by R. G. Belsky
She shook her head.
“Not really. Not the specifics. Just that his boyhood friend had died. We never talked about his cases. That was Roberto’s rule. He said he saw too much violence and ugliness as a police officer. He didn’t wanted to relive it when he was home. He just wanted to enjoy time with his family. I understood that, so I never asked him about the cases he was working on. Once in a while he’d mention something in passing about things that had happened on the job. Like you. He told me about you.”
“Roberto talked about me?”
“Yes.”
“Probably because we spent so much time together down at Ground Zero after 9/11.”
“No, not that. That was something he never talked about. The collapse of those towers. I think that affected him far more than I could ever imagine, but he never really opened up to me about it.”
“So how did you know about me?”
“He told me he met with you at a hospital after Reyes died. That he asked you to write a story about him. He desperately didn’t want Victor to have died unnoticed like he did. He wanted Victor to be remembered in some way, to matter to the world. That’s what he said. And that’s why he reached out to you.”
She looked at me now with sad eyes. I looked away. I couldn’t hold her stare.
“But you never wrote that story,” she said.
“No, not then.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was busy . . . no, that’s not true. I’m not really that busy with anything as a reporter these days. I’m not sure why I didn’t write the story at the time, Mrs. Santiago. I guess it didn’t seem like something that important to me.”
“Roberto was disappointed he never heard from you after that. He said he remembered you as a good man. A man he trusted to do the right thing. I think it hurt him very badly when you didn’t come through for him.”
“I’m doing the story now,” I pointed out.
“For Roberto?”
I nodded. “For myself too.”
She smiled. “I think Roberto would have liked that.”
Santiago had kept a small office at the back of the house. His wife let me look through it when I asked if he kept any files or records of his cases at home. She said it was just the way he’d left it on that last day when he went off to work. She hadn’t had the strength to deal with it—or with any of his personal stuff in the house—since his death.
There was a desk with some paperwork on top, a filing cabinet, some bookshelves, and a bulletin board with maybe two dozen pictures on it. Some were of him with his family. Others showed him at the precinct and on the job over the years. I recognized a couple of them that had been taken at Ground Zero a decade earlier. I looked at these the most closely. I found myself in one of them, standing with Santiago and other rescue workers near the ruins of the fallen towers. I stared at the picture for a long time, thinking about all the things that had happened to me—and Santiago too—since that day. Then I started looking through the room.
The papers on his desk were mostly bills, financial paperwork, and other personal stuff. I realized that some of the bills were now past due and had gone unpaid since Santiago died. I wondered if I should point it out to Mrs. Santiago. If maybe her husband had always handled all the finances, and now it was something she would have to learn to deal with. Instead, I simply pushed them aside. I was intruding enough already in this family’s personal grief. It was none of my business.
The filing cabinet was more helpful. The drawers were filled with case files. Like a lot of cops, Santiago kept his own record of cases he had worked on in the event he ever needed to refer to them if there were any questions about his actions from the department or anyone else. I figured I’d find the official police file on the Reyes case from fifteen years ago somewhere there. I was right. I spotted it quickly, along with more recent notations he’d made about the case, on top of most of the other files. Which made sense since he’d been working on that file the most recently. I sat at Roberto Santiago’s desk and paged through what was there.
The papers were in chronological order. They began with the shooting of Victor Reyes. The original police report said that a 911 call had been received at 8:11 p.m. reporting a shooting in the South Bronx. The call was from a woman who identified herself as the mother of the youth who had been shot. The EMS dispatcher who took the call was quoted as saying the woman had been “extremely emotional and almost hysterical” so it took several minutes to ascertain the exact details and the location of the shooting.
Whether for that reason or because it was just a bad night of mayhem in the Bronx, the paramedics didn’t arrive at the scene of the shooting until thirty-eight minutes later. Reyes was taken to Lincoln Hospital—the same hospital where he would die a decade and a half later—for treatment.
The first police officer had arrived on the scene shortly after the ambulance. Probably took that long for the same reason the ambulance did. There were a lot of shootings and violence in the Bronx on a summer night, and one more Hispanic kid shot in a bad neighborhood wasn’t exactly a priority crime.
The officer, a young patrolman named Gary Nowak, in his rookie year on the job, interviewed people in the neighborhood who might have witnessed the shooting but reported that no one he spoke to had seen anything. Nowak cordoned off the crime scene and waited until detectives arrived. The two detectives who responded were named Brad Lawton and James Garcetti. They conducted their own survey of the area, talked to neighbors too, and interviewed Camille Reyes. There was no indication of any follow-up interviews with Mrs. Reyes. Which must have been what she meant when she said cops spent very little time investigating the case. That was probably true. But it wasn’t Lawton or Garcetti or Nowak’s fault. That was just the way it was. Same as the way the Daily News ran a one-paragraph short about a killing in the Bronx and splashed the news of the murder of a pretty Upper East Side coed or a wealthy stockbroker all over the front page.
