Queens Noir (32 page)

The big blue-and-orange Mets banner tells me I'm in
the right place, and only one of the guys hunched over the
bar matches the description I extracted from the fast-talking
pharmacist. There's a spot next to him, opposite the big color
TV. I slide onto the empty stool as the Mets take on their
archrivals, the Atlanta Braves. Glavine's on the mound, facing his old teammates. Top of the third, one out, no one on.
Both teams scoreless.

The bartender comes over and asks me what I'll have.

"I'm fine, thanks."

"You gotta have something if you're gonna sit here."

"Oh, I've got to pay rent, huh? Okay, I'll have a seltzer
with a twist."

He doesn't try to hide his annoyance with me for ordering
something so girly-girly and cheap, and unlikely to result in a
big tip. I keep a close watch to make sure that's all he's giving
me, and leave a few extra bills on the bar.

The batter pops up to center field, and Beltran gets under
it with plenty of time.

`Asi se hace!" says my neighbor.

"Vamos Carlosito!" I chime in.

He looks at me. I toast him with my seltzer. He returns the
salute with his beer.

"Do I know you?" he asks.

"You've probably seen me around. I think I've seen you
around too. How's it going?"

"Me? Just trying to get through the day."

"It's good to set realistic goals."

Diaz comes up for Atlanta. He takes a few practice swings,
then gets into his stance. Glavine throws low and inside. Ball
one.

"So, a que to dedicas?"

He says, "Oh, this and that. Y to?"

"I've got my own business."

"Uh-huh. Doing what?"

"I'm a private contractor."

Glavine shakes his head. Lo Duca spreads three fingers
and taps them against his right thigh, pinky extended. Glavine
takes his time, then fans the guy with a devastating curveball.

"Yeah!" My guy pumps his fist in the air, and his T-shirt
sleeve slides halfway down his bicep. I gently slide it the rest
of the way. No tattoo.

He looks at me. "You like that?" He can't resist making a
muscle for me. "Want to see more?"

"That depends. Is your name really Julio Cesar Gallegos?"

His face darkens. "Hey, what is this?"

"Well, it started out as a counterfeiting case, but I think
it's turning into a homicide investigation, although a good
lawyer would probably get the charges reduced to seconddegree manslaughter."

He goes hard on me and swallows the stale beer at the
bottom of his glass, then says, "I have no idea what you're
talking about."

"And I always know I'm getting close when the guys I'm
interviewing start thinking about what they're going to say in
court. Uh, your honor, my client's remark, `I'll blow his fucking
head off,' was taken out of context," I say, mimicking a typical
mob lawyer, then wave it all away like bad smell. "Give me a
break."

"You got nothing on me."

"I also know I'm getting close when they start talking in
cliches."

"This is entrapment."

"I'm not the law, dude. I told you, I'm a private contractor."

I give him a brief rundown of my activities for the past
few hours, solidly connecting him to a shipment of counterfeit medicine at the pharmacy on 104th Street and implying
an equally strong connection to the death of Edison Narvaez,
with suspicion of possible intent, unless he comes clean with
me.

"Now, what do you know about the stuff that killed that
boy?"

"It's always the one you least suspect, right?" he says, trying to make it into a joke.

"That would mean Brigitte Bardot did it. She's pretty low
on my list of suspects. No, I'm looking for a guy with a tattoo
of the Ecuadorian or Colombian flag on his left arm." I let him
catch a glimpse of the .38 under my jacket. Diaz connects and
sends the ball sailing over Delgado's glove, but Chavez gets to
it quickly and holds Diaz at first. While the place erupts with
cheers, Gallegos looks at his shoes and says the words very
quietly, "It's the Ecuadorian flag."

I nod. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I knew one of these days someone like you would
be walking through that door." He looks around. "No cops, all
right?"

"Aw, shucks. And I just called them."

"What the fuck did you do that for?"

"Yo, buddy. Your language," says the guy two stools over.

"Yeah, it's English. What the fuck's your problem?"

"Settle down, guys," says the bartender.

I tell Gallegos, "You've got about three minutes, unless
you give me some sugar, comprendes?" I'm making that up, but
screw it-it's working. The next batter hits a hard one up the
middle and Reyes stops it cold to end the inning. That's Jose
Reyes, hometown: Villa Gonzalez in the D.R.

Gallegos says, "We could have worked something out."

"Before all this, maybe. Not with the Narvaez kid dying
from tainted meds, or whatever the hell you guys sold him.
Tell me where to find him."

"I can't do that."

"Do you hear sirens?" That's kind of a trick question, because you always hear sirens in this part of Queens. "Look, if
you point me to someone else further up the ladder, I'll leave
you out of it."

"I've been wanting to get out of the life," he says. "'Cause me and Gloria are gonna get married, and we're planning to
have babies."

"You can plan to have babies? That's news to me."

"I want immunity."

"Then tell me something that'll take the focus off you,
hermano."

"For real?"

"For real."

The lights are on at Shea as twilight turns to darkness, and
we can hear the fans cheering in the distance as a ring of cops
closes in on a clandestine warehouse near the boat basin off
Willets Point Boulevard. The police find what they're after: a
conveyor belt, pill counters, stacks of empty bottles and jars,
state-of-the-art printing equipment, boxes of fake labels, crates
of ready-made knock-offs from Pakistan, Vietnam, Malaysiatalk about the effects of globalization-drums of raw chemicals
from Colombia and China for mixing up everything from cough
medicine to horse steroids, as well as invoices, account books,
and a list of contact names, including delivery boys.

Ray Ray's name is right in the middle of the list.

