The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  “So no one will be able to find out who did that to Victor?” Camille Reyes asked me now.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reyes,” I said. “It’s been too long. The best hope at first was that Ortiz was the shooter, but we know he couldn’t have been because he was in police custody. Then I thought it was Brad Lawton, but that doesn’t seem to be true now either. That leaves us with the gang thing again and, after all this time, there are just too many possibilities.”

  At that point, all her strength, all her resolve, all her determination fell apart. She began to cry. I walked over, put my arm around her, and tried to comfort her as best I could. At some point, I began to cry along with her. She was crying for her lost dead son. Me, I was crying for something I’d lost too, I guess. The redemption I’d hoped to find for myself by solving the Reyes mystery. I’d done a lot of good things, but I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t been able to help this woman.

  “Maybe if the police had looked harder at the time, they would have caught whoever did this to my son,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “But they didn’t care.”

  “The police have a lot of cases. They’re very busy.”

  “Not too busy to be drinking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of the cops who talked to me that night. When he asked about my son, he had liquor on his breath. I could smell it on him. All I could think about was how my son was lying there and so badly hurt, and this cop was probably more concerned about getting his next drink.”

  “What cop are you talking about?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  “Not the first one. Not the one in uniform. He was very nice, very solicitous.”

  That would have been Gary Nowak.

  “So it was one of the detectives who showed up afterward?”

  “Yes. Not Lawton. The other one. I don’t remember his name after all this time. Besides, he barely spoke to me. All I think he cared about that night was getting his next drink.”

  “Garcetti,” I told her. “His name was Jimmy Garcetti.”

  After I left Camille Reyes’s place, I kept thinking about what she said. Garcetti was drunk that night. Not a surprise that Garcetti was drinking on the job. At least now it wouldn’t be a surprise. But Garcetti told me his drinking started after he stopped working with Lawton, that he’d been a good cop back in those days before turning to the bottle. But it appeared that wasn’t true. Of course, drunks say a lot of things that aren’t true, and maybe he’d just gotten his time frame messed up from too much booze. But if he’d been wrong about that, what else had he told me that wasn’t true?

  There was something else bothering me too. Something that had bothered me back at the very beginning of the Reyes story, but I’d never taken the time to pursue.

  Why hadn’t Santiago tried to talk to Lawton and Garcetti?

  Both of them said he never did.

  And there was no reference to an interview with either Lawton or Garcetti from the files I’d taken from Santiago’s home.

  They were the investigating officers on the Reyes case and they were both still on the force, so they should have been the first people Santiago went to for information. Just like I did. Unless . . .

  And then, just as quickly as I had posed the question to myself, I suddenly knew the answer.

  Lawton and Garcetti were suspects.

  And a veteran investigator like Santiago never started on a case by talking to the suspects. He first accumulated as much evidence as he could against them. Then, and only then, did he make his move to approach the suspects with what he had. And if there was more than one suspect, as in this case, he always picked the weakest, the most malleable, the easiest-to-turn suspect.

  But Lawton had known about Santiago asking questions about the Reyes case. How did he find out?

  I raced home and went through Santiago’s file again. There was still nothing there about either Lawton or Garcetti. But on one of the last pages, I found a phone number that he’d scribbled on the side of the page.

  It was a 718 number.

  The area code for the Bronx.

  I dialed the number. It rang twice, and then a man’s voice came on the line and identified himself as a detective.

  “I’m looking for Jimmy Garcetti,” I said. “Do I have the right precinct?”

  “This is Jimmy’s extension, but he’s not here right now.”

  “Any idea where I could find him?”

  “He’s . . . uh, out on a case right now.”

  I had a pretty good idea of where Garcetti was at the moment, and it wasn’t investigating any case.

  “Can I help you with something?” the detective asked.

  I hung up the phone.

  It wasn’t hard to find Garcetti. I just hung out at a couple of bars near his precinct in the Bronx, figuring I’d run into him sooner or later. And that’s exactly what happened. I walked into a bar and there he was, holding court with what appeared to be a lot of other regulars. They were talking about everything from the Yankees to sexual exploits to the sad state of law enforcement today.

  I nursed a beer, stood next to them for a while, and eventually joined the conversation. I don’t think Garcetti recognized me as the reporter who had interviewed him before. He looked pretty far gone at this point. Eventually, some of the others drifted away, and I found myself standing next to him.

  “How are things looking for your retirement?” I asked casually.

  “Getting close,” he muttered, talking more to himself than to me.

  “Yep, pretty soon you’ll be on that fishing boat and away from all this crap here, huh, Jimmy?”

  He gave me a quizzical look.

  “Do I know you?”

  “We met a few weeks ago.”

  “Are you on the force?”

  “I’m a reporter. Gil Malloy from the Daily News. We talked about one of your old cases. The Victor Reyes shooting.”

