Hipster Death Rattle Page 17

  The sky cracked again, and the rain began to pick up.

  The man on the bicycle made his way around the lifters and began to speed off.

  Tony noticed something then. Something that he had been grimly looking for was not there. Where the man on the bicycle had hit at the lifters—there was no blood.

  A papier-mâché Virgin Mary fell to the street in front of Tony. A trombone player slipped and fell on his back. The capo kept yelling, and the lifters strained. But the Giglio held.

  Meanwhile, the man on the bicycle had kept going, slicing through the crowd.

  The guy with the machete kept going. But some teenager stepped forward and, with a large inflated bat, clotheslined the biker off of his bike.

  A crowd quickly surrounded him.

  Tony grabbed Gabby and led her to a street light. He pulled her up to stand on its base, which was about a foot and a half above the concrete.

  “Take pictures.”

  “I don’t know if I’m tall enough.”

  “Just raise the camera in the air and start clicking.”

  She took picture after picture. “Oh my god,” she said. “They’re going to kill him.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “They’re kicking the shit out of him. Now the cops are coming.”

  “Get down. Let me see.”

  The man who had had the machete curled up in a ball. He bled from his mouth and knees.

  “That’s a souvenir,” some man was yelling. “That’s a souvenir.”

  A cop picked the machete up and sliced it across his own arm. Then he held it up to the crowd. “It’s wood,” he said. “It’s a fucking souvenir.”

  The man who had had the toy machete looked old. He had a shaved head, a grubby, toothless face. He wore work pants, unlaced work boots, and a wifebeater decorated with the Puerto Rican flag.

  “Shit,” Tony thought.

  When they brought the man to his feet, he wobbled. Tony could see from his eyes he was lit up bigger than Christmas.

  Tony jumped off the street post. The rain had begun to drive down.

  “Listen,” he said to Gabby. “If you can wait around, get more pictures. Meanwhile, I want to talk to the cops.”

  She was about to ask him a question when his phone rang.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  It was Magaly. “Chino. I’m at McCarren Pool. You have to get here. There’s a riot going on.”

  He was going to say, “A riot is exactly why I don’t have to get to McCarren Pool.” But she’d hung up, and he found himself running.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The sky flickered and flashed, and thunder cracked like a bomb, setting off car alarms. Tony ran to McCarren Pool. Police cars, sirens blaring, passed him, heading in the same direction.

  The rain had picked up again and came down in curtain after curtain. Tony ran through McCarren Park, past the pétanque court (now better suited for mud wrestling). Swimmers in swimsuits ran down past him, using beach towels as umbrellas. There was a terror in their eyes.

  On Bedford Avenue, police cars were parked in front of the pool entrance. More swimmers were running, and there was a mass of people on the steps, gathered around something.

  He didn’t see Magaly, so against his better instincts, he ran toward the mass of people on the steps. It was where she would be—where the trouble was.

  He pushed into the mass until he got to a ring of police. In the middle of them was one man, wearing only baggy swimming trunks and keeping them at bay by swinging a large wet towel.

  “Come at me, motherfuckers!” the man said, whipping the soaked towel back and forth. “Come on!”

  The man looked like and sounded like—yes, it was the son of Iris Campos. Danny. D-Tox.

  He was doing a good job at keeping the police back with just a towel. But Tony knew it was only a matter of time before they got him. He supposed tasers were not a good idea in the rain, and in such a close circle. Then one cop tried to grab the whirling towel. D-Tox was strong enough to pull it out of the cop’s grip. But this sent him off balance on the wet stairs, and he fell back onto the steps. The cops were on him in an instant.

  The crowd yelled: “Stop them!” “Oh my god!” and “Get him! Stomp him!”

  Tony pulled out his Williamsburg Sentinel ID card and thought, I can’t believe I’m doing this. He squeezed through the phalanx of cops—then, as loud as he could, he yelled, “Hold up, hold up, hold up! I’m a reporter. Keep this up, and I’ll put you bastards on the news.”

