Buried on Avenue B (19 page)

 

CHAPTER 49

THIRTEEN MILES NORTH
of the George Washington Bridge, O'Hara turns off the Palisades Parkway into the Citgo service center that sits in the grass divide between the north- and southbound lanes. It's 8:10 p.m., the end of the evening rush, and as O'Hara rolls past the pumps and minimart, the northbound traffic lays down a carpet of sound and orange taillights thread through the trees.

At the north end is a parking area for commuters. Crime scene has put up a tent, and O'Hara parks nearby between a New York State cruiser and the NYPD communications van. O'Hara is relieved by the lack of TV turnout. Without a body, the recovery of the stolen vehicle didn't rate a segment on the evening news, and without the cameras there won't be any brass to pontificate in front of them. That means O'Hara will be on her own and not obliged to kiss anyone's ass. Considering the way she feels and the length of the night ahead, that doesn't seem like a minor detail.

O'Hara climbs out of her Jetta and steps into the tent. Somewhere between the Bronx and New Jersey, O'Hara's cold burst forth into full majestic bloom, and she feels like utter crap. Nevertheless, the sight of the car under the crime scene lights is an enormous relief.

Moby fucking Volvo, thinks O'Hara, the great white wagon. It's about friggin' time. At the same time, she can see why it went unnoticed so long, particularly in this liminal strip of a nonplace, with traffic sweeping by at sixty miles an hour. The boxy lines are so straightforward, they look like they could have been drawn with crayons by a kindergartner, and the original fourteen-year-old paint has faded into something between white and invisible.

All five doors are open so crime scene tech Jack Marin can photograph the interior. O'Hara has worked with Marin before and trusts him. Rather than stand over his shoulder, O'Hara steps outside. The highway is wooded on both sides and, despite the proximity to the city, feels rural. Before the mosquitoes get a bead on her, she gazes at the stars and wishes Axl rock 'n' roll success.

O'Hara makes her way to the twenty-four-hour minimart, where the shelves are stocked for passing motorists and indigenous late-night stoners. On one side of the register is a medieval-looking apparatus that makes doughnuts, on the other a gleaming new machine that spits out Lotto tickets.
ALL IT TAKES IS A DOLLAR AND A DREAM
, reads the placard, and O'Hara finds it even more offensive than usual. She takes her chances instead on the iced coffee and a packet of Advil, washed down with her first sip.

Rather than returning to the tent, she walks to the idling communications van. The vehicle, outfitted with an arsenal of real time telecommunications, is alleged to have cost taxpayers a couple hundred thousand dollars, but the way O'Hara feels, the AC alone is worth that. For the first time in her experience, the computer actually works, and there's Wi-Fi.

O'Hara updates Wawrinka and Jandorek on the recovered vehicle and congratulates Axl on the show. She replays her voice mail from Sollie and thinks about the confederacy of perps preying on one old retiree. How, she wonders, did he fall into their clutches? Then she rereads the text from Ashworth and his arcane theory that the marble and pearl found near the remains had originally been placed in the boy's nostrils.

O'Hara turns back to the computer and Googles “pearls in nostrils.” She braces for porn—on the Internet all roads lead to smut—but the first result is an ad for a fourteen-karat gold, two-millimeter akoya pearl right nostril nose ring, for sale on Amazon. The second ad is for a similar nose ring for the left nostril. The third result is for a “faux pearl dangle navel ring,” “pearl bezel nostril piece,” and “nostril-piercing retainers with dome.”

O'Hara modifies her search to “beeswax and pearls in the nostrils of the dead.” The first item is “pediatric pearls for parents,” which offers tidbits of parenting information; the second for a “100% organic bee propolis beeswax lip balm from the Philippines.” The third result reads: “Death in Ancient Rome—Wikideath”: “A common practice was to place pearls or beeswax in the nostrils to prevent evil spirits from taking control of the dead body.” Ashworth didn't get the civilization right. It's the Romans, but still. The text continues: “The libitinarii would then ensure . . .” The fourth item is an excerpt from something called “The Patrin Web Journal—Romani (Gypsy) Death Rituals and Customs,” with the text “Some tribes may plug the nostrils of the deceased with beeswax or pearls to . . .”

