A Dark and Broken Heart (33 page)

“This is the phone?” he said eventually.

“No, Walsh, it’s my mother’s cellphone. Jesus Christ, of course it’s the phone.”

Walsh looked set to cry.

“So we’re done, okay?” Madigan said. “Now will you go the hell home and get some sleep?”

Walsh got up. “Christ Almighty, I don’t know what to say, Vincent.”

“Well, like I just told Bernie, why don’t you keep your mouth shut for a while and stay out of trouble?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

“Good, now get the hell out of here. I have things to do.”

Walsh left. Madigan could imagine him exiting the precinct, sitting in his car, playing that conversation over and over and then deleting it, all the while asking himself how much of an idiot he’d been. If such an experience had taught Walsh anything, it would have to be that there was a line. Step over it and you better know what you were doing, and if you didn’t . . . well, you’d end up like Bernie Tomczak. Hiding in some two-bit piece-of-shit motel in Mott Haven and scared to go outside.

And maybe, Madigan thought as he left his office once more, that would be his own fate too.

There had been other plays. The game had moved on. Now it was time to bring it all to a close.

48
FIRE SPIRIT

C
harlie Harris was at his desk. He seemed agitated before Madigan even started speaking, and when Madigan opened with, “Charlie . . . another question about this Valderas killing, the one with the screwdriver,” Charlie looked up at him with this vexed expression on his face. It was then that Madigan knew he was aggravating an open wound. Charlie Harris had something on this case, and he didn’t want Madigan pulling threads out of it.

“What?” Harris replied, in his voice an edge of suspicion.

“Just something that’s been bothering me.”

“Jesus, Vincent, I’m really busy here. I got a reassignment from some dickhead at the 158th because a CI we once used— Ah Christ, you don’t even wanna know.” He shook his head and leaned back in the chair. “So what is the problem now?”

Madigan took the other chair, hesitated for just a moment, and then said, “The witnesses?”

“Witnesses? What the hell are you talking about? I told you I got nothing, jack squat, nada . . . absolutely nothing on this one.”

“Inside the house.”

Harris seemed confused. “What about it?”

Madigan then took his turn to frown. “What about what?”

“Jesus, we gonna do this square dance all day? You ask me about the witness in the house, and then you look surprised because I’m asking you what you want to know about the witness in the house. You even mentioned this girl, the one who got sliced and diced. It’s all in the file.”

Madigan shook his head. “There’s nothing in the file about any witness in the house, Charlie.”

“Sure there is. I wrote the damned thing up myself. Go take another look.”

“I’ve gone through every page. There’s no report about a possible witness in the house.”

“What?”

“Seriously, Charlie, there’s nothing there.”

“Well, sure as shit there was someone in the house, and sure as shit I wrote it up. If some doofus in admin has screwed it up and lost a report, then that’s their problem.”

“What was in the report?”

“Look, Vincent, it’s real simple. We get there. There’s a DB on the deck with a freakin’ screwdriver sticking out of his face like an aerial. Maybe he’s trying to catch the WKLM evening show, I don’t know. We clear the house, we make sure no one’s hiding anyplace with a socket set and a monkey wrench, right? Then I’m in the bathroom, and all of a sudden I’m standing in a pool of piss, right? Someone’s peed on the bathroom rug. Then Crime Scene shows up, late as ever, and they’re looking at the pooling around the DB’s head, and they come back and tell me that there’s the edge of a woman’s shoe print in the blood, okay? So two plus two makes four. This footprint comes after the blood, not before. So we’re straight now. There’s someone in the house, some chick, and she’s hiding in the bathroom. She’s terrified, she knows what’s happening. She waits for the perp to leave, she comes out, she’s checking out aerial-head, and even as she’s standing there the blood pool reaches the edge of her shoes or whatever. Then she takes off—”

Madigan thought of Maribel Arias—decapitated, her torso and body parts divided, bagged, dumped unceremoniously in various locations. A week ago it had seemed insignificant. Now it seemed like a nightmare from the worst of all imaginations.

