“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.
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.