Stairway to the Bottom - a Mick Murphy Key West Mystery

by Michael Haskins

  “You told him in confession, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed again, softly. “I wasn’t sure he’d fuckin’ honor it.”

  “Religion isn’t a game to him, Dick. Whatever you think of him, Padre Thomas is a Jesuit and takes his vows seriously.”

  “Funny, sometimes, ain’t it?” He muttered to himself, as if we weren’t there. “I walked away from all that fuckin’ religious crap, hell and damnation.” He quieted down with a cackle and went on. “All the fuckin’ saints they taught us about in Catholic school when I was a teenager and here I want to embrace the Church I walked away from. I want its forgiveness, its peace and I don’t deserve it. Death bed Catholic,” he muttered, looked at us and forced a small, guilty smile.

  “Padre Thomas told me once we are all death bed Catholics,” I said. “Some all their lives because they believe and want to be prepared for death, others, like you, wait until the end to reach out, but ultimately, it’s the fear of death and the unknown that scares us into being believers.”

  “God’s all about fuckin’ fear, ain’t he? Well, I fear the wrath of God,” he said. “What about you? Padre Thomas reach you?”

  “Oh yeah, a few times,” I said thinking of the times he saved my sorry ass from the screeching Banshee. “But I think I fall somewhere in between the true believer and you. I still have questions that I can’t answer, not yet.”

  “Don’t wait too fuckin’ long,” he whined. “It only gets worse.”

  Walsh stood up, Bob moved toward the shotgun and, nervously, I stood up next to him. He looked into the main cabin. Bob scanned the water.

  “You live on the boat, right?” Walsh said without turning toward us.

  “Yes. I have for a while.” I looked at Bob and hunched my shoulders because I had no idea what was happening.

  “You’re a journalist, so you have a tape recorder?” He stared into the cabin.

  “Yeah,” I said, figuring less was better.

  Walsh turned to us with a determined look and said, “Can we go below? I want to tell you my story. If something happens to me, I want the fuckin’ truth to be known. Someone needs to know. That’s why I called you, Mick. I want to document that I shook hands with the fuckin’ devil in Boston and I want to make sure everyone knows about it. You can do that, right? Get the story told.”

  “I can’t promise anything.” I put the engine in gear and left Bob on watch as the Fenian Bastard moved forward on autopilot.

  “Leave the hatch open,” Bob whispered, as he stood by the wheel.

  Walsh and I went below. I got my small tape recorder and cassettes from the chart table while he tried to make himself comfortable on the settee. I sat across from him and put the recorder on the table. He squirmed about, never finding a comfortable spot.

  “The fuckin’ devil can promise you anything, Mick, and in his own way, he keeps his fuckin’ word,” he said cynically. “Just promise me you’ll do whatever you can, especially if something fuckin’ happens to me.”

  “Dick, until I know what it is you’re talking about, I can’t promise anything.”

  He thought for a moment and then nodded his head. “Sounds fair. Let me tell you the fuckin’ story of how I took the stairway to the bottom and it all began in Boston and I bet you know of some of the players.”

  I turned the on recorder and placed two empty cassettes on the table.

  “I killed for Whitey Bulger,” he said without emotion. “For Whitey and the Winter Hill Gang. You with me, so far?”

  I nodded. Whitey Bulger was Dick Walsh’s devil and recently captured by the FBI after sixteen years on the run.

  “I didn’t kill their girlfriends or someone straight that pissed Whitey or Steve Flemmi off. All that shit that’s made the papers. They killed them, they fuckin’ enjoyed it. I killed anyone that tried to fuckin’ cheat Whitey or someone in his way on business and, of course, he required I get rid of a few Dagos. I killed them. By our standards, they deserved what they got. It was business to me.”

  It took Walsh six profanity-filled hours to tell his story and then answer questions I wrote down as he spoke. When I realized what he was telling me I found a notebook and began taking notes, questions I had about what he said, but kept the questions until he was done. When we were done, I had no blank tapes left. Bob used the head twice, or said he needed to. I think he was checking on me. We reached Sand Key and I felt the boat turn toward Key West.

  When it was over I lit a cigar and sat back.

