She was right. I didn’t get anything useful from Janet Higgins, or in the house on either side, or across the street. I could have knocked on a few more doors, but I wasn’t going to find Betty Ann Dowling on the other side of them, or her son either. I gave up and went home.
By the time I got home, Dr. Froelich had come and gone, changing TJ’s dressing and pronouncing him fit for travel. He’d told him to keep the leg elevated as much as possible. “But not when you’re walking,” he said, “because it’s awkward as hell, and it looks silly. So what’s the answer? Stay off the leg. Give it a chance to mend.”
Elaine had picked up a second cane, and he used both of them to get across the street to the hotel. I went with him, and sat in the armchair while he got on-line and checked his e-mail. He’d accumulated dozens of messages in the time he’d been gone. Most of them were Spam, he said, bulk e-mailers trying to sell him porn photos or enroll him in unlikely financial ventures. But he had correspondents all over the world as well, people he traded jokes and quips with in a half-dozen different countries.
It didn’t take him long to catch up, and then I told him what I knew about Gary Dowling and his mom. The last address I had for them was twenty-five years old, and they could be using Farrelly as a last name.
“That F-A-R-L-E-Y?” I shook my head and spelled it for him, and he made a face. “Leave the Y off an’ you got Farrell, rhymes with barrel. Put the Y on an’ it’s Farrelly, rhymes with Charlie. Don’t make no sense.”
“Few things do.”
“If she got a listed phone, I can find her. Take awhile, is all. There’s a site, got all the phone listings by state. You figure New York?”
“I suppose you have to try it first.”
There was an Elizabeth Dowling in Syracuse, and a number of E Dowlings, including one in the Bronx. That was far too simple and obvious, of course, and it turned out to be Edward, and he’d never heard of an Elizabeth or a Betty Dowling and didn’t sound as though he appreciated my call.
We tried New Jersey next, and then Connecticut. After that we skipped to California and Florida because they’re states that people tend to go to. I got quite expert at my part of the program, dialing the numbers from the lists TJ printed out, saying, “Hello, I’m trying to reach an Elizabeth Dowling who resided on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx in the 1960s.” It only took a sentence or two to determine that they couldn’t help me, and I would get off the line in a hurry and move on to the next listing.
“Good we get to make our toll calls free,” TJ said, “or we be runnin’ up a powerful tab.”
He got way ahead of me—the computer could find Dowlings faster than I could call them—and that gave him a chance to hobble over to the bed and elevate his leg. When I was between calls he said, “Meant to tell you, I phoned that girl this afternoon.”
“And which girl would that be?”
“Sweetheart of BTK? Black father, Viet mama? She say she wonderin’ why she didn’t hear from me.”
“So you told her you took a bullet in a shoot-out.”
“Told her I had the flu. Vitamin C, she said. Yes, ma’am, I said, an’ did you find out about the dude with the face like the moon? Found out his street name is all. You want to take a guess, Bess?”
“Moon,” I said.
“Moon. Friend of Goo’s from Attica, an’ that be all anybody knows about him. Said thanks a lot, an’ call me when them pimples clear up.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“Course not.” He cocked his head, looked at me. “You sick of makin’ phone calls, ain’t you? You got somethin’ else to do, I can work the phone. I can even elevate my damn leg while I do it.”
* * *
I left and started walking uptown. I hadn’t eaten anything since Mrs. Horvath’s Nutter Butter cookies, and I stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, a block or two beyond Lincoln Center. I hadn’t eaten Chinese food since my last dinner with Jim ten days ago. I would never be having dinner with him again, and maybe I’d never be in the mood for Chinese, either.
Oh, get over it, a voice said, and it was Jim’s voice, but it wasn’t a mystical experience, it was my imagination, supplying the response I could expect from him. And he was right, of course. It wasn’t the food or the restaurant, it was the guy who walked in with a gun, and he wasn’t going to be doing that anymore.
Still, I couldn’t eat a Chinese dinner without thinking about Jim. I had hot and sour soup and beef with broccoli, and I remembered how he’d told me he wanted to have that vegetarian eel dish one more time before he died.
The food was all right. Not great, but not terrible, either. I knocked off a pot of tea with the meal, and afterward I ate the orange wedges and cracked open the fortune cookie.
There is travel in your future, it advised me. I paid the check, left a tip, and traveled the rest of the way to Poogan’s.
“The guy who hit you was Donnie Scalzo,” Danny Boy said. “I thought I was going to come up empty, Matthew, and then one fellow turned up who looked at the picture and knew him in a heartbeat. He’s a Brooklyn boy and I guess he never got across the bridge much, but this fellow grew up in Bensonhurst right near Scalzo. I think they got thrown out of the same grammar school.”
“I hope it wasn’t before they learned to diagram sentences.”
“Do they still teach that? I remember my eighth-grade teacher standing at the blackboard drawing lines, taking sentences apart and putting them back together. Here’s a subordinate clause angling off this way, and there goes a prepositional something-or-other slanting up toward the ceiling. Did you get that in school?”
“Yes, and I never knew what the hell they were doing.”
