The first response came on Thursday evening, when my cell phone kicked out an amazingly tone-deaf rendition of John Coltrane’s, ‘My Favorite Things’. By then, I had the patter down.
‘Detective Corbin,’ I answered. ‘How may I help you?’
‘This girl who is having her picture in the paper. I believe I am knowing her.’
‘Can you tell me when you last saw her?’
‘One week ago.’
‘That would be on July fourteenth?’
‘Yes, on Sunday.’
And that was the end of that. The question I’d posed was a screening device. Any date after Jane’s body was discovered on July 7th eliminated the possibility of a true sighting. But even if the caller had gotten the date right, I was prepared to add a series of questions about height and weight, country of origin, hair and eye color. Checking false leads was an activity I was determined, for obvious reasons, to minimize.
I continued to field calls through Friday, through torrential rains on Saturday, and into Sunday morning without getting a hit. Although a few of the calls began by asking whether there was a reward — and concluded shortly afterward — most were from desperate parents. Their collective heartbreak poured through the phone lines, as real to me as the air I breathed. They might have been sitting beside me. And I knew what they wanted, these mothers and fathers. They wanted to be made whole, to be restored. I could not restore them, but I doled out the only solace I had to offer. I informed them, after a few questions, that the murdered girl I searched for was not their daughter. They could go on hoping.
At one o’clock on Sunday, after a short lunch, I settled down to watch a Yankees-Mets game, an encounter I’d been looking forward to for some time, having been a Yankee fan all my life. But the game was a dud, and by the third inning, when my cell phone went off, I’d had enough anyway. The Mets were ahead, six-zip, having pulverized C.C. Sabathia, while the feared Yankee batters had been limited to a single infield hit. I muted the TV, then pushed myself to a sitting position and took the phone from the end table. ‘Detective Corbin, how may I help you?’
‘My name is Sister Kassia Grabski. The girl whose photograph appeared in the newspaper today was here, at Blessed Virgin. I spoke to her briefly.’
‘Is that Blessed Virgin in Maspeth, where they have the outreach center?’
‘Yes.’
At this point, I was supposed to ask when the conversation had taken place, to screen the call, but several things caught my attention. An authoritative tone, first of all, that conveyed near certainty, and the title, Sister. Then Blessed Virgin Outreach where I’d displayed Jane’s photo to a priest named Stan Manicki. Father Stan had examined the photo carefully before looking up. His eyes, as I recalled them, were large and strikingly blue, dominating a hawkish nose and strong cheekbones. They projected sincerity, those eyes, and maybe that’s the reason I slipped up.
Honest citizens have a hard time lying to a cop. When they don’t want to answer a question truthfully, they tend to evade it. Father Stan hadn’t said, ‘I’ve never seen this woman before.’ His response had been equivocal: ‘I can’t help you.’ At the time, I’d thought nothing of it.
Before I could begin to curse myself for a fool, Sister Kassia asked, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. Maybe you could tell me when you last saw her.’
‘On Saturday, June twenty-second.’ Again, the confident tone, the precise date.
‘Had you ever seen her before?’
‘I’d seen her at mass, many times, but I only spoke to her once, and not to her directly. That was on a Saturday when she came here with the other girls, to confess.’
‘To confess?’
‘Yes, to Father Manicki. They were chaperoned, as usual.’
‘Chaperoned by a man?’
‘This time, yes. But sometimes they’re accompanied by an older woman.’
I told myself to chill out, to wipe that smile off my ugly face. The nun’s confident tone might be no more than the natural outgrowth of an assertive personality. ‘Now, you said you spoke to her. Would you describe the circumstances?’
‘When the girls came into the church on June twenty-second, I was busy arranging the weekly flower delivery. There were five of them, including the girl you’re trying to identify. Though I had no real plan, I decided to stay inside the church while they confessed, hoping for an opportunity to speak to them alone. That chance presented itself at the very end when their minder left to use the bathroom. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I kept it simple. I spoke Polish, telling them my name, and that if they ever needed help, they should come straight to Blessed Virgin and we’d protect them.’
‘Protect them from what?’
‘I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Would you repeat it?’
‘Detective Corbin.’
‘Well, Detective Corbin, if you drive out to Blessed Virgin at six o’clock this evening, in time for the Polish mass, you can see for yourself.’
‘That, Sister, will be no problem at all. But there’s just one more thing I’d like to know for now. Did you by any chance catch the girl’s name?’
‘No, I’m sorry. This was my first approach and I spoke to the girls as a group. Not that I see how it matters. I’m certain of my identification because the girl had a curious way of looking at you out of the corner of her eye, just as she does in the photograph that appeared in the paper.’
ELEVEN
The community of Maspeth, in Queens, is heavily industrialized, like virtually every other New York community bordering the waters that surround Manhattan. In this case, the water is Newtown Creek, a polluted canal that feeds into the East River. The joke among cops who work near the canal is that a body dumped into the water at sundown will dissolve before morning. I’d never had the good fortune to view a body pulled from Newtown Creek, but I’d been close enough in midsummer to experience the foul odor that seeps from its oily waters any time the temperature rises above eighty degrees. Newtown Creek was an industrial dump site for a hundred years before the first environmental laws were written. Somehow, the near-miraculous rehabilitation of the Hudson and East Rivers has passed it by.
I drove across Newtown Creek that Sunday afternoon, on Metropolitan Avenue, from Brooklyn into Queens, continuing on through the industrial heart of Maspeth and into a primarily residential neighborhood near Fresh Pond Road. The homes were modest here. Semi-detached and two-family for the most part, they bore flat roofs and were sided in a textured vinyl that made only the faintest stab at a wood-like appearance. But their yards were neatly kept, the tiny lawns mowed, the shrubs carefully trimmed. In one, the path to the front door was framed by a trellis overgrown with pink roses. In another, a woman bent over an enormous hydrangea, cutting the purple blossoms and transferring them to a laundry basket at her feet.
Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church was as modest and well tended as its neighbors. The stone tower on its northern face rose only a few feet higher than the surrounding homes, and the statue of the Virgin in its churchyard, though crude enough to pass for lawn furniture, was freshly painted.
There were people gathered outside the church when I walked down the block. As they were universally Caucasian, I gussed they were arriving for the Polish mass, as I assumed there’d already been masses conducted in Spanish and English. The Roman Catholic Church in New York is committed to satisfying the demands of believers from nations as diverse as Rumania and Botswana. In the vernacular.
I scanned the crowd as I passed the face of the church, looking for a group of young women escorted by a single man, but found only the expected gathering of families. I was headed for a narrow wood-frame addition jutting from the church’s northern face. Blessed Virgin Outreach was run from this building and that’s where I was to meet Sister Kassia.
The large room I finally entered was given over to a motley collection of couches and upholstered chairs. Hand-me-downs, without doubt, their wildly mismatched fabrics, colors and patterns might have filled a
