Shadows Still Remain (9 page)

New York Hardcore Tattoos and Piercing is bowling-lane tight and deep, and set up like an old barbershop. When O'Hara steps in at 9:00 p.m., prime time for a tattoo parlor, the only people in the mirror-facing chairs are the three tattooed employees. At the front of the shop, O'Hara scans a shelf of hardcore magazines and CDs by bands called Turnpike Wrecks, Last Call Brawl and Heartfelt Discord. Then she thumbs through the stockpile of designs, set out row by row on large laminated sheets, attached to the wall by a hinge.

The top sheet reminds O'Hara of those first cave drawings. Every creature in the food chain rates a design, although in the tattoo version a disproportionate number are rendered with a stogie jutting from the corner of their mouth. Others celebrate places of origin (Ireland, Puerto Rico) or institutions (the U.S. Marine Corps, Mom), but mostly they name the wearer's poison, be it cheap liquor, hard drugs or bad girls. And bad girls are overrepresented. A saucy vixen wearing fishnets, horns and a long red tail winks over her shoulder from the center of a page and nearby an angelic-looking rival dangles the key to the lock between her legs. As O'Hara
jumps from a page celebrating noir chicks to one lined with gun barrels pluming smoke and knives dripping blood, she realizes that what she's really looking at is police work, or at least the incendiary crap that gets the ball rolling rapidly in that direction.

The detail, wit and imagination of many of the designs make O'Hara smile, and one in particular makes her laugh out loud, because it reminds her of that loquacious little Irishman Russ Dineen. It's a tat of the Grim Reaper, and obviously this one works the projects, because he's packing a .45 along with his scythe. To Dineen, who regaled O'Hara with tales of corpses frozen in the act of hiding their faces, or fighting off phantom intruders, the Reaper is just one more municipal grunt riding elevators and knocking on doors, and as real as the Con Ed meter man.

Eventually, a tattoo artist named Vincent gets off his ass and approaches O'Hara from behind. “Whatever you pick, you can't go wrong,” he says. “On redheads the colors explode.”

“Not quite there yet,” replies O'Hara. “but I'm tempted. No shit.” Instead of a wrinkled photo of a rose or butterfly, she pulls out her shield and a picture of Pena. She explains the reason for her visit.

“The girl's name was Francesca Pena. She was murdered last week, and we're quite sure the person who killed her cut a small tattoo out of her lower back. She lived around the corner from here, so maybe she had it done here. It would have been just over two months ago. The end of September.”

Vincent checks his records and comes back shaking his
head. “We only did eleven tats the whole month. Even if she used another name, a pretty girl like her, one of us would remember her.”

O'Hara isn't surprised business is slow at Hardcore. On her way back from Rikers, she stopped at her place and printed out the names of thirty-seven tattoo parlors between Union Square and Canal Street, and can't believe there's enough empty epidermis left to go around. Fanning out from Pena's Orchard Street address, O'Hara spends the rest of the night working through her list. She goes from tiny setups in the back of smoke shops on St. Marks to high-tech operations as chilly and antiseptic as operating rooms, but most fall somewhere between an all-night Laundromat and a dive bar. O'Hara is making stops well past midnight, and around 2:30 a.m., when the Manhattan parlors stop answering their phones, she crosses from Chinatown into Brooklyn and heads for Williamsburg.

Bedford Avenue is teeming, but the windy blocks by the river are empty. On a desolate warehouse-filled stretch of Wythe, above a basement entrance, O'Hara spots the skull, glowing orange like a jack-o'-lantern, and dangling from a creaking chain. Above it, swinging in the wind, is the crude wood sign for Bad Idea Tattoos.

Inside, the cicada drone of a working needle fills the air, and an enormous man, whose bald beige head is as festooned as Melville's harpooner, Queequeg, bends like a vampire over the pale neck of a skinny rock boy. A girl, every exposed inch inked and/or pierced, greets O'Hara at the counter. She is no more than seventeen, as elongated and lovely as a model, and O'Hara tries
not to wince at how efficiently she has rendered herself unemployable at anything other than what she is doing now.

