by Blake Banner
Nine
It happened the next day. We were settling down to some associated research that I had started when the phone rang.
“Stone.”
“I got to talk to you. But I can’t be seen.” The voice was Latino from the Bronx.
“What’s it about?”
“My sister. You been askin’ questions about girls who gone missing.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Maria.”
“Maria Garcia?”
“Yeah. She went missing ten years ago, man.”
“What’s your name?”
“José.”
“Listen to me, José, and do exactly as I say. Be at the corner of Longfellow and Randall in twenty minutes. When I talk to you, take a swing at me. Okay?”
“You gonna bust me?”
“You got a better idea? Don’t worry. I won’t charge you.”
I hung up and looked at Dehan. “Let’s go, we may have a break.”
We approached down Hunts Point Avenue, and he was there on the corner, loitering, whatever that is. He was leaning against a lamppost, and when I pulled over and got out, he spat on the sidewalk.
“You José?”
“Yeah, who the fuck are you?”
“Detective Stone. Turn around. Put your hands against the billboard.”
“What the hell for? I ain’t done nothin’!”
He took an ineffectual swing at me, and I gave him a push. Dehan got out of the car pulling her piece and walked over. I pushed him again. “Do it.”
He began mouthing off about motherfucking pigs, but he walked toward the billboard and put his hands up. I said, “Spread!” and kicked his ankles out so he was splayed. Dehan covered him while I patted him down. I reached in his pocket and pulled out some gum. I showed it to Dehan like it was dope, put it in my pocket, cuffed him, and shoved him toward the car. We put him in the back, and Dehan got in next to him.
Back at the precinct, I took him to an interview room, removed his cuffs, and sat opposite him. Dehan came in with some coffee and some sandwiches. She put them in front of him and sat. He looked at them and then at her.
“What? Do I look hungry?”
“Yeah, and malnourished.”
“I ain’t hungry. I ate today.”
I said, “Tell me about your sister.”
He looked at me resentfully. “I ain’t a snitch. I’m tellin’ you this because nobody else is doin’ nothin’.”
“I said, I don’t give a damn if you’re a snitch or not, José. I just want to find your sister.”
“She went away ten years ago. I was ten. She was nine years older than me. She was nice. She wasn’t like other people round here. She wanted to get out of the hood and do something. She used to talk about going to college. She used to say that me an’ her were going to San Francisco. There was a good college there where she could study psychology. She was smart.”
Dehan said, “You think she went to San Francisco?”
He shook his head. “She was real pretty. There was a gang back then. They were real tough. The boss of the gang was Nelson. He used to take all the nice-looking chicks. They were his girlfriends, but he’d use them as hookers too. He came one day and said Maria was going to be his wife. She was the best chick in the hood, so she deserved the best guy.”
He stopped because he was having trouble holding back the tears. His jaw muscles worked, and he looked away. After a bit, he drank some coffee.
“She cried and she begged him. He said if she didn’t come with him willingly, he’d hurt Mamá and me. Maria had a boyfriend from Brooklyn who used to come and visit her. They were makin’ plans together. Nelson said he’d kill him if he ever came round again.”
“You were ten?” It was Dehan. He nodded. “And you saw all this?”
“He told Mamá we had to be there, so we all knew he was serious. So in the end she married him.”
I frowned. “By the church.”
“No, man, it was a ceremony of the Ángeles de Satanás. But she was his wife, which meant she belonged to him, like his bike.”
“How long did this go on?”
He shrugged. “Couple of months, maybe a bit more.”
“Did she confide in you? Did she tell you anything about what went on?”
“She told me she didn’t want me to worry about it.” He gave a small bitter laugh. “She wanted me to think about getting out, about makin’ a good life. But Sam came and visited a couple of times, and he was always phoning her.”
Dehan interrupted. “Sam?”
“The guy she was seeing before.”
“He came back?”
