What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Could it have been an initiation ritual gone wrong? I know that some gangs require you to kill a random person to get in. You know, like what happened with those girls at that mall on the South Shore a few years ago.”

  He didn’t like it. “Salazar is a lifer. No need to have him kill randomly. Besides, they were already looking at him for a drug dispute homicide with MS-Thirteen.”

  “Maybe they were questioning his loyalty and he had to do it. Was he a snitch?”

  “You think I didn’t check that shit out? Believe me, Gus. No one inside the gang, not here or in Latin America, is questioning his loyalty. I would hear about it. Salazar was no snitch.”

  “Let’s go back to my initiation theory again, just for a second.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re right. Salazar is a lifer and didn’t need to prove his loyalty, but maybe it wasn’t his initiation. Maybe it was somebody else’s, some kid or his brother or cousin he was sponsoring who fucked up and Rondo is taking the fall.”

  Alvaro was almost always quick to answer, especially to refute something he thought I got wrong. So when he was quiet, I knew that maybe, just maybe, I had hit on a possibility he hadn’t given much thought to.

  “But what about the DNA?” he asked, finally. “And the cuts and scratches?”

  “I can’t explain any of it away, but remember, they found the girl in Heckscher State Park. She wasn’t killed there. You find where the killing actually happened, maybe you’ll find out there was someone else involved. Think about this scenario, Alvaro. He sponsors this kid and the kid stabs the girl once, twice, but the kid can’t go through with it. He freaks, but it’s already too late. The girl’s got to die. Rondo is furious, loses it, and takes it out on the girl which accounts for the vicious nature of the attack.”

  “That’s a whole lot of what-ifs and maybes and could’ve-beens, Gus. A whole lot based on what? Your imagination? Evidence. Where’s the evidence?”

  “Good question. Where’s the murder scene?”

  “Gus, you’re a fuckin’ pain in my cojones, you know that? But you’ve given me something to check into. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though, amigo.”

  “Hoping’s not something I do a lot of these days.”

  “Anything else, Gus?”

  “You should’ve learned your lesson by now, bro. Never ask me that.”

  “What?” He packed a lot of exasperation into one syllable.

  “If I need to, and I probably won’t, can you get me in to see Salazar?”

  “Are you fuckin’ with me now, Gus?”

  “No.”

  “If I had to, I guess I could, but it would cost me a lot of goodwill and capital. So make sure this is something you’re desperate for, or don’t ask.”

  “I probably won’t ask.”

  “Jefe, you’ll forgive me if I don’t have much faith in that.”

  “You’re forgiven, Alvaro. One other thing.”

  “How did I know you were going to say that? What else?”

  “Anything going on with the Asesinos? Nothing related to this. I mean, generally,” I asked, not expecting him to come back with any revelations. I was wrong.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. They’ve had more money to put out on the street lately, like they’ve had a big infusion of cash.”

  “Drug money? They were looking at Salazar for a drug killing, right?”

  “Doesn’t seem that way,” he said. “No big increase in drug activity from them, and if there was, I’d hear about it. No, Gus, this is something else. They’ve got some other business we’re not onto yet.”

  “Money from back home? Are they laundering cash?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. Money usually gets kicked upstairs, not down.”

  He knew better than to extend the conversation again, said goodbye, and hung up. As interesting as my theory was, I didn’t believe that’s how or why Linh Trang was murdered any more than Alvaro believed it. But like me, he was curious. His curiosity was different from mine. As Alvaro once told me, gang behavior, as irrational and violent as it seemed to outsiders, was governed by a twisted kind of logic and tradition. Gangs had all sorts of rituals, rites, and rules, a litany of dos and don’ts. What ate at him about the Spears homicide was his inability to make it align with his understanding of how gangs functioned. Me, I just wanted to know why.