  “Walsh ain’t my real name,” he said with a shallow laugh. “Write my story and I’ll tell you what it is.”

  He was in the witness protection program, he admitted, because he traded testifying against Whitey and admitting helping him escape in exchange for not being tried for murder. Now Whitey was caught it was time for him to testify.

  “I took Whitey money from Boston to New York City, Miami, New Orleans before the fuckin’ FBI caught on to me,” he said, almost with pride. “Now they got him, they need me to testify.”

  Whitey trusted him, but Walsh rationalized that turning informant was okay because Whitey had been an FBI informant all along, so had Steve Flemmi.

  “You can’t rat out a fuckin’ rat,” he said using old gangster slang.

  Walsh had been in the program since the mid ‘90s, a few years after Whitey Bulger escaped an FBI arrest because his friend and handler in the FBI warned him about it. The agent was doing prison time, Flemmi received life without parole, and the FBI finally caught up with Whitey and his girlfriend.

  “Why are you running from the marshals,” I asked when he had finished.

  “I was tired of someone looking over my fuckin’ shoulder all the time and I know I’m sick,” he said. “I had a good ID and money stashed in Boston, so I got it and came here. I was pretty public, if they wanted me they could’ve found me.”

  “You haven’t said why everyone wants you dead.”

  “Because I know too fuckin’ much,” he said with a little disgust in his voice. “The marshals and FBI, they’ve got to everyone. Including the local cops. Rumor is that FBI didn’t want Whitey caught because more than one agent was involved, some of ‘em way up the ladder now. Now he’s caught and if he goes to trial and talks…” He let his words end.

  “So, why all these years later do they want you dead?”

  “Whitey is old,” he muttered. “Capturing him was good for the FBI’s fuckin’ image. I’m the only witness they’ve got willing to testify. The only one alive that knows the who and the what…where the fuckin’ bodies are buried.”

  “Nothing personal, Dick, but you’re a confessed killer with a dozen or so victims, why would a jury believe you?”

  “The FBI has used fuckin’ Flemmi in cases and the juries believed him.” He grinned. “I’m an altar boy next to the Rifleman,” he said referring to Flemmi’s nickname.

  Chapter 12

  I wouldn’t have used altar boy to describe Dick Walsh after our six-hour talk, but who was I to judge him, especially against someone as notorious as Flemmi. We were on our second pot of coffee and Bob stood in the hatchway. Walsh stopped taking notice of Bob about an hour into his diatribe.

  “So, bring us up to speed on yesterday, tell me what happened at the house.” I drained the last of the cold coffee from my mug and stubbed out the cigar. “Who was she?” I stood to stretch my legs.

  “This is where things really get fuckin’ strange,” he said. “I don’t know who she was.”

  I wondered what a man who could murder a friend from the back seat of a car as they talked, or while a victim begged for his life, on his knees, thought was strange. I remembered how my mother assured me it took all kinds to make the world go around. I doubted she was talking about Bulger and his type, but maybe she was because my family had lived in South Boston for a time—Southie the locals called it.

  “Well, strange I need to hear about.” I gave Bob a shake of my head and we waited for an explanation. I had a head
ache and the reasons for it sat in front of me.

  “She asked about me at the shop,” Walsh said and sat back, still unable to get comfortable after six hours. “My crew told me a broad showed up askin’ questions. That was my first warning.” He sat forward and put his elbows on the small table. “Bitch shows up at the house last night…” He hesitated, thinking. “Eleven, I guess it was, the news was on the TV. I opened the door and the broad has a fuckin’ gun in my gut before I can say hello.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what happened. “A broad gets the drop on me. My first thought was, how the fuck did this happen?

  “She has me sit on the couch and called me some foreign fuck’s name that means nothin’ to me. I tell her, ‘You got the wrong guy, lady.’ Bitch speaks to me in a language, I don’t know, maybe German, hell, maybe Greek. I don’t understand a word, but she keeps on. Finally,” he pushed back from the table, “she begins to talk English. She wants to know who I am. I tell her the story the marshals gave me. She don’t fuckin’ buy it. I figure, somehow, she’s from Whitey or one of the old Southie goons, maybe the fuckin’ goombas settling old scores. If I tell her who I really am, I know she shoots. I stick to my story. She don’t ask nothin’ ‘bout Southie, but a lot of stuff about fuckin’ cities I ain’t never been to.”

