Hipster Death Rattle Read online

  He put another drive in. There were only a few files, but he immediately noticed a PDF marked “Rosa.” He clicked it open. It was a PDF of a news clipping from the Sentinel. He recognized Luis De Moscoso right away. Mr. Bathes-with-Cologne. Tony could almost smell him through the screen. It looked like the same shiny suit he wore at the reading and at the community board meeting. What the hell did Magaly see in a guy like that?

  The article read:

  Vigil against Displacement and Harassment

  By Patrick Stoller—Family members, community leaders, and local residents gathered to remember Rosa Irizzary, who disappeared earlier this year.

  Irizzary should have been blowing out her birthday candles to celebrate her 68th birthday. Instead, family and friends spent hours, days, and then months looking for any sign of her whereabouts.

  El Flamboyan Community Human Rights Organization, the Displacement Advocacy Group, and the Southside Development Corporation organized a vigil to mark the disappearance and bring attention to the issue of displacement in the neighborhood. More than 40 people came out in the rain to stand in front of Irizzary’s former dwelling, which has since been rented.

  Irizzary went missing in May. Police and family say they have no idea what could have happened to her.

  At 10:52 a.m. on May 15, her sister, Iris Campos, received a text from Irizzary on her cell phone, telling her she was on her way to Campos’s house. That was the last time anyone has heard from her.

  Irizzary disappeared in the midst of a two-year battle with her landlord to return to her apartment, which had been damaged by fire.

  “She had every right to stay in her apartment, but her landlord wanted her out so he could rent the apartment for more money,” said Luis De Moscoso, director of El Flamboyan.

  According to De Moscoso, Irizzary was frequently harassed. “She came to us many times, saying she was scared of her landlord and what he would do to her,” he said.

  No charges have been filed against her landlord, Elias J. Litvinchouk. Local police said there is no evidence of foul play, and a reasonable explanation for her disappearance has not been found. But while there is no evidence a crime was committed, Lt. Kevin Batista said all possibilities are being investigated.

  While the family and the community prays for Irizarry’s eventual return, Campos said she is certain something “bad” happened to her sister. Campos said all her sister wanted was to live in her own apartment, which she occupied for more than 40 years.

  In a press release, Representative Camila Santiago stated, “Rosa Irizzary’s disappearance cannot be forgotten, and we will continue to seek justice for her and for all of our residents who are threatened by harassment and displacement.”

  As Tony finished, he thought again that the name “Elias Litvinchouk” was familiar. He’d had a professor at Brooklyn College with that same name. A good professor, a bit quirky. Could it be the same guy? How many Elias Litvinchouks could there be?

  A picture with the article was captioned: “Friends, family, and neighbors of Rosa Irizarry hold a vigil for their friend. Pictured: Luis De Moscoso, director of El Flamboyan, Iris Campos, Magaly Fernandez, Denise Vazquez, Vivian Romero, Angie Roman, Martha Rodriguez, and Miguel Diaz. Picture by Patrick Stoller.”

  Each person in the photo was holding up the same picture of Irizarry. She was gray-haired, nut brown, and had small, watery eyes. It was a kind but stern face, just like a thousand other Puerto Rican mothers’ faces he’d seen.

  “Que?” his mother said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m reading about Rosa Irizarry?” He pulled himself and brought the laptop closer to her.

  “Aha,” his mother said. “It’s about time.”

  “It’s all still a mystery. She disappeared. She left home and then…well, they never found her.”

  “That’s too bad. I told you. The same thing could happen to me. But I don’t worry about me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know you find me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Some women can run in heels. Magaly Fernandez knew was not one of them. But she was walking as fast as she could because she didn’t want to be late, and it hurt—her feet, her calves were pulsing. She had always had an issue with punctuality, something that used to aggravate Chino all the time, and now that she was going to meet him, she didn’t want to hear him say, like he used to before, so many times, “Habitual lateness is an unconscious expression of anger and resentment.”

  Tony had surprised her with a text the night before, asking for a contact number for Rosa Irizzary’s sister, Iris Campos. She almost dropped her phone. She happily texted back, told him not to worry, that she would set up an interview for the next day, and that she’d meet him outside Iris’s building. Ten minutes ago.

  “Why do u have to be there?” Tony had texted.

  She had texted back: “Did yr Spanish get better than yr Latin? Iris is Spanish dominant + doesnt know u.”

  “Good point.”

  So, she had to be ready on time. Then Luis, her boss—and, oh god, her lover (How did that happen? Well, she knew how it happened, she just didn’t want to think about it) called and he was having another panic attack and needed her to calm him down. He’d started having these a few months ago, and now he was calling more often, to vent, to flirt, and—inevitably—to ask her if he could come over. Most times she would balk, come up with some excuse to keep him at bay as long as her willpower held up. But tonight she actually had somewhere to be. Still, she couldn’t get him to hang up until she’d promised to text him when she was on her way back home.

  She turned the corner and stopped for a second to check her face and hair. The face was fine, but the humidity was murdering her hair. It was blossoming like a bag of microwaved popcorn on top of her head. So be it. Tony just better not make any wisecracks.

