Dead Cold Mysteries Books 5-8

by Blake Banner

  “Guess you should have had that coffee, huh, Stone?”

  “You seemed to be in a hurry.”

  “Yeah. I was thinking last night about what Sue told us. It looks like the link between the two cases is rape, right?”

  I nodded.

  “We know from Sue that Ed raped her. There is an at least even chance that he raped and killed Rosario.”

  She paused, watching me, waiting for me to agree. I was feeling uncooperative and didn’t say anything. So she shrugged and went on.

  “I was thinking, I know you want to talk to Angela again today, but it might be an idea if we go and talk to Rosario’s sister first.”

  I glanced at her. “Her sister?”

  “Paulina, Pauli. They were really close. They were always in and out of each other’s houses. If Rosario was working some afternoon, Angela would go to Pauli’s after school, they would eat at each other’s homes, spend the weekend together… you know the kind of thing. Real close. So if Rosario was seeing somebody, or involved with a guy in any way, Pauli would know the details. I figured it might be helpful to talk to her.”

  I nodded. “Good call. You spoken to her?”

  “Yeah, I called her last night. She’s expecting us. If you’re with me, she’ll treat you like we’re family. Just ignore her.”

  I frowned at her. “Thanks.”

  She looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean… I mean…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dehan.” I said sourly. “I get it. What’s the address?”

  “She lives on Faile Street, at the back of the gardens.”

  “That’s the next street to Angela. They’re all in walking distance, huh?”

  “Yeah, family.”

  We got there a little after eight. It was a big, gray, clapboard house with a big bow window and an ugly, white, steel-tubing fence, faced in what looked like chicken wire. The rest of the street had all the signs of gentrification that were appearing all over the Bronx, but they hadn’t reached this house yet. Dehan spoke half to herself.

  “She’s not rich. Her parents bought it. It was cheap back then. Even so, they struggled. Her son has the upstairs, with his wife and kids.”

  We got out and climbed the stairs. The door opened before we rang the bell. Pauli was cute. She was barely five feet, comfortably rotund, noisy, and loving. She squealed at Dehan and smothered her in kisses. I speak a little Spanish, but all I could get was “Ay!” The rest of it was too fast. After they had disengaged and exchanged ‘ays,’ she turned her attention on me, grabbed my cheeks, and planted two big kisses on my face, telling me I was very ‘guapo’.

  She led us inside to a big living room and I saw she had coffee and cakes that looked like French brioche laid out for us. I was grateful.

  “I hope you didn’t eat!” She said, “I made caw-fee and I made Mallorca! When you called last night, I thought, ‘I gotta make Mallorca for Marta’s little girl! Ay!” She grabbed her cheeks and squealed again. “Sit down! Sit down! How you been?”

  We sat. Dehan was smiling. It was a nice smile, free from the sardonic twist it so often carried. “I’m good, Pauli.”

  She started pouring coffee. “You see your father’s family much?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. We stay in touch.”

  “Good.” She said it without much conviction. Then she changed the subject. “You made detective!”

  “I did.”

  Pauli turned to me, oozing pride like it was her own daughter. “Ain’t she the best? Ain’t she something special?”

  It was impossible not to smile back. It was contagious. “She is that, Pauli. She is definitely special.”

  The coffee was good. The Mallorca was better than good. I ate and drank in silence while Pauli launched a barrage of talk at Dehan, and Dehan responded monosyllabically. I looked up when she asked her, “So when you gonna get married, Carmen? A beautiful, smart girl like you should be married! You ain’t so young anymore, chiquilla!”

  Dehan shrugged. “Nobody wants me, Pauli. Who wants a half-Jewish, half Mexican girl with too much attitude? Huh? Nobody, that’s who.”

  “Hoy! Chiquilla!”

  “Listen, changing the subject, I wanted to ask you about Rosario.”

  Pauli looked sad for a moment and sat back in her chair. “Yeah, you said on the phone, but I don’t know what I can tell you, Carmen.”

  “Detective Stone,” she gestured at me, like Pauli might not know who I was, “heads up a cold cases team.”

