Long Island Noir

by Kaylie Jones

  C.T. says:

  We oughta deport all of them, send them back to whatever pisshole they came from. They’re like cockroaches, millions of them hiding in the dark and when you turn the lights on they run for cover. How do they get in the country? They just come here and nobody stops them, like they’re real Americans or something.

  LiptonLady55 says:

  They won’t let the Border Patrol do their jobs. They’re bringing them over to work cheap and take American jobs.

  RealAmerican says:

  First we got Obama, now we got this f*ckin’ beaner. What’s the country coming to?

  Skeptic says:

  You have got to be kidding. Puerto Rico’s part of the U.S. They’re American citizens. And he was born in the Bronx. They got his birth certificate, his baby picture in the paper.

  Avenger says:

  STFU, moonbat!

  WhiteMale14 says:

  [comment removed for violating guidelines]

  C.T. says:

  Puerto Rico’s a foreign country, duh! They don’t speak English there.

  Danny drove south on the Nicolls Road Highway and got off at Portion Road. It was a clear, beautiful, blue-green day. Coffee buzz of radios and gas pumps and America-runs-on-Dunkin’-Donuts. Eighty-seven degrees and sunny on this Sunday afternoon, traffic headed to the beach, construction and delivery, a white van with We Buy Junk Cars in red.

  He pondered the story.

  One victim.

  Many vague threats.

  No specific suspects.

  Grass growing in the sidewalk cracks. Leaves undulating in the light breeze, middle-aged maples and scrubby pines. A strip mall off Portion Road west of Nicolls, one of the scores filling in the sides of this once-country road. A brown-brick slab topped by a shingled façade, housing a pizzeria, deli, Chinese takeout, paint store, RE/MAX real-estate office, a vacant Pilates gym, and the Dos Grandes Varones bar, where the night before an amiably rowdy crowd had watched Cruz Azul tie Club America 1-1, followed by the Yankees at Oakland.

  This was the scene of the crime. Jefferson had stepped out for a slice of pizza after the soccer match. The slice had been slammed into his face.

  The patch of woods behind the stores was taped off. A woman from the cops’ Public Information Office patrolled outside, keeping the media, the forest of working legs and camera tripods, from getting too close. The victim was believed to be an immigrant from Ecuador, based on an ID card found in his wallet. Identification was being withheld pending notification of relatives. He was in critical condition at University Hospital in Stony Brook.

  Any suspects? Motive?

  “The matter is under investigation and we can’t comment any further.”

  Nothing more here. Danny took a walk. To feel out the atmosphere. The bar wasn’t open yet, but Portia’s Pizzeria was. The Quality of Our Pizza Is Not Strained, the sign boasted. He ordered a slice, sat down, and flipped through his notes.

  A familiar face came out of the bathroom. Detective Peter Restino.

  “Hey, Pete, how ya doin’?”

  “Hanging in there. You writing about this mess?”

  “Yeah, you know anything?”

  “Yeah.” He dropped his voice low, leaned over the table. “You didn’t get this from me, but we’re looking at a pattern of assaults in the area. Victims a couple Hispanic males, one black male, one homeless male. The actors probably a group.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. If you do, I’ll feed your balls to my dog.”

  Monday morning Danny parked his car by the Weekly’s eastern Suffolk bureau, upstairs in back of a row of storefronts by the railroad tracks in Port Jefferson Station. He knocked once on the open door of Lisa’s office and walked in. She looked up from her computer.

  “Lisa, what’s your take on this?”

  “You talk to the cops?”

  “Officially, they said it was under investigation and they couldn’t comment. Privately, it might be a gang assault, might be racial. We can’t use that, though.”

  “Not surprising. I don’t think Calero wants this to blow up. But I bet he puts his foot in it sooner or later.”

  Suffolk County Executive Paul Calero was a former county police commissioner, brought in from Philly in the ’90s with promises of an easier life and a bigger paycheck. In turn, he’d promised to bring urban tough-guy policing to the white-flight suburbs to make sure they didn’t fall like the inner cities had. In his first campaign, he’d been racially conciliatory, dropping hints in Brentwood and Central Islip that his name might be Spanish, but when he’d won reelection a year and a half ago, he’d switched to swearing to crack down on the hordes of drug dealers, rapists, and drunk drivers allegedly inundating the county from points south of Key West and the Rio Grande.

