by R.J. Ellory
Madigan swallowed the contents of his glass, went for the bottle again.
Isabella moved the bottle beyond his reach. “Enough . . . for now,” she said. “Eat first, okay?”
He looked at her. For a moment he felt challenged. For a moment he felt an intense rage boiling inside him. How dare she? How dare she come into his house, come right on into his house, take advantage of whatever miniscule sense of goodness that he still possessed, and tell him what he could and could not do . . .
Madigan stopped.
It was as if he could hear his own voice, and the voice sounded like another man entirely. He realized what she was doing. If she had to trust Madigan now, if Madigan was the man who would stand between her and Sandià, then she wanted him sober. Self-preservation. It was that simple. She did not care about him; she cared for herself and her daughter.
She let go of the bottle.
“Okay,” he said. “That would be nice.”
They ate. It was good, like restaurant food, but a good place where someone gave a damn about the customers. He drank wine, just one glass, and for a little while it felt like he didn’t want to drink anything else. She made coffee, he smoked a couple of cigarettes, and then they sat at the table and there was a strange and comfortable silence that was broken only by Isabella. Madigan felt no need to fill that silence with anything but the sound of her voice. He wanted to listen to her. He wanted to hear what she had to say.
“You know what it’s like when someone dies—your mom, your father, a child maybe?”
“A sister?” Madigan ventured.
“Yes,” she replied. “A sister too.”
“Tell me.”
“You stop. Your life stops. Everything stops. You cannot understand how things will ever start again. You cannot understand how it will be possible for life to go on after this. You are yourself, but you are also your family. There are parts of you in them. One of them dies and the parts of them that are within you . . . I believe they die as well.”
Madigan smiled. “You are quite the thinker, quite the philosopher.”
“My daughter doesn’t know her father,” Isabella said, going on as if Madigan wasn’t even there. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what to do for the best. She’s growing up without a father, and there’s going to be parts of herself that she doesn’t understand. We all pass on facets of ourselves to our children, don’t we?”
She looked up at Madigan. She looked like she was ready to start crying again. He wondered if he should give her a couple of lithium.
“Our children?” he said, and he thought of Cassie and Adam and Lucy and Tom, and he wondered if that was really true; if there were inherent and native parts of himself that would automatically be transferred to each of them. He wondered which parts. He wondered if Tom would be a thief, if Adam would be an adulterer, if Cassie would be an inveterate and compulsive liar, and if Lucy would be the drunk, the junkie, the violent one . . .
He closed his eyes.
“You can talk too,” she said.
“No, I can’t,” Madigan replied. “I want to listen to you.”
“There are things that have gone wrong for you . . . your family, your children?”
He laughed suddenly, a retort, a reaction more than anything else. “I have screwed up so many things,” he said. “That’s how come I know so much about how things can get screwed up.”
She smiled.
He didn’t. “I’m serious,” he said. “You do things, you know? We’re like kids all of our lives. Like when a kid does something that they shouldn’t do, and you sit them down and you ask ’em what the hell they did that for. What the hell did they do that for, right? Always comes back to the same answer. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. That’s always the reason. And we’re no different. We do things because it seemed like a good idea at the time. If we’re a bit smarter, you know . . . If we want to justify it, well, we call it instinct, survival instinct, but it isn’t anything but greed and hatred and prejudice. That’s the truth. Most things that people do, they do out of greed and hatred and prejudice—”
“That’s a very warped and cynical view of people.”
“People are very warped and cynical.”
“You believe that?”
“I know it.”
“You know, I have a dream,” she said.
“About what?”
“About the future.”
“And what’s that? What’s this dream?”
“That my daughter will keep the happiness I have seen and lose everything else.”
“Pretty unrealistic dream.”
“Why d’you say that?”
“Because she’s already out there with one strike against her,” Madigan said. “She’s Hispanic. She’s not white. You’re white, then, okay, you got a chance. You’re black or Hispanic or whatever, well, you’re walking against the tide before you even get to the beach. You know that. And the fact that we got a black man in the White House means shit. Government is more corrupt than any of us. That old saying: It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always wins. The country is screwed, the planet is screwed, and we’re all screwed too. Only business we should pay attention to is dealing with whatever it takes to make sure we’re covered.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Your logic doesn’t work.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m here. Because you’re helping me . . .”
“You think that’s out of the goodness of my heart? You think that this is some act of humanitarian selflessness?” Madigan shook his head. “Sandià has haunted the edges of my life for years . . . ever since I’ve been a cop really. I’m going to bring him down, and you’re going to help me.”
Isabella Arias looked directly at Vincent Madigan. Her gaze was unflinching, unerring, and Madigan looked back at her and felt invisible. He did not look away. He wanted to say something, but he did not know what to say.
“You do have a heart, Vincent Madigan,” she eventually said. “Dark and broken it may be, but you still have a heart.”
“Whatever you say,” he replied, and then he reached for the bottle of Jack.
They spoke little after that. She washed dishes. Madigan sat on the couch and surfed the TV for an hour, and then she came and said she was going to bed.
