by R.J. Ellory
September 30th, 1992. Eleven days time and it would be sixteen years since it happened. Sometimes it felt like yesterday, other times it felt like an entirely different life. Parrish had been twenty- eight years old, married the better part of seven years, Robert was all of six, Caitlin just four. Clare had been more of the woman he married, less of the nightmare she became. Later, after the divorce, Parrish had asked himself whether his father's death had been a significant factor in the beginning of the marital dissolution. Clare and John had been close. John Parrish called her the daughter I never had. She took his death badly. She had to be sedated after the funeral, and then she spent a month sloping around the house in sweats, her hair unwashed, chain-smoking, drinking vodka after lunch. She snapped out of it soon enough. The kids pulled her through far more than he had. He had yet to be made Detective; that wouldn't come for another four years. He was still busting his hump, taking on extra shifts, doing the legwork and groundwork and donkey-work that he'd been told was the road to success. Bullshit. Making Detective was as much about showing up and not fucking up as anything else.
The events of that day were clear in his mind, as clear now as they had been a decade and a half earlier. Whoever hit them hit them both. John Parrish and his long-time partner, George Buranski. George used to come over with his wife, Marie. Marie was all bouffant hair and cheap perfume. She brought angel food cake every time. She made it herself, and it tasted like crap. How someone could make angel food cake taste that bad Parrish didn't know, but somehow she managed it. They'd stay a few hours, Marie talking to Frank's mother, Katherine. Cop wives together. They knew precisely what John and George were discussing in back of the den, out in the yard with their Buds and burgers, sitting in front of the house in George's car like there were listening devices planted in the living room and the kitchen. Paranoid as hell, the pair of them. Sometimes George left with a brown paper grocery bag stacked with fifty-dollar bills. Sometimes he brought one with him and left it behind. Frank knew to say nothing, ask nothing, look nowhere but straight ahead. He knew to say Thank you, Marie when she gave him a bottle of Crown Royal for his birthday, another for Christmas. That was the best these people could do. Tens of thousands of dollars, and all they could come up with was Crown Royal and angel food cake. Cheap bastards.
So September 1992. Things had been on the upslide for years. The money was coming in, very little of it was going out. The Saints were cleaning up left, right and center. The Brooklyn Organized Crime Task Force was into everything that was worth being into. IAD did their periodic check-ups; IAD gave them a clean bill. And then something went bad. To this day Parrish had been unable to work out precisely what had happened, but it related to a bank on Lafayette near the Classon Avenue subway station. The Saints never did their own grunt-work. They weren't the workers, they were the management. Parrish had looked into it a little later, carefully peering round the edges of the internal investigation. His father had been involved. People were obviously concerned about what Frank might know, what Frank might say. Last thing they needed was the cop-son of the most decorated anti-organized crime, OCCB/BOCTF veteran spilling his guts on Channel 9. He got looks and comments in the corridors. You okay there, Frankie? Everything alright at home, Frankie? Hey, Frankie, how's your ma doing? She holding up? It went that way for a moment or so, and then they figured he was good. He wasn't gonna bust open like an overripe watermelon. He was going to keep it in-house, under wraps, close to his chest.
It was then that he'd started looking. Carefully at first, checking out what had been reported about the heist that took place that Wednesday afternoon at East Coast Mercantile Savings. It wasn't a major league bank. Routine day-to-day traffic, three ATMs in the street, one inside; four tellers, a loan advisor, a mortgage guy and a business consultant. Beyond that there was a manager, an assistant manager, a duty security guard. He was an ex-cop called Mitchell Warner, right out of Brooklyn's 15th, and evidently he had been their inside man. Of course that small fact never came to light, but reading between the lines - taking into consideration that Warner was in the restroom when the heist kicked off, the fact that they knew he was in there and had someone waiting outside the door for when he exited, and most of all the fact that he was found in his car with a self-administered .25 caliber bullet in his head eight hours after the fact. . . well, road signs were road signs and they led only one way as far as Frank Parrish was concerned.
