both of you,” says O'Hara. “I got so caught up in the activities of the morning, I forgot to do the introductions. Tida, the man on your left is Daniel Delfinger, but his really close friends call him Danny or Danny Boy or simply refer to him by the initials DB. And, Daniel, the woman on your right is Tida Entonces. If the last name is familiar, it's because she's the mother of your two girlfriends, Consuela and Moreal.”

Delfinger looks at O'Hara in horror, but all he can get out
of his throat is a gurgling noise. By then it doesn't matter, because Entonces is attacking him like a schizo street cat, spitting and biting and scraping his face with the edges of her cuffs. “Why can't folks get along?” asks Krekorian. “Beats me, K.” When Krekorian finally pulls over, Delfinger's glasses are broken and his face is in shreds. Krekorian stops the car and gets in back between the two of them, and O'Hara drives the rest of the way downtown. She gets on and off the FDR and turns onto Pitt Street. Cars and TV vans from half a dozen local networks are double-parked all the way up the hill, and milling in front of the precinct house are some twenty reporters from small papers and radio stations who lacked the clout to get inside.

“K., you make a call while I was dragging down Delfinger?”

“Not me.”

As O'Hara works her way down the street, a piece-of-crap Impala exactly like theirs approaches 19½ Pitt from the opposite direction. When the homicide detective Patrick Lowry climbs out, the locked-out reporters surround his car and besiege him with questions.

“Is McLain your man?” “Have you got a confession?” “Does McLain have an alibi?” O'Hara and Krekorian realize the media crush has nothing to do with them.

With Lowry serving as a 360-pound decoy, O'Hara and Krekorian easily slip Entonces and Delfinger in through the back door. Even inside, the precinct is overwhelmed by reporters. O'Hara and Krekorian are able to get their two suspects
to the fingerprint machine without anyone noticing except the desk sergeant, Kenny Aarons.

“What the hell you doing here, Darlene?” asks Aarons. “I thought you were suspended. We miss you, by the way.”

“Just helping my old partner out on something.”

“And what the fuck might that be?” asks Aarons. He eyes the two perps, one of whom is covered in blood.

“Give us a couple minutes, Kenny,” says Krekorian. “We can't talk right now.”

The new computerized fingerprint machine works only slightly worse than the old one. Despite the fact that Delfinger keeps sliding to the floor and Entonces has to be continually restrained from attacking him, they eventually get them both printed. As they wait for the machine to spit out copies, Krekorian wanders down the hall and sticks his head into the muster room. A podium has been set up in front, and Lowry towers over it, facing the standing-room-only crowd.

“How'd you find the van?” a reporter calls out from the back.

“We got a tip,” says Lowry. “John Q. Public doing his job.”

“Have you charged McLain yet?”

“No. We hope to by the end of the day.”

“Why'd he do it, Detective?”

“Why do people ever do these things?”

“Dewey, I mean Lowry, is making his victory speech,” Krekorian tells O'Hara when he gets back. By now, a couple dozen more scrub reporters have pushed and connived their
way into the precinct. Those who can't get into Lowry's press conference in the muster room are backed up in the corridor. The end of the line is so close to the fingerprint machine that Delfinger is practically bleeding on their cheap suits.

As O'Hara and Krekorian try to figure out the best spot in this bedlam to park their suspects, the familiar figure of Sergeant Callahan pushes toward them through the clogged corridor. Callahan is not as happy to see O'Hara as Aarons. “You picked a hell of a day to come in and play detective again,” he says. “But I don't even know why I'm talking to you, O'Hara. Your career is over.” And then to Krekorian, “This isn't doing yours any good either.”

“Sarge,” says Krekorian, “before you go down in flames with Dewey in there, we got to tell you something.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Dewey is the guy who ran for president against Truman in 1948.”

“I know who Dewey is, you condescending college asshole.”

“This is Tida Entonces,” says Krekorian. “An hour ago we got her taped confession to the murder of Francesca Pena. She killed her because Pena was pimping her eleven- and thirteen-year-old daughters to this piece of shit over here, named Daniel Delfinger.”

