No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  “You took a DVD from her?” asked Joy. “Why would you do that?”

  “I’ll give it back once I’ve had a chance to look at it, okay?”

  Torres turned to Yovanna. “Perhaps I can hold it for you, querida. Until we can sort this out—”

  “You can’t do that,” said Vega in English. “It’s evidence in a police investigation.”

  “Work with me, carnal,” Torres muttered. “I’m trying to keep you from getting arrested for kidnapping, you dig?” Torres turned back to the girl, his voice soft and sweet in Spanish. “Would you like that, querida?”

  “I want it back,” she replied.

  “And you will get it back, I promise,” said Torres. “But you need to calm down.”

  Yovanna nodded. She took a deep breath and stopped arguing. Torres held out his hand to Vega. Reluctantly Vega reached into his jacket pocket and handed Torres the DVD.

  “I need it back, Freddy.”

  “Of course. But right now, we’re working on de-escalating the situation.” Torres slipped the disc into a pocket of his zippered hoodie. “See? Wasn’t that better than a show of force?” Torres shook his head. “Honestly, Jimmy. When will cops figure out that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?”

  “I’m usually dealing with manure,” said Vega. “Vinegar and honey seldom come into it.”

  Torres turned back to Yovanna. “I will keep this safe for you, querida, until we can get hold of your family and figure out the best thing to do here, okay? In the meantime—” Torres switched to English and looked at Joy. “This girl really needs some mittens and an extra layer of clothes. You know that spare clothes room I showed you in the basement?”

  “Sure,” said Joy.

  “Take her there and get her something warm to wear.” Torres turned back to Yovanna and explained where Joy was taking her. To Vega’s surprise, the girl willingly followed his daughter. Vega watched them walk off down the hall.

  “Wow. I gotta hand it to you, Freddy. You know your stuff.” Vega rapped a knuckle against his. “I’ll take that DVD now.”

  “Don’t you want to see what’s on it?”

  “When I’m out of here.”

  “Listen, Jimmy—if there’s one thing I know as a principal, it’s teenagers. That girl ain’t going nowhere with you unless you give her back her DVD, know what I’m saying?” Torres had slipped into street vernacular. The neighborhood had that effect on people, no matter how they spoke elsewhere.

  “No can do, Freddy.”

  “You’re not using your gray matter, carnal. We can make a copy.”

  “I need the original.”

  “So? You keep the original and she gets the copy.”

  “I don’t want to take a chance on compromising the contents.”

  “We’re not going to compromise it. You think you’re going to get her home any other way? I bet you don’t even have her mother’s phone number. And she sure as hell ain’t gonna give it to you the way you’re acting.”

  Vega hesitated.

  “Listen,” said Torres. “Most of my computers are dinosaurs, but I have one up on the fourth floor that will do the job. Take a look. See what you think. If you’re not down with that, fine, man. It’s your call.”

  “All right,” said Vega.

  “And while we’re up there,” said Torres. “I want to show you the new roof gym I’m installing. Joy wanted you to see it before you left.”

  Vega didn’t really care about the roof gym but he didn’t want to say that to his old friend. “Will Joy and Yovanna be able to find us?”

  “I told Joy I was going to show it to you.” Torres grabbed his coat from his office. “C’mon, Jimmy. The front door’s locked. You’re safe. Besides, the longer you stay, the more likely people are to get cold, give up, and go home.”

  He had a point.

  The Bronx Academy of Achievement had once been a tool and die factory and it still possessed an industrial sense of itself. The ceilings had exposed ducts running across them but everything was painted in cheerful blocks of color so it reminded Vega less of a factory and more of a modern art museum. Vega could still smell the fresh coat from yesterday as he and Torres climbed the stairs.

  “What’s on the DVD?” asked Torres.

  “Can’t tell you that.”

  “Ah. Police business.” Torres chuckled. “Funny. Even after all these years, I still can’t picture you as a cop, man. You don’t have that killer instinct.”

