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“Not tonight.”
“Any reason?” asks the deflated suitor. But he does it so softly and with such diminished confidence that Pena, who had already turned to the bartender and ordered a Jack and Coke, pretends not to hear him as she takes the drink to a small table in the far corner. As the last customers trickle out, she sits with her back to the bar and nurses her drink for almost an hour. Finally, as a busboy gathers bottles and glasses from the empty tables, she pushes out of her seat and navigates the short alley to Rivington and the half block east to Chrystie.
At 3:30 a.m at the end of 2005, the corner of Rivington and Chrystie was still among the darkest and least trafficked on the Lower East Side. At 3:30 Thanksgiving morning, it might as well be the dark side of the moon. Pena knows there’s no point even trying to hail a cab until she walks the two long freezing blocks to Houston. After three queasy steps, she realizes she is about to pay the price for mixing all those ridiculous cocktails, and crouches between two parked cars.
“You OK?” asks a voice behind her.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she snarls, and retches some more.
3 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)
Detective Darlene O’Hara licks the cranberry sauce off her thumb and savors the penultimate bite of her homemade turkey sandwich. She is enjoying her modest feast in the empty second-floor detective room of Manhattan’s Seventh Precinct, overlooking a windswept corridor of the Lower East Side where so much unsightly city infrastructure—including a highway, bridge ramps, dozens of housing projects and this squat brick station house—has been shoved against the East River. The Seven is the second-smallest precinct in the city, covering just over half a square mile, and the curiously exact address of the station is 19½ Pitt Street, but there’s nothing half-assed about the institutional bleakness in which O’Hara has chosen to spend a solitary Thanksgiving.
O’Hara, who is thirty-four, with wavy red hair, raw, translucent Irish skin, that even in late November is sprinkled with freckles, provides the only color in the room. She sits at a beige metal desk facing a wall of beige metal file cabinets. The light is fluorescent and the linoleum floor filthy, and behind her, facing a TV that gets three channels badly, is a lunch table littered with the Chinese food tins and pizza boxes that couldn’t fit in the overflowing wastebasket. The windows are filthy too, darkening an already grimy view of the Bernard Baruch projects across the street, but the layer of dirt doesn’t seem to keep out the cold.
O’Hara isn’t the slightest bit put out by her surroundings or solitude. In fact, she welcomes the rare quiet. It’s like getting paid to think, she thinks, and besides, she isn’t altogether lacking in company. In the chair next to her, curled up in the deep indentation excavated by her partner’s ample Armenian ass, is her fourteen-pound terrier mutt Bruno, his peaceful canine slumber punctuated by snorts and sighs and the occasional rogue fart.
In addition to the overtime, O’Hara is working the shift for the distraction. Two p.m. in New York makes it 11:00 a.m. on the West Coast. In a couple of hours, Axl, her eighteen-year-old son and University of Washington freshman, will be heading to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue for his first visit to his girlfriend’s parents, and O’Hara pictures Axl, sprawled in his ratty chair in his ratty bathrobe, girding himself for five hours of hell (the father is a shrink, the mother a dermatologist) with black coffee and Metallica. As far as she can tell, a fondness for heavy metal is about the only attribute her son has acquired from her, not including of course his red hair and ridiculous name. In most significant ways, Axl takes after O’Hara’s mother, Eileen. This is probably a good thing and, once you’ve done the math, not surprising, since his grandmother is the person who essentially raised him. You don’t survive having a kid your junior year of high school without a great deal of help, and as O’Hara polishes off her sandwich she makes a point of silently expressing the thankfulness appropriate to both her circumstances and the holiday. Still, the thought of Axl spending Thanksgiving at a dining room table in a real house with a real family makes O’Hara feel like crap.
The first two-thirds of O’Hara’s shift go as quietly as expected. She reads the Post and News and half the Times. At 3:15, she gets a call from Paul Morelli, the desk sergeant on duty. A rookie patrolman, named Chamberlain, just brought in a Marwan Overton, nineteen, on a sexual assault. Should he bring him upstairs?
“It’s Thanksgiving, for Chrissakes,” says O’Hara. “It’s supposed to be a PG holiday—turkey, a bad football game, family.”
“Well, who do you think filed the complaint?”
“Martha Stewart.”
“Close,” says Morelli. “Althea Overton, who in addition to being a junkie, prostitute and a thief, is also the suspect’s mom.”
