Shadows Still Remain (17 page)

Over the next couple of hours, O'Hara becomes highly knowledgeable about the layout and contents of a double room at the Howard Johnson's Express Inn at 135 East Houston Street. She straightens the bed and hangs up her new old clothes, throws away the wrappers from breakfast and rinses her Amstel empties like they're family heirlooms. She calls down to the front desk and puts two more nights on her credit card and kills close to ten minutes washing her underwear in the sink and drying it with the tiny theft-proof hairdryer.

When she can't hold off any longer, she picks up the remote and turns on the TV. Judges Alex and Judy and the C-tier talk show hosts squeeze entertainment out of people's tawdry little fuckups, and the soaps are like porn without sex. Her one great piece of luck is that her room is too dowscale to have a minibar. Overcoming the urge to head to the corner for another six-pack is hard enough.

Somehow, she gets through the two hours and ten minutes before Krekorian calls back.

“Sounds like you're watching TV too,” says Krekorian. “Oprah?”

“I'd cut off a big toe for Oprah,” says O'Hara. “She doesn't come on till four.”

“Dar, we got Pena getting off the 1 train at 168th and Broadway at 9:06 p.m. And she's running.”

O'Hara clicks off the TV and stares at the blank screen. Moreal and Consuela Entonces, the two girls from Pena's Big Sister program, live three blocks from that stop. Tida Entonces, their ex–junkie mom, told O'Hara that because of Thanksgiving, Pena didn't make her usual weekly visit and hadn't been there since the previous Saturday. So now there are at least three lies about those missing one hundred and eleven minutes.

“Dar, you there?”

“Just trying to think. Serge, remember the girls in the program I told you about? They live on 170th and Fort Washington Avenue. Stay at that same station and switch over to the cameras on the downtown side. Let's see if Pena gets back on that train.”

O'Hara stays on the phone and hears a rush of tape, then a click when Krekorian says, “Stop.”

“You're right on again, Dar. At 9:14, we got her coming back in on the downtown side, and both girls are with her, one in each hand. That's six blocks round-trip, plus in and out of the building, in eight minutes. I know the girl was a runner, but that's Olympic-level hustling.”

“K., I'm heading uptown to talk to Tida Entonces. You call me the second you find out where they get off.”

O'Hara runs the two blocks to Allen and hurries down the
same stairs Pena did fifteen days ago. After ten minutes on the empty platform, she catches an F train to Thirty-fourth Street, runs the block to Penn Station, and after another excruciating platform wait, boards an uptown A train. O'Hara is the only passenger in the car, and as the rattling local lurches through almost twenty stops, O'Hara thinks about Pena and her two young charges sprinting through the night. Where were they running to? Or what were they running from? At the deep 168th Street station, one of four elevators slowly carries O'Hara toward the surface. On the street, O'Hara tries to quicken the pace but her vintage boots don't do her any favors. By the time she covers the short distance to 251 Fort Washington Avenue, her T-shirt is soaked.

O'Hara checks her cell—still no call from K.—and waits for her heart rate to come down. She has barely thought out her approach to talking to Entonces, but with two warrants out for her arrest and cops cruising the neighborhood, she can't hang out on the street. When a tenant steps out of the locked vestibule, O'Hara spins and slips through the door.

On six, sour cooking smells fill the hallway. O'Hara tries to buy a little time by the elevator, but a dog goes ape shit from behind a chipped door, and an old crone, carrying her trash to the incinerator chute, eyes her suspiciously. Just like with Tomlinson, everything is moving much too fast. But she can't loiter in the hallway any longer. She walks down the blackened tiles toward 6E.

On the other side of the door, Entonces shuffles toward her in her house slippers. O'Hara hears the metal cover slip off the
eyehole. The door opens and catches hard at the end of its six-inch chain.

“I barely recognized you,” says Entonces. “You look different.”

“Tida, can I please come in?”

“It's not a good time, Detective. The girls are home sick. You should've called first.”

“Please, Tida. There's something we need to talk about. It's important.”

