Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  “None. And neither Keesh nor the deceased had permits.”

  “You say Wilson was bagging money for Reverend Hal but he wasn’t known for packing?”

  “In this part of town, you couldn’t have a safer job than working for Hal. He’s got an army of ex-cons in his stable, doing all his dirty work, keeping the skeptics in line. Mess with his moneyman and you’re not likely to make it out of church.”

  “So Keesh has a history of partnering in at least one armed robbery. She’s a girl who can find her way to an illegal gun,” I said, walking around to the far side of the bed and sliding my hand in again. “And Wilson would have been stupid not to have one.”

  “You’re ignoring what I just said about the scuttlebutt on the street. No need.”

  “I put it in the category of ‘nice to know,’ Sarge. Maybe he didn’t carry,” I said, pulling open the drawer of his nightstand with a gloved finger, “but my bet is when he was holed up in this dump, he had heat at the ready. Just a matter of finding it.”

  “We didn’t do a search.”

  “Glad of that,” I said. “We’ll take care of it. Just thinking Keesh would have known where he kept it. Another arrow in her quiver to claim he pulled his own gun on her while he had a load on from the Rémy and she had no choice but to protect herself.”

  “You work for the defense team these days?” the sergeant asked.

  “Gotta think like the best lawyer money can buy. Best lawyer the Reverend Hal’s missing money can buy, ’cause that’s who Keesh will have.”

  My father had taught me most of what I know about investigating a case. He knew—and I had learned firsthand from watching Coop in action—that the point wasn’t just to make an arrest. It was to arrest the right guy and to make sure you got the evidence properly so it held up in the courtroom, no matter who the mouthpiece was for the accused.

  “How old was Wilson?” I asked.

  “Sixty-six.”

  “So maybe she was cheating on him,” I said. “A little more than half his age. Or he thought so and they fought over her possible infidelity.”

  “I’m telling you he was sound asleep. What does it matter if they argued before that?”

  “May not matter at all if the ME is sure Wilson died right where you found him.”

  “You’re just playing ‘worst-case-scenario homicide dick,’ right, Chapman?”

  I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There were blood pressure pills and Tums—nothing stronger.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” the sergeant asked, standing in the doorway. “Gets to be a senior citizen with some dough to spend, enough to hook up with a broad in her thirties, and he don’t even need Viagra. Wilson’s the man.”

  “So much for the idea that you didn’t search the place.”

  “Well, the medicine cabinet,” he stammered. “Just wanted to see if he was on heart pills or had any complications like diabetes. The doc will want to know.”

  “There’s not a health condition known to medical science, Sarge, that complicates a hollow-point bullet through the cerebral cortex. Don’t juice me.”

  “Hey, I didn’t disturb anything. It was a preliminary—”

  “You must have thought there would be a few bills stuck to the denture cream,” I said, brushing past the uniformed sergeant to head to the kitchen. “How about in the cookie jar? You stick your nose into that, too?”

  “I opened the fridge. Only thing in it was a meal Wilson never got to eat that his daughter cooked for him. My mother had this habit, Chapman, of hiding her extra dough in the freezer when she went upstate on vacation. Figured burglars would never look there.”

  “Wouldn’t have worked at my house. The freezer was the most popular spot. Ice cubes never lived to be two days old, once Brian got home from the squad,” I said, pulling open drawers and looking on shelves between cans of soup and packages of ramen noodles.

  “Brian was aces, Chapman. Nobody better.”

  I played cool to the comment, but truth to tell was that I couldn’t hear it enough. My father had been hero to more victims than I could count, but he was even larger than legend to me.

  I crouched in front of the sink. “Did you check the roach motels?”

  “Are you crazy? This building is like a cockroach sanctuary. Like a homeless shelter for the little suckers. Wilson has traps under the sink and behind the toilet and in every crevice in the kitchen. I feel like I’m crawling with them already.”

  I reached under the sink—the dark, damp environment that was so welcoming to these creatures—and pulled out one of the large boxes of Black Flag that was clustered in there.

