The Superman Project Read online

  Pablo’s bedroom was a mess. A mattress lay on the floor, and the room was filled floor to ceiling with comic books.

  The victim, or what was left of her, was on her back, on the floor, beside a plastic bowl of potato chips, a forty-ounce Coca-Cola, and a half-eaten package of Twinkies. Elvis’s flowers and chocolates were sitting in a pool of blood at her side. Even before I looked at her face, I knew.

  Samantha began to examine the crime scene from a safe distance in the doorway.

  “Whoever did this doesn’t seem to care about being caught,” said Samantha, pointing at the bloody footprints leading into and out of the room. “How do you know this man?”

  “Elvis? He’s the friend of a client. Kid who lives here.”

  “Looks like somebody was searching for something.”

  Everything in the room had been smashed, ripped, stepped on. The poster of Lynda Carter (the half-Mexican beauty who played Wonder Woman in the 1970s, all hips and breasts, wrapped in patriotic red, white, and blue—the first American female superhero, with a golden lasso and permanent wedgie, spinning like a dreidel at a Hanukah dinner, Wonder Woman teaching Catholic Bronx boys that superheroes and lust could go together) was torn to shreds. Pablo’s CDs—Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette—were all cracked in half. His superhero dolls were busted up and scattered everywhere. There was one book among the mess, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The smell of blood flooded my nostrils.

  “You think he did it?” Samantha said, signaling over her shoulder in Elvis’s direction.

  “He’s the only one here, still alive, and covered in blood,” I said. “No.”

  “Who is she?” asked Samantha.

  I looked at Samantha and then at the corpse and whispered, “It’s Pablo’s mother. Esther Sanchez.”

  Esther Sanchez had been killed. There was no knife or gun to be seen but I noted the TWO SETS of bloody footprints leading away from the body and out of the bedroom. There was only Elvis with his shirt and hands caked in blood. But if you found your friend’s mother like that, wouldn’t you try in your panic to help her, with no thoughts of prints or evidence tampering, before you finally realized that there was nothing to be done?

  Samantha crossed herself and kissed her Lady of Guadalupe pendant. “Honey,” said Samantha. “We should call.”

  Pablo’s home phone rang. It was a big red and translucent plastic job. I froze. Samantha shook her head for me NOT to enter and pick it up.

  I entered, stepped around the bloody footprints, and carefully picked it up and heard a calm male voice say, “Pablo?”

  “Yeah?”

  I looked for the caller ID. There was no caller ID.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Hola?” I said.

  More nothing.

  I heard a voice. “Chico?”

  “Joey?”

  “Are you alone, Chico?”

  “Uh.” I glanced over at Officer Samantha Rodriguez in civilian clothes.

  Dial tone. I put the phone back down.

  “Who was it?” asked Samantha from the doorway.

  “Joey Valentin,” I said. “He sounded shaken up. He asked for Pablo and changed his mind. Joey Valentin.”

  “Who is Joey Valentin?” asked Samantha.

  Elvis came over and stood in the doorway.

  “Is there something you’re not telling us, Elvis?” I asked, carefully slipping out to the doorway again.

  “No,” he said and began to weep hysterically.

  Samantha found something on the floor, left of the doorway. She handed me a business card covered in blood. I read the card, holding it between two fingers and the latex.

  The Superman Project

  Joseph Valentin

  1134 W. 47th Street

  I thought about what Esther Sanchez had said about her old employer: “The secrets I know about TSP. I could take that place apart brick by brick.”

  Then I heard Officer Samantha Rodriguez say into her cell, “I’d like to report a homicide.”

  I took out my Zippo lighter and flipped it open and closed. I wanted a Newport cigarette. I wanted a White Russian. I wanted. I wanted to be a farmer, to walk in the green fields, graze with brown cows, build red barns, raise cabbage. Chico Santana had had enough murder. What the hell do you know about raising cabbage, Santana?

  I’ll read a book. I’ll learn.

  Right.

