A Dark and Broken Heart

by R.J. Ellory

  “Vincent, seriously, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. You just speak to your guy. See if he’ll take the hundred and fifty grand for the phone from you, okay?”

  “You’ll have to make him a better offer. He was promised a hundred and fifty by the press, remember?”

  “So see what he’ll take. We got two hundred to spend, no more.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Madigan said, knowing full well that in a handful of hours he would come back to Bryant and tell him that after long and tense negotiations Bernie Tomczak wanted exactly a hundred and eighty grand. It was precisely the amount he needed, precisely the amount he owed Sandià, though Al Bryant would never know that detail.

  Bryant’s shoulders seemed to lower a good four or five inches, like someone’d had his spine in a tourniquet and then released it.

  “I don’t know how to thank you for this—” Bryant started.

  “Hell, don’t thank me. Thank the good luck fairy who put two hundred grand in the Evidence Room this morning.”

  “I’ll go handle it,” Bryant said.

  “And remember, Sarge . . . Nothing, absolutely nothing comes back to me, okay?”

  “Enough said, Vincent. You have my word.”

  Madigan watched Bryant go. Bryant thought they were out of it, that he and his precinct were in the clear, that he’d get the phone, tell Walsh to go screw himself, and everyone would walk away unscathed.

  Bryant had no idea. Not a single damned clue.

  Neither did Walsh. Walsh thought he was off the hook with the duplicate phone Madigan had given him. Now he was going to find out that there was a second phone.

  Madigan finished his coffee and left the diner. He drove to Mott Haven to see Bernie. Bernie was intrinsic in this plan. Bernie needed to be kept apprised of every step that was taken.

  Ironic, Madigan thought, that only days earlier he had kicked Bernie six ways to Sunday and back to Christmas for the sake of a debt that was about to be paid. The irony did not escape Madigan, didn’t escape him at all. Had he known what would transpire in those days as he gave Bernie Tomczak yet another smack, well, he wouldn’t have believed it. Even he—Vincent Madigan, he who had seen it all from the top down and the bottom up—would not have believed it.

  Life was a joke sometimes, and not always funny.

  It was two fifteen by the time Madigan reached the motel. He went in through reception and knocked on Bernie’s door.

  “Who’s it?”

  “Me. Madigan.”

  Bernie opened up. The usual barrage of questions did not assault Madigan. Bernie looked sober, a little serious.

  “What’s up?”

  “My guy got shot.”

  Madigan frowned.

  “This morning, Vincent. One of my guys got shot. One of your overenthusiastic rookies took a freakin’ shot at my guy and winged him. He’s got a through-and-through at the side of his gut, and right now I am trying to find a doctor who will fix him up. This . . . Fuck it, Vincent. This was not part of the fucking deal here.”

  “How the hell do you know what happened, Bernie? Tell me that. How the hell do you know what happened this morning?”

  “Because he phoned me, okay? They called me. They told me what happened, and right now he’s in a safe place, but he’s bleeding, man. He’s bleeding bad, and he needs a doctor.”

  “I told you not to make any calls, and I told you not to take any either, Bernie. You went and gave your number to these guys? Jesus, do you not listen to a word I say?”

  “These are my guys, Vincent. My people, okay? They’re people that trusted me to give them a good gig here, and you went and screwed it up!”

  “Hey, cut that shit out right now, Bernie. You know the deal here. This isn’t kindergarten, okay? You take the risks, okay? You take the damned risks, and it comes out the way it comes out. You’re playing in the big league here, my friend, and this is how it goes sometimes, right?”

  Bernie glared at Madigan. “Vincent . . . Jesus, you just don’t get it, do you? It’s my brother, right? My fucking brother. He’s the one that got shot.”

  Madigan didn’t speak for fifteen seconds. He looked at Bernie’s face. He saw what was there. He looked back at the two guys who’d appeared in that house—Anger Management and Zigzag—and he saw the resemblance. The shorter one, the one with the scarred face. Bernie Tomczak’s brother. Fuck. Zigzag was Bernie Tomczak’s brother. It all came full circle. This was the .22 guy, the gun Madigan had taken from Evidence. Bernie had been trying to protect his brother all along, and now he’d wound up shot.

