Read Chasers Online

Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra

Chasers (3 page)

4

Stephanie Torres walked down the burnt-out hallway, the thick and familiar smell of burnt wood and rubber filling her nose and lungs as smoke smoldered off the walls. She moved with seasoned steps, her eyes scanning each crack in the wall, each hole in the floorboards, easing her way from one ruined apartment to the next. She was looking for the one piece of evidence that would allow her to label the fire, which only a few hours earlier was a cauldron that had taken a full New York fire battalion to combat, the work of an arsonist. It cost the lives of three civilians and put two veteran smoke-eaters in an ICU ward. She moved up the landing, stepping over a large, gaping hole and moving past the bodies of a half dozen rats smoldering in a corner. At the top of the steps, she bent down and ran her gloved fingers over a small mound of dust, picking out the burnt remains of a safety pin. She reached into the pocket of her fire coat, pulled out a small cellophane evidence bag, dropped it in, and sealed it shut. She stood up and walked deeper into the second-floor hallway.

She was an arson investigator assigned to the New York Police Department, working out of a set of precincts in the East Bronx. It was a neighborhood that she knew well, having grown up in a two-story house on Boyd Avenue, the only daughter of a Puerto Rican garage mechanic and a tough-willed mother one generation removed from the streets of San Juan. Back then, the neighborhood was a series of redbrick houses that served as first homes to a working-class enclave of Italian, Irish, and Hispanic immigrants, each of whom found a common ground in rearing children and vegetable gardens. Stephanie was at ease both at school, where she excelled in science and English lit, and on the street in front of her home, where she had mastered the intricate rules of bottle-cap baseball before she lost all her baby teeth. Her father, Hector, a proud and stubborn man and the first in his family to land a civil-service job with the Department of Sanitation, would sit behind the small white gate leading to the basement steps of the two-story house he owned, mortgage-free, and watch his little girl at play. He preferred to work the more demanding eight-to-four morning shift in order to be home to spend time with Stephanie. She was a frail girl, suited more to the leafy confines of suburban sprawl than to the daily give-and-take tumble of the Bronx streets, but he was also confident that what Stephanie lacked in brawn she more than made up for with grit and sheer force of will. Across many years of lazy spring and fall afternoons, Hector would sit in an old garden chair, a cup of iced tea resting next to the folded sports pages of the
New York Post,
and allow the gleeful sounds of laughing and shouting children to transport him back to the streets of his native land.

Those afternoons also transported him back to a life he missed and a woman he could never forget. Hector Torres first laid eyes on Maria Espinoza on a side street just off the crowded main drag in Old San Juan. He was a week shy of sixteen and she couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, but it took only a second for the full, blunt force of love to give them each a hard jolt. They married less than a year later and were bound for New York a month after the wedding, not in the pursuit of wealth and dreams but in search of a steady job and a good home and a good school for the daughter they would soon call their own.

Those early years in 1950s New York were not an easy time for a young and ambitious couple, the available jobs being menial and on the low end of the pay scale. But working-class dreams die a slow death and Hector and Maria struggled on, determined not to live their lives in a cold-water, third-story walk-up where the radiators stopped hissing heat at ten at night, causing the windows to crack by morning. In the summer, the unforgiving humidity of the stifling days and nights turned the rooms into saunas. Hector, who found work as a school custodian, a gas-station attendant, a member of a park cleanup crew, and a boiler duster, all of them off-the-book and temporary jobs with no upside, sought and found the mother lode of middle-class stability. A two-year stint in the military, followed by a civil-service exam, gave him safe passage to a new world, one filled with low-cost housing and better schools. This allowed them a final break from the shackles of cash-by-the-day employment and the fast-money lure of the dark side of the street.

Hector and Maria saved as much as they could from each paycheck, putting small chunks away for a down payment on a new home and for Stephanie’s school, the rest going to meet both the daily demands and the pleasures of their new world order. They took their first vacation—a four-day stay in Bermuda—with Christmas-bonus and tip money Hector earned hauling and tossing garbage from the high-end, door-manned buildings along Park and Madison Avenues. And he doted on Stephanie, as did his Maria, the husband and wife eager to shower the bright young girl with all of their love and attention.

There were weekly ice-skating lessons in the fall months for Stephanie, dance lessons in the spring, and piano lessons year-round. She acted in school productions, helped to organize the annual church canned-food giveaway, and, along with her mother, worked one weekend a month as a volunteer, bringing meals and other necessities to those in the neighborhood who were either too poor or too infirm to provide for themselves.

Their life was a dream that was never meant to end, but it did, on a late-summer morning with a hint of fall in the crisp air. It was September, 1970.

