by Chaz McGee
‘Could he be getting out of his unit somehow?’ Gonzales asked.
Calvano felt the need to prove he was still breathing. ‘No, sir, we’ve had over two dozen men search his unit twice now. We’ve gone over his records and the sign-in and sign-out procedures. He’s not getting out of that ward.’
Gonzales looked at Calvano as if he was something nasty on the bottom of his shoe, but he seemed to accept his assurances. ‘Is it possible that the murdered orderly was working with Otis Parker? Or that he was the go-between linking Parker and a follower?’
‘Vincent D’Amato,’ Calvano said suddenly.
Maggie and Gonzales stared at him.
‘The dead orderly’s name is Vincent D’Amato,’ Calvano explained. ‘I went to school with his older brother. They grew up a few doors down from me.’
Gonzales had the decency to look vaguely ashamed at Calvano’s veiled rebuke.
‘Is it possible that Vincent D’Amato worked with Parker in some capacity and helped cause Darcy Swan’s murder?’ Gonzales asked.
‘It’s possible,’ Maggie conceded.
‘What do you know about Darcy Swan so far?’ Gonzales asked.
‘Her name, her address and the fact that she stayed out of trouble at school. She seems to have been one of those kids who showed up, never made waves, had a handful of friends, but that was about all, and barely registered with the teachers. We’re going to question the mother again in a few hours. She was too broken up to answer any of our questions the first time around. We’ll know more then.’
Judging from her tone of voice, I knew that Maggie did not like the mother. If she was anything at all like Darcy Swan’s grandmother, I totally understood.
‘Tell me about the murder this morning,’ Gonzales asked. He glanced at Calvano. ‘Vincent D’Amato, I mean. It was nowhere near Parker’s unit, right? It was outside the fence surrounding the building where he’s being held?’
‘It was outside both fences surrounding his unit,’ Maggie explained. ‘When they added on the unit fifteen years ago, which they had to do to stay afloat as a private institution, the trustees were concerned about the safety of the other patients. So they put a lot of money into security and checkpoints. I’m not seeing how Parker could get out. The murder itself took place in the center of a huge lawn that connects the long-term and short-term units. Anyone who is allowed out on the grounds – and that’s pretty much anybody, except for the inmates on Parker’s ward, or some of the more troubled civilian patients who are kept in locked wards – would have access to the lawn. Vincent D’Amato was found in a courtyard built in the center of it, next to a fountain.’
‘The fountain shows a bunch of naked cherubs and stuff,’ Calvano interrupted. ‘The water squirts out of their . . .’ Calvano hesitated. ‘Well, you know, it squirts out of their genitals, if that seems relevant.’
Maggie and Gonzales stared at him as if he were daft. Maggie put Calvano out of his misery by continuing quickly. ‘When I first saw the body,’ she explained, ‘my mind went straight to Otis Parker. I know that’s not enough to say there’s a definite connection, but hear me out. It was the way the body was staged. It was the fact that the body was staged at all. Granted, the orderly’s murder was quicker than Darcy Swan’s and it lacked the attention to detail, shall we say, of Otis Parker’s prior killings, but it’s the same mindset at work. I promise you that. It’s as if the killer is creating a panel from a comic book.’
‘What do you know about Vincent D’Amato?’ Gonzales asked.
‘He had a pretty good work record until about nine months ago,’ Calvano explained. He flipped open his beloved notebook and consulted his notes. ‘There was nothing on his record before that, except for a few concerns that he sometimes got too close with some of the female patients.’ He looked up at Gonzales. ‘No accusations or charges, just a few supervisor notes. But about nine months ago, he started missing a lot of work and taking them as sick days. Co-workers suspected he was taking drugs, and it turned out they were right.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Gonzales asked.
