by Blake Banner
Ed snorted. “You can spare us the phony empathy, Detective. The answer is no. And we will not collaborate in your transparent attempts to frame our son as being involved in drugs or prostitution. Whatever that loser Sebastian might have been involved in, I have no idea. But Luis had nothing to do with it!”
“Ed!” Mary’s face was crimson and her neck taut and corded. She stared at her husband and before he could answer she half-screamed at him, “Can you not give it a rest for one single minute? Our son is dying in hospital and all you can think of is scoring points off poor Sue! Sebastian is dead, for God’s sake! Is there no trace of humanity in you?”
He scowled at the table. The kitchen was strangely still and silent after her outburst. I looked at Dehan. She shook her head.
“Thank you, Mrs. Irizarry, you have been very helpful. We are very sorry to have brought you this news.” We stood and Mary stood with us. Ed continued to stare sullenly at the table, like it was the table’s fault he was such an ass.
Dehan went on, “We may need to contact you again, but we’ll try to trouble you as little as possible.”
Ed snorted and Mary showed us to the door through the dark house where dark blue light was beginning to tint the glass in the windows. We stepped out into the wild chatter of the dawn chorus. The door closed behind us and I went and leaned on the car, gazing at the sleeping street under a sky that was turning from midnight blue to gray. The Irizarry house was the only one with lights in the windows. Unlike the squabbling birds, the people of Herring Avenue had not yet started stirring from sleep.
The car bleeped and flashed and I climbed in to the muffled dark. Dehan got in behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and switched on the headlamps. I said, “Evergreen Avenue. It’s past the station, on the right, before the river.”
“I know where it is.” She pulled away. “Doesn’t get any easier, huh?”
“Nope.”
We drove in silence for a while. Then, she asked, “Why do women stay with guys like that?”
“I’ve often wondered. If you asked her she’d probably say, when he’s nice he’s great, and he makes her laugh. Maybe she figures the financial security makes it worthwhile. Or maybe it’s some kind of Stockholm syndrome.” Then I added with a sour twist, “Or maybe she wouldn’t know who to be, if he wasn’t there to tell her.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Wow.”
“Mornings like this, Dehan, I wonder if Captain Jennifer Cuevas wasn’t right when she advised me to take early retirement.”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Seriously?”
“If I am married to my job, my job is Ed and I am Mary.”
She laughed and we drove on in silence through the dawn, toward Soundview, toward a woman who was probably still sleeping, unaware that her life had, in the last few hours, disintegrated; unaware that her son was dead, unaware that nothing would ever be the same again.
Dehan’s voice broke into my thoughts. “What do you think happened?”
“Hmm?”
“Their group of cuchi cuchi friends. It broke up, they lost touch, stopped having cuchi cuchi parties…”
We pulled onto the Bruckner Expressway and started accelerating west. A hint of copper touched the sky from the east as the sun crept over the horizon. I spoke almost without thinking, expressing a feeling rather than an idea. I said, “Rosario was killed.” I sighed. I felt unaccountably depressed. “That is the starting point. Rosario was killed. That spoiled their swinging scene, the Irizarrys moved, lost touch with their old cuchi cuchi friends. But the boys stayed in touch. Maybe they stayed in touch with Angela, too. And now, fourteen years later, Sebastian has been killed, maybe twenty feet from where Rosario was.” I looked at her face and she glanced at me. I said, “And Ed and Mary know that’s significant for some reason. This is a cold case, Dehan, no doubt about it. A cold case that just started getting hot.”
FOUR
The information I’d received from the Jacobi had Sebastian Acosta’s mother listed as Susanne Mackenzie. We stood outside her house now, on Evergreen Avenue, and stared up at the door. It was a red brick house on three floors, with a flat roof and a chimney. The bottom floor was a basement and a garage with a ramp leading down to it from the sidewalk. Nine steps led up to a veranda and a front door that had been completely closed in with white wrought iron railings and a white, seven-foot, wrought iron gate. Above that was another floor with three sash windows. The drapes were all closed.
