TWENTY-THREE

The address was on Havemeyer Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Before evolving into hipster central, Williamsburg had once been a German, Italian, and Jewish immigrant stronghold. By the late sixties and early seventies, White Flight had emptied the neighborhood of its more traditional residents and that void was filled by the oddest of ethnic odd couples: Puerto Ricans and Hasidic Jews. Even as the area was transforming into its present incarnation as hipster heaven, the Puerto Ricans and Hasidim stayed on, if in somewhat smaller numbers than during the last two decades before the new millennium.

The uneasiness hit me before I got to Jorge Delgado’s street. I’m not sure why that was. Probably had to do with the dubious pleasure of starting my morning rounds with Mrs. Anthony Marinello and Patrick Scanlon, but maybe not. My unease intensified as I pulled into the spot across from Delgado’s address and it grew stronger still as I got out of my car. It was, I thought, an omen. I’m not one for omens except when I am. I mean, you don’t believe in God, it’s tough to believe in omens. Fuck that! Logical consistency only counts if you care about what other people think and my oncologist had given me license not to care.

Although his hate mail to Alta and Maya was just as scathing and cruel as the others, Jorge Delgado was a distinct creature, unlike Marinello, Scanlon, and the other douche bags on my list. He had been part of the FDNY for nearly twenty years. Delgado was highly decorated and very well-respected, if not exactly beloved. His fury at Alta and Maya—Alta in particular—came from a different place than almost all of the other hate-mailers. Not only was he good at his job, but his was a strong minority voice in the union and Delgado was a leading member of a Puerto Rican fraternal organization. He had fought long hard struggles for equality and fair representation of women and minorities on the job. Although he did, apparently, sometimes let his temper get the better of him. There were reports of the occasional shoving match and shout-down with fellow firefighters who stood on the opposite side of the issues.

Entering the building, I held the front door open for a big guy on the way out. It didn’t hit me immediately, but the man who nodded his appreciation as he passed was wearing a blue FDNY T-shirt.

After 9/11, half the men in New York City were wearing T-shirts just like his. They’d been sold to raise money for the families of the dead. I had a few myself. Those shirts, like my old PI license, hadn’t seen much action in the last several years and had been consigned to the bottom of a drawer somewhere. The man who walked by me was black, which didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t Puerto Rican, but he was about ten years too young to have been Delgado.

“Excuse me,” I called to him.

He stopped and about-faced. “What’s up?”

“The Delgados?” I asked, hoping the question in my voice would suffice.

He nodded, his rugged face drooping in sadness. “You here to pay respects too, huh?”

“No, I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard, but I’m glad I ran into you,” I said, furiously working out my cover story in my head. “I had an appointment with Jorge to discuss retirement investments. God, it would have been awful to walk in on his grieving family. What happened?”

“Traffic accident about three weeks ago. Georgie was walking to his car after a shift and this little girl was crossing the street. He saw a car blowing through a stop sign, so Georgie ran for the kid. Knocked her out of the way, but he took it full on. Wound up nearly a hundred feet away. He was totally fucked. Brain dead. The family finally gave up and pulled the plug a few days ago.”

“Christ! That was him?” I said, pretending to have known about the accident. Since my family tragedy in 2000 and 9/11 the following year, I’d stopped reading the papers or listening to the news. Reading the paper had once been a part of my everyday routine and one of the great pleasures in my life. Not anymore.

“Yeah, that was Georgie: the bravest of the brave.”

I lied. “The first time I spoke to him, he was still pretty upset over those two EMTs who stood by and let that man in the restaurant die. He sounded really angry.”

“That shit drove Georgie nuts. Said they had set back the cause by twenty years. Man, I tell you what, there was times I thought he was mad enough to kill those EMTs if he got the chance. I’ve seen him pretty crazy mad, but never mad like he was ’bout those two. He only just stopped talking about it.”

“You can’t be serious, not about him hurting those women. He seemed like such a nice man.”