‘Drugs to treat lupus,’ Gonzales explained. ‘Everyone thought he was on smack or oxycodone or some other kind of downer, but it turns out the guy was diagnosed with lupus and he was in some pretty heavy-duty physical pain. After a while, his treatment seemed to work and he got the pain under control and his work record stabilized a little. But, concerns about him getting too close to female patients came up again and so they transferred him out of the long-term unit about a month ago and put him in the hardcore unit. No women there.’
‘Which would have put him in daily contact with Otis Parker,’ Gonzales pointed out.
‘That’s true, sir,’ Maggie said. ‘But there was instant animosity between the two, according to all other staff members, and I am talking about from day one. I don’t think it was an act. I think the two men hated each other. It’s possible they were working together, but I think it’s more likely that Vincent D’Amato found something out about Otis Parker and was killed because of it.’
‘Tell me more about how Vincent D’Amato’s body was staged,’ Gonzales asked. I knew he was just fishing for a good story he could tell his golfing buddies at the country club.
Maggie shifted uneasily in her chair. ‘You know that Road Runner cartoon? And the way Wiley Coyote looks after he zooms off the edge of a cliff and lands on the canyon floor below? That’s how D’Amato looked.’ She looked a little embarrassed. I had never thought of Maggie being young enough to watch cartoons.
‘And . . .’ Gonzales encouraged her, certain there had to be more to the theory than that.
Calvano did his best to save her. ‘And Otis Parker has a Road Runner tattoo on his ass,’ he said, trying his best to look dignified.
Maggie gave him a look that would have scorched leather, inspiring Calvano to hold both hands up in an exasperated gesture. ‘What? The guy has a Road Runner tattoo on his ass. I’ve seen photos of it. It looks like the Road Runner is racing right out of his—’
‘I get the picture,’ Gonzales interrupted. ‘And all I can say is God help us all if this is what we have to go on.’ He looked at them in silence for a moment, with that way he had of making you feel like you were the most embarrassing, useless link in the entire department. Maggie wasn’t used to that look from him and squirmed uncomfortably in her chair. On the other hand, it bounced right off Calvano like he was coated in Teflon.
Gonzales reached a decision. ‘I want the two of you to concentrate on solving the Darcy Swan murder, period. I’m going to put a separate team on Vincent D’Amato and see what they come up with. I don’t want the assumption that they are connected to drive the investigation and I see no evidence that they are connected. Once you find out who killed the girl, I want you to go back and take a look at the murders that put Otis Parker away and make absolutely sure that he was guilty. I do not want anyone else to know that this is what you’re doing. You are to report to me and me alone on it, got it?’
Maggie was disappointed, but she was also a professional. ‘We won’t let you down,’ she managed to say as she rose to go. Calvano followed her lead, although he did not have a skirt to smooth down the way that Maggie did.
At least not yet.
SIXTEEN
‘You had to mention that tattoo on his ass,’ Maggie said to Calvano.
‘You’re the one who brought up Wiley Coyote,’ he said defensively. ‘I was just trying to help. Besides, I got to use the word “ass” right to his face.’
Maggie looked pissed, but after about fifteen seconds of silence, they both began to laugh. ‘Did you see the look on his face?’ she asked. They laughed even harder.
It was one of those moments when a partnership crystallizes into something you know is going to endure. I was jealous I wasn’t a part of it and, yet, grateful I had been a witness to it.
They were on their way to question Belinda Swan, Darcy’s mother. Apparently, she had been so upset a
t the news of her daughter’s death, that she had barely been able to march straight into the manager’s office, demand a week of family leave, cause a scene about Walmart’s lack of insurance for funeral expenses, and then negotiated to be paid early for the next month, even though her paycheck was unlikely to put much of a dent in Darcy’s funeral home bill. She had then marched over to the women’s clothing section, selected a ruffled black dress with a plunging neckline, picked up a pair of matching black heels with sequins from the shoe department and walked right out the front door without paying for either item. No one tried to stop her. The manager had just shrugged and returned to his office, leaving Maggie and Calvano to watch her drive away. She was already dialing people on her cell phone. To her, the tragedy was not about her daughter. The tragedy was all about her.
