Buried on Avenue B Page 4

  As the crowd, nonplussed, watches in silence. O’Hara wonders if it’s her destiny to spend both her days and nights with the mentally challenged. She also wonders if it’s possible, technically speaking, to empty an already empty room. Axl takes a gulp of air, nuzzles the mike with his beard, and launches into the tuneless ditty again. By the second “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge!” three kids and two bulky detectives have taken up the chant, and by the time Axl sings again:

  Because Dodge . . .

  Is the place . . .

  We want to get the fuck . . .

  . . . out offfff!

  The whole audience, seventeen strong, has signed on for the trip.

  With that last clumsy addendum still hanging in the air, the Ukrainian American drummer hurls himself at his kit, the guitarists of unknown ancestry pile on, and a rock ’n’ roll riot breaks out.

  The sound is so ragged and Axl expectorates the words in such a rush, O’Hara can only make out a line or two here and there before everything is buried beneath the sonic rubble. Enunciation aside, Axl’s voice is strong and full of feeling, equal parts outrage and dark comedy. And the songs keep her off balance, the phrases either running longer than she thinks they will or abruptly pulling up short, as Axl clings to the mike stand like a life raft, gasps for breath, and rants on.

  She could be wrong, but in the second song, she thinks she hears:

  Young lady, if you think one roast chicken

  Is going to make up for doing my best friend on my floor

  You’ve got a lot to learn.

  That’s going to take three chickens

  And a side of brussel sprouts . . . beeatch.

  The third song begins:

  I have a friend who says she just wants to be happy.

  Good luck with that, baby girl.

  FIVE SONGS AND nineteen minutes later the show ends much too quickly, although thankfully without a reprise of “Let’s Get the Fuck Out of Dodge.” As the small but ebullient crowd pushes up against the stage, O’Hara exchanges hugs with Krekorian, Nieves, and Flannery.

  “I’ll say one thing,” says her old partner K. “The boy has sack.”

  “A two-hundred-pound leprechaun in German leather,” says Flannery. “It works for me. Always has.”

  O’Hara, herself, is overwhelmed. When did Axl, who as a fourteen-year-old was so traumatized by his first breakup she had to stage an intervention/road trip to the Grand Canyon, acquire the sack, as K put it, to live so large and loud? And when did he acquire the experience to write those lyrics? And how did all this happen without her noticing any of it?

  O’Hara had naively planned to take her son out for a celebratory drink, but when she sees the crush of friends, including one very pretty girl who may or may not know how to baste a bird, O’Hara realizes that Axl is not going to be celebrating his band’s first show with moms. Lucky to get a five-second audience, she pulls his ear within whispering distance and cuts to the chase.

  “Not for nothing, Axl, but that was friggin’ amazing.”

  “Thanks, Darlene.”

  O’Hara’s former colleagues have to head to back to New City, Long Beach, and Valley Stream, but O’Hara is too amped for Riverdale. Besides, there’s still work to be done, and after depositing three twenties in the tip jar, O’Hara heads for the stairs. At 11:00 on a summer Thursday, Second Avenue is a zoo. O’Hara pushes to the curb and turns around to snap a retinal image of the building that housed what will always be Axl’s first New York show. Till now, it had never quite registered how Ukrainian this block is, with Veselka on the corner, and next to it the Ukrainian National Home, a shockingly ugly piece of architecture that looks as if it was airlifted from a midsize Soviet city. O’Hara had walked by the Ukrainian Center a hundred times without noticing, built into the facade, the gold bust of a man who, she assumes, is the Ukrainian George Washington.

  Half a block south, O’Hara turns right onto St. Mark’s. O’Hara is just old enough to remember a time when St. Mark’s still packed a little transgressive thrill. Now it’s low-end tourist traps—head shops, tattoo parlors, and T-shirt stalls—and dozens of small restaurants, mostly Japanese. All that’s left from the bad old days of Joey and Dee Dee and Sid and Nancy are the Gem Spa at one end, the Continental at the other, and the Grassroots Tavern in between, and that’s where O’Hara makes her first stop.

