by Blake Banner
We parked in the lot, and fifteen minutes later we were sitting in a secure room, waiting for Chen Zhu to be shown in. There was a loud buzz and a clang. The door opened and two guards led in a man who, even chained hand and foot, was terrifying to behold.
It wasn’t just his size, though he was tall, muscular, and agile. It was his face, the complete absence of expression and the deadness of his eyes. They communicated just one thing: he could watch an unlimited amount of suffering and feel absolutely nothing.
He was placed in the chair opposite us, and his wrists were cuffed to the table. The guards told us they would be just outside and left us alone. He watched me a moment. He didn’t blink. Then he watched Dehan in the same way. After that he settled down to watching the wall behind us.
“Zhu, I am Detective Stone, and this is my partner, Detective Dehan. We need to ask you some questions about the murder ten years ago of Nelson Hernandez in the Bronx. I know you’re in for twenty to life. If you help us, that will help you, in the long run, to get parole. Are you willing to answer our questions?”
I got exactly the response I had expected. Nothing at all. I was pretty sure he had put himself into a trance. Dehan said, “You have nothing to lose, Zhu. No one is going to accuse you of a loss of honor or a loss of face. All we want is for you to fill in a few details on a cold case.”
Same response. I asked him, “Did you kill Nelson Hernandez ten years ago in the Bronx?”
He blinked, but it was probably just his time for blinking that month. It didn’t tell me anything. Dehan looked at me like she was wondering why I was taking so long. I was wondering myself. I guess I just didn’t like doing it, but Carmen was done waiting. She said, “Do you see much of your brother Zak? He ever come and visit you?” His gaze shifted from the wall to Dehan’s eyes. She went on, “He’s kinda the black sheep of the family, huh?”
I said, “Actually we bumped into him and some of his friends last night.” His eyes shifted to me, but all I could read there was that somehow, some day, he intended to kill us. I said, “Does the family know?” I gave a small laugh and spread my hands. “This is New York, in the new millennium. What’s a bit of homosexuality in the family? No big deal, right?”
His face went rigid, and all the color drained out of it. This was true rage, and unleashed it must have been a truly terrifying sight. I was glad he was chained. I stared him in the eye and said, “Oh, they don’t know?”
Dehan said, “You’re kidding me. Your grandfather, the head of the most powerful Triad gang in the eastern United States, does not know that his grandson is gay?” She looked at me, then back at him. “Well, what do you think would happen, Zhu, if he found out? I mean, I know that family is really important to you, and I think that a life choice as profound as this one is something he should share with the family, don’t you?”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a large envelope. His gaze followed it onto the table. I shook out the photographs and spread them out in front of him. He turned away. I went on, “And I would say he was pretty committed to his life choice, wouldn’t you, Detective Dehan?”
She reached down and pulled my laptop out of her shoulder bag. She opened it up, hit Play, and spun it round for him to see the screen. I could hear the thumping and thudding of the music from the night before, and the shouts and screams. He refused to look. “You ought to have a look, Zhu. Because if you don’t start talking to me, the next people to see this will be your father and your grandfather.”
He spoke for the first time. I was surprised he had no accent.
“Turn it off. Take the pictures away.”
I left it playing. “Are you going to talk to us?”
He nodded. I turned the laptop around and turned it off, then collected up the pictures. “Did you kill Nelson Hernandez?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What happened that night?”
“Mick Harragan contacted us couple of weeks before. He said there was an opportunity for us to move in to Hunts Point. Till then our policy had been to stay around Chinatown in Manhattan. But things were changing, and some of the younger men favored the idea of expanding out. There was a growing Asian population in the Bronx. Mick said the Mafia weren’t interested, and all we had to contend with was the Mexicans. He said the Mexicans were not organized, and with our resources we could control them. There was a lot of money to be made in prostitution and drugs. Prostitution and drugs is what we do.”
Dehan said, “But he told you there was just one obstacle.”
