Long Island Noir (24 page)

That year, Brentwood high school boys had altered his name, chanting “
cul-ero, cul-ero
,” Mexican soccer fans’ version of the Yankee bleacher creatures’ “ass-hole, ass-hole” singsong. The paper translated it as “an anatomical insult.”

“You should talk to Jason,” Lisa told him. “There’s all kinds of stuff on the web about this. Some people are celebrating it.” Her phone beeped. “Lisa Vitaliano,” she answered, then raised her forefinger, signifying it was a call she had to take.

Jason Settles turned down the music, old-school Strong Island hip-hop, when Danny walked in, fading the segue from De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’” into EPMD’s “Strictly Business.” He was the
Weekly’s
resident computer geek. He resembled a nerdy Gil Scott-Heron, a retro Afro and big black glasses over a long-sleeved black jersey advertising some ultra high-end technobeast gaming machine. But he was a digital wizard, at least to this observer’s untrained eyes. A computer-science major at Suffolk Community and then Stony Brook, he’d been one of the few black guys in the Silicon Valley of the ’90s, when everything was going up-up-up, the money doubling every eighteen months like it was ordained by Moore’s Law. After the dot-com bust, he’d come back East. He’d lived with his parents in Gordon Heights for a year, then lined up a job setting up and running the paper’s fledgling website.

Jason called up a screen, drilled down through a succession of URLs and pages, and hit paydirt. “Yo, Danny, check this out.”

ChristianSoldier says:
Osorio can’t be the Antichrist if he’s Mexican. The Antichrist is from Rumania.

WhiteMale14 says:
I don’t give a f*ck where he’s from. I’m ready to defend myself. Remember—if it can’t break a stirnum, it ain’t worth sh*t!

RealAmerican says:
Like that illegal alien in Ronkonkoma last night. That’s how to deal with them. A few more like that, and they’ll think twice about crossing the border.

WhiteMale14 says:
F*ck yeah!

LiptonLady55 says:
He was a crackhead. He tried to rob somebody to get drug money, and he got what he deserved.

ItalianStallion says
:
Build a fence on the border. An electrified fence. And leave the bodies there so the snakes and rats and vultures can eat them. Show them what happens when you try to sneak into the USA illegally!

C.T. says:
If the vultures don’t die from eating human garbage! :)

Skeptic says
:
Hey, ItalianStallion, where did your people come from?

ItalianStallion says
:
What part of ILLEGAL don’t you understand? My family came here legally and worked. These people broke the law coming here. They’re breaking the law by being here. They’re criminals.

“Jason, you got any idea who’s putting this shit up?” Danny asked.

“You want to find out? You’ll have to put yourself in touch with the higher spirits. You have to smoke hemp.”

“Okay, Maharishi Triangle Offense. Get serious.”

“Okay, I’ll be serious. You are undertaking a journey into the netherworld of the political realm.” Atop the twin computer towers, a raging green Incredible Hulk stared at an implacable black Darth Vader. “This site is
LongIslandforAmericans.com
. It’s a far-right one, like LetFreedomRing or FreeRepublic. Then these people also post comments on sites like ours, and they troll on liberal ones.”

“So can you tell who they are?”

“It depends. Most media sites now require registration, so they can track identities and IP addresses and keep spam off. We do. People can get around that pretty easily if they know anything about computers. Nobody knows if their name is real and they can have ten different e-mail addresses, but it’s your first line of defense. It’s like locking your car and not leaving the keys in the ignition. If they don’t want anybody to know their IP address, that’s a little more work. These are the trolls you eighty-six from the site because they just come around to flame-war. You can block their IP address, but they can use a public computer or get privacy software for their own. And some sites don’t track IP addresses, ’cause they say anonymity protects people’s privacy and freedom of speech. If they’re paranoid and digitally savvy, they’ll hide. But if they’re not hip to privacy, or they’re just too raging to care, it’s not that hard to find them.”

“Thanks. You know, they said the Internet was the most revolutionary invention since the printing press, but sometimes it’s more like the world’s biggest toilet wall.”

“Word.”

Danny spent the next couple of hours going through old local weeklies and the
Newsday
police blotter. March 31, Federico Ibanez of Farmingville reported being punched in the face by a group of young men on Horseblock Road. No arrests. May 15, Tommy O’Halloran, 58, no known address, reported being beaten up while collecting empty cans in Holbrook. June 21, two Mexican day laborers reported being attacked by a gang of whites in a wooded area off Nicolls Road. They said they had been taken there from the Kohl’s parking lot on Ronkonkoma Avenue by two young men who’d offered them $100 a day for construction work. They’d fled and didn’t get a good look.

Restino was right. There definitely was a pattern, and it fit geographically. And there were probably a lot more unreported. If the victims were illegal, they’d be too scared to call the cops.