Maria Espinoza, her arms filled with grocery bags, stepped into the dank basement vestibule of her grandfather’s three-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on East 138th Street in the Bronx, the imposing shadows of the Cross Bronx Expressway noticeable in the distance. Grandpa Olmeda, eighty-four and still feisty, always refused any calls for him to move out of a building that had long ago dismissed any hopes of a return to glory days. Most of the other tenants had evacuated their apartments, goaded by a landlord desperate to sell to a consortium of city power brokers eager to put up a string of low-income houses on the street. On her last weekly visit, Grandpa Olmeda told Maria that the landlord had just left the apartment, having made what he had called his final offer. “The slick little bastard thinks he can get me out of my home with a check,” Olmeda said, his words, as always, coming in a great rush just before a coughing fit, his decades-long bout with damaged lungs now entering its final rounds. “I chased his ass fast out the door. And, if I were a few years younger, would have kicked it out to boot.”

“How much was the check for, Papi?” Maria asked. She never lost the warmth of her disposition, no matter how frustrating it was for her to see anyone suffer—especially the elderly man to whom she owed so much of the good in her early life.

“Does it make a nickel’s worth of difference?” he asked. “Dirty money never turns clean, I don’t care in whose hands it goes.”

“Maybe you should move out,” Maria told him. “All your friends are gone to live with family or are in better neighborhoods. No reason you couldn’t do the same. It doesn’t matter if you take the landlord’s check or not, even though, whatever the amount, it would help with your move. Then you could come and live with us. We have plenty of room. Hector is the one who always brings it up to me, and Stephanie would be so happy to have her papi there for her every day.”

“This is my home, Maria,” Olmeda said, fighting back another urge to cough. “It was my home when I was young and had a family, and it will stay my home for as long as the good Lord wants me to keep taking a breath. And the house you and Hector and Steph have, that is your home. That is as it should be. The bastards want me out, they have to learn patience. Once I’m dead, and they carry my body out that front door, they can do whatever the hell they want. But not one second before that day.”

Maria rested the grocery bags by her feet and searched her open purse for the key to the front door. She closed her eyes for a brief moment. The bus ride down from her home in the Wakefield section had taken longer than usual, the driver forced to make his way around a number of main streets under fresh repair; Con Ed and construction crews were hard at work coiling wires and cracking pavement. She had nodded off halfway through the stop-and-go twenty-minute ride as the bus snaked its way through the Bronx streets, crammed with the old and the weary, who were so content to reach their eventual destination in due time. Maria was wearing a blue jean jacket over a floral print dress. The dress was a two-year-old birthday gift from her grandfather, and she knew that wearing it was one of the few things she could do that would bring a smile to his face.

She got off two stops before her grandfather’s building, under the El and across from the Met supermarket. She walked into the poorly stocked store, moving up and down the disheveled aisles, filling her cart with her grandfather’s weekly list. It had taken three full months of pleading before he finally relented and allowed her to shop for his groceries. “You want the damn job so bad, it’s yours to take,” he told her, surrendering one more vestige of his freedom to the insatiable demands of old age. “But you come back in here with one thing that isn’t right, just one is all, and I pull the job right out from under you.”

He wasn’t angry at her—never was, truth be told. He had simply turned sour on the life he was now locked into, knowing that death was his only escape route. His days and nights had evolved into routines chiseled in stone, always accompanied by the sounds of an old television blaring too loudly in the background. He fed the cat—an overweight and elderly animal he had named Roberto in honor of his favorite baseball player, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates—and put on the morning coffee. He read a few select passages from the tattered pages of a Bible that had been in the family for two generations and then moved on to the few domestic chores he was still capable of completing. Summer afternoons and evenings were spent next to his old Philips radio, tuned in to either a Yankees or Mets game, eagerly rooting both teams home to victory. In winter, he followed the same pattern, listening to the Knicks, the Jets, and the Giants. He never watched any of the games on his eighteen-inch television. “If I can’t go to the games and see them with my own eyes,” he once said to Hector, “then I’m a lot happier and better off seeing them play out in my head. Makes me feel like I used to feel when I took the train to the stadium or the Garden and watched them up close. Besides, you listen to those TV voices for too long, you’re close to ready to reach for a knife and shove an end to your day. I tell you the Lord’s truth, no lie, but they can be an annoying group of bastards.”

Maria slid the key into the lock and turned it to the right, listening for the click of the deadbolt shifting loose. She turned the rust-stained doorknob and eased the thick and dented wood door open. A heavy odor of gas filtered through the foyer, causing her eyes to burn. She stepped deeper into the apartment, shades and curtains drawn tight, leaving the two grocery bags in the outside vestibule. “Grandpa,” she said, her lungs aching from the smell. “Grandpa, are you in here?”

The walls on both sides were covered with family photos and framed childhood drawings. The furniture that filled each room was as familiar to her as the lyrics of an old song. It was as if she had entered a time capsule, one that transported her back to the night before her twelfth birthday, when she was allowed to stay up until the midnight hour, baking cake and cookies in the kitchen with her Grandma Elena. The same night she caught a peek at her new bike, red with a white basket and a blue bell, hidden in the hall closet, just off the living room. Maria would never forget that night and that very special birthday, and she always looked forward to a time when she could do something that would be as memorable for her own child.

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