  Iris Campos lived in one of the older buildings in the Southside. Its entrance had once been classy—marble floors and lintel, cherubs carved above the doorway. But the doors had been covered over with metal bars and grates that were thick with black oil paint.

  Tony was waiting inside the front door of the building.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” Magaly said. “My life is so crazy now. I can’t begin to tell you.”

  “No worries. The front door lock is broken, so I got in here to stay cooler.”

  He looked grumpy. But he always looked grumpy. But something was different—the shirt. He was wearing a collared shirt! Some things do change. She decided not to tease him about it.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s upstairs.”

  Inside of the building, the floors and hallways were chipped, gray marble, and there was a strong, familiar smell of frying oil, garlic, sofrito.

  The bell on the metal door didn’t work, so they knocked loudly.

  Iris Campos cracked the heavy door open and peeked her head out. More of that sofrito smell spilled out into the hallway. She was a tiny woman with black hair heavily streaked with white and huge square glasses that sat like picture frames on her small face. She wore a bata—a housedress—decorated with tiny blue flowers, knee-high tube socks, and pink slippers with rabbit ears and whiskers on the front end. She gestured them inside. “Entre. Entre.”

  Magaly bent down to hug her. She turned and introduced Tony. Iris gave him a hug, too, and he looked as uncomfortable as Magaly expected him to. They all squeezed into the small kitchen. With three of them, there was barely room for the table and a cabinet with what looked like one of the first refrigerators ever made and a microwave that looked big enough to nuke a steer, head and all.

  Magaly explained again to Iris why they were there. In his very halting Spanish, Tony said he was happy to meet Iris, that he just wanted to ask a few questions.

  Iris led them into the living room dominated by an entertainment center with a big box TV squeezed into its center. On the set was a Spanish-language novela, the volume very low. Framed pictures of family covered the shelv
es on either side of the TV. Rosa Irizarry was in many of the pictures, smiling broadly enough to make her eyes squint. The top of the entertainment center itself swarmed with ceramic figurines of dogs, elephants, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as well as clowns in a million states of melancholy.

  “Siéntese,” Iris said, and as they sat down on the plastic-covered couch, it made a crunchy sound.

  Iris offered them coffee and food and then coffee again, but they both refused.

  Magaly saw through the open door of a bedroom a man she recognized as Danny, Iris’s son. The man turned to look at Magaly, giving one of those lifeless stares you get from ex-cons, killers, and video gamers.

  Tony took out his digital recorder and showed it to Iris, saying, “Do you mind?”

  Magaly touched him on the knee and then she explained to Iris that the tiny black box was like a tape recorder—un grabador. Tony asked her to ask the woman’s permission to record her.

  Iris picked up the recorder and said it was “maravilloso”—marvelous. Slowly, she said, “I will try to speak from my heart.”

  Tony asked a question in Spanish, but Iris just smiled at him and then looked at Magaly. She asked the question again, in Spanish—Tony wanted to know about her sister, about her life.

  Iris nodded her head and began speaking in Spanish. Magaly translated back and forth.

  <“Our family comes from Mayagüez, where I was born. My father used to own a farm, but the government took it away from him. So our parents moved to New York to get work. Mami raised the kids and Papi worked in the Schaefer Factory over here before they closed it. We moved here in 1951 to be close to his work. The Italians and the Irish didn’t like the Puerto Ricans. They did not want us here, and Papi used to get into fights all the time.

  “We had three brothers, but one died when he was a baby, the other went to Vietnam and never came back. God have him in heaven. And the last one moved away in 1972 and died in California. We all went to school over here in St. Peter and Paul on South 2nd.

  “Rosa was my little sister. She was born here, and she was a sweet girl, always smiling, always nice. But she sometimes had a temper, oh Christ in heaven. She used to throw things if she got angry at you. She almost took my eye out once when we were kids with a toothbrush.

  “So little Rosa met Jose when she was sixteen, and he had just come out of the army, very handsome in his uniform. They got married and moved to the Southside. They had a little boy, Joselito.

  “When the factories closed, Jose could not find work, but Rosa worked as a teacher’s aide. But then she got laid off. That was 1973. That was when the neighborhood turned bad. There were no jobs. We all had to go on the welfare. Jose hated the welfare, but we had no choice.

  “After, Joselito, he was working on Wall Street. He made good money. He died in 9/11. God have him in heaven. They never found his body.

  “After that, Jose, he died of cancer. Rosa was left very sad. She didn’t care about anything. She was left all alone in that apartment. I told her to come live with me, but she said that was her home.

  “It used to be a very nice building. Always clean. But then they stopped taking care. They stopped fixing things, and then one day she got the roaches and then she got the mice. Not Rosa! You could eat off her floors.

  “And then we were going to celebrate her birthday. She was so happy. She liked people. She liked parties. We got the cake, we had the music, I made yuca salad, which is her favorite, and everybody was coming.

  “Something happened her, something bad, I know it. I don’t want to think what happened, but I know it. I miss her so much, every day. God bless her wherever she is.”>

  When she finished, the only sound was the TV set and the video game being played in the next room.

