South by South Bronx

by Abraham Rodriguez

  “You know what those cards were for,” she said.

  A huff of smoke.

  “I make cards for a lot of people. It’s one of the things I do. I tell you what else I do: A week ago he called me. Wouldn’t talk on the phone, I had to meet him. Somebody was after him. Don’t tell Tony, he said. I gave him a Smith & Wesson mini .22, with two clips.” Contempt made his lips curl. “It’s the same gun you’ve got.” He closed his eye a moment, as if his whole system had shut down for meditation. “Why he didn’t use it to defend himself is beyond me.”

  “He thought he could talk to them,” she said, feeling her eyes burn. The rum was making her feel disconnected. “They had Tony. He wanted to stall, to bargain for Tony’s life.”

  The one eye was a round black stone.

  “I tried to tell him to run with me,” she said.

  The hesitation was now on her, the hatred of words. She was thinking she made a big mistake coming down that fire escape. What was Anne trying to tell her with that poem about betrayal and the Judas kiss? She wanted to take everything back: to go back up the fire escape steps. The need for tobacco reminded her of Alex, of his words about bad spirits and confusion. She took a cigarette from the pack and lit fast. Changó, Changó. The god of imposters, sometimes.

  “Don’t you get it? I tried to shield the organization from this! I can’t help you.”

  “You don’t have to help me,” she said. “Help David.”

  “Why should I?” His eye went cold hard. “You going to tell me there are ten million reasons?”

  David had said One-Eye possessed a lot of integrity to turn down a piece of ten million dollars. She could see it in his stiff bearing, the almost sneer, as if such fantasies were beneath him.

  “There’s maybe one reason to start with,” she said. “The bastard who killed David also killed Tony.”

  She watched the eye go glassy behind the cigarette smoke.

  “David wanted you to get this tape to Sanchez,” she said, reaching into her purse. “He didn’t have time. He knew you could get this to Sanchez for him.”

  “You know about Sanchez?”

  “No,” she said. “But you know him. You know if you can trust him.”

  One-Eye’s face was blank. He picked up the tape.

  “It’s from David’s answering machine,” she said. His fingers were tapping on the cassette, clack clack clack. “The killer is on it.”

  “What’s Sanchez supposed to do with it?”

  “He’s supposed to make a choice,” she said.

  One-Eye was packing for a real fade-out. A black 4x4 parked at the bus stop. Two young scruffs ditched cigarettes and moved in opposite directions across the block, taking up post. She was by the fire escape window, thinking: Go back. Go back up the fire escape steps. In a moment, maybe they would be coming upstairs to collect One-Eye, to collect her … ? For One-Eye had snapped into action, telling her she wasn’t going to run around on her own like that. After all, the organization had a stake in this. This was more or less a family issue and she should understand that. The best thing to do was for One-Eye to deliver her to Sanchez. Like Judas I have done my wrong. The betrayal, the Judas kiss? She was thinking of mistakes, flashes of her dream with Sarita intruding like pangs of conscience. How she whacked Alex, left him for dead. (Not dead, sleeping. She made sure.) There was a sick guilt, along with the weird sense that she had blown it. You’ll be with someone, but don’t fear him. Looking deep into that glimmery one eye and feeling she had made a mistake. Maybe he felt that way too, seeing her pull the gun on him right there in his bedroom, where he was still packing the duffel for his flight.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “But don’t you want to stop this?”

  “I made a promise.”

  His face darkened with disappointment. “Are you going to go through with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think it’s worth it?” he asked.

  “It’s me they’re after.”

  One-Eye was looking past her, at the fire escape window. “Do you know what you have to do?”

  “Yes,” she said. “David said you were a man of dignity. So why don’t you show some and turn around so that I can go out the way I came in?”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said.

  “Just give the tape to Sanchez.”

  “But maybe he can find a way to put a stop to this. You’re not gonna get away with ten million dollars!”

  “Turn around.”

  “My people are downstairs,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  When he turned, she swung the gun. He crumpled, hitting the floor with a bony clatter.

  13.

  David Rosario’s apartment was a mess. Drawers, boxes, pots and pans. Turned over kicked down pulled out. Kitchen cabinets thrown open. The gray couch had its cushions slashed, the back ripped down to reveal its skeletal frame.

  The desk. Drawers open, papers strewn. He must have just picked up those rolls of film from the developer’s. The packets had been opened, the pictures scattered. Snapshots of him happy smiling. An office party. The blonde I saw in his office. The way they snug laughed in the snaps, all close.

