Shadows Still Remain (21 page)

Three weeks later, an hour before dawn, Rick Helmsford, the ex-cop and recovering alcoholic who runs the Farm, gives O'Hara one last signature hug and puts her on the Trailways back to New York. O'Hara, who hasn't slept in two days, is out before the bus is back on the highway and doesn't open her eyes until the corkscrew descent into the Lincoln Tunnel.

Thanks to Walt and Rudy, O'Hara arrives in a highly sanitized Times Square. What little sleaze is left is sucking on a respirator in and around the Port Authority. O'Hara walks past a working girl in hot pants asleep on a bench, and slips into a concourse bar. At ten in the morning, as a janitor swabs the floor and ESPN reheats last night's highlights on an overhead TV, she washes out the chalky taste of all those AA meetings with a couple of ice-cold Amstels.

Fortified, she catches a 1 train to Riverdale, and without stopping at her apartment, gets in her car and heads down the West Side Highway. Grateful to have the Hudson on her right once again, she drives the length of the island, rounds the Seaport and takes the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn.

On a quiet street near Fort Greene Park, O'Hara finds
the house of Donna and Albert Johnson, the foster parents for Consuela and Moreal before the state returned them to their mother. Eleven Lafayette Street—O'Hara got the address from Nia Anderson at Big Sisters—is a warm, somewhat dilapidated row house, and Donna Johnson, who answers the door in a maroon sweater and black slacks, is a warm, somewhat dilapidated black woman in her early sixties. She deposits O'Hara in a large parlor with enough sofas and chairs to seat thirty, and when she reemerges from the kitchen, has a plate in one hand, coffee in the other.

“You got to try my plum tart,” insists Johnson. “It's the only good thing I make.” O'Hara, who hasn't eaten anything good in a month, needs little convincing.

While O'Hara tucks in, Johnson pulls a photo album from a shelf and sits beside her on the couch. “In the last twenty-three years, ninety-one children have lived in this house with Albert and me,” says Johnson, the hand carefully turning the pages clenched by arthritis. “Every one of them had to go through their own little piece of hell to get here.”

Johnson points at a skinny boy about six, who stares defiantly at the camera from the front stoop. “This young man is Arthur Henderson. He was with us five years. Now he works as a computer technician.” O'Hara patiently sips her coffee, as Johnson points out a young girl who just got her high school equivalency, another employed as a teacher's aide and a third earning twenty-eight dollars an hour unloading planes at Kennedy Airport. “No doctors or lawyers yet. Maybe one day.”

Eventually Johnson's finger stops under a picture of two
young girls, obviously sisters, their hair pulled back in tight braids. The younger one smiles shyly with her arm around the shoulders of her older sister, who raises two fingers behind the younger girl's head. “This bright mischievous girl is Moreal Entonces,” she says. “And of course that's Consuela. It's not easy to look at this picture now, is it? Moreal was eleven, Consuela nine.”

“Donna, what'd you think when Children's Services returned the girls to their mother?”

“Neither of us could believe it. Albert and I have been doing this long enough to know there's always going to be a bias for the mother, but Tida had been a junkie for twenty years and clean for six months. It was too soon by at least a year. And the worst part, both girls had turned the corner. After only ten months, they were doing better at school, better at home, better with the other kids.”

“Then why did they do it?”

“I'm not sure, but I know a big part of it was Francesca Pena. She snowed Children's Services just like she snowed everyone else. And she went after it. She didn't just vouch for Tida; she wrote letters to her caseworkers and her probation officer, even wrote to our local fool congresswoman. And since those letters were coming from a student at a fancy school like NYU and a young woman who had turned her own life around, they were persuasive.”

O'Hara and Johnson sit and stare at the two young sisters. Although the photo is two years old, Consuela's face looks hardly different than in the video.

“So what do you think will happen to Tida, Detective? I mean, after the jury decides that what she did was justifiable? Is she going to write a book? Do the talk shows? Am I going to see her on the couch beside Oprah? Is there even a chance she is going to get those girls back again?”

“No,” says O'Hara.

“I wish I could be as sure of that as you,” says Johnson. She wraps one warm fleshy arm around O'Hara and looks at her in mock alarm.

“Girl, I'm getting you another slice right now. You ain't nothing but skin 'n' bones.”