  In his other hand, he held his iPhone, with the video app turned on to record. It was pointed at the cops. His heart was pounding, he could barely breathe. This could go very badly. It wouldn’t be unheard of for them to kick him, too, or grab the iPhone. But he gambled on the fact that there were too many people, and other phones out, in the crowd.

  One cop heard him and turned. That cop tapped another, and soon they were all looking at Tony. A giant cop took a step closer. Tony backed up, but kept the ID and camera in the air. He wasn’t scaring them in the least. But his shouting had broken whatever atavistic spell they had been under.

  Two cops took hold of D-Tox, who was conscious but bloody. They cuffed him, picked him up, and led him away. As he went, D-Tox craned his neck and looked at Tony.

  “Danny!” Tony called. “D-Tox! Are you all right?”

  Two more of the officers leading him blocked Tony’s view. They moved toward him as he moved back. They said, “Get back,” about seventy-five times.

  They pulled D-Tox in the back seat of a cruiser.

  As the crowd parted, he saw Magaly. She and Luis De Moscoso had been on the other side of the crowd. Luis De Moscoso held his jacket over her head to keep her from getting wet.

  Tony went up to them. “What happened?”

  “Oh my god, Tony. It was crazy. People were fighting, shoving, yelling. And it looks like Danny might have started it all. They say he was punching some guy and there was blood everywhere. Half the crowd was cheering him on. The other half wanted to lynch him.”

  De Moscoso said, “You can’t blame him. These people think they can take over the neighborhood and change it. They can’t be allowed to do that.”

  Tony said, “Well, you can’t punch the neighborhood back to the old days.”

  “Listen,” Magaly said. “I’m going to help him get a lawyer. You need to write about this for the paper—a big paper.”

  “She’s right. They’re going to crucify him,” De Moscoso said. “You have to bring attention to this situation.”

  “Did you get it on video?” Magaly said.

  Tony checked his phone. It showed a jumpy scene of Tony’s frightened face. He’d forgotten to switch the camera’s view.

  “Can I see it?” she said.

  “Nah, it’s way too blurry, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Ai, Chino. At least you tried.” Her face softened. “That was very brave. You could have got your ass kicked, too.”

  “It’s more likely I’ll get pneumonia standing in this rain.”

  She laughed a quick laugh. “You’re right. We better go,” she said. “I’ll see you. Soon.”

  She and De Moscoso left, running on Bedford toward the BQE underpass.

  Tony went in the opposite direction. He cradled his messenger bag, hoping not everything in it was as drenched as he was. He walked home as quickly as he could, hugging the walls of buildings, praying for awnings and balconies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Magaly couldn’t hide the fact that she felt like a disappointment, to her parents, to herself, to everyone.

  She had dreamed for years of being a lawyer. But law school had taken the bloom off that dream, and graduating law school was the happiest day of Magaly’s parents’ lives. When she got a job within a year, they couldn’t have been more proud. So she didn’t feel like telling them that she was miserable, that every minute of every fourteen-plus-hour day of billable hours (broken into tenths) was killing he
r, that she didn’t feel like she was helping anyone (justice being not only blind but cruelly so), and that more than the specters of her parents’ disappointment and her own guilt, she feared the humongous debt she had accrued (despite some financial aid), a debt she knew would linger on her shoulders for the rest of her life. She had made a mistake. She floundered at other jobs for a while, even one at a Starbucks, until the position of general manager at El Flamboyan Community Center opened up.

  She thought she was good at her job. They held GED classes, gave tutoring, had food drives, blood drives, advocated for the poor and the homeless. Though she had to admit it often felt like a losing battle. She had begun to feel their best bet was to reach out to the people who were coming in. Unlike her boss, she thought they should work with the newcomers, not against them. But they didn’t make it easy.

