Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Let’s take that walk, Randy. There’s something I haven’t told you—something I think you should know.”

  34

  Georgia and Carter leaned over a wrought-iron railing on the East Side promenade and watched a salvage barge float by under the bright orange-and-blue footbridge to Wards Island Park. Georgia told Carter everything—about Robin Hood, about Gus Rankoff and the mayor’s plans to build a football stadium on the Bridgewater site, about the sabotaged valve in Coney Island and the CIDS card she found at the old firehouse the previous night—before someone decided she shouldn’t have.

  “Why in the heck did Robin Hood put you in the middle?” Carter wondered aloud. “It makes no sense.”

  “Maybe he knows me.”

  “Or wants to,” said Carter gravely. “You got a lot of publicity after you wrapped up the Spring Street fire. No telling who took a hankering to you after that. Either way,” said Carter, “you’ve got none of the higher-ups in your corner. The mayor’s not gonna be keen about looking into toxic waste dumps on a site he’s aiming to put a football stadium on.”

  “What about Brennan?” asked Georgia. “Doesn’t he care?”

  “Even if he does, he’s got to answer to Delaney who’s got to answer to the mayor. Everyone’s gonna protect his own turf.”

  Georgia stared out at a rusty tugboat slicing up the cement-colored water. “Somebody was doing more than protecting his turf last night, Randy.”

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “That’s what I’m thinking, too.”

  “It had to be Robin Hood,” said Georgia. “I know he’s connected to the Bridgewater fire. A lot of bad stuff happened there, Randy. The families are still in pain. I met Denise Flannagan’s daughter, Tricia. I saw the venom she felt for the FDNY. A million dollars of payoff money won’t erase that. Whoever this Robin Hood is, I think he’ll take the cash and still blow up the pipeline no matter what the police do. A lot of people are going to die.”

  Carter leaned on the railing and looked at her. “You want me to do something to help you? Tell me what, and I’ll do it.”

  Georgia sighed. “I can’t visit the Flannagans about that call Connie made. The department will have my head if I do anything that looks remotely related to this fire—especially after last night.”

  “I’ll go, then,” said Carter. “I’ll say I’m following up on Connie’s disappearance. I won’t even mention the Bridgewater fire.”

  “Okay,” said Georgia. She fished Marenko’s scribbled address for Northway out of her bag. “Maybe while you’re in Brooklyn, you could check this out, too. This is the company that took over the assets of the firm that owned that warehouse. Maybe you can find out who the owners are so we can talk to them.”

  “Will do.” Carter shook a finger at her. “Stay out of the office this morning, Skeehan. Nobody’s going to expect you to function. I’m going to put in a call to Suarez and Kyle and ask them to cover for us, all right?”

  Georgia nodded. “That’ll give me time.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “For what?”

  “Connie found out something about Robin Hood’s identity before she disappeared—I’m sure of it, Randy. If we’re going to find Robin Hood, I’ve got to find Connie.”

  “Y’all can’t accomplish what the entire PD hasn’t been able to.”

  “They don’t know Connie.”

  “Maybe,” Carter ventured softly, “you didn’t totally, either.”

  “But I know somebody who does.”

  35

  Joanne Zeligman worked at Gorman’s Gym on West Twenty-first Street. It was a boxing gym in a former loft—nothing fancy enough to qualify as a health club. But Joanne worked there for the same reasons that Connie loved going there—it was all about sweat, not spandex.

  There were no juice bars, ferns or hot tubs. And when someone took a pulse, it was the other guy’s—to see if he was still alive after they’d given him an up-close view of the canvas. Tae-Bo was about the only thing the gym offered that wasn’t designed to bloody another human being.

  Joanne was there, which was a good thing. Georgia didn’t have her home phone number and wasn’t sure it was listed. She was in an upstairs room with a few punching bags and fingerprint-smeared mirrors scattered around the perimeter. She was dressed in baggy sweatpants, frayed at the hems, and a faded blue T-shirt soaked with sweat. She must have just finished a class. Georgia assumed that Leahy would have checked her out after Connie’s disappearance, so she would have known Connie was missing. And she would have known, too, who the suspect was.

