Bronx Noir

by S. J. Rozan

  That was July. By August she was wasted, fresh girls came in, even a blond one, and Jasmine was out on the street.

  The streets in the Hunts Point area were tough. The strip club was like a high school where they prepare you for the rigors of real life. The streets were the real life. Jasmine wandered over toward Spofford. Toward the juvie correctional facility, toward the water of the East River, and toward the transfer station. Hunts Point was famous for its meat market—truckloads of beef and pork were sold wholesale in the early morning hours to supermarkets and grocery stores and delis. The neighborhood was also famous for its other meat market, where girls showed themselves and sold themselves, little by little, until nothing was left and they died. A baseball jacket and G-string was the normal uniform here, with a pair of stilettos and a Yankees cap as accessories.

  Jasmine wore sneakers, same ones she had left home in a half-dozen weeks earlier. She had on a Mets jacket and cutoff shorts, cut off so high there was really hardly any point to them at all. Her hair was in a ponytail, held by a rubberband. In one pocket she had a cigarette lighter for whatever she could get that needed lighting up, melting down, or smoking. In the other pocket she had a butterfly knife. Young but not entirely stupid.

  One night, so late it was almost morning, Jasmine was negotiating with a gypsy cab driver. He was Indian or Pakistani or Arab or…well, she didn’t care what. He mentioned having drugs, and Jasmine was listening. Then the smile on his face dropped off like a rock sinks in water and he grabbed for her. He tried to pull her into the cab through the driver’s side window. He had her by the head and she had both hands on the door frame to keep from being pulled in. If she could reach for her knife, she’d stab him, she thought fleetingly. But if she let go for a second, he’d win. She’d be in the car with him, and she knew as a fact heartless and cold as a stone that she would never get out of that car alive. Suddenly, the man let go. He was shouting something. There was a funny sound and someone else was shouting too as Jasmine fell sitting onto the asphalt. It took her a minute to focus.

  “You all right?”

  There was a woman standing over her. Jasmine nodded. She couldn’t speak.

  “Here. Have some.” The woman offered Jasmine a bottle and she grabbed it greedily. It was three gulps before Jasmine figured out the bottle had only water in it. She handed it back. They were silent together for a moment.

  “What was that sound?” Jasmine asked. She was holding her head with both hands as though making sure it was still on.

  “What sound?” Yolanda Morales asked back.

  Jasmine shrugged.

  “Oh, maybe it was the glass. I popped that dude’s back window with a rock.” More silence.

  “Thank you,” Jasmine said. She said this quietly and it hurt her. If it hurt her any more, she’d shed a tear. The last thing she’d told her parents was that she was thirteen and didn’t need anyone’s help. This went through her mind, she wasn’t sure why.

  “Maybe you should call it a night,” Yolanda said.

  Jasmine looked up at the woman. The adrenaline had cleared her vision, but it was wearing off and she was returning to her normal stupor.

  “I gotta work.”

  “Come home with me. Get some food, some sleep…”

  “I don’t do women,” Jasmine said as she got back on her feet and started to walk away.

  Yolanda snorted out a laugh.

  The girl turned back to her. “What you laughing at?”

  “Baby girl, I was out on these streets way before you was born. Believe me, if you ain’t done a woman yet, you will. They’ll come a time when you’ll do anything that walks. That’s when you hit rock bottom. Call me then.”

  Yolanda moved off and so did Jasmine, in a different direction, but then she stopped.

  “How am I supposed to call you?”

  Yolanda gave the girl a business card. She worked in one of the offices of St. Athanaisus over by Tiffany Avenue. “We give out food to the hungry.”

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “Not yet, baby girl. Give it time. It’ll come. In the daytime, you got my office address. Anytime you want, you call that number. That’s my home number.”

  “I don’t do women,” Jasmine said again, this time a little louder. Maybe this old lady didn’t hear too well.

  “Quit it,” Yolanda said. “I ain’t axed you to do me. I don’t do women either. Hell, it’s been a long while since I done a man. I’m just offering you a hand up—a place to stay a few days, get a little food in you, a little rest.”

