The Cold Room Page 6

  Jolanta returned a moment later with a child in tow, a boy wearing the blue, polyester pants and white shirt of a Catholic school student. Eight or nine years old, his blond hair was cropped to within a few millimeters of his scalp.

  ‘My aunt don’t speak English too good,’ he explained. ‘She wants me to translate.’

  Across the room, the girl finally broke free of the relentless scales she’d been playing, her right hand dropping to her side while her left pounded out an equally relentless boogie-woogie.

  ‘That’s my sister, Alena,’ the boy explained. ‘She’s getting ready for a talent contest. Little Miss New York. At Madison Square Garden.’

  I acknowledged his sister’s ambitions and talents with a short smile, then handed my victim’s photo to Jolanta Klaipeda. Almost without transition, her face brightened. This was not her dead daughter, not the baby she’d raised. It was someone else’s dead baby. I saw her look up at a crucifix on the wall to her right, watched her bless herself. Then she laughed, once, a bark of defiance, before addressing her nephew in Lithuanian. He listened attentively until she finished, then nodded.

  ‘She says to tell you that this girl is not her daughter. She says that Nina is beautiful. She says that Nina is a rose and this is a cabbage.’

  EIGHT

  Igot up and out on the next morning in time to catch the tail end of the eight o’clock mass at St Stanislaus in Greenpoint. Afterward, I passed out a dozen fliers to the exiting parishioners before chatting up Father Korda, who stood by the church door. Charm was my weapon of choice in these encounters, humble petitioner my stance. I told the priest, and anyone else who cared to listen, that I had good reason to believe that my victim was a Polish immigrant who’d lived in the neighborhood. Helping her was helping one of their own. I told the same story to Polish storekeepers on both sides of Manhattan Avenue. Murdered innocent, Polish immigrant. Her family was out there somewhere, awaiting closure. Her killer was out there, too, maybe getting ready to kill someone else.

  Whenever possible, I tried to buy something. Breakfast at one diner, coffee and a buttered corn muffin at another. I had fifty copies of the flier printed at a card shop. I bought a package of light bulbs at a hardware store and a tube of toothpaste at a small pharmacy. At every moment, I projected an attitude of brotherly cooperation, one common humanity; we’re all in this together. My goal was to place my flier in the front window where it would be seen by pedestrians. I’d even brought my own tape.

  I was mostly successful, but the going was necessarily slow. Still, by Thursday, I’d covered Greenpoint thoroughly and was out to Maspeth, a Queens neighborhood a few miles to the southeast. I’d gotten two hits by then. Both were false alarms, but ones I’d had to check out. This was a pattern that continued through the week and into the weekend. There were a lot of Nina Klaipeda’s out there, women whose daughters bore not the faintest resemblance to Plain Jane Doe.

  On Thursday, Millard called me into his office to review the case. ‘Tough luck,’ he told me. ‘Your vic’s prints came back negative. And nobody’s reported her missing yet.’ When I shrugged in response, he leaned back in his chair. ‘So, whatta ya doin’? Tell me.’

  A case review, at this point, was routine, and ordinarily I’d have progress to report. But there was nothing here and when I described my daytime activities, the effort rang hollow.

  ‘I’ve got two men out on vacation, Harry,’ Millard told me at the end. ‘You’re gonna have to pick up cases. C’mon guy.’

  Later that night, I took the bad news to a YMCA swimming pool on Twenty-Third Street. The pool was managed by a man named Conrad Stehle, who’d given me and a few other serious swimmers permission to use it late at night. Conrad had been my high school swimming coach, way back when I was a budding juvenile delinquent. That I didn’t suffer the fate of so many of my peers by running afoul of the law was due almost entirely to his intervention. Before we met, my options were limited to my druggie parents or a motley collection of street urchins on the Lower East Side. Conrad offered a third possibility; I could, if I wished, spend my afternoons in his Murray Hill apartment. I don’t want to take this too far – I never thought of Conrad as my father, or his wife, Helen, as my mother. Instead, what they provided, and what I needed, was stability, a dependable world equally free of the chaos offered by my parents and the casual violence of the streets.

