Shadows Still Remain

12

From the ME’s office, Lowry and Grimes proceed directly to the Seven, where Lowry commandeers the table in Callahan’s office and calls in O’Hara and Krekorian.

“I hear you two have been on this for a couple days,” he says. “What you got for me?”

“I’ll let O’Hara tell you,” says Krekorian. “She caught it as a missing person Friday night.”

“I don’t give a fuck who caught it. I just need what you got. If anything.”

Lovely to meet you too, thinks O’Hara as she flips open her notebook. O’Hara had been under the impression that for seventy-two hours the case belonged to her and Krekorian, but clearly that’s not how it works when the media get this involved and a homicide gets jumped to the front of the line.

“The victim was last seen at three-thirty Thanksgiving morning,” says O’Hara, reading from her notes, “walking alone out of a bar on Rivington between Bowery and Chrystie. A place called Freemans.”

“They got bars on that godforsaken block now?” asks Lowry

“Three,” says O’Hara, “unless they opened another this morning. Not to mention a store that sells something called ‘sutlery’.”

“Military provisions,” says Lowry. “Sutlery are military provisions. Who has her leaving that bar?”

“The bartender, Billy Conway,” says O’Hara, pissed off at herself for bringing up sutlery and doubly pissed off that Lowry knew what it was. “Conway poured Pena and her girls trendy cocktails for four hours. At two-thirty, her friends pack it in, and Pena, who apparently was interested in a guy, stays. The hookup, as far as we know, doesn’t happen, but she stays for another hour and essentially closes the place alone.”

“So at three-thirty, our victim staggers alone onto the darkest block in lower Manhattan? Brilliant.”

“Except for the staggering part. Conway says she wasn’t visibly drunk.”

“He would say that, wouldn’t he?”

“So does a busboy we spoke to. Conway says that after her friends left, she switched from the fancy cocktails to a Jack and Coke and nursed it for an hour.”

“Is that how you sober up, Red, with Jack and Coke?”

“I’ve done dumber things,” says O’Hara, and feels a tap on her right foot from Krekorian, who is getting increasingly worried about the competitive edge to O’Hara’s responses. The nudge takes O’Hara back six months to a night she and Krekorian spent at a beautiful old bar on East Eighteenth Street. The place is called Old Town, but because of the stained glass in the windows, the high ceilings and the cool wooden booths that feel like pews, they’ve renamed it the Church of the Holy Spirits. In the spring they often repaired there after night shifts, particularly lousy ones. On one of those nights, the foul residue from the shift led to round after round, and after three or four Jamesons too many, Krekorian directly violated their unwritten rule not to tell each other anything about themselves they didn’t want to hear. “The problem with you, Dar,” he said, “is you got a chip on your shoulder the size of an Armenian girl’s ass.” Krekorian wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. The attitude to which he referred had been there as long as her memory of herself, taking root when she was three or four at the latest, and had only gotten bigger over time. Nevertheless she was stunned, because to some degree everything else about her personality had been shaped in an effort to conceal it.

“Me too,” says Lowry, “but I weigh three hundred and sixty, on a good day, and not even my mother thinks I’m cute.”

That would explain it, thinks O’Hara, and Lowry flashes such a hard look, she wonders if she said it out loud.

“Anything else?” asks Lowry, still staring hard.

“After her friends leave, a guy or maybe the guy comes over and tries to chat her up, and according to Conway, she gently shoots him down. Again according to Conway, there’s no drama, and the guy leaves an hour before she does, unfortunately after paying in cash.”

“How about the ex-boyfriend who reported Pena missing?”

“David McLain,” says O’Hara, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh really,” says Lowry. O’Hara is not sure if she hears more sarcasm or condescension. Condescension, probably.

“Torturing someone for hours, then walking into the station and filing a report seems like a stretch for a nineteen-year-old slacker from Westfield, Mass., who’d been in the city three weeks. Me and Krekorian talked to him again last night before Pena was found. The kid’s a mess, but he’s not going anywhere. If he killed her, I don’t think he’d stick around.”

“That’s all you got for me in two days?”

O’Hara makes a show of slowly thumbing through her notes one more time, and although they contain several more items worth mentioning, including Conway’s observation about the unlikelihood of a beauty like Pena closing a bar alone, and K.’s related question about why she would stay even after blowing off the guy, O’Hara elects not to share them, telling herself a certified legend like Lowry would have picked up on such obvious irregularities himself.

“That’s it,” says O’Hara, closing her notebook.

“Then I need two things,” says Lowry. “Her so-called friends in the precinct and the phone records for her last forty-eight hours.”

An hour later, while O’Hara is still waiting on return calls from Chestnut and company, Krekorian brings over a printout from T-Mobile, and O’Hara can tell by the way he drops it on her desk, he thinks there’s something in it.

“Between Wednesday night and yesterday afternoon, Pena got eleven calls—two from her mother, four from her father, and five from McLain.”

“It’s her stepfather,” says O’Hara.

“Stepfather,” says Krekorian, “whatever. The last incoming call she picked up was at eight-thirty p.m. Wednesday night from Chestnut,” he says. “That checks with what you got from McLain about Pena meeting her friends at eight-thirty In total, she got seven calls her last two days—two from McLain, two from Chestnut, one each from Case, Singh and her parents. Over the same period, there are five outgoing calls—one each to Chestnut, Singh, and Case and two to McLain.”

“In other words,” says O’Hara, “no calls to or from anyone we don’t already know about.”

“Yeah, but only making five calls in two days? For a nineteen-year-old girl? That’s got to be a record.”

“You read the stories, K. Practice, studying, volunteer work. Pena had a lot on her plate.”

A little after four, Chestnut, Singh and Case arrive together, each chaperoned by a middle-aged male attorney. O’Hara clears the lunch table of debris, pulls up a couple extra chairs and is in the midst of thanking the debutantes for coming, when Lowry steps up to the table with his own chair and cuts her off.

“Was Pena having trouble with anyone?” he asks. “A student, a teacher?”

“No” says Chestnut, “everyone adored Francesca.”

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