I sipped some more coffee, thinking that I much preferred fake sugar to the real thing. “But here’s the thing, Zee, I think I know where I can find the motive.”
If how far his sleepy lids rose was any indication of his interest, that last thing I’d said about finding a motive had gotten his attention like nothing else I’d mentioned. Unfortunately, the first loser of the day chose that moment to stroll into the bar.
“Get the fuck outta here!” Zee shouted at him, coming around the bar. “We ain’t open yet for another ten minutes.”
The guy pointed at me. “But he’s—”
“He’s none of your fucking business, asshole. You want to drink in this place again, you’ll get out of here.” Zee grabbed the loser’s coat and pushed him toward the door.
“Okay, okay, I’m going.”
“And tell any of the other assholes out there that if they try and come in here—”
“I got the point. Okay.”
Zee stood there, scowling. Making sure the loser was stationed in front of the door.
“Sorry about that, Gus,” Zee said, flexing his hands, slowly walking back around the bar.
“You were moving pretty good there. Latched onto that guy’s coat like a vise.”
He snorted. “I can summon it up when I have to.” He poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s and gunned it down. “Want one?”
I shook my head.
“Gus, you were saying something about motive when that clown came in.”
“It’s like this. TJ shows up at Rusty’s Salvage Yard a week before he’s murdered with a stolen air bag that Frankie Tacos wants no part of. The kid’s desperate for money, needing a fix, so Tacos gives him a few hundred bucks and sends TJ on his way.”
Zee was skeptical. “You believe Tacaspina? The guy’s a world-class scumbag and, if you believe the rumors, he made his bones before he got laid.”
“You know, I do believe him. He didn’t have to tell me any of that. He could have just had the dogs chew my ass off and send me on my way. He really seemed to have liked TJ and he certainly had respect for his skills with cars.”
Zee nodded. “Okay, so let’s say Tacaspina’s telling the truth. So what? Where’s the motive? He killed the kid because . . . why?”
“No. I don’t think he killed TJ or Tommy D. So here’s TJ a week before his murder. He’s totally strung out and desperate, without two nickels to rub together. Four or five days later, he shows up at Ralphy O’Connell’s. He’s not strung out, but just the opposite. He’s high as a kite and he’s flush, but his face is swollen and he’d sporting a black eye like he’s taken a beating. He gives twelve grand cash to his pal to make amends for the drug deal, with a little something extra on top, promising there’s much more to come. See what I mean? The motive is in that time frame somewhere. All I have to find out is how TJ got that money and who he got it from and—”
“Bingo.”
“Yeah, great.” I shrugged. “Sounds nice, but where did that money come from and whose was it to begin with? Who beat the kid up? How the hell am I supposed to find that out? If only the cops had looked at these guys or cared even a little bit.”
Zee made another face and turned his palms up to the ceiling as best he could. “That’s the second time you brought up the cops, Gus.”
“Come on. I know the detectives that caught these cases.”
“Like I said, you brought ’em up, not me.”
“Yeah, but where would homicide detectives get their hands on big money? There’s money in vice and narcotics, not homicide.”
He was shaking his head at me, with a sneer on his face.
“What?”
“Stop thinking like a cop, Gus,” he said, holding the coffeepot handle with both hands as he refilled my cup. “Forget the detectives. Just because you were in uniform, it don’t mean detectives aren’t pawns. They take fucking orders, too. Look over their heads.”
I guess I must’ve made a face.
Zee smiled a crooked smile at me. “You winced there,” he said. “I hit a nerve or something?”
“I have taken a look at the brass.”
“You come up with a name?”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous?”
“Jimmy Regan.” The name spilled out of my mouth.
“Saint Superman Regan, huh? Wait, let me kneel and cross myself. Fuck him!”
“Wait a second, Zee, I—”
“You guys crack me up. You get all weak-kneed at the mention of that prick’s name, but there’s shit you don’t know about him.”