Entonces unlatches the chain, and O'Hara follows her down the dreary hall. The new Justin Timberlake's coming from behind the door of the first bedroom, and girls' voices rise over it.

“The girls don't sound too sick, Tida,” says O'Hara.

“What can I tell you? They fooled me.”

They stop at the kitchen, spotless as ever, even with the girls home for the afternoon. Entonces nods toward the Formica table. “Have a seat. I just made coffee.”

“Thanks. A glass of water would be better.”

O'Hara drinks half of it in one gulp, as Entonces watches warily.

“Tida, why'd you lie to me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You told me Francesca didn't visit the girls Thanksgiving week, hadn't been here since the previous Saturday. I just found out that's not true. She was here the night she was murdered. Wasn't she?”

Entonces's face crumbles. On a good day, Entonces is still an attractive woman. At least you can see the parts that were,
but when she cries, all that time on the streets pushes through the cracks. From across the table, O'Hara watches Entonces age twenty years.

“I didn't want to lie about the girls going out with Francesca Wednesday night,” says Entonces, “but I had to. The rules say Francesca can only take them out on weekends. To Children's Services, a Wednesday is always a weekday, no exceptions. Children's Services, they don't play. They'll use anything to take my girls away, even if it's dirty dishes in the sink. To them, I'm a two-time loser who never deserved my girls back in the first place.”

Tida Entonces's explanation is not implausible, and she's right about Children's Services. A sniff of trouble and they'll snatch Moreal and Consuela back in a second. Entonces sobs softly, and O'Hara feels her own grip slipping too. Is she so hard up for a break in this case that she's grasping at straws, taking a couple of snatches of MTA video and blowing them up into more than they are?

“Detective, you don't look so good. You need more water?”

“Please,” says O'Hara, and after Entonces refills her glass, takes another long gulp. “What did they do that night, Francesca and the girls?”

“Francesca took them out for a quick dinner,” says Entonces. “It was her Thanksgiving treat.”

“Where, Tida? Where did they go?”

O'Hara struggles to steady herself, as she runs the times through her head. They don't add up. At 9:14 Pena and the girls get on the subway, and barely an hour later, Pena is buying
CDs one hundred seventy blocks away. Where's the time for dinner? Before Entonces can answer, Consuela, the younger of her two daughters, wanders into the kitchen.

“I'm talking to the detective, baby,” says Entonces.

“I'm thirsty,” whines Consuela. She ignores her mother and opens the fridge.

“Then take your drink and let us be.”

On the shelf at the bottom of the door is a carton of strawberry Nesquik. Consuela reaches for it, and her sweatshirt rides up on her skinny back, uncovering black markings surrounded by red skin. Squinting, O'Hara makes out the shape of a heart and a dollar sign at the center, and before she can stop herself, jumps up from the table and grabs the girl's thin wrist much too hard. Startled, Consuela drops her carton, and the pink-colored milk spills onto the kitchen floor.

“Consuela,” says O'Hara, the kitchen spinning around her. “When did you get that tattoo?”

“Momma,” cries Consuela, “that hurts.”

“Get your hands off my daughter,” screams Entonces. She is already out of her chair and rushing toward them. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I'm sorry,” says O'Hara. “I didn't mean to frighten Consuela. But I need to know where she got that tattoo.”

“You don't need to know shit. Get out of here this minute. Or I'm calling the police.”

O'Hara pushes back out through the vestibule, to the curb, where a wash of milky light is all that's left of the day. Fort Washington Avenue is filled with the braying of just released Dominican and Puerto Rican schoolkids, one of whom careens through the clogged sidewalks on a small black bike just like the model in the window of Evelyn Lee's boutique. Still unsteady on her feet, O'Hara makes her way through the chest-high crowd, attracting hard stares from the more precocious preteens. The nascent street toughs are more adept at making a cop than Rodriguez and Chamberlain.

