by R.J. Ellory
I retch again.
“Hey! Who’s in there? You gonna be okay, buddy? You need me to get some help?”
“I’m okay,” I shout back. “Just a few too many. I’m gonna be fine.”
“Okay, buddy, if you say so. But you sure don’t sound so fine.”
And he’s right. I don’t sound good outside, and I sound even worse inside.
If I thought I was screwed beforehand, well, I was playing kindergarten.
Now I’m up for the big show. Now I’m in the big leagues.
Vincent Madigan is swinging for the fences, and the whole world is there to see him strike out.
What have I done?
And the girl. What is the deal with this little girl? Laid up in the hospital, bullet wounds, bleeding out. Maybe she’ll make it, maybe she won’t. And he wants me to take care of her, make sure she makes it through, and yet he won’t even tell me her name.
Who the hell is the little girl, and what was she doing in that house?
I try to stand. I have puke down my shirt, on the waistband of my pants, on my hands, my shoes, on the floor.
I back up out of the doorway and lean over the sink. I look at my reflection in the mirror. I can see how I appear to myself, yet I wonder how I would appear to someone else.
Like a dead man, I think.
That’s what I must look like to the world: a dead man.
18
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME
It was past midnight, closer to one. Madigan knew he would not sleep.
Upon arriving home, he went directly upstairs and pulled back the carpet. He took out the bag of money, upended it onto the floor, and stared at the bundles of twenties and fifties and hundreds. He figured he might as well burn it. He could not spend it, neither to pay the outstanding alimony to the lawyers, nor his debt to Sandià. He could not pay a bar tab, nor buy his groceries, nor get a pack of smokes from the liquor store on the corner. It was dead money. He—Vincent Madigan—was a dead man, and he had three hundred odd grand of dead money.
The simple question now was where to go from here?
Officially he was lead detective on the Sandià drug house robbery, the four homicides that had taken place. Unofficially he was Sandià’s inside line on who had carried out the same robbery and killings. Officially it would be a case that would stay open indefinitely. That had always been the intention. No names, no identities, he and the three others remaining strangers from that point forward. But what had he expected? Had he honestly believed that neither Fulton nor Landry nor Williams would figure out who he was? And what choice had he been given? As soon as Fulton had opened his mouth—You think I don’t know who you are?—the outcome had been inevitable. Fulton had to go down, and if he went down, the other two had to go with him. Ben Franklin was right: A secret between three people was only a secret if two of them were dead. And now there was the other side of the same coin: Madigan was supposed to come back to Sandià with the names and location of those who had killed Alex, and beyond that the responsibility of ensuring the safety of a potentially fatally wounded child, a child without an identity.
Madigan put the money back in the bag. He put that bag under the floorboards once more. He looked at the ziplock baggies of pills. He looked at the handguns, the Tec-9, at the boxes of ammo. He sat with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, his hands around them. He needed to think clearly. He needed to sleep. Then he would think clearly. A couple of Ambiens would do the trick, and he had some in the bathroom cabinet. But he didn’t get up. He didn’t make his way down the hallway to the bathroom. He just sat there, his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced, his feet going numb as his circulation slowed down. After twenty, twenty-five minutes he stood up. He leaned against the wall until feeling had returned to his calves and ankles, and then he withdrew the pictures of the little girl from his pocket. He looked at her, the tubes in her nose, her closed eyes, the frailty of her features. She was about the same age as Lucy, the eldest child of his second marriage. Lucy was six, would be seven come February 10th. Lucy was the image of her mother, and if she grew up like her mother then she would break more hearts than a girl should ever have the right to break. Catherine Benedict, longest relationship Madigan had ever had. Seven years and two months. Two kids—Lucy and Tom. Before that Ivonne, before that Angela. Other lives. Lives he had left behind. Kids he had forgotten about. Bad actions did not make you a bad person. He could hear his own thoughts, and for a moment he was disgusted at himself. He looked at the baggie of pills again. There was enough there to kill a horse. He could, couldn’t he? He could just end it. Be done with all the bullshit and lies, all the running and hiding and lying and cheating and . . .
Hell.
He leaned down, picked up the floorboard and replaced it, pulled the carpet over, and stamped it flat to the baseboard.
Even as he entered the bathroom he felt the picture of the nameless girl fall from his hand. And then he was sitting on the edge of the tub with his head in his hands, and had he been asked he was unsure he could have repeated his own name.
Twenty minutes later he was in the kitchen, his throat sore, his eyes gritty, in his hand a glass of Jack Daniel’s. There was no right or wrong. Not anymore. The things that had happened, the things he had done—these things exempted him from consideration in such a light. Ethics, morals, the law? It was all so much horseshit. There was no law. Not really. Ask any man in the street if there was such a thing as justice—real justice—and he would laugh at you. The law served the lawyers. The courts served those who leveled judgments, but never those who sought restitution for wrongs. The society was corrupt. Everyone had a price. There was no one who could not be bought. Madigan knew that, knew it with certainty. The dividing line between himself and Sandià was not a line. It was a shadow. If you considered the truth of such a statement, then the lawyers and the police were the worst. At least people like Sandià were not pretending to be something else.
