The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  On the plane and on the drive from the airport, I’d thought about the best way to approach Nowak. I wasn’t sure he’d want to talk to me. His days as a beat patrolman were a long time ago and presumably ended unhappily. If he’d come all this way to get away from that life, there was no reason to think he’d want to revisit his past with a newspaper reporter now. So I didn’t want to identify myself up front.

  In the end, I decided to just wing it and hope I got lucky. I walked casually into the school and tried my best to look like a teacher or a parent or someone else who might belong there. I didn’t see any security, which was good. There were a few students milling around, but none of them paid me much attention. I saw a bulletin board on a wall and walked over to read it. It was filled with names and class assignments for the fall. One of them was for Gary Nowak. The listing said he was in Homeroom 321.

  As I tried to make my way through the hall to find Room 321, I saw a security checkpoint ahead of me. People were flashing IDs to get through. Trying to do my best not to look too obvious about it, I backed away—like I’d gone the wrong way or forgotten something—and made my way back toward the bulletin board where I’d come in. I needed to confront Nowak face-to-face before he knew I was coming or why I was there. I didn’t want to alert him ahead of time and scare him off.

  Along the way, I had seen a sign that said PRINCIPAL’S/ADMINISTRATION OFFICE. I went back to the bulletin board, studied the list of names under Nowak’s homeroom assignment, and then went up to the reception desk in the principal’s office. One of the students’ names on the list was Patrick McKenna.

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Nowak,” I told the gray-haired woman behind the desk. “Gary Nowak. My son is in one of his classes. And there’s a question I wanted to discuss with him if he’s free.”

  “What’s your son’s name?” the woman asked in a bored monotone that sounded as if she’d had this conversation with a lot of other parents before.

  “Patrick McKenna,” I said. “My name is Thomas McKenna.”

  She picked up a phone, dialed a number, and told Nowak who I was and what I wanted to see him about. She listened for a few seconds, then hung up and smiled at me.

  “Mr. Nowak says he is free to meet with you now.”

  She wrote me out a visitor’s pass, which I pinned to the front of my shirt, and then I followed her directions up to the third floor to Nowak’s classroom.

  Gary Nowak was sitting behind a desk. He stood up to greet me. He was a relatively big, very fit-looking man of about forty, which fitted with the history of him on the force. He had curly red hair and he was wearing a pale green pullover shirt, loose-fitting khaki pants, and boat shoes.

  “You’re Mr. McKenna?” he asked, greeting me with a big smile.

  “Yes. Thank you so much for taking time see me on such short notice.”

  “Nothing’s more important than my students.”

  “This shouldn’t take too long. I just have a few questions about Patrick’s schoolwork for the fall.”

  He stuck out his hand now as he approached me. I shook hands with him.

  “Sure.” He smiled, holding on to to my hand. “I just have one question for you before we get to Patrick’s schoolwork.”

  “What’s that?”

  He suddenly pulled on my hand, whirled me around, and pinned my arm behind my back so I couldn’t move. Then he shoved me headfirst into the blackboard behind his desk. I saw stars from the force of the blow. He tightened the grip on my arm behind my back and then grabbed me around the neck at the same time in what I recognized as a classic police choke hold to immobilize a suspect.

  “Here’s my question,” Nowak said, as I tried without success to squirm away from him. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”

  I gave up struggling. It was no use. He was too strong, too good.

  “I told you . . . I’m Patrick McKenna’s father.”

  He twisted my arm even harder now. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, for one thing, Patrick McKenna is black.”

  Damn. I’d picked an Irish-sounding name to avoid something like that. But you can never be sure about a name.

  “Not Irish, huh?” I said, grunting through the choke hold.

  “His parents adopted him. I’ve met them. Mrs. McKenna supervises the PTA committee in charge of the school bake sale. Mr. McKenna—whose name is Donald, by the way—plays golf at the same course here as me. I was in a foursome with Mr. McKenna a few weeks ago. And you ain’t him.”

  He twisted my arm again and smashed me one more time into the blackboard to show he meant business.

  “My name is Gil Malloy. I’m a newspaper reporter. I’m here to talk to you about a shooting you dealt with as a police officer a long time back in New York. A kid in the Bronx named Victor Reyes.”

  I wasn’t sure how he’d react to that. I braced myself, waiting for another twist to my arm or collision with the blackboard. But he loosened his grip, then let me go entirely. I stood there wincing in pain and trying to get some kind of feeling back in my almost paralyzed right arm.

  “A newspaper reporter from New York,” he said.

  “That’s right. I don’t know how much you remember about the case. But Victor Reyes was a nineteen-year-old kid who got shot fifteen years ago in front of his house in the Bronx. You were the first cop on the scene . . .”

  “Victor Reyes,” he said. “I’ve always wondered when someone would finally get around to asking me about him.”

