Red Hook

by Gabriel Cohen

  She nodded.

  He looked down at his watch. “It’s getting late. Uh, thanks for coming out.”

  “Thanks for dinner.” She slipped her key into the ignition.

  Jack straightened up and put his hand on the back of his neck. “Listen, do you think you might like to get together again? I could have a barbecue at my place, invite Gary and his wife over…”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “Okay,” he said. “All right. Maybe, uh…Tuesday night?”

  She started her car. “Call me.”

  He bent down and leaned in through the window for a kiss that lasted just a moment longer than he’d expected.

  She started the car and pulled away from the curb. He stood, grinning, and watched her drive away.

  sixteen

  AS JACK APPROACHED THE entrance of the Bentley again, a group of teenagers streamed past him into the building, jostling and shouting. It was three-thirty; they must have just gotten out of school. The boys wore blazers with a crest over the pocket and the girls wore plaid skirts. They were awkward with the afflictions of adolescence: braces, acne, bodies expanding in odd proportions. Some of the girls had a precocious fashion sense, with expensive shoes and sexy makeup that looked sad on their little faces, but they still seemed soft. The neighborhood was a bubble: they wouldn’t have to worry about getting jumped on these streets, or wonder if their parents could keep up with the rent, or face the humiliation of going to school in shabby clothes, as he had. One day soon, they’d inherit the world.

  If he could feel intimidated by this glitzy building, and its snotty doorman—and he was a middle-aged man with a respectable job and all of the authority of the New York Police Department behind him—what must it have been like for a young Dominican guy coming here every day from an overcrowded little Brooklyn row house? If he could feel resentful of the privileged young kids, what had Tomas Berrios felt when he knew that his own kids would have to go to some overcrowded

  Brooklyn public school, a place where even elementary-school kids had to worry about boxcutters and Mac-9s? It might cause a young man some unhappiness.

  Jack usually enjoyed trying to verbally intimidate and outwit the bad guys, but he didn’t relish bringing that pressure to bear on a working stiff, especially when the man was already as hard-pressed as Arturo Guzman. While showering that morning, he’d rerun his interview with the super in his head, remembered small evasions, possible tells.

  The super sat now with his hands gripping his knees, looking down at the floor.

  Jack leaned forward. “I’ll say it again. When I left here the last time, you weren’t being a hundred percent with me. Now we can have this discussion in a little room down at the Seventy-sixth Precinct in Brooklyn and you can lose a day of work, or you can help me out right here.”

  “What do I know?” the super said miserably. “What can I tell you?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “If I knew something, some thing Tomas had done, or some trouble he was in, I would tell you.”

  “All right. Maybe it’s not some big thing. Maybe it doesn’t seem very important. But I know you’re holding back.” The key was to give the super a way to spill that would allow him to believe he was doing the right and necessary thing. Even murderers could be encouraged to talk if you helped them rationalize their confessions: You didn’t mean to kill him, right? He jumped forward, and you happened to be holding a gun, was that it?

  “I don’t know nothing,” repeated Mr. Guzman.

  Disliking himself for doing so, Jack pressed on. “I don’t want to, but I could go to your management company and say that you’re refusing to cooperate with a police investigation…”

  “It’s not important,” the super said in a small voice.

  “What’d not important?”

  “You asked me if he was especial friends with anyone here.”

  “That’s right. And?”

  “There is somebody.”

  Marie Burhala’s hands trembled, but when she saw that Jack had noticed, she tucked them under her thighs. The Romanian maid was a small young woman with a long braid of shimmering chestnut hair. A purple birthmark ran along one cheek, but somehow that flaw only accented her shy beauty. Jack had not given her any notice to prepare for the interview—she wore flip-flops, gray sweatpants, a purple T-shirt. Her gaze kept darting from him to the super, who sat glumly in the corner.