  22

  (WEDNESDAY MORNING, EARLY)

  No alarms. No phone calls. I got up all on my own at about one in the afternoon the next day. My shift had been unremarkable. Three trips to Ronkonkoma station and two to the airport. By midnight, there was nothing to do. So I used the computer in the business center to do a background check on Linh Trang. Not on her death, but on her life. Except for the autopsy photos and the ME’s report—which I could get from Al Roussis or Charlie Prince for the asking—I knew what there was to know about her death. No, if there was something I was missing, it was in the folds and creases of her too-short life, not in the depth of the twenty-three puncture wounds.

  It was odd how publicly people, especially kids, lived today. I had kids. I knew how it was, that the expectation of privacy was as much a thing of the past as covered wagons and rotary phones. I’d always been uncomfortable with how much of their lives John and Krissy shared, how much their friends shared, of things I would have never wanted anyone to know. The hardest thing for me to swallow was how much Krissy shared of her struggles after her brother’s death. She posted stuff about her drinking, her drug use, her careless dating, and anonymous sex. There were times I wasn’t sure which was worse, her posting about it or having to listen to people report the details of her activities to me. That was all over now, but remembering those days still made me wince.

  Linh Trang Spears left a social-media footprint behind her. I guess everybody does. She had a personal website she must’ve created when she was barely a teenager. Maybe her parents couldn’t bear to cancel the hosting fees or maybe they paid their credit card bills blind to those few dollars appearing as a charge month after month. Who knows? On the site there was some awful poetry about boys and unicorns, rainbows and clouds. There were drawings, too. Better than the poetry, much better, and a lot of old photos. The photos were mostly of her and her pals, some of her family. I thought it was kind of odd how few photos there were of her and her sister. When I spoke to Abby, I sensed that she and Linh weren’t the closest sisters ever. But so what? I guess I kind of liked that Abby didn’t act all guilty and regretful about it. Murder, at least in Abby’s eyes, hadn’t turned her sister into a saint. I saw there was a contact page, but didn’t go there. It just felt creepy.

  I had a Facebook account that went back as far as John’s freshman year in college. His idea, not mine. These days I used it occasionally to check in with Krissy at school, even though her school was a fifteen-minute drive from the Paragon. I went to my page and typed Linh Trang’s name into the Facebook search box. Her page was still there and, by my figuring, was current up to the day before she was murdered. Her last post was about her being bored at work and wanting to do real accounting after she got her CPA. Many of her posts were similar to Krissy’s: photos with friends at the wineries with wiseass comments below, photos at ballgames, a shot of her cat sleeping in a weird position. There were links to videos, funny and political, and shares of friends’ posts. There were some photos of her with men—“Jerry and me on midnight cruise around Manhattan.” Like that. To judge by her Facebook page, she dated several men, but none seriously or for very long. Maybe there was something in that. Probably not. None of them had killed her.

  What I was most interested in were her friends. I’d always believed that if you wanted to know someone, you talked to her friends. Friends knew a person in a way his or her family never would or could. I believed it, but I wasn’t sure that it was true of me anymore. So many of my old friends, friends that were ou
r friends, Annie’s and mine, had disappeared. Even before the divorce, they seemed to have evaporated. It was John’s death. Tragedy frightens people. It shakes the ground under their feet and they don’t know what to do with it, so they run. Don’t misunderstand, our friends didn’t abandon us. They were there for us during the worst of it, but then . . . pffft! Gone.

  I had some old cop friends like Al Roussis, though many of the people I had been so close to while I was on the job were out of my life. No one knows better than a cop the difference between work friends and friends. To my shame, my closest friend on the job had been Pete McCann. I didn’t like to think about what that said for me. Bottom line was, what my old friends would say about me wouldn’t be valid because I wasn’t who I used to be. They didn’t really know me, not really, not anymore. Now my friends were Slava, Felix, Bill, and this funny-looking ex-con named Smudge. They could tell you who I was.

