The Squad Room (28 page)

Without delay, and almost without further conversation, Simmons herded him into his car and drove him down to Beth Israel Hospital, on Sixteenth Street. When they were there, he marched his Captain straight into the Emergency Room. Typically for New York, the lobby was packed, and Morrison grimaced in dismay. Most cops believe that if you want to get sick, just visit any busy emergency room—and Morrison was no exception to this prejudice. But Simmons wasn’t hearing it. He walked right into the back with Morrison, sat him down on an empty gurney, and asked for the head nurse.

There is much in common between nurses and cops; they often seem to share a kindred spirit. Both groups deal with people at their lowest points in life, and are often misunderstood by the people they’re trying to help. Everyone in an emergency believes their case is the most important, and to such a person, someone for whom emergency is routine—for whom it is part of their job to prioritize emergencies objectively—can easily come off as aloof, or even cold. Only the professionals who deal with such emergencies daily can fully understand the heart that lies behind the professional manner. That said, though, a heart attack in progress was a high-priority emergency, no matter whom it was happening to; and Simmons was afraid that was exactly what Morrison was experiencing.

In a few minutes, a tall, pretty Hispanic woman, who by her actions was clearly in charge, came out from behind the central desk. She scrutinized Morrison closely.

“How can I help you?” she asked Simmons.

“I think my Captain here is having a heart attack,” Simmons said. “He’s having chest pains now.”

The head nurse grabbed another nurse, and together they moved Morrison into a small area surrounded by a privacy curtain. As he was changing into a hospital gown, Morrison winced.

“The pain is pretty acute, huh?” the head nurse asked him.

“Nothing I haven’t felt before,” he lied. “I’m sure I’ll be fine—I don’t need any of this fuss.”

The head nurse raised an eyebrow. “Let me be the judge of that,” she said. “You just lie back here. My name’s Nancy Dominguez.”

Morrison lay back on the bed. “Bill Morrison,” he said, wincing again as he raised an arm to gesture toward Simmons. “The worrywart over there is Sergeant Simmons.”

“Well, if you are having a heart attack, you’re lucky he’s got some sense in his head,” she said. “Now lie back! You cops always think you can tough it out. Trust me, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” Smiling, she held up several tie-downs for him to see.

“Phew, okay, okay,” he said, lying back. “Lady, you’d make a good interrogator.”

“I know it,” she said. “If I didn’t enjoy what I did so much—!” Simmons smiled at the pretty nurse. “You could interrogate me anytime.”

She looked him up and down with a smirk. “Honey,
you’d
give me everything I wanted to know in five minutes,” she laughed.

“That’d be a long night for Andre,” Morrison joked. All three laughed, and Morrison winced again, worse this time. The nurse quieted them down and began a preliminary examination.

Three hours and two doctors later, the diagnosis came back. Morrison, as it turned out, was suffering from a severe anxiety attack, brought on by stress at work and exacerbated by drinking. The ER doctor prescribed him some time off and a course of Xanax. Morrison accepted the diagnosis quietly, having absolutely no intention of taking either.

Having dressed, he walked out of the ER unit to find Sergeant Simmons in deep conversation with the head nurse. Simmons looked up at him.

“You ready to get going, Cap?” he asked.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Morrison said. Nancy handed Simmons a slip of paper.

“Call me anytime,” she said as Morrison pulled Simmons toward the door.

Outside, Morrison gave Simmons a questioning smile. “I have a heart-attack scare, and you go after the head nurse?” he asked.

“What can I say?” Simmons laughed. “She likes the same kind of music I do.”

31

Morrison rolled himself out of his bunk, headed to the shower, and hoped this day would be better than the last.

Sergeant McNamara was emerging from the shower as he went in.

Before he could duck inside, McNamara hollered out to him.

“Hey, Cap! You see the paper this morning?”

Morrison dropped his head, already aware of what he was going to see. He went back out to the squad room, picked up the paper, and sure enough, there it was.

COPYCAT KILLER LOOSE IN NEW YORK!

Thank God for journalistic integrity
, he thought, flipping to the story inside. It was even worse than the headline—nothing better than fear-mongering for the general public. He dropped the paper on the desk in disgust and retreated to the shower for five minutes of peace.

