by Blake Banner
And we did.
BOOK 3
GARDEN OF THE DAMNED
One
For reasons I couldn’t really put my finger on, it was somehow appropriate. Out the window, April was coaxing the first, tender green leaves from bare branches and withered twigs after a dark, cold winter. This seemed like a suitable counterpoint. I tossed the file onto the desk, narrowly missing my feet, and said, “This one looks interesting.”
Dehan picked it up, leafed through it, and read the abstract on page one.
“John Doe,” she smiled at me in a way that said she wasn’t really smiling at me, “good start.” She carried on, “Aged about thirty, found in a dumpster at the corner of Lafayette and Bryant, in the Bronx. No papers, no ID. Clothes suggest a vagrant. Cause of death, a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, possibly a .38. No slug recovered and no blood found in the vicinity.” She looked at me. “What makes this interesting?”
I frowned at her and spoke with some severity. “The fact that a young man got murdered.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “No. That is why we should investigate it. That doesn’t make it interesting. So far it looks like a guy nobody cares about got whacked by another guy nobody cares about. You said it was interesting, why?”
“Look at the photographs.”
She leafed through till she came to the photographs, three six by eights. She spread them on the desk and spent a couple of minutes staring at them. They showed a man of about thirty, in old, filthy clothes, lying face down in a dumpster full of rubble and builder’s trash. She shook her head. “Help me out. I’m not seeing it.”
I gave a small smirk as I handed her my magnifying glass. “Have a look at his hands.”
She stared at the glass a moment and then at me before taking it, then she looked at John Doe’s hands. She sat back. “Okay, they appear to be manicured. You are observant, Sensei.”
“And the hair. That is definitely a hundred dollar haircut.”
She leaned forward again and studied the photographs. She nodded. “So,” she said and handed back the glass. “How do we figure this? He’s in the neighborhood of Lafayette, maybe looking for a whore, he gets mugged…”
Even as she was saying it, she was seeing the flaws. I said, “Let’s suppose he had a thousand dollar suit that, by some fluke, happened to be the right size for our killer. So he kills him, takes his suit, his shoes and his watch, plus his wallet. Why then go to the trouble of dressing him as a homeless person and dumping him in a dumpster?”
She looked back at the file.
“Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution style.” She shrugged. “These days any kid who wants to be in a gang is likely to shoot you in the back of the head just so he can boast he killed you ‘execution style’.”
“True enough.” I stood. “But if you look at the ME’s report…” She leafed through to the report and read while I spoke. “You’ll see that entry was at the base of the skull, and the exit wound was where the two clavicles meet above the sternum. Which means the shot was at about a ten to twenty degree angle. Like so.” I demonstrated. “John Doe was kneeling, the killer was standing behind him.”
“Execution style.”
I nodded. “You haven’t got a lot of dark back alleys around there. It’s all mainly big, broad streets and open spaces. Plus we know they searched the area and found no blood, no slug. There was no bleeding inside the dumpster.”
Dehan was watching me and nodding. “So it’s clear he was killed somewhere else and then thrown in the dumpster.”
“Right, so the killer gets him on his knees. Shoots him in the back of the head. He has either already made him strip, or he now strips off his clothes, and he dresses him as a vagrant. Then, presumably in the small hours of the morning, he takes him and dumps him. What benefit does the killer get from doing that?”
Dehan arched her eyebrows and spread her hands. “The benefit he actually got was that the case went cold almost immediately, and if you hadn’t pissed off Captain Jennifer Cuevas it would probably have stayed cold.”
“Hidden in plain sight,” I nodded, “a guy nobody cares about murdered by another guy nobody cares about. So there is probably a missing persons report that relates to this guy, but nobody ever made the connection with our victim, because they assumed he was a vagrant. Let’s find out who he is.”
“Something else.” She tapped the photographs. “Why that particular dumpster? Is it because it was close? Did they own it and they were planning a more thorough disposal, but it went wrong? Maybe it was just random, but I think it’s worth looking into.”
