CHAPTER 5 (1)
Toni Santiago first met Ryan two years before when she was a patrol officer in a Spanish Harlem precinct. Her sector car had been called to a triple homicide at a social club at E. 105th Street and First Avenue in the early morning hours of a frigid Friday night. There was snow on the sidewalk, and a cardboard sign outside the entrance to the club that read in black magic marker, “NO GUNS ALOW INCITE.”
Nobody would identify anybody. All they would say was that a black male walked up to the three Latino male victims sitting at the circular table draped with a red tablecloth and opened up on them with what looked like a Mac 10 machine pistol. The Manhattan North Homicide Squad was responsible for interviewing all the patrons. Toni and the other uniforms were responsible for making sure nobody tampered with the crime scene or left without being identified and interviewed.
It was during that time that Toni noticed a pretty, shapely young black women dressed in a skin-tight white dress, no more than twenty years of age, standing off to the side where the D.J. booth was set up. Toni watched her carefully from across the dance floor. She would catch her ever so slightly shake her head and quickly wipe a tear from her eye. She did not want to be noticed.
As the sun was peeking above the frozen East River, Toni watched her secretly compose herself and sit down to be interviewed by one of the Manhattan North homicide detectives. Like all the others, she said she couldn’t identify the shooter and didn’t know the victims. The detective took her name, address, age, cell phone number, and let her leave with his card in the palm of her hand. Toni wanted to talk to her.
When the crime scene wrapped-up, Toni jumped into her jeans at the precinct, shot up to her apartment building in Riverdale (the same building her aunt lived in) and picked up her bulldog. She walked and fed Vita, grabbed a coffee and toasted corn muffin from the Riverdale Diner, then shot down to the Castle Hill projects with her dog in tow.
Castle Hill was a collection of eight-story buildings managed by the N.Y.C. Housing Authority. And like most box-shaped New York City projects, it was constructed of that distinctive reddish-brown brick. Toni always thought two things about the projects: first, the City must have gotten a very good price on that revolting reddish-brown brick, and, second, the projects always looked more to her like a prison compound than a place for families to prosper.
Toni kept the car running that cold Saturday morning as she sipped her coffee, worked on her muffin, and watched the entrance of the twenty-year-old’s Castle Hill building.
After listening to Vita snore curled up on the front seat for a few hours, Toni’s eyes were about ready to shimmy-down, when the young woman stepped out of her building, now wearing a long, black, down coat, and trucked through the snow to a liquor store three blocks away. The street and sidewalk had still not been cleared.
Toni waited for her to turn the corner from the liquor store and stepped right in front of her with Vita on a leash.
“Do you know who I am?”
The woman stopped cold. Toni pulled out her shield and I.D. card.
“I was there last night, and I know, you know, who shot those three guys.”
The woman’s eyes were wide, but she stayed quiet.
Toni pointed at the bag she was carrying. “Who’s all the booze for?”
The young woman held Toni’s gaze for a few long moments until her eyes started to water and trickle down her cold cheeks. She agreed to jump into the car with her and Vita.
That was one of the upsides to having your bulldog along on a stakeout; nobody would make Toni for a cop. And it made the informant more comfortable too. It wasn't exactly department policy, but it worked for her, and she was on her own time anyway.
From the age of six on, her father would sometimes take Toni on surveillance, and she loved every minute of it. Her Dad would lie in the back seat, his partner would be driving, and she would be sitting up front with hands stretched to reach the dashboard flashing a big smile. Whenever whoever they were tailing looked through their rearview mirror, all they would see was the head of a man behind the wheel and a smiling little girl. All teeth. The view she offered was just as effective: the flat face of an English bulldog.
Toni pulled into the back of an abandoned BP gas station a few blocks away. The snow-covered and stagnant gas pumps reminded Toni of a couple scarecrows she'd seen on a deserted stretch of Kansas plain as she drove cross-country to her first Marine Corps duty station in Camp Pendleton, California when she was nineteen.
The young woman told Toni that she had no idea her boyfriend was going to shoot those three guys. She said she had never been to the place before, but that he wanted to bring her there. He said the dancing and Latin music was great. She said they were dancing Salsa when he looked in the direction of where the three guys had just sat down. He left her on the dance floor, walked to them and shot them dead. No words were exchanged between her boyfriend and the victims. She said she was shocked. She then added that her boyfriend had also shot a rival dealer a couple weeks before on White Plains road and promised her it wouldn’t happen again.
“Is he in your apartment now?” Toni said.
The young woman nodded.
Toni put in a call to Bronx Homicide with the information and the commanding officer—the first-whip—Lieutenant Ryan Condon, and his cavalry of detectives descended on her and picked up the shooter. She would never forget how exhilarated she’d become when she watched Ryan Condon pull up in his unmarked car, chauffeured, of course, by one of his detectives, as all New York City Police bosses are from the rank of sergeant and above. He approached her in his long black cashmere-looking overcoat and sky blue tie, gave her a warm professional handshake and she got a direct look up into his remarkable light-brown eyes for the first time.
“Wow,” was all she thought.
Following that arrest, the triple homicide in the social club in Spanish Harlem was cleared, as well as the murder in the Bronx on White Plains Road. About a week later, Toni got a call from Sergeant Tazzo, who said that Lieutenant Condon was impressed with her initiative and asked if she’d be interested in coming up to Bronx Homicide for an interview. Within ninety days she was transferred to the Bronx Homicide Squad, and within her first year she was formally promoted to detective and received her father’s gold shield.
