by R.J. Ellory
“Happened to her?” the girl asked.
“Someone shot her. Left her in a hell of a mess . . .”
“Well, I can see that. I mean, who the hell would do something like that to a . . .” Her voice trailed away. There were plenty of people, and Madigan figured she could probably name a half dozen without trying.
“You know her, right?” he asked, his tone assured. It was more a statement than a question.
“No.”
“Who’d you think of when I showed you the picture?”
The girl shrugged. “Who I thought of and who it is ain’t the same damned thing.” There was the defensive tone. Madigan heard it. Now the girl was walking on eggshells. She knew if she said a single thing more she was involved. Involved meant statements. It meant more questions; it meant the possibility of face time with more police, other people in the neighborhood getting word that she was talking, and all of a sudden she doesn’t have any friends and she’s looking over her shoulder when she comes home in the dark.
“What’s your name?” Madigan asked.
“Hell business is it of yours?”
Madigan smiled. “None of my business.”
“Then what you askin’ for?”
“’Cause we can do this nice or we can do it shit. We have a real short conversation now. You tell me who you think it might be. You tell me as much as you know. I walk away and you never see me again. Other way we can go is I take off and get a warrant. I come back here with a black-and-white and a couple of uniforms, and they stand outside your place while I come in and listen to whatever bullshit might be going on and then I leave with the same information. Oh, and tell me what you know now and I’ll give you fifty bucks for your trouble.”
“I tell you who I think it is, you give me fifty bucks, and then I never see you again?”
“Right.”
I think it’s Isabella’s girl.”
“Who’s Isabella?”
“Used to live up on Pleasant. That was a while back.”
“You know the child’s name?”
“Nope.”
“You know Isabella’s surname?”
“Nope.”
“Anything else you can tell me . . . anything at all?”
“Think she went to the school over by St. Paul’s . . . Yeah, pretty sure she did.”
“Good,” Madigan said. “That’s good.” He took out his wallet, gave the girl two twenties and a ten.
“So we’re done?” the girl asked as she took the notes. “I ain’t never gonna see you again?”
“Sweetheart, I never even seen you this time.”
Madigan turned and walked back down the street to his car.
St. Paul’s was three blocks west, right by the 116th street subway station. He knew the school as well. He hoped to hell they knew her.
By the time he arrived most of the kids were taking lunch. He got in through reception and waited for the deputy principal to come on down and see him. When she came, Madigan was surprised she was white. She was good-looking, maybe mid-thirties, a little heavy perhaps, but a great smile.
“Detective Madigan? I’m Catherine Carvahlo, deputy principal. How can we help you?”
Catherine. Same name as his last wife.
Madigan rose, asked if there was somewhere they could speak away from the main corridor.
“One of the classrooms,” she said. “Down here. The children are all at lunch for another twenty minutes or so.”
Once inside, the conversation was brief. Yes, Catherine Carvahlo recognized the girl. She was a pupil there, but had stopped coming about two weeks earlier. This was not unusual. Happened all the time. The school reported the absentees to the board. The board reported them to the local education department. The education department put them on a list, and when their turn came around, the parents got a visit to find out what had happened.
“Her name is Melissa,” Catherine told Madigan. “Melissa Arias.”
“And you have the home address?”
“Of course, yes,” Catherine replied. “In the office. If you come with me now, I’ll get it for you.”
They walked side by side. Madigan waited for the questions. What happened to her? Do you know who did it? How is she? Is she going to make it? But Catherine Carvahlo asked nothing, and in a strange kind of way it didn’t surprise him. There were those who wanted to know everything, and those who wanted to know nothing. The nothings tried to go on believing that the world was a good place. They lived in some disconnected la-la land where people were nice to each other all the time. They wound up dead in a home invasion, or shot by a crackhead in a 7-Eleven robbery. The everythings carried their suspicions and cynicisms like a burden. They got depressed and frustrated, but they were smart enough to get their groceries in daylight and stay indoors after dark.
As Madigan left, in his hand a small piece of paper upon which was printed the name Isabella Arias and an address no more than five blocks away, Catherine Carvahlo did pause for a moment. She was going to ask something, and then she evidently decided against it.
Madigan looked at the piece of paper, at the woman’s too-neat schoolma’am handwriting, and he said, “It’s okay, Miss Carvahlo. Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
She knew then that he saw right through her. She looked embarrassed, as if she’d been caught in a lie. I do care, she wanted to say. I do care. About all of them. But I have to try and care for the ones I’ve got. The ones I lose . . . I would’ve lost them anyway . . . Oh hell, I don’t know what I’m saying . . . Forgive me . . . It doesn’t make sense . . . I am a good person really. I promise I am . . .
“I’ll let you know what happens,” Madigan said, and he knew he wouldn’t. Catherine Carvahlo knew it too, but the fact that he’d said it made the end of their meeting all the less tense.
He walked away, didn’t look back, reached his car and headed for East 117th between First and Second.