Afternoon oozed along quietly, interrupted by occasional cars, in the Morningwood Estates development in Farmingville, a former potato field a mile and a half northwest of Exit 63 on the Long Island Expressway. Blocky beige and yellowish twostory clapboard houses with peaked roofs and diminutive windows, built in the last burst of the great postwar urban sprawl. The American Dream and white people’s escape from the city had taken a big hit from leaping gas prices, and the satellites orbiting the city could only go so far out without losing heat and light.

It looked nicer now. The pitiful saplings staked into the lawns had grown into curbside shade trees. Houses that had sold for $39,990 new in 1974 went for $339,000 even after the bubble popped.

Five youths in baggy shorts shot hoops aimlessly in a keyhole-shaped driveway.

“Hey, Tyler. You hear about the guy we fucked up? He wasn’t Mexican, he was from Ecuador.”

“Where the fuck is Ecuador?”

“It’s on the equator, stupid.”

“Am I supposed to know that? Was I the teacher’s buttboy?”

“Who cares? He was a fuckin’ beaner, right?”

Danny headed down Nesconset Highway to Hauppauge. Calero was having a press conference at five. Police had identified the victim as Jefferson Nuñez, twenty-four, an Ecuadorian immigrant from Lake Ronkonkoma.

“We are doing and will do whatever it takes to apprehend the perpetrator or perpetrators of this crime,” Calero said.

“Mr. Calero, do you think this attack might reflect on some of the language you have used in addressing the immigration issue?”

“We enforce the laws equally. That is the job of our lawenforcement personnel, and they do it very competently and with a great deal of dedication. The perpetrators of this reprehensible crime will be brought to justice, but we cannot and will not ignore our nation’s immigration laws.”

Danny pushed forward, got his question in: “There have been several assaults on immigrants in the area. Is there a connection?”

“We have no evidence at this point that this was racially motivated. Next question.” Calero delivered his denial in a curt, clipped tone, like you were somewhere between a retarded tinfoil hat and an undersized cockroach for asking. When he was less tense he was more genial.

Danny called Nydia Perez for a response. The “outspoken county legislator” said the county exec was denying reality.

“We know of about ten attacks in that area in the past six months, by a gang of young men, usually calling racial names,” she told him. “It’s hard to get people to tell their stories. Obviously, the undocumented are scared to talk to the police. But you know, Danny, sometimes people who have their papers have fear too.”

“How do you know this was another one?”

“We don’t know who the attackers were yet, but it fits the pattern. And when some elected officials have built their political agenda on innuendoes about our community, it does not inspire confidence in their commitment to protect us.”

“Are you referring to Calero?”

“I’ll leave that to your readers to decide.”

Evening. Danny sat in his ground-floor garden apartment off Nesconset Highway, his aging car in the parking lot, the neighbors’ TV infiltrating the walls, a kid blasting hip-hop somewhere outside.

He filed a four-graph quickie for the website and pecked his notes into his laptop. He felt impotent and frustrated. Desire stunted by hopelessness. Cut off, isolated. You couldn’t walk anywhere here. You had to drive even to get a quart of milk or a can of coffee.

He’d been cast out east by successive waves of layoffs and two divorces. Like human flotsam or jetsam, whatever the difference was. It was one of those job-application test questions they used to give back when they cared that people knew the language and had some command of nuances. Like
Distinguish between parole and probation
. Not anymore.

He’d been at the
Eye
, an alternative weekly in the city, until it got bought out and the new owners dejobitated him and three-fourths of the staff. A short stint at
Newsday
followed, until the former General Mills CEO they called the Cereal Killer had swept in and scythed through the newsroom. Lisa had been his editor there, and she’d swooped him up when she landed at the
Weekly
.

He took a sip of beer. Nice apricot-tinged hippie craft brew. Only one. Only one.

We’re fucked. We need a miracle. Concrete behemoths roam the land crushing everything in their path, barreling around on tracks greased with corruption. I’m banging my head on the wall trying to tell these stories. Maybe five people care. They tell me, they praise me, it’s gratifying, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. They’re obsessed with celebrities.

The bosses want crap like that. They hire clueless twits who call some multimillionaire health-insurance exec or real-estate speculator a “populist outsider” because he bashes “Washington insiders” in his campaign ads. They want superficiality and snark from career-blinded yuppies whose knowledge of history doesn’t go past Monica Lewinsky.

LiptonLady55 says:
Illegal aliens are two-thirds of the drunk drivers who kill people.

C.T. says:
Their poisoning the country. They come out of the jungle eating monkey meat and fried bananas. Their never gonna be sivilized human beings.

LiptonLady55 says:
We’re sick and tired of these politically correct eletists ramming them down our throats.

Tuesday morning a spokesperson for University Hospital issued a statement. Jefferson Nuñez remained in critical condition with a fractured skull and other injuries. He had strong vital signs, but the main danger was cerebral edema. Doctors were working to reduce it.

LiptonLady55 says:
He came here to be on Medicaid and suck off of our tax dollars. All of them do.