Outrage

6

The sky was starting to lighten in the east when the young woman climbed the stairs out of the subway station at 167th and River Avenue. She’d just completed an eight-hour shift at the Old Night Diner in Manhattan and all she wanted was a hot shower and to crawl into bed. But with a groan she thought about the hours she’d first have to spend studying the schoolbooks she was lugging in the satchel over her shoulder.

It was Sunday morning and traffic was light on 167th as she started to walk west past Mullayly Park. She kept an eye on the shadowy environs of the park. The police had still not caught whoever murdered the woman she’d read about in the newspapers. The sidewalks were nearly deserted, too, and she was glad that it was getting light enough to see and be seen by the few pedestrians who were out and about. It made her feel safer.

Then out of her peripheral vision, she saw a man in a hooded sweatshirt. He had been walking in the same direction as she was on the other side of the street but was now crossing at an angle and speeding up to intercept her.

The woman, Marianne Tate, increased her pace. But so did the man. His face was shadowed by the hood, but he appeared to be a young Hispanic in need of a shave. She fought not to panic when he jogged the last few yards to catch up. “Your bag looks heavy,” he said with a slight accent. “We are walking in same direction, let me help you.”

“No, thank you,” Marianne said firmly, as she’d been taught in the women’s self-defense class she’d taken at the YMCA. He was to the side and slightly behind her, and she avoided looking directly at him and kept her eyes straight ahead.

When he started to hurry to get in front of her, she walked even faster. “Leave me alone!” she shouted, hoping someone would hear or that her voice would deter him.

Instead, he grabbed her from behind; she felt the blade of a knife against her throat. “Don’t scream, sooka, or I’ll cut your fucking head off,” the man snarled. “Now you and I are going to get busy.”

The man started to drag her into the park. But at that moment, a man walking a small dog came around the corner from River Avenue. He saw what was happening and shouted, which caused his dog to start yapping excitedly.

Tate’s attacker hesitated and she felt the knife move away from her neck. Summoning her courage and recalling her martial arts instructor’s admonition to fight back “with anything you have,” she stomped on the man’s instep and heard him cry out in pain. She then twisted slightly and threw an elbow behind her as she’d been trained, and was surprised when it made solid contact with the side of the man’s face.

His grip loosened and she dropped to the ground, where she scrambled away on her hands and knees. She heard her attacker run off and started to cry as she looked up into the worried face of her rescuer, whose dog danced around barking.

“Are you all right, lady?” the man asked, helping her to her feet. “Shut up, Roscoe. Sorry about him, he gets a bit wound up.”

“I think so,” she said. “And that’s okay, Roscoe was a big help. Thank you, thank you so much.” She wobbled and pointed to a bench. “Maybe I should sit down for a minute.”

“Yeah, yeah, you do that,” the man said. He pulled out his cell phone. “Dialing nine-one-one. Maybe if the cops aren’t snoozing in their patrol cars somewhere, they can still catch this creep. I couldn’t see him very well myself. Did you get a good look at him?”

“Not really,” Tate replied to the same question from the detective a half hour later, sitting at his desk in the detective squad room at the Forty-eighth Precinct house. “I mostly saw him out of the corner of my eye and he had the hood pulled up on his sweatshirt. I know he had black hair and might have been Hispanic, maybe Puerto Rican or Mexican, but not too dark skinned.”

“About how tall?” Detective Phil Brock asked, his pen hovering above his notepad. He didn’t hold out much hope that they’d catch the guy. Muggers were a dime a dozen, and for all he knew, this one was probably holed up in whatever rat’s nest he called home or accosting tourists in Battery Park.

However, the brass was all over violent attacks on women because of the Atkins murder. There’d been insinuations from some media outlets that the NYPD, in particular the detectives working out of the Forty-eighth’s detective squad, had messed up because the murder happened during the day and the killer had gotten away clean. The case had received a lot of press-particularly from one Ariadne Stupenagel, who’d been nosing around through unsolved murders in the five boroughs and was apparently using Atkins as her story’s centerpiece.

Brock thought the attacks were unfair. Actually, violent crime had dropped significantly over the past two decades in the Forty-eighth, an area of the Bronx described as “economically disadvantaged” and filled with a lot of low-income residents.

Rapes tended to fluctuate year by year, averaging three to four dozen. But robberies, which had numbered a thousand or more per year in the early nineties, were now a third of that. There’d been 137 murders in 1990, which dropped to a couple dozen ten years later and had been holding steady at less than a dozen for the past couple of years, and detectives like Brock were beating the national average at making arrests.

Still, the press barked and the brass sat up and listened. They wanted the Atkins killer and they wanted him bad. “Before he kills somebody else,” the captain in charge of the detective squad said. “Or life around here is really going to get miserable.”

So Brock and the other detectives were putting a little more into anything that sounded like a possibility. And this guy had attacked Tate during the day, even if it was a little early; he also used a knife and wasn’t just trying to rob her. The problem was Brock had no idea what he was looking for; no one had seen a suspect in the Atkins case.

Tate shrugged. “He was behind me, but I’d say a little taller than me, and I’m five-seven.”

“What color was his sweatshirt?”

“Gray. A light gray.”

“What about pants?”

“Jeans. I didn’t really look at him. I was trying to keep my eyes to myself.”

“I understand,” Brock said. “But sometimes you never know what question will stimulate a memory. Was there anything unusual about him? A scar you might have noticed? Maybe a tattoo on one of his hands?”

Tate shook her head. “I didn’t see anything like that… He had bad breath.”

Brock laughed. “Don’t they all? Dental hygiene is not a priority with most of the bad guys I meet. What was his voice like? Gruff? High-pitched?”

“He had an accent.”

“Any particular kind of accent? Hispanic?”