O'Hara buys a bottle of water and takes it to an island bench in the center of Broadway, rush-hour traffic whipping by in both directions. She's got a new message from Krekorian on her cell, and pressing the phone tight to her ear can just make it out. “Dar, spent two more hours in the MTA but never saw Pena and the girls get off. According to the tech, 103rd, Fiftieth and Christopher Street all have multiple cameras out, and there are so many holes in the coverage, they could have slipped through almost anywhere. I'd stay longer, but some of us still work for a living. Please call me before you do anything else ridiculous.”

Too late for that,
thinks O'Hara, but doesn't beat herself up with her usual brio. She shouldn't have grabbed Consuela, but spotting her tattoo more than makes up for it because it proves her instincts about the tattoo were right, and Lowry's were wrong. Whatever the reason, Consuela has the same heart-shaped pattern inked on her lower back as Francesca. And Consuela's tattoo was still fresh, the skin around it raw and pink. It couldn't be more than a couple of weeks old.

O'Hara extricates herself from the middle of upper Broadway and descends into the subway. On uptown trains, commuters are pressed up against the windows like aquarium guppies, while the southbound trains are empty. By 6:30, she is back on Houston, and just like on Fort Washington Avenue, she's the oldest human being in sight, not that that matters to the red-eyed counterman at her adopted bodega.

“Turkey on a Kaiser roll,” he says with a smile. “Lettuce, tomato, little butter, little mustard?”

“Nobody likes a showoff,” says O'Hara as she heads to the refrigerators.

Safely back in room 303, O'Hara cracks an Amstel and stares across the dark park. Uptown, she can follow Bowery all the way to St. Marks, each tenement topped with a distinctly different water tank.
Wherever you land,
thinks O'Hara,
the city absorbs you like a sponge
. In less than twenty-four hours, O'Hara has a new subway stop, bodega, sandwich order and view. The only thing missing is Bruno farting on the bed.

O'Hara unwraps her provisions on the desk. As she eats, she adds what she's learned to her timeline:

 

8:43 (approx.)
, writes O'Hara,
Pena enters the Second Avenue subway station at Allen Street.

9:06 p.m., Pena gets off the 1 train at 168th and Broadway. She's running.

9:14 p.m., Pena, with Moreal and Consuela Entonces, reenters 186th, southbound.

 

Thirty-one of the missing one hundred and eleven minutes are now accounted for, and with a little more time to consider it, Tida's story about Pena taking her girls out for a quick pre-Thanksgiving meal seems like one more piece of bullshit. If Pena and the girls got back on the subway at 9:14 p.m. and sixty-seven minutes later, Pena was at Tower Records, there's barely time to eat three slices of pizza and send the girls home in a cab. Why would Pena run all the way uptown for that? That brings it to four lies about this brief stretch of time.

O'Hara deserves to enjoy her sandwich, and she does, along with a second beer. Then she pulls out her cell and scrolls through her received calls until she finds the one she got from Lebowitz that evening while she was going door-to-door on Rivington. The call came in on his cell, and when she calls the number, he picks up on the first ring.

“Darlene, I've been worried about you.”

“I messed up, didn't I?”

“Only if you believe what they write in the papers.”

“In this case, I'm afraid, it's pretty much true.”

“Then I'm sure you had your reasons.”

“I like to think so.”

“Pena?”

“Yeah. That's why I'm calling. At least something related to her. Did you work on the Tomlinson suicide?”

“Terri handled that one. But since as I had a personal interest in the case, I looked over her shoulder as much as I could get away with.”

“Did Tomlinson have any tattoos?”

“No. Why?”

“I just found out that one of the girls Pena was mentoring had the same tattoo as Pena, same spot and everything. I wondered if Tomlinson did too. Some kind of secret sorority.”

“No tattoos. I'm sure. And there's something else. I read through her blood work. She had fatal amounts of three antidepressants in her system, plus twenty milligrams of lorazepam. If she hadn't gotten to a hospital within the hour, Tomlinson would have died whether she jumped or not. I thought you might want to know that.”

“I appreciate that, Sam,” O'Hara says, and realizes she doesn't want the conversation to end. “I really do.”

“Where are you staying?” asks Lebowitz.

