A Dark and Broken Heart (18 page)

“You and Larry.”

“Sure, me and Larry, ’cept no one called him Larry. I was Cutter, he was Bone, like in that movie, right?”

“Right.”

“We did a bunch of stuff together. Little things, nothing big. We did a while together in the box, and then when we came out we sort of hung around a while.”

“He was doing a three-to-five. What were you doing?”

“I was doin’ a seven-to-ten, but I busted it in five and a half. We spent the last three years in the same room.”

“He was a good guy?”

“You tellin’ or askin’?”

“Asking.”

“Sure, he was a good guy. Had his moments, like everyone, you know?” Moran nodded toward the stove. “He did a little too much crank, man, and that can get to you. Wears off the varnish, right? Makes everything sharp and awkward. He didn’t sleep good. He was burning himself up a good deal.”

“Was he trying to get out?”

Moran laughed. “Hell, man, who isn’t? Shit, I bet you’re even trying to get out of something. ’S what it’s all about, isn’t it? Life is getting stuff you want, getting rid of stuff you don’t.”

“Yeah, s’pose it is.”

Moran was quiet again. He lit another cigarette, reached over and picked up the spilled coffee cup to use as an ashtray. He smiled. “If I’d known we were having guests, I woulda cleaned up some.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Walsh replied.

“Oh, I won’t. You can be sure of that.”

Walsh smiled. “So what do you need me to fix?” he said, affecting as nonchalant a tone as he could. He needed to sound anything other than desperate. He needed to sound like whatever Moran had to tell him he could find in a dozen other places. In reality, the tension was almost unbearable. Within hours of taking this on he had located someone who could give him something of real use.

Moran cleared his throat. “I got a thing going on. It ain’t a big thing, but it’s number two for me. And if I got number two, then number three ain’t gonna be far away and then I’m a lifer.”

“What is it?”

“A possession beef.”

“What?”

“Some coke, a bit of weed, nothing heavy.”

“How much?”

“Gram of powder, maybe a half ounce of the weed.”

“Not enough for intent, but enough for a term.”

“Hell, I don’t know. It blows hot and cold, man. Seems like one week they want to get you inside as fast as possible, another week they want to keep you on the street.”

“Places get overcrowded,” Walsh said. “Has more to do with numbers than anything else. Numbers and politics determine whether you get a term.”

“Well, I don’t wanna risk it, you know what I mean? I ain’t goin’ up on a beef and just wishin’ on a star, right?”

“Right.”

“So you can sort it out?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe ain’t worth shit.”

“You ain’t told me anything worth shit, Richard.”

“Oh, but I got something, baby. I got something hot and heavy.”

“And if what you got is so hot and heavy why haven’t you angled for a let-up on the possession bust?”

“’Cause I didn’t know the motherfucker had gotten himself shot, did I? Jesus, the thing only went down yesterday.”

“The
thing
?”

“The gig that Bone had goin’ on.”

“You knew he had a gig yesterday?”

“Maybe.”

Walsh paused. It was like teaching a blind guy to play checkers.

“So—”

Moran shook his head. “I’m gonna need assurances.”

Walsh frowned. “Assurances? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I know some shit, and—like I said—it’s good shit, hot and heavy shit, and it’s worth a good deal to whoever has an ear for it.”

“I have an ear for it.”

“So I need an assurance from you, and if you don’t have the stripes to give me an assurance, then I need someone up the ladder to give the go-ahead.”

“Who’s the arresting officer?”

“Some asshole called Levin.”

“You know which precinct?”

“One I went to was the 158th.”

Walsh didn’t hesitate. “I can straighten out things at the 158th.”

Moran leaned forward. He looked directly at Walsh, and there it was. There was the psycho, the killer, the tin man, the crank cooker, the unpredictable whacko who’d stab someone in the eye with a pencil for a wrap of coke.

Walsh didn’t flinch.

“What does that mean?”

“Means I have a couple of friends at the 158th. I make a call, your paperwork goes walkabout, and lo and behold we don’t hear a thing about it for six months. And then the ADA and whoever the hell else doesn’t give a crap about it because we’re not looking for possessions anymore—we’re looking for suppliers—and even if we were still looking for possessions it wouldn’t matter because there’s no paperwork on you anyway.”

