No Witness But the Moon Page 12

  Vega stopped in his tracks. He turned toward them and spread his arms in a way that was non-threatening but at the same time exuded the confidence of a man who had a gun and knew how to use it. It was posturing of course. But so much of police work was.

  “Guess it’s your lucky day, hombres,” Vega said coolly. “I’m off-duty. Don’t need the paperwork.” He gave them a mock salute, turned, and kept walking, aware that their eyes were still on him. Sharks’ eyes. His peripheral vision caught one of the shorter gangsters leaning into the window of the car, having a conversation with one of the occupants. The guy was pointing to the protest up ahead—to the giant poster some demonstrator was carrying with Vega’s picture on it. Ricardo Luis had less face recognition to this crowd than Vega did.

  “That’s him,” the gangster said to the faceless figure inside. “That’s the cop they’re marching about.”

  Vega kept walking. Up ahead he saw the protesters. Their chant had grown stronger and more heated. Somebody had even turned it into a catchy rhyme:

  “Hands up! Don’t shoot! Cops should never execute!”

  Vega was trapped. There were no walkways to cut through. Nothing but solid fifty-foot canyons of brick and concrete on either side of him. There was a buzz of energy behind him now. A car door slammed—the Nissan’s, he suspected. More feet on the pavement.

  “Yo! Five-O! You the asswipe on those posters?”

  Vega’s heart pounded. A bitter, metallic taste settled at the back of his throat. If these gangbangers got ahold of him, they would beat him until he was as bloody as a side of beef and then finish him off with a bullet to the head—just like Hector Ponce. That’s how they’d reason it, too. Retribution. Street justice.

  Vega tried to calm his breathing and think. He had no weapon. He could fight as hard and dirty as any kid from the neighborhood. But he wasn’t eighteen anymore nor was he particularly big or brawny. He saw only two choices: fight a fight he was bound to lose. Or run straight into the hands of the protesters streaming across the intersection who might very well do the same thing to him—albeit with more cell phone footage on YouTube.

  He’d take his chances with the protesters. The ratio of college students-to-felons would be better. Not that that guaranteed anything. Vega had dealt with his share of drunken frat boys when he was in uniform. But at the very least, they’d be less bold about delivering a punch, more worried about losing teeth that their parents had spent thousands to straighten. He started running toward them.

  “That’s the cop! The one on the poster!” one of the gangbangers shouted to the demonstrators.

  Most of the marchers were too busy chanting to notice what was going on. They probably thought it was a personal scuffle. That bought Vega time to weave his way into the center of the crowd. He took off his cap and sunglasses to make himself less recognizable to the gangsters. Unfortunately, that made him even more recognizable to the marchers. A big black man with a shaved head turned and frowned at Vega. He was holding up a sign that read JAIL KILLER COPS.

  “Hey. Aren’t you—?”

  Vega didn’t wait for more. He took off again. But it was too late. His presence rippled through the crowd. People began turning, pointing their cell phones at him. There was expectation in the air. Everybody was waiting for someone to throw the first punch.

  It came from behind. A glancing shot just north of his kidneys. Vega felt the fire travel up his spine. If the punch had connected better, he’d be on the pavement now, and pissing blood in an hour. The punch was the invitation the rest of the crowd needed. Someone slapped his arm. Somebody else stomped on his foot. Another spit on his jacket. Vega shoved and kicked and tried to fight back but it was like being in the middle of a game of blind man’s bluff. He never saw his opponents. He only felt them trying to push him to the ground. He had to stay standing. If he lost his footing, it would all be over. They’d kick him then. Break his nose, his jaw, his ribs. Give him a concussion. By the time the cops worked their way into the crowd and pulled them off, Vega would be unrecognizable, even to Joy.

  A teenager stepped in front of Vega and tried to punch him in the face. Vega ducked and then swung to protect himself but he knew he couldn’t keep this up. He was dizzy with panic, unsure which angle the next assault was going to come from. Suddenly a Latino man with a droopy black mustache and thinning hair stepped in front of Vega. He was dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt. He wore a sweatband across his forehead and basketball sneakers on his feet like he’d just come from a game. He grabbed the teenager by the back of his sweatshirt and shoved the kid away from Vega.

