Saints Of New York (54 page)

Leycross
was McKee's next intended victim. He needed to remove the threat without Amanda
Leycross ever realizing what had happened, what might have happened, the fact
that she was spending her days being watched, considered, targeted. To live
one's life knowing that a killer had almost taken that life away from you . . .
well, such a thing would not rest easy in anyone's mind. Was there something about
you that made you a victim? If you had been chosen once, then would you be
chosen again?

No,
Amanda Leycross needed to walk right through this unscathed and unaware.

Parrish
got up. He left behind half a cup of coffee and a danish barely touched.

Perhaps
it was true that some things were so well-hidden they would never be known,
that some cases would never be solved. Perhaps all victims were not created
equal. Maybe there were people all over the city who wouldn't make it to
Christmas. The Leycross girl would not be one of them.

There
were mementos. Always. Invariably. They would be close to McKee. Parrish had to
find them. And if that meant the end of his career then so be it.

'I slept fine, better than I have
done for a while.'

'And how much did you drink?'

'Last night? Last night I didn't
drink anything.'

'This is good, Frank. This is
progress.'

'I believe so, yes. And I have to
tell you that I feel more settled in myself.'

'How so?'

'Like I've resolved some things.
It's hard to explain. Perhaps it's nothing more complicated than spending all
this time talking about stuff. It's all baggage, right?'

'A lot of it, yes.'

'And you carry it around and
around and around, and when you actually get a chance to put the suitcases down
and look inside them you find that you've been carrying a lot of worthless
crap.'

'Some of it has value, surely?'

'Perhaps some of it, yes, but
mostly it's your own unfounded fears about what other people might think, and
what other people really meant when they said something, and the rest of it is
indecision.'

'I must say that you sound a good
deal more positive today than almost at any time since you've been coming
here.'

'Well, like I said, I feel like
I've resolved something important.'

'Do you want to tell me what that
is?'

'Not really, no. Well, I'll say
that I have an idea about where I should go from here, what I should do with
myself—'

'Career-wise you mean?'

'No,
nothing as dramatic as that. More like my attitude towards what I'm dealing
with, where to go with the current case.'

'You
feel it's going to break?'

'Yes
I do.'

'What
has happened? Have you made some good progress with your case - this man you
suspect?'

'I
have, yes.'

'That's
good. Really good. I'm very pleased to hear it. It highlights the pattern we
spoke of before, the point where you start to think about things other than the
internal. I believe that you're now at the stage where we can - we should -
start really talking about tomorrow as opposed to today, about your plans, the
direction you're going in. This relates to your life, how you'll deal with your
kids as they make their own lives - their careers and marriages or whatever. I
also think we need to start looking at whether or not you are going to spend
the rest of your life alone, or if you need to start considering the
possibility of a new relationship.'

'Is
this a roundabout way of asking me out on a date, Doctor? Because, you know, if
you want to go on a date you only have to say so.'

'Frank
. . .'

'I
know, I know, I'm only kidding. I get what you say. It makes sense, but it's
Friday now. I think you should give me the weekend to get this thing all
wrapped up, and then we'll start talking about all that stuff you were just
saying.'

'Did
you listen to what I was saying?'

'Of
course I did. Jesus, Marie, what do you
think
I am? Ignorant?'

'No,
Frank, I don't think you're ignorant. I just think we need to start tackling
these issues, and seeing as we've made some progress I don't want to
backslide.'

'I'm
not going to backslide. I'm not planning on drinking myself into a coma this
weekend, if that's what you're worried about. This thing is going to end, and
once it has you're going to get a hell of a lot more of my attention.'

'So
the weekend?'

'Sure,
the weekend. Skip our session tomorrow, Sunday is as it is, and then we'll get
together again on Monday morning.'

'Right. If
that's what you want to do, then Monday it is. And have a think about what I've
mentioned. You know - the future, where you go from here, new relationships . .
. okay?' 'Okay.'

'Excellent. Have a good weekend, Frank.'
'I plan to.'

  
'You okay, Frank?'

Parrish
looked up. He'd been staring out of the window, unaware of anyone else in the
room. Radick was looking at him quizzically.

'Okay?
Sure I'm okay. Why d'you ask?'

Radick
shrugged. 'You seem elsewhere.'

'I
was thinking about my father.'

'What
about your father?'

Parrish
smiled drily. 'Nothing. Nothing about my father, Jimmy.'

What could he have told Radick?
My father was a
crook. He was the best of the best - apparently - but really he was a fucking
crook. A good one sure, but as corrupt as they came.

Parrish
had left Marie Griffin's office an hour before. Since that time he'd thought of
nothing but his father. The Mighty John Parrish. He remembered when he was
killed, what they reported as having happened, what had
really
happened, and he remembered also how
he'd felt in that moment. There was no other way to spell it. Frank Parrish had
been
relieved.