  I smiled at her with my mouth full of Mallorca and said, “You cam caw me Johng!” She smiled and I swallowed. “Anyone who makes cake this good can call me John.” I winked for good measure and she blushed prettily. Dehan was giving me her inscrutable look, but I ignored her.

  “So, we are reviewing Rosario’s case in the light of some new evidence, and I was wondering if you could tell us anything about her friends at that time, who she was hanging out with, if she had a boyfriend…”

  Pauli became abstracted for a moment, staring out of the window. She shook her head. “I don’t like to remember it. Sometimes it seems such a long time ago, and other times it’s like yesterday. She went a bit…” She waved her hand in circles in the air. “She went a bit crazy around that time.” She looked at me and shrugged. “She was smart, and sometimes smart people go crazy, you know? She started hanging around with this communist crowd. I don’t know about politics.” She waved her hand again, dismissing politics. “But I know that some people who say they are communists…” She waggled her head, waggled her hips, and started laughing. “Really, it’s not politics what they are doing! They are making parties, taking drugs…”

  I smiled. “Cuchi cuchi.”

  She laughed and pointed at me. “That’s what they are doing!” She sighed, stopped laughing, and dropped her hands onto her lap. “My poor Rosario, she wanted to live a little. She thought she had met people who were smart like her, you know? But they weren’t like her. They were not good people.” She gestured at Dehan. “Even your mom, God rest her! You know your mom was open-minded and tolerant, but even she stopped seeing her, because she said to me, ‘Pauli, your sister’s friends are a bit crazy!’ She was worried about her.”

  I scratched my chin. “What exactly was worrying her, Pauli?” I shrugged and gave her a meaningful look. “Or who?”

  She nodded a lot and pointed at me. She said to Dehan, “El no es tonto! El sabe!” Which I understood as, ‘He’s not stupid, he knows.’ Dehan gave a noncommittal shrug, but before she could say anything, Pauli was talking again.

  “There was one guy. She was crazy about him. And she told me he was crazy about her, too.” She started waving her hands around in the air. “Oh! He is wonderful! He is so handsome! He is so smart! He is good, and passionate, and committed to his cause, and one day, he is going to be president!”

  Dehan frowned. “President?”

  “That’s what she said. You know what I told her? I told her, ‘Wake up! Wake up, Rosi! He just wants to get you in bed!’ ‘No! No! No! We gonna get married! He’s in love with me! He’s gonna leave his wife! He don’t love her anymore!’”

  Dehan was nodding. “This guy was married? So, were he and Rosario sleeping together?”

  “She told me no! An’ I believe her. She always told me everything, and I asked her, ‘Rosi! You been sleeping with a married man? Tell me!’” She raised her hands again and made a horrified face, mimicking her sister, “‘Nonononooo! Pauli! I never do that! I told him, you want this body?’” She made a coquettish move that made me smile. “‘You put a ring on it, boy!’”

  She laughed out loud and we laughed with her. I asked her, “Can you remember his name?”

  She puffed out her cheeks and stared at the ceiling, blowing. “It was fourteen, fifteen years ago, but there was only five of them in that group. There was Rosario, Mateo…” She nodded. “He was a nice man. I liked him. He was married to that Irish girl, or Scottish…” She made a kind of beckoning sign at Dehan wit
h her fingers, “You know her. What was her name? Susanna! They were nice people. I don’t know why they hang out with that gang.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “They were half of that gang. The other half were Mary and…”

  She cut me short, pointing at me. “Maria and Eduardo! I remember now. No, you are right! You are right!” She turned to Dehan again. “I told you, no es tonto!” She turned back to me. “Eduardo! He was like the devil. He was a bad influence on people. Everybody follows him and do what he tells them. He was a big success, made lots of money, telling everybody he is a community leader, he is gonna help the Puerto Ricans and the Latinos... I think he was selling his soul to the devil!”

  “And this was the man she thought was going to marry her?”

  “Yes, Eduardo Irizarry.”

  I scratched my head and Dehan voiced the question I was about to ask. “So when she was raped and strangled, why didn’t the cops investigate Irizarry?”