  Chapter 44

  NOWAK TOOK ME down to the school cafeteria to talk. We got coffees along with an English muffin for him and a toasted roll with butter for me. It had been a long time since I’d been in a school cafeteria. This one was still pretty empty, just some teachers and a few students getting ready for the fall semester to begin in a few weeks.

  My arm was still sore from where Nowak had twisted it behind my back. I winced when I reached to pick up my coffee.

  “Are all the teachers here as tough as you?” I asked.

  “Sometimes it helps in the classroom.” He smiled.

  “I saw in your records that you had bench-pressed more than anyone else in your class at the Police Academy.”

  “I was a lot younger then.”

  “Do you still work out?”

  “I try to keep in shape. You never know when it might come in handy.” He smiled again. “Like when someone walks into your classroom pretending to be someone he’s not.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and a bite of the roll. I’d eaten something on the plane, but I was still hungry. I realized I’d been up for hours.

  “Bad luck my picking that McKenna name as my cover, I guess.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered.” Nowak shrugged. “I had you pegged for a phony the minute you walked into my classroom, even without the McKenna thing working against you.”

  “How?”

  “The ticket in your pocket. It was sticking out. I couldn’t read it all, but I did see the words ‘New York—LaGuardia Airport.’ I didn’t figure it was too likely that a parent of one of my students had flown here from New York City and then driven directly to discuss school curriculum. No, I figured instead that it was more likely you’d come from New York simply to see me for some reason.”

  I let loose a whistle of admiration.

  “You would have made a good cop,” I said.

  “I was a good cop.”

  “Until you quit.”

  “Which is why you’re here, right?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “You tell me first why this is so important to you.”

  I did. I told him everything. About Roberto Santiago. About the Reyes story. About the JFK story too and how I’d screwed up my career at the Daily News. And now I
was trying to make things right by finding out the truth about what happened to Reyes on that long-ago Bronx summer night. I didn’t hold anything back. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I thought it would help convince Nowak to open up to me in the same way. Or maybe because I just needed to unburden myself by telling the story to someone, and Nowak seemed to be as good a person as any (at least in the absence of Dr. Landis) to be the audience.

  At some point, a young teen boy came over to speak to Nowak. He asked him some questions about the civics curriculum and also about the baseball team, which he wanted to try out for. Nowak talked with him patiently about both, reassuring him about the civics course and encouraging him to try out as a pitcher. They discussed both civics and baseball until finally the kid thanked him and left.

  “You like teaching, huh?” I said to Nowak.

  “It’s the kind of job where you feel you can really make a difference, contribute something to make the world a better place.”

  “And police work?”

  “I used to feel that way about being on the force too.”

  “So why did you quit?”

  “Ah, right, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, you told me your story, so I guess it’s time for me to tell you mine.”

  “The first thing you have to understand is that I really meant that stuff I was saying before about wanting to make a difference, to change the world for the better,” Nowak said. “That’s why I joined the NYPD. I thought I could do that as a police officer. All those things they taught us in the academy, to serve and protect and all, I completely bought in with the program. I thought being a police officer was a noble profession, like being a doctor or a minister or something. I saw everything in black and white back then. I believed that good would always triumph over evil. That the good guys always won. I guess I was pretty young and pretty naïve. But that’s what I believed.”

  “Until Victor Reyes?” I asked.

  “Until Victor Reyes.”

  “So what happened that night?”

  Nowak sighed and took another sip of his coffee. He looked around the cafeteria. At a woman laying out dishes of Jell-O behind the counter. At a table of students laughing at a joke one of them had made. But he had a strange, faraway look on his face now. Like he wasn’t in a junior high school cafeteria in Florida anymore but back in the Bronx on a hot summer night walking his beat.

  “I’d only been on the street for a few months,” he said. “I’d seen some stuff. But nothing as bad as the Reyes shooting. When I got to the scene, the Reyes kid was screaming in horrible pain. He kept saying, ‘I can’t move! I can’t move! Why can’t I move?’ The paramedics were trying to sedate him or something, but they were having trouble getting close to him because the mother kept holding on to to her son. Finally, I came along to pull the mother to the side so they could get Reyes into the ambulance. She was hysterical with grief. She just kept crying and praying for her son and calling out to him. I still have nightmares about that scene. Even now, fifteen years later.”

  I nodded. I’d covered stories like that. So horrible that I would still think about them weeks, months, even years later. It could have been something as simple as that that convinced Nowak to quit the force, I supposed. He could have been so freaked out by what he saw that night that he decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a policeman dealing with tragedy like that. But I knew there was more to his story.

  “I was there for about fifteen minutes or so by myself, I guess,” Nowak said. “Until the detectives showed up to handle the investigation.”

  “Lawton and Garcetti?”

