Peter Jonge - Shadows Still Remain

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. Practically every day, it comes up with another fresh, fucked-up twist. And although few of the surprises are happy, O’Hara is usually more fascinated than repelled, and almost always grateful for the front-row seat.

His Thanksgiving tale over, Marwan looks up from Bruno to O’Hara and offers a heartbreaking sliver of a smile. Everything about him looks too small and young, but his eyes are ancient.

The next evening O’Hara and Krekorian stand outside Samuel Gompers House, two blocks up Pitt Street from the station, just north of the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. In the sixties, when the neighborhood was undesirable enough for city officials to get away with it, they threw up eight thousand units of public housing between Pitt and the East River, and when they all go condo and their tenants get relocated like Indians to reservations, O’Hara and Krekorian will have to find somewhere else to make their overtime. In the meantime, they’re paying a visit to apartment 21EEE, following up on a domestic abuse, the crime that keeps on giving. Since they’d prefer to arrive unnannounced, they’re freezing their asses off waiting for someone to step in or out through the locked door.

Shielding herself from the worst of the wind, O’Hara turns her back on the door and looks across Pitt Street. Facing the projects and their captive populace of thousands are a nasty little Chinese restaurant, a Western Union that cashes child-support payments and a liquor store named Liquor Store, with more bulletproof glass than the Popemobile.

“I haven’t even told you about my latest Thanksgiving fiasco,” says Krekorian, who is built like a fire hydrant, the swarthy skin on his face pulled tight across prominent cheekbones like a pit bull’s. After four years as partners, O’Hara and Krekorian are deeply familiar with the toxic ruts of each other’s dysfunctional lives. She knows that Krekorian only dates black women with two or three kids, and he knows that O’Hara hardly dates anyone and the two indulge each other by acting as if their emotional cowardice is primarily due to the stress and fucked-up schedules of police work.

By now, O’Hara is well aware of how little regard Krekorian’s family has for his unlucrative line of work. To her own family, O’Hara’s becoming a cop and promptly earning her gold shield is viewed as a minor miracle, particularly after the untimely arrival of Axl. To Krekorian’s parents, who squandered over one hundred thousand dollars to send him to Colgate, where he was the backup point guard on the basketball team for three years, it’s a profound disappointment, bordering on disgrace. At family gatherings his younger brother, an investment banker, loves to underline this fact by talking ad nauseam about all the money he’s raking in.

“What you say this time, K.?” asks O’Hara.

“Not a word, Dar.”

“Wow. I think you had what Dr. Phil calls a moment of clarity.”

“He went on and on about his bonus and stock options and being fully vested, and I just let him.”

“Like water off a duck’s back.”

“Exactly. Not a peep. I just sat there with my mouth shut and waited until it was just me and him in the den.”

“And then?”

“I hit him.”

“Maybe I spoke too soon,” says O’Hara, staring at her shoes, trying not to laugh.

“If he’s going to make me feel bad, I’m going to make him feel bad.”

“Exactly.”

Finally, an elderly Gompers resident ventures forth into the great outdoors, and the two detectives slip in behind him. The elevator is open on the ground floor, and as the doors close in front of them, Krekorian flares his enormous nostrils to draw his partner’s attention to the puddle of cat piss in the corner. O’Hara knocks on 21EEE and announces herself and Krekorian as police.

Dolores Kearns, who came to the precinct and filed a complaint on her boyfriend the day before, takes about a week to come to the door. Kearns wears nothing but a bathrobe, and her ample breasts spill out of it. “It took you ten minutes to put that outfit together?” asks O’Hara, but Kearns is no more put out by the arrival of NYPD than Chinese food.

“I was taking a nap,” she says, music seeping out from behind her.

“With Al Green playing?”

“I haven’t seen Artis since that one incident,” she says.

“That one little incident,” says O’Hara, “where he slapped you around and held a knife to your throat.”

“Like I said, I haven’t seen him.”

“But if you do, you’d call us, right?”

“No question.”

When their shift ends, Krekorian parks their black piece of crap Impala in front of the precinct house and heads to his own piece of crap Montero in the lot. O’Hara runs inside to use the bathroom before her forty-minute ride home. Slumped in one of the filthy plastic chairs just inside the door is a brown-haired white kid in a gray hooded sweatshirt about the same age and loose-limbed build as Axl, and when she gets back down the stairs she can’t help looking at him again. Like Axl, he looks like the kind of shy kid who could sit there all night, before getting up and saying anything to the desk sergeant.

“How long you been here?” asks O’Hara.

“An hour. I need to report a missing person.”

“Who?” says O’Hara.

“Francesca Pena. She’s nineteen, a sophomore at NYU, five foot nine, short black hair, about one hundred eighteen pounds.”

As O’Hara looks down at him in his chair, the kid takes out a well-thumbed snapshot of a very pretty teenage girl with long jet-black hair and bottomless brown eyes. “That’s before she cut it,” he says, touching the picture. “When she smiles, she’s got a beautiful gap between her teeth.”

“She your girlfriend?” asks O’Hara, looking wistfully over the kid’s shoulder at the door.

“Not anymore. Just friends. That’s why I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home Wednesday night. We’re not a couple anymore. That’s cool. But we had planned to spend Thanksgiving together and I knew she was looking forward to it. Now it’s Friday, and she still doesn’t answer her phone.”