“Neither did I, but I bet they don’t do it anymore. It’s another lost art. It would have been useful knowledge for Donnie, because he just recently got out of the joint. His sentence was five-to-ten, and he could have had fun diagramming that. Aggravated assault, so I guess you weren’t the first guy he ever took a swing at.”
“You don’t happen to know where he served it, do you?”
“Tip of my tongue. Upstate, but not Dannemora, not Green Haven. Help me out here.”
“Attica?”
“That’s it. Attica.”
I went home and called TJ. “Attica,” he said. “We gettin’ a lot of hits on that site. Too late to call, though.”
“A call won’t really do it,” I said. “I think I’ll have to go up there and talk to somebody.”
“Attica,” he said again, rolling the word on his tongue this time, as if looking for a name that rhymed with it. “How you get there, anyway?”
“Easiest thing in the world,” I said. “Just hold up a liquor store.”
Mick called, wanting to know if I’d heard anything from Tom Heaney, whom he’d been unable to reach. I said I hadn’t, but that anybody who’d called would have had to talk to the machine. Tom, I pointed out, barely talked to people. I told him what I’d learned—about Moon, about Donnie Scalzo, and about Gary Allen Dowling.
I made it an early night, and I was at Phyllis Bingham’s travel agency at nine on the dot. She was already at her desk. I told her I wanted to go to Buffalo, and while she brought up what she needed on her computer she asked how Elaine was doing on her buying trip. Of course she would have seen the sign in the shop window, it was just up the street, but for a minute I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said it was going fine, and she said she could get me on a 10:00 a.m. Continental flight out of Newark, but that wouldn’t give me any time to pack. Nothing to pack, I said. She booked me on the flight and on a return flight at 3:30 the same afternoon. If I missed it there’d be another two hours later.
“I guess you won’t get to look at the Falls,” she said.
I went out and got a cab right away, and I didn’t even have to talk the driver into making the trip to Newark. He was delighted. I made my plane with a few minutes to spare and landed an hour later in Buffalo. I rented a car and drove to At
tica, and that took another hour because I missed a turn and had to double back. I was there by noon and I was out of there by two, which put me way ahead of Gary Allen Dowling, not to mention Goo and Moon and Donny. It only took me forty minutes to get back to the Buffalo airport, where I had plenty of time to turn in the rental car and grab a meal before they called my return flight.
There was a long line for cabs at Newark, so I saved a few dollars and took a bus to Penn Station and the subway home. I walked in the door and Elaine said, “You said you’d be home for dinner and I didn’t believe you. But you may not be able to stay.”
George Wister had turned up, she told me, but this time she’d said I was out and refused to let him in. He came back with a partner and a warrant, but she’d spoken to Ray Gruliow, who was waiting with her when Wister showed up. She let them in, and after Wister had satisfied himself that I wasn’t there he traded threats with Ray and then left.
“They were looking for a gun,” she said, “and I knew you wouldn’t have tried to take yours through a metal detector. I looked all over before I found it in your sock drawer. I took it to the basement and locked it in our storage bin, and after they left I went down and retrieved it, holster and all. It’s back with your socks.”
“There’s another gun,” I said. “A little one, it must be in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing the other night.”
I looked in the closet, and it was still there. I put it in my pocket, and got the magnum from my sock drawer and donned the holster. I’d felt oddly vulnerable all day, walking around unarmed, which was odd in light of the fact that, up until less than a week ago, I went unarmed all the time.
She said the charge on the warrant was hindering prosecution, which Ray said was bullshit, and just meant that Wister had a tame judge on hand. He was planning to squash it, or quash it, or something.
I said I’d call him, and took a step toward the phone, but she caught my arm. “Don’t call anybody yet,” she said. “First there’s a message you should hear.”
We went in and she played it. A voice I’d never heard before said, “Scudder? Look, I got no quarrel with you. Just back out of this thing and you got nothing more to worry about.”
She played it a second time, and I listened to it. “The call came in around three-thirty,” she said. “After I heard it I took the phone off the hook.”
“To keep him from calling back.”
“No, so you could call him back. If you hit star-69—”
“It calls back the last person who called. You wanted to make sure he was the last person.”
I picked up the receiver, pressed the disconnect button, and hit *69. The phone rang twelve times before I gave up and broke the connection.
“Shit,” she said.
I hit redial and let it ring another twelve times. “It’s ringing its brains out,” I said. “Now if only there was some way to find out where.”
“Isn’t there? Aren’t all calls logged automatically?”
“Only the completed ones.”
“How about the call we received? That was completed.”
“And if I had a good friend at the phone company I could get at the data. The Kongs managed something similar once, but I don’t have them on tap and the phone company computers are harder to hack than they used to be. And you know how it would turn out, don’t you?”
“How?”
“It’ll be a pay phone that they called from, and what help is that?”
“Rats,” she said. “I thought I did good.”
“What you did was good. It just didn’t lead anywhere. But it still might. We can try it again later.”
“And leave the phone off the hook until then?”
“No, we just won’t make any calls out. That way anytime you hit redial you’ll get that number again. And if you really have to make a call, do it and don’t worry about it, because I don’t have high hopes that we’re going to get him this way.”
