by Blake Banner
“Susanne was my wife’s friend. Matt was a good man. We had been friends for a long time. We had similar ideas. He was more…” He made that ugly face again, that had something of contempt in it. “More idealistic. Forgive and forget socialism. He thought that education was the answer to everything.” He shrugged, lifted his cup with his baby finger stuck out and pursed his lips. He sipped noisily, then shrugged again, with only one shoulder. “Me, I think unforgiving litigation is the best lesson you can teach anybody. Nothing shapes society so well or so fast as litigation.”
I nodded once and sighed. “Can we move on from the lesson in social engineering?”
He made a dismissive noise like, “Yah!” and carried on. “Matt and me had a lot to talk about. We used to discuss national and international politics, but more than that, we were very involved in local politics, restoring the balance of power away from…” He jerked his head at me. “People like you, to a more representative range of the community.”
I asked him, “Did that include people like Mick Harragan?” He went quiet. “You’re not on a soap box now, Ed, and there is no jury for you to impress. I know who you are, you’re a jumped-up power-grabbing politico just like the people you profess to fight against, like Harragan. Now quit playacting and tell me about your relationship with Sue and with Rosario. So far, you are just confirming my belief that you raped them, and Mick got you off the hook.”
Dehan was looking antsy. She turned to me. “What are we doing here, Stone? OK, it’s a valid question, why’d he kill Rosario and not Sue? How about this? Rosario swore she’d report him to the cops, go over Mick’s head and make it stick. Sue was weak and didn’t want to upset the apple cart. Let’s get this son of a bitch down to the station, because if I have to listen to one more of his damned political speeches I swear…”
He raised both his hands. “OK, OK, OK…”
“Talk about a goddamn racist, misogynist…!”
“OK!”
She turned to stare at him. He made placating movements with his hands.
“OK, you made your point. Mary and Susanne were active in the community, in various ways, and they often ran into Rosario. Rosario was…” He shrugged. “Different. She was not like any woman I ever met. At first, she used to come over to visit Mary and Susanne, but her conversation, her curiosity, her hunger for knowledge and understanding…” He smiled and shook his head. “She was extraordinary. Matt and I started recommending books to her. She would read them and talk about them, intelligently! Soon Susanne and Mary’s conversation became boring for her.” He laughed. “She would join in with me and Matt instead.” He wagged a finger at me, smiling. “She would not always agree with us! Oh no! Often she would disagree! And she would argue with that fire that only a Latina can have!” He went quiet and the joy drained from his face. “It was not long before I realized that I was in love with her. Mary…pah! What was she compared with this passionate, beautiful, intelligent woman? Nothing!”
He sat staring at his cold, sweet coffee. “I could not keep silent. I told her. I had to tell her. I was burning inside!” He looked up at me like I would understand, and nodded several times. “She felt the same way. We had to be together.” He frowned and wagged his finger again. “It could not be straight away. I was in the middle of an important trial which was going to establish my reputation. A divorce right then, and especially a divorce from a Puerto Rican woman, it could have undermined my position and my reputation. But we became lovers. I used to go and see her regularly at lunch time. I helped her with her rent. We made plans.” He shook his head and tears glinted in his eyes. “We were going to be married. She was going to be my wife.”
He was quiet for a long moment. We waited. He took a deep breath and shrugged.
“The trial finished. We won. My reputation was secured. I went to see Rosario. I told her, ‘I am going to arrange the papers, before the weekend I am going to tell Mary it’s over, and when the divorce is final, we will get married.’ She was so happy! We made love…” He shook his head, like he was having trouble counting. “…Two or three times. Then I went back to the office. I prepared the papers, I talked to my friend, Alfredo, asked him to represent me, and when I got home, I found Mary and Susanne crying. Hugging each other. What happened? They were hysterical, but finally they tell me. Rosario has been killed. Murdered.”
We were all silent. After a moment, I asked him, “What happened?”
