“Ex-boxer, gang enforcer, now moves drugs all over the island. Also goes by the name K-Shivs. Lives over in Melville.”
Regan shrugged. “I got nothing, but I will personally pass the names on to Lou Carey and his new partner and make sure they follow up. You have my hand on that.” He offered it to me and I shook it for a second time. “About the word from on high . . . It sounds like you’re right about that, like someone’s put out the word to shut you out,” he said, placing his hand on his heart, “but it wasn’t me. My honor on that. And I will make sure a different word comes down tomorrow. From Monday morning on, I guarantee you that no one will be chasing you off or threatening you.”
“Thanks. I would really appreciate that.” I noticed his mention of Lou Carey’s new partner, but didn’t ask about it. If he wanted to explain further, he would. I also thought about bringing up my night in the Third Precinct, but decided to play a waiting game.
“Murphy, do you think I could have one for the road? Doesn’t have to be fine stuff.”
I pulled the expensive Jameson back down from its lofty perch and poured him a healthy one for the road. I held the bottle up to Bill.
“Red wine, I think, Gus,” Bill said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside.
I poured him a glass of a Chianti.
After Chief Regan had taken a few sips of that drink for the road, he said, “And I’ve heard about that little incident involving you and some of my detectives last evening. I’ve taken steps to discipline those involved. That Milt Paxson has been a thorn in my ass since the day he made detective, the chesty bastard. I’ve been looking for a way to take him down a few pegs and he’s given it to me. Well, maybe he and his pal who pulled you over will enjoy their time back in uniform.”
“You know they planted—”
Regan raised his right hand. “I know. It was only talcum powder.”
“So that was Paxson’s doing?”
“Like I said, Murphy, the man’s been a pain in my ass for years. He has a strong distaste for you. But please, let’s keep this in-house. Let me take care of it without raising a public stink. I know you’ve got every right to scream bloody murder about it, but do this for me and the department. All this heroin flowing into the high schools . . . it makes us look bad and the last thing we need is to air this laundry in the media. I’m glad to take it in the face for the team for now, but if the press gets a whiff of this . . .”
“I can do that, Chief.”
While we finished our drinks in silence, the DJ tested his lighting effects. First he turned the room lights off. He turned a bright narrow spotlight on a mirrored ball that hung from a tall pole next to his turntables. As the ball spun round, a whirl of stars appeared on the walls of the club, on the fixtures, and on our faces. The DJ put various filters in front of the spotlight, changing the color of the whirling stars from red to orange to green to blue to yellow. Then, as I turned to put the bottle of Irish back in its spot, the room went black again and the DJ turned on his strobe. In the bar mirror I noticed Bill raising his glass to his lips. Each part of his movement was broken up into singular frames. His glass and arm were here, then there, then here again. It was Regan I was focused on, though. And in the flashes of light, his expression morphed from a nasty drunken scowl to fury, his green eyes seeming to glow with rage. His eyes, I thought, there’s something about his eyes. But before I could figure out what that something was, the strobe shut off and the lights came up.
“Are we good now, Murphy?” Regan asked, slamming his glass upside down on the bar.
“We always were, Chief. Thanks again.”
“Oh, Christ, Kilkenny,” Regan said, skipping the apologies to Bill, “I need to get something to eat.” He then pointed at the hallway that led to the club exit. “Can we get out that way?”
“Sure, go ahead. It leaves you on the south side of the building.”
Regan went straight for the exit, but Father Bill lagged behind. A look of pure consternation on his gaunt, pale face.
“We’ll talk, the two of us,” he said to me.
I nodded.
“For fuck’s sake, Kilkenny,” Regan shouted from the hallway, “are you coming to get some dinner with me or walking home to that shithole basement apartment of yours? Massapequa, Jesus!”
Bill turned and left. I hadn’t been certain of anything until now, but one thing this little visit made crystal clear. Jimmy Regan was involved in this mess. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know how deep: up to his ankles or up to his eyeballs. I would have staked my life on it. The thing was, I was afraid that’s what it would come to.