  “Ah, Christ Almighty, Bernie. What did you use your own brother for, eh? What the hell were you thinking? This is not supposed to connect to either of us, man. And you go get your own brother in on this.”

  “Whatever, Vincent. It don’t matter. It’s too late to change that now. I made a mistake, sure. You made a bigger mistake. You got the poor bastard shot through the gut, and if we don’t get him a doctor he’s gonna die. Okay? You understand what I’m saying? He’s going to die.”

  “I got it. I got it. Jesus, let me think, okay? Let me think for a minute.”

  Madigan thought hard. Who could he use? There was an ex-pathologist, retired now, always willing to do some work for a few extra bucks. A gunshot—legally required to be reported immediately—was a tough call. Would he do it? To hell with it. Everyone had a price, and there was still more than a hundred grand under the floorboards in his house. He called from his cellphone. Three rings, four, five, went to voice mail. Madigan left a message. The guy would get back to him, for sure.

  “You don’t screw this up, Vincent, okay? I need you to handle this.”

  “I’ll handle it. I’ll handle it. Don’t worry, okay? You think I want your brother bled out somewhere and his buddy all fucked up about it? No, thank you, very much. So where are they right now?”

  “They’re in a house up on East 123rd. One with a red front door. I don’t remember the number, but it’s the only one with a red front door.”

  “You gotta give me your phone, Bernie. And you gotta give me your goddamned word that you won’t make any calls from the landline and that you won’t go take a walk to some phone booth, okay?”

  Bernie hesitated.

  “Bernie, don’t screw around on this one. This is too big. You got a hundred-and-eighty-grand debt that’s about to be paid, and you have a new life waiting for you. You can take your brother with you, wherever the hell you go. I’ll even give you some extra money, okay? I’ll double up on what I already agreed to pay them. Think about it. You make any more calls and there’s gonna be records. Cellphone records, records from the line here, prints all over a phone booth and the number you called at the house where your brother’s holed up. Give me the phone, Bernie, seriously, and I’ll take care of him.”

  “You better take care of him, Vincent . . . I’m serious, man, really serious. He dies and . . . Hell, Vincent, I don’t even know what I’d do if he didn’t make it. You gotta get it sorted out. Get your guy over there and fix this thing up.”

  “Bernie, I said I’d do it and I will. All right? Now give me your phone.”

  Bernie—resentfully—took the cellphone from his pocket and handed it over.

  “Good,” Madigan said. “Now you have your thing to do. You go get a message to Sandià that you’re paying off your debt to him tomorrow, okay? Not tonight, but tomorrow. Don’t go there, whatever the hell you do. You do not want him asking you where you’re getting the money from. You understand? You just make sure that word gets to him. I’m calling Bryant in the next two or three hours. I’m arranging a meet here for the three of us at seven. We come here together, you show him the cellphone with the Walsh conversation on it, and you tell him what we agreed. That means you’re gonna have to be in and out of Walsh’s house and back here by seven, just as we arranged. Okay?”

  “I got it, Vincent. We went over it a thousand times.”

  “I just need you to make sure you’r
e in this a hundred fucking percent now, Bernie. I get this thing with your brother. I really get it. I’ll get my guy down there and he’ll be fine. I’ll take care of it. You have my word.”

  Bernie held out his hand. “Shake my hand, Vincent. Shake my hand, look me in the eye, and give me your word.”

  “I just did, Bernie. I just gave you my word. When the hell have I ever let you down?”

  “Do what I ask, Vincent, seriously.”

  Madigan looked at Bernie Tomczak. He held out his hand, he looked him in the eye, and when Bernie took his hand, Madigan said, “Bernie, you have my word.”

  “Good,” Bernie replied.

  “Now I’m gone. You do your thing and be back here by seven, and I’ll take care of your brother.”

  Madigan started for the door.

  “His name is Peter.”

  Madigan turned.

  “You didn’t ask his name, Vincent. His name is Peter. I just wanted you to know that.”

