Bronx Requiem

by John Roe, Reed Farrel Coleman

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling crime writer teams up with a retired detective to deliver this raw tale of murder and corruption among the NYPD. Born into a family of Irish Catholic cops, veteran NYPD Detective Jack Kenny knows that good policing requires little more than a badge, a revolver, and some street smarts. Kenny’s partner, the young and beautiful Carmen Romero, believes in catching today’s toughest criminals with technological savvy. But now they’re both about to be put to the test as a grisly cold case suddenly draws heat on their fellow officers. When a new witness to the thirty-year-old “Bronx Barber” murder comes forward, Kenny and Romero discover that the brutal slashing of a prostitute is connected to an NYPD stag party gone wild. Suddenly, Jack’s long-deceased first partner is implicated in the crime. With pressure escalating and time running out, their frantic search for truth will put their careers, reputations, and lives at stake. Along the way, they’ll learn just how strong the ties that bind New York’s Finest really are.

Release date: November 6, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 270

Sample

It was done, her last job. Once she got home, dead-bolted the door to her cramped little apartment behind her, and slipped out of her work clothes, she could retire Angel Dancer forever. Angel Dancer—a name nearly as ridiculous as her black lace blouse, silver satin hot pants, black fishnets, and patent leather stilettos. The blouse, one size too small so that the lace seemed almost like a fabric cage, barely able to contain her breasts. The satin hot pants, more than skintight, leaving very little about the folds and curves of her body to the imagination. The fishnets emphasizing the perfect shape of her long legs. The heels causing the muscular cut of her calves to pulsate with each step. She’d already bagged her platinum blond fright wig and tossed it in the Dumpster outside the catering hall. Good-bye, Angel.

Her body shook, teeth chattered as she rubbed her ungloved hands along her arms in a vain attempt to keep warm. The tips of her too-long, blood-red fingernails kept getting snagged in the wet rabbit fur of the jacket her old pimp Tyrone had bought for her at Alexander’s Department Store. The cheap fur smelled gamey when it got damp, like something not even the rabbits themselves would want anymore. She stood on tiptoes, stretched her neck out, and looked through the freezing rain and into the soft black blur of night for her ride. The cab was late. She had spent too many nights like this, paid too little to be used up and left standing cold and alone in the rain, while the men who stuck themselves in every part of her went home to warm houses, cold beds, frigid wives. She looked again, a gesture like a prayer. And there in the distance, a lone pair of headlights appeared. She breathed a deep sigh of relief and crossed herself because she didn’t know how much more of the weather she could take. The wet rabbit fur was useless against the claws of the bone-chilling wind.

She watched as the swaying traffic light turned green from red and the headlights advanced her way. She exhaled. In her head she went over the steps she would take to finally retire Angel Dancer. She would run a hot bubble bath, the soap beads smelling of newly mown grass and fresh cut flowers, not of sweet motel soap. For the last time, she would remove the false eyelashes like black butterfly wings and cover her face in a thick layer of cold cream. When she had wiped away the cream, taking the slut mask of blue eye shadow, glitter, black eyeliner, eyebrow pencil, foundation, blush, lipstick, lip liner, and gloss with it, she would flush the tissues down the toilet. And when she was done with her bath, done gargling the taste of her last john out of her mouth, she would look into the mirror and see plain old Angelina Reyes for the first time in five years. Good-bye, Angel.

She’d already done the two hardest things she had to do to take back her life. She had gotten the smack monkey off her back and kicked it to the curb. Thank God, she thought, she hadn’t gotten to the point where the needle track scars showed on her forearms like a Bronx subway map. She couldn’t have gotten clean if Tyrone was still in the picture, so she’d done what she’d had to do to kick him curbside as well. If hooking had taught her anything at all, it was that you do what you gotta do to make it through one more night. That’s how she’d forced herself to do one man after the next for hours at a time, to be with other women, to be with many men at once, to let herself be filmed while doing these things. She didn’t want to think about that anymore. Good-bye, Angel.

