No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  Silence. Vega felt a sudden panic that he’d said the wrong thing. Everything that came out of his mouth toward his daughter—about her tattoo, her career choices, her friends—was wrong. He wondered if it was already too late to earn back her trust.

  “Do you know,” she said finally, “that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you really apologize?”

  “I guess it was overdue.”

  “By about a decade.” And just like that, a light switch flipped back on. Her whole manner toward him changed. Was that how it worked? Vega wondered. Could genuine remorse, honestly expressed, really be that cathartic between people? He felt embarrassed that it had taken him all these years to figure that out. Then again, you could say sorry for a fistfight and maybe put the pieces back together. No amount of sorrys brought back a life. Maybe that’s what Greco meant about being forever changed.

  “You aren’t anywhere near Lake Holly, I suppose?” asked Joy.

  “I’m in Dr. Cantor’s driveway in Wickford. Why?”

  “Mom and Alan and the boys had to go to an event at the synagogue” said Joy. “Can you give me a ride to the train station?”

  “You’re still going to see your friend today?”

  “At Fordham. Yes.”

  Fordham. Just the word made Vega’s stomach ricochet like he was on some carnival ride.

  “Dr. Torres is also going to give me a tour of his school after the basketball tournament is over this afternoon.”

  “Look, Joy, maybe you want to hold off. People hear you’re my daughter and—”

  “I’m not walking around with a banner over my head, Dad. I’ll be fine. See you in ten.”

  Vega drove to Lake Holly taking the same local roads he’d driven on the way over. He was testing himself. Testing his nerve.

  I can handle this.

  He went back to the signpost with the crime scene tape. He tried to breathe and found that he could. Good. He swilled some water in his mouth and made the turn onto Oak Hill. He’d do one drive around the cul-de-sac and then head back down. So far, so good. He wasn’t shaking. He was breathing steadily. His stomach was a little off. But okay, that was to be expected.

  That was before he saw Adele’s pale green Prius parked by the curb.

  He knew it was Adele’s. She had a Lake Holly Elementary School bumper magnet on the hatch and a little soccer ball with the Ecuadorian flag dangling from her rearview mirror. What was she doing here? Vega’s insides felt like they’d been folded, creased, and sent through the shredder.

  He quickly reversed his car and sped down the hill. He turned on the radio to distract himself. “Heat of my Heart” blasted out of the speakers. Goddamn this guy! Vega angrily punched the radio button off. All his misery these last forty-eight hours began and ended with Ricardo Luis. There was so much Vega wanted to ask him and couldn’t. Why was he alone in that house Friday night? How come he answered the door? Did he ever see a second assailant?

  What was he doing with Adele?

  Vega tried to push the last question out of his head and concentrate on Friday night. He wished he knew what Luis was thinking when he dialed 911. But the police would have that audiotape under lock and key at county dispatch now, given that it was part of an ongoing investigation. Vega would need a case number to access it. And nobody on the investigation was about to give him that—especially not after the way he’d been behaving.

  Then again, maybe he didn’t need to ask. In Joy’s driveway, Vega pulled out his phone and scrolled through his photos until he came to the evidence pictures Dolan had sent him Friday night. There it was, on the upper right hand corner. His way in.

  “So what are you planning to do today, Dad?” Joy asked him on the drive to the train station.

  “Oh, this and that.”

  Joy raised an eyebrow. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “I won’t get into any fistfights, I promise.”

  She kissed him on the cheek as she left the truck. “Stay out of trouble.”

  “Always.” He could hope.

  * * *

  The county’s emergency dispatch headquarters was located in a shoebox of a building on the state medical college campus, a sprawling patchwork of parking lots that cobbled together the most unlikely collection of services. Besides the county hospital, there was the county jail, rimmed in double razor wire so no one mistook it for the equally unattractive hospital. There was also the medical examiner’s office, a shelter for battered women, and the county’s emergency dispatch service. Each division had its own unattractive beige cement building complete with a parking lot, a couple of ugly rotting picnic benches, and itty bitty signage so that if you didn’t know where you were going, you probably shouldn’t be there.