  Systematically, I clicked on her friends’ photos, went to their pages, and sent them brief messages explaining who I was and what I wanted of them. That I’d been hired by Linh Trang’s family to try to learn as much about her as I could so they could remember her and not just her death. Technically, I was telling a stretched version of the truth. I gave them my cell number, my e-mail address, and the option of just messaging me back on Facebook. I expected to simply leave messages and that I’d check back in the morning to see if I had any takers, but her Facebook friends began answering me nearly immediately. Message boxes appeared on my screen and my cell phone was buzzing madly in my pocket. I was sure that if I checked my e-mail, there would have been replies there, too. I forgot how people in their twenties could be night owls. I was one by default. Twenty years of rotating shifts and driving the night-shift shuttle will do that to you.

  I ignored the phone calls and answered the three people messaging me back on Facebook. They all seemed eager to talk about Linh Trang. I answered each one with a thank you and explained that messaging on Facebook was probably not the most efficient way to accomplish what I had in mind. That a phone call was better and that meeting in person was best. I suggested a place closest to them would be best, a public place where they felt comfortable, like a local Starbucks or bar. I said anyplace would work for me as long as it was in the New York metro area. I made sure not to sound too pushy. Sound pushy and you push people away. Two of the three agreed to meet, said they’d think about where to meet and when and then get back to me. I had similar results when I returned calls to the messages left on my phone. And like I thought, there were e-mails from a few of her friends in my inbox.

  It was nearly three-thirty when I was done working through Linh Trang’s Facebook friends and exchanging messages. I was about to click out of Facebook and go back out into the lobby. Then I recalled Linh Trang’s old website and Facebook page, and I hesitated. I went back to the Facebook search box and typed in John Murphy Jr. When a hotel guest came into the business center, I looked at my watch. Five o’clock had already come and gone.

  23

  (WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON)

  I met Jim Bogart at Grandpa Tino’s in Nesconset. The place was a Long Island classic because below the green, white, and red lights that spelled out GRANDPA TINO’S PIZZA was a red neon sign that flashed FROM BROOKLYN. The essential message being the pizza didn’t suck like the rest of the crap in Suffolk County because Grandpa Tino came from Bay Ridge. I wasn’t sure I bought that. I had relatives from Bay Ridge, too, and none of them could make pizza worth a damn as far as I could tell. But I had to admit, the pizza was pretty good and they did keep it traditional. No garlic knots or Caesar-salad pizza with pretzel crust here. No Sicilian—square—pizza, either. Just old-fashioned flat, round Neapolitan pizza with lots of red sauce, shredded mozzarella, oregano, olive oil, and a dusting of Parmigiano cheese. I hadn’t had a slice of Grandpa Tino’s pizza for a while because I hadn’t been in Nesconset since last December.

  Bogart was a tall, slender young man with an earnest face, killer blue eyes, and the fading red traces of the acne wars. I recognized him from his Facebook photo. Even in the photo there was a sadness about him, which was more evident in person.

  “Jim,” I said, walking up to him and patting his shoulder. “I’m Gus Murphy.”

  He smiled an uneasy smile and offered me his hand. His handshake was like his smile, uneasy. But I wasn’t Micah Spears and chose not to make any judgments based on the relative firmness of his handshake.

  “C’mon, Jim, let’s get a table.”

  Linh Trang didn’t have a steady boyfriend, not that I could figure. Jim Bogart was as close as she got, although she had apparently broken up with him a month before she was murdered. Bogart was one of the first of Linh Trang’s Facebook friends to respond to my request. He’d been one of the callers, and his voice mail message to me was full of eagerness and grief.

  I ordered a pie and a bottle of Coke from the waitress.

  “That okay with you, Jim?”

  “Great. Perfect,” he said, though his words belied his unease.

  I wondered why’d he had picked Grandpa Tino’s to meet.