  “You’re already on probation, Carlos!” he shouted in a mixture of Spanish-sounding consonants and Bronx vowels. “You want to add assault? I know your probation officer!”

  Vega knew instantly that this was no stranger who’d saved him. This wasn’t even the first time.

  “Chill, hombres,” Freddy Torres said to the crowd. “This guy you’re messing with? He’s old school. From the ’hood. Him and me go way back.” He pushed Vega behind him and caught the eye of the gangsters who’d chased Vega into the march. “You got a beef?” Torres called out to them.

  “No beef with you, Doc,” said the one with the gun in his waistband. He held up his hands and backed off. Vega wondered if the gangbanger had long ago been a student at Torres’s school, the Bronx Academy of Achievement. Even the protesters seemed chastened. Freddy Torres—Dr. Fred Torres—was respected in this neighborhood, even if the “Doc” was for his Ph.D.—not an M.D. They hesitated to cross some invisible line Torres had drawn around himself and Vega. Which gave Torres just enough time to grab Vega by the back of his jacket and yank him away.

  “Ay puñeta, carnal.” Torres’s smile parted the curtain of his mustache. “Why am I always saving your ass?”

  Chapter 13

  This was the third time in Vega’s life that Freddy Torres had rescued him. The first, he couldn’t recall. His mother used to tell the story. Torres was nine and Vega was seven. Their two-year age difference meant they traveled in different circles. Still, Torres knew Vega was a good ballplayer—one of the few things Vega was better at than Torres.

  One day Torres let Vega join their street game. Somebody hit a high-pop foul and Vega dodged between two parked cars to run for it. He wanted to impress the older boys. But before he could make the catch, somebody grabbed his T-shirt from behind and pulled him to the ground. He hit the pavement hard, skinning an elbow. A second later, a car barreled past without even braking. Vega’s mother swore that Freddy Torres had saved his life.

  The second time was more humiliating. Vega was eleven. His grandmother had just died, his father had dropped out of his life entirely and his mother, a nurse, worked long hours at the hospital. Vega was feeling lost and adrift in a neighborhood teeming with gangs, drugs, and temptations.

  A sometime friend had gotten hold of a couple of cans of black spray paint and suggested Vega join him and another boy to tag some buildings and earn points with the local gang leader. Vega took the can and followed the boys down the street—right past Freddy Torres who was thirteen at the time and babysitting his kid sister Donna, who had Down syndrome. Torres saw the can of paint sticking out of Vega’s backpack, swiped it, and ordered Vega to quit hanging out with street toughs and go home. Vega, afraid to lose face, shoved Torres and demanded his paint back. Torres gave it to him, all right. He aimed the can and coated Vega’s clothes with permanent black paint. They both ended up on the sidewalk in a hail of fists after that. But Torres at thirteen had the advantage of weight and size. Vega was quickly dispatched. The other boys jeered him and left.

  Bruised, covered in paint, and burning with humiliation, Vega trudged home for the punishment he knew he was going to get, hatred for Freddy Torres in every pore. The following day he found out that the other two boys he’d been with had been arrested for vandalism. They were both so young; they probably got off with a warning. But still. Vega’s mother was horrified. She mo
ved them out of the Bronx soon after that. Years later Vega heard that one of those two boys went to prison for burglary and drug possession. The other died of an overdose. Vega often wondered if a can of black paint had spared him the same fate.

  That, and Freddy Torres.

  They crossed the street now, away from the mob.

  “Listen, Freddy.” Vega rubbed his sore back. He felt grimy and sweat-soaked. “I don’t want to be the reason your school burns down or you get beat up.”

  Torres laughed. “I’ve survived a dozen mayors, urban renewal, and both the crack and the AIDs epidemics in this neighborhood. I think I can survive your little visit today.”