Zhu nodded. “Nelson Hernandez. He said if we could take out Nelson, we would own the neighborhood. He wanted a fee for information on where and when to hit Nelson, and he wanted a retainer every month.”
I asked him, “How much?”
“Twenty-five K for the information, and twenty-five K a month.”
Dehan asked, “So that was fifty K upfront?”
“Yeah. When we got there, Nelson was dead. His head and his balls were on the table. There were four other guys dead too. It was an execution. We had a man outside, watching, who told us the cops were coming. We got out just in time, otherwise we would’ve gone down for it. Mick set us up and walked away with fifty grand.”
Dehan shook her head. “Why would he do that?”
He turned his direct stare on her. “That isn’t complicated. He knew his time was up. He was approaching retirement. Every year the system was getting harder to play. Every year there was a new bunch of clean cops coming onto the force, and every year it was getting harder for him to hold on to his position. He was beginning to feel the heat. It was just a matter of time before somebody took him down, either to clean up the show or to replace him. So he played us, Nelson and the Italians against each other. He took fifty grand from us. I don’t know how much he took from the Italians, but at least that much, and what he took from Nelson must have been close to five hundred K. Plus, whatever he’d been stashing away for the last couple of years, I figure he ran with a couple of million at least. Maybe five.”
I said, “So while you’re looking at the Mob, the Mob are looking at you, and the cops are looking at you both. Nobody is looking at Mick, who quietly slips away.”
“That’s how I figure it.”
Dehan asked, “So where’d he go?”
I was expecting the same answer I’d got from everybody, so it was a surprise when he answered without hesitation, “Mexico.”
“Mexico? How does that make sense? He just killed five guys who are in with the Sureños and he goes to Mexico?”
He smiled and shook his head. It was the most expressive thing I’d seen him do. “You think on the surface. You got to ask deeper questions. Ask yourself, how much would the Sureños pay Mick Harragan to kill Nelson?”
I dropped back in my chair and stared at him. “He was a fucking embarrassment to them. Mick wasn’t causing the turf war, he was playing the turf war the Nelson was creating.”
“The Sureños wanted Nelson out of the way more than anybody. With Nelson gone, they hoped we’d go back to Chinatown and they could negotiate a deal with the Jersey Mob. They knew Mick had a beef with Nelson because Nelson had stopped paying him. Mick wanted to make a stash and get out. So he struck a deal: he kills Nelson, they pay him and give him a safe place to retire. Ask yourself, which is the one group that isn’t chasing after Mick?”
“The very group you’d expect to be out for vengeance and punishment,” said Dehan.
I said, “You know this? You got proof?”
He shook his head but then said, “When we came out of Nelson’s place, we saw the Italians there. They thought we’d killed Nelson, so we knew they didn’t do it. We went and looked for Mick. His house was empty, but there was a bottle of tequila in the breakfast bar in the kitchen, with two glasses. We searched the place. There was nothing, but we found brochures.”
“Mexico?”
“Nelson had a couple of bitches. Mick has a thing for Mexican girls. Nelson kept him supplied. I figure Mexic
o is where he went, with one of the bitches.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Dehan said, “We done?” I nodded. She picked up the laptop and the pictures and showed them to Zhu. “Send your brother to college. Get him out of the rackets. Give him a chance to become the human being you never did. You obviously love him, so do the right thing by him. If I see him going into the family business, Zhu, this goes to your grandfather.”
He stared at her but didn’t answer, and we left.
In the lot, she leaned on the roof of the Jag and stared at the woodlands that surrounded us.
“You buy it?”
I leaned on the other side. A rook laughed at us without much commitment.
“Do I buy it? There’s no hard evidence for anything right now. All we’ve got is theories. It’s the best theory I’ve heard so far. It has a smell about it of being the right track. But does it make me want to snap my fingers and say ‘Aha!’? No. It doesn’t. How about you?”
