Buried on Avenue B Page 8

  So who is O’Hara going to be, she wonders, Jerry or Doris?

  “Do I look like a cop?” asks O’Hara.

  “Ah . . . as a matter of fact,” says the tall kid.

  “Let’s see,” says his watchful sidekick, as if working from a list. “Uncool jeans—check. Uncool hair—check. Uncool shoes—big, fat check.”

  “That was harsh,” says O’Hara. “How about these sunglasses? Don’t tell me they’re not cool, ’cause I paid seven bucks for them. As for the shoes, I’m a bartender. I’m on my feet all day.”

  “Then take a hit and prove us wrong,” says little Springsteen. “We all make mistakes.”

  “I can’t show up reeking of pot. It’s like advertising for the other side.”

  “Where do you work that opens this early?”

  “Homicide.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Milano’s on Houston.”

  “Take a hit,” says the shorter one. “Or take a hike. This isn’t a spectator sport.”

  “Twist my arm,” says O’Hara and slides over. “Darlene,” she says. “Friends call me Dar.”

  “Ben,” says the tall kid. “And this small bucket of filth is Jamie.” He treats himself to a lungful, then passes the pipe. She takes a long hit and collapses into violent coughing that lasts for minutes and provokes a fair amount of hilarity. Unlike firemen, cops are subject to random testing. When she finally stops coughing, the sky sparkles in a way it hasn’t for fifteen years.

  “So you want to know the way to Grandmother’s house?” asks Ben.

  “Grandma?”

  “Grandma, as in hydro dealer. Remember, for Stanley? Your handicapped cousin.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then follow me,” says Ben. He drops his board at his feet and stands on it. “It’s around the corner.”

  O’Hara follows him west past the boutiquey shops on Ninth Street—an antique store called Upper Rust, a vintage place called Magic Fingers, a couple hair salons and tiny bars. Every twenty feet or so, Ben busts an understated bit of skateboard suaveness that makes her smile.

  “That was nice, Ben.”

  “Thanks, Dar.” Covering ground on foot is a lot harder than on the board. Even in her telltale clodhoppers, O’Hara struggles to keep up. At Third, she runs into Duane Reade to withdraw $500 from an ATM and try to collect her thoughts.

  “What took you so long?” asks Ben. “It’s been like ten minutes.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  At Fourth Avenue, Ben turns north. A block and a half later he stops in front of a postwar building on the east side of the street. The lobby, which has a funky deco facade, is two steps down.

  “I’ve always liked this building,” says O’Hara.

  “You’re about to like it more. There’s a doorman. Tell him you’re here to see Dr. Kurlander. When you get upstairs, just say you’re a pal of Ben’s. And good luck with Stanley.”

  O’Hara glances in the direction of the lobby. When she turns back to thank her guide, he’s halfway down the block, one hand raised in farewell. O’Hara retreats to the bodega on the south corner, and buys a Red Bull. When it’s done, she deems herself straight enough to proceed.

  “Dr. Kurlander,” O’Hara tells the doorman. At seven, the elevator opens on a frosted glass door. Etched in white letters is “East Village Women. Ob-Gyn Associates, LLP, Dr. Elizabeth Kurlander & Dr. Ellie Weisenberg.” Rather than hook her up, Ben has referred her to a gynecologist, which answers her question. O’Hara is Doris.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I HOPE WHAT I’m smelling is secondhand,” says Jandorek.

  “It is. The skaters were hitting the pipe at eight a.m.”

  “They better have been hitting it alone. The last thing you need is another vice.”

  O’Hara and Jandorek are parked in front Lion’s Hardware, a freestanding brick building on B and First, across from a large mural dedicated to John Lennon. It’s the only facade on the block unblemished by graffiti, and when O’Hara gets a good look at the man behind the counter, she understands why. Malmströmer is at least six-seven and solid, with the severe countenance of a man from a harsher time and place, not the sort likely to see the upside of having some asshole’s initials on his store. After a super with a boil on the back of his neck picks up his preordered faucet, O’Hara and Jandorek follow Malmströmer to the office in the back.

  “Mr. Malmströmer,” says Jandorek, “as you might have heard, we’re investigating the disappearance of a young boy whose family may have been members of the community garden.”

  “I hadn’t. And I doubt I’ll be of much help. I’m never there. Christina has the plot now, and from what I can tell she’s doing a very good job with it.”

  “How do you know, if you’re never there?” asks O’Hara.

  “I live around the corner from the community garden. From my own garden on the roof, I have a pretty good view of her plot.”

  “I met your daughter last week,” says O’Hara. “She’s lovely.”

  “Christina’s my angel,” says Malmströmer.

  “We heard you watch your daughter with binoculars,” says Jandorek.

  “Casey should mind her own business.”

