by R.J. Ellory
Madigan returned to the precinct. He needed to find out about David Valderas, the murder that the Arias sisters had witnessed. He wanted to know who was on that case, and whether or not they were on Sandià’s payroll.
There was a message at the desk. Bryant wanted to see him. Madigan went on up, knocked and entered.
“The little girl,” Bryant said, getting up from behind his desk. “She’s gonna make it for sure. She’s a tough cookie, this one, and I need you to liaise with whoever’s looking after her and get the heads-up when she’s able to talk.”
“Should think it will be a while,” Madigan replied.
“Whatever, Vincent, I just need you there the moment she is given the go-ahead for some questions.”
“Will do.”
Madigan hesitated.
“Something else, Vincent?”
“Yes,” Madigan replied. He sat down. “I have to be honest with you, Sarge. I have to tell you that I think it’s a mistake to have Walsh all over these homicides.”
“How so?”
“Because he’s been a desk jockey too long, and even a month in IA gets you looking the wrong way.”
Bryant didn’t reply for a moment, and then he seemed to nod in affirmation of Madigan’s concern. “Okay,” he said. “So I’m thinking I should put Charlie Harris on it.”
“You don’t need to. I’ve got it covered. They’re the same case, no question. You’ve got a fourth man somewhere, and we just need to find him.”
“Any more on this rumor it was a cop?”
Madigan shook his head. “That came from the crackhead, like you said. I don’t think there’s any truth in that. I mean, for Christ’s sake—”
“Vincent, you’ve been around the block. Something like that would really surprise you that much? It could have been a cop. Jesus, it could have been the freakin’ ADA.”
Madigan laughed.
Bryant laughed too.
The tension dispersed.
“So what do you want to do?” Bryant asked.
“Just let me run both cases as one.”
“You want Charlie to work it with you?”
“Nah, just give me a uniform for the legwork as and when.”
“You can handle it?”
“No, Sarge, I’m gonna just make one royal fuck-up of a disaster—”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Bryant interjected. “Go do your worst.”
Madigan got up.
“And, Vincent?”
Madigan looked back at Bryant.
“If this is a cop then I need to know before anyone else. I am not naive. I know how dirty this business is. I know what these guys go through day in and day out. I know how easy it is to fall by the wayside, to lose sight of the bigger picture. I know that one mistake can destroy a career, and a wrecked career more often than not means a wrecked family.” He shook his head slowly. “I really do give a damn about the guys that work here. All of them. Their wives, their kids, whatever the hell their personal circumstances are, well, they put it all on hold to do something that is frustrating and thankless at the best of times. The more heads-up I have, well, the more damage control I can do. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Sarge, I understand exactly what you’re saying.”
“So keep me in the loop. Whatever you know, I need to know it next, right?”
“Right.”
Madigan walked to the door, stepped out into the corridor, and it was only as he reached the stairs that he realized his heart was going ten to the dozen.
Back in his own office, the small sanctuary within the madness, Madigan went back over the Maribel Arias file. The head in the Dumpster, the rest in garbage bags behind North General. Christ, Sandià was a freaking animal. If he had done this thing . . .
Madigan thought of his name—the Watermelon Man. Yes, Sandià could so easily have done this to Maribel Arias. He would not have blinked an eye.
And then he went on the trail of David Valderas. On the system he was listed as an active homicide, case registered on Wednesday, December 23, 2009. ME’s report said that Valderas had died approximately eighteen hours before on the Tuesday, his body having lain undiscovered in his house on East 115th. Again, Madigan took note that the address was the same one that Isabel had given him.
Cause of death had been a fatal puncture through the right eye into the frontal lobe of the brain. The murder weapon—a flat-head screwdriver, just a regular $1.99 cheap screwdriver available from a thousand places in any fifteen-block radius—had been left protruding from the socket. The driver’s shaft was all of five and three quarter inches, and it had been buried to the hilt. Paralysis of the entire nervous system would have been instantaneous, consciousness lasting no more than a handful of seconds, but in that handful of seconds David Valderas would have been aware of his own imminent death. A hell of way to go, and so much like Sandià. When there was no way that someone could say anything further, then Sandià would want them to know everything.
