The Cold Room Read online

  ‘Does that mean you’ve found them?’

  ‘It means I’ve found one of them. She’s working on the Upper West Side and I intend to approach her tomorrow, assuming she leaves the house. If you want to be there, you’ll have to put up with the elements.’

  I’d underestimated Sister Kassia. Her bird-bright eyes softened at the news and the smile on her face was positively beatific.

  ‘Tonight,’ she announced, ‘I’m going to collect.’

  ‘Collect what?’

  ‘Collect on that bet I made with Father Stan. He was certain that we’d never see you again. I told him you’d be back. I told him that underneath your dissembling exterior, there lay a primitive code of honor. Once you gave your word, you’d keep it.’

  ‘That’s nice, Sister, but when you made the bet, did you tell him the other part? Did you tell him that I’d also be returning to Blessed Virgin because I still needed you?’

  The nun’s smile broadened as she arched an already rounded eyebrow, then winked. ‘Nope,’ she declared, ‘I must have forgotten about that one.’

  The phone was ringing when I walked into the house. I picked it up a moment too late and the answering machine came on. I listened to the announcement, then heard Adele’s voice.

  ‘Corbin, where have you been? I’m dying to know what’s going on.’

  I picked up the phone and shut off the machine. ‘Adele, I just walked into the house.’

  ‘Busy day?’

  ‘Busy two days. But everything’s falling into place.’

  I went on to describe the various things and the various places into which they’d fallen. Adele responded with an ‘uh-huh’ from time to time, but saved her questions until I’d finished. Then she asked for the game plan.

  ‘Tomorrow, Sister Kassia and I will make contact with the maid, assuming she leaves the house.’

  ‘Toward what end?’

  ‘What I’m hoping is that she’ll be anxious to improve her circumstances. Say, for instance, by getting as far away from Aslan as possible. If that’s the way it goes down, I’ll pull the women out on Saturday night and hand them over to Sister Kassia.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then I’ll take her into custody.’

  ‘Sister Kassia?’

  Though I didn’t laugh at Adele’s joke, I finally paused long enough to take a breath. ‘It’s gettin’ a little crazy,’ I admitted.

  Adele took pity on me. ‘I have to give you credit, Corbin. A week into the case, I didn’t think you had a chance. Now you’re almost there.’

  I got off the phone a few minutes later, then took a long shower, finally pulling on shorts and a t-shirt. The apartment was relatively cool, the sun having passed behind my building while the clouds were still thick enough to shade the windows. I settled down in my office, flicked on the computer, finally sat back while it booted up.

  I began with an Internet search using the single word Portola. That got me 264,000 hits, for the town of Portola (‘Gateway to the Sierras’), for Portola Packaging, for the Portola Railroad Museum, for the Portola School District, for Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish soldier who’d served as Governor of Los Californias from 1768 until 1770.

  A more specific search, for Margaret Portola, produced no hits at all, and I struck out on Ronald and David as well. But I wasn’t discouraged. I jumped to the New York Times website and ran a general search for the name Portola through their archives. This time I got a mere eighty-five hits, a manageable number that allowed me to plough through several dozen abstracts before I found the obituary of a man named Guillermo Portola.

  The abstract revealed only that Guillermo Portola, born in Portugal, was survived by his wife, Margaret, and his two sons, Ronald and David. For the full text of the article, I had to fork over two dollars ninety-five. But the pay-off more than justified the investment. Guillermo Portola had died in 1998, at age seventy-three, five years after suffering a massive stroke. At the moment of his passing, he’d been lying in his own bed, in his own home, surrounded by his loving family.

  The obituary included Guillermo’s photograph. A man just approaching middle-age, he stood on the deck of a sleek, three-masted yacht, wearing shorts and sandals and a fisherman’s cap with a long brim that shaded his face. An Ernest Hemingway beard added a touch of bulk to his weak chin, while a broad smile revealed a set of horsey white teeth. Cradled against his chest, a brass trophy gleamed in the sunlight.