“Theo,” calls the girl, and the room falls quiet, as the tattoo artist spins away from his client and rolls up to the counter in his wheelchair. For the twentieth time that night, O'Hara pulls out Pena's picture, and Theo reaches for it with the biggest hand she's ever seen.

“I thought she might be a fainter,” says Theo. “It was her first one, and she wanted it just big enough to read. But I was wrong, and the tattoo was right. That little girl had a lot of heart, not to mention a world-class Puerto Rican behind.”

Despite his barbaric visage, Theo runs a tight ship and keeps a copy of every piece of work on his laptop. A printer spits out a facsimile of what he etched on Pena's backside. As McLain recalled and Theo alluded, the overall design is heart shaped. But that's not an
S
at the center, it's a
$
, and it's surrounded by six letters. The design Theo hands her looks like this:

The little lines, like quotation marks, rippling out on each side of the dollar sign, make the heart look like it's pumping money instead of blood.

O'Hara stuffs the copy of Pena's tattoo into her coat and steps back into the cold. The river is so close she hears it lapping against the breakwater, and looking across it, can take in the whole east flank of Manhattan from East River Park, where Loomis and Navarro found Pena five days ago, to the Triboro.
How about that?
thinks O'Hara.
The Brooklyn girl, who didn't even know she was smart until after she got kicked out of high school, knows something Manhattan doesn't. It makes the city look different.

O'Hara knows the paper in her pocket is significant. If the killer intentionally removed Pena's tattoo, then maybe all the other gouges and burns are a misdirect, an attempt to make a coldly calculated crime seem random and psychotic. That could explain the discrepancy between the apparent rage of the several-hour attack and the lack of any DNA evidence. With McLain in Rikers, Lowry has expanded his search for McLain's 1986 Aerostar, sending NYPD detectives to Westfield and the surrounding areas and coordinating efforts with police departments in Boston and Springfield and Hartford. He even sent cops to Farmington, Connecticut, where Pena
went to prep school. Take away McLain, and all Lowry has got is an opportunistic predator, someone who stumbled on a drunk girl on a dark corner and saw his chance. But if removing the tattoo was so important to the killer, killer and victim must be linked in some way. They can't be strangers.

Too amped to think straight, O'Hara races back across the Williamsburg Bridge. Homicide South is housed in the Thirteenth on East Twenty-first Street between Second and Third, buried in the back of the third floor in a space even smaller and filthier than the detective room at the Seven. At three in the morning, Lowry is the only one there. He sits at his desk and watches porn on his laptop, and although he mutes the moaning for O'Hara's benefit, he doesn't lift his eyes from the screen.

“Girl on girl,” he says, “my Achilles' heel.” O'Hara takes the copy of the tattoo from her pocket and drops it next to Lowry's laptop. “What now, more receipts for brussels sprouts?”

O'Hara knows she should grab her scrap of paper and bolt, but is too excited by what she's just learned not to share it, particularly since it proves her right and Lowry wrong. Stammering in her rush to get it all out, she explains how Lebowitz found that the first and deepest of Pena's gouges was the one that removed a tattoo, and also explains that she just got a copy of the removed design from the Williamsburg tattoo parlor where Pena had the work done. As O'Hara describes what she thinks it means, Lowry turns his attention back to his laptop and smiles appreciatively at the action. He never looks at the piece of paper.

“O'Hara,” he finally says. “Every girl in America has a
tramp stamp over the crack of her ass. Let me guess—you do too? And what about the rape? Or should I say rapes? Were they misdirects too? A piece of advice, Red, and it's on the house: don't quit your day job.”

O'Hara grabs the printout off Lowry's desk and humps downtown at a pissed-off, block-a-minute pace. She has no idea of her destination until she finds herself clambering down the steel steps of Three of Cups. The place is packed but there's a single empty stool at the end of the bar, and O'Hara is just settling into her spot when the bartender hoists a rusty old cow-bell over her head, rings it a couple of times and announces last call. It's the same bartender who was working the other night, and O'Hara wants to ask her if she's familiar with the oeuvre of a band called Last Call Brawl, but decides that ordering three Maker's Marks and backing them up with three shots of Jaeger is pushing her luck sufficiently.

