Black Irish (9 page)

“Jameson is shaking like he’s got a fever. He can barely speak at this point. First time he’s shot his gun, y’see. His feckin’ third day on the job! He’s practically doing a tap dance around the guy, looking here and there, ducking his head down, looking for a weapon.”

Her father looked under the table, imitating Jameson’s little dance, and the cops belly-laughed, the sound bouncing off the kitchen tiles.

“ ‘He had a gun, he had a gun, a black revolver in his hand,’ Jameson keeps saying.”

Her father held up his right hand.

“Now, what did he really have there? A black spoon. He’d been stirring the spaghetti sauce on the stove. I went over and turned off the flame and I say to Jameson, ‘Jameson, you hairy Kilkenny beast of creation, can you not tell a spoon from a revolver? Have you never been inside a guinea’s house? Have you no culture
at all
?’ ”

Sniggers from Jackson, who snuck a glance at his white partner. Of course. Bianchi. That was the reason her father was telling an Italian story.

“Now, I’d recognized the man as soon as we’d walked in the place. Jimmy Farelli, and he was with the Gallo gang, a hard man, you understand. The Gallos owned every bakery in the First Ward and were just beginning to get their oily fingers—”

He stopped.

“Excuse me, Officer Bianchi,” her father said, bowing in mock apology.

Bianchi waved his hand at her father. “Don’t even worry about it, Mr. Kearney.”

Jackson, shaking with laughter, mouthed the words “oily fingers” at his partner.

“Right,” said her father. “Just beginning to get their garlic-smelling fingers”—Jackson squeezed his eyes shut—“on the Irish unions, they were. But the point is Jameson had no idea he’d just killed a mob enforcer. The man was standing in his own kitchen, and there was no gun in sight. Jameson was still wet behind the ears and he’d just killed an honest, God-fearing man without a good reason. Even back then, that was frowned upon in the Buffalo Police Department.”

The old man caught her eye and smiled, some stray spark of his happiness flying across to her. Abbie gave him a half smile.

“So, we send out the call. Man shot at 34 Second Avenue. Now, every cop on the beat knows this is Jimmy Farelli’s address, he’s a known malefactor, the worst of the worst. So these beat cops come in one after the other, bend down to take a look at the body, then get up. Jameson is on his hands and knees, meanwhile, looking under the fridge, under the stove, crying, ‘The gun’s got to be here somewhere!’ No gun. Jameson’s career is about to go the way of the Lindbergh baby.

“So, thirty minutes pass. The medical examiner comes in, examines the body, tells his assistants to carry it off. The man’s still lying on the floor facedown. They roll him over.”

His father leaned forward toward Jackson.

“And what do you suppose they found underneath James Farelli on the night of June 16, 1974?”

The two cops looked at him like boys listening to a bedtime story.

“Four … black … pistols, lying on the linoleum floor,” her father said. He leaned back triumphantly, his head turning slightly to gaze at each cop in turn.

Their faces were puzzled.

“Four
guns?”
Jackson said. “I thought you said—”

Her father smiled. “He was unarmed when we walked in, sure. But every cop who entered that apartment had heard that there was no gun. So what do they do? Each one brought along their spare pistol or some old piece of junk they had lying in the trunk of their squad car. They bent down for a look at the body and secretly stuck that gun under the body. Without telling anyone else.”

The two cops stared in disbelief.

“That’s imposs—” said Bianchi.

“No fear of a lie,” her father said, closing his eyes like he was a priest pronouncing on the truth of Christ’s resurrection. “There’s a pistol under his right leg, an old revolver under his left, another one stuck under the man’s belly, and a fourth one spilling out of his shirt. He looked like Pancho Villa. All that was missing was a bandolier and a sombrero.”

The cops looked at each other, then simultaneously broke into roars of laughter.

“Jameson nearly had a heart attack. Three hands reached out, grabbed a gun each, and the cops walked out the door. We left one pistol there, logged it as the guinea’s personal firearm, and closed the case. Jameson was saved.”

The two cops shook their heads in wonder. Her father reached for his cup of tea—he’d never gotten the American addiction for coffee—and winked at Bianchi. Then he caught his daughter’s eye.