At some point, an all points bulletin was put out for a young Hispanic in a beaten-up old car, possibly green, as a suspect in the shooting. The suspect was identified as Bobby Ortiz, who had a long rap sheet for gang activity in the Bronx.
More recently in Santiago’s file, I found a copy of the hospital report from the night Reyes died, listing the extent of his injuries from the shooting, then a summary of his medical history over the years and the cause of death. It was officially listed as a heart attack. But there was additional material from medical personnel detailing—just as Santiago had done that night at the hospital—how the bullet had dislodged from Reyes’s spine and traveled to his heart, bringing on the heart attack that killed him. Santiago had written in large letters at the bottom of the medical report: “CAUSE OF DEATH: MURDER!”
Trying to find evidence for a shooting that happened fifteen years earlier is difficult. But Santiago had pursued the one solid piece of evidence he had: the bullet. Santiago had retrieved the bullet after the autopsy and logged it in as official evidence before Reyes was buried. Amazingly, it had somehow remained virtually intact after all this time. He had it run through the police lab, where it was identified as having been fired from a .38 revolver. The weapon, though, had never been found.
There were also more details about the gang affiliations of Reyes and Bobby Ortiz. Reyes had belonged to a gang in his neighborhood loosely connected to the infamous Bloods, but the Bloods were not a major gang presence in that area of the Bronx then. Ortiz belonged to the Latin Kings, the dominant gang at the time. So it wasn’t that much of a leap to theorize that Ortiz had shot Reyes over some sort of gang rivalry or dispute. Even if Reyes really had been trying to escape the gang life.
The files gave no indication that Santiago had tried to find out what happened to Ortiz or that he had even reached out to the three original cops on the case, Nowak, Lawton, and Garcetti. That surprised me a bit at first,
because I knew these were obvious moves for any investigator to make, and Santiago had been a top-flight homicide detective. But then I realized why he hadn’t done any of these things.
He never had a chance.
Santiago had simply run out of time. The last entry was dated the day before he had been hit and killed crossing the street.
I thought again about how much easier this all would have been if I’d started the story right after I saw him that night in the hospital. I could have worked with Santiago on the story, and then maybe things would have worked out differently. But it was too late to change that now. Too late to change a lot of things.
Chapter 9
JAMES GARCETTI WAS still a detective working out of the Bronx. I met him in a bar one day on East Tremont a few blocks from his precinct. He was probably in his fifties, but he looked a lot older. Gray haired, maybe forty pounds overweight, with a big paunch and a florid drinker’s face.
It wasn’t even noon yet, but he was already working on a beer and a shot. I had the feeling it wasn’t his first.
“I’ve been on this damn job for twenty-nine years, seven months,” he said. “Five months to go until I get my thirty years in. That’s all I want. Then I’m outta here. I’m taking my pension and getting out of this city and never looking back.”
I nodded and took a sip of the beer I’d ordered to make Garcetti feel more comfortable talking to me.
“Do you remember the Victor Reyes case?” I asked him.
“Who’s that?”
“A kid that got shot outside of his house about fifteen years ago.”
Garcetti took a swig of his shot. “Some Hispanic kid dies in the Bronx fifteen years ago and you expect me to remember it?”
“Actually, he didn’t die fifteen years ago. That’s when he got shot. He died a few months ago from the wound.”
Garcetti shrugged.
“Nothing, huh?” I asked him.
“Like I said, I’ve seen so many murders and shootings and all sorts of other crap on the streets over the years . . . well, after a while, you tend to forget a lot of the specifics. They all just blend together into one big pile of shit. You know what I mean?”
He drank some of his beer.
“Does the name Bobby Ortiz mean anything to you?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“He was a suspect in the shooting.”
“We catch him?”
“No.”
“We probably had too many other cases to worry about. More shootings. Robberies. Drug dealers. In a place like this, you aren’t supposed to waste too much time over one crappy case. You do what you can and you move on. There’s only so much time you can spend on a case like this kid you mentioned . . . what was his name again?”
“Victor Reyes.”
“If there was an arrest to make on Reyes, I’m sure we would have made it. If not, well . . . there’re a lot of Victor Reyeses out there.”
I told him about Roberto Santiago.
“Did you know Santiago?” I asked.
“Never met him. Heard about what happened to him, though. A damn shame.”
“He never approached you about this case?”
“No, why would he?”
“Same reason I’m here now.”
“Never heard from him.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Hey, I remember cops. Just not all the victims and the perps.”
He ordered another round for himself. Beer with a shot chaser.
“Your partner fifteen years ago, when Reyes got shot, was Brad Lawton, right?”
“That would be about the time we were teamed up together, I guess.”
“How long were you and Lawton partners?”
“A year or two.”
“What happened?”