And who was he? Who was Vincent Madigan? Who the hell was he fooling but himself? Evidence planted, evidence removed, drug raids where the money and the drugs went unrecovered. People like Walsh at IA spent every waking hour looking for this kind of thing—the internal corruption, the shadows around people where the law ceased to inhibit and started to be an advantage. Not everyone. No, not everyone. There were some who held it all together, kept their lives on track, stayed lawful and honest and coped with the ever-increasing sense of frustration of one failed investigation, one failed testimony, one prosecution after another.
You will never win, Sandià had once said. The police, the courts, the legal system will never win. And I’ll tell you why, Vincent. I’ll tell you why. Because they no longer have the people on their side. The people know you are as corrupt as anyone else. They know where your true interests lie. They see the ulterior motives, they see the bargains and trade-offs, they see the way the law is compromised, the way it turns and twists until it fits whoever possesses the greatest influence or the most money. That is why you will never win . . . Because you people stopped taking care of the man in the street long before we did.
That had given Madigan pause for thought. It was a truth. Perhaps not a complete truth, but a truth nevertheless.
The law did not serve the common man. And thus the common man had no desire to serve the law.
Madigan drained the glass. He set it down and lit a cigarette. It was a few minutes after one, morning of Wednesday the 13th.
He needed to find out who the little Hispanic girl was. He needed to know her name. He needed to know why she had been in that house near Louis Cuvillier Park. He needed to know how she was connected to Sandià, and why Sandià needed her to survive.
Perhaps he needed to know these things for himself. To give himself something to hold on to. His world had slipped off of whatever axis it might have been balanced upon, and it was spinning wildly out of control. He was caught—he knew that—caught between two things far worse than the de
vil and the sea, however deep or blue that sea might have been. Follow this investigation through—whether officially or unofficially—and he was dead. As was the case when he’d taken something bad, or taken too much of something, the only thing he could do was hold on to a single thing—whether physical or mental, it didn’t matter. Just hold on to a single thing, a point of reference, an anchor, and stay connected to that thing until everything else stopped moving.
He was going to find out who the girl was. He could do that. That was information that Sandià had been unwilling to give him, information that was unknown to the department. Information was power. Information was valuable.
He would try and sleep, at least for an hour or two, and then he would go looking once more. Someone had to recognize her. Someone had to know her name.
Madigan got up from the kitchen table. He looked around at the bare walls, the empty cupboards, the microwave oven—still in its box from more than six months ago.
What had happened here? Where had his life gone? His marriage to Catherine had been over for more than a year and a half. In that time he had seen her—what?—perhaps twice, three times? The last time he’d stayed no more than an hour. Their words had been bitter, acrimonious, a rerun of the previous meeting, the one before that. And his daughter? Well, she hadn’t recognized him. More important, he had barely recognized her.
And if Sandià took him out of the game, then who would care? Ex-wives, an ex-mistress, children who didn’t remember him? And if he avoided Sandià—somehow—but ran afoul of the department? If they closed down his career, if they sent him to prison for what he had done—what then? The people he worked with—people like Callow and Harris and Bryant—would perhaps think of him for a week, maybe two, and then he would disappear in the track of time and be forgotten.
Madigan stood in the hallway. For a moment he felt the pressure of it, the crushing sense of impending defeat and overwhelm. It had come down to this now. He had created his own Sword of Damocles, and it hung heavy and ominous above him. Was there a way out? Perhaps, perhaps not. But he could resign himself to the inevitable end, that end dictated by someone other than himself, or he could do his utmost to evade the personal and professional crucifixion that would follow close on the heels of discovery. He was not a stupid man, but he had been stupid. Taking Sandià’s money, killing the nephew—that had been ill advised. Using Landry and Williams and Fulton had not been smart. He had arrested Fulton twice, Williams also, and hadn’t Fulton said that he and Bobby Landry were friends? Hadn’t that been one of the very things to leave his lips before Madigan shot him in the throat? Had they spoken to anyone before they did the job? Had Fulton mentioned to anyone that he was doing something with this cop from the 167th? Hey, man, gotta tell you, I got me a sweet gig. Can’t do better than this one, right? Three hundred grand, and the whole thing’s being run by a cop! Yeah, you better believe it, man. A fucking cop!
Madigan sat on the stairs. He put his head in his hands. His breath was coming short and fast. He hadn’t even noticed. He was winding himself up. He was thinking too much. Sandià didn’t know. Sandià wanted him to get the inside line on the killings. Sandià wanted him to take care of the little girl. That was all he wanted. Hell, if he did those things he would be off the hook. Sandià would wipe the seventy-five grand, and that would be finished. Williams, Landry, and Fulton were dead. Madigan had the money. As it stood now, there was very little chance that they would see the work of a fourth man in this thing. But if they did, if there had been some detail overlooked, if the money was marked and they counted up what was on the floor of the storage unit and started to ask questions about the remainder . . .
Madigan stopped in his tracks.