  He looked down at the drink in front of him.

  “Who would have thought that damn kid would die and all this would happen over him?” he said.

  “Helluva bad end for your old partner.”

  “Yeah, well . . . Brad did a lot of bad things.”

  “I’ll bet you knew about some of them, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The drug theft in the Bronx back when you two were together here. The way he was using the stolen drugs to buy information on the street and make high-profile busts. Even if he didn’t come right out and tell you, you must have figured it out, Jimmy.”

  “I never knew anything about any of that stuff Brad was supposed to have done when we were together.”

  “What about now?”

  “Like I told you before, Brad and me lost touch. We were never very close after he left the Bronx.”

  “But you were still close enough to tell him about Santiago, weren’t you?”

  I saw a flash of concern in his eyes. Even through the alcohol haze.

  “Santiago came to you and told you what he thought happened to Reyes, didn’t he, Jimmy?”

  Garcetti didn’t say anything.

  “Santiago figured it out. He figured out about the drug theft in the Bronx, how Lawton was using Reyes, and putting it all together he suspected that Lawton had shot Reyes to shut him up. Then Santiago came to you and told you what he thought. He was probably hoping to pressure you into helping him make a case against Lawton. But instead you called Lawton and told him what Santiago was doing.”

  Still nothing.

  “And then Santiago got killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

  Garcetti picked up his glass, finished off what was left of his drink, and then signaled the bartender for another.

  “How’d that make you feel?”

  “How
the hell do you think it made me feel?”

  “You knew that Lawton was responsible. You knew he had gotten rid of Santiago because Santiago suspected he had shot Reyes that night. And you knew you bore part of the guilt for Santiago’s death too because you had gone to Lawton and told him what Santiago was doing.”

  Garcetti took a big gulp of his drink, downing almost half the glass.

  “Except Lawton didn’t shoot Reyes, did he?” I said to him.

  “No, Brad wasn’t there.”

  “But you were, right, Jimmy?”

  Garcetti reached into his pocket now and pulled out a picture. He put it down on the bar in front of us. It was a picture of a boat. A fishing boat.

  For just a second, I thought he hadn’t heard me or maybe had somehow forgotten I was there.

  “Three months, two weeks, one day,” he muttered again. “Three months, two weeks, one day—and then I could be on this boat. I bought it a couple of years ago. I figured that with the low cost of living down there in Florida, I could live on my pension and spend all my days fishing and trying to forget I ever worked in this hellhole of a city. That was my dream. That’s what kept me going all those years. But it all depended on Brad. Brad and me, we’ve always needed each other in some strange way. Now Brad is dead, and me . . .”

  He stared down at the picture of the boat and finished his drink.

  “I know you might find this hard to believe,” Garcetti said, “but I was ambitious back then too. Not ambitious like Brad was. But I wanted a future in the department. And Brad, well, he was the perfect partner for me. Everyone could see he was going places. And he was my partner. Me and Brad, we were going to go places together. At least that’s the way I figured it then.

  “So when Brad came to me and said he had a big problem—that the Reyes kid was talking about joining the force and could spill all sorts of secrets about what Brad was doing—well, that became my problem too. I was linked to Brad’s rising star. I needed to make sure no one did anything to dim that star.

  “He’d never told me in so many words about the drug theft. But I pretty much figured it out. Hell, he was getting all this information on the street. It didn’t come free, I knew that. He had to be giving them something. Money or drugs. He didn’t have much money then, so drugs seemed to be the obvious choice.

  “Anyway, when I heard about Reyes that day, Brad was all upset. He kept talking about how this could end his career if the Reyes kid ever got on the police force. Brad didn’t know what to do. Me, I knew what to do. I drank. I kept drinking all that day and into the evening. By that time, I was pretty far gone.

  “All I kept thinking about was how everything Brad and me had been doing was going to go down the drain if Brad got implicated in the drug theft. He was my ticket to the top. Without him, I had nothing. I had had it all in front of me and now it was all going to fall apart. Because of this damn Reyes kid. And the drunker I got, the more angry I got at Reyes.

  “Finally, I called his house. I told him to meet me out front. I told him I had some ideas on how to help him pass the police boards and get in the academy, or some crap like that. I think at that point I just wanted to talk to the kid. That’s all. At least, that’s what I try to tell myself now.

  “I don’t remember a whole lot else that happened after that. Like I said, I kept putting away the booze pretty hard. But I do remember parking my car on the street down from his house and watching until he came out. But from far away and an angle where he couldn’t easily see me. Sure enough, he came out on the street to wait for me. I just sat there and watched him for a long time, the anger building up in me as I thought about the damage he was doing to Brad and me. I had a bottle with me in the car. I kept drinking from it and getter madder and madder as I watched him.