Valderas’s case had been picked up by the second duty detective, and that evening it had been Charlie Harris. Charlie had canvassed the street, spoken to a half dozen neighbors, had come away empty-handed. Had anyone known it was Sandià, they would have said nothing. People in the Yard knew enough to know nothing. Always the way. Charlie was a good cop—thorough, methodical—and had the case been originally assigned to Madigan he doubted he would have found out any more. But then he doubted that Charlie Harris would have spoken to the same people as he would have. The irony was immediately evident. Had this been some other case, some other homicide, the first person Madigan would have contacted would have been Sandià himself. A murder such as that would’ve had to be sanctioned, or at least bought off. From the jacket, it seemed that Valderas had in fact been busy. Three pickups on possession, one of possession with intent, two grievous-with-intents, a GTA, a B&E, a spell in the pound for illegal firearms, a couple of community service orders with no indication that he satisfied them, finally a pending warrant for the robbery of a 7-Eleven. His house, right there on 115th was a stone’s throw from Paladino Avenue. With Valderas’s sheet, well, there was no way he was working for anyone but Sandià. So if someone other than Sandià had wanted Valderas to disappear, Sandià would’ve had to have given his blessing. If it had been advantageous to Sandià to lose Valderas, then the blessing would have been cheap. If the beef had been legitimate but personal—perhaps Valderas had raped some other big shot’s kid daughter or some such—then the big shot could have paid for the privilege of dispatching Valderas to the hereafter. Going rate was two years’ profit. Whatever Sandià made from Valderas, double it, and that would have been the fee. So Sandià would have known about the killing, and maybe he would have given some information about it to Madigan, but there would have been a cost to Madigan for that. Let some other wife-beating, vest-wearing Hispanic hothead off of a possession-with-intent rap, and Sandià would have given the nod on the perp. Madigan gets a line on the killer, picks up the homicide bust, Sandià gets the killer’s territory for safekeeping while he’s up at the Big House, and everyone is sweet. It was the way it worked, the way it had always worked, the way it would work from here on out. In one hand and out the other, and everyone looked lily white and perfect. Organized crime had always been there. The Mafia wasn’t 1940s Sicily. The Mafia went back hundreds of years. The Asians weren’t the Triads; they were the Yakuza, the Ronin, and way back a thousand years to the first time one guy wanted another guy’s rice paddy and was prepared to kick his ass to get it.
But this? This was Sandià himself. This time it wasn’t Sandià giving Madigan a nod on a killer in his midst. It was Madigan getting the word on Sandià for a homicide. So Maribel Arias got diced and sliced because she was in the house when Sandià stuck Valderas with a screwdriver, but why did Valderas get stuck? What had he done? How had he upset Mr. Sandià that fateful Tuesday in December?
That was a question with no answer as of yet, and a question to which Madigan would have apprec
iated an answer.
Madigan decided to say nothing to Charlie Harris. From all appearances, Charlie had not moved the case at all. Madigan decided to work it as a sideline; he wanted nothing official to say he had taken it on.
And then there was Walsh. Walsh was backed into a corner. Bryant would inform him he was off the homicides. Walsh wouldn’t argue. Madigan would take them on as part of the same case. Madigan picked up the phone, dialed internally and got Walsh after the second ring.
“Walsh, it’s Madigan.”
“Hey. Yes. How’s it going? Is everything okay?”
Madigan could hear the anxiety in the guy’s voice. He was on eggshells.
“Everything’s okay,” Madigan replied. “Now, listen . . . I had a word with Bryant and he’s given me the three storage unit DBs. I’m gonna run the whole thing. I might need you to do a couple of things, but if I do they’ll be off the clock. Know what I mean?”
