Shadows Still Remain

All O’Hara has to offer is that Pena spent the night with several classmates, one of whom may be the daughter of a famous artist, and Peter Coy, the new kid at Campus Security they got working the holiday weekend, can’t do anything with that. O’Hara asks him to call Larry Elkin. Elkin is a former detective from the Seven, who retired from NYPD the day after he clocked his twenty years. A month later he took a cushy security job at NYU. Now, still in his forties, Elkin collects one and a half salaries, and when he retires again, will do it on two pensions. If he has a kid smart enough to get in, he might even get a break on tuition.

Elkin knows the friend, not Pena. “Uma Chestnut,” he says when Coy hands her the phone. “Daughter of Seymour Chestnut. You may not give a rat’s ass about contemporary sculpture, O’Hara, but NYU does, particularly when they go for fifteen mil a pop. First day of the semester, we get a list of every student whose parents’ net worth is north of fifty million dollars. Someone says boo to Junior or Little Princess, we come running with our Tasers and mace. The amazing thing, Dar, is how fucking many of them there are, thirty, forty, in every class.”

Elkin tells Coy where to find the contact numbers, and O’Hara leaves messages for Chestnut on answering machines at three addresses. While they wait for her to call back, she and Krekorian eat a couple slices in the front seat of the Impala and watch shaggy-haired college kids get dropped off by their parents after their first long weekend home.

“You look like them ten years ago, K.?”

“I don’t know what I look like now.”

“It’s called denial.”

What O’Hara looks for and can’t find in the faces of the students is fear, not only the physical alertness that animates young faces in the projects but a fear of the future. These kids don’t seem to have ever doubted that there’s a spot waiting for them somewhere in the world. That alone makes them so different from herself at a similar age, she could be staring into a diorama at the Museum of Natural History.

When Chestnut calls back an hour and a half later, they’re back at the precinct house, their shift nearly over. She tells O’Hara that she, Pena and two other students, Erin Case and Mehta Singh, spent Wednesday night at a place off Rivington called Freemans. The three friends left at about 2:30 a.m., but Francesca, who was interested in a guy, decided to stay. “Can you describe him?” asks O’Hara. “Not well—he was at the other end of the room and the place was packed—but I can tell you that none of us liked him. He was older, close to fifty, and looked a little rough around the edges. Mehta and Erin practically begged her to leave.”

O’Hara and Krekorian drive to Rivington, double-park and walk down a short alley formed by the backs of several small tenements, and although the buildings themselves look real enough, the density of gritty urban signifiers (graffiti, fire escapes, etc.) is suspiciously high, and all are spotlighted. At the unmarked entrance, they push through a thick velvet curtain into a restaurant/bar art directed like the set of a nineteenth-century period play. Oil-stained mirrors, blurry battle scenes and portraits of soldiers, their gilded frames chipped and warped, hang from wainscoted walls. Displayed among them are the mounted heads of bucks and moose and a large white swan with collapsed wings that appears to have just been shot out of the sky. The place is too far from Washington Square to be an NYU hangout, and the crowd is older. Like a lot of the people roaming the Seven at night, they are enjoying that languorous ever-expanding limbo between college and employment. At midnight on Sunday, the place is packed. Krekorian clears a path to the bar and gets the attention of the ponytailed bartender. He only works weekends but retreats into the open kitchen and returns with a very nervous Hispanic busboy, who was on that night. Because O’Hara assumes the kid is working illegally, she doesn’t ask his name, just shows him the freshman Facebook picture of Pena they got from Coy.

The busboy recognizes her immediately. He points at a table at the other end of the room. “She sat over there. It was late. I was already cleaning up.”

“Was a guy with her?”

“No.”

“You sure? We heard she hooked up.”

“She sat alone for a long time. She was the last person to leave.”

“Was she drunk?”

“I don’t think so. She looked serious.”

When O’Hara gets back to the car, she makes the two calls she has been dreading for different reasons all evening. The first is to Pena’s parents in Westfield, Massachusetts. The second is to her useless sergeant, Mike Callahan.

