Two Graves Dug Page 7

  What I couldn’t do was stroll over to the station house and wander upstairs to squad and casually ask the detective in charge why he was handling this case in such a fucked up manner. For all I knew, he had a plan and was working it. That I thought he should share that plan with the victims wasn’t worth the buck fifty it cost to ride the subway. Which, strangely, I didn’t feel like doing this morning, even though I was on the West side.

  I’d missed my ritual morning walk because I was busy introducing Jill Mason to Mike Smith, while Eddie Ortiz watched from some hidey hole and was so good at his job that I never saw him, and I was looking. Now I was trying to decide whether to stop by the office and see what information Yolanda had elicited from her computers, or pay a visit to Carmine and get a sense of what was happening in the ‘hood...Holy shit! The realization smacked me in the face like a sucker punch: Carmine didn’t live in the same neighborhood as the other victims. Lower East Side, yes, but closer to Little Italy than Alphabet City, west of Allen Street. For some reason, that fact hadn’t registered with me on Friday night when all those parents were crowding around me. They shared a common problem so I’d ascribed certain common denominators to them, like living in the same neighborhood. But they didn’t live in the same neighborhood.

  I was running before I could stop myself, weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk and vehicular traffic in the street, running like I was dodging bullets instead of the hostile glares of walkers and drivers. And though I was headed toward the office, it felt very much like I was running away from something...or trying to outrun something.

  There were two people in the office, seated at the desks and talking with Yolanda when I burst into the room, and all three looked up at me with that look that demands an explanation.

  “It’s important, Yo,” I said to her, and “Good morning, folks,” I said to her visitors. Our visitors, since I supposed they were clients or prospective clients, two women in their mid to late forties with their Bruno Magli’s firmly planted on the rungs of the upwardly mobile ladder from the looks of them.

  “Have you found out something about who’s hurting the little girls?” asked the one with the platinum hair—expensive salon job, not the do-it-yourself variety.

  I looked hard at her, certain that she hadn’t been in my office on Friday night, and I was about to say as much when the other one who, on closer inspection, most definitely was the sister or other close relative of the first one though her hair was darker and she was shorter by three or four inches, spoke up.

  “We all know about what you’re doing. That’s why we’re here.”

  I felt nauseous. “You have a vic...ah, a daughter who’s been...ah...” I couldn’t finish and it took them a second to understand why.

  “Oh no!” exclaimed platinum. “God forbid, no!” She was shaking her head back and forth so forcefully that I could see the diamonds winking on her earlobes when her hair moved.

  “We want to help,” said the look alike. “We grew up in this neighborhood and moved out when it got so bad.”

  “If we’d known it was gonna clean up like it has, maybe we’d a stayed,” said platinum with a shrug.

  “As I was saying,” said look-alike, “we keep in touch and we heard about what...about these terrible things, all weekend the phone rang. And we heard how you were helping and we know your kind of work is expensive.”

  Yolanda raised a piece of paper that I recognized as a check. “Miss Golson and her sister, Mrs. Stein, have retained us to protect their property.”

  I was beginning to feel like Alice down the hole. I knew better than speak, so I waited. I could tell by the look on Yo’s face that I should prepare myself for what was coming, but since I didn’t know what I was preparing for, I forced a half smile from tight lips and nodded politely, if stupidly, toward Miss Golson and Mrs. Stein.

  “They own the building the little Cummerbatch girl was thrown from.”

  The little Cummerbatch girl. Arlene Edwards’ granddaughter. My nausea turned to anger. Yolanda must have been watching me because she quickly continued her explanation.

  “I told them that because they weren’t connected directly to this case, they couldn’t retain us, but they wanted to contribute financially. So, when I learned that they did, in fact, have a connection, we worked out an agreement whereby they hire us to secure their building— check the doors and elevators, the laundry room, and the roof access. Make sure no outsiders can get in, make sure the residents are safe...”