  Vega hadn’t seen Torres since his mother’s funeral nearly two years ago. His friend seemed to have grown old in the interim. His black hair had receded on the sides, leaving a little island of dark bird’s nest fuzz in the middle of his head. His droopy black mustache did nothing to hide the sag of his chin. His shoulders sloped. He wasn’t fat but beneath his hooded sweatshirt his belly had grown a little soft and pendulous. Vega had to remind himself that Torres had suffered even more losses than he had these past couple of years. His father died of cancer. Then his mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Then his younger sister, Donna, the one with Down syndrome, slipped and fell to her death from the family’s fifth-floor apartment window. Torres had an older sister, Jackie, but she lived out west somewhere, so Torres—never married and childless—had had to handle everything by himself. It couldn’t have been easy. And now here was Vega, as usual, bringing more trouble.

  “I hate to ask, but can I beg one more favor?” Vega told him about Joy, still waiting at St. Raymond’s Church. “You wouldn’t happen to have a car nearby, would you?”

  “My SUV is behind the school. Happy to be your chauffeur.”

  “I owe you.” An understatement.

  Vega dialed Joy and told her he’d run into “an old friend” who was going to drive Vega to the church to pick her up. She chewed him out for taking so long to call but she bought the lie. That’s all he was interested in.

  “Good,” said Torres. “Now let’s get you cleaned up.”

  Torres’s charter school, the Bronx Academy of Achievement was a block away. It was housed in a former tool-and-dye factory, four stories tall, with a fenced-in basketball court beside it. Everything about the building was square: square windows. Square flat roof. Square panes of glass in the front doors. What it lacked in architectural embellishments, however, it made up for in wow-factor. The entire stucco exterior was painted in tropical hues of lavender, orange, turquoise, and pink.

  A knot of teenagers gathered by the chain-link fence of the basketball court next to the school, eyeing Vega and pretending not to at the same time. Reggaeton and rap music blared over a stereo speaker. Vega missed those sounds. In the suburbs, loud music was considered an assault, not an expression of joy.

  Torres walked over to the fence and knuckle-rapped a few of the teenagers. “Game’s over today, hombres.” There was a collective groan. “Come back for the tournament tomorrow.” Torres turned to Vega. “We’re doing a basketball tournament in the indoor gym tomorrow at two. I’d invite you inside to wash up and take a tour of the school, but I’ve got painters redoing the stairwells at the moment and they don’t even let me walk around.” Torres nodded to the laundromat on the other side of the basketball court. “You can wash up at EZ Clean.”

  “They’ll let me?”

  “Carmela better.” Torres smiled. “I own the place.”

  The Bronx had once been bargain-basement real estate. But no more. The guys who hung around and put a few dollars into the borough were reaping big profits now.

  “So you’re into real estate these days?” asked Vega.

  “I own a couple of small businesses, that’s all,” said Torres. “Somebody’s got to keep the neighborhood institutions going.”

  Carmela, the EZ Clean’s manager, was an older Puerto Rican woman with a body like a water balloon and hair dyed the color of a new penny. She lifted her gaze from her magazine, greeted Torres as “El doctor,” and directed Vega to a bathroom at the back of the store. Silver Speed Queen washers and dryers rumbled along the floors and walls as Vega made his way down the aisles, dodging small children who were playing hide-and-seek and mothers chatting in Spanish on cell phones. The air was humid and detergent scented. The light had a truck-stop café brightness to it.

  It had been decades since Vega had been inside a laundromat. He considered it one of the hallmarks of becoming middle class that he owned his own Sears washer and dryer and no longer had to waste time in a place like this. And yet being here filled him with such an unexpected sense of nostalgia. He could still see himself as that small boy enveloped in a warm, sweet-smelling cocoon of maternal embraces and children’s chatter. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the chirp of the two parakeets that used to sit in a cage behind the front desk. He could still feel the static from the fresh-washed blankets as his mother removed them from the dryer.

  Vega washed his hands and face in the bathroom and took a wet paper towel to the surface of his insulated jacket.