  “What cities?” I sat back down and asked when he stopped to take a breath.

  “London, Paris, Moscow…them I knew, but she had a few more that didn’t mean fuck-all to me.” He sighed. “You know, I’m in the middle of the couch and just out of reach are the fuckin’ guns I’ve hidden for this kind of situation.”

  “Did she ever explain why she was there?”

  “Mick, you ain’t stupid,” he said with a sour laugh. “The bitch has a gun aimed at me with a silencer, what else would she be there for?”

  “Why not just shoot you?”

  “I told you, fuckin’ strange right? Her questions go on for an hour, maybe longer. She shut the TV off and there’s no clock in the room, so I’m guessing. Questions that make no sense. Bitch walks around the room, but never takes the gun off me. I ask her name, she don’t respond. I ask who sent her, bitch keeps her trap shut, but opens it to ask more fuckin’ lame questions.”

  “What do you think she wanted? Because she didn’t shoot you.”

  He laughed loudly and pounded his chest. “She didn’t fuckin’ shoot me because I shot her first. She delayed shooting and that was the bitch’s mistake. Should’ve done it at the door and walked away, I would’ve.”

  “She’s on the kitchen floor,” I said. “How’d you get from the living room to the kitchen?”

  “She let me go to the kitchen. A mistake I wouldn’t’ve made,” he said with a grin. “We both wanted something to drink and I said there was cold water in the icebox. Motioned me to move, waving the gun. I got up and in the kitchen I had a gun hidden in the cabinet. I went to get the glasses, got the gun and put one shot into her fuckin’ head.” He bragged. “Bitch dropped like a rag. I doubt she knew she was dead. Pretty good shot for a guy who ain’t handled a gun in years.” He chuckled. “Just like riding a bike.”

  “The guns you hid around the house were thirty-eights,” I said. “The cops said she was shot with a forty-five.”

  “Hollow points.” He smiled. “I always use them, even in the twenty-twos. They fuckin’ explode and do a lot of damage. Maybe a thirty-eight hollow point does the damage of a forty-five, but I never used a forty-five, too loud. Twenty-two for up close and thirty-eights for everything else.” He’d found his comfort zone.

  Chapter 13

  Dick Walsh gave me his new cell phone number and told me to call and leave a message, if I needed to. “I check it every six hours,” he said. Paranoid didn’t mean he was stupid, he knew a cell signal was traceable.

  “You aren’t living on the Jet Ski,” I said as he prepared to leave.

  “No,” he said. “But the less you know, the safer we both are. You can’t tell them what you don’t fuckin’ know.” It seemed his paranoia made him extra cautious, or maybe it wasn’t paranoia, maybe it was his lifestyle.

  I tossed him the makeshift line that held the Jet Ski to the Fenian Bastard, he started the engine and sped off toward the mangroves and never looked back.

  “We could sink the Jet Ski after shooting him,” Bob said, as he cradled the shotgun. “The world would be better off.”

  “Yeah,” I said without conviction. “But we’d be taking his place.”

  “How?”

  “Killing him would make us just like him.” I watched Walsh drive off in the darkness and my headache went with him. I didn’t bother with the binoculars. “I don’t wanna be like him and you don’t either.”

  The current pushed the boat slowly toward Key West. Bob went below and put the shotgun in its case. I started the engine and headed home holding the wheel and feeling the water against the hull. It felt real, it felt good, and cleared my head of murder.

  “I’ve killed defending myself,” Bob said lighting a cigar. He gave me one. “But the shit he confessed to…” He didn’t finish, he shook his head slowly.

  I went below, Bob took the wheel, and I brought back two bottles of Bohemia beer. I lit my cigar and set the autopilot. Darkness still blanketed the water and the lights of Key West highlighted the island like twinkling stars.

  “Think about it, Mick,” Bob said scanning the water. “Walsh left this morning and has a boat and new cell phone already. He was prepared for this.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said. “He talked about killing like we talk about sailing.”