When the car was about a block away, Angel’s heart was thumping itself out of her chest. She was so excited at the prospect of finally being able to leave the life behind that it took a moment for her to realize she’d been wrong. Fuck! That gray Plymouth Fury slowing down and pulling over wasn’t from the Ponce Car Service on Alexander Avenue. As the passenger side window rolled down and she saw the figure of a man leaning over to unlatch the door, her breath caught in her throat. One thing she learned early on in the life was to sense trouble coming. You learn or you don’t live too long. She stepped back, and as she did, she slid her hand into her shoulder bag to find the straight razor she kept there just in case. Another lesson learned: If you’re going to carry a weapon, you better be ready to use it or it’ll get used on you. Angel had used the razor more than once. Most of the time, all she had to do was show it and the john would back the fuck off, but once she’d cut a john so badly she thought he was going to bleed to death right in front of her. She didn’t stick around to see. Good-bye, Angel.

She relaxed a little when she felt the distinctive, slightly arched shape of the razor in her right hand. She traced the carvings in its ivory handle with the tip of her index finger. Angel used her thumb to slowly, carefully unsheathe the razor inside the bag. But when Angel saw the face of the man that appeared in the space above the car door, her heartbeat slowed. It was a face she recognized.

“Yo,” she said, “you scared the fucking shit outta me.”

“Sorry. C’mon, honey, I’ll drop you home.”

“I’m waitin’ on a car service. If I don’t wait, they won’t ever come for me again.”

“Suit yourself, babe, but what are the chances he’s comin’ out here in this weather? You could be standing there all night. And let’s face it, you ain’t exactly dressed for the cold.”

He was right. Car service drivers made big money on nights like this, carpooling or doing illegal curbside pickups and pocketing all the money for themselves. It might be hours before they got around to collecting her.

“At least let me give you a ten spot to pay for your fare.” He held a ten-dollar bill out to her through the open window. “We were gonna arrange for a ride for you. One of the other guys is driving your friend home, but when we came to get you, you were gone.”

He was right about that, too. She had been so anxious about getting this last job over with, to say good-bye to Angel, that she hadn’t waited around to see if she could catch a ride back down to the South Bronx. He was right about a lot of things, but she still didn’t trust it. She couldn’t say what was bothering her exactly. Didn’t matter. She had stayed alive by trusting herself. When you have an itch on the bottom of your foot that you can’t quite reach, she thought, you don’t question it. All you know is that it’s there.

“I’ll wait for my ride. My boyfriend works for them, so I know they’ll come,” she lied.

“Okay, but why don’t you sit in here and wait where it’s warm and dry?”

She knew that routine. Why don’t you come in here and wait where it’s warm and dry and you can pass the time by blowing me? On any other night, she might have done it, might have made the trade. Those days were over. “Nah, that’s nice of you, really, but I’ll just wait here.”

“At least take the ten spot or I’ll feel totally guilty. Please?” He held the bill out to her once again.

Angel didn’t see that she had much of a choice, not if she wanted to get rid of Don Quixote. Her mom had once taken her to Broadway to see a play about him. It was the only time in her life she had ever been to Broadway. She loved everything about it: the lights, the live music, the stage. It wasn’t so different than what she did. No, it was very different.

“Okay,” she said, “thanks.”

Then she got careless, letting go of the blade, and reached for the money with her right hand. By the time she realized her mistake, it was already too late. He had latched onto her delicate brown wrist with steel fingers and yanked her arm toward him like a lawn mower starter cord. The force of his pull was so strong that she couldn’t even throw out an arm in time to protect herself. Her nose broke with a nauseating snap as it smashed into the car roof just above the door frame. She was blind with tears, and she could not breathe for the blood and mucus filling her mouth, throat, and nostrils. There was a second or two when the shock of what was happening to her left her numb, but the pain overwhelmed her senses soon enough. There was a shrill ringing in her ears and it felt as if her skull was on fire. Time was passing very slowly, so that each of her struggling breaths seemed to have its own tortured history.

She wasn’t completely out of it and was vaguely conscious of being facedown in a puddle of slush and blood. She was wedged against the curb and could feel the heat from the car’s undercarriage on the back of her neck. Instinctively, she thrust her right arm back into her bag, which was still slung over her shoulder, and pressed tightly between her body and the curb. Part of her mind was a jumble of panic, begging her, pleading with her to get up and run, to scream for help, but she was still choking, coughing out blood, unable to scream. She was still too stunned to get up.

