Saints Of New York (4 page)
Read Saints Of New York Online
Authors: R.J. Ellory
The hole in his
throat was the only wound. Entry, no exit. Looked like the .22 had actually
been pointed upwards at a steep angle, leaving the bullet still inside his
head. Those little slugs had insufficient power to make it a
through-and-through; they would just ricochet around like a fairground ride and
mush the brain. Number of times they collided with the internal wall of the
cranium just pancaked the shit out of them. Difficult to pull any lands,
grooves, striations. Parrish used his little finger to push up into the entry
wound. It was still moist an inch or so in, telling him Danny had been dead no
more than a couple of hours. Danny Lange was small time. No money, no future,
little of anything at all. He would have pissed someone off, short-changed
them, cut a deal with something obvious like baby laxative or baking soda, and
that was that. It was all the same, and it was all war. Parrish knew his Cormac
McCarthy. The old judge in
Blood
Meridian
said, "It makes no difference what men think of
war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always
here. Before Man was, war waited for him . . . That is the way it was and will
be."
The
war had reached Danny Lange, and he was now one of its countless casualties.
Frank
Parrish called one of the uniforms over, gave him some gloves, told him to help
him roll the vic. They did. Danny had crapped himself.
'You
call the DC?' Frank asked.
'Yes,
sir, I did.'
'Good
man. You wait here and keep an eye on him. Make sure he don't do a runner. I'm
gonna go drink some coffee with my friend, and I'll speak to the deputy coroner
when he comes down, okay?'
'Yes,
sir.'
Hayes
had made it as far as Starbucks. No Vicodin, only aspirin, but at least the
coffee was passable. Parrish chewed a couple of tablets and washed them down.
'Anything?'
Hayes asked.
Parrish
shook his head. 'Usual shit. He must've upset someone. Someone said something.
Like the Sicilians say, a word in the right ear can make or murder a man.'
'How
many you got on?'
'Three,'
Parrish replied.
'I
already got five open. Can you take this one?'
Parrish
hesitated.
'You
take this one and I'll give you a credit on my next bust.'
Parrish
nodded. 'Deal.'
'You
got your partner yet?' Hayes asked.
'Tomorrow'
Parrish
said. 'Some nineteen-year-old out of
detective
school.'
'Hope that works
out for you.'
'Me I ain't
worried about. It's whatever dumb schmuck they give me'll have the problem. He
better be able to look round corners.'
'So, we're good?
I'm away. Leave you to deal with the DC.'
Hayes walked
back two steps, turned and disappeared. Parrish heard his car start around the
corner and pull away sharply.
He drank half
the coffee, tipped the rest into the road, dropped the cup into a basket at the
corner, and walked back to Danny Lange.
The Deputy
Coroner came and went. Parrish watched the wagon take Danny away, and then
walked to the nearest subway station.
Danny Lange's
place was a flea-bitten rat-hole of a shithouse
up
on
the ninth floor of some project building. Even as Parrish
approached the entrance, he remembered an earlier time he'd
been
there. Two
years ago, maybe three. He'd come away feeling
the
need to wash his hair and dry-clean his clothes. It was a sad day when a man
lost his reason, sadder when he lost his respect. Danny Lange had lost both a
long time ago.
The inner
hallway smelled of piss and puke. A scattering of used hypodermics crunched
underfoot as Parrish skirted the elevators
and
headed for the stairwell. The elevators were notoriously unreliable, the very
worst kind of place to get trapped.
He reached the
third and was already out of breath. He was alone. Shouldn't have been, but
partners wore out quicker than
they
used to - last one took a permanent rain check. Parrish had done his first
three years as a detective in Vice, the next six in Robbery-Homicide, and when
they split the units he stayed with
the
dead people. Robbery was bullshit. Penny-ante liquor store hold-ups, some
Korean guy dead for the sake of twenty-nine dollars and change. Junkies working
for enough money to score
pep
-pills,
trying to stave off the heebie-jeebies. Heebie-jeebies gonna getcha no matter
how many stores you rob. That was just
the
way of things.
