A Dark and Broken Heart (28 page)

But this? This was Sandià himself. This time it wasn’t Sandià giving Madigan a nod on a killer in his midst. It was Madigan getting the word on Sandià for a homicide. So Maribel Arias got diced and sliced because she was in the house when Sandià stuck Valderas with a screwdriver, but why did Valderas get stuck? What had he done? How had he upset Mr. Sandià that fateful Tuesday in December?

That was a question with no answer as of yet, and a question to which Madigan would have appreciated an answer.

Madigan decided to say nothing to Charlie Harris. From all appearances, Charlie had not moved the case at all. Madigan decided to work it as a sideline; he wanted nothing official to say he had taken it on.

And then there was Walsh. Walsh was backed into a corner. Bryant would inform him he was off the homicides. Walsh wouldn’t argue. Madigan would take them on as part of the same case. Madigan picked up the phone, dialed internally and got Walsh after the second ring.

“Walsh, it’s Madigan.”

“Hey. Yes. How’s it going? Is everything okay?”

Madigan could hear the anxiety in the guy’s voice. He was on eggshells.

“Everything’s okay,” Madigan replied. “Now, listen . . . I had a word with Bryant and he’s given me the three storage unit DBs. I’m gonna run the whole thing. I might need you to do a couple of things, but if I do they’ll be off the clock. Know what I mean?”

“I understand. Yes, of course,” Walsh replied. “But I can’t do anything that would jeopardize—”

“That would jeopardize what? Are you serious? Christ, man, you have any kind of idea how deep a hole you’re already in? You want me to help you out of this, then you’re gonna have to play ball, okay?”

There was silence at the end of the line.

“Okay?” Madigan repeated.

“Okay, okay . . . but—”

“But nothing,” Madigan interjected. “I might not need anything from you, but if I do, then I’m gonna need you to handle it. That’s all there is to it.”

He paused for just a second, and then he hung up.

The game was in play, and—as was always the case—if you made the rules, then you shortened the odds.

43
PREACHIN’ THE BLUES

T
here were people Madigan could talk to, but he decided to go home. En route he stopped at a clothing store, bought the things that Isabella had listed. The store assistant asked Madigan what size he needed.

“What size
I
need?” Madigan asked.

The girl smiled. She had a pretty smile.

“No, sir, I mean the size of the lady you are buying these things for.”

“Christ knows . . . Your size maybe, a little smaller in the . . . you know, up there . . .”

“The bust?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

“And do you know what style she likes? What color T-shirts she wants? Her underwear?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he said. “Just get a bunch of stuff that you like and I’ll take that.”

The girl smiled again. “What every girl loves to hear, right?”

Madigan frowned. Was she hitting on him? Jesus, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

“Yes, right,” he said, and he felt his cheeks color up. What the hell was this all of a sudden?

The girl went away. She came back ten minutes later. She had two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a blouse, a couple pairs of shoes, some underwear. “These okay?” she asked.

“Look good to me. How much?”

“Hundred and twenty-five fifty.”

Madigan counted out a hundred and fifty bucks, told the girl to keep the change.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

Madigan bundled the things into two bags and left the store.

He stopped at a supermarket coming out of Morrisania. He
bought coffee, tea, milk, sugar, eggs, bread, ham, salami, mayonnaise, mustard. He bought canned goods, a bunch of vegetables, a few pounds of hamburger, a jar of dill pickles, a six-pack of Schlitz, two bottles of red, two of white, a bottle of rosé, a liter of Jack Daniel’s. He got a kid to help him haul the lot to the car and gave the kid a ten. The kid seemed overjoyed.

Back toward home he wondered when he’d last done grocery shopping. He could not remember. It didn’t matter, save to highlight the fact that everything had been lonely since May of 2008. Better part of two years alone. Better that way. It had to be. He didn’t have to contend with what color underwear, which kind of wine.

Isabella seemed happy to see him, as if she’d imagined he would desert her. He showed her the clothes he’d bought.

“You did good for a guy,” she said. She smiled. It was the first real smile he’d seen since he’d found her. The smile did not last long, however, as if she had caught herself relaxing and knew that to relax her guard was to invite even greater trouble. There was no mistaking the fact that she had been crying, and thus he relayed the message he’d gotten from Bryant.