  I should have come looking for him. He never answered my calls. I must have left three messages on his machine at home. It was why the lieutenant found me squatting by the small table beside the desk. The phone was there, but no answering machine. I knew there had been one. I’d seen it myself that time I was here. It was missing.

  “Are you sure?”

  Lieutenant Jack’s round face creased up. I showed him the short connection cord, still attached to the phone. The phone jack was about ten feet away. The connecting cord, which would have gone from the jack to the machine, was gone too.

  The time I came here to see Spook, David let me in. I was trying to get Spook to help me line up some witnesses to testify against Dirty Harry. He was on the gray couch, while David went back to the little table where the phone was. The machine was a clunky old Panasonic that used regular audio cassettes. David had been clearing messages when I came. My messages would have been on the machine’s tape, along with something else. The something else that probably made someone swipe it.

  There were keys lined up on the desk, as if meticulously examined—and rejected. There was a lockbox designed for the storage of a firearm. It was empty except for a clip of .22 ammunition and a leather holster. I was still doing the math when Lieutenant Jack did the tour guide routine. He was a nut for ballistics and forensics. He had a good team. These guys could make a room talk.

  The killers had picked the lock. It was a pro job. (The locksmith was on his way.) They’d busted the flimsy chain on the door and poured into the bedroom. David must have had his back to them when they came. They blasted a bullet into his back that exited through his chest and lodged in the wall. When he fell, they pumped another bullet into his head. The bullet went through the floor. Scared the hell out of Mrs. Garcia, who lives in the apartment below with her three cats. She heard a third shot. This one shattered the window, perforated the blinds. The bullet chinked off the fire escape, and lay in the alley in a white chalk circle.

  That bullet was meant for someone else.

  “That would be the blond girl,” Jack said, popping another stick of gum. Jack tended to chew gum compulsively at murder scenes. He said it killed the stink. He handed me a photo, his pick from the bunch.

  “Myers identified her. Ava Reynolds. Twenty-six. Works with Rosario at the ad agency. His personal assistant. Looks pretty personal judging by these snaps. Got a couple of witnesses that spotted her running toward Westchester Avenue. Barefoot. In a minidress.”

  Her face. A white chalk circle. His pockets were pulled out, his shoes removed, pants unbuckled. IDs, wallet intact. Rings remained on fingers. The energy on Myers was an intense bright light. He was the first one on the scene. The other cops rubbing sleep from pupils all cloudy dark. Only way was to keep squinting. />
  “If I had something and didn’t want you to get it, I would hand it to someone else,” he said. “I would try to stall the killer so she could get away.”

  “She?”

  The sure confidence of him turned everything around him into sludge. I was molasses. We were all mollusks.

  “That’s right. Tried to stall them so she could get away. The killers knew she had it on her. The killers knew when they came in. They tried to intercept a pickup. It’s why they came.”

  “But he had a gun,” Lieutenant Jack said. “There was a gun here. He could have used it to defend himself. It’s missing. We haven’t found it.”

  “Gentlemen, I remind you that Spook is still missing and has not been found. It’s a possibility that they contacted David, to get him to hand it over. They probably threatened to kill him unless David handed it over. Instead of handing it over, David thought he would stall while the girl made the getaway with the goods. It’s possible.”

  “Maybe they called on the phone,” I said.

  “The answering machine is missing,” Lieutenant Jack added.

  Myers gave the phone table a look. “It’s possible,” he said.

  “Did you get anything from your wiretaps?”

  This was the first time I alluded to Myers and his bread truck in public, that is, alongside Jack. Myers squinted at me and glanced at Jack. There were other officers around.

  “Unfortunately, we had a weird system breakdown,” he said, not missing a beat. All Myers talk had a rhythm, a marching cadence. “We’ve been down for three days now.”

  “Tough break,” I said.

  “We have to think that maybe these people have Spook. They might have made him talk. They didn’t come here for payback. They came to find the money, or whatever leads to the money. They knew it was here. And they figured that whoever had it here didn’t intend for the money to reach its destination.”

  The pale totem face beside him, his fellow agent, never said a word. Never registered words or the sound of them. Stood looking about as if he was guarding his man. The other agent was by the door to the living room, same blank face watching everyone. It was like they were memorizing us. I just kept asking myself, if they were both here, who was in the bread truck? Was Myers telling the truth about the system being down?

