Slow Burn (12 page)

O’H
ARA HAD
his men take Rachel and the goon I’d knocked out back to the Twelfth Precinct for holding. I’d wanted to start questioning them right there in the apartment, but O’Hara was driving me uptown in my car instead, by orders of Chief Andrew J. Carmichael himself. O’Hara took Bleeker to Tenth Street, then Tenth over to Sixth Avenue for the long ride north.

I’d known Officer Liam O’Hara for over a decade. He was just as crooked as the rest of us, but a capable beat cop. He was also one of the biggest gossip mongers in the department, which made him a favorite of Archie Doyle and Terry Quinn. Whatever O’Hara didn’t know, he’d find out. What he couldn’t find out, he made up. O’Hara lived by a single golden rule: never let the truth get in the way of a good story. It made him the worst possible man to have around now that I was trying to keep this thing under wraps.

There was only one difference between Liam O’Hara and Wendell Bixby. Bixby didn’t spread every rumor he heard. I kept expecting O’Hara to pump me for information about why Carmichael wanted to see me, but he didn’t. He just concentrated on his driving and kept to himself.

And if a man like O’Hara was this quiet, that meant only one thing: O’Hara already knew why Carmichael wanted to see me. And that meant the whole world knew about the kidnapping by now. The news hounds. The Feds. Everybody.

That feeble advantage I’d had in this case was gone. That much was certain.

What I didn’t know is if Loomis volunteered the information or if someone weaseled it out of him. Either way, the jig was up, and I was in a hell of a lot of trouble. I wanted to take a look at the notebook I’d found in Jack’s dresser, but I didn’t want O’Hara to know I had it. I didn’t know what might be in it. It could’ve been a list of his friend’s phone numbers, or it could’ve been a diary. It could’ve been anything.

Since I couldn’t look at it in private, I put it out of my mind for the moment. I decided not to think about what Carmichael was going to do to me once we got to the mansion. I looked out the window and catch up on my people-watching instead.

Thanks to the ongoing construction of the new Rockefeller Center project several blocks north, traffic along Sixth Avenue crawled. It gave me plenty of time to watch the throngs of wilted people who trudged along through another hot August morning in the city.

Men and women of all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were headed to work. Many were on their way to soup kitchens or breadlines. Most of them had been somebody once, somebody they weren’t anymore and might never be again. Some of them had never amounted to much of anything at all. They were beat, and, worst of all, they knew it.

Starting over just wasn’t in the cards for most of them. All of their tomorrows were yesterdays. All their dreams were dead and ruined, haunted by the ghosts of who they used to be. They were either too old or too tired, no matter what their age might be. Whatever they’d lost had taken too much out of them.

And I’m not just talking about losing money. There are worse things to lose than money. Much worse. I’d learned that when my wife took the girls from me. And I had a feeling my lesson wasn’t over. Not if Chief Carmichael had anything to say about it.

My gut dropped when we got to the corner of Sixty-Sixth and Fifth Avenue. The street was lined with double parked police cars—both marked and unmarked. The sidewalk on the Fifth Avenue side of the Van Dorn mansion was full of uniforms killing time, sweating on the hot pavement, waiting for orders from the bosses gathered inside.

A couple of the photographers camped out in front of the house lurched forward and took pictures of the car as we pulled in. I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. Time to take my medicine.

O'Hara grabbed my arm, his voice low. “I'll be here waiting for you when you come out. No matter how long it takes, and no matter what happens. Whether you walk out that door or get thrown through the window, I'll be here, ready to take you wherever you want to go.”

I didn’t know what to say. I heard myself ask, “Why?”

“Because you’re in trouble for trying to do something admirable, which is more than I can say for myself.” He pointed at the mansion. “And it’s more than any of those high-ranking bastards in there can say for themselves, either. They’re just as crooked as the rest of us, Charlie. The difference is, you tried to do something to make up for it. And don’t you dare forget that. No matter what they say or do to you. Don’t you dare forget that.”

O’Hara put the car in park with the same resolve as an explorer who places his country’s flag in a mountain top. “Besides, Doyle might be gone, but you and me are still Tammany, and Tammany takes care of its own. I’m staying here.”

O’Hara’s speech was still soaking in when someone jerked open my door for me. It was one of Carmichael’s clean shaven cronies, leaning into the car, grinning down at me. Unfortunately, it was the closest thing I’d seen to a real smile all day.

“Let’s go, Doherty. Chief’s waiting.”

P
LENTY OF
familiar faces stood out among the cops on the street in front of the mansion. Cops I’d worked with back when I was in Vice. Cops I’d gotten out of jams with their bosses, or their bookies, or worse. Cops I’d done favors for, once upon a time — favors big and small. Transfers and promotions. Tickets to the Giants for their kids. Choice assignments come Christmastime. Things like that.

Not one of the bastards looked my way as Carmichael’s goon walked me past them. Not a smile or a nod for me in the whole lousy bunch. I couldn’t blame them, really. Dead men were bad luck. Flashbulbs flared and beat reporters fired questions at me about what was going on. I ignored them while I followed Carmichael’s crony up the mansion steps. Cops kept the reporters at bay, but the flashes and the questions kept popping.

