No Witness But the Moon Page 8

  His mother. Today she would have been sixty-four. The shooting had nearly wiped her birthday from his thoughts. He owed it to her that he was living in a place like this at all. She was the courageous one, the one who left her home and her friends, first at seventeen to move from a mountain village in Puerto Rico to New York, and then again when Vega was eleven to move from the Bronx to Lake Holly. The second move was only a geographical distance of about fifty miles. But in many ways it was a bigger change. Lake Holly back then was a place where everyone spoke English with an American accent and parents traveled two by two. A Puerto Rican single mother was neither welcomed nor understood.

  She didn’t make the move for herself. She did it for him, because she believed he deserved a better life and a set of dreams that included college. He’d hated her for it at the time, hated sticking out like a Devil Dog in a sea of Twinkies. But it was because of her that he could effortlessly swim and ice skate and ride a bicycle. It was because of her that he finished college. She moved back to the Bronx when Vega was grown. She missed her friends. Her world. But those years she sacrificed in between put Vega solidly in the middle class and gave him the skills to move comfortably between the Anglo and Latino worlds. He wouldn’t have this life if she hadn’t given up so much of hers.

  He made two more turns and then headed onto his street. There was a white Volvo parked on his tiny gravel patch of driveway. Vega recognized the car. It had once belonged to his ex, Wendy. Now it belonged to his daughter, Joy. Vega was touched that she’d driven all the way up here on a Saturday morning to see how he was doing. He was glad he’d given her her own key. He was also exhausted and needed a shower so he hoped her visit would be quick.

  Vega pulled his truck to the side, so as not to block her car. As soon as he got out, he heard her music blasting inside—even through the closed windows. It was probably some female pop vocalist who was big on the college circuit right now. Joy had never had exactly rarefied taste in music.

  He opened his front door. She hadn’t locked it. She should have. He swallowed back his fatherly concern. He didn’t want to greet her with a reprimand. He expected to see Joy right there in the open kitchen or adjoining living area. The house was only about a thousand square feet. The first floor was basically one big room with a fieldstone fireplace and a counter separating the kitchen from everything else. Upstairs were two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom under the eaves. It had the look and feel of a place owned by a man. Lots of electronics and dark wood. No curtains. Piles of bills and mail scattered across the kitchen counter. Nothing living, not even a plant. Vega turned off the music speakers. Joy had to be upstairs. He didn’t want to scare her if she hadn’t heard him come in.

  “Joy?” Vega threw his keys and mail on the kitchen counter. His answering machine light was beeping. He didn’t even want to think about how many messages he had. He was keeping his cell phone off for the same reason.

  “Dad?” She peeked at him from the top of the stairs. Vega felt a catch in his throat when he saw those big dark eyes and long black lashes. He saw the woman and the child all at the same time. He remembered when she was all arms and legs and braces glinting from her teeth. He forgot for a moment that she was now eighteen.

  She raced down the stairs and into his arms. She was a small girl with a ballerina’s build, delicate as spun glass. Vega hugged her tight, thrilled and humbled that she hadn’t stopped loving him even if right now, he felt supremely unlovable.

  “It’s going to be okay, chispita.” Little Spark. His Spanish nickname for her as a child, taken from a Mexican soap opera his mother used to enjoy. Even now, with too much eyeliner, long sparkly earrings, and jangly bangles, she was still his little girl.

  “We’ll get through this,” he promised. She shivered beneath his touch. Even though the house was now insulated, it still tended to be cold in winter. Yet here she was, in nothing but a thin, long-sleeved shirt. She always tended to underdress. “Let me get you something warmer to put on.” He broke away and noticed a suitcase and some boxes piled in a corner. “What’s that stuff?”

  “My things.”

  “Your things?”

  “I’m moving in.”

  “What? Why?”

  Her face dropped. “Don’t you want me here?”

  “Of course I do! You’re always welcome. But—why now? This is so much farther from school and work than your mother’s house.”

  “I don’t want you to be alone.”

  Vega felt touched by her concern. But another deeper part of him cringed with embarrassment and shame. He didn’t want to be the object of his daughter’s pity. “I’m fine,” he said stiffly. “I don’t need anyone taking care of me—especially not my daughter.”

  “Don’t get all defensive, Dad. It’s not like I’m going to cook for you or anything.”

  “Thank God for that.” The last time his vegan, gluten-free daughter cooked for him, she made a tofu lasagna that tasted like someone had mixed wallpaper paste and grass clippings.

  “We can talk about this later if you want,” said Joy. “After we get back from the Bronx.”

  “The Bronx?”

  “Don’t you remember, Dad? Today is Lita’s birthday.” Lita—short for Abuelita—Grandma in Spanish. “You promised we’d go put flowers on her grave.”

  Vega collapsed on the lumpy corduroy couch in front of the stone fireplace and palmed his eyes. “I don’t think I’m up to it, Joy. I need a shower and some rest.”

  “You could take a shower and nap and we could go later. I’ll drive.”

  “In the Bronx? No way.”

  “You need to keep busy, Dad. Be around people. Talk things out.”