  Aside from his support for the usual charities, yachting was Guillermo’s one claim to fame. In 1958, he’d won a race from New York to San Francisco that traced the route of the old clipper ships around Cape Horn. In 1963, he’d finished third in a competition that traced the route of Magellan across the Pacific. In 1974, his yacht had capsized in a squall thirty miles outside of Bermuda. All aboard were rescued after passing several harrowing hours in a life raft, but the vessel was lost.

  Oddly, there was no mention of Guillermo’s business activities, leaving me to wonder if he’d inherited his money, if he’d lived the life of an aristocratic playboy. Guillermo had been married four times, the last to his personal assistant, Margaret Applewood of Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1984. He’d been fifty-nine on the day of the wedding, his blushing bride a mere twenty-four. Or maybe she wasn’t blushing; maybe she was just as bold as could be. Certainly there’d been no hiding the fact that she was pregnant. According to the date of birth on his driver’s license, Ronald Portola was born three months to the day after Guillermo put the ring on his mom’s finger.

  According to his Times obituary, Guillermo Portola had died at home. Dying at home, especially if there’s no doctor present, raises all kinds of flags for criminal investigators, and so much the worse if the deceased was too feeble to resist an attack. Of course, Guillermo’s obituary hadn’t mentioned an investigation, but that possibility had reared its tantalizing head when the obituary also failed to mention the name of a funeral home, a memorial service, or the date of the funeral. Maybe the Portola family had instructed a crematorium to drop the old man’s ashes into the nearest dumpster, maybe they just wanted to be rid of him. And maybe his burial had been awaiting the outcome of an autopsy.

  The New York Times prides itself on avoiding sleaze. If the ME had termed the death a homicide, the paper would have reported the facts, but the rumor mill was beneath its collective dignity. Not so the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid whose most complex stories begin and end on the same page. The Post runs on sleaze the way locomotives run on diesel fuel.

  The New York Post did not disappoint. The paper’s first story, datelined May 17, 1998, six weeks after Guillermo’s passage, ran beneath the headline: ‘UNDETERMINED!’

  What was undetermined was the cause of Guillermo’s death, which the ME had failed to pinpoint after an autopsy that included a tox screen. But there was no mention of the ME’s findings in a far more pertinent area, manner of death, which includes natural, homicide, suicide and accidental among its classifications. I knew from experience that individuals die for reasons that cannot be divined by even the most thorough autopsy, and that pathologists commonly rule the manner of death undetermined and the cause of death natural.

  Nevertheless, my persistence did not go unrewarded. The story concluded with a description of Guillermo’s will, written a full year after his stroke. The estate was to be divided between his wife and two children, with Margaret receiving fifteen percent of the estimated forty million dollars in assets. The kiddies would split the rest, but not until they reached the age of forty. Until that time, the estate’s executor, Margaret Portola, would run their lives.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I spent Wednesday in Riverside Park with Sister Kassia, from a bit before nine until a bit after four. Far from the sweat-room I’d described the day before, the weather was delightful, the temperature in the mid-seventies, the breeze steady enough to lure a mini-fleet of sailboats onto the Hudson River.

  Sister Kassia turned out to be a good compa
nion. She didn’t complain as the hours dragged by, or when I treated her to a lunch of hot dogs and sodas. Instead, she questioned me closely about life on the job, her curiosity genuine.

  I limited my responses to a few amusing anecdotes, including a story about a stoned burglar who’d been apprehended six blocks from the scene of the crime because he’d sat on a peanut butter sandwich, and another about an alcoholic cop fighter named Elvira Menendez. A legend in the Three-Four, Elvira had once been a professional wrestler in the Dominican Republic.

  I told Sister Kassia my partner’s joke, too, the one about Ole asking God why he made Lena so dumb. She laughed even louder than Hansen.

  When I turned the tables after lunch and a trip to the restroom, Sister Kassia was straightforward, even admitting that she had doubts about the whole business of illegal immigration. She didn’t believe that the United States could throw open its doors to anyone with a plane ticket, and she realized that illegal workers took jobs that would otherwise go to the poorest Americans. Worse still, from her point of view, she fully understood the extent to which she was acting as a shill for American corporations in search of cheap labor. But illegal immigrants, she insisted, were also human beings, human beings exploited on all sides, human beings in desperate need of aid. Helping them was an obligation imposed on her by the God she loved.