  That year, Brentwood high school boys had altered his name, chanting “cul-ero, cul-ero,” Mexican soccer fans’ version of the Yankee bleacher creatures’ “ass-hole, ass-hole” singsong. The paper translated it as “an anatomical insult.”

  “You should talk to Jason,” Lisa told him. “There’s all kinds of stuff on the web about this. Some people are celebrating it.” Her phone beeped. “Lisa Vitaliano,” she answered, then raised her forefinger, signifying it was a call she had to take.

  Jason Settles turned down the music, old-school Strong Island hip-hop, when Danny walked in, fading the segue from De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’” into EPMD’s “Strictly Business.” He was the Weekly’s resident computer geek. He resembled a nerdy Gil Scott-Heron, a retro Afro and big black glasses over a long-sleeved black jersey advertising some ultra high-end technobeast gaming machine. But he was a digital wizard, at least to this observer’s untrained eyes. A computer-science major at Suffolk Community and then Stony Brook, he’d been one of the few black guys in the Silicon Valley of the ’90s, when everything was going up-up-up, the money doubling every eighteen months like it was ordained by Moore’s Law. After the dot-com bust, he’d come back East. He’d lived with his parents in Gordon Heights for a year, then lined up a job setting up and running the paper’s fledgling website.

  Jason called up a screen, drilled down through a succession of URLs and pages, and hit paydirt. “Yo, Danny, check this out.”

  ChristianSoldier says:

  Osorio can’t be the Antichrist if he’s Mexican. The Antichrist is from Rumania.

  WhiteMale14 says:

  I don’t give a f*ck where he’s from. I’m ready to defend myself. Remember—if it can’t break a stirnum, it ain’t worth sh*t!

  RealAmerican says:

  Like that illegal alien in Ronkonkoma last night. That’s how to deal with them. A few more like that, and they’ll think twice about crossing the border.

  WhiteMale14 says:

  F*ck yeah!

  LiptonLady55 says:

  He was a crackhead. He tried to rob somebody to get drug money, and he got what he deserved.

  ItalianStallion says:

  Build a fence on the border. An electrified fence. And leave the bodies there so the snakes and rats and vultures can eat them. Show them what happens when you try to sneak into the USA illegally!

  C.T. says:

  If the vultures don’t die from eating human garbage! :)

  Skeptic says:

  Hey, ItalianStallion, where did your people come from?

  ItalianStallion says:

  What part of ILLEGAL don’t you understand? My family came here legally and worked. These people broke the law coming here. They’re breaking the law by being here. They’re criminals.

  “Jason, you got any idea who’s putting this shit up?” Danny asked.

  “You want to find out? You’ll have to put yourself in touch with the higher spirits. You have to smoke hemp.”

  “Okay, Maharishi Triangle Offense. Get serious.”

  “Okay, I’ll be serious. You are undertaking a journey into the netherworld of the political realm.” Atop the twin computer towers, a raging green Incredible H
ulk stared at an implacable black Darth Vader. “This site is LongIslandforAmericans.com. It’s a far-right one, like LetFreedomRing or FreeRepublic. Then these people also post comments on sites like ours, and they troll on liberal ones.”

  “So can you tell who they are?”

  “It depends. Most media sites now require registration, so they can track identities and IP addresses and keep spam off. We do. People can get around that pretty easily if they know anything about computers. Nobody knows if their name is real and they can have ten different e-mail addresses, but it’s your first line of defense. It’s like locking your car and not leaving the keys in the ignition. If they don’t want anybody to know their IP address, that’s a little more work. These are the trolls you eighty-six from the site because they just come around to flame-war. You can block their IP address, but they can use a public computer or get privacy software for their own. And some sites don’t track IP addresses, ’cause they say anonymity protects people’s privacy and freedom of speech. If they’re paranoid and digitally savvy, they’ll hide. But if they’re not hip to privacy, or they’re just too raging to care, it’s not that hard to find them.”

