Shadows Still Remain (10 page)

Breaking in a new box of Advil is rarely attempted under happy circumstances. With the kind of hangover O'Hara wakes up with late Sunday morning, it's a gruesome exercise. By the time O'Hara rips apart the box, pries off the cap, deflowers the aluminum foil and plucks out the last shred of cotton plug, she's grateful her service revolver is in the bedroom. “Still feel like crap, Sarge,” she says into Callahan's voice mail after she's washed down a handful. “Must be the goddamned flu.” The first part is certainly true, the second unlikely, and O'Hara hopes the gratuitously colorful
goddamned
doesn't give her away. She couldn't have just said “the flu.” It had to be “the goddamned flu.” Fortunately Callahan isn't much of a detective. That's why he's a sergeant.

Gelcaps and coffee clear out enough space in O'Hara's head for her to rough out a working plan. If the killer knew Pena well enough to be connected to her by a tattoo, finding him is just a matter of learning more about Pena. You can cut out a tattoo but not every trace of personal history. As long as O'Hara keeps slogging forward, she's going to stumble on him eventually. She clears her kitchen table and plows through six days of unread
papers, clipping every story about the murder and jotting down the name of every person with something to say about it.

Two stories quote a Dr. Deirdre Tomlinson, NYU's assistant provost of admissions. O'Hara calls her office, expecting on a Sunday afternoon to get another machine, but is startled by a booming theatrical “Tomlinson here!” Although Tomlinson was about to head home, she agrees to wait for O'Hara in her office. Based on the dramatic phone presence, O'Hara pictured a matriarch of some heft and vintage, but the woman who leads O'Hara into the parlor floor of a redbrick townhouse on Washington Square North is rail-thin and in her late thirties, her long skinny legs emerging from a chic tweed skirt and disappearing into knee-high equestrian boots. The unkind descriptor that pops into O'Hara's mind is “Condi with a 'fro.”

“Francesca's death is a tragedy for her family and a catastrophe for this university,” says Tomlinson, directing O'Hara to the high-backed chair facing her desk. “It's also a great personal loss. If there's anything I, or the university, can…do.”

Despite her relative youth, Tomlinson's office is enormous. It's adorned with a dazzling array of African-centric art, and when Tomlinson sees O'Hara's eyes roving from piece to piece, the former literature professor plays the patronizing docent. “That photograph of a beautiful Kenyan woman was taken twenty years ago by a wonderful photographer named Irving Penn, and the small figures on the shelf are Ethiopian and fashioned, believe it or not, from cow dung. The collage of course is a Romare Bearden, one of our great late artists. It belongs to the university, obviously, but I get to look at it every day.”

Cow dung is about right
, thinks O'Hara, and does her best to keep her eyes from rolling out of their sockets. “It sounds like you knew the victim quite well,” she says.

“I recruited her to NYU. The dean at Miss Porter's alerted me to Francesca when she was only a junior, and I visited her there as well as at her home in Westfield.”

“Do you spend that kind of time on all your applicants?”

“Hardly. But Francesca was an exceptional young woman, and NYU wasn't the only school to recognize that. We had to beat out Stanford and Duke and half the Ivies. The good half.”

As Tomlinson talks about Pena's lost potential, O'Hara revisits the elegant black-and-white photographs, and the ebony sculptures made of cow shit, and it all comes together. At the elite forty-thousand-dollar-a-year colleges, a qualified minority like Pena is the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, the one they all fight and drool over, and at NYU, Tomlinson is the designated drooler. “I'm going to need her entire file,” says O'Hara. “Everything you got, from application to transcripts.”

“I'm afraid I can't give you those. It would directly violate our confidentiality agreements.” For the first time since O'Hara arrived, Tomlinson smiles at her instead of down at her.

“This has to be a PR disaster for NYU,” says O'Hara, taking her time and almost enjoying herself despite the throbbing in the back of her head. “One of your most promising students has just been murdered. Not only that, she was raped and horribly mutilated. Every parent who is thinking of sending their
kid here must be getting seriously cold feet. I know I would if I was in their position. Well, how do you think those parents will feel when they learn that the school and its administration aren't cooperating fully with the investigation?”

“Detective,” says Tomlinson, teeth bared in what might be mistaken for a smile. “Do you always have a problem with women of color?”

Some folks,
thinks O'Hara,
don't waste any time pulling the race card
.
Particularly ones who refer to themselves as “women of color.” Sounds like a bad soul band
.