We stood for a good ten minutes on the steps, ringing at the outside bell. Eventually, one of the drapes on the upstairs windows opened a few inches, then closed again. I rang some more and after three or four minutes, the door opened and a tall woman in her forties stepped onto the veranda. She was a redhead. Her skin was very white, with a spray of freckles over her nose and cheeks. Her hair and her green eyes said she had only just woken up. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and nothing on her feet. She had a good, athletic body and an intelligent face, but somehow she wasn’t attractive. You got the feeling she didn’t want to be.
She looked at us both through the railings. “Are you cops?”
We showed her our badges. “I’m Detective Stone, Ms. Mackenzie. This is my partner, Detective Dehan. Why do you ask if we’re cops? Were you expecting us?”
“No…” She sighed. “Maybe. Is it about Sebastian?”
I nodded. “May we come in?”
She opened the gate and stood back. “Is he OK? Has he done something?”
I studied her face a moment. All I saw was anxiety. “We’d better go inside, Ms. Mackenzie.”
Her eyes flicked over my face, then looked at Dehan. She led us indoors to an open-plan living room and kitchen. She sat on the sofa. Dehan sat next to her. I glanced around the room. There was one plate in the drying rack by the sink, and one glass. There were three low bookcases with a wide variety of books: fiction and works on psychology and sociology, feminism and civil rights. A bottle of bourbon, a quarter full, stood by a photograph of Sebastian.
I sat in the armchair. She was staring at me. I held her eye and told her, “Ms. Mackenzie, I have some very bad news. I’m afraid your son was shot and killed last night.”
For a moment, she went rigid. Her face flushed red, then went dead white. She put her hands to her mouth and screamed. It was loud, shrill, and startling. She stood and Dehan stood with her. Then she screamed again, three times, covering her face with her hands, trying to articulate the word ‘No’, but making only a horrific, screeching sound of horror and panic.
Dehan tried to take hold of her. Sue turned to face her with huge, staring eyes, pupils reduced to pinpricks. She tottered two steps back, faltered, and collapsed with a horrible, jarring thud on the floor.
I picked her up in my arms with some difficulty. She was heavier than she looked. I laid her out on the sofa and Dehan went to the kitchen for a glass of water. I heard her rummaging in a couple of cupboards and she came back with the drink and a spoonful of honey. She touched the honey to her lips and after a moment Sue opened her eyes. Her pupils were dilated. She stared at me a moment, and as the realization of what had happened dawned on her anew, her face screwed up, she curled into the fetal position and started to wail, repeating his name over and over.
Eventually, the crying subsided into convulsive sobbing, and after another minute or so, she lay still and quiet. Dehan stayed sitting with her, her hand on her arm, and after a while she asked her, “Do you want us to call your doctor?” Sue shook her head. Dehan went on, “A friend? Somebody who can be with you?”
She looked up at Dehan, seeming to see her for the first time. The she stared at me and sat up. She said, “Peggy.” She pointed at the bookcase, by the photograph and the bourbon. “My phone. Tell her to come please, I need her. She’s a homeopath.”
Dehan stood, took the phone and walked into the kitchen, scrolling through the address book. Sue curled herself into the corner of the sofa, staring at an empty space
in front of her face for a while. Then she moved her head and stared at a different empty space, like she was seeing something different in each empty space she looked at.
“Ms. Mackenzie.” She blinked and looked at me now. “It’s important that we get on the trail of whoever did this as quickly as possible. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”
She stared for a moment. “Like what?”
The question surprised me. I frowned. “When we arrived, you seemed to know that it was about Sebastian…”
“He didn’t come home last night. I was worried.”
“You thought he might have done something.”
