St. Patrick's Day Murder (26 page)

“You don’t have to. I think my prestige in the community just went up several notches.”

When I hung up, we dashed out of the apartment. The weather had suddenly decided it was spring, something the calendar had decreed a couple of weeks earlier. It would have been a wonderful day to walk in the park or sit with the sun on your back and read a good book. Instead we drove to Rikers Island.

Rikers Island is actually part of the Bronx, but you approach it through the Steinway section of Queens, Steinway as in pianos. The old piano factory is located there. A causeway formally known as the Rikers Island Bridge crosses Rikers Island Channel and Bowery Bay and you can see LaGuardia Airport from it. Jack gave me the Cook’s tour as we approached the island, a place I could have happily lived a complete life without ever visiting.

He had arranged our meeting while I was still asleep. An irritable young lawyer with thinning hair and a newish-looking attaché case reluctantly joined us. On this day, he would surely have preferred to be doing what I wanted to do,
but I was grateful he had given up his leisure and I told him so.

What you never forget about Rikers is the smell and the noise. The odor of unwashed bodies competes with the equally unpleasant smell of the disinfectant used to cleanse the effects of the other. The two together made me long for the fresh air we had only minutes before left behind. The other assault on your senses is the buzz. There doesn’t seem to be a moment of stillness in that place. Some voices rise above the constant murmur, announcements are made over a public-address system, there are angry shouts and bursts of laughter.

For Jack there was the unsettling moment when he relinquished his gun. No one is armed at Rikers, including the corrections officers. Nor, it turned out, was the prisoner we were visiting handcuffed.

We met Johnny Waldo in a room with a couple of small, high windows, a table bolted to the floor, and benches bolted down as well. This was a place where no one in a fit of anger could pick up and throw furniture. Waldo had a face marked with adolescent acne, a nose that may have been broken once or twice, and a sullen look that didn’t make me feel confident we would get anything out of him. Tim O’Brien remained outside the conference room, and by agreement, I did the talking.

“You remember the night two and a half years ago that Detective Moore was killed?” I began.

“Yeah,” Waldo said, looking at me with curiosity.

“We have some pictures for you to look at. I’d like to know if anyone in any of these pictures was in the park that night.”

Jack handed me the first layout, and I placed it in front of Waldo. Each layout contained eight snapshots, each about an inch and a half square, of police officers. Tim O’Brien, who had put them together for us this morning, had cropped the pictures so that very little uniform showed. For the most part, they looked like men staring into a camera, a hint of shirt collar and tie, and little else. The way the layouts were arranged, one of the members of Moore’s old team was on each one; the other pictures were selected because they
showed some similarity to the person we were interested in. The layout with Ricardo Ramirez contained only Hispanic officers. The one with George Barker, who sported a thick mustache, contained seven other mustachioed faces. I put the one with Barker on the table first. Waldo looked at the faces carefully.

“None of these,” he said.

I tried the Hispanics next and got the same response. Paul Dorgan, a typical son of Ireland, nestled among the faces from the Emerald Society. Waldo pushed it away after looking at it. Finally I showed him the layout with Macklin.

“This is the guy that busted me last week,” Waldo said, pointing.

“Did you see him in the park two and a half years ago?”

“I never seen him before last Friday night.”

“You sure of that?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Waldo said, as if he were picking a fight.

“Thank you, Johnny,” I said. I picked up the last layout and handed it to Jack.

“That’s it?” the lawyer asked, with disgust. He had put on a clean shirt for five minutes of work and he wasn’t happy about it.

“There was a guy in the park that night,” Waldo said as I got up.

“There was?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t any of them guys. It was someone else.”

“Would you recognize him?”

“Yeah. You show him to me, I’ll recognize him. What’s it gonna get me? I didn’t kill nobody. You know it and I know it.”

“We’ll talk about that,” Jack said.

“You’re damn right we will,” the lawyer said. “My client’s been very cooperative.”

We walked out of the room, and Johnny Waldo was led away into the unceasing smell and din. Watching him go, I felt an unreasonable welling of sympathy for him.

“I forgot about Lieutenant Connelly,” I said to Jack.