  Jack hoped she’d provide a good lead, but he wasn’t ready to jump to the conclusion that her nerves were any indication of involvement in the Tomas Berrios case. If he was from a former Communist-bloc country and had been brought down to a grim basement room and confronted with a police detective, he supposed he’d be nervous too.

  “You work as a maid here?” he asked.

  “Yes. For Mr. Heiser.” Her Romanian accent was thick, but she seemed to speak English pretty well.

  “What floor?”

  “Fourteenth,” the super said.

  Jack gave him a sharp look. “Thank you, but let’s let Ms. Burhala answer.”

  “The fourteenth floor,” she said, reaching back to tug on her braid.

  “How long have you worked for Mr. Heiser?”

  “Almost one year,” she said, sending a scared look to the super.

  “How long have you been in this country?”

  “Almost one year and a half.”

  “How much does Mr. Heiser pay you?”

  She mumbled something.

  “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “Two hundred dollars every week.”

  “For how many days a week?”

  “Every day except Sunday.”

  Jack did a quick computation. If she worked fifty or sixty hours a week, which seemed likely, considering that she lived in, she was making maybe four dollars an hour. Less than minimum wage. Why would she do that? He saw his advantage.

  “You married?”

  She shook her head, a pained expression on her pretty face.

  “Green card?”

  She crumpled. “Please. I do very good work for Mr. Heiser. I never make any problem.” She started to cry. “I can’t go back. I have to make money for my family. Please, mister. Please.”

  Jack leaned back, satisfied with himself. He didn’t need a vacation; his recent lapses were just a fluke. He was still one of the best detectives around, sharp as a freakin’ tack.

  He leaned forward. “Listen, Marie, I don’t work for the Immigration Service. I’m not here to check up on your papers. I’ll tell you what: if you help me with some other questions, I’m going to pretend I never asked about the green card. You understand me?”

  She stared at him in disbelief. He handed her his handkerchief and she wiped her eyes.

  “Do you understand?” he repeated. She nodded carefully.

  “Did you know Tomas Berrios?”

  She turned toward the super, as if hoping that he might be able to explain the sudden shift in the conversation.

  “Look at me,” Jack said. “Did you know him?”

  She nodded, mesmerized.

  “Were you friends with Mr. Berrios?”

  She nodded again.

  “Would you say that you were good friends with him?”

  She turned toward the super. “Just look at me,” Jack said. “Would you say that you were more than good friends?”

  “I…he had a wife, children.”

  “I know that. Tell me the truth: did you have a sexual relationship with Mr. Berrios?”

  “No!” she cried. “Never. I’m not…it wasn’t like that.”

  Jack sat back in his chair and ran a hand over his mouth. He was getting somewhere. He wasn’t sure where, but progress was being made.

  “What did you do?” he asked softly.

  “He was very nice. We would talk, that’s all. On my mother, I swear it.”

  “Where would you talk?”

  She glanced guiltily at the super. “Tomas would come in s
ometimes.”

  “To Mr. Heiser’s apartment?”

  She nodded. “If no one was at home. Sometimes I would give him something to eat. Sometimes…” She stopped as if concealing some shameful secret.

  “Yes?” Jack said eagerly. “Sometimes what?”

  Marie Burhala turned away from the super. “Sometimes we watched The Jerry Springer Show on the TV.”

  Jack stifled an impulse to laugh.

  Now he had another image to add to his mental movie: Tomas Berrios entering a fourteenth-floor apartment through the back door. He considered his next question. If the porter and the maid had been having an affair, if she’d been angry because he wouldn’t leave his wife…He doubted that this small, shy woman could have stabbed Berrios to death, and even if she had, that didn’t explain the two men dumping the body in Brooklyn. He wondered if Romanians were like Albanians, nursing vicious family feuds.

  “Do you have any family in New York?” he asked. “Any brothers?”

  “No. No one. I have only a sister. She lives with my mother in Brasov. In my country.”

  “Do you have many friends here?”

  She shook her head sadly.