“Luis. Luis was a bad influence on Sebastian. Sebastian worked so hard, he was doing so well. Luis was always taking him to parties to meet girls. It was probably his fault that this happened…”
Her lower lip curled in and she started to cry again. I could hear Dehan talking quietly in the kitchen. I pressed on. “Can you think why Sebastian would have been at Hunts Point last night?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment. I was about to repeat the question when she shook her head. “No, of course not.”
Dehan returned and sat beside Sue. “Peggy is on her way. She’ll be here in about ten minutes.”
Sue looked at her but said nothing.
I said, “Ms Mackenzie, we are almost done, and we really do appreciate your help. Can you think of anyone, however far-fetched, who might have wanted to hurt your son?”
She shook her head. “He was the nicest, sweetest, kindest…” Again she covered her face with her hands and started to cry. I glanced at Dehan. She put her arm around her and stroked her back and shoulders.
“What about friends, colleagues at the hospital, is there anyone we can talk to?”
Mary had my handkerchief. I stood and went to the kitchen, found a roll of paper and brought it back. I handed it to Sue. She took it and blew her nose, then wiped her eyes. “Elizabeth,” she said. “Elizabeth Kelly. An intern he was seeing at the hospital. They weren’t that serious. I haven’t got a number. What happened? How did it happen? What was he doing in Hunts Point?”
“That is something we are trying to find out. They had parked on Bryant Avenue…” I paused to see if she would react. She just stared at me so I went on. “An unknown person approached the car and shot them.”
Her face clenched in on itself. Her lip curled in. She curled in, tucking her elbows into her belly, silently swaying from side to side. The howl of pain didn’t come for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. And then it was an awful sound. The doorbell rang and I rose gratefully to open it.
There was a middle-aged woman in sensible clothes, holding a bag and looking at me as though she was ready to blame me for something, anything, most things. I said, “Are you Peggy?”
“Yes, I am. Where is she?”
I stood back. “On the sofa.”
She bustled through, opening her bag as she went.
“All right, you can leave now. There will be no questions and no answers today! You have caused quite enough upset as it is, thank you!”
I looked at Dehan and sighed. “Peggy, this is a murder inquiry. We will have to come back and ask Ms. Mackenzie some questions. Will you please let us know when she is able to see us?”
She looked at me, pointed at the door, and said, “Please close it on your way out, Detective.”
I took a card out of my wallet and put it on the coffee table and we left.
Outside, it was a bright morning. I looked at my watch. It was thirty minutes after six.
“I need a gallon of coffee and some breakfast. What do you say we head over to the hospital, see if Elizabeth Kelly is around and grab some breakfast in the café?”
“Sounds like a plan.” She paused, then, “Stone..?”
“What?”
She opened the car with a bleep and climbed in. I climbed in on the other side and slammed the door. She looked at me. “Why are people such assholes?”
“I don’t know, partner. I was hoping you could tell me.”
For the fourth time that morning we drove across the Bronx, this time toward the molten orb of the sun. Dehan spoke suddenly.
“There is only one way this makes sense. So far, nobody knows what the hell those boys were doing there at three in the morning. If Angela knows, she ain’t telling, Ed, Mary, and Sue all look shocked out of their minds that their boys were there…”
“And, did you notice how Ed and Sue both suggested the other boy was a bad influence on their son?”
“I got that. So I’m thinking, you have two basically good, hardworking boys who are not quite as saintly as their parents like to believe.”
“Agreed.”
“And, as I initially suspected, they have been taking certain medical substances from the hospital, probably fiddling the records, and selling the medication to somebody in the ’hood.”
“The barrio.”
“Exactly. Now, I am thinking also that maybe Angela was involved in some way, perhaps as a contact or a middle man. She was expecting them to arrive. That’s why she was up and not in bed. They pull up in their car, kill the engine, but, before they can get out, somebody gets out of the car ahead of them. He doesn’t need to see their faces, because he is expecting them to be there, and maybe he knows the car…”
“Note, we need to establish who the car belongs to.”
“Agreed, noted. Stop interrupting. So our shooter is there because they are selling on his turf. He strolls over and executes them, cowboy style, empties his magazine into them and leaves.”