“She’s doing real well,” Madigan said. “There is no question that she’s gonna be fine . . . And considering what I have worked out, I don’t think it’s going to be too long before you get her back. Right now she’s not able to answer any questions. The doctors don’t want her stressed. But I’ve been put in charge of the whole case, so no one will speak to her before I give the okay. That way, whatever I find out from her you’ll find out right away.”

“And can I see her? Am I going to be able to see her?”

He shook his head. “No, you can’t see her. That’s tough, I know. But say it had been another cop there when you showed up at the hospital, huh? Say it hadn’t been me. Then you’d be having an entirely different conversation. You’d either be in a jail cell for your own protection, or you’d have been delivered up to Sandià.”

“By the cops?”

Madigan looked at her. He did not believe that she could be so naive as to consider such a thing impossible. “You don’t have to try and make me feel better,” he said. “I know that some of those inside the PD are far worse than those on the outside.”

“But not you?” she said. “You are helping me, right?” The tone in her voice was definitely that of a question. She was afraid, alone, suspicious, defensive. There was no way in the world that Isabella
Arias would be won over with one night’s sleep and a bunch of cheap clothes.

“Yes,” Madigan said. He hesitated. “Yes, I am helping you. But I’m also helping myself.”

They were silent for a moment, and then she said, “I’ll make some food. You are staying now?”

“No,” Madigan replied. “I have to go and see someone, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll make food,” she said. “I’ll make dinner, and then we can eat when you get back.”

“Sure, that’d be good.”

Madigan walked to the front door. She followed him, but he turned and told her to hang back. “I don’t want anyone in the street to see you here,” he said.

“You’re thinking of everything,” she replied. She reached out her hand to touch his sleeve, but Madigan read the gesture as more of an effort to convince herself that here was someone she might possibly trust. She was not trying to express any degree of affection for him.

Madigan flinched.

“What?” she said. “You afraid of me?”

He tried to smile.

“Everything about you is lonely,” she said. “Your house, your cupboards, the rooms . . . lonely. Everything you say sounds like something a lonely man would say.” She paused for a moment, looking at him intently.

Madigan found it disconcerting. He just wanted to leave.

“You and I are not so different,” she said. “I do not trust you. You do not trust me. Right now this is the way it is, and this is the way it has to be. I appreciate what you have done so far, Vincent Madigan, but I know that people are never who they appear to be . . .”

“I don’t expect you to trust me, but I do need you to believe what I am telling you,” Madigan replied. “For the moment, all I need you to do is stay here. This thing is going to go one of two ways, and we will either come out of this alive, both of us, or we won’t. It’s that simple. But you do anything other than precisely what I ask of you, then we shorten the odds significantly.”

“I will stay here,” she said. “And I will do what you say.”

“Good enough,” Madigan replied, and with that he opened the door, closed it quietly behind him, and didn’t look back.

Four blocks southwest, heading back toward the Third Avenue Bridge, Madigan pulled over at the side of the road and wondered what the hell was going on.

This was a circus, the whole thing, and he either kept his head together or he could wish goodbye to everything. The girl was merely a tradeoff for Sandià. Someone was going to win and someone was going to lose. Hell, maybe both of them would. Those were the breaks.

Enough already. Get busy living, or get busy dying. Just like the man said in
Shawshank
.

On MLK Jr. Avenue and Second, Madigan pulled up and came to a stop against the curb. He sat for a moment, smoked a cigarette, decided to drop a Percocet, and then decided not to. He got out, flicked the cigarette butt across the sidewalk, and started left toward the corner. A third-floor apartment, the building that overlooked the junction, and even as he approached he saw the curtain flicker.

Vincent Madigan and Freddy Virago went back a thousand years. Once upon a time they had been tight, but life happened, things happened, and there had been a rift. The rift was as healed as it ever would be, but the friendship they’d once possessed was a thing of the distant past. Now their tolerance of each other was born out of a mutual respect.