  “How do you kill someone you’ve known, in cold blood, because you’re told to?” Bob said and drank the beer. “And he talked about it matter-of-factly, like he was giving you a recipe.”

  “He’s a psychopath, the whole bunch is,” I said and blew thick, white cigar smoke into the darkness.

  “Yeah, and we’re not, right?” He finished the beer.

  I swallowed my beer after sloshing it around in my mouth and hoped it would wash the sour taste away that came from listening to Walsh’s story. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write it. I wasn’t sure I could.

  “Are you going to write it?” Bob asked as if he’d read my mind.

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to glorify him or be his apologist,” I said. “What is his story? He’s a sociopath with no sympathy for his victims, no guilt for what he’s done. I think he has prostate cancer and knows he’s dying.”

  “Why do you think that?” Bob sat up.

  “He kept moving around down below, unable to sit comfortably. He reminded me of Captain Maybe. Remember him? And Padre Thomas said Walsh was ill.”

  “Captain Maybe, he died in Cuba.”

  “Yeah, prostate cancer and he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t get comfortable, like Walsh.”

  “Walsh deserves it, let him die slowly.” He exhaled smoke into the night.

  “When we get back, I’m going to give Richard a call and tell him what happened,” I said. “I want to wash my hands of this.”

  “That’s a good idea, Mick, but don’t mention me, okay? I don’t need to be interrogated in a small, windowless room for hours.”

  “I’ll tell him I got Walsh’s call and motored out on my own.” I smiled. “That’ll keep your name out of it.”

  “You giving Richard the tapes?”

  “Probably.” It was against everything I believed in as a journalist, but I hadn’t come to Key West to deal with a sociopath. I accepted assignments from magazine that took me outside of the Keys, outside of Florida, and then I returned to sailing and drinking with friends.

  “Even if the marshals don’t toss him in prison for killing that woman, they won’t leave him here,” I said to see if I believed it. “They’ll have to set up a new identity for him somewhere else and they’ll take better care of keeping track of him.”

  We motored without speaking the rest of the way, drinking a second beer, and finishing our ci
gars. It was a different harbor at four in the morning. The waterfront businesses closed for the night, the streets appeared empty, and Conch Key only had security lighting. We could smell smoke from a campfire on Palm Tree Island.

  The moon set in the Gulf behind us, but there were no revelers in Mallory Square to watch it. I took over from the autopilot and Bob and I paid attention as we turned at the tip of Fleming Key. A soft breeze carried jasmine and other tropical scents from Hilton Haven as we moved through the cut to Garrison Bight. Sporadic traffic raced along North Roosevelt Boulevard. The marina’s docks were bathed in dim light and there was life on the dock.

  We had a straight shot at putting the Fenian Bastard into her slip, as we came through the cut and wouldn’t have any problem tying off because there were a dozen men waiting for us.

  “Cops?” Bob asked.

  “Marshals and cops, probably.” I put the engine into low and felt the current against the hull. “Take the wheel.”

  I went below and hid the tape recorder and tapes in the hidey-hole my friend Norm Burke had built into the bilge back in California. It held my Glock, which I put back, money and papers.

  I closed the bilge cover and went on deck.

  The men on the dock spread out as if they were expecting trouble.

  “Your buddy Luis probably thinks Walsh is onboard,” Bob grumbled. “Now they’re gonna know I was with you.”

  “Can’t do anything about that,” I said and put the engine in neutral so we could glide into the slip. “But think how disappointed Luis is gonna be.”

  Bob used the pole hook to catch the line we’d strung between the slip’s two pilings. I put the engine in reverse until Bob was able to stop us. The men on the dock had their guns drawn, including Luis.

  Chapter 14

  “Hands where we can see them,” a man screamed in a burly voice from the shadows as we watched the lawmen spread out. “Come off…one at a time…slowly.”

  Bob and I shook our heads and mumbled to ourselves at the nonsense, but stopped at the rail and raised our arms. They stood in pairs and I saw Luis next to a man on the pier, two slips away. Luis should have told them this was unnecessary, even if Walsh had been onboard. He didn’t and it was probably so he could enjoy my discomfort.