Shadows Still Remain (11 page)

Practice is making O'Hara a better liar. At 6:05 a.m. Monday, when she calls in sick for a third day, she eliminates the folksy flourishes and gratuitous colloquialisms and presents the untruth as simply as a piece of sushi. Then she pulls on stockings, her best dress and heels, and drops Bruno and a stack of CDs on the front seat of the Jetta. Pena's memorial starts at eleven, and MapQuest estimates the 218-mile trip from Riverdale to Westfield, Massachusetts, at five hours and ten minutes. I-95 is empty and the sun barely up as she motors past the exposed backsides of Stamford, Norwalk and Westport. They make such good time, they stop at a McDonald's near New Haven. There they both enjoy a breakfast burger, and afterward, the sight of Bruno squatting and extruding on the manicured sod beside the microphone causes the driver of a dark green Tahoe to roll up his window in midorder and tear out of the lot in disgust. O'Hara's cell rings as she's cleaning it up.

“What's going on?” asks Krekorian.

“Same old shit,” says O'Hara. “Me and Bruno are on our way to Westfield for Pena's memorial, and the beast just dropped a McTurd by the express lane.”

“Thanks, Dar. I get it. And I got something for you. This morning, I decided to go back a couple months in Pena's phone records, see if anything pops out. The first week in October, about the time she got her tattoo, she received twenty-one calls from Deirdre Tomlinson, the assistant provost of admissions at NYU. Nine were from her office, the rest from Tomlinson's home or cell. All of them were three seconds or less, half were hang-ups.

“That's interesting. At her office yesterday, Tomlinson took an instant dislike to me.”

“Oh yeah. Sure it wasn't the other way around?”

“No.”

“One other thing.”

“What's that, K.?”

“When you have the flu, it's very important to drink plenty of fluids.”

Saint Benedict–Our Lady of Montserrat Parish is a crucifix-topped 1970s A-frame with the spiritual gravitas of an International House of Pancakes. O'Hara grabs one of the last seats toward the back and anxiously scans the packed house. She's worried that Homicide sent a team to scope the room for possible perps, or even worse, that Lowry himself made the trip. But the only cops O'Hara sees are the contingent of gray-haired brass sent by the commissioner to demonstrate NYPD's commitment and concern. They're strategically deployed in the fifth row—far enough upfront to be visible, close enough to an aisle for a quick exit—and to her relief, they don't include anyone who might recognize a lowly detective like herself. In
the middle of the front row are Ingrid and Dominic Coppalano. The wife drapes one arm around her shorter, darker husband, and from their relative size and complexion, O'Hara speculates that Ingrid Coppalano is the type of woman who keeps marrying the same man. Five rows behind them, O'Hara spots Dr. Deirdre Tomlinson and at the end of the same row, a man she recognizes as the president of NYU. O'Hara had hoped to talk to someone from Pena's time in Chicago, but in the whole church there are only three or four Hispanic faces, and all of them appear to be students from the second, sunnier, half of Pena's life, part of the large, well-scrubbed group who arrived in buses provided by NYU and Miss Porter's. The priest didn't know Pena or her family well and has the rare grace not to fake it. It's not necessary. A simple recounting of Pena's short life is enough to fill the room with sobbing.

When the priest concludes his service, O'Hara lets the crowd clear, then makes her way toward Tomlinson, who is still crying in her seat. “This is more than I can handle, Detective,” she says. Working a funeral is questionable form, but unlike her colleagues, already halfway through their first round at the nearest tavern, O'Hara came here to learn something, not pay phony respects and tie one on. “Dr. Tomlinson, since we've got a quiet moment, I need to ask you about something my partner just brought to my attention. Going back through Francesca's phone records, he found that one week in early October, you called her over twenty times.”

“I may have called that many times,” says Tomlinson. “but I never spoke to her once. And she never returned my calls.”

“Why were you trying to reach her?”

“I had a terrible feeling she was in trouble. I should have told you when you came to my office. I'm sorry.”

“What made you think something was wrong?”

“Francesca had changed. It wasn't anything specific, but I could see it. When someone like Francesca turns her life around, the temptation to lose focus is enormous. A huge goal has just been achieved. You're nineteen, on your own in a great city.”

