Katie Beers (4 page)

“Yeah. She sure is,” she said, raising her brown penciled-in eyebrows for the first sign of expression in the exchange.

“Katie knows enough to stay away from strangers. She’s been
warned about it—learned that from Linda —it’s just strange. John just said he went to get tokens and he just turned around and she was gone.” She bit her upper lip and pressed her fingertips deeper into her temple.

“The phone rang and it was Katie on the phone and about twenty minutes later Big John had called and he said he couldn’t find her and he was crying on the phone. He said he couldn’t find her and I had spoken to him a second or two. I don’t know. All we want to do is know she is alright and have her come back.” Ann shook her head and finally put down her trembling hand.

Do you have any indication of where she is?

“Evidently,” she said, “it has to be someone she doesn’t know. To say ‘a
man
.’” She shook her head again, her trembling hand back on her forehead.

And then, in response to a reporter’s question about what message she has for the public, Ann looked up from the overflowing ashtray filled with Basic Full Flavor cigarette butts smoked down to the tan filters and looked square into the camera lenses.

“My message would be please, please get in touch with Linda. Linda is very upset; the whole family is very upset. Linda is in a wheelchair so she can’t go running looking for her, so if anyone sees her, please call. That’s all I can say,” she ended, burying her head in her hand, covering the tears that dropped into the ashtray.

Police, meanwhile, told reporters they were following two trails. There were two men in Katie’s life and both of them were possible suspects.
²
They wouldn’t say that publicly, but they didn’t have to. Attorneys for the two men eagerly informed inquiring reporters.

Facts started to come in from the assignment desk and my ever buzzing beeper. Sal Inghilleri, the godmother’s husband, was already facing first degree sexual abuse charges involving Katie after Marilyn had reported him to police. He was arrested two months earlier and was due to appear in court in February. In fact, there was a court order forbidding him from coming in contact with Katie, which he apparently violated just being in the Bay Shore house with Katie. With the child now missing, “they have an idea that it may be him,” Sidney Siben, Inghilleri’s lawyer, volunteered to reporters.

At the same time, Siben’s law firm had also just been retained by a new client: John Esposito. The forty-three-year-old contractor had
called them that morning, exhausted, saying he needed a lawyer after fielding eighteen hours
³
of police interrogation. The case was assigned to the senior Siben’s far younger nephew, Andrew. Police, the younger Siben told reporters, “tried to convince (Esposito) that he was the one who did it.” The cast of characters was growing.

To the throngs of reporters now camped both inside and outside the Inghilleri’s Bay Shore cape, it certainly appeared as if police believed Katie had actually been kidnapped. This was no runaway. Public information officers revealed that police operators were receiving a steady stream of Katie “sightings,” and uniformed cops and canine units were searching the woods and trash bins surrounding Spaceplex, the game arcade where John Esposito said she was last seen. Eyes were fixed on the frozen ground, scanning for discarded clothing, or worse, a body. The FBI, which had an agent assigned to the case almost immediately, quickly analyzed the answering machine tape and determined the voice on the phone was in fact Katie’s.

At this point everyone seemed cagey, no one seemed authentically sincere. There were cigarette butts everywhere and the house air was stale and heavy, almost unbearable. Marilyn was sniffling with her eyes closed and tears were flowing freely. Outside, on the front stoop, a heavyset stocky man was taking long hard drags of his cigarette, blowing puffs of smoke high up above his head.

“I’m Sal,” he greeted me, raising his bushy salt and pepper eyebrows. I stopped, got a good look at him, tried to size him up. He smiled at me, and I thought to myself, did this guy just kill a child? Couldn’t be.

What do you think happened to Katie, Sal?

“I don’t know nothin’. Who could hurt a little girl?”

I headed to the car and gave Tony the nonverbal universal sign— the head tilt which meant to any good cameraman—roll. He fixed his lens on Sal and got images of him kicking a black cat out of the way and then stamping out a butt on the front stoop.