There was another part of her brain working furiously, calculating her best chances. That part of her mind kept asking, “Where is he? Where is he? How much time do I have?” Then, through the panic and pain, the choking blood and shrill ringing, Angel’s world grew pin-drop silent. She could hear individual sounds as distinctly as if they were the only things to experience in an otherwise empty universe. There was the hollow ping, ping, pinging of the icy rain against the car’s hood, the metallic creaking of the traffic light as it swung in the wind on its tether, a jet’s engines whining as it passed over the Throgs Neck Bridge on the way to LaGuardia. And there was something else, another sound, one much more urgent to her chances of survival: the crunch and scrape of ice and grit caught between the soles of a man’s shoes and the pavement.

With that, time exploded, lurching full speed ahead. She once again recognized the familiar shape of the straight razor at the bottom of her bag. The footsteps were almost on her. Using all of her strength, Angel pulled the razor up out of the bag, thumbed it open, and swung it wildly. She hit something solid. His leg? His hand? She had no way of knowing.

“You fuckin’ whore bitch! You fuckin’ cut me,” he growled, but in a low, angry voice. Then he did something that caught Angel off guard as she struggled desperately to get up. He laughed. That scared her more than anything had ever scared her.

She was nearly to her knees. Suddenly, there was a fierce whooshing of air. She felt the wind of it on her cheek. There were brittle, cracking sounds. Her right hand went limp, the razor clanging to the sidewalk. It was only when the sickening pain shot up her arm and into her core that she realized the cracking sounds had been the shattering of her bones. She didn’t have time to think about it. She remembered him saying, “Thanks for the razor, whore.” He laughed again, cruelly. She pictured him standing over her, smiling. There was another whoosh, a dark shadow moving before her blurred eyes, and a thud. Her jaw went numb.

When she opened her eyes, pain and silent prayer were the only things left to her. Her mouth had been stuffed with her lace panties and layers of tape had been wound across her lips, cheeks, hair, and the back of her head. She was nude. She could feel the coarse grass biting at the gooseflesh of her back and her legs. She wasn’t tied down, but she couldn’t move. When she tried to shift her weight, the pain almost made her puke into her gag. Then he came back into view, the grass snapping under the weight of his ugly black shoes. He held the razor in his hand.

He put his face very close to hers. His breath stank of whiskey, cigarettes, stale coffee. “I’m going to take the gag outta your mouth and I’m going to let you beg. If you scream, I’m going to do bad things to you, honey, real bad things. Understand? Blink your eyes if you understand.”

Her eyelids fluttered madly.

He used the razor, carefully slicing through the tape. He pulled it back layer by layer and used his fingers to fish the panties out of her mouth. She gasped for breath. He knelt over her, her saliva-soaked, bloodied panties in one hand, the razor in the other. He was in no rush. When she seemed to have caught her breath, he said, “Are you ready now?”

She nodded.

“Beg!”

She knew men too well to ask the impossible. “Kill me quick, please. Quick.”

Blank-faced, he smiled as he shoved the panties back into her mouth. He put his lips to her ear and whispered, “No.”

Good-bye, Angel.

Jack drove. He usually didn’t, but the rule was the driver was captain of the ship, and he wasn’t in the mood for Carmen Romero’s bullshit about parking. So far, so good. She was too busy fussing with her new iPhone to give him the speech. Fucking iPhones, just more bullshit, more toys. Sometimes he thought he would give anything to have been born a few decades earlier, when New York had three baseball teams, a working waterfront, and people had only each other to rely on. Was the world a better place because there were thirty-one flavors, men on the moon, and computers? Not the way Jack Kenny figured it. As he recalled, folks weren’t any worse off with seven TV stations to choose from instead of seven hundred. You made do with what you had. That’s what growing up poor Bronx Irish had taught him: how to make do.

“Pad thai or jerk chicken?” Romero asked, never looking up from the iPhone screen.

“You pick, Carm.”

“Pad thai.”

He glanced over at his partner without turning his head. Carm was thirty-two with light mocha skin, deep copper eyes, and shoulder-length hair so thick and black it almost didn’t seem real. She had curves like other women, only more of them and in better places. She was, Jack was forced to admit, smoking hot. A fact which he was reminded of on a daily basis by at least half the males at the Two-Six, and some of the women, too. The thing was, he had never thought of Carm that way. Not from day one, not when they were out drinking and went a few past their limits, not ever. He supposed that was his upbringing, too. His cop upbringing, not the one he got at Visitation Catholic in Kingsbridge.

