by Blake Banner
I sighed and knocked back the shot. She grinned and refilled. “That, my friend, is the heart, soul and essence of this case: drugs, Christen, Amy.”
I leaned on the table, did the salt, lemon shot thing and shook my head. “Wrong, I’ll tell you what the heart of this case is. Dyslexia and dyspraxia. Amy was as dyslexic and dyspraxic as Charlie. Dyspraxics have a feeling that they don’t belong. They feel isolated from the world. Charlie and Amy found each other, recognized each other and came together, and that is what is at the heart of this case.” She stared at me for a long moment, then nodded. On an impulse I reached out and refilled our glasses. “But I agree with you, drugs are key, and so are Amy and her mother. Maybe the case has two hearts and two souls. C’mon, last one.”
We did another shot. She squeezed her lips, trying to suppress a belch, failed and grinned. “Are you chickening out because tomorrow is Monday?”
I shook my head. “I never chickened out of anything in my life, Carmen. I just don’t want you falling asleep at payback time.”
As I said it, she refilled our glasses. “One for the road,” she said.
“There is no road,” I replied.
She held up her glass to me and began to sing. “Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar, golpe a golpe, verso a verso…”
I laughed. “What’s that?”
“Antonio Machado: walker, there is no path, the path is made as you walk, blow by blow, verse by verse…”
“You, my friend, are quoting poetry at me. You are getting drunk.”
“Sometimes you have to be reckless, because there is no time to be careful. I had a friend who used to say, ‘sometimes you just have to be Irish, because there is no time to be Greek.’ In a moment, Stone, we will have lost this moment. Forever. Tell me some poetry, now!”
We knocked back the shots, she refilled our glasses and I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. She was still grinning.
I said, “OK, one of my favorites. ‘The rain it falleth on the just, and also on the unjust feller, but mainly on the just, because, the unjust took the just’s umbreller.”
She laughed noisily and slapped her thigh. We knocked glasses and tossed them back. As she set her glass down again, she said, “You’re one of the good guys, Stone. Always thought so. Now, tell me a real poem and we’ll go to bed.”
I looked for the moon, but she had snuck overhead while I wasn’t looking, and was now raining silver light on the table from above. The barbecue had burned down and the bottle of tequila was almost empty. I drained it into our glasses.
“Funny day,” I said. And then, “I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
She nodded. “Robert Frost. You’re a good man, Stone. Robert Frost is good. You took the road less traveled, and that’s why I love you. Take me to our bedchamber.”
FIVE
I awoke late, at seven thirty, with less of a hangover than I deserved, but enough to make me uncomfortable. I carried it into the bathroom, where it survived a shower, toweled myself dry, pulled on some clothes and stepped out onto the landing, wondering why Dehan was already up. What greeted me was the smell of coffee, bacon and hot bread rolls, the clatter of knives and plates and the creak and slam of the oven door. They were sounds that should have been reassuring, but somehow weren’t. Especially as, above it all, I could hear Dehan’s voice yammering on the phone, sounding vaguely like she was selling insurance. I peered into the kitchen.
She had her cell wedged between her shoulder and her ear. She had a tea towel over the other shoulder, a pot of coffee in her right hand and a spatula in her left. On the cooker, bacon was frying in one pan and four perfect eggs were sizzling in another. In a basket on the side, there were four hot rolls fresh from the oven. She was talking. While she talked, she pointed at things that I had to do.
“No, the name was definitely Felix….” (take the coffee) “What can I tell you? I can tell you what I’m telling you. That’s all I got…” (Wait! And the rolls!) “What I hear is he’s a smooth operator. You know what I’m saying? Working the fringes of the Manhattan glitterati…” (Come back for the cups) “He’s going to all the parties, making connections…”
I carried the coffee and the hot rolls to the table. It was set with plates, butter and marmalade. No cups. I could still hear her talking.