“Well, OK then.”
Minutes later, Chamberlain escorts the handcuffed Overton into the detective room. After O’Hara takes the suspect from him, Chamberlain lingers awkwardly by the door, like someone at the end of a date hoping to be invited in.
“I heard you actually volunteered to work the shift,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Although O’Hara wears no makeup, rubber-soled shoes, and cuts her own hair, and obscures her generous curves under loose-fitting pantsuits and button-down shirts, she’s not fooling anyone. Half the guys in the Seven have a crush on her and the young ones like Chamberlain, tend to get goofy and tongue-tied when they talk to her.
“Hopefully, you’ll get out on time at least,” says Chamberlain. “Thanks,” says O’Hara. “I’ll take it from here.”
O’Hara walks Overton to the far end of the room and puts him in the holding cell, where he slouches disinterestedly on the corner of the metal cot. Faithful to the fashion, everything Overton wears is three sizes too big, but in his case it only serves to exaggerate how small and slight he is. Overton, who could pass for fourteen, is barely taller than the five-foot-three O’Hara, and after looking at his tiny hands and sad hooded eyes, O’Hara guesses that along with everything else, Overton was a crack baby.
Not that any of this matters to Bruno. Since Overton was brought in, Bruno has practically been doing summersaults, and after Overton tells O’Hara that he’s OK with dogs, Bruno races into his cell and greets him like his last pal on Earth, which, not to take anything from Marwan, is how Bruno greets everyone. Detectives look for the bad in people, the incriminating detail, the contradiction, the lie. Bruno is only interested in the sweetness and never fails to find it. Overton is so disarmed, you’d think letting Bruno into his cell was calculated, and probably it was, because twenty minutes later, when O’Hara brings him out of the cell, Overton waves away his right to an attorney without a second thought.
“So Marwan,” says O’Hara, “you going to tell me what happened?”
“I was having Thanksgiving at my grandmom’s.”
“You live with her?”
“In Jacob Riis House,” he says, referring to the eighteen-building project where she and her partner, Serge Krekorian, get half their collars. “It was nice until my mom arrived and started begging for money.”
“What happened then?”
“I knew she was just going to use, so I said no,” says Overton, looking down at Bruno and scratching him behind the ear.
“OK?”
“She pulls me into my room and puts her hand inside my jeans, says she’ll take care of me for ten dollars. I was feeling so sorry for myself, I let her. After, when I told her I wasn’t going to give her any money and never wanted to see her again, she runs outside and calls for a cop.”
Imagination-wise, thinks O’Hara, the city never lets you down. Practically every day, it comes up with another fresh, fucked-up twist. And although few of the surprises are happy, O’Hara is usually more fascinated than repelled, and almost always grateful for the front-row seat.
His Thanksgiving tale over, Marwan looks up from Bruno to O’Hara and offers a heartbreaking sliver of a smile. Everything about him looks too small and young, but his eyes are ancient.
4 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)
The next evening O’Hara and Krekorian stand outside Samuel Gompers House, two blocks up Pitt Street from the station, just north of the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. In the sixties, when the neighborhood was undesirable enough for city officials to get away with it, they threw up eight thousand units of public housing between Pitt and the East River, and when they all go condo and their tenants get relocated like Indians to reservations, O’Hara and Krekorian will have to find somewhere else to make their overtime. In the meantime, they’re paying a visit to apartment 21EEE, following up on a domestic abuse, the crime that keeps on giving. Since they’d prefer to arrive unnannounced, they’re freezing their asses off waiting for someone to step in or out through the locked door.
Shielding herself from the worst of the wind, O’Hara turns her back on the door and looks across Pitt Street. Facing the projects and their captive populace of thousands are a nasty little Chinese restaurant, a Western Union that cashes child-support payments and a liquor store named Liquor Store, with more bulletproof glass than the Popemobile.
“I haven’t even told you about my latest Thanksgiving fiasco,” says Krekorian, who is built like a fire hydrant, the swarthy skin on his face pulled tight across prominent cheekbones like a pit bull’s. After four years as partners, O’Hara and Krekorian are deeply familiar with the toxic ruts of each other’s dysfunctional lives. She knows that Krekorian only dates black women with two or three kids, and he knows that O’Hara hardly dates anyone and the two indulge each other by acting as if their emotional cowardice is primarily due to the stress and fucked-up schedules of police work.