“Like what?”
“No, sir. No way. Like I said before, I’m this close to being out of Dodge. And just like I don’t need any shit from Tacaspina and Shivers, I don’t need any cop trouble neither on my way out the door.”
“I thought you were Tommy’s friend. I thought you liked his kid. So you’ll bury Tommy, but you won’t help me—”
Zee’s face twisted up and turned red. He slammed his tree knot of a right fist down onto the bar.
“Get the fuck outta here, Gus, and send my paying customers in. Don’t bother coming back in here again until the spics run this place. Fuck you and fuck Jimmy Regan, that hypocritical piece of crap. Go get ahold of his service record from the mid-’90s. Then you can go pray at his fucking altar. Until then, get outta here!”
I stood up and left. When I passed the loser on my way out, I told him it was okay to go in. He looked hurt about how Zee had treated him, but he went in just the same.
41
(FRIDAY AFTERNOON)
I didn’t know what to make of the things Zee hinted at before he sent me packing. You couldn’t just dismiss what he had to say because snitches were more than sponges. They did more than just hear things. They traded information to get information. So if he said what he said about Jimmy Regan, there had to be at least something there, though maybe something less than what he’d been told. But I knew beyond Zee, I knew that no one had forced Jimmy Regan’s name from between my lips. In spite of Bill Kilkenny’s assurances and Chief Regan’s stand on the heroin flooding into Suffolk County, I had doubts of my own. As much as I didn’t like hearing what Zee had implied and as much as I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a person or persons inside the SCPD might be implicated in two murders, there was no getting around the fact that someone inside the department was determined not to have TJ Delcamino’s murder looked at too carefully. It was one thing to warn me off. It was something else for Lou Carey and Milt Paxson not to do their jobs. Milt Paxson, okay, he was an incompetent schmuck. Not Lou Carey. Problem was that all I had for evidence was a lot of smoke and supposition. Which is to say I had nothing.
At least now I knew where to go and who to talk to. I wondered if I would get any answers from him. I doubted it, but I had to try. So before I sat down in my car, I fished my cell out of my pocket and made to punch in Father Bill’s number. Before I could tap in even one digit, the phone buzzed in my hand. I recognized the number: the Paragon Hotel.
“Gus Murphy.”
“Gus, it is Felix.”
“Hey, Felix. You miss me already? I saw you an hour ago.”
“You are not so funny, Gus,” he said. “Remember you promised we would go for a Filipino meal together soon.”
“I remember. Is that why you called?”
“No. A man called for you.”
“Did he leave a name?”
“He did not, but he said that you would know him. That you met in the Macy’s parking lot.”
Pauly Martino.
“Did he leave a message?”
“A kind of a message.”
“What does that even mean, Felix?”
“It is very brief, two words, I think, but I am not certain I heard him clearly. He sounded quite agitated when we spoke.”
“Yeah, that guy’s always agitated. What’s the message?”
“It makes no sense. The message is PacSun.”
“PacSun? Like the store in the mall?”
“Yes, exactly, Gus. PacSun. It makes no sense.”
“Could he have said Paxson?”
“Yes, that is what he said, PacSun.”
“Okay,” I said, “thanks.”
“Gus, this makes sense to you?”
“All the sense in the world, Felix. All the sense in the world.”
I didn’t have time to deal with it at the moment, not that I was sure how I would deal with Milt Paxson when I found the time. And Pauly Martino’s admission that it was Paxson who put him onto me raised more questions than it answered. One thing at a time, I thought. One thing at a time. First I had to go talk with Bill.