“Felix, yeah, Felix, like the cat. This is six or seven years ago. But I am guessing he was around before that…”
I returned to the kitchen, eased past her and collected two cups. She had the bacon on the plates and she was scooping the eggs out too. Suddenly she erupted. “Me cago en la puta madre que parió al hijo de la gran puta! God dammit!” She slammed the pan on the cooker and threw the spatula in the sink. “How stupid am I? Tell me that! Please! How stupid am I, Al? Jesus! That’s it! Of course it is! Thanks… What…? Nonono! No, you’ve been real helpful. Email it to me, will you? I didn’t mean to scare you.” She laughed. “Thanks, pal.”
She hung up and handed me a plate. I took it and said, “Good morning, Dehan. What’s going on?”
She shook her head at me and made for table. “How could I have missed that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” I followed.
She sat and pointed to the chair opposite. “Sit!”
I sighed softly, sat and poured myself a large cup of very black coffee. When I had eaten one of the eggs, half the bacon and a hot roll, I said, “What did you miss, Dehan?”
“Finally! Mr. Grumpy is awake! Not Felix—you must have distracted me with all that tequila and poetry—not Felix,” she said and waved an eggy knife at me. “Félis! Feliciano! Feliciano Camacho, brother of Julio Camacho…”
I sat back in my chair and nodded. “Oh… now that makes a lot of sense,” I said. “Julio Camacho. The ‘godfather’ of the Chupacabras.”
“Exactly. El Patron. It was playing on my mind all night, you know? While you were snoring, I was thinking. ‘What a stupid name, Felix. Who’s called Felix anymore? And a dope dealer? A dope dealer called Felix? No way.’ So I was up at six and called the 41st, they’re on Longwood. They cover the whole Hunts Point Longwood area.”
“I know where the 41st Precinct is, Dehan.”
“Right. ’Course you do. So I got them to put me through to the head of vice.”
“At six AM.”
“Yeah. Well, he came in at eight. Shut up. So he says to me, ‘no way, not in New York.’ High end, low end, he knows all the gangs in the five boroughs and he doesn’t know any Felix. Then he says, that area? Where we are talking about? That is Chupacabras territory. And I’m thinking, that name came up before…”
“Adolfo and Mateo, who put Karl in hospital. They were members of the Chupacabras.”
She ignored me and carried on talking. “So Al says to me that six years ago it was run by the two Camacho brothers. One of them, he can’t remember his name, was not so important and eventually retired. Julio was the bad boy, he was running the show and now he’s the patron. Like you said, the godfather.” She stopped, nodded a few times, shook her head. “Then, when he said that, I remembered—hijo de puta! How could I be so stupid? Not Felix, Félis!”
“You know where he retired to?”
She started eating again. “Not far. New Jersey. Englewood. I figured we could go and pay him a visit. Al at the 41st says he’s an upstanding pillar of the community now. He made his fortune, now he’s trying to whitewash it. If we take it easy, don’t come on too strong, don’t threaten him, he might be willing to cooperate.”
I broke a roll and mopped some egg. She went on. “So I figure, what we’re looking for here is the link that ties Adolfo and Mateo to Feliciano, and then to the Redferns.” She sighed and spread her hands like I had asked a stupid question. “Obviously the link is that Adolfo and Mateo and Feliciano were all in the Chupacabras. But we need something tighter
than that…”
I nodded and chewed a while. “Yeah, I guess. But I think we need to be pretty open-minded about what that link might be, Dehan. Because so far I can see two things clearly: one, there is a link; two, it is a link that doesn’t make any sense at all right now.”
She drew breath.
I spoke quietly. “Don’t talk for a minute. I am willing to bet that as we start digging up the threads that tie these people together, we’re going to find they lead us off to places we did not expect to go.”
She shrugged. “Maybe.” She reached over for the coffee pot and refilled her cup. “But you know how it is, Stone, once drugs are involved, things get pretty predictable.”
“Twenty stab wounds in an area of four inches is not predictable.”
She grunted.
We washed up together and by nine thirty, we were thundering down the Bruckner Expressway toward New Jersey. We crossed via the George Washington Bridge and turned north along the Palisades Interstate and into the leafy suburbs of Englewood.
