“So you killed your sister?”
“My sister’s life insurance paid for my mother’s home health care. It’s still paying for her care now. You think Medicare picks up everything? Not for the kind of care she’s getting, it doesn’t,” said Torres. “My solution was working. It made sense. If your mother hadn’t gotten all up in my face. If Hector Ponce had repaid his loan instead of trying to get cute with me.”
“So Hector knew that you killed my mother?”
“Then? No. I don’t have a clue why he switched DVDs. Later? He probably ran the footage and figured it out. But he was a gambler who liked to borrow money so he wasn’t about to rock the boat—until he had to.”
“And then you killed him.”
Torres steadied his gun with both hands. “Everyone who was a witness is gone now. It’s over, Jimmy. No more.”
“I’m a witness,” said Vega.
Torres didn’t answer. He took out his phone and punched in 911. A dispatcher came on the line. “This is Dr. Fred Torres,” he said in his smoothest and most professional voice. The street vernacular was gone. “I’m on the roof of the Bronx Academy with a distraught police officer—the one who shot that dishwasher in Wickford? He’s threatening to jump—”
“No!” Vega took a step forward. Torres leveled his gun and spoke into the phone again. “Please hurry. He’s acting crazy. I don’t—” Torres disconnected in midsentence. Which made it seem as if someone else had done it for him. Then he put his phone away.
“You see, Jimmy? I shoot you, it’s in self-defense. Or maybe you just want to jump and save us all the trouble?”
Chapter 38
“The theme of this symposium is healing a divided nation,” Adele reminded the hushed audience as she stepped on the stage at Keating Hall. “I suspect no one in this audience is more divided than I am at the moment.”
There was a small murmur of polite but nervous laughter from the crowd. Adele saw no point in pretending that they wanted some canned speech or that they didn’t know exactly who she was and how she was connected to the shooting. They thought they knew her—just as they thought they knew Vega. But they didn’t. To go forward, she would need to summon the courage to look back. Publicly. It was something she never did.
“When I was a little girl,” she began, “I was terrified of the police.” Her voice sounded shaky to her ears but she needed to explain her position. If that meant walking off this stage and out of this line of work, so be it. She could not flinch.
She spoke about her childhood, living in fear that the police might one day break down her door and haul her parents away. Or that her parents might go to work cleaning offices one evening, get caught in a raid, and never come home. Blue uniforms terrified her. Sirens terrified her. She learned early not to talk too much about her family. If someone stole from her or cheated her, she quietly accepted it rather than chance anyone in authority asking questions that her parents couldn’t answer.
“I was born right here in Port Carroll, New York. I’m an American citizen,” said Adele. “And yet I’ve never felt that sense of birthright.” She went on to confess how she learned early to shut down her emotions and not speak about things she couldn’t change. She didn’t go into all the silences she was asked to endure. Some were too deep to ever speak about and certainly not here.
She described her father’s one visit to the police, when she was fourteen, after a neighbor stole her parents’ business from them—and the ridicule the officers subjected him to.
“My father died two years after that incident,” said Adele. ”The doctors said it was a heart attack. But I think it was a broken heart.” She had the audience spellbound now. She didn’t really notice. She was lost in her own raw memories.
“My mistrust of the police only deepened after I became a defense attorney,” she continued. “I saw cops lie. I saw them mistreat my clients. My fear and anger turned to cynicism. You could say I’d lost all faith.”
She paused. “And then, one day, I met a police officer who changed all that. Not because he was perfect. I saw him make mistakes. Again and again, I saw it. But for the first time, I also saw behind the shield. I saw a man trying hard to do the right thing. Sometimes an impossible thing. In a world that is rarely fair or helpful, I saw a man get up every morning and try to be both.”
Adele took a deep breath. “Does that exempt him from explaining his actions or having them scrutinized? No. But it does mean that we need to give him and all police officers the benefit of the doubt. We need to be as fair as we ask them to be. If the forensic evidence warrants a grand jury investigation, then I’ll be the first to call for it.”
She caught Tate’s scowl from the audience. “Or maybe the second, since my esteemed colleague, Ruben Tate-Rivera, will probably be the first.”