6 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)

Thumbing the photograph of Pena in her coat pocket, O’Hara follows Bruno’s jaunty ass down the steep porch steps and doesn’t correct him when he tugs hard to the right. For nearly five years, ending in her late twenties, O’Hara lived with a fireman in Long Beach in Nassau County, and even though he was kind of a mess and his lips spent more time attached to his bong than her, O’Hara adored him and counted herself happy. At least until the morning she got a call from his other girlfriend, also NYPD, who informed O’Hara that she was about to have his kid. A week later, determined to escape the incestuous grip of Long Beach, with its bars for firemen and bars for cops and bars for both, she rented the top floor of a white clapboard house on 252nd Street in Riverdale, just west of the Henry Hudson Parkway. On days off, she treats Bruno to a longer and more interesting walk, and when Bruno realizes it’s one of his lucky days, the sawed-off mongrel pulls like a rottweiler, steam snorting from his nubby black nose.

Bruno drags his owner past a 1960s-era high-rise, then slows to investigate the rusty fence that surrounds some cracked tennis courts. High on the list of things that kill O’Hara about her dog is the power of his convictions. No matter how many times he’s checked out a certain stump or tire or fence, he never phones it in. Every stop and sniff adds to his storehouse of canine knowledge. Every piss sends a message, and every time he scrambles out of the house and into the world it matters a lot, at least to Bruno.

The two skirt the neglected grounds of a once grand Tudor mansion, and rounding the corner, O’Hara catches her first glimpse of the Hudson. As always, she’s delighted that’s she’s seeing it not from a public lookout on the Palisades Parkway but through a small break in the trees on a quiet street half a mile from her home. Still preoccupied by her cruelly inconclusive conversation with Pena’s parents the night before—the father, who answered the phone, could barely get a word out, while the steelier mom clung blindly to what little hope remained—O’Hara follows her dog to the river. She lets Bruno root among the cold, damp weeds a hundred feet from the water before she pulls him out and turns him back toward home. As they climb the steep hill, the burn in her thighs reminds O’Hara she hasn’t been to the gym in a week.

At home, O’Hara saws three slices off a stale baguette and puts on coffee and music. Ten minutes later, when she steps out of the shower, her hair is clean and all the pieces of modest domestic life are in order: coffee aroma wafts out from the kitchen, Bruno sleeps on his side in a circle of sun, and Heart’s Ann Wilson sings “Crazy on You”. When O’Hara moved in with the fireman, every bit of decor, not to mention his collection of piss-poor CDs, was all grandfathered in, and any input on her part was highly discouraged. That’s why, despite the fact that she was almost thirty when she signed the lease, this is the first place that feels entirely her own. The purchase and placement of every stick of furniture, from the overstuffed whorehouse couch (a flea market on Columbus Avenue) to the small kitchen table (a Riverdale yard sale) to the brass floor lamps (IKEA in Elizabeth) represent an unfettered decision of one and give her inordinate pleasure. The same goes for the photographs, including the pictures in the small foyer of her parents and grandmother and Bruno. Her favorite, hanging just above the couch, is of her and Axl, in the midst of their epic road trip. It was taken at six in the morning in front of a motel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Above them the sky is just lightening, and the fifteen-year-old Axl looks so beautiful and nakedly adolescent it almost feels wrong to look at him. As Axl and Pena and Pena’s panicked parents clamor for different parts of her attention, Krekorian calls.

“Dar,” he says. “You caught something big.”

“Do I need to get tested?”

“Give me a call after you’ve seen the papers. I think we need to go in.”

When O’Hara gets off the phone and fans her Monday papers out across the table, the same photo of Pena she has in her pocket stares back from all three. O’Hara is surprised the press jumped on the case so quickly. Being Puerto Rican and working-class is usually enough to keep anyone from getting much ink. But as O’Hara reads the stories, she realizes that Pena, with her wealthy friends and NYU scholarship, has the prospects of a well-off white or Asian kid. Plus, she’s beautiful and light-skinned, and comes with an irresistible backstory

The Post and News are interested in the potential tragedy as a cautionary tale. A teenage girl stays alone at a bar in the hope of getting laid. Therefore, she has to be punished. The Times concentrates on the poignancy of Pena’s unlikely journey that began long before she got to NYU. Its story on the front page of the Metro section, above the fold, recounts how Pena grew up on public assistance in a notorious Chicago ghetto, lost her drug-addicted father to AIDS when she was eleven and got into enough trouble in her early teens to do two months in juvenile lockup. Desperate to escape the gravity of the inner city, mother and daughter rolled the dice and moved to New England. In Westfield, the mother was remarried, to a local carpenter and small-time contractor, Dominic Coppalano, and took his name, while Francesca kept the Pena of her late father. The terrified man on the phone last night was Pena’s stepfather.