José smiled. “He was crazy about her. I used to listen to them talk. He said he wasn’t scared of Nelson. He was going to save her.”
Dehan asked, “Did he say how?”
“It was just talk. He never did. He said he was gonna go to the cops, but she told him not to. She said there was a cop Nelson used to pay with money and girls. He liked Latina girls. Nelson gave him my sister one night, and he fell crazy in love with her.”
I said, “Wait. You’re telling me this cop fell in love with your sister?”
“Yeah. What? That so hard to believe? What, only white chicks…?”
“Shut up, José. Just answer the question.”
“Yeah. He was crazy about her. He was losin’ his fockin’ head!”
“And this cop’s name was…?”
“Mick, they called him Irish Mick. And his pal Kirk, like fockin’ Star Trek.”
The madder he got, the more he exaggerated his accent. Dehan suddenly exploded, “Cut the fucking act, will you! Show your sister some respect! Is this what she wanted for you? Mouthing off at a couple of cops? Nelson kidnaps and rapes your sister, and instead of honoring her and what she wanted, you do your damnedest to be like Nelson!” She leaned across the table and spoke into his astonished face. “It’s pronounced fuck, with a u. Fucking. Fuck.”
I suppressed a laugh and tried to look serious. “So what happened, José?”
“They used to have a poker game regular once a week. Maria and sometimes some other chicks would be there to serve drinks and… take care of the guys. One night some guys turned up and wiped out Nelson and his cousins and took Maria with them. That was the last time I saw her. She give me a kiss. She said next day she’d take me to the zoo. I remember that. I’d never been to the zoo. She left and I never saw her again. Word was Irish Mick disappeared that night too, and Captain Kirk.”
I sighed, weighing all the angles, trying to fit the pictures together in my head. “You think it’s possible she could have planned all this with Mick?”
He shook his head. There was no hesitation. “She hated Mick. She hated him as much as she hated Nelson. Maybe more.”
“Did you ever hear from Sam again?”
“No.”
I drummed on the table for a bit while my mind did some thinking. Then I said, “José, we’re going to find your sister.” I pointed at Dehan and then at myself. “We’re going to look for her, and we are not going to stop until we find her. You can help. Now you’ve done this much, why not go the whole ten yards?”
He eyed Dehan cautiously. “What you want me to do?”
“I want you to talk to your mom about Maria. I want you to ask her if she knows where she is. And I want you to persuade her to talk to us. We can fix it so that nobody ever finds out. Will you do that?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll do that.” He stood. “We done?”
“We’re done for now.”
He looked at Dehan, and there was a real sincerity about him when he said, “Thanks, Detective.”
He left, and I looked at her and shrugged. “I guess it’s the way you pronounce fuck. Who could resist it?”
Ten
I was sitting at my desk with squares of sunlight warped across the old sheets of paper I was looking at. Dehan was talking, but I was only half listening because what I was reading had me total
ly engrossed.
She was leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed and her fingers laced behind her head. She was saying:
“We know from the mother superior, and from José, that Maria Garcia was an intelligent, sensitive girl with ambitions for herself and for her brother. We know that Nelson decided to take her as a sex slave. We know that Mick fell in love with her, in as much as an animal like that is capable of falling in love. Let’s say he became obsessed with her. So much we know and some of it we can maybe prove.”
“Mhm…”
“We know that Maria had a boyfriend who, if nothing else, had guts,” she went on. “He wanted to save her. Maybe he had a Galahad complex. Maybe he was just a nice guy. We know they stayed in touch even after Nelson forbade it, so the kid’s got balls. They’ve both got balls. So, here’s how it plays out…”
“Hm…”
“Nelson has his poker game coming up, and it’s a night when he is going to have a lot of cash in the place. Maria knows this. She’s desperate to escape, and she’s got the guts to do something about it. She has two options: make a plan with her boyfriend, or make a plan with Mick. A third option is do both.”
She opened her eyes and stood up, staring out of the window. I glanced at her and carried on reading.