“I said I'd buy you a drink,” says the bartender with a smile. “Not six.”

“Don't worry, I'm buying. And yes, they're all for me.”

“Been a long day, hon?”

“Yeah.”

If something sad and slow were coming out of the speakers, O'Hara might do something embarrassing, like cry. Thankfully and somewhat appropriately, it's Humble Pie front man Steve Marriott screaming “30 Days in the Hole” like sixty would be better. And when it's followed by Skynyrd and Zeppelin, O'Hara wonders where this place has been all her life. When it comes to drinking, and it usually does, O'Hara and
Krekorian give the Lower East Side and East Village a wide berth. In the case of the former, they're abiding by the graft-fighting rule that forbids cops to patronize establishments in their own precinct, but cops ignore the rule every night and it's been ten years since anyone gave a shit. The real reason is those hipster bars, with their iPod mope rock, make O'Hara feel old and fatally uncool.

But this place plays the shimmering metal of her all-too-brief adolescence, with no apologies for the fact that it once got played on a million car radios and in one-hundred-thousand-seat arenas.
Obscure
doesn't always mean good, and
mainstream
doesn't always mean bad. At least it didn't back then. And if Axl Rose, Steve Tyler and Robert Plant are barely three degrees from Spinal Tap, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. If you ask O'Hara, ridiculous hormonal posturing is half of what's
good
about rock and roll.

The first Guns N' Roses single, “Welcome to the Jungle,” comes on. O'Hara, halfway through her second Maker's Mark, is transported eighteen years to a Brooklyn basement where a defiant fifteen-year-old girl was getting naked with Jimmy Beldock, a beautiful, charismatically pockmarked fuckup with too much balls to do anything but front a band.

O'Hara was born in 1971. Eleven years later, her father, who drove a truck for Boar's Head, keeled over from a heart attack. The next four years, her mom moved her and her brother every year, not when the neighborhoods got worse, but when they got too good to afford. That's when O'Hara started acting out, and by the time she got to Beldock's basement, she was ex
hilaratingly out of control, a precocious red-haired teenager and would be groupie-ready to party with anyone having the slightest connection to a band.

O'Hara feels like she discovered sex and rock and roll on the same night. To her, sex isn't like rock and roll. It is rock and roll. It's why she got preggers listening to Zeppelin in Beldock's basement, and why, when nine months later, three months after Guns N' Roses' first record,
Appetite for Destruction
, hit the stores, she gave birth to a sixteen-inch, seven-pound red-haired boy, she saddled him forever with the name Axl Rose O'Hara. And, thank God, he doesn't hate her for it.

Axl's unheralded arrival—no one had a clue he was in transit until the school nurse made O'Hara pull up her hippy blouse eight days before she gave birth—got O'Hara kicked out of high school and sent to a special school for fuckups, where all she had to do to collect her GED was show up and not get into fights. It also forced to her to calm down and start pulling her weight. Her first job was at a midtown travel agency, and the first thing she learned when she got there was that she was exceptionally competent, something no one had bothered to tell her in high school. Two weeks after she started, her boss gave her a promotion, and she'd probably be running the place or one just like it if her uncle, a retired transit cop, hadn't talked her into taking the police exam.

As O'Hara rattles the ice in her last drink, she wonders if the last eighteen years of semi-respectability have been a smoke screen. Maybe that arrogant piece of shit Lowry is right, and fundamentally she's still the same fuckup and loser the world
declared her at sixteen. Maybe her “appetite for destruction” was never sated, and all it took was a little push to veer off the tracks again.

On the other hand, maybe she's been playing it too close to the vest, and what her life really needs is another infusion of rock. At the far end of the bar next to the door is a postersize blowup of that famous photo of a thirty-two-year-old Keith Richards wearing a T-shirt that reads,
WHO THE FUCK IS MICK JAGGER
? No disrespect to the Stones and Sir Mick, but O'Hara's got a question a bit closer to home.
Who the fuck is Darlene O'Hara?