Buried on Avenue B (10 page)

 

CHAPTER 23

“BUCKLE UP, KIDS,”
says Jandorek. “You too, dear.”

To a sound track of siren and screeching tires, Jandorek hustles the Impala crosstown, where the trip ends on Twenty-Second just west of Tenth, two wheels on the curb. Ben and Jamie lead them into a three-story tenement. One flight up, they enter a pristine space with track lighting and beautiful plank floors. Stenciled directly on a whitewashed wall, is “Freek Staps / 1954–2006.” Even as O'Hara digests the odd foreign name and the fact that he is no longer alive, she is struck by the scent. Then she remembers where she's smelled it before. The Prada store in SoHo, where she and K arrested a clerk on a domestic dispute. That place had the same bouquet—the smell of money.

“Freek was Dutch,” says Jamie, referring to the wall, “but he was in Berlin when he OD'd.” While the luxe interior and aroma suggest high-end retail, the subjects of the black-and-white pictures on the wall are dead-end kids. O'Hara recognizes East River Park and Tompkins Square, and one shot was taken ten feet from where she, Ben, and Jamie were sitting the day before. Boys and girls in their early to mid-teens are photographed on benches, in diners, and in subway cars, but mostly they're partying in a barely furnished unsupervised space. They share forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor and pass joints, and to an unseemly degree, the revelers are beautiful and semi-naked. The boys are shirtless, the girls in panties and bras, and while the precocity is intended to shock—one kid who looks no more than fourteen sits on a toilet, shooting up—it doesn't take a PhD in bullshit to know that the photographs are as staged as a fashion ad, kiddie porn masquerading as social commentary.

In addition to the four of them, there are two middle-aged couples in the gallery. They take in the work in an awed hush, as if the stained planks are sacred ground. Ben and Jamie lead O'Hara into the gallery's second room and position her in front of the show's largest image, centered on an empty wall. “That's Herc,” says Ben, and nods toward a shirtless boy, whose long blond hair spills out from under a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. A girl, also blond, not much older, wearing only panties, stands beside him, but Herc, who is sucking the last bit out of a fingertip-burning joint and stares directly into the camera, is the focus. Since Staps died in '06, Herc couldn't have been more than eight when the picture was taken, and with his pale skin stretched tight over his belly and ribs, he is little-boy skinny. But you can see why the photographer and gallery gave him top billing, and why his friends gave him the name Herc. Small and skinny as he is, the kid is all bravado. He acts as if getting semi-naked with a little blond beauty is no big thing. Hell, it happens every day. An eight-year-old James Cagney couldn't have pulled off a cheekier performance, and his grin is penetrating, as if asking Staps, “This is what you wanted, right?”

“When was the party?” O'Hara asks Ben.

“Last summer. It was in an empty loft on Bowery they couldn't sell. Somehow Freek got ahold of the keys from a broker. He invited all these kids, stocked the cabinets with booze, and had all this killer pot lying around. While everyone got fucked up, he walked around with an assistant and took pictures. We got invited after one of his talent scouts spotted us skating in the park, but it was obvious he was only interested in Herc. We were too old.”

“He ever touch any of you?” asks Jandorek.

“No, he just liked to watch,” says Ben. “And take pictures.”

“And sell them,” says Jamie, pointing at the red dot under the name of the picture, titled
boy / girl
. “The same talent scouts who invited us to the party invited us to the opening last month. They told us not to get dressed up. They wanted us to look street. It was creepy. While I was there, I checked out the price list. The cheapest picture was twenty-five thousand dollars. For Herc and the girl, they were asking eighty grand.” The snotty discretion about the prices reminds O'Hara of the Prada store too. Out of morbid curiosity, she had wanted to find out the price of a cashmere coat. She had to sort through five different tags before she finally found it in tiny numbers—$4,200.

“At least we got a picture now,” says Jandorek.

“What I would like to do is take this one, fucking rip it off the wall, and leave, but I figure you're in enough hot water already, just by association.”

“Don't worry about me, Dar. I can take care of myself. Whatever you want to do is jakes by me.”

O'Hara smiles for the first time in a couple days. Instead of grabbing the photo, O'Hara walks back to the front of the gallery. Behind a partition is an enamel table lined with large-format coffee-table art books, including a lavishly bound catalogue of the show:
Freek Staps / 1954–2006
.

“Freek was an amazing artist,” says a stylish woman in a very short dress.

“An amazing asshole,” says O'Hara, and puts two of the catalogues under her arm.

“Excuse me, those are two hundred and fifty dollars each.”

“Go fuck yourself,” says O'Hara, and the four of them leave.

