Hose Monkey (9 page)

“We’re almost there,” he said, half-turning to the backseat. Then he refocused, trying to find the turnoff for the unmarked road.

Getting Toussant out of the car was no mean feat. They literally had to drag him out, but neither Serpe nor Healy could fault him for resisting. Most people don’t suffer their impending executions gladly. Once they’d gotten far enough into the woods, Joe removed the sock from Mr. French’s mouth. He screamed.
“M’aidez.
Somebody ‘elp me.”

Serpe was amused at the irony in that. “Scream your head off, asshole. Unless the local deer figure out how to dial 911, you’re fucked.”

Next, Toussant did the second most logical thing after screaming; he ran. At least he tried to, but Healy slammed his right leg across the back of Toussant’s knees. The Haitian’s legs went rubbery. First he teetered back, then pitched forward. The two ex-cops let him lay face down in the frozen compost of fallen leaves, bark, and squirrel droppings for a minute before propping him up into a squatting position.

His first two options gone by the boards, Toussant went to his third; a combination of begging and bargaining. Between pleas for his life to be spared, promises of an impending religious rebirth and feeble claims of innocence, Toussant rolled over on his cousin for dealing Ecstasy and coke out of his club.

“Just shut up and listen,” Healy barked.

Serpe took over, kneeling close to the big man, whispering in his right ear. “I wanna know exactly what happened that Saturday morning, minute by minute. I wanna know what you did to Cain, when you last saw him. The first time I think you’re lying to us, I’m gonna nod to my partner over there and he’s gonna press that gun right up to the back of your head. Its muzzle will be so close that when he pulls the trigger, it’ll light your fuckin’ hair on fire. Luckily, you’ll be too dead to give a shit.”

Toussant didn’t hesitate. As he had admitted back in Brooklyn, he said he had hit Cain, but claimed that the kid had taken the first swing. Pressed for a reason why, Toussant confessed to goading Cain into it.

“I call ‘im names. I tease de monkey boy about ‘is big cop friend and ‘is boss. I say it stink in ‘is room.”

Joe Serpe had no trouble believing Cain would have had a go at Toussant after that. But even with the kid’s surprising strength, he’d be no match for a man like Toussant.

“Firs’ ‘e punch me across the face, then the eye. I ‘ave to defend myself. You would defend yourself, no?”

Healy and Serpe let that question hang in the air like the smell of rotting undergrowth. That made Mr. French nervous. He started talking. Whining. Complaining about how hard his life was.

“These retards, you think it is a joy to work with them? They are terrible, dirty and stupid.”

If he was trying to win his captors over with his charm, he was doing a poor job of it.

“So why do you work at these homes if you hate the residents so much?” Healy was curious.

“Women.” Toussant blurted out before he could stop himself.

“You fuckin’ piece of shit!” Serpe backhanded Toussant with his good hand, sending him sprawling. Joe wanted to grab the gun out of Healy’s hand and do the world a favor. There was evil in the universe, enough of it so that removing Toussant would go unnoticed. Joe wasn’t interested in whether Mr. French was born a violent pig or if he developed into one.

“Take it easy, Serpe,” Healy warned, seeing the brewing storm in Joe’s eyes. “Let’s get this over with.”

Joe took a deep breath. “Okay, Toussant, what happened after you hit the kid?”

“‘e was difficult to control at first, but I learn ‘ow to ‘andle such people. The monkey boy is crying, threatening me you will kill me.”

A broad smile crossed Serpe’s face. “Yeah, and then …”

“I keep ‘im restrained until ‘e calm down a little. I say for ‘im to forget it if ‘e knows what is good. Then I leave the room and I never see ‘im after that.”

“And what time was that?” Healy asked.

“Please, I beg that you don’t kill me. I ‘ave many children. I—”

“What time, shithead?” Serpe screamed.

“I don’t remember, early. Seven-thirty maybe. I don’t know.”

Silence again dominated the night.

