by R.J. Ellory
And when it ends, as I know it will, there will be talk in the lecturers’ canteen. They will ask each other questions, and they will guess and assume and try their best to figure it all out. But they won’t come close. Not even close. And the students will gossip and trade rumors, and wonder how many I killed. Or if I killed any at all.
Why is it, every time you can do something good, the nice people come in and mess it up? Who said that? It was La Guardia wasn’t it? Fiorello Henry LaGuardia - ‘The Little Flower’ - Mayor of New York from ’34 to ’45. He knew the deal. He knew the kind of people we were. On the face of it we were the good guys, but the shit we did? Jesus, the shit we did you couldn’t even keep your head on. And we’ve been doing this shit for ever. People like me, believing somehow that we were involved in something good, something that would make a difference. Catherine Sheridan and John Robey, all the way out to Managua to make a fucking difference to the world. Well, we made a difference alright, and the difference we made has reverberated right the way through twenty-five years. Right the way into Washington, and all the way into the lives of people who didn’t even know what was happening back then. People like Margaret and Ann and Barbara and Natasha. People like Darryl King. And now Robert Miller. Scratched the surface? Hell, this boy doesn’t even see the surface, let alone what lies beneath.
Why is it, every time you can do something good, the nice people come in and mess it up?
I’ll tell you why. ’Cause there ain’t no money in goodness. There’s the rub, friends and neighbors. There ain’t no money in goodness.
FORTY-TWO
Back in the office at the Second, Roth found his notes from the original meeting with Lorentzen, VP for Security at the Washington American Trust Bank on Vermont Street.
‘McCullough opened the account 11th April, 2003,’ he said. ‘Month or so after he retired from the PD. Deposited fifty dollars. Account manager’s name was Keith Beck—’
‘Who no longer works for the Washington American Trust Bank,’ Miller interjected. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair near the window. He had Roth’s note pad, and from the notes made at the coroner’s office he started to write on the whiteboard the dates of security screening for Mosley, Rayner and Lee. He added Darryl King’s name at the bottom of the board, wrote ‘August 1995’ beside it.
‘This,’ he said quietly,’ opens up another avenue entirely.’
‘And what avenue do you think that might be?’ Roth asked.
‘That they were all something other than who they appeared to be. I mean . . . well, we always suspected that was the case with Catherine Sheridan, ever since the Isabella Cordillera thing came to light, but not all of them.’
‘You still with this witness protection thing?’ Roth asked. ‘That would go some way toward explaining why Darryl King might have been cooperating with the police department.’
‘Witness protection is primarily federal isn’t it?’ Miller said. ‘Fuck Al, I don’t know. Jesus, it looks like one thing and then it looks like something else entirely.’
‘Which is probably the way it’s supposed to go,’ Roth replied.
Miller massaged his temples. It was early afternoon. He had not eaten lunch and somewhere back of his forehead a migraine was gearing itself up for the duration.
‘I think you’re gonna have to go back to see Robey,’ Roth said.
Miller’s heart stopped for a second. He thought of the hairbrush - neatly wrapped in a blue evidence bag and tucked inside a sneaker in his locker downstairs. He couldn’t believe he’d done it. What had it earned him? It had earned him the certainty that Robey was a liar, that Robey knew Catherine Sheridan or had been to her house, that there was some distinct and definite connection between them, but it had also earned him a sense of futility, of impotence. There was nothing he could do with this information. Even to the point that he’d somehow managed to forget about it while he’d been discussing the case with Roth. And now Roth was telling him to go back and see Robey again. It would give him the opportunity to return the brush, that much at least.
‘At this stage I don’t think you should speak to him without it being official. We have to coordinate with Nanci Cohen—’
‘I don’t see that we’re going to get anywhere on an official basis. We have nothing of any significance on this guy.’ Miller paused, listened to his own words, confronting the possibility his viewpoint would have been different had he not taken the brush. He had compromised not only the investigation, but also his own objectivity. ‘We go after McCullough. That’s what we were going to do. We go check out McCullough some more, talk to this guy that Lassiter knows from the Seventh, see if he can shed any light on this character.’