From Fort Greene, O'Hara takes the BQE to the Grand Central, gets off at Astoria Boulevard and follows Twenty-third Avenue into a huge chain-fenced parking lot at the edge of the East River. At the end of the lot, a guard waves her onto an unnamed two-lane bridge, and she drives for more than a mile out over the water. LaGuardia Airport is so close on her right, the roar of landing planes is deafening and she can see a pier of lights directing pilots to runway 13/3.

In the watery tissue between the boroughs, ten miles from the Statue of Liberty, is Rikers Island, the nation's largest penal colony, built by the city on a 415-acre island of trash. Over the bridge, O'Hara heads down an eerily quiet street lined with aging brick jails, most of which have sprouted at least a couple of cheap modular additions. With its own power plant, bakery, chapels and hospitals, it's a world apart, and as Delfinger's violent demise illustrated, it's run by the inmates as much as the guards.

The island has ten jails. O'Hara parks near the Rose M. Singer Center, the only one that holds women. As she walks in from the parking lot, she can hear a newborn crying in
the nursery, some lucky infant who got dealt a hand right up there with Moreal and Consuela and Marwan. Entonces has just finished a meeting with her public-appointed attorney in one of the closet-sized rooms near the visitors' lounge, and the guards have kept her there rather than return her to her cell. When O'Hara steps in, Entonces, wearing dark green scrubs, sits uncuffed at a small metal table.

“You look different,” says Entonces.

“Been away.”

“Me too.”

“That's too bad about what happened to Danny Boy,” says O'Hara.

“A crying shame.”

“You put up a bounty?”

“Didn't have to lift a finger. Place like this is full of volunteers. From what I hear, guys were fighting over who got to do him.”

“Still,” says O'Hara, “getting to him in only two days is pretty quick.”

Entonces shrugs. “You expect me to be sorry? Send flowers to his family?”

“Remember Moreal and Consuela's foster mom in Brooklyn, Donna Johnson?” says O'Hara. “I visited her this morning. A very nice woman. Bakes a helluva plum tart.”

“Good for her.”

“She told me the only reason you got your daughters back was Pena went to bat for you with Children's Services.”

“She's right. Till Pena came along, I was just another unfit junkie mom. Who was going to listen to me?”

“And Pena didn't stop at phone calls, said Johnson. She told me Pena wrote letters, lots of them. And visited your caseworkers and met with your probation officer. I wondered why she went to so much trouble.”

“We all know why,” says Entonces, looking away from O'Hara at the colorless cement walls, smelling of sweat and disinfectant. “So she could take my beautiful children and turn them into whores. So she could sell my babies to people like Delfinger.”

“And because she knew you'd go along with it.”

“What are you saying? That twisted bitch played me like everyone else.”

“Why go to all that effort to get them away from a place where they were finally safe and doing well, unless she knew for a fact it was going to be worth her while? That's what Delfinger was trying to tell me in the car, before you attacked him, wasn't it? The night you killed her, you probably swung by his place and picked them up yourself.”

“You're crazy. Like I told you, he put them in a cab.”

“Maybe. But how much of Delfinger's money was going to you, Tida? A quarter? A third? Whatever it was, it wasn't enough. Well, maybe at first. You could buy yourself a TV, some clothes. But not for long. And why should you get a cent less than Pena? Why should Pena get a dime? Moreal and Consuela were
your daughters. Your flesh and blood.
You carried those girls for nine months. You brought them into this world and could have died doing it, and some Puerto Rican yuppie shows up at the last minute and takes all the money? It
was like you were getting screwed all over again, just like you have your whole life.”

“Then you get it,” says Entonces, turning from the wall and staring directly at O'Hara for the first time since she arrived. “I'm their mother. A mother has her rights.”

On a sticky morning in late August, O'Hara leans against her rented Mitsubishi and watches gawky adolescent girls stagger around a cement track. The track, which is cracked and gouged and might once have been green, is behind the Arthur Alvarez Center for Juveniles. The facility, cut off from a treeless neighborhood of warehouses and outdated factories by a double-height barbed-wire-topped fence, is as bleak and institutional as Pena described.

In June, after prosecutors were made aware of the mother's active role in the prostitution of her daughters, Entonces copped a plea that will keep her off
Oprah
for the next ninety-nine years. O'Hara fell back into the routines of her work, the standard Seventh Precinct bullshit, ameliorated by the dependable ardor and affection of Lebowitz, who is already her longest-running relationship since the heartbreaking, bong-sucking fireman. Despite the satisfaction of seeing Entonces locked up for life, and the novel experience of actually having one herself, O'Hara is still haunted by the case, so much so that she has cashed in three vacation days and flown JetBlue to Chicago on her own dime to try to learn what turned a bright teenage girl into a psychopath.