  Dispatch was conveniently located right across from the medical examiner’s office. Just to make doubly sure no one knew what he was doing, Vega parked in the ME’s lot and crossed over to dispatch.

  The vestibule door was alarmed, but he showed his ID to the video camera and immediately got buzzed through. The front reception area had all the warmth of a post office. The ceiling was acoustical tile, the floor was linoleum. There was a collection of flags—American, New York State, and county. At the front desk was a young white guy, not long out of college. He had close-cropped hair and wore a dark blue dispatcher’s knit polo shirt that looked as if it had been pressed, certainly not by him. Vega suspected he still lived at home with his parents.

  Vega showed his badge and added a little push to his voice, hoping his rank and seniority might keep the kid from asking too many questions.

  “I need to pull the tapes on the Benito Diaz shooting.” Diaz—a.k.a. Lil—was a teenager who had been gunned down in a lover’s triangle back in September. Vega was the lead investigator on the case so nobody was likely to question his motives.

  The dispatcher buzzed Vega through the doors. Vega followed the hallway to a room with cubicles, computer monitors, and headsets. It reminded him of language lab when he was a kid. He expected to be listening to someone discuss their vacation in French. For all Vega’s fluency in Spanish, he couldn’t order off a menu in French.

  The screen required him to type in his badge number and the number of the case he was looking to access. It meant there would be a record linking him to audio he wasn’t authorized to listen to. But who would bother to look?

  Vega pulled out his phone and copied the case number from the evidence pictures Dolan had sent to him. Then he put on the headsets and hit play. A flat, emotionless female dispatcher’s voice came on the line:

  “County dispatch 911, what is your emergency?”

  A male voice answered in a heavy Spanish accent.

  “Ah, I was home? By myself? And this man? He, ah—he broke into my house.”

  Vega frowned. It took Luis three full sentences to get around to stating his emergency. In Vega’s experience, people got to the point pretty quickly: I’ve been shot! My baby’s not breathing! My house is on fire! And okay, Luis wasn’t a native speaker. He was likely scared and under pressure. But why was every statement framed as a question? The only people Vega knew who framed statements as questions were teenage girls and lying suspects. And Ricardo Luis was not a teenage girl.

  “Where is your house, sir?”

  “Six Oak Hill Road. In Wickford.”

  “Is the suspect there now?”

  “Ah, I’m not sure. I think they—he ran away? After I shot him.”

  They? Did Luis confuse singular and plural? Or did he know there were two men? If so, then why lie to the police?

  Unless he didn’t want the police to go looking for a witness.

  “You shot him? Where did you shoot him?”

  “In the hallway.”

  “No. I mean where on his body?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t listen. I told him to get out. It’s his fault he got shot.”

  The more Vega listened, the more the 911 recording filled him with unease. When Vega was in uniform, he
regularly responded to 911 calls. The contents—relayed by dispatchers—were nearly always some variation of Get over here now. Help. Save me. Hurry. The callers couldn’t care less what happened to the people who were hurting them. They never thought to justify their actions. The one time Vega remembered listening to a 911 transmission like this was on one of his first serious child abuse cases. A man called 911 to report that his girlfriend’s toddler had “fallen” down the stairs while he was caring for the boy. Vega arrived to find a man more interested in explaining how “naughty” the child was and how he was always “tripping” rather than in whether Vega and the EMTs could save him. They did save the boy, thankfully. But the man eventually confessed to beating the toddler when he wouldn’t stop crying.

  So what was going on here? The dispatcher’s voice came on again.

  “Okay, sir. Stay on the line with me. Police will be responding shortly.”

  “Chingada madre! He’s still in the house.”

  Okay. Here, Luis sounded genuinely upset. He cursed. He gave factual information. Vega believed that whatever was going on, Luis definitely was afraid to have this guy still in his house.

  “Can you get someplace safe in the house until police arrive?”