  The Keap Street gallery, for example, had announced a big exhibition called “The Soul of Williamsburg.” But not one of the twenty-four artists they would be featuring was a Latino or Latina, and not one of them had been born and raised in the neighborhood. “That probably would have been a good idea,” the gallery owner had said. “We’ll definitely keep that in mind for next time.” Magaly almost screamed when she heard this.

  Still, when someone in the community center needed legal help, as often happened, she stepped up, giving advice, helping to fill out forms. She never went as far as a trial—the very idea of it made her nauseous—but to some extent it made her feel her law degree wasn’t a complete waste.

  Danny Campos would end up with a court-appointed criminal lawyer, but his mother Iris called that night saying he wanted Magaly to come by in the morning. And to bring Tony.

  So she dressed up in her one-and-only pants suit and got to the jail early and found herself waiting for Tony. She talked to Danny about the charges and explained his options. But he didn’t seem to worry about his troubles. He only seemed concerned with talking to Tony.

  When he showed, the guard let him into the interrogation room. He wore cargo pants that needed a wash, but at least he had a collared shirt on.

  “You made it,” Danny said. He reached over to shake Tony’s hand, but stopped when he realized he was handcuffed. Danny tried to laugh it off. He held up his hands. “See how it is.”

  Tony smirked and sat down. Magaly could tell he was nervous.

  “Listen,” Danny said, “I asked Magaly to ask you to come because I wanted to thank you. I really appreciate what you did for me out there. Those cops coulda beat me to death, and I’d end up on YouTube for sorry-ass nerds to look at.”

  “I didn’t do anything, really,” Tony said.

  “This guy. Look at this guy,” he said to Magaly. Then to Tony: “You saved my life, bro. You saved my life. God bless you, bro.” He covered both Tony’s hands with his, despite the cuffs. She could see Tony was shocked by the contact.

  “You did good, Tony,” she said. “You did.”

  “Well, okay,” Tony said. “You’re welcome.”

  “Do you got any updates about my aunt? Did you find out what happened to her?”

  “I’ve been going over a lot of old ground, just trying to see if I can uncover anything new. But let me ask you something: Did you happen to know the super of her building?”

  “You mean Jorge? What about him? You think he did something to my aunt?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to ask him some questions.”

  “Ahh, I would say hi to him and shit. But I never talked to him talked to him, you know. I knew he was going with one of the ladies in the building.”

  Magaly hadn’t heard this before. “Who was this?”

  “Yeah, this lady, Angela. She lived in the apartment below my aunt’s. They were friends. They used to go shopping together.”

  “Does this Angela still live there,” Tony said. “Do you know?”

  “Nah, I think she moved back to PR or to Florida, one of those. PR, I think. Last year. A little while after my aunt went missing.”

  “You don’t happen to know her last name?”

  “Let me think. Yeah. Her last name is Roman. I know ’cause I dated her daughter Vivian for a little while.”

  “You don’t happen to know where the daughter is?”

  “Nah, she ain’t talking to me anymore. I love ’em and leave ’em and then I forget ’em, know what I mean?”

  The proverbial Latin Lover, Magaly thought. Did all men, not just Latinos, think they were that way, or did they just wish they were?

  Tony said, “Did you hear about your aunt’s having any extra money around the time of her disappearance?”

  “You mean when she hit the number?”

  “So she did?”

  “Yeah. She hit for, like, ten thousand.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before? This could be important.”

  “I didn’t want you thinking my aunt was a criminal, a gambler, shit like that. People judge, you know?”

  “Everybody plays the numbers, Danny,” Magaly said. “It’s the same as Lotto.”

  “Without the taxes,” Tony said. “Do you have any idea what happened to that money? Do you think it might have anything to do with her disappearance?”

  “Wait up. You think someone robbed her for the money?”

  “That’s where I was going, yeah.”

  “Nah, nah, nah. She hit the number a while before she disappeared. Like a month. I think she spent most of it.”

  This surprised Magaly. “Spent it? On what?”

