CHAPTER 20
THE SALAZARS HAD one of their daughters come out to watch the counter as they led me to their tiny back office. Ricardo Salazar shut the flimsy door in the hope they would have more privacy. All three of us crammed into the room. I sat awkwardly with my notebook on my knee.
Ricardo and Monica sat in matching hard metal chairs with straight backs. They looked worried. I tried to put them at ease.
I said, “This is not about Deason. It’s a completely separate investigation and won’t come back on you at all. There’s nothing to worry about.” I noticed Monica exhaling in relief. Anyone who’d ever lived in a neighborhood controlled by drug dealers knew the dangers of speaking to the police.
Ricardo said, “What do you need to know, Detective Mike?”
“I don’t know much about Deason or his crew. Anything you could tell me about him might be useful.”
They started by mentioning a couple of Deason’s enforcers. I made note of their names. Then Monica said, “They’d come into the store and take whatever they wanted like we were their private pantry. They never paid. We made our niece stay out of the store because we didn’t like the way the men would look at her. It was a terrible time.”
“His guys were the problem,” Ricardo said. “Mr. Deason wasn’t like that. He was always polite and paid for everything. He often left extra money on a table like he was making up for his own people. He liked to eat here. He said he liked the fresh ingredients.”
Monica added, “He was always nice. He had an office just down the street, so we saw him almost every day. He’d even come in with his family once in a while.”
I asked, “What about his family?”
“Mr. Deason married a beautiful Panamanian woman, Isabel Vega. They had a little boy named Antonio. I’m pretty sure it was Antonio. Cute as could be. You just wanted to pinch his pudgy little cheeks.”
Ricardo said, “That’s why we were so shocked when we heard on the news about everything he did. We knew the men who worked for him were bad, but we couldn’t think of him that way. The news made him sound like a monster.”
“Have you seen the wife and son since his arrest?”
Monica shook her head. “No. They got a divorce before the arrest.”
“When did he get the divorce?”
Monica bit her lip as she thought. “I don’t know. The boy was about eight or ten. So maybe fifteen or twenty years ago.”
I did some quick math and estimated the young man would be in his mid to late twenties by now. I wondered if he was in the business too. I turned back to Ricardo and said, “I see kids still use the Deason Youth Center.”
Ricardo said, “Oh, yes. It’s busy every day. Even our son, Ricky, used to go there to study before he went to Stony Brook.” Then Ricardo leveled his gaze at me. “Did Deason really have all those people murdered?”
I shrugged and said, “It looks like it to me.”
“Have you ever met anyone worse than that?”
I thought about it. Then I said, “Yeah, unfortunately I have.”