In the depressed former mill town of Westfield, Massachusetts, Pena rewrote her destiny, or at least tried to. She became a competitive runner and a motivated student, won a scholarship to a prep school and two years later a full ride at NYU. According to a quote from the Assistant Provost and Director of Admissions, Pena had made so much progress as a student-athlete, the school was planning to propose her as a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship.

O’Hara has read enough of these stories to know they’re written to a curve. When catastrophe lurks, a pretty girl becomes a breathtaking beauty and a B student a future world leader. But it’s the particulars of Pena’s story that get O’Hara’s attention. O’Hara also lost her father at eleven, and although getting pregnant didn’t get her sent to juvenile detention, the special school for fuckups on East Tenth Street wasn’t much better. And then there’s the oddly parallel cross-country trips, Pena’s mother grabbing her daughter and heading east, not long before O’Hara and Axl headed west. And weren’t both mothers attempting about the same thing: to distract their impressionable kids with a change of scenery?

O’Hara should have known Callahan would call reporters, but it never occurred to her that they would bite so enthusiastically. Now that they’ve decided Pena can sell papers, it’s become the kind of case that can launch a career. But not for long. If Pena’s disappearance is upgraded to a homicide, she and Krekorian will only get to work it for seventy-two hours. Then it will be turned over to Homicide South, and for O’Hara and Krekorian, it’s back to burglaries and domestic disputes, Astrid with her stroller and fake kids and Dolores in her bathrobe.

7 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)

Krekorian lives twenty miles up the Palisades in the Rockland County town of New City, or as he likes to call it, Jew City. He picks up O’Hara on his way in, and they get to Freemans at 2:30 p.m., several hours before it’s due to open. Although O’Hara finds the place a lot easier to take empty, the daylight isn’t kind to the decor and reveals how little money was spent to achieve its faux-antique effects. The oil-stained mirrors and dusty paintings that at night suggested the lodgings and funky heirlooms of a hard-partying disinherited count look like sidewalk trash during the day, and the animal heads on the walls look like roadkill.

“Two things you can’t avoid, Dar,” says Krekorian, nodding at a glassy-eyed elk.

“Death and taxidermy.”

“I guess someone forgot to tell Wesley Snipes.”

They sit at the bar and sip their coffee, while in the open kitchen a line chef sautées onions and a busboy pulls oversized plates from a dishwasher. Over the next hour, the waitresses and other kitchen staff trickle in, the employees getting prettier and whiter the closer they get to the customers. The maître d’ arrives, sporting a natty tweed blazer a couple of sizes too small, and soon after the weekday bartender, Billy Conway “She was too pretty not to remember,” says Conway, who actually looks like a bartender, with the thick shoulders and forearms of an ex-jock. “She and her friends had a couple spots at the bar. After they left, she moved to a table and stuck it out by herself to the bitter end.”

“When was that?” asks O’Hara.

“About three-thirty Because of Thanksgiving, we closed a little early.”

“She leave alone?”

“Yeah.”

“No one followed her out?”

“There was no one left to follow her. She was the last one here.”

“She talk to anyone beside her friends?” asks Krekorian.

“Right after her friends left, a guy came over and tried to chat her up, but got cut off at the knees.”

“You ever see him here before?”

“First time. About five feet ten, bad skin, long hair, at least fifty One of those ugly Euro guys some girls can’t get enough of.”

“Little old for this place, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but we get a couple trawlers just like him every night. Polanskis we call them.”

“Speaking of age,” says O’Hara, “all four of those girls were under twenty-one.”

“They had IDs; I looked at them myself.”