  “Thanks. You know, they said the Internet was the most revolutionary invention since the printing press, but sometimes it’s more like the world’s biggest toilet wall.”

  “Word.”

  Danny spent the next couple of hours going through old local weeklies and the Newsday police blotter. March 31, Federico Ibanez of Farmingville reported being punched in the face by a group of young men on Horseblock Road. No arrests. May 15, Tommy O’Halloran, 58, no known address, reported being beaten up while collecting empty cans in Holbrook. June 21, two Mexican day laborers reported being attacked by a gang of whites in a wooded area off Nicolls Road. They said they had been taken there from the Kohl’s parking lot on Ronkonkoma Avenue by two young men who’d offered them $100 a day for construction work. They’d fled and didn’t get a good look.

  Restino was right. There definitely was a pattern, and it fit geographically. And there were probably a lot more unreported. If the victims were illegal, they’d be too scared to call the cops.

  Afternoon oozed along quietly, interrupted by occasional cars, in the Morningwood Estates development in Farmingville, a former potato field a mile and a half northwest of Exit 63 on the Long Island Expressway. Blocky beige and yellowish twostory clapboard houses with peaked roofs and diminutive windows, built in the last burst of the great postwar urban sprawl. The American Dream and white people’s escape from the city had taken a big hit from leaping gas prices, and the satellites orbiting the city could only go so far out without losing heat and light.

  It looked nicer now. The pitiful saplings staked into the lawns had grown into curbside shade trees. Houses that had sold for $39,990 new in 1974 went for $339,000 even after the bubble popped.

  Five youths in baggy shorts shot hoops aimlessly in a keyhole-shaped driveway.

  “Hey, Tyler. You hear about the guy we fucked up? He wasn’t Mexican, he was from Ecuador.”

  “Where the fuck is Ecuador?”

  “It’s on the equator, stupid.”

  “Am I supposed to know that? Was I the teacher’s buttboy?”

  “Who cares? He was a fuckin’ beaner, right?”

  Danny headed down Nesconset Highway to Hauppauge. Calero was having a press conference at five. Police had identified the victim as Jefferson Nuñez, twenty-four, an Ecuadorian immigrant from Lake Ronkonkoma.

  “We are doing and will do whatever it takes to apprehend the perpetrator or perpetrators of this crime,” Calero said.

  “Mr. Calero, do you think this attack might reflect on some of the language you have used in addressing the immigration issue?”

  “We enforce the laws equally. That is the job of our lawenforcement personnel, and they do it very competently and with a great deal of dedication. The perpetrators of this reprehensible crime will be brought to justice, but we cannot and will not ignore our nation’s immigration laws.”

  Danny pushed forward, got his question in: “There have been several assaults on immigrants in the area. Is there a connection?”

  “We have no evidence at this point that this was racially motivated. Next question.” Calero delivered his denial in a curt, clipped tone, like you were somewhere between a retarded tinfoil hat and an undersized cockroach for asking. When he was less tense he was more genial.

  Danny called Nydia Perez for a response. The “outspoken county legislator” said the county exec was denying reality.

  “We know of about ten attacks in that area in the past six months, by a gang of young men, usually calling racial names,” she told him. “It’s hard to get people to tell their stories. Obviously, the undocumented are scared to talk to the police. But you know, Danny, sometimes people who have their papers have fear too.”

  “How do you know this was another one?”

  “We don’t know who the attackers were yet, but it fits the pattern. And when some elected officials have built their political agenda on innuendoes about our community, it does not inspire confidence in their commitment to protect us.”

  “Are you referring to Calero?”

  “I’ll leave that to your readers to decide.”

  Evening. Danny sat in his ground-floor garden apartment off Nesconset Highway, his aging car in the parking lot, the neighbors’ TV infiltrating the walls, a kid blasting hip-hop somewhere outside.

  He filed a four-graph quickie for the website and pecked his notes into his laptop. He felt impotent and frustrated. Desire stunted by hopelessness. Cut off, isolated. You couldn’t walk anywhere here. You had to drive even to get a quart of milk or a can of coffee.

