South by South Bronx (11 page)

“I should go back to working with captains,” Myers snapped at one point, when frustrated by Jack's questioning. (He would find it hard working with our captain, a man who rarely left the office.) It looked like in many ways he was still trying to avoid involving the locals. His thing was with me. He knew something about me. Him and his fucking bread truck, his twin zombies, his silent team. What did he need me for? I hadn't found Spook and I couldn't save David. Wasn't I just talking about the captain? He seemed to have the same opinion of me and my record of failure. “This doesn't seem to be working out,” he said, but he meant ME, ME.

I hadn't seen the captain at a crime scene for a long time, even Jack was agape. What brought the captain here now was probably not concern, but the FBI, which he had spent part of the morning talking to. (They must have roused him out of bed.) Myers's face went blank when he saw the three agents approaching. The captain addressed me with enough solemnity to bend my cigarette, had I been smoking one.

“Detective Sanchez, this is Special Agent Anderson from the FBI,” he said. A tall, white-haired guy with a face like the rock of Prudential shook my hand, steel hard. “Special Agent Richards, Special Agent Dupreé. This is Detective Sanchez, Lieutenant Jack. I believe you already know Special Agent Myers.”

Anderson's piercing blue eyes were stiff on Myers. He didn't waste time on formalities.

“Myers, just what the hell have you done? How did you get your nose so deep so fast in this case, and how did you manage to botch it up?”

Myers answered smooth swift, seemingly routine for him to field hostile questions. “It's not botched up yet. It's your butting in that's causing the problem.”

“You don't have jurisdiction,” Anderson said. “Did you forget that? Even if you solved this case, you can't possibly walk it into court. The judge will throw it out the moment you show him how you compiled your information.”

Myers grinned. “You don't know that. You're hoping it's like that.”

“You should know better, Myers.” Special Agent Dupreé smirked like he was making a dirty joke. “You can't bug the natives. You can't watch them, listen to them, or triangulate their cell phones. You can only do that to foreigners.”

“And Puerto Ricans aren't foreigners, last time I checked,” Special Agent Richards quipped, giving me a wink. Was that supposed to make me feel better? These bastrads probably knew all about my record. They had a way of looking at me that made me feel diseased. Or it was me, the same paranoia. A net had fallen over me, and though there was plenty of air, I couldn't breathe. The apartment, so full of cops, was not the place to air this shit. The captain suggested we go outside, not even bothering to give the body a look. Out by the stoop, the words started twice as fast.

“Can you say ExECUTIVE ORDER 12333?” Anderson seemed to be reprimanding a child. “American citizens have been murdered here. This is where we step in.”

“An American citizen murdered by foreigners,” Myers said.

“You don't know that,” Dupreé countered.

“Murdered by people we know,” Myers continued. “You're stepping in a little late, I think. You don't fool me, Anderson. You tried it in D.C. and now you're here again, making another shoddy attempt to shut us down when what you really want is to confiscate our information.”

That was it, I was through waiting. I lit a cigarette. All eyes turned to me. That's the thing about smokers: You light one, we all light one. I didn't have a pack, so I dug in a pocket and held up a handful to takers. Lieutenant Jack lit the round with his Normandy 44 Zippo. I don't know if it was rude. Everyone but the captain and Anderson lit up. Myers, calm and unfazed, held the cigarette more than smoked it.

“Let's face it, Anderson. You dropped the ball.”

“
We
dropped the ball?” Anderson's eyes looked like they were full of boiling water. “How about you? Wasn't Ava Reynolds
your
idea?”

“That's the blonde,” Jack said, nudging me.

“Will you—?” Myers coughed up smoke. “Not everybody here has been briefed,” he said, giving the captain a wary look.

“You mean you want New York's Finest to locate this girl for you, and you haven't even told them about her?” Anderson laughed, his eyes mocking.

“Tsk tsk,” Dupreé said, wagging a finger, joining in the laugh.

“No problem,” Anderson said. “I briefed the captain on the way here.”

“You what?” Myers tossed down his cigarette. “I demand you tell me what you told him! Captain, what he said just isn't true.”