  “I work about a mile or two from here in the frozen-food department at the Stop and Shop in Ronkonkoma.” He snorted and shook his head. “See what a three-six-five GPA and a BS from Hofstra gets you these days. I’ll be done paying off my student loans about the time we establish a second Mars colony and unify quantum mechanics with Newtonian physics.”

  “You’re too young to be so cynical. Leave that stuff to old people like me.”

  He relaxed a little, laughed. “You’re not old. You’re probably younger than my dad.”

  “I was twenty years on the job, Jim. That’ll make you a cynic.”

  But I didn’t believe it even as the words came out of my mouth. The job hadn’t made me cynical. Other things had done that. I was always the cop knee-deep in shit who still believed in people. I was the good neighbor. The guy on the block who mowed other people’s lawns when they were away or shoveled their driveways just because I was already out shoveling mine. Not because I thought it would buy me anything, but because it felt right to do. Nor did Jim have to remind me that I wasn’t old. I knew that. And being with Maggie made me feel really young. Christ, I was young! Maybe that’s why I worried about her. I didn’t want to go backward, returning to the lonely days in my hotel room watching hours of SportsCenter. I went back to the conversation before my mind drifted off the subject at hand and into my own regrets.

  “Don’t let it get to you, kid,” I said, as much for my own sake as for his. “Things’ll work out.”

  “They didn’t for LT.”

  “No, they didn’t. They don’t always, not for everyone. So, Jim, you’re the second person who called Linh Trang LT. In fact, a lot of the people who responded to my message about her called her that. Why?”

  “She hated her name.”

  “Did she? It means beautiful spring, right?” I said, proving only that I could Google Vietnamese names as well as the next guy.

  “She felt like it marked her. Like, ‘Hey, if you can’t already tell I’m Vietnamese by birth by the way I look, just listen to my name.’ It was like that. She said that if she didn’t love her dad so much, she would have changed her name in a second. She said her mom didn’t care, but that her dad got really pissed if she brought it up. So LT was kinda like a compromise.”

  “Was there any more to it than that?”

  “Nah, I think she felt very American on the inside and that she was already saddled with having to explain her adoption to people all the time when they found out her parents were white. She felt like the name made it harder for her to just be who she was.”

  “How did you guys meet?”

  His lips shaped themselves into a sad smile. “At a party off campus. We both were bored and standing around, and we just started talking. I asked her to dinner and she said yes. It was no great roma
nce or anything. We didn’t see each other from across the room or anything.”

  As we ate, Jim told me more about their relationship, trying the whole time to convince me and maybe himself that LT wasn’t the great love of his life. Neither one of us was convinced.

  “So,” I said, “what happened between you guys?”

  He looked as if the cheese had caught in his throat, but he could see I wasn’t going to let him change the subject or move on to the next question.

  “She could be very cruel sometimes.”

  “Cruel how?”

  “After I told her that I loved her, she would never say she loved me back.” He held up his hands to stop me from speaking. “I know that that happens, that there’s no guarantee that just because you love somebody, they’re gonna love you back. But the thing is, I think she did. I know she did. She just wouldn’t say it. So this one time we were in bed and I said it to her again, I love you, and she got really mad. She like jumped out of bed and began shaking her ass at me and rubbing herself and screaming at me, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to tell you I love you, too?’”

  “That’s rough, Jim.”

  “That’s not the worst part. You ever see the movie Full Metal Jacket?”

  I nodded.

  “You know the first scene after they get out of boot camp and they’re at an outdoor table in Saigon and this Vietnamese prostitute approaches them and—”

  “I know the scene,” I said.

  “So after she asked me if she was supposed to tell me she loved me, I got really frustrated and told her yes, that it would be nice to hear once. I mean, I’m human. I just wanted to hear her say it, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “She said, ‘You want me to say it? Okay, I’ll say it.’ Then she started touching herself again and in a bad Vietnamese accent she said, ‘Me love you long time.’ And kept repeating it. After that, Gus . . . it was never the same. It wasn’t right between us. She wasn’t cruel to me, but to herself.”