  She takes her Maker’s Mark to a small table in back, across from a pair of dartboards, raises her glass in a silent toast, and repeats to herself what she whispered in her son’s ear—Not for nothing, Axl, but that was friggin’ amazing. Over the years Grassroots has lost some of its roué charm, but makes up for it with the strongest air-conditioning below Fourteenth Street, and O’Hara wonders if the chilly draft is strong enough to affect the flight of a dart, not that she normally gives a flying fuck about darts. Then she glances over her shoulder, and when she sees that the bartender is distracted, she pulls a paper rectangle from her bag, peels off the back, and slaps it to the wall between the two boards. Bull’s-eye.

  Until someone is sufficiently motivated to scrape it off, every dart thrower who lets his concentration waver will come eye-to-eye with the Flat Screens. So begins a brisk hate-to-drink-and-slap-a-band-sticker-on-your-ass-and-run pub blitz that will include successful stops at half a dozen iconic East Village dives. In the next hour and a half, the women’s bathrooms at Holiday Lounge, the International, Lakeside, 7B, and Manitoba’s are all installed with Flat Screens. Maybe it’s guerrilla marketing, probably it’s vandalism, but without question the working conditions are foul enough to warrant a medal and a tetanus shot.

  Her last stop is Three of Cups. The basement bar below First Avenue represents a unique challenge to a proud mother, since it already boasts the highest concentration of band stickers in the city. The low ceiling is plastered five, six, seven deep. Fortunately, O’Hara has become something of a regular over the past couple years, and is able to guilt the bartender into surrendering the best media placement in the neighborhood—the chrome bill drawer on the old cash register, which faces out from the back wall, among the vodkas and whiskeys. Now every sale is a ringing, open-and-shut endorsement of New York’s next great band.

  After five brown drinks in two hours, O’Hara is finally coming down off the rush of the Flat Screens’ show. For the first time since she’s left the squad room, her attention drifts back to her homicide, and the likelihood that Henderson’s treacherous old partner Charlie Faulk is buried in a shallow grave a couple blocks away. Persuading Kelso to let her dig him up is not going to be easy, but she can worry about that tomorrow, and with one last look at her handiwork on the register, she pushes from the bar. Time, she thinks, to get the fuck out of Dodge.

  CHAPTER 9

  “ANY CHANCE YOU and I could have an adult conversation?” asks O’Hara.

  “I don’t see why not,” says Kelso, his face registering surprise as he sits up in his chair. “As far as I know, it’s still legal.”

  “Right now,” says O’Hara, “there are eleven names on the board, and ten have lines through them. The eleventh, the guy who forgot how to chew, is never going to close. He’s going to be up there till the ball drops on Times Square. Every time I see his name, it makes me sick.”

  “Really? I thought I was the only one who felt that way.”

  “Right here,” says O’Hara, pointing at a spot in the middle of her chest. “Like acid reflux. Can I borrow your calculator?”

  When O’Hara says the C-word, something changes in Kelso’s expression. For a second, O’Hara can’t interpret it. Then she realizes Kelso is listening to her. For the first time since O’Hara got to homicide, Kelso is actually paying attention to what she has to say, and when she bends over the little device and starts jabbing at it with a fingertip, he’s riveted.

  “Right now we’re ten out of eleven,” says O’Hara, “a closure ra
te of point-nine-oh-nine-oh-nine-oh-nine. That’s barely over ninety percent. For a precinct with a hundred hommies a year that would be just dandy, but for Manhattan Soft, that’s not going to get it done. Brass expects better—you’ve spoiled them, Lieutenant—and with our caseload, you can hardly blame them. My pal Torres says Manhattan North is over eighty-eight percent, and a Colombian narco is about to plead to those execution-style slayings in Washington Heights, which would take eight homicides off the board just like that. With a little luck, they could end the year with a better closure rate than us. With ten times the caseload.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “A couple weeks ago a home health aide came to the precinct. She told me that the guy she’s taking care of, who thought he was about to croak, made her pull the shades and light a candle, then confessed to a murder. Seventeen years ago, he says, he stabbed a big black guy to death and buried him in the garden on Sixth and B.”

  “That overgrown tangle of weeds?”

