Buried on Avenue B Read online

  “No,” says Bradley, “it doesn’t appear to be.”

  Working steadily from the cap down, Bradley uncovers a striped button-down dress shirt. If there were any possibility that these are the remains of what had once been a six-four, 320-pound man, it’s gone by the time Bradley uncovers his jeans. From the narrow shoulders and waist, it’s clear that the clothing covers the remains of a child, a small, slight one. When Bradley reaches the knees of the pants, Kelso can’t contain himself. “It’s not the motherfucker,” he mutters. “It’s not the motherfucker. It’s not the goddamn fucking motherfucker.”

  O’Hara has sold him a bill of goods. Not one thing she promised has come to pass. Instead of a black male, it’s a white child. Instead of a victim named Charlie Faulk to whose murder another man has already confessed, O’Hara has dropped a pile of unidentified bones on his desk. And instead of a name going up on the board with a line already drawn through the middle of it and a closure rate of 0.916, O’Hara has added a John Doe, and nothing else. He watches morosely as Bradley reaches the bottom of the pants legs and whisks the dirt from a tiny pair of Converse high-tops.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office is in a building on First and Thirtieth as ugly as the Ukrainian National Home. The decomp morgue is located in the most ventilated corner of the basement. Bradley wheels in the body, still enclosed in the orange bag in which it was transported from the garden, and parks it next to an archaic X-ray machine. It’s 1:00 a.m., and Bradley moves in the deliberate manner of someone who has been awake too long. With the discovery of a recently buried white child instead of a long-deceased black junkie, all bets are off, and the six-hour time limit waived. Bradley and his assistant were still sifting, measuring, and photographing long into the night, and although Kelso and Jandorek headed back to the precinct, O’Hara stayed in the garden until the work was done, then followed the body up First Avenue to the ME’s office. Bradley loads a twenty-four-by-eighteen-inch cartridge and slides the tray under one end of the bag. Then he aligns the nose of the X-ray machine and takes the first shot. “When I got here,” says Bradley, “there was talk of finally getting a state-of-the-art machine. As you might guess, that conversation didn’t go anywhere.”

  Bradley works his way down the length of the body bag, the previous image developing while the next is being taken. When he’s done, the four overlapping shots, laid out on the counter, yield a composite view of the full skeleton. For the next couple hours, Bradley separates clothing and remains. He unbuttons the dress shirt and finds a black T-shirt, “The Germs” written across it in red letters. From the armholes of both shirts, Bradley pulls out the delicate bones of the fingers, hands, and arms. From the bottom and top he slides the spine, ribs, chest, and shoulders. Then he performs the same drill with the lower half, removing the bones of the feet, legs, and pelvis from the victim’s sneakers and the legs and waist of his jeans, a process made slightly simpler by the fact that the victim is not wearing underwear. When he’s done, the clothes are lying on one high-bordered metal tray, the bones on another beside it. To make sure the bones are all accounted for, Bradley reassembles them like a jigsaw in proper anatomical order. “An adult has fewer bones than a child,” says Bradley, “because over time, bones fuse, particularly in the hands.” When he’s finished, the skeleton lies naked on the table, as it lay clothed in the grave.

  Bradley will return to the skeleton later, but now directs his attention to the clothes. Hovering over them, he takes them in as a group. Then, although the evidence department will perform the same task in greater detail, he moves from one garment to the next, examining it inside and out; assessing its condition; looking for signs of blood, hair, or remains; and checking the contents of the pockets. In a back pocket of the jeans he finds a sodden clump of paper so stuck together that he decides to leave it where it is for evidence to tease apart, and caught in the laces of the sneakers he finds several strands of light blond, nearly white hair. “A towhead,” says Bradley, showing a strand to O’Hara before sealing the hair in a separate plastic bag.

  Finally he gathers each article of clothing, holds it about a foot over the table, turns it over, opens it up, and gingerly shakes it to see if anything has been caught in the fabric. When he shakes out the black tee, the early morning silence is punctured by a metallic ping, as startling as when his trowel hit the lighter. A quick search and Bradley holds a small copper bullet between his latex-covered thumb and forefinger.