  “I don’t know. I know she didn’t have none before she disappeared.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I asked her for some, and she said she didn’t have any.”

  They were wrapping up. Magaly said she would find out who Danny’s court-appointed was and see if he or she was any good.

  “Before you go, there’s one more thing,” Danny said. “Come close.” Magaly and Tony leaned closer, and Danny whispered, “I was thinking of you when I heard these gang guys talking in here. I thought maybe you could do a big story. I mean, after my aunt’s.”

  Magaly looked over at Tony and he seemed more annoyed than curious.

  “What big story?” Tony said.

  “You know the SQs, right?”

  “The what?”

  “The Southside Quistadoreys. The gang. There’re like six or seven in the lockup with me last night, and they was talkin’ about the slashin’. You know, first he be mowing down white people like they was sugar cane. More power to him. But now he’s doing everybody. Anyway, they were saying they know who this guy is, the real guy, and they’re going to get him because of all the hell he’s bringing down on them, you know. The police have been on their shit like crazy, which is why so many of them were in the lockup last night.”

  Magaly saw Tony’s eyes pop open. Now he was excited.

  “So, who is he?” he said.

  D-Tox looked at the door and then back at them. “It’s not like they have his home address and social security, Papi. Jesus! But they know his bike. It’s a funky-looking bike. Red, they said, but it looks like it was put together with duct tape.”

  “Well,” Tony said, “that’s something, I guess. Thanks, D-Tox.”

  They all shook hands, and Danny was escorted out. As they were leaving, Magaly picked up Tony’s messenger bag to hand to him.

  “Damn,” she said. “What do you have in here, encyclopedias?”

  Tony took the bag and stopped in the hallway. “Only essentials.”

  “And your balls, I assume. You carry your balls with you everywhere.”

  Tony smiled. “Well, I need them.” He reached into his bag and came out with a bag of flash drives and one of the mini-cams. “Hey, you want these?”

  Magaly held the mini-camera up her eye and felt like a cyborg. “Chino, aren’t these for online dating?”

  “Um, not just,” he said, but she caught him not looking at her. “You want them? You can help me lighten my load. Take the fla
sh drives, too. I don’t need them.”

  “Hell, yeah, I’ll take them. I love free stuff,” Magaly said. “You know how tough it is to get supplies in non-profit? Hey, by the way, you know you were pretty good in there. You might almost be learning to accept nice things that people say to you.”

  Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. It happens so rarely I don’t worry about it.”

  “So, what’s your next move?”

  “Next move? My next move is an afternoon in the park and then a night of beer.”

  She shook her head. “The park? How about Angela Roman?”

  “Are you kidding? Talk about a long shot. Mr. D-Tox thinks she went back to PR. Or Florida. Maybe. And maybe she went with the super. What have I got to start with? Nada. Simplemente nada.”

  “Your horrible accent kills me. Can’t locate her in PR? There is the Internet!”

  “But then what am I supposed to do?” Tony said. “Give her a call, send her an email, post on her timeline? If she’s shacked up with Marte, she’s not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, let me put him on the phone.’ It’s a dead end.”

  “So you must think they have something to hide?”

  “Yes, I do. The coincidence is weird. Rosa disappears, and then they leave the state quickly after. Something is fishy.” He stopped himself and rolled his eyes. “Listen to me. What am I saying? Statistically, it’s just as likely they had planned to retire into the sunset years ago and it has nothing to do with Rosa. Coincidences only seem meaningful because we try to explain them.”

  “But your gut is telling you something is weird here. My gut says the same thing.”

  “My gut is telling me it’s lunchtime. I have enough for a story. I’ve got plenty for a nice retrospective article just in time for the anniversary of Rosa’s disappearance. It’ll be respectful, have some nice pictures—”

  “But what about what you told D-Tox—Danny? You said you would keep digging.”

  “C’mon, Mags, I was just trying to be nice. You used to say I didn’t know how to be nice, but quod erat demonstrandum.”