By now, O’Hara is well aware of how little regard Krekorian’s family has for his unlucrative line of work. To her own family, O’Hara’s becoming a cop and promptly earning her gold shield is viewed as a minor miracle, particularly after the untimely arrival of Axl. To Krekorian’s parents, who squandered over one hundred thousand dollars to send him to Colgate, where he was the backup point guard on the basketball team for three years, it’s a profound disappointment, bordering on disgrace. At family gatherings his younger brother, an investment banker, loves to underline this fact by talking ad nauseam about all the money he’s raking in.
“What you say this time, K.?” asks O’Hara.
“Not a word, Dar.”
“Wow. I think you had what Dr. Phil calls a moment of clarity.”
“He went on and on about his bonus and stock options and being fully vested, and I just let him.”
“Like water off a duck’s back.”
“Exactly. Not a peep. I just sat there with my mouth shut and waited until it was just me and him in the den.”
“And then?”
“I hit him.”
“Maybe I spoke too soon,” says O’Hara, staring at her shoes, trying not to laugh.
“If he’s going to make me feel bad, I’m going to make him feel bad.”
“Exactly.”
Finally, an elderly Gompers resident ventures forth into the great outdoors, and the two detectives slip in behind him. The elevator is open on the ground floor, and as the doors close in front of them, Krekorian flares his enormous nostrils to draw his partner’s attention to the puddle of cat piss in the corner. O’Hara knocks on 21EEE and announces herself and Krekorian as police.
Dolores Kearns, who came to the precinct and filed a complaint on her boyfriend the day before, takes about a week to come to the door. Kearns wears nothing but a bathrobe, and her ample breasts spill out of it. “It took you ten minutes to put that outfit together?” asks O’Hara, but Kearns is no more put out by the arrival of NYPD than Chinese food.
“I was taking a nap,” she says, music seeping out from behind her.
“With Al Green playing?”
“I haven’t seen Artis since that one incident,” she says.
“That one little incident,” says O’Hara, “where he slapped you around and held a knife to your throat.”
“Like I said, I haven’t seen him.”
“But if you do, you’d call us, right?”
“No question.”
When their shift ends, Krekorian parks their black piece of crap Impala in front of the precinct house and heads to his own piece of crap Montero in the lot. O’Hara runs inside to use the bathroom before her forty-minute ride home. Slumped in one of the filthy plastic chairs just inside the door is a brown-haired white kid in a gray hooded sweatshirt about the same age and loose-limbed build as Axl, and when she gets back down the stairs she can’t help looking at him again. Like Axl, he looks like the kind of shy kid who could sit there all night, before getting up and saying anything to the desk sergeant.
“How long you been here?” asks O’Hara.
“An hour. I need to report a missing person.”
“Who?” says O’Hara.
“Francesca Pena. She’s nineteen, a sophomore at NYU, five foot nine, short black hair, about one hundred eighteen pounds.”
As O’Hara looks down at him in his chair, the kid takes out a well-thumbed snapshot of a very pretty teenage girl with long jet-black hair and bottomless brown eyes. “That’s before she cut it,” he says, touching the picture. “When she smiles, she’s got a beautiful gap between her teeth.”
“She your girlfriend?” asks O’Hara, looking wistfully over the kid’s shoulder at the door.
“Not anymore. Just friends. That’s why I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home Wednesday night. We’re not a couple anymore. That’s cool. But we had planned to spend Thanksgiving together and I knew she was looking forward to it. Now it’s Friday, and she still doesn’t answer her phone.”
“You roommates?”
“No, I’m visiting. From Westfield, Mass. Francesca’s from Westfield too.”
A handsome kid, thinks O’Hara, but with that fatal transparent sincerity that drives girls away in droves. Wednesday night, Pena probably hooked up with someone sarcastic and cutting and didn’t have the heart to tell him she was blowing him off for their Thanksgiving dinner. It’s amazing how many girls disappear at the start of weekends and reappear Sunday night. But O’Hara brings him upstairs to the detective room anyway. Partly, it’s because he’s not Dolores Kearns, and she can’t imagine him two days from now looking through her like a pane of glass. Mostly it’s because she misses Axl.
Without taking off her coat, she sits him down by her desk, turns on her computer and takes down his information. Name: David McLain. Age: nineteen. Address: 85 Windsor Court, Westfield, Massachusetts. Since he arrived in the city, he’s been staying with Pena at 78 Orchard Street, 5B. He gives her the numbers for his cell and Pena’s.