The captain stared back blank.

“These officers,” Anderson went on, “are involved in a homicide investigation, and now that this is a domestic case, I'm going to make sure we find this Ava Reynolds. She's not going to disappear like some of the others in this case.”

“Nobody's disappeared,” Myers said.

My ears were definitely perking up now. I knew agencies competed. Sometimes teams within the same agency fought each other as viciously as street gangs. They battled over access, information, and scoops just like reporters, stalkers, and paparazzi. Which team gets the goods, which team gets the ear of the district attorney? Does the D.A. have a favorite team? The different agencies responsible for protecting the country do not communicate well, they mistrust each other, and they generally work independently. The cops are the last people to be let in on anything.

“This office should have been notified. We could have gotten the Rosarios with warrants.” Anderson stepped awful closer. “Instead, you chose not to involve us and play spy games. Some stupid hook-and-tail scam like you pulled in D.C. It even looks,” he said, casting a glance at Myers's bookends, “like the same cast as last time.”

“Anderson, why don't you lick my nuts?”

“Gentlemen,” the captain said. I liked him right then. He seemed the father figure cutting in between battling siblings. “My people haven't all been briefed.”

“It's about the girl,” Anderson went on, staring Myers down at close range. “She's no innocent bystander. She was working for Myers.”

Now the blonde came charging into my mind like an icepick. I could see her smiling away so snug and close in David's arms in those office party pictures. Could see her watching me, those two times I visited David at the office. The strange penetrating stare of her and how she seemed to be sizing me up. Now I thought hard, of David, David trusting her, David telling her, David pulling her in with him. For some reason for whatever reason she was inside that strange secret. And so was I, so was I. Did she know? And if she knew, how didn't Myers know? A burn to the air, a burn to my cigarette.

“Man, did you come all this way just to drop that bombshell?” Myers, hands in pockets, grinned furious.

“She was supposed to set up the Rosarios,” Dupreé said, looking right at me, right into my eyes, something cops don't do very often these days. “But it looks like the bunny just up and run off with the prize. Ain't that about right, Myers?”

There was a slight Southern twang to Dupreé. Myers didn't say anything.

Dupreé laughed. “Man, you and your people should stick to overseas tricks.”

“She's no agent,” Richards said with a scowl, sucking down that last bit of cigarette nub. “She's a contract player.”

“There's another word for that type of contract,” Dupreé said, again wearing that dirty-joke grin.

I felt buzzed with a sick nausea, a need to crack someone, anyone, in the face. I wanted silence when the paramedics walked David's body past us. I wanted slow motion so that I could take my time and digest it, frame by frame. I should have been up there with him, working to find the answers and maybe receive any clues he might want to give me. It was a different feeling for me now. The room was full of cops. I didn't want to be in there anymore. I didn't want to talk through the stares and feel that hesitation when I gave orders or opened my mouth. It was a dark feeling. I was sad for David, but now I felt I was in danger. The
good
guys bad guys
paradigm, the sense that I had crossed a line starting with the day David asked me a theoretical question about what I would do if I had ten million dollars. It was all questions with David. He had boxes full of question marks. I should have never answered. Maybe I was being hard on myself, but something I did got him killed, maybe something I didn't do. David went by with as much ceremony as a laundry pickup. He took my old life with him, that one wheel on his gurney jiggling round spin. I wondered if he knew about her, if she knew about me. I couldn't decide. Not about her. Not about David, Spook, or Myers, who was pulling an envelope from an inside pocket.

“Look, you want jurisdiction? Here's mine, gentlemen. You give the DD/I a call. Tell him what you told me. You get him to tell me I'm off the case.”

Anderson didn't look at the letter. He passed it to Dupreé.

“Who hired you?” Richards asked, “Kagan? Kristol? Somebody at the PNAC?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Why are you after it, Myers?” Anderson kept pushing. “Even if you get it, you can't bust anybody. You need us for that. And we probably can't use your evidence.”

“That's what you say now, in public,” Myers answered, taking the letter back. “I have my orders. His ways are not your ways.”