“I understand. Yes, of course,” Walsh replied. “But I can’t do anything that would jeopardize—”
“That would jeopardize what? Are you serious? Christ, man, you have any kind of idea how deep a hole you’re already in? You want me to help you out of this, then you’re gonna have to play ball, okay?”
There was silence at the end of the line.
“Okay?” Madigan repeated.
“Okay, okay . . . but—”
“But nothing,” Madigan interjected. “I might not need anything from you, but if I do, then I’m gonna need you to handle it. That’s all there is to it.”
He paused for just a second, and then he hung up.
The game was in play, and—as was always the case—if you made the rules, then you shortened the odds.
43
PREACHIN’ THE BLUES
There were people Madigan could talk to, but he decided to go home. En route he stopped at a clothing store, bought the things that Isabella had listed. The store assistant asked Madigan what size he needed.
“What size I need?” Madigan asked.
The girl smiled. She had a pretty smile.
“No, sir, I mean the size of the lady you are buying these things for.”
“Christ knows . . . Your size maybe, a little smaller in the . . . you know, up there . . .”
“The bust?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“And do you know what style she likes? What color T-shirts she wants? Her underwear?”
“I haven’t a clue,” he said. “Just get a bunch of stuff that you like and I’ll take that.”
The girl smiled again. “What every girl loves to hear, right?”
Madigan frowned. Was she hitting on him? Jesus, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“Yes, right,” he said, and he felt his cheeks color up. What the hell was this all of a sudden?
The girl went away. She came back ten minutes later. She had two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a blouse, a couple pairs of shoes, some underwear. “These okay?” she asked.
“Look good to me. How much?”
“Hundred and twenty-five fifty.”
Madigan counted out a hundred and fifty bucks, told the girl to keep the change.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
Madigan bundled the things into two bags and left the store.
He stopped at a supermarket coming out of Morrisania. He bought coffee, tea, milk, sugar, eggs, bread, ham, salami, mayonnaise, mustard. He bought canned goods, a bunch of vegetables, a few pounds of hamburger, a jar of dill pickles, a six-pack of Schlitz, two bottles of red, two of white, a bottle of rosé, a liter of Jack Daniel’s. He got a kid to help him haul the lot to the car and gave the kid a ten. The kid seemed overjoyed.
Back toward home he wondered when he’d last done grocery shopping. He could not remember. It didn’t matter, save to highlight the fact that everything had been lonely since May of 2008. Better part of two years alone. Better that way. It had to be. He didn’t have to contend with what color underwear, which kind of wine.
Isabella seemed happy to see him, as if she’d imagined he would desert her. He showed her the clothes he’d bought.
“You did good for a guy,” she said. She smiled. It was the first real smile he’d seen since he’d found her. The smile did not last long, however, as if she had caught herself relaxing and knew that to relax her guard was to invite even greater trouble. There was no mistaking the fact that she had been crying, and thus he relayed the message he’d gotten from Bryant.
“She’s doing real well,” Madigan said. “There is no question that she’s gonna be fine . . . And considering what I have worked out, I don’t think it’s going to be too long before you get her back. Right now she’s not able to answer any questions. The doctors don’t want her stressed. But I’ve been put in charge of the whole case, so no one will speak to her before I give the okay. That way, whatever I find out from her you’ll find out right away.”
“And can I see her? Am I going to be able to see her?”
He shook his head. “No, you can’t see her. That’s tough, I know. But say it had been another cop there when you showed up at the hospital, huh? Say it hadn’t been me. Then you’d be having an entirely different conversation. You’d either be in a jail cell for your own protection, or you’d have been delivered up to Sandià.”
“By the cops?”
Madigan looked at her. He did not believe that she could be so naive as to consider such a thing impossible. “You don’t have to try and make me feel better,” he said. “I know that some of those inside the PD are far worse than those on the outside.”