  “Your gloves are gonna need gloves if you touch that,” the sergeant said.

  I opened the first box. “No vacancy at this motel.”

  “How many days’ catch you figure that is?” the sergeant asked, leaning over my shoulder. “Not such a good housekeeper, that Mr. Wilson. Guess the roaches are lured right in by the smell of those hormones.”

  “Pheromones,” I said, reaching for the second box, a few inches behind the first one. “Not hormones, Sarge. They’re pheromones.”

  “Must be another fifty in there. You got a thing for them, Chapman?”

  “Nope. I’ve just got a hunch.”

  The first three cardboard boxes of stiff roaches would be off-putting to most people. The fourth and fifth cartons were far more attractive.

  Someone had removed the chemical compound that invited the hardy bugs inside to die, and lined the boxes with three layers of aluminum foil. Wrapped inside the foil were hundred-dollar bills, dozens and dozens of them. That seemed to be how Wilson had protected his money from all kinds of unwelcome visitors.

  TEN

  I left the boxes on the kitchen floor in front of the sink when I heard Lee Petrie’s voice. He’d been working the Crime Scene Unit longer than I’d been on the job.

  “Open up a trash bag before you even try to kiss me,” I said, stepping out into the hallway to remove my vinyl gloves and replace them with a fresh pair, holding the dirty ones out in front of me till Lee’s partner got ready to receive the garbage.

  “That bad?”

  “That good, actually. The deceased is a longtime local. Got recruited a few years ago to do some of Hal Shipley’s cash pickups—from the grateful worshippers and the ne’er-do-wells who think Hal’s influence can help sway bribable politicians.”

  “I heard this one was easy. Gunshot wound to the back of the head. Prime suspect already in the wind, but with enough connections to locals and to law enforcement that you’re likely to find her before too long.”

  “Slam dunk, like the sergeant says. Come right inside and pay your props to Wynan Wilson,” I said, stepping back so that Lee and his partner could enter with their camera equipment. I asked the sergeant to wait for us outside the front door.

  “Where are the Baskervilles?” Lee asked. “I can sure as hell hear the hound.”

  “That’s the vic’s daughter, Angela Wilson. She’s next door till I get there. Found the body and didn’t get along with the girlfriend at all. She pointed the finger at Takeesha from the minute she walked in.”

  “What do we have?” Lee said as he crossed the threshold.

  “I guess you’d call this Wilson’s living room. I haven’t poked at anything in here yet,” I said, looking around at the sofa, love seat, table lamp, and large-screen television.

  Lee walked behind me into the bedroom. I stood at the foot of the bed while he approached the body for a closer look.

  “Damn, this one really is the big sleep, isn’t it?” He was taking in the blood that had blown out the front of Wilson’s forehead along with gray matter and skin particles that had plastered themselves on the wall. “Any sign of a bullet?”

  “Didn’t look. I’m guessing from the size of the exit wound that it blasted through and lodged into the wall, behind that flap of scalp that’s stuck to it. Left the digging to you guys.”

&nbs
p; Lee leaned in to study the deceased’s head. “I’ll start with some photos. Where’s the doc?”

  “A few minutes behind you.”

  “I’d really like to roll this dude over. Hope the ME moves her ass.”

  “When you’re doing the pictures, would you get me some close-ups of those scrapes on the torso?”

  “You got it,” Lee said, studying the mottled wall above the body. “She sure took away his pain.”

  “Pain? What pain did he have before his head exploded?”

  “‘Livin’ la Vida Loca.’ The crazy lover who takes away your pain, like a bullet to the brain. You know, Mike. Ricky Martin.”

  “I get the crazy-lover bit. Seems to be the case here.”

  “Ask Alex. She does a killer imitation of Ricky’s dance moves. She loves that song.”

  “She does?”

  Amazing the things you learn about someone you think you know so well, when you hear about her from the perspective of others.