The heist was carried out by four men. It went according to plan. They entered the bank at eleven forty-one a.m., exited at eleven fifty-six. Across the street was a barbershop, and it was from there that an off-duty cop called Richard Jackson had seen them. He came out with his hair wet and his .38 drawn. He was not on the Saints payroll, couldn't have been, for if he had been he would've known to leave well alone. This was official business, no question about it, and the last thing they needed was some gung-ho jarhead uniform gatecrashing the party. But gatecrash it he did, and got a gut full of double-ought for his trouble. He was thrown back through the plate glass window of the barbershop, and the four men were away like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Had it not been for the dead cop it would have wound up another unsolved matter for Robbery. The Feds would have trodden on everyone's toes, but they would only have trodden so long. They were as underpaid and overworked as everyone else. No, it was definitely the dead cop that soured the pie. All of a sudden Richard Jackson was a hero, an off-duty cop in a barbershop that tried to do the right thing. He didn't have a radio, couldn't call for back-up, had asked the barber to call 911, which he did. But 911 responses were always minutes, never seconds, and the speed at which these things unfolded meant that by the time they got to the scene most of the damage was done. Whoever was going to get shot was shot already. Whoever was going to die had already done so. In that instance it was Jackson, and whoever might have come along from IAD and Robbery to make it go away couldn't. Not this time.
And as far as killing two cops were concerned, it was easy enough. Someone calls some business in for the Task Force, John Parrish and George Buranski are dispatched, another member of the Saints is waiting for them and that's the whole show. The Unit has the emergency call-out on file, and whoever made that call was smart enough to use a phone booth and pass it through the switchboard so it couldn't be traced. So now there were two dead cops in a derelict house near Ferris Street. Frank Parrish could only later surmise that his father and George Buranski were the go-betweens. They had dealt with the bank crew, with the security guard; they had made whatever arrangements were required, and they were the ones who could have connected the job to Internal Affairs, the Brooklyn Task Force, the head of the unit himself, Captain James Barry. So they had to go. John Parrish and George Buranski were good officers. They would be sorely missed. They would be buried with full honors, and their wives would receive the pension that was due them. The last chapter was written, the book was closed. The security guard from East Coast Mercantile, ex-cop Mitchell Warner, so overwhelmed was he by his dereliction of duty, said failure resulting in the death of a fellow officer, that he took his own life only hours later. FrankParrish knew that Warner no more took his own life than Richard Jackson had, no more than his own father and George Buranski.
It had been a business matter, all of it, and business such as this was kept in-house for the good of everyone.
James Barry, ex-head of the Brooklyn Organized Crime Task Force, had long-since retired. The Task Force, at least in that unholy incarnation, had been disbanded back in 2000, but their legacy lived on. You caught sight of it every once in a while when some old-hand mobster was dragged in. He would ask to speak to so-and-so or such-and-such, believing still that the right word in the right ear would see them home for fettuccine and cannolis with the grand-kids. When informed that so-and-so or such-and- such was retired or dead, they would start to sweat.
Frank Parrish's legacy was a dead father, a dead mother, the ghosts of the past, a sense of guilty conscience that he had been a part of t
hat - at least indirectly - and that people were dead that shouldn't have been because of John Parrish. Talking about it with Marie Griffin had been important in more ways than one. Did he believe that it had had some inherent therapeutic value? No more than the value anyone would gain by talking about something. Did he believe that he had let go? Did he hell. He'd lived in the shadow of John Parrish his whole life, and the shadow was still very visibly there. Did it matter? No more than any other detail of his fucked-up life. Clare. Robert. Caitlin. Jimmy Radick. Richard McKee and the snuff movies. He'd meant what he'd said to Radick. If he was wrong on this one then he was going to quit. He was not wrong. He couldn't be. Not again.
SEVENTY-THREE
Friday dissolved somewhere. Parrish was uncertain where it went. He and Radick talked around in circles until lunchtime, and then they both went down to Archives to see if there was any further evidence of Absolute Films and the work that they had undertaken to further Jennifer's short-lived cinematic career.