Maggie and Calvano discussed the strange scene on the way over to her house for a second interview. They did not seem to have much love for Belinda Swan, though neither thought that she’d had anything to do with her daughter’s death.
What happened next would not change their poor opinion of her. When Maggie and Calvano arrived at her house, Darcy’s mother was sitting in her living room sucking down a beer while waiting for a news anchor to arrive to interview her about the tragic death of her daughter. She seemed giddy at the prospect of being on TV. I could feel any sympathy that Maggie or Calvano had for her evaporate. Me? I’d never felt any sympathy for her in the first place. I’d met many versions of Belinda Swan before, and I am ashamed to say that I had never been particularly sympathetic to any of them. She was overweight from too much booze and constant junk food and her brassy hair was far too harsh for her ruddy face. She was dressed in clothes both too short and too tight, and her heavy make-up only made her look more desperate. I wondered what she saw when she looked in the mirror each day. Did she see a woman beaten down by life or did she still see a pretty high school girl who’d once had hopes of a better life one day?
Many women just like Belinda Swan had come into the station house when I was alive to complain that their live-in boyfriend had stolen their car, or given them a black eye, or raided their bank accounts. I wanted to feel sorry for them, I really did. But after a few trips out to their homes, and dropped charges of assault, and being turned on by complainant and abusers alike, the truth was that I stopped caring. I began to think of them as hamsters on the most unfortunate of wheels, repeating a cycle over and over without any real thought as to why they were doing it at all.
I felt the same way about Belinda Swan, at least at first. She was defensive about being caught drinking and belligerent when Maggie asked her if they could sit and talk for a few minutes. ‘Only if you got the cash,’ she said defiantly, raising the can of Budweiser to her lips. ‘I’m out of Darcy’s paycheck now and we needed that money. If anyone talks to me, they have to pay.’
I had a sudden fantasy of Maggie pulling out her gun and shooting the can of Budweiser right out of Belinda Swan’s hand, then maybe plugging her in the ass for good measure. But that was never going to happen and, besides, Calvano spared Maggie the trouble of putting her in her place. He smiled at Belinda Swan and sat a little bit too close to her on the couch. She immediately turned toward him and assessed him. He was several rungs up the ladder from her league and passed with flying colors. It appeared that Adrian Calvano was good for something.
‘We just want to ask you a few questions about your daughter and her friends,’ Calvano explained. He leaned in even closer. ‘You deserve justice. She deserves justice. We want to make sure that her story has a final chapter. You know how the media loves a good ending.’
The reminder that she could milk more money out of her daughter’s murder if it were solved softened Belinda Swan up. She looked at her watch, but said, ‘OK. But make it quick. That skinny Channel Five bitch with the blonde hair is arriving in ten minutes.’
A door slammed in the back of the house, startling Maggie and Calvano, but it was only the grandmother. She ambled out of the back hallway dressed to the nines, hair teased high and make-up troweled on. Clearly, both women planned to be on the news that night.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Belinda Swan warned her mother. ‘I’m the one they want to interview.’
I felt a flash of impatience at their self-centeredness. They had lost a child, and from what I had overheard from the kids on Michael’s ward, Darcy Swan had been trying as hard as she could to rise above her circumstances. She was going to school, she was paying attention in class, she was trying to find something she was good at it and she was working a job after school on top of it all. She deserved better than what these two women had to offer her memory. But I also felt bad for the two women before me, if only because the bed they had made would be a tough one to lie in going forward. Judging from their hair, their make-up and their attire, their entire lives revolved around attracting the attention of men. Neither one realized that they had long since grown invisible to the male species. They would keep trying to regain their glory, to no avail, until the day they died.
Calvano dealt with the stand-off by patting the cushion on the other side of him and inviting the grandmother to sit. She perched next to him and crossed her legs conspicuously – I had to give it to her, they were damn fine legs for a grandmother – then promised her daughter that she would just sit quietly in a chair once the newscaster arrived unless a question was specifically asked of her.
