The only thing Bobby Dealy could offer me that morning was the arrest of a demented old guy who had been attacking children with syringes, which admittedly was a good story—especially because the man was a defrocked Catholic priest—but the victims were spread all over the city, which meant a lot of legwork, and I was due to spend the afternoon in the Malaysian bank. So I passed on that one and the paper put a young Puerto Rican woman on it who was going to be as good as anybody in about three years. I didn’t mind; I had the retired Coney Island nail-pounder story set for the next day, and I wanted to talk to the guys at the demolition company that handled the job at 537 East Eleventh. The firm, as I remembered from the file Caroline had shown me, was called Jack-E Demolition Co., and I found it way out in Queens, not far from Shea Stadium, on one of those avenues where the sidewalks are gone and the trees are cut off halfway up, where smashed cars and disemboweled trucks are everywhere and guys in jumpsuits with axle grease on their hands drive eighty-thousand-dollar BMWs and big dogs sleep in little sheds with a pile of chain in the dirt out front and the NO PARKING signs note that THIS ABSOLUTELY MEANS YOU. Jack-E Demolition Co. was a dirt lot filled with cranes and yellow bulldozers pocked with rust and, in the back, a trailer that served as the office. A lot of these places do some kind of illegal business—stolen cars, often—and I was wondering how pleased the management would be to answer my questions, but McGuire, the foreman, a man in his fifties with a dried trickle of tobacco juice on his chin, laughed as soon as I introduced myself.
“You’re fucking shitting me! Porter Wren, right here? I read every column!” He pumped my hand, and I hoped I would get it back. “Here, here! Sit down.” He rummaged through the mess on his desk and came up with a newspaper from the previous week: MOM BURNED WEDDING DRESS. “About the lady whose daughter got shot? And the wedding dress? Fucking shitting me!”
I asked if he remembered the job in which Simon Crowley’s body had been found.
He nodded vigorously, as if the question was somehow an insult. “How can I forget? My son found him, head like a smashed tomato, poor kid threw up.”
I asked if he could explain the demolition procedure.
McGuire nodded. “Yeah, here’s what we do. Remember, we’re covered by all kinds of regulations and shit. We inspect the building. Maybe there’s some old blueprints on file somewhere—half the time, nobody has any plans. Maybe if there was, like, a partial rehab or something twenty years ago, but these buildings are mostly the same. We figure out how it’s going to break apart. Sometimes you take it down floor by floor, especially if there’s a lot of steel in the building or the space is tight. You just need room for a chute and a truck to get rid of the rubble. Or if it’s not that kind of job, then we’re probably knocking it down with a ball on a crane and bulldozers. If it’s too big, too high, then you have to use specialized procedures like beam cutting, explosives sometimes, that kind of thing. We don’t get into that—that’s for the big boys. But this building you’re talking about was what? Six stories? No, we’d just look it over, you know, take out the detail if there was any left. Ornamentation on the lintels, anything a little out of the ordinary. Sometimes we might take out the fixtures or doors or something, fireplace mantels, anything that can be salvaged and sold off. Sometimes people like to buy the old radiators. Myself, I hate them, make too much noise. The copper we pull out of the rubble. You got to destroy the walls to get the copper. Sometimes we’ll hang on to a banister. Maybe a nice arched window, something, you know, no longer code but someone’s going to want it. Then we just put the sidewalk shed up.”
“Anybody else go in there?”
“Sure, all kinds of people.” He fished in his breast pocket and pulled out a stump of a cigar and put it in his mouth.
“Who?”
He took the cigar out of his mouth. “The gas guys come to shut off the gas. Same thing with Con Ed. Cut the power out of the building. An insurance guy goes through there, make sure we didn’t miss some kind of structural element that’s fucking going to kill somebody, especially like me. Then the water has to be shut off, too—waitaminute.” McGuire hollered into a squawk box. “Becky, go look up that job on East Eleventh. Maybe sixteen, seventeen months ago, just bring me the prep file.” He looked at his cigar. “My son runs the jobs now.” The file was handed to him. “Yeah, here it is, August two years ago. We knocked out the windows early. That’s code. No flying glass. Let’s see … turned off power, elevator company dropped the box a couple days before we wrecked—”
“Dropped the box?”
“That means—well, nobody wants a seventy-year-old elevator—so we get the elevator company to drop them back down into the bottom of the shaft, and then we fill in on top. See, most of the time the basement of the job is going to be full of rubble, because the owner doesn’t want a hazard, lots of kids coming in and climbing around in a big hole, which legally you can get sued for even though you have a fence around it—you gotta love that—so we fill in the whole thing with rubble and give them a pretty good brick pack on top of that. Cap it over with concrete if they want to pay for it. Then later, if there’s going to be a building erected, they gotta excavate all that shit.”
“Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”
“Not really, because you gotta excavate for the footings of the building anyway. Some of these new footings go fifty, sixty feet down. So fifteen, twenty feet of rubble is no big thing.”
I nodded, but none of this seemed relevant to me. “So, the sequence is fence, turn off everything, inspection by insurance guy, then demolition?”
“No, you gotta get a permit first.”
“Okay.”
“Also a licensed exterminator has to kill the rats first.”
“There were rats all over the place on that site,” I said.
“Well, you pay a guy to say he exterminated, see.” He gave me a wink.
“Then what?”
“Well, the city has an inspector, too.”
“Is all this done in a rigid sequence?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean is it always done in the same order?”
“No, the water may get turned off before the power, the power may get turned off before the water. You know, like maybe the insurance guy comes a few days early, late, whatever. See, we know all the guys down at the Department of Buildings. It’s a comfortable relationship. We more or less get everything checked off before we start breaking it down.”
“Must have been a shock to find the body.”
“Well, I was in Vietnam, so I’d seen a few things, but my son—” He stared away. “He took a couple of days off.”
“How do you think the body got in the rubble?”
McGuire laughed. “That’s what the cops wanted to know.”
I waited for him.
“Me? I think it wasn’t in the building to start with, I think it came off the roof. There was a rope.”
This fact hadn’t been in Caroline Crowley’s file. “You tell that to the cops?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They didn’t believe me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They just didn’t.” McGuire opened a drawer and found a new cigar and put the wet stump back in his breast pocket. “You know what? I wanted to see for myself if they threw the body over my sidewalk shed. So I took a stepladder and I checked every inch of that razor wire, looking for torn clothing or hair or blood or something, and I didn’t find a fucking thing. I told the cops that, and they were mad at me for disturbing the crime scene. I said it was my shed. They loved me for that. I told them no way did the body go over the shed. I think it came down off the roof, and I told them that and they just looked at me like I was crazy.”
“There’s a guy who’s a superintendent in the next building, Puerto Rican guy. You ever meet him?”
McGuire shrugged. A bulldozer rumbled by outside the window. “I might have, I can’t remember.”
“No. That’s not what I meant. They came over the roof with the body, from number, ah”—he looked at his file—“from number five-thirty-five to five-thirty-seven. This was when the building was still up. Then they reached over with crowbars or something, piece of lumber, anything, and smashed in one of the window frames on the top floor. That’s, like, only four feet down from the cornice. It’d be hard, but you could do it. Then this is where the rope comes in. We found a heavy piece of rope tied on to one of the iron legs under the water tank. What I think is they tied the body with the rope, measured it, you know, got the length right, then swung the body off the side of the building and into the smashed window. Then cut the rope.”
I tried to picture it. “That would mean that the other end of the rope would still be tied to the body.”
He looked at his cigar. “Maybe.”
“The body didn’t have any rope tied to it.”
“I know, I saw it, remember?” he said in irritation. “But it was missing a hand.”
I thought about this. “If I was swinging a body through a window from above, I’d tie the hands together or the ankles or I guess even around the neck.” If a rope had been tied around Simon Crowley’s neck, the neck would have been broken, and the coroner would have noted it. On the other hand, the neck could also have been broken in the demolition, under the weight of the rubble or the bulldozer.
“I still think it was a rope.”
“But your theory has a flaw.”
He shook his head, stuck his new cigar in his mouth. “Come on! The body was pretty smashed up. The rope could have come off somehow.”
“Did you ever measure the length of the rope that you found on the water tower?”
“Nah, this was all later.”
The conversation was becoming too speculative, and I thanked him for his time.
Now McGuire lit the cigar, puffed up a bluish cloud, and squinted at me. “You going to write a story?”
“Checking it out,” I told him. “Just checking it out.”
This, I suppose, was now true. And after I worked my way back into Manhattan, creeping along behind a van with a door that flapped open and shut, the next place to check it out was the newspaper’s own library, which is no longer simply a room where yellowed clippings are stuffed into file cabinets but an office containing row upon row of compact discs sold by private companies that make it their business to manipulate the electronic trail each of us leaves behind. Most people don’t realize how much a newspaper can quickly learn about them, should it choose. In our library, for example, we have cross-directories on CD that we can use if we have a person’s phone number but no name or if we have an address but no name or phone number. It’s an extraordinary tool; give me a scrawled phone number in the city and there’s an excellent chance that in a few minutes I can tell you what address it’s from, who lives there, who lives in the same building or across the street, who in the building owns a car, what make and model, when they bought their apartment, their taxes on it, the purchase price, whether they are .registered to vote, what party, and whether they have been involved in any recent litigation in the city. We can even get basic credit information. Is this an intrusion into people’s privacy? Most definitely. Is it going to get worse? Same answer.