As he was the first time I’d come to his basement apartment in Massapequa, Bill was at the side of the house, smoking a cigarette and looking off into the distance. He didn’t notice my car, not at first, and I sat there watching him, wondering if what he’d done in Vietnam ever really left him. I didn’t doubt him for a second when he said he had gotten his faith back, finally. I wondered just how powerful his faith was as a hedge against the blackness. Or was it a topical salve, something to apply to the wound to bring relief, to bring a little bit of light into the void? Was there ever an escape from your past? I knew I was wondering about these things in terms of Bill, though my pain and grief were as much in question as Bill’s nightmare experiences in Vietnam. All those silly analogies about unscrambling eggs and unringing bells crossed my mind. And I thought, did I really want to forget? If all the grief and pain could vanish, but it meant truly forgetting, would I make that bargain?
Of course, there are no such bargains to be made. No one to make them with. Not for me. Bill, I supposed, believed such things could happen. The Holy Trinity as dealmaker. I also supposed he felt he deserved his pain. That somehow, through some sin of his own or through the one he was born with, he had earned it. He finished his cigarette, and as he snuffed it out, his eyes refocused on the present. That’s when he noticed my car and waved me in.
He poured us glasses of red wine without bothering to ask.
“I knew you’d be back to talk,” he said, lifting his glass. “Sláinte.”
“Sláinte.”
We clinked and drank.
“So far today my calories have all been of the liquid variety. Coffee and wine.”
“Is that complaint I hear in your voice? Would you like something to eat? I don’t have much in the way of food. I can scramble you up some eggs?”
I laughed.
“That’s me, Gus, a short-order comedian. You ever hear the one about the strip of bacon, the sausage, and the omelet that walked into the bar?”
“Sorry, Bill. When I was out in the car I was thinking about undoing the past.”
“I see, unscrambling the eggs, you mean?” he said with a sad smile.
“When you were out there smoking, were you remembering ’Nam?”
“Christ help me, I was. Forty plus years and eight thousand miles away, yet it’s never far from me.”
“If you could unsee what you saw, unhear what you heard—”
“Would I? What man wouldn’t? Surely, Gus, each of us has moments in our lives we would undo?”
“How about Jimmy Regan?”
He laughed, but not because he thought it was funny. “I believe I just gave you an answer to that. What man wouldn’t?”
“It’s an answer, but it’s pretty vague.”
“How did I know you wouldn’t be satisfied with our last talk?”
I shrugged. “Bill, I don’t want to believe Regan has any connection to all this violence, but I keep coming back around to him.”
“You’re wrong about this, Gus. I feel sure of it.”
“The other day when we spoke,” I said, taking a gulp of the wine, “you said Regan was no saint.”
“Nor are the two men in this room.”
I ignored that since his statement was true on its face. “When you said that about him, I thought you were talking about his drinking. Everyone in the department knows he used to have a problem with that and that he’s gotten it under control. But that’s not what you were talking about, was it, Bill?”
He finished the whole of his wine in a single swallow. He walked over to the sink of the tiny kitchen, poured himself some more, and gestured at me with the bottle.
“Sure, why not?” I walked over by him, letting him fill a third of the glass before I waved him to stop. I looked down, once again taking note of Bill’s ugly black shoes, the shoes he wore when he still wore the collar.
“Jesus, Bill, why don’t you buy yourself a pair of running shoes or cross-trainers?”
He patted my jacket pocket where I had my gun stashed. “And why don’t you stop carrying that damned thing around with you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Because we are who we are. We all find comfort in odd things.”
“Comfort can be a kind of prison of its own.”
“There are any number of prisons, Gus. Some of our making and to our taste. Some not.”
“Fair enough,” I said, raising my glass to him, “but you haven’t answered my question about Regan.”
“You’re wrong about Jimmy, because I know the man.”
“Bill, you know a lot of things. I’ll give you that. You’re maybe the most intuitive person about human feelings I’ve ever met. Believe me, that’s saying something. You saved me, probably from killing myself. You helped save what was left of my family—”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming down the road here shortly.”
I obliged him. “But there’s something life and being on the job has taught me.”
“Care to share it with a broken-down ex-priest?”
“It’s impossible to really know somebody else.”
“And why is that, Gus?”