“What makes you think she's telling the truth?”

“For starters, she's the one who called in the tip on the van. It wasn't some eagle-eyed civilian like Lowry is telling them. It was her. She got the keys off Pena when she attacked her and knew exactly where the van was parked because she drove it
there. Your choice. Stick with Lowry if you want, but this thing is tighter than a squirrel's ass. And one other thing, Sarge: I'm just an extra pair of hands here. This is all O'Hara, and when these reporters are through with her, she might decide to run for mayor.”

Callahan's skills at police work are limited, but he's not color blind. And right now the sod under his feet looks a lot greener than the crabgrass down the hall. Shoving bodies out the way, Callahan fights back down the hall and into the muster room, where he works his way to the podium.

“NYPD can't be everywhere,” says Lowry, as Callahan whispers in his ear, “but good citizens like the anonymous caller so crucial to this case can be our eyes and ears.”

In the hallway, several reporters at the end of the line overheard Krekorian's discussion with his sergeant. Now it's the small-time print and radio guys, whose audience wasn't big enough to get them past the velvet rope, who are closest to the story. Word of it races back through the line so quickly that even while Lowry stands at the podium, reporters turn their backs on him and rush the back door. In the scramble to locate a small red-haired female detective, few notice Lowry slip out a side door. But it doesn't escape the attention of observant reporters that when O'Hara is finally brought into the room and set up behind the podium, the same man who five minutes earlier stood beaming beside Lowry now stands just as proudly behind his suspended detective.

The cabins are set in a row on the bank of a steep hill. When O'Hara pushes through the door she can smell the damp air coming up from the frozen lake, and the stars and moon are bright enough to read the
Post
, if they let you read the
Post
up here. The thermometer beside the door reads minus seven.

O'Hara negotiates the stairs in her heavy boots and heads to the shed. In the far corner she finds the wheelbarrow, backs it out and with the bent wheel jouncing over rocks and frozen ruts, pushes it up the gravel road. Past the last cabin, the gravel becomes a mud trail, which climbs into dark woods, and a quarter mile later opens into a small clearing, whose missing trees are now a stack of logs covered by a green tarp. This is the part of the procedure O'Hara dreads the most, and to reduce the odds of an unwanted encounter with Mother Nature, she noisily stomps her boots and claps her gloves. Then she whips back the tarp like a magician and quickly fills the wheelbarrow with wood. Back at the cabin, Velma, a lush from the Seventy-third in Brownsville, helps her get the logs up the stairs, and Megan, a methhead from Patchogue, feeds them into the cast-iron stove, pausing at every opportunity to smile long
ingly at O'Hara. O'Hara told her the day she arrived that when it comes to cable, her tastes run to
The Sopranos
, not
The L Word
, but like most guests here Megan is practiced in the art of denial. “You see the flames licking those logs,” she tells O'Hara. “That's how I want to lick you.”

Whatever,
thinks O'Hara. Ignoring her butch admirer, she climbs into her bunk, and reaches for the comfort of her mail. She pulls out a card from the desk sergeant, Kenny Aarons. It's a drawing of a squad car, and beneath it in big uneven letters: “To Dar at the Farm.” The drawing and penmanship are at the level of a modestly talented five-year-old, but the thought of her buddy Aarons putting crayon to paper on her behalf never fails to produce a smile. If she ever makes it back to Bruno and Riverdale, she's going to have it it framed and hang it in her apartment. O'Hara is thinking about exactly where, when a counselor, named Dougherty, sticks his bearded head into the cabin.

“O'Hara,” he says, “you got a call.”

O'Hara layers up again and steps back into the bright cold. The moonlight, this way too fucking serious moonlight, O'Hara thinks, misquoting Bowie, as she trudges past the neighboring cabins with their chimneys pluming gray smoke. Perched on the hilltop is the largest structure in the facility, whose name is Hanover Woods, but is referred to by every cop who gets sent there as the Farm. Careful not to trip over a table or chair, O'Hara walks through the dark cafeteria and the room behind it with the chalkboard where visitors are subjected to group therapy and initiated into the mysteries of the twelve steps. In a smaller room just beyond that, there is a soda machine and a
foosball table and the pay phone. O'Hara picks up the dangling receiver and hears Krekorian on the other end.

