A Dark and Broken Heart (9 page)

So Madigan asked questions, got word back, met this Mr. Sandià in January of 1995. Madigan could remember the day as if it were yesterday. Bright, cold, the air fresh and clean. The meeting had been in a small house on East 124th. Lunchtime. Madigan went on up there. The door was opened even as he approached it. A narrow-shouldered man in a good suit waved him in, smiling. One gold tooth on the right side, the rest artificially white. When he turned and led the way down to the kitchen in back Madigan saw the bulge of a handgun in the small of the man’s back. A second man rose as Madigan entered the kitchen. The smell of fried meat and cheese filled his nostrils. It was a good smell.

Sandià got up from the table. He was smiling too. He was no more than five eight or nine, but solidly built. His hair was thick and crimp-curled. His complexion was fair, almost Caucasian, but the warm depth of his eyes and the pitch black of his hair made him nothing but Hispanic.

“You are Madigan,” he said, and there was but the faintest hint of accent.

“And you are Mr. Sandià.”

Sandià smiled again and extended his hand. “We are eating,” he said. “Simple, but good.”

And they ate, and they spoke little—merely of the cold weather, the upcoming political changes, the deterioration of educational standards for children in the area—and all the while Madigan knew that here was a man who possessed no small aspirations. And when lunch was finished and they sat smoking, drinking coffee, Madigan merely said, “There is work for both of us here, Mr. Sandià,” and Sandià, nodding slowly, said, “And what line of work would be of the greatest interest to you?”

It started small. Madigan gave Sandià heads-up on traffic lines for the black gangs. Consignments coming in were detoured, redistributed. In exchange Sandià gave Madigan the inside line on the Orientals, even supply lines for the dealers who provided for the white college kids and student nurses who drove up from Yorkville and the East Side. Sandià got rich. Madigan got a bust sheet the length of the Mississippi, and all was well. August of 1995 Madigan was promoted to investigation detective in the Gangs Division, and there he stayed until October of ’98. From there it was 3rd Class at Vice until January of 2001, and then six years in Robbery-Homicide. But the roots had been planted here, all those many years before, and he and Sandià, differences aside, had worked hand in glove for the better part of fifteen years.

It was this history that was always there, always present. Though tacit, unspoken, there was still a contract between them. A promise. One hand washes the other. One good deed deserves its recompense.

What Madigan had done that morning was a violation of everything that had ever taken place between them—every word and every action through every year of that decade and a half.

And it was this—this painful awareness—that he was doing his utmost to hide as he stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hallway to Sandià’s room.

14
GHOST ON THE HIGHWAY

W
alsh should not have been called out, but he was one-time Homicide and was the only detective in the precinct when the call came in. Callow, Harris, the others—they were all out on other jobs. There was a dead twelve-year-old in a Dumpster near St. Paul’s Place; a domestic on 125th near the subway station that had gone so terribly, terribly wrong; something that looked like an erotic-asphyxia case in a shitty apartment overlooking Thomas Jefferson Park that looked more like a setup with every question asked of the deceased’s boyfriend. A regular evening’s work. So Walsh it was. Duncan Walsh, thirty-nine years old, New Jersey born and bred but sounded like someplace else. Unmarried, living with a woman three years his senior, no kids. Walsh went into the PD in New Jersey. Took his exam late, already twenty-six years old, but he sailed it. Out of the academy into patrol, he did three years feet-and-seat, half the time in a black-and-white, the rest on the sidewalk. Eighteen months in Homicide, and then an about-face that took him into the SWAT Program. SWAT didn’t suit him or vice versa, because four months into that he cut and ran, transferred to NYPD in the early part of 2003 and spent the next four years jockeying a desk in PD Veteran Admin. The mayor’s office PD public relations department came looking in the fall of 2007, and he went; spent a year smoothing out the creases and tucking in the corners, and then he decided it was time for a gold shield. That’s why he wound up in Internal Affairs, the guaranteed fast-track to detective without doing the real grunt work.

