part0010

We arrived at the Mescal at just after one PM. It was in an area of the Bronx that was made up of an ugly mix of warehouses and the kind of housing you’d only live in if you had no choice. It was on the corner, where East 135th becomes that other Park Avenue. It was surrounded by industrial lots and sported a big, burgundy awning with the name of the club scrawled in gold.

The door was open and inside it was dim and smelt of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke. Juanes was playing on the sound system and there was a big guy with tattoos behind the bar, reading the Fortean Times . He looked up as we came in and the dead glaze in his eyes said he’d made us as cops. So I decided not to waste time and showed him my badge.

“Detective Stone, NYPD. This is Detective Dehan. Nelson Vargas here?”

He pulled the corners of his mouth down and shrugged, then turned back to his magazine. I leaned my elbows on the bar. “You ever heard of Claire Carter?”

He made the same face at his magazine and shook his head. I snorted a chuckle.

“Your pal Vargas knew her.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t look at me. He licked a finger and turned the page. “You talkin’ a lot of shit and I don’t know nothin’, cop. You wastin’ your time, and mine.”

Dehan reached out, took a fistful of the magazine, screwed it up and threw it on the floor.

“The man is talking to you, punk.” She turned to me and frowned. “That smell like burned cabbage to you, Stone? What does that remind me of?”

I gave the big tattooed guy a sweet smile. “She gets like that sometimes. I tell you, it scares me. I never know what she’s going to do next. So about Nelson, he needs to know that somebody is trying to frame him for murder, and I need to know who. I figure he does too. So, you know, he needs to talk to us as much as we need to talk to him. So where is he?”

He jerked his chin at me. “Go fuck yourself.” He turned to Dehan. “You too, puta! ”

She nodded at me. “Definitely cabbage… No! You know what that smell is, Stone?”

“It’s definitely familiar, but I can’t place it offhand.”

“That, Stone, is the smell of marijuana. I swear it.”

“Oh, man! I do believe you’re right.”

The tattooed gorilla threw up his hands. “Come on, man! There ain’t no weed here!”

I made a fair imitation of his expression earlier, pulled the corners of my mouth down and shrugged.

“I sure hope you’re right, because that carries time, man, especially if you have priors. Have you got priors?” I turned to Dehan. “Have we got probable cause? Do you think we should search him?”

“Tell you what, Stone, before you do...,” she labored the heavy innuendo, “I’m going to go to the car and check in the manual if we have probable cause . OK?”

“Come on! You can’t do this!”

“Do what? What are you accusing us of? What’s your name?”

He spread his hands wide and hunched his shoulders. “Come on, man! I ain’t done nothin’...”

“What’s your name?”

“Jose, man. Jose. My name’s Jose. I ain’t got no weed back here.”

I turned to Dehan. “You know what I have heard, Detective? That very often, in establishments of this sort, where there is marijuana, there is very often cocaine too. So, if you have smelled cannabis, it is entirely possible that we will find cocaine as well. So just as soon as you get back from checking the manual, which we keep in the trunk, I think we should search this gentleman to see if he is in possession of marijuana or coke. Remind me, Detective Dehan, what is the penalty these days for possession of half an ounce of cocaine?”

“With priors?” She smiled at Jose. “Well, with violent priors, Detective Stone, a second-time offender can do anything up to twelve years inside. You think this punk might be a violent offender with priors?”

He closed his eyes and raised both hands, like I was training a gun on him.

“OK, take it easy. I’ll go see if he’s in.”

“Well I sure hope he is, Jose. ’Cause I would hate to have to call for backup and wind up raiding the place, all on your account. I think that would make your friends and employers very unhappy, don’t you?” I turned to Dehan and gave a laugh. “I mean, who knows how much stuff we’ll find here!”

“You can’t do that, man. We have friends. We got protection.”

Dehan leaned on the bar and narrowed her eyes at him. “Really. Well, if you don’t go talk to Nelson right now, you’re going to need all the damned protection you can get, because you’ll not only have us on your ass, you’ll have the Cabras on your ass too. Now move, punk!”