‘Okay,’ Roth said. ‘That I can deal with.’ He called Lassiter’s secretary, learned that Lassiter would be unavailable for much of the day.
‘Can you find a current address on a retired captain from the Seventh? Guy named Bill Young?’ Roth asked her.
The secretary put him on hold, came back a moment later. ‘Have a Bill Young on a personal file here,’ she said. ‘This is not something I can give you without Captain Lassiter’s authority.’
Roth didn’t argue, knew he’d accomplish nothing. ‘Admin unit,’ he said to Miller when he came off the phone. ‘They’ll have a record of where he is.’
‘Just call the Seventh,’ Miller said. ‘Someone down there is sure to know.’
Fifteen minutes later, much of it on hold while people talked to other people who talked to other people, someone came back with an address. It was four years old, but it was an address. Roth called Information for a number, came back with nothing.
‘We go down there,’ Miller said, looking at the slip of paper with the address scribbled across it. ‘This is no more than fifteen minutes from here.’
Miller asked Roth to get the car, said he’d meet him out front. Once Roth was out of sight he headed down past reception to the locker rooms. He left with the hairbrush tucked down in his inside jacket pocket.
Miller drove, hit the early afternoon traffic. What should have been a fifteen-minute drive took the better part of forty, and when they reached Wisconsin Avenue out near Dumbarton Oaks Park it was close to three. The house they were looking for was on the corner of Whitehaven Parkway and Thirty-seventh, an attractive wooden colonial-style bungalow set back from the road behind a low bank of trees. Miller went up there first, and when a middle-aged woman came to the door Roth stayed back on the sidewalk.
The conversation between Miller and the woman was brief. Roth was too far away to hear anything specific, but after a moment or two the woman pointed back toward Montrose Park and the Oak Hill Cemetery. Roth wondered whether Young had died.
Back in the car Miller said, ‘He’s in a care home. Bancroft Street, opposite Woodrow Wilson House.’
Bill Young had a crew of nurses who ran interference between him and the world. The Bancroft Care Home was a vast complex of houses on a single plot, presumably an estate that had been modified to accommodate its current purpose. The reception building was a low-rise modern block at the end of a short drive. Security was evident, questions were asked and answered, and by the time Miller and Roth stood before someone who could tell them about Bill Young it was quarter after four.
‘He’s not so great,’ Assistant Facility Director Carol Inchman told Miller. ‘Bill has been here a good fourteen months now. Had a massive stroke which paralyzed the left side of his face and much of his body. He’s improved considerably with treatment, but he struggles to speak and eat. He tires easily.’ Carol Inchman’s manner was brusque, yet she somehow also managed to convey some warmth in her tone. She was businesslike, yet compassionate-sounding - precisely the manner that would give potential clients’ families the degree of confidence needed to start writing checks.
‘Is this matter of great importance?’ she asked Miller.
‘Very much so,’ Miller said. ‘Our captain, Frank Lassiter, was a very
good friend of Captain Young’s, and he felt certain that Captain Young would be able to assist in the resolution of an important aspect of this case we’re on.’
Inchman smiled. ‘We call him that even now, you know?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Miller asked.
‘Captain. That’s what we call him. He appreciates it. I think being a policeman was his entire life, and when he became ill it had a very deteriorative effect on him, mentally as well as physically.’
Miller nodded understandingly. ‘So do you think there’s a possibility we could see him?’
‘I should think so. Perhaps doing something to help might cheer him up. He’s been rather down these past few days.’
‘That’s really appreciated,’ Miller said. ‘I promise we won’t keep him long . . . we’ll make it as brief as possible.’
