Devil's Bridge (24 page)

“You think this has something to do with Brian?” Mercer asked me. “Your father?”

“I do.”

“I know there was a shooting, Mike. I know someone died. If you tell me who it was, maybe we can figure a connection to Lonigan,” Mercer said. “We can get Peterson on the hunt to see if there’s a link.”

“Thirty years is a long time to wait for revenge.”

“Give me a lead.”

“Mickey Spillane stepped into the mobster role in the late sixties, when there was a power vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen. Sort of a gentleman gangster—bookmaking, policy—and then a slow buildup to loan-sharking. Bought turkeys for the needy on Thanksgiving,” I said, shaking my head at the idea, “but began to break legs as he gained control.

“Spillane made a big mistake when he pistol-whipped a local accountant named Coonan for not paying his dues. The guy had an eighteen-year-old son known in the hood as Jimmy C—the kind of kid your mother was always praying you didn’t grow up to be.”

“Yeah.”

“Jimmy C went up to the rooftop of a tenement on West 48th Street with an automatic rifle and just began to fire down at the street, fire at everyone he saw.”

“Not at Spillane?”

“Spillane was nowhere around. Jimmy C just did it to show he was mad about the whipping his old man took, and that he was moving into the turf. The rise of the Westies.”

“Where did Mickey Featherstone come in?” Mercer asked.

“Up from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, just like Jimmy C. Got noticed because he had a thing for killing people. He liked his hardware.”

“Jail time?”

“A few short stints. Then the army. Then psycho’d out of there. Back to the hood. Featherstone was Jimmy C’s right-hand man for years,” I said. “But their major falling-out happened when Coonan decided to go big-time and join forces with the Gambino family.”

“Featherstone got ruffled because that wasn’t loyal to the Irish?”

“You nailed it,” I said. “Coonan became John Gotti’s guy. He put the Westies to work as contract killers for the Gambinos.”

“Now, that’s a high-stakes business.”

“The highest. Ironically, Featherstone’s the one who got convicted for murder—for one of the few murders he didn’t commit.”

“Served time?”

“Not before he turned snitch, Mercer.”

“Featherstone was actually a rat? A big mobster like him?”

“Mickey Featherstone and his wife both agreed to be wired in order to get evidence against Coonan—that’s how bitter the internal Westies feud had become. Rudy Giuliani indicted Coonan with Featherstone’s information—one of the first big RICO cases. Racketeering going back two decades.”

“So one Westie boss winds up in jail,” Mercer said, “and one in Witness Protection.”

“Giuliani declared the Westies dead, but that’s just when all the wannabes began to crawl out of the woodwork,” I said. “There were Shannons and Kellys and McGraths and Cains looking to lead the parade by then, get a piece of the action. It’s like someone had lifted names off headstones in a Dublin cemetery.”

“Didn’t Coonan have an heir apparent?”

“An unlikely one. He wanted the Yugo to step in for him, over all his Irish boys.”

“The Yugo?”

“Bosko ‘the Yugo’ Radonjic,” I said. “He was a Serbian nationalist and for some reason Coonan took a liking to him. Started as a low-level associate—a parking lot attendant in a local garage turned gangster—but he was rewarded early for his efforts. That’s when the next turf war for Hell’s Kitchen began, in the late eighties.”

I swallowed hard and started biting the inside of my cheek again. It was an event that had ripped my family apart, the night I questioned whether my father was really the hero I’d thought him to be.

“My father was working homicide then. Hated the Westies for what they’d done, as Irish, to the Irish.”

“Had he known Featherstone and Coonan?”

“Sure he did. Not drinking buddies, but we all had relatives in Hell’s Kitchen. Ate in the same pubs, went to the same churches, worked in the same unions and shops,” I said. “Just earlier today I was telling Jimmy about playing as a kid in Bennett Park, about exploring Fort Washington just a stone’s throw from the George Washington Bridge.”

“Yeah.”

“Half the kids I hung out with had fathers who were cops and firemen,” I said. “The other half came from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. Westies and thugs of all varieties. I wasn’t choosy when I was out on the street.”

“The shooting?”

“Sure. The shooting,” I said. “So the Yugo thinks he can dance into the Irish mafia, the Irish Sopranos, without a struggle. But the next generation of hoodlums thought otherwise. The demographics were changing and so were the profits, because drugs had come into the mix. Every tough guy seemed to be hungry for drug money.”

“Understood.”

“It was most often a family affair at this point. When Mugsy Renner was running drugs, he put the rest of his relatives into the action. Same for all the guys. Narcotics was following a big shipment of cocaine that was coming in through a mule from South America, bound for a safe house in Hell’s Kitchen. It was Renner’s crew against some of the Shannons—at least the ones who weren’t behind bars.”

“Why was homicide involved?”