  Terrorists strike. War sucks. Life is hard. Death, like bad milk, happens. People die. It was simple. It didn’t matter who you were, or how you went, rich, poor. You would eventually take that trip to the graveyard. It was a party we all had to attend. And one day you’d be the guest of honor, Chico. Today was Esther Sanchez’s day. And the not-so-funny thing was, I never did get a chance to tell her that I had, after all, taken the Joey Valentin case.

  Hijo. Son. She had called me son. I thought about my own mother and Esther Sanchez’s stupid Tupperware full of Dominican food.

  No time for tears, Santana.

  It was 4:25 A.M. by the time they arrived for the body.

  SEVEN

  Elvis was in jail and I was chowing down on a cold pastele for breakfast, after polishing off my fifty punishments—I mean, push-ups and sit-ups—of the day, waiting for Mimi, already wearing a black suit, when I got a phone call from Officer Samantha Rodriguez. The NYPD had another possible suspect besides Elvis Hernandez. Thirty-nine neighbors were questioned and nobody heard anything except for one who reported seeing a man, not Elvis, running out of the apartment some time after the killing.

  Joey?

  Esther Sanchez’s brand-new two-hundred-dollar cell phone was missing and Pablo Sanchez, before suffering a chronic asthma attack during questioning and being taken to Roosevelt Hospital, reported that he had not returned directly home from Cosmo Comics the night of his mother’s murder because he was working on his comic book, Captain Bravo and The Cuchifrito Kid.

  Esther Sanchez was dead. She had been stabbed in the back. Esther Sanchez was a good woman, active and beloved in her neighborhood. One year short of her sixtieth birthday. The police weren’t interested in any private investigator or his mysterious visitors in the Bronx called S and L but they were interested in Joseph Valentin and his business card found at the scene. Pablo confessed to the police during interrogation that Joey had called him that night from a disposable phone looking for a place to hide out. Pablo said that he had refused the request and had walked home from 23rd Street to Washington Heights, for his new self-imposed weight loss regimen, starting out at 1:00 A.M.

  I looked over the detecting truths that hung on the wall of my mind. One: There is no such thing as coincidence when it comes to murder. Two: There is such a thing as coincidence when it comes to murder. Two: Never try to predict the weather or the future. Five: Maybe look into taking an adult-learning math class.

  I guzzled my cold, sugary Malta.

  My cell phone rang.

  I answered.

  It was her.

  She had called the morning after the murder.

  I confirmed our meeting and hung up.

  I made the next call. “Hello, Caliente.”

  “Would it kill you to press your pants and change your shirt once in a while, maybe shave regular, cut your hair, Santiny?” Joy said.

  “How do you know I haven’t?”

  “How do I know that crawfish soup is spicy?”

  “How does the New York police force get on without you, Joy St. James? You and Hank should go back to active duty.”

  “What?” said Joy. “And give up helping my former John Jay pupil Chico Santana for free with stuff I taught him to do for himself? Never.”

  I had called Joy St. James, Ebony, ex-cop, my old boss and professor when I studied criminal law at John Jay, and her husband Hank Murphy, Ivory, also an ex-cop, also my old boss at St. James and Company private investigations where I was one of nine independent contractors before I started my own detective agen
cy, last night. Ebony asked me to join her for a Stephanie Mills concert at the Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse because Ivory was in Ireland tracing his family tree or something. I politely declined and asked Joy if she could have Office Manager Kelly Diaz go home a few minutes later to her husband and children in Sugar Hill and check out Pablo Sanchez, Esther Sanchez, Joseph Valentin, Elvis Hernandez, Father Ravi, and The Superman Project.

  “I need the dirty,” I said.

  “I need the rent,” she said, after cursing me for not having a computer yet and threatening to send me a St. James and Company bill.

  “Kelly’s got nothing on most of your people so far,” she said. “But she did some criminal background checks on Valentin and Gupta. There were some domestic violence reports.”

  “Against Joey?”

  “No,” she said. “Against his wife Gabby Gupta. Let me get this straight. You knew the murder victim?”

