Vengeance is mine, p.22
Vengeance is Mine, page 22
DiRaimo filled in the silence. “Of course, we might find clues to his real identity, aliases, fake addresses, shit like that.”
“Brilliant,” Carver said. “Now, you go and make that phone call to Langan’s boss. I’ll take the car and tie up a couple of other details.”
Carver waved at his partner as though telling him to scoot out of the car.
“But shouldn’t we do this together?” DiRaimo asked.
“Langan’s still out there, and god only knows if he’s looking at some other four-year-old right now. If we split up, we work faster.”
“Okay, but what are you going to be working on?”
“Look,” Carver said, “I can’t carry your weight for the entire investigation. You’re going to have to do some work here. Believe me. There are loose ends, and I need to handle them. Now get out, and let me drive.”
DiRaimo got out of the car and watched as his partner got into the driver’s seat and pulled away, then he walked back to the station house.
* * *
There was only one rule to detective work when you had to talk with people who didn’t want any part of your investigation. If you shook the tree long enough and hard enough, you always got what you wanted – as long as you had the right tree. If he could get his hands on Mark Langan, Carver would shake until answers came out, but the little shit was on the run. DiRaimo had checked to make sure he didn’t have a passport, but if he faked the diplomas on his office walls, he might have faked a passport and who knew what else. One way or the other, that tree wasn’t going to be shaken.
Elena Maldonado was still in town, and she was fragile. Most of the shaking had been done already thanks to Robert Meister and the goons he had hired. Langan had helped there as well. The woman was on the verge of something – probably a nervous breakdown, but maybe she could be finessed into just telling him where the money was. Pressure tactics hadn’t worked yet. She was stubborn. Maybe taking the pressure off would do the trick.
He rang her doorbell and the husband answered. The tired look on his face turned to something closer to anger.
“Have you found that Mark Langan?” William asked.
“Not yet, but, in fact, that’s what I wanted to talk to your wife about, if she could just step out for a minute.”
“She’s not stepping out,” William answered.
“Listen,” Carver said. “If you want to keep your wife and your daughter safe, I need to speak to your wife.”
“You’ve spoken to her a bunch of times,” William said. He crossed his arms. “None of that talk has done a damn thing for us so far. Maybe you should just let me handle Elena’s safety. And another thing—”
Elena came up from behind her husband and put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. He turned to her, and she nodded.
“It’s all right, William,” she said. “It won’t hurt to talk a few minutes. Come in, detective.”
“I was hoping to talk to you in private, Mrs. Maldonado. If you don’t mind.”
Elena thought about the situation. If Carver had something to say about her attack, then she didn’t need to hear about it in front of her husband. She looked at William.
“Go ahead and finish what we were doing,” she told him. “I’ll only be a few minutes, right, detective?”
“Five. Tops,” he answered.
She stepped out and the detective escorted her ten feet from the front door of the apartment. They spoke in a near whisper.
“Look, I know about the money. Millions of dollars went through your hands and it didn’t get to where it was supposed to go. I’m guessing Mark Langan helped you set up a phony account.”
Carver paused there, hoping to get confirmation from Elena, but she didn’t react. He wondered if he’d have to speak louder.
“Well, by doing what Langan wanted, you helped rip off someone who probably deserves it, but this man is a terrible man, and he’ll do terrible things to get the money back. In fact, he’s done terrible things. You know what I’m referring to.”
He waited again for confirmation, but it wasn’t coming.
“Well, I know who this man is, but right now, there isn’t a whole lot I can do against him. There simply isn’t enough evidence. Even if you testified against him, there wouldn’t be enough evidence to keep us from getting laughed out of court.”
Another pause. Elena crossed her arms, and Carver could almost swear she was seconds away from rolling her eyes at him in boredom. The badass attitude must run in the family.
“Anyway, if I can’t put this guy away, I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can get him to back off from you. If you can, anonymously of course, get half the money into an account, he could access it. Then, this paper trail would keep him from bothering you again because if he did, I’d bust him for receipt of these misappropriated…uh, funds. Now…nobody wants him to go to jail over this because it would come out that you helped him with his theft. You see? Both of you would be stuck with just leaving each other alone.”
There was more silence and Carver wondered if he had explained it right, but replaying it in his head, it sounded good – she keeps half the money and Meister is out of her life for good. Of course, once Elena accessed the money, Carver was sure he’d be able to get the rest out of her.
“So what do you say?” Carver pressed. Elena was smaller than him by a lot, and she was still badly bruised though the marks were fading, but her silence and her look of contempt or disdain or both unnerved him.
Elena straightened up and counted off on her fingers.
“Number one,” she said. “I don’t have the money. And number two, I thought by now you would have figured a few things out, but you don’t know anything about any of this. Sad, really. Pathetic.”
With that she walked back to her apartment door and let herself in without looking back or waiting for a response.
Carver felt like punching something as the door clicked shut.
* * *
“Where’s your partner?” Captain Lowe came up behind Detective DiRaimo, startled him a little.
“Hell if I know,” was his answer.
“Trouble?”