  I wanted the next cigarette. I swiped three from Sergeant Mooney, but no smoking at a murder scene. A dead body should remain as pure as possible, the air untouched by nicotine, by scents and smells. Skin is highly receptive, even in death. A bit of cigarette ash on a thumb does not only change its smell. It can distort a vast network of minute data, or worse: wipe it out. Yet I wanted the next cigarette. To light and puff. To block words from coming, from spilling out.

  Myers seemed to have developed the ability to ignore Jack completely. Maybe he was trying to dismiss him as a gum-crack wise-ass. I’m sure Jack realized that. It didn’t stop him. It made him worse.

  “But he had a gun. Why would he not use it to pop these bastards?”

  “He thought he could talk to them,” Myers said. “Just think, if they’re holding his brother.”

  “But maybe the gun would have kept him alive.”

  “He gave the gun to the girl.”

  “You know that for a fact, yeah?”

  “It hasn’t been found.”

  “Maybe the killers took it, what do you know? You think they swiped the answering machine too?”

  Myers grit his teeth. “Maybe if they were on it.”

  “Quite a bitch, not having your gizmos in effect, huh?” At this moment I was so in love with Jack. His gumshoe style was the stuff of movies, every romantic image of a cop I ever had. He nudged me, like I was in on the joke. “What the hell? A recording will only tell you you’re right. But are you going to recognize the voice? Is it someone we know?”

  “They obviously thought so,” I added, “since they lifted the machine.”

  Myers’s face went flat with distaste.

  “He gave the girl the gun,” he said, as if overriding all previous assumptions. “And probably something else.”

  The token booth clerk at the train station was still on his shift. He hadn’t seen a blonde.

  The bus driver said it was before 3 a.m. He was heading down Westchester Avenue, under the el. It was raining hard. He had just hit the bus stop on Elder Avenue when the blonde got on. She was in some obvious distress. Wet through and breathing hard, she could hardly swipe her MetroCard from trembling. She was also barefoot.

  “Barefoot?”

  “She was carrying the shoes in her hand.” (Because she ran for the bus, get it?) She asked for 149th Street. The bus driver told her she should stay on until the last stop, but she didn’t. She got off at the spot where Prospect Avenue meets Longwood. The driver was pretty sure it was down Prospect Avenue that she went. Hit the street running like she thought a car might veer off and give chase. “Sure as hell the devil was chasing that girl,” he said.

  Could Myers know like I know? If the bus driver was right, then she got off at the perfect spot to hit 149th Street. It was a walk, but going straight down Prospect Avenue in the direction she took would have led her right to the spot where 149th crosses Southern Boulevard. It made me think this was no girl just running. She had a definite destination.

  The apartment was starting to reek.

  It was still dark outside. Officer Jenkins was taking pictures. Mahoney was dusting for prints. Officer Peters stepping right up to bat.

  “Lieutenant, I’d like to know how my people are supposed to do their jobs with this guy running around getting prints on everything,” he said. “Did you see him and his people earlier?” He hooked eyes on Myers. “This is a crime scene.”

  “I have gloves on,” Myers said, holding up both hands. Covered in those rubber disposables cops use when they touch homeless guys.

  “You don’t disturb a crime scene like that,” Officer Peters went on. “And his people took stuff.”

  “Okay, I took these keys,” Myers said, holding up a plastic baggie. “Would you say these are safe-deposit box keys?”

  Jack took the baggie and gave the keys a look.

  “More like luggage keys.”

  “Just what did you take?” I asked, but Myers didn’t hear me in the outburst of cop voices that followed. Procedural questions, investigative priorities. Departmental pecking order. Jenkins, Mahoney, Peters. Cops I had worked with. I looked at them now as if from a distance, images through a train window on a landscape I was speeding past. I might have said once that these men were my friends. But since Dirty Harry, they were just officers. Their eyes grew hooded and empty when they looked at me. Unlike Jack, they would not stand and smoke with me. I never asked them for cigarettes. (I swiped them.)

  I watched them argue. Myers wanted the room sealed, while Jack refused to cripple what he felt was HIS investigation with federal meddling. Besides which, he pointed out loudly, he hadn’t even been briefed yet … at least not by Myers. All this while David lay there, no longer able to say a word as we pawed through his possessions and walked through his space. The stink that was starting to fill the room was his only gesture of complaint.