  Jasmine thought this over a moment. She sized up Yolanda and took a chance. “How about a little money now? A little something so I can get what I need and get off the streets.”

  Yolanda smiled. “Nice try, baby girl, but I ain’t got no money.”

  “I got a knife,” Jasmine said. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and tried to open it, but she didn’t quite have the hang of it. The move was clumsy.

  Yolanda laughed. “Maybe so, but I see that taxi man drove away with all his blood still inside of him. Put that thing away fo’ you hurt yourself. Even if you kill me, I still ain’t carrying no money.”

  Jasmine did what she was told and felt a little foolish, but only a little.

  Yolanda walked away calculating how long it would take before she got a phone call in the middle of the night asking for a place to stay. She gave Jasmine a week.

  The next night, 3 a.m., the phone in Yolanda’s one-bedroom apartment rang. Jasmine was sobbing and couldn’t get the words out.

  “Baby girl, I can’t understand you. I’ll come pick you up. Where you at?” She really didn’t even have to ask. The spot Jasmine had worked the night before was the worst territory—secluded, dangerous, and low in traffic. Most johns wouldn’t drive that far from civilization and the ones who did probably wanted to get away with something they couldn’t do where screams might be heard. That was the only spot a small girl like Jasmine could work, especially if she couldn’t flick a butterfly knife open. The older, bigger prostitutes wouldn’t let her near their territory.

  Hard to imagine what rape is to a prostitute. The two young men Jasmine told Yolanda about had done all they wanted with her and some of it involved pain—deliberate, not incidental. It wasn’t until the men were zippering up that it became a rape.

  “Which one of y’all got my money?” Jasmine had said. Her voice was quiet. Shaky. Maybe that’s what gave them the confidence they needed to just laugh at her.

  “What money, bitch?” one asked. He was tall, blond, muscular. Maybe he played football. He smelled good. His hair was short. That was the description Jasmine gave Yolanda.

  The other one, a bit shorter, heavier, sweaty, dark-haired, glasses. He didn’t laugh. He had been the more painful, the more degrading one—this man reached into the car, found an empty forty-ounce beer bottle, and walked up to her. He smashed her in the face twice. She fell to her knees and he slammed the back of her head twice more. She was on hands and knees and would have fallen flat on her chest if she had thought of it, but she wasn’t good at playing the whipped dog yet. She wanted to stay as close to on her feet as she could get. This dark-haired one kicked down on her back several times until she collapsed. He continued to kick until his friend dragged him away, pulled him off her. Then he launched the beer bottle into the night, over a fence.

  “Shit!” The dark-haired guy yelled at her. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” His last kick was aimed at her ear, but he missed her altogether and stumbled back to the car. The car, she remembered in full detail. Porsche, black, New York license plate—YODADY.

  All of this took until sunrise for Jasmine to explain. The story went through her mind so often, starting and stopping at different humiliations. By the time she got to the details of the descriptions, she was broken again, crying herself dry.

  “There, there,” Yolanda said, patting her back. “Let it all out. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I’ll feel better when we
put these guys in jail.”

  For what? were the words Yolanda wanted to say. She wanted to explain that no one was going to care if two white boys beat up a Puerto Rican prostitute. Hell, they wouldn’t care if the prostitute was killed. You could see from the news that you had to murder a whole string of prostitutes before anyone started searching. Instead, she said nothing.

  Jasmine fell asleep on the sofa. Yolanda brought a chair over from the dining room and sat watching her.

  The next day she asked for leave from her job. It was a mission from God she was on, and the priest she ultimately reported to was a man who respected missions from God.

  At the start of September, three weeks of vomit and chills later, Jasmine was mostly clear-eyed. Yolanda’s eyes, however, were bleared from lack of sleep. It was hard work making sure a young drug addict didn’t just escape and get what she wanted by trading herself.