A good fifteen years older than Madigan, Freddy Virago had run a hundred different names. He had ex-wives and mistresses scattered throughout the Yard and beyond. Twenty years before, it was a running joke that if some girl hadn’t carried one of Freddy’s kids then she wasn’t a real Yard girl. Approaching sixty, Virago had done enough years inside to know he didn’t want to die there, and so he stayed outside of everything. He knew what was going on, but he was never involved. Madigan believed he didn’t even smoke reefer these days. He had a drink or two, as Madigan himself did, but the line had been drawn. Go down that route and you wound up doing something crazy.

Madigan buzzed; the door opened. Virago had seen him coming a hundred yards away.

Madigan took the stairs, and Virago’s door was open by the time he reached the landing on the third floor. A young woman was there waiting for him—eighteen, nineteen perhaps, her hair a
tight mess of jet-black curls, her skin olive and swarthy. She was pretty in that wild, unkempt way of so many Hispanics, a look that had broken Madigan’s heart on too many occasions.

“Mr. Vincent,” she said, and smiled.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

She frowned. “You don’t remember me?”

“Sure, I remember you,” he replied, and even he could hear the uncertainty in his own voice.

Now she would want him to say her name. Madigan racked his brain. But she merely smiled a little wider and said, “Uncle’s inside . . . He’s watching a game.”

Okay, so she was one of the nieces. Good enough. Virago had five sisters, all of them with a billion kids.

“How’s your mom doing?” he asked the girl.

“Moaning, as ever. She wants me to stay on and do more school. I want to get a job. You can understand that, right?”

“Sure, I can.”

“I want to do hairstyling. I want my own shop. Maybe more than one. I could have a chain and call them Caterina’s. That sounds good, no?”

Right, it was Caterina. Madigan still couldn’t remember her from Eve, but at least he had her name.

“That would sound great, sweetheart, but you know, sometimes moms have a point. The better your education, the better your chance of making the business work. You know how to fill out the tax forms, right?”

Caterina frowned.

“See, right there you got a problem. You don’t know how to fill out your tax forms then the IRS’ll be all over you like a bad rash, and they can just snatch your business right out from under you. They’re a bunch of mean bastards, Caterina, and you gotta have some smarts to deal with all that shit.”

“Caterina!” Virago hollered from the back of the apartment.

“Caterina . . . tell that lazy bastard to get his ass in here and shut the damned door!”

Madigan smiled. He stepped on inside the hall and closed the door behind him. He followed Caterina into the kitchen, where Virago was seated at the table, a plate of something in front of him, the small TV on the top of the refrigerator playing some rerun of a baseball game.

“Hey, Madigan, what the hell? You want some mystery meat?”

Caterina playfully smacked the back of her uncle’s head.

Virago laughed. “This girl is the best damned cook in the whole city, let me tell you.” He turned around and grabbed her, hugged her around the waist. “I’m just teasin’ you, honey. You know that.”

“I’m good,” Madigan said. “I got dinner waiting for me when I get back.”

“That’s bullshit,” Virago said. “Last time you had dinner waiting for you is when someone left what they didn’t want in a diner.”

“Seriously, I got some dinner . . .” And then he stopped. If he had dinner, who was making it? That would be the next question. Virago—loyal though he might once have been—was a man with a past. If Sandià got word that Madigan had visited, well, he just might come over and visit Freddy himself. Half an hour and Freddy would give Madigan up, tell Sandià every word that Madigan had uttered.

“Okay,” Madigan said, “but just a little. I don’t have much of an appetite these days.”

“You look a little better than last time I seen you. You know that?” Virago said as Caterina fetched a plate for Madigan. “You staying off the sauce?”

“Yes, sure I am,” Madigan said. “This is the new and improved me.”

Virago smiled. He pushed his plate away and reached for his cigarettes. “You don’t need no one to tell you anything, Vincent. That’s the way it always has been. That’s the way it always will be, right? You’re a smart guy, you know? You know the inside and the outside, and all of it from three fucking miles away—”

“Uncle . . .” Caterina said. She put a plate of chili in front of Madigan, a tortilla on the side. There were some slices of avocado, a quarter of lemon.