The following Thursday I’m standing with the family as the flag-draped coffin is about to be lowered into a hole overshadowed by the Long Island Expressway and a recycling plant. The last notes of “Taps” float by on the wind, mingling with the Doppler-shifting wee-oo-wee-oo of a passing police siren. Someone’s not at peace with the Lord out there.
A white-gloved finger presses the play button on a boom box, and the crash of angry Spanish ghetto rap rips the stillness to shreds. Freddie chose this music as his final shout-out to the world, and, if I know Freddie, as a final screw-you to all the white boys in his unit who would have gone with “Amazing Grace.” The honor guard salutes stiffly as cars roar by on the overpass.
I go up to the cops who brought Freddie’s uncle here, and ask them to take the guy’s handcuffs off for five minutes so he can hug his family. It takes a moment, but they do it for me.
“You on a case?” says Officer Sirota.
“Friend of the family.”
“Uh,” he grunts. “Say, you know what that’s about?”
There’s a group of mourners dancing around a grave across the street in Mount Zion Cemetery. I tell him it’s a splinter sect of Orthodox Jews who believe that their former leader, Rabbi Aaron Teitelboym, is the Messiah, so every year they gather at his grave on the anniversary of his death to celebrate his imminent resurrection.
“That so?” says Sirota. “How long’s he been dead?”
“Nine years.”
“Nine years? Man, it only took Jesus three days. So I guess that’s one up for our side.”
The lieutenant presents Freddie’s mom, Irene, with the purple heart and bronze star, and salutes her. She presses the medals to her chest, and hugs a color photo of her smiling boy, the sharp-eyed soldier who waved his comrades away from the roadside bomb that shattered his skull and left a smoking crater of that handsome young face. It was a closed casket service.
Too soon, they snap the cuffs back on Uncle Reynaldo and escort him to the squad car. I wait my turn as close relatives go up and hug my neighbor. She’s clutching Freddie’s brother Felipe, who’s already sprouting a teen mustache and getting pretty big for a twelve-year-old.
Felipe wrenches his arm away from her and seeks out the masculine ritual of swapping greetings with his cousin Ray Ray, who I once helped dodge a graffiti rap that could have gotten nasty if the cops had felt like pressing it. Just being caught with “graffiti instruments” is a Class B misdemeanor, and it doesn’t help that in order to get proper respect as a graffiti writer in the barrio, the supplies have to be stolen. Reparations were costly, but worth it, since that dark-skinned Dominican kid is now working on a twenty-one-game hitting streak carried over from his previous season at Newtown High School, and the rumor is that he’s being scouted by the Mets.
That night we climb up onto the roof so Felipe can look at the glittering crown of Shea Stadium on the horizon.
“Yo, Filomena,” he says. “I hear los Mets are gonna put their game on real thick this year.”
“They definitely have a shot at it.”
“Remember the subway series when that cabrón de Yanqui Clemens threw the broken bat at Piazza?”
“Sure.”
“Freddie got some tickets for me and Ray Ray. We was in the upper deck, the three of us doing mad daps all around.” He points at the bright lights as if the exact spot is marked for all time, which I suppose it is, in a way. I know what he’s thinking, but he says it anyway. “Some day Ray Ray gonna be playing center field out there.”
The next morning, I’m training my new part-time office assistant, a tanned and freckle-faced sophomore at Queens College named Cristina González. They’re putting her through the wringer at that school, making her take two semesters of Composition, which is encouraging since half the college kids I see lie to me on their resumés and think they can get away with writing crapola like, My mother’s a strong women and roll model for all American’s, which doesn’t look too good in a report.
The last applicant didn’t mention his credit card scam and drug convictions when I asked him if there was anything unusual in his past that I should know about. When I caught it on a routine background check, he said, “Hey, in my neighborhood, that’s nothing unusual.”
“You mean, I beat out a convicted felon for this job?” says Cristina. “Gee, thanks.”
It’s hard to find good help for $6.50 an hour, which is all I can afford to pay. But striking out on your own is risky at my age, and I wouldn’t even be able to pay that much if my former bosses at Davis & Brown Investigations didn’t toss a few heavy bones my way, continuing a long-standing American business practice of subcontracting out to cheap immigrant labor like me.
So I’m sitting in my eight-by-fourteen storefront office, directly beneath the flight path of every other jet approaching LaGuardia Airport, trying to debug the Hebrew font we installed for a case involving an Orthodox congregation in Kew Gardens Hills. The font’s right-to-left coding has defeated the security protocols and migrated to some of the neighboring programs, causing system commands to come up randomly in Hebrew.
Oy vey, couldn’t it have at least been Yiddish?
I look up as a man in a light gray business suit who I’ve been expecting knocks on the glass. I buzz the door open for the junior executive, who looks like he’s worried about contracting malaria through the soles of his wingtips from walking on these cracked sidewalks.
“Miss Buscarella?” he says.
“Close enough. It’s Buscarsela.”
He doesn’t seem to be listening as he sits in a chair that was once bright orange and hands me his card, which says his name is F. Scott Anderson, and his title is Assistant Director of Product Security for the Syndose Corporation.
“What can I do for you on this fine spring day, Mr. Anderson?”
He snaps open his briefcase and pulls out a plastic bottle of dandruff shampoo with a blue-green label you can find in any drugstore in the northeast.
“What’s wrong with this?” he says, holding up the bottle.
I check the label and tell him, “That used to be an eight-ounce size, and now you’re selling six and a half ounces for the same price.”
He doesn’t bite. He just places the plastic bottle on my desk and pulls a seemingly identical one out of his briefcase. “How about this one?”
I study it for a moment, and it’s obvious that the blue-green color isn’t as saturated as it should be, and the white lettering isn’t perfectly aligned with the other colors on the label.
“It’s counterfeit,” I announce.
Cristina butts in. “What kind of dumb-ass would counterfeit shampoo? Ain’t no money in that.”
I’m about to tell her to keep out of this, but Mr. Anderson beats me to it. He says, “Counterfeiting and product diversion cost my company several million dollars a year. The police just raided a store in Jackson Heights and seized 24,000 bottles of counterfeit shampoo. In one store. That’s a tremendous economic loss.”
“To say nothing of the babies who get sick from diluted baby formula,” I say.
He smiles. “Mr. Davis told me that if anyone could find an illicit manufacturing operation in Corona, you could.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. What makes you think Corona’s the place to start?”
“Because the store owner in Jackson Heights gave the police an important clue. He said one of the suspects had dark hair, a gang tattoo, and listened to Spanish music.”
I wait for more. Nothing doing.