Vengeance is mine, p.23
Vengeance is Mine, page 23
“Why? Why? Why?” he said in a hushed tone as air found its way out of him.
“What was that, sir?” one officer asked.
“Why?” Ray said. “Why can’t I just die?”
* * *
There was no safe way down to the water directly from the bridge. Teenagers wanting to graffiti the side of the bridge could get down part of the way, all the way to the underside of the bridge if they were careful and strong enough, but it was still over thirty feet from there to the water. A false move meant a dead graffiti artist.
The police and fire departments both had men by the side of the river within ten minutes of Willie’s call. An ambulance crew also waited. It took a half hour longer to get Elena out.
* * *
“Sir?” One of the uniformed officers tapped Ray on the shoulder. “You said you’re the father?”
Ray nodded. His throat was in such pain, he couldn’t trust himself to say a word.
“We’re gonna need you to identify the body.” The officer stayed stooped over Ray where he sat in the snow. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Ray almost laughed at that. Ready to identify the corpse of his child. He’d done that once before and it nearly killed him. The world was a hard place and he was a hard man, but damn it if he wasn’t about ready to crack.
The officer straightened up and waited, hovering. Ray worked himself to his feet, motioned for the officer to lead the way.
The EMTs leaning against the back end of the ambulance, their hands in their pockets, waiting for Ray, stood up straight when he neared, smiles dropping off their faces, left over from whatever conversation they were having. Ray took a breath and nodded to the one closest to him. He looked very grave and nodded back, then he reached for the sheet that covered Elena and pulled it back a foot using both hands. Ray looked up to the stars first, the few of them that had started to show through the clouds. He would have said a prayer, but he didn’t know one that fit. Then he looked down to the gurney.
The face was mashed, bloody, torn, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter. It wasn’t Elena on the gurney. The prayer he didn’t know how to pray had been answered. Ray laughed, laughed right into the face of Ramona Esposito. The sound came from his throat like a dog’s bark. He laughed again into her face as though she might hear him. The EMT covered over the body again, offended.
“What?” he said.
Ray was already walking away, waving a hand as if to say he had more important things to attend to. He did. Detective Carver was there now with his partner.
* * *
Ray was smiling at the detectives. With the stitches and bruises on his face, it wasn’t the prettiest sight.
“Not your daughter?” DiRaimo asked.
“Nope.”
“Know who she is?”
“Ramona Esposito,” Ray said. He hadn’t thought about deceiving the police on this issue – didn’t think he’d get the chance to say it was anyone other than his daughter. He wanted to retract the name as soon as he said it.
“And Ramona Esposito is…?” Carver asked, but his partner looked like he’d swallowed a roach. Carver turned to him.
“What?”
“I know that name.”
“She’s an FBI agent,” Ray said. He knew cops didn’t like to hear about one of their own getting hurt. Figured he’d probably get hauled in even though he had nothing to do with her death and it looked to him like Ramona Esposito deserved what she got.
“FBI agent?” Carver asked.
DiRaimo pulled a photograph out of a coat pocket and stalked over to where the EMTs were closing the door on the ambulance that would take Ramona to the morgue.
Carver repeated his question.
“Yeah, she said she had been working with Elena on something. Very sketchy. Anyway, I figure she got tired of playing it straight and went crooked.”
“And what makes you think that?” Carver said. He crossed his arms.
“She tried to kill my daughter,” Ray answered.
Carver didn’t have an answer for that. Tried another question.
“So your daughter killed her first?”
“I didn’t see what happened,” Ray said. “Anybody could have killed your FBI girl. This is the Bronx, baby. Only the strong survive.”
“You quoting t-shirts at me now? Now? When we’re talking about murder?”
DiRaimo came back before Ray could answer. Good thing, since Ray didn’t have a comeback ready. Carver and DiRaimo took a few paces away from Ray. Ray didn’t bother trying to listen in. He didn’t care what they had to say.
Carver and DiRaimo walked over to the ambulance, talked with the EMTs and several of the uniformed officers and the rescue workers who had fished Ramona off the ice. Ray stood in the snow, his good hand dug deep into a pocket, his cast hand tucked under his jacket. It was an hour before the detectives came back to him.
Carver finally called him over to his unmarked car.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Station house. You got a lot of questions to answer.”
“About what?”
“That woman ain’t no Ramona Esposito, ain’t no FBI agent, and you knew all about where she’d be. That means questions.”
“I’ve got to find my daughter.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about that. She’ll be found. The whole precinct is looking for her.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was a half hour to midnight when Ray finally opened the door to his apartment. He knew he was exhausted, but at the moment he felt light like a rough wind would be enough to lift him off the ground. Life was hard and the world was bad, but none of that mattered because his daughter was alive somewhere. The police were hunting for her like a criminal, but that was nothing too. She was a smart girl. She’d handle a confrontation with the police and come out all right. In fact, if he could just get her to JFK the next day, things would be better than all right.