  “Right. Garcetti was technically the senior member of the team and the lead investigator, but it was pretty clear Lawton was the guy calling the shots. He was smooth, he was cool, he was completely in charge. He asked me what I’d done, and I went through everything with him. How I’d tried to find passersby or witnesses who might have seen something. How I’d talked to Mrs. Reyes—as best I could—about what she remembered. Lawton took down everything I said in these detailed notes. Like I said, he was completely in charge.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “Lawton asked me to control the crowd scene for a little while, then said he was wrapping up the investigation and I could go back to my beat. I’d only been there maybe thirty minutes tops. Didn’t seem like much of an investigation to me. But then I was just a rookie cop.”

  I remembered what Camille Reyes had said to me about the cops: “They asked a couple of questions and then I barely heard from them again.”

  Nowak continued. “Anyway, after I left, I heard a description had just gone out for a green car and a shooting suspect in the car. Later, they broadcast another bulletin, which included the suspect’s name. Bobby Ortiz. That didn’t make much sense to me.”

  “Ortiz was in a rival gang from Reyes. They speculated that the shooting was some sort of gang feud.”

  “I found that out later.”

  “So what didn’t make sense?”

  “How did Lawton and Garcetti know this? I interviewed everyone there. The mother, neighbors, people on the street who might have seen something. But no one saw or knew anything. Not a damn thing. So—and look, I know this wasn’t my place—I went to Lawton and Garcetti and asked them how they got the description. They said someone at the scene told them that. Someone I must have missed.”

  Nowak pushed away what was left of his English muffin. His coffee was cold now. He looked down at it. I think he was deciding how much more of the story he wanted to tell me. But I knew he would tell me all of it. He’d been holding this inside himself for too long. Just like me. Gary Nowak had his own demons to deal with from the past and the choices he had made in his life.

  “I bought that explanation,” he said. “I bought it then, anyway. I mean, these were experienced detectives, and I was a kid fresh out of the academy. Besides, why would they make up a story like that? And so I believed that I was the one who’d messed up the investigation by not getting the description and the name of the suspect. I felt bad about that. But Lawton and Garcetti had caught it in time, so no real harm was done.”

  “Except they never caught Bobby Ortiz.”

  “I did.”

  I stared at him. “You caught Ortiz? When?”

  “A few days after the shooting. The whole thing was on my mind because I thought I’d screwed up at the crime scene. So I studied the wanted bulletin and information and a picture of Ortiz just in case I found out something about him on the street. I did better than that. I saw him. Standing there on the street, a few blocks away from his house as if he didn’t have a care in the world.”

  “And you arrested him?”

  “Sure. What else was I going to do? I took him back to the precinct, turned him over to the booking desk, and went home that night feeling damn good about myself as a police officer.”

  I was confused.

  “There’s nothing in the records about Ortiz being arrested and booked at that precinct.”

  “Yes, so I found out later.”

  “Why not?”

  “When I got to work the next day, I learned that the suspect I’d picked up had been released without bail. No charges were ever filed. And no one could explain to me why. So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I went back to the investigating officers on the case, Lawton and Garcetti. But Lawton, really. Like I said, I’d been impressed with him on the street at the crime scene, and I figured he’d help me get to the bottom of this. I thought he’d be as furious as I was that Ortiz was gone. But he wasn’t.”

  “What did Lawton say?”

  “He told me that I’d gotten the wrong man. That the person I picked up wasn’t Bobby Ortiz, just someone who bore a resemblance to him.”

  “Okay, you could have gotten the wron
g man, I suppose.”

  “It was Ortiz.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He told me that was who he was. Like I said, he didn’t seem too worried until I slapped the handcuffs on him. Then he was just confused.”

  “And you told Lawton and Garcetti that you were certain you hadn’t make a mistake on Ortiz?”

  “Right. At first, Lawton—he did most of the talking—was very nice and solicitous with me. But then when I kept pressing my point and insisting that I had picked up the right man and that a mistake had let a shooting suspect go free, he became more confrontational. Finally, he barked at me that I’d screwed up the investigation at the crime scene and now I’d screwed up this too.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that I knew what I knew, and that if he didn’t want to listen to me I’d take it to someone higher up in the chain of command and let them sort it out. Lawton got really mad at me then. It got very ugly.”

  “Did you do that? Go to someone higher up?”

  “I never got the chance. There’d been a big drug robbery from the evidence room in the precinct several months earlier. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug evidence seized from crime scenes had disappeared. Out of nowhere, I was informed that I was a suspect. That an informant had fingered me as selling the drugs on the street of my beat. It didn’t make sense. I’d barely been at the precinct when the drugs were stolen out of the evidence room. And, in the end, I was never charged with anything. But the damage was done. I was smeared with the stench of corruption. They transferred me off my beat to a desk job in the property room. Some irony, huh? I’m accused of stealing evidence, and my job is now watching it at the station. Well, that was one of the real dead-end jobs at the precinct, and I was pretty sure I would never get back on the street again. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career cataloging police property. So gave I gave up my dream of being a police officer.”

  “And you think Brad Lawton was the one who fingered you, who short-circuited your career?”