Inchman leaned forward, lifted the receiver and dialled a number. ‘Visitors for the Captain,’ she told someone. ‘Tell him there’s some official help required from the police department. ’ She hung up the phone and rose from her chair. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked breezily.
Miller and Roth followed Assistant Director Inchman out of her office and down the corridor.
The side of Bill Young’s face had all the tension of a damp paper bag. The effect was disquieting, and when he smiled the left side of his mouth merely tightened awkwardly and produced an expression that seemed designed to unsettle. He had lost muscle control around one eye, he blinked with great difficulty, and the pupil had become opaque with cataracts. When the nurse showed Miller and Roth into his room, Young appeared to be asleep in a reclining chair, but the sound of the door closing was sufficient to rouse him.
‘Captain?’ Carol Inchman said gently.
Young turned slowly, and from his semi-prostrate position he looked at all three of his visitors in turn. Recognition seemed to dawn slowly, and Miller realized then that Young was seeing them for what they were: one-time colleagues, fellow police officers, a brief return of something that he’d once been, something that he’d lived for.
His agility surprised Roth. Bill Young was out of the chair and across the room toward them within a moment. The strange grin, the outstretched hand, something that told them that though his body might have suffered a hurricane of trouble, his mind was as present as ever.
‘Captain Young,’ Miller said as he shook Young’s hand.
Young laughed. ‘She tell you to call me that?’
‘We’re from Frank Lassiter’s precinct . . . came to see if you could help us with something.’
Young’s eyes widened. The right side of his face smiled wider, the left merely tightened a few more degrees.
Carol Inchman backed up a step or two. ‘I’ll leave you boys to your business,’ she said. ‘Come see me before you go, detectives.’
She closed the door quietly behind her leaving Roth and Miller standing in the middle of the room, Bill Young looking them up and down, waiting with anticipation for whatever might serve to restore his sense of usefulness.
‘We have a case,’ Miller started.
‘This serial thing, right?’ Young said.
‘The Ribbon Killer . . . you know of this?’
‘Hell, I might be a hopeless case, but I still read the newspapers. You have a wild one there. You said you were from Frank’s precinct . . . how the hell’s he doing?’ Young’s voice was strained, but they had no difficulty understanding him.
Miller smiled sardonically. ‘Stressed . . . you know the beat, right?’
‘Do I know the fucking beat?’ He laughed. ‘Jesus Mary Mother of God, do I know the fucking beat. Stressed like the Brooklyn Bridge, right?’
‘And then some,’ Miller replied. ‘We can sit down?’
‘Sure, pull up a chair.’
Young returned to his recliner, pulled a lever and came upright to face them.
‘I’ll give you a brief rundown on what we have and what we don’t,’ Miller said.
Young raised his hand. ‘Back up and go from the start. I ain’t got nothing else happening here.’
Miller started in on the case, told Young about the victims, all the way back to Margaret Mosley, told him about Natasha Joyce, Darryl King, the information they’d gleaned, and before he even mentioned McCullough’s name Young was smiling like he knew what he was going to be asked.
‘You want to know about McCullough,’ he said.
Miller and Roth were left speechless.
‘Darryl King,’ Young said. ‘That was the black guy that got killed on the drugs raid, right?’
Miller nodded.
‘And McCullough was his keeper. Darryl King was McCullough’s CI on that hoe-down.’
‘You remember that?’ Roth asked.
Young shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t remember what I had for fucking lunch yesterday, son, but the important stuff, stuff that happened back then . . . shee-it, I remember all of that like it was this morning. I know about McCullough. He came on loan back in . . . Jesus, when the fuck was that? July, maybe August 2001. That gig with the black guy went down a couple of months later as far as I can remember—’
‘October 2001,’ Miller said.
‘That’s right. The kid got himself killed. There was an almighty fucking row that broke out and then nothing. Never seen anything like it. All of a sudden it was the most important thing that had ever happened on my watch, and then there was nothing. Like walking out of one thing right into the opposite. McCullough was there for about an hour and then he just disappeared—’
Roth leaned forward, frowning. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘What?’