“What are you talking about? I read her transcripts. Some of her grades could have been better, but I didn't see any backsliding.”

“Maybe it was all in my head,” says Tomlinson, on the brink of losing it. “I hope to God it was. Because that's what I told myself when I stopped calling. Now, it's obvious I didn't do nearly enough. I shouldn't have called twenty times; I should have called a thousand. I should have gone to her apartment and knocked on her door. I should have made her an appointment at Student Counseling and seen that she kept it. But what did I do? Nothing.”

Tomlinson is gesturing so erratically that O'Hara fears a scene and backs off. She leaves the chapel and takes the stairs to the basement, where a modest spread has been laid out, and a long line snakes along three walls of the room as people wait their turn to offer condolences to Pena's parents. As in the waiting room at the ME's office, the stepdad appears eviscerated by grief. As her husband teeters beside her, Ingrid Coppalano handles the required interactions with neighbors and
students, and only the efforts of an attentive relative keep Dominic Coppalano on his feet. With the other cops gone, O'Hara joins the line and reintroduces herself. “I'm Detective Darlene O'Hara from the NYPD. We spoke on the phone and met briefly at the medical examiner's office. You must have been tremendously proud of your daughter.”

“You saw the turnout,” says Coppalano. “They came by the busload.”

“It was amazing.” says O'Hara.

“And it's not just the number,” says Coppalano fiercely. “It's the quality.”

“Is there anyone here from your time in Chicago?” asks O'Hara.

“Just me. When Francesca and I left Chicago, we vowed to never look back. Only forward. Detective, do you know that my daughter didn't just get into NYU? She was also accepted by Harvard and Yale.”

“No, I didn't,” says O'Hara. “That's very impressive.”

She clasps Ingrid Coppalano's hand one last time and smiles sadly at her husband, who doesn't seem to see her standing in front of him, then joins the crowd filing from the church. The southern New England afternoon has turned bitterly cold, and an icy wind blows through O'Hara's thin dress coat as she hurries toward her car and leashes Bruno for his walk. On the far side of the street, across from the entrance to the parking lot, a gaunt figure in an awful plaid suit stares forlornly at the church. Only when Bruno tugs inquisitively in his direction does O'Hara recognize David McLain.

“David,” asks O'Hara, “why are you paying your respects from across the street?”

“Because I wasn't welcome inside.”

“Francesca's family, they think you were involved in her death?”

“It's got nothing to do with that,” says McLain, a beat-up ten-speed lying at his feet. “Her mom disapproved of me from the beginning. I can't really blame her. Francesca was going someplace. She didn't need someone like me. Thanks anyway for the lawyer. She got me released yesterday morning. I hitchhiked here last night.”

McLain says he's heading back to the city, and O'Hara offers him a ride. First, he has to stop at home, and when his bike won't fit in the trunk, O'Hara and Bruno trail behind him in the Jetta as McLain, doing nearly thirty with his hands in his pockets and tie flying back over his shoulder, leads them through a modest but tidy suburban neighborhood. In the middle of a curve, McLain casually pulls one hand from his pocket and points to a white mailbox with
COPPALANO
painted across it. Behind it is a small ranch house, a pickup
in the driveway. After McLain crests a hill and crosses Main Street, the houses and yards get shabbier. He leads them past a rundown garden apartment complex and a boarded-up grammar school, then, pedaling furiously, turns off the road into a trailer park, where he drops his bike in the dirt and runs into a double-wide on green cinder blocks. O'Hara looks at the trailer and junk-strewn yard, puts it together with Ingrid Coppalano's bizarre comments about her murdered daughter's college acceptances, and isn't surprised McLain wasn't welcome at the memorial. Three minutes later, still in his pathetic suit, McLain steps out of the trailer toting a Hefty bag of clothes. Behind him, a woman waves from the doorway. “Shouldn't I say hi to your mom?” asks O'Hara. “Please, let's just go,” says McLain. “She's half in the bag already.”