Feliciano Camacho’s house was a grotesque sage green building that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a Spanish hacienda or a Rococo palace. It failed at both. It was set back from the road behind a large wall with a crescent drive running between two open gates guarded by four iron eagles. The whole place was surrounded by a superabundance of pine trees, maples, planes and chestnuts that were in the first stages of turning from green to russet and orange.
I pulled into the drive, stopped in front of an oak door that would not have looked out of place on a medieval castle in Disneyland, and climbed out. The door opened before we reached it and a guy in an Italian suit with a wire in his ear, shades over his eyes and a bulge under his left arm stepped out to meet us. His face managed to ask us who the hell we were and tell us he didn’t give a damn who the hell we were, all in one look without a single expression.
I ignored the look and said, “I’m Detective John Stone, this is Detective Dehan. We’re here to see Feliciano Camacho.”
“You got an appointment?”
It was Dehan who answered. “Why are you asking stupid questions? Who told you to ask stupid questions? Did Felis tell you to ask stupid questions? Huh? Did anybody say to you, ‘Hey, dumb-ass, go outside and ask stupid questions’? No? Nobody told you to do that? Good. So get the fuck inside and tell your boss Detectives John Stone and Carmen Dehan are here to see him. Or does he need your permission to see us? Dumb-ass!”
He looked at her resentfully and muttered, “Wait here,” then turned and went inside.
I blinked at her a few times. “If we take it easy, don’t come on too strong, don’t threaten him... that was your strategy?”
She looked away and shrugged. “Appointment! Do we have an appointment? What is he, a dentist?”
The door opened again and the reservoir dog stepped out with his tail between his legs and jerked his head at us. We followed him inside, where he led us through more architectural mayhem: over terracotta floors, among Greco-Roman statues, through Tudor arches and down adobe corridors past Arabic gardens and neoclassical colonnades, to another Disney oak door upon which he knocked and then pushed.
We stepped through into a large library-cum-study. The walls were occupied, floor to ceiling, by dark-wood bookcases. Some had glass-paneled doors and all were filled with sterile, dust-free, unread hardbacks. The floor was covered in a burgundy Wilton carpet, there was a nest of chesterfields around an open fireplace and, to the left of the door as we entered, there was an oak desk big enough to launch a squadron of B-52s. Standing behind it, looking vaguely confused, was a big man in his early fifties. He was dressed in an amber, double-breasted suit and his hair was gelled into spikes, making him look as though he’d been terrified and then sneezed on by something large and sticky.
Dehan pulled out her badge and showed it to him. “Detective Carmen Dehan, this is Detective John Stone, NYPD, are you Feliciano Camacho?”
He frowned at the badge and then at Dehan. “Just tell me, do I need my lawyer?”
“No.”
He looked past her at his boy and said, “Vale, Dixon, váyase.”
Dixon left and Camacho spread his hands, laughing softly, looking gently nonplussed. “I am Feliciano Camacho.” He gestured at me. “You are Detective Dehan and he is Detective John Stone. Why are you in my house? What does the NYPD want with me?”
“Not much, actually, Feliciano.”
He liked the sound of that and gestured toward the chesterfields by the fireplace. “Shall we sit? Can I offer you coffee?”
We said we didn’t want coffee, but we sat and he went straight in with a thinly veiled warning.
“Detective Dehan, I am sure that you are aware, as many people are, that there is a period in my past where I walked a dangerous path, where the line between good and evil was …” He nodded a few times, like he was trying to think of a really good word. In the end he came up with, “Blurred—to say the least! A lot of people paid a high price for my wild ways. But that is all behind me now, all of my business interests today are legitimate, and I have influential friends in law enforcement and in the Bureau who will vouch for me.”
His smile was amiable and smooth, but his eyes said he wanted to gut us like fish and barbecue us for his dogs. Dehan smiled. “We are not interested in you, Feliciano. We heard already, you are a pillar of the community these days, so we thought we’d drop in and see if you can help us out a bit.”
“If I can, I would be pleased to.”
I said, “Do you remember Amy Redfern?”
