Gardened of the Damned

by Blake Banner

  She paused and made a few more interlocking rings, like she was trying to link her thoughts. When she spoke again, she was staring at the table.

  “Stone, my mom and dad were murdered, destroyed body and soul, by a bent cop. Not just a bent cop, a cop who was sadistic and cruel and violent. When I met you, when we were partnered, you were everything that Mick Harragan was not. In your own, dinosaur way you were honorable, decent, good…”

  “Stop, you’re going to make me blush.”

  She didn’t laugh. “It’s not a joke, Stone, it meant a lot to me. I felt I could trust you. I never got that close to anybody before.” She looked back at the table for a moment, like she had her thoughts laid out there. “You were tough, you had attitude, you could be as mean as the next guy when you had to be, but the bottom line, I always knew you were going to do the right thing. You were honorable.”

  I took a pull of my beer. “All of this is in the past tense.”

  She gave her head a shake, but it wasn’t a denial. It was a shake of reluctance. “I don’t recognize you, this you I have seen in the last couple of days, this you that fed Conor Hagan information that would get Sadiq killed, that exposed his daughters to a trauma from which they will never recover. And now you have set Bellini up for the same fate. You’re not taking him into protective custody, you’re not arresting him. But you know Hagan is going to come after him. Suddenly, I don’t know you.”

  I smiled and rubbed my face with my hands. It was ironic and I let that show on my face. “Couple of days ago, you made me promise that I would not dump you, or ask the captain for a change of partner. I did promise, and I will stick by that promise, because, though I am fallible, like any human being, what you said about me is basically true. I try to be honorable, and I try to do the right thing where I can. Now, ironically, it is you who are going to dump me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t need to. It’s written all over you. I may as well have been alone back there in Bellini’s office. I didn’t get his prints, but neither did you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dehan, if you want me to, I can explain what I did and why I did it, but I am not going to justify it, apologize, or beg you to stay. I want you to stay. You’re the best partner I ever had and the best friend. But you have to make your own choices according to your own conscience.” I paused and took a deep breath. “I just hope if you do decide to transfer, you know why you’re doing it.”

  She looked hard at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since you saw those two girls, when you look at me, you don’t see me, you see Mick Harragan. You partner with somebody else, you’ll be trying to walk away from Harragan, but you’ll be breaking up a damn good partnership, and maybe a friendship with it.”

  “That’s blackmail, Stone.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s reality. And that’s the difference.”

  “The difference with what?”

  “What Mick did was abuse and brutalize weak, vulnerable people so that he could exploit them for money and sex. And because he was cunning and had no inhibitions, he escaped the law. Remember, Dehan, the justice he received in the end was unlawful. It was Maria who killed him.

  “What I do, Carmen, is to try to see things as they really are—not how I want them to be or how the law says they should be, but as they really are. And I saw thirteen girls—more, as it turned out—who had been raped and murdered by this gang of sadistic monsters who felt entitled, because of their power and their privilege, to take these girls’ lives. And I saw that they were going to get away with it because all our evidence was either decayed or dead.”

  Her eyes were locked on my face, but her expression was one of fear, anticipating that I was going to destroy the trust she had put in me, in my care.

  “But I did not hand Sadiq—or Bellini—over to Hagan for him to execute them. God knows I would have been justified in doing so. But I didn’t. I had two options: shelve the case, file it as unsolved, and betray the memory of those children, your cousin, and Sean O’Conor, or investigate. And investigating meant two things, finding out if I was up against Hagan or not, and exposing Sadiq and Bellini to the risk of being executed by Hagan.” I shrugged. “Maybe I am not as honorable as you would like me to be, maybe you are misguided in your idea of what honor is, maybe both are true. But if Sadiq had not raped and murdered those children, or at least colluded in their murder and rape, Conor Hagan would not have gone after him.” I picked up my glass. “And besides, I don’t see it as any part of my job to protect creatures like Sadiq and Bellini from the consequences of their own actions.”

  She was quiet for a long time, thinking.

  “What about the girls? What about what they witnessed?”

  I spread my hands. I felt genuinely helpless. “Dehan, I wasn’t able to protect you from Mick Harragan, either. How many kids have we failed to protect this year? If we start limiting our investigations because of the collateral damage we might do to a criminal’s family, we will end up completely paralyzed. Think what Sadiq would have gone through in prison. How do we protect his daughters from that?”

  “It sucks.”

  I nodded. “Yuh, that is reality, and don’t we know it!”

  She smiled in a way you could call rueful.

  “But Sadiq is not your dad, Mrs. Khan is not your mom, you are not those little girls, and I am definitely not Mick Harragan. For a start, I haven’t got four million bucks in an account in Belize.”

  She looked at me and gave another rueful smile. She sat forward and put her hand over mine. “Sorry, partner. You’re a good man and I shouldn’t have doubted you. It was all a bit close to home.”

  I put my hand over hers. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I got your back. What do you say, spaghetti Bolognese, bottle of wine, and an early start?”