Had Maggie and Calvano not been there, I have no doubt Belinda Swan would have taken her mother to the mat. As it was, she agreed somewhat ungraciously and once again told Maggie to make it quick.
Maggie and Calvano led the two women through a series of questions. It soon became apparent that neither one of them knew a damn thing about Darcy’s life. They lied about it, too, inventing details, I was sure, because they were vaguely aware that they should be ashamed of knowing so little about her. No, they told Maggie and Calvano, Darcy had never known Otis Parker and, they assured them, neither had either one of them. They seemed titillated by the thought of knowing a notorious killer, but were smart enough to realize that he could not have killed Darcy since everyone knew he was locked up in Holloway. They did not know the names of Darcy’s friends, nor even the names of her teachers, and while they were sure she had boyfriends – all the women in their family always had plenty of boyfriends, they assured Maggie and Calvano – they didn’t know their names or how long they had lasted nor if Darcy had anyone special in her life. They knew Darcy brought home at least $30 in tips per night when she worked at the diner, since the girl had given them $100 a week for room and board ever since the two older women had locked Darcy out of the house once, when she failed to give them the full amount, ‘to teach her a lesson in responsibility.’
Nice – charging your teenage daughter to live in her own home and then throwing her out on the street when she couldn’t cough up the cash. My burgeoning sympathy for them disappeared. I had visions of them going up like torches, their hairspray fueling a mighty conflagration that would startle even the most seasoned residents of Hell.
They weren’t even sure what kind of grades Darcy had made, but the mother bragged proudly that no disciplinary notes had ever been sent home with the girl. No doubt. The school officials probably didn’t even know Belinda Swan existed, or if they did, they knew that Darcy had been far more responsible that her mother.
Maggie and Calvano left hurriedly once the interview was over, anxious to leave the house before the TV crew arrived. They knew Gonzales was serious about his orders to keep things out of the press, and Maggie had learned that the only way to keep Calvano out of trouble was to keep him out of sight.
SEVENTEEN
I knew Maggie was furious at the two older Swan women for their selfishness. I sat in the back seat, enjoying the crackles of energy Maggie gave off when she was mad. She was like a pinwheel spinning off droplets of life as she whirled.
In her anger, she drove too fast toward their next stop, and sen
t Calvano banging against the dashboard more than once when she had to stomp on her brakes to keep from ramming the car in front of her. About the fourth time this happened, Calvano turned to her and demanded to know where the hell they were heading in such a hurry.
‘To get you a tetanus shot,’ she said, keeping a straight face. ‘I don’t know how you could sit that close to those two women.’
‘Sometimes you just have to take one for the team.’
And I was part of that team, I told myself, even if they didn’t know it.
We were heading toward Holloway and I knew what it was probably all about – the time had come for Maggie to meet Otis Parker for herself. She was ready.
Otis Parker was brought into the interview room by one of the same orderlies who had guarded him during Calvano’s first interview. The dead orderly, Vincent D’Amato, had been replaced by a new guy who was easily as tall and muscled as Parker. Like Parker, he was stone-cold white and his head was shaved. It gleamed beneath the room’s fluorescent lights. He had numerous gold studs and hoops in his ears and colorful tats decorated both of his truly massive arms. I spotted an angel tattoo, a dolphin leaping from blue waters, a bright yellow sun and a rose-framed heart with ‘Mother’ etched across it in flowery script. I had never seen such happy tattoos in my life. But the new orderly’s most distinguishing feature was a red beard that dangled in a series of six small braids from his chin. A tiny brass bell tinkled at the end of each braid. He looked like a modern-day pirate dressed in hospital scrubs.
Something told me that Otis Parker had met his match.
The new orderly didn’t ask Parker to sit. Instead, he shoved Parker into place and strapped his feet tightly against the legs of the metal chair while the other orderly shackled Parker to the arms of it.
‘Is that necessary?’ Maggie asked.
