Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra
“You
should
know her,” the man said. “You’ve been fucking her for almost a year now.”
“There’s a mistake here,” Pins said, his voice steady.
He stayed focused on the man’s eyes, looking to talk his way out of this strange situation.
“I love her,” the man said. “Can you understand that, you bastard? I love her.”
“Listen to me,” Pins said quietly. “I’m a cop. I’m gonna take out my shield and show you. Okay?”
The man lifted his right arm and pointed it straight at Pins. There was a .22 caliber clutched in his hand.
“You’re not gonna show me anything,” the man said, clicking back the trigger. “And you’re not gonna see Sheila ever again.”
“You don’t know what you’re doin’.” Pins was surprised at how level his voice was. He wasn’t even yelling. “I’m not the guy. I’m a cop.”
One look at the man and Pins knew he had moved beyond reason to reside in madness.
In a lifetime constructed around caution, Jimmy Ryan had made a mistake. He had misread the scrawled handwriting on the wire sheet. He had walked through the wrong door, 6F instead of 6E, and there he stood, inches from a jealous husband’s rage, accused of having an affair with a woman he had never met.
The first bullet hit Pins in the right shoulder. The second shattered bone above the right elbow. The final two hit him in the chest and sent him to the ground, pain rushing through his body like a river.
The young man hovered over him, two more shells left in the chamber.
“You’ll never see her again,” he said to Jimmy Ryan.
“It’s sure startin’ to look that way,” Pins said.
He heard the undercovers before he saw them, guns drawn, ready to fire. He looked up at the young man and watched him drop the gun back down to his side. He saw two undercovers rush over, yank the man’s arms back, cuff him, and pull him away. Through it all, the man kept his eyes on Pins, a small smirk etched across his face.
A third undercover, Gennaro, ran over, leaned down, and lifted Pins’s head, holding it in the crook of his right arm.
“We got an ambulance comin’,” Gennaro told him.
“Think I need it?” Pins wanted to know, looking down at the blood flowing out of his bowling arm.
“Who’s the shooter?” Gennaro asked.
“Just a kid,” Pins said.
Pins looked away from Gennaro. He turned to the photo lamp in the corner. He tried to take a deep breath and smiled.
The small bugging device he planted in the neck of the lamp had picked up everything he said and did during his final moments as a cop.
It was the last bug Jimmy Ryan would plant as a member of the New York City Police Department.
B
OBBY
S
CARPONI WAS
a drug addict and an alcoholic.
He was twelve when he had his first taste of scotch; two weeks later he lit his first joint. Besides his ability to consume large quantities of any illegal substance, Scarponi was known for his chronic truancy and violent streak. He stole bikes and toys from his South Jamaica neighbors to help feed his expensive habits. His parents couldn’t exert any control over the boy, finding it easier to ignore, as much as they could, the whispers that followed their troubled son.
Bobby never dealt drugs, but was a steady customer for a number of local dealers. If he got in too deep financially and couldn’t make the payoff from what he could steal, he could bank on a discreet parental bailout. As a result, he was stripping the Scarponis of their security, slapping away at their pride, and digging into their future, which for them embodied nothing more ambitious than a two-bedroom Laguna Beach condo built around Albert Scarponi’s construction foreman’s pension.
Despite his problems and frequent run-ins with the police, Bobby Scarponi was a well-liked kid. In the pattern of the users and abusers he associated with, Scarponi learned early in his addiction to be a performer, to adjust his demeanor, hide the tracks, clear the eyes, and pretend to be normal. He had an easy way, blending natural charm with rugged features that managed to withstand the ravages of the drugs he ingested.
By the time he reached sixteen, Bobby had been in and
out of four rehab clinics and undergone three years of ineffective counseling. He had worked his way up the pharmaceutical ladder from pot to glue to crystal meth to acid to cocaine. Then, on a cloudy April afternoon in 1966, Bobby put a thin needle to a fat vein and felt the hot rush of heroin for the first time.
He was now traveling on a narrow strip of road that often led its passengers to a head-on with death.
Bobby Scarponi was no exception.
• • •
B
OBBY SAT NEXT
to his mother, Beatrice, on a park bench across from the empty playground. It was cold and late, deep into a Monday night. His mother turned up the collar of her brown parka against the chill wind, shoved her hands deep inside the front pockets, and stared down at the withered grass by her feet. She was a short woman, slender, with a thick head of prematurely graying hair and sorrowful dark eyes. She spoke with a slight trace of an accent, remnants of her years growing up in the Italian seaside village of Panza.