Our final stop of the day was the nearby home of John Esposito, the family friend who was with Katie when she vanished. We shot video of his house at 1416 Saxon Avenue and could see a man with a baseball cap
and dark sideburns let detectives through a stockade fence at the end of the driveway. He scampered to close the gate quickly. As it slammed shut, I could see the sign on the outside of the fence. “Beware of Dog.” The man with the baseball cap was Esposito. There was no sign of a dog.

It was as though I was on a date with Big John. He let me ride in the front seat of his Nissan pickup, like a girlfriend. I didn’t even have to buckle. Sometimes he would let me sit on his lap and I would do the steering all by myself.

“Anywhere you want to go?” John asked.

“7-Eleven ,” I answered and minutes later I had a cola flavored Slurpee in hand.

I didn’t really get nervous until after we left the 7-11. John told me that he wanted to go to Toys R Us to pick up a Nintendo game too, and the Toys R Us is completely out of the way from Spaceplex and right around the corner from his house. I reminded him he had already bought me a birthday present and said that I didn’t want a Nintendo game and only wanted to go to Spaceplex, but he insisted.

“We are going to Toys R Us first.”

“Okay,” I finally gave in, but added, “then we’ll go to Spaceplex afterwards?”

John knew I didn’t have my own Nintendo player. I remember saying I just wanted to go to Spaceplex and I could go play the game some other time, knowing very well that I would never be going to his house again because I wasn’t even supposed to be with him in the first place.

Big John had been trying to get me alone for months. Almost every day he would call me at Aunt Linda’s when she was taking a nap and he would ask me to sneak out so he could buy me a new toy or take me to lunch or buy me candy. He told me Linda was jealous of our relationship and I would have to sneak away to play at his house. I was always scared to death to do it—scared of Linda’s wrath. She would surely beat me if she found out I was with him and not there to answer her demands. He would say, “I’ll meet you at the corner at noon,” and then he’d call when I didn’t go and ask me why I didn’t show up. I would lie to him and say that Aunt Linda hadn’t taken a nap. And he would always say, “Then we’ll do it tomorrow.”

This December day, two days before my tenth birthday, was a grey gloomy day—but not as frigid as it had been. Big John parked his pick-up truck at the end of his driveway—behind the main house—steps from the garage that he converted into his own apartment.

The Nintendo game was upstairs in John’s bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed—pushing the controls, lost in the sounds of the new
Home Alone
game. John was busy in the walk-in games closet. I was sitting on top of the unmade covers, on a bare mattress, Indian style, playing the game and I just knew that there was something off about that. I had played Nintendo so many times in the same place, but there was always my brother or somebody else there. It was never just me, alone with Big John.

He spent some time in the game closet and then went downstairs. He went downstairs by way of the staircase that went directly into the kitchen and came upstairs by the spiral staircase which was out of his living room. When he came back up, his Big John eyes had drained from his face and it was someone I had never seen before. Big John was gone. And he was no longer wearing his ever present baseball cap. I knew I was in trouble.

I remember I was jumping over something, the character in the
Home Alone
game was jumping—maybe over a chair or a box. The room was dark—curtains were drawn or the lights were off. The room was cold and the only sound was the repetitive arcade groan of the
Home Alone
game. Home alone. It was I, a sitting duck. I could feel my cold legs against his shiny mattress and then something even colder—his sandpaper fingertips on my white skinny thighs. I couldn’t see him, he was behind me. I could smell his sour breath—warm—against my ear.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Katie” he whispered.

And as he spit those seven words into my tiny ear, I knew for certain that there was something really very wrong happening to me.

The uneasy feeling in my stomach came first, before his coarse hand tightened around my mouth. I couldn’t see his face, but I could feel his other hand grab my waist. He was squeezing my mouth hard and lifting me up with force onto his lap. In those days, my mother used to joke that I wasn’t even forty pounds, so my twists of protest barely swayed him.

