“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?”
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.
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