Shadows Still Remain (4 page)

Krekorian lives twenty miles up the Palisades in the Rockland County town of New City, or as he likes to call it, Jew City. He picks up O'Hara on his way in, and they get to Freemans at 2:30 p.m., several hours before it's due to open. Although O'Hara finds the place a lot easier to take empty, the daylight isn't kind to the decor and reveals how little money was spent to achieve its faux-antique effects. The oil-stained mirrors and dusty paintings that at night suggested the lodgings and funky heirlooms of a hard-partying disinherited count look like sidewalk trash during the day, and the animal heads on the walls look like roadkill.

“Two things you can't avoid, Dar,” says Krekorian, nodding at a glassy-eyed elk.

“Death and taxidermy.”

“I guess someone forgot to tell Wesley Snipes.”

They sit at the bar and sip their coffee, while in the open kitchen a line chef sautées onions and a busboy pulls oversized plates from a dishwasher. Over the next hour, the waitresses and other kitchen staff trickle in, the employees getting prettier and whiter the closer they get to the customers. The
maître d' arrives, sporting a natty tweed blazer a couple of sizes too small, and soon after the weekday bartender, Billy Conway. “She was too pretty not to remember,” says Conway, who actually looks like a bartender, with the thick shoulders and forearms of an ex-jock. “She and her friends had a couple spots at the bar. After they left, she moved to a table and stuck it out by herself to the bitter end.”

“When was that?” asks O'Hara.

“About three-thirty. Because of Thanksgiving, we closed a little early.”

“She leave alone?”

“Yeah.”

“No one followed her out?”

“There was no one left to follow her. She was the last one here.”

“She talk to anyone beside her friends?” asks Krekorian.

“Right after her friends left, a guy came over and tried to chat her up, but got cut off at the knees.”

“You ever see him here before?”

“First time. About five feet ten, bad skin, long hair, at least fifty. One of those ugly Euro guys some girls can't get enough of.”

“Little old for this place, isn't he?”

“Yeah, but we get a couple trawlers just like him every night.
Polanskis
we call them.”

“Speaking of age,” says O'Hara, “all four of those girls were under twenty-one.”

“They had IDs; I looked at them myself.”

“You should have looked harder. Polanski, how'd he take getting shot down?”

“Quite well. I don't think he was going to leave the country. Besides, she did it so fast, it was like laser surgery. If I wasn't right in front of them pulling a draft, I wouldn't have noticed. He finished his drink, put down a generous tip and left. Paid cash, or I'd look for the receipt. Then she took her Jack and Coke and sat down at that table.”

“You remember every drink you pour four days later?” asks O'Hara.

“The reason I remember is because she and her friends had been ordering one labor intensive cocktail after another, stuff that's a pain in the ass to make. As soon as they left, she switched to something simple. I was relieved. The other reason I remember is because it confirmed something I already thought, which is that she didn't fit in with her friends. They seemed like brats. She didn't.”

“Anything else stand out about the night?”

“How about a beautiful girl, the night before Thanksgiving, closing down a place alone. Isn't that weird enough? And it wasn't like she was drinking herself blotto. It was more like she had nowhere to go.”

O'Hara takes Conway's cell number, and she and Krekorian walk back down the alley, where on second viewing even the graffiti looks bogus. Despite being filthy, the piece-of-crap Impala is a welcome sight, probably because it's the only place in the Seven where they feel entirely comfortable. Krekorian starts the car and cranks the heat, and they sit in silence, giving
each other the space to think. A soft rain has begun to fall, and at 4:30 Rivington is already deep in shadows, the last bit of light falling out of the sky like a boxer taking a dive.

“Something's off,” says Krekorian. “Pena tells her girlfriends she wants to stay and check out this hot prospect. Then, the minute he comes over, she shoots him down.”

“I hate to be the one to break it to you, K., but a girl can change her mind at any time. Maybe Polanski looked even older up close. Maybe he had a creepy voice. Or worst of all, maybe he smelled bad.”

“According to Conway, she didn't let him get three words out. At three a.m. people aren't that fussy.”

“They are if they look like Pena.”

“Then why didn't she leave? Why'd she stay and order another drink?”

Slushy rain slobbers all over the roof, and O'Hara tracks a fat brown droplet down the windshield. In front of them on the curb, a tall Nordic girl wearing a purple and white NYU windbreaker, maybe a member of Pena's track team, steps up to a light pole and tapes a picture of Pena over the sticker for a band called the Revolutionary Army of California. When the student moves on, Pena's brown eyes stare down at them from the pole. O'Hara thinks of that mangy elk head on the wall.