“This boutique hotel on Houston you've never heard of. It's called Howard Johnson's. Very exclusive, very obscure. Not everyone gets the irony.”

The joke falls flat and is followed by an awkward silence.

“That's funny,” says Lebowitz finally.

“You sure?”

“You must think I'm a fatal nerd.”

“I don't. Really. I mean I doubt it's fatal. Of course you know a lot more about causes of death than I do.”

“That's funny too,” says Lebowitz, and this time emits a sound very much like laughter. “It's good to hear your voice, Darlene. Please call again if you need anything else.”

“It's good to hear your voice too,” says O'Hara, and feels herself smile at Lebowitz's shyness as she hangs up.

The conversation takes O'Hara back to Bobst Library, not a place she wants to go. Once again she sees Tomlinson's skinny arms and legs windmill through the air, an image she had somehow managed to avoid all day. O'Hara pushes her attention from Tomlinson to her rival, Evelyn Lee. Maybe in O'Hara's embarrassment about that staged picture on the Halloween Web site, she wrote off the Tenafly madam too quickly. Lee might not be much of a pimp or a businesswoman, but that doesn't mean Pena wasn't poaching. And if Pena had taken one of Lee's clients private, then at least one of those johns, all of whom swore to O'Hara that they had never seen Holly again after their first magical date, was lying.

O'Hara looks inside the desk drawer for a second piece of HoJo stationery, but the cheap bastards only give you one. So she turns the timeline over, divides the back of page into three columns—one for Stubbs, Delfinger and Muster—and writes everything she can recall about those three interviews. When she's done, the only one O'Hara feels comfortable ruling out is Stubbs. Although, in retrospect, there's something off-putting about the way Mayer had all the paperwork waiting for her so nice and neat, and someone with halfway decent Photoshop
skills could probably have forged them all, Stubbs's alibi still feels solid. She can't see Mayer risking that town house or anything else for a client, and besides, Stubbs was the only one of the three who came to her. Coming forward makes sense as a gamble to save a career. It doesn't make sense if you killed someone.

The other two alibis, however, are paper thin, and O'Hara is disgusted with herself for having accepted them so readily. Beacuse O'Hara was convinced Delfinger couldn't be the killer, she let him slide on a calender and an E-ZPass statement, and the only thing propping up Muster's alibi is a highly dependent subordinate who desperately needs the job. As O'Hara tries to add to her memory of those last two interviews, the phone rings.

It's not her phone. It's the hotel's, and against her better judgment, she picks up. “Someone's on his way to your room,” says the overnight man at the front desk. O'Hara looks at her watch: 12:15. It's got to be Krekorian, just released from his four-to-midnight. But the footsteps in the hall are too light for Krekorian, and the knock on the door too tentative for a cop. O'Hara looks through the peephole, and she sees the dark, unruly hair of Sam Lebowitz. She can't see his face because he's staring at the carpet. Thrilled to see him and anxious to put him out of his misery, she pulls him into the room and kisses him on the mouth. Then she runs her tongue across his ear. “I've been wanting to do that for a while.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

O'Hara hands Lebowitz an Amstel and jumps into the shower, washing her hair with the tiny bottle of shampoo on the ledge, and when she steps out of the bathroom her wet red hair and freckled thighs bracket a black Yonah Schimmel Original Knishes T-shirt. Gazing up at her, Lebowitz's face registers a level of excitement several times higher than anything he had experienced in his first thirty-two years.

“You drank all that by yourself?” asks O'Hara, pointing at the minuscule space at the top of his beer.

“It's the curse of sobriety,” says Lebowitz. “My family has suffered from it for generations.”

“Not mine,” says O'Hara.

O'Hara pulls Lebowitz out of his chair and starts kissing him in earnest, and as she pulls off his shirt and unbuttons his jeans, sees something in his eyes and posture so immutably seventeen, she knows already she will never tire of fucking him.

“Sam, I got to say, you look even better without your clothes.”

“In high school, I was getting picked on a little. My old man bought me a set of weights.”

“That's not what I meant, Sam.”