Walsh may have been New Jersey, but he wasn’t real New Jersey. His father was Scots lineage out of Pennsylvania, his mother from the South. Duncan had been an only child, neither spoiled nor ignored, but hovering somewhere in the middle ground. Later, after both of them were dead, Walsh looked back on his parents and wondered if they’d had a child not because they wanted to, but because they were supposed to. That’s what people did. They
got married and had kids. His folks tried it once and figured it was someone else’s game.

Work was his thing. That was what Walsh did. He latched on to the police career for lack of some other vocation. He forced himself to identify and relate. It was neither a case of personal reconciliation, nor conditioned response, but the simple fact of having to do something that possessed meaning. Walsh’s problem had always been the expectations afforded tomorrow. It would be better
tomorrow
. What was up ahead was infinitely better than what had gone, or what was now. A trait he took from his father. Not pessimism, more a belief that everything was a way station en route to something better. It was a double-edged sword. You didn’t rest on your laurels, and yet neither did you acknowledge your immediate successes. Always in limbo, Walsh worked and watched and waited for his chance to prove something. What he was trying to prove he was as unaware of as anyone else, but that didn’t change the fact that this was what he felt. Such an attitude, such a
philosophy
, gave him a degree of perfectionism and attention to detail that was almost obsessive. He had been that way in PD Veteran Admin, in the mayor’s office, and before that in Homicide. SWAT had been a different ball game. SWAT had tested everything that he was, and he had been found wanting. Walsh knew himself better than most. He recognized a hiding to nowhere, and he got out before he arrived. Acceptance of limitations was not defeatist as far as he was concerned; it was simply realistic and pragmatic.

That Tuesday evening, when the call came through from the desk to say that a triple homicide had been reported in a storage unit off of East 109th, Walsh’s first response was, “Who told you to give it to me?”

“Squad sergeant,” the desk told him.

Walsh called Bryant, and Bryant said, “We have no one else. I’m not asking you to take the case. I’ll pass it on to whoever comes back first. I just need someone with half a brain to go down there and secure the scene. That’s all.”

“This is
so
not my job—”

“You think I don’t know that? Jesus, Walsh, stop acting like six feet of bullshit. Right now you’re all I have . . . oh, aside from three dead fellers and a crapload of cash all over the floor of some storage unit garage. Gimme half an hour of your precious time, will ya?”

“Crime Scene been called?”

“Yep, but they say another twenty minutes or so.”

“Give me the address,” Walsh said, and he was already reaching for the jacket on the back of his chair.

Uniforms had put a black-and-white on either side of the storage unit. Already there were people haunting the edges of the thing. Walsh pulled over, flipped his badge, and tucked it into his breast pocket. He glanced at his watch. Five fifteen.

Bryant had been good to his word. Inside there were three DBs, a bunch of cash scattered this way and that, a lot of blood. Only vehicle was a Ford Econoline E-250. Looked like the party had all gone to shit. Crime Scene would have a field day.

There were three dead, two of whom still held handguns—a .38 and a .44. The guy holding the .44 had a chest wound, looked like he’d taken a slug right through the heart. The guy with the .38 had been shot in the stomach, and from the wide pool of blood around him Walsh figured it had been a bleed out. The third man had gone down with a head shot, looked like a .38 as well; he was without a weapon, and there didn’t seem to be a weapon anywhere on the floor of the storage unit. Walsh’s first question was who shot who first? The only way it could have worked was for .38 to shoot the one with no weapon. No weapon is down and finished, no argument. We’re good so far. Then .38 and .44 have a face-off. Did they fire simultaneously? One gets it in the head, the other gets it in the stomach, and then .38, he bleeds out? Seemed to work in theory, but Ballistics and Forensics would confirm.

Walsh backed up to the storage unit’s entranceway, then headed back to his car for his digital camera. He took shots of the Econoline treads, the tread marks on the floor near the wall. He snapped the three DBs, the entry and exit wounds, the handguns, the bodies themselves from each corner of the storage unit, the van, and then the blood-spattered tens, twenties and fifties across the floor.

This was the aftermath of a robbery, a robbery executed successfully, and then someone got greedy. Maybe someone had been greedy all along, and this had been inevitable.

Walsh returned to the door as he heard a vehicle draw to a stop outside. Crime Scene, three of them, booted and suited, businesslike as always.