“Sam, her boyfriend, however noble and gutsy he may be, is no match for Nelson and the Sureños—and Irish Mick. So, she’s smart and she makes a plan with Mick. She makes like she’s falling for him too—it’s becoming mutual. She tells him about the money, and they plan to wipe out Nelson and escape to Mexico together. Meanwhile, she makes a second plan with Sam. After the showdown, she’ll dump Mick in Mexico and come back for Sam and José.
“At the game, she lets Mick in. He comes in with Kirk and two other guys. My money is on two Italians. They blow Nelson away, leave the Bronx open for Vincenzo to move in, because without Mick, the Triads can’t operate here. The Italians go back home, and Mick leaves with Maria. Pro makes a big smokescreen, and the killing goes unsolved.” She turned to face me. “Maria tries to leave Mick and come back for Sam and José. He ain’t having it, and he kills her.”
I looked up from the papers I was reading.
“Hm…? That is excellent, Carmen. Really, very good. Let’s go.”
She sighed and followed me. “Anywhere in particular?”
“Why, naturally, to Brooklyn.”
“Naturally.”
I took the I-87 toward Randall’s Island and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. While I drove, I said, “Last couple of days I’ve been meaning to do some research, but there was always something else more important to do.”
“Life’s like that.” She said it with some asperity, so I ignored her.
“Nelson was killed on November 13, 2007.” She looked at me with curiosity. I went on. “We’ve been working increasingly on the assumption that Mick killed him. So I thought it might be a good idea to find out where Mick was that night.”
She sighed. “Oh, shit…”
“Kirk had been off sick for a few days. Remember he said that? So Mick was partnered temporarily with another detective. They were on duty that night. At one in the morning, they were called out to a homicide. While they were on that case, Sam was called out to Nelson’s. You couldn’t buy a better alibi.”
She was silent for a long time. As we crossed the Calvary Cemetery, she wound down her window and let the air beat her about a bit. I liked the idea and did the same. She said, above the buffeting of the air, “It’s like a fucking Rubik’s Cube.”
“It gets better.”
She stared at me, biting her lip, and asked, “Where are we going now?”
I smiled. “To Prospect Park, Fourteenth Avenue. To have a chat with the victim’s mother.”
Twenty minutes later, we stood on her stoop and rang the bell. She opened the door and peered at us curiously. She had gray hair and a string of pearls around her neck. “Can I help you?” she asked.
We showed her our badges. “I wonder if you could spare us a few minutes of your time, Mrs. Bernstein. It won’t take long, but we have some questions…”
She stood back, pulling the door open. “Of course, please come in. If I can be of any help.”
She led us into an overstuffed living room with photographs covering every available surface. She pointed us at an imitation Louise XIV suite. “Can I get you some coffee?” She made it sound like “caw-fee.”
We said she couldn’t, and she sat.
“Mrs. Bernstein, I know this must be painful for you, but we have reason to believe that your son’s murder ten years ago may be connected to another homicide that occurred that night.”
She put her hands to her mouth and spoke from behind her fingers. “My Sam…?”
“We believe he had a girlfriend…”
“Oh yes. She was a lovely girl. I told him not to marry her, but he wouldn’t listen. She was a Catholic…” She gestured at me. “I don’t know, maybe you’re a Catholic and no offence.” She turned to Dehan. “I can see you’re Jewish and you know what I’m talking about. You’re best sticking to your own, but he was in love, so what can you do? It’s love. She was also poor.”
“What was her name, Mrs. Bernstein?”
“Maria. Catholic name. Lovely girl. Beautiful.” She shrugged. “Mexican. Sweet, you know? Real tender.”
“Maria Garcia?”
“Like I said, Mexican. They set a date and everything. Then there was some kind of problem. He didn’t want to tell me about it. He didn’t want to worry me. He was a good boy. You could tell he was going to be a real mensch. He had a pair of balls on him.” Again she looked at Dehan. “You know what I’m talking about.”