“It’s coherent and makes sense. What about the two shots in the door?”
“A previous warning.”
“Hmmm… OK, it’s an hypothesis. Let’s see what we get from Elizabeth and the hospital. We also need a list of dealers in that area who might have been mad at them for encroaching on their territory. And this afternoon, we’ll grill Angela over exactly what her relationship with Sebastian and Luis was.”
We lapsed into silence again, but after fifteen minutes she said to me, “I know why you’re not happy.”
“Yeah?”
She turned into Seminole Avenue and then headed for the parking lots.
“You’re not happy because the drugs-pushing theory does not allow for a connection with Rosario’s murder fifteen years ago.”
I nodded. “And they are connected, Little Grasshopper. They are connected.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
I laughed.
“What? You can’t be wrong?”
“They are connected.”
“How?”
She pulled into a parking space, killed the engine, and turned to look at me. I stared out at the lawn, at the single plane tree with its silver peeling bark. After a moment, I shook my head and sighed.
“I don’t know yet, Carmen. But I’ll tell you this much. It is no coincidence that Rosario and Sebastian were killed within a few yards of each other. The house is significant. And I’ll tell you something else. Luis was not the intended victim.”
She frowned. “How can you know that?”
I shrugged. “Because he didn’t finish him off.”
She shook her head. “Nah! Seven rounds. His magazine was capped. It’s the law.”
“Come on, Dehan! Even if his magazine was capped. He went there for the purpose of making the kill. He didn’t bring a spare magazine? All he had to do was put in a new clip, walk around the car, and finish the job. But he didn’t. And he didn’t because he didn’t care that the passenger was getting away. His target was the driver.”
She made a face. “OK, if you say so. Let see what Elizabeth says.”
“And their other colleagues. And then please let’s have breakfast.”
We climbed out and headed for reception.
FIVE
We were lucky. We inquired in reception and discovered that Elizabeth Kelly was coming off duty at seven thirty that morning. So we went and had scrambled eg
gs and coffee and waited for her at a plastic table by a plate glass window overlooking the parking lots. She eventually walked in at ten minutes before eight, looking freshly showered but tired, in jeans and a sweatshirt. We stood as she approached, and shook hands with her. She was polite, but didn’t look happy to meet us.
“What is this about? I’m at the end of a twelve hour shift and I would really like to get home and sleep.”
I produced a smile that looked like an apology. “I understand, can we offer you a coffee?”
“No, thank you. As I said, I’d like to get home…”
I gestured to a chair and she sat reluctantly. Dehan smiled at her in a way that did not look like an apology and said, “We won’t keep you any longer than is absolutely necessary, Ms. Kelly. We’ve slept three out of the last twenty-six, so we are pretty keen to get moving, too. We just have a couple of questions. How well do you know Sebastian Acosta?”
She looked surprised. “Seb? We’re pretty close. First year residency doesn’t allow you much of a personal life, but we see each other when we can. We’ve talked about moving in together, a future some day. Why?”
Dehan gave a small grimace. “When was the last time you saw him, Elizabeth?”
Now Elizabeth looked worried. Her eyes flicked to me and then back to Dehan. “About twelve hours ago. He was going off duty and I was coming on. Can you please tell me what this is about?”
Telling people a loved one has died is one of the worst things you can do in life. Doing it to four people in five hours is exhausting. I drew a deep breath and said, “Elizabeth, I am really sorry to have to tell you this, but Sebastian was killed in the early hours of this morning.”
It was as though she’d been slapped in the face. She went rigid and the color drained from her already pale cheeks. Her right hand covered her mouth. At first she looked angry, like we had insulted her. Then the tragedy and the sadness flooded her eyes. She shook her head. “Not Sebastian. No…”
Dehan gave a small sigh. “I’m really sorry. There is no doubt about the identity.”
“How…? You’re asking me how well I knew him. Why? What’s happened?”
