Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  A. Yes.

  Q. What did I promise you?

  A. You said you would tell the DA that I help you out.

  Q. Is that the only promise you heard from me, that I would tell the district attorney that you are cooperating in the investigation of these two homicides?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Did I tell you what good this would do?

  A. You told me you didn’t know.

  Q. Then we understand each other.

  A. Sure.

  Q. Do you know an individual whose street name is NeNe?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. How long have you known him?

  A. I met NeNe in jail and I know him for about a year.

  Q. When was the last time you saw NeNe?

  A. The last time that I saw him I was on the street on 138th Street and I was talking to this guy Benny and I was invited to a baptism.

  Q. When you say you were invited to a baptism, what did that mean to you?

  A. A baptism to us means that they’re going to kill somebody, that somebody wasn’t doing too good, he was going to be killed.

  Q. Now Benny said this to you?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Did he tell you where to go, where to come for this baptism?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Where did he say to come?

  A. In the basement where he lived.

  Q. Now describe what you saw after you went inside.

  A. Benny opened the door, when I walked downstairs they opened the room, in one of the rooms they were cutting up a person.

  Q. When you say cutting up a person, did you see what they were cutting up that person with?

  A. With a chain saw.

  Q. Now you said they opened the room for you. Who are they?

  A. I don’t know them.

  Q. If I show you pictures of people would you be able to pick any of them out?

  A. I’ll try.

  Q. All right, what did you see inside the room?

  A. NeNe and somebody else who was tied up and another person they were cutting up.

  Q. The person that was tied up, was that male or female?

  A. A male.

  Q. Now, you say you saw NeNe in there?

  A. Yes.

  Q. What was he doing?

  A. Not good.

  Q. What do you mean by that?

  A. He was sitting down in a chair with his hands tied behind his back.

  Q. Did you see what was being done with the body that was being cut up?

  A. They were cutting up the body and they were putting it in a plastic bag.

  Q. Was anyone speaking to NeNe at this time?

  A. Benny asked him who put out the contract on somebody.

  Q. Who is this somebody?

  A. I don’t know.

  Q. Was his name Teenager?

  A. I don’t know this name.

  Q. You don’t know?

  A. No.

  Q. Wasn’t Teenager there?

  A. I don’t know this name.

  Q. How come you knew Benny and you don’t know Teenager?

  A. I don’t like Benny.

  Q. All right. Now they wanted to know something from NeNe.

  A. They say to him if you say who was this person we’re going to give you your freedom.

  Q. Who was doing the cutting up of the other body when you came in?

  A. Benny was helping.

  Q. Now did you see anything happen to NeNe at that point?

  A. NeNe knew that anyway whether he would talk or not he was going to get killed.

  Q. Did you hear NeNe say anything when he was being questioned?

  A. He was denying he was involved in this. One of the persons in the group said that NeNe was one of the ones who came into the apartment that they were mad about.

  Q. Who was the person who said NeNe was in the apartment, do you remember?

  A. Benny.

  Q. As best you can remember, how long did they question NeNe?

  A. For about five, ten minutes.

  Q. Did anybody do anything to NeNe?

  A. They were mistreating him, hitting him so hard with a gun that he couldn’t talk.

  Q. Then what did they do?

  A. They got mad at NeNe and put him on the table.

  Q. Do you recall what happened after that, after they put NeNe on the table?

  A. Yeah, the first thing I saw was when they cut his member.

  Q. When he was on the table, was he alive?

  A. Yeah, he was alive.

  Q. What did they cut him with?

  A. With a knife.

  Q. Did they do anything else to him that you saw?

  A. They put the saw to his belly, the chain saw, and they started cutting him up. Then Benny shot him with a forty-five twice.

  Q. Shot NeNe?

  A. Sure.

  Q. Was NeNe alive at that time, was he alive when they were sawing him or were the bullets already in him?

  A. Half and half. He was real alive when they cut up his belly with the electric buzz saw and then they shoot him in the head before they cut off his arms and legs.