That's not to say Tomlinson is entirely off base. You don't grow up like O'Hara, broke and Irish in Bay Ridge, without a little redneck in you, and probably more than a little. And it doesn't help that Tomlinson is taller, skinnier and better dressed, with a Harvard PhD on the wall, compared to her own dime-store GED. But does Tomlinson really think O'Hara is going to admit to it? And what would it mean anyway? O'Hara doesn't say a word, just smiles back, and five minutes later, when she leaves Tomlinson's office and heads across Washington Square, there are two large folders under her arm.

In the gray afternoon light, the park looks nothing like it did during the snowy vigil. Both the grounds and demographic seem far shabbier, and no one in sight has anything to do with the university. Rosy-cheeked college kids have been replaced by people with not nearly enough money and way too much time, and the matinee crowds that have gathered around the malodorous dog runs skew heavily toward the gimp and insane. Dodging small-time pot dealers and clipboard fanat
ics, O'Hara walks the east-west length of the square, picks up a venti at Starbucks and enters Elmer Bobst Library, the redbrick edifice on the southeast corner. With its fourteen-story atrium, the balconies have become the favorite jumping-off points for student suicides—two in the last fifteen months—and as O'Hara crosses the checkerboard marble floor said to hypnotize the susceptible, she notices the Plexiglas barricades the school has built on every floor to thwart them. After she identifies herself as a cop, a guard tells her about the reading rooms on even floors. She gets off at twelve and takes a seat at an empty mahogany table, carefully placing her coffee on the carpet beside her feet. Floor-to-ceiling windows face north over the park toward Midtown, and far below through the leafless branches she can see the grid of sidewalks where a homeless man is moving in tight manic circles, the twelve-story remove turning schizophrenia into modern dance. To her right is a shelf lined with parliamentary papers documenting the British slave trade from 1866 to 1877 and by the entrance a cast-iron bust honoring an old dead rich guy named Charles Winthrop, whose estate must have picked up the tab for the room. O'Hara's high school years were a waste of taxpayers' money, and since then she has spent more time in dive bars than libraries. That ratio, however, might be subject to change, because the tranquillity, quiet and good lighting are all deeply appealing, and not just because she's hungover. While her young, well-heeled neighbors text and IM each other, steal music off the Internet and check the value of their trust fund portfolios, O'Hara puts her phone on “silent,” takes
a long sip of coffee and cracks the first folder. Soon, she is the only person in the room who is learning something.

Pena's application lays out the essentials of a two-part life that are as starkly different as the upper and lower halves of her own body. Her first twelve years were spent in Chicago, the next six in a small New England town, and her essay explains how she got from one to the other. In blue script, raw and ill-formed for a high school senior, she recounts how her father, Edwin Pena, a longtime junkie, tested positive only after finally beating his heroin habit, and died three years later on a cloudless spring morning. And just as O'Hara spiraled out of control when her father died young, so did the twelve-year-old Pena. Six months later, she was sent to a boot camp for troubled teens. Every morning started with a two-mile run, and Pena discovered her gift for endurance. Pena's mother knew a woman, more acquaintance than friend, who had moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, and that fall, determined to escape the old neighborhood, mother and daughter abruptly pulled up stakes. The only link between Pena's two lives was her new sport. In her first three races at her new high school, Pena finished eleventh, fifth and third, and the self-confidence earned on the track spilled over to the classroom. Two years later, the barrio girl reinvented as a student-athlete won a scholarship to a tony prep school for girls called Miss Porter's. At the end of the essay, Pena describes how events in her life sparked an interest in early adolescence, particularly that small window of opportunity, when a still impressionable young person can go up as easily as down. O'Hara knows high
school seniors will say or write anything if they think it will get them into college. They're worse than drunk guys trying to get laid, but apparently, Pena actually meant it. Although her grades weren't as high as O'Hara thought would have been necessary to be considered for a Rhodes scholarship—one A-minus, four Bs and even a C—six of the twelve courses she took or was taking at NYU were in the psych department. Attached to her transcript is a proposal for independent study, already approved, based on her volunteer work as a mentor to two at-risk Dominican sisters, thirteen and eleven, who, like her, are the daughters of a recovered junkie. Pena, it appears, was a girl on a mission, the rare student who arrives on campus knowing exactly what she intends to do, and then follows through. But O'Hara knows that things are rarely as clear as they seem to a headstrong teenager. Not everyone can be saved, or even wants to be. Missionaries find that out all the time, sometimes by getting killed.