  “I can’t talk about the shooting.”

  “You can talk about your feelings. You’re going to make an appointment with a therapist, I hope.”

  Vega didn’t respond. Joy’s mother was a school psychologist. Therapy was Wendy’s answer to everything—except ironically, their marriage. The phrase, “I’m pregnant with twins and you’re not the father,” kind of puts a dent in the notion of talking through your marital problems.

  Vega noticed that the dining table across from the kitchen counter was covered in old photo albums, some of them open to yellowing snapshots of him as a child. He usually kept them in a trunk in the spare bedroom upstairs.

  “Why are the albums out?”

  “While I was waiting for you to come home, I thought it might be nice to look back through Lita’s life,” said Joy.

  “Mmm.” Vega never liked looking at old family albums. They just made him sad. Joy walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door. She was greeted by a can of coffee, a pint of milk, a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of hot sauce. She was probably just beginning to discover what living with her single father might be like.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Vega.

  “A little. I can go to the supermarket for you,” she offered. “Stock up your refrigerator while you get some sleep.”

  “You don’t know where the supermarket is.”

  “I don’t need to,” said Joy. “I have GPS.”

  Vega wondered if anyone under thirty could read a map anymore. He fished some bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “I’m too tired to write up a grocery list.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll improvise.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  As soon as Joy left, Vega trudged up the stairs, showered, and fell into a deep sleep. In his dreams, he was running through a dark forest. But instead of chasing someone, he was being chased.

  Someone is in the woods with me.

  He stopped and slipped a hand into his back pocket, searching for the snapshot of Joy that he always kept in his wallet. It was gone. And then he heard it. The deep kettledrum sound:

  Bam.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  He woke up shivering and soaked in sweat. His head was pounding. His stomach was turning flips.
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  Someone was in the woods with me.

  No matter how much Teddy Dolan and Mark Hammond insisted otherwise, Vega couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been another person in the woods the night of the shooting. He threw back the covers and squinted at his watch on his bedside table. He felt like he’d been sleeping for days. He’d only been asleep for an hour. Joy wasn’t even back from the grocery store yet.

  He forced himself back into the shower and then toweled off and slipped into clean jeans, a T-shirt, and a button-down deep green Oxford. He was still shivering and achy. Deep regret felt like the mother of all flus. He checked his phone and saw that his lawyer, Isadora Jenkins, had texted him to see how he was doing. On the off chance that he was actually doing okay, she passed along a copy of Ricardo Luis’s statement to the press calling Vega’s “escalation” of the situation “regrettable.” So much for civilian gratitude. He already hated that Mexican ham.

  Everywhere Vega looked on the Internet, someone was selling him out. Ruben Tate-Rivera called him an “executioner” and compared today’s police tactics to Nazi Germany. His own brass was quoted as vowing “a full investigation”—as if Vega had something to hide.

  Hector Ponce, by contrast, was being readied for sainthood. Neighbors described him as “a devoted father and die-hard Yankees fan” who “held down two jobs.”

  Two?

  The first one at Chez Martine Vega already knew about. The second stopped him cold:

  Though Ponce worked nights as a dishwasher at an upscale French restaurant in Wickford, neighbors fondly remember him fixing leaky pipes and painting hallways in the Bronx building where he was both the super and a resident for the past eight years.

  Vega felt an electric current zip through him. Ponce was the super in his mother’s building? That meant he had a master key to every apartment. This guy had warning sirens going off all around him. He’d forced his way into Ricardo Luis’s house. And now it turned out that not only had he lived in his mother’s building at the time of her murder, he had access to her apartment as well. So how come Vega couldn’t recall the Bronx detectives ever mentioning Ponce as a person of interest in her murder investigation?

  You’re looking to fix your conscience. Greco’s words echoed in Vega’s brain. So what if he was? He had the paperwork. He owed it to his mother to run down every lead.

  Vega opened his bedroom closet and pulled down a brown cardboard box from the shelf. Inside were copies of nearly two years of NYPD paperwork concerning his mother’s murder investigation. Witness statements. The autopsy report. Forensic analysis. The various detectives who’d worked the case had forwarded copies of their work to Vega piecemeal over the last two years as a professional courtesy. He’d read it all at one time or another. He’d made notes and charts and diagrams—all of it to no avail. Nothing had ever jumped out at him. Nothing.

  Vega hefted the box down the stairs and onto the kitchen table. He pushed all of his mother’s photo albums to one side to make room. Then he opened the box and began sorting through its contents. He’d never bothered to organize it before. Every time something new surfaced, Vega read it and placed it on top. As a result, the whole box was like an archaeological dig with information in layers going all the way back to the initial police report.

  Vega separated out all the DD5s—the official form NYPD detectives use to follow up on a criminal investigation or complaint. Hector Ponce’s name was not listed on any of them. There was however a mention of a Hector Fernandez who was listed as the building super. Vega checked the name of the interviewing detective: Mike Brennan. He was the first detective on the case and had since retired and moved to Florida. Vega was betting Brennan had made the classic Anglo mistake and assumed Hector Ponce-Fernandez’s last name was Fernandez—his mother’s maiden name—rather than Ponce. That’s why the name never registered with Vega. But at least he’d been interviewed.

