18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  “Look at the top of the ramp; there should be a metal sign across the top of the ramp with the street name on it. Can you see it from there?”

  “Just a minute,” the woman said. A moment later she was back. “Yeah, Rio Grande—just like you said.”

  “All right, ma’am, that’s Strayer’s Pier. Can you stay right there where you are? We’ll need you to show the officer where your dog went under. Can you wait long enough to show the police the way?”

  “Uh, yeah, I can wait.”

  “All right, Cathy, they’re halfway there now, you just hang on, all right?”

  “All right,” she said.

  The tape stopped, but O’Shaughnessy pedaled on, thinking that at any minute her own phone would ring. McGuire should certainly have found one of the Carlino relatives by now.

  She thought about the foreboding she’d felt under the boardwalk this morning, how eerie it all had seemed. It was like another world down there. She thought about the graffiti and the beer cans and the cigarette butts and the idea of people walking up and down the boardwalk with someone crouched beneath. The pier no longer summoned the good feelings it once had.

  Strayer’s Pier was where all the teens hung out in summer; it was no secret to the Wildwood police that there were drugs around. Even in winter, when the weather was decent, there were crowds. Had Anne gone to buy drugs and returned to her car to find her tire flat?

  O’Shaughnessy stopped pedaling and jotted a note on a pad she kept next to the bike. Check service stations about other tire repairs from parking lot. Maybe it was a robbery that turned bad. You wouldn’t report it to the police when someone stole your drugs, but you still had to get your tire fixed.

  She jumped off the bike, disappointed that she hadn’t heard from McGuire. It had been nearly twenty hours and they still didn’t have a name for their victim.

  She took a hot shower, then crawled into bed and tried to read.

  McGuire called at eleven. He explained that the judge had issued a warrant so that the police could enter the Carlino family residence to check on their well-being. McGuire used the alarm company’s keys, searched the house, and picked up messages from the answering machine. A young woman wanted Anne to call her immediately. A young man simply said, “Call when you get a chance.”

  A calendar on the refrigerator displayed school events, dentist appointments, and an oil change for the Explorer. Today’s date had a line through it with “Dallas” written in pencil on it. McGuire picked up an address book from a desk in the dining room and left a note for the family to call him upon their return.

  O’Shaughnessy could hear a phone ringing in the background as they talked. “Wait just a minute, Lieu,” McGuire told her. “That might be them.”

  Five minutes later he was back.

  “That was Mr. Carlino. He’s at the Airport Hyatt in Dallas with his wife. The daughter, Anne, is still here in town. I explained that we found his car and he said his daughter would have been driving it. She’s supposed to be staying at a girlfriend’s house in Wildwood. He called there as soon as he got our message, but the line has been busy and he can’t get through. I told him I’d head straight there and call him back.

  “The girlfriend is Jennie Woo. Needless to say, the father’s upset. They’re booking a flight home now. You’ll be in Trenton tomorrow?”

  “Yes, but call me when you get to the Woos’. I can sleep on the way to the conference.”

  The call came at 1:00 A.M.

  “Jennie Woo said that Anne lied to her parents about staying at her house. When her parents leave town, Anne’s boyfriend always sleeps over at the Carlino house. It was a thing they had going on.”

  O’Shaughnessy looked at the Nicorette box on the dresser and forced herself to remain in bed.

  “Anne was supposed to hook up with the boyfriend at Strayer’s Pier after ten.”

  “Didn’t she worry her parents might call the Woos’ house?”

  “Jennie said they had a routine. Anne’s mother always called to check on her in the morning. Anne would spend the night at her parents’ house with her boyfriend and beat feet over to Jennie’s in time to intercept the call. She said they’d done it two or three times before. She said her parents never talked to the Carlinos so there was little chance the families would compare notes.”

  “Didn’t her friend worry when she didn’t show up for the call?”