  We finally caught a break at three thirty when the townhouse door opened and the Portolas’ maid emerged. Again she headed south, this time only to 80th Street where she turned east, toward Central Park. Sister Kassia and I set off in pursuit, but the small woman moved too quickly and we were still a hundred yards behind when she disappeared into a drug store on Broadway.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Sister Kassia asked.

  ‘Wait for her to come out.’

  A few minutes later, she did exactly that, only to enter Zabar’s, an upscale market every bit as pricey as the Fairway Market to the south, and a lot more famous. If you’re fond of Namibian goat cheese at twenty bucks a pound, it’s the only place to shop.

  ‘This waiting business,’ Sister Kassia noted as we stood outside, ‘it wears thin pretty fast.’

  ‘Policing is a game of starts and stops. You’re always waiting for something, an autopsy, a ballistics report, a witness to surface. There’s no end to it.’

  This time the wait was only a quarter of an hour; still too long, it seemed, for the little maid. She double-timed along 80th Street as if she’d just snatched a hundred-dollar bottle of grape-seed oil and Zabar’s security guards were on her tail. By the time I caught up and took her arm, she was halfway to West End Avenue.

  ‘Police,’ I said, displaying my badge, ‘I need to talk to you.’ She stared at my shield for a moment, through dark blue eyes, while the implications of my sudden appearance made themselves felt. Then her legs buckled as she dropped her parcels and I had to tighten my grip to keep her from falling. A second later, Sister Kassia chugged up, breathing hard. She said something to the girl in Polish and the girl managed to get her legs under her. Nevertheless, she was shivering with fear, her eyes as wild as those of a deer in a forest fire. Her chest had locked up as well, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to inhale or exhale. When she finally spoke, she spat her words out in short, choppy phrases.

  The woman spoke directly to Sister Kassia, gripping the nun’s arm. I understood not a word of their conversation, but I didn’t interrupt. I knew about fear, of course, having seen it first hand, in the terrified eyes of battered women and battered children, in the eyes of rape victims in hospital examining rooms, in the eyes of the elderly after even a minor assault. Like grief, fear is an emotion cops try to avoid, but this woman was gripped by a terror so powerful that when Sister Kassia finally turned to me, I found it mirrored in her eyes.

  ‘I’ll make it simple, detective,’ the nun told me. ‘Her name is Tynia Cernek. She has a ten-month-old son and she’s worried about what Aslan might do to the child if she speaks to the police. She also claims that her chores are timed by her employer. If she’s late getting back to the house, she’ll be physically punished.’

  Again, I wondered if Aslan included an abuse premium in the fee he charged for the maid’s services. You want to beat her? Fine. You want to stick her in a refrigerator? Great. In fact, you can even kill one from time to time, as long as you’re willing to pay the price. Dominick Capra had told me a story about a servant regularly beaten by her Saudi employers. I remembered it, then, but my attitude didn’t change. I was the bad cop here.

  ‘That’s not good enough,’ I told the nun. ‘That doesn’t get us anywhere. We can’t just let her go.’

  When the maid’s eyes widened, I knew that she understood English well enough to grasp my intentions. The look in her eyes grew imploring and for a moment I thought she was going to drop to her knees.

  ‘Tell her,’ I instructed Sister Kassia, ‘that if she cooperates, the police will protect her, her child, and all the other workers. But she has to make a decision right now. She has to convince me that she won’t run back to Aslan. Otherwise, I’m going to take her to the Ninety-Second precinct in Brooklyn where I can question her at my leisure.’

  Sister Kassia gave me a searching look, but I ignored it. There was no going back.

  ‘What exactly will it take, detective,’ she demanded, ‘to let her go? Please, be precise.’

  ‘I’m the only chance she has for a normal life, Sister. Me, and me alone. I’m her only hope.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

  By then, I was certain Tynia was following the conversation. ‘First, she has to swear that she won’t contact Aslan or anyone else. Then she has to name a time and place where we can talk to her without being disturbed.’

