by Blake Banner
“Yes.”
“What made you realize that they were shots?”
Now she stared at me, real hard, and swallowed a couple of times. “I don’t know what you mean.”
I spread my hands. “I’m just trying to get a picture of what happened. You’re in bed and you hear what sounds like seven firecrackers going off in rapid succession, right…?”
She gave a very small nod and half-whispered, “Yes…”
“And you didn’t go and look to see what it was, you immediately went to the phone…”
Dehan added, “Downstairs.”
“So you must have known they were gunshots. I was just wondering how you knew they were gunshots.”
She looked like she was about to start crying again. She started to speak two or three times but stopped herself, and finally said, “Well, I looked quickly out of the window.”
I smiled kindly. “Oh, that’s great. So you did see something, just—not very much.”
“Yes.”
“So you heard the shots, you got out of bed and peered quickly out of the window. What did you see that made you call 911?”
Her bottom lip was trembling and tears spilled from her eyes. She covered her mouth with her hands. I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to her.
“There is no hurry, Angela. I know this has been very traumatic. We would just really like to get whoever did this to…” I frowned at Dehan, like I couldn’t remember their names.
Dehan reached across the table and took Angela’s hand. “Hey, listen, take it easy. In your own time.” She smiled. “What were their names? I remember you guys used to play together, right?”
It was like a trigger. She went to pieces, sobbing violently into my handkerchief, making the ugly, convulsive noises of deep grief. Dehan stood and pulled her chair around so she was sitting next to her, and put her arm around her shoulder. The sobbing lasted a good four or five minutes. Eventually, Dehan persuaded her to have some of the coffee and that seemed to settle her a bit. Then, Dehan said, “Hey, we can do this a little later. Maybe we can come ’round in the afternoon and take a statement from you.” She looked at me and I nodded. “But, just before we take you back, can you just give me a rough idea of what you saw when you looked out of the window?”
Angela stared at the tabletop, but like she wasn’t seeing it, like she was seeing something else instead, something that made her scared. Her breathing was ragged. Finally, she said, “There was just a man running to his car. Seb was lying on the seat and Luis was on the steps. The man got in his car and drove away.”
I said, “Was his car on your right or on your left?”
“On the right.”
“And once you saw that, you ran downstairs and dialed 911?”
She nodded.
I looked at Dehan. “I don’t know if you have any more questions, Detective Dehan. I have all I need for now.”
Dehan gave Angela a squeeze and said, “We will need a full statement later on, but right now I’ll get somebody to drive you home. You need me to call anyone? A doctor, a friend?”
“No. I’m fine.”
They got up and moved to the door. As she was about to leave the room, I had a thought. “Angela?” She stopped and looked at me like she was afraid I was going to make her stand in the naughty corner. “Do you think whoever did this saw you at the window?”
She stared at me for a long while before she shook her head. After that, Dehan walked her downstairs and I made my way to our desks. There I dropped into my chair and sat gazing at the black window that showed nothing of the creeping dawn, but just the orange wash of the streetlamp on the corner of Storey Avenue. Dehan came in on her long legs, yawning, and fell into the chair opposite me, leaning her elbows on the desk. We stared at each other for a while and eventually, I said, “From her bedroom window, she could not have seen Sebastian lying across the seat. Neither could she have seen Luis on the stairs.”
She chewed her lip and gave three ponderous nods. “She was downstairs.”
“I think you are right. First order of priority, Carmen, we need to find out what those boys were doing there at three in the morning. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that they were outside her house. They were close friends, you could see that by the way she went to pieces when you mentioned they used to play together.”
“I noticed that.”
“They were there…” I shrugged. “They were there for her, for some reason. Which begs the question, how did the shooter know they were going to be there?”
“I told Angela we’d see her again after she’d had time to sleep and get over the shock. She said she’d take a pill.” She looked at her watch. “It’s just after four. We should go and call on the parents.”
I sighed and rubbed my face. “Yes…”
“You want me to take Acosta and you…”
I interrupted her. “No. I’d like us both to do both. This is going to be a complicated case. My gut tells me there will be subtle emotional nuances all over the damned place. I want you there so we can discuss it. We’ll see Luis’ family first, then Sebastian’s.”
“You got it, Sensei.”
We took her car because my Jaguar was still at my house. She had picked me up after dispatch called her. I climbed in the passenger seat and slammed the door. She fired up the engine and I looked at her profile against the creeping light of early dawn. She was exquisite, and totally unaware of it.
She backed out onto Fteley Avenue and headed for Bruckner Boulevard. The Irizarry family lived not far from me, in Morris Park.
“One thing I am still not clear about,” I said, as she pulled onto the freeway, “is how this becomes a cold case.”
She grimaced. “I’ve been wondering that myself. I see it and I don’t.”
“Explain.”
She gave a little sigh and thought for a bit. As we turned onto White Plains Road, she started to talk.
“I’m going back a bit. This must be 2004, maybe 2003, so I was thirteen, fourteen. It was about a year before my parents died. My mom had become real close with Rosario, one of the mothers in the barrio.”
“Barrio?”