50
(SUNDAY, EARLY MORNING)
I liked the lobby late at night or very early in the morning. It was a place I had spent a lot of time in over the last year. Between runs to the station and the airport, it was usually where I sat reading those left-behind and forgotten novels. I didn’t usually go back up to my room. I didn’t like doing that. When I was at work, I was at work. Besides, my room could get awfully claustrophobic. My room, that’s where and when John would come back to me. The space of the lobby let me breathe easier. And I could talk to Slava or whoever was working the night registration desk. But reading a guest’s forgotten novel wasn’t why I was in the lobby at that hour.
When Jimmy Regan and Bill showed up, I’d been on my way down to the business center to do some nosing around about the Alison St. Jean case. I had tried to get a turn at one of our two computers several times during the evening, but with the hotel full and everyone shuffling to make new travel plans, there was actually a line out the door of the business center for several hours. So I spent some time in the club, lending a hand. The crowd was bigger than I expected it would be and, because so many of the people at the club had rooms at the hotel for the night, they drank way more than the regulars dared. The bar got a hundred dollars’ worth of my money, too. That just about covered the cost of Bill’s Chianti, my beer, and Jimmy Regan’s thirst for fine Irish whiskey. Another twenty went for their bill and tip to the coffee shop.
Part of me hoped Casey would show up and that I’d be able to explain more fully why I hadn’t been attentive enough. Part of me wished she would have showed so that I might talk her into my bed. Both of those parts of me were disappointed, probably for the better. There was no denying a woman like Casey would be well rid of me whether the sex was good between us or not. I was damaged goods, a dented can. Like I’d said to her, I was who I was, not who she had wanted me to be.
Afterward, when the crowd thinned out, I went up to my room, watched SportsCenter and slept for a few hours. Then, sometime around three, I made myself coffee with the one-cup machine in my room—coffee creamer, yuck!—and wandered back down to the lobby. The business center was finally empty, though it did look as if a bomb had hit it. At least one of the computers was still in working order. If I wasn’t such a low-tech kind of guy, I might have downloaded the app for how to do this on my smartphone.
I got several pages of hits even before I finished typing Alison St. Jean’s name into the search engine. As I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I went through the first couple of hits very carefully. Mostly they were newspaper stories recounting the very early stages of the investigation when it was believed Alison had been the victim of a sexual predator. Then, after the autopsy had been performed and the motive for Alison’s death became murkier, the reporting got less feverish. The area residents who consented to be quoted expressed an odd sense of relief. At least the killer, whoever he was, wasn’t a sexual predator. That was something to hang on to, wasn’t it? When the pins get knocked out from under you, you look for anything to hang on to. Anything. Things didn’t get really ugly until the deeper truth of what happened to Alison St. Jean came to light, when it was discovered that it was a group of neighborhood girls who had done this terrible thing and that two of her killers had babysat Alison. Yet as chilling and hor
rifying as it was, none of it rang any bells for me in terms of the Delcamino homicides.
Halfway down the page, though, I found a site that bore a newspaper headline, and that headline rang the bells loudly and rattled my memory, all right. The headline read: “Hero Cop Speaks for Murdered Girl.” That hero cop’s name was James Regan. And when I clicked on the site, the full article appeared. There, side by side, were grainy black-and-white photos of Alison St. Jean and a very much younger Jimmy Regan in uniform. Although the events happened over twenty-five years ago, just seeing the headline and those photos brought most of it back for me.
The story goes that Regan, whose wife had recently given birth to a baby girl, and another uniform from the Fourth had worked off the clock for two weeks straight, talking to hundreds of people who lived in the vicinity of Brady Park and Millers Pond. Then they finally found an older gentleman who remembered seeing a girl who fit Alison’s description with a pack of older girls heading toward the park. Not only did he recall seeing a girl who resembled Alison with those girls, but he also remembered some of the costumes those older girls were wearing. It was easy police work from there, tracking down the girls who had worn those particular costumes. Once one of them talked, they were all finished. On the next page of hits was a piece detailing the promotion to detective of hero cop Jimmy Regan. The piece also mentioned the promotion of Neil Furlong to detective. Buried deep in the body of the story were a few lines about how Furlong had been a help to Regan in his quest to bring Alison St. Jean’s killer or killers to justice.
