No Witness But the Moon
Suzanne Chazin
To Bill Hayes: you will always be family to me.
And that’s why I have to go back
to so many places
there to find myself
and constantly examine myself
with no witness but the moon.
—Pablo Neruda
Chapter 1
He hoped this day would never come. He hoped he’d never have to cross the divide.
On one side were cops who never had to second-guess their instincts, never had to shield their consciences—that soft tissue of the soul—from the razor-sharp judgments of colleagues, friends, even strangers.
On the other were those who had to look in the mirror at three A.M. with a belly full of booze and a heart full of lead. The ones who had to whisper the worst question a cop can ask himself and then listen for that tumor of self-doubt in the echo: Did I do the right thing?
Jimmy Vega never wanted to be a cop in the first place. He wanted to be a musician. He wanted to move people with rhythm, not muscle. Then his girlfriend—later wife, later ex-wife—got pregnant. You could say he became a cop the same way he became a father: by backing into it and then trying his hardest to make it work out.
And it had. For eighteen years, it had.
Until tonight.
It was a Friday evening in early December, too early for real snow, even here some fifty miles north of New York City where the deer sometimes outnumber the people. There had been a dusting earlier today—the first of the season. Most of it had melted away but a sugary glaze still clung to the trees and stone walls, lending a festive atmosphere to the rolling hills and horse farms of Wickford, NY.
Vega, a detective assigned to the county police’s homicide task force, had been in Wickford most of the day helping the local cops investigate a fatal robbery. The homeowner, a retired school principal, had suffered a heart attack during the break-in. Vega suspected the crime was part of a string of increasingly violent home invasions in the area. Four weeks earlier, just over the border in Connecticut, a rookie cop had been disarmed and pistol-whipped by four Hispanic men involved in a burglary there. Two weeks ago, a teenage babysitter in nearby Quaker Hills had been raped and savagely beaten by what appeared to be the same gang.
“Every day I’m getting a dozen suspicious vehicle calls,” Mark Hammond, a Wickford detective, told Vega. “I swear, if we don’t catch these mutts soon, we’re gonna have some dead Wall Street CEO on our hands.”
“Perish the thought,” said Vega dryly.
Hammond made a face. Vega suspected the Wickford detective played golf with a few of them. He certainly dressed like he did.
At six P.M., Vega and Hammond had progressed as far as they could in the case. Vega was ready to call it quits for the evening. He phoned his girlfriend, Adele Figueroa, from the parking lot of the Wickford Police station, a brick and clapboard structure that looked like George Washington still slept inside. The entire village, with its cobblestoned sidewalks and whitewashed New England storefronts, could have sprung whole from a Currier and Ives lithograph. It was a cold clear night, the moon so bright it bleached the surrounding sky. A gust of wind bit right through Vega’s dark blue insulated jacket. The air felt sharp enough to crack a tree branch. Tomorrow would have been his mother’s sixty-fourth birthday. Vega had been trying to distract himself and not focus on it so much this year. It was supposed to get easier with time. That’s what everyone told him.
“I just need to drop my car back at the station,” Vega told Adele. “Then I’ll be right over.” He heard what he thought was a bark through the phone.
“Nena?” His term of endearment for her. Babe in Spanish. “Did I just hear a dog?”
“Don’t ask.” She blew her nose. “It’s just for a little while.”
“But you’re allergic to dogs.”
“Yeah, but Sophia isn’t.” Adele’s daughter had been begging for a dog ever since Vega first met the girl eight months ago when he and Adele started dating. But even so, Adele’s plate was full. Besides being the founder and executive director of La Casa, the largest immigrant outreach center in the county, Adele was on the board of the local food pantry and had also recently joined the advisory board of a Hispanic think tank in Washington, D.C. She barely had time to deal with the drama of being a divorced mother raising a nine-year-old, let alone take on a pet.
“One of my clients at La Casa had to move into a friend’s apartment temporarily,” Adele explained. “The landlord doesn’t allow dogs. Sophia cried when she found out he might have to go to a shelter. It’s just for a couple of weeks.”
“Huh. Famous last words.”
“I figure the walks will do me good. Lately my hourglass figure has too many hours and too little glass.”
Vega laughed then wished he could take it back. He never understood why a woman with a Harvard law degree couldn’t accord her body the same confidence she accorded her mind. “I think you look beautiful, nena. Even if you are picking up steaming piles of—”
“Mock me, mi amado, and I’ll make you do it. See you in—what? An hour?”
“Sure thing.” Vega hung up and drove his unmarked Pontiac Grand Am out of the parking lot. He’d pulled the short straw getting this silver hunk of junk this morning. It had four wheels and working brakes but the interior lights worked only intermittently and the heater was lukewarm at best. He preferred the cars he used to get when he worked undercover in narcotics: Humvees and Land Rovers and Escalades. Drug dealers drove in style.