“I passed out.” He stared straight at me. “Right there, on the spot. I passed out. I lost consciousness.” He snapped his fingers. “Mary knew. If she had any doubts before, right then she knew.” He kept shaking his head. “You know? I made no effort to hide it. I didn’t care if she realized or not. But if she missed it before, right then she knew.” He sighed. “I called Mick. I told him about me and Rosario. He said he knew about it. That was why he had respected her. He liked Latina women. He would have liked to have Rosario, but he knew she was mine. So he respected her. He asked me, did I kill her? I told him of course not. He was a good man. He understood. He said that was enough for him. But they never caught the son of a bitch who did it.”
Dehan stood and walked out of the café. Ed watched her leave. I said, “That good man who was such a great pal of yours?” He turned to look at me. “That corrupt gangster in a uniform, that son of a bitch, raped and murdered her mother and put her father in the hospital, while she watched. She didn’t kill him because he beat her so badly she couldn’t move. That friend and ally of yours was a parasite on the Latino community you claimed to protect and serve.”
He looked away.
I went on, “So what about Susanne?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. It was like contempt was an autonomic response with him. He couldn’t help it. “Nothing about Susanne. I told you, she was nothing to me. Less than that.”
“So what was your problem with Sebastian?”
Before he could answer, Dehan came back. She had obviously breathed and counted to ten. I asked her with a look, and she gave me one back that said she was OK. I asked Ed again, “What was your problem with Sebastian, Ed? Because I am having trouble swallowing the line that says, Sue accuses you of raping her, at about the same time Rosario gets raped and murdered, and then Sue’s son is murdered outside Rosario’s house—and you have nothing to do with it.” I shook my head. “That is hard to swallow.”
He shrugged. “Hard or not, it’s the truth. Sebastian? He was nothing, like his mother. Same kind of weak thinking as his father, but without the intelligence. Education will lead to equality? Look at the profession he chose! Investigating the dead! What use is that? They’re dead, for crying out loud! Do something useful!”
Dehan raised an eyebrow, her voice was acerbic to the point of being almost venomous. “Like providing skin-deep beauty to the rich?”
She looked at me. I sighed. “Ed, don’t go anywhere. Do not leave the city. I am not done with you.”
“I am no longer under arrest?”
I shook my head. “But I will be looking for evidence to corroborate Susanne Mackenzie’s story.”
“You mean you’ll be manufacturing it!”
I stood. “That was your friend and ally Mick’s game, not mine.”
We left him staring at his hands on the table, and made our way out to the parking lot.
TWENTY-TWO
We were back at Emilio’s pizza joint. Dehan was staring at her pizza like she couldn’t see it. “You know,” she said, “if I were like Mick, I’d put him away. I’d fabricate the damned evidence and put the son of a bitch away. Because he deserves it, because of the way he treats women, because of the way he treats people! The world doesn’t need more bastards like Ed Irizarry. But I can’t do that.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“You know why I can’t do it?”
“Because you’re a good person.”
“No,” she said, illogically, “I can’t do it because that would make me like him! And I am not like him!
”
I frowned but didn’t ask the obvious question. I wasn’t sure she was listening to me. I picked up a piece of pizza and bit into it. While I chewed, she stared out the window. After a bit, she said, “You believe him, don’t you?”
I swallowed. “Do you?”
She mad a sound that was almost a growl and buried her face in her hands, then ran her fingers through her hair. “Man, I really did not need a hangover today!”
I smiled. “Do you regret it?”
She looked at me sharply, then slowly smiled. “No.” She flopped back in her chair. “I’m sorry I was… weird. It’s complicated.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded.
Before I could say anything she added, “But it’s nice to be back to normal.”
“Are we?”
She looked surprised.
I went on, “Were we ever?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We were never normal, Carmen.”
“I guess not.”