  “I said no names, Bernie. I didn’t want to know their names. I would have known which one he was, okay? I would have been able to tell the damned difference between the one that got shot and the one that didn’t.”

  “But I wanted you to know his name, Vincent. His name is Peter, and he’s my younger brother.”

  “I got it, Bernie. I got it. Now concentrate on what you have to do, and let me worry about everything else.”

  Madigan left the room, paused for a moment in the corridor. He called the number again—the ex-pathologist—but still there was no reply. He put a half hour reminder on his phone. He couldn’t forget. In the panic and confusion of everything, he could not forget about Bernie’s brother. Last thing he needed was another casualty of this insane war.

  The ex-pathologist, a man by the name of Don Jackson, called back fifteen minutes later.

  Madigan explained the scenario.

  “So if he’s a CI, or connected to your CI, and he was doing some shit that it was okay to do, why can’t he get himself to the hospital?” Jackson asked.

  Madigan said nothing.

  There was silence between them for a good ten seconds.

  “He wasn’t doing something that was okay to do,” Jackson stated matter-of-factly.

  Again, Madigan didn’t speak.

  “East 123rd, you say? Red front door?”

  “Right.”

  “Call-out charge is five grand. Then another five on top for treatment and house calls.”

  “Deal.”

  “You ain’t gonna haggle with me?”

  “I haven’t got time, Don. I really haven’t. I just need you to fix the guy up.”

  “I’ll be there within the hour. I’ll call you back on this number if I can’t find the place or he’s already dead when I arrive.”

  “Good man,” Madigan said. “Appreciated. We’ll work out a time for me to pay you before the end of the day.”

  “Hey, it’s all on trust,” Jackson said. “It’ll be fine. The guy’ll live. I’ll get my money. And you won’t find yourself on a murder charge.”

  “I didn’t shoot him, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t need to know who shot him, Vincent.”

  “Go do the thing, Don. Call me if there’s a problem.”

  Madigan ended the call.

  Jesus, now he had Don Jackson thinking that he shot Bernie Tomczak’s useless damned brother.

  Okay, so he was ten grand lighter, fifteen if he cut in Jackson’s percentage to get it cleaned. The two hundred from Evidence would now be in Bryant’s possession; a hundred and eighty of that would go to Sandià; the remaining twenty would go . . . where? Hell, it didn’t matter where it went. It was marked money. The other hundred and twenty or so under the floor in Madigan’s house? If Sandià was off the radar for good, then Madigan would give fifty to Bernie and tell him to disappear forever. Bernie would also have to get it cleaned, preferably out of state, and that would cost him fifteen, maybe twenty grand, seeing as how it was federal money. And what was left over? Madigan could put that through a cleaner, get back forty, maybe forty-five. Give ten or fifteen to Isabella and her daughter, something to at least get them started, and he would have thirty left over. Give twenty to the lawyers to keep them quiet, and the rest for Cassie. Maybe she would get a car for her eighteenth, after all. That’s if it worked the way he intended. That’s if it all went smoothly.

  Madigan pulled over before he hit the expressway. He found a bar on 136th. Just one drink. A short drink to quench his thirst and steady his nerves. That was all. It was three thirty, a little after, and he had a couple of hours to kill before he went back to Bryant with the deal.

  Madigan took a Jack on the rocks. A double. He sat back in a corner booth and wondered if he should maybe eat something. He had time. He would have to go back to the house. He would have to see Isabella again. He didn’t want to, not after last night. He still didn’t know what to think about what had happened. He didn’t want to think about it. He could stay with her, maybe. If she would have had him. But there was no way in the world he could ever live with a woman behind that kind of lie. He would have to tell her about the Sandià house. He would have to tell her that he was the fourth man that morning. And that he could not do. Not a prayer. That stayed with him to the grave. So Isabella was out of the picture. She had to be. The kid was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

  Madigan ordered another drink, and just as the girl brought it to his table Don Jackson ran a stop light on Lexington and got his fender clipped by an Audi. He had to pull over. There was no other solution. And before he knew it, the asshole in the Audi, some fat son of a bitch with an attitude, was hauling a cop off the sidewalk into the melee and it was all going to shit.

