Slow Burn

by Terrence McCauley

  And I’m not just talking about losing money. There are worse things to lose than money. Much worse. I’d learned that when my wife took the girls from me. And I had a feeling my lesson wasn’t over. Not if Chief Carmichael had anything to say about it.

  My gut dropped when we got to the corner of Sixty-Sixth and Fifth Avenue. The street was lined with double parked police cars—both marked and unmarked. The sidewalk on the Fifth Avenue side of the Van Dorn mansion was full of uniforms killing time, sweating on the hot pavement, waiting for orders from the bosses gathered inside.

  A couple of the photographers camped out in front of the house lurched forward and took pictures of the car as we pulled in. I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. Time to take my medicine.

  O'Hara grabbed my arm, his voice low. “I'll be here waiting for you when you come out. No matter how long it takes, and no matter what happens. Whether you walk out that door or get thrown through the window, I'll be here, ready to take you wherever you want to go.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I heard myself ask, “Why?”

  “Because you’re in trouble for trying to do something admirable, which is more than I can say for myself.” He pointed at the mansion. “And it’s more than any of those high-ranking bastards in there can say for themselves, either. They’re just as crooked as the rest of us, Charlie. The difference is, you tried to do something to make up for it. And don’t you dare forget that. No matter what they say or do to you. Don’t you dare forget that.”

  O’Hara put the car in park with the same resolve as an explorer who places his country’s flag in a mountain top. “Besides, Doyle might be gone, but you and me are still Tammany, and Tammany takes care of its own. I’m staying here.”

  O’Hara’s speech was still soaking in when someone jerked open my door for me. It was one of Carmichael’s clean shaven cronies, leaning into the car, grinning down at me. Unfortunately, it was the closest thing I’d seen to a real smile all day.

  “Let’s go, Doherty. Chief’s waiting.”

  AIN’T THAT A KICK IN THE HEAD?

  PLENTY OF familiar faces stood out among the cops on the street in front of the mansion. Cops I’d worked with back when I was in Vice. Cops I’d gotten out of jams with their bosses, or their bookies, or worse. Cops I’d done favors for, once upon a time — favors big and small. Transfers and promotions. Tickets to the Giants for their kids. Choice assignments come Christmastime. Things like that.

  Not one of the bastards looked my way as Carmichael’s goon walked me past them. Not a smile or a nod for me in the whole lousy bunch. I couldn’t blame them, really. Dead men were bad luck. Flashbulbs flared and beat reporters fired questions at me about what was going on. I ignored them while I followed Carmichael’s crony up the mansion steps. Cops kept the reporters at bay, but the flashes and the questions kept popping.

  It felt like a standard perp walk, except I was the perp.

  Carmichael’s boy pushed in the front door of the mansion like he owned the place and walked inside. I guessed we were past the point of ringing the doorbell and waiting politely for Soames to let us in.

  The Chief’s boy slid open the pocket doors to the parlor where I’d spoken to Mr. Van Dorn only an hour or so earlier. A jerk of his thumb told me to go inside. But I waited a moment, seeing that the Chief was briefing a room full of his top commanders.

  In all my time on the force, I’d never put anyone away for a capital bounce. I’d never gone to the death house to see anyone shot, hanged or electrocuted in the name of justice. In Vice, most people usually got themselves killed before I got anywhere near building a case against them, anyway.

  But just at that moment, standing in the back of that parlor, I knew exactly what those poor bastards on death row felt like. Shuffling forward toward an inescapable fate that yawned before you. Nothing but a whole lot of pain and misery for your trouble. But I walked in anyway, and stood just inside the doorway. All alone.

  The room had enough brass to rival the Philharmonic: Chiefs of departments, deputy chiefs, the borough commander, his people and a few others. Every one of them was appropriately serious and grim. Heads bowed, brows furrowed while they clustered around Chief Carmichael at the front of the room. If any man had ever been born to hand down orders to a room full of cops, it was Chief Andrew J. Carmichael.