He walked away, muttering obscenities in Spanish, and I watched him push through a door at the back of the club that had a plaque reading “Private” on it. I followed and Dehan came close behind me.

Through the door there was a short passage with a locked door to either side. I thought Vice might be interested to know what was behind those locked doors, but today would not be the day they found out. Instead I moved on to the door at the end of the passage that had a plaque that read “Office” on it. I rapped on the plaque and pushed the door open.

It was like a scene from a dime thriller from the fifties, only the clothes were all wrong:

There was a big, oak desk with a guy behind it smoking a cigar. It smelt like a good Havana. He was staring at me with eyes that were so mad they were crazy. Instead of a double-breasted Italian suit, though, he was wearing a black T-shirt with a death’s head on it, and over that a denim jacket with the sleeves torn off.

Leaning on the desk, also staring at me, was Jose. His expression was a weird mix of outrage, terror and astonishment.

Then there were what Spillane would have called the goons, two of them sitting in easy chairs at a small coffee table that had probably seen more coke than it ever had coffee. They were big, seasoned, stupid and dressed like their boss, only their bare arms and their faces covered in intricate, detailed tattoos. The one with his back to me, craning his head around to look, had a mohican, while the other had a long ponytail. They both got to their feet.

I smiled at the guy behind the desk.

“Hello, you must be Mr. Vargas. I am Detective John Stone, of the NYPD, and this is Detective Carmen Dehan.” I reached in my jacket and pulled out my badge. “We have four units discretely parked on Canal Street and East 138th . All I want is to talk to you.” I pointed at the guy I guessed was Vargas. “So this need not get ugly.”

It was like he didn’t speak English. He turned to the two goons, his lip curled with contempt, and he snarled, “Echenlos. Maten los si hace falta .”

Dehan is fast. She trains in Krav Maga and Jeet Kune Do and takes it pretty seriously. Vargas was halfway through his instructions to his men when she stepped forward and smashed the heel of her boot into the back of the mohican’s head. By the time he slumped forward across the coffee table she had already vaulted over the back of his chair and, as the ponytail scrambled to his feet, landed a sweet right straight to the tip of his chin. He went down like a sack of wet sand as I cocked my Sig Sauer P226 and had it trained on Vargas’s cigar. I spoke quietly.

“You want me to light that for you, Mr. Vargas?”

He slowly raised his hands. Dehan pulled her piece and shoved it in Jose’s face. “Go tend bar, Jose.” She grinned malevolently. “And if I were you, I’d skip town. I don’t think this is going to be a very healthy environment for you from now on.”

I put my Sig away, but Dehan kept hers handy and we both sat at the desk as Jose left on hasty feet and closed the door behind him. I was pretty sure he’d be heading for California and a new identity.

Vargas said: “What do you want?”

“Maria Ortiz ring any bells with you?”

He shrugged and made an ugly face. “Maria, how many fockin’ Marias in the world?” He jerked his head at Dehan. “Your fockin’ name is probably Maria.”

I growled, “Watch your tongue, Vargas. You need to be making friends right about now, not enemies. First of May, 2014, Maria Ortiz called the cops to complain that you had threatened her with rape and murder. Five days later she was murdered.”

He looked up at the ceiling and laughed a laugh that said he was bored but amused by our stupidity.

“This again? Yeah, I remember now. Fat bitch.” He leered at Dehan. “You know? Sometimes I like a bit of carne .” He glanced at me to see how I was taking it. “A bit of meat you can get a hold of. I remember she was sexy. She made me crazy always fockin’ laughin’, always so fockin’ happy. That made me wanna make her scream.” He laughed. “Bot in a nice way. You ever done that, Detective Maria? Scream with pleasure? I joss wanted to give her a nice time, a nice party. She was a fockin’ whore and I told her, ‘Come and have a little party with me and some nice friends! We gonna have some fun!’ And the fockin’ bitch told me no. She’s a fockin’ whore and she tells Nelson Vargas no. It made me so mad. I told her, party or no party I am gonna fockin’ own you, and then I’m gonna gut you like a fockin’ fish and cut your fockin’ arms and legs off.”

