Chapter 76. Raiborne
THE FACT THAT there’s nothing in the forensic reports linking the murders of Michael Walker and Manny Rodriguez helps me keep my mind off the two dead men for a while. Then I start to get nuts again. I call Vince Meehan. Vince, who runs the evidence room, gives me the number of the individual who picked up Rodriguez’s silver crucifix, empty wallet, and packed iPod.
It belongs to a twenty-three-year-old waitress named Moreal Entonces, and a few hours later, I’m at the counter of a trendy Cuban diner in Nolita listening to Moreal tell me her and Manny’s life story.
This one’s sadder than most. Not just because Moreal and Manny had a cute eighteen-month-old daughter, but because she really believed in the guy. And the guy actually may have been worth believing in.
“Manny had talent,” says Moreal, whose caramel skin is the same color as the flan she puts down beside my coffee. “But he couldn’t catch a break.
“That’s why he was at Cold Ground,” she continues. “Manny was an artist, but he was working as a gofer for free. Not even that. He bought sandwiches and coffee with his own money sometimes, all on a chance that a big-shot producer would give him four minutes of his precious time.
“And what happens when a producer finally does agree to hear his song? Manny gets shot in the back of his head the night before, caught in the middle of some nonsense he had nothing to do with.”
“What was the song? The last one?” I ask her.
“‘Arroz con Frijoles’: ‘Rice and Beans.’ And that track was something. For real.”
“Is that what your name means, Moreal? More real?”
“That’s good. I might even borrow it. But no. In Colombia, where I’m from, Moreal is like Mary or Martha.”
I nurse my café con leche and scan the pictures of Cuba on the wall-beautiful, ornate streets filled with big-finned American cars from the fifties. I let Moreal decide when her story is over, and it’s another ten minutes before I ask the one question I came here to ask.
“Moreal, I know this may sound ridiculous, but had Manny been spending time in the Hamptons?”
Chapter 77. Raiborne
NOW I FEEL as if maybe I’m pushing the envelope too far, even for me.
The next morning, instead of driving to the precinct house in Brooklyn, I take the Grand Central Parkway to the Northern State and follow the signs for Eastern Long Island. Two hours later, I’m rolling through the shade of the biggest, oldest elms I’ve ever seen into downtown East Hampton.
Since it’s my first time out here, I squeeze my Taurus between a starter Porsche and a bright-red Ferrari and have a look around.
It’s Main Street USA. I’m two hours from Bed-Stuy, but I feel as though I’m on some kind of National Geographic expedition, like Darwin in the Galápagos. I’d buy a notebook and jot down my impressions, except there’s no place to buy one.
The only things for sale seem to be cashmere, coffee, and real estate. Shit, there are more real estate agencies here than bodegas in Brooklyn. In two blocks I count seven, all in white clapboard houses with cute, preppy names: Devlin McNiff and Brown Harris Stevens.
But there’s nothing cute about the prices under the black-and-white photographs, eight-by-tens, like the ones Krauss takes in the morgue. Twenty million for something grand, four million for something nice, and $950,000 for a shack on an eighth of an acre. Is that possible?
When I tire of walking, I check out a “bodega” called the Golden Pear Café, where oddly enough everyone behind the counter is Hispanic, like in a real bodega. I pick one of the six kinds of coffee and a four-dollar slice of angel cake, and take them to a bench out front.
The coffee’s way better than I’m used to, the pastry beats the hell out of a Hostess Twinkie, and there’s something about the light out here. But there’s so much money dripping off of everything I can’t tell where the town ends and the money begins. Instead of wasting any more time figuring it out, I cut myself a break and spend the next ten minutes warming up in the sun and smiling at the girls walking by, suddenly remembering life’s too short to do much else.
Chapter 78. Raiborne
THE EAST HAMPTON Police Station isn’t quite as idyllic as the sidewalk outside the Golden Pear. To my disappointment, it looks like a police station-squat and grim and overcrowded and sweaty. Three beefy, Irish-looking detectives are stuffed into one room. The chief detective, the youngest of the four, has got his own little office, the size of a small closet.
“Make yourself at home,” says Detective Van Buren. He dumps the contents of one chair onto the floor. “We’ve been about to move to new headquarters for two years now.”
I wasn’t expecting much civility, and I don’t get any. Just typical cop shit. Who wants a visit from a big-city cop who’s going to look at him like he’s some kind of pretend cop? But Van Buren seems like any other young, ambitious detective, and there’s nothing pretend about the bodies piled up in his backyard.
“I’m here,” I say, “because about a month after Michael Walker got shot I investigated the murder of Manny Rodriguez, a rapper who was also shot. Yesterday I found out he also had been hanging out at Wilson ’s place. That makes five dead bodies connected to Wilson ’s court.”
“A starting squad,” cracks Van Buren, and I have to smile because I think it might help me get somewhere with him.
“An all-dead team,” I say.
“You probably should be talking to Suffolk County Homicide. After the first couple weeks, they’ve been running the show out of Southold. But since you came all the way out, I’ll be glad to drive you over to Wilson ’s place.”
I leave my black banged-up Taurus in the lot and get into Van Buren’s black banged-up Crown Vic, and we drive to the good part of town. Soon we’re in a neighborhood that makes Main Street look like the projects.
“Through those hedges,” says Van Buren, “is Seinfeld’s place. Stole it from Billy Joel for fifty-six mil. Just up that road to the left is where Martha Stewart used to live.”
“This is all very interesting, but where the black folks live at?”
“We’re almost at Wilson ’s place right now,” says Van Buren, turning onto a particularly wide country lane called Beach Road.
Van Buren unlocks the police chain on the rustic wooden gate, and we take the long driveway toward the ocean. The basketball court is also locked, but Van Buren has the key for that too.
“Were you the one who talked to Wilson originally?” I ask.
“No.”
“One of the other detectives?”
“No one talked to Wilson.”
“Three local kids are piled up on his lawn. Another deceased individual shows up afterward, and no one feels it’s necessary to talk to Wilson?”
“Ahh, no. That’s not the way we do things out here.”
I look around the estate, but other than the spectacular ocean views, there’s not much to see, or make notes on.
Eventually, Van Buren and I are standing on the veranda of the massive house, which, he says, is for sale.
“I’m a little pressed for cash right now,” I tell him.
Van Buren laughs, and actually, we’re getting along fairly well under the circumstances.
“There’s one name that’s come up,” he finally says. “Local dealer who calls himself Loco.”
I nod, scratch my head some. “You talk to this Loco?”
“Nobody’s been able to find him.”
“Mind if I try?”
Chapter 79. Raiborne
WHAT’S WRONG WITH this messed-up picture? Three days ago I was kicking back in the Hamptons. Now I’m in NYC, on my hands and knees on the floor of a beat-up surveillance van eyeing the entrance of a take-out joint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.