  Joanne represented a side of Connie Georgia never really saw. A tougher, more street-savvy side. She was older, for one thing—somewhere in her late forties or even early fifties perhaps, but it was hard to tell. There was a raven-haired beauty beneath the veneer, but she did nothing to bring it out. Her once-black shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray and usually tied off her face in a brittle ponytail. She paid no attention to clothes and ridiculed Connie about her own preoccupation with expensive shoes. She had a grown son Georgia rarely heard anything about. There were marriages in her past, as well as drugs, alcohol, and stints as an actress, a folk singer and a commune dweller. But she had shed all that now and seemed content with sweating out her demons in Gorman’s.

  “Joanne?” Georgia called out hesitantly in the doorway.

  Joanne looked over, wiping her face on her loose T-shirt. A steely edge came into her eyes.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Joanne asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Georgia, stepping nearer. “The police…found some of her clothing in, uh, Mac Marenko’s apartment building. But no one’s found Connie.”

  Joanne reached for a water bottle, took a slug and regarded her coolly. “Then why are you here?”

  Georgia started. She hadn’t expected such a chilly reception from the only other person who knew Connie as well as she did. Then it came to her. In Joanne’s eyes, at least, they weren’t really allies.

  “Joanne, please—don’t turn away from me. You and I—we’re the two people with the best chance of finding out what happened to Connie.”

  Joanne thrust out her jaw skeptically. “You care for Connie’s sake? Or Mac’s?” she asked.

  “Both.”

  Joanne shook her head. “You can’t have it both ways—not on this one.”

  “I want the truth just as much as you do,” Georgia insisted.

  Joanne put down her water bottle and turned to a large, duffle-shaped punching bag behind her. She pounded her fists in it several times. “Did he confess?” she grunted between hits.

  “Not yesterday. I haven’t seen him today.”

  Joanne steadied the bag. Then she took a gulp of water from her bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “He was the one, you know—the one she really thought would work out.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve figured that out?” asked Georgia. “Don’t you think I know Mac was the cop she flipped over a couple of years ago? Neither of them told me, Joanne. Neither of them. And I’m burning with anger and guilt because of it.” Georgia made a fist and hit the punching bag—hard. “I don’t need you to rub salt into the wound.”

  Georgia turned and headed for the door. Joanne stepped in front of her.

  “Don’t go, Georgia,” she said. “Connie wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  The two women stared at each other for several long seconds. On the main floor below, Georgia could hear the hollow echoes of fists hitting punching bags and feet hitting bare planking. There were shouts and curses, gruff voices and monosyllabic commands. Not unlike a firehouse.

  “I’m sorry,” said Joanne. “I don’t mean to come down on you. Connie wouldn’t want that. All she wanted was your happiness.”

  “I know,” said Georgia. She closed her eyes. She could hear the words as if they were coming from Connie herself. She stepped back against a padded wall by the door, across from the mirror, and sank down. She felt drained. Joanne sat down
beside her. The fight had left them both.

  “It must have killed her when Mac and I started seeing each other,” Georgia said softly. “I wish I’d known. I would’ve stopped the relationship right then and there.”

  “That’s probably why she didn’t tell you,” said Joanne. “She never told you anything if she thought it might upset you.”

  “She told me everything,” said Georgia defensively. “Everything except this,” she corrected.

  “She tell you about her tattoo?”

  “Connie didn’t have a tattoo,” Georgia insisted.

  “Oh no? She had a rose tattooed on her butt about a year ago—kind of like the one on your bike. She never told you because she knows you hate tattoos.”

  Georgia put her head in her hands. “She didn’t trust me?”

  “Of course she trusted you,” said Joanne. “But like I said, she didn’t want to upset you.” Joanne brought an arm up to her face and wiped off a line of sweat that had collected on the ridges across her forehead. She wore her life on her face—the crow’s-feet, the lip lines, the gray that sprouted like weeds from her black hair. Her face told of a woman who had made so many mistakes, she was a walking advertisement for human frailty. But maybe in the end, that’s what Connie needed. Maybe in Joanne Zeligman’s imperfections, Connie saw a haven of acceptance for her own.