“You think a lieutenant was playing hit man that night?” O’Brien said, with disbelief.

“Well, someone was. We’ll just have to leave it for another day.” I felt discouraged. I had been so sure Waldo would identify Macklin as the man.

The lawyer reminded Jack again that his client had been very helpful. Then he ran ahead of us to get out of the place. Jack retrieved his gun, along with O’Brien, and we went out to the parking lot together. I didn’t say anything till we were in the car. We drove onto the causeway to Queens and then back toward Brooklyn.

“Petra knows,” I said.

“If we can break her.”

I hated the sound of it. Somehow her involvement in this was all wrong, but I was convinced she was part of it.

When we got back to the apartment, I called Melanie Gross. Sister Benedicta came to the phone.

“You have very nice friends, Christine,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“With smart children. I like smart children.”

“I hope you’re all right.”

“I feel very safe here. I got a phone call yesterday that worried me. It was a man who said he was a police detective working on Harry’s murder and he wanted to meet me and talk to me. It didn’t sound right. I told him I’d be at the convent and then I decided to visit you, even though I called and you weren’t home.”

“You did the right thing. Did Melanie give you that list of names?”

“They mean nothing to me. But there was a name Harry mentioned. I’ve been racking my brain to get at it. It’s right there, but I can’t get it out.”

“Could it have been Connelly?” I asked hopefully.

“No, no,” she said impatiently.

“Maybe it’ll come back to you. I’ll be home later and we’ll go out to dinner and relax.”

“It was a name like—Oh, I don’t know. It was something like—” She sighed into the phone. “Cereal,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

“Searle?” I said. “Sorrel?”

“No, no,” she said again. “That stuff we used to eat when we were children.” She’d been a child about fifty years before I had and I had eaten Rice Krispies and cornflakes until I switched to English muffins in my teens. “Didn’t your mother ever cook you cereal?” she said.

“Farina?” I asked as it hit me.

“That’s it, that’s it. I couldn’t think of it. Harry said a man named Farina was the middleman, the one who sold the drugs. Do you know him?”

“I certainly do. God bless you, Sister.”

“And the same to you. I’ll see you when you get home.”

There was music playing inside Petra’s apartment. She hadn’t answered the downstairs bell, so we had waited for someone to open the door for us. I pushed the doorbell and heard her approach.

“Who is it?”

“Chris.”

“Go away.”

“Petra, I have to talk to you about Joe.”

The music stopped. The bolt was turned and the chain released. The door opened, and a somber Petra let us in. The shelves were empty and there were cartons on the floor. She was packing to leave.

“You’re ruining my life, do you know that?” she said. She looked a wreck. She was wearing old jeans and a faded floppy top; her hair hung limp and out of control. Although she never looked made up, this afternoon her face was pale and washed out. She walked on bare feet to a chair and sat down. “I didn’t do anything, but everyone wants something from me. Well, they all got it and there’s nothing left. I’m going back to Germany, where they can’t get me anymore.”

“When did you meet Joe Farina?” I asked.

“Last year sometime. In the fall maybe.”

“You went out with him?”

“A few times.”

“Did he introduce you to Ray?”

“He took me to a bar where Ray went sometimes. He said Ray was a dirty cop and they needed information on him.”

“Why did you do it, Petra?”

She looked desolate. “I had problems with immigration. My visa. Joe said … He threatened me if I wouldn’t do it.”

“Tell us what you did.”

She took a deep breath. “We talked a lot. I asked him questions. But I didn’t get anywhere. Finally, one day I told Ray to go buy something while I stayed in his place and made coffee. I went through his closet and his desk and found some notes and things. Then I looked in the drawers in his dresser and there was the letter from Jean. I knew right away who it was and I guessed what happened.”

“You told Joe?”

She nodded. “I told him and I said that was it. I said Ray and I were finished; we broke up and it was over. I couldn’t get any more information for Joe.”

But of course, that had been enough. Unsubstantiated information on an overheard.

“You mentioned Tom Macklin,” Petra said.

“Did you know him, too?”