Neil Furlong. Neil Furlong. I repeated the name to myself over and over again. He had been a detective in the Second before I got on the job. I didn’t know him more than to nod at, and he’d been transferred out of the Second before I’d done my first year. He wasn’t exactly a friendly guy—pretty sour-faced and bitter, was my recollection—but there was something else about him that I should have remembered. I didn’t have to strain very hard because the Internet made refreshing one’s memory pretty damned easy. When I typed his name into Google, I got several hits. Not nearly as many as I had for Alison St. Jean, but enough for my purposes.
In 1994, Neil Furlong had been caught in an Internal Affairs Bureau sting involving a joint narcotics/vice task force that had been set up to explore the long-rumored linkage between prostitution and drug distribution in Nassau and Suffolk counties. It didn’t take long for a few of the detectives involved to fall prey to the obvious temptations of that line of work. And it took even less time for IAB to jump on the accusations made against the task force detectives. Furlong escaped criminal prosecution, but he hadn’t escaped with much else. He lost his job and his pension.
When I walked out of the business center, I noticed there was a stir of activity in the lobby and that the sun had risen, if only barely. I smelled that the coffee shop was open and made my way there. I wanted to get some food in me and a few more hours of sleep behind me before I went digging into the past.
51
(SUNDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON)
The roads were mostly clear as I drove north to the LIE, then east toward Mastic, but the tracking device that had been planted under my front passenger seat wasn’t coming along for the ride. I’d thrown it in a sewer. The only place it would lead anyone was to a water treatment plant. I didn’t want any company with me where I was going. I made sure to check my mirrors frequently to be certain I was by my lonesome. Saturday’s storm and today’s clear skies helped me with that. There were many fewer cars on the road, and if anyone was tailing me, it was by drone.
As I approached the LIE, I turned my eyes right to look at Dr. Rosen’s building. It seemed like an eternity since I’d sat in his office, though it had only been twelve days. For two years, my world had been a sad and painful play reprised at irregular intervals by a close-knit troupe of actors whose only purpose it seemed was to deepen the wounds we shared. Murder had changed all that, shaking me from my grief-stricken sleepwalk. I owed Tommy Delcamino for that, and it was a bill I meant to pay.
I got off at William Floyd Parkway south. If I had gone north instead, I would have passed by the Brookhaven National Laboratory and miles of wildlife-laden forest as I headed toward Shoreham-Wading River. But no, I was headed due south, deep into the heart of Long Island’s great contradiction: the areas of Mastic, Mastic Beach, and Shirley. So close to the south shore with lots of beachfront property and wetlands, so near Smith Point Park, yet still within a two-hour train ride of Manhattan, they should have been prime, thriving communities, maybe even a poorer man’s Hamptons. They weren’t, though. Don’t get me wrong, there were some beautiful houses down here and things had improved, but this area had always had a weird vibe and a somewhat dangerous rep. The rep wasn’t completely undeserved. Ask any cop who’d ever served in the Seventh Precinct.
But I wasn’t interested in any cop just at the moment. I was interested in Neil Furlong. Furlong lived on Neptune Avenue in Mastic, a short rock toss away from the Poospatuck Indian Reservation. Don’t be fooled by the enchanting Indian name. There were times the Poospatuck was seventy acres of hell surrounded on two sides by the Forge River and Poospatuck Creek. This smallest of New York State’s reservations was the realm of the Unkechaug Tribe. It was home to about three hundred people, double-wide trailers, cheap cigarette shops, and the same problems that plagued reservations everywhere: alcohol, drugs, crime, and hopelessness.