  “Or maybe you should mind yours, Mr. Malmströmer. I doubt a twenty-five-year-old woman appreciates being kept under surveillance by her father.” Malmströmer’s eyes flicker with indignation. He glances at Jandorek, holds the stare for a beat, then looks down at his own enormous hands, as if admonishing them not to do anything rash. “I have a garden, and Christina has a garden, and it so happens that when I am working on mine, I can see her working on hers. . . . Excuse me.” A young clerk stands outside the office. “Do we have any more rat traps in the basement? A customer wants a hundred.”

  “Tell him we can have them tomorrow. But take a deposit.”

  “I hear you have quite a garden yourself,” says Jandorek.

  “Casey again?”

  “What do you do with all the stuff you grow, Mr. Malmströmer?” asks O’Hara.

  “You want me to account for my vegetables?”

  “Your daughter has her own garden. You live alone. That’s a lot of produce. What do you do with it?”

  “I eat some. And give the rest to the Bowery Mission. They seem to appreciate it. Is there anything else I can do for you, detectives?”

  “I understand you have an older daughter,” says Jandorek.

  “I’m afraid I lost Inga to the streets.”

  “What was she doing that was so awful? There’s no record of an arrest.”

  “Taking drugs, lying about it, and disobeying me.”

  “Eighty percent of the kids in New York do that. Why’d you wait three years to file a missing person report?”

  “I thought that if I was patient, she would just walk in the door one day. I still hope that will happen.”

  CHAPTER 21

  AT 3:05 A.M. O’Hara and Jandorek visit Malmströmer again, this time in his home at 538 East Sixth Street. The rooster on the roof crows like a Doberman and Malmströmer, a tired man in a bathrobe, is shown the freshly signed warrant.

  “You have a permit for livestock?” says Jandorek.

  “You came in the middle of the night for that?”

  “No. We came to search your apartment and basement. The warrant is good for both. Let’s start at the bottom.” They drag him down seven flights and wait for him to open the steel padlock below a large KEEP OUT sign. Inside is a well-appointed workshop, lined with band- and jigsaws, a planer and a lathe.

  “We hear you spend a lot of time down here, Mr. Malmströmer. What do you do?”

  “Make things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Anything I want to.”

  With a tip of his finger, Jandorek n
udges an expensive drill just far enough over the edge of his worktable so that it falls onto the cement floor. They step over it and walk to the far end of the shop, where a small dresser, recently stained, is drying. Although the scale is Lilliputian, the detail and design are exquisite. “Why so small?” asks O’Hara.

  “It takes up less space.”

  “And you’ll give it away, like your tomatoes?”

  Malmströmer doesn’t reply.

  “Who’d you make it for, Mr. Malmströmer?”

  “I made it for myself.”

  “I thought you were going to say it’s for your grandchild,” says Jandorek. “But you don’t have any, do you? Because you threw your own daughter into the street for smoking a joint or holding hands. And your other daughter hates you because you spy on her with binoculars.”

  “She doesn’t hate me.”

  In the corner of the room is a half door, also steel, fortified and padlocked.

  “What’s back there?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Open it,” says Jandorek, and it occurs to O’Hara that her partner’s hard-on for Malmströmer may be related to his hard-on for Fagerland. Malmströmer takes out his keys. With his hands shaking, he struggles to separate the right one from the ring and slide it into the lock. Finally he undoes the bolt and pushes open the door. It takes several seconds for a flickering light to come all the way on. When it does, they see a low-ceilinged room crammed with wooden miniatures as beautifully crafted as the dresser. Among the furnishings are a bunk bed, a desk, and a rocking chair. There’s also a pair of hand-crafted hockey sticks, a scooter, and a small perfectly proportioned dark green canoe with a white pinstripe.

  “I thought you said you didn’t have grandchildren.”

  “I don’t.”

  “So why all this?” asks Jandorek.

  “I drove Inga away, but it’s not too late for Christina. She could still have a family.”

  O’Hara stares back into the crawl space. The old world pieces seem too small to contain all the anguish and love that has been instilled in them.

  CHAPTER 22

  O’HARA SITS AT her desk and tries not to flinch every time Kelso walks by. If their roles were reversed, O’Hara would be just as pissed. A week after they brought the kid out of the ground, they still don’t even have an ID, and her only suspect, Henderson, is both incompetent and incontinent. Even though Gus got the body wrong, he got the burial spot right, so there has to be a connection, but the thought of returning to his malodorous apartment is no more appealing than sparking up another adult chat with Kelso.

  “Any ideas?” O’Hara asks Jandorek.

  “I was thinking a nice piece of fish.”

  “I mean the homicide.”

  “This afternoon Kelso’s giving it to the media in time for the evening news. We got so little, he has no choice.” Jandorek adjusts his voice downward to the basso profundo of a TV newsreader. “An idyllic East Village garden has become the scene of a grisly discovery . . .”

  “Idyllic my ass.”

  “You need the contrast, Dar—the idyllic and the grisly—otherwise it doesn’t sing. In any case, a towheaded Yankees fan with a limp, someone’s going to pick up the phone. In fact too many people will pick up the phone, and ninety-nine percent of it will be useless. The rest will be atrocious. It always is when you set up a hotline for a murdered kid. The shit you hear . . .”

