Dead Man's Time

by Peter James

  ‘Shall I call the police?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  She retreated, slamming the door hastily behind her.

  ‘Dad, I can explain,’ Lucas said.

  ‘I said I’m listening. But I know what your involvement is, you little shit. Money to pay your debts, right?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t give me any.’

  ‘At your age, isn’t it about time you learned to support yourself, instead of sponging off me and your wife? Or are you planning to kill a member of the family every time you need money?’

  ‘Dad, I told you, that was never the plan. It just all went – it went – wrong. No one ever intended to harm Aileen, you have to understand that!’

  ‘I only understand one thing. My sister is dead, and the watch that was in her safe, that belonged to the two of us, is lying on that table. And you two are behind this.’

  Daly swung the gun on Pollock. ‘I want to hear from you. I want the whole damned story. I want to know everything you know.’

  ‘Don’t kill me!’ Pollock pleaded, raising his hands. ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Heavy beads of sweat were guttering down his face, and he was shaking.

  ‘Why not? Did your thugs show any mercy to my sister? I don’t think so, Mr Pollock.’

  ‘Please, I’ll tell you everything I know.’

  ‘Go right back in time. I want to know about Pegleg. I want to know about the night he shot my mum and took my dad away. How much do you know about that? What are your family stories? Did your uncle boast to you about the night he murdered my mum?’

  ‘I know a little of the story,’ he yammered. ‘My – my dad used to talk about my uncle. I grew up in Brooklyn until my dad was put in prison. My mum was from England and she took me back there. My dad told me my uncle, Mick – Pegleg – was murdered a few years after your dad.’

  ‘What a sad loss,’ Gavin Daly said acidly. ‘Your uncle was a murderer and your dad a jailbird. And you’re a murderer. What a nice family. You can all have a happy reunion in Hell.’

  ‘I know a bit about how your dad died.’

  Gavin Daly stared at him in silence for some moments. The words seemed to echo inside his head, and to go on echoing. He steadied himself on his stick, his hands shaking. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘You ever heard the expression, take a long walk down a short pier?’

  Daly stared back at him icily.

  ‘My dad told me one day about Brendan Daly – your father. They took him for that walk one night.’

  ‘Which night? The night they took him from our home? Or did they keep him prisoner for a while and torture him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What pier?’

  ‘There was a wharf at the end of the tobacco warehouse beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Almost all of that old Brooklyn waterfront’s gone. Redeveloped.’

  Gavin stood still, letting it sink in, continuing to point the gun alternately at Pollock, then Lucas. There was no surprise, not now, not after all this time.

  ‘There was snow on the ground,’ Pollock said. ‘My dad told me it was lucky that the cops weren’t very smart back then, otherwise they might have noticed.’

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘There were five sets of footprints walking along the pier out into the East River, and only four sets walking back the other way.’

  ‘Three and a half, if your uncle was one of them.’

  Pollock looked at him warily, as if unsure whether he should smile.

  ‘Did your dad say anything to you about numbers?’ Gavin Daly asked.

  ‘Numbers?’

  ‘Twelve numbers. 953704042404. Those mean anything to you?’

  Pollock frowned. ‘Can you repeat them?’

  Daly said them again.

  Pollock shook his head.

  ‘I was about to board the Mauretania, with Aileen and my aunt Oonagh. Someone, a messenger, came up to me,’ Gavin Daly said. ‘He gave me the watch, busted and stopped like it is now; he gave me this gun; and he gave me a newspaper cutting with four names written on it – your uncle among them – and those twelve numbers. And he gave me a message. “Watch the numbers,” he said, then he vanished.’

  Now Julius Rosenblaum was frowning. ‘What were those numbers again, Gavin?’

  Daly repeated them and Rosenblaum scribbled them down. Then he stared at them for some moments, and frowned. ‘I’ve done it again – I’ve reversed them! This is really interesting!’ He held up the sheet on which he had written, then rewritten, the numbers, excitedly.

