A Dark and Broken Heart

by R.J. Ellory

  The second detour was to an auto-salvage place he knew. Here they crushed cars, recycled windscreens and tires, other such things. They also possessed a small incinerator unit where they burned what couldn’t be sold. It was into this unit that his bloodstained shoes went, and he slipped a fifty to the owner, an old acquaintance. Madigan had turned a blind eye to a few stolen vehicles over the years, and they had an understanding.

  Madigan headed back up First. As far north as 128th, west to Third, east to the FDR, and south to 110th. That was the deal. That was the zone, the territory. They called it the Yard. That was all. Just the Yard. Eighteen blocks up and down, eight from left to right. Little more than a mile one way, three quarters of a mile the other. Never ceased to amaze Madigan how much garbage could be packed into someplace so small. Gentrification was overdue here. Hell, maybe they could do it as well. They’d worked some on the Bronx, the Village, the Fulton Fish Market, Tribeca. It was all going upmarket. East Harlem was the latecomer. Maybe the Yard wouldn’t make the qualifiers, would never make it to the Big Show. Did it matter? Hell, no. Not to Madigan. He was going to take what he could and run. Staying here was not an option. He’d been good for too many years, smart for too few. Right back to July of ’89 when he’d taken the academy exam, he was looking for the angle. No one wants to be a cop. That never happened. There were some who had to be a cop, some who needed it, but none who wanted it. That was not the way it worked. This wasn’t a job. It was a vocation. And if it wasn’t a vocation, well, it was an angle. You heard the stories, and for sure they were true. Little kid sees the tapes go up someplace, the black and yellow crime scene tapes. He sees the big guys in the blues, the even bigger guys that the blues saluted, and those guys didn’t come in uniforms; they came in slacks and sports jackets and they had shirts and ties and there was a holster on the hip and a badge folded outside the breast pocket, and they went right on inside wherever and saw whatever shit had been done. And most often it was some bad shit, and how bad it was no one knew except the guys with the hip holsters and the sports coats. The kid makes a decision. I wanna be that guy. I wanna see what that guy sees. I wanna know it all. But the knowing wasn’t the end-all. Knowing had a reason. Always had a reason. You wanted to know something because . . . Because what? Because it would get you rich or laid or powerful or free or safe or protected, or something. What it did, well, it didn’t matter. Different for different people. And maybe the kid on the sidewalk watching those guys go in the house where the family had been shotgun slaughtered for forty bucks and a wireless had no inkling of what he wanted to know, even why he wanted to know it, but he knew enough to recognize the truth. The more you knew, the stronger you were. Dead people were dumb. That was the simple fact. The dumber you were, the deader you got. Not old people. That’s a different thing. We’re talking people dying ahead of nature, ahead of the natural order of things. Those were the dumb ones. And usually it came down to one thing. They say “wrong place, wrong time.” Well, that didn’t make sense. It could only be one or the other, never both. More often than not people got killed because there was one thing about which they were ignorant. Had they known that one thing, well, they’d still be alive.

  Life wasn’t complicated. At least Madigan didn’t believe so. Life was simple. Take or be taken. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed.

  Six months academy, four years patrol officer at the Twelfth, thirteen months as suppression officer in the Manhattan Gangs Division, three years in Investigative, two years in Vice, six years in Robbery-Homicide to secure Detective First Class, a year in Organized Crime Control Bureau, and then a requested transfer back to Robbery-Homicide. Six one-eighty-ones for excessive force, eleven officer-involved shootings, thirteen commendations from the mayor’s office via the police chief, a fifty-one-percent average arrest-to-charge rate, thirty-one lifers, countless ten-to-fifteens and six-to-tens, a taxable salary of ninety thousand, additional sources of income bringing in another hundred or so. He’d do a year or two more of this, and then cut out for greener pastures. Pick up another twenty a year in Nassau, Suffolk, maybe Westchester or Rockland, someplace where people didn’t crap in their own backyards and expect the stink to vanish by itself. Someplace where the bureaucrats possessed some organizational skills, a basic understanding of manpower assignment and resource utilization. Down here they couldn’t organize a blowjob in a whorehouse.

