Buried on Avenue B (14 page)

 

CHAPTER 34

AT 1:30 O'HARA
meets Wawrinka at a Waffle House just north of downtown, where the letters of the sign look like they've been typed directly on the sky. Wawrinka orders three eggs, a short stack, sausage links, and grits, O'Hara a short stack with bacon.

“Where you been?”

“The Longboat Key library, right behind Publix.”

“I know where it is, Darlene. What the hell you doing there?”

“Thinking about two gunshots and a green van.”

“Don't tell me you're one of those pervs whose mind only works in public.”

“Like those cretins at Starbucks?”

“Yeah, fingering the devices on their laps and loitering outside the bathroom for strange.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

Their petite waitress, working name Samantha, delivers two coffees, and Wawrinka's eyes follow her butt back into the kitchen.

“I could eat that baby girl for breakfast and still have room for three eggs, a short stack, sausage links, and a cup of grits.”

“Connie, you sure talk a whole lot of shit. Any of it true?”

“Nah. It's pretty much all talk.”

Wawrinka really is a guy, thinks O'Hara.

“I also made a couple phone calls,” says O'Hara. “I found out there is no such thing as the Sarasota Water Authority.”

“I could have saved you the roaming charge,” says Wawrinka. “Besides, Longboat is under Manatee County.”

“And they didn't send a vehicle to Banyan Bay on March 3 either. Or anytime in March.”

“And they don't use vans, they use pickups, although they are green with black letters. So maybe Di Nunzio's memory is as lousy as her hearing. Sharon's not exactly a spring chicken.”

Samantha returns with their food, and O'Hara waits for her glutes to recede from view.

“Actually,” says O'Hara, “Sharon is a spring chicken. In fact, the springiest fucking chicken of all time. And not only does she remember the van from the Sarasota Water Authority, but she remembers seeing it made her anxious about her drinking water. That's not just one memory, it's two, and they make sense together. That's a pretty complete and coherent little nugget to spin out of thin air.”

Wawrinka responds by bursting a sausage with her fork, and O'Hara does her best to conceal her disappointment that Wawrinka's sausages look about twenty times better than her three strips of undercooked bacon.

“You think the van was a fake?”

“What I'm saying is that Sharon Di Nunzio has earned some credibility. And if she wasn't ninety and deaf with a fucked-up hearing aid, we wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what she had to say, and I wouldn't be making calls to discredit her.”

“You're saying we're ageists?”

“That's exactly what I'm saying. Because every single thing Sharon says checks out with what we've already got. For starters, she heard two rifle shots.”

“Claims to.”

“Well, we got two bodies with bullets in them from the same ancient twenty-two, and we didn't tell her anything about the second victim. The two gunshots corroborate what we already had. She should have heard two shots. It only makes sense that there were two shots. And although we don't know anything about the whereabouts of the kid, or anything else, there is no evidence the old man had traveled to New York in the months before he died, and if he did, it's highly unlikely he would have taken his trusty rabbit gun, so Sharon's memories bolster the scenario that already makes the most sense, which was that the kid was shot in Levin's place along with Levin that morning.”

“Except there was no blood. No evidence of anyone else there.”

“But now there is. Two gunshots and a van that wasn't there by the time the cops and EMS arrived. If they got the kid out of there quickly, there wouldn't necessarily have been any blood. It's a twenty-two. There was barely any of Levin's blood either, and he was lying there for over an hour. I understand that had also to do with where he shot himself, but still.”

O'Hara looks at Wawrinka for some sign of approval, and although she sees none, takes comfort from the fact that Wawrinka hasn't put anything in her mouth in twenty seconds.

“If the kid was shot at Levin's place that morning, and it certainly looks that way to me, he had to get there and he had to leave and he had to travel eleven hundred miles north so that he could end up buried in a hippie garden in the East Village. And since you can't get a bleeding kid on an airplane, the van makes sense too.”

“You might be able to get him on a bus. There're some sketchy bus lines down here.”

“Not likely,” says O'Hara. She flashes on the scene in
Midnight Cowboy
when Ratso Rizzo dies on the bus just short of Miami and Jon Voight closes his eyes.

“You're saying someone went to all that trouble to create a fake van?”

“It's not that hard.”

Wawrinka's lack of enthusiasm is chipping away at O'Hara's confidence.

“I don't know what happened at Levin's place that morning, or why a kid would be there, but something went very south.”