 

CHAPTER 24

O'HARA NURSES A
beer and seethes. As far as she is concerned, the $250 coffee-table book, with its thick stock, lavish jacket, and fawning commentary, is more offensive than rank porn. At least porn is up-front. That this piece of crap is even in her home, and that she is looking at it on the same couch where Axl and Bruno do some of their best napping, disturbs her. As best she can, she avoids thinking about Ben's face. After they left the show, O'Hara had to tell Ben and Jamie that Herc was dead. Since the story was going to be on television in hours, and the papers the next morning, they deserved to hear it from her. Ben took it as hard as a sibling and blamed himself, and his crumpling face was one of the saddest she'd seen since she became a cop. O'Hara studies the catalogue, and learns as much as she can from it about the charismatic subject of its most expensive photograph. When she looks at the Tigers cap, she remembers the Yankees atop his skull in the garden and how even in the grave he seemed to be smiling. The hat shows that the grave was also a phony tableau: whoever staged it kept getting the details wrong. For starters, he wasn't a Yankees fan. He probably wasn't a baseball fan at all, but if he was going to be buried in a baseball cap, he would have wanted it to be a Tigers hat, not a Yankees cap, for Christ's sake. Same thing with the
Batman
comic and the Coldplay CD. Whoever dressed the kid and threw in the gifts didn't know him that well.

On the other hand, Herc did like comics, and he did like music, and he did wear baseball caps, so whoever it was hadn't got it completely wrong either. They got it half right. What kind of people get those things half right? It's not your friends. Your friends, God bless them, know exactly what you like to wear and smoke and drink and listen to. The people who get those things wrong, or half wrong or half right, however you want to put it, are your fucking family, so maybe the kid had a family after all. As O'Hara thinks about the semi-ignorance, semi-loneliness of families, and sinks deeper into her funk, her cell rings, and it's an area code she doesn't recognize.

“Is this Darlene O'Hara?”

“Who are you?”

“Connie Wawrinka, a detective with the Sarasota Police Department.”

O'Hara panics, fearing that something has happened to Axl. She reminds herself that she talked to him a couple nights ago and he didn't mention anything about Florida. Of course maybe he wouldn't. She's just the kid's mother, and not a particularly good one. “We got a match,” says Wawrinka.

“A match?”

“From ballistics.” O'Hara realizes Wawrinka is talking about the ballistic report on the .22-caliber bullet. NYPD sent it to every police department in the country. “Six months ago,” says Wawrinka, “we pulled the same kind of bullet, shot by the same weapon, out of the brain of an eighty-seven-year-old resident of Longboat Key named Benjamin Levin.”

“What happened?” asks O'Hara.

“He put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth and shot himself.”

 

PART II

 

CHAPTER 25

INSTEAD OF A
shot from a starter's pistol, there's the
bing
made by a microwave when the soup is warm. O'Hara pushes from her seat in the second-to-last row and with two hundred compressed, vaguely nauseated travelers plods toward the exit. She presses through the malodorous air of coach and the still-warm party debris of business and does that little perp walk past the chipper smiles of the flight crew. When she steps into the rubber hose that connects the plane to the terminal, the crappy seal offers the first inkling of Florida heat.

Inside the terminal, O'Hara washes her face and buys a bottle of water, then lets the conveyor sweep her past a Starbucks and TGIF. After a glossy billboard for Accenture, which features the magisterial focus of Tiger Woods, come local ads for Barnacle Bill's Seafood, and the Varicose Vein Center of Sarasota, where you can “walk away from varicose veins.” Ahead, at the end of the walkway, an elderly couple, who O'Hara suspects have been waiting without a hint of impatience for hours, extend a frail, blissed-out welcome to their grandchildren, and behind them, in the floor-to-ceiling aquarium, a baby hammerhead makes tight angry circles, his dead eyes assessing the meat parade.

O'Hara dodges the family reunion and hungry shark and takes the escalator to ground transportation. On the way down, she passes a monumental bronze of Hernando de Soto, and learns that the Spanish explorer arrived on the Gulf Coast around 1540. Till now the only celebrity O'Hara associates with Sarasota is Pee-wee Herman, but she appreciates that Pee-wee might not be the way the chamber of commerce would choose to welcome visitors.

When O'Hara steps outside, a rosy smudge is all that's left of the day, but even at 9:00 the thick swamp air paws at her, and in the time it takes to walk through the lot to her rental, the back of her shirt is soaked through. She's booked a room at a Marriott but is in no rush to get there and too out of her element to look for trouble. Instead, she decides to take a little drive, roll the windows down, and become a tourist of humidity.