  Madigan had been back in Robbery-Homicide since September 2008. Forty-two years old, two marriages, one mistress, all gone by the wayside. Four kids, youngest three, oldest seventeen. He had his issues. He smoked too much, drank too much; he slept around some. He had his medicinal predilections and proclivities, but nothing he couldn’t control. It was all a question of balance. Too much coke, take a Xanax. Too much Adderall or Dexedrine, well, just smooth off all the rough edges with some lithium, a couple of ’ludes, maybe a Percocet or two. The road of excess did not lead to the palace of wisdom. Blake might have been smart on everything else, but he was dumb on that one. Look at that poor, dumb fool Jim Morrison. Where the hell did a philosophy like that get him? Less than thirty years old and he was in a hole in the ground in Paris, that’s where.

  It was true. New York was nobody’s city. And because it was nobody’s, then—in a way—it was everybody’s. And Madigan was as good an everybody as anyone else.

  He pulled over to the sidewalk on 117th. He picked up the pictures of the little girl from the passenger seat and looked at her.

  He felt what he felt, but he convinced himself he did not. He could not afford to feel anything.

  Maybe she would die, maybe she wouldn’t. Ballistics wouldn’t get him, and he did not believe the girl had seen any faces. Landry, Williams, and Fulton would be found in the storage unit. Two and two would make four. It was a home run, and he wasn’t even out of breath, hadn’t even skidded to base.

  It was all collateral damage.

  Madigan tried to smile, gave it up as a bad idea, opened the door, and started walking.

  12

  GREAT DIVIDE

  This is the thing. People are not the same. It’s that old adage: All victims are not created equal. Sure, that’s the case wherever you go. Like the fire chief said, “I ain’t never put out a fire in a rich white guy’s house.” You live up in Chelsea or someplace, then you’re gonna get the best of the best. Some upmarket Detective First Class Gold Shield shiny-shoed son of a bitch, and he’s gonna be all over your case until someone’s in the hole for whatever they did to you. Down here, here in the Yard, you’re gonna be one of twenty-nine homicides I’m investigating, and three weeks after the coroner signed you off I’m still gonna be chasing a requisition form for Crime Scene snaps.

  I do this for an hour and I’ve already had enough.

  First guy I talked to was some dirty-faced, semi-incoherent white guy with filthy hair woven into ratty dreadlocks. He smelled like a penitentiary toilet in high summer.

  The only thing I’m thinking while I’m talking to these people is, “Why are these motherfuckers lying to me?” Not about the girl. Not that. About everything else. Their lives are lies. Lies upon lies upon lies. Layers of lies. They lie to their husbands, wives, their kids, their neighbors, and they lie to themselves. And those are the biggest lies of all, the ones they tell themselves every goddamned day: I am different from everyone else. I am different from all these people around me, and things are gonna get better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Soon they will get better, and I will be out of here. This is not my life. This is a way station, a bus stop, nothing more than that.

  Bullshit. You’re born here, you live here, you die here. It ain’t never gonna change. You ain’t gonna win the lottery. You ain’t gonna sing one time and find some Warner Brothers A&R guy was just happening by, and lo and behold, all of a sudden you’re Beyoncé or Alicia Keys. Not a prayer. That shit happens in other peoples’ lives.

  I see the lies in the eyes of the guy who serves me at Chicken Shack. He knows I’m
a cop. He can see it in my attitude, in the way I walk and talk, in the bulge of my hip holster.

  He thinks I’m a piece of shit. He thinks I’m no one. Less than no one.

  I’m thinking right back at him, “Hey, buddy. You’re what? Thirty-five years old, and you’re still wearing a name tag to work. You tell me who made the wrong career decision.”

  But I say nothing. This guy’ll spit in my chicken if I piss him off.

  I tell him, “Thanks,” and I take my chicken back to the car and eat it.

  I sit there chaining smokes, like I don’t want to breathe the air down here. Whatever six thousand toxic chemicals they put in my Luckies is one helluva lot cleaner than the shit they get to breathe in the Yard.

