No Witness But the Moon(26)

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 pushed 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.