by R.J. Ellory
Faber had come up from Vice at the 27th, had a clean track, a solid record, but he was one of the methodical, pragmatic types. Faber did not have intuitive strikes, or so he told Madigan.
“It’s all legwork,” he said. “It’s a numbers game, right? Talk to enough people and you’re gonna find someone who knows something.”
Madigan didn’t disagree, didn’t argue. All he needed was a look at the files. Faber was all too eager to cooperate. Give him another year in Homicide and he’d be as suspicious and awkward as the rest of them.
Madigan took the files to his own office. He read through the initial scene of crime reports, the ME’s findings—decapitation, clean severance, the body parts separated with a narrow-toothed mechanical saw, the lack of tearing on the bone indicative of a high-quality blade, possibly carbon steel, and the extensive notes that Faber had himself made as he tried to talk to enough people to find someone who knew something. As yet Faber had not located that mysterious and singular individual who could shed light on what befell Maribel Arias. As was always the case, irrespective of the nature of death or the victim, the more time that elapsed the less likely any new information would be forthcoming. More often than not it was a crapshoot. Chance eyewitnesses, unknown to perp, unknown to police until the police knocked on enough doors and found them. Faber was right, at least to a degree, but the thing he was missing was the certainty that there was always someone who knew something, and often it was nothing but the intuitive shift that led you in their direction. The shift was a change of perspective, an alteration of viewpoint. It wasn’t science, rocket or otherwise. It wasn’t even a sixth sense, per se. It was an appreciation for tone of voice, body language, eye movement, for all the other myriad details that passed by you until you started to read them for what they were.
It was as he read the file that Madigan remembered something. An event, a circumstance, the thing that had prompted his enrollment in the New York Police Academy back in July of ’89. A woman was raped. She was an acquaintance of Angela’s, his first wife. He had only just met Angela, and it would be another two years before they were married. They’d had a date booked, but Angela had called him to say that she didn’t want to go.
Why, he’d asked.
Because of this thing that happened to a girl down the street.
What happened?
She got attacked by some guy. He raped her.
Did he kill her?
No, Vincent, he didn’t kill her. But you wonder if something like that happened to you whether you’d be better off dead. I mean, how the hell do you go on living after something like that happens to you?
Anyway, she hadn’t wanted to leave the house where she lived with her folks. Vincent drove over and fetched her. They went on the date, and after an hour or so she stopped talking about this thing and they’d had a good time.
A couple of months later they got the guy. Arrested, charged, arraigned, the whole show. But there was a problem. Vincent heard about the problem from Angela. There was a hitch with the warrant, some administrative thing, and all of a sudden the guy’s arrest was invalid, and the guy was out on the street again. And the girl he raped? She committed suicide. Angela didn’t know the girl any better then than she had when the attack had taken place, but it cut her up bad. She was inconsolable for a while. She went on about how she could have spoken to the girl, befriended her, been there for her. I mean, hell, she lived down the goddamned street. All it would have taken was a three-minute walk and a knock on the door. Maybe, just maybe, if she’d done that, the girl would still be alive.
Vincent told her no, that’s not the way things work. But then he started thinking. He started wondering about the people on the street. He started wondering about their thoughts, their intentions, their motivations. He started to get it into his head that maybe things were not just that way. How that resulted in him becoming a cop he was never sure, but it was a watershed, a point of change. He spoke to Angela about it and she was all for it.
You’d make a good cop, she said. You get decent money, a good pension. It’s a career, Vincent, something that you can raise a family behind.
It seemed to make sense. He went for it. The academy loved him, and he got a kick out of the fact that he was actually good at something for the first time in his life.
A natural. That’s what the instructors said. Vincent Madigan is a natural.
And it started out fine, but then it went bad—and it went bad in proportion to the number of times he found his hands tied. Just like those guys must have felt when their rapist walked and the vic killed herself.
You can do only so much good, people said. We ain’t here to save the world. The world is too messed up for anyone to save it. This is damage control, that’s all. This is the best it’s gonna get, and if you’re hoping for any more then you’re in the wrong line of work.
That’s when things had changed. The slow, insidious undermining of faith in the system. The loss of faith becomes a sense of resentment, bitterness, a deep-seated frustration that founds a sense of disillusionment. You doubt the system, then you doubt yourself, and that begins an unforgiving deterioration in self-belief. If I could have been so wrong about my career, what else could I have been wrong about? My marriage? My ability as a father? And swift on its heels comes the effort to replace all that exists with something else. A mistress instead of a wife. Another child that your wife knows nothing about. And then the desire for more money creeps in. If only I had more money I could . . .
And then comes the day.
The day.
Vincent Madigan, seated there at his desk, remembered it now as if it were yesterday. Monday, January 16, 1995. The day it all turned inside out. The day he made the decision. The day he met Sandià for the first time. Of course he had known of the man beforehand. Madigan had been in the Manhattan Gangs Division, and anyone in Gangs knew of Sandià, if not personally then professionally.
That had been the day everything changed.