  He’d been cast out east by successive waves of layoffs and two divorces. Like human flotsam or jetsam, whatever the difference was. It was one of those job-application test questions they used to give back when they cared that people knew the language and had some command of nuances. Like Distinguish between parole and probation. Not anymore.

  He’d been at the Eye, an alternative weekly in the city, until it got bought out and the new owners dejobitated him and three-fourths of the staff. A short stint at Newsday followed, until the former General Mills CEO they called the Cereal Killer had swept in and scythed through the newsroom. Lisa had been his editor there, and she’d swooped him up when she landed at the Weekly.

  He took a sip of beer. Nice apricot-tinged hippie craft brew. Only one. Only one.

  We’re fucked. We need a miracle. Concrete behemoths roam the land crushing everything in their path, barreling around on tracks greased with corruption. I’m banging my head on the wall trying to tell these stories. Maybe five people care. They tell me, they praise me, it’s gratifying, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. They’re obsessed with celebrities.

  The bosses want crap like that. They hire clueless twits who call some multimillionaire health-insurance exec or real-estate speculator a “populist outsider” because he bashes “Washington insiders” in his campaign ads. They want superficiality and snark from career-blinded yuppies whose knowledge of history doesn’t go past Monica Lewinsky.

  LiptonLady55 says:

  Illegal aliens are two-thirds of the drunk drivers who kill people.

  C.T. says:

  Their poisoning the country. They come out of the jungle eating monkey meat and fried bananas. Their never gonna be sivilized human beings.

  LiptonLady55 says:

  We’re sick and tired of these politically correct eletists ramming them down our throats.

  Tuesday morning a spokesperson for University Hospital issued a statement. Jefferson Nuñez remained in critical condition with a fractured skull and other injuries. He had strong vital signs, but the main danger was cerebral edema. Doctors were working to reduce it.

  LiptonLady55 says:

  He came here to be on Medicaid and suck off of our tax dollars. All of them do.

  C.T. says:

 
; Why should we pay his bills? Let him go back to El Bananastan and have THEIR taxes pay for a witch doctor.

  WhiteMale14 says:

  Kick him in the head a little harder next time and save the taxpayers some money!

  The night before, the phone had rung at Nuñez’s house, on a side street between Portion Road and the Expressway. Nine people shared the four-bedroom dwelling, three pairs of men, including Jefferson and his cousin Juan Carlos, in the smaller bedrooms, and a family, Santiago and Carolina and their baby girl, Xochi, in the big one.

  Carolina answered. “ ¿Hola?”

  “Good evening, this is Michelle from Atlas Health Insurance. Can we speak to Jefferson Nuñez?”

  “Mi ingles is no good. Momentito.”

  She went to look for Gabriel, one of the two Salvadorans, who spoke the best English of anyone in the house.

  Jefferson Nuñez had insurance with Atlas, thanks to the regular job he’d scored in March with Ozzy’s Demolitions in Holtsville. The side of the company van declared, EVIL MINDS WHO PLOT DESTRUCTION. Ramon, the longhaired Mexican rockero whose tatuajes covered his arms like sleeves, had to explain the joke.

  Gabriel got on the phone. The woman repeated her inquiry.

  “He’s in the hospital. Can I take a message?”

  “We’re just reaching out to you to make arrangements for payment.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s in the hospital.”

  “Sir, we have to make arrangements for payment for medical services. His claim has been denied. There was alcohol in his blood.”

  “Say what?”

  “He is ineligible for reimbursement. His policy does not cover alcohol-related injuries, so it is his responsibility to make payment in full. He is legally obligated to do so.”

  “¡Puta!” Gabriel cursed, slamming down the phone.

  * * *

  Jason called Danny and Lisa into his office. “I think I got something,” he said. “The IP address for both ItalianStallion and WhiteMale14 is the same as the one for the website of the Farmingville Civic Protection Association.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything, but it makes sense,” Lisa observed. “Those were the people trying to get a town ordinance prohibiting landlords from renting to illegal immigrants last year. Tom Montanelli was the head of it. I remember him saying, If we don’t stand up now, we’re gonna be overrun.”