The fourth man.
Of course, there had to be a fourth man. Not himself, but someone else. Any remaining clue regarding his own presence would then be attributed to whoever he chose.
And how would that fourth man be identified? By the money, that’s how. Put that money someplace, and no matter what happened, no matter what was said, whoever was in possession of that money would be the fourth man. It was that easy.
Madigan got up. He felt his head clear. He felt his heart settle, his pulse slow down. It was simple. Find a patsy. Find somewhere to put that money, and he would have someone to take the fall. Give word to Sandià, Sandià takes care of things, retrieves his money, and Madigan winds up with a closed case, Sandià off his back, no debt, and a clear conscience.
Yes. No question. The most complex situations were always resolved with the simplest solutions.
And then he remembered the girl. There was still the girl, the agreement he’d made with Sandià that he would ensure no further harm came to her. Why was she important? That was something he needed to know. And if she survived, would she be able to identify Madigan from the assault on the house? Surely not. She had been in another room. She had seen nothing. Couldn’t have seen anything, could she?
Madigan was buzzing. He was electrified. He would never sleep, not now, not now that he had a solution worked out for this. All that remained was the girl—her name, her identity, the part she played in this game.
Madigan left the house. He walked to the car, got in, pulled away from the sidewalk, and headed for Harlem Hospital.
19
A DEVIL IN THE WOODS
“What is it?” she said.
She stood in the doorway. She had on a robe, her hair was tousled, her eyes sleepy.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Walsh said.
“You okay?”
He smiled. “Sure.”
She came forward, sat facing him, reached out and took his hand.
She said nothing. Walsh liked that best about her. Carole Douglas. A woman who had the ability to say nothing and yet communicate everything that needed to be said.
“Something bothering you?”
He shrugged. “Work stuff.”
“Tell.”
“Went out to a crime scene. Three dead guys. Bryant asked me to go, didn’t have anyone else to secure the scene. I went to be helpful, that was all.”
“And?”
Walsh smiled wryly. “The bug’s still there,” he said.
Carole nodded. “As if that’s a surprise.”
He gripped her hand. She read him better than anyone.
“You say what you say, Duncan, but what you say and what you feel are rarely the same thing. Whether that’s a man thing, or that’s just your thing—” She smiled briefly. “No, it’s a man thing. Anyway, regardless, you are a policeman because you want to be a policeman. It’s not a job you choose; it’s a job that chooses you. I get why you didn’t follow through with SWAT, but I never did get why you left Homicide—”
“Because it’s a circus, Carole. Because it’s a joke. Because it’s bullshit.”
“And—what?—Internal Affairs is any less bullshit?”
“We’re not having this conversation.”
“Sure we are. You don’t hear yourself talking already?”
Walsh sighed.
“You sighing about me, or you sighing about yourself?”
“Myself.”
“So tell me what happened today.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I went out there. Three dead guys, a whole pile of money all over the floor of this storage unit. I wanted to see beyond what was there. I wanted to see something that no one else would see. I wanted to understand what had happened there, what had really happened, and I haven’t felt that for so long.”
“You think no one can do the job as well as you?”
Walsh shook his head. “No, of course not. I just know how important it is to close cases. I know that it’s often easier to accept what appears to be, rather than dig any deeper . . .”
“So say something.”
“Say what? That I have a hunch? That I have some intuitive feeling that something isn’t right, but I don’t know what it is?”
“Duncan, you were born for this stuff
. I’ve always said that. I knew that when I met you, and I’ve hung in there for the last seven years because . . .” She shook her head. “You want to know what I think?”
“I guess I’m gonna find out whether I want to or not, right?”
“I think you’re running away from commitment—”
“Carole—”
“Shut up a minute, okay? Hear me out. I know you won’t marry me. I’ve accepted that we’ll not have kids together. That was a big deal, okay? We’ve been over this before, and I’m not going to get into it again. Loving someone is sometimes about sacrifices, right? But the sacrifices I’ve made, well, you know how I feel because I’ve said it before. The sacrifices I’ve made have been a great deal bigger than the ones you’ve made. I’ve done the marriage thing before. I’ve got two kids. That makes it easier for me. And we’ve stuck it out, we’re still together, and it’s working fine. But one thing I will not do, and I’ll tell you this right now, is sit and watch you fold your career up nice and neat and put it in a box in the basement—”
“What the hell is that—”
“What you’re doing means something, okay? I don’t give a damn whether you do Homicide or SWAT or IA or the mayor’s office, but if you’re not going to be a husband or a father, then the very least you can be is a man with a career that means something to him.”
“Carole, I—”
She shook her head. “Carole nothing,” she interjected. “It isn’t a rehearsal, Duncan. It isn’t a quick go at something to see if you like it. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re thirty-nine. Past forty, you’re getting into the zone where it’s a little tough to start from scratch in an entirely new direction. You were a cop before I met you, and you’re still a cop now, but you act like it’s something you’re doing weekends.”
“Carole, I want to go back to Homicide.”
“I don’t think you should have left Homicide in the first place.”