The drinking started a month later, maybe less. The pills soon after. A little more than a year and things were irreconcilable between him and Angela. A year later they were divorced. He’d already been seeing Ivonne for three years, Adam was eleven months old, and in that moment it seemed that everything was right again. He had never loved Angela. Not really. Not the way he loved Ivonne. And Cassie, his first child, the daughter he had with Angela? She was a girl. A beautiful, wonderful girl, and that was the worst thing of all. That was like wrenching out the very center of his soul. He bonded with Adam, but not the way he had with Cassie. That made him feel guilty and cheap. Made him feel like a liar. But he knew it was all of his own making, and he knew he couldn’t fight for custody of Cassie. Nevertheless, he tried. He drank less, he cut down on the uppers that kept him going, the downers that let him sleep. But the world got to him again, and other things happened, and the guilt kicked in, and all of a sudden Adam was two years old, getting on for three, and he and Ivonne were seeing each other less and less frequently, and even when they did speak they didn’t really speak. They shouted, they screamed, and that started Adam screaming. And the kid was supposed to be out of diapers, but he was such a freaking wreck he would wake every night, his bed soaking, his eyes swollen red with crying, and Ivonne was telling Vincent to get the hell out of here you drunken son of a bitch, you asshole, you useless druggie piece of shit . . .
And so he went.
Madigan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He tried so hard not to think of these things, but this was it. This was the deal now. This is where he was, and he had carried himself here without anyone’s help.
Except Sandià.
Sandià wanted him messed up and drunk and out of control. Sandià wanted him in the palm of his hand. Sandià wanted to play him for advantage any which way he could.
Sandià. That was where the problem had started, and that’s where it had to end. He had to get out of Sandià’s business dealings. He had to get away from the man.
The money would serve a purpose, but only to get Sandià out of the picture.
Madigan looked back at the pictures of Maribel Arias in the file before him. She was a pretty girl. Twenty-nine years old, her head in a Dumpster, her body cut up and left in trash bags behind North General Hospital. What had she done? Had she done anything? Why had she been murdered? Why cut her up? Why separate out her head and her torso and leave them in two entirely different locations? Too many questions, and—as always—too few answers.
Madigan took a photocopy of every document in the file and returned it to Faber.
“How’s it seem to you?” Faber asked.
Madigan shook his head. “Could be anything. Psycho, contract, ritualistic, sacrificial, religious, ex-lover on the rampage. Like Paul Simon said, there’s fifty ways to leave your lover.”
“Well, I sure as hell hope I never have a girlfriend pissed enough with me to do that.”
Madigan thanked Faber and headed back to the office. Before he left again he typed a quick e-mail to Bryant. Good ID on girl and mother. Melissa and Isabella Arias respectively. Am following up potential connection to murder of girl’s aunt, Maribel Arias. Questions around area of residence, also back to Harlem Hospital to see if the girl has had any visitors.
He hit SEND and stood up to get his jacket. Even as he did so the phone rang.
“Vincent, it’s Bryant. Got your e-mail. Walsh has come back with something as well.”
Madigan felt something cramp in his lower gut. Was he afraid?
“Shoot.”
“He managed to track down one of Fulton’s associates. The guy was probably off his head on crank, but he did say a couple of things that Walsh is going to follow up. First, from what Fulton told his buddy, the money that was taken from the Sandià house was the proceeds of a bank job. Anyone spending that stuff . . . well, we’re gonna know about it within a couple of hours.”
Madigan took an audible breath. He knew now precisely what Sandià had meant. The money is no use to whoever took it. Start spending that money and they’ll get no farther than the next 7-Eleven.
“You okay, Vincent?” Bryant asked.
“Sure, sure . . . Got a little indigestion . . .”
“Anyway, here’s the other ballbuster. This guy . . . hang fire a moment . . .” The sound of rustling paper. “Richard Moran, that’s his name. Anyway, he said that Fulton was hired for this job by some guy, went to check it out and there were two others on the payroll, presumably Chuck Williams and Bobby Landry. That ties in with the ballistics and crime scene info on the storage unit shootings, the fact that there must have been a fourth man, and from what this guy is saying he was the one who put the job together—”
“What about the fourth man?”
“Well, this Moran character says that the fourth man was a cop.”
Madigan stopped breathing. There was an awkward, tangible silence between him and Bryant.
Suddenly he spoke. He had to. “You are bullshitting me.”
“Hell, Vincent, it’s some crank cooker. And he got it from some guy who was no better. These guys talk crap to each other most of the time, and the rest of the time they’re talking worse crap. The bank money thing interests me, but as you can imagine, Walsh has got a big hard-on for the cop connection.”
“He’s taking it seriously?”
“He has to, Vincent, he’s IA. This is what he does. I agreed to have him help out on this thing. Better to have him inside pissing out than outside pissing in an’ all that, but now he’s got a legit reason for sticking his nose anyplace he wants to on this.”
“What, because some junkie says some other junkie said that a cop was involved?”