“I never lied to your father, Roberto,” she said. “Tonight was the first time.”
“Relax, Mom,” Bobby said. “It’s gonna be over soon. We pay them the money and then we go home.”
“It’s never over,
figlio
,” Beatrice said. “As long as you buy what they sell.”
“Mom, please,” Bobby said, zipping up his green army jacket. “No lectures, okay? It’s bad enough we gotta sit in the cold and pay these dirtbags off.”
“You took your father’s heart,” Beatrice said, looking at her son, a hand on his right leg, which was jiggling nervously from the cold and the need for a fix. “You kill him a little bit each day. Every time you put that stuff inside your arms.”
“It’s my life, Mom,” Bobby said, throwing a glance up and down the street, concern etched on his face.
“It’s
our
life,” Beatrice said. “And it’s a wrong life right now.”
“I’m gonna quit,” Bobby said, turning to look at his mother, seeing the tears welling in her eyes. “I promise you. I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“You know, I was sixteen when I first met your father,” she said. “I looked and I fell in love. I love him even more now. And I can’t let him die and leave behind a junkie for a son. I can’t live with that shame.”
“What about me?” Bobby asked, sadness wrapped around the question. “You still love me?”
“I’m here, no?” Beatrice said. “To give strangers money your father works in a hole to earn.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Bobby said. “I swear it.”
“Don’t pay me with money,” Beatrice said.
“What, then?”
“Walk away from this life for good,” she said. “From the drugs and these bums who sell them to you.”
“I said I was gonna quit,” Bobby said. “This’ll be my last payoff.”
“If you can’t do that,” Beatrice said, cupping his chin, “then take enough to kill yourself.”
“You want me to die?” Bobby said slowly. “That’s what you’re tellin’ me you want?”
“You’re dead now, Roberto,” Beatrice said. “You walk and talk, eat and drink, but inside you’re dead. So, make it simple. For everybody. Stop what you’re doing or let me have a grave to pray over.”
The dealer came up out of the shadows to stand by Bobby’s left, a long, dark raincoat buttoned to his neck. The thin brim of a gray fedora shielded his eyes and hid his face; his hands were covered by thick black gloves. He was in his mid-twenties, long blond hair rubber-banded into a ponytail.
“Hey, Ray,” Bobby said in a startled tone, standing when he saw the dealer. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
“You got my money?” Ray asked, his tired voice sprinkled with venom.
“This is my mom,” Bobby said, pointing down toward Beatrice, who stayed in her seat, staring at the dealer with contempt.
“I don’t give a fuck who she is,” Ray said. “You got my money?”
“Most of it,” Bobby said, looking over Ray’s shoulders, spotting the car waiting by a fire hydrant, smoke filtering out of the exhaust.
“I didn’t ask for
most
of it,” Ray said. “I want
all
of it.
Now.
”
“I brought five hundred,” Beatrice said to the dealer in the strongest voice she could muster. “It is all we have left.”
“You’re a thousand short,” Ray said.
“I’ll have the rest in about a week,” Bobby told him.
“How you gonna do that, High School?” Ray said. “Mama already gave you everything she’s got, and she’s all you know that’s got money.”
“It’s my problem,” Bobby said. “I’ll figure it out.”
Ray jumped off his stance and pounced on Bobby. His two gloved hands grabbed hold of the front of the zippered army jacket, lifting Bobby several inches off his feet.
“It ain’t just
your
problem,” Ray said. “It’s
my
problem now. And I gotta solve it.”
He let Bobby go, pushing him back toward his mother, who sat rigid in fear, her hands locked across her face. Ray walked past the boy, stopping in front of Beatrice. He crouched down, his eyes meeting hers, two hands on her knees, and smiled.
“You tellin’ the truth?” he asked her. “Five hundred’s all you got left?”
Beatrice nodded, too frightened to speak.
Ray took a hand off her knee and put it in his pocket. He leaned closer to Beatrice as the hand came out holding a black Indian-point switchblade. He pressed on a thin button at the bottom edge of the handle, releasing a seven-inch knife, sharp enough to cut through wood.