“And whoever was there took off with the kid?”

“Yeah. And if you leave Levin's place in a van with a kid who's been shot, what are you going to do next?”

“Take the kid to an ER.”

“That would be the right thing to do, but considering where he ended up, I don't think anyone took him to a hospital. According to the ME in New York, who traced the line of the bullet from where it hit the first rib to where it ended up in his shoulder blade, it might have barely nicked the kid's lung. With prompt medical attention, the kid could have been fine. So if a perp just left someplace where two shots had been fired, in a van with writing on it that even a ninety-year-old can remember six months after the fact, and a kid inside bleeding all over it—”

“Now he's bleeding—”

“He would have started to bleed soon. If I was the perp or perps, what I would do, first chance I got, is dump the van.” O'Hara looks across the table again, but Wawrinka is concentrating on her nearly empty plates. “And I say we find it.”

Wawrinka drags her last bite of sausage through the maple syrup and pops it in her mouth.

“So what you're saying is that if a ninety-year-old deaf woman is all we got, that's all we got, and we go with it until someone better comes along, like, an eighty-five-year-old who uses his hearing aid.”

“Basically.”

“Fair enough, but I hope you're not doing this just because Sharon is the Helen Gurley Brown of Longboat Key and still likes to give head at ninety.”

“And still gets wet too.”

“That is something, I'll give you that.”

In the neighboring booth, a man clears his throat, and a trucker's cap clocks a half turn. “Ladies, no disrespect to Sharon or Helen, but we're eating lunch, and we'd like to keep it down.”

 

CHAPTER 35

O'HARA FOLLOWS WAWRINKA
back to the Sarasota PD, where Wawrinka fires off a dispatch to every municipal, county, and state law enforcement agency within five hundred miles. She inquires if any of them have recovered an abandoned green van with black writing, believed to have been the getaway vehicle in a homicide on Longboat Key March 3 and presumed to have been abandoned later that day or soon after that.

“Feels like writing a personal,” says Wawrinka as the two eye the blank screen. “Dropping a hook into the ether and waiting for a nibble. Ever try it?”

“No,” says O'Hara, and thinks of those night fishermen casting their lines off the bridge into Sarasota Harbor.

“Why not? It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Almost too easy.”

O'Hara feels the conversation moving toward that awkward silence, which she'll be expected to fill with a recap of her checkered relationship history, including her breakup with Leibowitz, his not wanting another child, et cetera. To avoid that, O'Hara wanders to an empty desk and turns on the computer.

“Getting right to it?” asks Wawrinka. “Rare Irish beauty looking for stud . . .”

Instead of Nerve or Match, or whatever, O'Hara brings up Mapquest. For the starting location, she types in the address of Ben Levin's condo: “5265 Gulf of Mexico Drive, Longboat Key, Florida 34228.” For the destination, she types “East Sixth Street and Avenue B.”

In seconds, it generates a map of the Eastern Seaboard. It affixes a red
A
just south of Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico and a red
B
in NYC, and connects them with a blue worm. The preferred route runs northeast in a wiggly diagonal through the top half of Florida from Tampa to Jacksonville, continues on the same approximate line past Savannah, Raleigh, and Richmond, detours around Washington, then turns more sharply east toward Trenton. Before the worm slithers into the Hudson and emerges in Lower Manhattan, the bulk of nearly twelve hundred miles are on 95 North or its extensions 295 and 495. The estimated driving time is 23.9 hours.

Despite the warp speed with which the map and route were spat out, the map itself has an analogue grammar-school concreteness that takes O'Hara back to a Brooklyn classroom. O'Hara returns to the present and refocuses on the route. She sees a green van with the boy bleeding inside it as it travels north through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. How far did he make it? When did the van become a hearse?

As O'Hara studies the route, she imagines the van morphing from one vehicle into another and that gives O'Hara a thought. After printing out the map and the directions, she walks back to Wawrinka's desk. “Anything?”

“No.”

“I think looking for the van was the wrong approach.”

“Ye of little faith,” says Wawrinka. “It's been twenty minutes.”

“I mean looking for it directly. If we're right and they dumped the van, they had to steal another car. Instead of just looking for the van, let's look for a car that was stolen around that time, somewhere north of Tampa. Depending on how good of a job they did getting rid of it, the van could be hard to find, but someone gets their car stolen, they're going to report it right away.”

“Good idea. The kind of thing I look for in a partner.”