“Look at her stare me down,” her father whispered to the two cops, pretending to wilt under her gaze. “She doesn’t approve, y’see.”

Abbie’s eyelids lowered slightly as she regarded him.

“I didn’t say a word, Dad,” she said, smiling.

Her father narrowed his eyes and held up a finger toward her. “Every one of those cops went in there to save Jameson’s ass. It has its own beauty.”

“If you say so. But Jameson was lucky he shot a mobster.”

He ignored her and turned to Bianchi.

“It’d never happen today,” he said.

“Probably not,” Bianchi said, gripping his gun belt and shaking his head.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Abbie said.

“Mr. Kearney, that’s the single best cop story I’ve ever heard,” Jackson said. He nodded at Abbie, his eyes strange.
He’s probably wondering what it was like to be raised by a legend
, Abbie thought.

“Come back tomorrow,” Abbie said. “He’s here all week.”

The cops stood up to leave.

“Thanks for checking this out,” she said as they shuffled past her out of the small kitchen.

“No problem,” said Jackson, stopping. “Your father’s a good guy.”

Abbie nodded and looked at her dad, finishing the last of his tea.

“He’s something.”

They said their goodbyes and left. She listened to them clomp down the stairs. The front door clattered open and then banged shut.

“Dad,” she said, walking over to the kitchen table and sitting across from her father.

“Hmmm?” He was still in the glow of 1974.

“What did you hear?”

“Oh, a jiggling at the door.”

She laid the toy in the baggie on the table.

“Does this monkey mean anything to you?”

He didn’t look down.

“A teenager playing a trick, Abbie. ’Tis all it is.” He tilted his cup and looked to see how much tea he had left.

“It was hung on our door.”

“Maybe a commentary on your gypsy background,” he said.

She smiled, but not her eyes. “My neighbors are a bit more advanced than people in the County. What I need to know is if this was directed at me or at you.” Her eyes sought his, without success.

“I couldn’t tell ya.”

“Take another look.”

She picked up the baggie with the monkey weighing down one corner.

Her father stared at the refrigerator.

“Over here,” she said, dangling the bag.

No response.

Suddenly, her fist smacked into the wooden table. Her father looked up, startled, as his teacup rang in its saucer.

“Damn it, Dad, it’s
important
. The killer …”

His blue irises widened. “Which killer, Detective Kearney?” he asked.

Abbie frowned. “I meant whoever left this,” she said.

“No, you didn’t,” he said slowly, and his eyes glimmered. “Jimmy Ryan’s killer is connected to this … this thing?”

“Why?” Abbie said, smiling. “You’ve seen it before?”

He paused.

“Didn’t I raise you never to answer a question with a question?”

“You raised me to always find the truth,” Abbie said, watching him closely. Finally, he turned away.

Abbie sighed. “Okay. You want to talk about Jimmy Ryan? Tell me what you know about Jimmy Ryan.”

“It’s getting late, Abbie. I’m tired.”

She went to say something but it caught in her throat.

“Dad, please.”

He coughed and crossed his legs.

“I’ll ask around,” he said finally.

“Or you could give me the names and I could ask around. You’re retired, remember?”

He took a sip of tea and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Maybe they should bring me back to catch this one.”

“You are something. It’s under control, thanks.”

“Ah!” he said. John Kearney turned in the chair to face his daughter. “Now, are you sure about that?”

Abbie stared at him, and for a moment her father was fully present, the eyes keen, the intelligence that had put a thousand men behind bars—and two in Forest Lawn Cemetery—lit up behind his eyes. Was he mocking her? Doubting her skills as a detective?

“I’m asking for your help, Dad.”

Her father frowned and looked away.

The kitchen went silent. She felt her heart slow. Abbie traced the ridges of his deeply lined face as he looked absently at the teacup, and suddenly she felt a sorrow so deep it was beyond tears. She remembered the times she’d woken as a child and found her father sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her in her darkened bedroom. It had happened a dozen or so times, always late at night. Once he sensed she was awake, he’d get up and leave silently. At first it had creeped her out, but then she’d begun to pretend she was still sleeping, so as to keep her father there.

If her father had just told her a story the way he had to those two cops, she’d be okay now, her depressions gone, her fears dispelled once and for all. She was convinced of that.
Wouldn’t you do that for a random stranger, Dad, some wanderer you met in the Gaelic Club or on the streets of the County?