  “The mob at your front door might disagree,” said Vega. “And besides, having a killer instinct doesn’t make you a cop. It makes you a killer. Most cops I know lead pretty tame lives off the clock.”

  He and Torres were on the fourth floor now. Vega squinted down the darkened hallway. “So, where’s this computer I can make a copy on?”

  Torres led him into a room and flicked on the light. He turned on a computer with two DVD slots. It looked old and painfully slow.

  “It’s going to take a couple of minutes to warm up,” said Torres. “How about you come eyeball what I’m building on the roof. It’ll just take a minute. By then the computer should be ready for action.”

  Vega hesitated.

  “Listen, carnal.” Torres was clearly getting frustrated with him. “You think I like being on lockdown like this? You got creds with me, man, but that only goes so far. You need to step up your game, you dig?”

  “I hear ya.” Vega would have to wait for that dinosaur to power up anyway.

  The door to the roof was up six short steps. The passageway felt cold. Torres rummaged around in the pocket of his puffy down jacket for a key.

  “A key?” asked Vega. “I thought all these exits were supposed to have emergency push bars?”

  “Some of my students were playing hooky on the roof. It’s better this way.” Torres unlocked the door and pushed it open. A blast of cold air fanned their faces as Vega stepped outside.

  “It’s not finished yet,” Torres apologized.

  It looked barely started from what Vega could see. The nearest sides of the roof were enclosed by chain-link fencing but the far side was still open. There was no gym equipment, only bundles of metal joists and rods piled near a ventilation shaft and blanketed in snow.

  “It’s—nice,” said Vega. It was freezing is what it was. He wanted to go back inside. The heavy steel door slammed shut behind them.

  “See?” Torres slipped his key back in the door and turned the lock. “I can lock and unlock the door from both sides to ensure no one gets up here without my permission.”

  “That’s great, Freddy. So listen. Maybe we should—”

  “Look at this view, man. You ever see a view like this?” Torres swept a hand to the unenclosed part of the roof. Sturdy tenements stood shoulder to shoulder, their grimy facades dressed up in the twinkle of traffic lights and neon signs. Even the high-rise housing projects took on a certain dark majesty set against the hazy accumulation of all that wattage. Vega wanted to appreciate it but all he could feel was the needles of ice pricking his face and the flakes of snow melting into his hair.

  Something that sounded like a sheet of ice snapped behind him. Vega turned. At Torres’s feet, he saw glittering shards on the compacted snow.

  “What the—?” The DVD lay like a broken Christmas ornament between them.

  Torres pulled a .380 Beretta out of his pocket and pointed it at Vega’s chest. “It’s loaded, Jimmy. Trust me, in this neighborhood, it’s loaded. I know you’re not packing. You wouldn’t have run from that mob just now if you were.”

  Vega’s insides burned with a mixture of rage and confusion. He couldn’t believe the man who’d saved his life so many times could betray him so completely now.

  “You’re on the DVD.” Vega had to say the words to believe them. “You killed my mother.”

  “Didn’t want to, carnal. I swear. I tried to talk some sense into her on the phone that night. But all she kept saying was ‘Turn yourself in. Get your head right
with God.’ I was outta options.”

  His mother’s final phone call. It wasn’t to speak to Martha. It was to speak to Freddy. A slow dawning crept over Vega. That’s why his mother had an appointment with Detective Renfro in the Bronx homicide division. Luisa Rosario-Vega had evidence that Freddy Torres was involved in a murder, Martha’s words at the nursing home came back to Vega:

  You know what you did, yes? So does Luisa. And he knew.

  “Donna.” The name felt like a prayer on Vega’s lips. Snow covered his shoulders and slipped inside his jacket. He felt the chill all the way down his spine. “She didn’t fall from that window, did she? You pushed her.”

  Torres’s face tightened for just a moment and then turned smooth and slack. Something went dead in his eyes. Vega felt as if a serrated spoon were digging out the lining of his stomach. Finding out about Donna was almost worse than finding out about his mother.

  “Why, Freddy? For chrissakes, why? Donna never hurt anyone in her life.”