  Q. Mr. Carvallo, do you know why they told you to come to this baptism?

  A. I was working for Benny. I’m a drug addict and was using two hundred a day so I had to do whatever Benny said for money. When I came there that night I stayed forty-five, fifty minutes and then they sent me out to pick up some drugs for them.

  Q. Who are they?

  A. Benny.

  Q. You saw people cutting up other people and you didn’t know one of these criminals by name?

  A. Only Benny. He did everything. He let me in, he shot NeNe, then he cut up NeNe and the other one too.

  Teenager got out of the car carrying a supermarket carton tied with rope. Inside it was about sixty-five thousand dollars, nearly all of it in small bills. He walked it to the front door of the Rincon Social Club, a storefront whose windows and door was painted a tired red. The door, operated by a buzzer, was opened for him and he stepped into a room lit by Christmas tree bulbs hanging on cords along the walls. Benny Velez sat at the small bar. His wife, Carmen, plump and expressionless, sat on a chair alongside the juke box, one hand in the pocket of her crimson baseball jacket, the other held out, the edict of a bored mediator, to separate her children, Letty, eight, and Wanda, nine, who fought with each other for the juke box. At Carmen’s feet were two large bags of groceries.

  “I go shopping in the store and I buy all this food and I am just coming out with all these packages in my arms,” Carmen said, “and Albertito comes running up to me. ‘You cannot go home. All the police is there.’ ”

  “Benny was with you?” Teenager said.

  “Benny was not with me. Benny never carries a package for me in his whole life.”

  “I was on 140th Street,” Benny said.

  “Well, they’re just sitting at the corner waiting for you,” Teenager said.

  “Just for me?” Benny said.

  “Only for you.”

  “They don’t want you?”

  “No. You’re their man.”

  “Who told them to look for me and not for you?”

  “Nesterline got busted,” Teenager said.

  “Why would Nesterline want to be a rat on me?” Benny asked. “I never did anything to Nesterline.”

  “Because he’s a real bad guy, this Nesterline.”

  “Nesterline must get taken off the count,” Benny said.

  “They got him hid away,” Teenager said. “I ask somebody who goes to the Bronx County jail and this guy says to me, ‘Nesterline isn’t in the place. They took him where no one can see him.’ ”

  “What do I do?” Benny said.

  “Go away,” Teenager said.

  Benny stiffened. His fear passed when Teenager held out the carton tied with rope.

  “You go away to Ponce and give this to my mother. She will take care of it for me. I cannot put it in a bank. They might check on me and take all my money. You just give this t
o my mother and stay in PR until all this is over.”

  “How long will this take?” Benny asked.

  “Four, five months,” Teenager said. “They will get tired of this Nesterline. They will see he is a real bad guy. They will throw him out into the street and then we will take him right off the count.”

  Benny nodded. “So, four or five months in San Pedro. That I could take.”

  Teenager shook his head. “Not San Pedro. In San Pedro they would look for you. The cops love to go to San Pedro to look for people. The police in San Pedro meet them at the plane and take them out with girls. You go where you belong. To Salinas. No cop would ever go to Salinas to find anything.”

  “I love this,” Carmen said. She got up and hugged the children at the juke box. “We are going to see Grandma,” she said.

  The two little girls began to jump about. “Grandma!”

  Benny Velez looked at the floor. In Salinas, he had grown up sitting on the road running between fields of sugar cane, with his front teeth pulling the skin off the hard white center of the cane and chewing it down until it could be sucked. When he was twelve, his uncle wanted him to go fishing with him. Benny knew that the uncle went on a small boat and spent the first night sleeping in the boat at La Playa de Ponce and then for the next three days he sat in the sun on the water and caught fish, took them to La Playa de Ponce to sell and then went back out onto the water. The night before he was to go fishing with his uncle, Benny ran away. A month later, his mother left his father and took him to the Bronx. The mother got a job in a factory, and at the end of work one day she came home and was unable to find Benny until ten o’clock that night. He was on the sidewalk in front of a candy store that sold drugs. When the mother announced that she was sending him to his grandmother’s in Salinas, Benny ran away and lived in basements and pushed drugs. Through the years, particularly since he had married Carmen, he had returned to Salinas for visits. Always, he found the place lonely and could not wait to get back to the Bronx. He now was being told that he had to live in Salinas for a period of months. This he did not like.