On the highway, O'Hara asks McLain what he knows about Francesca's life in Chicago. “Next to nothing,” says McLain. “She never talked about it, and I got the feeling the whole subject was off limits.” The sun drops quickly, and except for the occasional snore from McLain and sigh from Bruno, the car falls silent. McLain is all arms and legs, and seeing him folded into the front seat makes O'Hara think of Axl and their great road trip of 2003. The week is so precious to O'Hara because it's the only example of bona fide parenting she's got to hold up and hang on to. As she ferries her sleeping passengers toward the city, she thinks about Tomlinson's hysterical premonitions and Ingrid and Francesca's shotgun exit from Chicago. She wonders if there was something about mother and daughter's old life that couldn't be outrun.

It's not quite seven when O'Hara pulls to a stop in front of a fire hydrant on Fifty-first and Ninth across from the building where a friend of McLain's has offered his couch. McLain groggily thanks her for the ride and grabs his clothes. O'Hara, exhausted and hungry, scans the block for a cheap restaurant. There's a falafel joint on the corner, Chinese two doors down, and as she reaches into the backseat for her coat, McLain steps back out of the apartment building. When he runs across the street and walks briskly down the avenue, O'Hara drops her police placard on the dash and follows him on foot. McLain weaves through the thickening crowds of the theater district, but thanks to his ridiculous suit, O'Hara has little trouble keeping him in sight. At Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue, she follows him down into the subway and onto a packed 1 train; four stops later, she follows him off at Twenty-third Street, where McLain turns west and picks up the pace. His long, loose strides eat up the wide crosstown blocks, and O'Hara curses her wobbly heels. By Tenth, she's a block behind, and when she reaches the isolated garages and storage spaces just short of Eleventh, McLain has vanished.

Across Eleventh Avenue, a soccer game is in progress on the well-lit Astroturf soccer field, and beyond that across the West Side Highway is Chelsea Piers. McLain might have headed for either, and as O'Hara weighs which is more likely, the side door of the strip club across the street crashes open, and McLain, propelled by an enormous tuxedoed bouncer, flies through it. McLain's momentum sends him staggering backward into a small vacant lot, where he trips and falls
into an oil-filled puddle. O'Hara fears that McLain will not have the good sense to keep his mouth shut, and she's right. He springs to his feet and points at his soiled pants and torn jacket as if he bought them that morning at Bergdorf's, and whatever he shouts is all the excuse the bouncer needs to charge back through the door like an enraged bull. Instinctively, O'Hara pulls her gun and her badge, but as she steps into the street, she is cut off by a van pulling out of the garage behind her. By the time it clears, the bouncer is practically on top of McLain. O'Hara can do nothing but watch as McLain twists, tilts and kicks the bouncer in the face. The impact is so solid, it echoes off the walls, and the well-dressed behemoth stops in his tracks and topples over like a black refrigerator. Laid out on his back, he offers no resistance as McLain reaches into his shiny jacket and empties his wallet, and although it's not the response to a violent mugging taught at the academy, O'Hara returns her gun to its holster and smiles.

Money talks. Bullshit walks. Suddenly flush, McLain straightens his tie and hails a cab, and O'Hara, her blistered feet in agony, gratefully does the same. McLain's cab exits the West Side Highway at Fourteenth, and O'Hara, staying a couple cars back, follows him all the way east to Avenue A. At Tenth Street and Avenue A, McLain jumps out and slips into Tompkins Square Park, where he joins a bench full of homeless juicers, who razz him mercilessly about both the style and condition of his suit. Ignoring the soup kitchen sandwiches that lie beside them in plastic bags, the men pass a pint, and
when it reaches McLain, he helps himself to such a long pull, their laughter turns into howls of protest.

Not for long, however, because as O'Hara watches from a nearby jungle gym, McLain pulls out his wallet and hands each man two bills; judging by the reaction, they're not singles. Then McLain gets up and displays the same largesse toward the occupants of the next bench and the one after that, duking every bum in sight like the Sinatra of Tompkins Park. Having done what he could for the standard of living in the southwest corner, McLain heads to the center of the park and slips bills to the owner of an elaborately loaded cart and two of his friends. His ill-gotten cash tapped out, McLain enters the dog run set aside for small dogs and sits on the bench in the corner. With all the yapping and commotion, it takes O'Hara several minutes to see that McLain is weeping.