She glanced at me. “Yeah. My mom wasn’t an intellectual, but she liked intelligent people. Rosario was smart. She hadn’t had much in the way of opportunities or schooling, but she read a lot and she had opinions. She liked my mom because my mom had broken the rules. You know, defied the church, her family, married a Jewish guy. Anyhow, after a while Rosario starts hanging out with a crowd…”
She stopped and made a face like she didn’t really approve of what she was going to say. I prompted her, “A crowd? What kind of crowd?”
“My dad described them as ‘fast’. My mom wasn’t crazy about them either. From what I remember,” she glanced at me again, “and I was only about fourteen years old! From what I remember, there were two couples. One of them was mixed race, which attracted a lot of attention. She was a white academic.” She laughed. “She might have been a schoolteacher for all I know! But that was the impression. Radical left wing, making a statement, you know the kind of thing.”
I managed to frown and raise an eyebrow at the same time. “Kind of woman who made it possible for you to have your job.”
“Absolutely. I’m not criticizing. Shut up and listen. Anyhow, she was married to a black guy, black Puerto Rican, I think. He was also some kind of academic. I remember there was some talk about him being ill, and he may have died. These two were close friends with another couple…” She thought for a moment. “Eddie and Maria. This couple were also Puerto Rican. He was a defense attorney. He was just starting out, but he was doing OK. He was becoming successful. I don’t remember anything about his wife, except that Mom used to say it was a shame he didn’t look out for her rights as much as he did for the crooks he helped set free. That was my mom all over. So those four used to hang out, have barbeques and talk the good talk.”
“And these are…?”
She seemed to nod with her whole body while she spoke. “These are the parents of our vics. Now, shut up while I tell you. Mom never hung out with them. They invited her to a couple of barbeques but she never went. And after a while, she stopped hanging out so much with Rosario, because, she said, there was too much cuchi cuchi.”
“Cuchi cuchi…?”
“Hanky panky.”
“So what, there was wife-swapping going…?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Or husband swapping. I don’t know, Mom was never more specific. She was pretty straight-laced and it may have been no more than flirting while drunk. Point is, it only took Rosario to tell her about a couple of these get-togethers, and Mom stopped seeing her so much.”
“So what happened?”
“Give me a chance and I’ll tell you. Next thing, Mom doesn’t hear from Rosario for a while, it might have been a couple of weeks, I’m not sure, and suddenly she turns up dead. Turns out, according to the cops, she’s been raped and murdered.”
“And they never caught who did it.”
“Not even a suspect.”
“And Angela is Rosario’s daughter. Where’s the dad?”
“She was a widow. I don’t remember her husband. He left her a pension or something.”
“And she was killed in that house?”
She looked at me and nodded. “In that same house.”
I looked out at the limpid light and the sleepy storefronts of Morris Avenue. Sunrise was still an hour away and the cars and the streetlamps seemed to be hung with amber dreams, still warm from the beds where people slept behind dark windows. For a moment, I envied those sleeping bodies. And then I pitied the two we were going to wake, to tell them their son was in hospital, shot in the chest.
Outside Rosario’s house.
“They’re connected. That is a simple fact.” I turned toward Dehan. Her face was momentarily washed with orange light, then went into shadow again. “But the connection doesn’t seem to mean anything. It may well be that the people are connected, but the crimes are not. If they are not, this is not a cold case.”
She sighed, then shrugged. “So we inform the families, make some initial inquiries, report to the Inspector later this morning, and see what he says.”
I nodded absently. My brain said that made sense. My gut said my brain didn’t know what it was talking about.
THREE
We pulled into Herring Avenue. I said something about it being a fishy address, but Dehan didn’t laugh. It was a broad, attractive street with large, detached houses and well-tended front lawns. She pulled up outside a double-fronted red brick with two horse chestnuts standing guard by some stone steps that made a path through a slightly over-ornate garden. We looked at each other. Dehan heaved a big sigh and we got out. The doors slammed and echoed in the stillness. We climbed the steps to a white door and I leaned on the bell several times. After a minute, a sash window opened above, and an angry voice shouted down.
“Who the hell is it? Get the hell out of here or I’ll call the cops!”
I stepped back out into view and looked up at him. I held my badge so he could see it.
“Detectives Stone and Dehan, sir. Are you Eduardo Irizarry?”
He scowled. He was a thick-set man of about forty, with a balding head, hairy shoulders, and dark, Hispanic features.
“I am he,” he said, rather pompously. “What the hell is this about? Can’t it wait to a more civilized hour?”
Hell was a word he seemed to like. I thought sourly that it was a place he was soon going to become familiar with.
“Mr. Irizarry, we need to talk to you, in private…” I looked with meaning up and down the street.
He hesitated.
I said, “It’s about your son…”
He closed the window and after a moment, a light showed through the glass panels in the front door. Next thing, the door opened to reveal Ed Irizarry wearing a silk dressing gown and a foul expression.
“What the hell is this about?”
I tried to suppress the anger that was beginning to warm my belly, but failed. I said, brutally, “Your son has been shot. He is in hospital in a critical state, but we can come back at a more civilized hour if it’s inconvenient now.”