As soon as he entered the apartment, he turned on a light and headed for the phone.
“William, you know the plans for tomorrow?”
“Sure, but where’s Elena? What happened? I’ve been waiting here for hours.”
“The plans for tomorrow are still good,” Ray said. He gave William a minute to think about what that meant.
“Oh. Good. Thank god. But why are we talking in codes?”
“Because your phone might be bugged. Or maybe mine is. One way or the other, the less we say, the better. Now get some sleep. I’ll be over first thing in the morning.”
“And Elena too?” William asked. Ray hung up on him.
He went into the kitchen. Peanut butter and jelly chased down by rum and Coke to give him strength for meeting with Mark Langan. Made his sandwich, made his drink, and turned with them in hand to carry them out to the dining area, but the sight shocked him so that he spilled the drink and the sandwich flipped in the air before landing on the plate again. There was his daughter – wet hair and clothes, fresh bruises on her face.
“Papi,” she said.
She was about to cry and held her arms open for a hug. Ray emptied his hands and pressed his daughter against him, held her tight, burying his nose in the nape of her neck, sniffing in hard to get all of her, tears running from eyes that had grown swollen in the past few hours.
“How did you get in?” Ray asked after a minute.
“The super knows me.”
“Ah. And you want to talk about what happened?” He didn’t want to add that the first kill can be the hardest.
“I want to tell you everything,” Elena answered.
* * *
The plan was supposed to be simple. The law firm she worked for was supposed to administer seven million dollars in disbursements made by the city to several nonprofit housing and education organizations. The money was hijacked; it never was transferred correctly and instead went to one account. Since the city had bungled this small matter, the federal government was stepping in to make sure the money was taken back from the account it had gone into and that it went to the proper accounts. Steal back what had been stolen and give it to those it was intended for. Simple.
At the same time, the federal government was overseeing an auction of properties that had been seized around the city in the past year. The bids were already in, but whoever had stolen the seven million (an identity masked by false names and encrypted account numbers) had apparently rigged the bidding. Rightful high-bidders replaced with one bidder for twelve of the properties all centered in the Hunt’s Point area. These bids needed to be re-rigged – the rightful high-bidders would get their deeds.
This is where Elena came in. Mark Langan, working on behalf of the firm and Ramona Esposito, representing the federal government by way of the FBI, approached her, explained the situation, and asked for her help in this delicate matter. She agreed. Who doesn’t want better housing for the poor, better schools for children?
“So you were supposed to do what?” her father asked.
“I was supposed to take money from one account and put it in another which Mark and Ramona told me about.”
“And about the property?”
“That was still under investigation – maybe someone in the law firm was involved, maybe not. Anyway, I was supposed to make sure that the sales were all made in one name – a fake name so that essentially the government sold the buildings and lots back to themselves. This would buy them time so they could hunt for the guilty. Then they could offer the properties again in a clean auction.”
Ray had a half dozen questions he could ask, but he narrowed it down to the one he cared about most at the moment.
“So you did what they asked you to?”
“At first. I switched all the paperwork. Agent Esposito gave me a false ID so none of it would come back to me. That night I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“It dawned on me. If they knew where the money was – even if they couldn’t identify who the owner of the account was – why not just transfer it into the right accounts?”
“So…?”
“So, the next morning, bright and early, I went into the office and did just that.”
“Shit,” Ray said. “For all we know that fake account belonged to a mobster. Now it’s empty.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Elena said. “I reworked the auction bids too. Figured if they were wrong about one thing, they’d be wrong about the other.”
“Reworked the auction?” Ray said.
“Easy, just slips of paper in envelopes in Langan’s office. I replaced them with other slips.”
“Aw shit,” Ray said a little louder.
“What?”
“What? Langan was running a scam on someone about this auction thing. Slips of paper in envelopes, that sounds a little unofficial to me.”
“Well, he might have been scamming someone but it’s too late now. I filed those papers the same morning. It was all done by the time Langan came in.”
“Does he know you changed the slips?”
“I figure he’ll find out on Monday when the results of the auction are released,” Elena said. “You think Langan will try to hurt me again? I mean, he should be running from the police now, right?”
Ray said, “You did the right thing, mi’ja. In everything you did, you did the right thing. Don’t forget that. But I wouldn’t worry about Langan anymore. There’s still someone out there missing seven million that they were expecting, but who knows, maybe that’s also Langan.”
Elena looked down, her face turning to sadness. Ray figured he knew what was on her mind – the cost she had paid, the cost her family was paying for her trying to do the right thing.
“What about the FBI lady?” Ray asked. He’d learned a lot from Carver and DiRaimo, but wanted to hear what his daughter knew.
“She just wanted the money. As crooked as they come,” Elena said. “Once I got in the car, she started talking about needing access to the money. When I told her what I did with it, she pulled her gun out.”
“And what did you do?”