  Yolanda had asked over the last weeks where Jasmine ran off from, who her parents were, what her real name was, but she hadn’t gotten anything more than, “My name is Flor,” which sounded like a lie. She preached at the girl about the value of one’s own name.

  “My father was a very proud man. No money, no education, no fancy nothing, but he had his name and no one could take that away from him. He could give it, but it couldn’t be taken away. You understand?”

  “My father is an asshole,” Jasmine said.

  Yolanda didn’t have an answer for that and gave up on the subject.

  “School’s started already, baby girl,” she announced a few days later.

  “I can’t go to school,” Jasmine answered. Of course, she was right. What were her experiences compared to those of her potential classmates? How could she make a friend? How could she answer, What did you do last summer?

  Yolanda dropped the subject. She wouldn’t know how to enroll the child in a school without being the legal guardian anyway, though she figured that couldn’t be too hard.

  The next day, Yolanda went out for groceries. When she came back, there was no Jasmine.

  “Shit,” she said. It was afternoon. She wouldn’t know where to find the girl until night had fallen.

  Yolanda sat for a moment. She was tired. She tried to calculate the chances that Jasmine had already scored and was shooting up or snorting or smoking something. Chances were good.

  It was near midnight before Yolanda found Jasmine coming out of a parked car right where Farragut Street met Hunts Point Avenue. She was high and giggling, and she didn’t know how many men she’d been with.

  Back in Yolanda’s place, Jasmine fell asleep, and Yolanda made a phone call. When Jasmine woke the next morning, Yolanda was out, and Ray Morales was sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, and reading the Daily News comics. She was frightened and it took a few moments for her to figure out where she was.

  “Who you?” she asked without getting up from the sofa.

  “Ray,” the man said. He flicked his cigarette into an ashtray and turned the page on the comics. Ray was a small man—five-foot-two and maybe 110 pounds. Wiry. He wore shades though there wasn’t much sunlight coming in through any of the windows. His hair was dark and wavy, slicked back. He might have been forty years old like Yolanda, but if he was they had been forty hard years.

  “You know Yolanda?”

  The man looked up and smiled. “No, I just broke in for a cigarette and the comics” He laughed at his own joke. Jasmine wasn’t sure she got it, but she laughed too.

  Ray just sat and read while Jasmine went about her morning business. She took a piece of toast for her breakfast—her hunger was for other things—then headed for the door.

  “Nope,” Ray said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean no. You’re not going out. Yolanda wants you here when she gets back.”

  “I’m just going to the store to get something.”

  “No.”

  “I really need to go.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No infinity. Sit your ass down.”

  Ray looked mad when he said this. He hadn’t taken off the shades and he held his cigarette between index and middle fingers jabbing at Jasmine as he said his nos.

  Jasmine did as she was told, but thought of some ways around this man. Her best option, she thought as she chewed her nails, was to make a dash past him to the door. If he caught up with her, she’d start kicking and screaming rape. With all her bruises, it didn’t seem like it would be that hard to get people to believe her. She was making up her mind to try this, trying to avoid Ray’s shaded eyes, when Yolanda returned.

  “Who’s that?” Jasmine jumped to shout, a finger pointed at Ray.

  “That’s Ray,” Yolanda said. “He’s my husband.”

  Ray smiled again and went back to his comics.

  Ray and Yolanda had married when they were teenagers and divorced a couple of years later when Ray was sentenced to eighteen years in a federal penitentiary for his part in a liquor store robbery that went really, really bad. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but that didn’t matter as much as he thought it should have. He did every bit of his time and collected bottles and cans and did odd jobs for his living now. He lived in an SRO on Bruckner, paying his room rent weekly. Yolanda explained all of this while making sandwiches for the three of them. Jasmine listened, wiping sweat from her brow and scratching at her arms and face.

  “Where’s he going to sleep?” she asked.

  “In my bed,” Yolanda said.

  “I don’t like this. I don’t want him here. No offense,” Jasmine said, turning to Ray. He shrugged and moved on to the sports pages.