He looked at me like I gave him a headache. “Amy Redfern? I don’t know anybody with this name. Should I remember her?”
Dehan shook her head. “Not necessarily. How about Charlie Albright?”
His eyes became abstracted. He looked up at the ceiling above Dehan’s head. “Albright... Yeah, I remember Pamela… ah! Yes, her son was Charlie. Am I right? Yeah, I remember. But he was…” He shrugged and spread his hands, as though mentioning his name was somehow absurd. “…nothing. He was nobody.” Then he smiled, snapped his fingers, pleased with himself. “Oh, yeah! Yeah, his girlfriend! She was a little, skinny thing. They were both like little ghosts. You know? Like little bits of mist.” He laughed at his own inventive simile. “She was Amy, I remember. My memory ain’t so bad, huh? But I did not know them. I knew Pamela, I knew some of Pamela’s friends. The kids were there sometimes, in the background. We went to a lot of crazy parties, a party almost every night. You know the stupid stuff you do when you are young.”
I said, “That was only six years ago.”
He raised a finger. “It ended six years ago. For me. It started long before that. And believe me, Detective Stone, I did a lot of growing up in the last six years. I am fifty-two now!” He turned back to Dehan. “To be honest with you, Detective Dehan, I am surprised that you are asking about these kids.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I knew a lot of people back then that you might be interested in, but these kids?” He shrugged and shook his head. “They was nothin’.”
She offered him a weary smile, overworked cop to wise, reformed villain. “You know how it is, Felis. Nine-tenths routine, going through the numbers and ticking the boxes, one tenth following leads that go nowhere. Now, how about Amy’s mother, Christen Redfern? Did you ever meet her?”
“I have no idea who she is. Was she a friend of Pamela’s?”
“I don’t know. That is pretty much what we are trying to find out. Aside from the relationship between Amy and Charlie, was there any connection between the Redferns and Pamela’s crowd?”
He sat back and crossed one expensive leg over the other. “I can tell you that I, personally, never met anybody called Christen Redfern. I can also tell you that Pamela was the poorest person in that group.” He narrowed his eyes and made a face that was oddly reptilian. “We were moving in circles of leading TV producers, influential bankers, celebrities…” He held up both hands. “OK! We are not talking Chris Hems
worth, Leonardo DiCaprio, but ‘Names’, for sure. Big names. So Charlie and Amy… poof!” He waggled his fingers in front of his face to suggest something evanescent, then laughed.
Dehan disguised a flash of irritation with a lame smile. Before she could speak, I asked him, “Mr. Camacho, did either Charlie or Amy ever approach you…”
He frowned like the word was new to him. “Approach me? I’m not sure what you mean.”
I offered him a rueful, lopsided smile. “Well, neither do I, exactly. Did either of them ever engage you in conversation, discuss your business with you…?”
He gave a soft grunt and stared at the ceiling again. I stared at it with him. It was paneled in oak, like the rest of the room, and I decided that if it hadn’t been in that house, it would have been a nice ceiling.
“Yeah.” He said it suddenly, as though he had surprised even himself. “Yeah, Charlie approached me once. I can’t remember exactly…” He turned to Dehan. “You have to remember, off the record…” He glanced at both of us in turn. “We are off the record, right? Are we off the record?”
“We’re off the record.”
“I was making sometimes ten or fifteen K in a night. Sometimes more than that, at the peak, when things were good. So this little piece of shit comes to me…” He half laughed and half sighed. “I gotta be nice to him because Pamela is helpful to me, right? She gives me some respectability and she connects me with important people, and this is her son. But he is asking me some shit about…”
He stared around the room, like he’d lost part of his sentence and he didn’t know where he’d put it. Finally, he spread his hands and shook his head.
“I don’t know! I don’t even know. Probably I wasn’t even listening, you know what I’m saying? I was thinking about something else, and this kid is wasting my time, talking to me.”
I scratched my chin. “This could be important, Mr. Camacho. Some vague idea about the general purpose of the talk? Was he asking for something? Offering something…?”