“Maybe I met him once, I don’t remember. But Joe used to talk about him a lot. He said Tom had worked for the Auto Crime Division for a year and he could get into any car in ten seconds—except a Mercedes.” She pronounced it in German, and spoke with pride. “That took longer. They’re very secure cars.”

So they had someone who could steal a car easily.

“What else, Petra?”

“Nothing,” she said vehemently. “I was crazy about Ray. I couldn’t believe what Joe said about him. After that, I never went to Ray’s apartment with him again.”

“What about the day Ray was arrested? You had the key.”

She covered her face with her hands for a moment. “When he called me and told me, I went to his apartment to get the letter. I didn’t know what I would tell him, but I wanted to get it out of there. It was the first time I ever used the key. I went in and someone was there, a man with a big mustache. I said, ‘Who are you?’ and he pushed me out of the way and ran out. I was shaking, I was so scared. I wanted to call the police, but I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do. I locked the door and looked for the letter. It wasn’t where I
found it the last time. When I saw some kids playing in the driveway, I left. If he came back, they would see him.”

The mustache could have been Barker, but we didn’t have the layouts with us.

“Did you ever see Joe again?”

“Never. He moved in with some woman he was seeing. He was seeing her before he met me and he went back to her after.” She clasped her hands and looked at me. “You talked to Ray, didn’t you? He knows, doesn’t he?”

“We talked to him last night before we saw you. He didn’t believe you had done anything.”

Her eyes filled. “He won’t talk to me. I called and called. Is it my fault Scotty got killed?”

“It’s not your fault,” Jack said. “Don’t go away, Petra. Nobody’s going to immigration about you.”

“Did Joe do it?” she asked in a small voice.

“We don’t know. Chris, I think we have one more stop to make.”

We drove to a nearby Laundromat, and Jack called Sharon Moore’s number. Joe Farina was working. I directed Jack to the Moore house. Farina’s car wasn’t around, but Sharon’s was in the open garage. I was starting to feel distinctly ill. Petra’s situation was bad enough; this one was much worse.

Sharon answered the door. She was wearing a bright red shirt with jeans and she looked better than she had yesterday morning. The furniture was all back in place, her catharsis over. I introduced her to Jack, and we went into the living room and sat down. I could hear kids inside and out. It was Saturday afternoon and they were having fun. I wasn’t.

“Hi,” she said, shaking hands with Jack.

“We’d like to ask you some questions,” Jack said. “There’s nothing official and you don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to.”

Some of the color left her face. “Is this about Gavin?”

“It’s about a lot of things,” I said. “It’s about Joe.”

“Joe?” Her face tightened. “What about Joe?”

“Do you remember where he was on St. Patrick’s Day?”

“He was home.”

“All day?”

“He was on call. He said they’d call him if they needed him.”

“Did they?”

“Yes. They did.”

“When?” I asked.

“Late. I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. He took it downstairs. He came up and said there was trouble somewhere, rowdy kids or something. He had to go.” She looked frightened. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Mrs. Moore,” Jack said, “do you remember when he came home?”

“I was sleeping. I really don’t know. That was the night of the shooting, wasn’t it?”

“Officer Scott McVeigh. He was my friend.”

“Why do you think Joe would know anything about it?”

“How long have you known him?”

“A long time. He knew Gavin. He knew the whole team. We used to run into him at, you know, get-togethers. He was always very nice to me. He still is.”

“Mrs. Moore, I don’t have a warrant and you can ask us to leave if you want, but I’d like to look at Joe’s gear, if he keeps any in the house.”

She stood and looked at each of us. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

I started over to help her, but she put her hand up. “It’s OK. It’s OK. This is because he knew about Scott McVeigh’s wife and Ray Hansen, isn’t it?”

I wondered if she had heard about that from “the wives,” as she had told me. “It’s about a lot of things.”

She looked directly at me. “Tell me he didn’t kill Gavin.”

“He didn’t.” But I didn’t add that someone had saved him the trouble.

“You can look all you want. It’s my house. You have my permission.”

She led the way upstairs. There were three bedrooms, one with the door closed. She opened it, and we went in. From the closet she pulled out a nylon bag, the kind people carry sporting equipment in, and put it on the bed. Jack opened it and looked inside without touching anything.