“Yeah.” Tate thought about it for a moment then added, “I think so. Or maybe something else. I’m not sure.”

“No problem, you’re doing real good,” Brock said. “So he grabs you and says something. What was it again?”

“He said that if I screamed he was going to cut my head off,” Tate replied. “And he called me a name. Something like ‘sucka’ or ‘sooka.’ Then he said we were going to ‘get busy,’ which I guess meant he was going to rape me.”

“Then Mr. Tierney shows up and yells. You fight with the guy and you think you got him pretty good?”

Tate nodded and demonstrated how she’d struck her attacker with her elbow. “I know I hit him hard because I heard him give like a little grunt and he sort of let me go. That’s when I got away.”

Brock made a note and smiled. “Good for you. I hope you cracked his friggin’ skull, pardon my French.” He closed his notepad. “I think that’s all the questions I have for now. I have your number, and we’ll call if we need you.”

The two stood up and shook hands. “So what happens now?” Tate asked.

“Well, I’m going to get an officer to drive you home,” Brock said. “And while he’s doing that, I’m going to have dispatch put out a BOLO-that stands for ‘be on the lookout’-for someone who looks like your guy. Dark hair, dark eyes. Maybe Hispanic. Five-nine or so. Slight build. Wearing a light gray sweatshirt and jeans. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the patrols will see him.”

“I’m easy, easy, easy like Sunday morning. I can kick a stupid nervous joint when I’m yawning.” Felix Acevedo practically skipped down Anderson Avenue on his way to Mullayly Park while reciting the lyrics to Common’s “Take It EZ.”

As far as he was concerned, the previous night at the Hip-Hop Nightclub couldn’t have gone better. Even his run-in with Maria Elena’s boyfriend- former boyfriend, he thought-had been a blessing in disguise after Alejandro Garcia stepped in and then the girl had said she thought he was sexy.

When she said that he’d panicked and taken off for the men’s restroom. He sat in one of the stalls to pull himself together and considered whether she was hinting that he should ask her out. But where would he take her? He didn’t have much money. Then he thought about asking her to go for a walk and he’d give her the ring. But after some more thought he’d decided to talk it over first with Alejandro.

“A diamond ring?” Garcia asked when Felix told him hours later. “Where’d you get it?”

“I bought it,” Felix had replied, fishing it out of his wallet and handing it over to his friend.

“Bought it, huh?” Garcia said, holding it up so that he could read the inscription. “It says ‘Always,’ but someone filed another word off of it. Who’d you buy it from?”

“A guy I know from Mullayly Park,” Felix replied. “His name is Al Guerrero. He’s a friend and sold it to me for twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents. It used to say ‘Always, Al.’ But he broke up with his girlfriend and she gave it back. I filed the ‘Al’ off.”

“Yeah, I see that, homes,” Garcia said. “But you know it’s probably hot, Felix. Stolen. You shouldn’t be buying diamond rings from guys on the street.”

Felix looked crestfallen. “I know,” he said. “I just get tired of being teased because I don’t have a girlfriend, and I thought maybe if I had a nice ring…”

Garcia put his arm around his shoulder. “It’s okay. You didn’t know. But next time, say no.”

“I will, Alejandro,” Felix replied, then he brightened. “Do you think I should give it to Maria Elena?”

Chuckling, Garcia shook his head. “No, I’d hold off on that for a bit. She just got out of a relationship, and it’s too soon. Especially for diamond rings. Maybe ask her to a movie or something first if you want.”

Felix considered the advice and then nodded. “You’re right. It’s too soon. I’ll wait until after our date to give it to her.”

Unfortunately, he never got the chance to ask Maria Elena out. He kept watching for the opportunity, but she seemed to have other people around her the rest of the night. And then Alejandro told him he was leaving and that if he wanted a ride home in the limousine, they had to go.

Wishing there were more of his neighbors out and about at two A.M. so they could have seen him, Felix had stepped out of the limo feeling important for one of the few times he could remember in his life. The back window came down and Alejandro poked his head out. “If your dad gives you any more shit,” he said, “I want you to tell me. It’s not right he beats up you and your mom. Someday, somebody’s got to put a stop to it.”

Alejandro drove off and Felix crept into the family apartment. He paused at the door and was happy to hear his father snoring on the couch. Once the old man passed out, the fire alarm in the hallway, even if it had been in working order, wouldn’t have awakened him.

In the morning, Felix got up early, pulled his light-blue Georgetown Hoyas sweatshirt over the T-shirt he’d worn the night before, and left the apartment. He wanted to miss his father’s foul mood when he woke up hungover. Standing on the sidewalk for a moment, he decided to head to the park even though none of his crowd would be there yet. It would give him time on a park bench to rehash his recent victories so that he could tell the others, whose faces he pictured turning green with envy.

Lost in his daydream, Felix didn’t notice the police car that passed him going the other direction. The car slowed and then, with a sudden squealing of tires, pulled a U-turn to come alongside of him. He turned just as the officer on the passenger side jumped out with his hand on the butt of his gun. “Hold it right there, I want to talk to you!”

Felix panicked. If he got in trouble with the police, his dad would beat the hell out of him. He turned and started to run but tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and fell to the ground. His glasses skittered away.

A moment later, the officer was on top of him, wrenching his arms behind him. “You’re under arrest, asshole,” the officer snarled.

Screaming in pain, Felix at first couldn’t think why the police officer was attacking him. Then he knew. “The ring! The ring is in my wallet,” he cried out.

“What ring?” the officer demanded.

“The stolen ring! It’s in my wallet!”

“Thanks for the tip,” the officer said. “Now, pay attention, ’cause I’m going to read you your rights, and then my partner and I are going to haul your ass down to the Forty-eighth.”