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Grant Shaffer

Op-Ed Contributor | Summer Thrillers

A Prison of Her Own Making

September 7, 2009
The New York Times
By PETER de JONGE

“NOT for nothing, Mike, but it’s a little early for ‘Strangers in the Night.’”

“It’s never too early for Frank.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Just don’t think of this as a precedent,” Mike says, and soon after his gray ponytail dips beneath the bar, Sinatra’s ’60s hit skids to a halt.

Darlene O’Hara smiles appreciatively, palms her vitamins and swallows them with grapefruit juice and vodka. It’s Tuesday, 8:03 a.m., on a perfect June morning, three minutes after Milano’s has opened for business. On the overhead TV, NY1 broadcasts day-old images of Lucas Browning, the so-called GQ Killer, being processed for the parole violation that will send him back to jail barely three weeks after doing 23 years for strangling a Romanian model in Riverside Park. The screen cuts to a shot of his gaunt, longtime girlfriend, Allison Osai, standing outside the courthouse with a dozen microphones in her face.

Why O’Hara, a respected 34-year-old N.Y.P.D. detective, has chosen for the second time in three months to start her day in this semi-legendary downtown dive is a mystery. If pressed, she’d cite boredom or maybe something about the impressive effect of one drink on an empty stomach, not that people can be trusted on the subject of themselves. While O’Hara enjoys another long sip, the radio on her belt crackles to life as the dispatcher reports a 911 call about an assault in progress at 148 Forsythe. O’Hara puts down her glass and focuses as best she can on the legitimate hope that the call is false. After all, most 911’s are. Then she hears the dispatcher report three more calls to the same address, and the sirens racing by on Houston Street.

“Mike, you got any coffee back there?”

Twenty minutes later, O’Hara follows a clattering stretcher into the small medical suite off the lobby of a recently renovated but otherwise empty building. A patrolman waves the emergency technicians through the door labeled Marc Stein, M.D., and O’Hara heads for the other, which frames the thick back of her partner, Serge Krekorian.

O’Hara has never been inside a therapist’s office. From the two elegant chairs facing off at the center of the room to the white noise purring from an appliance in the corner, every detail contributes to the oasis of calm, and the framed photograph of the interior of Belfast’s Ulster Museum is a portrait of quiet. The only off note is the woman sprawled beneath the desk, her once beige blouse stained crimson and her legs bent in a position not even Gwyneth Paltrow’s former yogi could sustain.

“What do we know, K?”

“Beyond the fact that you’re loaded?” asks Krekorian. Although O’Hara doesn’t respond, he shares what he’s learned.

“At 7:30, Patricia Costello, 48, unlocks her office, and prepares for her day. A couple of minutes after 8, someone — we got no doorman, no video, no tenants — enters her office and attacks her with a knife. People on Forsythe hear screams and call 911, and Dr. Stein runs in from next door in time to get badly cut himself. Before the ambulance arrives, he describes the perp, who ran off, as tall and thin, wearing a blue and white Nordic ski mask.

“Stein’s a tough old guy,” says Krekorian, “but he’s 83. Who knows if we’ll get anything else.”

O’Hara turns from Krekorian to the less judgmental eyes of the victim. O’Hara heard the name but is still surprised to see a face so much like her own. Are there really Irish shrinks? With her lovely auburn hair and delicate, empathetic features, she looks like O’Hara might in a dozen years, if she takes care of herself, and although Costello’s skin is so translucent it barely serves as a barrier, the dozens of slices on her hands and arms prove she put up a ferocious struggle.

“A junkie?” asks O’Hara without much conviction.

“Doubt it. Costello was a psychologist, which meant she couldn’t write prescriptions. If the killer was after drugs, he’d have gone into the office marked M.D. Unless, of course,” says Krekorian pointedly, “he was too messed up to know better.”

The condition of the room bears Krekorian out. The place hasn’t been torn apart. The only items on the floor are two open Netflix envelopes that must have been knocked off the desk. Both disks have slid far enough out of their sleeves to reveal the titles. One is the I.R.A. movie “Hunger,” the other “The Shawshank Redemption.” O’Hara wonders, Why would anyone rent “Shawshank?” It’s on TV more than “Jeopardy!”