“Good, I agree.”
The next couple of hours were drudgery fuelled by coffee. The dumpster belonged to a company called Hagan’s Dumpsters, which was a spawn from a parent company called Hagan Construction, which in turn belonged to Conor Hagan, a guy known to be the head of a clan in the Irish Mob. Hagan’s head office was on East 116th Street, one block from the Supreme Criminal Court. You’ve got to love the Irish and their sense of humor.
I was about to tell Dehan when she stretched out in her chair and sighed. “A lot of people went missing in New York in 2005. But when you filter out the women, guys over thirty-five and under twenty-seven, and people with a criminal record, you wind up with two, and one of them was a car mechanic.”
I could hear the printer churning out a photograph. She stood and walked away, coming back a few seconds later with a photograph and a sheet of printed paper. She dropped the photograph in front of me and sat. This was our guy. She read from the printed sheet.
“Sean O’Conor, thirty years old at the time of his disappearance, an attorney specializing in human rights, junior partner at Stanley and Cohen, in Brooklyn. Also worked on a pro bono basis at the Drop In Center, on Sheridan Avenue, a free representation unit funded by charities, which he helped to set up. There was him, David Foster, and Arnav Singh. The office closed down shortly after Sean disappeared.
“Parents, James and Kathleen O’Conor, apparently still living.”
I sat back and scratched my chin.
“So, we have a case of an Irish human rights attorney from Brooklyn found, dressed as a vagrant, murdered execution style, in the Bronx, in a dumpster owned by the Irish Mob.”
“Really?”
“Hagan construction.” I told her what I’d found.
“Where do you want to start?”
I stared at Dehan’s face. It was a nice thing to stare at and she stared back at me. It was a thing we did. Other people found it unsettling but it helped us to think.
“My gut,” I said, “tells me whatever Sean O’Connor was doing in Brooklyn did not get him killed in the Bronx. I want to talk to his partners at the Drop In Center, then maybe we have a chat with his mom and dad.”
“My thoughts exactly, Sensei. You want to forage some food while I find out where Foster and Singh are?”
I left her to it and made for the deli on the corner.
Two
I got two beef on rye and Dehan met me outside the station, sitting on the hood of my Jaguar. Not many women can sit on the hood of a 1964 Mark II and look good. Mostly you want to move them off so you can get a good look at the car, but Dehan looked like she belonged there. I handed her her sandwich and she began to unwrap it.
“His office is in Manhattan, but he’s at home today. Harbor Road, Oyster Bay, Long Island, I called and they are expecting us.”
I opened the car. “I guess we can assume he isn’t doing pro bono work anymore.”
“Seems a safe bet.”
We took the Bronx Whitestone Bridge and then, at Cunningham Park, we turned east onto the Long Island Expressway and followed that as far as Jericho. The Jericho Oyster Bay road was long and straight and leafy in the dappled sunshine, and there were cute houses hiding among the trees, with chimney pots poking out and leaded bow windows. It was like driving into a chocolate box.
We arrived at Oyster Bay and crawled throu
gh a sleepy town where it seemed almost everybody lived in a mansion, and the small houses were the ones with only five bedrooms and no tennis court. It was a tasteful place but none had the gaudy ostentatiousness of Manhattan. You had the impression that poverty was not allowed here, not because it was immoral, but because it was in bad taste, like stretched limos and tie-pins.
As we turned into Harbor Road, Dehan was looking around her with a kind of rueful air. “Jeez, I bet even the muggers here wear Ralph Lauren and say please and thank you.”
“We have become cynics, Dehan. We devote our lives to fighting crime, but have you ever thought what it would be like if we won?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, staring out at the rows of sweeping lawns, white picket fences and rambling houses. “It never crossed my mind,” she said at last, “that we might win.”
He had an ample driveway, so I pulled in and parked beside his Porsche. As I climbed out and Dehan walked towards the front door, I glanced at the two cars. I thought mine fit better than his. It was less gaudy. Maybe I needed a house to go with my car.