Furlong’s house was small and shabby. Someone had tried to vinyl-side the place, but seemed to have given up three quarters of the way through the job so that the east-facing flank of the house was covered only in foiled squares of rigid insulation and sun-bleached tar paper. Several of the vinyl strips on the rest of the place were either bulging or missing altogether. The cyclone fencing around the perimeter of the lot was more rust and memory than metal, and there were two cars up on concrete blocks in the driveway. The only thing missing seemed to be a nasty, drooling Rottweiler on a chain. The six inches of snow that had fallen yesterday were undisturbed on Furlong’s lot except for a lone set of raccoon prints. The blanket of white powder covered a multitude of sins, but it would have taken a blizzard to disguise them all. If not for the steady stream of steam pouring out a dryer vent on the west side of the house, I might have thought no one was home.
I walked carefully up to the sagging wooden porch, not knowing what hazards might be hiding beneath the snow. I was smart to have been cautious. There were piles of uncollected newspapers and sales circulars lurking, the soles of my shoes slipping here and there on the plastic bags in which they were wrapped. Good thing I didn’t turn an ankle. When I got up to the porch, I noticed a wooden wheelchair ramp at the left end of the porch, screened by a tangle of overgrown hedges that hadn’t seen trimming since Obama and hope had been synonymous.
The doorbell didn’t work and the glass pane was missing from the top of the storm door. So I stuck my hand through the storm door and rapped my knuckles against the steel-clad front door. It didn’t take long until I heard a woman’s voice come from the other side of the door.
“Who is there?” She had a clear, strong voice that was very Haitian.
“My name’s Gus Murphy. I’m here to speak to Mr. Furlong, if I could.”
That was met with momentary silence. Then, “Ne quittez pas! Please wait.”
I heard footsteps, some muffled voices.
She was back. “What is this about, that you wish to speak to Mr. Neil—Mr. Furlong?”
“Jimmy Regan.”
I might just as well have said “Open Sesame,” for after a second or two, the door pulled back.
The woman who greeted me was very heavy and very dark-skinned with a lovely kind face. She was dressed in blue nurse’s scrubs. She told me her name was Fernand and that she was Mr. Furlong’s home health care aide. When she walked me into what passed for the living room, she didn’t have to explain any further. Furlong was in a wheelchair, one that h
e had been in a long time. You could just tell. And you could tell he was a broken man. I’m not referring to the fact that he was missing his right leg or that he had plastic tubing that led from his nostrils, over his ears, behind his shoulder to a small metal tank attached to his chair. It was the look of his unshaven face, the stained white T-shirt, and the empty, faded nature of his eyes. He noticed me noticing.
“Yep, Gus, I hit the daily double: diabetes and emphysema. Just a race to see which one kills me first.” He winked. “My money’s on cancer.” He laughed, but after a few seconds, he gasped for air and coughed.
Fernand walked quickly over to him and turned up the flow of oxygen. She stroked his back to calm him.
“Now, Mr. Neil, you must not excite yourself so,” she scolded, then turn her scowl to me.
I saluted her. “Message received.”
“Bon. Good. I will leave you men to your talking. Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
She left the room, her smile back on her face. When she did, I sat down on a beat-up old wing chair next to Furlong’s wheelchair. In the few photos I had seen of Furlong, he’d looked like a pretty sturdy guy, though not as big as Jimmy Regan. Regan looked a lot better for wear, but those were old photos and their lives had gone very separate ways.
“You a reporter?” he said when Fernand was out of earshot.
I shook my head. “Was on the job until three years ago. Mostly in the Second.”
“You one of Jimmy’s boys?”
He may have been sick, but not too sick to notice the confusion on my face.
“Every few years, Jimmy sends one of his ass-lickers around. Sometimes they say they’re reporters. Sometimes lawyers or PIs, but I’m still sharp. My mind ain’t half as in shitshape as my body.”
“Why would he do that, send people to play head games with you?”
Where It Hurts Page 25