Fifth floor and
Parrish took a break. He would have smoked a cigarette but he couldn't breathe.
He stopped, tried not to think
of
Caitlin, his
daughter, but she came at him every which way.
Get
more exercise, Dad. Smoke less cigarettes. And don't even get me started on the
drinking.
He wasn't winning. She was almost done
with her
training, and he wanted her close - Brooklyn Hospital, Cumberland, even Holy
Family down on Dean Street, but Caitlin wanted to go to Manhattan. St.
Vincent's perhaps. She had gone for nursing; something her mother had always
supported. And Caitlin's mother was Frank's ex-wife. Clare Parrish. Except now
she'd reverted to her maiden name of Baxter. Fuck it. How did that ever go so
wrong? Sure, they were married young, but it had been good. December '85 they'd
gotten hitched. Robert was born just four months later in April of '86, Caitlin
in June of '88. Good kids. Better than their parents. Such a great start.
Difficulties, yes of course, but nothing major, nothing serious. How that deteriorated
into a barrage of vitriolic accusations - unfounded for the most part - he
would never know. Silent grievances saved up like bad pennies. He was
aggressive, bull-headed, ignorant, forgetful. She was shallow, cynical,
untrusting, dismissive of his friends. Friends . . . What friends?
And then it
turned really bitter. He failed to understand
even the most rudimentary requirements for social interaction.
She
could not
cook, clean,
she had
no culture, no passion.
Afterwards, the argument spent, they
would get drunk and fuck like rampant teenagers, but it was never the same and
they both knew it. Each had uttered sharp words, and between them - neither
more guilty than the other - they had pricked the matrimonial bubble. Tolerance
deflated. He had rented a three-room apartment on South Portland, started an
affair with a twenty-seven-year-old paralegal named Holly. Clare started
screwing her hairstylist - half-Italian with a ponytail - who called her
bambino
and left
fingernail crescents on her ass.
Hindsight, ever
and again the cruelest and most astute advisor, gave him harsh lessons in
responsibility. He should have had a better attitude. He should have
appreciated that his wife - despite the fact that she did not work in Homicide
- nevertheless had an important job raising a family. All well and good now,
after it had blown itself skywards.
Most guys,
she used to say,
you have to wait for them to fuck up. You? With you there ain't no waiting.
You're a fuck-up before you arrive.
Divorce had gone
through in November 2001, when Caitlin was thirteen, Robert two years older.
Clare got them weekdays, Frank had them weekends. They got their diplomas, went
to
college,
started to
take their own bold steps in the world. They
were
undoubtedly the best thing that came out of it. They were
the
very best part
of him.
Parrish reached the ninth and was
ready to fold. He stayed for a while, leaning against the wall, heart thudding.
A black woman opened the door of one of the apartments, looked him up and down
like he'd gotten his dick out and shook it at her. She asked nothing, said
nothing, closed the door again.
He tried a deep breath, headed
down the hallway, and let himself into Danny Lange's apartment with the key
he'd taken from Danny's pocket. Everything else he'd signed over to Evidence
Control and left for Crime Scene to pick up.
The lights were on, and the place
smelled ripe.
She
wasn't yet old
enough to show any wear on her face, not even
In
her eyes - eyes that looked back at him with the quiet and hopeful surprise so
evident in all unexpected deaths. She was
naked
but for her underwear, her skin the color of alabaster; white, with that faint
shadow of blue that comes a little while a
fter
the breathing stops. The thing that really surprised Frank
Parrish
was that he
was not surprised at all. A dead girl on Danny L
ange
's
bed. Just like that. Later, he even remembered he'd said something to her,
though he could not recall what it was.
He
pulled up a
chair and sat for a while in silence. He guessed she was sixteen, perhaps
seventeen. These days it was so hard to
tell.
