by Neil Plakcy
I was curious, but I was reluctant, too. When I was a kid, my mother had cousins in Brooklyn, and every now and then when we’d go visit them we’d stop on the Lower East Side to pick up authentic New York bagels or pastrami or other Jewish delicacies that were hard to come by in the wilds of suburban (read goyish) Pennsylvania.
Then Tor and I had lived on the Lower East Side years before, right after we both graduated from Columbia, and it had been a pretty marginal neighborhood. I felt I was lucky never to have been mugged or burgled. After years in the suburbs, was I too soft to face tough areas? I had no desire to revisit the Bowery or Needle Park. I had enough panic in my life as it was.
“I don’t know, Tony. Tough neighborhoods are out of my wheelhouse.”
“Please? Take the dog if you want. He’ll protect you.” He smiled again. “Talk to the monks, see if there’s any connection to Friar Lake. If they have any idea what DeAndre was doing down here.”
Rochester got up from his place by the French doors and came over to me.
“See, the dog wants you to go,” Tony said.
“When do you need this information?”
“Depends. How soon do you think you could get up to New York?”
“I’ll have to check with President Babson. If he’s willing to give me some time to look into this for you, I could probably go up there tomorrow.”
“That would be great. I’ll email you the details I have about the drop-in center.” He reached over and scratched behind Rochester’s ears. “You see what you can do to help out, boy.”
Rochester woofed in agreement.
“Any other irons in the fire?” I asked casually.
“I looked into that email you sent,” he said, and for a moment I forgot that I’d sent two messages – one legit and one cloaked. “About the chop shops.”
“Yeah?”
“Went out there this morning. The place was completely shut down. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection, but it’ll take some time to track where those guys went.”
“It was a try,” I said.
He nodded, then looked at me. “You know anything about grow houses?”
My heart skipped a beat but I stayed cool. “What do you mean?”
“Somebody sent us an anonymous tip about a potential grow house out on Tinicum Creek,” he said. “I passed it on to the state police, and they made a big bust out there this morning.”
“Wow.”
He stood up. “Yeah. Gave me some good cred with the state guys. And always nice to knock a couple of crooks out of town. Wish I could thank whoever sent in the tip, but like I said, it was anonymous.”
“Probably a neighbor,” I said. “Or a rival.”
“You never know with anonymous tips,” he said. “Let me know if you go up to New York and what you find out.”
“I will.”
I checked with Babson’s secretary. He was in a meeting, she said; she could squeeze me in to see him at four. I sent an email to Ruta del Camion, telling her that the dead body at Friar Lake had been identified, but there was still no indication of a connection to Eastern.
Then I did some basic Googling on DeAndre Dawson. Nothing that Santiago Santos would object to—just checking public records to find the dates of his incarceration. I was well aware that such information was readily available online; I’d found my own records online as soon as I had access to a computer after leaving the California penal system.
I began with the New York state criminal records system. Everyone who had ever been in the system since the 1970s was listed there, except youthful offenders (who were governed by different statutes) and a few other categories.
DeAndre’s record began with his name, sex, race and birth date. Since he was born in March 1990, he had celebrated his twenty-second birthday a few days before his death.
He had been arrested and convicted in New York County of two class D felonies, assault and attempted robbery. I knew that assault meant committing physical harm to another person, and that robbery meant taking money or goods from another person using force. He had served two years at Sing Sing and then been paroled in early January.
I figured Tony already had this information, but it was useful for me if I was going to New York to talk to people about him. I kept surfing around, looking for information on DeAndre. There wasn’t much. I found a few addresses and phone numbers, all on the Lower East Side, with no indication as to which was the most recent. I wrote them all down, on the off chance that talking to someone at one of those locations might turn up a clue.
At four I walked down to Babson’s office. I had been rehearsing what I wanted to tell him; I didn’t want the dead body to be a big deal, but I needed some time to help Tony. As soon as he waved me into his office I jumped in. “Do you remember Sergeant Rinaldi from the Leighville Police? He was up here a lot this winter after Joe Dagorian was murdered.”
“Of course. Very sad time.” He eyed me appraisingly. “Nothing happened here on campus, I hope.”
“Not here. Out at Friar Lake. A dead body was discovered out there on Monday.”
I deliberately used the passive voice so I didn’t have to state that I was the one – accompanied by my dog – who had found the body.
“That’s terrible,” he said. “Why did he come to you, and not directly to me?”
“Probably didn’t want to bother you.” I thought I might need to embroider a bit, to distract Babson from his usual curiosity and need to micro-manage everything, but I wanted to be careful not to say anything that wasn’t true. I recapped the situation quickly, and then said, “Sergeant Rinaldi spoke to the Benedictines, and he discovered that they had sold the property to Eastern. Since he and I worked together quite a lot during the winter, he thought I’d be a good place to start asking questions.”
“Has he discovered who it is? One of the monks or friars? Not a student, I hope.”
“A drug addict from New York named DeAndre Dawson. Apparently he was there after the monks had already left, so Sergeant Rinaldi wondered if he had a connection to the College.”