  “I am not responsible for the money when it gets to your mother’s house,” Benny said.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  Teenager had arrived in a light-blue two-door Continental driven by Albertito. He told Benny and his wife and kids to go out to the car, and Albertito would take them to Kennedy Airport for the 5:50 P.M. flight to Puerto Rico.

  “What if the police are by the plane?” Benny said.

  Teenager sneered. “It takes them a day to do a thing like this, to go to the airport. First they must sit by your house all day. They expect you to walk into the bar any minute now. You go to the airport. Nobody will be there.”

  Both children, realizing they were leaving without stopping at home, began to cry and mention things they absolutely had to have in order to survive.

  “Buy them new anything they need,” Teenager said.

  “Do I use this?” Benny said, holding up the carton.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  The car taking Benny and his family to the airport raced along the Bruckner Expressway, passing two blocks away from the bar on the corner, where Myles Crofton and his partner Hansen sat. Myles held a Coke and Hansen the typed warrant for the arrest of Benny Velez for the crime of killing other people.

  “You got a gun?” Luisa Maria said to Myles.

  “I guess so.”

  “You better not guess. You must have a gun if Benny comes in here.”

  “He thinks he’s tough?” Myles said.

  “He wants to kill you because you are such bad police. You big and strong. He wants to kill you.”

  “That’s good to know,” Myles said.

  Hansen, looking out the window, said, “No man ever died from talk.”

  “Benny does not talk. Benny will shoot.”

  “What about his friend?” Myles said.

  “Who’s friend?”

  “His friend Teenager.”

  “Which Teenager? Little Teenager or Big Teenager? Lot of guys here called Teenager.”

  “There’s only one that you know and I know,” Myles said.

  Luisa Maria watched as Hansen walked to the back door and surveyed the sidestreet.

  “I ask you something,” Luisa Maria said.

  “What?”

  “You like fresh sexy movies?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Fresh sexy movies. Oooh. Pardonnez moi. They fun. What’s the matter with you? Fresh sexy movies.”

  “Yeah, so?” Myles said.

  “So you come with me and watch fresh sexy movies.”

  “Lady, I’m just here working.”

  Hansen now walked from the back door to the front door. Luisa Maria turned her back and began rearranging bottles on the back bar. She wanted them to leave, because she wanted to get somebody to watch the bar for her while she went up to Watson Avenue to talk to Ada, who came from her country, Colombia. Over the phone, Ada had told her that Teenager had said to this bitch girl Ramonita that he would let Ramonita shoot her with a shotgun. Maybe, she told herself, she would do something to Teenager first if Ada was right. Do something very bad to Teenager. He likes to have everyone killed but himself. He will not have me killed before he is killed, Luisa Maria said. For something this important she would have to see Ada in person. All she knew now was what Ada had told her over the phone. But if it was right, and Ada never would lie because she was from my country, Colombia, Luisa Maria knew she would do something to Teenager first. Do what? She thought about the detectives behind her. They could be very good for her.

  “I love French movies,” Myles said.

  Hansen, looking out the front window, said, “I don’t get to see many myself.” He had his back turned and he did not see Luisa Maria turn around and smile at Myles.

  “Some day we will all go to movie maybe,” she said. “Then we talk.”

  Myles and Hansen sat in the bar, and the two unmarked cars, one on the main street and one on the sidestreet, remained on duty until 1:00 A.M. They were relieved and went out into the Bronx night and drove to their homes. By that same hour, Benny Velez stood at the black grillwork covering the front porch of the house of Teenager’s mother in Ponce, a new ranch house. In the driveway was a gold Cadillac, whose front appeared to have run into a group of redwood trees. Alongside it was a red Lincoln Mark IV. Suddenly, the dark porch was flooded with light and Teenager’s mother stood in a long housecoat and peered out.