I found the chief librarian, Mrs. Wood, a petite black woman with killer fingernails who had helped the paper break news for almost ten years. It was said that she had a photographic memory, which may have been true, but it was my opinion that her true genius lay in her ability to be given one stray fact and to infer from it an entire structure of information.
“Mrs. Wood, can you look up something for me?”
“For you, Mr. Wren, I’ll look up the moon.”
“No doubt I will need to get you some coffee in a few minutes.”
She nodded. “No doubt.”
“Black coffee.”
“Like me.”
“How could I forget?”
“You couldn’t.”
“Because you, Mrs. Wood, are seared into my memory.”
“Stop that white-boy flirting with me. What’s the problem?” She pulled up a chair by her computer and I gave her the address of 537 East Eleventh Street; after about ten minutes she had determined that the lot was now owned by the Fwang-Kim Trading Import Corp., of Queens.
“A bit odd,” she said.
“Why?”
“Usually vacant lots belong to the city. Seized for back taxes.”
“And the Koreans buy stores, not lots.” Perhaps they were just holding the land. If the area ever became gentrified, which was dubious, then maybe the value of the land would rise.
Mrs. Wood walked over to a standing microfiche file and in a minute came back. “It’s never belonged to the city. But the Fwang-Kim Trading Import Corporation bought it from another Korean company, the Hwa Kim Import and Realty Corporation, and before that the lot—with a building—was owned by another company in Queens, so far back there’s no microfiche record of when it was bought.”
“The two Korean owners were recent?”
“In the last two years.”
“Price?”
“First time seventy-six thousand, second time thirty-one thousand.”
“Strange it would go down.”
“I have a theory.” She returned to her computers. I watched her slip discs in and out of the machine. “Here … all right. The two Korean companies have the same address. This means one is probably just a re-incorporated successor company of the last. Small-businessmen do this all the time—lets them walk away from bad debts. The reduced second purchase price would be a way to create loss on the balance sheet of the first company. That might help an owner with his taxes. The reduced price might also be useful for the purposes of gift or estate taxes. It’s pretty clear both companies were run by the same person or people.” She waved her hands. “Typical financial messing around.”
“But why would a Korean trading company in Queens buy an abandoned building, tear it down, and then just sit on it? It’s not a prime location or anything.” I thought of Mrs. Garcia moving slowly over her blasted garden. “You can’t do any business there.”
“Are there Korean delis in the neighborhood?”
“Yes.”
“Then the Koreans have decided it’s a viable neighborhood.”
“Maybe. There’s not a lot of money there, though.”
“Could you build there?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve seen the lot?”
“Yes.”
“How big is it?”
“Maybe four, five thousand square feet.”
She looked back at her screen. “You don’t follow real-estate values in the city.”
“Not for abandoned lots.”
“Thirty-one thousand for a big lot, even on the Lower East Side, is nothing.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“Lot of people in the neighborhood?”
“Everywhere.”
“See any supermarkets?”
I nodded. “There’s one a couple of blocks south. But I know what you’re thinking, maybe they want to put in a commercial building. But the zoning would be wrong. It’s not on an avenue, it’s in the middle of the street, residential. But poor.”
“An apartment building.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling discouraged. “I don’t know what else to look up.”
“I do. That valuation is way too low.” Mrs. Wood peered at the microfiche reader. “Look, a comparable lot one block east—that’s a worse neighborhood—sold for ninety-nine thousand.”
“Why would the company that originally owned it sell it below market?” I asked.
“Now you are finally asking some good questions.”
Mrs. Wood then did two things; she looked up in the civil litigation records the names of the former longtime owner, Segal Property
Management, of Queens, and the name of the company it sold the lot to, the Hwa Kim Import and Realty Corp. “There it is,” she said. “Segal Property Management was sued by Mr. Jong Kim three years ago. Now let me look up the—here it is …” Soon she had determined that Segal Property Management, of Queens, had filed for bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of State Superior Court two years prior. Then, using the cross-directories, she determined that the address of Segal Property Management was also the address of a Norma and Irving Segal, who apparently ran a law firm, Segal & Segal, out of the same address. Segal & Segal had also filed for bankruptcy, on the same day as Segal Property Management.
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