David Foster had a polite Latin-American housemaid who opened the door to us. We told her who we were and she led us out to the pool. It was not warm enough to swim yet, but it was pleasant enough for tasteful pre-prandial drinks on the patio. David was sitting at a white, wrought iron table reading some documents, with what looked like a bone dry Martini by his elbow.
He looked up as we approached, smiled agreeably, and stood to greet us. We showed him our badges.
“I am Detective John Stone, this is my partner, Detective Carmen Dehan.”
We shook and he gestured toward the table. “Please, take a seat. Can I offer you a drink? You are on duty, so perhaps some homemade lemonade?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and said, “Rosalía, dos vasos de limonada, por favor.”
She gave a cute little bow and walked back toward the house. We all sat. He was handsome in an Anglo-Saxon sort of way, with sandy hair and blue eyes. He smiled at Dehan and said, “When you called, you mentioned that you wanted to discuss Sean O’Conor with me. I haven’t seen Sean for about twelve years. I am not sure what I can tell you about him, but may I ask what your interest is?”
Dehan glanced at me.
I said, “You worked together at the Drop In Center, on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx, is that right?”
He smiled. “Yes, there were three of us. They were good times. There was me, Sean and Arnav… Arnav Singh!” He said it as though remembering their names was an achievement of some sort.
Dehan gestured around her. “It seems a long way from this.”
“Oh, it is! But my uncle insisted on it. If I was going into his firm, he wanted me to experience life, and the law, at the sharp end. I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad it’s over. But your interest is in Sean, not me, I gather. And I am still not sure why.”
I asked him, “Do you recall what cases Sean was involved in back then?”
He frowned. “Only vaguely, and I am not sure I would be allowed to discuss them with you. If he discussed them with me in a legal capacity…”
“Privilege would extend to you, I understand that. The thing is, Mr. Foster, Sean was murdered, and we believe it may have had something to do with a case he was working on at that time.”
His frown had become incredulous. “Murdered? Sean? But that’s…grotesque! Poor Sean. What on Earth happened?”
Dehan said, “That is what we are trying to find out. I’m not a lawyer, Mr. Foster, but if he was murdered, surely you could be a little flexible.”
He nodded. “Of course.” He stared hard at the tabletop for a while. “Sean was a bit stereotypic, you know, very much the Irish firebrand. Always ready—a bit too ready if you ask me—to take on the big boys and strike a blow for the underdog.” He looked at me and frowned. “That was what always surprised me. One day he just didn’t turn up at the Center. Arnav and I stuck it out to the end of the month, but the driving force behind that place had always been Sean. So we just closed up shop and went our separate ways.”
“Can you remember any particular cases he was working on just before he disappeared?”
He stared at me. “Is that why he disappeared? Because he was murdered? Twelve years ago?”
I nodded.
“Jesus…!” He sighed. “Yeah, his big thing at the time was a squatters’ rights case. You should talk to Singh. He and Sean were thick as thieves. He was going up against a big construction company that wanted to evict, or was in the process of evicting, a bunch of people who were squatting in a building. The company wanted to knock down the site and develop it. Of course there were millions—tens of millions—of dollars at stake, but Sean’s point was, quite correctly, that the rights of the people who were living there were being trampled on.”
Dehan asked, “Can you remember the name of the construction company?”
He shook his head. “I can’t, but I do remember him making a big thing at the time of the fact that they were Irish, like him. The whole Irish, Catholic thing was a big deal for him.”
Rosalía came out with two glasses and a pitcher of iced lemonade. She poured us a glass each, left the pitcher, and went back inside.
I sipped and Dehan said, “You mentioned he was close to Arnav. You guys stay in touch?”
“No, he moved down to Washington. His thing was playing politics, not my scene. I get more than enough of that at work. But he was smart and ambitious, so he shouldn’t prove hard to find. Then there was his church. Not Arnav, Sean.”
