No Witness But the Moon(96)
“It’s—nice,” said Vega. It was freezing is what it was. He wanted to go back inside. The heavy steel door slammed shut behind them.
“See?” Torres slipped his key back in the door and turned the lock. “I can lock and unlock the door from both sides to ensure no one gets up here without my permission.”
“That’s great, Freddy. So listen. Maybe we should—”
“Look at this view, man. You ever see a view like this?” Torres swept a hand to the unenclosed part of the roof. Sturdy tenements stood shoulder to shoulder, their grimy facades dressed up in the twinkle of traffic lights and neon signs. Even the high-rise housing projects took on a certain dark majesty set against the hazy accumulation of all that wattage. Vega wanted to appreciate it but all he could feel was the needles of ice pricking his face and the flakes of snow melting into his hair.
Something that sounded like a sheet of ice snapped behind him. Vega turned. At Torres’s feet, he saw glittering shards on the compacted snow.
“What the—?” The DVD lay like a broken Christmas ornament between them.
Torres pulled a .380 Beretta out of his pocket and pointed it at Vega’s chest. “It’s loaded, Jimmy. Trust me, in this neighborhood, it’s loaded. I know you’re not packing. You wouldn’t have run from that mob just now if you were.”
Vega’s insides burned with a mixture of rage and confusion. He couldn’t believe the man who’d saved his life so many times could betray him so completely now.
“You’re on the DVD.” Vega had to say the words to believe them. “You killed my mother.”
“Didn’t want to, carnal. I swear. I tried to talk some sense into her on the phone that night. But all she kept saying was ‘Turn yourself in. Get your head right with God.’ I was outta options.”
His mother’s final phone call. It wasn’t to speak to Martha. It was to speak to Freddy. A slow dawning crept over Vega. That’s why his mother had an appointment with Detective Renfro in the Bronx homicide division. Luisa Rosario-Vega had evidence that Freddy Torres was involved in a murder, Martha’s words at the nursing home came back to Vega:
You know what you did, yes? So does Luisa. And he knew.
“Donna.” The name felt like a prayer on Vega’s lips. Snow covered his shoulders and slipped inside his jacket. He felt the chill all the way down his spine. “She didn’t fall from that window, did she? You pushed her.”
Torres’s face tightened for just a moment and then turned smooth and slack. Something went dead in his eyes. Vega felt as if a serrated spoon were digging out the lining of his stomach. Finding out about Donna was almost worse than finding out about his mother.
“Why, Freddy? For chrissakes, why? Donna never hurt anyone in her life.”
Torres’s voice turned steely when he spoke. “Who did you ever have to look after in your life, huh, Jimmy? You didn’t have a drunken father you had to protect your mother from. You didn’t have a sister with Down syndrome you had to watch all the time. It was all on me. Everything was always on me! And then my mother’s Alzheimer’s hit and I saw the future. I was going to be saddled with two dependents. Two! My mother and my sister. Their care was going to bleed me dry. Until the day I died, I would never be free. Jackie ran away. She got to live her life. When was it my turn?”
“So you killed your sister?”
“My sister’s life insurance paid for my mother’s home health care. It’s still paying for her care now. You think Medicare picks up everything? Not for the kind of care she’s getting, it doesn’t,” said Torres. “My solution was working. It made sense. If your mother hadn’t gotten all up in my face. If Hector Ponce had repaid his loan instead of trying to get cute with me.”
“So Hector knew that you killed my mother?”
“Then? No. I don’t have a clue why he switched DVDs. Later? He probably ran the footage and figured it out. But he was a gambler who liked to borrow money so he wasn’t about to rock the boat—until he had to.”
“And then you killed him.”
Torres steadied his gun with both hands. “Everyone who was a witness is gone now. It’s over, Jimmy. No more.”
“I’m a witness,” said Vega.
Torres didn’t answer. He took out his phone and punched in 911. A dispatcher came on the line. “This is Dr. Fred Torres,” he said in his smoothest and most professional voice. The street vernacular was gone. “I’m on the roof of the Bronx Academy with a distraught police officer—the one who shot that dishwasher in Wickford? He’s threatening to jump—”
“No!” Vega took a step forward. Torres leveled his gun and spoke into the phone again. “Please hurry. He’s acting crazy. I don’t—” Torres disconnected in midsentence. Which made it seem as if someone else had done it for him. Then he put his phone away.
“You see, Jimmy? I shoot you, it’s in self-defense. Or maybe you just want to jump and save us all the trouble?”
Chapter 38
“The theme of this symposium is healing a divided nation,” Adele reminded the hushed audience as she stepped on the stage at Keating Hall. “I suspect no one in this audience is more divided than I am at the moment.”