  Vega began reading the DD5: Fernandez states that on April 5th at 10:05 P.M. he went to fix a light in the third-floor hallway and noticed Lisa Rosario-Vega’s front door partially open.

  Lisa. Vega gritted his teeth. His mother’s name was “Luisa.” He remembered how annoyed he’d been the first time he read the misspelling of her name. He couldn’t ask Brennan to redo the report because the guy was passing it on as a favor to begin with. But it made Vega wonder suddenly: if Brennan could be sloppy about Ponce’s last name and his mother’s first name, what else had he been sloppy about? He read on.

  Fernandez states that he entered victim’s apartment and found her beaten and unconscious near the front door. Dispatch indicates that Fernandez dialed 911 at 10:22 P.M.

  Seventeen minutes? Ponce spent seventeen whole minutes inside his mother’s apartment before dialing 911? Why hadn’t this registered before? Had he been so annoyed with Brennan for getting his mother’s name wrong that he’d completely overlooked the most important part of the report? Vega continued.

  Fernandez states that he also used his cell phone to call the victim’s priest, Father Francisco Delgado from St. Raymond’s Catholic Church.

  Vega knew Delgado. Everyone knew Delgado, even Adele. He was widely respected in the Latin American community.

  First officers arrived at 10:26 P.M. and found Father Delgado in the apartment administering CPR to victim. Officers took over CPR while Delgado performed last rites. Fire Department EMS arrived at 10:27 and pronounced victim D.O.A.

  Vega sat back in his chair and frowned. His mother lay beaten and unconscious in her apartment for almost twenty minutes after she was discovered and before any kind of help arrived. How had he missed this before?

  He tried to remember that night but it was a blur. Sirens. Rubberneckers. Indifferent cops. People that he didn’t even know rushing up to hug him. His mother’s body bag being hefted from the apartment like an oversized piece of luggage. Some police officer on his cell phone arranging his girlfriend’s birthday party. Father Delgado was there. He probably tried to talk to Vega but Vega was too distraught to remember the exchange. He hadn’t even registered until now that the priest had performed CPR and tried to save his mother’s life.

  I killed Hector Ponce and Hector Ponce may have killed my mother. That was simplistic, he knew. But at the very least, Ponce’s delay may have contributed to his mother’s death. Was it incompetence? Or was there a much darker reason behind the man’s actions? Vega noted that there was a security camera in the building’s lobby that was wired into a digital video recorder. Brennan’s notes indicated that the wire connecting the camera to the recorder had come loose and the DVD was blank. As the building super, it would have been easy for Ponce to yank that wire. Then again, as the super, he wouldn’t have needed to. No one would have questioned his presence anywhere in the building—certainly not the lobby.

  Vega thumbed through the painful forensic details of his mother’s death again. She hadn’t been raped, thank God. But aside from probably emptying a few bills from her wallet (she never carried much cash), she hadn’t been robbed either. There was Chinese takeout food on the table (not something his mother normally ate), but the food could have been for one person or two—the number and placement of dishes didn’t make that clear. There was no receipt from the purchase and no menu clipped to the bag, though there was a staple puncture from where a menu or receipt might have been.

  A homicide detective named John Renfro who took the case over from Mike Brennan canvassed the area’s takeout joints and their grainy video cameras but Vega’s mother didn’t appear on any of them, nor were they able to match up the very standard Chinese food items—dumplings, white rice, sweet-and-sour pork—to a specific customer. Renfro was only on the case a short time. He was promoted to a joint FBI task force on organized crime after that. Vega didn’t even know where he worked in the city anymore.

  Vega was desperate for new leads but he didn’t see any. At the time, the police had theorized that his mother had opened her door expecting someone else and her assailant had push
ed in and attacked her for her wallet. But the police were never able to come up with the person she might have been expecting. Her last call that evening, three hours earlier, had been to the apartment of her best friend, Martha Torres, who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, when the police interviewed Martha after the murder, she couldn’t remember his mother’s call despite phone records that showed they spoke for at least twenty minutes.

  Vega hadn’t been a homicide detective back when his mother died. He still worked undercover in narcotics. Now however, with a few dozen homicide cases behind him and his mind less clouded by emotion, there were so many questions he wished he’d asked. Why the 911 time lag? How did the wire come loose from the building’s security camera? Were there other videos from store security cameras in the neighborhood? From any of the Chinese takeout joints? In Vega’s defense, he had to be diplomatic about backseat driving the NYPD. Everything they sent him was done as a courtesy; they could have rescinded it at any time. But still—he should have pushed harder.

  Now he had to. He scrolled through his cell phone and was able to locate a phone number for Mike Brennan. He dialed. The phone number was no longer in service. The Bronx detectives division would have Mike Brennan’s new number in Florida. They’d have John Renfro’s too. But there was no way they’d give them to Vega. No cop was going to stick his neck out for Vega at the moment, especially a cop from another jurisdiction. Then again, maybe Vega didn’t have to be the one who did the asking.