  Luis took the phone away from his mouth and shouted in Spanish to someone in the room. The words were garbled. They sounded like . . . but no. That didn’t make sense.

  Or did it?

  “Sir? Sir? Are you still on the line? Police are on the scene.”

  The dispatcher lost contact with Luis after that. The rest of the radio communication had to do with Vega and the Wickford Police. Vega went back to the beginning and played the tape again. He heard those garbled words more clearly this time:

  “Largo de aquí, joto!” Beat it, faggot!

  Was Luis calling the intruder a homosexual? And if so, did that have something to do with why the man was there in the first place? Was that what Luis was hiding?

  Vega left the building, still trying to make sense of this development, when a man stepped out of the front doors of the medical examiner’s office and began walking toward the only other car in the lot. He had a shaved head, broad shoulders, a blond walrus mustache, and the distinctive chest-forward walk of an ex-high school linebacker who still played in weekend leagues, albeit with increasing sprains and pulled ligaments. Dolan.

  Vega stopped in his tracks. “Thanks for returning all my calls, Teddy.”

  “I’ve been a little busy trying to save your ass.” He took in Vega’s bruised face and frowned. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Duran and Wilson didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Huh.” Vega figured the two officers would have blabbed to everybody in his department by now. He’d behaved like a bastard to them last night and they’d still covered for him. He owed them big time. “I tripped.”

  “On what?”

  “My good intentions.”

  “The worst kind.” Dolan swept a gaze behind him to the video cameras mounted on the side of the building. “For a former undercover narc, you sure pick lousy meeting spots. The brass sees me here with you, we’ll both be stamping pistol permits.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “Get in my car at least, will ya?” said Dolan. “If I’m going to talk to you, it’s not gonna be out in the open like this.”

  Vega hopped into the passenger seat of Dolan’s unmarked—a late-model gray Toyota Camry. Dolan always managed to draw the better vehicles. Vega started talking as soon as Dolan slid behind the wheel.

  “Have you listened to the nine-one-one tape of the shooting?”

  Dolan shook his head. “Not yet. The robbery’s Wickford’s jurisdiction.”

  “Wickford is Boy Scouts with guns. Listen to it when you get a chance.”

  Dolan gave Vega a sour look. “I gather you already have.”

  “That would be against department policy.”

  “Yes, it would.” Dolan played along. “So assuming a friend heard it, why is it worth listening to?”

  “Because my friend thought it didn’t sound like Luis was getting robbed. It sounded more like he was having a homosexual encounter that went wrong. And by the way, Luis may have known there were two guys on his property.”

  “We checked the gay angle,” said Dolan. “It didn’t pan out—least as far as Luis is concerned.”

  “Wait.” Vega frowned. “Why would you check that angle if you haven’t yet heard the nine-one-one tape?”

  Dolan fixed his gaze at the windshield and delivered his best hundred-yard stare. “Turns out the phone in our possession didn’t belong to Hector Ponce. It belonged to the other man—the one you shot. And a lot of the contacts on it are gay men. But Luis’s closest associates assure us he’s not gay or bi. We have no evidence to the contrary.”

  “Hold on a moment, back up,” said Vega. “Are you confirming that the man I killed wasn’t Hector Ponce?”

  “The DNA from Ponce’s toothbrush and hairbrush match the body from the Brighton Aqueduct. Dr. Gupta verified the results this morning.”

  “So who’s this other guy? A gay friend of Ponce’s? Someone entirely unrelated?”

  “Neither,” said Dolan. “When Gupta originally ran the DNA from Ponce’s hairbrush and toothbrush against the man you shot, some of it was a match.”

  “What do you mean, ‘some of it’?”

  “Gupta originally thought the samples had been corrupted,” said Dolan. “So she ran the test again. The second batch indicated that the man you shot had the same mitochondrial DNA as the mitochondrial DNA on the hairbrush.”

  “That’s the DNA a person gets from their mother, right?” asked Vega.

  “Affirmative.”

  “So you’re saying the man I shot was Hector Ponce’s brother?” Vega blinked as it sank in. “How come nobody in the Ponce family told the police this?”