  “So I look up the perp’s rap sheet. I see that twenty years ago he and his best buddy, Charles Faulk, African American, six-four, three-twenty, got nabbed for mugging somebody in Washington Square. Faulk flips, and Henderson, my perp, does three years in Attica. When does he get out of jail? In 1990—seventeen years ago—and a couple weeks later Faulk disappears. His mother files a missing person report, and he hasn’t been seen since. It’s a ridiculous case—the perp has Alzheimer’s, thinks Schwarzenegger is president, and would never go to trial—but I got a confession, a motive, a body, and the place where it’s buried. All I got to do is dig him up. Now look at this.”

  O’Hara bends over the calculator again, jabs it a couple times, and spins it so the screen faces Kelso. “Point-nine-one-six,” she says. “Which rounds up to ninety-two percent. We go from barely over ninety to well over ninety percent. And one more thing, I just got off the phone with Lucas Bradley, the forensic anthropologist they hired after 9/11. He says he doesn’t need a backhoe or any other heavy machinery. Just an assistant, a shovel, and five hours.”

  O’Hara is spouting nonsense, but it’s Kelso’s favorite variety of nonsense.

  “You got six hours,” he says. “But that’s it, because it’s on our dime. So don’t come running back to me asking for even five minutes more. And one other thing.”

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?”

  “Thanks, Darlene. For caring.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE NEXT MORNING at 6:00, Kelso, O’Hara, and Jandorek stand beneath the willow in the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B as Lucas Bradley makes his first incision in the downtown dirt. To thwart rubberneckers, an orange tarp went up around the tree overnight, along with a new padlock on the gate and notification that the garden will be closed for forty-eight hours so Con Edison can repair a gas leak. To give the cover a ring of truth and further impede the view, half a dozen Con Ed trucks are parked along the perimeter. The thirty-four-year-old Bradley, who has lank brown hair and the kind of open boyish face rarely seen on a native New Yorker, was hired to oversee the sifting and identifying of remains at the base of the World Trade Center towers. He made such a good impression, he was appointed the city’s first full-time forensic anthropologist. O’Hara heard that he got his PhD from a department at the University of Tennessee known as the Body Farm, because of a wooded plot strewn with stiffs where students can observe them in various states of rot. To O’Hara, he looks like a kid in a sandbox, particularly when he unzips his nylon backpack and removes a Teenage Ninja lunch pail. It would drive O’Hara crazy to work with strangers looking over her shoulder, but Bradley seems to appreciate an audience. As he strips away the topmost layer of soil, he points at the hardy weeds around the base of the tree.

  “Normally, you wouldn’t have this much grass or weeds near the base of a tree, but sometimes you see opportunistic growth above a grave site,” he says. “There’s no better fertilizer than a juicy corpse.”

  With the help of an intern, Bradley exposes an area of dirt about the size of a picnic blanket. The outer ring of dirt is darker than the area inside it, and according to Bradley that’s another propitious sign. “When you dig a hole and refill it, the dirt from various levels get mixed together. Overall that makes it lighter.” The intern sets aside the loose sections of sod. Bradley opens his juvenile lunchbox and extracts a handful of plastic chopsticks. He sticks them into the dirt about sixteen inches apart around the border of the possible grave.

  “I don’t think I’ll be going Chinois for a while,” whispers Jandorek to O’Hara.

  “You don’t eat it anyway,” says O’Hara. An Asian guy would kill himself before he shared his marital woes with Jandorek.

  Using the trowel like a shovel, Bradley begins to dig, and dumps each small scoop into a basket covered by a fine-mesh screen. It’s slow, tedious work, even more so for the gallery of detectives, like watching a man empty a bathtub with a spoon. The temperature is rising quickly, and because of the tarp, there’s no breeze. Kelso in particular grows restless.

  “Any chance we could goose this up a little?”

  “Excavating is a destructive process,” says Bradley without turning. “You only have one chance to do it right.”

  Bradley works briskly but carefully, the sweat stain on his shirt expanding at about the same rate as the hole. It’s at least half an hour before he comes into contact with anything other than dirt, but when he does, the sound is so sharp, everyone but Bradley jumps. “We got a body,” says Bradley. “Naked, topless, headless. Petite.”