As O'Hara weighs the significance, if any, of Pena's sharply focused application and transcripts, a particularly annoying hip-hop ring tone shatters the silence. After much too long, a male student at the table beside her casually flips opens his cell “What up, dawg?” he says. O'Hara, who to her own surprise is already feeling proprietary about the thought-conducive quiet in old Winthrop's room, leans forward in her chair and whispers, “No talking in the library.” Unfortunately, O'Hara's respectful reminder is ignored. So is the second, and the third is blown off from behind with a dismissive wave.

O'Hara quietly gets out of her chair and walks over to the
next table, where the student, about the same age as Pena, is still on his phone, still barking at his dawg. When he bothers to look up from under his gray fedora, he is stunned to see that a beautiful red-haired woman has taken the seat across from him. O'Hara stares directly into his eyes and smiles. Then she opens her coat and beckons him to peek inside. Now he sees the gold detective shield clipped to her inside pocket, and perhaps just below it, the black rubber handle of the .45 sticking out from its leather holster. “No fucking talking in the library,” she whispers again, although at this point it's no longer necessary, and nodding at the likeness of Winthrop by the door, returns to her table.

When O'Hara finally descends from the twelfth-floor reading room, the lights have come on in the park. Checking her cell, she sees that Tomlinson has left three increasingly urgent messages, and by the third seems almost as agitated as the out-patient still turning tight circles in the deepening dusk. In a moment of weakness, O'Hara walks back around the park and deposits the folders directly into Tomlinson's skinny arms, although the assistant provost would have been less relieved had she known about the stop at Kinko's along the way.

The portion of 106th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam is a block going two ways at once—Caribbean nannies rolling $1,200 strollers west toward the co-ops and teenage moms dragging toddlers east toward the projects. No big mystery how it's going to turn out. Soon the only dark babies in the neighborhood will be adopted ones from Haiti and Ethiopia, but for now the rents are still cheap enough for Big Sisters to afford a storefront. The sign on the door says it's open Sundays, but it's closed for the night when O'Hara rolls up, her karmic reward for stopping to photocopy all those files. Although Big Sisters is closed, there's enough light from the street to see that it's run on a shoestring. Inside there are just a couple of old desks, a bulletin board, some beat-up chairs. When a truck stops on the corner, its headlights briefly illuminate a card table covered with candles, cards and flowers and above it a blown-up picture of Pena with her two little sisters. All three wear nice going-out clothes and beaming smiles. It's the third picture O'Hara has seen of Pena, but the only one in which she looks happy. On her way back to Riverdale, O'Hara grabs a slice near Columbia. Then she collects Bruno for his
evening walk. As she trails the happy beast down the sidewalk, she calls Krekorian and leaves a lengthy message, filling her partner in about her visit to Lebowitz, Bad Idea Tattoos and Tomlinson. It's eight o'clock by the time she makes it back up the stairs to her beloved whorehouse couch.

O'Hara likes to think of her couch as a raft on which, like Huck, she floats downriver through an evening, book and beverage in hand, lumpus furrus at her feet, and every item of potential necessity (remotes, cell, laptop) safely stowed within reach. Despite all the grief she gives Krekorian for being a college boy, O'Hara is usually working her way through three books at once, and spaced along the backrest, like baited fishing poles waiting to catch a bite, are
Mortal Causes,
a Scottish mystery,
Garbage Land: On the Secret Truth of Trash
and
102 Minutes
. Tonight she concentrates instead on her stack from Kinko's, and out of respect for the still-vivid memory of her hangover, sips water instead of something red or brown. When the phone rings, it's Nia Anderson, director of Big Sisters, returning the call O'Hara left on her machine. “Sorry I missed you,” she says. “Everyone's so depressed, we closed at noon. Besides, we're all going to the memorial tomorrow.”

“I saw the candles and the cards,” says O'Hara, “and the big picture on the wall.”

“That was taken last month from our night at Bowlerama. Her little sisters are Moreal and Consuela Entonces.”

“Did Pena connect with the girls through Big Sisters?”

“That's right—through our mentoring program. Pena began spending time with Moreal and Consuela while they
were still living with their foster parents, Donna and Albert Johnson, but we introduced her to over a dozen girls and families before we found the right fit. What makes all this so horrendous and demoralizing for Big Sisters is that until three days ago, this was our great success story. Francesca didn't just mentor the daughters, but she inspired their mother, Tida Entonces, a recovering heroin addict, to get clean and earn them back. That's something everyone else had just about given up, including Tida. Maybe Tida manages to stay clean and the girls will be able to remain on track, but right now it all feels terribly precarious and beyond sad.”