  “She did. When Anne’s mother called this morning, Jennie lied and said that Anne had just run to the store for orange juice. She thought maybe Anne had had too much to drink and was sleeping it off with her boyfriend. That’s when she left the message we heard on the machine.”

  “Who’s the boyfriend?”

  “Name is Larry Wilder. Jennie already called him.”

  O’Shaughnessy grunted and swung her legs out of the bed, walking to the dresser for a piece of the gum. “One of Bud’s sons?”

  “Oldest. He said he was on Strayer’s talking to another girl when Anne showed up and it turned into an argument. He said he left her standing there and went out drinking with the guys. Larry is twenty-two and Anne is seventeen. He told Jennie he thought Anne had gone straight to her house. His was the second call to the Carlinos after he talked to Jennie.”

  “Get over to his house and see if he’ll give you a consent to search his car. If not, secure it until we can get a warrant. Someone had to drive her out of there, and whoever did has blood in their car.”

  “On my way.”

  “One more thing. Check out the parents’ flight to Dallas. Make sure it jibes with what he’s telling us.”

  “I’ll ask Randall to confirm it.”

  “Good. I want a picture of Anne on the news the moment the parents return. Pick a good one. I’ll write the press release and fax it to you when I reach Trenton.”

  “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  She lay back on the pillow and chomped on her Nicorette for a while. Then she took it out of her mouth and laid it on the edge of a magazine for morning.

  Thirty minutes later she was awakened by a sleepy eight-year-old Reagan in flannel pajamas. The two snuggled tightly, but for O’Shaughnessy, the night was sleepless.

  4

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 4

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  Sherry was bundled in a sweater on a lawn chair overlooking the Delaware. She could hear the growl of a tugboat heading upriver and the chop of the waves slapping against the bulkhead. The evening sun was warm on her face and along the shoreline someone was playing music. Laughter traveled easily across the water. Happy people, touching people, the kind of people she wanted to be.

  Sherry was nearly five years old when her life began. A maintenance man found her unconscious on the stairs outside a Philadelphia hospital. It was in the early-morning hours and the city was glazed by many hours of freezing rain. Investigators later speculated that she had neared the top and lost her footing on the ice, stumbled backward, fallen, and fractured her skull on the concrete landing. Her face was so thoroughly frozen to the ground that the skin over one cheek tore in their haste to get her inside. Only an adult-size red fisherman’s sweater that someone had put on her saved her from hypothermia. But she suffered brain damage resulting in the bilateral destruction of the occipital cortex, leaving her blind and without a memory of her past.

  Philadelphia made a fuss over her for quite a while: money poured in from well-wishers all over the country, much of it used to pay her medical bills. Police used the media in their search for her parents, and doctors tried for months to break down the psychosomatic walls that her brain had erected to protect her. Neither came to fruition.

  Sherry was eventually named for the deceased daughter of the janitor who’d discovered her and packed off to a city-managed orphanage. It was there—at age eleven—that Sherry first experienced the loss of another human being, of someone she knew.

  It was in the springtime, when windows are left open and green buds
dot tree branches. One of the girls at the orphanage fell ill and was rushed away.

  Four days later the children were bused to a funeral parlor where they lined up with single carnations to carry to the casket. Sherry, who had been instructed to keep her hand on the shoulder of the child in front of her, instead reached for the dead girl’s hand to press the flower in and was instantly overpowered by visions not her own: a drab steel cabinet, a glass bottle, the black-and-white tile floor. The girl was vomiting; her eyes were at floor level watching a green-colored translucent bottle rolling in a circle by her face. There were letters on it: C O C A—C O L A.

  When Sherry was next aware of her surroundings, she was kneeling on the wet step in front of the casket. There were hands on her shoulders; she had vomited all over her dress.

  Later she told one of the children what she’d seen. When the staff learned of it they sent her to the headmaster, who made her apologize for lying. Sherry could no more know the color green, the headmaster told her, than she could read Chinese—or English—for that matter.