Unit First acknowledged Walsh, listened to Walsh’s résumé of the prelim.

“We can tell you who shot who, no problem,” Walsh was told. “Don’t know how long it’ll take, however. We’ve had a busy weekend and I got traffic backed up from late Saturday.”

“I’m just on secure detail,” Walsh said. “I’m staying until someone gets here from Robbery-Homicide; then it’s their problem . . .” Then he hesitated and added, “But sure, yes, if it’s no trouble. Send me a copy when you get through with it.” He gave the Unit First his card.

“IA?” he asked. “You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?”

“This is the breaks,” Walsh said, and smiled. “Like I said, I’m just on secure detail until the cavalry arrives.”

Walsh left them to get on with it, headed back to the car, and sat patiently. It was another fifty minutes before someone showed. Ron Callow, some new guy in tow.

Callow and Walsh shook hands, always polite yet never friendly.

“Appreciated,” Callow said.

“No problem.”

“You get a take on this?”

“Nothing much. Looks like a robbery went down, someone got greedy, they had a falling out, and it all went to hell.”

“We’ll go see,” Callow said. He turned back after a moment. “You done?”

“Not until eight,” Walsh replied.

Callow and his partner headed for the storage unit. Walsh got back in his car and started the engine. As he pulled away he glanced back at the strange glow of the arc lamps that emanated from the doorway of the storage unit. Was there something that he missed about this? It had been there, hadn’t it? He’d felt it. Standing over those dead bodies, the blood spatter, the money sent in six different directions . . . the rush that came, that feeling in the base of the gut. Eighteen months in Homicide had taught him a great deal, but also it had embittered him, given him an edge of cynicism. That was something he’d never wanted to keep, and thus he had moved on, just as he had at SWAT, the same thing that had prompted the transfer from New Jersey to New York. It was the edge that was so visible in people like Callow, in Bryant and Harris and Madigan. And yet Madigan was something beyond even that. Madigan possessed something that was uniquely Madigan. Madigan, Walsh believed, was the best of them. He had
a hell of an arrest record, a lot of people put away for a long time. But Madigan was also the hardest to deal with, the toughest to nail down, the quickest to vanish. Madigan was also the man Walsh believed he himself would have become if he had failed to see the signs. They were there, just like the signs on the freeway. Speed limits, stop signs, detours and diversions. There was a reason for those signs, and if you ignored them . . . well, if you ignored them then your career ceased to be a career and became simply a means by which the days and weeks could be made to disappear. Madigan had become such a man; so long a cop there was now no other life he could lead. Two divorces, two different sets of kids, more than likely living in some shitty little apartment, boxes in the hallway containing everything he owned, still there from the day he moved in. That was not a life, certainly not the kind of life Walsh wanted. And yet Madigan inspired a degree of respect, simply because he had not compromised that sense of purpose.

Walsh saw it in most of them—fifteen years in and they were worn out, half-beaten to death, suspicious of all offers of help, cynical not only about the law, but any real possibility of justice, forever angling for any kind of letup that would ease the pressure. And yet they kept on going, kept on doing the job, and they did it as best they could.

Walsh had been in twelve years already, and by the time he reached a decade and a half he wanted the gold shield, the rank, the office, the salary. He had convinced himself that he would not become another Callow, another Harris or Bryant, and certainly not another Madigan. And yet, even in convincing himself of this, he knew that he would never have what they had: a sense of pride in the simple fact that they hadn’t quit.

Walsh took a left after Thomas Jefferson Park and headed down the incline into the parking garage beneath the precinct. There was no reason to feel anything as he walked from his car to the elevator, and yet he did. An uncharacteristic anxiety had settled somewhere in his lower gut, and as he rode up the two levels to his floor he could see little but the scene that had confronted him in the storage unit.

Something hadn’t made sense. He wondered who had been robbed, and how much had been taken. He wondered about the identity of the three dead men, the way in which that final scene had played out. He tried to imagine how they must have felt—believing that whatever they’d done had been a resounding
success, that here was the money they needed, a way out, an escape route, and yet swiftly understanding that this was the point at which it would all end.