  Yo’s words trailed off into what sounded like a warning wrapped in a question. Didn’t I understand what she was saying? Was I that stupid? Smile and thank the ladies and take their money, you fool! I heard Yo’s eyes saying those things to me, so I shook hands with Miss Golson, whose name was Shirley, and her sister Eileen—Mrs. Stein—and as I was accepting the ring of keys that would give me access to every door in the building they owned, I understood that I now had legal and legitimate access to a crime scene. My smile became genuine, my handshake firmer, my gratitude for their business expressed heartily.

  “Hell of a good job, Yo,” I said after they’d gone

  Yolanda gave me one of those looks, but her heart wasn’t in it. “The cops aren’t gonna give you an engraved invitation to their party, and you can’t help anybody standing on the outside looking in.” Then she shrugged as if what she’d done was as normal as breathing. And for her, it was.

  “You know a lot about this business, Yo, more than you let on.”

  “The issue has never been that I don’t know the business, Phil,” she snapped at me. “The issue is that I don’t like the business, but no way I could run this office and not know what we can and can’t do, and ways to get around the can’t dos.”

  She was angry and I didn’t’ know why and it didn’t look like she was going to tell me. So I told her what had brought me there in such a hurry. She began frowning as I was talking and when I was finished, she vanished behind the Shoji screens and reappeared as quickly as she’d departed. She was waving a sheaf of papers at me, proceeds, I knew, from her various computer searches. She’d also stuck her computer glasses on her nose, which confirmed a suspicion I’d harbored for a while about the status of her eyesight. One of these days I’d gather up enough nerve to mention it.

  “None of those little girls really lived in the same neighborhood,” she said, pointing to a sheet of paper that listed the names and addresses of all the victims, “though they all attended the same two schools,” she said, pointing to the names and addresses of the schools on her list.

  I studied the list. “Time to play stick the pins on the map,” I said, more to myself than to Yolanda. She had the kind of brain that contained its own map. Not only could she visualize the addresses, she could see how they connected to each other—or didn’t. I needed to see it all laid out before me in neatly ordered grids. “So if they don’t have location in common, it’s something else. I’ll double check the schools, to be certain we haven’t missed anything there. And clubs and organizations. The Girl Scouts.”

  “Brownies,” Yo said, and shook her head at me when I looked confused. She wasn’t talking about food?

  “The little ones belong to Brownies. Girl Scouts is for big girls. You know, like Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts?” She was talking to me in that ‘speech for the mentally deficient’ voice and I was about to get annoyed when she said, “And don’t forget church.”

  “Church?”

  “Church, Phil, find out what churches they attended.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  She raised her eyebrows at me but didn’t say anything. I was about to defend myself but realized even before the words left my mouth that they were stupid. I was prepared to say that kind of thing happened elsewhere, not in my neighborhood, but it was no joke what was happening to these little girls right here in my neighborhood, and certainly no joke that churches weren’t the safe havens we’d once been lulled into thinking they were.
r />   One of our first major expenses in the early days was for maps: four-foot-by-four foot sections of the city, enhanced so that every street and alleyway was visible. We hung up the Lower East Side section and spent the next couple of hours going over everything we knew, point by point, me marking the relevant locations with colored flags that suctioned on to the map surface rather than literally punching holes into it. The girls were all eight or nine years old and attended one of two schools. There were no other common threads. They were different races—Black, white, Latina; they were from different economic circumstances ranging from quite comfortable (Anna Cummerbatch and Terry Aiello) to bean sandwich poor (most of the others); and Yo was right—they all lived in different neighborhoods. All in the East Village and the Lower East Side, but every neighborhood down here had its own identity, not to mention that the word “neighborhood” carried a different definition and connotation in the five boroughs of New York City than in some other parts of the world. A “neighborhood” in, say, a city like Los Angeles or Atlanta could encompass a few miles. Here it was more like a few blocks. Chinatown was a neighborhood. Little Italy was a neighborhood. The Bowery was a neighborhood. The Lower East Side was both a neighborhood and a designated part of town, and within that, was a neighborhood the real estate moguls and gentrifiers dubbed LoEsida.