  “Yeah. She rocks it. You must have been working the night of Nan’s birthday party. A few too many Dewar’s and Alex was putting on a show with Ryan Blackmer. The girl has moves,” Lee said. “What other rooms we got?”

  “Bathroom. Seems the sergeant and his rookies were eager to get in the game. He tells me nothing was touched, but I’m not betting on it. And a tiny kitchen. That’s where I struck oil.”

  I waited while Lee checked out the bathroom and then crossed back to the kitchen. I couldn’t dance to save my life, yet I knew Coop liked it almost as much as she enjoyed cross-examining every lying scumbag she’d ever faced.

  “Roach traps? You moved them to get to the oil?”

  “Took them out from under the sink. You can still see the footprints of each of them from the liquid that leaked onto the cardboard and left a stain.”

  We were both on our knees, my flashlight beaming into the dark hole. “I took these five boxes out and left the rest in place. The first three? Enough cucarachas to line up head to toe, string them to Jupiter and back.”

  “No kidding? I’ve got to text Alex a picture of the roach mortuary.”

  “She’s sound asleep, Lee.”

  “Tomorrow, then. That girl’s lived a charmed life. I think she saw her first cockroach when she showed up at the scene of a homicide we had together in the projects ten years ago. Like they didn’t migrate to the fancy part of Westchester where she grew up. Lucky thing.”

  “Yeah.” Lee was right about Coop’s charmed childhood. I had wasted way too many hours wondering how her background and mine could possibly find common social ground.

  “How about the next two boxes, Mike?”

  “Hundred-dollar bills, my man. Lots of them. Maybe more once we toss the place.”

  “Bingo! I thought the broad killed him for his money.”

  “Maybe so. But she didn’t get all of it—that’s for sure.”

  “We’ll start shutterbugging. Why don’t you go to the wailing wall and calm Wilson’s daughter down?”

  “Have a heart, Lee. It’s her pops lying here with a hole in his head.”

  “You want me to snap the green before you go next door?”

  “Keep it where it is for the moment. I want to see what the daughter knows. I want to see if she claims the missing loot was her father’s or the property of the not-so-right reverend. Give me thirty minutes.”

  Lee and his partner were setting up their equipment as I walked out the door of Wynan Wilson’s small crib. His daughter, Angela, was in the adjacent apartment. I didn’t need a floor plan. I just followed the sound of the sobs.

  The door was unlocked. I knocked lightly and twisted the knob. She and the neighbor, a slight elderly woman in a blue chenille robe, were sitting on the sofa. There was a cup of tea on the table in front of Angela, but it was still full.

  “Hello, ladies. I’m Mike Chapman,” I said, extending my hand with the gold and blue shield of the NYPD detective division to show my proper ID.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” the older woman said.

  “Thanks. And thanks for taking care of Ms. Wilson,” I said, before turning to the dead man’s daughter. “I’m so sorry for your loss. And for the fact that you had to see your father this way.”

  Angela Wilson nodded, blowing her nose at the same time as she tried to get her emotions under control.

  I had a habit of running my fingers through my hair, sort of subconsciously, so that I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. Coop thought it was a nervous reaction, that it made witnesses think I was working my first homicide or something. I didn’t know how to stop doing it, since most of the time I didn’t know that I was. But now Angela Wilson was watching the top of my head instead of making eye contact.

  “Tea, Detective?” the neighbor asked. “Or something stronger?”

  “No, ma’am. Nothing, thank you.”

  “Then I’ll excuse myself, Detective. It’s Angela you want to see.”

  The women hugged each other and the older one left the room. I pulled up a small armchair across the table from Angela and started to talk. I asked her how she was feeling now, and whether she’d taken any pills or had anything to drink. Neither, she told me.

  Her eyes were red and the skin beneath them was puffy and tear streaked. I riffed for a while about how difficult her work must be, the fact that the sergeant had told me she was an only child, and my big lie to her that someday the image that had been created tonight—the sight of her father’s head blown to bits in his own bed, the crimson fluid spattered around him—would fade to a distant memory. That would stay with her as long as she lived.