Anderson's heartbroken voice shames O'Hara off her couch and back across Spuyten Duyvil into Washington Heights. Entonces and her daughters live at 251 Fort Washington Avenue and 170th Street, a dark, forbidding building between 170th and 171st, a block west of Broadway. The neighborhood tilted Dominican twenty years ago. For the fifty before that, it was as Jewish as the Lower East Side once was, filled with German refugees whose old men and women never entirely lost their accents or regained their footing but whose children and grandchildren more than made up for it. The Dominicans aren't doing badly either. In less than twenty years, they have the toughest gangs in the city and control the bulk of the drug trade.

Tida Entonces is a large woman in a housedress and slippers. She leads O'Hara down the dark hall of an ancient railroad flat, seats her at the Formica-topped table in a fluorescent-lit kitchen, and pours her a coffee. The ravages of a twenty-year
heroin habit are plain to see, but so is the intelligence in her eyes, the pretty shape of her face, the flicker of sensuality at the corners of her mouth. That might be the one bonus of getting hooked early. If somehow you can get clean, there might still be a little time left on the other side, and when her daughters, Moreal and Consuela, slip in and out of the room in a sad, shy daze, O'Hara can see that the squandered beauty of the mother has already started to bloom in her girls. Anderson described a fragile family that was just getting their legs under them, and it's reflected in the condition of the apartment, which is desperately spotless. For Tida Entonces, good housekeeping is not optional. The system is slow to take children from their mother and slower to return them, but when they have been lost once, the benefit of the doubt is gone forever, and losing them a second time is excruciatingly easy. As long as Entonces is lucky enough to have her children, she will be subject to unannounced visits from Children's Services. One failed drug test or the slightest evidence of backsliding, and her kids will be gone forever.

Entonces looks up from her coffee and attempts a smile. “I'd say Francesca was like family, but that's being too nice to my family. They never lifted a finger for any of us, but a young woman I had known two weeks decided she was going to save me. Even then, it was hard. After a twenty-year habit, I had all these excuses lined up in my head like toy soldiers—about why my life was hopeless, and why it was OK to keep using. Suddenly, those excuses were gone.”

“How much time did Francesca spend here?” asks O'Hara.

“One weeknight she helped the girls with their homework. Then, every other weekend, she'd take the girls to a movie or a museum. Once, as a special reward, she even invited the girls to sleep over, then took them out to breakfast in the Village Sunday morning. ‘We didn't have breakfast, Mommy, we had
brunch
,' they said. Everything she did was about showing them that there's a bigger world out there.”

“When was the last time she was here?”

“Homework night was usually Monday or Tuesday. Because of the holiday she hadn't come since the Saturday before Thanksgiving. That's when she took them to the Museum of Natural History. See that?” asks Tida, and points at a plastic model dinosaur on the kitchen counter. “Francesca bought that for them on their last trip.” Beside the dinosaur is a small white bag you fill yourself with a little plastic shovel at candy shops, and O'Hara remembers the chocolate Lebowitz found in Pena's teeth. “How about the candy?” asks O'Hara.

“From Francesca too. She was always bringing little treats by the house and giving them out as rewards.”

“How did your neighbors feel about what Francesca was doing for your family? Any jealousy?”

“Nothing I noticed,” says Entonces.

“How about the young men in the neighborhood? Any of them seem particularly interested in this beautiful girl? Anyone ever ask her out?”

“She was way above their kind.”

“Wouldn't keep them from asking. Some of them must have been interested.”

“When she visited,” says Entonces wearily, “Francesca was just another pretty Hispanic girl. Believe it or not, there are lots of girls in this building just as pretty or prettier. The way she dressed and acted, no one knew she went to a fancy college or was so successful in her life. It wasn't anything you could tell by looking.” Entonces stares into her coffee as if searching for something.

“Maybe she taught you enough already,” says O'Hara. “Maybe you had her long enough to make it on your own.”

“Detective, I'm thirty-three years old. If I look a lot older, and I know I do, it's because I was a junkie for so many of them. My best friend died in my arms, and I've seen people get shot dead standing closer to me than you are right now. But I've never been this scared.”