  ‘I used to know the waters around New York like the back of my hand,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘Sailing up the East or West River on a fine day, looking at glorious Manhattan and all the surrounds. Could never tire of it. Go around into the Harlem River, in summer, and all you can see is trees on both banks; you can’t see a building at all. You could be in a wilderness anywhere in the world.’ He rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a scrolled sheet of paper that was held by an elastic band.

  ‘404240407359,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘I have an idea.’ He unrolled the sheet, and Gavin Daly could see out of the corner of his eye that it looked like a nautical chart. ‘If I’m right, there are three digits missing. And a few letters and symbols. Okay, first we add an N in front of the 40. Then a degree symbol after it. Forty degrees north. We add a minute sign after 42. That’s forty-two minutes. Then the 404. We stick a W in front of 073 and a degree sign. And a minute sign after 59. And that puts us three digits short, as I thought.’

  ‘Short of what?’ Gavin Daly asked. ‘Three digits short of what?’

  ‘These co-ordinates put you in the area of the Manhattan Bridge, Gavin. But it’s a big bridge, covers a huge area. We need those last three digits.’

  Gavin Daly glanced down once again at the watch. And then he realized.

  It had been staring him in the face for ninety years.

  111

  In the back of the Crown Victoria, Roy Grace was aware of the minutes ticking away. With each one that passed, the chances were increasing that Eamonn Pollock had offloaded the watch, and was on his way out of town and probably out of America, doubtless under one of his aliases.

  ‘Hey, move it!’ Aaron Cobb shouted out of the window at a delivery van blocking the cross-street. ‘Just move it, will ya! We’re on an emergency!’

  Grace could barely contain his anger at Detective Lieutenant Cobb. If he had done his job properly, they would not be in this situation now, and instead would have had a tail on Pollock. The crook could be anywhere in this city, or in any of its boroughs. He wasn’t necessarily even taking the watch to a dealer; it could be to a private buyer. Hector Webb, the former head of the Brighton Antiques Squad, had told him there were rich people who got a kick out of buying famous stolen works of art, and hiding them away in private galleries in the basements of their homes – a kind of guilty secret pleasure for the super-rich. The same could apply to this watch.

  One thing was for sure, Eamonn Pollock was no fool. He’d showed up on the hotel’s CCTV camera when checking in, but he’d managed to evade them when he had done his moonlight flit. The hotel had only one exit not covered by a camera, which was a fire door in the kitchens. How he knew about that was anybody’s guess, but no doubt that was the exit he had used. Besides, it was irrelevant how he had left. The fact was, he had gone.

  Guy Batchelor phoned in to say they’d had no joy at any of the dealers they’d visited so far. Moments later, Jack Alexander reported the same news.

  Grace did a quick calculation. He needed to be at Newark Airport by 7 p.m., which meant leaving Manhattan at 6 p.m. This gave him a shade under seven and a half hours to find Pollock, or return home empty-handed. He intended leaving Batchelor and Alexander out here, but all his instincts were that today was the day that counted.

  If they didn’t find Eamonn Pollock with the Patek Philippe in his hot, sweaty palm, they weren’t going to have a hope in hell, right now, of charging him with any
thing.

  Pat Lanigan turned round to face him. ‘Any news from the others?’

  ‘Goose eggs,’ Grace said with a grim smile. And that’s what this felt like at the moment: a wild goose chase. Eamonn Pollock had done the rounds of the legitimate dealers on Friday, no doubt to fix a value for the watch in the market. But now, very obviously, he was not being stupid and risking walking into a trap.

  He peered out of the window at a street vendor, with his stall selling hats and scarves. A cyclist wormed past them, bell pinging. A fire engine honked its way through traffic close by. Then he looked up at a wall, rising sheer into the sky, with maybe a thousand windows. Eamonn Pollock could be behind any one of those at this moment. Behind any one of the millions and millions of windows of this city.

  One man and a watch.

  A needle in a haystack.

  112

  Pointing the gun at his son, Gavin Daly said, ‘Take the chart, we’re going.’ Then he turned back to Rosenblaum. ‘Julius, I’m sorry for the damage I caused, and send me the bill for whatever it costs to fix. I’m also apologizing in advance for what’s about to happen, and any further damage.’ He reached forward, picked the watch off the table and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  Eamonn Pollock started to stand up.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Daly snapped, pointing the gun at him. ‘Sit down! You’re not going anywhere. I’m not done with you yet. You know how the Irish punish people? A bullet in the kneecap. I should give you one in each knee – one for what your uncle did to my ma and one for what he did to my pop. Yes? That’s what I think I should do.’