They're willing to let me talk to him first, but Ray Ray's out
celebrating his twenty-three-game hitting streak, and by the
time he comes home from his viernes loco a couple hours later,
the cops have gotten a warrant, stormed right past me, torn
up his room, and are tramping down his front steps with their
arms full of cases of counterfeit steroids. And I have a sick
feeling that the lab is going to find significant traces of the active ingredient in Edison Narvaez's blood samples.

"What the-" he starts to say, but he knows what's going
on.

I tell him, "I was on my way over to talk to you, but I guess
it's too late for that now."

They read him his rights under the harsh lights of Shea
while the fans cheer somebody's throw-beating play. The
cheers that he'll never hear. And I can just imagine Felipe
when he finds out tomorrow. When they all find out: "Dime
que no es cierto, Fit."

Which translates roughly as, "Say it ain't so."

histo remembered it like it was yesterday. The first time
he saw a dead body. It was in the embalming room of
his father's funeral home. He was almost twelve years
old, already bored with school and given to playing hooky,
cruising around in stolen cars with his new friends from a
Bloods gang that controlled the Baisley Projects.

That day the police had stopped them in a stolen green
Caddy on Archer Avenue and had taken the older boys off to
jail. He later found out the only reason he'd escaped a trip to
the lockup was because one officer had known his old man.
Turned out the tough-love cop wasn't doing him any favor by
not taking him to jail.

The cop drove him home and he almost bluffed his way
out of trouble. But the guy refused to release him without first
speaking to his parents. The house was empty that afternoon.
His mother had died earlier in the year, and soon afterward,
his eighteen-year-old sister ran off with the pastor who conducted his mother's funeral.

The cop took him down to his father's funeral parlor over
there on Guy Brewer Boulevard about a mile away from where
they lived on 178th Place, a quiet leafy neighborhood of oneand two-family homes dense with Caribbean immigrants like
his father who'd settled there in 1960.

Phisto had never visited the funeral home until that day. He knew what his father did for a living. He knew that his
father buried people. And made a pretty good living from it,
evidenced by the latest appliances and new furniture they had
in their one-family brick house, but it was never talked about
in his company.

While the officer explained to his father why Phisto had
arrived there in the back of a patrol car, his father showed no
emotion, merely nodding and shaking his head. Moments after the blue-and-white drove off, his father exploded, displaying a temper that Phisto had heard his mother talk about but
had never seen before.

His father took him down into the basement and ordered
him to strip. Defiant, Phisto grabbed his crotch, aping the badboy posturing he'd picked up on the street. With this bluff,
he tried to walk away. His father grabbed him in a chokehold and slammed him to the ground. Phisto was surprised by
his father's strength. The slightly built man from the island
of St. Kitts, though no more than a few inches taller than
his son, was well-muscled with surprising power in his upper
body from cutting sugar cane and working construction in his
youth. With a piece of electrical cord, he tied his scrawny son
to a chair next to the dead body he was preparing for burial
and proceeded to rip Phisto's clothes from his body until he
was naked in the cold room.

Then the mortician went back to his work. The smell of
embalming fluid soon filled Phisto's lungs. The prickly odor
knifed through his toughness and singed his palate until he
puked all over himself. His father paid no attention to him
at all. Singing cheerfully and going about his business, stepping over Phisto sitting there in his own vomit, admiring how
craftily he'd restored the young woman's face, mutilated by a
jealous boyfriend after he'd killed her.

With nothing left in his stomach, Phisto leaned against
the table leg. He was weak and bleeding where the wire chafed
his wrist. Slime dripped from the corners of his mouth. From
where he sat he could see the blood and fluid draining from
the woman's body, flowing down into the waste receptacle.

He glanced at the corpse's face and felt a strange relief,
a sort of bonding with something outside of himself. Quietly,
as if he'd somehow acquired the facility to remove his spirit
from his body, he stared at the pathetic little boy with spittle
drooling from his mouth, trembling at his father's feet. He saw
himself, the pathetic little boy, rise up and walk over to his father and put his arm around the man's shoulder and whisper,
Thank you.

Then he headed out of the room, pausing at the door for
one final glance at the sniffling kid sitting in vomit.

Phisto stored that dead woman's face in his mind, embracing that stillness characterized by death as a part of himself. By
the time his father released him two hours later, the smell of
vomit and the sickly odor of embalming fluid had disappeared
from his senses. He wasn't even aware of the cold anymore.
He could've sat there for another two hours as comfortably as
if he were lounging poolside at the Four Seasons in Miami.

Years later, he came to realize that in those two hours he
sat in that frigid room while his father worked on that body,
he'd formulated the virtue that would rule his life: Feel no
pain or remorse.

In 1984, he quit school at sixteen and started selling weed.
In three months he had moved onto powder, making as much
as $8,000 off an ounce. He struck a deal with some Colombians and by the end of the year was flipping $100,000 a week
with rock houses in South Jamaica. In two years, he controlled
the large housing projects which dominated the two sections of the southside. But he knew that this game wasn't going
to last, so he started taking business classes in sales and real
estate. By the time the crack craze was over, he'd amassed a
fortune and an army, and while maintaining his stranglehold
on the drug trade, exporting to as far away as Texas, he had
diversified his holdings into real estate in Atlanta, Miami, and
the Caribbean.

People saw him as a drug lord. A gang leader. A killer. A
psychopath. He laughed whenever he read those kinds of descriptions in the news. America worshipped psychopaths and
other miscreants in the name of business. Just pick up Business
Week or the Wall Street Journal or any major business magazine
and you found profiles of men who ran businesses, who on
the surface appeared to be legal, but with a little digging were
discovered to be looting the companies, stealing employee
pensions, and knowingly selling products that killed people.
The newspapers and magazines lauded those muthafuckers
as visionaries, but condemned people of a similar personality
profile like himself, who did business on the margins of society.
Ain't that some shit.