Condemned (21 page)

“Hey, hey, officer lady, who's that?” said a man from another doorway to a short female police officer who was speaking into a hand-held radio. The police officer's belt bristled with new and shiny equipment: flashlight, baton, memo book, cuff caddie, cartridge clip holders.

“Move it,” a police sergeant, seated in the passenger seat of an RMP (Radio Motor Patrol) car barked toward the doorway. The female officer with the radio slid into the driver's seat of the RMP.

“What did I do? I only asked girlie a question.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” the Sergeant snapped, his lips thin and angry, as he began to open the door of his RMP.

“I'm outta here,” said the man, scurrying into the darkness. The Sergeant's face soured with disgust. He said something to the female driver, as his eyes turned toward the flare of lights from a camera crew standing a few yards closer to Avenue C.

John Deutzman, from Channel 5 News, bathed in the flood lights, spoke into a hand held microphone. “The quick brown fox, etc. etc. Do you have a level yet, Mort?” he said to his cameraman.

“It's okay, sweetheart,” said the cameraman.

“
The scene here is grim
,” Deutzman said into his microphone. A little red light above the camera lens was flashing.
“The all too familiar and horrifying story of a little girl, a baby really, Desdemona Rouse, three years old, burned, tortured, raped, and dead. The child's mother, Hettie Rouse, known in the run down confines of this neighborhood as Li'l Bit, along with her male companion, Ruben Alvarado, are being held for murder in the second degree. They are part of the other all too familiar scene in this neighborhood—the drug scene. The mother and her boyfriend are both reported by the authorities to be drug addicts. Last night, the child's screams, which were routinely ignored in the building across the street from where I'm standing, became unbearable, and someone finally called the police. When they arrived, the police found little Desdie, lifeless, burned with cigarettes, raped …”

“Here she is, here she is,” called a voice from beside the camera. In mid-sentence, the reporter, the camera and the lights quickly turned toward a cordon of policemen, now surrounding Li'l Bit, as she was moved from the tenement toward a patrol car.

“Hold it, hold it,” called someone from another camera crew.

“Come on, give us a break. Hold it,” pleaded someone from yet another crew.

A policeman put his hand on Hettie's head to guide it under the door-frame as she was placed into the backseat of the RMP. The lights of several camera crews flared against the closed windows, lighting the interior of the patrol car to a searing white.

“Hettie, Hettie,” a reporter called to the closed windows. “Anything to say to Channel 7?”

“What happened in there tonight, Li'l Bit?”

“How long was she dead, Hettie?”

“We have reports you held Desdie while Ruben raped her. Is that true?” another voice called.

“You did it for a fix?” added another voice. “Is that true?”

Inside the vehicle, Hettie Rouse, in her dirty tee-shirt stared straight ahead, never turning, not even blinking at the clamor outside the police car.

“Not ten fucking cents of emotion,” growled one of the policemen on the sidewalk, glaring into the vehicle.

The RMP's siren began to wail as the vehicle moved slowly forward through the crowd.

Another figure, bent forward from the waist, apparently a man with a windbreaker pulled up over his head, now emerged, being dragged, half-carried, by two policemen from the same tenement building. Skinny arms stuck out of a soiled tee-shirt beneath the windbreaker. The figure wore no shoes.

The voices of the media rose to a crescendo, shouting requests and questions at the draped figure in the clutch of officers.

The police quickly placed the individual now identified unofficially as Ruben Alvarado into the back of a patrol car. Immediately, the siren of the second RMP began to wail, the RMP pushing forward through the pack of gathered reporters and cameras. The RMP reached the Avenue, turned, and disappeared into the enveloping darkness.

The din that had colored and bounced from the faces of the brick tenements began to diminish as emergency vehicles left the scene, one by one. The buzz of voices soon disappeared altogether, and dark figures stole back into the dark doorways of the night.

Woolworth Tower : June 19, 1996 : 8:25 A.M.