“Because the coke had been flown in through JFK. Three airline employees, cargo traffic agents, were supposedly in on the deal and let Renner’s gang and their truck into the hangar for the pickup. The agents were tied up and executed, mob-style—single bullet to the back of the head. Not exactly the cut of the profits they had expected. So narcotics called in homicide for backup when they rushed in to raid Renner’s headquarters on West 51st Street.”

It still made my blood boil to think of Renner setting up my father and his team.

“The cops walked into a trap, of course. The drugs were worth too many millions to sit in a tenement in Hell’s Kitchen,” I said. “There had actually been two dump trucks involved in the sting, and the one with the drugs got away clean. Never been found to this day. Renner parked a truck full of garbage in front of his house. When the narcs burst in on them in the middle of the night with a warrant, there was nothing to be found.”

“No drugs? No money?”

“Nothing. Nothing except Renner’s crazy kid. His oldest son, Emmet, was up on the roof with an automatic rifle. Twenty-two-year-old with a history of mental illness.”

“Against a narcotics squad and homicide?”

“I’m talking certifiably crazy,” I said. “He thought it wasn’t against the law to possess a weapon in his own home, so as the cops were leaving, tempers flaring, Renner starts shooting off rounds, hailing bullets down on the street.”

I paused. I had been back to stare at that building so many times as a young boy that I could see it in front of me today.

“Shooting
at
people?” Mercer asked. “At the cops?”

“Nope. He was imitating Jimmy C. He was figuring his father could win control of the Westies just the way Coonan had done it when he was eighteen—with a great show of force from the roof of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement.”

“It worked the first time, I guess.”

“Only now it was a street full of cops.”

“And they returned fire,” Mercer said.

“Just some warning shots, to show Renner they were serious,” I said. “But then he shot a cop. Right in the head. The guy bled out on the street before anyone could help him.”

“So Emmet Renner was a dead man.”

“Not exactly. That would have been one thing. But what nobody knew was that his brother was up on the roof with him.”

I gnawed on my cheek again.

“By that time, Emergency Services had burst into the house on their way to the roof. Renner ducked down and the cops thought he was reloading,” I said. “What they couldn’t see was that the crazy bastard thought he’d initiate his brother into the Westies. Handed him the rifle and told him to take his best shot.”

I put myself in my father’s shoes, as I had done thousands of times since that night.

“The gun barrel comes back over the side of the building, only this time Renner stands up. He fires the rifle and wings the guy right next to my father. Got his shoulder, and the blood splashed all over my dad’s face.”

“So he fired back.”

“Damn right, he did. My father shot Renner in the head. One round, direct hit. Of course everyone on the street figured it was Emmet, the crazy one, who’d been shot. They had no reason to think he’d turned the weapon over to his brother. His brother, Charlie.”

“But it was actually Charlie who shot one of the cops, wasn’t it?” Mercer asked. “He shot the guy standing right next to your father.”

“Yeah, that was Charlie Renner all right.”

“And that’s the man your father killed? Charlie Renner?”

“He wasn’t a man, Mercer. He was five years older than I was then. He used to play stickball with me in Hell’s Kitchen. He was an altar boy at St. Ignatius before I was,” I said. “Charlie Renner was thirteen years old the night he died. That’s the stuff that doesn’t quite fit into the Brian Chapman legend, Mercer. My father killed a kid.”

“This has to stay between us for the time being, Loo,” I heard Mercer say. “I need your word on that.”

Apparently, the short pause in the conversation meant he got Peterson’s word.

“Mike’s got an idea that this whole thing could have something to do with him and that Alex is just the pawn in all this,” Mercer said. “What we need you to do is use your juice to find out where Emmet Renner is.”

Ray Peterson knew Emmet Renner’s name well. All the old-timers did. He was a cop killer who’d skated because he, too, had turned snitch and testified against other mobsters for the feds.

“Last Mike knew, he was in Arizona in the Witness Protection Program. New name, plastic surgery, the whole nine yards. You’ll have to cut through all the red tape with the feds to get that information.”

Mercer looked at me while Peterson asked him a question.

“He’ll have to tell you himself,” he said, shrugging as he handed me his phone.

“Where the hell are you two?” Peterson asked.

“On our way back to the marina, Loo. I got sidetracked.”

“You don’t even want the good news?”

“Is there any?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Peterson said. “The blood in the Shipley SUV is Wynan Wilson’s.”

I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Coop’s. But I had already made the connection to the Westies that this just seemed to confirm.

“You hear me, Chapman?”

“I got it, Loo,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Now, what is this with Renner, Mike? Your old man did the right thing at the right time. Twenty other cops were aiming at the shooter. Just nobody was as good as Brian, and none of them knew he was a—a kid.”