“True that. He was a great guy, a brother. Kept my ass alive more times than I’d like to say, but Georgie had a temper on him, a bad temper. It was his Achilles heel. You know what I’m saying? When the man got a bug up his bee-hind about something, it was hard to calm him down. Don’t matter much now, does it?”

“I guess not,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I do work with some other firefighters. One of them told me that EMT that got murdered was … that she was a … you know …”

“Gay?”

“I guess that’s the better way to say it.”

The man’s previously sad and caring expression turned suddenly cold. “So what if she was? She fucked up, but even that don’t mean she should’ve been cut up like that.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

“Forget it.”

He turned and walked to his Honda Accord parked down the street. I watched him drive away. It’s an amazing thing, what people will tell absolute strangers. They’ll tell you things they wouldn’t tell their best friends or their priests. Investigators count on that impulse. I was kind of disappointed that I’d upset him because he was clearly grieving for Delgado, but one of the things about doing PI work is that you’re never going to win any popularity contests. Whether you tell the truth or lie through your teeth, you’re not usually saying things people want to hear. I thought about finding Delgado’s apartment, but decided there were some situations that were off limits no matter how just your cause. I wasn’t going to intrude on the Delgados’ grief. What I needed to know, they probably couldn’t tell me. Even if they could, I wasn’t going to ask, not today.

I’d never met Jorge Delgado. I’d never even seen a picture of him. To me he was a man who wrote a threatening email and, until I knew more, simply the sum of the parts of a limited background check and the brief testimonial of a grieving firefighter. Still, I could not ignore the feeling in my belly. Hunches worked both ways and I had to trust them equally. If I had been willing to believe that a complete scumbag like Patrick Scanlon was telling me the truth based solely on my sense of him, then I had to believe the gnawing in my gut about Jorge Delgado. I wasn’t prepared to be judge, jury, and executioner—I was already too late for that last part—but I couldn’t deny that bells had gone off in my head during my conversation with the firefighter with whom I’d just crossed paths.

Back in the front seat of my car, I called Brian Doyle. He answered on the second ring.

“Yeah, Boss, what’s goin’ on?”

“I sent your check yesterday as soon as I got the package.”

“Thanks, but that’s not why you called, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Then why?”

“Jorge Delgado. He’s one of the firefighters you guys did a preliminary background check on. I want you—”

“Delgado,” he interrupted. “Why does that name sound—”

“—familiar? He’s that hero fireman that got killed saving a little girl’s life,” I said, suddenly an expert on the subject.

“Right. Right! What about him?”

“I need you and Devo to do the full Monty on him. The works.”

“He’s dead, Boss.”

“You have a flare for the self-evident, Brian. Anybody ever tell you that?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “Yes, he’s dead. Doesn’t matter. Do what you have to as soon as you can.”

“Even if it means rubbing some people the wrong way?”

“Especially that. And I know it’s gonna cost me, but I can’t take it with me, can I?”

I could hear him thinking of how to respond. Brian was a loud thinker at the best of times and this wasn’t one of those. Brian was a doer. I let him off the hook. “Look, forget I said that. Just do it. It’s important to me.”

“Sure thing, I’ll get somebody right—”

“Not somebody, Doyle. You. I want you for this, please.”

“You know, Boss, you’re more of a pain in my ass now than when you really were my boss, you know that?”

“Yeah, but the pay’s better.”

I left it at that and clicked off.

I sat and stared up at Delgado’s building. On the second floor, I saw a chubby-faced little girl staring blankly out her front window. She reminded me of another little girl I’d met once a long time ago. That little girl’s mom, a nickel and dime crack whore, had been beaten to death in a dreadful SRO hotel called the Mistral Arms. The last time I saw that girl, on the day her mom was murdered, she was sitting in a wobbly chair with a one-eyed cat in her lap. She fed him from a tin can. She had the same blank expression on her face as the girl across the way. Maybe I was reading too much into her expression, maybe that wasn’t Delgado’s daughter at all. Maybe, but I knew in my gut it was his kid.