Sandro's offices were near the top of the Woolworth Building. Though far smaller than today's behemoths, from 1913 to 1930, the Woolworth Building was the tallest man made wonder of the world. At the level of Sandro's offices, encircling the four sides of the tower, was a balcony from which a kaleidoscopic quilt of the City stretched to the horizon: tall buildings rising from a background of surrounding, low, red brick patches; industrial complexes wafting smoke from tall, needle-thin smoke stacks; expressways on which steady ribbons of cars and trucks, their windshields reflecting the morning sun, twisted across the surface; massive suspension bridges in the distance spanning shimmering rivers; herringbone patterns behind tugboats pulling barges, their prows billowing sparkling water in the rivers; the unused parachute jump, like a miniature Eiffel Tower, at the far edge of the sea in Coney Island.

Sandro stood in a glass-enclosed area of the balcony, directly outside his personal office. Rattan couches and light-colored, flower upholstered chairs interspersed between small palm trees and tropical plants, gave the enclosed area an island-like atmosphere. Against one wall stood a rattan bar with palm leaf roof, stocked with bottles of liquor, a running water tap, and an ice maker. From the edge of the bar, drinking orange juice, Sandro watched a tug, pushing through water that danced exuberandy ahead of it, speed on the tide toward Manhattan.

Farther out, the Statue of Liberty held aloft her gilded torch, resolute and determined to outlast the sparkling sun that shone through a cloudless azure morning. At night, the City was thousands—tens of thousands—of street lights, headlights, lit office windows shining into the dark, punctuated by strobe flashes from helicopters coursing over the rivers. Through it all, Liberty knew, in the mantle of night, she would again reign supreme over the most splendid city in the world.

Sandro had arrived at the office at seven-thirty this morning. He hadn't had a very restful night; his mind was roiled by thoughts of Judge Ellis, his lost holiday week-end, Red Hardie and his case, someone following Joe Galiber around last night, and drilling one of the tail lamps of the Senator's beautiful Cadillac.

At ten minutes to nine, Connie, Sandro's secretary, arrived. “Good morning,” she said, coming to his door. “Sorry about your vacation.”

Sandro shrugged.

“You know there's a couple out in the waiting area?”

“No. Who are they?”

“A Spanish man and woman. Their name is Quesada, something like that. The husband said they were referred by a friend. The police found a large sum of money in their closet last night, in a valise—God forbid such a thing should happen to me.”

“Bring them in,” said Sandro, putting on his jacket and walking behind his desk. Some of his fellow criminal lawyers would handle theft, assault, robbery, even homicide, but drew some intellectual line at drug-related cases or cash seizures resulting from drugs. Sandro was still looking for the section in the Constitution which provided fair trial for some crimes, but not for others.

Connie led in a neatly dressed, short woman, with dark hair. The man was also short, with slicked, dark hair. The man sat in the wing chair across from Sandro's desk; the woman on the couch.

“What's the difficulty?” Sandro knew that people didn't come to his office for sociability or bearing good news.

“The police came to my house, yesterday, in the early evening,” said the man. He spoke English fairly well, although with a distinct Spanish accent. “We were all home—me, my wife and two kids. They said they had a pizza. Then, when my wife opened the door to tell them we didn't order pizza, they pushed in. They said they wanted to look around. If I refused, they said they'd go to a judge and get a paper.”

“Were they in uniform?”

“They had badges and jackets with big yellow letters—D.E.A.”

“You submitted to their authority?”

The man shrugged. “I don't know—my wife opened the door. They pushed in. They took a Yankee duffle bag from my closet. They said it was filled with money.”

“Was it?” said Sandro.

“Sure.”

“How much was in there?”

“Two-million-four-hundred,” said the man.

“Any drugs, guns, anything like that?”

“No! We have nothing to do with drugs.”

Sandro nodded. “Did they give you a receipt?”

“They give me something.” He turned to his wife. She opened her purse, rummaged around, shrugged, and said something in Spanish. “We must have left it home. I told my wife to take it.”