Madigan wanted to ask Charlie Harris how they had become so cynical. At what point had these people ceased to be people? He caught himself even as he voiced the question in his own mind. Something was happening to him. A week ago he would no more have thought such a question than confess to the Sandià house robbery and the three DBs in the storage unit.

He was losing it. He wasn’t drinking as much. He wasn’t swallowing pills like they were M&M’s. Yes, he was definitely losing it.

“Okay,” Madigan said, and started to get up.

“Anyway, you have any other questions about this bullshit you ask someone else, okay? I got too much on my desk to be dealing with history right now.”

“I think I’m done, Charlie . . . I was just puzzled about the witness in the house thing.”

“Well, we’re straight on that now. All done and dusted, right?”

“Right.”

Madigan looked back as he left the office. Charlie wasn’t watching him, and Charlie had really seemed pretty much the way he always was. And the report from the file? The report that was no longer there? Maybe Charlie wasn’t the lead to Sandià. Ron Callow? Hell, it could have been anyone in the precinct. Everyone had access to files, or could get access to them without difficulty. All Sandià had to do was give a nod to whoever he had in the system, get them to keep tabs on an ongoing investigation, keep him informed of what was happening with it, and “lose” the odd document or two to slow down the proceedings. Madigan knew it could happen that way. Why? Because he’d done the very same things himself.

No, intuition told him that this went further than Charlie Harris and a lost piece of paperwork, but he couldn’t think who . . .

Back in his own office he put Bernie Tomczak’s phone in an evidence bag and locked it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he changed his mind, took it out, and hid it way back behind the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet. He counted the few remaining hundreds of Sandià’s ten grand, and he wondered what his next step should be. No one else was looking into the Sandià robbery and the three homicides. No one else was looking into the Melissa Arias shooting. The Maribel murder and the killing of David Valderas were on the back burner. With Walsh taken care of, no one was even looking at him. Charlie Harris wasn’t filing any more reports, and neither would Madigan. That way, whoever was feeding information to Sandià would run dry very quickly. That would make Sandià dependent upon Madigan. That would also prompt someone—perhaps—to come asking about progress on the cases. Madigan remembered a scene from
The Godfather
. The garden, Michael talking with his father, and Vito told him to look out for whoever came to propose the reconciliation meeting. It was the same here. Whoever asked for progress—nonchalantly, as an aside, a
Hey, Vincent, anything ever happen on that Sandià bust . . . You know, the one where those three guys got whacked in the storage unit or whatever?
—well, that was the man. That’s what he had to watch for.

Resolved in his own mind that things were as under control as they could be, Madigan left the office. He took the stairs, headed out of the building, and drove home. It was nearly three, he’d
eaten no lunch, had been on-shift since eight that morning. Officially he had a couple of hours left, but no one would miss him. He wanted out for a while. Just a little while. He wanted to be elsewhere—away from this, away from the madness and the lies and the killing.

Something had shifted. Was it the fact that he had Isabella Arias in his house? Was it the fact that he wasn’t drugged out of his head half the time? He hadn’t even thought about it, but he was taking fewer and fewer pills. He reached his car, got in, and searched through the glove box for the hip flask. It was full. He drank half of it, maybe a little more, and then he leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. The warmth of the spirit filled his throat, his chest, and he could feel the knot of muscle easing at the base of his neck and across his shoulders. There was that ever-present anxiety in the base of his gut. Always there, always reliable . . . the tension that came with living this life.
At the end of every phone call is another disaster. No victims are created equal. When your day ends, my day begins. Lord God, if nothing else, just grant me one more day
. . .

Madigan set the hip flask aside and started the engine. He pulled out of the underground parking lot and turned right toward home. He was going to stop on the way and get food. He knew a Thai place a half dozen blocks from his house. He would get food for them both, and he would make believe that he was a normal guy with a normal life and that everything that happened today had no bearing on tomorrow or the next day or the next.

