Shallow Graves Page 3

  Jill moved to the South End apartment, around the corner from a pizza parlor, in a neighborhood with the type of multifamily homes seen in so many old factory cities. It was cramped, and there wasn’t much of a yard, but for Jill it was a safe haven. Years earlier, Jill would have found comfort in her mother’s apartment—her home—as she faced raising two children. Her mother was the mama bear. She would have been there to help raise the grandbabies. Nothing would have come between her and her girls—or her grandchildren. Those days were now gone, though.

  Nancy could be tough. When Jill first became pregnant at age fifteen, Nancy wasn’t pleased. Angry was more like it. The person she first directed that anger at was Jill’s boyfriend, a local boxer who was a few years older. But as the pregnancy progressed, she calmed down and focused on her daughter and soon-to-be grandchild. She made sure Jill ate right, made it to doctor visits and, when the time came, she was there in the delivery room to welcome her first grandson. That was before Frankie and his drugs moved in, before life quickly spiraled downward. By the time Jill was pregnant with her second child, Frankie was firmly ensconced in the household, and life at home was very different.

  At age seventeen, Jill was out of the house but tried to stay in her mother’s life. She still chatted on the phone with her mom and sometimes they would meet when Frankie wasn’t around. Jill harbored the hope that whatever tied her mother to the relationship would snap. Or Frankie would wind up back in jail. For a long time. Long enough for her mother to start fresh and the family to move on. Nancy kept telling people she would leave him. Her daughter hoped it would be soon.

  Jill remembered Nancy Paiva the mom as the woman who baked chocolate-chip cookies—the ones with real chocolate chips, the big ones that oozed and filled the apartment with that sweet, lush scent. Who hosted slumber parties. Who took her daughters—and their friends—strawberry and apple picking at the farms of Acushnet. Who cooked every meal, every day. Who insisted on everyone eating together. Christmas with her mom was a festive event, with evergreen trees over the years decked out with homemade decorations by her children, popcorn on a string and pinecones. There was never a lot of money, but what there was she spent on her children.

  Jill wanted that mom back. She wanted that life back.

  Jill refused to believe her mother was using hard drugs. Other people years later would echo the daughter’s conviction. Not Nancy, not ever. Jill, however, was not naive. She knew some people her mother knew—like Frankie—did use hard drugs. She would see them and try to look the other way. Her mother was different, though. She wasn’t like the rest. She was smarter, she was sharper, she was classier. She would never risk her health, her family, her life. Her mother knew better. Jill kept repeating that in a silent mantra each day. But she knew, deep down, that something was wrong. It all happened so quickly, these changes in her mother both physically and psychologically. She saw how thin her always-fit mother was getting. She heard the yelling, she saw the bruises and she saw the tears. She could see both the fight and the light in her mother’s eyes flickering out.

  On July 7, 1988, Jill was outside on the stoop of her apartment in the late afternoon when she saw a figure walk by. The woman was thin, dazed, looking ahead. She could tell, even from across the street, it was her mother. She raised her arm to motion to her. Her mother kept walking. Later that night, Nancy called her daughter from a pay phone from the South End. She told Jill it might be a while before she saw or even talked with her again. She had to go to court the next day and would likely go to jail. She owed court fines on a bad-check case, money she didn’t have just yet. Money she likely wouldn’t get by the morning. She spent her last dime in the pay phone, on this call. The recorded operator’s voice broke in, instructing Nancy to insert more coins to continue. Then the line went dead. Jill waited that night and the hot July days that followed for another call.

  THE SEA BREEZES off New Bedford harbor and city beaches a mile away did little to cool Jill’s tiny apartment as the summer temperatures reached the mid to high nineties that month. People were calling it one of the hottest summers in recent memory—or at least the hottest stretch.

  Jill was trying to figure out the best way to keep the children cool when she saw Frankie at her door.

  What’s that son of a bitch doing here? she wondered.

  She let him in, warily.

  Your mother is in a rehab, he lied to her.

  Jill was suspicious. This just didn’t make sense. She peppered him with questions. Why didn’t her mother call to tell her this? What rehab? Where? When did she go?

  Frankie paused. He didn’t tell her Nancy was missing. He didn’t tell her he had no idea where Nancy had gone. He didn’t tell the teenager he had reported her mother missing to the police a week earlier. Instead, he lied again.

  He insisted her mother didn’t want Jill and her younger sister to know she had gone to rehab, that she was an addict, but he couldn’t keep it a secret. He would later say he lied because he didn’t want Nancy’s daughters to worry, that he thought she would be back soon. So, on this day, facing Nancy’s oldest child, he spun this rehab tale. Jill wasn’t buying it.

  Jill repeated her questions. What rehab? When did she go? I need to talk with her.

  Frankie picked up Jill’s phone and dialed.

  I’ll call them for you, he told her.

  Jill glared as he talked into the phone.

  She listened suspiciously as Frankie appeared to talk with a receptionist. He asked to speak to Nancy Paiva. He paused, spoke again and looked up at Jill.

