Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

by Judson, Daniel

  Though I wasn’t here to get to know the man better, I was curious what photographs were hanging on his walls. I felt around to the right of the door for the light switch and found it, but before I could throw it I heard the sound of someone rushing up behind me, a rustle of clothes and footsteps. I turned and bent my knees to lower my center of gravity and out of sheer luck managed to duck under a swinging stick. It hit the wall, and the knuckles of the hand holding it made little divots in the plaster. I shot up fast and hit the stick with a hammer fist, knocking it to the floor. Without missing a beat my attacker moved toward me faster than I would have thought possible for a man his size. I braced myself to accept his charge, but it did little good.

  He came crashing into me, driving me across the room and into the wall opposite the door. Frames fell, glass shattered around my feet. My back crushed the few that remained hanging; I could feel the broken glass piercing my denim jacket and pricking my skin. I arched my back out of reflex and his shoulder slammed into my ribs. My body had nowhere to give, and my ribs nothing else to do but pop under his weight. The sound was almost metallic, like a pin shearing, and the pain caused my eyes to roll back for a few seconds.

  He grabbed my jacket and lifted me off the floor, pressing me against the wall. Only then were we face to face. Frames were still falling around me, smashing on the floor. Our eyes met. There was a brief cognition, and then, still holding onto my jacket, he dropped me to my feet. The instant they touched the ground he spun around, pulling me with him. I actually felt the force of gravity increase. I crashed into another wall, into another collection of framed photos. Plaster cracked where my shoulder landed.

  Before I could do anything I was off for another ride, my feet racing along the floor, trying to keep up. His legs were so much longer than mine, and anyway he was the axis of our little circle, he barely had to move at all, taking no more than a few strides toward the wall of his choice. He carried me like a child but I didn’t resist. His long arms were bent, holding me close to him. I knew I didn’t particularly want another run-in with a wall, but there was nothing I could do. He let go of my jacket and I flew into the wall and hit it, landing even harder than before. I felt my kidneys shift and blood rush to my head, where it throbbed and pounded as if I was hanging upside down. I slid to the floor.

  He scrambled for the stick then, broken glass cracking under his shoes. Then next thing I knew he was over me. The first blow landed just above my temple. My head almost flew off and I saw a blue light with a dense core of burnt orange. A second shot, a backhand, clipped my jaw. It rang the bone. I lifted my hands blindly for cover, and the third shot hit my left wrist. A fourth struck my right shoulder.

  He towered above me, taking wild swings, looking for that clean shot at my skull that would crack it open. He grabbed me then out of frustration and lifted me to my feet. The instant my feet touched the ground I reached out and grabbed for his throat, catching his larynx between my thumb and four fingers. I dug around it till my fingers and thumbs were close to touching. The Chief’s mouth opened then and his tongue stuck out, flat and motionless. I kept my hold on his throat with my right hand and trapped his right arm with my left. I locked the crook of my elbow under his and then pulled my arm into my ribs with one swift motion. His elbow snapped and he tried to scream but all that came out was gurgling.

  The stick hit the floor but I held his throat and broken arm a moment more, then released him. He dropped to the floor, coughing and cradling his arms. He lifted his head and looked up at me. His face was white and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip.

  I looked for the night stick and picked it up, then found the light switch and flipped it on. I turned back to the Chief and raised the stick above my head. I was about to bring it down when something caught my eye and stopped me frozen in my tracks.

  On the wall directly in front of me, in a narrow rimmed silver frame with a cracked glass, hung a photograph of Tommy Miller in his football uniform, taken, obviously, before I had crippled him behind the Southampton Library the night he and two friends attacked Tina.

  I looked at the photograph and suddenly couldn’t move. I glanced around the room, and every frame on the wall contained a photograph of Tommy from various times in his life, and all of them before I got to him. In the showcase were his trophies, dozens of them and, too, a letter congratulating him on his full scholarship to the University of Michigan, which of course he never got to use. I lowered my hand and saw on the desk a photograph of Tommy and his mother, this one, however, taken after the fact. In my rage I had worked his joints -- wrenched a knee, twisted an arm. In this photo Tommy is in rehab, his beautiful mother watching him with a mix of encouragement and grief. The arm I had broken Tommy could not yet straighten, and it looked almost mechanical, like the arm of the Tin Woodsman. Tommy didn’t smile, and the smile on his mother’s face was so forced and brave that she really shouldn’t have bothered at all.

  I turned back to the Chief. He said nothing, just looked at me, his face ashen, the edges of his eyes red and raw.

  I was still dazed, breathing fast, shallow breaths. I didn’t bother to check if my head or face was bleeding. It was beyond all that now.

  “What is it you want, Chief,” I snapped.

  His breathing, the swelling of his mountain man’s chest, reminded me of a heaving ocean, of a stormy sea.

  “What do you want from me, Chief?” I said again. I was out of breath. Words were wisps.

  “What are you talking about, MacManus?” he muttered.