‘He was around for an hour . . . you said something like that?’
‘Sure, yes. McCullough was shot too. Not badly, a flesh wound really. He hung around for like two weeks, maybe less, spoke to IAD, spoke to me a couple of times, said nothing of any fucking use to anyone, and then he pulled out of the precinct and vanished.’
‘But he retired in March 2003,’ Miller said.
‘I know when he retired. I had to sign his final release docket. But he wasn’t around for a while before that. I’d say a week, maybe ten days at the most after the King shooting, and then he was gone. Raised a few questions about him, where the fuck did he go, but I just got a polite word that suggested I stop asking after him, you know what I mean?’
‘From who? Who told you to stop asking?’
‘Chief of Police. Figure that’s where it came from ultimately, but it came through the lines. Sometimes you just get the message without someone being that fucking direct, you know?’
Miller didn’t know what to make of what he was hearing. Assumption right from the start had been that McCullough stayed with the Seventh until he retired. This suggested an entirely different agenda.
‘You say he came on loan from somewhere?’ Roth said.
‘Yes, he was replacement for someone we transferred. Back then we had a more understanding policy. Compassionate relocation, you ever heard of that?’
Roth and Miller shook their heads.
‘Meant that if your folks got sick or something, if you got married and your sweetheart wanted to be closer to her family, then you could apply for transfer to another precinct, even another county. Now they’re not so sympathetic. Now they tell you to deal with it or fuck off. Anyway, we had a guy we transferred out to Port Orchard as far as I can recall, and the guy we got in his place was McCullough. But even then, McCullough was not the guy we were supposed to get. Can’t remember the original guy’s name, Polish-sounding maybe, all Zs and Ks, but something happened with him and we got McCullough. Can’t remember where he came from. Think it might have been Vice, or Narco maybe. Good record, nothing too outstanding, straightforward kind of guy. Fitted right in, didn’t make any waves. Kept his arrest sheet up, made some half-way decent busts, and then he started bringing in some interesting traffic through this CI he’d cultivated.’ Young grimaced cheerfully. ‘You know the beat on this shit, right? W
ell, McCullough had a way with this Darryl King feller. Got us the largest coke snatch of the decade in September of that year. I remember it because it came about a week after 9/11, right before the precinct evaluation. Scored us some brownie points with the chief, you know? Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s dancing around making whoopee about this bust . . . better part of three kilos. Quite something.
‘Well, then the shit goes missing out of evidence lock-up. Just takes a walk right out of there, and the thing that surprised everybody was how un-pissed off McCullough was. He seemed to take the whole thing in his stride, said that we shouldn’t worry too much about it, that there’d be other busts, you know? IAD got in there, turned the place upside down, and then it just all went quiet again. Second strangest fucking thing I ever saw. Anyway we dropped the thing, didn’t ask any more questions, and then McCullough starts to be late. Starts to show up three hours off the schedule. All this kind of shit kicks off, and I’m having to pull him in and tell him what the fuck, you know? Make his life a misery to the degree that he’s making everyone else’s life a misery. Finally it comes down to business. I’m telling him he’s gonna have to shape up or ship out, and that’s when he tells me about this warehouse thing, about this crack-house gig he’s got set up with his CI. This thing sounds like the biggest thing since the French Connection. I get all excited like I’m gonna lose my cherry, and McCullough has everyone wound up like a clock spring for this bust. Of course, it all went to shit in the end . . .’
Young paused, breathed deeply for a moment. Roth started away from the bed toward him but Young raised his hand and backed him off. He reached down the side of his chair and pulled an oxygen mask up from nowhere. He clamped it over his face and sucked like crazy. He closed his eyes and seemed to settle down somewhat. A few more inhalations, and then he lowered the mask, hawked a mess of spit into the back of his throat and spat it into a pressed-cardboard kidney dish.