  Many years later a detective in the Philadelphia Police Department would pull the files on the death of the young girl at the orphanage and discover that the maintenance people were storing strychnine concentrate for rat control in soft drink bottles in an unlocked cabinet on the children’s floor. The child’s death had been ruled accidental by the coroner, he told Sherry. The headmaster had received a slap on the wrist.

  It was her second experience with death at age twenty-three that would bring Sherry’s remarkable ability to the attention of authorities and soon after, the world.

  The incident was in late November, during a snowstorm when tire chains jingled merrily throughout the city. She had just departed the bus at Passyunk and Washington to a street corner transfer, tasting spits of snow on her tongue and thinking about a boy she had met at work. Suddenly she heard a woman’s scream and something heavy fell against her. A strong hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her down to the sidewalk. There were more screams, then movement all around her; she was dazed, but heard the word ambulance.

  She turned in the direction of the person who had grabbed her, his hand fiercely clutching hers now; snow covered the side of her face, stuck to her eyebrows and hair. “He’s not breathing!” someone screamed. “He’s not breathing!”

  Someone else grabbed her shoulders. “Are you all right? The ambulance will be right here.”

  There were more footsteps, then sirens and people crowding against her; suddenly the hand went limp. The moment the big cold fingers relaxed, she saw a woman, then a man behind a desk, a truck, a barrel filled with holes, a finger coming out of one of the holes, the finger moving, the barrel falling, striking water under a bridge, bobbing for a moment, then sinking beneath the surface.

  Sherry’s injuries were minor. Separate ambulances took her and the heart attack victim to Nazareth Hospital, where a police officer later told her that the man had died on the street.

  Sherry wanted to tell him about the man in the barrel. But it wasn’t easy telling someone what you thought you saw when it was clear to the person that you were blind. She recalled the sharp rebuke from the staff at the Halley House Orphanage and kept her mouth shut.

  But later that night in her apartment, she remembered thinking that she was withholding something vitally important. What if the police were looking for a man? What if they would know what she was talking about?

  Sherry called 911 and convinced someone to let her talk to a detective. A young rookie named John Payne answered the phone, and agreed to come to her apartment and meet her.

  She was still second-guessing her decision when he arrived. He sat on her threadbare sofa and listened as Sherry described what she’d seen. He was sensitive, or at least polite. He asked her questions about what had happened during her fall; he was curious about how hard she’d struck her head, but who could blame him? When she talked about the barrel on the truck drilled full of holes, he prompted her to recall what the barrel was made of and whether or not it had any markings or imprints on it or if she could see anything else in or around the barrel or the river that could tell them where it was. Sherry remembered that there had been a blinking red light on the concrete support below the bridge. A navigation light?

  The detective promised to check reports of missing persons in the city and let her know if anything unusual came up. She was sure he also called the hospital to check on her head injury. Whether it was her story or the next morning’s news article in the Inquirer that motivated him , she would never learn. All she knew was that the following afternoon Detective Payne was back in her apartment carrying the newspaper.

  The headline, he told her, read “Teamster Boss Missing.” The article went on to describe how Joseph Pazlowski, recently indicted by a federal grand jury for pension fund fraud, was rumored to have been making a deal with the U.S. attorney’s office before he mysteriously disappeared. Pazlowski was last seen near Christ Church on Market.

  The man who had had the heart attack and pulled her to the sidewalk was Frank Lisky, better known on the waterfront as “Little Franky.” Lisky had a record for freight hijacking and homicide.

  Payne was particularly interested in the solid gold tractor-trailer-shaped clip they found on Lisky’s necktie in the hospital. Sherry couldn’t have known he was wearing one. Sherry was blind. But Pazlowski, the missing Teamster, had owned one just like it. In fact it had been custom-made for him by Peterbilt, and he’d worn it every day of his life including the last on which he was seen.