  “Heads up,” said Torres when Vega stepped out. Torres tossed a can of Coke from the vending machine in his direction. Vega caught it.

  “Still got the old baseball reflexes, I see,” said Torres. “I’d buy you a beer, but I figure you don’t need to add a DUI to your troubles.”

  “You got that right. Salud.” Vega popped the tab and took a long pull. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I never thanked you properly for today,” said Vega.

  “You don’t have to thank me.” Torres clinked his own soda can against Vega’s. “Like I said out there, you’re old school. There aren’t too many of us dinosaurs left anymore.”

  Vega threw out half a dozen names of kids they both knew growing up. Two had gone into the army and left—the preferred exit route. Freddy’s older sister, Jackie, had done the same herself. Two others had died—one in a shooting, the other from drugs. Another still lived in the neighborhood but was managing on disability after working construction and injuring his back. The last had moved to Atlantic City with a daughter to work in the casinos. There weren’t a whole lot of escape routes.

  “Hardest thing I have to do at my school,” said Torres, “is convince my students there are worlds beyond this one.”

  “You did pretty well staying put,” Vega noted. “Full scholarship to Columbia . . . a Ph.D . . . head of a prominent charter school.... My mom referred to you as Doctor Torres all the time. I’m not sure she ever figured out you weren’t an M.D.”

  Torres laughed. “No wonder you were never all that jacked about coming back to the ’hood and seeing me.”

  Vega felt suddenly embarrassed. Did he sound envious? His mother never overtly compared him to Torres. Nevertheless, it was there. Torres got better grades than Vega. He attended an Ivy League school whereas Vega did four years at a commuter college. He was certainly a more involved son, taking care of both his mother and his sister after his father’s death.

  “I didn’t mind,” Vega lied. “Besides, it gave her a lot of joy. She’d watched you grow up. You were like a second son.”

  “And she was like a second mother. Hell knows, we needed second mothers. It’s not like we had fathers to count on.” Even though Torres’s father was a presence in his children’s lives (unlike Vega’s father), he’d been a drunk and a brute. Torres and his sisters spent more time hiding from the man than bonding with him.

  “Speaking of mothers,” said Vega. “Is your mom—?” He didn’t know how to ask. Fortunately Torres rescued him.

  “She’s over at Sunnycrest Manor.”

  “The nursing home on Webster Avenue?”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t keep her at home anymore. She went downhill fast after Donna died.”

  “Would she”—Vega hesitated—“know me?”

  “She has good days and bad. But yeah
, I think she would. You should go see her—when this blows over, I mean.” Torres frowned at Vega. “Not to pry, Jimmy, but I’m kind of surprised that of all times to get nostalgic, you picked today.”

  “It’s my mother’s birthday.”

  “Ah. Hope you’re not planning to go to her building. Hector Ponce was . . .” Torres’s voice trailed off.

  “My mother’s building super, I know,” said Vega. Clothes thumped in the dryers like a samba rhythm. Vega played with the tab on his soda can. “Did you know him at all?”

  Torres shrugged. “After so many years here, I sort of know everybody.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Like a lot of building supers. Sort of a tigre.”

  “You mean a hustler?” The Spanish word for tiger could be used as a compliment or an insult in the neighborhood, depending on context.

  “You know the way it is down here. Things haven’t changed. Everybody’s got a hustle going on on the side. Especially the supers. Weed. Numbers. Women.”

  “So what was Ponce’s?”

  “I heard he liked to gamble.”

  “You don’t mean Lotto tickets, I’m assuming.” Vega recalled Dolan saying that they’d found expired Lotto tickets in Ponce’s wallet.

  “Everybody down here does that,” said Torres. “That’s financial planning in the ’hood. No. I mean like horses, numbers, sporting events.”

  “Do you know if he owed money?”

  Torres stroked his mustache and smiled. “Everybody down here owes money, carnal.”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking big money. Enough to make him do something desperate like rob Ricardo Luis’s house.”