Jo looked out the window and hesitated before answering. “She told me she lifted them.”
“Shoplifted?”
“Yeah. From Macy’s.”
The idea that Angel had stolen things gave me a new source of hope. “Do you know if she was ever arrested?”
“She never said. But I don’t think so. She was good at swiping food from bodegas,” Jo said, remembering something that made her happy. “Last time I saw her she had one of those big jars of peanut butter and must have been five of us that ate dinner and breakfast off her.”
“Where in the Park did Angel stay, Jo?” I asked. “Where is your favorite place, and where was hers?”
She looked back and forth between Mercer and me. “I’m not telling you where I go. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You won’t get in any trouble,” I said. “I promise you. We want to find the man who killed Angel. We want to give her a decent burial. This isn’t about you, Jo.”
“Did she have a spot?” Mercer asked.
“Yes, sir. She was staying in a place they call the Ravine. You know where that is?”
“I do,” I said. “Up near 110th Street.”
“I’d never seen anything like it. Me and my girlfriend couldn’t believe we were in New York City. Angel said the woods were so thick there and it was so far off the road, down this big hill, that nobody would bother us. So we slept there, I think it was two nights.”
“Was Angel with anyone else?”
“Two other people.”
“Tell us about them,” I said. “Anything you can remember.”
“Guys. They were both guys. One was a tranny,” Jo said. “A white kid, maybe sixteen, from Long Island, who’d been beaten up pretty bad when one of the men he came on to found out.”
A wounded transsexual who sought shelter with Angel sounded just right.
“The other one was African American. Old, like maybe my grandfather’s age. Skin color dark like yours,” she said to Mercer, “with his hair all white. I don’t know where the tranny is now, but the old guy is Vergil. Folks call him Verge. Everybody in Central Park knows him, even the cops.”
“Knows him because he’s done bad things?” Mercer asked.
“Oh, no. ’Cause he’s lived there forever. Verge looks out for people. He knew Angel’s story, about her being abused and all. It’s Verge who made her leave the Ravine. Told her that bad stuff had happened there. He said there was a guy going around at night attacking people.”
Raymond Tanner? Could he have been Verge’s concern? Tanner’s work release had started in April and by mid-May he’d been AWOL. We needed to find Verge as soon as possible.
“When he made her leave the Ravine,” I said, “do you know where Verge took her?”
“Yeah. Yes, I do. We went together. Me and my girlfriend, and her and the tranny.”
“Where to?”
Jo hesitated again. “Verge took us to the Ramble. He said we’d be better off there.”
Again I kept a poker face.
“The Ramble covers a huge part of the Park,” Mercer said. “Can you describe where you were?”
Jo held her hands out to the side. “Verge said it was called Muggers Woods. That’s what I remember ’cause it sounded like a bad place. He said it used to be that way a long time ago, but not so much anymore. And it was perfectly fine.”
“Do you know it?” I asked Mercer.
“As of yesterday I do. It’s far north of the Point, way back off the paths,” he said to me. Then to Jo, “Does Verge have some kind of problem? Is there a reason our girl was with him?”
Jo smiled. “Yeah. Verge is real slow. I had an uncle like him, my mama used to call retarded. But fortunately people don’t use that word now. He’s simple, is what I’d say. Can’t read, and sometimes he talks nonsense.”
“What kind of nonsense?”
“Verge talks like a child, really. Likes to spend his time at the zoo, panhandlin’ for money. Speaks about the animals like they’re his friends. Says his family used to have a house in Central Park. Silly things like that.”
I leaned forward when Jo mentioned a house in the Park. “Does Verge say he lived in that house?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. He talks about it like there were houses there a hundred years ago. I told you it’s nonsense.”
“Not so crazy, Jo,” Mercer said. He didn’t stop to tell her about Seneca Village, but I knew that’s what he was thinking.
“Did you find her notebook?” Jo asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Tell us about it.”
“Lots of us write in journals. Especially the girls. You know when you sleep outdoors, it’s always good to keep a book by you, ’cause then the cops think that you’re a student. But it really doesn’t have anything to do with that. Like my girlfriend, she makes lists. People she misses and people she doesn’t, stores where she lifted things so she can pay them back someday when she gets a job, which churches serve food and what times of the day.”
“And you? Do you write?”
“Mostly about places I’ve been on the street so I can tell other people about them-what’s good and what’s bad. Angel, she mostly wrote descriptions of folk. What their problems were, what she tried to do to help them. Sometimes she even sketched their faces. She could draw really good.” Jo paused for a few seconds. “She wrote in it every night, the times I was around her. You find that notebook, and you’ll pretty much find her life.”
“Did she let you read any of it?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. She showed me her drawings every now and then. Even made one of me with my girlfriend.”
“Was she afraid of anyone, Jo? Did she ever confide in you about that?”
“Just her father is all she told me. She told me nobody could hurt her as bad as he did.”
“How about Verge?” Mercer asked. “Did you ever see him get violent, get angry with anyone?”
I was sure he was thinking, as I was, about someone who knew the remote places of the Park so well and had attached himself to a vulnerable young woman. We needed to find to out who and where he was as quickly as possible. We needed to know whether he had a criminal history.
Jo rolled her eyes at Mercer. “No way Verge ever got angry. I told you he wanted to protect Angel. He’s got this thing he carries with him all the time, this little thing that he told her would make her safe. I guess that didn’t work.”
“What kind of thing?” I asked. “Was it a weapon of some kind?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing like that. I only saw it once, the last time we were with her,” Jo said. “It was some kind of cherub, some little creature that was painted mostly black with gold trim.”
Mercer was already reaching for the folder with the photographs of the ebony statue.
“Did she tell you that Verge gave her the cherub?” I asked.
“She never told me how she got it,” Jo said. “But there can only be two ways, don’t you think? Verge either gave it to her, or she stole it.”
TWENTY
“Your head looks like it’s spinning and ’bout to fly off your body,” Mercer said.
“We’ve suddenly got so many directions to go in that I don’t know where to start.”
My paralegal was making the short walk to Canal Street to buy clean clothes-T-shirts, pants, and underwear-for Jo. She had welcomed our invitation to shower in the restroom and was playing the vending machines for snacks and chips like they were Vegas slots.
“Where’s Mike?”
“Don’t know. He was going to check the Panoscan from the center of the crime scene to see what the views were from Bow Bridge. We’re waiting to hear from the head of the Conservancy to see if she can get us into Lavinia Dalton’s apartment. Now we need to find Verge.”
“I’ll call Manny Chirico about that. Get him ID’d, picked up, record checked, and tease everything he knows out of him-good guy or not. And I’ll go back at Vickee.”
“About what?” I asked.