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?”
“Estamos aquí para hablar con usted acerca de Paco Johnson. ¿Se puede abrir la puerta, por favor?”
Palmer added, “Ma’am, don’t be alarmed. Just open the door so we can ask you a few questions.”
The door closed. Ippolito and Palmer listened for the sound of the chain being removed, but heard nothing. They exchanged looks. Palmer raised a fist to bang on the door when it suddenly opened wide.
Lorena Leon stood in the doorway, defiantly blocking entrance. She had once been a good-looking woman. Even now, after a lifetime of hard years, she made sure to color her gray hair a deep brown with something she bought off the shelf at the local Duane Reade. But she couldn’t cover the deeply etched lines in her skin, or hide the anger and defiance in her eyes. She wore a pair of old jeans that hung off her bony hips and a clinging, faded white top with navy blue horizontal stripes that emphasized her sagging breasts.
Ippolito asked, “Okay if we come in?”
She stepped back and hacked a phlegmy smoker’s cough.
Old, cheap furniture crowded the small living room. For some inexplicable reason, an iron skillet filled with fried ground beef sat on a heavy 1950s coffee table in front of a beat-up red couch.
Drooping green drapes covered most of the room’s two windows, blocking the gray daylight outside. A tired window air conditioner ground away, doing very little to change the fetid air filled with cooking smells.
Both detectives stepped in, but neither moved very far into the apartment so as not to upset her. She stood with her arms crossed, waiting for whatever trouble they had brought to her.
Palmer hung back, letting Ippolito continue.
“Mrs. Leon, I’m afraid we have some bad news.”
She shook her head and turned away from them, moving over to the couch, sitting down at the edge, as if she didn’t want to hear the bad news while standing. She didn’t offer the detectives a seat so Palmer and Ippolito walked toward the couch and stood opposite her.
Palmer held his notebook and pen, ready to take down any information Ippolito might pull out of the old lady.
Ippolito knew from his interview with Ferguson that Lorena was Paco Johnson’s mother-in-law, so he put on a sympathetic demeanor, informing her, “Your son-in-law was found dead this morning, not too far from here.”
Lorena looked up at Ippolito confused. He translated. “Su yerno fue encontrado muerto.”
Maybe it was his accent, but Ippolito’s translation seemed to confuse her even more.
She responded with a voice degraded by decades of cheap menthol cigarettes. “What?”
Palmer glared at the woman and raised his voice in case there was something wrong with her hearing. “Paco Johnson has been murdered.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes. He’s dead.”
“Why?” she asked.
Good question, thought Ippolito.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Do you have any idea why?”
She looked down at a frayed green carpet and shook her head. Palmer couldn’t tell if she was somehow trying to deny Packy had been murdered, or deny them an answer.
She looked up at them and frowned.
Ippolito said, “Can you tell us anything that might explain what happened?”
“He should never come here. Never.”
“Why, Mrs. Leon? Why should he have never come here?”
She shot her right hand up as if to slap away the trouble that had entered her home. She sat up straighter.
“He don’t belong here. He knows nothing. I never see him for years. He no care about me, about my house.”
“So why did he come here?” asked Ippolito.
“From prison. For a place to stay. He no want to be here. You are the police. You already know these things? You know he was in prison.”
Palmer said, “Why did you let him come here, if you didn’t want him to?”
Now the old lady looked up at the two men. First Palmer, then Ippolito. Something in her hardened. She shook her head again, digging in, a stubborn scowl twisting her face.
Ippolito was tired. The hot, stuffy apartment and odor of the fried beef aggravated him. The old lady’s raspy smoker’s voice annoyed him. If this was their only lead, they were going to be fucked on this case.
He walked to the dining area and came back with a chair, part of an old red Formica dining set. The vinyl on the back of the chair had split apart years ago. He dragged the chair near where Lorena Leon sat and placed himself in front of her.
Palmer stood where he was, watching, listening carefully.
Ippolito poked the old woman’s knee, perhaps harder than he’d intended. She jerked away from him and looked at him, angrier now. Ippolito didn’t care.
He dropped his attempts at Spanish, not wanting to give her any cover. “Listen to me, lady. This is serious. This isn’t drugs, or burglary, or some petty bullshit. This is homicide. Murder. Understand?”