“I want all my money, Bobby,” Ray said, his eyes still on Beatrice, his face close enough for her to smell his drink-stained breath. “So I’m gonna ask you again. You got it for me?”
“Give me one more day.” Bobby moved two steps closer, trying not to sound as panicked as he felt. “I’ll get you the rest tomorrow. I swear it.”
“When tomorrow?” Ray ran the edge of the blade up the front of Beatrice’s coat.
“I’ll meet you here,” Bobby said. “Same time.”
“You think your little junkie’s tellin’ me the truth?” Ray asked Beatrice.
“My son is a junkie,” Beatrice said, putting a hand on Ray’s raincoat, bunching a small corner into a ball. “But you are much worse. You live off junkies. And that makes you nothing but an animal.”
“This is between us, Ray,” Bobby said. “Keep her out of this. Please.”
“You’re the one that brought her,” Ray said.
“Take your blood money.” Beatrice pulled out the envelope with the five hundred dollars from her coat pocket, then shoved it against Ray’s chest. “And go.”
Ray took the envelope with his free hand, stood up, put it in his pocket, and turned to look at Bobby.
“Forget the rest of the money,” Ray told him. “After tonight we’re even, you and me. You want any fresh shit, you hustle it someplace else. Anyplace but me. Deal?”
“Deal,” Bobby said, nodding his head. “Thanks, Ray. I appreciate it.”
Ray smiled at Bobby, turned back to Beatrice, grabbed her hair, and pulled it back with a hard snap, waiting until he saw her neckline under the glimmer of the overhead light.
He brought the blade down next to Beatrice’s throat, his eyes gleaming, a relaxed smile on his face. He ran the blade against her neck, one long cut from the edge of the left ear across to the bottom of her right jaw. He
watched the blood gush out in thick rolls and held on to her hair until he saw the life float from her body. He watched Beatrice slump down the side of the park bench.
Ray Monte cleaned the sides of the knife against his victim’s coat, snapped it closed, and walked off into the night.
“My pleasure,” Ray said to Bobby, leaving the young boy with his dying mother.
Bobby cradled Beatrice in his arms, letting her blood flow over him. He didn’t cry, didn’t speak, just held her close, head against her heart, rocking slowly back and forth. He hadn’t touched her in years and couldn’t remember the last time he told her he loved her. And yet he knew she would forgive him anything, even her own death.
He put his head down against the side of hers, his lips close to her ears and whispered the words to “
Partira
,” the Italian ballad she had sung him to sleep with when he was a little boy.
They stayed that way until the dawn broke and the police arrived.
• • •
B
OBBY
S
CARPONI BURIED
his drug habit alongside his mother. He stayed clear of the streets and worked hard in school. He fought off the nighttime urges when he hungered for a needle bubbling with heroin, for an escape from the life around him.
He lived with his father in a silent house. Albert Scarponi said good-bye to the only woman he ever loved, then turned his back on his only child. They shared a home but never spoke, the older man living quietly with his grief and anger, unable to forgive Bobby for leading his mother into the path of a dealer’s knife. Albert’s hatred was further fueled by his son’s refusal to identify his mother’s killer.
Ray Monte had walked free.
“Don’t get any ideas about doing this on your own, Bobby,” one of the detectives told him. “He’ll kill you just like he did your mom.”
“The dealer didn’t kill my wife,” Albert said, looking up at the detective. “He only held the knife. She was brought there by her son. Her own blood.”
“You get a change of heart,” the other detective told Bobby, placing a card in the napkin holder in the center of the table, “give us a call. Day or night.”
The two detectives left through the back door of the wood-shingled house, leaving Albert and Bobby Scarponi behind, alone in their two separate worlds.
• • •
F
ROM THEN ON
, Bobby Scarponi kept track of Ray Monte.
He would see him occasionally walking the streets of his Queens neighborhood, drinking coffee and pushing drugs, never far from a new car with a running engine. Bobby finished a two-year army tour while Ray sat out the calendar in a Comstock cell, doing three to five on an assault charge. They were discharged two weeks apart.
Ray Monte returned to the streets, ready to move back into the prime arena of the drug trade. He teamed up with an Irish crew working out of Forest Hills and set up shop on 168th Street in Jamaica, handling heroin and cocaine for the posses wresting control of the drug action from the old-time Italians. He took a cut from all the pot and illegal prescription sales generated in the area, and contracted out members of his outfit for hits on anyone who objected.