‘Corbin, what can I say? I’m dealing with the realities at hand.’
At eight thirty, after a long drive in heavy traffic, I knocked on the door of Jolanta Klaipeda’s Westchester Avenue apartment. She opened a moment later, then led me to a cracked leather couch draped with a red and green Christmas blanket. The couch was occupied by two elderly men, brothers by the look of them. When Jolanta addressed them in what I assumed to be Lithuanian, they struggled to their feet and shuffled toward one of the bedrooms. Only after the door closed behind their backs did Jolanta turn to face me. Her eyes met mine for a moment, then darted away, then returned. I could see the fear in those eyes, fear dancing in the amber motes flecking her brown irises, and fear in her raised and reddened lids, in the tight line of her mouth, in the flare of her nostrils. On the phone, I’d attempted to reassure the woman. My visit, I’d explained, was routine. I had no reason to believe that the photo I intended to show her was of her daughter. But that strategy backfired when Jolanta, in halting English, told me that she’d provided a photo of Nina to the officers who’d interviewed her five weeks before. Clearly, she didn’t believe me when I explained that Nina’s photo had somehow been misplaced. Clearly, she thought I was coming to the Bronx only to confirm what I already knew, that her daughter was dead.
I reached into my pocket for the computer-enhanced photo I intended to show her, but Jolanta stopped me. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘for a moment.’ Then she followed the two men into the bedroom, leaving me to my own devices.
I can’t say for sure how many people lived in the Klaipeda household, but there were two single beds and a cradle in the living room. Half hidden by an upright piano, cradle and beds were lined up against the wall opposite the windows. A young girl, maybe ten years old, sat at the piano. She was playing scales, her touch light and delicate, even in the lower registers. An older man sat on a kitchen chair beside her, nodding from time to time, while a metronome ticked away a few inches from her face.
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
I got 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.