“Hey, hey, don’t take it personally. We all feel the same way about these scumbag dealers and whatever. You can’t lose sight of the game here, my friend. You can’t lose sight of why you’re doing this in the first place. Jesus, you’ve been around long enough to know that these assholes will say anything to impress one another, and most of it is BS. Anyhow, do what you gotta do on your end, and leave Walsh doing whatever he’s doing. You guys shouldn’t cross paths much anyway. Let me know if you find anything on this other murder, the kid’s aunt, okay? You think there’s a connection here?”
“I don’t know, Al. I don’t know. Give me some space and I’ll come back to you.”
“For sure, Vincent. For sure.”
The line went dead.
Madigan hung up the phone.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply—three, four times—and all he could hear was Bryant’s voice . . .
Well, this Moran character says that the fourth man was a cop . . . says that the fourth man was a cop . . . fourth man was a cop . . .
All of a sudden the world seemed terrifyingly small, and there was pressure from every direction.
It was a good ten minutes before he moved. And when he did he knew he had to get a drink, a drink and a couple of Librium, a couple of anything just to get rid of that feeling, that terrible, terrible feeling that it was all going to end like this.
And he thought of the kids again—Cassie, Adam, Lucy, Tom. But Cassie figured large, larger than all of them, and he realized that of all of them—of all the people he knew, all those who knew him—the one that he hoped would never discover the truth was his daughter.
And then he thought of Melissa Arias—eight years old, lying in Harlem Hospital with a fist-sized hole through her little body.
Maybe I deserve it, was the thought he had as he left the precinct house and started toward his car.
Maybe everything that happens now is my own inevitable justice for all the shit I have caused.
And then a final thought.
Okay. So be it. But if I go, then Sandià is going with me.
30
WILDWEED
This is who I am.
I am the fourth man.
I am the one they are looking for.
I stand in a restroom stall. I am sweating profusely. I don’t even know what time it is. I have forgotten which bar I am in. I think it might be dark outside, or getting dark. Dusk maybe. Something like that.
I am supposed to be over at Harlem Hospital. I am supposed to be in Maribel Arias’s apartment on East 118th between Lexington and Third.
But I am not.
I am here.
Taking a ride on the Black Train.
Jesus fuck Jesus fuck Jesus fuck Jesus fuck . . .
Fuck.
What the hell am I doing now?
I gotta go home and change. I gotta clean myself up and get back out there. I gotta find out if whoever killed Maribel put Melissa in the Sandià house, and if they made Isabella disappear . . .
And the Sandià money came from a bank?
And Fulton knew this?
How the hell did I not know this? How the hell did that one get by me, when some asshole druggie crackhead like Larry goddamned Fulton knew about it?
I am losing the edge. I am losing the game by inches.
And who told Fulton about the money? Who did he speak to? How many people other than this guy, Richard Moran, knew that Fulton was doing a job with a cop? And did he tell anyone the cop’s name? Is there someone out there who knows that Larry Fulton, Bobby Landry, and Chuck Williams were doing the Sandià house with a cop called Vincent Madigan?
And which of those people are gonna hear about the three dead guys in a storage unit off of East 97th and put two and two together?
Up to my neck and sinking fast.
I need another drink.
31
SENSITIVITY
Walsh left with two other names. A second compadre of Laurence Fulton, a man by the name of Bernie Tomczak, and Karl Benedict, the 158th Precinct arresting officer on Moran’s possession beef. Walsh had bullshitted Moran. He didn’t know whether he could make the bust go away. He needed to do whatever it took; he might need Moran again, and—with Fulton dead—Moran would have to play his part in confirm
ing that a cop was the fourth man on the Sandià heist.
With this information it had become an entirely different case. A case that Walsh could legitimately pursue within his official brief. A crooked cop. A cop that set up a robbery of a drug dealer’s house, the proceeds of that robbery seemingly the earlier proceeds of a bank heist. Which bank, well, Moran hadn’t been privy to that info. Walsh didn’t want to make a big noise about the bank robbery connection. It’ll bring the feds in, he told Bryant. And Bryant had backed his call. Play that down, he told Walsh. I don’t want the feds here any more than you do. Hell, dealing with you gives me enough of a headache.
Play that down was the phrase Bryant had used, and Walsh had read it both ways. Bryant was working with him, making things as straight as he could. IA dealt with the department’s dirty laundry. That was bad enough. To have that laundry hung out to dry in public was another issue entirely. Irrespective of the precinct, a bad cop was a bad cop. It reflected on the department, not the divisions or the units or the precincts. It made the whole NYPD look bad. And this was robbery and multiple homicide. This wasn’t some rookie taking a twenty to lose a traffic violation ticket. This was murder.
First of all, Walsh went out to the 158th. He asked after Karl Benedict. Fortunately Benedict was on duty and in the building. Walsh waited in the foyer, wondered which way the conversation would go. He was soon to find out.
Benedict, suspicious at first, curious why IA from the 167th would want to talk.
“I need you to drop a charge,” Walsh told him.
“Drop a charge? What charge? Who is it?”
“Guy called Richard Moran. You were the arresting officer on a possession beef, and it needs to go away.”
Benedict—early thirties, five years in the department, smarter than he looked—smiled and shook his head. “I don’t just make possession busts go away, Detective Walsh.”