“What you up to, K.?”

“Not a whole lot. Sitting in the car with Loomis here, polishing off a slice from Stromboli's.”

“What's on it?”

“Sure you want to know?”

“Not really. Tell me anyway.”

“Peppers, meatballs and onions. And a delicate dusting of oregano.”

“You were right. I didn't want to know.”

Even after the arrest of Entonces and Delfinger and a week of worshipful coverage in the tabloids, O'Hara faced serious disciplinary measures from NYPD for defying her suspension, interfering with an ongoing investigation, and leaving the scene of a crime. The idea of making them go away by checking herself into rehab was actually Maître Dee Dee's, concocted during O'Hara's all-night celebration with Krekorian and Lebowitz at the Empire Diner. “Now that you're a celeb, baby girl, you gots to act like one,” said Dee Dee. “And, besides, from where I'm standing, it wouldn't exactly kill you to go easy on the sauce for a few weeks.”

Having said his piece, Dee Dee returned his attention to doling out and shaking the contents of O'Hara's fifth martini, while O'Hara concentrated on groping Lebowitz beneath the counter, and Lebowitz, who was honest-to-God shitfaced drunk for the second time in his life and grinning like an imbecile, did his best to stay mounted on his stool.

“Jewish boys, Dee Dee,” said O'Hara as she ran her nose over Lebowitz's prominent Adam's apple. “What makes them so hot?”

“You mean aside from their shlongs?”

“Yeah, Dee Dee, aside from that?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard that,” said Lebowitz, clutching the counter with both hands as if he were riding the roller-coaster at Coney Island.

The next morning, reeking persuasively of gin and vermouth, O'Hara walked into the Seven and sat down across from her favorite sergeant, Mike Callahan. “The reckless behavior and insubordination were only symptoms,” she told him straight-faced, her vicious hangover once again contributing much-needed ballast for her shameless bullshit. “The underlying problem that has to be addressed, and the sooner the better, is demon alcohol.”

“The hardest step is admitting you've got a problem,” said Callahan, and although he didn't believe a word O'Hara said, he was more than happy to play the fool. The way the media had been drooling over his renegade detective, NYPD was as anxious as O'Hara to resolve the matter gracefully. Twenty minutes later, Callahan came back with a proposal. If O'Hara agreed to four weeks at an accredited facility on NYPD's dime, her slate would be wiped clean—no suspension, no loss of pay, no lost vacation days. The following afternoon, O'Hara was on a bus to the Poconos.

“I have some news,” says Krekorian as he swallows another bite of his slice.

“Is it good?” asks O'Hara.

“Not good or bad. It just is. Delfinger got murdered at Rikers this afternoon.”

“Didn't those morons have him in protective custody?”

“Yeah—North Infirmary Command—but apparently it wasn't protective enough. An inmate slit his throat on his way back from the yard. He bled out in ninety seconds.”

“A friend of Tida's from the neighborhood?”

“Doesn't look like it. Just some three-time loser already looking at life. Says he did it for the girls. Probably just wanted to feel like a hero. Like Loomis says, Rikers is a self-cleaning oven. And by the way, Loomis sends his regards.”

When O'Hara gets back to her cabin, it's lights out. She climbs into her bunk and stares into the darkness overhead. The prison yard execution of a pedophile shouldn't cost her sleep, particularly after the video she sat through. But it does.

She thinks about Delfinger and Entonces in the backseat that morning and the primal fury with which Entonces attacked him after O'Hara introduced him as the “DB” in Consuela's diary. It reminded her of the time she and Axl watched a bluejay strafe a cat who had wandered too close to her nest. The outsized bird swooped down from the tree and attacked with everything she had: beak, feet and flapping wings.

Looking at Axl that day, O'Hara understood how the mother bird felt, but what O'Hara can't get out of her mind tonight is the look in Delfinger's eyes just before Tida pounced. That and the drowning sounds that came out of his mouth instead of words.