Erickson gave them unlimited access. "Knock yourselves out," he said, and left them to it.
Parrish - no stranger to such material - was nevertheless reminded of the very darkest edges of human depravity and degradation. At what point did people become uncontrollably driven to do such things to one another? And why? For sexual satisfaction? Dominance? Power over life and death? And at what point did it become necessary to cross the line ... He did not know, and neither, he believed, did anyone else.
Everyone has thoughts - cruel, destructive, wicked, vindictive - thoughts sometimes harbored for months and years against people whom we believe should suffer ignominy and retribution for some wrong they have perpetrated. But these remain just thoughts. We withhold ourselves from action, perhaps because we have our own in-built censor; or perhaps because we believe in the fundamental balance of all things and are concerned for the harm that might come our way if we enact our own strains of viciousness.
But those who did terrible things, thought Parrish, were only a tiny minority when measured against the vast majority of those who only thought. Thought was no sin. Action, when directed against the peace and dignity of the individual, of the society - that was the sin. It was there in the law books. It was in the moral structure of the community. It was woven into the very fabric of society. And yet now, here, sitting with Radick in a basement office of Vice Archives, reminded of what had happened to these girls, he fixed his resolve on his intended course of action. The single shot of Jennifer had been enough. And perhaps Richard McKee was not guilty of all the sins of Man, but he was sure guilty of something . . .
Guilty enough to warrant the extraordinary measures that Parrish was going to take? He believed so.
They'd had enough by four, both of them. They boxed up the material that Erickson had left and returned it to the rightful storage unit. They had only scratched the surface.
'It's endless,' Radick said as they were exiting the building. 'We could go on looking for ever, and maybe find nothing, and then if whoever's doing this doesn't take another girl, or if he does but we don't know, then I guess we're never going to find the truth.'
Parrish - tempted then more than at any other time to tell Radick his suspicions, to give him the name of Amanda Leycross, to tell him what he planned to do and the action Radick should take if it all went horribly wrong - said nothing. Radick would only try and convince him otherwise, and Parrish knew he didn't want to be convinced. It was now no longer a question of if, but merely when. Tonight, tomorrow night, sometime before Monday morning for sure. As he had told Marie Griffin, he needed only a day or so to wrap this thing up. What he should have added was that this thing was going to end: one way or the other. But she would have asked him what he meant, would have delved into his thoughts the way she had been doing for the previous two and a half weeks. Seemed so much longer. Seemed like a month, two, six. Seemed like an eternity. Things had changed. There was no question about that.
He now realized how much of his father he had carried with him all these years. He realized how little he'd understood Clare or the kids, what they wanted and how he had failed to provide it. He had begun to appreciate that existence was a collaborative thing. It didn't work single-handedly, at least not the way he had managed it.
He was not so selfish as to consider that the people he knew would be better off without him. That was so much self-pity and shallowness. That was the sort of thing you told people when you wanted them to feel sorry for you. No, he didn't believe that. He believed that people, in general, were better with him - strangers for example; he did well with strangers. And he did well with the dead. He was dogged and persistent enough to make someone else's death a matter of priority. The old saw: My day starts when your day ends. He now believed that. The time with Marie Griffin had given him a sense of balance, an understanding of his own small but necessary place in the woof and warp of things. He was not wrong about the present case. He had convinced himself of this much at least. And if he was wrong, well - as he had vowed so unequivocally to Radick - if he was wrong then it wouldn't matter because he wouldn't have the job anymore. It was that simple.
At half-past five Parrish told Radick to call it a day.
'Only if you will,' Radick replied.
'I am,' Parrish said. 'I'm out of here, I've had enough. We're back on early shift next week . . . not that shifts make a lot of difference, but it means we get the weekend at least.'
'Man, have I looked forward to this.'
'You got anything planned?'