I frowned at him. “His church?”
“Oh, yes! When I say to you that everything, and I mean everything, revolved around God, Jesus, and the Roman Catholic Church, I am not exaggerating even a little. I don’t know when he found time for his actual, real job, but he used to spend every spare moment he had at the church, doing everything from distributing clothes to running a soup kitchen, reading to little old ladies… you name it.”
“Some guy.” It was Dehan, she was looking skeptical.
“No, don’t smirk, detective. He was the real deal, an honest to goodness good guy. I try, let’s face it, most of us try and do the best we can. We all care a bit, right? Not him. He was the genuine article. He really cared, completely. If you talk to the priest there, I am sure he will remember him.”
I asked him, “What church?”
“St. Mary’s, it was… let me see if I can remember… Lafayette. It was a big church. Old. You know, the ones that actually look like churches. You won’t have any trouble finding it. The padre was Irish too. One of those ‘O’ names.”
Dehan said, “O’Neil?”
He snapped his fingers and smiled. “That’s the fellow. Father O’Neil, Padraig O’Neil!”
She nodded. “I know it.”
Foster had got into his stride. “It’s coming back to me now. He had a girl, too. You should talk to her, although oddly enough she wasn’t Irish. I think she was Venezuelan or Mexican maybe. Anyway, for sure she was Latin American. He was pretty sweet on her. I definitely remember that.”
I asked, “Can you remember her name?”
He shook his head. “As I say, he and I weren’t real good pals. I think I was too much of a WASP for his taste, Boston Brahmins, English ancestors... not his cup of tea. He was a nice guy, though.”
We chatted a bit longer, finished our lemonade, and left.
Dehan closed her door and I sat drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. Dehan glanced at me. “Don’t tell me, it’s too easy.”
I grimaced, turned the key in the ignition, and took off.
Three
James and Kathleen O’Conor had a house in Corona, just by the Flushing Meadows Park. It was a nice, detached place on 46th Avenue, which would probably have fit comfortably into David Foster’s kitchen. As I pulled up in front of their gate, I paused a moment to think about relative values. I get deep like that sometimes. Dehan said, “You think the pool and the tennis courts are in back?�
�
I climbed out and looked at her across the roof of the car. The first green leaves of spring were coming out on the plane tree behind her. “Is that the whiff of sour grapes I detect in your voice, Dehan?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m just wondering, what didn’t these guys do, that David Foster did do…?”
“If your point is that life isn’t fair, you’re a little late. We already knew that.”
She sighed. “I know.”
I pushed through the gate and rang on the bell.
The door opened and I looked down at a small woman of maybe five feet. She had a squint and short hair, jeans, a pink cardigan, and a mischievous smile.
“Can I help you?”
I showed her my badge. “Detectives Stone and Dehan, NYPD. Are you Kathleen O’Conor?”
“I am, what have I done now?” she said, and grinned.
I smiled back. “Nothing we know of, Mrs. O’Conor. We would just like a quick word with you and your husband, Jim. Is he in?”
“He’s watching the TV, for a change. Come in.” She walked ahead of us into the front room, speaking as she went. “Jim! Would you turn the feckin’ TV off for five minutes? We have visitors.”
We followed her in. There was an immensely tall man, with a shock of snow white hair swept back from his face, folded into an armchair opposite the TV. He fumbled with the remote control, switched off the television, and levered himself to his feet. Once he had managed all that, he smiled. He must have been six foot six if he was an inch.
I told him who we were and they both told us to sit down. I watched Jim lever himself back into his chair and Kathleen sat on the sofa, next to Dehan, with her feet barely touching the floor.
I sighed. “We need to talk to you about your son, Sean.” I pulled the photograph Dehan had printed from my pocket and showed it to them. “Is this Sean O’Conor, your son?”
All the humor drained from their faces. Kathleen put her hand to her mouth and tears glistened in her eyes. Jim seemed to turn gray.