  Pollock, his eyes bulging in fear, was shaking his head frantically. ‘Please. I’ll tell you everything I know.’

  ‘Gavin,’ Rosenblaum cautioned.

  ‘Julius, this skunk’s uncle ruined my childhood. Now this skunk himself has ruined my old age. You think he deserves mercy? This fat, greedy vulture?’

  ‘Gavin, calm down, let’s hear him out.’

  He turned to Pollock. ‘I’m all ears, you piece of blubber.’

  ‘I lent Lucas money – he came to me and I helped him out.’

  ‘How nice of you. Then he didn’t pay you back? Did I get that one right?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, he has a moneylending business,’ Lucas interjected.

  ‘You’re a moneylender, are you?’ Gavin Daly’s finger was shaking on the trigger. ‘A proper little Shylock?’

  Julius Rosenblaum took a step towards his desk.

  ‘Don’t move another inch, Julius. You hit your panic button and I’ll shoot you too, God help me I will.’

  ‘Gavin, you have to calm down!’ Rosenblaum said.

  ‘No, I’m ninety-five years old; I don’t have to calm down.’ He looked back at Pollock. ‘You sent two pieces of shit – maybe three pieces of shit – to rob a ninety-eight-year-old lady who’d done no harm to anyone in her life. They tortured the fuck out of my sister, and you want mercy from me? Yes?’

  ‘Those were never my instructions.’

  ‘Oh, really? You had the code to the safe from my piece-of-shit son, so why did they have to torture my sister? They stole ten million pounds’ worth of antiques, and they tortured her to death for her credit card pin codes, for a few hundred lousy quid. Did they do it for fun, or is that because you were too greedy to pay them decently for doing your filthy work for you?’

  Pollock was shaking. ‘I didn’t, no, that’s not right.’

  ‘Stand up!’

  Eamonn Pollock pushed himself upright and stood, cowed and quivering.

  Gavin Daly stared at the dark stain around his groin. ‘You’ve just pissed yourself. What kind of a man are you?’

  Pollock stared wildly around, as if looking for an escape route.

  ‘Dad, let’s be calm!’ Lucas said.

  ‘Calm? From a man who beats up his wife regularly, that’s rich!’ He turned to Julius Rosenblaum. ‘She’s a very pretty, very smart television presenter. When Lucas hits her, he makes sure it is always below the neckline, so it doesn’t show in public, so it doesn’t hurt her ability to earn a high salary – for him to squander. He’s a brave man, my son is. Know what I’ve always believed?’ He covered all three in turn with the gun. ‘You judge a man by the friends he keeps. Eamonn and Lucas, you deserve each other.’

  ‘Hurting Aileen was never intended, please believe me,’ Eamonn Pollock whimpered. ‘Please believe me.’

  ‘You employed those men, Ken Barnes and Tony Macario. They’d worked for you for a long time. You must have known what they were like, what they would do when you set them loose on an elderly, defenceless lady? What’s to believe?’

  ‘Please believe me.’

  Gavin Daly pulled the trigger. There was another thunderclap and an explosion of blood in Pollock’s right shoulder, sending him hurtling back onto the floor. His mouth was wide open, his eyes looking like they were shorting out.

  ‘Oops, sorry, Eamonn, I didn’t mean to do that. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Gavin!’ Rosenblaum shouted, in shock.

  ‘Dad!’ Lucas shouted.

  ‘That was for my ma; this is for my pop!’ Gavin Daly fired again. Pollock jumped in the air, as if a defibrillator had gone off on his chest, and a crimson patch of blood began spreading from his left shoulder.

  ‘No! No! No!’ Eamonn Pollock was thrashing on the floor, crying in pain and terror, holding his hands in the air, in front of his face as if they could stop the next bullet.

  ‘Gavin!’ Rosenblaum said. ‘Stop, man! Have you gone crazy?’ He took another step towards his desk.