  Day or night, he always looked like he’d just stepped off a recruitment poster. His uniform was always crisp. His badge and the buttons on his tunic gleamed. The shine off his shoes would blind you if you looked at them at the wrong time of day.

  Carmichael was six-foot-three, broad-shouldered and over two hundred pounds. He had gray wavy hair and clear blue eyes that had seen everything a man could expect to see in over twenty years on the force. And he kept on looking. He had a crooked lantern jaw and a flattened nose, both of which had been broken too many times in the line of duty to bother counting.

  We’d known each other our whole lives and, up until two years before, we’d been closer than brothers. We’d walked through everything life and this city could throw at us, and we’d come out the other side, together. There’d been a time, not too long ago — before Reform — where I would’ve been in that briefing from the beginning, ready to carry out the orders that Carmichael couldn’t issue publicly, but needed to be done quietly.

  Now I was stuck in the back, like some kid summoned to the principal’s office. Carmichael was in the middle of an order when he spotted me standing at the back of the room. He stopped mid-sentence and stared at me.

  All the brass turned to see what the great man was looking at. Chief Carmichael wasn’t a man who stopped in midsentence without a damned good reason. Now that they were looking at me, I saw plenty of familiar faces in here, too. Husbands of wives I’d lied to about working overtime one weekend. Boyfriends of girls I’d paid off to get rid of inconvenient babies. Indiscretions I’d covered up for their sake and for the sake of the department. I saw about a dozen careers I’d saved and problems I’d smoothed over at one time or another. I guess you could say I’d built up a hell of a lot of IOUs over the years.

  I’d always figured they’d come through for me if I ever needed them. But judging by the way they were looking at me, it looked like I was stuck with a fist full of blank paper.

  No one was saying anything, so I decided I would. “Morning, Chief. Somebody said you wanted to see me?”

  Carmichael’s mouth became a thin, colorless line as his chin slowly rose. When he spoke, he spoke to no one and everyone at the same time. “Give us the room, boys.”

  A couple of dozen or so brass filed out past me. I could’ve stepped out of their way easy enough, but I made them walk around me. I wanted at least that much acknowledgement from the bastards.

  I fished out my Luckies and lit one. As the room emptied, I saw Loomis sitting on the couch by the fireplace. He looked paler and more worn down than usual, which was saying something. He looked up at me as though he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. I knew how he felt.

  Given the Van Dorns’ deep pockets and family name, I would’ve expected Mayor Jimmy Walker to be there in person. I was surprised to see Deputy Mayor Horace “Pinky” Flynn standing next to Carmichael instead. Flynn had been Mayor Walker’s right hand almost from the beginning, a Tammany hack through and through. A backslapper, a glad-hander extraordinaire. A fixer who kept the river of dirty money flowing from the streets to where it needed to go: Judges, ward bosses, district attorneys. And police chiefs. Chief Andrew J. Carmichael, to be exact.

  I ought to know. I used to give Pinky his envelopes from Doyle personally.

  Pinky might’ve been one of the most powerful men in the city, but you’d never know it by looking at him. He was one of those dumpy political types who always had a quick smile on hand, as if smiling made the shit he shoveled stink a bit less. He was giving me one of those smiles now.

  Someone slid the pocket doors shut behind me. It sounded like a t
hunderclap.

  Carmichael looked at me for a long time from the front of the empty room before saying anything.

  And I looked right back at him. “What have you got to say for yourself, Detective?” Carmichael said. He looked at my lit cigarette. “And who the hell said you could smoke in here?”

  “I thought a condemned man was entitled to a last cigarette.” I walked further into the room. “Christ, Andy, what’s with the formalities all of a sudden? We’re all family here, aren’t we? Hell, even Loomis is a cousin of sorts.” I saw Flynn’s nervous smile strain wider. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he kept them busy flattening down his suit. I threw him a wink to steady him down. “How you been keeping, Pinky? Haven’t seen you in a while, not since old Andy here found religion. What’s—”

  Carmichael clipped me in the jaw with a quick left hand that I didn’t see coming. I bit off the tail end of my cigarette and swallowed it, while the lit end tumbled off somewhere. My hat landed on the couch just before I did. I almost rolled onto the floor, but I managed to steady myself.