  She made a huge shrug, “Don’t ask me! How should I know?”

  “Did you tell them about him?”

  “Of course! Me and your mom, we told the detective, ‘This is the man who done it, for sure! For sure! Because she didn’t want to go to bed with him!’ But nothing happened.” She looked embarrassed and put her head on one side. It was a kind of apologetic gesture. “It was different back then. There was a lot of corruption in the cops. People said Eduardo had friends in the precinct.” She hesitated. “Look, I show you something.”

  She got up and went to the sideboard. She opened the cupboard and, crouching down, she pulled out a photo album, which she brought back to her chair. She leafed through it until she came to a particular page. There she stopped and peeled back the cellophane to extract one particular photo. She handed it to Dehan.

  “This was one of the last parties they had. It was a barbeque at Eduardo’s house. She was excited because there was a police detective there as a guest. She was saying that Eduardo was real well connected. I told her, ‘Rosi, that is not a good connection. He is a defense counsel, what’s he doing making a barbeque with detectives?’ Anyhow, I knew this detective, we all did. He was not a good man…”

  Dehan stared at me and handed me the picture. They were all about fifteen years younger. There was Sue Mackenzie with a man I guessed was Matt. Mary Irizarry was standing next to a pretty Latino girl whom I assumed was Rosario. Next to her, with his big arm around her, was Ed, holding a beer, and next to him was a big, broad-shouldered hulk of a man in shorts and a floral shirt. Pauli knew him, Dehan knew him, and I knew him. Everybody knew him. It was Mick Harragan, the bent cop who had killed Dehan’s parents.

  TWELVE

  It was a three hundred yard walk to Angela’s house, what used to be Rosario’s house. It was a walk that Rosario and Pauli must have done a thousand times, and Angela with them; until Rosario had been murdered, murdered for being pretty and fun and attractive and curious.

  We walked slowly, Dehan with her hands thrust deep into her pockets, frowning at her feet as she went. “It’s not unexpected,” she said after a moment. “This was Harragan’s beat. He had it sewn up. If Ed was up and coming in the barrio as a defense attorney, he would have sought a connection with Mick Harragan, to keep him sweet. And if Harragan saw a young Puerto Rican making a career for himself as a defense attorney, he would have sought that connection, too. For the same reason.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, they were natural bedfellows. The question is, did Mick rape her, or was it Ed?” I shrugged. “Or somebody completely different. So far we have little more than hearsay.”

  It was getting warm and she reached behind her neck and tied her hair into a knot. “Logically,” she said, “I doubt Mick did it. He knew the Latino culture pretty well by then, and he knew it was very territorial. He may have been an arrogant son of a bitch, but he was also cunning, and he knew how to manage his patch. Rosario was Ed’s. Ed was making a claim in that photograph. Mick was on the outside, so was Ed’s wife. Ed was holding Rosario. She was his.”

  “So Mick would not have intruded on that.”

  She shook her head. “The fact that he even went along to Ed’s barbeque was a gesture of respect. He was acknowledging that Ed carried weight in the ’hood. He wouldn’t have messed with his girl.”

  I nodded again. “OK, that makes sense.”

  She shrugged. “I guess he just got sick of waiting.”

  I glanced at her. “Sick of waiting?”

  “Yeah, he kept promising her marriage, he was going to leave his wife, all that BS, and she just kept telling him, ‘Sure, when you do that, we’ll share a bed.’ He got tired of waiting.”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “After that, Mick Harragan saw to it that the case went cold. He looked out for his pal.”

  We turned into Bryant Avenue and started in the direction of Angela’s house. There was a dark blue BMW parked outside. There was no reason why there shouldn’t be, but it caught my eye and my gut told me there was something wrong. I noticed Dehan had gone quiet. Next thing, she was loping across the road toward the car, and I was running after her. We were maybe a hundred yards away. For a moment, there was the sound of a woman screaming. I was pulling my piece, accelerating. Dehan had her weapon in her hand and had broken into a sprint. Then there was a figure, big, dressed in black, barreling down the steps.