“Okay,” he replied. “I won’t be long. I’ll keep the volume down.”
“It’s your house,” she said. “Do as you wish.”
I will, he thought after she’d gone. And it’s my life, and finally I will do with that as I wish . . .
45
THE MIDNIGHT PROMISE
What did McCarthy say about politics? People went into politics because they were smart enough to understand it, but dumb enough to think it was important? Something like that.
Hell, that could apply to pretty much everything in life.
Do I want to fuck her? No, I don’t. She is good-looking, this Isabella Arias. I’ve had a little less to drink than usual. I am able to string a sentence together. But there’s something about her that just makes me mad. Self-righteous? No, that isn’t it. I think it’s her naïveté. Hell, her daughter just got shot. Her daughter could have died. The girl’s father is nowhere to be seen. She has no money, lives in some two-bit piece-of-shit apartment in Crapsville, and she talks about hopes for the future, dreams for her daughter. Get real, sweetheart. Your daughter’s gonna be a whore or a crack addict or both by the time she’s seventeen. This is the life you’ve got to look forward to. These are the dreams that await you, sweetheart.
That’s why I didn’t try something. That’s why I didn’t want to fuck her. Because she looked at me with an expression that said, “I know this. I know that . . . You are too negative, Vincent Madigan.”
To hell with you.
Life is negative. People are negative.
Wake up and smell the despair.
I took the bottle to bed. I didn’t bother getting undressed. I lay there on
the mattress and I could hear her in the bathroom, and I thought about the clothes I bought for her, the food she made, the feeling I’d experienced as I’d driven back from talking with Freddie Virago, and how I figured it would be nice to have someone to come home to again . . .
I have to get out of this life.
I promise I will get out of this life, one way or the other.
If I gotta die to do it, then so be it. Whichever way the shit flies, well, you got to deal with it.
Someone is talking to Sandià. Someone other than me. What does that tell me? Tells me I am naive too. Tells me I am a dumb schmuck for thinking that I was the only one who had my hand in the guy’s pocket. The whole thing tastes sour now. The whole thing seems bitter and small-minded and petty. We did this for money. Always for the money. Sold out on every front. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing, that’s what. Three hundred grand of worthless money under the floor, a drink problem, and loneliness. That’s what I got.
Gonna take a bunch of Ambiens and Quaaludes and get some sleep.
Tomorrow I have to figure this shit out. Someone has a line to Sandià. Charlie Harris? He was the investigating officer on the Valderas murder. Somewhere in that house they figured out that there was a witness to the Valderas murder, and whoever the hell is on Sandià’s payroll got that information to him. Maribel is dead. Now he wants Isabella dead. Could it really be that Charlie Harris has got a line in with Sandià? Seems unlikely. Not Charlie Harris. But then, wouldn’t he say the same thing about me?
I have to know who it is.
There has to be a way to find out.
I’ll give something to Charlie, something that would interest Sandià, and then we’ll see if I get a call from Sandià.
I cannot sleep.
Not with all this noise in my head.
For a while I sit by the window and look out into the street.
Then I stand in the corridor outside the room where she sleeps.
Isabella Arias.
I press my ear against the door. Can I hear her breathing, or is that my imagination?
Am I crazy now?
Have I just slipped away from all the moorings and drifted?
Christ, I don’t know what’s happening anymore, and the fact that I don’t know scares me more than anything else . . .
46
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
She was up and awake and showered, and she was making breakfast by the time Madigan came downstairs.
“Pancakes,” she said. “Bacon, too. There’s a 7-Eleven on the corner—”
“You can’t go out, Isabella,” he said. “I told you that already—”
“I put a coat on, one of yours, and I tied a scarf around—”
“Not again,” Madigan interjected. His voice was stern, direct. “Don’t go out again. Seriously.”
“But—”
“No buts. No reasons. Nothing. You stay inside. You don’t go out again. They find out you’re here, then both of us are dead. This is not a good time for me to die, okay? I have some things I need to do.”
She looked at him, started to smile. His expression was intense. Her smile disappeared.
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t go out again.”
“Good,” Madigan replied. “I appreciate that you wanted to make breakfast. I appreciate that you needed to get outside. But this is something you cannot screw around with, Isabella.”
“I got it, Vincent. I really do. Now sit down. Eat. Shut up with the talking.”
He sat down. She poured him a glass of orange juice.
Madigan ate as best he could. He had not drunk as much as usual the night before, and he felt a little sharper for it. He needed to speak to Charlie Harris. He needed to give Charlie something, and then see what happened. He felt wired, attuned to what was going on around him, and when Isabella asked what he wanted to eat that evening, he said, “It doesn’t matter. Whatever you can make with what we have.”
“You didn’t bring a great deal for me to work with.”
“Then I will bring take-out,” he said. “I am not doing any more grocery shopping, and nothing is going to be delivered here.”
Isabella said nothing in response. She’d picked up on Madigan’s tone. What they planned to eat that evening was utterly insignificant in the face of what was really happening here.
