CHAPTER ONE - THE BIG CHANGE

I heard smashing sounds and glass shattering while watching Miami CSI, my favorite program. I reluctantly got off the couch, went to my bathroom and saw the whole affair reach a tipping point and suddenly come crashing down as I stood in my bathtub, peering out of my little bathroom window overlooking the building in back of mine.

I had warned police officers that events were bound to come to a violent head in back unless the alley building was vacated of its current tenants. But regular patrol officers, having been called to the premises time and time again only to leave empty-handed because they did not arrive at exactly the right time to catch lawbreakers in the act, apparently thought I was crying wolf in respect to the noisiest troublemaker, one Rod Rodriquez. They didn’t show up until an hour after I called about the noise, not until ten minutes after all hell had broken loose and I mouthed the most significant provocative phrase to the 911 operator, “Shots fired!”

By then the murderous deeds had been done. Three men lay dead and one mortally wounded. I went downstairs with towels and a belt to see if I could stop his bleeding. I slipped on the blood and landed next to Rodriquez – the sight of his face half blown off by a shotgun blast almost gave me the heaves. So there I lay among the other bodies, contaminating the crime scene with mine, when the officers finally arrived with guns drawn.

“Dammit!” I thought, “I shouldn’t have inserted myself into this situation. I should have just moved out.” Indeed, Sally Jones, a hard-nosed narcotics detective, had told me to lay low a month ago, to “stop confronting” my unsavory-looking neighbors, to “be patient because these things take time.”

“Just relax,” she reiterated, “there will be a big change in your alley building in two weeks.” I envisioned a S.W.A.T. team kicking in doors, with myself and other residents cheering them on.

“Yeah,” her amiable, roly-poly partner, Larry Wilson, chimed in, “It takes time, but they’ll be nailed. And thanks for telling us about this scum. We didn’t know they’d come down here. You’re going to see a big change soon.”

The detectives were not talking about the loudmouthed alcoholic punk, Rod Rodriquez, and his crack suppliers, but about his next door neighbors, Francisco Santeria and his gold-toothed, tear-drop tattooed crew from Tampa, black Cuban-Americans sent down by the Gotti outfit to open up shop on pseudo-chic South Beach. What the big change might be Lt. Jones would not say – it certainly did not occur to me that the drugsters would kill each other – but she did say that as a journalist I should very well know why she could say no more.

Cops are naturally suspicious and secretive because of their dangerous business and negative criticism that diminishes the respect that is essential to their safety, but on rare occasions one or two are motivated to give me some inside info after they say their lips are sealed and I promise them confidentiality. Or I might get some typed information in a plain envelope slipped under my door. The last time I got one of those and followed up on the contents, a contract was put out on me. A friend of mine on the organized crime task force alerted me to the danger and told me to saw off a shotgun just over the legal limit and to keep a clean gun around just in case. Since I was recently divorced hence had no woman to cleave to, I left the state and headed to California, women being my only reason for staying put anywhere for long; I thought I might find a toothy smiling blonde police officer in the Golden State, and write a movie script with her as model for my heroine.

Lt. Jones can be as cryptic as the Kabala. Her thin lips were firmly sealed in this case. She knows I’m a compulsive storyteller, I opined. Experience with blabbermouths has set her face in stone. Maybe I can get some cop stories out of her, anyway, I speculated, and conceal her identity by calling it fiction, changing the names and moving the scenes of the crimes from San Diego to South Beach, where I had lived a few years hence was familiar with the environs.

But now I don’t need inside stories: I am a firsthand witness to a bloodbath, and I know exactly why it happened and how it could have been prevented. I’ve got to tell this one, I told myself, to recount the causes of the frustration and stress that nearly killed me. I’m sorry these hip-hopping drugsters are dead, but on the other hand, I am glad I can sleep at night, for that is all I wanted out of my apartment was quiet enjoyment in the first place. Who knows, this living novel could be the big one, not only the one that makes me a fortune so I can pay the costs of dying in style, but the one that inspires thousands of people to make things right in their neighborhoods.