For a little while—perhaps—Sandià would not exist, nor Maribel in a Dumpster, nor Valderas with a screwdriver through his face, nor a little girl in a hospital with a bullet hole through her guts. Perhaps.

49
SEXBEAT

“I
don’t eat oriental food usually,” she said, “but that was good.”

They sat at the kitchen table, she with a glass of wine, Madigan with a coffee mug half-filled with Jack Daniel’s.

“I don’t usually eat,” he said.

“I know.”

He leaned back. “So tell me about Melissa’s father.” It seemed right to ask her about her daughter. Madigan had called the hospital. The child was doing well, would be there for another few days yet, had asked for her mother, and the attending nurse—the one that Madigan spoke to—had dealt with it well. She’d told Melissa that she was under a
No Visit Order
due to potential infection from outside the ward. The child was fine. The nurse had asked Madigan if the mother’s whereabouts had been established. Madigan denied all knowledge.

“She’ll have to go with Social Services if the mother doesn’t show by the time we release her.”

“I understand,” Madigan said. “It’ll be fine. I’m gonna find the mother. You let me know if anyone from Child Services comes around, okay?”

Madigan relayed the conversation to Isabella, omitting Melissa’s request for her. The last thing he needed was for Isabella to be taking off to the hospital to see her daughter while Madigan was at work. Containment was now the key. Containment of Bernie Tomczak, containment of Isabella Arias, and most of all, containment of himself. He had to keep it together. He knew he should not have been drinking, but he couldn’t help it. But he was doing better. He really believed he was doing better. What would transpire with the Ariases, he did not know. He had no plan beyond the immediate end of this thing. It was like Alcoholics Anonymous—take everything just one day at a time. Anything beyond that was more than he could deal with right now.

“Melissa’s father?” Isabella said. “We were together for some
years, but . . .” She shook her head, reached for the wineglass. “But he was not a father. Some men just aren’t ready to be fathers.”

“Some men are never ready to be fathers.”

“You speak of yourself?”

“Myself, and a lot of others.”

She shook her head. “Every man is ready to be a father. It’s nature. Some men don’t want to be fathers because they believe a child will slow them down, stop them living, stop them enjoying things so much, when really it’s exactly the opposite.”

“In what way?”

“What could be a greater guarantee of your continued happiness and well-being than a child?”

“That’s a very basic viewpoint.”

“Basic?” she said. “Maybe. But basic can be fundamental, and fundamentals are everything. Without fundamentals there is no structure—”

“What is this? Philosophy and Sociology 101?”

She laughed, but Madigan did not get the impression she was laughing
at
him.

“You pretend to be shallow, but you are not,” she said.

“Oh, I’m shallow,” Madigan replied. “I have a veneer of awkward misery, and beneath that there is very little else.”

“You are too hard on yourself. You are a good man.”

“So people keep telling me.”

“Maybe it would be good to believe such a thing, then.”

“Maybe it would be good if people stopped trying to tell me who I am, especially those who don’t know me.”

“Like me.”

“Like you, yes.”

A frown crossed her brow, like the shadow of a cloud across a field. “I have upset you, Vincent?”

“I’ve got thicker skin than that.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Madigan asked. “I just said that you didn’t upset me.” He reached for the coffee mug.

She drank her wine.

There was silence for a moment.

“And your children?” she asked.

“What about them?”

“How many do you have?”

“Four.”

“Four? Well, hell, for someone who doesn’t want to be a father—”

“I never said I didn’t
want
to be a father. I said some people were not
ready
to be fathers.”

“But four kids?”

“Yes, four.”

“What are their names?”

“Cassie, Adam, Lucy, and Tom. Seventeen, thirteen, six, and three, respectively.”

“You see them?”

“Rarely.”

“Do you not think it would be good for them to see more of you?”

“Probably not.”

“Why, Vincent? Why do you think that a child wouldn’t want to know their father?”

“Because that father might not be the best influence on that child.”

“You really don’t have a high opinion of yourself, do you?”

“Maybe I don’t deserve a high opinion.”

“You can’t have done anything so terrible that you feel this badly about yourself.”