“That's all right. Next time. Was anyone arrested?” said Sandro.

“They took me down to the—to their office. They took my picture and fingers, you know? They kept the Yankee bag with the money. Can they come into my house, just like that? Go through everything, all the closets?”

“They can't, unless they have a warrant. Did they show you a warrant, a piece of paper saying that a Judge gave them permission to come into your house?”

He shook his head. “They said they would get one, that they'd wait a few hours in my house. I didn't want them in my house. My kids were crying.”

“They'll say you consented.”

“They come in just like that—” he made a pushing motion, “—right into the apartment. They knew just what they was looking for.”

“Who recommended you to me?”

“Adalberto, The Whale.”

“From Cali?” asked Sandro.

The man nodded. “I called him from the phone booth on the corner. He said we should come to you.”

“I'll need that piece of paper the police gave you, so that you can claim the money back.”

“How can I claim that money? I told them we don't know nothing about the money, that some guy in a bar asked me to take some money, said he'd give me something. How come they come to my apartment looking for money?”

“An
informante
, somebody who gave them information,” said Sandro.

“That must be so. I'm sure they don't just go to every door, searching every apartment, do they?”

“No. Someone gave the police information. They just want to seize the money. Sometimes I can get a portion of the money back, because the police, if you bring a claim for the money they seize, prefer to give some of it back, rather than give the name of the
informante
.”

“I hope so. They, them, you know, the ones in Cali, they know my family and everything. We are responsible for the money until it is paid back. It is a very dangerous thing for us, for my family, now. Do
I
have to bring the claim?”

“You were the one the money was taken from. So you have to be the one to make the claim.”

The man explained to his wife in Spanish what Sandro said. She looked worried, and said something to him. “We have no green cards, we're illegal,” he said. “Does that make a problem?”

Sandro shook his head. “Not really.” He looked at the small clock by the window. He had to be in court with Judge Ellis soon. “I should be able to do something for you. But I can't do anything without the piece of paper they gave you. When can you bring it to me?”

“I have to go to work. I work in a kitchen in a restaurant, uptown. Can I bring it tomorrow before I go to work. Is that soon enough?”

“Fine.” Sandro rose and reached out to shake the man's hand, then his wife's. Spanish women are unaccustomed to shaking a man's hand, and their fingers are always limp, lifeless. Glancing out the window, Sandro could see a ferry in the river, approaching from Staten Island, bringing commuters to work. Working stiffs, going to make four or five hundred for the week's work, twenty-five thousand for the year. If they ever saw two million in cash, in one place, they'd faint.

As Sandro stepped out of the elevator into the lobby of the building he saw Stan Jones, a reporter from the New York Post, leaning against a wall. He was looking upward, studying the mosaics on the vaulted ceiling of the lobby. Jones was young, clean-cut, and wore a little gold ball earring in his left ear.

“You on the architectural beat these days?” Sandro asked.

“Just waiting for you, brother. The courthouse is crawling with media people waiting for you. I figured I could catch you over here and walk you to the gallows.”

“My pleasure—the walk, that is.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” He followed Sandro through the revolving door that emptied onto Broadway. ‘You going to get sucked back into Hardie's case?”

“I hope not. That doesn't mean I won't.” They crossed Broadway and began through City Hall Park.

“Can I get an interview with Hardie? You can approve the questions in advance.”

“I won't let him talk about the case.”

“I'm thinking I could do a feature about his elegant life-style—travel, cars, yachts, island resorts, women. The public will eat that stuff right up.”

“Now that you mention it, the answer is no!” said Sandro “You'd be confirming the case the Government is pitching to the jury—right out of Hardie's own mouth.”Jones was disappointed. “But I've got a different terrific story for you about big dough, if you want it.” Sandro and Jones walked behind City Hall toward the Municipal Building. “You want a different terrific story?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“A Spanish couple just came to see me. They had two million dollars seized from their apartment yesterday, probably by the D.E.A.”