Unlike the query for the missing van, hits on stolen cars pour in immediately. Like Wawrinka's would-be paramours, there are almost too many. In the first hour, they get over forty, mostly around Tampa, but few are promising. They are the kind of expensive rides that always get stolen—Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, 'Vettes. Most have been recovered since, and in any case are an unlikely choice for someone trying to stay under the radar. As the hits come in, O'Hara plots their locations to see their proximity to the blue worm. Then she plugs the location of the theft into Mapquest to determine the driving distance from Sarasota, and checks whether that is consistent with someone heading north from Longboat Key.

At 9:00, they break for some surprisingly decent Mexican. When Wawrinka gets back to her computer, an e-mail is waiting from the state police barracks in Monroe, South Carolina. A white 1993 Volvo station wagon was reported stolen by Alfred Vanderbrook, eighty-three, of 1560 Western Highway, Walterboro, South Carolina, at 11:05 p.m. on March 3, or about twelve hours after the van left Levin's parking lot.

“A nondescript vehicle like that is what we're looking for,” says O'Hara. She types in the address of the home from which the car was stolen and sees that it's 450 miles, or an estimated seven hours and nineteen minutes, north of Longboat Key. Allowing for a couple brief stops, the time required for the perp or perps to find their new target, and for the victim to notice the car was missing, location and timing both work. And when O'Hara goes back on Mapquest, she sees that Walterboro is less than four miles from I-95.

Location, timing, kind of car, are all pretty much perfect, thinks O'Hara, while still trying to maintain a realistic degree of skepticism for what she knows is a Lotto-esque long shot. The age of the car theft victim—that feels right too.

 

CHAPTER 36

A MATTE BLACK
Crown Vic screeches into the parking lot of the Marriott Courtyard, and the tinted window spools down. Behind it, Wawrinka holds up her pinkie and forefinger, grins in a way that ought to be illegal at 5:15 a.m.

“Road trip.”

A pair of iced coffees sweat in the cup holders and there's a stack of CDs between the seats, but Wawrinka, in wifebeater and jeans, is the real wakeup call. On the job, O'Hara buries her ample curves under Clintonian pantsuits and reinforces the effect with self-administered haircuts and rubber-soled shoes. Wawrinka's butch aesthetic is kept under wraps even more thoroughly.

“Look at fucking you,” says O'Hara. “Nothing but baby girls and muscle cars.”

“What else is there?”

“For one thing—dogs.”

Neck to wrists, collar to cuffs, every bit of skin that would otherwise be concealed under Wawrinka's buttoned-up oxford shirts is tattooed with a female or an automobile or something that pertains to either. Circling her neck like a choker is the inscription “need for speed,” and on her breastbone the heavy metal band “Rage Against the Machine.” On her right shoulder a sailor-style tart in a negligee rides a wrench like a broomstick, and bumper-to-bumper down her left arm are scaled-down illustrations of a '68 Camaro, a '72 Malibu convertible, a '74 Chevy Monte Carlo, and finally a dull black 2001 Crown Vic. “That's what we're in now,” says O'Hara, pointing at a spot above the elbow.

“Very good. I bought it when it was decommissioned by the department three years ago. Did all the work myself.” When O'Hara makes the mistake of asking what that involved, she hears more than she needs to know about MagnaFlow mufflers, 2.5-inch piping, K&N cold air, and a custom tune. “She can do one-forty all day without breaking a sweat,” says Wawrinka, and as she rips out of the parking lot, the pleasure she takes in her inked-up persona is so palpable it makes being a freckled Irish hetero feel like a bore and a half.

A dull black Crown Vic with big side mirrors earns a certain amount of goodwill from local law enforcement and removes whatever stress a couple cops might feel about mocking the speed limit. Slouching in her seat like Richard Petty, Wawrinka rolls the speedometer up to 110 and sticks a pin in it, and when she spots a state trooper lurking behind some bushes in the dim predawn, taps her brights instead of her brakes. A deep sonorous growl percolating beneath them, they do 260 miles in their first three hours, and that includes a stop to use the bathroom and get more coffee.

The sun comes up north of Tampa, and by Jacksonville, O'Hara's face has settled into the squint that has become her default expression. By now, she takes as a given that the old man and the kid were shot at about the same time in Levin's condo, but what connects them, beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Why was the kid there at all, and why did he make the trip from New York? From there she turns to the obdurate riddle of Levin's wooden spoon and the upward flight of the bullet that struck the kid.