  “Esther Sanchez,” I said. “Not really. Her son Pablo Sanchez hired me.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “Pablo Sanchez thinks somebody’s trying to make Joey Valentin look like a kidnapper and a killer,” I said. “The coppers have another suspect besides Elvis Hernandez but won’t share.”

  “And now you’re caught up in the mix,” said Joy. “Stepped right in the poop with your Rockports and your eyes wide open. Again.”

  “Joey Valentin called Pablo the night Esther Sanchez got permanently retired and I found his business card at the scene.”

  “How do you know this Joey Valentin again?”

  “Childhood friend.”

  “Not one of those Dirty Dozen boys you always go on about?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe Joey did do this. Or maybe somebody wants the police to believe he did.”

  “Anyways,” Joy continued, “Kelly got hold of a former TSP member. It’s some kind of school. It’s run by that Father Ravi and meets every Tuesday and Thursday night or Monday and Wednesday night. New people are recruited by current members who strike up conversations in coffee shops and bookstores and colleges and invite them to lectures. If the potential recruit expresses interest in the topic, they’re contacted and interviewed. The recruitee thinks they’re joining a group devoted to increasing consciousness.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Kelly’s source said that they’re being recruited into a cult, with all the markers for manipulation and mind control. But this is not evident to new people or to long-term people who are still members.”

  “So it’s a cult?”

  “Well,” said Joy, “members are not what you typically think of as cult members. They’re not only college students but professionals, doctors, nurses, architects, engineers, teachers, artists, businessmen.”

  “With a hankering for some Kool-Aid?”

  “Apparently,” she said. “My favorite is lime. Yours?”

  “Anything blue,” I said. “If it’s blue, I’ll drink it.”

  “Toilet water is sometimes blue.”

  “No comment.”

  “Some members of this TSP, many of whom belonged for decades, have given hundreds of thousands of dollars, married, divorced, and gave up family, friends, and children at the whim of this Father Ravi.”

  “Nice,” I said, pacing.

  “Apparently, some of his followers treat him as a god or something. They believe this Ravi had spent a year meditating without food and water.”

  “That’s some diet,” I said.

  “I’ll put Kelly on,” said Joy. “She’ll fill you in on the rest, I gotta go get my hair did. Later, Choco.”

  “Later, chocolate.”

  “Hola, gorgeous,” said Kelly Diaz, coming on the phone.

  “Still married?” I asked.

  “Until you say when, papi.” She laughed.

  “I’ll check my calendar,” I said.

  Kelly Diaz was filling me in on Father Ravi and his four daughters and the main players at The Superman Project when I heard banging coming from Max’s room. I thanked Kelly and rushed down the long hall and into the bedroom and saw Max at an open window, red towel tied around her neck, jumping up and down on the wood floor with all of her weight, arms outstretched.

  “What’re you doing, Max?”

  “Tryin’ to fly,” she said, turning from the open window, screwing up her face like what a stupid question. “I prayed and prayed to God every night now, hard, real hard, I cried and everything, and I asked God, I begged God, to make me Superman and every morning I wake up and I know he’ll do it soon so I open the window and try to fly and then I thought maybe he’ll do it at night and now I feel real stupid because he didn’t. I prayed to God that when I woke up he’d really make me Superman and I’ll help everybody, the whole world, and I’ll get rid of all the bad people with guns and I’ll catch the guy who killed my father and I’ll save all the good people and there won’t be no more war or people dying and everybody’ll be happy and safe.”

  She had tears in her eyes. “I prayed real hard that in the morning tomorrow I’ll really be Super Max. That everything’s gonna be alright, Uncle Chico.”

  “Everything’s gonna be alright,” I said and picked her up and put her back into bed.

  “I forgot to feed Gizmo his breakfast!” she said, trying to rise up.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, pushing her back down.

  “Okay,” she said, and leaned back.