“You’re tellin’ me straight?”

Walsh leaned forward. He met Moran’s unflinching gaze. “Straight as a highway.”

“How do I know to trust you?”

“You don’t.”

“We’re doin’ this on a handshake.”

Walsh shook his head. “We’re not doing anything, Richard. I don’t know who you are. You don’t know who I am. This conversation never took place. All that happens is you tell me what you have. I make a call. We both walk away happy—depending, of course, on whether or not what you got to tell me is worth shit.” Walsh heard himself talking, and all of a sudden he was ten years younger, smart and fast and on the ball. It felt good. He was lying backward and sideways at the same time, but it felt good because he was doing it for the right reasons. This was how the game worked, and this was a game he could play.

“Oh, it’s worth shit all right.”

“How do I know we’re even talking about the same gig?”

“Fulton, Bobby Landry, Chuck Williams, right?”

Walsh—once again—felt that narrow twist of electricity along the length of his spine. He said nothing.

“So we’re talking about the same gig, right?”

Walsh nodded.

“I tell you what I know, you make the possession beef go away. This is the deal?”

“That’s the deal.”

“Give me your word.”

“I give you my word.”

Moran leaned back. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m even trusting you—”

“Because you aren’t dumb, and neither am I,” Walsh said. “You don’t think I know what you’re capable of? I turn this over and it goes bad for you, what you gonna do? You’re gonna come after me, right? You’re going to get loaded up on some of that homemade shit and come find me. That stuff inside of you, hell, you won’t even think twice about putting me down.”

Moran smiled. He nodded slowly. “I am the Cutter.”

“So talk.”

“Was a bullshit thing from the get-go,” he said. “I don’t know much, but what I do know counts for a good deal. Some guy set it up. He was the leader of this crew. He was recruiting. He was the one who got Larry into it, and then Larry comes back and says there’s two others as well. Four in all. The head honcho, then Larry, this guy Williams, lastly this other one, Landry. Takes a while to get a handle on the main guy, but Larry got something. Didn’t tell me his name, but he told me something else.”

“And this was the robbery of the house?”

“House? I don’t know, man. I don’t know what they were robbing, but I know
what
they were robbing, if you get my drift.”

Walsh raised his eyebrows.

“Bank money.”

“You what?”

“They were taking bank money off of someone. Some other crew turned over a bank, the money was traveling, and this main guy—whoever he was—had a gig going on to lift this money.” Moran laughed coarsely. “It was like something out of some goddamned Hollywood movie. Some crew turns over a bank, and before they can get it into their system to clean it up, some other crew comes along and takes it right off of them.”

“You know which bank?”

Moran shook his head. “Not a clue. But I’ll tell you this . . . The main guy, the one that recruited Bone, he didn’t know it was bank money. He thought it was drug money.”

“So how did Larry find this out?”

“Larry knows people. He knows enough people. He can get info on anything.”

Walsh was already working this through. The money was traceable. That money was going to start showing up somewhere pretty soon.

“You say that they robbed a house?” Moran asked.

“Yeah, someplace up in Harlem.”

“There you go, then. It all makes sense. This main guy brings Larry into the crew. Larry does his own homework, finds out that the cash they’re going to lift is bank money, all of it typed and traceable and serial numbers in some system somewhere. But the main guy doesn’t have a clue. Larry had his own guy ready to take his percentage and clean it up for him after the fact. He was going to get maybe seventy, seventy-five on the dollar and get the hell out of here. He didn’t want to be around when those other schmucks started spending their bank money.”

“But if he knew it was marked money, why did he get involved? Soon as the others started spending that money they’d bring them in. One of them was sure to give up Larry on a plea bargain with the DA’s Office.”

“Mexico,” Moran said. “Hell, man, there wasn’t nothing for him here. He reckoned he’d get the money cleaned within twenty-four hours, be in Mexico in forty-eight, and that would be the end of that.”

“But surely if he was going to Mexico he wouldn’t need to get the money cleaned?”

