"Bertematti presents a gritty inner-city setting and protagonist who doesn't fit the usual profile." (Publisher's Weekly)

"The streets of New York vibrate with life here, rough at times, but seen through the eyes of a snappy survivor. Buy this book and look out for the next." (Library Journal)

"As a mystery novel, the book is entertaining and clever...Fans of the mystery genre will enjoy this book and will look forward to the next Tito Rico mystery." (Counterpoise)

"The novel is a heart-wrenching sociological study of poverty and racism." (Multicultural Review)

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Excerpt

Chapter One

        A black guy wearing a leather cap wanted to sell me a gold chain for fifteen bucks just as I was ready to cut into the projects through a broken metal fence. He was insistent, and fallowed me all the way to Pepito’s building, begging me to buy the chain. He got too close to me, dangling the chain in front of my face with a dirty hand, and I thought of pegging him in the mouth for bothering me. But the time he split because he saw the police and the ambulance, he only wanted five dollars for it.
        My friend Pepito lived near 125th, in the Sherman projects stretching from Broadway to Morningside Avenue. The projects were composed of ten massive red-brick buildings, filling two whole blocks, with glass-littered playgrounds, grassy spaces, and walking paths between the buildings. I couldn’t imagine how many people lived in the projects. Thousands. All packed in as little space as possible. The projects were built tough. Everything was bolted down,. What wasn’t made of concrete was made of steel, unbreakable and cold. There was no nonsense about living in the projects, no fineries and pleasantries. You decorated your apartment any way you wanted, but once you stepped into the hallway, you were on common, and dangerous ground. Only graffiti added any aesthetic sense to the projects. But that was true only of the seventies, when I was growing up, when kids were artists. Today they scribble their tags and other nonsense as if they were in a hurry.
        It all started that Saturday morning when Pepito came to see me just as I was ready to fry some eggs. I usually knew it was him by the way he knocked. But that time he beat my door as if he was angry with it. When I opened the door, he came in fast and closed it himself.
        "Que pasa, Pepito?" I asked. "What's da mattah wit'ju?"
        Pepito was a foot shorter than me and so thin you felt sorry for him when he wore a short-sleeved shirt and his wrists looked so frail they could have broken off any minute. He was a Puerto Rican with short, curly hair, a mousy face, and a thin moustache that made him look effeminate.
        "Yo, bro', lend me five hun'red dollars!"
        "Say what?"
        "Man, I need five hun'red dollars. I swear I'll pay you back in two weeks. Just give me two weeks, and I'll pay you back. Come on, Tito."
        Pepito hardly ever addressed me by my name. It was usually "Bro'" or "Man". So when he called me Tito, I knew something wasn't right.
        "Why you need five hundred dollars for?"
        "Yo, Tito, just help me out, alright? I'll pay you back."
        Pepito was usually a milk-and-coffee brown color. But he looked white to me.
        "Pepo, I ain't got that kind'a money on me. What you want it for anyway?"
        "If I tell you, you lend it to me?"
        "Yeah, okay," I said, but I really didn't want to. Pepito was my best friend, but five hundred dollars was quite a bit of money to give a way. I say give away because when you lend a friend money, you never see a cent of it again.
        Pepito said: "I lost some money in a bet, and when it was time to pay, I didn't have it. They told me they was going to kill me if I didn't pay them by tonight. That's why I need it, Tito. If I don't pay, they'll kill me!"
        "Who's they, man?"
        "These guys."
        "Who?"
        Pepito didn't answer right away. He was thinking.
        "Chimp and his boys. You don't know them, but they run numbers down in Harlem. I laid the bet a mano limpia. Somebody tipped me off on the number. But that number didn't come up."
        "Why'd you bet so much?"
        "I was tipped off, man. I thought I had them by the balls. Now they got me by the balls."
        "Alright," I said. "I don't got any money here. I gotta go to the bank."
        "So go get it."
        "Not now. You said you got to pay them by tonight, right? Let me cook some breakfast first."
        "You bring it to me?"
        "Sure, just let me eat first."
        "Alright, Tito, I'll be home. Just come by as soon as you eat."
        Pepito opened the door and left. I locked it and went to fry my eggs. Pepito was always running around doing crazy things, even when we were kids. He used to like to go down to the railroad tracks by the Henry Hudson Parkway and throw rocks at the bums who lived in that desolate area. I went with him, just for the fun of it, but I stopped throwing rocks when I saw Pepito hit a bum square in the face. He lived in a shack built into a grassy rise filled with trash, tires and other discarded car parts. We called him names until he came out, and then Pepito threw a big rock at him and his face split open like a watermelon.
        As soon as I was done eating, I went over to my girlfriend's place near Broadway, just past Trinity Cemetery. I didn’t live too far from her. My Papi and Mami came from Cuba in the sixties and settled in the Heights. Decent people existed back then, but now all you saw was dominicanos and puertorriquenos, and to the east in Harlem, the blacks.
        My bank was downtown, and there were no cash machines in my neighborhood. So I decided to bum the money off of her until Monday, when I would pay her back. Her name was Mircea. She was Puerto Rican, petite, with nice, olive skin, blond-dyed hair, widely spaced black eyes, and a smile that could drive you crazy. Her mother, Mrs. Corteza, opened the door for me. She was proud of me because I looked white. I was actually Mircea's color, due mostly to the sun, but I looked like a Spaniard. It was a good thing for a dark-skin to catch a light-skin, like Mircea did me. My mother knew this Dominican who was as black as any black. One of his sons went to Germany with the Army and married a blond white girl over there. My mother asked him if he would have preferred his son to marry a black woman, and he told her, "Black? Why? We've got enough black in the family."
        Mrs. Corteza didn't speak any English, but I liked talking in Spanish anyway when I was at Mircea's place. But when I was alone with Mircea, we spoke English, or a mixture of the two.