  I have spoken to fifty people, maybe more. They don’t want to know. They say they don’t know the girl before I even show them the snap.

  I say, “Look at the picture before you tell me you don’t know her,” and they get that defensive light in their eyes, all superior and condescending. And then they look at the picture without really looking at it, and they say they don’t know her again, and it’s little more than an echo of the first denial.

  Makes me wanna smack them. Smack them hard. Hard enough to go down and stay down.

  “Don’t screw with me,” I want to say. “You have no idea the whirlwind of shit I can bring down around your life if you screw with me. Today I killed three people. Three white people. Three pedophile loser scumbags sure, but I killed them for pissing me off less than you are pissing me off right now.”

  But once again, I say nothing. I was raised up polite, see?

  And it is then—just then—as I am thinking these thoughts, as I hold the lighter to the tip of the last cigarette I will smoke before I get out of the car and start down the other side of the street, that my cellphone goes off.

  I think, “What the hell now?” and I take it from my pocket and turn it over, and I see the name flashing on the screen.

  And my heart stops for a moment. My heart stops and my stomach sort of swallows itself, and I feel the hairs on the nape of my neck stand to attention, and I feel my scalp tighten . . .

  The phone won’t stop.

  I hesitate, my finger hovering over the little green telephone, and then I push it.

  “Yes,” I say, and already I can hear it in my voice. The edge. The nerves.

  “You gotta come see him,” the voice says. And it doesn’t matter whose voice it is. It could be the president of freaking Cuba, for all that it matters. It’s just that the message will have come from him, and him directly.

  “Get me Madigan,” Mr. Sandià will have said, and there won’t have been the slightest doubt in his mind as to whether or not I would comply.

  “Now?” I ask, like six feet of stiff shit.

  “No, dickhead,” the voice says. “Why don’t you come next Christmas?”

  The line goes dead.

  Oh fuck, I am thinking. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

  13

  PROMISE ME

  His name wasn’t always Sandià. His name used to be something else, and something before that, but none of these names was the one with which he was born.

  Now he was just Mr. Sandià, and this was the name by which he was known and the name that everyone used.

  Anything that went before didn’t matter.

  Madigan sat for a while in the smoke-filled car.

  He felt nauseous, light-headed. He wished he hadn’t taken the lithium back at home, and then he thought that the smartest thing to do would be to take another one. And so he did.

  He chewed it dry, and it tasted bitter in the back of his throat, and he took the empty cup from Chicken Shack and pulled off the lid. There was a half inch of melted ice water in the bottom. He drank it, sucked the last ice cube into his mouth and chewed it. He lit another cigarette, opened the window, tried to breathe deeply and couldn’t. His chest was too tight. Everything was too tight. He loosened his tie, his top button, even his belt. He opened the door and let the cool air in, and then he slammed it shut and started the car. He tried to clear his throat. It was tourniquet-tight. His fingers drummed nervously on the wheel.

  Come on, he thought. Lithium, lithium, do your worst.

  He was at the junction of a 119th and Pleasant before he could even get his thoughts straight.

  Mr. Sandià wanted to see him.

  That morning he—Vincent Madigan—ably assisted by three dead scumbags, had busted one of Sandià’s houses. Sandià’s courier and accompanying entourage had been massacred in a hail of gunfire, and all the money had gone. Four hundred grand, give or take some change, more than three hundred and sixty of which was in a bag under the floorboards on the upper landing of Madigan’s own house. Next to that bag were several boxes of pills—everything from Demerol and Quaaludes to Dexedrine and Bennies. Besides that there were three unlicensed handguns, a Tec-9, about ten grams of coke, and a half dozen wraps of smack. What a field day Walsh would have. And what a fun time Madigan would have explaining it all away. Walsh had nothing. IA never had anything. They relied on informants and snitches within the division, and they never got them. They said they did, but they lied, just like most everyone else. Walsh was not only chasing Madigan, he was after Charlie Harris and Ron Callow and a dozen others. Some rumor that three or four of them had lifted a crate of Zegna suits from Evidence, sold them on to whoever was interested. Those suits had gone missing for sure, but it wasn’t the suits that were the item of interest. The suits went into a furnace, and the six kilos of grass that has been vacuum-packed in coffee cartons and buried at the bottom of that crate had been trafficked into the network within twelve hours of leaving Evidence. That hadn’t been Madigan’s gig. Weed was bullshit. Six kilos? Jesus, you could make that much money off of three ounces of coke if it was cut right.

