Capra thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘Lemme start by givin’ you an example. Four or five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl, a Philippine national, broke her ankle jumping from the second-floor window of a townhouse. When she got to the emergency room, the docs noticed that she’d been beat to shit and called in the cops. According to the girl, Consuela Madamba, she was recruited in her home village by a woman representing an American employment agency. For a substantial price, to be paid from her wages, Consuela would be smuggled into the United States and guaranteed employment as a domestic. Consuela didn’t find out, until she got here, that her employer would be a Saudi family attached to the UN. She didn’t know that she’d be watched constantly, that she was expected to work sixteen-hour days, or that she’d be routinely beaten for the slightest failure to maintain the home properly.’
My thoughts flashed to Roach, the profiler, and his prediction: there’s a sadist in the mix.
Capra leaned over the table. Though his speech and mannerisms were unaffected by the alcohol he’d consumed, the light reflected from his dark eyes was sharp and fragmented. ‘Indentured servants, in colonial times, they only had to work a given number of years until they were free. These days, illegals have to keep going until the debt is completely satisfied. Plus, they’re responsible for their upkeep. Funny thing, Harry, but Consuela’s living expenses were always just a bit higher than her wages. Call it sharecropping for the new millennium.’
I thought about this for a moment, before asking the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t she just walk away? It’s a big country.’
‘First, she was carefully supervised. Second, her family in the Philippines co-signed for the debt. Third, the reason she got her ass kicked was because she tried to escape.’
‘But they didn’t kill her.’
Capra leaned back as the waiter set a fresh drink on the table before him. He looked at his whiskey for a minute, then caught a single drop running down the side of the glass on the tip of a finger. He brought the finger to his mouth and sucked appreciatively.
‘I see what you’re gettin at,’ he finally said. ‘You kill the debtor, you can forget about collecting the debt, which is something no smart businessman wants to do. On the other hand, shit happens now and again, after which you have to clean up the mess.’
Capra’s hamburger sat on a dish in front of him. Though he’d nibbled around the edges, it was clear that he was drinking his lunch. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, you told me that the international sex trade doesn’t operate much in the United States. What about those ads in the Village Voice, the ones for Korean, Thai and Vietnamese escort services?’
‘I didn’t say never, Harry. What are you gettin’ at?’
‘I want to know if you think my victim might have been a prostitute? We figure she was around eighteen when she was killed.’ I slid my photo of plain Jane Doe across the table to Capra, who stared at her for a few seconds before looking me in the eye.
‘Gimme a break, Harry. She was a dog, most likely she was the one who had to pay for it.’
I was still cooling down, when Capra glanced at his watch. ‘I gotta get goin’ in a minute,’ he declared as he chugged his drink. ‘I’m supposed to testify at a hearing this afternoon. But there’s one other thing I wanted to mention. In my opinion, the best way to reach large numbers of immigrants is through their newspapers. Forget about runnin’ from one neighborhood to another. You could be doin’ that for the rest of your life. Advertising is what works. I know this because we used local papers to pull off a number of stings. It was very effective.’
I had a sudden vision of shackled deportees being led, in a long line, toward a waiting airplane. Headed for home sweet home.
‘How many newspapers are we talking about?’
‘Maybe a dozen that cater to Eastern Europeans and Russians.’ Capra pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. ‘Another thing you might want to consider. Those foreign gangsters I mentioned? Well, they’re not civilized, not like your Italian gangsters. You run up against one of them, you shouldn’t expect him to act with restraint.’
Capra turned to go, but I held him with a gesture. ‘One more thing. The employment agency that placed Consuela Madamba with the Saudi family. Did you run them down?’
‘Yeah, we traced them to an apartment in the Bronx. It took about a week, by which time they and their workers were long gone.’
I went from my lunch with Capra to a news store on Second Avenue. I showed the owner my badge and asked a few questions about Polish-language newspapers.
‘There’s only one with any kind of circulation, Gazeta Warszawa. For Polish immigrants, it’s the paper of record.’
That was enough for me and I took a ride to the paper’s offices in Long Island City. Though I showed my badge and explained the situation in enough detail to draw pity from a psychopath, Lucjan Bilawski refused to discount his advertising rates.
‘First thing, I get lots of calls from desperate relatives. If I ran free ads for every one of them, there wouldn’t be room for the paying customers. Now, in this case, being as this is a murder, we’d run it as a news story if you could prove that she was Polish.’
I couldn’t, of course, and so I paid out three hundred sixty-five dollars for an ad that would run from Thursday through Sunday. At Bilawski’s suggestion, I laid out the facts in Polish, him translating: murder victim, unidentified, help the police. On the bottom, I left the number of my cell phone.
Bilawski smiled when he took my check. He shook my hand vigorously. ‘If you decide you want the ad to run past Sunday, you don’t have to come back. Just give me a ring. I’ll take your credit card.’
TEN
I carried Dominick Capra’s revelations through the rest of that week, carried them along First Avenue where grown men delivering food on bicycles flew past me. They worked for tips, these men, gathering in small knots outside the many restaurants, their battered bikes chained to meters and no-parking signs. Everybody knew they were in the country illegally. The Mayor knew it. The City Council knew it. The New York Times knew it. Dominick Capra knew it. Just as all knew there was a less visible army of illegals out there, sewing dresses, cleaning floors, mowing lawns, busing tables in restaurants all over the city.
But if there’s a government agency prepared to deal with the problem, it isn’t the NYPD. The job, at the direction of a succession of mayors and commissioners, has disavowed the whole business. Illegal immigration, as the job understands it, is a federal, not a local, crime. As for the rest, the debts and the coercion, they don’t blip on the radar screens of working cops. It takes something more — a murder victim, for instance, eviscerated and dumped on a street in Brooklyn — to motivate the NYPD. Or at least one low-ranking detective.
I can’t say that I recall the days following my lunch with Capra in any great detail, but I have a general sense of Adele retreating, of Plain Jane Doe coming forward. I couldn’t do anything about Adele. She was in charge of the decision-making process. If I pushed her, she’d only move further away, even assuming I successfully concealed a resentment that had already begun to fester.
The issue was more pressing for Jane. My ad in Gazeta Warszawa was not just another turn of the cards. The newspaper, which claimed a proven circulation of forty thousand, was written entirely in Polish. That meant every reader had to be a Pole.
Even as I placed the ad, I’d known that the chain of speculations running from Jane’s gold crowns and white fillings to an illegal immigrant from Poland would fall apart if the ad failed to produce a viable lead. A few fillings, a clandestine dump site, a Polish community nearby — it didn’t amount to much. Hyong had told me that white fillings were rare in the West. But what about South America? Or South Africa? And while I was sure the man who carried Jane to the Brooklyn waterfront was familiar with the area, I also knew, as Adele suggested, that he might work in the neighborhood and live somewhere else. And then there was the possibility that Jane had only been in the country for a few weeks, or even a few days.
Ordinarily, I don’t allow myself to wallow in negativity, not while I’m working a case. After all, any line of investigation can be second-guessed. But I’d laid down a big bet when I placed the ad and most of my chips were on the table. If I busted out, I’d continue to work the case, but the likelihood that I’d ever speak for Jane Doe #4805 would sharply diminish.
