Vengeance is mine, p.5
Vengeance is Mine, page 5
“Well, she hasn’t told me anything like what you’re asking.”
Detective Carver rubbed his forehead. He completely understood Elena’s desire to keep a low profile – if he were a victim, he wouldn’t want to talk about it, but then he wouldn’t need to talk about it with anyone to make sure the bastard paid.
“Any chance she’d come down to the station house, take a look at some mugshots?” Carver tried.
Willie pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “She needs to rest.”
Detective Carver tossed his hands up and surrendered.
“I’ll be back tomorrow unless the precinct gets something else for me to track.”
Willie shrugged. Carver could come back as often as he wanted, but if Elena didn’t want to see him, that was it.
Carver left, sighing.
* * *
Later, when Detective Carver had left, Willie prepared to go to work.
“You’ll be okay?” he asked Elena.
“Go,” she told him. She didn’t want to be the object of pity and there was a chance she could finally get a few hours of sleep.
Willie left the apartment building and didn’t notice the two men in suits sitting in a car parked across the street and a few dozen yards away. They watched as he left.
“Is that everyone?” Meister asked.
“Father, daughter, husband. That detective. Should be about it. She might have a friend over, but I doubt it. She’s pretty private.”
Meister nodded. “Then get up there,” he said.
The younger man exhaled. Then he got out of the car and made his way up to Elena’s apartment.
The doorbell rang, and Elena got up to answer it, almost happy for the interruption. Sleep was staying away from her, frustrating her.
“Who is it?” she asked through the door.
“Mark Langan,” he announced quietly. He didn’t need the entire apartment building hearing his name.
The door didn’t open immediately and Elena didn’t say anything. Langan tried again.
“I know what happened yesterday,” he said. This, also, was quiet. The door still didn’t open. “We need to talk about it, Elena.”
Langan looked around. There was the sound of someone’s television coming from somewhere on the floor. He hoped it was enough noise to mask what he had to say.
“Elena. Look. Worse things can happen to you. Your family,” Langan said. The lock came undone.
* * *
Ray went to the law office where his daughter worked, and walked past it. It was a bustling place – the lawyers were the best dressed, he figured, then the secretaries or paralegals. Maybe fifteen or twenty people went in and took up positions or went straight to offices in the morning. Ray wanted nothing more than to go in, speak to whoever was Elena’s boss and ask some simple and direct questions – did Elena have enemies on the job, among the clients? Had anyone threatened her? Had there been any psychos hanging around the office or outside of it? Had anyone noticed anything that might give him a clue as to who had done terrible things to his daughter?
But how could he ask any of this if Elena had called in with bronchitis?
Besides, he didn’t think a bunch of lawyers would want to talk to him, if only because they wouldn’t want to open themselves up to accusations of negligence.
Still, Ray thought, Elena had fought back. He saw the scabs on her knuckles – if some guy tried to stroll in with bruises to his face, Ray would drag him out and get some answers. He didn’t think any of the lawyers had done this, but he didn’t know that for sure.
Plus, there was a chance that if a couple of thugs were hired to do this to his daughter, they might come in to pick up their payment. Of course, he didn’t think lawyers normally met with the thugs they hired in their offices, but it was possible.
He tried to think of some story he could tell to get himself inside the offices and within reach of answers. Nothing came to mind, just like it hadn’t come to mind all the previous night.
He was about ready to give up on the idea of talking to the lawyers – there were plenty of dope dealers and streetwalkers for him to interview. He stood a few doors down from the law office, staring at it like it might speak to him.
“Cruz,” Detective Carver said, nice and loud, clapping him on the right shoulder. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just standing,” Ray answered.
“Ah, well, no law against that, right? Unless you’re thinking about going in to talk to one of the lawyers in there. You weren’t going to do something stupid like that, were you, Cruz?”
Ray didn’t say a word.
“Good, because I just came from your daughter’s apartment. She seems to want to bury this whole thing, leave it in her past. Now, I’m going to pursue it – I normally work homicides, but it’s been slow the last couple of weeks. If you start stepping on the toes of people I need to speak to, we’re going to have troubles, you understand me?”
Ray nodded.
“Good. Now I’m going in there, and I’m going to ask some questions, and when I come out, I don’t want to see you loitering. Got it? Good.”
Carver strode over to the law office and entered, his black trench coat flowing out behind him. He never looked back.
* * *
Carlos Alvaro, Lisa Soto, Charlie Pilar, and Carmen Escobar all owned legitimate businesses in the area between Elena’s job and the train station she would have headed to if she were going home. Ray talked with each of them, asked them to find out what they could, left them each a couple of hundred dollars, but none of them had anything to say that could help him.
From those legitimate business owners, he moved on to speaking with dope dealers and streetwalkers, but for three solid hours and a thousand dollars, he got nothing. Nobody knew anything. Nothing had been heard the evening before.
Tired, disgusted with himself, he went into a diner for a late lunch. The waitress looked as tired as he felt.
“Bacon cheeseburger,” he ordered.