“But not you?” she said. “You are helping me, right?” The tone in her voice was definitely that of a question. She was afraid, alone, suspicious, defensive. There was no way in the world that Isabella Arias would be won over with one night’s sleep and a bunch of cheap clothes.
“Yes,” Madigan said. He hesitated. “Yes, I am helping you. But I’m also helping myself.”
They were silent for a moment, and then she said, “I’ll make some food. You are staying now?”
“No,” Madigan replied. “I have to go and see someone, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“I’ll make food,” she said. “I’ll make dinner, and then we can eat when you get back.”
“Sure, that’d be good.”
Madigan walked to the front door. She followed him, but he turned and told her to hang back. “I don’t want anyone in the street to see you here,” he said.
“You’re thinking of everything,” she replied. She reached out her hand to touch his sleeve, but Madigan read the gesture as more of an effort to convince herself that here was someone she might possibly trust. She was not trying to express any degree of affection for him.
Madigan flinched.
“What?” she said. “You afraid of me?”
He tried to smile.
“Everything about you is lonely,” she said. “Your house, your cupboards, the rooms . . . lonely. Everything you say sounds like something a lonely man would say.” She paused for a moment, looking at him intently.
Madigan found it disconcerting. He just wanted to leave.
“You and I are not so different,” she said. “I do not trust you. You do not trust me. Right now this is the way it is, and this is the way it has to be. I appreciate what you have done so far, Vincent Madigan, but I know that people are never who they appear to be . . .”
“I don’t expect you to trust me, but I do need you to believe what I am telling you,” Madigan replied. “For the moment, all I need you to do is stay here. This thing is going to go one of two ways, and we will either come out of this alive, both of us, or we won’t. It’s that simple. But you do anything other than precisely what I ask of you, then we shorten the odds significantly.”
“I will stay here,” she said. “And I will do what you say.”
“Good enough,” Madigan replied, and with that he opened the door, closed it quietly behind him, and did
n’t look back.
Four blocks southwest, heading back toward the Third Avenue Bridge, Madigan pulled over at the side of the road and wondered what the hell was going on.
This was a circus, the whole thing, and he either kept his head together or he could wish goodbye to everything. The girl was merely a tradeoff for Sandià. Someone was going to win and someone was going to lose. Hell, maybe both of them would. Those were the breaks.
Enough already. Get busy living, or get busy dying. Just like the man said in Shawshank.
On MLK Jr. Avenue and Second, Madigan pulled up and came to a stop against the curb. He sat for a moment, smoked a cigarette, decided to drop a Percocet, and then decided not to. He got out, flicked the cigarette butt across the sidewalk, and started left toward the corner. A third-floor apartment, the building that overlooked the junction, and even as he approached he saw the curtain flicker.
Vincent Madigan and Freddy Virago went back a thousand years. Once upon a time they had been tight, but life happened, things happened, and there had been a rift. The rift was as healed as it ever would be, but the friendship they’d once possessed was a thing of the distant past. Now their tolerance of each other was born out of a mutual respect.
A good fifteen years older than Madigan, Freddy Virago had run a hundred different names. He had ex-wives and mistresses scattered throughout the Yard and beyond. Twenty years before, it was a running joke that if some girl hadn’t carried one of Freddy’s kids then she wasn’t a real Yard girl. Approaching sixty, Virago had done enough years inside to know he didn’t want to die there, and so he stayed outside of everything. He knew what was going on, but he was never involved. Madigan believed he didn’t even smoke reefer these days. He had a drink or two, as Madigan himself did, but the line had been drawn. Go down that route and you wound up doing something crazy.
Madigan buzzed; the door opened. Virago had seen him coming a hundred yards away.
Madigan took the stairs, and Virago’s door was open by the time he reached the landing on the third floor. A young woman was there waiting for him—eighteen, nineteen perhaps, her hair a tight mess of jet-black curls, her skin olive and swarthy. She was pretty in that wild, unkempt way of so many Hispanics, a look that had broken Madigan’s heart on too many occasions.