To my surprise, Dehan nodded and there was a warmth in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. She said, “What can you tell us about this problem they were having?”
“He was vague, but he said her family were objecting to her seeing him. It’s the age-old story. But I had a feeling there was more to it than that. He never told me where she was from, but I got the feeling she was maybe from a rough neighborhood. The way things played out, I wish I had listened to my mother’s intuition.”
I said, “Can you tell us about the events of that night, and what led up to them?”
She looked a bit distressed and started rubbing her hands with her thumbs, staring at the carpet.
“She broke up with him. He was devastated. She was the love of his life. He was crazy about her. He went nuts. He was crying, he wouldn’t eat. He had no father—his father, God bless him, is in heaven—nobody could help him, and nothing would do but getting Maria back. So he went there, he called, he called her mother—he was nothing if not persistent. And eventually she spoke to him.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Well…! That was the worst thing that could have happened. Because now he’s convinced that she has been kidnapped, or abducted, or being held to ransom… God only knows what he was imagining. Personally, I think she’s trying to get him off her back. Her mother has told her, ‘you’ve got to marry a Catholic!’ I told him, ‘Marry a nice Jewish girl!’ But Sam isn’t having it. He is convinced that she’s being held against her will.”
“So what happened?”
“I said, ‘Go to the police!’ She told him not to. There’s a bent cop at the precinct. A likely story! So on the night of the November 13, 2007—I will never forget it so long as I draw breath—without my knowledge, he goes up into the attic and he gets his father’s revolver. A very nice pearl handled Colt .45, one of a pair that was given to him by his commanding officer…”
“They sound beautiful,” Dehan said. “I’d love to see them later. What happened?”
“So he takes the revolver, and he goes to the Bronx. It seems she had told him there was a man called Nelson who was forcing her to have sex with him and with other men. That night she was being forced to go to a poker party, where she would be raped. Well, poor Sam lost his mind. He was crying his heart out. He was raving. He said
he couldn’t stand by while the woman he loved was raped. Like I said, he was a real mensch. So he went upstairs, took the gun, and went to look for her.”
I frowned. “But he didn’t know where to go…”
“He was a mensch, but he was stupid, like his father. He went to the roughest part of the Bronx—Hunts Point, down by the warehouses—and he was going like a crazy man from one bar to another, yelling and shouting, saying he needed to see Nelson Hernandez right then. It seems some feller said he’d take him to him. He led him outside and…”
She folded up, buried her face in her hands, and started to cry. Dehan got up, sat next to her, and put her arms around her. It was like her chest had clenched around her heart and wouldn’t let go. Her voice came, squeezed through her pain. “I’ll never have him back. Never see him again…”
We eventually soothed her and apologized for having brought back the memories. She called her neighbor to come over, and we left.
Eleven
Dehan rested her ass on the hood of my car in the dappled shade of the plane trees. “It wasn’t Pro, it wasn’t Zhu, and it wasn’t Mick. So by the process of elimination, that leaves us only one possibility.”
“The Angels of Satan.”
“The Sureños, the Ángeles de Satanás. There is nobody else.”
“That will not be the main thrust of the DA’s case.”
She didn’t seem to hear. She stared at me, and her eyes were on fire. “It has to be Mick!”
I shook my head. “Stop right there, Dehan.”
She held up her hands and closed her eyes. “Okay. Okay… I agree.”
We started walking, as though one of us had suggested it, but neither of us had, down the avenue toward the park. She kept talking.
“Early hours of Tuesday, November 13, 2007, Mick and Jennifer are at Hunts Point, goddamn it! Where Sam has been gunned down, a few streets away from where Nelson has been killed. At the same time, Pro is arriving in the neighborhood with his guys, for the purpose of killing Nelson. Zhu is arriving in the neighborhood for the same purpose. They are all there, and they all want the same thing. They all want Nelson dead.”