  “I can’t bring myself to believe she might be dead.” Joanne sighed. “She sent me a birthday card right before this. I’ve kept it in my locker in its original envelope. I’m so afraid it’s the last contact I’ll ever have with her.” Joanne bit her lip and got to her feet. She wasn’t going to break down in Gorman’s Gym.

  B-day card for Joanne…Georgia remembered that Connie had scribbled that in the same place she’d scribbled Bridgewater.

  “Joanne? Do you mind if I take a look at the card?”

  Joanne shrugged. “A detective looked at it when he came to interview me. There’s nothing there. But you’re welcome to see it.”

  Joanne walked Georgia to her locker and fished the card from her top shelf. On the front was a picture of two little girls with ribbons in their hair, holding hands. For a Dear Friend on Her Birthday, read the gold lettering. Inside, Connie had scribbled a short note about how much she cherished Joanne’s friendship. Georgia ran a hand over the ballpoint scrawl. Connie always pressed down too hard. Feeling the ridges of her writing was almost like feeling her. Georgia’s hand trembled as she fumbled to put the card back in its envelope.

  “It’s beautiful,” Georgia said. She didn’t trust herself to say more. She went to hand the envelope back to Joanne when her fingers felt the press of another set of ridges—on the envelope, this time. When Connie addressed Joanne’s birthday card, she’d obviously been writing something else, too—on a sheet of paper on top of the envelope. Connie had pressed down so hard, the ghost of it was now on the corner of the back of the envelope. Georgia fished a pencil and a scrap of paper out of her bag. She put the paper over the indentations and lightly rubbed the pencil over the area until the shadings forced the words to life. Her insides turned to dust. Her breath left her as if a baseball had just been lobbed at her sternum.

  …When O’Rourke becomes Robin Hood? Though the sentence had obviously been much longer, that was all the scribble that had registered.

  “Are you all right, Georgia?”

  Georgia lifted her gaze and looked straight into the woman’s raw face. “Did Connie ever mention someone named O’Rourke to you?” Georgia showed her the impressions.

  “No. Never. I don’t even understand what that means.”

  “It means,” said Georgia, “we may just have gotten a break in her case.”

  36

  O’ROURKE. It was a common name, as was any Irish name in the New York City police or fire departments. Hell, there were probably thirty O’Rourkes between the two agencies. Yet even as Georgia told herself that, she kept picturing the photographs in Captain Flannagan’s basement. She remembered a grisly one of a big man with a head misshapen by surgery. She recalled the faded snapshot of that same man she’d seen the night before at the old firehouse, taken when he was still healthy and fair-haired, eating a meatball sandwich.

  O’Rourke is dead. They’re all dead, she told herself. Seamus’s brother, Mickey. Tricia’s father, Pat. They’re all dead except for Vinnie Battaglia, and he’s nearly dead, too. Only their widows and brothers and children are left to mourn them.

  Their children…

  Outside Gorman’s Gym, the Manhattan sky was blackening over again and a wind was kicking up grit on the pavement. Georgia walked north and found an air-conditioned office building atrium with banana plants and ferns. She took a seat beside the tropical foliage and dialed home. Dr. Arigoni, her mother’s boss, played golf on Thursday mornings, so her mother never went in before eleven on Thursdays. Richie would be at camp. Hopefully, neither of them had heard the news yet.

  “Ma?” said Georgia when her mother picked up.

  “They’ve found her,” Margaret whispered. It was as if she’d been steeling herself for this moment. She couldn’t bear any more losses.

  “Ma, calm down—they haven’t found her yet,” said Georgia. She paced the marble floor of the atrium, searching for the right words to tell her mother about Mac. She never thought she’d be delivering the worst news of her life surrounded by a bunch of banana plants and ferns.

  “Dear Lord,” said Margaret when Georgia had finished. “This is going to break Richie’s heart.”