  They are interrupted by a call to O’Hara from the desk sergeant.

  “I got a Ben and a Jamie here to see you.”

  When O’Hara is slow to respond, the sergeant adds some memory-jogging detail. “Long hair, about eighteen, skateboards. They claim they’re pals of yours.”

  “That’s an exaggeration,” says O’Hara. “They don’t by any chance reek of pot?”

  “I don’t think they’d roll into a police station if they did.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “You want me to bring them up?”

  “Absolutely not. I’ll be right down.”

  Rather than wait for the elevator, O’Hara and Jandorek take the back stairs to the lobby and hustle the visitors outside to the sidewalk. “I guess you really are in homicide,” says Ben.

  “That’s what I tried to tell you.”

  “Bullshit you did,” says Jamie.

  “Listen,” says Jandorek. “I don’t know what the fuck this is about, but if you came here to cause trouble, you picked the worst place on the planet to do it. And you didn’t pick a good time either.”

  “That’s not why we’re here,” says Jamie.

  “I’m glad that’s settled. Why are you here?”

  “About a friend of ours,” says Ben, “a little kid, who we haven’t seen in months. We’re worried about him. We’d been thinking about what to do for a while, but we couldn’t get it together to go to the police. Then yesterday, we met Darlene in the park, and even though we had a little fun with her, we decided she’s basically good people.”

  “So we went to look for you,” says Jamie, picking up the thread and now addressing O’Hara. “We started at the Nine, but they weren’t very helpful. Then we tried the Seven, and they sent us here. We thought, Damn, homicide, pretty good for a sto—”

  “Jamie,” says O’Hara, cutting him off. “Tell us about your friend. What’s his name?”

  “We don’t know his real name. He didn’t tell us. We called him Hercules.” Jesus Christ, thinks O’Hara, her hopes sinking again.

  “We called him that as a joke,” says Ben. “Because he was so skinny. He was this little guy, about eight, nine, who hung around the skateboard park the last year or so, and he was such a cheeky little gink, we sort of adopted him and made him our mascot.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Blond.”

  “Dark blond or light blond?”

  “Almost white, like a little surfer. And he had a slight limp from when he broke his leg. I guess it never healed right.”

  “Why wasn’t he at school?”

  “Good question. I asked him once. He said he was homeschooled, not that I believed him, because he was never at home either. I guess I should have gotten on his case about it, but it’s not like he was the only one of us who should have been at school. And maybe he was homeschooled. He could read okay.”

  “How do you know that?” asks O’Hara.

  “He read comics,” says Jamie.

  “Oh, yeah. Which ones?”

  “Superman, X-Men, Destroyer. But more than anything Superman.”

  “Not Batman?”

  “Never saw him reading that.”

  “Me neither,” says Ben.

  “Let’s get out of the heat,” says Jandorek, pointing at a filthy Impala parked ten feet away. “It’s a piece of shit, but the AC works.” He unlocks the door, and they climb in—Jandorek and O’Hara in front, Ben and Jamie in back.

  “Here we are,” says Jandorek, “a perfect family.”

  “All we need is Herc,” says Ben.

  O’Hara looks away as Jandorek starts the car and cranks the air. He opens the glove compartment, takes out two notebooks, and gives one to O’Hara.

  “You know where he lived?” asks O’Hara, twisting toward the rear. “Who his parents were?”

  “No,” says Ben. “He just tagged along with us at the park. He didn’t want to talk about his life. It was obviously something not so wonderful—maybe a foster home. I should have asked more. Gotten involved, like you say, but I didn’t.” He looks nothing like the arrogant brat from yesterday. He looks like he’s going to cry.

  “You’re here now, right?” says O’Hara. “You’re doing the right thing now. That’s what counts.”

  “We waited too long.”

  “You never saw him with anyone?” asks Jandorek.

  “Every on
ce in a while someone would come to the park, looking for him,” says Jamie, “but they didn’t seem like his mother or father. Didn’t look like it, or act like it.”

  “He was never glad to see them,” says Ben, “but he left with them anyway, like he had no choice. He’d disappear for a couple days, or a week or even a month, and then one morning he’d roll into the park and everything would be back to normal.”

  “You ever ask where he went?”

  “Once. All he said was he went on a trip.”

  “I need you to describe the people who picked him up,” says O’Hara. “Take your time and try to remember. It’s very important. Anything you remember at all.”

  “The thing is, it was never the same person,” says Jamie. “I remember a guy, a little guy. Kind of low-key. Herc actually seemed to like him okay. And a woman who was quite unattractive, and another that was borderline hot—big tits, big hair. Kind of sexy.”

  “The woman who was unattractive,” asks Jandorek, “you remember what about her was unattractive?”

  “Her face, I guess.”

  “When he came back,” asks O’Hara, “from being gone, did he look different? Act different? Were there any bruises on him? Any indication like he’d been roughed up or treated badly?”