“Probably,” DiRaimo answered. He was in no mood to protect Carver. He amended his statement. “He’s out tying up some loose ends on the Maldonado thing.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be checking on a couple of loose ends. Carver got it in his head that Langan may be a fraud – fake law degree, that sort of thing.”
“Make the calls,” Captain Lowe said, and he left.
DiRaimo started dialing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After speaking with Detective Carver, Elena sat quietly on her living room sofa for twenty minutes. William came out of the bedroom where he had been packing a suitcase and looked at her for one of those minutes, then he went back to work.
For the full twenty minutes, she tried to practice not feeling anything, not thinking anything. Mostly it worked, but when her time on the sofa ended, she went to the kitchen in search of rum.
William heard the cabinets opening and closing and stopped in the middle of folding a shirt. He was positive that soon he’d be summoned to the kitchen. Elena would find a plastic bag with three bottles he had emptied into the sink and rinsed out, and she’d want to know why he had done that. He considered telling her that he was just preparing for the trip to Puerto Rico, but that didn’t make sense. If you were leaving, you threw away the things that could spoil like meat or milk, but how long would they have to stay away for the rum to go bad?
He heard Elena leave the kitchen and enter the bedroom. He tried to think, but only telling her the truth made any sense to him. He was afraid she’d get drunk for the third time that week. Elena went to the opposite side of the bed, picked up a shirt and folded it. She didn’t ask him anything, didn’t give him the evil eye. He still felt like explaining his decision, but kept it to himself.
Elena was still folding clothes when the phone rang. William and she looked at each other. On the second ring, Elena put down what she was doing and went into the living room to answer it. Two minutes later, she walked out of the apartment. William rushed to find his keys to the apartment, put on shoes and his coat, and left Rosita behind, sleeping. He hurried down the stairs after his wife, calling her name, but she didn’t answer. He could hear her footsteps taking the steps as fast as she could; she was a flight and a half ahead of him. By the time he made it out to the street, all there was for him to see were the red taillights of a retreating sedan and the silhouette of Elena riding in the front passenger seat.
* * *
Detective Carver looked at his watch while waiting for a light to turn at the intersection of Tiffany Avenue and Southern Boulevard. He had promised his partner he’d be back at the station house in an hour. There were fifteen minutes left for him to keep that promise, but he didn’t think that would be likely. A minute later he was parking in front of the same store where he had once dropped Lenny off.
The store owner behind his plexiglas stood up a moment, thinking the detective might be a customer, but recognized him and sat again. Nicky was on his customary seat at the back of the store. His bodyguards no longer had seats. Carver looked at the three of them and their matching bruises.
“Let me guess, the three of you got into a lovers’ quarrel,” Carver said. He figured he’d get a smile out of one of them, but it didn’t work out that way.
“Detective Carver,” Nicky said. He paused for effect. “You want to remind me why I’m cutting you in for one K a month for the past two years if some punk can walk in here and beat the shit out of me?”
Carver looked at the guards – busted lips, purpled noses, hangdog expressions.
“Ray Cruz?” Carver asked. Had to be.
“Damn straight. Now what you gonna do about it?”
“What did you tell him?”
“The hell was I supposed to tell him? I’m the only one that don’t know shit about shit and he gotta come in here and bust my ass for that? I’da told him anything. That man’s crazy.”
Carver looked at Nicky until he went on talking.
“I told him Lenny was here, Lenny bought from me, and Lenny was leaving the city. I told him you were going to take him out to the train station, like Grand Central Station or something. That’s it. S’all he wanted to know.”
Nicky held his hands out, palms up like he was inviting Carver to search him.
“You’ve been playing with fire, my friend,” Carver said. “Any ideas where I can find this ‘crazy man’?”
“Don’t you worry about Ray Cruz,” Nicky said. “I got people out there looking for him right now.”
“Let me guess. Two guys in a white van?”
Nicky nodded.
“They’re not the only ones.”
* * *
Ray made his way to Elena’s apartment to drop off the car. Fatigue came close to overwhelming him. His head hurt, his broken hand alternated between throbbing and stabbing him with pain, and his ribs were sore. His back felt tight, like it might spasm on him, and his face felt like it had been beaten, which it had. He told himself that he had only a day more of troubles ahead of him, and if he could survive to see his daughter get onto the plane, he could rest.
As he parked, he saw his son-in-law walking toward the apartment building. Ray got out of the car and caught up to him.
“What happened to you?”
William was breathing hard. There was a plaster of snow on the chest of his coat and a small trickle of blood running from his chin.
“I fell,” William answered. Standing out in front of his building, he rested his palms on his knees, stooped low and sucked in air.
“Why are you out?” Ray asked. He already feared the answer.
“Elena left. Walked out while I was packing. I tried,” William said.
“You tried what?” Ray asked.
“I tried to follow her, but I wasn’t fast enough. I slipped on ice about a block down. By the time I got up, the car was gone.”
“What car?” Ray asked.
He grabbed William by the upper arms and forced him to straighten up, then William explained what had happened. When Ray heard how his daughter had disappeared – gotten into a strange car of her own free will – he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to get into the car and drive around, but the Bronx went on for miles, and in five minutes Elena and her driver could be anywhere.