  The detectives put boats and search teams on the rivers under bridges. Divers did the rest, and when they finally found Pazlowski’s body in an olive-oil barrel drilled full of half-inch holes, a very frightened Sherry Moore was brought into the U.S. attorney’s office in Philadelphia District Court for interrogation.

  The United States attorneys and organized crime investigators grilled her for hours until they were satisfied she had no prior knowledge of Pazlowski or Lisky and that her unexpected meeting with Lisky on the sidewalk had been just that. How she knew what she knew, they didn’t dare to contemplate. In fact, all mention of Sherry Moore’s testimony was stricken from the case files, and the department credited an anonymous caller’s tip with leading them to the body.

  No way did they want some defense attorney screwing up a murder indictment if they were lucky enough to make arrests on whoever ordered the hit.

  Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending upon how you looked at things—a clerk in the U.S. attorney’s office leaked Sherry’s story to the press and she was immediately set upon by the media.

  The front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer read “Blind Woman Sees Dead in Philadelphia.” Detective Payne, fearing that halfwit mobsters might be planning to dispose of Sherry lest she see them committing crimes, began to stop by her apartment to check on her.

  She got crank mail now and then and some odd and obscene calls until she dropped her listed number. Eventually the ruckus quieted down, but a letter that came a few months later from a lady in Minnesota would change Sherry’s life forever. The woman had written to ask for Sherry’s assistance in locating her husband’s body. The missing man, Sherry would later discover, was the CEO of a national car rental company who had gone hunting in Canada with his best friend. Neither had been seen or heard from for weeks until her husband’s friend had washed up in an Ontario Indian village on Rainy Lake.

  Sherry’s first friend outside the orphanage was Jolet Sampson, a neighbor who used to help Sherry go through her mail and pay the bills. She was sitting in Sherry’s apartment laughing over the letter until it came to the part about the fee. Then Jolet went silent.

  “What’s it say? What’s it say?” Sherry coaxed.

  Jolet started again, but the mellifluent qualities of her voice were gone. “She wants to pay you fifty thousand dollars,” she said, her voice quiet, speaking more to herself than to Sherry.

  “Okay, yeah, yeah, tell me what it says.”


  “Sherry, I’m not kidding. The woman wants to pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

  Sherry laughed and told her friend to throw the letter away.

  But Jolet’s attitude had changed. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do in this world, you and your walking stick and your public school education. Do you have any idea what this place looks like, girl?” Jolet threw her arms out. “This ain’t the fucking Ritz. This is a roach-infested slum, you idiot. You call that woman and you call her now. You be a damned fool if you don’t. People like us don’t get no second chance. If you don’t call that lady, then I have nothing else to do with you, girl. I ain’t hanging ’round with no fool. Not Jolet Sampson. You hear me?”

  Sherry couldn’t bring herself to make the call. Not even when Jolet failed to look in on her the next day and the day after that. For one thing, she wasn’t even sure she could repeat what had happened on the corner of Passyunk and Washington. She couldn’t take money for something she didn’t know how to do in the first place.

  Of equal concern was the fact that Sherry had never been beyond the ten square blocks in which she had been found and raised. Going out into the world by herself was an overwhelming prospect for a blind twenty-five-year-old. Maybe this wasn’t the Ritz, but she was living on her own and that was a leap from the orphanage in her mind.

  She did the only thing that made sense to her. She threw the letter away and hoped that Jolet would come to her senses.

  The following Saturday, a man knocked on the door to her apartment. Sherry could hear the chains rattling down the hall as neighbors peeked out to see who was visiting. Jolet later told her the man had gotten out of a “big ass” limousine parked in the circle in front of their building.

  His name was Abernathy, he said, an attorney, and he worked exclusively for a woman in Minnesota who had written her concerning her missing husband. Mr. Abernathy said that he was authorized to hand her a check for ten thousand dollars if she would only allow him ten minutes of her time. Sherry, who wouldn’t have refused him under any circumstances, let him in.