25
LONG LONG GONE
Walsh pulled their sheets—Landry, Fulton and Williams. There was a wealth of information, a good roster of contacts, all ex-cons, all with sheets themselves. It would take a month to trawl through what he had in front of him. Who the hell knew who’d said what, and when they had said it? The vast majority of these guys couldn’t keep their mouths shut about anything. They talked about past jobs, present jobs, future jobs. They talked about ideas—smalltime, much of it, and then the wildcat shit that was going to make them a million and get them out of New York. And then there were the lies. These guys were born lying. They started out lying and they just kept on going. They lied to one another, to their friends, their wives, their girlfriends and mistresses and mothers. They lied to the police, the lawyers, the judges, the prison crews, and their cellmates. Most of all they lied to themselves. They had to, or they’d go mad. It was hard work, that kind of life. Always trying to remember what you’d said, who you’d said it to. Five, six, seven cellphones, all with names written on the back of who had this number, who had the other. If you’re going to call such and such a person, do it from this phone, not from some other number. Exhausting. Just utterly exhausting.
Bobby Landry was a two-timer, once on a GTA, second time on a B&E. Had he not been shot in the face with a .38 he would have wound up somewhere three strikes down, career criminal, out for life and never coming home. Landry was thirty-one, hailed out of New Jersey. His father—Charles Francis Landry—had done a five-to-seven for robbery, but there was a catalog of other charges, cautions, notices, fines, suspended sentences, and God only knew what. He was questioned about a reported instance of sexual abuse against the daughter of a woman he was sleeping with. Daughter was nine years old. Her word against his. Never went anyplace. Even Landry’s mother had done six months for solicitation. Hell of a family.
Charles “Chuck” Williams was out of the same petri dish. One term only, a three-to-five for assault with a deadly weapon. Did it without any trouble, came out on parole after forty-one month
s, ran his probation clean and didn’t go back. Probation report painted him as a misguided individual, a temper-driven reactive who went off the rails at an ex-girlfriend’s new lover. His outburst was a one-time thing. Bullshit. Read his sheet and he was in and out of precinct houses all over the city. He never got charged. There were no arraignments. But he was implicated in eleven robberies, two GTAs, assault on a minor, pandering, a gang-rape, possession and intent to distribute. Mom and Dad must have been proud. Williams walked all of them, maybe because he was just so charming. Walsh looked at his picture. His was a hard face. Dark eyes, bitterness in every facet of him, the sort of awkward bastard who believed that everybody and the world owed him whatever he wanted. He was a New Yorker, came up out of the Lower East Side as far as Walsh could work out. And when he got up close and personal with the concrete floor of that storage unit—one slug in his chest, a second in his head—he was thirty-four years old.
Laurence Fulton made Landry and Williams look like kindergarten cons. Fulton was also a two-timer, a three-to-five upstate for a multiple GTA, something a couple of years earlier in and around Atlantic City, and he’d had an armed robbery charge pending trial. He was out on bail—a seventy-five grander, said bail posted by his mother. Seemed she’d put her house on the line for her delightful child. Well, she wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore, her delightful child now lying in one of the ME’s chill drawers with most of his throat and the back of his head someplace else.
Fulton looked like the roughest of the three. He’d done juvy as a pre-teen, in and out of an assortment of facilities between fourteen and seventeen, forever skipping around the edges of something or other. His sheet was twice the length of Landry’s and Williams’s combined. He was boosting cars at eleven, pulling 7-Elevens when he was fifteen. They got him a few times, but he bullshitted his way around the system somehow or another. As a teenager he robbed grocery stores wearing a leather jacket with olive oil smeared all over the sleeves and back. Someone grabbed him they could never hang on. They even got him for such a stunt one time, had the coat, had the store guy with oil all over his hands, but there was no way to prove that the oil on the guy’s hands was the very same oil that covered Fulton’s coat. He walked again. Or slithered maybe. Got himself criminal defense lawyers who were as slippery as the jacket. Fulton was a violent man. Was up for a rape charge one time, but that went away too. Lack of evidence. There were reports of domestic abuse, visits to his house on numerous occasions due to reports of screaming, an endless history of ER visits made by the various girls he was sleeping with, and yet no one ever pressed charges. Not once. He was cautioned, interrogated, kept overnight a dozen or more times, but without a charge there was nothing that could be done. He didn’t only beat his girlfriends senseless, he beat them scared. He instilled such a terror of retribution that they wouldn’t say a word.
Walsh felt sure that Fulton was the heavy hitter of the three, so much so that he decided to focus his energies on Fulton’s contacts, Fulton’s known associates, maybe some of the girls that he’d kicked six ways to Sunday, and in among all of that he might find someone who remembered Fulton saying something about taking down one of Sandià’s houses. Such a venture was not undertaken lightly. Walsh knew of Sandià; there were very few people in the PD who didn’t know of Sandià, especially in the Yard and surrounding territory. No, whoever decided to go up against Sandià was either crazy, extraordinarily clever, or just plain suicidal. Fulton was crazy, no doubt about it, and maybe Landry and Williams were crazy too. But what they were and why they got involved was not important now. All that was important was the fourth man, and Walsh believed that Fulton’s world—the one that still existed, the one that still contained his memories—was where he would find the ghost on the highway. He believed, however, that the fourth man might not be crazy, that he might be the clever one of the pack. Why? Because he’d been the one to walk away with the money. Walsh was certain that the few thousand dollars on the floor of the storage unit was nowhere near the sum total of the robbery. And the fact that he’d left three men behind—all of them dead, thereby creating the appearance that some internal conflict had resulted in the three perps wiping themselves out—had been a smart idea.