  Torres’s voice turned steely when he spoke. “Who did you ever have to look after in your life, huh, Jimmy? You didn’t have a drunken father you had to protect your mother from. You didn’t have a sister with Down syndrome you had to watch all the time. It was all on me. Everything was always on me! And then my mother’s Alzheimer’s hit and I saw the future. I was going to be saddled with two dependents. Two! My mother and my sister. Their care was going to bleed me dry. Until the day I died, I would never be free. Jackie ran away. She got to live her life. When was it my turn?”

  “So you killed your sister?”

  “My sister’s life insurance paid for my mother’s home health care. It’s still paying for her care now. You think Medicare picks up everything? Not for the kind of care she’s getting, it doesn’t,” said Torres. “My solution was working. It made sense. If your mother hadn’t gotten all up in my face. If Hector Ponce had repaid his loan instead of trying to get cute with me.”

  “So Hector knew that you killed my mother?”

  “Then? No. I don’t have a clue why he switched DVDs. Later? He probably ran the footage and figured it out. But he was a gambler who liked to borrow money so he wasn’t about to rock the boat—until he had to.”

  “And then you killed him.”

  Torres steadied his gun with both hands. “Everyone who was a witness is gone now. It’s over, Jimmy. No more.”

  “I’m a witness,” said Vega.

  Torres didn’t answer. He took out his phone and punched in 911. A dispatcher came on the line. “This is Dr. Fred Torres,” he said in his smoothest and most professional voice. The street vernacular was gone. “I’m on the roof of the Bronx Academy with a distraught police officer—the one who shot that dishwasher in Wickford? He’s threatening to jump—”

  “No!” Vega took a step forward. Torres leveled his gun and spoke into the phone again. “Please hurry. He’s acting crazy. I don’t—” Torres disconnected in midsentence. Which made it seem as if someone else had done it for him. Then he put his phone away.

  “You see, Jimmy? I shoot you, it’s in self-defense. Or maybe you just want to jump and save us all the trouble?”

  Chapter 38

  “The theme of this symposium is healing a divided nation,” Adele reminded the hushed audience as she stepped on the stage at Keating Hall. “I suspect no one in this audience is more divided than I am at the moment.”

  There was a small murmur of polite but nervous laughter from the crowd. Adele saw no point in pretending that they wanted some canned speech or that they didn’t know exactly who she was and how she was connected to the shooting. They thought they knew her—just as they thought they knew Vega. But they didn’t. To go forward, she would need to summon the courage to look back. Publicly. It was something she never did.

  “When I was a little girl,” she began, “I was terrified of the police.” Her voice sounded shaky to her ears but she needed to explain her position. If that meant walking off this stage and out of this line of work, so be it. She could not flinch.

  She spoke about her childhood, living in fear that the police might one day break down her door and haul her parents away. Or that her parents might go to work cleaning offices one evening, get caught in a raid, and never come home. Blue uniforms terrified her. Sirens terrified her. She learned early not to talk too much about her family. If someone stole from her or cheated her, she quietly accepted it rather than chance anyone in authority asking questions that her parents couldn’t answer.

  “I was born right here in Port Carroll, New York. I’m an American citizen,” said Adele. “And yet I’ve never felt that sense of birthright.” She went on to confess how she learned early to shut down her emotions and not speak about things she couldn’t change. She didn’t go into all the silences she was asked to endure. Some were too deep to ever speak about and certainly not here.

  She described her father’s one visit to the police, when she was fourteen, after a neighbor stole her parents’ business from them—and the ridicule the officers subjected him to.

  “My father died two years after that incident,” said Adele. ”The doctors said it was a heart attack. But I think it was a broken heart.” She had the audience spellbound now. She didn’t really notice. She was lost in her own raw memories.

  “My mistrust of the police only deepened after I became a defense attorney,” she continued. “I saw cops lie. I saw them mistreat my clients. My fear and anger turned to cynicism. You could say I’d lost all faith.”