Healy and Serpe propped Toussant up once more. The big man was now beyond begging. He body trembled in their hands. Reluctantly, Healy handed the 9mm to Serpe. If ever there was a test of trust between two men, this was it. The sight of the gun changing hands was too much for Toussant. Vomit spewed from mouth in a steady stream and, his hands still cuffed behind him, he fell forward right into his own puke.

Healy straddled Toussant to remove the cuffs, but the Haitian’s panic got the better of both of them. He squirmed and bucked, knocking Healy off him. Serpe pressed his boot down on Toussant’s neck. That seemed to take all the fight out of him. Healy took off the cuffs. They both stepped away from Toussant.

“Okay, shithead, start running,” Joe said.

“You are going to kill me?”

“Ten, nine, eight, seven.”

Jean Michel Toussant didn’t need to be told twice. He ran wildly, further into the woods.

When they got back to the car, Joe Serpe retrieved the cell phone he’d lifted from the room above the club. He dialed 911.

“Hurry,” he said breathlessly when the operator got on. “There’s a crazy man assaulting people along the nature trails in Bethpage State Park. Hurry.”

As they approached the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway, Serpe tossed the phone down a storm drain.

They were nearly to the Sagtikos Parkway before anything but ambient engine noise and talk radio could be heard in the car. Both men had kept their very loud thoughts to themselves. Serpe, feeling unexpectedly guilty, could not get Healy’s admonition about the relative merits of good deeds out of his head.

“You trusted me with your piece back there,” Serpe said. “I appreciate that.”

“Yeah, especially since you wanted to kill him.”

“You noticed that, huh?”

“I noticed.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“You’re not exactly a stranger to me, Serpe. You never struck me as the executioner type,” Healy answered.

“If anyone ever deserved executing, that piece of shit did.”

“I don’t disagree, but you’re still not a murderer.”

“What am I, then?”

“A guy who plants a little evidence, maybe.”

“You saw—”

“Yeah, I noticed that too.”

“I couldn’t just let him walk away.”

“I suppose not. What are you gonna do with the tapes?”

“Me, I don’t know what to do with them, but I think I know someone who will.”

“Okay. So what’s our next move?”

Serpe was shocked.
“Our
next move? There isn’t a next move for me or you. The cops will pick up Toussant and our part in this will be over. I guess G.A.F.F. or G.A.F.T. or whatever the fuck the name of that task force will have to do the rest.”

“Yeah,” said Healy. “I guess.”

When they pulled up in front of the lonely split ranch at 89 Boxwood, Healy hesitated, staring at the house as if for the first time.

“I used to love this house,” he whispered as much to himself as to Joe Serpe. “Now, when I leave it, I almost hate to comeback. I hate it.”

“You don’t hate the house,” Joe said. “You hate that she’s not there waiting for you. You forget sometimes, right?”

“Less now than I used to.”

“It gets easier, but it never gets easy.” Healy shook his head, unconvinced.

“So thanks for helping me out.” Joe offered his hand. “You did a good thing today.”

“I was glad to help.” He shook Serpe’s hand. “Listen, I’ll have the shirt dry cleaned and mail it back to you,” Healy said, referring to one of Vinny’s shirts Joe had lent him as part of their charade.

“Keep it,” Joe said. “Or give it away. I’ve been hanging on to some of my grief a little too long also.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Bob Healy waited until the car was completely swallowed by the night before stepping toward his house. He never did tell Joe what he had meant to, but he wasn’t terribly bothered by it this time. In spite of Serpe’s words to the contrary, Healy knew they would be seeing each other again, and soon.

Friday
February 27th, 2004

 

ON THE WATERFRONT

 

I
t had been a long time since Joe Serpe picked up a
Newsday
with his twenty-four ounce coffee at the 7/Eleven on Portion Road. Sometimes he couldn’t avoid a glimpse at the screaming headlines of the New York daily rags as he passed the rack on his way to the coffee pots, but that was about the extent of his media interest. Blessedly, the tugboat had no radio and he never watched TV news. As far as he could tell, he was none the worse for his less than encyclopedic knowledge of world events.