  There was a second benefit to my relationship with Conrad, a benefit still with me twenty-five years later. Simply put, as I learned to swim competitively, water became my preferred element. With my goggles wet and every sound dampened by ear plugs, I was finally able to shut the world out, to turn my attention inward until I eventually became my own object, the insect under the glass. Double-stroke, then breathe. Turn, push off. After a while, you don’t have to look ahead to find the far wall, or even count your strokes as you cross the pool. Something inside you, the same something that makes your heart beat and your stomach digest, counts for you.

  I swam for an hour on that night, concentrating my attention on the case. I knew, going in, that if Jane wasn’t identified, her murder would never be avenged. As I knew that, for the time being, I needed to continue my canvas, gradually expanding the search area, and hope for the best. Still, at some point, assuming I didn’t identify her first, the law of diminishing returns would kick in with a vengeance. It’s a very big city. Myself, I didn’t intend to give up if I crossed that line because there was another possibility out there, a wild card named Bill Sarney.

  Now assigned to the Chief of Detectives office, Deputy-Inspector Bill Sarney had been in command of the One-Sixteen when Adele and I worked the case that put us on the outs with the job. Two-faced from the beginning, Sarney pretended to be my rabbi and my friend, all the while selling me out to Borough Command and his buddies at the Puzzle Palace.

  It took me awhile, but when I eventually uncovered his game, I’d threatened to expose him to a sitting grand jury. The threat was potent enough to secure a promise that I’d eventually be transferred to Homicide – my long-term goal from the day I stepped through the doors of the Academy – and that we’d meet in public from time to time. About the PBA and its whispering campaign he could do nothing.

  Working for the Chief of Detectives, Sarney had the kind of juice I’d need if I took the case in a different direction. Unidentified victims are not all that rare in New York, certainly not rare enough to attract attention from the press. True, the media occasionally takes up the cause of a Jane Doe, but cops who reach out to the media without the backing of the job’s Public Information Office pay a heavy price. Bill Sarney could get me that backing. All I’d have to do is beg.

  Almost from the minute my hands cut the water, I’d been making an attempt to banish Adele from my thoughts. By then I knew she wouldn’t return, as promised, by the weekend. On Monday, her mother was scheduled to undergo an endoscopy, a procedure that requires the insertion of a tube through the mouth and into the stomach. Leya Bentibi was beside herself, not least because Jovianna insisted that she make a living will.

  Adele could not simply desert her mother. Right? So there was nothing to consider. That’s what I told myself, and I almost made it stick. But then, as my stroke became ragged, an image of Adele rose, unbidden, to hang before my eyes. Adele was sitting in the lobby of North Shore Hospital, her face a mask of bandages, her ski jacket matted with dried blood. I’d come to pick her up after an overnight stay because her husband was in Dallas on a business trip that could not be interrupted for so mundane a task.

  Adele had been sitting with her back straight and her head up when I entered the hospital, enduring the frank stares of all who passed her by. I fell in love with her at that moment, with her pride, her defiance. You could kill her, but you couldn’t break her. A few days later, when she came to me, when I felt her breasts against my chest and tasted her lips, I knew there was no going back. If I lost her, I’d pay a price until the end of my days. Twenty minutes later, after a quick s
hower, I tried to call Conrad on his cell phone. If I could talk to anyone, it was Conrad, who knew me better than I knew myself. But Conrad was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, on a cruise with his girlfriend, Myra Gardner. He was reachable only when the ship was in port, which it apparently wasn’t because I was transferred, after a single ring, to his voice mail. I started to leave a message, then abruptly hung up. There was no point.

  NINE

  By Monday, I was in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, popularly called Little Odessa. Upwards of one hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians, most of them immigrants, are packed into Brighton Beach, enough to spill over into the communities of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. On the little shops along the streets and avenues, the signs are most commonly written in Cyrillic, and more business is conducted in Russian than English. There are grocery stores in Brighton Beach, no larger than bodegas, which carry ten brands of pickled herring and a dozen of caviar.