  “Finally, I guess he figured I wasn’t going to show so he turned around and started back toward the front door of his building. I gunned the car and drove up behind him. He never saw me. Something snapped inside me, I guess. I took out my gun and pointed it out the open window of the car at him. I like to tell myself that I didn’t really want to kill the kid. Or mess him up too badly. I just wanted to scare him. But I don’t really know what happened at that instant. All I know is that I pulled the trigger and the shot hit him in the back. He went down, and I sped off.

  “When I called Brad and told him what I’d done, he made sure he got us assigned to the case. He got there first. He made me go somewhere and drink coffee and splash cold water on my face before I showed up at the crime scene. To try to sober me up, you know. It helped a bit, but I was still in pretty bad shape. And I made a bad mistake. He said we needed to point the finger of suspicion at someone else, one of the gang members in the area. So I put out an arrest bulletin for the Ortiz kid, figuring he was a likely choice. I didn’t know Brad had picked him up that night as one of his snitches, and that Brad had been at the precinct questioning him and getting information at the moment I shot Reyes. Brad made sure no one ever got to the Ortiz kid to find out the truth. I was glad he did. But I knew he didn’t do it to protect me. He was looking to protect himself. Because if I went down for the shooting, then everything about him and Reyes would come out. So I fingered Ortiz, he made sure Ortiz disappeared, and then everyone forgot about the whole thing.”

  “Until Roberto Santiago,” I said. “And then me. We came around asking questions about it again.”

  He nodded.

  “Not long after Reyes died, Brad put in for a transfer. He didn’t want to be my partner anymore. That’s when I realized I wasn’t going along with him on his rise to the top. But he still looked out for me. A couple of times when I got screwed up with my drinking and got into trouble with the department, he went to bat for me. I would have lost my pension except for him. Brad said he’d make sure I got the pension. He knew how important that was for me. It was a little deal Brad and I made, I guess. I got to keep drinking and not worry about messing up my pension. In return, I kept my mouth shut and Brad got to keep on being the golden boy of the department. We’d been partners once, and being partners on the street . . . well, that’s a bond that can never be completely broken.”

  I thought about that and wondered if Jimmy Garcetti might have actually been a good cop once a long time ago.

  “But now you can’t live with the secret of the Reyes shooting without him, can you?” I said. “You can’t keep quiet about it anymore. Because it’s all falling apart now and sooner or later someone besides me will put it together and come looking for you. It’s time to do the right thing first, Jimmy. To come clean once and for all.”

  “They’ll send me to jail. A cop doesn’t stand much chance in jail, Malloy. Especially an old cop.”

  “Maybe they won’t,” I said. “There were extenuating circumstances and it was a long time ago.”

  “They’ll take away my pension.”

  He took another look at the picture of the fishing boat he’d bought in Florida, where he’d dreamed for so long of retiring and forgetting about the Bronx and the NYPD and Victor Reyes and all the rest of it.

  “Are you going to tell everyone about this?” he asked me.

  “You could tell them yourself.”

  “It’s too late for that. And yes, you’re right, I guess it is time for me to finally do something right.”

  I still have nightmares about what happened next.

  He reached under the jacket he was wearing and came out with his gun.

  At first, I thought he might shoot me.

  But that wasn’t going to be his play.

  Instead, he pointed the gun at his own head.

  “Damn, I sure would have liked that fishing boat—”

  “No!” I shouted.

  But it was too late.

  Then there was the sound of a gunshot.

  Jimmy Garcetti was still holding the picture of the fishing boat in his ha
nd when he dropped to the floor dead.

  Chapter 53

  DID YOU TELL Mrs. Reyes about what happened to her son?” Dr. Landis asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “That must have given you a sense of accomplishing something out of all this. That was your goal when you set out on this story, wasn’t it? To find out for her who shot her son and why. You did that. You did the job that you set out to do.”

  “Except it wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. I think she hoped—I know I did—that there would be some meaning, some logic behind his death that could explain how a tragedy like this could happen. That his death had some significance, even if his life never did. But there was no meaning, no significance, no reason behind Reyes’s death. It was just a stupid accident. I wish Lawton had done it so there was someone that she—and me too—could truly be angry at. Instead, the only person to blame was a drunken old cop who made a mistake one night and lived with the memory of that until it became too much for him to bear.”

  “You told the truth. That’s all that you can do.”

  “Sometimes the truth doesn’t seem like enough.”

  I thought about Camille Reyes sitting in her little apartment, staring at the picture of her dead son as I left there for the last time. About Roberto Santiago’s widow and her three children on Staten Island. And about Lee Mathis in that wheelchair and hooked up to an oxygen machine, waiting to die with the guilt of how his actions contributed to the death of his son.

  “There are no happy endings here,” I said.

  “Didn’t you once tell me that happy endings don’t sell newspapers?”

  “I just wanted a happy ending on this one,” I said.

  “What will you do now?” Landis asked.

  “Everyone keeps asking me that question.”