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 companion. 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.