  Jackson did have time to call Madigan, but the music in the bar was loud and Madigan had his attention elsewhere. Jackson left Madigan a message to say that he would not be able to make it to the house with the red front door on East 123rd Street. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Peter Tomczak was en route to the hereafter already, bleeding out in a shitty back bedroom, while his friend—Anger Management, his given name Glenn Wilson—tried calling Bernie desperately. But Bernie’s cellphone was in Madigan’s car, switched off and buried in the glove compartment.

  Madigan drank his drink. He listened to the game as best he could over the music, and at eight minutes to four Peter Tomczak’s eyes seemed to go yellow, and then they rolled backward into his head.

  The guy died in his friend’s arms, blood all over the place. Looked like a slaughterhouse. Looked a lot like the room where Melissa Arias had been found just a handful of days before.

  58

  MOONLIGHT MOTEL

  The temptation to take something—just one pill, maybe half of one—was more overwhelming than it had ever been.

  Madigan steeled himself, steeled his nerves. This was where it all came together. This was where it could all come apart. If the seams showed, he was dead. Bernie would be dead too. Then they would find Isabella, and Sandià would kill her and her daughter without a second thought. Madigan knew that. He knew it as well as his own name.

  Bernie would be out by six, would do what he had to do, and then reach the meet for seven. The negotiation would begin. Bernie knew what was required. Could he do it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Much of it depended on Bernie’s ability to bullshit Bryant. The only advantage was Bryant’s own fear. Such a fear would make him want to believe that Bernie was telling the truth. Bryant needed to believe him.

  Madigan went back to the car, called Don Jackson. Once again, there was no answer. He returned to the bar, took one more drink, watched the TV up on the wall. People—beautiful people, people no more than a handful of years out of high school—read truths in crime scenes that could never be found. They used equipment that did not exist. They made their jobs look as good as sex. They did not reveal the depth of filth and rot and shit.

  For just a moment Madigan resented the lie they were selling the world
, but then he reminded himself that he did not care.

  He sipped his drink, and it felt like hard work. The good kind of drunk didn’t seem to be there, didn’t even want to meet him halfway.

  He thought about Isabella, how it felt to be around her. Had he possessed the attention to consider it more subjectively, he would have identified how this was so different from Angela, from Catherine, even Ivonne. In each case, when he withdrew they came at him all the more. They invaded the silences and spaces he presented. Isabella did the opposite. When he withdrew, she withdrew also.

  Earlier, when he’d left, her expression had cornered him. He knew she wanted him to be careful.

  That expression said all that needed to be said. He believed she’d begun to trust him, at least enough to give a damn about what happened to him. She’d believed what he had told her. She wanted him to come back safe. Of all the lies that he had told, the lie to her was the worst. It was under his skin, inside him, down deep inside, and he could feel it breathing. It was a bad sensation, a sensation he wasn’t used to, a feeling with which he didn’t wish to become familiar.

  He imagined that this was conscience, that this was guilt.

  Everything seemed unimportant. What he thought, what other people thought, what had occurred in the past, what would occur beyond tomorrow. If this didn’t go right, well, there would be no tomorrow.

  Madigan drained his glass, wanted more, didn’t dare.

  All of this was shit. All of this was meaningless. In the grander scheme of things, what happened to him, to Isabella, to Melissa, to Bernie and Sandià, meant nothing at all. But Madigan, sitting there, his heart driving a fist through his chest, his palms damp with sweat, his scalp itching, a feeling across his back like a thousand insects climbing the length of his spine, simply knew that he did not want to die. Not now. Not because of this. He did not want to wind up in prison. Twenty-five to life, no hope of parole. That was a death sentence. Word would be out within hours that he was a cop. Send him anywhere in the state and there would be people who would recognize him. It would all be over before he reached his first weekend. Worse than that, they’d more than likely blind him, cripple him, let him live without any real life at all. And then he would have to end it himself. Could he do that? Would he have the presence of mind and willpower to end his own life? Would they leave him in a condition where he would still be mentally and physically capable of doing so?