After Vinny’s death, Joe’s life had gotten very small. He liked it that way. With his family gone and his brother dead, the outside world couldn’t touch him. He had Mulligan, his sack time with the Triple D ladies, and his work. In the last three plus years, the only aspects of his life that ever really changed were the faces of the women he slept with and the price of oil. And with oil, price was almost beside the point. It was like food in that respect. People had to eat and they had to heat.

Ossie, the Pakistani counterman, gave Joe his usual broad smile, but this morning mixed with a tinge of confusion. Joe noticed a questioning look in Ossie’s eyes. This was not lost on Joe. When he worked undercover, his life had often depended on his ability to read people’s faces. If he couldn’t detect a situation going sour from the tiniest changes in a dealer’s demeanor, all the backup in the world would have done him no good. There was less at stake this morning. As Joe slid a five dollar bill across the counter, he mumbled something about movie listings.

Serpe sat in his car, sipping his coffee, scouring the pages for word of Toussant’s arrest. Joe smiled as he turned the pages, once again enjoying the feel of the paper in his hand. Before the troubles, he had been a newspaper junkie, reading two, sometimes three papers a day. It used to drive Ralphy crazy. Suddenly aware of his pleasure, Serpe also began to realize how he had let his life atrophy. In a weird way, Cain’s murder had given Joe his life back. The long sleepwalk was over.

He had purpose. He had Marla, he hoped. And strangest of all, he had Bob Healy. Though Joe had no idea how to characterize their relationship, they definitely had one. As much as Joe liked Frank and as close as they had become, it wasn’t a cop thing. In an inexplicable way, Joe had felt closer to Healy during their silent ride from Brooklyn to Bethpage than he had felt to Frank in the whole time they were acquainted. When this all got sorted out, he’d have to have a long sit down with Healy. Not only to thank him for his help, but to finish up their business.

As forthcoming as Healy had been about what had transpired four years ago, Joe got the sense that the former I.A. detective had more to tell. Last night, and when he came to ask for help, and even at the diner that first time, Joe sensed Healy on the verge of saying something, but he seemed never to find the words. There were still details missing. Joe had questions that begged for answers, itches that needed scratching. That he and Ralphy had been targets of the I.A.B. was pretty fucking self-evident, but why, he wondered, and for how long? Who initiated the investigation? Was it Ralphy’s carelessness or Joe’s covering for him that had gotten I.A.’s attention? None of that ever came out at trial. But as ready as Serpe was to finally hear everything there was to hear about those dark days, he knew he could wait a little while longer. He had something else to take care of first.

Toussant did not make the paper, at least not
Newsday.
Joe wasn’t particularly surprised by this. First off, he had no idea how long it had taken the cops to track down Mr. French, there in the wilds of Nassau County. With its five golf courses, polo grounds, tennis courts and nature trails, Bethpage State Park was pretty damned expansive. If the cops hadn’t gotten to him quickly, a shrewd and desperate man like Toussant might be hard quarry, even if he was as big as a house and stank of vomit. Secondly, he hadn’t been big news to begin with. Like Healy said, the Suffolk cops had lost interest in him. Gangs had become the focus of their investigation.

And now they were the focus of Joe Serpe’s unofficial inquiry as well. In spite of what he had said to Bob Healy last night, Joe had no intention of letting this go. Group blame gave him no comfort. No, someone, a person, had killed Cain. To Joe, murder was a kind of robbery, the worst kind, the kind that takes everything away. It didn’t matter whether the killer was a Shriner, an alien, or a MexSal Saint. Responsibility lay with the individual, not with a group. Joe couldn’t help but remember Abe Hirsch, the old guy who owned the candy store on Avenue P back in Bensonhurst.

Joe was about ten when he became aware of the funny numbers tattooed on old man Hirsch’s forearm. When he asked his dad about it, Joe Sr. explained about the concentration camps during WWII. A few years later, Joe got up the nerve to ask Mr. Hirsch about the camps. Initially, the old jew was shocked that this skinny little Italian kid should be so interested in the camps.