He raised his fist. He wanted to punch his son-in-law, tell him he had managed to sink to a new low, but none of that would help.
“I’m the stupidest man alive,” Ray said, then he went up the stairs at the front of the building.
As William led the way up to the apartment door, Ray thought that he had come within only a few hours of finally figuring out why his daughter had been attacked, why his granddaughter had been threatened, but at the same time he had lost his daughter altogether.
He tried to tell himself that maybe the sedan meant nothing, maybe the phone call meant nothing, but it didn’t work. He wanted to believe that a random girlfriend had called her, and Elena had gone down to meet her. He couldn’t. He tried to tell himself that maybe it wasn’t Langan in the car, maybe it was as simple as Detective Carver wanting to chat or maybe that FBI lady, Esposito. The cops or the Feds might use all kinds of pressure tactics, but they didn’t actually hurt or kill the victims they wanted testimony and evidence from. He prayed his daughter might be with someone as harmless, then he prayed for the faith to believe.
“Carver was here,” William said.
Ray nodded. This helped.
“They talked a few minutes, then Elena came in and sat for a while, thinking.”
William said the last word like it was a bad one.
Ray opened his mouth to propose that William stay with Rosita while he go out in the car to look around. He didn’t get to say anything. The phone rang. Ray was sitting on the sofa next to it. He picked up before William could take a step or reach out his hand.
“Elena?”
“Papi,” his daughter called out to him and her voice was broken as it had been some days ago right after the attack. The sound nearly shredded his heart. “I need you now. Agent Esposito. She’s crazy. Come and get me.”
She lowered her voice for these last few phrases, but Ray could make them out.
“Where are you, sweetheart? I’ll be there in—” he was saying. There was a noise in the background, sharp and loud. Another ear might not have known what it was, but Ray jumped from the edge of his seat to his feet – actually lost contact with the floor – when he heard the shot. He fell back onto the sofa.
“Sweetie?” he said into the phone. The answer was another shot, closer.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted into the receiver. Another shot. And, not as close, the sound of a car passing over the rough metal grating of the Bruckner Drawbridge.
Ray shoved the phone in his son-in-law’s direction. He wanted to say something like “keep talking to her” but he was breathing out snot and spit, and the tears in his eyes made him unsure William was even in the room with him. The entire rest of the world had slipped away from him, so why not his son-in-law?
He went into the kitchen and pulled out a carving knife. It was the only weapon he had. He came back to the living room.
“I’m going to the Bruckner Drawbridge. Sounds like she’s there. I…I….”
“There’s just a dial tone,” William said. He held the phone out to Ray as proof.
“Call the police. Call Carver. Tell them where she is. Call 911. Esposito’s got her,” Ray said. He had his hand on the doorknob.
“Esposito?” William asked, but Ray was gone.
* * *
The drive to the bridge was torture. After three minutes on the road Ray inhaled, and for all he knew it was his first breath since hearing the gunshot. Ray’s blood pounded in his ears. The streets were still slick, and stopping for lights and starting up again was work. At one stoplight, with the bridge in sight, Ray took his eyes off the road, searching the sidewalk for pedestrians. When the light turned, he floored the gas, spun on ice, and clipped a parked car with the back end of his. Foot still on the gas, he overcorrected and clipped the front end too. Somebody’d be surprised in the morning.
At the corner before heading onto the bridge, he pulled over a moment. Wanted to check for footprints. The noise of a car going over the bridge’s grated surface made him drive again. A squad car came around the corner, roof lights on but no siren. A semi-emergency. Ray followed it onto the bridge. Another squad car rounded the same corner and pulled up behind Ray for a moment before moving to pass him. The squad cars parked on the bridge.
Ray pulled to a park and put on the hazard lights, left the engine running. There was a half inch of snow but no footprints on his side of the street; he crossed against traffic. Plenty of footprints on the other side – a whole area where it seemed like someone had rolled around, mashing the snow. The police officers were out of their vehicles but not moving anywhere, just standing, chatting, probably had orders to just be there. One of them looked at Ray, deciding whether to stop him or let him be. It took a second for him to say something about Ray moving along. Ray ignored him.
There was a spot on the concrete wall that kept drunks from driving off the bridge where the snow had been wiped away or pressed down. For the second time that day, Ray approached the wall and looked over the side. This time, there was no mistake. On the ice forty feet below, his daughter.
“You can’t be here,” the police officer shouted at his back.
He had no idea how true his words were. If Ray had the strength, he would have rushed at the officer with the knife in his pocket drawn out – forced him to shoot. Instead, he crumpled where he was, fell to his knees, scraping his forehead against the rough concrete of the wall. The tears that fell from his face melted dots into the snow beneath him, and what use was the air that blew if he couldn’t breathe for the fist inside his throat twisting itself and strangling him? The officer behind Ray was joined by others and they mumbled something. He didn’t hear it and didn’t care anymore. He felt he was about to lose consciousness and wished for it as a mercy.