  “You set me up for Concannon’s murder, didn’t you?” I gasped as I spoke. “First you tried to kill me in the cottage in Townsend’s house. And when that didn’t work you set me up for Concannon’s murder. You took my knife from my apartment, didn’t you? When you were there, waiting for me to wake up. You set me up good, Chief. My life’s in your hands. So just tell me what the fuck it is you want and get it over with?”

  He adjusted his position against the wall, rising from his slouch to more of a seated position. I kept a close eye on him. He winced and drew in air through his teeth. I thought of how I reacted the same way to pain.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yeah. I’m scared. Is that what you wanted? To scare me? Well, you got it, job’s done, so call off your dogs.”

  The Chief shook his head. It seemed more a gesture of correction that disagreement.

  “It’s not what I want, MacManus,” he said. “It’s never been about what I wanted. It’s what he wants. It’s been that way for a long time now.”

  I watched his words as carefully as I watched his movements.

  “What are you talking about, Chief?”

  “He’s wanted you dead for a few days now, actually. He has hired people to kill you. Professionals. But you don’t seem to have enough sense to die when you’re supposed to. Montauk, the reservation, it was all him. Since you wouldn’t die, he came up with this instead. Concannon had to die anyway, so why not get two for the price of one. He’s always been one for a bargain. Christ, he’s the cheapest son of a bitch I’ve ever known.”

  “Chief, what the hell are you talking about?”

  He looked down at his arm for a moment. He seemed to be gathering the strength he needed to continue. Finally he shook his head in almost amused disbelief and looked up at me. His face was white, but dirty white, like newspaper.

  “You don’t even know what you’re in the middle of, do you, MacManus?”

  I took a step toward him. “Why don’t you enlighten me, Chief?”

  “He’s the reason why I didn’t just walk into your place and drag you out by your collar and beat you like a dog right there on Elm Street. He’s the reason why I didn’t do a lot of things.”

  “Who?”

  “He told me that he needed you, and that was that. This was after what you did to my son. I wanted to kill you, but he wanted you around, and in good health, in case he needed you for something at some point do
wn the road. So I sat on my hands, I did just what I was told. He assured me that once you were no longer of use to him, I could do what I wanted. I’ll tell you, it was a day I lived for.”

  “You’re saying Frank was -- “

  “He always likes to tell people that someone is pulling my strings. That I’m the corrupt and evil one and should be run out of town on a rail. He makes a big deal of saying that he needs to know exactly who it is pulling my strings, that he’s determined to find out. You’ve probably heard the speech. Looking out for the good of the town, he’s the only one who can do something, that kind of thing. He’s the one who runs my department, not me. He has half of my men in his pocket. They do what he tells them. Christ, they’ve even murdered for him.” The Chief sighed through his nose, short and brisk, and shook his head regretfully. “You don’t know what’s going on here, do you? You live here in this town with your head in the ground and you don’t see a damn thing that’s going on.”

  I felt like I was doing math in my head. It was exhausting me just to listen to him, just to try to keep up. I could put the numbers together, just slowly. It took a minute for the bell to ring. When it did my jaw went slack.

  “Chief, are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”

  “Too many blows to the head, MacManus?” He paused. “All this time he’s been telling you I’m the monster. He’s been telling you, I bet, that any day now I was going to bust down your door and slap a made-up charge on you. He wanted to keep you scared and in line. You could be more easily coerced then. Meanwhile, I’m at my desk counting the holes burning in my gut. I wasn’t even allowed to go anywhere near you, and there you were in constant fear of me. The man knows what he’s doing. He played you like a plywood violin.”

  “You’re just telling me bullshit, Chief. Frank’s clever, but he’s not that clever.” What I was really saying was, I wasn’t that stupid. I heard my voice and it sounded exactly like what I was, a panicked man clinging to his fixed perspective of a suddenly changing world. The floor had been yanked out from beneath me, and I was afraid to look directly at all that might now lie below.

  The Chief said, “Who put you and Augie at the scene of the accident? Frank, right?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He wanted you and Augie there to witness the crash, so you could tell everyone it was a terrible accident and nothing more. There was no errant son-in-law for you to tail. You were there to see a murder disguised as an accident and tell the papers and everyone who cared that that’s just what it was.”

  “Wait, what does Frank have to do with the accident?”

  “You still haven’t figured it out. Frank killed the Curry girl. Frank blew out her tires to make it look like an accident, and my men covered it up. Jesus, MacManus, Frank’s been running this thing all along. He killed Amy Curry, and that was just for starters.”

  I stared at the Chief. It was all I could do. I said nothing. I wondered why I felt as much betrayal as anger. Frank was not a friend, or a colleague. Frank was what I didn’t want to be – greedy, mean, blind. He was the mirror reflection by which I judged myself. And now that reflection had deceived me. It had deceived me all long.

  The Chief was my enemy, and I was his, and that had kept my world simple. He was the extent of evil in my town, he and only he held my back against the wall. But now I was to accept that there was another whole world beyond that wall, and in it roamed free the man who held both of our chains.

  “What do you mean, ‘for starters’?” I said.

