As I watched Aida Valentin Lucenti search her soul for an answer, I knew I was looking at a tormented human being. Her face was ashen, her melon-tinged lips twisted in agony. She stared at the pile of dusty posters, her fingers again doing their unconscious drumming.
She’d already answered the question, I realized, whatever she chose to say. I wondered whether she would put her reply into words, or let her body speak for her. Finally, she turned to me, her face a mixture of resignation and pleading. “He might,” she whispered, “he might.”
It was like glimpsing an enormous room through a tiny peephole. Behind the glossy façade, under the hard-seeming exterior, was a terribly frightened woman. She, as much as I, as much as Detective Button, had come to believe that Art Lucenti had killed Linda Ritchie.
The Flaherty living room had seen a hasty clearing of children. On the colorful rag rug lay a Cabbage Patch doll that must have been Jenny’s, a chemistry set I couldn’t believe Chris was old enough for, and a pull toy of baby Andy’s. From upstairs I could hear the sounds of reluctant kids being put to bed—splashes from the bath, cries of “Where’s my Teddy?” and, from Chris’s room, a plaintive plea to pipe down so he could hear “Knight Rider.”
Pat, lowering his bulk onto the chintz-covered sofa, smiled apologetically. “The joys of fatherhood,” he joked.
The kids had left the downstairs TV on. In spite of myself, I was drawn to it. Pat saw my eyes stray to the screen and kidded, “You and Todd Lessek won’t be on tonight, Cass. That’s yesterday’s news.”
“It’s not that,” I responded absently, my attention caught by the news story. “Here it comes.” I pointed as Peter Jennings showed the clip.
Flaherty grunted his understanding as the tape rolled. Hundreds of paralyzed veterans were demonstrating in Washington to protest budget cutbacks. They carried signs demanding access to public buildings and increased aid for the disabled. I scanned the screen for a familiar face.
“Your brother went to the demo?” Pat asked interestedly.
I nodded. “He said he was going. With his roommate Gene Kavanaugh and their companion. They have a special van.”
The vets were orderly, even cheerful, in their militancy. They wore parts of uniforms—Army jackets, caps, even Green Berets, dotted the crowd. Most were wheelchair-bound; some, like my brother Ron, were quadriplegics, unable to move their own chairs. They were either motorized or pushed by buddies. The signs read BUILD RAMPS, NOT BOMBS, and ACCESS NOW! A spokesman talked, his voice cracking from the cold, of the way vets felt about being denied access to housing, to public buildings, to veterans’ benefits, in the country for which they’d given so much. I was moved, and I tried to see Ron in the crowd, but I saw only people who reminded me of him.
“How’s he doing,” Pat asked, “since he left the VA hospital?”
I turned and smiled. “Great,” I replied, “really great. He’s heavily into computers. He’s got one of his own, and he’s taking classes at Kent. They’ve got a special computer program for the disabled. Plus he’s into ham radio. He can’t get out of his chair, but he can talk to Switzerland.” I shook my head in admiration.
“And,” I went on, warming to the subject, “he and Gene have a new attendant. He’s a real character. His name is Zack and he’s a Vietnam vet who went from drugs to Jesus, so you never know whether he’s going to say ‘Praise the Lord’ or ‘Fuck you’ in any given situation.” I joined in Pat’s appreciative laughter. “Zack and Gene are both born-agains; Ron says it’s like living in a revival meeting, but they really seem pretty happy together.”
“You saw him over Christmas?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking away. Christmas was a minefield of emotions. Happiness is relative, and I still felt a searing pain when I saw my once-tall brother folded into an electric wheelchair. I wasn’t ready to talk about it, not even to as old a friend as Pat Flaherty.
“I think Art Lucenti killed Linda,” I said abruptly.
“I thought you had your money on Todd Lessek,” Pat replied. He went along with the change of subject with a grace I was grateful for.
“If I did,” I smiled wanly, “I guess I lost it. Lessek’s hanging tough, denying it all. So’s Bellfield, and he’s already admitted every other crime in the book.”
“Why would Art kill her? Because he was being blackmailed?”