September
30th, 1992. Eleven days time and it would be sixteen years since it happened.
Sometimes it felt like yesterday, other times it felt like an entirely
different life. Parrish had been twenty- eight years old, married the better
part of seven years, Robert was all of six, Caitlin just four. Clare had been
more of the woman he married, less of the nightmare she became. Later, after
the divorce, Parrish had asked himself whether his father's death had been a
significant factor in the beginning of the marital dissolution. Clare and John
had been close. John Parrish called her
the
daughter I never had.
She took his
death badly. She had to be sedated after the funeral, and then she spent a
month sloping around the house in sweats, her hair unwashed, chain-smoking,
drinking vodka after lunch. She snapped out of it soon enough. The kids pulled
her through far more than he had. He had yet to be made Detective; that
wouldn't come for another four years. He was still busting his hump, taking on
extra shifts, doing the legwork and groundwork and donkey-work that he'd been
told was the road to success. Bullshit. Making Detective was as much about
showing up and not fucking up
as anything
else.

The
events of that day were clear in his mind, as clear now as they had been a
decade and a half earlier. Whoever hit them hit them both. John Parrish and his
long-time partner, George Buranski. George used to come over with his wife,
Marie. Marie was all bouffant hair and cheap perfume. She brought angel food
cake every time. She made it herself, and it tasted like crap. How someone
could make angel food cake taste that bad Parrish didn't know, but somehow she
managed it. They'd stay a few hours, Marie talking to Frank's mother,
Katherine. Cop wives together. They knew precisely what John and George were
discussing in back of the den, out in the yard with their Buds and burgers,
sitting in front of the house in George's car like there were listening
devices planted in the living room and the kitchen. Paranoid as hell, the pair
of them. Sometimes George left with a brown paper grocery bag stacked with
fifty-dollar bills. Sometimes he brought one with him and left it behind. Frank
knew to say nothing, ask nothing, look nowhere but straight ahead. He knew to
say
Thank you, Marie
when she gave him a bottle of Crown Royal for his birthday, another for
Christmas. That was the best these people could do. Tens of thousands of
dollars, and all they could come up with was Crown Royal and angel food cake.
Cheap bastards.

So
September 1992. Things had been on the upslide for years. The money was coming
in, very little of it was going out. The Saints were cleaning up left, right
and center. The Brooklyn Organized Crime Task Force was into everything that
was worth being into. IAD did their periodic check-ups; IAD gave them a clean
bill. And then something went bad. To this day Parrish had been unable to work
out precisely what had happened, but it related to a bank on Lafayette near the
Classon Avenue subway station. The Saints never did their own grunt-work. They
weren't the workers, they were the management. Parrish had looked into it a
little later, carefully peering round the edges of the internal investigation.
His father had been involved. People were obviously concerned about what Frank
might know, what Frank might say. Last thing they needed was the cop-son of the
most decorated anti-organized crime, OCCB/BOCTF veteran spilling his guts on
Channel 9. He got looks and comments in the corridors.
You okay there, Frankie? Everything alright at home, Frankie? Hey, Frankie,
how's your ma doing? She holding up?
It went that
way for a moment or so, and then they figured he was good. He wasn't gonna bust
open like an overripe watermelon. He was going to keep it in-house, under
wraps, close to his chest.

It
was then that he'd started looking. Carefully at first, checking out what had
been reported about the heist that took place that Wednesday afternoon at East
Coast Mercantile Savings. It wasn't a major league bank. Routine
day-to-day traffic, three ATMs in the street, one inside; four tellers, a loan
advisor, a mortgage guy and a business consultant. Beyond that there was a
manager, an assistant manager, a duty security guard. He was an ex-cop called
Mitchell Warner, right out of Brooklyn's 15th, and evidently he had been their
inside man. Of course that small fact never came to light, but reading between
the lines - taking into consideration that Warner was in the restroom when the
heist kicked off, the fact that they knew he was in there and had someone
waiting outside the door for when he exited, and most of all the fact that he
was found in his car with a
self-administered
.25 caliber bullet in his head
eight hours after the fact. . . well, road signs were road signs and they led
only one way as far as Frank Parrish was concerned.

The
heist was carried out by four men. It went according to plan. They entered the
bank at eleven forty-one a.m., exited at eleven fifty-six. Across the street
was a barbershop, and it was from there that an off-duty cop called Richard
Jackson had seen them. He came out with his hair wet and his .38 drawn. He was
not on the Saints payroll, couldn't have been, for if he had been he would've
known to leave well alone. This was official business, no question about it,
and the last thing they needed was some gung-ho jarhead uniform gatecrashing
the party. But gatecrash it he did, and got a gut full of double-ought for his
trouble. He was thrown back through the plate glass window of the barbershop,
and the four men were away like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Had it not been for
the dead cop it would have wound up another unsolved matter for Robbery. The
Feds would have trodden on everyone's toes, but they would only have trodden so
long. They were as underpaid and overworked as everyone else. No, it was
definitely the dead cop that soured the pie. All of a sudden Richard Jackson
was a hero, an off-duty cop in a barbershop that tried to do the right thing.
He didn't have a radio, couldn't call for back-up, had asked the barber to call
911, which he did. But 911 responses were always minutes, never seconds, and
the speed at which these things unfolded meant that by the time they got to the
scene most of the damage was done. Whoever was going to get shot was shot
already. Whoever was going to die had already done so. In that instance it was
Jackson, and whoever might have come along from IAD and Robbery to make it go
away couldn't. Not this time.