  Daly pointed the gun at Rosenblaum. ‘Don’t move.’

  He swung the gun back at Pollock.

  ‘No, for God’s sake, no. Please. Oh God, no!’ Pollock squealed, crabbing his way across the carpet on his back.

  Daly took careful aim at Pollock’s crotch. ‘This one’s for Aileen.’

  ‘No!’ he screeched. ‘Please no, please no, please no!’

  He fired straight into the dark stain.

  Pollock let out an animal howl. He sat up straight, his face contorted, his hands pressing desperately at his groin, his whole body convulsing; a low yammering, which was getting louder and louder every second, came from somewhere deep inside his throat.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Gavin!’ Rosenblaum said.

  He pointed the gun at Lucas. ‘We’re out of here, son.’

  Lucas was frozen to the spot.

  Gavin Daly walked across to the door, swinging the gun towards his son and then Julius Rosenblaum, then his son again. ‘I’m sorry, Julius, sorry it had to be here.’

  Pollock’s screams were almost deafening now.

  Daly reached the door, still keeping Rosenblaum motionless with his gun. Then he looked down at Pollock, sheet white, his face a contorted, agonized, clammy mass of perspiration, his eyes rolling; he was breathing in short, fast gasps, still clutching his groin, his hands covered in blood.

  ‘Have fun next time you try to screw someone, Pollock.’ Then he pointed the gun at his son, who was holding the chart and looking like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘You, you’re coming with me.’

  Then he threw the gun on the floor. ‘I’m done with it,’ he said. ‘Maybe my dad sent it to me for a purpose. I don’t know. But I’m done with it.’

  Followed by Lucas, Gavin Daly stomped past the secretary, who looked frozen in shock, out and into the elevator.

  ‘Dad, this is insane!’ Lucas said as the elevator clanked its way down. ‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’

  ‘Just shut the fuck up. I’ve not even started with you yet, boy.’

  Lucas Daly said nothing. When they reached the ground floor, Gavin stepped out into the busy street.

  The black Town Car limousine was right outside. The driver jumped out as they emerged, and held the back door open.

  Lucas climbed in first, then slid across the wide seat.

  ‘How’s your day been so far, sir?’ the driver a
sked, taking the cane, helpfully, as Gavin Daly lowered himself onto the seat.

  ‘Pretty average,’ he replied.

  113

  Inside the car, Gavin heard a siren. Anxiously, he looked over his shoulder through the darkened rear window. To his relief it was an ambulance, not a police car. Moments later it went wailing past.

  ‘Driver, go two blocks, make a right, then stop where you can,’ he instructed.

  ‘You realize what you’ve done, Dad,’ Lucas said, peering back anxiously at the door to Julius Rosenblaum’s offices. ‘Shit, you know what kind of a mess you’re in?’

  ‘Give me that chart.’

  ‘Why did you do that? Why?’

  ‘You want to know why? Because I might not live much longer and I don’t trust the justice system. I’m satisfied now; I’ve got some justice for Aileen. Some, at least. Give me that chart,’ he said again.

  Lucas handed it to him, and he scrutinized it carefully. Then he pulled out the Patek Philippe watch, and studied that for some moments, before returning to the chart.

  The limousine made a right turn, then pulled over to the kerb. Gavin Daly, keeping a weather eye on his son, leaned forward and said to the driver, ‘You have any kind of internet connection in here?’

  ‘Got my iPhone, sir.’

  ‘I want you to look up scuba-diving companies in Manhattan for me.’ Gavin Daly pulled out his wallet and handed the man two fifty-dollar bills.

  ‘That’s not necessary, sir, but thank you. Scuba-diving companies, you say?’

  ‘Please.’

  The driver picked his phone off the seat beside him and began tapping. In the distance, Gavin Daly heard another siren, followed by another. Both of them stopped a short distance away. Then he heard another.

  ‘Got a whole list here!’ the driver said, and passed the phone to him.

  Daly ran his eyes down them. One in particular stood out for him. Hudson Scuba. Lessons on our own dive boat, moored in central Manhattan.

  ‘Call them for me, please,’ he asked.