  I shouted, “Stop! Police! Stop!” He had the passenger door open and he was about to climb in. He stopped and turned to look. I saw he had a ski mask over his face. He thrust out both hands in front of him, leaning on the roof of the car. He had an automatic and he was taking his time to take aim.

  To take aim at Dehan.

  She stopped dead, raised her weapon. There was a double crack, almost simultaneous. I powered into Dehan and hurled her to the ground, sprawling on top of her. I didn’t stop. I kept sprawling and scrambling to my feet. But I heard the squeal of rubber and the car was away, turning left onto Garrison Avenue.

  I turned toward Dehan. “You OK?”

  She was getting to her feet, wincing. “Yes.”

  I ran for the house.

  The door was open and I took the nine steps in two bounds, shouting, “Police! NYPD! Angela, are you OK?”

  I froze in the hallway, listening. The bright sunshine lay in a twisted oblong at my feet, framing my shadow. I could hear crying. It was coming from upstairs. Another shadow rose up next to mine. Dehan. She came and stood by my side. I gestured at the living room. She covered me and I went in. It was empty. The back room was the same. Dehan checked the kitchen and we made our way up the stairs, weapons drawn and held out in front of us.

  The sobbing grew louder. I shouted again, “Angela! This is Detectives Stone and Dehan! Are you alone? Are you hurt?”

  We were on a broad landing. There was a restroom on the right, and three bedrooms making a right angle, two in front of us and one on the left. Only one of the doors was open, and that was were the crying was coming from. It was an ugly, guttural noise, like a young child crying convulsively with an adult’s voice.

  A shadow moved in the doorway, and then Angela stepped out, her mouth twisted with grief, her hair disheveled, her nightgown awry and ripped open, drenched in blood that streamed from a gash in her forehead.

  I moved past her and into the room while Dehan holstered her weapon and went to her. The sheet and the pillow were stained with blood. The duvet was twisted and half on the floor. It also had blood on it. I pulled my cell from my pocket and stepped back onto the landing. As I dialed, I said to Dehan, “Get her downstairs, to the living room. Don’t touch the blood for now.”

  Into the phone, I said, “This is Detective Stone. We need a crime scene team at 899 Bryant Avenue, we also need an ambulance.”

  I followed them downstairs. Angela was leaning on Dehan’s shoulder, still sobbing. Dehan settled her on the sofa and knelt in front of her, examining her forehead. I hunkered down beside her to have a look, too. There was a two-inch gash above her right eye, and
her left cheek was beginning to swell, On closer inspection, I could see she had bruising all over her face and on her upper arms.

  Dehan held her hand in both of her own and asked her, “Angela, what happened?”

  Angela shook her head, wiping her eyes on the back of her free hand. “I don’t know. I was asleep. I took a pill. Then in my dream…” She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She wasn’t breathing. When her voice finally came, it was twisted with fear and grief. “I didn’t know if it was a dream or what was happening. I couldn’t move…! And it hurt so much!”

  Dehan got up and sat next to her, with her arm around her shoulders. She glanced at me. “You want to make a cup of tea?”

  I nodded and went to the kitchen. While the kettle boiled, I ran over in my mind what I had seen. It wasn’t much. The dark blue BMW. I hadn’t seen the plate. Then the guy. He came down the nine steps fast, maybe in a single bound. He was big, real big. Not just tall, but powerfully built. I figured at least six-three, maybe more. Big shoulders, big arms and legs. Agile. Black jeans, black sweatshirt, black ski mask. I tried to focus more, on his hands, on his eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. Dehan had been ahead of me, and by the time I was close enough to make out details, I was concentrating on her, and getting her out of his line of fire.

  The kettle clicked and I poured the boiling water into a mug with a tea bag in it, added two spoons of sugar and a dash of milk. She needed it strong and sweet.

  By the time I got back and handed her her tea, she had calmed down a bit. She took it in both hands and I sat in one of the armchairs.

  “It’s been a pretty rough couple of days for you, Angela, hasn’t it?”

  She nodded and shivered, holding the hot mug close. Dehan rubbed her back a couple of times and said, “I’ll go and get you a blanket.”