“Brad moved up. He was very successful, very ambitious. Me, I never had ambition.”
“Are you still in touch with him?”
“Brad?” He laughed. “Oh, I run into him from time to time over the years. Funerals, retirement parties, that sort of thing. He’s very polite and asks me how I’m doing and all of that. But no, we’re not really in touch anymore. I was a pretty good cop back then—the drinking came later. Our careers—our lives—just sort of went off in separate directions, I guess you might say.”
He stared down at the shot glass in front of him, then took a big drink to empty it. He signaled the bartender for another.
“You better be careful,” I told him. “Don’t you go on duty soon?”
“I am on duty,” Garcetti said.
Gary Nowak, the first patrolman on the scene of the Reyes shooting, was no longer on the force.
He’d left the NYPD about six months after it happened. Overall, he’d spent barely a year on the force. I’d run into a lot of young cops like that when I was working the police beat. They had all these grandiose ideas about what being a policeman would be like, and then—when they were confronted with the grim day-to-day reality of the job—they decided it wasn’t for them. I was disappointed when I found out about Nowak, though. It made him a lot harder to track down.
The last known address I could find turned out to be a dead end. Neighbors told me he’d moved a long time ago, and one said he’d talked about leaving New York City. Because he hadn’t been on the force long enough to qualify for a pension or other benefits, there was no active file on him in the police department records bureau. I put in a request with Public Information to try to find an address, and they said it might take a while to get back to me with whatever they could find out.
Brad Lawton, Garcetti’s partner, who had been the third cop at the scene of the Reyes shooting, was a lot easier to find. All I had to do was go to police headquarters. He was a deputy police commissioner now.
“I remember the Reyes shooting,” Lawton said to me as we sat in his office at One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan.
“Really? I figured since it was so long ago . . .”
“I remember them all. All the murders, all the victims, all the violence. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But they’re all there somewhere inside me—the names, the faces, everything—whether I like it or not. Yep, I remember everything I’ve seen out there.”
Lawton was a distinguished-looking, impeccably dressed guy in his late forties. I’d read up on him before I got there. He’d worked his way up from street cop to detective to precinct commander to deputy commissioner. It was an impressive résumé. He was a very high-profile cop too, doing a lot of newspaper interviews and appearing on TV and radio talk shows; he’d even written a book about fighting crime in urban areas such as New York City in the twenty-first century. His name sometimes appeared on Page Six of the New York Post or one of the other gossip columns for parties or events or openings he attended. Lawton was definitely a cop on the way up. The exact opposite of his old partner, James Garcetti.
I told him about Santiago and his involvement with the Reyes case.
“Fifteen years is a long time to go back and try to find a murderer,” he said when I was finished.
“I understand. But that’s what Santiago was trying to do. Did he ever come and talk to you about the case?”
Lawton shook his head.
“Your partner, James Garcetti, never heard from him either?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Santiago would have wanted to talk about it with the two detectives on the case sooner or later,” I said. “But he was probably doing this on his personal time, before or after his shift. Working on the case for a few hours a day here and there. He probably thought he had plenty of time. He had no idea just how little time he really had left. I guess none of us can ever be sure of that.”
Lawton looked at me sadly. The death of a cop always was traumatic for other cops. Because they realized how easily and unexpectedly
the same thing could happen to them too.
“If there’s anything I can do to help . . .” Lawton finally said.
I told him about Bobby Ortiz, the suspect from fifteen years ago.
“I’ll make sure we check Ortiz out,” Lawton said. “See if we can track him down, if he’s still alive. Then maybe we could find out some answers from him about what happened to Reyes.”
“That’s great. But why wouldn’t someone have done that right away, fifteen years ago?”
Lawton sighed. “Are we off the record here, Malloy?
“Sure.”
“Then you know the real reason for that as well as I do.”
I nodded. “Because no one cared enough about Victor Reyes to make the effort.”
“I was only on that case when it began. I’m listed on the file because we were the first investigating detectives on the scene that night. But the case quickly got shuffled off to the gangs squad. They were supposed to be the ones who prioritized going after these kinds of street shootings. But I imagine Reyes wasn’t really a priority for anyone.”
I appreciated Lawton’s honesty. He seemed like he’d been a pretty good street cop. Someone who really did care. Sadly, that was rare in the cops I’d met, probably because so many of them had become cynical and defensive about all the problems they’d found trying to enforce the law in treacherous parts of the city.
I thanked Lawton for his help and asked him to keep in touch with me if he found out anything more about Ortiz or the shooting.
He promised he would.
There was something else bothering him though. I could tell that. He finally brought it up as he walked me to the door of his office.
“You said you saw Jimmy Garcetti, my old partner?” he asked.
“Right. Yesterday morning in the Bronx.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Counting the days until he retires.”
“He was doing that when we were on the street together. No, I mean how is he . . . well, how is Jimmy really doing?”
