Don’t Look Twice. Andrew Gross
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heading. “He was there with her that night? At the pool?”
Sunil slowly nodded. “Look, he’s a good boy, Lieutenant. He’s no trouble, you understand? He does well in school. He’s already taken his SATs. They were just kids. Messing around.”
“What do you mean by ‘messing around,’ Sunil?”
“I mean, it’s not like he was doing drugs or tried to hurt someone. There was a whole group of them who were there. Six. When he came home that night I could see in his face that something was terribly wrong. During the night he came into my room. He told me what had happened. How everyone had run. We called the police. We told him he had to take responsibility. We told him he could not hide behind his friends. Azzi was the only one who came forward. He didn’t mean to run away that night. He was just scared. It was a boy’s reaction. You understand this, Lieutenant. Sometimes boys do stupid things…”
“No one’s judging what he did, Sunil.”
“Yes, I know that, Lieutenant. You’re fair. You’ve always been fair. But not everyone is. Where we live, we are the outsiders. He was afraid. Not just for him. For me. Afraid it would hurt me. What I’d worked for. We said we would help make restitution. Did anyone else? We never consulted a lawyer.” Sunil’s face was caught between remorse and anger. “He was all the way on the other side of the pool, Lieutenant. That poor girl, they were just horsing around.” He shook his head. “Why would they do this to us? Why…?”
Hauck felt the pieces starting to fit. Sunil’s face was like a sheet of wax. He took a sip of water.
“Was anyone threatening you over this, Sunil?”
“Threatening?” His eyes were round and startlingly white against the dark color of his skin. “Where we live, it’s not the most settled neighborhood, Lieutenant. There are clashes. They have gangs. There were accusations. Many of them. The girl’s family, they were upset. Who can blame them? She was by all accounts a good person too. Her brother, he might have said some things…”
Hauck leaned forward. “Name those kinds of things, Sunil.”
The Pakistani looked up, a little scared. “I don’t want any more trouble, Lieutenant. Enough is enough. I just didn’t think…” The manager was still in the blue Exxon work uniform, his name emblazoned on his chest. “When I saw your daughter lying there, I was so scared. Then that poor man…” He ran two hands over his hair and sank back in his chair. “Yes, there were threats. They called us names. Pakis…Pakis, Lieutenant! I’ve been living in this country for thirty years! The girl’s brother…people told us he was in some kind of gang. They are commonplace up there now. My son stood up, Lieutenant. He came forward. We offered to make restitution. The others…” Sunil shook his head. “Why would they want to take this horrible thing out on us?”
“I’ll talk to someone on the force up there, Sunil. I’ll make sure they station someone outside your house.”
“It was an accident.” The manager somberly shook his head. His eyes were round and sad. “Now look what it’s done.”
Outside, Munoz asked Hauck, “You still want us to take a look into Sanger’s case files?”
“Not any longer.” Hauck shook his head. “But grab your jacket; we’re going to take a ride.”
Bridgeport was just twenty minutes up the thruway from Greenwich, but it might as well have been in a different century.
The last fifty years had not been kind to Bridgeport. Once home to factories for companies like Underwood Typewriters, Singer Sewing Company, and Bassock Tool and Dye, it was always a blue-collar town, home to blacks and Hispanics and Portuguese. By the 1980s, its downtown had decayed and its factories had been abandoned. It had a lagging school system with clashing minorities living in throwback 1960s projects.
Artie Ewell was the head of the Gangs and Street Crime Unit. Hauck had worked with him several times on cases and at Fairfield County youth conferences where their interests overlapped.
Ewell was already familiar with Josephina Ruiz. An imposing black man, he had been a lane-clearing forward at UConn before it became a national power, and his office was covered with photographs of the charter school basketball program he ran each summer. He had interviewed the Ruiz family after the tragedy and decided not to pursue any charges.
“Good family,” Ewell said, motioning to Hauck and Munoz to take a seat in his small office at the central police headquarters on Congress Street. “What could I do? The father’s back in Guatemala somewhere and the mother held down two jobs. There’s an older sister studying to be a nurse, I think, or something. Another brother somewhere. They live up in the Tombs…” Ewell sighed. “We looked it over two ways to Sunday, but we couldn’t find anything other than some awfully bad decision-making on the part of the kids involved. The DA decided not to charge. I heard about what happened down there today, Ty. You think this is connected?”
“The brother,” Hauck said, still in his jeans and pullover, “someone said he was in a gang?”
“Gang?” The burly detective linked his thick hands together, leaned back, and crossed his ankles. “The Ruizs live in the Tombs, Ty, a housing complex over on Pembroke. You’re familiar with that part of town, are you not, Detective Munoz?”
“I’m familiar.” Munoz, who was from neighboring Fairfield, nodded.
“If we brought in everyone who was part of some gang”—Artie Ewell laughed— “we’d have more kids in jail than in school. Everyone connects to the gangs up here. Every neighborhood has its own colors. The Cobras, they’re over on Grove; 9-Tre, they’re over on Sherman. Even the Crips and the Bloods have set up chapters now. You know what they say…Bridgeport’s a third black, a third Hispanic, and the rest just plain poor.”
Hauck knew he was right. The high school graduation rate was something like 70 percent. There were twenty murders committed last year. The crime index was twice the national average, ten times that of Greenwich. Like a sore on the perfect complexion of Fairfield County, Bridgeport was the town all the hedge funds and market booms forgot. The place you passed on the thruway, where the people who washed your linens and mowed your lawns went home every night.
“Any of them decked out in red bandanas?” Hauck asked him.
“Red bandanas…?” Ewell pursed his thick lips. “DR-17, maybe. Why?”
“Because that’s what the shooter was wearing, Artie.”
The heavy-set detective let out a cynical breath and rocked back in his chair. “Someone sees a black dude or a guy in a bandana in Greenwich and they immediately finger it for us…Must be something else you’re holding, Ty.”
Hauck glanced at Munoz, who took out the newspaper article, still in the evidence bag. “We found this in the getaway vehicle. Which was dumped about a mile away.”
The Bridgeport detective read the bold headline through the plastic.
“The manager of the Exxon station where this occurred was Sunil Gupta, whose son was one of the kids involved. The girl had a brother, Artie, who’s reputed to be in a gang. The shooter yelled out the victim’s name as they drove away.”
“So you’re thinking it was revenge?”
“I happened to have been there, Art. My daughter was with me. When it occurred. I guess I don’t know what I’m thinking, other than we’re lucky to be alive.”
Art Ewell shook his head with a disgusted air. “Yeah, I understand.” He pushed his large frame out of the chair, reached into his desk drawer, and took out his gun. “C’mon, let’s find that kid,” he said. “Just remember, keep your eyes open, Dorothy…You’re not in Kansas anymore.”