“Check with Dot Sneiss. She can look at our student records.”
“I will. He also asked if I can help him do some research. I thought it would be a good chance for me to stay involved, and maybe deflect any bad publicity that might come up. I know how important this project is to you.”
“Good idea. I’ve always thought you had excellent instincts,” Babson said. “But I want you to keep me in the loop, all right? If there’s any way this could disturb our plans, I need to know as soon as possible.”
“Will do.”
I walked back to my office, pleased at the way I had been able to massage the situation. That was PR, after all. Putting the right spin on any news.
I called Tony and let him know that I was going to New York the next day. “The guy in charge of The Brotherhood Center is Brother Macarius,” he said. “I’ll give him a call and let him know you’re coming up.”
“I thought you wanted me to talk to people instead of sending a cop.”
“I want this Brother to know what’s going on. You don’t have to tell anybody else you’re working for me. Be honest with people but don’t be specific.”
I hung up and went online to see what I could find about The Brotherhood Center. It had a single webpage, with lots of color and pithy sayings. It served a diverse population of homeless men and women, veterans, and recovering drug addicts. A soup kitchen offered a hot lunch seven days a week and a counselor was available to talk and help navigate bureaucracy.
That was about all I could find from a casual search. I looked at the clock, and it was close enough to five that I thought I could call it a day.
I called Lili to check about dinner. She was too caught up in researching Friar Lake, she said. I told her I was going to New York the next day, thinking she might want to come along—but she told me she was too busy, though she wished she could.
That night, I kept thinking about
DeAndre Dawson. There had to be something online that could give me an idea of who he was. Was he a New York native? Where had he gone to school?
Online restrictions are so pesky when it comes to kids, though. I understood the need to keep information away from predators—but I wasn’t looking for some kid to molest. I was interested in what kind of childhood had led DeAndre Dawson to end up dead at Friar Lake.
I retrieved Caroline’s laptop once again. I ran the anonymizer software that protected my identity online, and then started to surf. The New York City Public Schools website was very well-secured, but I managed to sneak in and check out DeAndre’s records. He had attended P.S. 110, Florence Nightingale School, on Delancey Street, until fifth grade. I couldn’t find any record of discipline problems.
He transferred to Middle School 131 on Hester Street, and that’s when the problems started. He was often tardy or badly behaved, and he was regularly suspended. He finished eighth grade there, and then went on to Emma Lazarus High School on Hester Street.
I stopped for a minute to reminisce, because so many of these names were evocative of my own childhood. I studied Emma Lazarus in both public school—where we had to memorize her inscription on the Statue of Liberty—and Sunday School, where she was hailed as one of the earliest American Jewish heroines. I had fond memories of the area when I was a kid, and even a couple from when Tor and I lived there.
But Memory Lane was a detour, and I refocused on DeAndre. He had dropped out of high school after ninth grade. Was that because he was already in juvenile hall? Or had he gotten tired of the discipline and routine?
I went back to public records for his birth date and found that the only parent listed on his birth certificate was his mother, Rashida Dawson. I did a quick search on her and found that she had died of a drug overdose in 2004.
Well, that explained DeAndre’s dropping out of school. I almost hoped he had been in juvenile detention for a while; at least then he would have had a relatively safe place to sleep and three meals a day.
I was sure that DeAndre had a juvenile court record so that database was my next step. But it was a lot harder to hack into those records. I thought I’d gotten in, after an hour of trying, when suddenly a big red X popped up on my screen with the words illegal access. I shuddered and my hands jumped off the keyboard. I quickly closed the browser and all the windows I had open, and shut the laptop off.
It took a couple of minutes for my pulse rate to get back to normal. It was interesting that it was easier to break into the school system and learn about innocent (or mostly innocent) kids than it was to learn about their criminal counterparts.
By then it was almost eleven o’clock, and time for Rochester’s last walk of the day. I stood up from the computer and stretched; my back ached from leaning over it without stop for so long. Rochester jumped up and began his demented kangaroo routine, and I hooked up his leash and took him out. The last thing I did before bed was wipe Caroline’s laptop clean, except for the hacking software, and climb back up to the attic to hide it away.
13 – Brother Macarius
I don’t usually drive into New York; it’s easy to head over to Trenton and catch the train, and I can read or otherwise multi-task. The train would have been a good time to keep reading The Hunger Games—I really wanted to finish all three books before I started putting together a seminar program.
But Tony had specifically asked me to take Rochester, so the next morning I bundled him into the car. He seemed to have recovered completely from whatever had been bothering him, and he stuck his head out the window as I drove up the River Road to the industrial town of Easton, where we hopped onto the I-78 for a straight shot across Jersey.
Rochester didn’t like the Holland Tunnel. Too claustrophobic for him, I guess. He pulled back from the window as we drove and settled his head on my lap and I petted his fur with one hand. Once we were back above ground, though, he scrambled back to the window, absorbing all the smells and sights and sounds of Canal Street, the Bowery and Houston Street.