  “May I ask you some questions, Angela?”

  “Certainly, Detective. I’ll do my best to answer.” She was wringing a handkerchief with both hands.

  “Mike. Please call me Mike,” I said, with a glance at my watch. It was after midnight. “Did you work yesterday?”

  “I did. Yes, I did.”

  Her shift was twelve hours, from eight A.M. to eight P.M., caring for a woman in her late nineties—who was in good health, she said, though too frail to manage at home by herself.

  “Had you planned to visit your father after work?”

  “No. I hadn’t expected to do it. I was going to meet a friend of mine for a late supper, around ten o’clock, at a restaurant just two blocks from here.”

  “The friend, may I ask his name?”

  “A woman. We went to high school together. We have dinner once a month. She’s a nurse at Columbia Presbyterian.”

  “Sorry to interrupt you,” I said, after she spelled the friend’s name for me.

  “It’s okay,” Angela said, sniffling into her handkerchief. “I called my father, probably around four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “On his landline, or does he have a cell?”

  “No landline anymore. He’s got a cell phone.”

  “What’s the number?” I hadn’t seen one anywhere in the apartment. I texted Lee to look for it immediately and when Angela gave me the number I texted the lieutenant to have TARU—the Technical Assistance Response Unit—start tracking it.

  “Anyway, I hadn’t seen him in almost a week. I called to ask if he needed anything, but he didn’t answer.”

  “What about Keesh? Wouldn’t she get what he needed?”

  “Keesh doesn’t live here. Least not most of the time. And the reason it was so good for me to come by is that my father said that she was out of town for the week.”

  “Out of town?” Not the three words I wanted to hear about my suspect.

  “Don’t get that worried look on your face, Mike,” Angela said. She was focused again on the top of my head. I must have had my hand in my hair. “She never goes far.”

  “Where to?”

  “I didn’t want to burst my father’s bubble. Keesh would just move in with somebody else who fancied her, brief as that might be. Somebody with a fatter wallet than my daddy.”

  “Didn’t he know that?” I asked. “Wasn�
��t there a chance that he’d run into her on the street?”

  “Daddy? I’ve got to back you up so you understand him. He only went two places when he left home—the community center and the liquor store. If Keesh stayed clear of both of those, she might as well be on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, ’cause Daddy wouldn’t see her.”

  “But—?”

  “I know. You’re going to ask me about food. Doesn’t he—didn’t he—have to eat?” Angela said without my prompting. “Yeah. Cans of soup, and mac and cheese for the microwave. Wash it all down with Rémy and my father had everything he needed. With Keesh? That’s all he got. Which is why I liked to check up on him. I’d go home when I got off work and pick up some homemade food to bring him.”

  “And you did?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I made meat loaf the night before—two of them—and some black-eyed peas. Called Daddy again around nine o’clock to say I was on my way. I was gonna heat it up for him, sit and talk for a while—” Angela said, choking up and covering her mouth with the handkerchief.

  I waited while she composed herself.

  “I called mostly to make sure that Keesh hadn’t come home a couple of days earlier than Daddy expected. Hadn’t come back to him, dragging her sorry tail between her legs.”

  “Did he—?”

  “No. No, he still didn’t answer. Went right to voice mail.”

  “Did that worry you?”

  “Not really. My father’s healthy as a horse. Excuse me. My father was perfectly healthy. When he didn’t answer it usually meant the TV was on and he couldn’t hear the phone ring. I put the food in a shopping bag and started over here.”

  “But Keesh,” I said. “What if she had showed up?”

  “Daddy would have called me. Right as rain. Two of us couldn’t be in the same room,” Angela said, dabbing at her puffy eyelids.

  “What’s your beef with Keesh, Angela?”

  She lowered both hands to her lap and looked at me like I was crazy. “You kidding me or what?”

  “I just walked into this story tonight. Blank slate. Help me here.”

  Angela’s expression turned to ice. “You need a guide dog for this, Detective? You always so slow on the pickup?”