“I have to go,” he said brusquely. “I have a lot to do.”
Isabella looked at him, and Madigan knew she was going to speak.
“I don’t want to die . . . like my sister,” she said. “And I don’t want them to kill Melissa . . .”
Madigan put on his jacket. “You’re not going to die,” he said, “and they’re not going to kill your daughter.”
“You promise?”
“Jesus, no, I can’t promise something like that . . . But what I can promise is that I will do everything I can to make sure that all of us come out the other side of this. I am also going to do everything I can to take Sandià out of the picture.”
“I am starting to believe that you are a good man, Vincent.”
Madigan shook his head. He smiled sardonically. “You have no idea, Isabella . . . absolutely no idea.”
Madigan left without another word passing between them. It was staying impersonal, and he needed it to remain that way until the end.
The call came four hours later.
Madigan had arrived at the precinct house before nine. He shuffled papers in his office for twenty minutes, drank a cup of coffee, and then he wandered down the hall. He found Charlie Harris at his desk.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Vincent. How goes it?”
“It goes, you know . . . slowly.”
“Always the way.”
“Had something on my radar yesterday . . . a case you looked at a while back. Guy got stabbed in the head with a screwdriver.”
Charlie Harris stopped typing. He frowned, seemed uncertain, and then he said, “Yeah, of course. Some Hispanic guy. Got dug right through the eye.”
“That’s the one.”
“What about it?”
“Wondered if anything ever came of it.”
Charlie shook his head. “Can’t say it did. Some drug gang shit more than likely. These assholes are digging each other all the freakin’ time with whatever comes to hand. Why you looking at it?”
“I’m not,” Madigan said. “Not directly.” He walked forward and took a seat facing Charlie. “I got a little girl who was shot in one of Sandià’s houses up near Paladino. Little girl’s mother has vanished, her aunt got murdered, and the aunt was your guy’s girlfriend. Looks like they might be connected.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit.”
“Helluva thing.”
“It always is,” Madigan replied. “So your man, name of Valderas, gets himself dug in the head with a screwdriver, his girlfriend is this Maribel Arias DB they found all in pieces in a Dumpster and wherever, and now it looks like word is out on the sister, name of Isabella. And the little girl up in Harlem Hospital just happens to be Isabella’s daughter. Is that a bunch of too-coincidental coincidences or what?”
“Sounds like all one thing. So who you after?”
“Seems it all started with whoever put a hole in your guy’s head.”
“Would seem that way.”
“And you never got a lead on this . . . no names, no faces, nothing coming up on it?”
“Not a word. No eyewitnesses, no tip-offs, no CIs coming out the woodwork. No-man’s-land on this one, Vincent, just no-man’s-land.”
“Okay,” Madigan said, and started to get up. “You heard this thing about the robbery on the Sandià house . . . this thing about how there might have been a fourth man on the scene?”
“Sure did.”
“Any ideas?”
“Nothing,” Charlie said. “Pulling a stunt like that. What kind of crazy son of a bitch would do something like that?”
“You figure it might have been t
he same one who did your guy? Stabbed him in the head?”
“Jesus, Vincent, I don’t know what you’re smoking, but it’s doing wonders for your imagination.”
“Yeah, crazy idea,” Madigan said. “Anyway, I’m gonna snoop around on it, and if anything comes from it I’ll give you the heads-up before we take it to Bryant. It’s still your case, the screwdriver thing.”
“Appreciated, Vincent. But don’t bust your balls on it. Hell, he was only some smalltime dealer. Neighborhood’ll do better without him.”
The conversation ended. Madigan walked away. He made some calls, chased files, went out for lunch. When he got back, four hours had elapsed since his meeting with Charlie Harris and that was when his cellphone rang.
“You have to come see him,” the voice said, just the same as always.
It was the second time in as many days—the drive to Sandià’s place, the elevator ride, the goons on either side of the doorway. Madigan wondered what it would feel like never to have to do this again. En route he had taken a moment to pull over and drop the Subway bag with the disassembled .22 inside it into a municipal trash can.
“We have a good relationship, Vincent,” Sandià said, once Madigan was again seated on the other side of his desk. “Would you agree that we have a good relationship?”
“Yes, we do. No question.”
“I thought you would feel that way, Vincent. And good relationships—doesn’t matter whether they are personal, a marriage even, and especially business—these relationships are based on mutual respect, sometimes a little faith, but always respect. Wouldn’t you agree, Vincent?”
Madigan nodded. He was thinking about Charlie Harris. He was thinking about all the years he’d known Charlie, the cases they’d worked together, the drinks they’d shared after successes, the drinks they’d shared when the bad guy got away, and whether or not it was Charlie Harris who was in Sandià’s pocket.
Christ. Jesus Christ Almighty.
“So we have had our differences over the years, Vincent. I know that. But they have never been differences that we didn’t ultimately resolve . . .”
“What do you want me to do?” Madigan asked, knowing full well the answer before he’d asked the question.