When Wawrinka's energy lags, she shoves early Stones into the CD player, or one of her compilations of garage punk with bands who sound like perps—Little Willie and the Adolescents, the Intruders. When Wawrinka joins in on a chorus, O'Hara discovers another advantage of being a lesbian beside the most obvious. Nine out of ten rock songs are about girls. If you're gay you don't have to transpose the gender. When Mick croons about some Siamese cat of a girl, Wawrinka can sing along without losing a thing in translation.

The tricked out Crown Vic devours the miles, and they're half an hour into Georgia, west of the Okefenokee Swamp, before O'Hara associates her queasy stomach with the growing realization that this entire trip is a fool's errand. The closer they get to Walterboro, the more tenuous her belief/hope/hunch/prayer that the Volvo was stolen by the same people who raced out of Banyan Bay in a green van. Now O'Hara has an even more disquieting thought. One detail that helped her zero in on the Volvo is the age of the victim, which seemed to fit a pattern, but short of a handicapped parking sticker, how would the perps have known the owner was old?

Eighty minutes later, they cross into South Carolina. A couple miles after that they exit the highway and pull up to the barracks of the Colleton County Police Department. Deputy Sheriff Carter Barnwell is waiting and drives them in his vehicle to 1560 Western Highway, the address where the '93 Volvo wagon was stolen from the driveway six months before. O'Hara has driven to Florida a couple times over the years but never strayed from the interstate. The country roads are her first taste of the rural South.

At 1560 Western Highway, they find a well-kept but faded ranch house, and O'Hara is relieved. As long as there was enough light, the perps would have had little trouble discerning that the home was occupied by an older person or couple. From the curtains in the windows to the porch furniture to the mailbox, everything is dated. At the top of the drive there is only a single garbage can, and in the garage window an ancient sticker commemorating the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Before 9/11, which this clearly predates, the only people who put up VFW stickers were people old enough to have fought in World War II.

For the next couple hours Barnwell patiently works his way out from the spot where the car was stolen, taking them to a dozen locations where there is a chance, however remote, that an abandoned van might have escaped attention, and as the sleepy tour enters its third hour, O'Hara's pessimism blooms anew like a dark spring. For some reason, Walterboro has five high schools, and they check them all, as well as the hospital, the playgrounds, the cineplex, and the shopping centers.

“The problem,” says Barnwell as they're idling in a parking lot, “is that, except for the hospital, these lots are empty by ten or eleven, midnight at the latest. Anything in them after that is going to get noticed.”

In the early afternoon they stop at a diner on Main Street, where Barnwell steers them to the meat loaf and key lime pie, and O'Hara picks up the tab, the least she can do for wasting half the man's day. “Any gay bars in town?” asks Wawrinka.

Jesus Christ, thinks O'Hara. This is all we need.

“A couple. Why?”

“For one thing, they tend be out of the way, particularly in a little town like this. And if someone did leave a vehicle behind one of them, people might be hesitant to report it.”

Pretty far-fetched, thinks O'Hara, but no more than driving to Walterboro in the first place.

Without batting an eye, Barnwell shows them all gay Walterboro has to offer, which consists of a piano bar attached to a motel at the edge of town and a lesbian joint called Christy's in the basement of a bed-and-breakfast in the boonies.

“Ever been here?” O'Hara asks Wawrinka.

“No, have you?”

In the midafternoon, both are closed, but at Christy's two old cars are parked in the dirt lot, and to O'Hara's annoyance, both are VW Jettas. I drive a dyke car, she thinks. Great. Depressed by the folly of their excursion, she summons the little self-discipline she has not to ask Barnwell to stop at a grocery so she can pick up a couple six-packs.

“Sheriff,” says Wawrinka, “you said that everything in Walterboro shuts down by midnight. Any big twenty-four-hour shopping centers in the vicinity?”

“There's a Walmart superstore. That big enough for you?”

“How far?”

“Four miles north on 95. Couldn't miss it if you wanted to.”

Barnwell drives them back to Wawrinka's car, then has them follow him to the highway. “Sorry about this,” says O'Hara.

“What are you talking about, Darlene? The meat loaf alone was worth the trip.”

“By the way,” says O'Hara, “guess what kind of car I have?”

“A Jetta,” says Wawrinka.

“How'd you guess?” says O'Hara, laughing.

“Pretty obvious to me what you'd be driving.”