Her hair was cut shoulder length and hung down around her face. She was
beautiful, no question, and the care and precision With which she had applied
red polish to her fingernails and toenails was something to behold. She was
almost perfect in every sense, save for the livid bruising around the base of
her throat. Confirmation of strangulation came when Parrish knelt
on the
floor and
looked directly into her eyes with his flashlight. The tiny red spots of petechial
hemorrhaging were there - present
On
her eyelids, and also behind her ears.
He
had not seen
Danny Lange for a couple of years. Then, the gu
y
had been a junkie and a thief, not a killer. But hell, times
had
changed. It
wasn't that people did worse things than they
had
fifteen
or twenty years before, it was simply that more people
did them.
Parrish called
it in. Dispatch said they'd inform the Coroner's Office and Crime Scene Unit.
Parrish went around the apartment - the front room, the kitchen, the narrow
bathroom, then back to the girl on the bed. There was something strangely
familiar about her, and then he realized what it was. She looked like Danny.
Fifteen minutes
later Parrish's suspicions were confirmed. He found a small bundle of pictures
- Mom, Danny, the dead girl on the bed. A hundred-to-one she was Danny's baby
sister. In the pictures she was no more than ten or eleven, bright like a firework,
all smiles and freckles. Danny looked real, like he had yet to hit the dope.
Mom and the two kids - a regular snapshot from the family album. Was there such
a thing as a regular family, or did shadows lurk behind the front door of every
home?
He pulled a
clip-top evidence bag from his jacket pocket and dropped the photos into it.
Then he went and sat back in the chair near the bed. He wanted to stay with the
girl until everyone else arrived.
An
hour and a half later Parrish was in a window booth in a diner on Joralemon
Street near St. Francis College, a plate of food in front of him. He'd managed
just a few mouthfuls, but that acid burning was back, somewhere low in the base
of his gut. An ulcer perhaps. If he saw a doctor he would be told it was the
booze.
Cut back on
the booze,
the guy would say.
Man your age should remember that the body hurts faster, heals slower.
Parrish perused
the half-dozen pages of notes he'd taken in Danny Lange's place. There was
nothing much of anything. Deputy Coroner had shipped the girl out, tied and
tagged, and she would be autopsied tonight or, more likely, tomorrow. Coroner's
initial findings at the scene accorded with his own.
'Thumb prints
here and here,' he told Parrish. 'Fingers here and here and here. Marks are
darker on the left side of her neck, which means whoever choked her was more
than likely a rightie. You can't be absolute on that, but it's a strong
possibility.'
The DC had
checked beneath her fingernails for skin, combed her hair and her pubes for
foreigns, checked inside her mouth, looked for cuts, bruises, abrasions, bite
marks, needle punctures, indications of tape adhesive on the ankles and wrists,
rope-burns, signs of restraint, subcutaneous hemorrhaging, external residues of
toxic elements, semen, saliva and blood. She was pretty clean.
'I can do a rape
kit, confirm COD, and get word back to you within twenty-four, maybe
forty-eight hours,' the DC had said. 'Might be able to get a tox done, but
that'll take a little longer. At a guess, she's been dead ... I dunno . . .
about eight hours, I'd say. Laking indicates that this is the primary. I don't
think she was moved.'
They pressed
latex and Parrish left.
So Parrish went
to a diner and had tuna casserole, a bagel, some coffee. The casserole was good
but the appetite was gone. He kept thinking back to Eve, to the fact that he
couldn't get it up that morning. Seemed he was losing everything by inches. He
was on the way out. He needed to take some exercise, cut back on the smokes,
the drinks, the hydrogenated fats, the carbs, the shakes and chips and Oreos.
He needed a vacation, but he knew he wouldn't take one.
His father used to say something:
What do you
want most? And what would you do to get it?
To this he could now add his own variation:
What do you
fear most? And what would you do to avoid it?
Right now, what
he most wanted to avoid was another session with the psychotherapist.