When O'Hara clicks on it, she lands on a site bearing a large title—“Patrin”—and the subhead, “Romani Customs and Traditions: Death Rituals and Customs.” It is illustrated by an old black-and-white photograph of a Romani or Gypsy funeral procession, the mourners following a coffin through the woods. Another click opens an academic entry several pages long, which she scans through.

All Roma tribes have customs and rituals regarding death. . . . For Roma, death is a senseless unnatural occurrence that should anger those who die. . . . According to traditional Romani beliefs, life for the dead continues on another level. However, there is a great fear among the survivors that the dead might return in some supernatural form to haunt the living. . . . Some tribes may plug the nostrils of the deceased with beeswax or pearls to prevent evil spirits from entering the body . . . another important step is the gathering together of those things that will be useful to the deceased during the journey from life, to be placed in the coffin. These can include almost anything, such as clothing, tools, eating utensils, jewelry, money.

O'Hara thinks of the artifacts excavated from the community garden—the cash, the subway token, the lighter, the Swiss Army knife, the CD. Now she adds the random bits of Gypsy hearsay she's absorbed over the years—that they yank their kids out of school after third or fourth grade, constantly pull up stakes and move, often on a day's notice and usually because the police are closing in, and their suspicion about modern medicine. It all fits. The perps are Gypsies. Rom, Roma, Romani, whatever the PC term may be. Dark scamming outsiders operating in the margins and governed by their own obscure, inverted code.

Why had none of this occurred to her earlier? It was the kid's hair. Who has ever heard of a towheaded Gypsy? But now that she runs everything she has learned through this new Gypsy filter, the pieces fall into place: the physical description of the two perps—swarthy but not African American—the kid's untreated broken leg, the lack of school records.

O'Hara flashes back to that night in Sarasota when the woman and girl sank their hooks into the elderly shopper at Publix and she followed them home. She recalls the smells emanating from their motel room and the curse howled from the doorway, which must have been a choice bit of Rom. Somehow Benjamin Levin fell into the clutches of a tribe of Gypsies, and unlike the times he stepped into the ring to face an opponent who in most ways was his double, he didn't stand a chance. Hauling aboard the ramifications requires so much of her depleted brain, it takes three knocks to distract her from the screen. In the window is the wide-brimmed hat of a New York State trooper.

“Steve Baginski,” he says when O'Hara opens the door. “We talked on the phone this afternoon. Jack Marin asked me to come get you.”

 

CHAPTER 50

THE REAR PASSENGER
door of the Volvo is open, and Jack Marin crouches behind it like a man praying to his backseat. His broad back blocks whatever he's looking at from view, but glancing over him into the front of the car, O'Hara can see that the perps didn't improve their diet between South Carolina and Jersey. The passenger well is strewn with the same collection of soda cans and fast-food wrappers that littered the van. The backseat of the car, however, is nothing like the back of the van, showing only slight traces of blood. In a way, that's as disturbing as the blood-soaked mattress. It means that by the time the boy had been transferred to the Volvo, he didn't have much blood left. It also confirms what O'Hara had deduced from the receipts, which is that by now even the most meager efforts to help him had stopped.

Marin twists to face O'Hara and points at the upright tube of Pringles open on the floor of the car. “I found it under the front seat,” says Marin. “It's too heavy for chips, and there's something shiny inside. Since these aren't Cracker Jacks and you said the perps were burglars, I thought you'd want to see it.”

With his gloved hand, Marin carries the orange tube, about the size of a can of tennis balls, to a foldout table at the back of the tent and tilts it over a plastic tray. After a couple greasy napkins fall out, there's a sound of metallic objects bumping into each other as they slide along the cardboard. Then a gold ring and two gold watches, their delicate bands intertwined, fall into the tray. The diamond has been plucked from the ring, but the watches, which have blacked-out circular faces unmarked except for a small gold disk at the top to signify noon, are intact and lovely, not at all crass.

The smaller is inscribed “hers,” the bigger “his,” and both engraved “6/1/51,” presumably the date Lebrie and her husband got married. The ring must be the one Lebrie slipped off her finger and dropped into the bowl of milk. O'Hara remembers her gentle knowing eyes, her broad sun hat, and her paper-thin skin slathered in zinc. Lebrie told her that in old age one thing after another gets taken away. Now, three of them are about to be returned.

