“You’ll be the first to know,” Karp said, finishing her sentence.
The reporter smirked. “Yeah, I’m sure you have my number on speed dial,” she said, and turned to Marlene, who also stood. “At least it was a pleasure to see you, my dear.”
“As always,” Marlene replied, giving her friend a hug.
When Stupenagel left the room, Marlene turned to her husband. “You have to admit, she may be on to something there. Violent sex offenders do tend to escalate. Do you think NYPD has made the connection?”
Karp shrugged and pressed the button on the office intercom. “Darla, would you see if you can track down Ray Guma and ask him to come to my office please?”
Marlene smiled. “So maybe Ariadne Stupenagel isn’t as bad as you make her out?”
Karp grinned back. “She’s a reporter; she’s still the enemy.”
4
“Mierda! Who in the hell took my last goddamn beer!”
Even shut up in his tiny bedroom with the door closed, Felix Acevedo cringed as if he’d been struck by the sound of his father’s fury coming from the kitchen of the family’s tiny apartment. He’d been happily dressing for the night’s outing to the Hip-Hop Nightclub, trying to decide which hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans looked best. He squinted at himself in the mirror and practiced the rap songs he planned to perform. But now he flinched as his father yelled again.
“Felix! Get your skinny culo out here, goddamn it, or I swear to God, I’ll-”
The man’s swearing stopped for a moment as a woman tried to calm him. She spoke soothingly but her voice was obviously tinged with fear. For good reason. She’d hardly said five words when there was the unmistakable sound of a slap followed by a cry of pain.
Felix clenched his fists in anger and for a moment imagined storming out of his bedroom to the kitchen and beating his father, Eduardo, unconscious, as he’d seen the old man do to his mother on more than one occasion. He hated Eduardo-he was a mean drunk who hadn’t worked a steady job in years but drank and gambled all day, sometimes all night, before eventually coming home. If Felix and his mother were lucky, Eduardo would then continue drinking until he passed out. However, if they crossed him, or if he simply felt like it, he’d take out his anger on them with his fists and feet, and sometimes a leather belt.
Eduardo Acevedo had brought his family to New York from Puerto Rico when Felix was a young boy, but his sloth and drinking prevented him from ever realizing the American dream, and his wife and son paid the price. Felix’s mom, Amelia, was the sole support for the family. She worked nights cleaning offices in Manhattan. She left each evening after fixing her husband and son dinner and then didn’t return until early the next morning.
“Felix, I’m gonna count to three and if you’re not…”
It was no use. Felix relaxed his fists and felt his shoulders sag in defeat. He did not have the courage to confront his father, much less attack him. He’d just have to take his medicine for whatever he had, or more likely had not, done.
“I’m coming,” he shouted. He put his glasses back on and gave himself one last look in the mirror, contemplating the piles of secondhand clothes he’d left on the floor of his messy room, wondering if there was a better combination than what he was wearing. But another bellow from his father reminded him that the longer he took to respond the worse it was going to be.
As he approached the doorway leading into the kitchen, he considered bolting out the front door. If it wasn’t for the fact that his mother would then have to take whatever punishment his father thought necessary, he might have fled. He certainly had no idea what his father was screaming about regarding beer. Neither Felix nor his mother drank alcohol, having witnessed its effect on the other member of the household for so many years. If the beer was gone, it was because the bastard drank it, but the truth wouldn’t matter to him now.
Felix shuffled into the kitchen with his head down so that he wouldn’t have to look into the angry, bloodshot eyes of his father. But as if against his will, he eventually glanced up.
Dressed in a dingy wife-beater undershirt with yellow stains beneath the armpits, Eduardo stood glaring at him from the open refrigerator. His hairy arms were covered with faded green-black tattoos from two stints in Rikers Island prison. His mother, a tiny woman with a strawberry-shaped birthmark on her right cheek, sat mutely in a chair at the small kitchen table, using a tissue to dab at the blood that trickled from her mouth.
Eduardo caught Felix glancing at his mother and the look of sorrow that passed between them. He pointed at his wife as he snarled at his son, “See what you made me do, you little hijo de puta?!”
Felix nodded his head. “Yes, sir. I… I… I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry don’t cut it. Where’s my fucking beer, pendejo!”
The words slammed into Felix like fists. His father rarely spoke unless it was to yell with the occasional Spanish curse word tossed in. “I don’t know,” he said, lowering his eyes again. “I didn’t take it.”
“Liar!” Eduardo screamed, slamming the door and moving toward Felix with his fist raised. “There was one more in the fridge when I left for work this morning! You took it, fucking thief!”
By “work” Eduardo meant gambling and boozing, but Felix wasn’t about to throw gasoline on the fire. “Okay, okay,” he cried. “I took it. I… I… I’ll go buy you-”
The attempt to mollify his father was cut off by the backhand blow across his face that knocked his glasses off. “I’ll teach you to steal my beer!” Eduardo started to remove his belt.
Amelia Acevedo jumped up from her seat and darted behind her husband to look in the refrigerator. “Look, Eddie, there is another beer, it was behind the carton of milk,” she said, holding up a forty-ounce bottle of cheap malt liquor.
Eduardo looked at her suspiciously. Then he nodded as if he’d just realized some great truth. “Puta!” he spat. “You bitch! You hid it on purpose! What? You got some asshole over here doing you all day while I’m at work? You giving him my beer?” He raised his hand again and started for the cowering woman.
“No! It was me, I hid it,” Felix said. Without his glasses his dad’s face was fuzzy, but he knew it would be a mask of rage. “I was going to the park, and I wanted to bring some beer so that the other guys would think I’m cool.”
Eduardo stopped and looked back and forth from his wife to his son as if he couldn’t figure out which one to hit first. With a snort of disgust, he reached out and grabbed the bottle from his wife. “You owe me a six-pack for trying to steal my beer,” he snarled at Felix, though he stopped shouting. He then turned to his wife. “This ain’t gonna last, bitch.”
“I was just going to the store,” Felix’s mother responded with a look at her son that signaled it was time for them both to leave. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Make it ten if you know what’s good for you.”
As quick as they could, Felix and his mother left the apartment and were soon standing on the sidewalk in front of the run-down tenement building. “You… you… you should leave him,” Felix stammered.
His mother didn’t raise her head. “Where would I go? This is my home.”
“Home?” Felix cried. “A home for rats and cockroaches, you mean-at least until winter, when even they won’t stay because we can’t pay for heat. You could live better if he wasn’t around to drink and gamble all your money away.”
“He’d find me, and when he did…” Her voice trailed off but they both knew what she was going to say.
Felix flushed with anger. “Someday I’m going to be a famous rapper, and I’ll buy you a nice house. And if he comes around, I’ll get the dogs on him.”
Amelia looked up at her son and smiled through her tears. She reached out and patted his cheek where a bruise was already beginning to show from the blow his father had given him. “You’re a good son, Felix. Now, you be safe tonight and stay away from people who can get you into trouble.”