It felt like a standard perp walk, except I was the perp.

Carmichael’s boy pushed in the front door of the mansion like he owned the place and walked inside. I guessed we were past the point of ringing the doorbell and waiting politely for Soames to let us in.

The Chief’s boy slid open the pocket doors to the parlor where I’d spoken to Mr. Van Dorn only an hour or so earlier. A jerk of his thumb told me to go inside. But I waited a moment, seeing that the Chief was briefing a room full of his top commanders.

In all my time on the force, I’d never put anyone away for a capital bounce. I’d never gone to the death house to see anyone shot, hanged or electrocuted in the name of justice. In Vice, most people usually got themselves killed before I got anywhere near building a case against them, anyway.

But just at that moment, standing in the back of that parlor, I knew exactly what those poor bastards on death row felt like. Shuffling forward toward an inescapable fate that yawned before you. Nothing but a whole lot of pain and misery for your trouble. But I walked in anyway, and stood just inside the doorway. All alone.

The room had enough brass to rival the Philharmonic: Chiefs of departments, deputy chiefs, the borough commander, his people and a few others. Every one of them was appropriately serious and grim. Heads bowed, brows furrowed while they clustered around Chief Carmichael at the front of the room. If any man had ever been born to hand down orders to a room full of cops, it was Chief Andrew J. Carmichael.

Day or night, he always looked like he’d just stepped off a recruitment poster. His uniform was always crisp. His badge and the buttons on his tunic gleamed. The shine off his shoes would blind you if you looked at them at the wrong time of day.

Carmichael was six-foot-three, broad-shouldered and over two hundred pounds. He had gray wavy hair and clear blue eyes that had seen everything a man could expect to see in over twenty years on the force. And he kept on looking. He had a crooked lantern jaw and a flattened nose, both of which had been broken too many times in the line of duty to bother counting.

We’d known each other our whole lives and, up until two years before, we’d been closer than brothers. We’d walked through everything life and this city could throw at us, and we’d come out the other side, together. There’d been a time, not too long ago — before Reform — where I would’ve been in that briefing from the beginning, ready to carry out the orders that Carmichael couldn’t issue publicly, but needed to be done quietly.

Now I was stuck in the back, like some kid summoned to the principal’s office. Carmichael was in the middle of an order when he spotted me standing at the back of the room. He stopped mid-sentence and stared at me.

All the brass turned to see what the great man was looking at. Chief Carmichael wasn’t a man who stopped in midsentence without a damned good reason. Now that they were looking at me, I saw plenty of familiar faces in here, too. Husbands of wives I’d lied to about working overtime one weekend. Boyfriends of girls I’d paid off to get rid of inconvenient babies. Indiscretions I’d covered up for their sake and for the sake of the department. I saw about a dozen careers I’d saved and problems I’d smoothed over at one time or another. I guess you could say I’d built up a hell of a lot of IOUs over the years.

I’d always figured they’d come through for me if I ever needed them. But judging by the way they were looking at me, it looked like I was stuck with a fist full of blank paper.

No one was saying anything, so I decided I would. “Morning, Chief. Somebody said you wanted to see me?”

Carmichael’s mouth became a thin, colorless line as his chin slowly rose. When he spoke, he spoke to no one and everyone at the same time. “Give us the room, boys.”

A couple of dozen or so brass filed out past me. I could’ve stepped out of their way easy enough, but I made them walk around me. I wanted at least that much acknowledgement from the bastards.

I fished out my Luckies and lit one. As the room emptied, I saw Loomis sitting on the couch by the fireplace. He looked paler and more worn down than usual, which was saying something. He looked up at me as though he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. I knew how he felt.

Given the Van Dorns’ deep pockets and family name, I would’ve expected Mayor Jimmy Walker to be there in person. I was surprised to see Deputy Mayor Horace “Pinky” Flynn standing next to Carmichael instead. Flynn had been Mayor Walker’s right hand almost from the beginning, a Tammany hack through and through. A backslapper, a glad-hander extraordinaire. A fixer who kept the river of dirty money flowing from the streets to where it needed to go: Judges, ward bosses, district attorneys. And police chiefs. Chief Andrew J. Carmichael, to be exact.

I ought to know. I used to give Pinky his envelopes from Doyle personally.

Pinky might’ve been one of the most powerful men in the city, but you’d never know it by looking at him. He was one of those dumpy political types who always had a quick smile on hand, as if smiling made the shit he shoveled stink a bit less. He was giving me one of those smiles now.

Someone slid the pocket doors shut behind me. It sounded like a thunderclap.

Carmichael looked at me for a long time from the front of the empty room before saying anything.

And I looked right back at him. “What have you got to say for yourself, Detective?” Carmichael said. He looked at my lit cigarette. “And who the hell said you could smoke in here?”

“I thought a condemned man was entitled to a last cigarette.” I walked further into the room. “Christ, Andy, what’s with the formalities all of a sudden? We’re all family here, aren’t we? Hell, even Loomis is a cousin of sorts.” I saw Flynn’s nervous smile strain wider. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he kept them busy flattening down his suit. I threw him a wink to steady him down. “How you been keeping, Pinky? Haven’t seen you in a while, not since old Andy here found religion. What’s—”