“Or because he found out Aida was.” My enthusiasm was returning, my voice becoming animated as I began to make my case. “You and I may not think her record was so bad,” I explained, “but for Art to see her put through hell in the press—”
“What about Nilda?”
“Who’s Nilda?”
“Nilda Vargas, Aida’s co-defendant?”
“Nilda—oh, the name I saw written on Aida’s rap sheet. What about her?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what? Pat”—I was getting exasperated—“what are you talking about?”
“I can’t believe you don’t know. Nilda Vargas was notorious, for God’s sake.”
“Why?” I all but shouted, my patience exhausted.
“She killed people.”
24
“My God.” I stopped the bentwood rocker and tried to take it in. “Who’d she kill? And where is she now?”
“She’s dead,” Pat replied in a flat voice unlike his own. “Died of an overdose. As to who she killed—I don’t remember names or anything. There were too many, for one thing.” His mouth twisted. “The papers called it a ‘crime spree.’ They nicknamed her and her boyfriend ‘the South Bronx Bonnie and Clyde.’” Pat’s tone was sarcastic and bitter. “I can’t believe you don’t remember it!” he exclaimed. “It was a huge media circus. The Son of Sam of its day.”
“Just what ‘day’ are we talking about?”
“Oh, God. Nineteen seventy, seventy-one. Somewhere in there.”
“I was probably still in college in Ohio,” I reminded him, “not paying much attention to the New York crime scene.”
“It was her being a girl that caused the publicity storm,” he explained. “Otherwise, it would have been a routine story. Nelson Rodriguez”—he had begun to assume a lecturing tone—“was the leader of a two-bit gang called the Savage Machos.” He cleared his throat. “Nilda Vargas became his girl. She was good at roles, Nilda—she played one for me, all right,” he added, with a note of anger I couldn’t understand. “Only for me she played the good little client, always coming to court on time, going to see her probation officer, that kind of thing. With Nelson, she played gang sweetheart, Macho Deb all the way—leather miniskirt, gang colors—the whole bit. Down to going with him on his robberies. Small businessmen, mostly on the Grand Concourse, and there were plenty of liquor stores, delis, cleaning stores, just ripe for the picking. The Machos would make the customers hit the floor and when they had the money, they’d shoot everyone in the head. Didn’t matter if they were young or old or pregnant women or how much they begged them, the proprietor would get it. Didn’t matter that he’d given them all he had without a fight; he was dead the minute they walked into his place.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Nice people.”
“Yeah,” he agreed sourly. “Finally, one of the victims lived. He led the cops to Nelson Rodriguez and the gang.”
“Including Nilda Vargas?”
“Nilda was never caught,” he explained. “Her body was found a few months later in a shooting gallery. Dead of an overdose.”
“And she and Aida were co-defendants,” I mused out loud. “So in addition to her criminal record, Aida faces guilt by association with Nilda Vargas.”
“It gets better,” Pat said. His face was chalky white above the red beard; the freckles that dotted his face in summer had faded. “It wasn’t widely known, but Aida Valentin was living in the abandoned building where Nilda died.”
“So Aida harbored a fugitive? A little accessory-after-the-fact stuff?”
Pat’s answering smile was sardonic. “The pe
nal law prefers to call it criminal facilitation.”
“Is it enough to kill for?”
Pat shrugged. “Maybe,” he replied. “Put it together with the rest of the stuff, picture it splashed all over the Post. If it had come out during the campaign, Art would have been spending a lot of time defending his wife instead of getting elected.”
“But that brings it back to the damned election!” I hit the arm of the chair in frustration.
“What’s that mean?”
I gave him the same reasoning Duncan Pitt the fire marshal had laid on me. “Which means,” I concluded, “that Art had a hell of a motive to kill Linda before November, but a pretty weak one in January.”
“Maybe it just piled up,” Pat suggested. His face was drawn in thought. “This Linda liked to turn the screws, you said?”
I nodded, recalling her many petty cruelties.
“Does Art know Linda was blackmailing Aida?” Pat asked.