She gave me a small smile that unsettled me for some reason. “What you said.”
She got in and we drove to Attica to eat pizza.
Eight
I chewed on the last piece of crust. I was looking out of the window, but in my mind I was seeing the five men sitting around a table, drinking beer and whiskey, eating crisps and nuts, playing poker.
Dehan said, “They’re sitting at the table.” She was tipping a glass of sparkling water this way and that, watching the bubbles, “There’s a knock at the door. Nobody gets up, but somebody opens it.”
“The same person who left their prints on the glasses and the dishes of nuts.”
“Right. She opens the door and they come in fast. It’s like a raid. Mick’s at the front. Who’s he got with him? A couple of Sureños. They rush in. They’re shouting and hollering, ‘Freeze! Nobody move!’—that kind of stuff.”
“That’s why nobody reached for his piece.”
“That’s right. They’re surrounded. They’re taken by surprise. Plus, they can see it’s Mick and some guys they know. They’re wondering, ‘What the hell? What’s going on?’”
“And they execute them.”
“But the Sureños got to make a point. They’re punishing this guy. You don’t presume to tell the Sureños who they do and don’t support. So they cut off his balls and his head. Leave them on the table as a message to anybody else who wants to declare himself king of the Bronx.”
I nodded. “Now the guys leave, and Mick takes his dues, all the money Nelson had at the house…”
I looked at her, and she looked at me. She shrugged. “It sounds awful generous coming from the Sureños, but maybe Mick was holding something over them.”
“Yeah… I’m wondering what it is exactly Mick has done for them. Okay, he was there and he shot at least one of Nelson’s gang, but in this scenario, he’s just come along with the Sureños. It’s the Sureños who made the hit. They didn’t need Mick.”
She sighed. “Okay, then it was hired muscle. Couple of guys he paid to do the job with him. Either way, they leave. He takes the money and the girl. They have tequila. They get in the car and they go, leaving Pro, Vincenzo, Chen Zhu, and the NYPD all scratching their heads.”
I played a short tattoo on the table with my fingers. “It’s a scenario. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions. But it gives us one thing.”
“The girl.”
“Yup. Chances are high she was from the neighborhood. Let’s pray that for once the stereotype holds true. Latina girls love their mothers. Wherever she is, she may well still be in touch with Mamita.”
“How do we find Mamita?”
I pointed at her. “You will find her. You will go around the hood putting up flyers, talking to community leaders, talking to parish priests. Did a young girl in her twenties go missing about ten years ago? You will not say, but you will allow them to think, that remains have been found.”
“But if she’s still in touch with her mom, her mom will know that she’s not dead.”
I nodded. “Correct, but the chances are that only her mom will know, and it will be their secret. So there is every chance that an aunt, a cousin, a sister a brother, a parish priest, will get in touch with us. Maybe they won’t, but it’s worth a try. I suggest you do it in uniform.”
She frowned and sounded skeptical. “You think that will inspire more trust?”
“No, it would just be nice to see you in uniform.”
“Take a hike, Stone.”
“I’ll tell you something else that keeps playing on my mind. How did that hit man out at Yonkers know to follow us?”
She made a face. “There are only two possibilities.”
“And one of those possibilities is in bed with the Triads and wanted Kirk dead.”
We spent the next day canvassing from East Bay Avenue to Lafayette in Hunts Point. Dehan did most of the legwork because most of the people we needed to talk to would refuse to talk to me. Dehan was half-Mexican, looked Mexican, and grew up in the neighborhood. If anybody had a chance of getting through, it was her.
I focused on the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the African Methodist Church, and the Corpus Christi Monastery of nuns. The priests at the first two were very understanding and promised to spread the word and encourage anybody who remembered anything to come forward, even if it was through them, rather than directly. The mother superior at the monastery had been there for thirty years, and she remembered something.
We sat in her office overlooking the small woodland that was part of the grounds, and she peered at me over the top of her reading glasses.