“Rats.” She pressed a button, played the message another time. “You know what?” she said. “He’s lying.”
“I know.”
“He wants you to stop pressing, which is a good sign, isn’t it? It means you’re getting close. And he wants to make you lower your guard. But he still intends to kill you.”
“Tough,” I said.
I didn’t want to stay for dinner. I’d just eaten in Buffalo, and I didn’t want to hang around if Wister decided to come over again, with or without his chickenshit warrant. Elaine wondered if they’d have our building staked out. I didn’t think they’d waste the manpower, but I’d continue to use the service entrance. I’d come in that way just now, probably out of habit, and it was a habit I’d stay with.
I had a cup of coffee, and told her what I’d learned in the small town of Attica, where the state penitentiary was the principal industry. Gary Allen Dowling, who had in fact used the names Gary Farrelly and Pat Farrelly as occasional aliases, had been released in early June after having served just over twelve years of a twenty-to-life sentence for second-degree murder. He and an accomplice had held up a convenience store in Irondequoit, a suburb of Rochester. According to the accomplice, who rolled over on Dowling and pleaded to a lesser charge of robbery and manslaughter, it had been Dowling who herded two employees and a customer into a back room, made them lie face down on the floor, and executed them all with two rounds each to the head.
I remembered the case. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time because it happened a couple of hundred miles away upstate, and the city has always provided crime enough to keep my mind occupied. But I’d read about it, and it had been fodder for the pols in Albany who’d been trying to get a death penalty bill through the governor’s office. It turned out to be easier to get a new governor.
Dowling had been twenty-four when he shot those people, twenty-five when he went away. He’d be thirty-seven now.
He went to Attica, and his traitorous partner in crime was sent to Sing Sing, in Ossining. Within a matter of months the partner turned up dead in the exercise yard. He was doing bench presses, and the bar he was supposed to be lifting had over five hundred pounds of iron on it. His chest was crushed, and nobody seemed to know how it had happened, or who might have had a hand in it.
Dowling let all of Attica know he’d arranged it. Revenge was sweet, he said. It would have been even sweeter if he could have been there to see it go down, but it was sweet all the same.
Later the same year an inmate he’d had words with was knifed to death, and it was like so many murders inside the walls, you knew who did it but you couldn’t hope to prove it. Dowling did his first bit in solitary as a result. You didn’t need evidence to put a man in the hole.
His mother was the only person who visited him, and she drove down from Rochester once a month to see him. Her visits were less frequent in recent years because she was ill, and got so she needed to get someone to drive her. It was cancer, and she died of it during the final winter of his confinement. He might have been released to attend her funeral, but he was in solitary at the time. It was funny, he’d learned to behave himself in prison, but he lost it when he learned of her death and choked a guard half to death before they pulled him off. You wanted to make allowances for someone who’d just had that kind of news, but it was the kind of incident you couldn’t overlook, and he was in the hole while his mother went in a hole of her own.
June 5 they’d let him out. No question, really, with the good time he’d accumulated. He’d have been odds-on for the death penalty if it had been on the books at the time, but even without it you’d expect someone who’d done what he’d done to serve straight life without parole. Not how it worked, though.
The official I talked to didn’t have much faith in the system he served. It didn’t seem to him that there was a whole lot of rehabilitation going on. You had some men who never did a bad thing until the night they got drunk and killed their wife or their best friend, and most of them would probably be all right after their
release, but he wasn’t sure the prison system could take the credit. And there were the sex offenders, and you’d be better believing in the tooth fairy than in the possibility of straightening out those monsters. When it came to your hardened criminals, well, some got old and just couldn’t cut it anymore, but could you call that rehabilitation? All you did was warehouse ’em until they were past their expiration date.
One thing he was sure of, he told me. Gary Allen Dowling would be back. If not in Attica, then in some other joint. He was positive of that.
I hoped he was wrong.
That’s what I learned in Attica. I don’t think I could have told her all of it, not then, over one cup of coffee. I told her the greater portion of it, though, and I told the rest to Mick a little later.
The phone rang while I was trying to decide if I wanted a second cup. I went to listen to the machine and picked up when I heard Mick’s voice. “By Jesus,” he said, “have you spent the whole evening on the telephone?”
“The evening’s young,” I said. “And I haven’t been on the phone at all. Elaine took it off the hook, and I’ll tell you why some other time.”
“I’ve been going half mad,” he said. “I can’t reach anybody. Have you heard from Andy or Tom?”
“No, but the phone’s been off the hook, so—”
“So they couldn’t call you if they wanted to, nor could they call me as they haven’t the number. Twice I’ve called Andy and twice his mother’s told me he’s out and she doesn’t know where. And there’s no one at all answering at Tom’s house.”
“Maybe they’re out having a beer somewhere.”
“Maybe they are,” he said. “Have you any plans yourself?”
It was Friday. I always went to the step meeting at St. Paul’s on Friday night. Then I always had coffee afterward with Jim. I’d thought I might do the first, even if I couldn’t do the second.
Everybody Dies (Matthew Scudder) Page 23