There’s a commotion behind them and O’Hara and Krekorian step up to the door as the E.M.T.’s wriggle the stretcher bearing Stein through the tight corridor. Before they can roll him past, Stein, who has bandages on his hands and face, manages to free one arm and stop the stretcher. Stein addresses both detectives but his eyes reach out to O’Hara. “Patricia was an E.R. nurse before I talked her into going back to school,” he says. “I was her intern adviser at Cornell and I offered her this space. I’m the reason she was here this morning. I need to know you’re going to find who did this.”

With Stein gone, the two detectives return to Costello’s office, where O’Hara expects her partner to launch into her again. Instead he nods toward the window and says, “I think we got something behind curtain number one.”

Krekorian pulls on latex gloves and draws back the heavy drape. Behind it is an ancient leather suitcase, as eccentric and dilapidated as your most insane relative. With the curtain no longer holding it back, it lurches forward and topples into the room fast enough for Krekorian to have to jump out of the way. Ignoring protocol, which requires they wait for crime scene specialists, Krekorian unhooks the ancient latch himself with a rubber fingertip and pries the case open. Inside, inexplicably, are three plastic toy soldiers, a pack of Sharpie pens and a rusted enamel bedpan.

“I guess you should have picked curtain number two,” says O’Hara.

One pen is missing from the pack, and she scans the desk for a note.

“Check it out,” says Krekorian and when O’Hara turns around, points toward the lower right of the museum photograph, at a tiny 17th-century painting of a Madonna and Child. Stepping closer, O’Hara sees that the infant in the mother’s arms has been given a thick black moustache. “Jesus Christ,” says O’Hara.

“I assume, “ says Krekorian.

There was no appointment book on Costello’s desk, but after securing a warrant for her home laptop, Paul Alvarez, in the computer lab at 1 Police Plaza, easily finds the file containing the names, addresses and appointment times of every patient Costello billed in the last two years. On the three previous Tuesday mornings, she’d scheduled meetings with a patient named Steve Montgomery.

Twelve hours after Costello’s murder, O’Hara and Krekorian walk up to a well-kept but dated white house in Babylon, on Long Island. No lights are on inside or out, and through the living room window they can make out an old lady alone on the couch peering out at the dusk. “This could be our guy,” whispers O’Hara. “He still lives at home with Moms.”

There’s no bell and when they finally get the woman to the door, she won’t open it. “Stevie isn’t home,” she barks. “And I don’t know when he will be.”

On the ride back to the city, Alvarez calls O’Hara again with fresh information pulled from the victim’s hard drive. “In the last several months, Costello was a frequent visitor to a Web site for Catholic singles, seeking ‘friendship only.’ A lot of her exchanges were with a guy who called himself ‘Modest Jack,’ whose I.P. address is in Cumberland, Me. There’s no indication they ever met.”

Depressing, thinks O’Hara, but not much of a lead, particularly since they’d already grilled Costello’s husband for hours and ruled him out as a murderous cuckold.

“I’ll keep that in mind, “ says O’Hara. “but while I got you, could you a take a look at her Netflix queue?”

“For real?”

“Humor me.”

When they get back to the precinct, Stevie, who got the heads-up from his mother, is waiting for them. Unfortunately, he’s neither tall nor thin and looks more like Bob Hoskins than Anthony Perkins. And instead of a browbeaten son who finally snapped, he’s a partner in a downtown advertising agency. He claims he saw Costello three times, which matches the record, and that they talked about the impact of a possible divorce on his 7-year-old daughter. He didn’t want the bill going to his home or office, so he had Costello mail it to Long Island.

After Steve Montgomery leaves, O’Hara sees that Alvarez has e-mailed the movie list, prints two copies and hands one to Krekorian.

“She had good taste,” says Krekorian.

“If you like convict movies.” says O’Hara. “‘Papillon,’ ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,’ plus the two at her office. It’s like she’s got some kind of fetish for men behind bars.”

“So do you — bartenders.”

For the 10th time that day, O’Hara calls Costello’s husband. “Sorry to disturb you again, but I need to ask you something. Those prison movies you ordered from Netflix. Did you pick them, or Patricia?”

“Patty,” he says, his voice catching. “I guess that’s what happens when your father and brother were in the I.R.A. and the heroes in your life spend half your childhood in jail.”

“Your wife was from Belfast?”

“Just east of there — Donaghadee.”

“She ever do any work with inmates? Pro bono — something that might not show up on her billables?”