And aren’t we strangers?

H
ER CELL PHONE RING HAD MERGED WITH HER DREAM AND GONE OFF FOUR
times before she snapped out of sleep and grabbed it from her nightstand. Outside her window, it was just getting light.

“Hello?”

“You’re never gonna believe who we found.”

It was Z.

“Who?”

“Gerald Williams. We got him.”

She sat up in bed, running a hand through her hair.

“Where?”

“Niagara Falls PD. He’s in their open files. His real name is Gerald Williams Decatur. That’s how we missed it at first.”

“Murdered?”

“And how. Three months ago.”

She paused. If it had been three days ago, she would have said that it was the same guy for certain. Three weeks even. But three months? Impossible to say.

“The same killer?” she said, lifting off the bed and walking to the bathroom.

“I don’t know. I’m headed up to Niagara Falls to get the report.
But whoever did old Gerald, they did him bad. Let’s just say he didn’t have an open casket.”

“Meet you downtown.”

She took a quick shower, dressed, made instant oatmeal for her father and left it in the microwave for him to heat up. She was out the door in fifteen minutes.

At HQ, she found Z in his cubicle, his feet up on the desk. A small black .22 with a brown grip was tucked into a leather ankle holster.

“You still carry that thing?” she said.

Z groaned as he reached over to pat the leather. “The Slammer? Best friend a man could have.”

“Unless you’re too fat to reach it in the clutch.”

She walked around his chair and stood behind him, leaning over. He had six of the crime scene photos spread across the top of the desk, and he was going over them between sips of coffee.

The Niagara Falls PD report was near his elbow. She took off her jacket, hung it on the coatrack, grabbed the file and dropped into her cubicle chair. She read through it quickly. Gerald Williams Decatur, forty-nine, last known address 121 Richmond Avenue, Buffalo. He’d been found at the Lucky Clover motel on Ontario Avenue on the Canadian side of the Falls. He’d paid thirty-two dollars for a basic room, which made the Clover a rock-bottom establishment. Since its heyday in the fifties, parts of Niagara Falls had sunk as low as Buffalo, its cheapest motels catering equally to bargain tourists and the drug dealers, transients, and other spillover from the normal world that piled up at border crossings like refuse at a sewer grating.

Gerald Decatur had been found sitting upright on one of the two single beds, propped against the wall. The nightstand that had stood between the beds had been moved and placed carefully near the bathroom door. The killer giving himself room to work, Kearney thought. Decatur was light-skinned, with a thin face covered with old acne scars and a scraggly goatee. He had a modified Afro cut
short on the sides and had a silver cross earring hanging from his left ear. In the crime scene photos, his face had been crosshatched with deep cuts, pulpy red flesh squeezing up between the slashes. His green T-shirt was saturated with dark blood and his hazel eyes stared dully ahead, the eyelids still there. Two defensive wounds on the left hand: the killer had clearly immobilized Decatur rather quickly before going to work on his face. There was nothing cut into his body, no symbols or numbers or torture marks. Decatur had been killed by a single thrust of the blade to the heart, expertly placed and five and a half inches deep, according to the coroner.

The room had been paid for in cash. The worker at the front desk had seen no one enter or exit and barely remembered Decatur checking in. The rooms to either side had been unoccupied. A guest four doors down had called the front desk at 2 a.m. to say she’d been woken up by “some animals throwing a party.” The front desk guy had done nothing about it, thirty-two dollars a night apparently not getting you much service in Niagara Falls. The cops had tracked down the guest and interviewed her, but she had little to add, saying only that she’d been woken up by what sounded like someone banging into a wall and a man screaming. But the noise had cut off mid-scream and never started up again.

Abbie hovered over Z again, peering at the photos. Their eyes moved over the images for three minutes before Abbie spoke.

“They know why he was there?”

“I spoke to the lead on it and Decatur got one suspicious call the day before he went up. All the other numbers on that day were family or friends, and all their alibis check out. This one was different. It came from a pay phone at the Buffalo Public Library. Call came in at 4:15 p.m. At 4:22 p.m., Decatur calls his brother and asks if he can borrow his car for Friday night. The night he was murdered.”