I thought about it. “No,” I said definitely. “Aida seemed very concerned that Art shouldn’t know.”
“Does Art know about Aida’s past?”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t have any reason, just a feeling.”
“On the other hand”—Pat was beginning to sound like a Jesuit—“Aida may think she’s kept her secret, but what if Linda told Art the truth—and Art went berserk when he realized Linda was squeezing Aida?”
“I like it,” I said, my mind conjuring up a sharp visual memory of Aida, sitting in the dusty little room, brooding on the possibility of her husband’s guilt. “I could see that. Art’s got a kind of old-fashioned machismo that says you take it on the chin for yourself, but you die to protect the womenfolk.”
“The note you mentioned,” Pat began slowly, “what if Art found one, realized what Linda was up to—”
“The note!” I cried. I calmed down and told Pat about Donna Healy’s supercilious amusement at Aida’s poor spelling. “But what if the name wasn’t Linda spelled wrong, but Nilda?” I finished in triumph. “That would prove Aida was being blackmailed over the Nilda business.”
Pat wasn’t with me. Not entirely. He gazed into his firepace with a faraway expression on his face. “God, Nilda,” he laughed. “Even dead thirteen years, that girl’s trouble. The shortest miniskirts and the tallest platform shoes in the South Bronx—and that was saying something. She was sharp and funny. I swear if she hadn’t become Nelson’s girl, she could have been anything she wanted to be.”
“Sounds like you had more than a lawyer-client relationship,” I commented.
“We were all pretty gung-ho in those days,” he answered with a smile. “We were going to save the South Bronx single-handed. You may be too young to remember.”
What I remembered was an idealistic college student who’d gone into the tomato fields of Northwest Ohio to help the migrant farmworkers and had gotten a bigger dose of radical politics than she’d bargained for. “I remember.”
“Okay. Then you know how we all felt. Part of it was that the traditional distance between lawyer and client made no sense in that context. We were close to our clients as people, and proud of it. So when Nilda started hanging around the office, doing me favors, bringing me little things, it seemed okay. I was glad that she was going to school and seeing her probation officer and staying out of trouble because she wanted my approval. What I didn’t see”—he looked away, his face deadly serious—“was that she wanted something else—something I couldn’t give.”
“Like what?” I thought I knew, but I wanted it from him.
“She was a ghetto kid,” he explained. His face was pinched and his voice tight. “She knew more about sex at fifteen than I did at twenty-five—and my two years in the seminary didn’t help one bit. I was a naïve idiot and the only person in the office who didn’t see what was happening.
“It was Christmas,” he went on, clearing his throat. “We had a tree in the office. Red and green balls and somebody’s leftover Christmas lights. Nilda hung two Christmas balls from her ears like huge glowing earrings and then pranced and danced all around the office, her little ass bouncing under that skirt. She was all over me, Cass. Perching on my desk, sitting in my lap, running her fingers through my hair. Even I had to get the picture. Everyone kidded me about her anyway, but finally I couldn’t stand it. I told her to keep her hands to herself. She got mad, called me filthy names in Spanish, and stormed out of the office. The next thing I heard,” he said with a shrug, “she’d started going with Nelson Rodriguez. No more school, no more probation—just meaner and meaner crimes.”
I sounded a skeptical note. “All that, just because you—”
“Just because I rejected her as a woman?” Pat’s tone was harsh, but it was directed at himself as well as me. “Because that’s how she saw it. She was a kid under all that sex—a kid with her first crush on an adult male who should have known how to handle it. But I didn’t. I made it worse.”
I said nothing, but I hoped the look I was giving him expressed my sympathy. I decided it didn’t and reached out my hand. He took it with a rueful smile.
“I tried to talk to her,” Pat went on, his voice tight, “but she was finished with me. She just laughed and called me maricón.” Spanish for “queer.” It figured.
“It sounds to me,” I said tentatively, “as though the real problem wasn’t that she came on to you, but that you responded. You wanted her, but you couldn’t admit it to yourself.”
Pat’s face reddened and he snapped, “Thank you for the pop psychology, Cass, but I’ve managed to figure out that little insight all by myself.”