  Tynia began to speak before Sister Kassia broke eye contact with me. ‘Tomorrow in early afternoon,’ she said, groping for the words, ‘family goes to lunch for museum benefits. I will be in this house alone.’

  ‘Does that about cover it?’ Sister Kassia asked.

  ‘Almost.’ This time I spoke directly to Tynia. ‘I want to know where you stay on Saturday and Sunday when you aren’t working.’

  Tynia’s eyes first grew mistrustful, then resigned. She went into her purse to withdraw a little notebook. The address she rattled off, on 38th Street in Queens, included an apartment number. Though I wasn’t familiar enough with the borough to pin the location exactly, I thought it was somewhere in Astoria, near Steinway Street.

  ‘Now, tell me Mynka’s last name.’

  The fear returned then, followed by an onrushing of tears. ‘Mynka, she is dead? Aslan has told us she is running away.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s dead. I want to know her last name and how to contact her relatives.’

  ‘Mynka Chechowski. This is her name. Together we are growing up in Poland, in Grodkow. We come here for better life.’

  Did the irony escape Tynia Cernek? I was only certain that when I handed her my notebook and she wrote down a phone number, her hands were still shaking. ‘Mother’s name is Katerina. Of her daughter she is greatly fearing.’

  I nodded, then let go of her arm. I was pleased, of course, to finally know Plain Jane’s full name. She would have her funeral, in her own country, surrounded by her family. I’d wanted this for her from the very beginning. But there was still that phone call to make, to Katerina who was ‘greatly fearing’ exactly what I was going to confirm.

  ‘One more question, Tynia. When you were still on Eagle Street, did Aslan live with you?’

  ‘No, there is not room for man.’

  ‘Do you know where he stayed?’

  ‘I am sorry. Aslan, he only speaks to make threatening. If from customer is complaint, he is very angry.’

  I nodded to myself as an idea blossomed, then drove home my final point. ‘Listen, now, Tynia, to what I’m going to tell you. You must keep this meeting to yourself. Your child’s safety depends on it. Speak to nobody, not to your closest friend or your closest relative. T
omorrow, we’ll create a plan that accounts for everybody. By the end of the week, this nightmare will be over. I promise you.’

  Tynia said nothing for a moment and I turned impatiently to Sister Kassia. ‘Please, Sister, repeat what I just said in Polish.’

  When Sister Kassia finished, I stepped away. Tynia didn’t hesitate. She snatched up her parcels and sprinted toward Riverside Drive.

  ‘You could rescue those children right now,’ Sister Kassia said once Tynia disappeared around the corner. ‘You don’t have to wait.’

  ‘And what would I do next? Hand them over to the social workers? Deliver them into the foster care system?’ I turned to face the nun. ‘Given the illegal status of their mothers, their missing fathers, and the fact that their mothers knew they were in danger and failed to protect them, the odds are those children would remain wards of the state for the next ten years.’

  An hour later, after a quick tour of Astoria, I put Sister Kassia in a gypsy cab, then returned to the Nissan, parked a hundred yards from the address supplied by Tynia Cernek. Nondescript, the building was six stories high, spanned several lots and contained somewhere between forty and fifty apartments. As I’d suspected, it was a block from Steinway Street, the neighborhood’s main commercial drag.

  The northern and eastern reaches of Astoria have long been the center of New York’s Greek population. So much so that natives automatically link Astoria to the many Greek restaurants and groceries along Ditmars Boulevard. But there’s another Astoria to the south, near the Grand Central Parkway. This Astoria is a United Nations of ethnicities in which no group predominates. On this particular stretch of Steinway Street, for instance, a block from where I sat, the signs on the storefront businesses were all in Arabic.

  Like the warehouse on Eagle Street, the building on 38th Street was an excellent place to hide. For most of the week, apartment 5E would be occupied by Zashka and the children. The workers would arrive on Saturday night. On Monday morning, back they’d go again. This arrangement would not appear terribly unusual to the mostly poor locals, many of whom were illegal themselves.