  I looked at the map and at where the little flags of different colors hung on the map’s surface, and superimposed faces of little girls on the flags. There also was nothing similar about their names, their sizes, their hair color. Yet there had to be a common denominator. Unless there were seven different rapists.

  The super at the apartment building owned by the Golson sisters was relieved to see me. The way a rat is relieved to see a cat instead of a cobra. He was sick and tired of the cops, he let me know, but he was sick and tired generally of people asking him questions to which he had no answers, and interfering with his performance of his duties. Which, he informed me, were many and varied. “It ain’t easy keepin’ a buildin’ this size in good workin’ order, Sir, I can tell you that.” His name was Basil Griffin and yes, he was a native of Trinidad and how did I come to know that? He softened only slightly when I explained how my best friend in the police academy was Trinidadian and how we’re still friends though we don’t see each other as often as we’d like. I didn’t explain why a Black man rising up through the ranks of the New York City police department has time for nothing but keeping the people trying to prevent his rise off guard and at a safe distance.

  “I know you’re busy, Mr. Griffin, and I’m sorry to take you away from your duties, but I need your help.” And I also need to rule you out as a suspect, I thought to myself, as I scrutinized the man. Who had better access to a building and its tenants than the super who just happened to live in the front apartment on the first floor?

  Come on then,” he said gruffly, and turned away from me and toward the elevators at the end of the lobby. “Where to?” I asked

  “To the roof, Man.” He said ‘Mon.’ “Isn’t that what you want to see? Where the little girl was t’rowed from?”

  I shook my head. “Not just now, Mr. Griffin. What I need to do is understand how this building works. When people come and go. How many of them come and go, and how many remain home during the day. Who works nights? Is this a friendly building— do people talk to each other and visit back and forth between apartments— or do they keep to themselves? Are there any problems? Like some kid makes too much noise— playing his music or riding his skate board in the hallway—or some kid deals drugs, or somebody doesn’t like somebody because they’re Black or they’re gay? That’s the kind of thing I need to know, Mr. Griffin, because whoever killed Arlene Edwards’ granddaughter and threw her off this building knew her, and he knew this building.”

  Basil Griffin had been listening to me, his eyes locked on my face, shifting from my eyes to my mouth, as if he could see the words coming out, and until I mentioned Arlene Edwards, his eyes had been cold and flinty and practically unblinking. He blinked when I said her name.

  “You know Arlene?”

  “I consider her a friend,” I said.

  He nodded his head up and down a few times and hooked the fat key ring back on to his belt. “These things you want to know, they’re better things than what the police wanted to know.”

  “And what did they want to know, Mr. Griffin?”

  “Stupid things!” He spat the words like ridding his mouth of rancid meat. “Did I see anybody strange in the building or with the little girl! I watch for that child to come home every day except when she goes to her Grandma at the restaurant. How stupid! If I see somebody strange with that child—with any child—he don’t get the chance to t’row them from ‘top the buildin’, I can tell you dat!” All the Caribbean returned to his speech with the anger and he took two deep breaths to calm himself. Unless he was a hell of an actor, Basil Griffin just removed himself as a suspect in my book, for certainly had he seen the perp with Arlene’s granddaughter, we’d have a dead rapist instead of a dead child.

  I followed Griffin on to the elevator and he inserted a small key into the control panel and we rode down a floor to the basement. The door slid open and deposited us into the other world of the New York City apartment dweller: the world of mesh and metal storage cages and of laundry rooms; of recycling bins and garbage collection bins; of generators and compressors and conductors of steam and heat and air and water. These basement labyrinths— the size of a closet or encompassing a square block depending on the building served— reflect the condition of the buildings they support. This was one healthy building.