It was my turn to blush. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound like a smartass.”
Pat sighed. “I remember at the time feeling good that I’d withstood temptation. Saint Patrick of the Slums wrestling with the devil.” He gave a wan, bitter smile. “It was only later—much later—that I realized how in saving my own soul, I’d lost Nilda’s.”
There wasn’t much more to be said. I thought about the young Pat Flaherty, the young Nilda Vargas, the young Aida Valentin. None of my thoughts, however, seemed to bring me any closer to the killer of Linda Ritchie.
Then it hit me. A chill ran through me in spite of the fire in Pat’s fireplace.
“Pat,” I croaked, “what if the woman we think is Aida Valentin Lucenti is really Nilda Vargas? What if she’s not dead?”
“Too much TV, Cass,” Pat protested, waving a pudgy hand. “That’s crazy.”
“Is it? What about—”
“Cass!” Flaherty was getting angry. “I knew them!”
“How many years ago?” I shot back. “You said yourself that Aida’s changed.”
“Yes, but not …” he broke off, lost in thought.
I pressed my advantage. “That would explain her running away from you at the fundraiser,” I urged. “She was afraid you’d recognize her close-up.”
Pat remained silent. I continued to think out loud. “It fits, Pat, it really does. Remember those discrepancies in Aida’s application to the drug program? They make sense if you realize that Nilda was trying her best to remember the details of Aida’s past. It also explains how she became the star of the drug program—she was never an addict to begin with!”
Other details began to come back to me, details Donna Healy had put her own interpretation on, but which now had a new significance. “It explains why Mrs. Lucenti’s not too keen on visiting the relatives in Puerto Rico. They’re Aida’s family, but she plays the Nuyorican so they think she’s just Aida gone Anglo.”
When Flaherty finally spoke, it was with a hollow voice that told me he was taking the possibility very seriously. “It was summer when she died,” he said, “and the body was there for over a week. Bodies swell in the heat, and the maggots come. Not to mention the rats.” I had the distinct feeling this was not the first time he had thought about a body rotting in a South Bronx tenement. “Nilda’s mother was a junkie
,” he continued, lifting anguished blue eyes to meet mine. “She’d have identified anything they put in front of her as a daughter.”
“And the medical examiner does a fingerprint check only when he hasn’t got a family member’s ID,” I remembered. Pat gave me a funny look, but said nothing. Then I recalled the rats: no fingers, no fingerprints.
“All she had to do,” Pat said, “was switch their clothes and identification. They looked enough alike that they could pass for one another if you didn’t know them,” he added. “And jewelry,” I agreed slowly. It was a grisly thought. One girl pulling earrings out of dead ears and putting them into her own, then putting her own gold rings through the holes in the dead girl’s ears.
“Pat,” I exclaimed, “when did Nilda die?”
“August.” He frowned with concentration. “August—somewhere around the fifteenth. I remember going to church—holy day of obligation.”
Whatever that was. “Aida applied to the drug program on the eleventh of August,” I said.
“But could she really pass herself off as Aida?” Skepticism was returning to Pat’s face and voice.
I gave it serious thought. “She’d have Aida’s birth certificate and her Medicaid card. She deliberately went to another borough, where she wasn’t known. And—”
“And she changed her looks,” Pat finished. “New hairstyle, modeling classes. She didn’t look like the old Aida or the old Nilda. She was okay as long as she didn’t get busted.”
“Fingerprints!” I all but shouted. “That’s it! That’s the clincher. That no-show job that caused all the fuss?” Pat nodded. “She had to quit that job. They were after her to come in and be fingerprinted. It’s routine.”
“It’s routine”—Pat shook his head—“unless you happen to be wanted for murder under another name.”
I took my thoughts one step further. “Linda,” I said confidently. “I’ll bet that’s what started her wondering—and snooping. She was working for Art when the whole no-show job thing blew up. She must have sensed that Aida was afraid, and, with her instinct for the jugular, she decided to find out why.”
Where Nobody Dies Page 23
