Hack (27 page)

The next morning, after walking Skippy and eating breakfast, the self-inflicted torture continued. Right behind Pookie in the Netflix hit parade was
You’re Foreclosed
, with his royal highness Cash Cushing sitting, literally, on a golden throne and deciding which unfortunate family to throw into the street next. They all pleaded their cases to him, as he made snarky comments about how it was their own fault and they were greedy and got in over their heads. Listening to a slimeball who was born into millions brag about how he was a self-made man was sickening. Especially since—as I discovered from Wikipedia—Cash himself went bankrupt in the 1990s while operating the world’s tackiest casino in Atlantic City. He actually went broke in a business where morons bring you their money and throw it at you.

One woman with cancer, who had lost her job and her health insurance, pleaded with Cash to cut her monthly payment so she and her kids would not lose their home.

“It’s not your home,” Cash snapped. “It’s the bank’s home because you made the wrong decisions and now you want me to pay for them. This is the best thing that can happen to you. You’re foreclosed.”

When he said the catchphrase it was accompanied by a whooshing noise and “You’re Foreclosed” lettering on the screen, along with special theme music. The woman sobbed. The woman killed herself three days later, so her life insurance settlement would pay off the mortgage. On the next episode Cash praised her for finally making a sound business decision.

The answer to the question “Who would want to kill Nolan Cushing?” was simple. Everybody. Including me. But I still did not detect anything that would help solve his murder. The only direct link between Cushing and the
Mail
was the fact that Tal Edgar lived in one of Cash’s buildings.

That killed my second day of reality-show surfing. I decided I wasn’t getting paid enough.

I swore my third day would be my last.
Food Fight
was also getting serious play after the murders. It had begun airing the previous year and two seasons were available. Neil’s murder had interrupted the filming of the third. It was pretty tame in comparison with the other shows. Aubrey was a bloated bastard, who lived to trash restaurants and humiliate people. Neil was sly but actually sort of charming. Each show had Aubrey pigging out on an industrial scale, while playing the gourmet. He would cook, with Neil assisting. It was obvious that Neil hated Skippy, from the way he would insult him in a fake-sweet voice. During the first such instance, Skippy came running in from my bedroom and barked at the screen. He watched the rest of the episodes with me.

The basic script was that Aubrey would go to a restaurant and make nasty notes on a tape recorder, the prelude to a trashing in the
Tribune
. In one episode, Cash Cushing made a two-second appearance at a gala dinner attended by Aubrey and Neil but the two men just waved and smiled at one another. Interesting. I fast-forwarded through a lot of the footage, looking for Skippy coverage, since that was what the last argument between Neil and Aubrey had been about—Neil kicking Skippy. The show was very repetitive. Only the names of the restaurants and the menus changed. In the second season, it was much the same. The housekeeper, Adela, made an appearance. I remembered talking to her on the phone when I’d been checking up on Skippy. I had read her voice right. She
was
an elderly Hispanic lady. Her screen time was limited, probably because she kept looking at the camera. Once she appeared with a young teenage boy behind her, who was leading Skippy on a leash. I rewound and hit PLAY.

It was strange to see the kitchen before the murder. The boy was the dog walker and his name was Bobby. He was shy and nervous on camera. Neil came over to try to put him at ease but the boy seemed to have stage fright. Neil tousled the lad’s hair and Aubrey snapped at Neil. The boy left and Aubrey began to prepare a meal. I played the scene over. It was subtle but the kid shrank away from Neil’s touch. It seemed just a friendly gesture but there was something odd in the way the boy recoiled. Also in Aubrey’s overreaction. I watched it again, then fast-forwarded to find more footage of Bobby but he never reappeared.

I finished up the episodes and celebrated with a beer. I found one of my notebooks and called the number for the field producer of
Food Fight
. She did not remember the kid and tried to end the conversation.

“Doesn’t everybody have to sign release forms to be on a TV show?” I asked her.

She sighed. “Yes, that’s true. Hold on, I’ll look it up.” I heard the clicking of a computer keyboard. “He was only in that one episode, the dog walker, a minor, fourteen years old. We had to get his grandma to co-sign the release. She’s the housekeeper.
Was
.”

“Adela?”

“That’s right. Adela and Bobby Enriquez.”