  Mr. Guzman shifted in his chair. “It’s true, mister. She never goes out. Even on Sunday, she only shops around here. It’s no good for a young person, to live like this.”

  “How old are you, Marie?”

  “I am nineteen.”

  Jesus. A nineteen-year-old kid, practically on her own in a foreign country, working for some rich stranger. She’d have to be pretty plucky. He felt sorry for her, trapped in such a job when she should be out having fun with other young people. He felt sorry, but he’d come for information.

  “Did you ever have an argument with Tomas? A fight, maybe?”

  She shook her head firmly. “Never. He was my friend.”

  “How did he get in the apartment?”

  Marie looked confused. “I let him in.”

  “Personally? You were always there to let him in?”

  She thought about that. “Sometimes…sometimes if I was busy in the house, I left open the back door.”

  “Did he ever come in when you weren’t home?”

  She looked puzzled. “How would I know?”

  Good point. He tried another angle.

  “Did Mr. Heiser ever see Tomas in the apartment with you?”

  The young woman tugged her braid.

  “Marie?”

  She winced. “Air. Heiser was coming home early one day, and Tomas was in the living room with me. We were watching the TV.”

  “When was this?”

  “It was…I think perhaps three weeks.”

  “Did Mr. Heiser say something to Tomas?”

  “He is not easy man to get along with. He—”

  “Did he say something?”

  “He told Tomas it was not app…app…”

  “‘Appropriate?’”

  “Yes. He told Tomas that he must never enter the apartment unless he is working, that he should know his place.”

  “Did Mr. Heiser sound angry? Was he heated up about Tomas being there?”

  “No, not heated up. He was…cold. Like is not worth his time to explain such things.”

  “What did Tomas do?”

  “‘Do?’ What can he do?”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Mr., he is a servant here. He cannot say something. He went out.”

  “Was he angry? Did he say anything to you later?”

  “He said he does not like it when Mr. Heiser speak to him like a child. Then he—how you say?” She raised her shoulders.

  “He shrugged?”

  “Yes. Shrugged. After all, Mr. Heiser is not only tenant who speaks to staff like children.”

  “Did Tomas mention it again?”

  “No—only to say he was sorry he cannot visit me.”

  Jack stood up. “I think that’ll do it for now. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  seventeen

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AS Jack drove along broad, tree-lined Ocean Parkway, where Orthodox Jewish parents walked their neatly dressed kids home from school, he turned on the radio. An oldies station was playing the Drifters. The horns swelled and Ben E. King swelled with them: This magic moment…The afternoon light glowed, cool air flowed in the open window, and somehow the corny sentiment seemed to point to something real. Of course, he acknowledged with a grin, that might have something to do with the calls he’d made last night to Daskivitch and his wife, and to Michelle, inviting them to his barbecue. Now he had a night to remember, and one to look forward to.

  At task force headquarters, he jogged in, made a Groucho face at Mary Gaffney as he passed the front desk.

  “Someone’s in a good mood today,” she said.

  He grinned, tapped an imaginary cigar, and trotted upstairs. He spent several hours plodding through paperwork, then took a break to go downstairs and chat with the desk cops.

  He had just come back up and was headed for the supply room and a cup of coffee when Vince Grasso, one of the other detectives on the squad, looked up from his desk.

  “Jackie L.—you got a phone call a couple minutes ago.”

  “From who?”

  “Gary Daskivitch over at the Seven-six.”

  “Is he there now?”

  “Nah. He left a message, though. Said it was urgent.”

  Grasso looked down, gave his big walrus mustache a tug. “Hold on a sec, my desk is such a fucking mess…I wrote it down somewhere…Here.” He held up a pink message slip. “He wants you to meet him right away at this address.”

  Jack gripped the steering wheel so hard his fingernails dug into his palms. He sped along the Shore Parkway, which afforded spectacular views of the sunset over the bay and the Verrazano Bridge. He ignored the scenery. The parkway turned into the Gowanus Expressway, marching on monster stilts over Third Avenue, into Sunset Park.