“Nazis, Nazis, everybody blames the Nazis,” Hirsch had said. “Vas is a Nazi but a man in a uniform? It was men killed us, not Nazis. I blame the men, not the uniforms.”

Until Healy had spoken about the potential gang involvement, old man Hirsch’s words had never quite struck home. Now, at this late date, he understood. Maybe Cain had interrupted this Reyes kid spray painting the trucks. Maybe he had killed Cain. Maybe he had some help. Joe had his doubts. Whereas Cain was no match for a guy like Toussant, he’d give almost anyone else a hard time. In any case, Joe was going to find out. He put the paper down, shifted into reverse and headed east down Portion Road toward Farmingville, where it turned into Horseblock Road.

There in front of the convenience store on Horseblock Road stood a hundred squatty, brown-skinned men, their mouths and nostrils pumping clouds of foggy breath into the air like little chimneys. There were few hats in the crowd to cover the heads of uniformly black hair. Many of the men wore inadequate clothing against the biting cold. The standard uniform seemed to be a denim jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, dirty jeans and dusty work boots. No gloves but work gloves. Some men wore uncomfortable smiles. Some laughed as a hedge against the grind. Mostly there was blankness in the round faces of these men descended from Aztec, Incan, Mayan, and Spanish blood. But in their eyes Joe Serpe thought he spotted a toxic mixture of hope and bitterness—the incremental destruction of one leading directly to the other.

Joe had seen this spectacle several times as he often began his days with a few deliveries in Farmingville or Selden before doubling back west into Brentwood and Bayshore. But he had never before taken the time to witness it. Before today these men had simply been part of the scenery, not unlike the mailboxes or utility poles he passed as he drove from stop to stop. Now they had been transformed from things to people. Each had a name. Each had a heart and blood and a story.

Serpe parked his car and watched as pickup truck after pickup truck pulled to a nearby curb. A white man would get out of the truck, talk to a chubby man at the curbside, then bark something at the huddled brown men. The heavyset man would translate. Hands would go up in the crowd. The white man would wade through them like a rancher culling his herd. He would select one, two, three of the men. These were the lucky ones, the ones who would work ten hours for lunch, a hundred bucks cash and maybe a
cervesa
at day’s end. The luckiest of the lucky would ride in the pickup cab with the contractor. The others would secure their sweatshirt hoods, lift their futile jacket collars and hunker down together against the bed walls of the pickup.

Joe wasn’t close enough to hear, but he didn’t have to be. He understood the nature of these transactions. This was a shape-up right out of “On the Waterfront.” Scenes just like it were being repeated with increasing regularity all over Long Island. There’s always a hungry market for cheap labor and just below our southern border were millions of impoverished people eager to cast themselves into its maw. There wasn’t a landscaper, contractor, builder, concrete man, roofer, or mason on the island that didn’t avail himself of their services. They came cheap, worked hard, didn’t bitch. You didn’t have to pay their taxes, supply insurance or follow safety regulations. They were like little brown-skinned
fuck you’s
to OSHA, Social Security and the IRS.

Across the street from the shape-up, close to Joe’s car, were a second group of about ten people, very angry people. This group was comprised of an equal number of white men and women ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty-five. They were better protected against the weather, if only by their rage. They spat a constant stream of insults, slogans, and taunts across Horseblock at the workers. They carried a mixture of printed and handmade signs which bore slogans like:

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS
MEXICO FOR MEXICANS
or
CHEAP LABOR=
LOSS OF JOBS,
LOSS OF PRIDE,
LOSS OF COUNTRY
or
STAND UP TO THE BROWN TIDE
RESIST THE SILENT INVASION

 

And those were the friendly ones. A man with a bullhorn stepped into the midst of the ten angry citizens, adding his voice to theirs and fuel to the fire.

“We are being invaded, degraded and infiltrated,” he bellowed. “And the worst, most unholy part of it all is that our own government, the men and women we elect to represent us, have sold us out for a plate of rice and beans. Do they care that with cheap labor comes costs to our schools, our hospitals? Do they care that these people come with their violence, their gangs? Ask your congressman, your state senator, your governor, ask them if they are aware that these people are here illegally. Of course they know. They admit it. But what do they do about it? They want to take your tax dollars and build these invaders a hiring hall. How dare they? How dare they?”