She gave me an address on the Lower East Side, in an area called Alphabet City.

“What’s this about?” she asked, smelling a story.

“I’m talking to all the people on the show. I’m doing a book,” I lied.

“Cool. We should shoot you for the new season.”

“New season?” I asked. “I thought the show was over?”

“With these numbers? Are you kidding? It’s called
Food Fight III: The Investigation
. We have a detective, a psychic and a new chef, working together to solve the killings.”

I suppressed a laugh. I told her it sounded great and we would get together soon—another fib. I called the library at the
Daily Press
and asked them to check Bobby and Adela Enriquez for past clippings but they found nothing. I googled the names. I got a huge number of hits but they were common names and none seemed to be the people I was looking for. I was done with fake reality shows. I wanted to be done with the whole case, so I decided to run over to Alphabet City before heading back to Jane’s place. Talk about reality.

It was a rough neighborhood named for Avenues A, B, C and D that ran north and south. The address was on the second floor of a beat-up tenement on a run-down block. The peephole window wobbled a bit.

I knocked. I heard movement but the door didn’t open. “Mrs. Enriquez?” I asked in my best friendly voice. “Adela Enriquez? My name is Shepherd. Do you remember me? We spoke on the phone after Mr. Leonardi’s murder, about Skippy. I’ve been investigating the murder.”

The door opened a crack and her face appeared, barely, above the security chain. She looked tired.

“Can we talk?”

She shrugged, dropped the chain and let me in. The place was lemon-scented and immaculate, befitting her profession. Her purple sofa was glazed with plastic covers, under a large framed black velvet portrait of Jesus, his head shimmering with holiness, dripping crown of thorns in place. Her glass and brass coffee table had several greeting cards standing open on top. I tried to read them but they were in Spanish.

“Please sit down, officer. Can I make you some coffee?”

As I crinkled the plastic on the couch, I explained to her that I was a reporter, working with the police.

“Oh,” she said, probably reconsidering her coffee offer. “You’re the one who wrote those bad things about Mr. Aubrey?”

“I would say I wrote some bad, some good, just as he said it.”

“Is he back?” she asked, brightening.

“No. Not yet. Have you heard from him?” I asked. She shook her head sadly. “You don’t have a job right now, do you?”

“No. Mr. Neil is dead,” she said, crossing herself. And Mr. Aubrey is gone. Nothing for me to do. Unless he comes back.”

“Maybe your grandson Bobby has heard from Aubrey? Is he in school?”

She gaped at me for several seconds. Her sob was so explosive it scared the hell out of me. I jumped. She ran out of the room shrieking in Spanish. I stood up, unsure what to do. She was crying in the kitchen. I followed her and asked if I could help. She was blowing her nose.

“I’m sorry, sir… Bobby is in the hospital…”

“I’m so sorry. What happened? Is he sick?”

“Yes… My grandson is in God’s hands.” She blew her nose again.

I couldn’t get anything more out of her. I gave her my number and asked her to call if I could help. She said yes, she would, but I knew she would never call.

Outside, an old lady was sweeping the front steps. I told her I just heard about poor Bobby Enriquez. The woman also crossed herself. It seemed to be contagious. I asked what hospital he was in. I wanted to send flowers. She told me he was in Ward’s Island. The way she said it, it sounded like a death sentence. I asked when he was hospitalized and how he was doing. She shook her head like I was stupid and returned to her sweeping.

On the street, I got a listing and called the hospital, the Ward’s Island Rehabilitation Institute. I asked for Bobby Enriquez’s room.

“The patient does not have a phone, sir,” the operator told me.

“Really? Why not?”

“Sir, the patient is in the critical care unit.”

“You mean, like he’s in a coma or something?”

“I have no idea, sir, and we cannot discuss medical information over the phone. Are you a relative?”

“No, just a concerned friend, thanks.”

I hung up. I considered calling back and pretending to be a doctor but I didn’t know enough. I looked around the neighborhood. A bodega on the corner had three teens with droopy pants in front, drinking something out of paper bags and passing a joint around, like it was legal. Two had red t-shirts on and the third had a red bandana on his head. Gang colors? I went over.

“Afternoon, officer,” the one in the bandana giggled.

They were high. Or low.