  I pulled open the top of the box sitting on the floor in a corner of her room. As soon as I looked inside, the three-legged black kitten started meowing, blinked its big eyes, happy to see me, maybe complaining a bit about the service in this joint.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s comin’. Keep your fur on.”

  I changed the cat’s water, gave it some food, and went out to feed Boo who kept me busy trying to keep him out of Max’s room where Gizmo had three good cat legs left for a crazy high-strung Chihuahua to nibble on.

  Then Mimi finally arrived all red mane and cleavage.

  I told her what had happened, handed her my father’s old baseball, and asked her to check with that friend of hers Dolores who worked for the Yankees if she knew or could check with somebody about its worth and hit the door.

  “Where are you going, Chico?” Mimi asked, glancing curiously at the signature on the baseball.

  “Funeral,” I said.

  Mimi crossed herself. “Are you coming back after that?”

  “No,” I said. “After that, I got another appointment.”

  “Where?”

  “India.”

  The crowd of mourners walked into the crematorium behind the small church on Fire Island, where candles were lit and a Buddhist monk in saffron robes said a prayer. The incinerator was built into the wall, and Esther’s closed coffin, a box of light wood or cardboard, was on a platform with small wheels, like the ones you see in those bakeries in Little Italy, leading into the hot furnace.

  Esther Sanchez was loved. People lined the walls to bury her. So many turned up that mourners had to take turns going in and out.

  Among the people were neighborhood friends, local Dominican politicians and wannabe politicians, social workers, community activists, some organizers of the Dominican parade, and employees from Cosmo Comics.

  Pablo—slicked black hair, decked out in a cheap blue suit, yellow polyester shirt, red polyester tie, and red polyester handkerchief, looking like a plump Mafioso on welfare—signaled for me to go closer to the casket. I don’t know how it is for some, but something awful happens to me every time I come face-to-face with death.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Pablo.

  I nodded.

  “It’s my own fault,” Pablo whispered. “I should’ve sent her back to Santo Domingo when she first got sick.”

  I nodded. I stood there looking down at the box, holding the eternally closed eyes, ears, and lips of what was once Esther Sanchez. My own mouth ran dry. My palms sweated. My knees went soft. I had that pain in my chest a
nd my voice trembled every time I tried to speak to Pablo, so I stopped trying.

  What are you afraid of, Santana? Death is not a failure on the part of the dead. Death is just as natural and even more common than life. Get used to it. So why couldn’t I get used to it? Hell, in terms of death, I started young with my own father’s murder, then the others, and now Esther Sanchez. So many gone, and with so much war in the world, even more going, every day going, so much going, and I still was not used to it.

  Maybe I never would be.

  As the coffin started rolling into the fire, Pablo held on and squeezed his pudgy fingers into my forearm. And when the door of the incinerator closed, you could watch the flames through a small glass porthole as they engulfed Esther’s coffin like a giant tongue of red fire, until everything turned to black ashes.

  Pablo wept and turned away and was consoled. I did not turn away. I was not consoled. I watched the fire. The heat coming from the incinerator was warm and inviting, not like nasty New York heat and humidity. It was a gentle and inviting warmth. Cremation. Pablo’s idea. Something he got from Joey and The Superman Project. That’s why I was there. Because Joey couldn’t be. Because Elvis certainly couldn’t be, even if Pablo wanted him to come. Because Chase Gupta refused to come. Cremation. It didn’t seem like such a bad way to go. With the stipulation, of course, that you were dead before they put you in.

  Afterward, outside, Pablo and I walked toward his little Ford Fiesta.

  “Good turnout,” I said.

  Pablo nodded and wiped some tears.

  “She was good people, huh?”

  “She was a fool like me,” Pablo Sanchez said, wiping more tears. “She couldn’t just save herself. It’s a family thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My grandmother didn’t come here from D.R. because we were poor,” said Pablo. “She came to escape that bastard Trujillo. My grandfather was political. When Trujillo ordered his army to kill twenty or thirty thousand Haitian workers in 1937, my grandfather and some of his friends disagreed with that.”