Ippolito made sure to get his face right in front of the older woman’s. He looked at her carefully, letting what he’d said sink in. Although her skin had creased with age and taken on a web of fine lines from years of smoking, the woman had strong features. This wasn’t some shy old lady. She still had plenty of fire in her.
She didn’t look away. She met Ippolito’s direct gaze.
He spoke slowly and forcefully. “We don’t forget about murders. We will find out everything. Everything. If you help us, if you tell us what you know, it will be better for you. What’s the matter, don’t you want to know who killed your son-in-law?”
“No. I don’t want to know. I don’t care.”
Ippolito ignored the response and forged on. “Did he come here like he was supposed to when he got released from prison yesterday?”
“Yes. He come here like he was supposed to.”
“What time was that?”
“Last night. About eight.”
“How long was he here?”
“I give him some food. Maybe an hour he stays. Then he went out.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t ask?”
Again she stopped talking, but Ippolito and Palmer had no doubt she knew more than she was telling them. Palmer took a soft approach, speaking to Lorena Leon as if the two of them trusted each other. Not like the other cop in the chair staring at her.
“Come on, Mrs. Leon, it’s okay to tell us. Don’t worry. Where did he go? He must have said something.”
Lorena responded with a quick shake of her head. She grabbed the iron skillet with the pungent ground meat and stood quickly, her agility surprising both men.
Palmer took a half step back, thinking for a moment she was going to toss the greasy ground meat at him, or worse, try to hit him with the iron skillet.
Ippolito stood, thinking the same, and how embarrassing it would be to take down an old lady trying to hit them with a damn frying pan.
But the moment passed quickly as Lorena stepped around the coffee table, moving away from them, heading toward her kitchen.
She didn’t turn to them as she spoke. She yelled out, “He went to find his mandria daughter.”
Palmer whispered to Ippolito, “What’s mandria mean?”
“Worthless.”
Both men followed at a distance as Lorena walked into her small, cluttered kitchen. Now Ippolito hung back, letting Palmer stand in the doorway asking his questions.
“What’s his daughter’s name?”
“Amelia.”
“Johnson?”
“Yes, what other name?”
“Why did he want to find his daughter?”
She continued answering in a shout, never looking at Palmer. She dropped the skillet on the counter with a bang. Pulled out a bowl from a cupboard over the counter. Scooped and scraped the ground meat into the bowl. Shouting out information.
“Why shouldn’t he go see his daughter? He didn’t see her for so many years. He wants to see her, so I told him. Go to the Bronx River Houses. She’s in there. With her pimp. Derrick. Derrick Watkins. I know what she does. Like her mother. A whore and a drug addict.”
Palmer wrote quickly and carefully in his notebook.
“The same, the same. Always the same. Such a beautiful girl. Like her mother. And look what she does.”
Lorena was crying now, talking, ranting as the tears ran down her face, seemingly unconnected to any anguish. Her face remained without expression as she angrily wiped her tears with the back of her hand, as she continued to fuss with the food and the bowl and the skillet, scraping up the ground meat and wiping away the drip under her nose, as annoyed and angry at her crying as she had been at the two men who had come into her apartment. No sobbing, no hitch in her voice. Her tears seemed to be an independent part of her that she simply couldn’t control. Just like she couldn’t control what was happening around her.
She dropped the skillet into her sink and pushed past Palmer before he could step out of her way. She headed back to her small living room, away from them. She was done with them.
But Ippolito wouldn’t let her get away. He yelled out after her as she walked past him, putting enough into his voice to let her know this wasn’t over yet.
“Hey, Mrs. Leon!”
Ippolito walked after her into the living room. Palmer hung back. She stopped and turned to him, her old wet eyes blazing, arms crossed.
“What?” she yelled.
Ippolito saw Lorena was reaching a point he didn’t want her to go past.
“Just one more question, okay? Why did you let him come here?”
She lifted her chin at him as she answered, “Go ask the parole man. The black man and his friend.”
“What friend?”
“Someone who knew Paco in prison.” She paused, remembering the name. “Beck. His name is Beck. They made me take him, that’s why. They make me do it. Okay?”
Ippolito said, “You know his first name?”
“James. He and the black man, they say he can’t get out of prison without a place.” Lorena’s mouth formed into a tight line. She looked like a defiant child refusing to eat. She suddenly yelled, “They make me take him, okay?”
With that, she walked out of the living room, down a short hall to her bedroom, and slammed the door behind her.