“I’m not a cop,” I told them, perhaps unwisely. “I’m a reporter for the… for the
Daily Press
. You guys know Bobby Enriquez from the white building over there? He’s in the hospital.”

“An’ he ain’t comin’ out, meng,” Bandana said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Too much fun,” Bandana said. “Got run over by a Mexican brown bus. Dumbass shoulda known better.”

“An overdose?” I said, shocked, unable to connect the young, clean-cut kid from Netflix with heavy drugs.

“He and his
abuela
too good for everybody but not now. Bobby’s brains guaca-fucking-mole,” Bandana laughed, joined by his pals.

“Somebody do that to him?” I demanded. “Give him a hot shot?”

“He did it—who you think? One day he churchin’, then he wanna be outlaw. Not for long. Oh well.”

They giggled. I tried to get a time frame out of them, when he had overdosed—before or after Neil was parmesaned—but they were in a different time zone. I walked away.

Why would a nice kid like that go bad? Of course, I didn’t know he was a good kid. I just saw a few seconds of video. His grandmother wouldn’t talk about it because she was ashamed. Or maybe something else… I could ask Izzy to check it out but that meant they would question the grandmother and rake it all up again. No kid, no case. Oh well.

I went to visit Jane at work. She was busy, so I chatted up her assistant, Xana, at the front counter. Today, the message on the tight black t-shirt stretched over Xana’s chest was
SAVE A LIFE. ADOPT A HOMELESS PET
. I couldn’t tell if she had gotten new piercings or had just changed the jewelry in the holes. I wondered why such a pretty girl would go to such extremes to make herself look scary. I wondered why I was thinking like some old guy.

“Hey, it’s Neil Parmesan,” Xana giggled. “That headline still cracks me up. Still working on the Hacker case?”

“Yeah. Just following up a few things,” I said vaguely, hoping she would drop it.

“I wish I had an exciting job like you,” she gushed. “What’s it like to be shot?” Her pretty eyes were wide under stainless-steel eyebrow hoops.

“At first you only feel electricity, heat,” I told her. “Or nothing at all. Pretty quick, it hurts like a bastard. Your bones burn.”

“Cool. So, you’re, like, a detective, too. What’s it like, you know, investigating murders? Like CSI?”

“No. They would have found the killers by now. Sometimes it’s depressing,” I told her truthfully, hoping to turn her off. “Like today, I thought I had a hot lead and it turned out to be nothing—just a kid called Bobby who overdosed on drugs and may be in a coma.”

Xana’s smile vanished.

“Oh my God, I know,” Xana agreed. “Poor Bobby. It was so terrible when we heard. Such a sweet kid. I never thought he would get involved with dope.”

I was quiet for about a minute, as she rambled on about what a good kid he was—until I realized I was holding my breath.

“You knew Bobby?” I asked, desperately hoping I sounded casual.

“Sure. He worked here part time. He walked dogs, helped out. Sometimes went out with me in the Catmobile. Really nice boy. Jane really loved him, too. We all did. His grandma is just devastated. I mean, brain damage? Terrible. And on top of that, she has no job now because…”

“I know. I just spoke to her.”

A weird thing about people is if they think you know something they want to tell you all about it but if they think you don’t know, they won’t tell you. I calmly asked her about Bobby and let her talk, trying to steer the conversation around to Neil and Aubrey. She knew a little about Bobby but had only seen Neil and Aubrey a couple of times, when they brought Skippy in.

“Bobby also walked Mr. Cushing’s dog, ya know?”

“He had a dog?” I thought back to the Cushing crime scene, remembered photographs of Cash embracing a ball of golden fur. “Wait, a corgi, right?”

“Yup. Named Bubbles. Mr. Cushing had joint custody with his last wife. Lucky Bubbles was in his own room in the back when it happened. He’d have been traumatized.” She paused. “Funny how both of them got hacked—Mr. Leonardi and Cushing. ‘Cashes out’—that headline killed me. How do you think of them?”

“Reporters don’t do the headlines. Editors do that,” I explained. “So, Bobby also walked Cash Cushing’s dog, Bubbles? How did that work? Did he have a key and the alarm code for when no one was home?”

“Oh. What? Yeah, sure. Clients give Jane keys and codes if we need them. Why?”

“No reason. Do you remember if Bobby overdosed before or after Neil Leonardi was killed?”