“How long you been visiting?” asks O’Hara.
“Three weeks. I’ve been working as a barback a couple nights a week at a place on First and Fifth called Three of Cups.”
“Don’t you want to go to college yourself?” she asks, not sure why she’s talking to the kid like a guidance counselor.
“Maybe. I had a pretty good chance for a soccer scholarship till I let my grades slip.”
With his forlorn expression and downtrodden posture, McLain looks almost as pathetic as Axl after he got dumped by his first real girlfriend sophomore year. People outgrow each other. Sad as hell, but it happens, and for six months, Axl walked around just like this kid, with his head so far up his ass that eventually O’Hara had no choice but to stage an intervention. On a Friday afternoon, the last day before summer vacation, she picked him up at school and just started driving. Chugging Big Gulps and talking, they drove twenty-six hours before they stopped in their first motel. Five days later, they walked up to a guardrail and stared with their mouths hanging open at the Grand Canyon. Looking at McLain, she doesn’t know whether to hug him or kick him in the ass.
“Is staying this long OK with Francesca? She didn’t give you a deadline?”
“Not yet. I help out. I buy groceries. I clean up.”
“Where’d you sleep?”
“On the floor in my sleeping bag.”
He’s as loyal as Bruno, thinks O’Hara. But who knows? Maybe he got kicked one too many times.
“When was the last time you saw Francesca?”
“About eight-thirty Wednesday night. She was meeting friends for dinner. Then they were going to have drinks at some new trendy place. Don’t know which one.”
“You know the names of her friends?”
“No. Never met them. I’m pretty sure she’s ashamed of me. One is the daughter of a famous artist.”
“So what did you do after she left?”
“Shopped for our dinner.”
“Where’d you buy the stuff?”
“A twenty-four-hour supermarket on Avenue A around Fourth Street.”
“What time you get there?”
“About one a.m., maybe a little later. I think I got the last turkey in NYC. Then I got up at seven the next morning and started cooking.”
“Who taught you to cook, your mom?”
“You kidding me? My grandmother.”
You walked right into that one, thinks O’Hara, and for a second feels as bad as she did about Axl’s suburban Thanksgiving.
“Keep the receipt for the groceries?”
“Why would I do that?”
5 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)
Saturday, O’Hara and Krekorian focus their crime-solving talents on a pocketbook, net contents seventeen dollars, snatched the night before at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Delancey. When they get there, the manager has the whole caper cued up on video, and it plays like something out of Oliver Twist. The victim, African American, approximately thirty-five, sits at a table enjoying her coffee and the latest Patterson, when the five-foot, two-hundred-pound Astrid Canozares waddles through the door, a stroller in front and two hyperactive kids in tow. While the kids distract the mark, Canozares tosses the woman’s pocketbook into the stroller, then mother, kids and infant, suddenly no longer hungry, exit the premises. O’Hara and Krekorian know the stroller is empty and the kids on loan because they’ve arrested Canozares three times in the last six months.
“The hardest-working obese kleptomaniac on the Lower East Side,” says Krekorian.
“Hands down,” says O’Hara.
Even though they know where Canozares lives, and the family that supplies the prop and extras, it takes all evening to track her down and another four hours to run her through the system. O’Hara and Krekorian share the collar, and because it’s her turn, O’Hara gets the overtime, which is the only real point of the exercise, turning seventeen stolen dollars into an extra $176 on O’Hara’s next pay stub. It’s a long slow night, and O’Hara spends much of it thinking about David McLain and Francesca Pena, more worried about the lost boy than the missing girl.
Sunday, her shift starts at four, and in the dismal early dusk, the short thick precinct house, with its slits for windows, looks medieval. O’Hara tells herself she won’t take the girl’s disappearance seriously until the end of the day, but when she calls McLain and finds he still hasn’t heard from Pena, she takes out her coffee-stained list of hospitals and ERs and starts making calls: Beth Israel and St. Vincent’s in the Village, NYU, Cabrini and Lenox Hill, St. Luke’s Roosevelt near Columbia, Mount Sinai in East Harlem and Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights. Pena hasn’t turned up at any of them or in Hoboken or Jersey City, and near the end of their shift, she and Krekorian drive up to NYU to have a talk with Campus Security.