He had never been to the city before, and he was excited. A couple of times I worried that he might try and jump out the window to track down a hot dog cart or the smell of dim sum wafting through the open door of a Chinese restaurant.
I lucked into a street parking space a few blocks from The Brotherhood Center. I put Rochester’s leash on and let him out, and he went right to the single spindly plane tree and lifted his leg. I could imagine he was proclaiming, “Rochester is here!” Or else he just had to pee after the long trip.
We walked together down the sidewalk, skirting bags of trash and open metal doors that led to basements. Rochester nosed his way down, sniffing everything, and I had to rein him in a few times.
The Brotherhood Center was an unassuming storefront sandwiched between a launderette and a locksmith. The glass windows were protected by roll-up grills, and had been painted with Christian symbols and inspirational quotes. “If it’s meant to be, it’s up to me,” read one that I particularly agreed with.
The door was open, so I walked in, tugging Rochester along. A strapping black guy with a shaved head was sitting behind a desk, and I asked, “Okay if I bring the dog in? He’ll behave.”
“Everyone’s welcome here,” he said, standing up. “I’m Brother Macarius.”
He wasn’t what I’d expected of a religious brother; he looked like he’d be more at home in a wrestling ring if he wasn’t wearing a plain brown robe with a cowl neck, full sleeves and a hood on the back. When he stood I saw he had a single white cord wrapped around his waist in lieu of a belt.
I introduced myself. “Tony Rinaldi suggested you might be able to help me learn some more about DeAndre Dawson.”
He shook his head. “DeAndre was a difficult case. Come, sit in the back with me. We’ll have some tea and we’ll talk. I may even have a biscuit there for your friend.”
“This is Rochester.”
Macarius bent down and scratched behind Rochester’s ears, and he smiled a doggy grin. As they got to know each other I looked around.
On one side, an earnest-looking young guy behind a scarred desk was counseling a middle-aged woman wearing layers of grimy T-shirts and sweaters and skirts over a pair of worn sweatpants. Across from them, three young black men clustered around a TV set and a game system. I could hear the gunshots and panicked screams from the soundtrack.
The walls were decorated with the same mix of Christian material and inspirational posters. A crucifix was centered on the back wall. I recognized images of Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows; the Virgin Mary; and the Pieta.
“Interesting name, Macarius,” I said, as he led me to a cozy room at the back, furnished with a couple of oversized sofas and a squat black machine that dispensed hot or cold water. “Was he a saint?”
“I took the name when I became a friar,” he said. “Saint Macarius was a smuggler who turned monastic. Seemed to fit me. I did five years in Attica for possession with intent to sell.”
“I did a year in California for computer fraud,” I said. “Didn’t make me into a monk, but it did change me.” I sat on one of the sofas and Rochester settled on the floor beside me.
“Time inside does that,” he said, as he pulled two mugs out of a cupboard. “Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.” He turned to me. “Green tea or oolong?”
“Oolong. No sugar or milk.”
“Wise man. Take care of your body and it will take care of you.”
He stuck each mug in turn under the spigot, and curls of steam arose. While the tea steeped he rummaged in the cabinet again and came up with a dog biscuit. Rochester jumped up, grabbed it from him, and then returned to chew on it next to me.
Macarius pulled the tea bags out of the mugs and handed me the one with the darker liquid. I lifted it to my nose and smelled the rich tea.
“You’re not a policeman,” Macarius said, sitting across from me. “So why are you doing the investigating?”
I shrugged. “I�
�m not quite sure myself. Rochester and I have helped Tony out before, and he seems to think people are more willing to talk when there’s a dog around.”
Macarius nodded. “I’m glad someone is looking into what happened to DeAndre. All too often we accept the deaths of young black males as part of our culture. As if their violent deaths are foretold at their birth, simply because of their skin color.”
“Tell me about DeAndre,” I said.
“What do you want to know? What he was arrested for? Where he served his time?”
I shook my head. “Tony can find all that out from official channels.” I paused, thinking about what I wanted to say. “The college where I work recently bought this property from the Benedictines. We call it Friar Lake. I was assigned to manage it, and Rochester and my girlfriend and I were out there walking around when he discovered DeAndre’s body.”
“Where on the property?” he asked. “One of the friars who works here is elderly, and I’ve driven him out there to recuperate a few times from illnesses.”
“A few hundred yards from the house down by the lake,” I said. “Someone had buried him in a shallow grave down by the lake front. We had a lot of rain recently, and DeAndre’s hand had come up out of the earth.”
The ends of Macarius’s mouth turned down, either in sadness or in anger – I couldn’t tell which. I remembered that he had known DeAndre, and I was sure that the news of the young man’s death had hit him harder than it had those of us in Stewart’s Crossing who didn’t know him.
“But that area is nowhere near the cemetery on the grounds,” he said. “Why was he down there?”
“I have no idea. We thought that the body belonged to one of the monks. We had the same question about why his body wasn’t in the cemetery. I called the police to report the body, and Tony is the one who tracked down DeAndre’s identity.”