I pulled off half my beer. “Beer is good for a hangover, Ritoo Glasshoppah. We’ll talk later. Right now, let us consider the state of the case.”
She did several things with her eyebrows that were hard to follow, then said, “If you believe that piece of… If you believe Irizarry, we have a real problem. Because we have gone from having too many suspects, to not having any at all. And somebody murdered Sebastian.”
“Of that there can be no doubt, Dehan. But we must not fall into the trap of making the facts fit our theories. If it was not Jack O’Brien, it was not Akachukwu, and it was not Ed Irizarry, then it must have been somebody else.”
She spread her hands, looking at me aghast. “Who? There isn’t anybody else!”
I shook my head, bit into another slice of pizza, and spoke with my mouth full. “Yum cum shee amybobby erf.”
“I can’t see anybody else.”
I nodded. “Mm-hm…”
“OK, Sensei, enlighten me.”
I shrugged, swallowed, and drank beer. “Think. What is the eternal motivation for murder?”
“Sex.”
“So who might have had reason to be sexually jealous?”
“Of Sebastian?”
“For example…”
“Um…” she looked abstracted, frowning out of the window at the bright, June day. “Um…”
“Was he good-looking?”
“Yeah, I guess he was.”
“An attractive young intern with a bright future. You think maybe Angela might have been attracted to him?”
“Come on! You can’t be serious!”
“Why not?”
“Moses?”
“A man of very strict morals. Strikes me as the Old Testament type. We know by his own admission that he will strike out when provoked…”
“Holy cow!”
“Both he and Angela were keen, first to tell us nothing, and then to send us off after Akachukwu. Think it through: He’s been hiding out, but he misses his woman, so late that night he comes home. But instead of finding her alone, asleep in bed, he finds her up, with two young men, drunk, at three in the morning… Is it so unbelievable?”
She was gaping.
I ignored her. “But hang on there, Little Grasshopper, what about Luis? Didn’t we wonder right from the start why the killer left him alive?”
Now she looked horrified. “So who shot him?”
“You never came across somebody so crazed with passion that they kill the object of their rage, and then shoot themselves?”
She flopped back in her chair. “What are you doing?”
“Just showing you that there is always another suspect.”
She looked distressed. “Is this what it’s like in your head all the time?”
I smiled and reached for my phone, which had started ringing. “Eat your pizza and drink your beer, or you’ll never grow up to be strong and smart like me. Stone!”
The last bit I said into the phone.
“Detective Stone, this is Detective Anthony D’Adamo, of the 45th Precinct. Do you have two witnesses staying at Prentiss Avenue, in Edgewater Park?”
I frowned at Dehan. “Yes, I do. Why?”
“One Moses Johnson and Angela Rojas?”
“Yes, what’s this about, Detective?”
“I think you’d better get over here. They’ve both been murdered.”
* * *
Detective D’Adamo was waiting for us beyond the yellow tape, at the top of the stairs we had so recently climbed to meet Moses Johnson. We moved through a horseshoe of patrol cars and flashing lights and climbed those steps again. He was taller, younger, and thinner than he’d sounded on the phone, and he was smoking a cigarette. He watched us arrive, took a cursory glance at our badges, and said, “So is this your case or mine?”
I sighed. “That’s a good question, Detective. Mind if we take a look?”
He shrugged. “Be my guest.”
We stayed by the door because the Crime Scene team were dusting and photographing, and Frank was kneeling beside Angela. She was on her back, at the far end of the room, by the sofa, with her left leg out straight and the right one bent at the knee, flopped over to one side.
Moses was closer. He was lying partially on his left side, with his right arm slightly outstretched, as though he had been reaching for something. I figured he’d been reaching for Angela, trying to get back to her, and I felt momentarily guilty about the way I had teased Dehan earlier. She stood by my side and muttered, “I guess it wasn’t him, huh, Stone?”
I nodded. “I guess.”
Frank stood and walked over to us. He looked depressed.