“How do you want it?”
“Huh?”
“How do you want it?”
“On a plate,” Ray said. The waitress rolled her eyes.
“I mean do you want it well done? Medium? Bloody?”
“Well,” Ray answered, and as soon as the waitress turned away from him, a thought came to mind and he left the diner as fast as his aching feet would carry him.
“Blood,” he said out loud once he was on the street. “She was bleeding.”
Elena must have bled a trail, he thought. It would show how she got to his apartment. If he traced it back, it would lead him to where she was attacked.
Ray walked the sidewalk outside his apartment building a dozen times before he noticed a drop of blood. She had come at his building from the south – the direction she’d have traveled if she came from work. Finding a second drop of blood was as hard as finding the first, but it got easier as the afternoon wore down to a nub and the temperature dropped.
With three-quarters-of-a-mile worth of blood drops and smears on the walls, he was in front of the office where she worked. He looked through the glass of the front window. A receptionist looked back at him, and he moved on, thinking it was only a matter of a few seconds before she got spooked at him and called somebody, maybe the police.
Elena could not possibly have been attacked in the office. At the time she was attacked, the place would have been crawling with lawyers and clients. He walked slowly past the law office, trying to think things through. He stopped a couple of doors down.
To hell with it, he thought. I got the gun – if I want answers from them, I can get them.
He turned and was about to head back to the law office, pull out the revolver and start asking questions. If someone needed shooting, he’d provide that service. A smudge caught his eye.
The store he stood in front of, a cuchifrito selling fried everything, had a palm print of blood on the window in front of the alcapurrias. He walked a little farther, found more drops. Three doors down from the end of the block the drops led into an alleyway. From the head of the alley he could see piles of garbage bags and two five-yard bins.
The blood ended in front of a steel door with a single light bulb above it and a sign tacked onto it – KEEP OUT. There was blood on a spot of the brick walls. There was long dark hair mixed in with the blood on the bricks. Ray understood precisely everything.
The bastards who did this got Elena into the alley somehow, shoved her into this wall, they did what they did to her, then they left her. The owners of the place probably had no idea what had happened. Maybe they didn’t notice the blood and hair. Maybe they did. In a neighborhood like this you’d only call the cops if there was something valuable missing, maybe not even then.
Ray went back around to the front. It was a restaurant serving Spanish food – rice, beans, pork chops. It wouldn’t be busy for another couple of hours, when work let out for most people at five. Ray went up to a counter where four waitresses in white blouses and skintight black pants were talking. One of them broke conversation and took a step toward him.
“I’m looking for the manager,” Ray said.
“He’s not here,” she said. “Can I help you?” Worry was swallowing her face whole.
“I know you have security cameras for the front of the store. I need to see the videos for yesterday.”
Her face registered the strangeness of his request.
“There’s no videos,” she said. “Just a storage room.”
“But I need to see.”
“Why?” She looked like she was half inclined to lead him to the back. The other half of her probably wanted to call the other waitresses over for advice.
Ray pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill. She reached out and took it from him and gave a glance over at the other waitresses. They weren’t paying attention.
“And I’ll give you another one when I’m finished seeing the video,” he said.
“There’s no video. Cameras only for show.”
“Fine, just let me see the back rooms.”
He followed the waitress down a corridor, through a storage room and past a small office with a desk and a chair. The tour ended at a room with a heavy door. The padlock on it was hooked through its latch, but not done up. It would be the room closest to the alleyway. Ray hoped it would have a video recorder.
The room was maybe fifteen feet long but only six feet wide. The walls were down to the studs and there were a dozen pieces of Sheetrock leaning up against the right-hand wall. There were a few pieces of lumber and a couple of five-gallon cans of joint compound. There were buckets with tools, and there was dust over everything.
“Wait here,” Ray told the young lady who’d led him. He walked into the room alone.
There wasn’t much to learn from seeing the room where he had hoped there would be video recordings. Nothing to tell him who had done it or why.
He took a last look around and held out another hundred-dollar bill.
“You guys hear anything going on in the alley yesterday, maybe three-thirty?”
The girl shrugged and shook her head. “There was a lot of music on yesterday. Anyway, sometimes the workers are working here all day and we don’t hear anything up front.”
She took the hundred, folded it up and tucked it away. She smiled at him and for a moment she reminded him of Elena from a few days earlier and before tragedy. He wanted to caress her face but checked himself and walked out.
Darkness had fallen on the city and a snow was starting. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and walked home.
* * *
Later that evening, Ray, tired as he was, went over to see his daughter. He had no plans to share with her what he had found. Maybe there was a connection between the restaurant and the attack that Elena could make clear to him, but he knew she wouldn’t want to talk about that. He’d figure it out for himself. For now, it was enough to be near her.
Elena and Willie were having one of their low-key arguments. The ones that simmer but never boil. Probably the best type of argument to have with Rosita asleep in her room. Ray felt the tension in the way Willie answered the door. Ray didn’t know what it was about, and he wasn’t sure what to do to end it. Ideas came to him, but nothing Elena would approve of. Whatever the fight was about, his presence calmed things. Not the usual effect for him.