Dehan’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead and she turned to stare at me. Irizarry went a pasty gray color. “Good God… Shot? By whom…?”
“Do you think we can come in, sir? This is probably not something you want to discuss in front of all your neighbors.”
He nodded once, then again several times and stepped back. “Yes, yes, of course… Come in.”
He led us through a large, middle-class house that was in fancy dress, pretending to be a Rococo palace. Evidently we weren’t the kind of people he would have in any of his drawing rooms, so he led us to the kitchen, which was not so much Rococo as Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He switched on the lights and stood staring at us with his mouth slightly open, like he’d expected us to be somebody else when the lights came on.
After a moment, I said, “Mr. Irizarry, perhaps you should get your wife.”
He frowned. “Mary?”
“Is that your wife’s name?”
“Yes, of course it is!”
I nodded. “Then that is who you should get. She needs to hear this. Do you mind if we sit down?”
“Of course…”
He turned and walked away, back into the sleeping shadows of his house. The kitchen was brightly lit. The walls were lemon yellow, a vast refrigerator gleamed silver, and there was a large, round, pine table with four pine chairs in the middle of a floor laid with big, terracotta tiles. In the center of the table, there was a bowl brimming with tropical fruit. We sat and waited. I wondered, bizarrely, if he’d notice if I had a banana.
The sound of rushing, unsteady feet on the stairs drove the thought from my mind. We stood as they came back in. Mary was small and dark, perhaps a couple of years younger than her husband. Her hair was in curlers and she had a dressing gown drawn tight around her, as though she hoped it might protect her somehow. She ran across the kitchen, clutching her gown with her left hand, reaching out to me with her right.
“What’s happened? Is he all right? Where is he?”
Eduardo announced in a voice that was too loud, “I’ll make coffee!” and stared at us each in turn. I ignored him and guided Mary to a chair. We sat and Eduardo left the coffee pot by the sink and came to sit with us. He looked for a moment as though he might start weeping.
I put my fists on the table and spoke. “Mrs. Irizarry, Mr. Irizarry, we do not know all the details yet, but in the early hours of this morning, at about three o’clock, Luis and his friend Sebastian were parked in a car in Hunts Point…”
Eduardo’s eyes went wide. “Hunts Point? What the hell…?”
Maria covered her ears and screwed up her face, “Ed, please!” It was an eloquent gesture that spoke of a hypersensitivity developed over years of enduring his unquenchable outrage at everything he encountered.
I ignored them both and went on. “It seems they were approached by an unidentified person and shot point blank. Luis was in the passenger seat and managed to exit the car. He received two bullet wounds to the chest. He is in critical condition at the Jacobi.”
Ed’s mouth was sagging open. He kept staring around the room, as though he was following a slow-moving fly on its journey around the kitchen. Mary had both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were huge with horror as she stared at my face, struggling to give some meaning to what I had told her.
It was Ed who spoke first. “What was he doing at Hunts Point?”
Dehan answered him. “We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on that, Mr. Irizarry.”
He glared at her. “I? How the hell would I know?”
“Ed, please! These people are here to help us..!”
“Cops? Help us? Just shut up, Mary!” He turned back to Dehan. “I have no idea what he was doing there…”
Her
eyes were hooded when she cut him short. “There were two of them, Mr. Irizarry. He was with his friend, Sebastian. You know Sebastian, don’t you?”
Mary said, “They’ve been friends since they were tiny. Is Sebastian badly hurt?”
“He received five shots. Two to the head and three to his arm and chest. He is dead.”
Her face twisted with grief. “Oh no…” Her voice was the voice of infinite sadness. She said it again. “Oh, no, no… Poor Sue. Poor Sue…”
She took a handkerchief from her pocket and began to sob into it. She cried silently with her shoulders shaking in small spasms. I was struck with the impression that crying silently and unnoticed was something she had learned to do over the years. Dehan turned back to Ed, who was staring at the tabletop.
“The reason we thought you might be able to shed some light on why they were where they were, Mr. Irizarry, is that they were parked outside Rosario’s house. You remember Rosario, right?”
He didn’t do anything. He didn’t react. Only, his eyes stared a little harder, and it was his motionlessness that was so striking. Mary’s sobbing stopped abruptly and she looked up at Dehan. “Rosario…? She’s dead…!”
“I know, Mrs. Irizarry. That house now belongs to Angela. Have you any idea why Luis and Sebastian would be parked outside Angela’s house at three in the morning?”
Ed’s eyes narrowed. “What are you implying?”
I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward. “It’s a simple question, Mr. Irizarry. We are not implying anything. We know that at one time you were both friends with Rosario, and the boys used to play with Angela. So, have you any idea what they might have been doing there?”
He didn’t answer. Mary shook her head. “I thought they had lost touch. When we moved out of the neighborhood, we lost touch with Rosario, Sue, Matt…”
I asked, “Sue and Matt were Sebastian’s parents?”
She nodded. “Matt was ill. He died. Poor Sue, this is going to hit her so hard.”
Dehan sighed. “Please forgive me, we have to ask these questions, have you any idea, at all, however remote, who might have wanted to hurt Luis and Sebastian?”