“Never shite where ya eat, lad,” he remembered his grandfather Timothy saying. “It’ll bring ya only troubles and we’ve troubles enough in this life.”

Padraig Timothy Kenny was born on the other side and never lost his lovely lilting manner of speech. Not even thirty years on the job in uniform in the worst parts of the city could wrest it from him. His dad and uncle, both thirty-year men as well, had given Jack much the same advice, if spoken more plainly and with less romance: “Don’t hump where ya dump.”

Of course it was advice easier given in their days. There were almost no women on the job back then, certainly none with names like Carmen Romero or with her looks. Even when Jack had started in the seventies, women—white, black, red, or green, smoking hot or plug ugly—were few and far between. And the concept of a college-educated, female Puerto Rican detective would have been greeted with as much skepticism as the idea of openly gay men serving in the military. Go figure!

At first, it was hard for Jack to figure Carmen. Why would anyone who looked like her and who’d graduated top of her class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice become a street cop? A prosecutor? Maybe. A defense lawyer? Sure. A fed? Definitely. Some rich guy’s trophy wife? Why not? But not ten years in uniform on the streets of Bed Stuy and the South Bronx, only to wind up as a detective-third in a concrete-block squad room that smelled like cheap pine disinfectant and old coffee, on the second floor of a precinct house in Harlem. Shit, Jack thought, she wasn’t even from the city. She’d grown up in the burbs.

On Amsterdam Avenue they drove by Jamal Jackson’s three-card monte game. Jamal was there every day, rain or shine, relieving suckers of their discretionary income. One of the things Jack and Carm liked about being out of uniform was that they didn’t have to worry about petty stuff like Jamal’s monte game.

“Jamal’s good,” Jack said to Carm, “but not nearly as good as this guy Mingas who used to work my patrol sector in the Four-O.”

“Mingas the Magnificent? Little Puerto Rican guy? Used to be a jockey?”

Jack Kenny nodded. “That’s him.”

“He was still there when I worked the Four-O.”

“I’ve seen a lot of guys run three-card monte, but Mingas was the master. One day we brought him into the station house and he put on a show for us. He did it sleeveless, in slow motion, and with only three cards and he still beat us. That was the deal: If he beat us, we had to kick him loose. We kicked him loose.”

“Even when he was old he was the king,” Romero agreed. “He’s dead, you know?”

“No, I didn’t. That’s too bad. He told me once that the secret was not in your eyes, but in your head. ‘People, they too fast to trust their eyes,’ Mingas said. ‘Smart man, he trust his head, not his eyes. Eyes is easy to fool. Head, not so easy.’”

Carm wasn’t buying. “Sounds like a load of horseshit to me.”

Jack shrugged and pulled to the curb in front of their favorite Thai restaurant, Yes Siam. That was his first mistake.

“You can’t park here, Jack,” Romero said, finally looking up from her iPhone. “You know that.”

“Not this shit again, Carm. Besides, rule is, driver is captain of the ship. Right?”

She pointed up at the rectangular red-and-white parking sign with the following written on it:

No Parking Anytime

←

“Don’t be talking to me about rules, Jack.”

“Ah, Christ, Carm. We’re cops. We have the damned parking plaque. We throw that in the window and we could park on the sidewalk by a fire hydrant and no one could say boo.”

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you the difference between could and should? Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should do it.”

Jack screwed up his still handsome face into a mask of false consternation. “I thought you were talking about could and should, now you’re talking can and should. I’m old and confused.”

“Fuck you, Jack. Don’t give me that confused excuse. There’s a reason the city doesn’t want cars on this block.”

“If there’s a reason, I haven’t figured it out yet. Since I been at the Two-Six, they’ve changed the parking rules on this street three times. The city just likes to screw with people so they can reap in all that ticket money. And don’t even try to tell me that’s not true.”

Carmen had to confess that it did sometimes seem as if the powers that be were far more interested in collecting parking violation funds than in keeping the public safe or the traffic flowing smoothly. Still, right was right. She bent, but didn’t break. “If we were here on a homicide, that’s one thing. But we’re here on suspicion of pad thai and chicken satay.”