  “Twenty-two-caliber,” he says, “the kind my grandfather and I used to shoot beer cans and bottles, as well as various critters who made the mistake of treating themselves to his vegetables. Twenty-twos aren’t much good for killing anything much bigger than a rabbit, and this is a lot smaller than the urban ammo that gets pulled out of bodies here. You got to be pretty unlucky to be killed by a twenty-two, but I guess we’ve already established that this kid wasn’t lucky.”

  Having found the bullet, Bradley takes a second, more focused look at the two shirts. He searches for holes and blood, but he finds neither. Then he walks to the counter where the X-rays are lined up. And after scanning the ghostly images for several minutes, points out a dark spot in the left shoulder blade or scapula. “Until the last of the flesh decomposed, the bullet was lodged in here. Eventually, it fell out into the shirt.”

  Bradley slips the bullet casing into a plastic bag and sets it aside for ballistics. On the counter is the Tupperware container holding the various items dug up with the victim, which will soon be delivered to the evidence lab or, in the case of the pot, to narcotics. As Bradley packs and labels the clothes, slipping each into a separate bag, O’Hara looks them over again and continues the effort she began in the garden to make sense of them. Several items are currency, or a form of it—the $20 bill, the pesos and yen, the old subway token, maybe even the marble and the fake pearl. The knife, the roach clip, and the titty lighter are, loosely speaking, tools, and the booze, weed, and CD are entertainment, the makings of a party. Maybe the movie stub falls into that multimedia group as well, or maybe it’s a bit of trash that just happened to end up in the vicinity. The tiny bag of weed bears the initials “GMS” in small, discreet script, like a monogram on the inside of a pricey wallet.

  The clothes packed and labeled, Bradley sits down for the first time that O’Hara can recall in a nearly twenty-four-hour day and reviews his notes and sketches from the site. “We’ll know more in a day or two,” he says, “after the dental X-rays and the DNA sample come back, but here are some broad strokes. The date of the movie ticket was 6/11/07, which means that the body could not have been buried in the garden before that. That’s a little over two months ago, and the level of decomposition is well beyond what you would expect from a body that had been buried for that amount of time. That suggests that the body spent a significant interval exposed aboveground before it was buried. But the most glaring thing,” says Bradley after a pause, “is the manner in which the corpse has been handled. I’m sure you noticed this as well, but this is not the case of a body being dumped in a hastily dug hole. On the contrary, the body was carefully and respectfully laid out. The body was placed flat on its back, arms at his side, and the grave was meticulously dug. The length and width are consistent to within a quarter-inch. Then there’s the condition of the shirts. Since there are no bullet holes or blood, and only slight evidence of remains, these can’t be the clothes the victim was wearing when he died. That means that the body was prepared and dressed for burial, and considering that at that time there would still have been decomposing flesh on the bones, that would have been a horrendous job. The stench alone would make you retch. The point I’m trying to make is that this boy—and based on his clothes, I’m assuming for now that it’s a male, approximately ten years old—was given a decent burial, or at least an attempt at one. A considerable effort was made to send him off with a sense of ceremony.”

  CHAPTER 13

  NO MATTER WH
AT gets put in the ground or dug out of it, big picture, nothing changes. The rear of the ME’s office looks straight out at the FDR Drive, East River, and Queens. At 7:30 a.m., the sun, with its dumb-fuck optimism, has risen again, and people are going to work, because the FDR southbound is bumper-to-bumper. O’Hara walks around the building to First, buys a buttered roll from a sidewalk cart, and eats it as she leans against the hood of her car.

  Half an hour later, moments after it opened for business, O’Hara is back on her stool at Milano’s, and for a second it feels as if she never left. On her left and right, she is flanked by the same even more punctual regulars, and from the wall-mounted TV another vintage black-and-white seeps into the room. The only thing separating her from Groundhog Day is that the pretty brown-haired barkeep has changed classic metal allegiances, or at least her T-shirt. Instead of AC/DC, it’s Kiss.