“I say we have another talk with your buddy McLain,” says Krekorian.

They decide to leave the car where it's parked and walk to Pena's Orchard Street apartment, O'Hara glancing at her Casio so she can time the trip and see how long it might have taken McLain to get back and forth from Freemans. At 5:03, the sun's gone and few lights have been turned on to replace it, and when they reach Chrystie, the steel skeleton of a condo in progress called the Atelier looms behind them. To the east, all is black, as if the night had taken the old neighborhood by surprise.

They cross dark, skinny Rivington Park between a rubber-coated jungle gym and an overgrown garden, the damp air smelling of night and greasy egg rolls. Then two more dark blocks to Allen, past a Chinese nursing home and a boarded-up synagogue whose windows are shaped like the tablets Moses, the first cop, brought down from the mountain. The synagogue can't be more than a hundred years old, but here, where a century is as good as a millennium, it's an ancient ruin.

On Orchard, lights have been strung overhead to announce the start of the Christmas shopping season. As O'Hara and Krekorian take it south, the Indian owners in the doorways whisper “very good price” and draw their attention to the
racks of seventy-nine-dollar leather coats lined up on the curb. Even ten years ago this neighborhood was filled with bargains, its small narrow stores so stuffed with inexpensive merchandise it poured out onto the streets. These two blocks of Orchard between Rivington and Delancey are all that's left, an anomaly in a neighborhood whose only purpose is to provide a backdrop of authenticity for fake dive bars, pricey restaurants and whitewashed boutiques.

Seventy-eight Orchard is halfway between Broome and Grand, on the east side of the block. Less then eight minutes after leaving their car, they step into a vestibule papered with Chinese menus and hike the old tiled staircase, the marble so worn it looks like soft dough.

The door to apartment 5B is unlocked and slightly ajar. When they knock and step inside, McLain looks up at them from a tiny couch. He has a paper cup in his hand, half a bottle of Jack between his hightops, and the room reeks of pot. The rich bouquet reminds O'Hara of the fireman, and although in weaker moments she still feels pangs for the treacherous stoner, she also misses the pot. For some unfair reason, the NYPD routinely tests for marijuana and the FDNY almost never does, so maybe she and the fireman were doomed from the beginning.

“Throwing yourself a party?” asks Krekorian.

“No,” says McLain. “Just getting wasted.”

“How long you been at it?”

“What day is it?”

“Monday, Chief.”

“A while.”

“Is there a bed in this place?”

“I'm sitting on it.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“I don't.”

“When you did?”

McLain nods at the purple sleeping bag on the floor.

“Your old girlfriend slept on the couch, and you slept beside her on the floor? That sounds like fun. And you did that for almost a month?”

“It's her place. She didn't have to let me stay at all.”

“She ever bring home guys?”

“Twice.”

“She make you watch?”

“She called from the street. I took a walk.”

“An eight-hour walk?”

“Went down to Battery Park and watched the sun come up. I recommend it. It clears the head.”

“Ever occur to you that your old girlfriend was trying to tell you something? Rub your nose in it so bad, you'd take the hint and leave on your own?”

“It's possible. But I don't think so. She was looking forward to spending Thanksgiving together as much as me.”

“So that was the fantasy? You roast a nice turkey, and she realizes what a mistake she's been making.”

“Basically.”

On the way up the stairs, the two agreed that Krekorian would ask the questions and O'Hara would look around, but
McLain's responses are so guileless, Krekorian can't get any traction, and the place is so small and sparsely furnished, there's very little for O'Hara to look at. Against the wall behind McLain is a small table with two chairs, a dresser and a column of textbooks, but except for the iPod dock on the table and a small pile of wadded-up bills on the dresser, there's not a single personal effect. It looks like Pena moved in over the weekend, not four months ago. More troubling to O'Hara, however, is the fact that there's no trace of McLain's Thanksgiving feast.

“David,” asks O'Hara, “you ate the turkey yourself?”

“Too depressing. I threw it out.”

“How about the pots and pans?”

“I washed them.”

“David, I need a list of everything you bought that night at the grocery store.”

McLain slowly stands, toppling his bottle of Jack with his right sneaker, and at the same time that he reaches under the cushion of the couch and pulls out a scrunched-up menu like those all over the vestibule, he catches and rights the bottle with his left sneaker. This feat of stoned and drunken athleticism that impresses even Krekorian, a former hard-partying college point guard. The menu is from Empire Szechuan on Delancey, and running down the right side is McLain's twenty-one-item list in small precise green letters.