  It was now, while standing there in that veritable cop world, that David Rosario’s murder started to hit me.

  I had told Myers that David was clean. How was I supposed to stick to a story like that if David got caught handing the goods to the blonde? Got plugged just as he shunted her out the window. Myers had suspected him all along. That smug look he was giving me. He was right and I was wrong OR I was lying OR I couldn’t come up with a good enough story to explain the edges jutting through the fabric. And how about him, would he have a good story to tell? Could he explain to me how David got murdered while Myers claimed to have planted an operative on him? How did this informant not tell Myers what was coming? I was dying to put him on the spot, but I couldn’t bring that up in front of all these cops. It seemed more and more that there was something between u
s, a private place of stories and lies.

  The time I met David here, he pelted me with questions. He didn’t really believe I was hunting down a fellow cop. “I’m sorry,” he had said. Shaking his head. “Cops just aren’t too big with us.” (I thought he was going to say WITH US PUERTO RICANS, an instinctive feeling I grew up with.) Good guys bad guys. Spook and David’s parents have a nice house in the Puerto Rican furry green. Couldn’t link it directly to dirty Spook money, but I knew. The two of them, crooked and straight, earned their folks a nice calm life in the suburbs of San Juan.

  “You never give up, do you?” He’d watched me grill Spook about getting me those witnesses. Spook had been wary. Bitched about immunity issues, cop retaliations, worries about his street cred … David pushed him. I got my witnesses. After Spook left, I lingered awhile. A cigarette before the despedida at the door, something that can take a Puerto Rican a long time.

  “Hey man,” he’d said as I went down the stairs, “do you think being Puerto Rican makes you a different kind of cop?”

  I didn’t know at the time if it was an honest question or a challenge, a dare, a playful gibe. It was better to think of it as a joke, and that’s how I took it at the time. I gave him some shrug, some vague one-liner. Back then I wasn’t even thinking about stuff like that. Now it was too late to talk to him. I wanted to rewind the tape and examine the question with him. I wanted to tell him that no one had ever asked me this. Other Puerto Rican cops I knew didn’t talk about it. I almost felt trained not to answer his question, even though I had never in my entire life heard the word spick as often as I heard it at the police academy. It was the price of admission. We were too busy trying to be cops. I didn’t get to seriously answer his question. I wanted to, now. I think if I had back then, the answer would have been different. Maybe he already knew better than I did. Maybe what he was really asking was, Are you sure you should be hunting down a fellow cop? That made me feel stupid, naïve, sorry. POLICE CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER. A bullet in a chalk circle. A light rain. A deep gray street. A watery coffee. Myers and I watched the paramedics walk a stretcher into the building. Half a stale cigarette. A bad gig. I could imagine taking the fall for this. A few words from Myers could do it. I found Detective Sanchez to be uncooperative, combative, and unreliable. The captain would be happy to finally see me wash out. Was that what Myers was thinking? I can’t forget the grin he shot me as cops argued all around us about procedure, as if this chaos pleased him. About him I was guessing, just guessing all along. I could put a picture of him together, only to have him change the pieces, rearrange his face, his voice, his manner. I was growing two faces myself. One face to Myers, one face to Lieutenant Jack, who was simply trying to solve a pair of murders. In the old days we would have immediately side-by-sided. Now my legs were made of lead, my instincts no longer based on cop procedures or cop speed or even cop BELIEF. That comic book stuff about how good guys inevitably triumph over bad guys. How all parts fit together snug and there are always answers. Spook missing, probably dead, and David murdered right under my nose, almost as if that freak cop had returned to do a sequel. That’s another thing that happens in comic books: Super villains who get snuffed in one issue may reappear a few issues later, just as powerful. Maybe it was just my instincts gone bad. I stood with Lieutenant Jack, popped a stick of gum, made cracks about the feds like we were high school brats razzing the teacher’s pet. I felt I was going into mourning. Jack was the last piece of my cop life left. I could feel his energy bubbling over with mission. He had been briefed by Myers, in the loop but still skeptical and unimpressed. Who knows what the fuck Myers told him. Cops like to keep things basic. The more complicated things get, the less they believe it. This business with the ten million just didn’t swing with him. The blonde was a witness who might be able to identify the murderers. But if she was an innocent witness in fear for her life, why not just come to the police? She could walk into a station house or flag down a cop car. That she was clearly not doing this already soured him on the whole business. Myers was impatient with him, brusque, matter-of-fact.