“These were stolen from a woman on March 2,” O'Hara tells Marin. “The next day they tried to rob the old man.”

“What's the name of the woman?” asks Marin.

“Fran Lebrie.”

“And the man is Benjamin Levin?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I found both their names on a piece of paper in the driver's-side door. It's in the container on the other table. Don't touch it—I'm hoping to get some prints off it—but you can read it.”

On the far side of the car, O'Hara bends toward a ripped sheet lying faceup in the container. It's a printout, generated by an organization called Ambex Marketing, working out of a P.O. box in Tampa, and contains some twenty-five names in alphabetical order. “Lebrie” and “Levin” are next to each other in the middle of the list, and like all the names, are followed by their addresses, ages, and a date. For Lebrie, the date is 4/1/05, for Levin 6/14/06.

“Is that it?” asks O'Hara.

“So far,” says Marin.

When O'Hara steps out of the tent, it's after midnight, too late to share this small piece of good news with Lebrie. With no traffic, the odd isthmus sandwiched between four lanes of blacktop feels even more remote. O'Hara walks beneath the chilly stars to the highway bodega, where she replenishes her supply of iced coffee and ibuprofen and returns to the van. Before being summoned by Marin, O'Hara forwarded her findings about the Gypsy connection to Wawrinka. Now she finds Wawrinka's reply, titled “Fudgesicle & Popsicle.”

“Darlene,” reads O'Hara, “meet Johnny George and Nick Adams.” She stops reading and opens the attached mug shots. George is the larger, darker one. He is listed at five-eleven, shorter than Lebrie thought, but at over three hundred pounds he must have loomed far larger than his actual height.

Rather than overtly vicious, he looks like someone who has never been able to afford the luxury of giving a shit about another human being. His face is scarred by acne, his chin a crease in his jowels, and in his eyes is the weariness of pushing his massive bulk through the world. Adams, five-seven and 135 pounds, is a no-account little grifter. His ears are too big for his face, and he's got diamond studs in both. His eyes are large too. According to Wawrinka, Johnny George goes by: George Johns, Skigo, and Fudgesicle; and Adams's aliases include Nick Miller, Tom Marks, and Popsicle.

The rest of Wawrinka's message reads: “When you told me our perps are Gypsies, I went online and found a retired detective in San Diego who maintains a national database of Gypsies and other con artists. These guys rarely do real time and often don't have rap sheets. Old people make terrible witnesses, and no one believes them anyway. That means they almost never get convicted. When they do, they pay restitution, write it off as the price of doing business. That's why they didn't show up in the big computer. But based on the name on the credit card and the description, he found Nick Adams, aka Popsicle, and through him, his most frequent accomplice. Quite the duo, these two. The Laurel and Hardy of distraction burglary.”

O'Hara returns to the brooding face and sleepy eyes of Fudgesicle and imagines him in Lebrie's doorway. These assholes think they're outsmarting every one, but all they're doing is bullying people at the end of their lives, when their strength and resolve are depleted. Lebrie was smart to keep slapping the spatula until she knew they were long gone.

She Googles Lebrie and finds a small site devoted to “Fran Lebrie—Assemblage Artist.” “Fran Lebrie,” reads the introduction, “is an assemblage artist whose imaginative constructions reflect both her background in philosophy and her skills in product design.” The site includes photos of Lebrie's work, including several O'Hara and Wawrinka saw on their visit. Among the other results is an obituary for Alfred Lebrie in the
Longboat Key News
, dated 4/8/05. Looking at her notepad, she sees that the date is a week after the date on the list. An obituary in a weekly paper would probably run the week after a death, and the obituary confirms it. “Alfred Lebrie, who wintered for 36 years on Longboat Key, died last Monday, April 1st, at the age of 86. A veteran of World War II, who served as a lieutenant in the 93rd infantry division . . .”

Now O'Hara Googles Levin and scrawls down the list of items until she finds the obit on his wife, Evelyn. The date of her death also matches the date on the sheet. Apparently targeting the elderly isn't enough of an edge for these motherfuckers. To find victims even more vulnerable, they search out those who have just lost their spouse.