  “I know.” A hot poker of guilt burned in Georgia’s gut. “Please don’t tell him anything when he comes home from camp today. Keep him away from the television, okay? I want to let him down slowly.”

  “I understand.”

  Georgia took a deep breath. “Ma? I’ve got to ask one last favor. You know that picture I gave you the other day of Jimmy? The one from Seamus Hanlon?”

  “Yes,” said Margaret. Georgia could tell that just hearing his name brought a dull ache to her heart.

  “I need you to look at it for a moment.”

  “Georgia, I told you. I can’t.”

  “Ma, this is really important. Can you get it?”

  “It’s an old picture of him. It must be at least fifteen years old.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Georgia. “But it isn’t Jimmy I want you to look at.”

  Margaret sighed. “Hold on.” Georgia heard her footsteps on the stairs. Her mother came back down a moment later. “I’ve got the picture in front of me. What is it you want?”

  “There are some names on the back. They match up with the people in the picture. One of them, as I recall, is named O’Rourke. Can you figure out which one?”

  “Hmmm,” said Margaret. Georgia could hear her mother mumbling off the names, then mumbling them again when she figured out where they were in the photograph. “Yes, I think I’ve found him. It says ‘Carl O’Rourke’ on the back and, according to this photo, he’s…hmmm…well…”

  “Well, what?”

  “He doesn’t look very much like an O’Rourke. More Italian, if you ask me. He’s got tanned skin and dark hair. And he’s no more than about ten or eleven. What could you possibly want with a little boy?”

  “He’s not little anymore, Ma.”

  Carl O’Rourke. He’d be about twenty-four now, thought Georgia. And Seamus Hanlon knew him—took him fishing with a group of firefighters when Carl was only a kid.

  Seamus Hanlon was off duty today. He lived in Little Neck, Queens, near the border of Long Island. The house, a split-level, was on a quiet, tree-lined street with late-model American cars in the driveways. It was vinyl sided in powder blue. There were Hummel figurines in the bay window and an American flag over the front door. Hanlon had served two tours in Vietnam, and he had never stopped being a soldier on some level.

  Randy Carter had taken the Caprice, so Georgia was forced to rely on the Long Island Railroad and a brisk walk to reach Hanlon’s house. By the time she stepped onto
his driveway, lightning was streaking the sky and a scattershot of drops had started to fall.

  Hanlon’s garage was half open and the trunk of his eighty-eight Oldsmobile was sticking out the door. The captain was at the rear of the garage, hunched over a workbench, drilling into a piece of lumber. From the looks of the other materials on the bench, he appeared to be making a dollhouse. Georgia knew his four children were grown, some of them married. She wondered if the dollhouse was for a grandchild.

  Hanlon didn’t notice her until she walked right up to him. He shut down his drill and lifted his safety goggles. His eyes, as soft and faded as an old pair of blue jeans, regarded her curiously.

  “Georgia? To what do I owe the pleasure, lass?”

  She nodded toward the wood on the bench. “I’m never too old for a dollhouse.”

  Hanlon smiled. “It’s a hobby of mine.” He shrugged. “This one’s for my granddaughter, Jenna. But I make ’em all year for kids in hospitals and foster homes. Then at Christmas, I dress up as Santa and give ’em out.”

  “That’s really nice, Captain.”

  “Seamus,” he corrected. “No need for titles. I’m off duty.” He looked down at the dollhouse. “Anyway, it keeps me occupied since Alice…” Hanlon’s voice trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to say “died.” Just like my mother, thought Georgia.

  Hanlon clapped his hands together. “But you’re not here for a dollhouse, are you, lass?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to ask me about that fire again, aren’t you?” He threw his goggles on his workbench. “I can’t help you, Georgia. I’ve told you that already.”

  “Seamus—please. A lot more is riding on this than you know about.”

  He smiled sadly and shook his head. “No, Georgia. A lot more is riding on this than you know about.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I told you. I can’t.” He walked over to a door separating the garage from the house. He started to open it. “I’ve got to go.”