“Grabbed the steering wheel and pulled. We hit a parked car and her airbag went off. I got out of there.”
Elena said the last sentence like she was surprised at herself and at the fact she was still alive. Then her hands started to shake.
“We fought on the bridge,” Elena said. “I killed her.”
She cleared her throat.
“I gave her a right cross like you taught me. Then I kicked her in the gut, and she stumbled back against the wall, and I just….”
“She got what was coming to her. She was a murderess and a con artist. Never an FBI agent at all.”
“How do you know this?”
“First time I saw her I knew she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Hadn’t seen her in years, and she grew up. I used to work for a guy named Fat Tommy – not a nice guy. It was about ten years ago that her mother took her to live in Florida. When I saw her up close and dead, I was pretty sure. When Detective Carver gave me her real name, it made sense. She’s wanted in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for fraud…she was wanted.”
“Isn’t Fat Tommy going to come after us?” Elena asked.
“Don’t worry about him. If I know him, he’ll be on the run about now. I’ll catch up with him.” Ray looked at his watch and kissed his daughter on the forehead. “Listen. I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back.”
He went into the bedroom and brought out the last gun in his possession, a .9mm Smith & Wesson. He made sure a round was chambered and got a second magazine as well. He took everything to where his daughter was sitting.
“Here,” he said. “This is the safety, now it’s on, now it’s off. On, off. On again. See? Someone tries to come through that door? You take the safety off, you hold the gun with both hands, and you aim for the belly button. You understand me?”
Elena smiled at him like he was an idiot in need of her sympathy.
“No one is going to look for me here,” she said.
“Maybe not,” Ray answered. “But they might look for me. Did I tell you someone beat the shit out of me with a baseball bat and put a gun to my head right in this apartment?”
Elena’s smile dried up, and she put her hand out for the gun.
* * *
It was close to the meeting time of 1 a.m. when Ray finally drove into the area of Columbia University. He parked around the corner from the meeting place at the south end of a small park, but he could see that Mark Langan, in a dark overcoat and with a knapsack hanging from one shoulder, was waiting there already. That wasn’t how Ray had wanted things to go. He wanted to be there first, stake out the place, watch Langan approach, surprise him as he arrived. Wasn’t going to happen.
He didn’t shut off the motor, didn’t fully close his door. He got out the blackjack he’d brought along, carried it close to his right thigh, and hugged the side of the park fencing as he made his way to the corner and around. Langan had his back to him only ten paces away. He was doing a little dance to keep warm. As long as the dance didn’t involve turning around, things might turn out all right. Five paces away, Langan turned. He froze; Ray didn’t. He kept striding, getting into position before Langan knew what was happening. He raised the blackjack, and just one step from slapping Langan his right foot went out from under him on ice. Ray was on his back, the blackjack still raised as though his body hadn’t yet realized he had fallen.
Langan took two steps away, running, then turned back. No traction problems for him. He kicked Ray in the ribs then he did it again.
“You stupid bastard,” he shouted.
He raised his leg to kick again and Ray smacked the foot he was standing on right out from under him with the blackjack. Langan fell straight to the concrete with a scream and clutched at his leg, not really wanting to touch it but feeling like he had no choice.
“What the hell was that?” he yelled at Ray. Ray slapped at him again, still on his back. Not much leverage, but he broke the hand Langan had been using to soothe his leg pain.
“Jesus! Stop that!”
Ray stood up and made sure he was on a firm footing.
“Don’t hit me again!” Langan shouted. Lights turned on in an apartment across the street.
“Shut up,” Ray said, and he gave Langan a whack to the face that caved in his two front teeth and broke his nose. The blow sent Langan onto his back. He was still moving, but not with any purpose.
* * *
Inside the car, it was quiet. Langan either didn’t know what was going to happen to him or didn’t care or Ray had hit him harder than he thought.
Ray drove north to a building on 153rd Street near Trinity Cemetery, the Amtrak train lines and the Hudson River. The building was fully occupied with working-class families who didn’t want any trouble, but Ray knew the passageways in the basement led to a large room with double-thick walls and soundproofing so effective that forty men could scream and shout and cheer on fighting dogs as they tore each other’s ears off and no one in the building would suspect a thing.
Dogfighting was not a sport Ray enjoyed. It seemed cruel. But that didn’t mean the Pit didn’t have its uses. He’d been there on business several times and the place never failed. If they had seen a live dogfight, the toughest cases cried at the thought of being taken there. If they hadn’t seen one, it only took showing them a warm-up exercise – a poodle thrown to a pit bull.
Marcos Howard was waiting for Ray outside the building, leaning against the thick stone handrail of the building’s front steps. He was a big man, six foot four or more, and he said he was three hundred pounds because his bathroom scale refused to go any further than that. Nobody would have been surprised if he told them he weighed four hundred. He stepped over to Ray’s side of the car, stooped down to the window, and put his hand in to shake.
