slowly stands, toppling his bottle of Jack with his right sneaker, and at the same time that he reaches under the cushion of the couch and pulls out a scrunched-up menu like those all over the vestibule, he catches and rights the bottle with his left sneaker. This feat of stoned and drunken athleticism impresses even Krekorian, a former hard-partying college point guard. The menu is from Empire Szechuan on Delancey, and running down the right side is McLain’s twenty-one-item list in small precise green letters.
“Keep it,” says McLain.
“You remember the total?”
“$119.57,” says McLain, refilling his Dixie cup.
“Got a pretty good memory,” says O’Hara.
McLain gives O’Hara permission to look into the barely filled closets and drawers, but they are no more revealing than the blank walls and furniture tops. The only thing of interest, at least to Krekorian, is a Nike sneaker box that Krekorian pulls out from under the couch. When he brings it to O’Hara in the bathroom, he dramatically opens the lid on two vibrators, a dildo and other novelty items.
“What’s the big deal?” says O’Hara. “A girl’s got to have her toys. If something were to happen to me, I’d appreciate it if you’d go to my place and throw out the box under my bed.”
O’Hara has no idea why she said that. She doesn’t have a dildo under her bed or anywhere else, but Krekorian’s junior-high leering, just like the tone of some of the newspaper stories, ticks her off and provokes a knee-jerk protective response. Those stories seem particularly unfair now that it looks like the only reason Pena was stalling at the bar was that she didn’t have the heart to face her puppy dog old boyfriend. Even after they leave McLain and hump down the stairs, O’Hara stays on Krekorian’s case about it. “The way you showed me that box was classic. It’s like you’re fourteen.”
“That’s not fair, Dar. I was just surprised Nike made a butt plug is all. Who do you think they’re going to get to endorse it?”
“Callahan,” says O’Hara. “This is Sergeant Callahan from NYPD, and I’m here to tell you about a remarkable new product that changed my life.”
Outside, the lights have come on and the slushy rain has turned to light snow, and in the soft light the profiles of the narrow streets, with their tenements and synagogues, can’t look much different than they did a hundred years ago. A large pack of NYU students have walked down from the campus and poured into the neighborhood to pass out pictures of their missing classmate, and in their straightforward parkas and hiking boots, they resemble missionaries.
O’Hara and Krekorian walk back through Rivington Park. This time O’Hara notices the crude sculptures rearing up in the weeds like downtown scarecrows, and when they get back to the Impala, O’Hara sees that Freemans has spawned a retail outlet, located at the mouth of the alley, called Freemans Sporting Club. The window is dressed with the same kind of old-timey props as the bar, and in the corner a sign reads, TAILORED CLOTHING, BARBERSHOP AND SUTLERY.
What the fuck, thinks O’Hara. A condo called the Atelier. A store that sells sutlery. O’Hara has worked in the precinct for five years, but take away the projects on the perimeter and she could be in a foreign country.
Three hours later, just before midnight, O’Hara and Krekorian watch through the falling snow as hundreds of NYU students and faculty crowd under the redbrick overhang in front of Bobst Library. While more students stream in from all directions, those in front, closest to the glass doors, grab a lit candle off a long table and file into the southest corner of Washington Square. The column moves silently past the leafless trees and white-limned statue of Garibaldi, and when a thousand candlelit faces surround the recessed circle at the center of the stone plaza, O’Hara and Krekorian leave their car to stand at the rear of the crowd.
Unlike the Lower East Side, Washington Square doesn’t seem foreign to O’Hara at all. As high school freshmen, O’Hara and her best friend Leslie Meehan would often skip school and catch a train into big bad Manhattan. A sizable chunk of those happy truant days was idled away in this very park, drinking Bud out of paper bags and making out with older boys with sideburns and brave smiles. The first time she let a boy slip a hand between her legs was in the grass at the edge of the square, although when she thought back on it, it was probably she who took his hand and guided it there. Sex is the one realm in which she felt at ease from the very beginning, maybe because with your clothes off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O’Hara isn’t so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post vigil, it’s the prospect of death, not sex, that’s brought them into the park tonight.
At the center of the circle are five stone mounds often commandeered by tattooed jugglers, fire eaters and street comedians. When the crowd settles, some twenty students separate themselves from the pack, divide into groups of three and four, and climb onto the elevated platforms. Then a female student, small and blond, wearing a camel hair coat, steps out from the crowd to face them. When she throws her arms into the air, twenty voices rise into the snow-filled night, and as O’Hara follows them upward, she looks north over the scaled-down Arc de Triomphe and elegant town houses just north of the park to the office towers of Midtown, where these same kids will soon be fighting hand to hand, cubicle to cubicle. In the middle of the dirge, which O’Hara is pretty sure is in Latin, her cell goes off.
“Darlene,” says George Loomis, another detective in the Seven, “some skell in East River Park just stumbled on a body by the tennis courts. Me and Navarro are on our way over, but thought you’d want to know. The description sounds a lot like your girl.”
Krekorian does a U-turn on LaGuardia, and with his siren pushing aside the sparse traffic, runs reds across town. Just short of the river, he takes the access road under the FDR Drive into the park and turns toward the pulsing lights in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. East River Park is a narrow strip of public recreational space squeezed between the highway and the river that no one at tonight’s vigil is likely to have set foot in, not because it’s a wretched place, but because the highway cuts it off from the city. During the day, families from the projects take the walkways that cross over the highway into the park, but at night, it’s a no-man’s-land. If you’re looking for a spot to dump a body, you could do a lot worse.
Krekorian drives south past the soccer fields and the baseball diamonds, and pulls in behind the squad car parked between the tennis courts and an overgrown bathroom. Whitewashed by a couple of inches of fresh snow, the park looks as good as it ever will, but the snow can’t do much for the FDR over their shoulder or the black undercarriage of the bridge or the warehouses that form the Williamsburg skyline across the river. On the other side of the squad car, blocked in by a van from Crime Scene, is a piece of crap Impala as filthy as theirs, and standing beside it are Steve Navarro, George Loomis and Russ Dineen.
Navarro and Loomis, who wear dark wool topcoats pulled off the same oversize discount rack, are fellow Seventh Precinct detectives who work the shift opposite O’Hara and Krekorian, and because this part of the park, the approximate latitude of Delancey Street, falls in the Seven, they got the call. The third, much smaller man, an unlit Camel bobbing precariously from the corner of his mouth, and wearing a leather