  The weather remained hot throughout and I was grateful for the deep shadow cast by the el on Brighton Beach Avenue as I made my rounds. My pitch to these Russian shopkeepers differed only slightly from my approach to the Poles of Greenpoint. I told the Russians that I was sure my victim came from Russia or the Ukraine, a white lie that netted me zilch, though I managed to post fliers in a number of businesses. Adele called me that evening, a few minutes before I entered the Nine-Two. Her mother’s endoscopy had revealed a small gastric ulcer that would be treated with antacids and a course of antibiotics. No surgery was foreseen, now or in the future. All concerned were relieved.

  Besides a muttered, ‘Uh-huh,’ I made no comment. I was waiting for Adele to say that she was coming home. Instead, she turned the conversation to the case.

  ‘I set up that meeting with Dominick Capra. He says you should call in the morning and let him know where to meet you.’

  It took me a moment to remember that Capra was an agent with the Immigration & Naturalization Service. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll call him.’

  ‘Corbin, don’t be so negative. He thinks he can help you.’

  ‘I’ll definitely call him. So, when are you coming home?’

  Adele sighed and I knew the answer: no time soon.

  ‘I need to think,’ she told me. ‘I have to take a look at my life. I have to take a look at the fact that every day I go out to a job I hate. Do you remember when I told you that I didn’t want to live a trivial life? Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m not saying you, Corbin. You’ll never be trivial. You don’t have it in you. But I’m saying that I need time to think. Time and space.’

  This carefully prepared speech presented a line of reasoning familiar to Harry Corbin. You’re perfect, darling, the story goes, but my life is fucked up in every other way. So I’ve decided to leave you. That way I won’t be conflicted.

  At noon on Tuesday, I met INS Agent Dominick Capra at Pete’s Tavern near Gramercy Park. About my age, Capra was short and wide-shouldered, with a thickened nose red enough to hang on a Christmas tree. That nose reddened still further when he chugged a double bourbon within minutes of his arrival.

  ‘Be a sport,’ he said, the fumes on his breath thick enough to ignite, ‘and spring for another.’ And another, and another, as it turned out.

  Adele had cautioned me about Dominick Capra, and for good reason. Capra was obsessed with the criminality of the new immigrants and the threat they posed to the nation. He spewed bigotry with every breath.

  ‘First of all, there’s no Russian mob,’ he told me at one point. ‘What you got in Brighton Beach is a Jewish mob. And it’s bigger than the fuckin’ wops ever were.’ At another, he declared, ticking the items off on his fingers. ‘There’s a Rumanian mob, a Bulgarian mob, an Israeli mob, a Nigerian mob. There’s mobs from ten different parts of China. Hell, you could just make a list of the world’s busted-out countries and there’d be organized criminals emigrating from every fucking province.’

  I didn’t react to Capra’s tirade, probably because my concentration was still focused on my little talk with Adele. But then Capra surprised me with something relevant and my focus shifted abruptly.

  Illegal immigrants, he pointed out, aren’t hermits and they don’t live in caves. They live in ordinary communities, most commonly among individuals they knew in their home countries.

  ‘Bottom line, Harry, even if she was illegal, she should have been reported missing. This is especially true for your ex-commies. Before they’re here a month, the kids are in school, the family’s on Medicaid and they’re collectin’ food stamps. They know all the tricks and they’re not afraid of authority.’

  ‘What could I say, Dominick? I keep in touch with Missing Persons on a daily basis. If there’s anyone out there who cares about her, they’re keeping it to themselves.’

  ‘I believe you, Harry.’ Capra’s head swiveled back and forth, until he caught the attention of a waiter. Then he raised his glass. ‘Por favor.’ Finally, he turned back to me and said, ‘Look, you got two possibilities here, one pretty remote. Let’s take the remote one first. You don’t see much of this in the US, but every day, thousands of girls from across the third world are drawn into the sex trade against their will. Some are lured into it with false promises and some are purchased from their parents. Either way, these girls become virtual slaves.’