“I don't think Myers has ever made an arrest in his life,” Dupreé cracked with a smirk. Myers seemed to ignore him, but seized on that keyword.

“Yeah, arrests! Listen, Anderson. Why don't you go downtown and make some arrests? You know who they are already, right? Go arrest them, make a big splash. Afterwards, we can meet at the Senate hearings in Washington, which is where the agency will take you after you blow this lead we've been working on for months. Go ahead. I dare you. Your courts will just let these people go. You're lucky if you can bust them on visa irregularities. Why don't you just do it?”

The captain was wearing a wry smile that I hadn't seen for years. I nudged Jack.

Anderson stepped so close to Myers I thought he would spit. “We'll find her,” he said. “I'm sure she'll have a lot to say about you.”

“Not if I find her first,” Myers said. It was an underbreath, muttered. The words stayed with me for a day and a night. Words like a pledge, like an oath. The captain walked the agents to their car. Myers made FBI cracks. The cops laughed with him. Suddenly he wasn't looking so bad to everybody, more like a Joe next to those feds. I felt jealous of the easy camaraderie that grew around him, even if momentary. I was wondering why Myers would think I was the path to the blonde. The captain seemed to wonder the same thing. Talking to me and Jack seemed to rob him of all energy. He authorized Jack to give Myers whatever he wanted, whatever it took. As for me, “Find the blonde then,” he said, “just try to find her alive, not dead.” (The captain was still good at those
indirectas
.) “Then this guy Myers can take the whole mess with him back to D.C. and leave us the hell alone.” He felt the case was already beyond us. Jack could talk as much as he wanted about finding the murderers with that old fire and verve, the captain gave him that closed face too. To me, Jack seemed a child, a happy puppy. He was alone with his enthusiasm. The captain went to talk to Myers, who had crossed the street to take a call.

“We have a murder investigation going,” Jack said, “and that little bastard has taken all the fun out of it.”

I couldn't tell if he was talking about Myers or the captain. Back when, we would've been Heckle and Jeckle, burning with the desire to solve this murder. Now I just stood beside him, feeling tired and empty.

I was thinking about a man named Roman. His manner was of tall thin aristocrat, of hardly ever speak. His black shirts, his eye-patch. People call him “One-Eye.” Like Wiggie, Jaco, and Quique, he was one of Spook's district chiefs. I'd tried reaching him over and over again since Spook disappeared, over and over for a few reasons I wasn't sure Myers didn't know about. I couldn't tell him, that first time in my office. I knew about Spook. When I saw the accounts, I had gone straight to David. I was on the trail. I was sticking my nose where it didn't belong, or maybe it was where it belonged all along. I wondered later what an honest cop would have done with this information, realizing now I had passed the point where such terms carry any meaning. I thought I would just ask questions. I hadn't expected to be on the receiving end of a proposition. David just came right out with every fine detail. He laughed, it was a kick. “We're swiping the money from criminals!” More information than I had bargained for. No walls no barbed wire no tollbooth. A door was simply opened. I had expected evasions, having to duck verbal dukes, avoid tank traps. Instead I got some Asian defense tactic, which calls for letting your enemy defeat himself with his own momentum. You side-step his charge, maybe grab a piece of him EN PASSANT and help him along. Into a wall out a window down some stairs. Only this was no defense. This was an invitation.

David then took me to Spook. I told him it was madness. He told me it was a ticket out. The kids could keep the drug trade. The only person in the whole organization he brought into the deal was Roman, an old friend who was already phasing himself out of the business. Those couple of weeks I tried to talk David and Spook out of it, I approached him. Roman said no. To him it was a cheap-ass sellout of the organization. He fought, like I did in the beginning, to get them to give up the idea. By then, the laundering job was already on, the cash flowing in, before the swipe—“Call the feds,” I said to them. “Tell them you want to make a deal.” But Spook and David didn't think that was the way to make ten million bucks. In the end, Roman stuck to his guns and backed away, no doubt making contingencies for the troubled times to come. I didn't back away. I made contingencies too.