Radick shook his head. 'Nothing particular. Eat, sleep, watch TV, eat some more, sleep more than that. It's been a bitch of a fortnight and I really feel like I need to recharge, you know what I mean?'
Parrish smiled understandingly. 'I know exactly what you mean. See you Monday, Jimmy.'
'Take care, Frank.'
Parrish watched him leave, waited until he saw Radick's car pull away and turn down Fulton. He knew in his bones that Jimmy would be seeing Caitlin this weekend, and he also knew that there was nothing he could do about it. . .
Parrish was leaving the room when the phone rang. He glanced at the phone, hesitated, but it was his desk, and that meant the desk was calling up with a message. Erickson? Maybe Radick calling from his cell phone with a final thought? Parrish stepped back and lifted the receiver.
'Frank, that you?'
'Yeah, what's up?'
'You got a priest on the way . . . sorry, I couldn't stop him. Heasked if you were up there and I said yes, and he was gone before I had a chance to stop him.'
'Oh for Christ's sake—'
'Taking the Lord's name in vain, Frank?'
Parrish turned at the sound of voice behind him. There, in the doorway, stood Father Briley.
'I got it,' Parrish told the desk sergeant, and he hung up.
'Father—' he started.
Briley raised his hands in a placatory fashion. 'Fifteen minutes,' he said. 'I just need fifteen minutes of your time. I've been trying to reach you, but for whatever reason my messages haven't arrived.'
Parrish couldn't lie to the man. 'Your messages arrived, Father, I just didn't return them.'
Briley nodded. 'I understand that. Perhaps we didn't part on the most amicable of terms.'
Parrish smiled. 'Compared to the conversations me and Clare have had recently I'd say we parted the best of friends.'
'I need to talk about—'
'My father?' Parrish interjected. 'I can't, Father, I really can't. I have spent the last two weeks talking about my father with a counsellor here, and I've kind of had enough.'
'There's things you don't know, Frank.'
'And I am sure, Father Briley, that there's things that you don't know either.'
Briley looked down at his shoes. 'Can I sit, Frank? Can I sit down for a minute?'
'Look, I appreciate your concern, but I really have to go—'
'Like I said, Frank, fifteen minutes . . . fifteen minutes to let me tell you something that your fa
ther made me swear I never would.'
Parrish started to speak, an automatic response, and then he registered what Briley had said, and indicated a chair. They both sat, and for a few moments they just looked at one another in silence.
'It started with Santos,' Briley said. 'You might not remember him. Jimmy Santos? He would have been around when you were five, six, seven years old.'
'I know the name,' Parrish said. 'He was a dirty cop. Armedrobbery. Got busted, did time, came out and went to the dark side.'
'He was the one who helped sew up the airport,' Briley said. 'He named names, had information on which police they needed out there, and your father took money from him to expedite those transfers.'
Parrish shook his head. 'I don't want to hear this, Father, I really don't—'
'Yes you do, Frank, yes you do. You just think you don't.'
'He was a crook, okay? What more is there to know? He took money, he took bribes, he lost paperwork and evidence, he was involved in armed robberies, Christ only knows what. I know enough already, enough to see that he and I are so different. . .'
'You love your kids, Frank?'
Parrish stopped and looked at Briley.
'You don't need to answer that question. I know you love your kids. And your father loved you. More than you know. More than you can imagine. He made mistakes. He crossed the line and took some money from Jimmy Santos, and once he did that they had him. Santos was a bad man, through and through. He could have kept his word. He could have maintained your father's anonymity and just used him to get the police he wanted out at the airport, but no. Jimmy Santos wanted to be the big man. He wanted to be in everyone's good books. He told the people he worked for about your father, and they came for him. Your father was a sergeant in 1967. He was a good cop. He was making an impression. He took a few hundred dollars to expedite some paperwork, but aside from that he was a good cop. He had policing in his blood, and he was never going to do anything else. These people saw that in him, and they saw a man rising in the ranks, someone they could use to get cases dropped, to get evidence mislaid, to get reports lost from files before they got to the DA—'