“Quite a bit. Remember Lucas Browning? She’d been in talking with him for several months before he got out. Not that it did him any good.”

“Really? Was he ever in her office?”

“Couple times. She swore he wasn’t dangerous. She didn’t even believe he killed that model.”

“So what?” says Krekorian when O’Hara gets off the phone. “Browning’s been in Rikers since yesterday morning. Even his arms aren’t that long.”

O’Hara tracks down Gerry Baginski, the officer who arrested Browning on Monday, at home in Long Beach. Baginski tells O’Hara he responded to a complaint of a disturbance in a coffee shop at 103rd and Third Avenue.

“His girlfriend claimed he hit her,” says Baginski. “Didn’t look like it to me, but you know the drill — once I hear that, I have to arrest him. As Browning bends over to be cuffed, two vials of meth fall out of his shirt pocket.”

“What did he say?” asks O’Hara.

“What they all say. That it wasn’t his. And had no idea how it got there. Had a funny look on his face as he said it.”

As anyone who reads the papers knows, the one thing Lucas Browning has going for him is his girlfriend, Allison Osai. In jail, Browning fought with inmates and guards and repeatedly got caught with smuggled heroin, turning what could have been nine years into 23, but Osai never missed a visit. She famously spent more than two decades sewing an elaborate quilt of the sun rising on Mount Fuji and timed it to be completed the day Browning got out. When O’Hara pushes on the door of Osai’s apartment in Spanish Harlem on Wednesday morning, it opens just enough for her to see a corner of the quilt on the far wall before it hits the end of the chain.

O’Hara identifies herself as N.Y.P.D., and a tall emaciated Asian woman who had probably once been beautiful lets her in. The tiny apartment is in shambles and Osai looks as if she hasn’t closed her eyes in three weeks. “They took my boyfriend,” she says, as if that explained everything.

“What are you going to do now?” asks O’Hara.

“I waited 23 years. I can wait two more.”

Osai sits at a ruined card table in front of an overflowing plastic ashtray. When O’Hara sits across from her, she relights a crumpled Newport, picks up a pen and scribbles furiously on the back of an unopened Con Ed bill.

“The meth the cop found on Lucas,” says O’Hara. “Was it yours?”

Osai sneaks a coy glance at O’Hara. “I don’t do drugs.”

“Then where did his come from?”

“You’re going to have to ask Lucas that, ” says Osai, suppressing a grin.

“The reason I’m asking you, Allison, is that I just read the results of Lucas’s drug test from Rikers. It’s dirty for heroin, clean as a whistle for meth.”

“Same difference,” says Osai. “Either way he violated. Either way he goes back.”

“But why are you the one sending him? You put in 23 years to give up in a month? What happened?”

“Just between friends?” asks Osai.

“Yeah,” says O’Hara. “Just between us girls.”

“Men are so weak.”

“No argument there. That’s why you planted the drugs?”

“I had to. Lucas wasn’t strong enough to make it on the outside.”

“Sure it wasn’t you who couldn’t deal? What with all those frisky females waiting to pounce?”

Osai flicks ash off the tip of her cigarette and goes back to her dark hieroglyphics.

“Like that shrink, Patricia Costello, who was trying to help Lucas get back on his feet.”

“On his feet? Puh-lease. That’s the last place she wanted him.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe, “says Osai, pausing for a second to appraise her work.

“One question, Allison, what was the deal with the bedpan in the suitcase?” Osai puts down her pen and looks up from the blackened envelope.

“Oh, that? That was to make the killer look crazy.”

•

Six months later, on a bitter December morning, O’Hara hustles toward the cluster of self-conscious regulars waiting for Milano’s to begin dispensing early morning cheer. O’Hara, who is dressed more carefully than usual and is as nervous as a girl on a first date, feels the tug but keeps heading east and south until she enters the lobby of 148 Forsythe, where the crime scene tape was long ago packed away. Glancing at her Casio, O’Hara hurries into the medical suite off the lobby and down the tight corridor that leads to the office of Marc Stein, M.D. When she stands at the open door, Stein, whose stooped body looks like a gnarled stick and whose cheek is creased with a long pink scar, looks up without smiling.

“You’re late,” he says and gestures toward the empty chair across from his. Then he gets up and closes the door.

Peter de Jonge is the author of “Shadows Still Remain.”

    A Prison of Her Own Making, NYT, 7.9.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07jonge.html