  He hung up and told Jill her mother was fine but she was busy. She couldn’t come to the phone.

  What’s the number? she demanded.

  Your mother didn’t want me to tell you where she was, he insisted.

  What’s the number?

  He jotted a phone number down and left.

  When Frankie was out the door and out of sight, Jill picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  Doo. Doo. Dee.

  Check the number and dial again.

  Doo. Doo. Dee.

  Jill replaced the receiver, puzzled.

  Maybe mommy finally left him, Jill thought. Maybe she is in hiding. Maybe he was trying to see if she was here. Maybe he was trying to see if I knew where she was.

  Maybe now she is finally safe.

  BY THE THIRD WEEK of July, there was still no word from Nancy. Frankie finally broke down and told Jill and her sister he had no idea where Nancy was. He had been trying to buy some time, hoping Nancy would show up.

  Jill called her aunt.

  “What do you mean your mother is gone?” Judy DeSantos asked her niece on the phone.17

  Time is important when someone goes missing, Judy knew from television and newspaper articles; the sooner a search starts, the better. As she listened to her niece, she hoped time hadn’t run out for her older sister already.

  “Let me call the police,” Judy said. “Let me find out what’s going on.”18

  She hung up and called the downtown police station and was transferred to the front desk.

  “I understand there is a missing-person’s report on my sister,” she told the officer on the line. She heard a scoff.

  “You have to understand, junkies go missing all the time,” the officer answered, she recalled. “I wouldn’t worry about it. She’ll show up.”

  Judy went silent. She didn’t question what cops said. She rarely questioned what anyone in authority said, even if it was the counter clerk at Dunkin’ Donuts. She didn’t like to argue or rock the boat. She kept her voice soft and tone even. Her life was simple, uncomplicated, nonconfrontational, risk free, just as she liked it. What was she supposed to do now?

  She thanked the officer and hung up.

  The next day, police came to her door with a message: call Detective John Dextradeur. She called right away. The detective first apologized. He told her he had taken a missing-person report for her sister from a man named Franklin Pina, w
ho claimed he was Nancy’s common-law husband. He never mentioned any other relatives, and Mr. Pina gave the impression he was the only next of kin, the detective said. This type of follow-up on a missing-person report in 1988 was unusual. At the time, New Bedford police did not launch intensive investigations into reports of adults who went missing unless there was evidence of foul play or an indication the person might be in danger. Police officers at the daily roll call at the start of a shift would be made aware of the reports but rarely would it go much further than that. In nearly all of the cases, many involving teenagers, the person reported missing would show up safe. However, the disappearance of Nancy Paiva nagged the detective. He didn’t like the tale he heard her boyfriend told Nancy’s children and he was now bothered by how quickly Frankie reported her missing. He wondered: was Frankie hiding something? He didn’t share those concerns with Judy just yet. Instead he tried to learn more about Nancy Paiva’s life, her relationship with Frankie and, if possible, her last days.

  He asked Judy what she thought of Frankie’s decision to report her sister missing so quickly. Did she think that was strange? What did she know about her sister’s boyfriend? About Nancy and Frankie’s relationship? Did she think he would hurt Nancy? The detective didn’t like what he was now hearing about the relationship between Nancy and Frankie. Did Frankie have something to do with Nancy’s disappearance? Was he no longer the worried boyfriend? Should he be a suspect, instead? John kept the suspicions to himself as he spoke with Judy. He asked for more information about her family and jotted down Judy’s home and work numbers. It would be best to call at work, she told him. Judy thanked him. He thanked her. She promised to do whatever she could to help. But Judy still wasn’t sure what that was.

  As disturbing as her sister’s disappearance was, Judy discovered the conflicting information she was getting from people about Nancy’s whereabouts was even more troubling: Nancy was at a bar last night. She was walking along a street in the South End. She was at a pharmacy, a grocery store, a coffee shop. She was paying a bill. She took off. She was hiding out. She was everywhere and, when Judy checked, she was nowhere.

  By the end of the week, Judy found herself at the front door of her sister’s Morgan Street apartment with a friend’s son fiddling with the key. Her stomach felt hollow. Her hands trembled as she opened the door. Her heart raced. Her instinct was to turn and leave. She took a deep breath. I need to do this for Nancy. She stepped inside. It had been more than a year since she had been in the place and she wondered—no, she worried—what she would find. Her youngest niece, Jolene, was fourteen and now living with her paternal aunt, Linda Spinner, around the corner, a place where she stayed when things got bad at home. Both of Nancy’s daughters had dropped hints about what had been going on in the apartment but didn’t tell her everything until after their mother was gone. They told her about the strangers crashing on the couch. Once, someone tried to crawl into the place through a window. There was a lot of arguing. When they were in the bedroom, the girls could hear things crashing to the floor in the other room. People were high. They saw signs—such as burned spoons and needles—that someone was using heroin but never saw their mother shoot up. The girls laid the chaos of their home at the feet of Frankie. None of this happened before he moved in. None of this would have happened but for him, they were convinced. If their mother was using heroin, and that was something the girls still didn’t want to believe was possible, it was Frankie’s fault, they believed.