  “Who?”

  “Benny.”

  A delighted squeal came from inside the house. Teenager’s sister Wanda, with at once the largest pair of breasts and hips imaginable, came trotting onto the porch in nightgown and bare feet. She opened the grillwork door, kissed Benny and grabbed the carton.

  “Look at my car,” she said to Benny. “Some bad guy hit my car up.”

  “My daughter needs a car,” Teenager’s mother said.

  “She don’t let me drive hers,” the daughter said.

  “If she takes my car to drive, then that means I need a car,” the mother said.

  The daughter Wanda took the carton from Teenager and hopped into the house with it. Teenager’s mother said goodbye and closed and locked the black grillwork door.

  “Why do you have this thing?” Benny asked, tapping the grillwork.

  “Drug addicts try to rob these houses.”

  Benny walked in the darkness out to the car where his children slept in the back and his wife sat with a paper bag full of money on her lap.

  Benny took the highway that ran along the sea and at the first lights of Salinas he felt like he was standing in a vacant room. Beside him, Carmen called excitedly to the kids to wake up and watch for their grandmother’s house, which was in a caserio, public housing almost forty years old, that sat at the foot of the exit from the highway. Carmen’s mother lived in apartment number one and when she banged on the door, th
e mother answered with the door open a crack and a thick safety chain showing. She howled when she saw her daughter and fumbled with the chain in her excitement. The mother and daughter fell into each other’s arms when the door finally opened.

  As Benny stepped in, the mother pointed to the chain. “Drug addicts.”

  At bedtime, the two daughters were put in one bed in a bedroom and then Carmen pointed to the other bed in the room, kissed her husband on the cheek and went in and slept with her mother. The next day, Benny arose and found his wife singing while she cleaned a fish at the kitchen sink. He had not seen her this happy in a long time. He sat around the house and then took a walk to the plaza, where a cluster of men sat in a place called La Tablita.

  “Clémente picked his pitchers,” a man at a table said.

  The owner, lounging behind the bar, became erect. “How do you say this thing?”

  “That’s right,” the man at the table said. “If Steve Loring is pitching for the Dodgers, Clemente comes to the game early. He knows he can hit Loring. But if Tommy John is pitching, here is Clemente. ‘Oh, I cannot play today. I have this bad flu.’ That is how Clemente had such a great batting average. He picked his pitchers.”

  “That’s a lie, man,” the owner said.

  “That’s the truth, man,” the guy at the table said.

  The owner looked at Benny. “What do you think of what he just said?”

  Fuck this Clemente, Benny said to himself. I never made any money with him. What does he matter to me?

  To the owner, Benny said, “I don’t know.”

  After dinner that night, Benny went for another walk to the plaza. In the La Tablita, the same man sat at the same table.

  “I can prove to you that Roberto Clemente picked his pitchers,” he was saying.

  Benny left. He walked around the town and saw the stores all had gates on them.

  “I’ll go home and have sex with my wife,” he said to himself.

  When he got home, he found his wife already had gone to bed in her mother’s room. The door was shut. Benny sat in the living room and stared at Kojak speaking Spanish. He did not like what was going on; if all of his stay in Salinas was to be like these first two nights, then he would go crazy.

  Oscar Ocascio, nineteen, and his friend Ralphie, twenty, celebrated a robbery of a hundred and twenty-six dollars and a pearl necklace. The party was a good one. It started with quart bottles of beer and joints in an empty flat on the top floor of a building on 138th Street. At eight o’clock in the morning, the friend went down and bought some wine, met Melody Martinez on the street and brought her back with him. She sat on the floor next to Oscar Ocascio and drank wine. The friend fell asleep. Oscar put his arm around her and said, “Do you want a pretty necklace?”