Delfinger and even Entonces, O'Hara can comprehend. Unfortunately, she's encountered scumbags like them too many times not to. But Pena, at least the why and how of her, is as much of a cipher as the afternoon David McLain walked into the detective room and reported her missing. So instead of sharing a towel with Lebowitz and Bruno on Jones Beach, O'Hara watches juvenile delinquents jog around a steaming track.

Chicago summers come highly recommended, but the lake breezes don't reach here. At 6:45, it's pushing eighty, and the heat takes its toll, particularly on the heavier girls, one of whom veers off the track and pukes in the dust.

“All done, fatso?” asks a heavyset man with a flattop and a pink face. “Then get back out there. This isn't camp. No one cares how you feel.” When O'Hara pushes off her car and approaches the man from the far side of the chain-link fence, he steers his contempt from the girls to her.

“Didn't you see the sign?” he asks. “Or can't you read?”

“I love to read,” says O'Hara. “Got anything to recommend?”

She shows him her shield, then holds up two pictures of Pena: one as a Westfield High School freshman, the other an NYU sophomore. “Recognize her? Her name was Francesca Pena.”

The man looks back over his shoulder to make sure no one is taking advantage of his inattention and slacking off. “Yeah,” he says. “She's the girl who got murdered.”

“How long have you worked here?” asks O'Hara.

“Too long. Can't you tell?”

“So you must have known her. She was here in the summer of 2001.”

“No, she wasn't.”

“But you recognized her?”

“I remembered her from the stories in the papers,” says the man, looking over his shoulder again. “When they came out, I couldn't place the name or the face. But a lot of girls come through here, and in a couple years, at that age, they can look completely different. So I went through the records. Turns out, I wasn't so dumb after all. She was never here.”

“But she described this place to a T.”

“I wouldn't know about that,” says the man, walking back toward the track. “But she was never here. You don't believe me, call Juvenile.”

O'Hara drives back to the Econo Lodge and reads
USA Today
until the municipal offices open at nine. Then she calls the Department of Juvenile Justice, which sends her to its Custody Movement and Control Unit. When the latter confirms that Pena never went through its system, she calls the Board of Education and Elections, the Office of City Archives, the Postal Service, the Office of Public Assistance and the Food Stamp Office, the HIV/AIDS Services Administration and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She often makes up to a dozen calls to each as she gets bounced from division to division, employee to supervisor.

O'Hara works the phone for four hours and gets exactly nothing. There is no record of Pena attending public school in Chicago. No record of her or Ingrid and Edwin Pena having
lived there. No record of her parents voting in a city or federal election or receiving public assistance or food stamps. No record of Edwin Pena having been treated for AIDS at a Chicago hospital or succumbing in a local hospice. No addresses. No phone numbers. No utility bills. No certificates of birth or death.

O'Hara puts down the phone and pulls open the curtains. It's one in the afternoon, and there's a knot in her neck the size of a golf ball. For ten minutes, she squints at a glaring white parking lot that could be anywhere in America, except the one city she shouldn't have left. She thinks about Lebowitz and Bruno and feels like an idiot. Then she sits back down on the unmade bed and calls the Seven. The desk sergeant Kenny Aarons picks up.

“Kenny, I need you to run a check on someone, name of Ingrid Coppalano.”

“Dar, where you calling from?”

“Chicago. It's a long story.”

“Coppalano, as in Francesca Pena's mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Ancient history, isn't it, Dar?”

“I know. It's embarrassing.”

“Give me a sec. This computer's a piece of crap. Here we go—one arrest—DWI—4/27/99.”

“Where?”

“Beacon, New York.”

“Wonderful. She wasn't even in Chicago. I should have called you four hours ago.”

“Dar, you can call me whenever you want, day or night. You should know that by now.”

“Kenny, you're the best. What else?”

“Maiden name, Ingrid Falb. Married Dominic Coppalano in New Paltz, New York. I been hiking around there. It's beautiful.”

“When?”

“Two summers ago.”

“Not you, Kenny. When did Ingrid Falb become Mrs. Coppalano?”

“Twenty-two years ago and change—5/15/83—in Beacon, New York. Two years later, on 4/5/86, Francesca Falb Coppalano was born, also in Beacon.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“I say something wrong, Dar?”