“Keep it,” says McLain.

“You remember the total?”

“$119.57,” says McLain, refilling his Dixie cup.

“Got a pretty good memory,” says O'Hara.

McLain gives O'Hara permission to look into the barely filled closets and drawers, but they are no more revealing than the blank walls and furniture tops. The only thing of interest, at least to Krekorian, is a Nike sneaker box that Krekorian pulls out from under the couch. When he brings it to O'Hara in the bathroom, he dramatically opens the lid on two vibrators, a dildo and other novelty items.

“What's the big deal?” says O'Hara. “A girl's got to have her toys. If something were to happen to me, I'd appreciate it if you'd go to my place and throw out the box under my bed.”

O'Hara has no idea why she said that. She doesn't have a dildo under her bed or anywhere else, but Krekorian's junior-high leering, just like the tone of some of the newspaper stories, ticks her off and provokes a knee-jerk protective response. Those stories seem particularly unfair now that it looks like the only reason Pena was stalling at the bar was that she didn't have the heart to face her puppy dog old boyfriend. Even after they leave McLain and hump down the stairs, O'Hara stays on Krekorian's case about it. “The way you showed me that box was classic. It's like you're fourteen.”

“That's not fair, Dar. I was just surprised Nike made a butt plug is all. Who do you think they're going to get to endorse it?”

“Callahan,” says O'Hara. “This is Sergeant Callahan from NYPD, and I'm here to tell you about a remarkable new product that changed my life.”

Outside, the lights have come on and the slushy rain has turned to light snow, and in the soft light the profiles of the narrow streets, with their tenements and synagogues, can't
look much different than they did a hundred years ago. A large pack of NYU students have walked down from the campus and poured into the neighborhood to pass out pictures of their missing classmate, and in their straightforward parkas and hiking boots, they resemble missionaries.

O'Hara and Krekorian walk back through Rivington Park. This time O'Hara notices the crude sculptures rearing up in the weeds like downtown scarecrows, and when they get back to the Impala, O'Hara sees that Freemans has spawned a retail outlet, located at the mouth of the alley, called Freemans Sporting Club. The window is dressed with the same kind of old-timey props as the bar, and in the corner a sign reads,
TAILORED CLOTHING
,
BARBERSHOP AND SUTLERY
.

What the fuck,
thinks O'Hara. A condo called the
Atelier
. A store that sells
sutlery
. O'Hara has worked in the precinct for five years, but take away the projects on the perimeter and she could be in a foreign country.

Three hours later, just before midnight, O'Hara and Krekorian watch through the falling snow as hundreds of NYU students and faculty crowd under the redbrick overhang in front of Bobst Library. While more students stream in from all directions, those in front, closest to the glass doors, grab a lit candle off a long table and file into the southeast corner of Washington Square. The column moves silently past the leafless trees and white-limned statue of Garibaldi, and when a thousand candlelit faces surround the recessed circle at the center of the stone plaza, O'Hara and Krekorian leave their car to stand at the rear of the crowd.

Unlike the Lower East Side, Washington Square doesn't seem foreign to O'Hara at all. As high school freshmen, O'Hara and her best friend, Leslie Meehan, would often skip school and catch a train into big bad Manhattan. A sizable chunk of those happy truant days was idled away in this very park, drinking Bud out of paper bags and making out with older boys with sideburns and brave smiles. The first time she let a boy slip a hand between her legs was in the grass at the edge of the square, although when she thought back on it, it
was probably she who took his hand and guided it there. Sex is the one realm in which she felt at ease from the very beginning, maybe because with your clothes off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O'Hara isn't so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post-vigil, it's the prospect of death, not sex, that's brought them into the park tonight.

At the center of the circle are five stone mounds often commandeered by tattooed jugglers, fire eaters and street comedians. When the crowd settles, some twenty students separate themselves from the pack, divide into groups of three and four, and climb onto the elevated platforms. Then a female student, small and blond, wearing a camel-hair coat, steps out from the crowd to face them. When she throws her arms into the air, twenty voices rise into the snow-filled night, and as O'Hara follows them upward, she looks north over the scaled-down Arc de Triomphe and elegant town houses just north of the park to the office towers of Midtown, where these same kids will soon be fighting hand to hand, cubicle to cubicle. In the middle of the dirge, which O'Hara is pretty sure is in Latin, her cell goes off.

“Darlene,” says George Loomis, another detective in the Seven, “some skell in East River Park just stumbled on a body by the tennis courts. Me and Navarro are on our way over, but thought you'd want to know. The description sounds a lot like your girl.”