“There were threats back then, Loo. Don’t you remember that?” I asked. “How my mother had to leave town for a month. Take my sisters and me to my aunt’s house in the Poconos.”

“Sure, but that was thirty years ago. Things change.”

“Things change if you’ve got all your marbles. I don’t know what happens if you only started out with half a load.”

“Have you heard from Emmet Renner in all this time?” Peterson asked.

“Veiled threats. Bullshit from wiseguys I’ve locked up over the years,” I said. “But he never came back to the city, so far as I know. It was part of his deal for turning state’s evidence. That, and the desire to live a long life.”

“How about his father?”

“Mugsy?”

“Yeah.”

“He must be dead by now, don’t you think? Didn’t he get, like, six life sentences for all the rubouts he did?” I said.

“I’ll check that, too,” Peterson said. “What’s got you thinking about the Renners?”

“The shrink. That genius Scully sat me down with this morning.”

“Dr. Friedman? What does she have to do with it?”

“I blew her off when she said it, Loo, but I’m in a different place now,” I said. “Friedman asked me all kinds of things about Coop, to see who’d be interested in kidnapping her and also to try to predict how she might respond. But then Friedman made the point that if there was someone who wanted to get to
me
, someone who wanted to cause me more pain than I’d known in a lifetime, they’d do it by targeting Coop.”

Peterson must have taken a drag on his cigarette to consider the point.

“You hear me?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Like the doc said, even two months ago there were no chinks in my armor. Now, because of the way I feel about Coop . . .”

“Yeah,” Peterson said again. “And the word about you two is out.”

“I mean, it’s not exactly headlining the society page, Loo. But most guys in the courthouse seem to know.”

“Perps, too, you think? Snitches?”

“Some.”

“Tell me about the threats, back in the day,” Peterson said.

I could call up the weeks after my father shot Charlie Renner as easily as I could walk someone through every hour of last night.

“Mugsy was heartless,” I said. “Look at him cross-eyed and he’d have you knocked off. Emmet inherited that trait in spades, along with a heavy touch of insanity. There were a couple of sisters in between, and then came Charlie. And Charlie was the light of everyone’s life. If anyone in that family was going to get out of Hell’s Kitchen and make a life for himself, it was the kid. Mugsy and his wife—well, she was inconsolable. My mother tried to get the priest to set up a meeting with her, but there was no use.”

“Why not be mad at Emmet instead of your father?” Peterson asked.

“He had it in for both of them, but it was my dad who pulled the trigger,” I said. “Rita, Jude, Gregory, Philomena.”

Mercer looked at me like I was nuts, but Peterson was a devout Catholic, and he spoke. “Patron saints of hopeless causes.”

“My mother prayed to all of them.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Anyway, word on the street was that the Renners were going to kill my father,” I said. “Not while he was on the job. They didn’t want to get tagged for another cop killing. But after he quit the force.”

“Only his ticker did it for him,” Peterson said.

My father had dropped dead less than forty-eight hours after turning in his badge and gun.

“Let me get on this, Mike. Let me find out about the Renners. Where did you say you were?”

“Close to the marina, Loo. You get any info, Mercer and I are good to go.” I thanked him and ended the call.

“You’re not even letting Peterson know where we are?” Mercer asked.

“To what end? If anyone’s keeping an eye on this place and suddenly the Harbor Unit shows up and tramps around the island, what happens to Coop?” I said. “What we need to know, before we involve anyone else who might have some harebrained scheme to get to her, is where she is, and why.”

“Emmet could have come after you before now,” Mercer said.

“Sure. But this isn’t a job he’d contract out,” I said, walking to the end of the dock and staring down at the water that ran past me. “The pleasure of killing me is something Emmet Renner would keep for himself.”

“And Alex?”

“I’ve never been in love with anyone like I am with her.” I spoke softly. I wasn’t used to saying that out loud.

“Emmet Renner wouldn’t know that.”

“Sometimes I think everyone around me knew it long before I did. It shows, Mercer,” I said. “Sometimes I think it’s got me so lit up inside I must glow in the dark.”

He reached out an arm and grasped me by the shoulder.

“How does word get around?” I asked. “My mother tells the priest that her son’s a changed man now that he’s got a woman he loves? Then the whole parish knows. My cousin who tends bar in Queens gossips to an old Westie? The word’s out in Woodside. Somebody sees the Page Six photo of me in a rented tux holding Coop’s hand at the Safe Horizon charity gala two weeks ago? My cover’s blown for anyone who reads that rag. The only thing new in my life is a love affair, and maybe that’s reached the ex-con’s retirement home in Arizona. Could be a dozen grapevines he heard it through. How the fuck would I know?”