Joe lost interest in the demagoguery. He felt sorry for everybody except the asshole with the bullhorn, who, Serpe was willing to bet, had come from out of state. He was sure the people in town had some valid worries and complaints, that most of them probably wanted nothing more than to lead quiet, peaceful lives watching their kids and property values grow at a healthy clip. He also had little doubt that the men across the street would have liked nothing more than to go back to their families, to warm weather, and to steady work.

As badly as he felt for the parties involved, this wasn’t his fight. He had the kid’s murder to worry about. Joe waited for the traffic to pass and made a u-turn across the wide boulevard. It was his turn to choose men from the crowd, but not to clear a lot or put on a new roof. What Joe wanted was information.

“Two men,” he said, wading into the crowd. “Speak English. Good English.”

Some of the hands that shot up with Joe’s first demand, went down just as quickly at the second. All the men eyed Joe with suspicion. Sure, the yankee looked like a working man in his Carhartt jacket, stained coveralls, Mack baseball hat, and boots. He walked like a working man, maybe even smelled like one, but his car was all wrong. Two years back, a few of the day laborers were lured to a deserted work site and nearly beaten to death. Then, only a few months ago, some neighborhood kids had set one of their houses on fire. They didn’t need the protesters across the street to remind them they were targets. Nor was Joe under any illusion that he was fooling any of these men, but he also understood the allure of money. He had little doubt that these guys had taken precautions.

Joe was presented with a group of about ten men from which to choose. He didn’t realize how ill-prepared he would be for the task. There was nothing in his past that would have readied him for it. He couldn’t give a quick English exam or ask which of the men knew the most about the Latino Lobos and the MexSal Saints. It reminded him of the time he’d had to pick out his mother’s coffin. There he was in the basement of Gargano & Sons, the funeral director in tow. How do you choose, he wondered? You can’t kick the tires or take it for a test drive. Caskets didn’t appreciate in value like diamonds or real estate. In the end he’d picked one based on price and the fact that the coffin matched the wood of his mom’s living room set.

Joe pointed randomly at two men. “You and you. Come on.”

Both men smiled cautiously, but hesitated. Understanding their reluctance, Serpe removed a dollar bill from his wallet and a pen from his jacket pocket. He scribbled his name and license plate number down and handed the dollar note to the heavyset man at the curbside who seemed to be in charge of the shape-up. The man smiled. He didn’t need an explanation and nodded for the two men Joe had selected that they should go ahead. As they drove away, Joe noticed the people on the other side of the street giving him the finger. He couldn’t hear what they were screaming, but it didn’t take a mind reader to figure it out.

“So, what are your names?” Joe asked, as the waitress left.

“Jose and Hose B,” the younger of the two men joked.

“No, really,” Joe prompted.

“Miguel,” the older man piped up. He was probably thirty, but looked forty.

“Paco,” said the younger. Joe figured him for twenty, tops. “What’s your name?”

“Joe.”

“Hey, Joe, what kind of work you got for us?”

Miguel glared at Paco. Serpe guessed this must have been a breach of day laborer etiquette. You don’t want to scare off the man paying your way by making him think you were picky or couldn’t do certain kinds of jobs.

“To tell you the truth guys, I just wanna talk,” Joe confessed, peeling off two one hundred dollar bills, but not handing them over.

“Talk?” Paco was curious, never taking his eyes off Joe’s money.

“I’m a writer,” Joe lied. “I’m interested in what your lives are like, where you came from, what—”

“Work,” Miguel interrupted, “not talk.”

Paco ignored Miguel. “Talk about what?”

“Look, in this country we all came from other countries, right?” Joe leaned across the table as if he were sharing secrets. “When my people came over from Naples, there were men here who took advantage of them. That’s what I’m interested in. The men who take advantage of you guys, the gangs like the MSS and the Lobos.”