I said, “.38?”
“Yes, John, a .38. Seven shots, two in Moses’ chest. One in the heart, the other on the right side of his chest. The other five are distributed around Angela’s thorax: one in the heart, another narrowly missed the heart, one in her liver, one through the gut, the other in the right lung.”
“Cowboy.”
“You might say so, John. Please catch this killer.”
“Detective D’Adamo wants to know if it’s our case or his.”
“I need to get this couple back to the lab, but on the face of it, John, these two were killed by the same man who killed Sebastian and shot Luis. I’ll ask Joe to do me a favor and put a rush on the ballistics, but you and I both know what we’re going to find.”
He stared at me a moment, then turned and went back to Angela. Outside, I heard a gurney being rattled up the steps. The door opened and a young man and a girl with a ponytail maneuvered the trolley through the door and across the floor toward Angela.
Dehan said, “They were sitting on the sofa. Somebody called at the door. They both stood. Angela stayed there, where they’d been sitting. Moses came to see who it was. Whoever it was came in. The lock isn’t forced, so maybe Moses let him in? Whatever the case, once in, he shot Moses to get him out of the way, then shot Angela. His rage was against Angela, not Moses. She was the intended victim.”
I turned and went out to D’Adamo. I spoke to him while I inspected the door. “Was the lock picked?”
“Uh-uh. Looks like they let the killer in.”
“Moses.”
“Yup.”
Dehan came out. I stood. “Moses opened the door to the killer while Angela stayed inside. But Moses is halfway across the floor. So he went in ahead. The killer followed. At this point, Moses does not feel threatened. But he stops and turns. Now he detects a threat. The killer shoots him twice, almost point blank, Moses falls, and his last act before death is to reach for his wife. The killer then closes in and empties the last five rounds into Angela.”
D’Angelo nodded. “Sounds about right. I guess it’s your case. We’re canvassing the neighbors in case anybody saw or heard anything. We’ll get statements from anyone who did and send them over to you.”
I nodded. “Sure, I appreciate that.”
He went down the stairs and talked to the sergeant, then got
in his car and left. Behind us the door opened and the girl with the ponytail backed out ass-first. We were in the way, so I touched Dehan’s arm and we walked down, back to my car. I sat on the hood and she stood with her arms crossed, looking at me. Her expression said she didn’t think I was very funny.
“Devil’s advocate aside, Stone, there is only one person who could have done this—who could have any motive at all to do this.”
“I agree.” I studied her face a moment. “What motive?”
She spread her hands and shrugged her shoulders like I was being stupid. “He lied, Stone! I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the first time in his life that he lied. I knew her, remember? Not intimately, not as well as my mom did, but I knew her. She was a nice, smart woman.” She was shaking her head as she spoke. “Frankly, I can’t see a woman like that falling in love with a piece of… shit like him!”
I made a doubtful gesture with my head. “She wouldn’t have been the first nice, intelligent woman to fall in love with an odious son of a bitch.”
She smiled. “An odious son of a bitch? You have a way with words, Stone.”
“I’m serious. Nice men like me are constantly astonished at the way nice women like her fall in love with…”
I gestured with my hand and she filled in the blank. “Odious sons of bitches like him. OK, I grant you it happens. But in this case, it makes a lot more sense that she didn’t. He became obsessed with her. I’m willing to bet it all played out pretty much the way he described it, Stone, except that he fantasized her love and her agreement. And when he’d finished his case, he went ’round to her house and she blew him off. He…” She shook her head, lost for a moment for words. “He’s like a spoiled four-year-old, who flies into a tantrum when he can’t have what he wants. She tells him to get lost and he goes crazy. He rapes her. She fights him and he either kills her during the rape, or he kills her afterwards when she tells him she is going to report him to the cops.”
I made a face and crossed my own arms. “It’s a very credible scenario, Dehan. But it leaves a couple of things unanswered…”