  Iris turned toward her son’s room, and then she told them they should talk to him, that he used to go over to check on Rosa all the time. Magaly had met him once or twice before, and she knew he was intense.

  Iris called her son in, as if he hadn’t been listening the whole time, and he came in, still staring dead-eyed at Magaly.

  He was heavyset, with muscular arms. His shiny hair was cut in severe bangs and he had a razor-thin goatee. On his neck were two tattoos—“Faithfulness to a cause” across his Adam’s apple and, on his jugular vein, “God Understand Me.”

  The man shook Magaly’s hand—his grip was surprisingly limp and disturbingly moist.

  “Hola,” Tony said, and they shook hands. “I’m Tony Moran. Trabajo for el Williamsburg Sentinel newspaper.”

  Danny smiled with sharp yellow teeth. “What you want?”

  Tony said, “Ah. Danny, I wanted—”

  “Call me D-Tox.”

  “D-Tox? Really?” Tony said. Magaly bumped him with her knee and gave him a sharp look.

  “Yeah. I came up with that.”

  “Okay, D-Tox, I just wanted to get some quotes about how you all are doing now?”

  “My aunt is dead. How am I supposed to be doing?”

  “Well, she’s missing, as far as we know. I just wanted to check in, see if you’ve heard anything new or felt there was something maybe that wasn’t covered before.”

  “Look at this,” he said, pointing to his arm. Above a very large tattoo of Al Pacino as Scarface was a tattoo of a cross-eyed blonde angel and above that the words “Rosa. Dios le protégé.”

  Iris, who had gone to the kitchen, came in and put cups of coffee in front of Tony and Magaly.

  “Gracias,” Tony said to her, and then to Danny, “But I guess you think she was killed for sure?”

  “Yeah, and I know who did it, too. That landlord—he had it in for her. He was trying to get her out of there for years and years. You gotta go after him, ask him some questions. Bring some justice for my aunt.”

  “What do think the landlord did, specifically? The rats and roaches would be hard to prove. What about this fire?”

  “That was done on purpose! She didn’t see how the fire started, but the super, he showed up right away to stop it from getting out of hand. Right away—you see what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They didn’t want to burn down the building, you feel me. That’s why he showed up right away.”

  “So you definitely think the super had something to do with it?”

  “Had to! Had to! How else would they get in and out of there. You reporters need to do something good for once. You don’t do shit against the government. Try to do a little something good for my family.”

  “Well, justice—you know what justice is?” Tony said, and something in his voice made Magaly wince inside. Please don’t make it a long, condescending lecture, she silently told him. She looked at his face. Here it comes.

  “Justice,” Tony said, “is what’s fair and morally right. It’s also when everyone gets their due under the law. Now, I’m not a cop, I’m not a detective. I’m a reporter. Part-time. And I barely get paid, and…But that’s beside the point and not what you want to hear. What you want to hear is that we can find your aunt safe and sound tomorrow, or if she was kidnapped or killed, find the person or persons responsible. Any of that—that ‘justice’—is very unlikely, an impossible long shot. I mean, let’s be honest here, I doubt we’ll turn up anything.”

  There was a silence, and Magaly realized she was grinding her own teeth. But to her surprise, D-Tox was not murdering Tony.

  “If you don’t mind me saying,” D-Tox said, “you’re kind of an asshole. But that makes me like you more.” He took Tony’s hand in what looked like a crushing embrace and shook it fiercely. “You’ll find my aunt,” he said, then he turned to his mother. “Mami, da mi comida ahora, por favor.”

  Iris asked him something in Spanish, and D-Tox said, “No, no, ellos tienen que ir ahora.”

  Time for dinner and they weren’t being invited, Magaly thought. Rude of D-Tox, but she had no desire to stay and watch him try to eat while staring at her.

  Tony picked up his recorder, and they both stood.<
br />
  Magaly thanked them again, in Spanish.

  Iris followed them to the door. In Spanish, she said, <“God bless you. Please find my sister.”>

  Magaly hugged her. Then the woman turned to Tony and hugged him.

  “We’ll do our best,” Tony said.

  Magaly looked at him. Maybe he had changed.

  They walked downstairs and stood in the coolness of the vestibule, avoiding the heat of the night until the last possible minute.

  “Wow, that guy creeped me out,” Tony said.

  “You?” Magaly said.

  “How much did it hurt to get that tattoo across his neck?”

  “Nice speech about justice at the end there, Chino. Couldn’t help yourself.”

  “I was being honest.”

  “Oy. God help us.”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said. “Which makes the Lord pretty superfluous. Speaking of which, I need to get a hold of the landlord from the building, Litvinchouk. Do you people at El Flamboyan have his contact information?”

  “You bet we do. We have every landlord in our database.”

  “You know, you’re proving to be very helpful.”

  “What was that? Was that Chino Moran admitting that people—people of the human race, no less!—can help him with something?”

  “See, that’s not helpful.”

  Magaly smacked his arm but then let her hand linger on him. “Funny. So, why do you want to talk to that man?”

  “Well, it’s only fair to let him tell his side of the story. I mean, he’s not going to confess to harassing Rosa or say, ‘Oh yeah, I have her right here in my cellar.’”

  “That’s not funny.”