“My granddad, dad, and uncle had thirty years on. My brother Pete had thirty years on. My daughter DJ’s got ten years on and Jack Jr.’s got six years on. I am almost at thirty-four and going strong. This city owes my family a lot more than letting me park where the—”

“Okay, Jack, I surrender.” Carmen held up her palms. “If I have to listen to the litany of your sainted family’s time on the job again, I’ll lose my appetite.”

Jack had finally won the argument, but he wasn’t smiling. Carmen never surrendered. That was one of the things he admired about her. Her attachment to doing stuff by the book and her unshakable belief in technology may have driven him a little nuts, but he never questioned her resolve. She had a bigger set of cojones than most men he knew. He put the car in drive and stepped on the gas.

“Is it that thing?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

She looked out the window. “I don’t want to talk about it. We’ve talked it to death.”

She was right. They had talked it to death. Carmen had made the mistake of being human, of giving in to a spur-of-the-moment impulse and had been suffering for it since. Last St. Paddy’s Day, she’d hooked up with one of the bosses, Dominguez, a real up-and-comer from OCCB. He was the complete package: handsome, ambitious, aggressive, politic, charming, accomplished. Problem was the package also included a politically connected wife and kids. After a few months of motels and midnight meetings, Carmen had had enough. She wasn’t going to be someone’s side slice, but ambitious mothers like Dominguez didn’t sacrifice political connections for love and they didn’t like losing. Over the last several months, he’d tried every trick in the book to get Carmen to reconsider. First it was flowers and poetry. Now it was extortion. Dominguez was either going to have her back or have her badge. He’d even cornered Jack once when he was visiting his girl, DJ, at 1 Police Plaza.

“Someday soon, Detective Kenny, I am going to be a very powerful man in this department. You would do well to be my friend,” Dominguez had said. “Your girl has a big future ahead of her and your son could make detective like that.” Dominguez snapped his fingers. “On the other hand, things could get very tough on the kids.”

“And all I have to do is what, pimp my partner to you? Get the fuck outta my face before I forget our ranks and religion.”

That confused Dominguez. “Religion?”

“You didn’t hear? I’m taking circumcision lessons. You threaten my kids or my partner again and I’ll perform one on you without a scalpel.”

Jack hadn’t mentioned the encounter to Carmen, though he suspected Dominguez made sure word got back to her. Jack opened his mouth to say something to comfort his partner, but thought better of it. If she didn’t want to discuss it, it was better left alone. He found a legal spot around the corner from the eatery and pulled in. That seemed to get Carmen out of her funk. And when he stopped at a newsstand kiosk to buy the Post, she lit right back up.

“Christ, you’re old, Jack. No one reads newspapers anymore. And the Post! It’s like a paper for right-wing three-year-olds.”

He winked. “My kinda people.” Then he looked at the front page headline. That was his second mistake.

From New York Post

New Evidence in Bronx Barber Slay

By Park Kim

It’s not only on our TV screens that police dramas play out. In a stunning development, a witness has come forward with new testimony that sheds light on a notorious case that held this city’s attention for a brief while back in the Bicentennial Year of 1976. On the morning of Thursday, December 16, 13-year-old Jeffrey Talbot was out walking his family dog in an undeveloped area beneath the Bronx side of the Throgs Neck Bridge. Talbot’s dog, a beagle named Olivia, broke free of her leash and ran howling into a nearby marsh close to the water’s edge. When Talbot finally caught up to Olivia, he made a terrifying and grisly discovery. There, among the reeds and cattails, was the nude and mutilated body of a young Hispanic woman later identified as Angelina Reyes aka Angel Dancer. The medical examiner’s report indicated Miss Reyes’s death had been “… gruesome, slow, and painful,” that nearly every bone in her body was broken, some pulverized, while she was still alive, and that the pattern of some of her other wounds indicated she had been tortured with a straight razor. “This same razor was, after the victim expired, used to severely mutilate the body.” The use of the old-fashioned straight razor led the media to dub the killer “The Bronx Barber.”

Miss Reyes, who had worked as an exotic dancer and prostitute, had last been seen by one of her neighbors leaving her South Bronx apartment at 9 PM the previous evening. A livery cab driver. . .