  No, Duncan Walsh had nothing, and hell, the guy was out of there within three months if the grapevine was anything to go by. He’d move on up, gold shield clutched in his greedy, sweaty paws, and end up behind a desk in the chief of police’s administrative division, bullshitting war stories from the good old days when he busted cops for smoking reefer in the precinct garage.

  Madigan was off-track. Thinking about Walsh and IA and Zegna suits was avoiding the issue. Sandià had called.

  You gotta come see him.

  That meant nothing. It inferred and implied and gave away nothing. The message was always the same, the same tone of voice, the same kind of call. Didn’t matter what you were doing or where the hell you were. Your kid’s first birthday party, and if you don’t stay your wife is going to divorce you. Your daughter’s marriage, and you’re right there in the damned church about to give her away to some slick-haired dentist out of Yonkers with a brand-new Lexus and a weekend chalet on the edge of Blue Mountain Lake. It didn’t matter. You were summoned by Sandià, you went. End of story.

  Despite the lithium, Madigan’s nerves were all over the place. He thought about taking another, but he didn’t want to be drooling and tongue-tied like some hopeful kid on prom night.

  This was it.

  Showtime.

  He turned left at the lower end of Paladino Avenue and started on up toward Sandià’s tenement. Sandià was up top, right there at the peak of the mountain, six floors beneath him filled with Hispanic junkies and hookers and dealers and loan sharks, the topmost level a fortress of solitude and safety. You wanted to get to Sandià you had to walk a gauntlet of security like no other. The mayor, the chief of police, the state senator? Not a prayer. The security around such people was a tissue-fine web of nothing compared to that provided for Sandià.

  Madigan parked fifty yards away. In and of itself, there was no concern that his car would be seen and identified, either by his colleagues or the assholes that prowled this neighborhood and kept Sandià informed of who was around and what they were after. Madigan was supposed to be in the area. He was looking for the girl. That was the official line. The unofficial line? Well, an
yone who was anyone in the Yard knew that he and Sandià had a working relationship. In reality, it would take six divisions of cops and most of the National Guard to bust open Sandià’s tenement. It was a castle. Perhaps it was the last bastion of real opposition to the mayor’s progress machine. There would be no gentrification here. Perhaps Sandià was paying the world to take no notice. Madigan knew some things, but not others. He knew more than most, but when it came to whatever working relationship that might have existed between Sandià and the real powers that be, well, Madigan was in the dark. There was an uneasy alliance, a tenuous rapport, and for as long as Madigan could remember it had held in this part of the city. Raids happened, of course, but it was always the little guys who bit the bullet. It was in the dealers’ houses, in the crack dens, the cluster of dilapidated condos where Sandià’s hookers plied their trade that the busts were made. Never here. Never up close and personal.

  Madigan started walking back the way he’d come. He’d left both his guns in the car. Take them with him and they’d keep them until he came out again. Unless he was up for a suicide mission, there was no hope of killing Sandià on his home ground. And before today there had been no reason to kill him. Before today he hadn’t hit Sandià personally and directly.

  And if Sandià already knew that Madigan had taken the house that morning, well, Madigan would be dead within the hour. His head, hands, and feet would be a dozen pounds of hamburger by nine, most of it in the New Jersey swamps, a little in the East River, maybe some in the Hudson. By midnight the fire department would be traipsing through the wet, smoldering wreck of his house, and the office of the chief of police would be making a statement to the New York Times about how sorely Madigan would be missed by his colleagues and his family.

  And Sandià would make sure that his connection to Madigan never saw the light of day.