  She smiled. For a moment she looked really happy. She blinked a couple of times and I realized she was blinking away tears. She nodded, then got up and went quickly to the toilet. I watched her go and thought about all the male partners I had had over the years. I tried to remember any of them ever doing something like that. I was pretty sure none of them ever had.

  TWENTY-THREE

  We arrived at noon, parked on Indiana Avenue, and walked a block back to the park. We had a look around. There were few people and nobody seemed to have any interest in us. At twelve forty, we found a place for Dehan to sit on the edge of the fountain, where she could cover the entrance to the park and the entrance to the Pavilion Café. Then I went inside and chose a table close by the glass wall where she could see me and I could see her.

  She sat cross-legged, tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head and started looking at her phone. When I was a kid and used to go to the movies, she would have been reading a book or a newspaper, but Orwell’s nightmare of a screen for every human being had become a reality in a way he could never have imagined; that people would actually pay for their screens, and carry them around with them voluntarily.

  Every few seconds, she looked up and scanned the area. At one o’clock precisely, she looked directly at me and then back at her phone. A few seconds later, a man in a suit appeared. He looked Indian, with olive skin and very black hair. He was in his late thirties or early forties.

  He stepped into the café, saw me and came over. He sat and smiled.

  “Don’t shake my hand. There is nothing unusual about our meeting here. I meet a lot of friends and acquaintances here.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “That’s fine. Who do you think is watching you?”

  He hailed a waitress and shrugged. “Maybe nobody, but in this city, in this job, you learn to be careful. Cappuccino please, Astrid.”

  This last was directed at the waitress who had rolled over and was smiling at us. I smiled back. “And two double espressos.”

  He grinned as the waitress rolled away. “Your friend on the fountain.” She had got off the wall and was pushing through the door.
“She’s good. I almost missed her.”

  She slipped into a chair.

  “He came alone.”

  He nodded. “I did. I came alone. Because I am the only person in the world who knows what I am about to share with you.” He smiled apologetically. “It sounds melodramatic, but it is the truth.” He laid both hands on the table and seemed to study them for a moment. “Sean and I didn’t actually know each other very long. We came from very different backgrounds and had very little in common, but we were both very idealistic.” He glanced at each of us in turn. “You understand, we both really wanted to make a difference.”

  The coffees arrived and we were instructed by the waitress to enjoy them. Dehan gave a lopsided smile and said, “We’ve learned enough about Sean in the last few days to believe that much.”

  “For me, it was always a question of making subtle changes from the inside. Get into the corridors of power and influence change from there.” He gave a laugh. “You know? The cynics are as mistaken as the idealists. Politicians are just like the rest of us, neither good nor bad, but somewhere in between. Most people would rather do good, if they can. Most people’s sin is not evil, but indifference.”

  Personally, I prefer to get my philosophy from Hume and Locke than from a guy who spends too much time reading Facebook thought-bites. So I smiled and said, “You were telling us about Sean.”

  “Yuh, sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, that was my approach, but Sean.” He got a far away look in his eyes, smiled and shook his head. “He was the fearless warrior. I don’t know if it was that Celtic fire in his blood or what it was, but he had to be reckless and bold, and meet his enemy in open battle. Nothing else would do for him. He was truly fearless.”

  For a moment, the incongruity of it struck me. This fearless warrior, who was devout almost to the point of fanaticism, who must meet his enemy in open battle, had died on his knees. It somehow didn’t seem to fit. I filed it away for further consideration.

  “David Foster told us he didn’t talk much about his cases.”

  “That is true. We used to have regular meetings at the Drop in Center and discuss points of law and give each other a hand. Sean was a very good lawyer, and also a tiny bit arrogant. He would discuss our cases with us, but very rarely confide in us about his. But later, as he and I became closer friends, he did begin to confide in me a bit.”

  Dehan sipped her coffee. I could tell she was becoming impatient. She said, “About which cases in particular?”

  He nodded at her, like she had asked just the right question. “That’s it, exactly, it was about two particular cases. The first was the eviction of squatters on Tiffany Street. He was awfully indignant about that. He had several meetings with the Hagan Construction Company’s lawyers and he seemed to be pleased with the progress they were making.” He paused, frowning. “You know about his fiancée?”

  Dehan nodded. “Alicia.”

  He beamed. “Lovely girl. Lovely! So beautiful, so sweet, so kind, he met her at the Church of St. Mary, where he was always doing voluntary work, as was she. And straight away, they hit it off and fell in love. It was a fairy tale love affair, worthy of a movie, I am telling you. So he made an arrangement with Father O’Neil, with Alicia and with Conor Hagan, that the church of St. Mary’s would take care of the evicted squatters and provide education for the orphaned children, with Alicia as their loving teacher. Conor Hagan would provide a sum of money. It was considerable, one hundred grand I think was the agreed amount…”

  “One hundred grand?”

  “Oh yes! It was a big sum of money!”

  Dehan whistled through her teeth. “No wonder he’s mad.”

  “And a small group of benefactors would match his contribution so that Father O’Neil could provide help for the dispossessed. Of course, their contribution was just on paper. No payment was ever made. They just stole Hagan’s money.”