He grinned at me. “Things you say when you’re mad, right? I didn’t mean it. I told your boy Alvarez the same thing. People say things when they’re mad. Besides, I was with like twenty guys when she was killed. Right here.

“Say, what happened to Alvarez? He was a good boy. I knew him when he was a kid. He made good, right? Up from the streets, became a detective. I haven’t seen him around. He skip town?”

I ignored his questions. “So you had an airtight alibi for the time of the killing. The problem with false alibis, Vargas, is that sometimes they turn around and bite you in the ass.”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

Dehan cut in: “So how about Claire Carter?”

“You heard me. You threatened her, too. You want to tell us about that?”

He shrugged again and spread his hands, appealing to me as a guy. “You know how it is, dude. Women. It’s like streets. You never know them by their names. You know them by the bars, things like that. You tell me, the bitch with the...”

I didn’t want to hear anymore so I cut him short. “She was white, forty-three years old, plump, the way you like them. Lived on Watson Avenue, opposite the church. She had a little club going and you wanted in on the action. She told you no. So you threatened to kill her.”

He observed me with hooded eyes for a long moment. Finally he said, “She was killed? I didn’t know that. That’s what bitches get, see...,” he turned his eyes on Dehan, “...when they give the come-on to a man and then tell him no. She was always laughin’, jokin’, kind of cute and fun, and then when you get hot and wanna make your move, she tells you you can’t. That kind of bitch gonna get hurt. That's the way it is.”

Dehan didn’t blink. She said, “Jose work here every night?”

He frowned. “Yeah. Why?”

“Was he here all this week?”

“Yeah? You think Jose killed this bitch? He didn’t. He was here, man. He didn’t even know her.”

“Where were you the night before last?”

“Right here, all night, with my boys.”

She smiled. “Yeah? Was Jose one of those boys?”

He froze. I chuckled and stood. “Don’t get up, Vargas. We’ll see ourselves out. Thanks for talking to us.”

His goons were starting to stir and groan where they lay. Dehan was still smiling as she stepped past them. She winked at Vargas where he sat staring at us with rage in his eyes. “Good security you have here. Everything’s real tight.”

I was surprised to see Jose still in the bar. He was standing by the door looking sick. I put my hand on his shoulder and shoved him gently outside toward the Jag.

“Get in. We’re going to take a ride.”

Dehan got in the back and Jose climbed in the passenger seat up front. I gunned the engine and we took off toward the Grand Concourse to join the expressway. As I turned from Park Avenue onto 138th I said, “You’re in some trouble, Jose. You need some powerful friends right now. Vargas is one crazy son of a bitch, and he blames you for letting us in.”

Dehan spoke up from the back. “You don’t realize right now just how serious that is. He is going down for the murder of Maria Ortiz and Claire Carter. And as far as he’s concerned, it’s your fault that we nailed him. You know from experience, Jose, how that ends. You’ll be lucky if he only kills you.”

He swallowed and I could see his hands shaking in his lap. He’d seen what Vargas did to people who let him down. It was slow, painful and ugly. I gave the screw another turn.

“You might have saved your skin. I doubt it, but you just might have, if you hadn’t got in the car with us and driven away. Now you have no hope.”

Dehan spoke from the back again. “Now you have to make some choices. You can make smart choices, or you can make some really bad choices. You can talk to us and the Feds, in which case we will do everything we can to persuade the DA to give you immunity, or you can go back to Vargas and plead for your life.”

I took over before he could answer.

“Both outcomes are foregone conclusions. If you can give the DA Vargas and his network, it’s a cinch she’ll give you immunity in exchange. If you go back to Vargas and plead for your life, it’s a slam dunk. He’ll tie you to a chair and take his sweet time killing you.”

We were on the expressway, headed for the river and Bruckner Boulevard. He was staring out of the windows like a cat on its way to the vet to have its balls removed.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the 43rd Precinct. I’m going to put you in protective custody while you think things over. I’m going to tell Vargas where you are, to help focus your mind. And then, when you’ve thought things through, you and Detective Dehan and I are going to have a conversation. After that, who knows? If you’re lucky I’ll hand you over to the Feds and they’ll give you a new life.”