  Every corner of the basement was illuminated, revealing a new, high-gloss paint job. There was no hint of a garbage odor, though the trash collection cage was in full view to the left of the elevator. The whir and rumble of washing machines and dryers were a comforting background sound, as were the heat and the clean smell they generated. Even the locked storage bins reflected a sense of cleanliness and order. I remarked on the fact, thinking of the state of the storage bins in my own building, and in buildings in which I’d lived. Clearly having Basil Griffin as the superintendent would have made a difference, for, as he told me succinctly, he didn’t allow disorder in the storage bins. Dirt and disorder breed “vermin,” he noted, and he didn’t allow vermin in his building. And I couldn’t picture a rat or roach attempting to scurry across this floor, in search of garbage that had no odor. Couldn’t picture any of the two-legged variety, either.

  Basil Griffin’s 40-square foot office was a further reflection of the building and of himself. Two walls of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held neatly arranged boxes of everything he could possibly need to maintain his sense of order. My visual scan spotted light bulbs and garbage bags; nuts and bolts and screws and nails and hooks; an array of hand and power tools; tins and tubs of cleaning and disinfecting powders and solutions; mop and broom heads and handles; five-gallon buckets of paint; 50-pound bags of rock salt. Home Depot had nothing on Basil Griffin’s store room.

  Along one wall was a desk-cum-work table and affixed to its surface laminated schematics of the building. Basil Griffin pointed to each apartment and told me who lived there. Told me great detail who lived in each unit and how long they’d lived there and where they worked and how long they’d worked there. He knew who was home when; he knew who was ill; he knew which marriages were in trouble. He knew that nobody who lived in “his” building had raped and murdered the daughter of Errol and Sylvia Cummerbatch and tossed her child’s body from the roof.

  “How do you do all this alone, Mr. Griffin? This basement is cleaner than most peoples’ apartments.”

  He looked at me hard, then gave me a slight, sly grin. “You wanna know who else works here in this buildin’? Then ask me who else works here in this buildin’.”

  Nothing slight or sly about the grin I gave him. I’d probably never have enough experience to put one over on this guy. “Who else works here with you, Mr. G
riffin?”

  He told me: Alvin Boggs, from six in the morning until two-thirty in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, for the last eighteen years; Javier Lopez from two-thirty in the afternoon until eleven at night, Monday through Friday, for the last eleven years. On Saturdays and Sundays, he said, Gregory Jenkins, the newest employee, works from noon until four. “Three years and he hasn’t missed a weekend,” Griffin said, adding that the man was so grateful to be off the midnight shift he wouldn’t dare miss a day. He hesitated only slightly when I asked for their addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers, and he readily supplied a physical description of each man.

  We left his office and I followed him around his domain as he showed me the new locks he’d installed on the laundry room door and on all the doors leading into and out of the basement. The door to the garbage cage was equipped with a spring lock, so that the gate automatically shut— and shut quickly—behind anyone entering or exiting that space. No way to get trapped inside there. No way or place for anybody to hide in this basement, I noted, as I followed him back into the elevator for the twelve story, non-stop ride to the roof.

  It was immediately apparent that the plate and lock on this door were new. “People liked using the roof,” he said quietly. “For sunnin’ theirselves, and growing their gardens. We had real pretty gardens on this roof. Flowers and plants and fruit trees. Even a palm tree. Lady in 6-G is from California and she missed her palm trees. Grew it on the roof in the spring and summer, took it back down to her apartment in the cold months.”

  He opened the door and we stepped out to the roof. The bedraggled vestiges of the garden were silent witness to the ugly horror that had occurred here. The plants seemed turned away, their boughs and branches drooped and dangling like heads held down in shame. Two weathered Adirondack chairs sat hunched together in one corner of the roof, faced away from where the sun would be if there were sun. Our feet crunched on the gravel carpet that covered the roof. I looked at Griffin, the question asked silently.