“You were engaged before,” Mercer said. “To Valerie.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning my back to him. “Because I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance with Coop. That’s why I was ready to marry Valerie. Now maybe Dr. Friedman is right after all. Maybe people realize the best way to rip my heart in half would be to hurt Coop.”

“I hear you, Mike,” Mercer said, stepping up beside me and putting his arm on my shoulder.

We both snapped our heads at the sound of voices coming down to the dock from the island. It was Jimmy North and his prisoner, along with a park ranger.

“You guys need help?” the ranger asked, after Jimmy introduced us.

“We’re good for the moment,” I said. Jimmy took Pete Fitzgerald back up to the wire fencing that ran around the island’s perimeter and handcuffed him through the open metalwork so he’d be out of earshot.

“I told Jimmy,” the ranger said, “that I can run him back to Manhattan anytime he’d like to go. The Fitzgerald kid, too. What’d he do exactly?”

“We’re grateful for your offer,” Mercer said as I parked myself on one of the crates. “We’re not able to tell you what happened till the police commissioner signs off on everything in the next few hours. Nothing violent. No felonies. But still kind of top secret, if that isn’t being too rude to you on your own property.”

“I understand completely. I’m just here to give you what you need,” the ranger said. Then he pointed at the sturdy wooden box beneath me. “If you’re trying to keep things quiet over here, don’t kick on that package. It’s got some of the Roman candles for tomorrow’s celebration.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

As soon as he walked away, Jimmy started talking. “The guys at TARU will give you everything you want on the phones as soon as I get them over there.”

“How about contacts?” I asked. “Did you run through all of the names on Lonigan’s phone?”

“See for yourself. There aren’t many,” Jimmy said. “A lot of Lonigans, a girlfriend, some of the guys from the union, the main number in the office here.”

“Renner. You see anything listed for a Renner? Maybe Emmet?”

“No luck, Mike.”

Mercer folded his arms and looked back at the Fitzgerald kid, locked in place to the fence.

“Did he say anything to you once he and Lonigan were separated?”

“He’s whining a lot about what he doesn’t know. Doesn’t seem too interested in giving up any dirt on Lonigan, if there’s any to be had.”

“Let me see how I do,” I said.

Mercer’s long arm reached out, his palm touching the center of my chest. “Stay away from the kid, Mike. You’ve been spinning out of control.”

“I’ve got no reason to hurt him. I just want to talk to—”

“And I think we ought to get going before it gets dark,” Mercer said. “I promised you fifteen minutes and your time is up.”

I walked back to the river’s edge. The sun was behind me now, playing what was left of its light off the glass towers in the canyons of lower Manhattan.

“And get that Lonigan kid out of the head, will you?”

“When I’m good and ready, Mercer.”

I had no intention of letting Cormac Lonigan go until the lab did a thorough examination of the backpack, the sheet, and the plastic handcuffs. He could spend the night in the homicide squad if that’s how long it took.

“What is it about the river for you?” Mercer asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Is it Renner? Something to do with him or the Westies?”

“Renner just picked up where Coonan and Featherstone left off,” I said. “Their whole thing was kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping?” Mercer asked. “I thought the rackets was it.”

“Yeah, but when their vics didn’t pay up, they got their revenge by kidnapping,” I said. “They took relatives, they took local businessmen and their families—it was known as the snatch—and held them for ransom.”

Mercer was quiet for a minute. “But there’s no ransom here.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Coonan had a guy who worked for him. A butcher. The neighborhood butcher. His name was Eddie Cummiskey. Eddie the Butcher they called him.”

“So?”

“Coonan used Eddie to kill his victims if nobody paid up. Dismember them.”

“You serious?”

Mercer came up beside me on the end of the dock.

“Stop asking me that. Of course I’m serious. I used to have nightmares, after my dad shot Charlie, that Eddie would take him apart one day, piece by piece.”

“That must have been jive, man. Not for real.”

“You think so? Check the Westies’ files, Mercer. Coonan used to keep some of the dismembered fingers from the victims’ bodies in a freezer in his office, so he could use them to plant fingerprints on guns his crew used in hits.”

“No wonder you had nightmares,” Mercer said. “What did they do with the other body parts?”

“Coonan made Eddie the Butcher take them down to the Hudson,” I said, staring out at the darkening ripples in the water. “Throw them in the water. Right there in Midtown, the West Forties and Fifties. One time Eddie forgot to puncture the lungs in a guy’s torso and it bobbed to the surface a week later. Floated right into a sailboat out for a ride off the Battery, or he’d never have been found. But usually the fish got the flesh and bones that sunk to the bottom.”

“I can’t begin to imagine what those men were like,” Mercer said.

“The Westies made me ashamed to be Irish,” I said, looking from the Verrazano Bridge to my right back up to the GW on my left. “They were murderous thugs, Mercer. And they used the Hudson River as their personal morgue.”