  Bradley twists on his knees and extends his arm. Lying tits up on the trowel is a cigarette lighter in the shape of a female torso.

  In the next hour, Bradley and the mesh catch one stray item after another—an old subway token like the ones O’Hara saw in Henderson’s cigar box, a couple foreign coins, a marble, a folded-up $20 bill, a tiny plastic bag of weed, and then a couple larger objects: a CD, a Swiss Army knife, and a pint of whiskey. As they’re found, the intern deposits them in a plastic container, and in one of the many lulls O’Hara wanders over for a closer look. They are such a motley assortment, and in an effort to make some sense of them and their possible connection, O’Hara pulls out her notebook and lists everything Bradley has unearthed so far: “1 cigarette lighter, 1 subway token, 2 coins—5 pesos, 25 yen—1 roach clip, 1 marble, $20 bill, pint of Ballantine’s, 1 Swiss Army knife, 1 synthetic pearl, 1 CD, 1 small bag of weed.”

  Of the objects in the Tupperware, the pint of Ballantine’s gets O’Hara’s attention first, not because it’s good and alcoholic, but because it’s unopened. Why would someone throw away a brand-new bottle? That it’s unopened differentiates it from the rest of the items, which seem like random urban debris accumulated over the years. But when she scrutinizes the others more closely, she notices that the tiny plastic bag of pot is also sealed. As O’Hara pores over the collection as best she can through the plastic lid, the intern adds another New York artifact—a ticket stub from Sunshine Cinema for a movie called the The Lives of Others dated 6/11/07. The date surprises O’Hara. That’s less than three months ago, and when she combines it with the pristine condition of the pint and some of the other items, it doesn’t jibe with a seventeen-year-old homicide. Then O’Hara recalls Bradley’s comment about “opportunistic growth.” There may be nothing quite like human fertilizer, but would it still be pushing up daisies after seventeen years? While the intern is nearby, O’Hara asks her to flip over the CD. O’Hara sees that it’s Coldplay, something called X&Y, which according to the label came out in 2005, but O’Hara is distracted from her calculations about dates and timing by word from Bradley of another find.

  “This is soft,” says Bradley almost to himself. Till now, everything Bradley has found has been hard and quite small.

  After Bradley climbs out of the grave, O’Hara sees that the entire length and width of the hole has been taken down more than tw
o feet. Bradley, who is drenched in sweat, takes a long pull from a bottle of water, then goes back to his lunchbox and removes a brush and a single chopstick, this time a wooden one. Back in the hole, Bradley uses both to pick and whisk away the dirt from the soft thing he has found.

  “It’s some kind of fabric,” he says, and a couple minutes later, “It’s the bill.”

  He backs away to give the lieutenant and two detectives an unobstructed view. O’Hara can see that he’s referring to the bill of a cap, the leading edge of it, which is pointing straight at the sky. In the next ten minutes the entire navy blue lid is revealed, then the crown, with the “NY” of the New York Yankees. The style of the hat is quite current; it’s certainly not a seventeen-year-old cap. Apparently Kelso has noticed that too, because she can feel his glare on the back of her neck. But neither has long to concentrate on the other. Less than a minute later, Bradley sits back on his heels and announces, “We’ve got remains.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE YANKEES CAP rests on a yellow-brown skull. Where there were eyes are two square holes, and centered beneath them, where the nose had been, is a triangle. Between the upper and lower jaws, small teeth are visible. It’s been a while since O’Hara scrutinized the human skull, and is surprised by the rounded smoothness of the shapes, which are far more elegant without the lumpy draping of skin and tissue. O’Hara feels as if even without eyes, the skull is staring at her, and despite the ghoulishness of the scene, something in the cast of the jaw suggests a smile. Kelso, however, is far from smiling. His agitation is so palpable that O’Hara resists the urge to turn and face him.

  “It’s not a black man, is it, Bradley?” says Kelso.

  “No.”

  “You can tell by the opening for the nose, can’t you?”

  “If it was an African American, the aperture would be bigger.”

  “And it’s not a large man, either,” says Kelso.