“I don’t know. Jesus, man, I’m just tellin’ you what he told me. I don’t know what was going’ on with him—”

“Okay,” Walsh said. “But still one hell of a risk.”

“You gotta speculate to accumulate. That’s what he said. Higher the risk, the greater the danger, but the bigger the return.”

“So that’s all you’ve got for me?”

Moran shook his head. “I’ve got something else. This is the shit man, the real shit . . . And hell, if he wasn’t dead I wouldn’t tell you, but he’s dead ’cause someone shot him. And if what he told me is true, then it ain’t only Larry Fulton that had a problem with this guy. I’d say that you have one too.”

Walsh shook his head. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“That’s ’cause I ain’t told you yet.”

“So tell me.”

“We got a deal, right? I tell you this, you make the call, I’m in the free and clear on that possession beef.”

“That’s the deal.”

“Hold on to your freakin’ hat, man—”

“Just tell me . . . Tell me, for Christ’s sake . . .”

“The main guy, the one who brought Larry and the other two in . . . He was a cop, man. He was a fucking cop.”

29
LOVE AND DESPERATION

M
aribel Arias’s body had been found in the Yard. That made her the 167th’s problem. Her head had been discovered in a Dumpster behind an empty store near the 125th Street subway station. The rest of her was in garbage bags, the heavy-duty ones used by builders for masonry and pipe work—her legs in one, her arms in another, her torso sectioned in two more. Those bags had been found by a homeless guy rooting around behind the North General Hospital. Used needles, that’s what he was after. Said he sold them on to junkies who used them once again. What remained of Maribel Arias was still on ice with the ME. Eighteen days had elapsed since the discovery, but the case—assigned initially to Charlie Harris, then transferred to a relative newcomer to Homicide, John Faber—had stalled within seventy-two hours and moved nowhere since.

Faber had come up from Vice at the 27th, had a clean track, a solid record, but he was one of the methodical, pragmatic types. Faber did not have intuitive strikes, or so he told Madigan.

“It’s all legwork,” he said. “It’s a numbers game, right? Talk to enough people and you’re gonna find someone who knows something.”

Madigan didn’t disagree, didn’t argue. All he needed was a look at the files. Faber was all too eager to cooperate. Give him another year in Homicide and he’d be as suspicious and awkward as the rest of them.

Madigan took the files to his own office. He read through the initial scene of crime reports, the ME’s findings—decapitation, clean severance, the body parts separated with a narrow-toothed mechanical saw, the lack of tearing on the bone indicative of a high-quality blade, possibly carbon steel, and the extensive notes that Faber had himself made as he tried to talk to enough people
to find someone who knew something
. As yet Faber had not located that mysterious and singular individual who could shed light on what
befell Maribel Arias. As was always the case, irrespective of the nature of death or the victim, the more time that elapsed the less likely any new information would be forthcoming. More often than not it was a crapshoot. Chance eyewitnesses, unknown to perp, unknown to police until the police knocked on enough doors and found them. Faber was right, at least to a degree, but the thing he was missing was the certainty that there was
always
someone who knew something, and often it was nothing but the intuitive
shift
that led you in their direction. The
shift
was a change of perspective, an alteration of viewpoint. It wasn’t science, rocket or otherwise. It wasn’t even a sixth sense, per se. It was an appreciation for tone of voice, body language, eye movement, for all the other myriad details that passed by you until you started to read them for what they were.

It was as he read the file that Madigan remembered something. An event, a circumstance, the thing that had prompted his enrollment in the New York Police Academy back in July of ’89. A woman was raped. She was an acquaintance of Angela’s, his first wife. He had only just met Angela, and it would be another two years before they were married. They’d had a date booked, but Angela had called him to say that she didn’t want to go.

Why
, he’d asked.

Because of this thing that happened to a girl down the street
.

What happened?

She got attacked by some guy. He raped her
.

Did he kill her?

No, Vincent, he didn’t kill her. But you wonder if something like that happened to you whether you’d be better off dead. I mean, how the hell do you go on living after something like that happens to you?

Anyway, she hadn’t wanted to leave the house where she lived with her folks. Vincent drove over and fetched her. They went on the date, and after an hour or so she stopped talking about this thing and they’d had a good time.