Meanwhile, in Mamaroneck, Detective O’Dell and Sergeant Rivera were waiting outside the pub where they’d arranged to meet Sergeant Gonzalez. The seasons were finally starting to turn to early spring—one of the best parts of living in the tri-state area—so they opted to wait outside in the cool, fresh air rather than inside the musty pub. They watched as several cars and SUVs came and went, with no sign of the Sergeant.

Finally, an older-model Ford pulled up, and they could both tell from the look of the driver, when he got out, that their rendezvous had arrived. Though he was dressed in civvies, his clean-cut appearance and almost at-attention walk gave him up for a military man. Rivera extended a hand.

“Sergeant Gonzalez,” he said. “I’m Frankie Rivera. Thank you for your service.”

The other man smiled. “Ernesto Gonzalez,” he said, shaking Rivera’s hand. “You know, I’m not too used to being thanked for that.”

“I know how you feel,” Rivera said. “Jeffrey here and I—Sergeant Gonzalez, Jeffrey O’Dell—we were both Vietnam guys, so we get it. Hey, at least they don’t spit on you anymore, right?”

“That’s true,” Gonzalez said. “I guess times have improved that way.”

Laughing, the three of them made their way into the pub. It wasn’t much on atmosphere, but at this hour it was quieter than most diners. They chatted a while about their respective military experiences and their reception on coming home, encouraging the bond of shared experience they had already between them; then, once the coffee had been refilled, they got down to the matter at hand.

Jeffrey O’Dell opened the manila folder he’d had sitting on the table in front of them since they arrived, and turned a photo of Lou Galipoli towards Gonzalez.

“Yep, that’s him,” Gonzalez said immediately, anticipating O’Dell’s question. “I still can’t believe the guy’s a cop, though.”

Rivera glanced over at O’Dell. “Well, Jeffrey and I were hoping you’d elaborate on that a bit,” he said. “What exactly do you know about Louis Galipoli?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“I mean, we’d appreciate you telling us everything you know about him, so wherever you want to start would be fine.”

“All right,” Gonzalez said, with absolutely no hesitation. “I’ll start by saying that he’s the biggest piece of garbage I’ve ever met.”

Rivera and O’Dell laughed. Gonzalez looked at them, his smile stony.

“I mean that,” he said quietly.

Rivera nodded. “I know, it’s nothing we haven’t heard, believe me. It’s just—well, they’re pretty strong words for a guy who was awarded a Silver Star.”

Ernesto Gonzalez looked as though he’d been slapped.

“There is no way
this
guy”—he stabbed a finger roughly at the photograph—“won a Silver Star.”

“I know it’s hard to believe,” O’Dell said, “but it’s in his military records—we looked up his applicant folder from when he was coming into the department.”

Gonzalez shook his head, adamant. “I don’t care what paperwork it’s on—I cannot believe
he
did anything that would be even
remotely
close to deserving a Silver Star. Absolutely not. This guy was on his way to a court martial during our time at Camp Falcon!”

“Court martial?”
Rivera asked, his eyes wide.

Gonzalez sighed. “You guys really
don’t
know much about Louis Galipoli, do you? Okay, I’ll start at the beginning, then. When I was a Staff Sergeant, he was assigned to my platoon; and from the first day, I could see there was something off with this guy. I mean, the
first day.
And it didn’t take long for my instincts to be proven right by his actions, either.

“Being the platoon commander, I didn’t hang out with the rank and file all the time; but pretty soon after he came on, several soldiers of African-American descent came to me to complain that Galipoli was a racist. You know how it is—as soldiers in a combat zone, you tend to rib each other in ways that back home might not be considered appropriate. So at first, I thought that might be what was going on here. I talked to the guys about it, then sat down with Galipoli to talk about what the boundaries were when it came to the platoon, and what I would tolerate. I should have seen it during that first interview, but I didn’t.”

“Should have seen what?” O’Dell asked.

“His attitude. He could have cared less about the brotherhood of being a soldier, or that his life might depend on his platoon mates, or
any of that. He was completely callous toward what anyone else thought. Anyway, like I said, I should have started a file on him then, but I gave him a bit of play, since he was new. It was a big mistake.