“Because we don’t even know ourselves. Sure, from day to day, inside the confines of our lives, we’re pretty good at predicting how we’ll react. But that’s not knowing yourself.”
He had no snappy comeback, no handy scripture quotation. Instead he sat down and sipped his wine. I knew he was thinking about it, that he had thought about this very subject many times before.
“There’s truth in what you say. To deny it would make me a liar or a fool. I know with some certainty that I’m not much for lying, but I don’t suppose I will find out if I’m a fool until I’ve drawn my last breath.” Bill let a smile light up his gaunt face. “My, we’ve gone a bit far afield, haven’t we, though?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry, Gus, but the things you want to know about Jimmy Regan . . . I cannot help you there.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both, I suppose.”
I thought I understood. “Did you hear his confession?”
“For a few years there, I was his confessor, but I won’t rely solely on the sanctity of confession to deflect your questions. Jimmy and I are friends, much as I’d like to think you and I are friends. My friendship with Jimmy was forged like ours, Gus, in the midst of very personal crisis. And it is neither my place as a priest nor as a friend to share the details or the nature of that crisis. Though I will say to you that it was many years ago and I can’t see how it would have any bearing on what’s going on here.”
“Okay, Bill. I understand and I owe you far too much to press you on this. But can you answer me one question and then I’ll leave it be between us?”
“If I can.”
“This crisis, whatever it was, did it happen in the mid-1990s?”
He didn’t have to answer in words. The look on his face was answer enough.
42
(FRIDAY, LATE AFTERNOON)
D
usk was taking a sharp turn toward night as I swung left off the Southern State onto the northbound Sagtikos/Sunken Meadow Parkway. With schools out and people getting an early jump on holiday travel, traffic was sparse on both sides of the road. I was more than a little preoccupied by any number of things when I saw the flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I immediately looked at my speedometer. I was doing seventy, fifteen over the Sag speed limit, though by Long Island standards I was crawling.
I wasn’t really worried about getting a ticket. Cops, even retired ones, can usually escape that fate. No, the problem was that the Sag, like the Southern State and Northern State Parkways and unlike the Long Island Expressway, was patrolled by state troopers, not the SCPD. It was that territorial thing. State troopers weren’t particularly fond of local cops and resented the hell out of our contracts, so they took a strange delight in any opportunity to bust our balls, and traffic stops were perfect opportunities for just that.
There was a brief moment when I thought that maybe the lights weren’t for me. A very brief moment. When the unmarked Crown Vic zoomed up behind me, I knew it was game on. I pulled onto the shoulder, my tires kicking up a cloud of dust. I saw the Crown Vic emerge out of the dust as it pulled to a stop directly behind me. I flicked on my interior lights and rolled down my window. I retrieved my license, registration, and union card. I put the documentation in my left hand and stuck my hands on the steering wheel and watched out my sideview mirror, waiting for the trooper’s inevitable approach. But the second the trooper shut off his Crown Vic’s in-grille-mounted red-and-blue flashing lights, I got the sense that something was wrong. I just didn’t know how wrong.
With those flashing lights off, we would be less conspicuous to passing cars. That was if passing cars would even notice us in the dying light. But it was only when the door of the Crown Vic opened and the man behind the wheel stepped out that I knew I might be in more serious trouble than just a little ball busting. The guy who got out of the unmarked Ford wasn’t in uniform. He wasn’t dressed in state trooper grays, nor did he have on a beige felt trooper hat. That didn’t mean anything by itself. The troopers had plainclothes personnel, too, but I had never seen one doing a traffic stop. And then there was the fact that he already had his weapon fully drawn. That wasn’t exactly doing it by the book. Look, traffic stops can be dangerous and there are times you have to have the attitude proper procedure be damned. The thing was, I couldn’t see how this was one of those times. I’d been speeding, sure, but there was nothing about my car or the way I’d been driving to call particular attention to myself or to mark me as dangerous. I was being set up.
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