  “You smug little son of a bitch,” Carmichael yelled down at me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? This is a kidnapping case, for Christ’s sake. A federal case — and now you’ve got Van Dorn close to telling them to stay out of it.”

  I was already down on the couch, but Carmichael shoved me again anyway. “Do you know the position you’ve put the department in? The position you’ve put me in?”

  I shook the cobwebs from my eyes, only to find Loomis on the couch opposite me, looking pretty damned scared. I couldn’t blame him. My jaw hurt like hell, but I still managed to say, “Sorry if I was too busy doing my job to worry about your goddamned career, Andy. You’ve always done a good enough job of that yourself, so I figured...”

  Carmichael went for me again, but Flynn scrambled in front of him. “Easy, Chief. Easy. Charlie’s an old friend, remember? An old friend.”

  “Friend, my ass,” Carmichael said. “He’s a goddamned grandstander, that’s all. The fucking chiseler is trying to put himself in good with the Van Dorns and stick it to the department in the bargain.”

  A dull ringing in my ears started as I sat up, but I talked over it. “How the hell am I sticking it to the department? I got a line on where the Van Dorn kid might be, and I ran it down. That’s all.” I wouldn’t tell him about Rachel, the notebook or the matchbooks I’d found. If I was getting bounced off this case, let him find out about them on his own.

  Flynn scurried out of the way while Carmichael crouched down and yelled directly into my ear. “And just why in the hell are you running down leads in a kidnapping case when everyone knows that kidnapping’s a federal beef now, not ours? Let the Bureau of Investigation boys take the shit when this whole thing goes south.”

  Carmichael’s yelling made my head hurt worse. I kept my voice even, mostly to keep from throwing up. “Because there’s no proof that Jack’s dead, and he doesn’t have time to wait around while you and the Feds set up shop.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Carmichael spat as he stood up and stepped back toward his spot by the mantel. “That kid’s probably been dead for a couple of days by now, and you know it. And if he wasn’t dead already, they killed him right after they plugged the sister for the ransom money.”

  The ringing in my ears was beginning to die down, but I was still nauseous. “I don’t think —”

  “No, you don’t think, Charlie,” Carmichael yelled. “You never did. That’s the root of all your fucking problems. All balls, no brains.”

  I dropped my head into my hands and tried to rub some blood back into my skull. My jaw was beginning to tighten up, but I took another run at making my point. “I’ve got reason to believe that Jack Van Dorn is—”

  “Don’t give me that shit. This isn’t about the Van Dorn punk. It’s about revenge. Revenge for all those shitty assignments you’ve pulled the past year or so.”

  I held up two fingers. “Two years, Chief.”

  Carmichael snatched me by the collar and jerked me back. “You thought that was bad? Well, let me tell you something, fucko…”

  I still couldn’t see straight, but I did my best to look Carmichael in the eye while I said what I’d been trying to say. The one fact that Carmichael’s punch in the head had jarred loose in my mind:

  “I know Jack Van Dorn is still alive.”

  “What was that?” Flynn perked up. “What did you just say?”

  Loomis looked more scared now than when Carmichael hit me.

  The genie was already out of the bottle, so I repeated it. “Jack Van Dorn is still alive.” Flynn and Carmichael traded looks. Flynn looked damned near joyful. Carmichael looked more amused than anything else.

  “That so?” The Chief let me go with a shove as he went over and sat on the arm of Loomis’s couch. “And what evidence have you uncovered that has brought you to that conclusion, Detective?”

  “Because they need more ransom money.” Flynn’s joyful look faded fast. “But they already have the fifty thousand in cash that the girl brought them.”

  “Her name was Jessica. And fifty grand isn’t enough now that they’ve got blood on their hands. They know we’ll look for them harder than ever now, so they’ll need more money. And they’ll have to prove Jack’s alive before we pay them, and they can’t prove it if he’s dead.”