  Capra tilted his head back and brought his glass to his mouth, draining the last few drops of Jim Beam. Then he grinned. ‘How’d ya like to be sold by your parents in Vietnam, taken to a mining camp in Burma, then forced to screw twenty guys a day? For nothing, right? You’re not even gettin’ paid.’

  This was too much for me and I ignored the question. ‘What’s the other possibility?’

  Capra thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘Lemme start by givin’ you an example. Four or five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl, a Philippine national, broke her ankle jumping from the second-floor window of a townhouse. When she got to the emergency room, the docs noticed that she’d been beat to shit and called in the cops. According to the girl, Consuela Madamba, she was recruited in her home village by a woman representing an American employment agency. For a substantial price, to be paid from her wages, Consuela would be smuggled into the United States and guaranteed employment as a domestic. Consuela didn’t find out, until she got here, that her employer would be a Saudi family attached to the UN. She didn’t know that she’d be watched constantly, that she was expected to work sixteen-hour days, or that she’d be routinely beaten for the slightest failure to maintain the home properly.’

  My thoughts flashed to Roach, the profiler, and his prediction: there’s a sadist in the mix.

  Capra leaned over the table. Though his speech and mannerisms were unaffected by the alcohol he’d consumed, the light reflected from his dark eyes was sharp and fragmented. ‘Indentured servants, in colonial times, they only had to work a given number of years until they were free. These days, illegals have to keep going until the debt is completely satisfied. Plus, they’re responsible for their upkeep. Funny thing, Harry, but Consuela’s living expenses were always just a bit higher than her wages. Call it sharecropping for the new millennium.’

  I thought about this for a moment, before asking the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t she just walk away? It’s a big country.’

  ‘First, she was carefully supervised. Second, her family in the Philippines co-signed for the debt. Third, the reason she got her ass kicked was because she tried to escape.’

  ‘But they didn’t kill her.’

  Capra leaned back as the waiter set a fresh drink on the table before him. He looked at his whiskey for a minute, then caught a single drop running down the side of the glass on the tip of a finger. He brought the finger to his mouth and sucked appreciatively.

  ‘I see what you’re gettin at,’ he finally said. ‘You kill the debtor, you can forget about collecting the debt, which is something no smart businessman wants to do. On the other hand, shit happens now and again, after
which you have to clean up the mess.’

  Capra’s hamburger sat on a dish in front of him. Though he’d nibbled around the edges, it was clear that he was drinking his lunch. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, you told me that the international sex trade doesn’t operate much in the United States. What about those ads in the Village Voice, the ones for Korean, Thai and Vietnamese escort services?’

  ‘I didn’t say never, Harry. What are you gettin’ at?’

  ‘I want to know if you think my victim might have been a prostitute? We figure she was around eighteen when she was killed.’ I slid my photo of plain Jane Doe across the table to Capra, who stared at her for a few seconds before looking me in the eye.

  ‘Gimme a break, Harry. She was a dog, most likely she was the one who had to pay for it.’

  I was still cooling down, when Capra glanced at his watch. ‘I gotta get goin’ in a minute,’ he declared as he chugged his drink. ‘I’m supposed to testify at a hearing this afternoon. But there’s one other thing I wanted to mention. In my opinion, the best way to reach large numbers of immigrants is through their newspapers. Forget about runnin’ from one neighborhood to another. You could be doin’ that for the rest of your life. Advertising is what works. I know this because we used local papers to pull off a number of stings. It was very effective.’

  I had a sudden vision of shackled deportees being led, in a long line, toward a waiting airplane. Headed for home sweet home.

  ‘How many newspapers are we talking about?’

  ‘Maybe a dozen that cater to Eastern Europeans and Russians.’ Capra pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. ‘Another thing you might want to consider. Those foreign gangsters I mentioned? Well, they’re not civilized, not like your Italian gangsters. You run up against one of them, you shouldn’t expect him to act with restraint.’

  Capra turned to go, but I held him with a gesture. ‘One more thing. The employment agency that placed Consuela Madamba with the Saudi family. Did you run them down?’