  As Judy stood in the doorway of her sister’s apartment, holding her niece’s house key, she worried what she might now see. She looked around. There were no signs of a struggle. No signs of Nancy. No signs of Frankie. Judy felt like a criminal, waiting for someone to order her out. She fought the urge to run out.

  Judy scanned the apartment. There were tiny spatters of blood on the telephone. There were the boots and clothes of strangers in the closet. The bedroom set was in pieces on the floor. The mattress was ripped open. The dresser drawers were on the floor, broken. She spotted her late father’s shoeshine box on the floor and opened it: there were needles and syringes on the bottom. There were no drugs—at least none she could see. She quickly left, called the police from her home and went back.

  The uniformed officers who showed up confiscated the phone and took her father’s shoeshine box with her permission.

  “What did you expect to find in there?” she remembers one officer asking, trying to hide a wry smile as he raised the box up.

  “Shoe polish, what do you think?” she answered.

  A week later, she went back to the apartment, this time with her husband. Her nieces—one living on her own, the other still staying with another aunt a block away—had been retrieving clothes, photographs, and mementos from the unit. She didn’t know where Frankie, who was not on the apartment lease, was. She suspected he had moved on. She hoped he might be in jail on some type of charge. She prayed he wasn’t in the apartment. Judy’s hands still trembled as she opened the door again. Her heart still raced. Her instinct was still to turn and leave. Instead, she pushed inside. The apartment still looked as if it had been ransacked. Judy opened the kitchen cabinets, the refrigerator, the stove, looking for anything of importance hidden there. She went into the bedroom, where the mattress was still overturned, and looked through the clothes strewn on the floor. She recognized the gray, metal lock box—roughly the size of a piece of notebook paper—near the dresser. Her mother, who died four years earlier of a heart attack at age fifty-seven, used it as a recipe box. Judy placed it on the dresser top and opened it. She recognized the tight writing of her mother’s hand, detailing the dishes of her childhood. She lifted the first recipe card then saw it.

  She froze. There, on the bottom of the two-inch-high box, was a gun. It was gray. It looked big. She wasn’t sure what make or model. She knew nothing about guns. She had never touched one. She’d never even seen one up close. Guns scared her. This one scared her. She picked it up and carried it gently with both hands like you would a tray of brimming water glasses then placed it on the washing machine. I’ll come back for it with the police. Then she bolted out.

  Judy’s heart was still pounding by the time she got home but she had talked herself out of reporting the gun to authorities, at least for that night. She tried to tell herself she didn’t want to cause trouble for Nancy. The apartment lease was in her sister’s name, and having an unlicensed gun might be cause for eviction, she tried to reason. It could even lead to an arrest. Her hesitation, though, was deeper than the worry about the apartment lease. She was afraid. What was really going on in that apartment? Who was involved? What if someone came back for the gun? What would happen to her? What would happen to her children? Did she want to get involved? She would wait before she said anything. She needed to think. But by the next day, Judy changed her mind. She returned to the apartment to find the gun. It was gone.

  Judy knew things were now out of her control. She couldn’t try to do things on her own. She couldn’t try to hide whatever problems her sister had. She called the detective who talked to her about the missing-person report. He in turn told her he wanted to get into her sister’s apartment. Would she let him in? I can do it after work, she told him. They agreed to meet outside the daycare center near the Nancy’s apartment. Later that night, Judy realized they had only spoken by phone. She had no idea what he looked like.

  At 4:15 that next afternoon, weeks after her sister went missing, Judy stood at the corner of Maxfield and Cedar Streets in the West End of the city, waiting for a stranger to meet her. She saw a sedan circle the block once, twice, three times. Then it stopped. A fortyish sandy-haired man behind the wheel rolled down the window. Another detective was in the passenger seat.

  “Are you Judy?” the driver asked, she recalled.19

  “Yes.”

  John Dextradeur introduced himself.

  The two detectives and Judy were at the Morgan Street apartment a block away minutes later: Judy walked, th
e detectives drove. This time the apartment key wouldn’t work. The detectives said it appeared someone had jammed the lock. Judy walked over to the apartment management office and asked for help getting in. No, she was told. She wasn’t the tenant. She couldn’t get in. It didn’t matter that her sister was missing. Judy’s name wasn’t on the lease and the police didn’t have a search warrant. The three left, frustrated.

  In the weeks and months that followed, John Dextradeur groused about not getting into the apartment that day, about not knowing about Nancy’s extended family when she was reported missing, about what evidence might have been in the unit. When he went there with Judy, he didn’t have a search warrant to get into the apartment and he likely couldn’t have gotten one even if he went to court and asked a judge for it. He didn’t have any legal grounds. There was no evidence of an abduction. There was no evidence of a homicide. There was no evidence any harm came to her at the apartment. All he had was a missing mother, likely addicted to heroin, last seen walking in the South End of the city. All he had was a gut feeling she might be dead.