  The yard was full of squad cars, unmarked cruisers, and Crime Scene vehicles. An unseen dog howled as Jack climbed the exterior staircase to the third story, where faded aquamarine curtains hung in the windows.

  The screen door had been sliced open and the lock was popped. Jack badged the uniform out front, entered the little vestibule, walked on into the low-ceilinged living room. The room was airless and humid—the windows were all closed. It still smelled of mothballs and mildewed rug, but over those scents pressed the sweet metallic odor of blood. A Crime Scene detective crouched by a red streak on the musty shag carpet to clip a sample, which he dropped into a plastic envelope. A photographer stood in the corner next to a big old TV, shooting down at the top of it, where a square of the surface was free of dust. “Looks like a VCR’s missing here.”

  In the corner, another tech dusted a china cabinet filled with a series of presidential plates. The doors were open and the shelves inside in disarray. Jack picked up two broken halves of a plate and put them together to form Richard Nixon’s jowly face. (What a strange and terrible thing: to be admired and respected as the president of the United States, then fall so low and be reviled.)

  He glanced up at the ceiling and his heart froze: the stucco held a spray of little red dots he recognized as castoff, the splatter pattern made when a perp yanked a weapon back in preparation for another blow. Or stab.

  He followed a trail of bloodstains across the carpet toward the back of the apartment. Halfway across the room, a partial shoeprint marred the edge of a sticky pool of blood.

  “Did you guys get this?” he asked the nearest Crime Scene tech.

  “You bet. I’ll bring in a saw to take up that carpet and get it to the lab.”

  Jack took a deep breath, then continued on toward the kitchen.

  He stood in the entry; the first thing he noticed was a wide blood smear on the inside of the back door. He moved in past the kitchen table, to a point where he could see the bottom of the stain, which led down to the corpse of Raymond Ortslee. The barge captain knelt against the bottom of the
door, as if he had toppled forward while searching for a mouse hole—or praying. He wore only boxer shorts and a T-shirt with yellow sweat stains under the armpits; he’d probably been home alone at the time of the attack. The side of his right wrist bore two deep red slashes: defensive wounds he’d sustained while raising an arm in a useless attempt to protect his body from a knife. Red streaks ran down the bottom half of the door; they marked where his grasping fingers had fallen short of the knob.

  Jack flashed on a World Book picture he’d been fascinated by as a kid: it showed the ashen mold of an ancient Roman trapped in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii, his body curled in a fetal position as he raised feeble hands against the death raining down from above.

  Gary Daskivitch knelt next to the body, his necktie flung over one shoulder to keep it clear of the blood. As Jack moved close, his partner glanced up, then wordlessly pulled back the T-shirt to reveal another nasty stab mouth under the man’s protruding ribs.

  Jack went clammy. He forced himself to draw several deep breaths, then took out a handkerchief and wiped off the sweat beading his forehead.

  Daskivitch looked up. “You all right?”

  “How did you know he was here?” Jack said grimly. There was no routine reason why a Seven-six detective would be immediately informed of a murder in the Seven-two.

  “The Crime Scene guys found my card on the body. It was in his fucking shoe.”

  Jack turned away from the body. The techs had left their sooty print dust on the door, the rusting stove, the cabinets…

  Daskivitch tugged nervously at his tie. “That Berrios murder was no amateur job. These people figured out how to track this guy down.”

  “Speaking of which—”

  “I know. We need to check with whoever’s in charge of the canal to see if they got any strange calls. I think it’s the DOT.”

  A big droopy-eyed black man in a sharp double-breasted suit came through the door. Ed Colby, from the Seventy-second Precinct. Jack had met the detective before, when they were both working Robbery.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” the detective said. His left eye twitched, an involuntary tic. The other cops at the Seven-two had taken to calling him Detective Winks.