He sat on the sofa near his daughter. She was in a bathrobe and had her legs up, her knees almost at her chest. It didn’t look like a comfortable pose. She looked sleepy.
If the TV had been on, Ray would have been happy to watch anything, but it wasn’t and he felt like a fool sitting between husband and wife in the silence.
“How was your day?” Ray asked Willie. It wasn’t much of a conversation starter, but he didn’t feel he deserved to have the question ignored. Willie felt differently.
Ray ignored Willie back.
“You feeling better, mi’ja?” He turned his back on his son-in-law and focused on Elena.
She shrugged.
“The police were here. Right after you left,” Willie threw in.
Ray glanced over at Willie then back to Elena.
“They bother you?”
She started crying and used the sleeve of her bathrobe to wipe tears away. Ray reached out and put a hand softly on her knee. He didn’t want to make things worse, but couldn’t keep himself from touching her.
She shook her head. She wanted to tell about the other visit, the one from Mark Langan, but she knew that if telling about the guys who had actually hurt her was bad, then talking about Mark Langan and how she was involved with him, working for him, was even worse.
She shook her head again – cleared her mind. She wiped her eyes and her nose and stood, putting her feet into slippers.
“Where are you going?” Willie asked.
Elena pulled herself up to her full height.
“I’m going to get a glass of wine,” she said. Her voice was slurred a little.
Ray could tell she was not sleepy, just a little on the drunk side.
“That’s your fourth,” Willie said. The edge in his voice clued Ray in. This had been the source of tension.
Elena pointed at her husband, jabbed her finger like she was aiming to take out one of his eyes.
“I have been beaten. I have had to hide myself from my daughter because I look like this. Like this.” She pointed to her face and its bruises. “I’ll drink a fourth glass, a fifth glass, and anything else the hell I want,” she hissed. Then she turned for the kitchen.
Willie started to get out of his seat, but Ray reached across and put a hand on his knee.
“What?” Willie asked.
“Let her have her drink,” Ray said.
“So this thing can turn her into a drunk?” Willie asked.
Ray nodded.
“One bender doesn’t make a drunk,” he said.
“Oh yeah? How many does it take?” Willie said. He started to get up again.
“Three. Look. She needs to get through today and tomorrow and the next day,” Ray said. “Whatever it takes to get her through. Let her have her drink. Let her sleep it off. The headache in the morning will keep her from doing it again.”
Willie wasn’t sure he agreed, but it didn’t matter much anyway. By the time he got to the kitchen, Elena was mostly done with her wine. A short while later, she was tipsy and ready for sleep. Ray saw her into bed and prepared to leave.
“Look,” he told Willie at the door, “I’ll see if I can talk to this detective, get him to ease up on her. Maybe if he doesn’t come around for a few more days, she’ll get a chance to relax a bit. Heal.”
“That detective doesn’t like you, Ray. Don’t do us any favors,” Willie said. The two men looked at each other for a second, then Willie closed the door.
Chapter Five
At a little past five in the morning, Ray stood in front of his bathroom medicine cabinet, staring at himself in the mirror. He’d gotten about an hour and a half of sleep. The rest had just been tossing and turning and aching to be doing something. He got up exhausted, but there was no point in staying in bed anymore. There wasn’t a point to staying in the apartment at all. His daughter had sat in the living room after the attack, showered in the bathtub. The whole place gave him the worst memories.
In his sleepiness he thought for a moment about counting the scars on his face, but he stopped himself.
“Self-indulgent bullshit,” he whispered.
Besides, there was work to do.
Finding out about the men who had beaten his daughter meant scraping the bottom of the barrel, and he hadn’t heard the scrape yet. He hadn’t yet talked to Israel Mendoza.
* * *
Along one stretch of Bruckner Boulevard there were three shops in a row that offered to fix or replace auto glass, headlights and side-view mirrors. They’d also fix flats if they had the stock or charge your battery – but glass was their bread and butter. Each of the shops had, for a long time, been owned by one man – Samuel Ortiz.
Sammy had been wiry and greasy – always dirty and in torn clothes, though Ray had done some petty jobs for him and knew he had money. He sold and installed car parts, and when business slowed, he hired some homeless guy or drug addict to go around the neighborhood and smash lights and windshields in the night. The next morning, he’d have a line of people looking for parts. He got a piece of just about every car stolen within five miles of his shops, and in the South Bronx, that was a lot of cars. He usually sat on a high stool in front of Sammy’s Fixit and counted money.
Israel Mendoza was one of the drug addicts Sammy hired. He was the best of the bunch. Most drug addicts would smash windshields all in a row – ten or twenty cars all on one block. That got the police involved, and though there was no way they could tie the broken glass back to Sammy, that didn’t stop them from hassling him – not something he needed. Israel – Israh to his friends – was more inventive, smashing a window on one block, cracking a taillight a block over, wandering the neighborhood and getting the results without the police ever being called.