  I scratched my chin. “So, as far as Sean was concerned, his case against Conor Hagan had been resolved.”

  “Yes, indeed. That is exactly right. It was always really more a matter of brinkmanship and negotiation than a likely court case.”

  I turned to Dehan. “Of course, David Foster wouldn’t have known that, because Sean didn’t discuss his cases with him.”

  Arnav nodded. “That is correct. Because even as the resolution was found, Sean became extremely worried by things that began to emerge.”

  Dehan said, “The prostitution ring.”

  Arnav shook his head. “Oh no, it was not prostitution. It was much worse than prostitution.”

  Dehan frowned. “Worse?”

  He nodded. “They were slaves. They were sex slaves. For the personal use of the cabal, but above all, for clients or political allies that needed to be appeased or coaxed.”

  I felt sick. “How did he find out about this?”

  “It was Alicia. There was a child, her name was Sole. It is ironic; it is the diminutive of ‘Soledad’, which in Spanish means ‘loneliness’, and I have often thought how alone those girls must have felt in those few months that they were there.

  “It was Sole, who was only eleven years old, who began to confide in Alicia about the parties that they were taken to at night sometimes.”

  Dehan spoke tonelessly. “Parties…”

  “Sometimes Father O’Neil would take them. He would tell them to pray for God’s forgiveness!” He looked away, shaking his head. Gathered himself and went on. “He would tell them to pray for God’s forgiveness because they were going to be made to sin, but if they repented and prayed for forgiveness, God would still allow them into Heaven.”

  I asked, “Did he ever participate in these parties?”

  “Apparently not, he was just the chauffeur. Other times, some men would come and take them and then bring them back.

  “At first Alicia thought that Sole was making it up. The child had had a very traumatic infancy; it would not be uncommon for her to indulge in fantasies sometimes. But then she began to display bruises. When she approached Father O’Neil, he dispelled her concerns, saying that sometimes the girls had squabbles at night, but eventually she began to talk to the other girls. Some of them, the older ones, were too scared to admit that it was true, but some of the younger ones did. And once the young ones did, they all did.”

  “So what did she do? She didn’t go to the cops.”

  He gave a harsh laugh and looked at me like I was crazy. “No way, Jose! There was a cop in the cabal. One Michael Harragan, a man with a special passion for Latina girls. A very violent and dangerous man at that. He was always at the church, demanding one girl or another, and Alicia was very careful to stay away from him, apparently, because he would have gone for her good and proper, I don’t mind telling you!”

  Dehan nodded. “So she told Sean?”

  “Exactly, and he and I discussed it. We decided that the only thing to do was to get depositions from all the children. So, using various pretexts, such as Sean wanting to check on the progress of the children, he and Alicia worked together, gathering statements from each of the girls, and it was as they did this that they began to realize the extent of what was being done, and the grave danger that all of them—all of us—were in. For not only was the Bishop of the St. Mary’s an active member, but he was intimately connected with the major Mafia crime family of New Jersey, the Vincenzo family. They gathered a lot of evidence, photographs that were taken of the girls, voice recordings, footage of one of the parties.”

  “So what happened? He got caught?”

  He spread his hands and shook his head.

  “The last few times I spoke to Sean, he was very worried. He was beginning to talk a bit crazy. He said he had committed a sin with a woman who was not Alicia, to try to gather information about the Vincenzo family. He was very worried because he needed absolution, and he could not go to Father O’Neil, obviously. He was also scared because he thought Father O’Neil was beginning to suspect him and Alicia. He did not know how lo
ng they had, and he said they needed to act fast but he feared for his life and Alicia’s, so he gave me a big file and told me to keep it safe, not tell him where, and if anything happened to him, to give it to the authorities. After that, he disappeared.”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow at him and I thought she was about to hit him.

  “But you never handed the information to the authorities?”

  He looked at her face for a few moments. “I am not a hero. I was quite frankly scared. There was no doubt in my mind that he and Alicia had been bumped off. I knew I could not go to the local PD, because of Michael Harragan, and I did not know how many associates he had, and to make matters worse, I knew also that one of the members of the cabal was a Special Agent with the FBI. I know enough, because of my specialized line of work in the law, to know how the tendrils of power spread. I honestly did not know whom to go to, to expose this thing. And so, a week became a month, became a year, became a decade, until David tracked me down and phoned me, and told me about you.”

  I didn’t admire him, but I understood him. Not everybody can be a Sean O’Conor, a fearless Celtic warrior.

  “Who is this FBI agent?”

  “I can’t remember his name. Sean rarely mentioned him and he never went to the church. He was a contact of Harragan’s.”

  Dehan glanced at me. I said to Arnav, “Where is this file now?”

  “In New York, in a bank vault. The key is held by an attorney, somewhere in the United States, and if I don’t contact that attorney once every six months, a copy of the file goes to the DA, and another copy to the New York Times.”

  I smiled. “You covered your bases.”

  “Oh yes, and there are other measures that I am not even going to tell you about.”

  “So, now we need to get the file to the DA without anything happening to you. How do we go about that?”