His fingers made their way under my denim skirt and pushed
aside my panties. My memory is hazy here. I know he penetrated me with his fingers for what in my memory was a split second. Or maybe I was so used to it with Sal that I thought what is the point in trying to stop him? I was only nine years old, but that was a place that had been violated many times. I was kicking, trying to get words out, but his tight grip was squeezing away my words, my breath and my strength.

I was kicking and crying when he carried me down the stairs. I knew that unless he was going to do something bad to me, there was no reason for him to be carrying me downstairs. Nobody was home. His sister-in-law sometimes stayed on the second floor of the main house and I knew that she wasn’t there now, so there was nobody that could help me. I knew basically whatever he was going to do, he was going to do. With all that had happened with Sal, a part of me knew there was no use trying to fight. If he didn’t have something bad in mind, he wouldn’t be carrying me down the stairs kicking and screaming.

At the bottom of the stairs, he turned left into his office and dropped me on the floor and slammed the door closed. One thing that I knew about his house is that we were never allowed in his office. That was the one room that kids weren’t allowed in, because he worked for himself. He worked out of his house basically. That was another alarm—why the heck are we in his office?

There were pillows everywhere. Couch pillows scattered on the office floor. As I sat there, I shook silently, tears running out of my eyes.

John said in an icy unrecognizable voice, “I have something I want to show you.”

He turned and began removing the baseball caps hanging on hooks inside a wooden bookcase. I knew he had built almost everything in the converted garage apartment himself including this bookcase built into the office closet. It was filled with wine and travel bottles of gin and rum and hats and knickknacks. John seemed to be unscrewing the silver hooks on either side of the wooden shelves, underneath where the baseball hats had hung. Then, grasping the middle shelf, he gave a tug, and the entire unit of shelves slid on wheels out into the office. It only slid half way out and then he had to unlatch something to have it come all the way out, revealing a rectangular hole in the wall where the bookcase had been. I didn’t understand.

I was standing there in the office, now sobbing, hyperventilating really, petrified about what he was going to show me. Then, he entered the closet, and I could see him roll up the tan rug, coil it tight and then roll up a layer of padding revealing a big square slab of concrete underneath. It looked like it has been cut out of the floor with a frame around it. John then got a long metal pole from the corner in the closet, a pole with a hook on either end, and attached one end to the clothing bar and the other end to a hook in the center of the concrete slab. He dropped a dumbbell weight onto the slab and started cranking. What was he
doing?

My heart was beating furiously and I scanned the office for the phone and found the portable on his desk. With John busy cranking inside the closet, I slipped behind the desk and crawled up in a little ball in the opening beneath the desk and held the phone in my hand and pressed the numbers: 9-1-1. And I started talking in a voice I could barely hear myself.

“I’m on Saxon Avenue,” I whispered.

I didn’t know what town I was in. I didn’t know the house number. I didn’t really know anything. I was crying. Somebody came on the line.

I must have said it too loud. The feet and blue jean clad legs in front of my wildly shaking body made that clear. John reached down, and he took his big carpenter hand and yanked the phone away from my ear and slammed the phone into its cradle. I never really saw him coming—I had my eyes closed tight—I could only feel the phone snatched out of my hand. Then, he picked me up and threw me like a rag doll into the closet and raged, “Don’t touch that phone again!”

Sharp sticks of pain instantly shot through my shirt and into my back as I realized that I had landed on a wall of exposed nails. Inside of the closet was the back of something he had built in his kitchen. He threw me up against it with such force, I was certain I was bleeding. I was crying hysterically. John went back to work as blood dripped down my back. He finished cranking up the concrete slab revealing a hole in the floor. It was dark in there. He worked and said nothing. The only sounds were my now uncontrollable sobs.

I still don’t think he said anything. And if he did, I might have been crying so loud that I didn’t hear him. He then stepped over the hole, came and got me, and picked me up. I remember he was crouching in the
closet. The closet was built under a staircase, so it had a high ceiling on one side and then it came down on a slant. He stooped over and held me at the edge of the hole.

The concrete slab was now dangling above the opening in the floor and John moved it to the side and ordered, “Get down the fuckin’ hole.”

“No, I don’t want to. What is it?”