  Jasmine’s reaction to coming down off whatever she had taken the night before was mild, but she was twitchy and everyone including her knew that if she had the chance, she’d go out and get high again.

  That night in bed, Ray and Yolanda talked in voices low enough to hear the creaking of the floorboards if Jasmine got any bright ideas.

  “She’s not Rosita,” Ray said.

  “I know that.”

  “And she never will be.”

  “I know that too.”

  “And no matter what you do for this girl, you’ll never get Rosita back.”

  “Shut up and go to sleep,” Yolanda said. When he had done as she told him, she got out of bed, put on a robe, and went out to the living room to watch Jasmine sleep.

  Twice more that same week, Jasmine slipped out of the apartment. Both times Ray and Yolanda found her before she could do herself any harm.

  “You can’t do that, baby girl,” Yolanda said both times. “These streets are bad. This is New York. They’ll eat you up and they won’t even spit out the bones.”

  Each time, Jasmine cried and complained, cursed and argued, but she said she understood and promised never to hit the streets again.

  The third time, Ray and Yolanda were too late. They walked along Tiffany all the way down to the docks near Viele Avenue. Homeless people sometimes hung out there since you could fish, but there were none that night. Just a vehicle with its lights on.

  “What kind of car is that?” Yolanda asked. She had stopped in her tracks a hundred feet away and grabbed Ray’s elbow.

  “That? That’s a Porsche.”

  “Oh no.” Yolanda went off at a sprint toward the car. The driver noticed her and pulled out fast.

  “License plate, license plate!” Yolanda yelled out.

  Ray ran into the street and squatted to get a better look at the rear of the car as it pulled away. When it had turned a corner and disappeared, he jogged over to Yolanda’s side.

  Yolanda sat amongst the weeds on the crumbled concrete of what had once been a sidewalk and cradled Jasmine’s head on her lap and soothed her brow. She wept. The small girl’s body was naked and broken. The beating had been more vicious than before, and by the time Ray and Yolanda had arrived, the life had been shaken and battered out of her.

  Ray didn’t know what to say. He told her
he had gotten the first three letters of the plate: YOD. Yolanda began to wail, and the sound grew.

  “Yoli. Yoli, that’s not Rosita, Yoli,” Ray tried. He thought this might at least be some tiny consolation. He should have kept his silence.

  “I know that!” Yolanda roared at him. “I know who she is…Just call 911.” She used a hand with blood on it to point out a pay phone across the street.

  Ray jogged across and did as he was told, then jogged back.

  “Yoli, let’s get out of here. I called the police, they’re coming.”

  “Go,” she told him.

  “Yoli, I can’t get mixed up in something like this. You know I can’t. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’ll stay by myself.”

  “Yoli…” He wanted to remind her that her past wasn’t spotless either and that she couldn’t afford a dead girl’s blood on her hands when the police came by, but he couldn’t bring himself to say any of it. “Yoli,” he said again, but she wasn’t listening anymore, just looking into the face of the girl she had known as Jasmine, and when he heard the sirens in the distance, he jogged away. “Yoli!” he called out over his shoulder, but she didn’t move.

  The officers who arrived first on the scene put Yolanda in handcuffs. They asked a few questions, and when she told them she’d prefer to talk to the detectives, they shrugged. Yolanda had put her light jacket on the girl, covering most of her body. She knew that the first officers on the scene probably wouldn’t move it, and if they got a look of the girl’s nudity, there might be jokes and talk that she wouldn’t be able to stand to hear.

  The officers called in a second time for the detectives and crime scene people and quieted down for the wait. After what seemed like an hour, Yolanda heard more sirens approaching. Crime scene technicians set up lights and took pictures and searched halfheartedly through the underbrush.

  Later still, two detectives arrived on the scene. Both men were white and middle-aged. Both wore light trench coats and dark ties. One, “DiRaimo,” he identified himself, was heavy and the other detective called him “Fats.” The other, “Hamilton,” was thin by comparison, but his face was lined with deeper grooves and wrinkles and his teeth hadn’t recovered from smoking days.