  She paused. “And then, one day, I met a police officer who changed all that. Not because he was perfect. I saw him make mistakes. Again and again, I saw it. But for the first time, I also saw behind the shield. I saw a man trying hard to do the right thing. Sometimes an impossible thing. In a world that is rarely fair or helpful, I saw a man get up every morning and try to be both.”

  Adele took a deep breath. “Does that exempt him from explaining his actions or having them scrutinized? No. But it does mean that we need to give him and all police officers the benefit of the doubt. We need to be as fair as we ask them to be. If the forensic evidence warrants a grand jury investigation, then I’ll be the first to call for it.”

  She caught Tate’s scowl from the audience. “Or maybe the second, since my esteemed colleague, Ruben Tate-Rivera, will probably be the first.”

  That got a laugh. The audience was with her even if Tate wasn’t.

  “I do believe, however, that if we truly want to heal our divided nation, then we need to step away from the actions that divide us. We need to meet emotion with logic, hatred with justice. I would rather whisper my conscience to the wind than scream my fury with the mob. Thank you.”

  The applause was long and generous as Adele stepped down from the stage. Had she done it? Had she dodged a bullet and saved Vega from it as well? She wondered where he was right now. At a police station explaining why he’d grabbed Yovanna against her will? On his way back home? She felt too wired to stay for the dinner. Too light-headed and dizzy. She needed to hear his voice on the other end of a phone line. She walked out of the auditorium and found Gloria Mendez to apologize that she couldn’t stay for the meal. Ruben Tate-Rivera caught up to her.

  “Enough.” She waved her hands in front of her face as he walked over. “I’m leaving.” She backed away.

  “Good thing you’re a defense attorney,” Tate hissed. “Your boyfriend’s gonna need one. That is, if he survives at this point.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The NYPD just got a nine-one-one call from the principal of that charter school. Vega’s holding him hostage.”

  “No!”

  “It’s coming over the police scanner,” said Tate. “One of the reporters just told me. Your boy’s finally gone over the edge, Adele. Nobody’s going to defend him now. Or you, either. Don’t let that polite applause fool you. You talk about whispering your conscience to the wind? That sounds a whole lot like spitting into it to me. And you know what happens when you
do that.”

  Chapter 39

  Two options. That’s all Vega had: jump or get shot. Torres was a highly respected community leader and school principal. Vega was a disgraced cop with a pattern of emotionally unstable behavior. It was a no-brainer whose story the police were going to believe. Cop or not, Vega was the one the police would be gunning for. He didn’t even have the DVD anymore to prove that Torres was lying. It lay shattered at their feet. Not that Torres was going to wait around to let Vega prove his case anyway. He planned to dispatch him long before that.

  Vega had to get control of the situation. What he needed was a weapon. He spotted the pile of metal joists for the roof fencing. They were blanketed by snow. But still—if he could just get to one. He needed to keep Torres talking. He slipped back into the vernacular of the neighborhood, hoping to lull Torres into a false sense of security.

  “Hey, carnal,” said Vega, spreading his hands. “Chill, man. I’m totally down with what you’re saying here. You were carrying the load. Most dudes, they’d have crumbled. Not you. You held it together. Kept it tight all these years.”

  Snow dusted the little bird’s nest of dark hair in the middle of Torres’s head. He shook it off. “I just want to be free.”

  “Put the piece down, hombre, and you are.” Vega stepped forward. The snow was falling harder now. The roof was slippery.

  “Stay where you are.”

  “C’mon, Freddy. The evidence is gone. You said so yourself. Ain’t nothing to tie you to anything.”

  “There’s you. You’ll never let it go.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna believe a head case like me anyway, right?” Vega tried to inch his body toward the pile of metal joists. If he could just reach one, he might have a chance. “You’d be saving my ass once again. Like you always do.”

  One step. Then two . . .

  “Dad? Are you and Dr. Torres okay?”

  Ay, puñeta! Joy’s voice tore through Vega, sharpening all his senses, derailing all his plans. She was on the other side of the locked door and Torres had the key. No way could he risk his daughter.