Bronx Requiem(16)

“Okay. Fine. Good.”

Beck had walked Walter Ferguson to the door.

“How’d you get here, Walter?”

“Car service. I told him to wait.”

Beck opened the door and saw the car parked across the street.

“Okay, good. I’m—I’m at a loss here, Walter. I don’t know what else to say.”

Walter stepped out of the bar into a day that had continued to be gloomy and overcast. He turned to Beck. “What can you say?”

The two men shook hands solemnly. Beck watched as Walter walked slowly toward the car. After a few steps he turned back and faced Beck.

“James.”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For listening to me.”

Beck nodded, grimacing at the effort to contain the emotions overtaking him. Three seconds after the car pulled away, Beck turned back into the bar, not even bothering to close the door. He let out a primal curse of rage and slammed a fist down on the nearest table.

Manny Guzman, baleful and solemn as ever, had already taken off his apron, heading back to the kitchen for his guns.

Demarco pulled Beck’s gun lockbox out from under the bar and placed it on the bar top. He took out a Benelli M2 Tactical Shotgun with a pistol grip from a cabinet in the back bar. He laid it on the bar, pulled his Glock out from his waistband at the small of his back, and brought out boxes of ammunition from under the bar.

Demarco asked, “What’s the old lady’s address?”

Beck spoke slowly, trying to keep his anger in check.

“I’ll give you directions. Goddam f*cking parole board. We had to use her place so it looked like he was with a relative. So it would look good on his f*cking COMPAS score. But she wasn’t a blood relative. She was nothing to Packy.”

Manny returned to the bar room, the old gangster’s expression without affect. Maybe old friends like Beck and Demarco could see an extra intensity smoldering in his dark eyes, but even without it, Manny Guzman, a stocky Hispanic man in his fifties, looked to be a man intent on a reckoning.

Manny had a gun in both of his front pants pockets. A Charter Arms .357 Magnum Bulldog revolver for up close. A Smith & Wesson .38 Special for longer distance.

“Do we need Ciro?” Demarco asked.

“I don’t know,” said Beck. “But Packy was one of us. We have to call him.”





6

After their meeting with Walter Ferguson, John Palmer and Ray Ippolito pulled up to an address on Hoe Avenue located seven blocks from where they’d found the body of Packy Johnson.

Palmer parked their unmarked car in front of a row of redbrick two-story buildings that ran the entire block. The public housing had been built in 1958. Each building held four apartments. From the outside, everything looked well maintained. All the windows had child-safety bars on them. The garbage cans were lined up neatly out front.

Palmer checked the address he had written down in his notebook and pointed to the entrance two sections to their right.

“Over there,” he said.

“Think she’s gonna have anything to tell us?”

“Let’s find out.”

Ippolito knew the best chance to find a lead usually happened in the first hours of a murder investigation. Despite needing sleep, he knew they had to keep going for as long as they could, even though he didn’t have high hopes. Most murders were committed by someone who knew the victim. But Paco Johnson hadn’t been on the streets for seventeen years. Maybe this was a simple drug deal gone bad, just another guy out of prison looking to score. It happened so often it was a cliché. But Ippolito didn’t think so. The man had clearly been in a fight. He still had his wallet on him with over two hundred dollars in it. And where they’d found him wasn’t a known location for drug deals.

He put it all out of his mind and followed Palmer toward the entrance. Ippolito knew Palmer saw this case as an opportunity for advancement. He was the most ambitious young man he’d ever known. It ran in the family. Palmer’s father, John Palmer Senior, had a reputation for being a hard-charger. He was a well-known lobbyist and political operator with clients both in Albany and Washington. Ippolito had zero doubt that John Junior fully intended to use his father’s connections and influence to advance his career.

More power to him, thought Ippolito.

They found Lorena Leon’s buzzer. After three rings, a garbled voice came over the intercom.

“?Qué?”

Ippolito leaned toward the speaker. “Policía. Lorena, abra la puerta, por favor.”

Palmer said, “You sound like you know her.”

“Exactly.”

A buzzer sounded. They pushed open the entrance door, stepping into a musty interior. The humid weather seemed to intensify the cooking odors, cat piss, and general mustiness of the old building.

Both men trudged to the second floor. They passed cinder-block walls painted institutional green. The linoleum floors were worn down to black in the center of the stairwells. Ippolito found apartment 2G. At the second knock, the door opened to the width of a safety chain. The weathered face of a short, thin Hispanic woman peered out at them.

Ippolito held his police identification in front of her eyes. “Policía.”

She squinted at the identification. “?Qué deseas?”