“This is Hunts Point, Detective Stone. Young Latina girls go missing every year. Some are murdered, others die of drug overdoses, others escape to try and make a new life for themselves. You are interested in one particular girl who disappeared ten years ago…”
It wasn’t a question, but she made it sound like one. I haven’t got a lot of patience, but I mustered what little I have and smiled.
“Mother Superior, we could get into a long, involved discussion about the complicated social interactions between the NYPD and the residents of Hunts Point, and the socioeconomic and political dynamics that condition those interactions. But that is a discussion which won’t lead us anywhere except to where we are right now. The fact is there are dozens of girls, and boys, and men and women and children that we can’t do anything to help. But there is one whom maybe we can help.”
She gave me a frigid look and then smiled. “I shall consider myself duly told off.” She sat back in her black leather armchair and heaved a large sigh. Her eyes kind of glazed, and I could imagine her traveling back in time. “Ten years… 2007… the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl, the Oregon Beavers won the College World Series, George ‘dabaya’ Bush was in his last year, and the financial crisis had struck.” She nodded. “Yes, there was a girl. Maria. She was eighteen or nineteen. She came to me in considerable distress.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “She wouldn’t tell me. She said she was forced to marry a gang member with whom she was not in love. She feared if she said no to him, he would not only hurt her, but also her family and the boy she loved. I tried to advise her that the best thing she could do was to go to the police for help, but she said that was impossible.”
“Did she say why it was impossible?”
The mother superior was pensive for a few moments. Finally, she said, “No… but I got the impression that she didn’t trust the police.”
She gave me a level look, and I said, “Or a particular policeman.”
“That could be the case.”
“What was her surname, Mother Superior?”
“Garcia. But I am afraid that’s all I know about her. She stopped coming to see me. I made discreet inquiries, and the rumor was she had eloped or escaped. But nobody really knew where she was or what had happened to her.”
I met Dehan back at the precinct. I was there doing some research of my own when she came in an
d dropped into her chair. She looked mad, but like she was trying not to be mad. “A lot of girls go missing from Hunts Point over a period of years, without ever being reported.”
“I got the same feedback.”
“They go into prostitution and die somewhere as a Jane Doe with needle marks in her arm, so nobody ever follows it up because who cares anyway? Or their pimp shoots them, stabs them, chokes them, whatever, and throws them into the Bronx River. Their families and friends never report them missing, because if they do they will end up on a deep-six vacation themselves. Or the lucky ones get out and never write home in case somebody comes looking for them. What the fuck, Stone?” She stared at me. “What the fuck is wrong with this world?”
“People. People are wrong with this world. But we haven’t got time right now for existential passion. Tonight we can drink whiskey and ask each other existential questions. Right now I need to know if you got anything useful.”
She glanced at my face, then for some reason seemed to study my shirt and my arms. “I don’t know right now if you’re an asshole or a nice guy. I have a list of six girls who went missing about that time. One of them is Bulgarian, three are Russian, two were local. One of those two was a hooker, like the Bulgarian and the Russians. They are all almost certainly dead.”
“The one you’re saving till last was called Maria Garcia.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I decided. You’re an asshole. Yeah, she was Maria Garcia. Maybe she still is. I tried to talk to her mother, but she didn’t want to know. I left it because she was getting too upset, and I was worried I would draw unwanted attention.”
I told her what the mother superior had told me. “That sounds like our girl. How do we play it?”
I thought about it for a few minutes.
“We need to keep pressuring the family. One of three things is true. Either nobody knows where she is, only her mother knows where she is, or the whole family knows. If we keep pressing them, somebody is going to talk—either her to make us go away, or some member of the family for the same reason. If they are protecting Mick—and thus Maria—from the Mob, the Triads and or anybody else who is after him, the last thing they want is the cops drawing attention to them. So if we start pressuring them, one of them is going to talk.”