  I could’ve sworn that Flynn popped up on his tiptoes as my words sank in. “How do you know that, Charlie? And how do you know it’s more than just one man doing this?”

  For a political hack, Flynn asked some damned good questions. I wasn’t so sure myself, but I started repeating a lot of the bits that had been rattling around in my head all morning. I just hoped they’d lead me somewhere other than walking a beat on the ass end of Staten Island.

  “Because of the way Jessica Van Dorn was killed.”

  “She got her throat slit in a hotel room,” Carmichael said. “That’s not a two-man job.”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “Considering who they killed. And where they killed her.” The more I was talking, the more it began to make sense.

  Carmichael reddened. “You’ve got exactly one minute to quit babbling and start making sense, because I swear to Christ—”

  “Jessica was a nice little rich girl, wandering the streets with a bag of money. Times being what they are, it’s a miracle she wasn’t mugged by a stranger. Whoever called Van Dorn said she’d be watched along the way, but she’d never know when. That kind of planning is easier when you’ve got one person watching Jack, someone else watching the girl, and someone else waiting for her at The Chauncey Arms.”

  “Unless Jack was already dead,” Flynn said. “Then all you’d need is one guy doing everything.”

  I had that beat. “Then why lead her to The Chauncey Arms at all? Why not just lure her into an alley, knife her and run off with the ransom money? It would’ve been a whole lot cleaner. Easier, too. It could’ve been a day or so before we figured out who she really was. Probably longer, which would’ve given them more time to get away.”

  The look on Carmichael’s face told me I hadn’t lost him yet, so I kept going. “But they didn’t do that, did they, Chief? No, they brought her to a hotel room instead.”

  Carmichael didn’t look amused anymore. He was putting it together for himself. “Tell me why.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but it proves they didn’t plan on killing her from the beginning. They probably weren’t planning on blood at all. That means Jack was probably still alive when they called in the ransom demand. And that means something went wrong while she was in that room. Something that got her throat cut.”

  “Maybe there was a struggle,” Carmichael said. “Maybe she refused to give them the money until she saw her brother. Maybe—”

  “She didn’t have a bruise or a scratch on her, Andy. Hell, her fingernails weren’t even damaged. The only wound she had was the gash in her throat. It was very quick. Sudden.”
All the scattered pieces that I knew about what had happened in that room rushed together and began to make sense to me. I was damned close, just not close enough. Or smart enough. “Whatever happened in that room happened fast.”

  Carmichael got up from the arm of the couch and slowly walked back over to the mantel. “I’ll admit you’ve laid out a compelling case, but this isn’t about compelling cases. It’s about jurisdiction, and the Feds have it. We want them to have it. We can’t afford to be holding the bag when pictures of this kid’s corpse turn up on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

  I wasn’t ready to let it go that easy. “This is still a murder investigation, Andy, and murder’s not a federal crime. We can still—”

  Carmichael shook his head. “This city is already on edge as it is. I’ve got Hoovervilles springing up on the banks of both rivers, not to mention right next door in Central Park. I’ve got labor marches in the garment district, and rent strikes up in the Bronx that get more violent every week. I’ve got breadlines that stretch for blocks and soup kitchens that are busting at the seams, not to mention the fucking Commies holding marches all over the city, getting people riled up. We’re stretched thin enough as it is, and the department can’t afford to be blamed if this thing goes south. The Feds will want this case, and I want them to take it.”

  “But I don’t think —”

  Carmichael wasn’t done. “You saw what the press did to the New Jersey State cops when the Lindbergh baby turned up with its skull caved in. What do you think they’ll do to us if the same thing happens here? We can’t afford that kind of thing, especially right now.”

  I’ll admit that I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but I’d never had to think about those things before. “Then the mayor will handle it, like he’s always handled everything else. Jimmy’s had the press eating out of his hands for years, no matter how bad the news. Let the Feds in on this if you have to, but that doesn’t mean—”

  The way Carmichael and Flynn looked at each other told me that something was wrong.