  “Because they thought he was dead,” said Dolan. “Hector Ponce only had one brother, Edgar. He was supposed to have died in the desert twenty years ago.”

  Chapter 29

  Vega pulled out his phone and scrolled to the picture Dolan had texted to him Friday night—the one Edgar Ponce held in his hand when Vega shot him. Vega pointed to the man standing next to Hector Ponce by the fruit stand, the one with the slightly narrower face and soft smile. “This is Edgar? The brother who was supposed to have died in the desert?”

  “That’s him,” said Dolan. “Edgar Antonio Ponce-Fernandez. That’s where the ID with the name ‘Antonio Fernandez’ came from, as well as the Atlanta, Georgia, connection. We’re just piecing all of this together now. We haven’t even notified next of kin yet so you can’t talk about this.”

  “I understand.” Vega closed his eyes and tried to wrap his mind around this new development. He hadn’t killed Marcela’s father. He’d killed her uncle. There were people who loved and cared about him somewhere—in Georgia perhaps. They would never see him again. Changing the name didn’t change anything.

  “So the family didn’t know he was alive?” asked Vega. “I’m assuming Hector knew.”

  “That’s what I’m gathering so far,” said Dolan. “It seems the brothers crossed the border together twenty years ago, got separated, and each thought the other was dead. I think in Fernandez’s case, he saw no future as a gay man back in Honduras so he decided to stay dead to his family.”

  “Okay,” said Vega slowly. “I get why he might want to disappear if his family was very traditional. But—why resurface now?”

  “That’s the part we don’t know yet,” said Dolan. “Fernandez has an ex-partner in Atlanta who told us that he left for New York about three weeks ago to reunite with his brother. But his ex didn’t know any more than that.”

  “So who was Fernandez staying with in New York? Not Hector and his family, I’m assuming. A gay lover? It seems like somebody in the Bronx would know.”

  Dolan’s cell phone dinged with a new text. “Stay out of this,
Jimmy. You’re sounding a bit too interested for my taste.”

  Dolan checked his text and began tapping out a reply. Vega’s mind drifted. Twenty years. The brothers had been apart for twenty years. So what sparked their reunion? Some criminal enterprise? Vega the cop suspected as much. But Vega the man wondered if the motive could be something much simpler. Whatever else family was, it was shared recollection.

  Vega could understand the hunger for such a thing. He’d felt it himself since his mother’s death. He had no brothers or sisters to soften the pain of her passing with stories of their life together, no presence of a father to color in the faint outlines of early childhood. All the rituals of his youth were sealed away inside of him. He was a soda can with a broken pop top. Even Martha, his mother’s best friend, couldn’t reminisce with him now. Vega wondered if maybe that’s why Fernandez and Ponce reconnected. There was too much shared memory not to.

  “I’ve gotta go, Jimmy.” Dolan leaned across the empty seat as Vega stepped out of the car. “Hey, when this thing’s behind us, come over and have a couple of beers at my house, okay?” He wasn’t looking for a response. He was looking for an escape. “In the meantime, try to stay at least twenty feet back from every one of your good intentions.”

  Vega watched Dolan drive away. He had the day to himself—and he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He couldn’t handle being with friends. He wasn’t allowed to attend anything public. Adele wasn’t speaking to him—and in all likelihood, in a few hours she was going to be speaking about him.

  Vega felt a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach that he could only describe as homesickness. He wanted to sit at his mother’s kitchen table while she fussed over him, piling too much fried food on his plate, straightening his shoulders, mussing his hair, and complaining that it needed a cut. He wanted to talk in shorthand about people and experiences long in the past. He wanted comfort without expectation and chatter that required no rejoinders.

  In short, he wanted to feel like a child again.

  He thought about what Ellen Cantor had said about visiting Martha Torres. She was not his mother. She was not even really Martha anymore. But she was the one person who had known him almost as well as his mother. If Vega wanted to start healing himself, he had to go back to a place before the pain began.