“The next incident involved a female soldier named Eleanora—pretty woman, could have been a model. Women in the military have changed since back in the Vietnam days, you know—back then, most if not all of your enlisted females were nurses. Nowadays they work in a lot of positions, and they end up working closer to combat than in the past. Anyway, Eleanora came to me to complain about Galipoli. She’s African-American too, so at first I thought it was the race issue again; but no. Once again, he’d gone way beyond anyone else with the comments, this time of a sexual nature. She told me he wouldn’t leave her alone—and not in the usual stupid
I want to be your boyfriend
kind of way. This was more in a degrading, chauvinistic way. The things he’d said were really vile, really disgusting.

“He never physically did anything to Eleanora—probably because she was a tough cookie who would have shot him if he tried anything—but he was unrelenting, and was moving toward stalker status before she brought it to me. This time I didn’t hesitate. He was written up and ended up in the stockade after Lieutenant Lyons was done with him.”

“Sounds like a real piece of work,” Rivera said. “But so far, it doesn’t sound like he was much more than mouth.”

“Well, that’s what I thought, Sarge,” Gonzalez said. “But wrong again. That was only the beginning. He wasn’t out of the stockade for more than a week when another female soldier named Cynthia came to me. She was another good-looking woman—but when she walked into my tent, she was a mess. Took me half an hour to calm her down before she could talk. When I finally got her to tell me what was wrong, she told me Galipoli had just tried to rape her in the showers.”

Rivera turned his head in disgust. “Are you shitting me? He tried to
rape
another soldier, and he ends up getting a Silver Star?”

“Now you know why I don’t buy it. Anyway, this time we had some physical evidence: Cynthia had bruises on her face from where Galipoli
had slapped her around. He really beat her up. The only thing that stopped him raping her, apparently, was that another soldier walked into the shower, and he ran off.”

“Did the other soldier see who it was?” O’Dell asked.

“You bet he did, and he spoke up about it too. So I had the MPs bring Galipoli before Lieutenant Lyons again. Obviously this one was going up the chain, so I sat down and did a file on the incident, and delivered it to the Lieutenant myself.”

“Can you remember when this all happened?” Rivera asked.

“Absolutely—October 6, 2006.”

Rivera’s eyes widened. “How do you remember that specific date?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s a day I’ll never forget,” Gonzalez sighed. “Later that night we got hit with enemy mortar fire. Blew the base to hell. I took some shrapnel to my left side—I’m lucky to be alive. They airlifted me out, along with a few other soldiers who got hit that night.”

“Do you know what happened to Galipoli after the attack?” O’Dell asked.

“Well, I’d
thought
he was court martialed, but now it sounds like he wasn’t. I didn’t follow it after that. I was hurt pretty bad—I spent the next two years coming back from my injury.”

“What about Lieutenant Lyons? Have you seen him since you were injured?”

Gonzalez nodded gravely. “He got it worse than me that night. His tent was right next to a munitions truck that took a direct hit. He was killed in the explosion.”

Rivera and O’Dell were silent for a long moment before Rivera spoke.

“What would you say,” he said slowly, “if I told you it was Lieutenant Lyons who signed off on Galipoli’s Silver Star?”

Sergeant Gonzalez stared at both of them, dumbfounded.
“What
did you say?”

“That Lieutenant Lyons signed off on—”

“I heard you—it’s just—it’s impossible,” Gonzalez stammered, furious. “Lieutenant Lyons was going to recommend a court martial for this piece of crap, not a Silver Star. It has to be a mistake. Listen,” he added intensely, “I don’t know how it happened, but it’s bullshit. Complete bullshit. If he’s anything like the Galipoli I knew, that guy ought to be in jail.”

Rivera and O’Dell nodded. “Do you have anyone we can talk to about what happened to him?” O’Dell asked.

“Yeah, definitely,” Gonzalez said. “I have a couple of contacts who were also at Camp Falcon; they must know what happened to Galipoli. Rich Dyer, particularly—he’d be a good man for you to talk to.”

“All right, make sure to get that to us,” Rivera said. “We don’t buy the guy’s story either, but we’re having a hard time making anything stick.”

“A Silver Star,” Gonzalez said. “That’s absolutely unbelievable. You know, I was thinking of becoming a cop, now that I’m done with military service—but with guys like that on the force, I don’t know!”