Perhaps the fourth man believed he had pulled it off, this master plan. But there had been a mistake. Just that one tread mark, that one small thing, and it had taken on a whole new slant.
Now Walsh had to contend with his own self-appointed return to the world of Homicide, the fact that he was investigating one half of a case while Vincent Madigan investigated the other, and there was yet a third matter to take into consideration—the simple reality that Sandià would be even more driven than the police to identify who had committed this crime against him. He would want his money. He would want revenge. He would want his own pound of flesh. He would get word out that no one should speak of this matter to the police. His own people would be taking care of things. And he would not want it made known that he had been ripped off. It would not serve his reputation well. Both Walsh and Madigan would be up against a wall of silence.
No, this was not a simple case of three dead guys in a storage unit. This was something else altogether, and Walsh realized how much he had missed it. He had two weeks before Callow returned, two weeks to prove to himself, to prove to everyone, that he could do this thing, that he belonged here, that he had learned how to make a mark that counted for something in this territory.
Somewhere there was a fourth man with a great deal of money and a car with tires that matched those treads, and this was going to be legwork and late hours, the usual routine for such cases. Homicides fell into four main categories—premeditated and intentional, everything from domestic murders for the insurance money to contractors employed to make someone disappear; those occasioned in the execution of another crime—bank robberies, kidnappings and suchlike; crimes of passion—the drunken ex-husband stabs the wife’s new lover; finally, the gang-related and territorial homicides. Pretty much everything fell into one of those boxes, and what had happened with the Sandià robbery was the latter. Until the fourth man was found there was no way to determine whether or not it had always been his intention to kill the other three, but this didn’t change the nature of the crime. It was an internal thing, something that fell within the bounds of the criminal fraternity, and there was little going on in that fraternity that someone somewhere didn’t know. It was a matter of finding that person, or getting something on someone that could then be used as leverage to find that person. That’s all it would take. Walsh would begin with Fulton’s closest people, the ones whose names appeared most frequently as accomplices, those with whom he had shared a cell and then maintained a connection post-sentence. That was how the vast majority of these partnerships were founded. There was little to talk about in a twenty-three lockdown aside from what they were going to do once released.
Walsh set everything else aside and combed through Fulton’s file. Three names figured prominently, two of them from prison terms. One of them was back inside, and thus was out of the loop. That left two, the first being Fulton’s cousin on his mother’s side, the second a cellmate from the upstate three-to-five. His name was Richard Moran. Fulton played booster, Moran was the driver. So, if they’d worked a few things together, why wasn’t Moran brought in as a driver on the Sandià hit? Because Fulton was a hired hand, that’s why. The fourth man was the contractor, not Fulton. The loyalty lay with the money, so Fulton may have suggested Moran, or Number Four might already have secured his driver before Fulton joined the crew. Walsh pulled Moran up on the system. He had a sheet like Fulton’s—B&Es, GTAs, assault and battery, possession with intent—and though he’d done eighteen months a while back, he seemed to have slid through everyone’s fingers for the rest of it. Seemed that the PD spent the vast majority of their time and resources chasing the big guys, the guys like Sandià, and Sandià would never see the inside of a jail cell. Otherwise, they were chasing the small-timers, the kids
with the dime bags, the speeding offenders, the traffic violations. In between was a whole world of violent, single-minded thieves and dealers and sex offenders, every one of them protected by the lumbering inefficiency of the system. This was the nature of the beast, and if you didn’t care for it, then this was not the line of work to pursue.
The second connection—the cousin—was named Edward “Eddie” Fauser. Fulton’s maternal aunt had married one Jerry Fauser, and Jerry Fauser was a star. He was inside even then, serving an eighteen-to-twenty-five for armed robbery. He’d gone down in May of 1994, had done sixteen, looked like he’d be doing at least another three or four. Two parole applications had been denied, next one wasn’t due until after the following Christmas. Eddie was definitely his father’s son—looked like him, behaved like him. Followed in the family business, started young, worked hard at it, and by the time he was nineteen he’d already done a year for aggravated assault. On his sheet were charges of attempted robbery, malicious wounding, physical abuse of a minor, an assorted collection of robbery-related things, but—once again—he appeared to have maneuvered his way through all of it with a certain deftness and aplomb. He was out and about too, didn’t have anything pending, but the last time his name had been linked to that of Laurence Fulton had been four years before. Fulton and Moran, however, had been marked up as prime suspects for questioning in a recent robbery. Nothing had come of it, and they were not pursued. But it had been recent, and that’s why Walsh felt his time would be better spent following up on Moran. If that went nowhere, then he could go running after Eddie Fauser.