  O’Hara’s NYPD notepad is in her bag, but for reasons of propriety and self-preservation, she leaves it there, and when the bartender delivers her grapefruit juice and vodka, O’Hara asks to borrow the yellow pad beside the dictionary. Standing between O’Hara and sleep is not only the lingering effect of half a dozen cups of bad coffee but the quantity of still-unprocessed evidence unearthed from the garden, then added to in the fluorescence of the morgue. For the next twenty minutes she filters it through her exhausted brain like the mesh filtered the dirt at the site, and although she doesn’t make a mark on the pad, the sight of her pen lying across the long, empty page is as calming as her drink. O’Hara smiles at her memory of Bradley’s response when Kelso tried to hustle him along. Excavating is a destructive process. You only have one chance to do it right. Although strictly speaking, the analogy doesn’t apply to police work, and she may have more than one chance to get it right, a composed and thoughtful start could avoid unnecessary missteps and save her a lot of time. Finally, almost reluctantly, she makes the first blemish on the page—a capital V and, a couple sips later, ictim. Beneath it, she lists what she knows so far:

  Caucasian, presumably male, approximately ten years old

  Hair color: blond, nearly white

  Height: 4-foot-7

  Another sip produces a second heading—“Burial Artifacts.” She divides them into the three categories she observed at the morgue. Under “Currency” she lists:

  $20 bill

  5-peso coin

  25-yen coin

  1 subway token—obsolete

  1 pearl

  1 marble

  Under “Tools” she lists:

  1 lighter—female torso

  1 roach clip

  1 Swiss Army knife

  Under “Entertainment” she lists:

  1 pint of Ballantine whiskey, unopened

  1 small bag of weed, sealed

  1 audio CD—Coldplay, titled “X&Y”

  As O’Hara reviews her work, she considers adding Kelso to the list under “Tools” but decides it’s bad form to kick a man when he’s down, particularly when you’re the one who put him there. Now O’Hara creates a fourth heading—“Clothes”—and beneath it writes:

  1 baseball cap, New York Yankees

  Unlike most New Yorkers, and cops in particular, O’Hara roots for the underdog. Instead of the Yankees, she pulls for the Mets. Instead of the Giants, she roots for the Jets; instead of the Beatles, the Stones. Her ex-boyfriend, the medical examiner Leibowitz, another Mets fan, said pulling for Steinbrenner’s Yankees would be like going to Vegas and rooting for the house. Continuing the list of clothes, O’Hara writes:

  1 dress shirt—blue with yellow stripes

  1 T-shirt, “The Germs”—clean

  O’Hara looks up from her list at the bartender in her long-sleeved Kiss concert tee and wonders if at this point in the history of civilization, it is possible to infer anything about a person from the name of the band emblazoned on her chest. To do so, you’d need to know the exact degree of irony with which the garment is being worn, and to know that, you’d have to interview the wearer. O’Hara doesn’t doubt the barkeep likes Kiss. How could anyone not like Kiss? At the same time, it’s worn with a bit of a wink. T-shirts for AC/DC, Kiss, and Def Leppard are heavy metal ironic, just as T-shirts for the Stones, Zeppelin, and the Beatles are rock royalty ironic. The Strokes are prematurely obsolete ironic, the Wings and Ted Nugent b-list ironic or, if you’re a contrarian, underrated a-list ironic. The only thing you can know for sure is that the T-shirt is no longer just about the band, because at this point, no one is willing to give it up blindly to anyone, not Mick or Keith, and certainly not Gene Simmons.

  The only exception might be a band so obscure no one’s heard of it. O’Hara hasn’t heard of the Germs, so maybe they fall into that last category, but who knows? O’Hara takes a sip and adds:

  1 pair of jeans

  1 pair of sneakers—Converse high-tops, white

  (No socks, no underwear)

  As O’Hara ponders her various lists, she gets a call on her cell, and for the breach in early-morning Milano’s etiquette, a dirty look from the female on her left. “I just learned something else about the victim,” says Bradley. “I want to tell you now because it could be helpful in making an ID. When I cleaned up the bones, there was a major difference between the right and left femurs. The left is bowed and much thicker, the result of a fracture that was never set. After it healed, the victim’s left leg was a quarter-inch shorter than his right, which is a lot. It would have given him a noticeable limp.”