  “He ordered the hit on Augie.”

  “Hit?”

  “The two men that came to his house, they were sent there to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was taking pictures, getting nosy. Frank got nervous.”

  “So the man Augie killed had a gun.”

  “Of course he did. My men removed it from the scene, locked it away. Augie survived two tours of duty as a marine in Nam. He spent twenty-five years working undercover for the DEA. It’s impossible for him to panic and shoot an unarmed man.” He smiled then. “I can only imagine those two fools not knowing what hit them. Augie’s a tough son of a bitch. That’s why Frank sent two.”

  Hearing of the existence of the gun gave me a burst of hope. It was like a rush of adrenaline. It was almost enough to matter. I felt that I had to do something with that information.

  “How are you doing so far, MacManus? Still with me?”

  I didn’t answer that. I was onto another thought upon which I had only a casual grasp at best. I didn’t want to lose it.

  “So the man who sacked me outside the Hansom House, he worked for Frank?”

  “Yeah, at that point you weren’t a threat to Frank. He didn’t think you could come anywhere near him, so there was no reason to kill you. He felt he could still use you. But then you got close, Frank got nervous, and that’s when he decided to have you killed.”

  I tried to keep up but couldn’t. My mind snagged on something. The man who’s knee I popped, whom I found and brought to Frank, whom Frank sent walking into the freezing Atlantic – this man worked for Frank. By finding him, I had without knowing it surprised and threatened Frank. By trying to kill him, Frank was tying up loose ends. I thought of that cold evening– how long ago was it now? – when to see what the hell it was Frank Gannon wanted. I thought of all the things he had told me.

  The Chief said, “When that failed, he went to plan B. If he couldn’t kill you, he’d have the State of New York do it for him. He got your knife and killed Concannon with it. You were lucky you were wherever you were and not home when my men came to your place looking for you.”

  I thought about that, about where I was and how I had come to be there. Had the Chief inadvertently saved me by sending me to the reservation? Could he live with himself if he knew that?

  And then I thought of Gale, imagining her on her porch right now, wrapped in her afghan, maybe scanning the dark night, looking for me, or maybe not. After a while I looked at the Chief and said, “Why kill Concannon?”

  “Because I think Concannon found the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “I think he came across what someone’s been trying to keep secret. What someone’s been killing to keep secret.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The Chief looked at me, waited a moment, then said, “In the past thirty years Frank Gannon has murdered, or has had murdered, close to fifteen men, mostly political rivals and men who found out something about him that he didn’t want to get out. And I’m sure that in his early days, when he was just starting out, he killed for money. If you ask me, the guy’s a fucking serial killer. He was just lucky enough to find a vocation that allowed him to indulge his compulsion. But none of the bodies of the men he murdered have ever been found. Not one of them. Not a trace. And, in most cases, Frank was the man they were last seen with. I’m no genius, MacManus, but even I can do that math. I’ve thought about this a lot, and over the years I’ve come to conclude that Frank had to have been hiding the bodies in one place, in his own private graveyard somewhere out there, right under our fucking noses.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “If he scattered the bodies around the East End, with all the development that has occurred out here over the past thirty years, we would have found at least one of them. If he dropped the bodies in the ocean, one had to have washed ashore at some point. No, Frank has his own burial ground somewhere, and by what’s been going on these last few days I’ve got a pretty good idea for the first time where it is.”

  “The reservation,” I said.

  “I can think of several good places to hide bodies, places no one would ever build upon – or, rather, no Shinnecock would build upon.”

  “You’re saying Frank killed Concannon. Because Concannon found out about the bodies.”

  “The environmental group opposing the sale hired Concannon to research the effects future construction
might have on the ecology. They wanted to block the sale entirely, or at least have the land declared a wildlife refuge. Anything to prevent construction. The town was behind them. Of course, Frank was all for this, too. It would solve a lot of his problems. He watched closely, staying out of things. But Concannon must have found something that made Frank nervous, and so Frank had him killed.”

  “The girl, Amy Curry. Why did Frank kill her?

  The Chief shrugged. “To warn Concannon, maybe.”

  “To warn him of what?”

  “To keep his mouth shut. To do what Frank told him to do. To write his report the way Frank wanted. I don’t know. Maybe it was all that. Maybe it was something else.”

  “And in between he tried to kill me and Augie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just my luck to have an overachiever for my enemy.”

  The Chief nodded. “I’ve never seen Frank this reckless. He’s running scared. I don’t see how he’d be able to sleep at night, knowing that a few hours after the first bone is found the FBI will come crashing down on our little town. A lot of people have a lot to say about Frank, if only someone would just ask them. But he’s in a panic now. And there’s going to be a lot more killing before this is over, you can count on that.”

  “So do something about it, Chief. Now that you know where his victims are, call the FBI, get them over there now. Be the one who brings down Frank Gannon.”

  The Chief was silent for a moment. I could hear a faint wheezing deep in my lungs when I exhaled.

  He shook his head and said, his eyes winced as if he was in pain, “Frank would just take me down with him.”