The airport labyrinth spits her out at the entrance to the Tamiami Trail, Route 45, the main drag into Sarasota. Idling in front of her is a rusted pickup. “When I get old I'm moving up north and driving slow,” reads the bumper sticker. Across the street is the John Ringling Museum, a huge marble edifice bequeathed to the state of Florida by the circus impresario. Ringling was the partner of P. T. Barnum, whose words were scrawled on the wall in Coney Island, and she shakes her head at the divide between this palazzo and that sweaty box on the boardwalk. O'Hara heads east and the neighborhood takes a dive. Two-story cinder block lines the road on both sides—the Cadillac Motel, the Flamingo Inn, a cocktail lounge called Memories. Sprouting among the vacancy signs are billboards for Mom's Bail Bonds, Justice.com, and Credit Repair. Others don't even have ads, just
LEASE ME
and a phone number, and the combination of heat and squalor feels third-world. A shirtless boy pedals his bike through an empty parking lot. He's probably just trying to stir up some breeze and feel the air on his skin, she thinks, but even at forty miles per hour, the air barely moves.

As O'Hara takes in the local color, she returns to the questions she brought with her from New York. What does it mean that the same weapon that killed a nine-year-old street urchin from the East Village ended the life of an eighty-seven-year-old retiree from Teaneck, New Jersey? What connects the young and old bodies a thousand miles apart? As soon as the NYPD got the ballistics match, they sent the boy's DNA down to Florida to determine if the two were related, but it bounced back negative. At the moment the only thing that connects them, at least roughly, is the timing. The old man died a little over six months ago, on March 3, and based on the deterioration of the boy's body at two sites, the first exposed, the second buried, and the maggot casings in the skeleton, that's about the same time frame Bradley came up with for the boy's death.

A marquee reads
ADULT MOVIES, XXX VIDEO CLUB
, and behind it is a minimal white structure whose bleakness is only exceeded by the imagined bleakness inside. Is this where they busted Pee-wee? O'Hara read somewhere that he was watching a titty movie called
Nancy Nurse
, because that unfortunate detail is still lodged in her brain. Was it really necessary to nab Pee-wee for that? Of course they didn't realize who he was till after, but maybe, thinks O'Hara, certain less annoying celebrities should be immune from arrest for trifling but embarrassing misdemeanors, not for their benefit as much as for everyone else's.

The blight of the Tamiami Trail moderates, and the reflecting glass of downtown reassures motorists that they'll soon be safe and sound in the land of money. O'Hara turns away from the business district and climbs a graceful bridge over the harbor. To her left is the Gulf of Mexico and to her right the intercoastal waterway; below her, sleek powerboats bob at the private docks of the waterfront mansions. At the apex of the bridge, O'Hara catches little filaments of light in her peripheral vision and sees that they are fishing lines, connected to dark-skinned men in T-shirts and shorts, trying to pull some free protein from the harbor.

A short distance beyond the bridge, O'Hara slows for a shopping roundabout and through her open windows hears the tinkling of a piano set up outside a restaurant. O'Hara recognizes the melody but can't quite name the song. A white-haired couple window-shop—the woman in heels and a dress, the man in slacks and white patent leather shoes—and despite the heat, hold hands. Halfway round the circle, O'Hara sees signs to Longboat Key, which she remembers from her conversation with the Sarasota detective Connie Wawrinka as the address of Benjamin Levin.

O'Hara crosses a second bridge and gets another view of the Gulf, this time under a crescent moon, before picking up the flat, straight road that bisects the narrow key with its golf courses, tennis courts, and elegant twenty-story condos. For a penultimate stop you probably can't ask for much more—although there are “Units for Sale” signs at every gated entrance—and O'Hara enjoys the moneyed hush until the sight of a grocery store called Publix reminds her of her eight-pretzel dinner.

There are only seven minutes till closing, and the parking lot's empty. In New York she'd be banging on the glass, pointing at her watch. Here, as she steps through the sliding doors, she is approached by a smiling man in black slacks and a lime green shirt. He says “Welcome to Publix” and seems to mean it, and in the few minutes it takes for O'Hara to grab a six-pack of Amstel and get a turkey sandwich at the deli counter, two employees ask if there's anything they can do to help. And they're not giving her the bum's rush. Did she die in a plane crash, or has she stepped into an alternate universe?

At checkout, it's more of the same. Did she find everything she needed? Has she had a nice evening? Why is everyone acting so fucking nice? Is it the heat, the sun, the dire economy? Is business so bad that every customer is appreciated, no matter when they straggle in? And yet despite that, the visit ends on a disquieting note. After O'Hara has paid and collected her change, her mostly liquid supper is bagged by a man wearing large plastic glasses and a loose-fitting apron. As his sinewy arms and translucent skin register in her brain, she realizes that the man working at minimum wage in his golden years is not a day less than eighty. He hands her the bag with a lovely smile and says, “Have a great night.”