  When Bradley hangs up, O’Hara adds “Noticeable limp” to the small list under “Victim.” The new piece, which O’Hara shares with Jandorek via text, reinforces something that has already struck O’Hara, which is the disconnect between the caring and the not-caring, the regard and the disregard. On one hand you have a ten-year-old boy in a shallow grave in a community garden with a bullet in his shoulder and a broken leg that was never set. On the other, you have an exactly measured, well-dug grave, a carefully laid-out body that’s been re-dressed for burial, and a motley collection of trinkets and refreshments that may have been parting gifts. For a moment, because it makes her feel better, O’Hara focuses on the caring part—on the evidence that at least somebody gave a shit about this kid. In that context, she actually takes comfort in the whiskey and the weed tossed in with the body, because it suggests that despite the brevity of his life and the violence and neglect, the kid managed to make some friends and maybe even have some good times, which is about all anyone can hope for. Suddenly she is overwhelmed with admiration for this plucky urchin with his Yankees cap and his Ratso Rizzo limp and his impish smirk he never surrendered, not even in the grave. It lets her think of a young murdered boy as a kind of survivor, but at the same time, the kid’s resilience breaks her heart all the more. The suffering of children is the part of the job that fucks up O’Hara, and everyone else, the most, and she is crawling off to the saddest, bleakest corner of her mind when the bartender appears in front of her.

  “Need another?” she asks.

  “How’d you guess? But I’m going to resist. By the way, I’m Darlene.”

  “Holly,” says the barkeep.

  If I don’t come up with something to say, thinks O’Hara, I’m going to start crying, and that’s even worse form than talking on your cell.

  “Holly, you ever hear of a band called the Germs?”

  “Of course. L.A.’s first punk band. Produced by Joan Jett. Their lead singer was Darby Crash, who unfortunately killed himself.”

  “So the Germs were pretty good?”

  “I don’t know about that, but they were important.”

  “How about Coldplay, what you do you think of them?”

  “I think they suck.”

  “And how about this new outfit called the Flat Screens? Ever hear of them?”

  “No. Any good?”

  “Amazing.”

  The barke
ep has given O’Hara a musical disconnect to go with all the others. Whatever you think about the Germs or Coldplay, they’re not compatible. They don’t belong on the same playlist, let alone the same shallow, well-dug grave.

  “In the spirit of full disclosure,” says O’Hara, “I should probably mention that the lead singer of the Flat Screens is my son.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have a son who is the lead singer of a band.”

  “I appreciate that, although in my case, that’s not much of a compliment. I was fifteen when I had him.”

  “I used to be in bands myself,” says Holly. “Lots of them.”

  “Any I might have heard of?”

  “I don’t know. Space Mice, Paper Boat, Spungent.”

  “You were in Spungent? I saw them twice. The last time at Spiral in ’97. It was a great show. What instrument you play?”

  “Guitar.”

  “Really?” says O’Hara, and as she studies Holly’s face, tries to square it with her decade-old memories.

  “Yeah, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I looked a lot different, and played under a different name.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was your nom de rock?”

  “Richard.”

  “No shit? Well, thanks for sharing. Now that I know you’re a rocker, it puts you in a whole new light.”

  CHAPTER 14

  O’HARA WALKS BRUNO, grabs a few hours of sleep, and returns to the ME’s office in the early evening. One look at Bradley’s eyes, and she knows he never left. His pupils are the size of nickels.

  “Jesus Christ,” says O’Hara. “What are you on?”

  “Adderall,” says Bradley, “same thing that got me out of Davenport, Iowa, and into Harvard. Makes me feel young.”

  “You started taking that shit in high school?”

  “Best thing I ever did. In two months, I went from fuckup to National Merit scholar. I didn’t need more attention, a role model, or a good talking-to. I just needed a little support from big pharma. Let me show you a couple things before it wears off.”