        "How are you, Tito? Come in, please. You hungry? Did you eat? I do not think you ate. Let me boil you some plantains and fry you some eggs. How about it? I know you are hungry," Mrs. Corteza said to me in one breath as I stepped in.
        "No, thank you, Mrs. Corteza."
        "Mircea!" she called and followed me down the hall into the living room, where I found Mircea's twenty-year old brother Jose watching a video.
"Yo Tito," he greeted me without taking his eyes off the television. It was a Schwarzenegger movie. I could hear the noise of the violence from the end of the hall. Jose was still trying to finish high school. He had been going off and on for the past six years. He was working at this bodega down on 139th.
        Mircea came out of her room, came to me, and kissed me. She was wearing a tan halter-top and a pair of tight fitting blue jeans with expert rips across the thighs.
        "Hi, baby," she said. "I thought you weren't coming to see me today."
        "Mircea, I got to talk to you. Can we go in your room?"
        I remembered Mrs. Corteza was still behind me. I looked back at her and smiled. "We're just going to talk, Mrs. Corteza."
        Mircea's mother was a devout Catholic who didn't allow any foolishness in her house. I could be alone anywhere with Mircea except in her own room. But I understood that and didn't mind.
        Mircea took me by the hand and we went into her room. She was twenty-six but still decorated her room like a little girl would. The dolls she so prized when she was a kid were neatly dressed and sitting or standing on shelves and furniture. Her dresser was a storefront of perfume bottles and talc boxes. The comforter on her bed was pink and had azure ruffles along the edge.
I sat on the bed, and Mircea sat on me. Since I was there, I kissed her for a while.
        "Baby, " I said, "I need you to lend my five hundred dollars."
        "What?"
        "It's not for me. It's for Pepito. He got in a little trouble. I got the money in the bank and will pay you back on Monday. I promise."
        "Ha! Pepito is always in trouble," she said as she stood up from me, went to a drawer of her dresser, and took out a cigar box. She came to sit next to me. "Why do you keep on helping him? He's never going to change."
        "He's my friend."
        "Friend? What's he ever done for you, Tito?"
        "A lot. We're buddies. We grew up together in the 'hood. You know?"
        "I don't know," she said as she counted off five hundred dollars into my palm from a wad that contained much more.
        "How much you got there?" I asked.
        "None'a your business," she said playfully.
        "What you saving up for?"
        "For when we get married."
She was always bringing up marriage. Not intrusively, but when the conversation gave an opportunity. The last thing I wanted to do was get married. I liked us just the way we were.
        "Well, keep on saving," I said as I stood up. She shook her head.
        "You're going to go?"
        "I got to get this money to Pepito."
        "Stay a little while. Let's go out."
        "I got to work on my car today. It's been sitting outside my building for two weeks."
        "Do it tomorrow."
        "No."
        "So you just came here just to get the money?"
        "Yeah."
        She sucked her teeth loudly and stood up. But she smiled as she reached up to put her arms around my neck. I kissed her and didn't want to leave. But I had to leave when Mrs. Corteza began knocking on the door.
        "I don't hear talking!" she shouted through the door.
Mircea wiped the beige lipstick around my mouth with her fingers. He glanced in her mirror before opening the door.
        "I was just leaving," I said.
Mrs. Corteza's face softened from to a concerned frown.
        "No, stay a little while!"
        "Thanks, Mrs. Corteza, but I got to go work on my car."
        I turned to Mircea and blinked at her. I kissed her mother on the cheek and said goodbye to Jose. I heard him say "Yo" as I left the apartment.
Pepito's building faced LaSalle street and two walking paths cut through a playground to the street. There were two ambulances parked on the street and three police cars. There was a crowd of people standing around the entrance to the building or sitting on nearby benches. Cops were standing around, their radios scratching away. They weren't letting anyone in or out of the building, so I stood and watched, waiting to see what happened. Somebody came to stand next to me and asked me what was going on. When I said I had no idea, an old woman, standing in front of me, turned around.
        "They kilt sumbody up there!"
        "Who?" I asked.
        "Don't know that. But they kilt sumbody."
        While I waited, the siren wail of a police car made its way down the street. The cops who got out of that car talked with some of the cops who were standing around and then went into the building. Fifteen minutes later paramedics came out of the building pushing a cart on which was somebody under a white sheet. There was a large red stain on the sheet, under which the head would be. The cops pushed some people aside to make way for the paramedics. I was intent on looking at the body on the cart when a woman ran out of the building screaming. When I saw who it was, my heart stopped and jumped up into my throat. It was Maritza, Pepito's eighteen-year-old sister. She was thin like her brother, and her mousy face stuck out because she wore her hair in a tight pony tail. Two cops rushed in and grabbed her and pulled her back inside. With my heart still in my throat, I looked up at the paramedics who were halfway to the ambulances. Then I ran after them. A cop behind them turned around and stuck his hand out, but I was running so fast that I nearly knocked him over. The other cops managed to pin my arms behind me, but not before I pulled away the sheet from the body. Underneath was Pepito, as white as the sheet that covered him, with a gash from one ear to the other. A mess of gauze was stuck into the wound and there was blood under his head and around his neck. The sight was so horrible that it was good the cops pulled me back.
        "What the heck you doing?" one of them yelled in my ear.
        "He's my friend!" I cried
        "You know 'im?" the other cop yelled.
        "He's my friend!" I cried again.
        That was enough for them. They relaxed their grip on me when I calmed down and put me in a squad car. In a few minutes, I was sitting in the 27th Precinct.

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