by R.J. Ellory
Moran’s last-known address was on the outskirts of the Yard, up around West 132nd, just near the point Park Avenue crossed the Harlem River. Walsh called down to the pool for a vehicle, took his jacket from the back of his chair, and made his way out.
Bryant saw him leaving, called him back.
“Got word from Madigan . . . Looks like he has a lead on this girl, the one from the Sandià house,” he said. “And where you off to?”
“After a buddy of Fulton’s, see if Fulton was a talker.”
“Good ’nough.” Bryant smiled, added, “And, hey, let’s be careful out there.”
“That is such a crap impression. Did you ever actually watch Hill Street Blues?”
“Yes, I did, wiseass.”
“Well, you take it easy as well, Sarge.”
“Fuck you very much,” Bryant replied, and turned to head back to his office.
Walsh watched him go. Bryant was a good man, a good sergeant, but it was the first time Bryant had ever cracked wise with him in all the months he’d been there. IA was a hell of a way to make no friends.
26
BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE
Three blocks south and he would be outside the 167th—that’s how close he was—and for a while Madigan stood ahead of the beat-to-shit tenement building and wondered whether there was anyone inside who would talk to him. And if he found someone who was willing to talk, would they know anything of consequence? The Arias apartment was up on the third. Madigan took the stairs. He didn’t trust elevators at the best of times, and in buildings such as these it was best to trust them not at all. Even as he entered the hallway on the third floor, as he checked door numbers for the right apartment, he had an uneasy feeling. For Madigan, it was never a question of whether or not to trust his intuition. Intuition was vital. Intuition was a faculty to be cultivated—not necessarily depended upon, but certainly cultivated. Criminology and profiling were not sciences. Not in the strictest sense of the word. There were variables in all aspects of these subjects, and the guys that had worked on them initially, the ones who had built the foundations, well, they had originally gone with their intuition. In that moment it was intuition that told him the apartment was empty. Number thirty-seven, supposedly the residence of Isabella Arias and her daughter, Melissa, missing from school for two weeks, now laid up in Harlem Hospital with a gunshot wound. The terrible irony was not missed on Madigan. Had he not hit the Sandià house, the girl would not have been shot. Had he not been carrying seventy-five grand’s worth of gambling debts, he would not have hit the Sandià house in the first place. Had he spent a little more time concerning himself with his own relationships, his own duties as a father, then he would not have been gambling. Now he was out here concerning himself with the well-being of someone else’s child, a degree of concern far greater than he had shown his own children. All the while he was aware of the fact that if too much of what he learned became common knowledge then he was dead, if not physically then certainly professionally.
He raised his hand and knocked on the apartment door.
“Ain’t there,” a voice said behind him.
Madigan turned, came face-to-face with a middle-aged white woman. “Sorry?”
“She ain’t there . . . She’s gone. Left us with three hundred bucks of unpaid rent.”
“Us?” Madigan asked.
“My brother and me. He’s the super. I do all the money stuff, collect the rent and what have you. She just took off a couple of weeks back and that was that. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of her or the brat kid since.”
Madigan was beginning to get irritated by the woman’s tone. He flipped his badge. She looked at it nonchalantly and shook her head.
“So what? She’s dead or something?”
Madigan closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath. “I’m looking for her,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth what?”
“Elizabeth Young.”
“And your brother’s name?”
“Harold. Harry.”
“And you own the building or just supervise it?”
The woman cracked a bitter smile. “You think I’d live in this rathole if I owned it? No, the place is owned by some real estate people in the city, far as I know. I don’t deal with them. I deal with the property agent. I collect the rent, bank it, do the paperwork an’ all that.”
“And these people, the woman and her daughter—”
“Isabella Arias. That’s her name. And the kid’s name is Melissa.”
“And when did you last see them?”
“Two weeks maybe. Something like that. Three hundred bucks behind and they just took off. I’ve been in there. There ain’t nothin’ worth nothin’ for us to sell and make it back. Hell, I don’t know who these people think they damn well are.”
“Do you remember the exact day you last saw them, Ms. Young?”
Elizabeth Young looked at Madigan for a moment. She seemed to stand a little straighter. She was being addressed politely, a little respectfully perhaps.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do,” she said. “It was the last day of December, middle of the day.”
“New Year’s Eve.”
“Right. New Year’s Eve.”
“And were they coming in or going out?”
“Coming in, just her and the girl. Had some bags, groceries, I reckon. Didn’t pay much attention, to tell you the truth. I’d let the rent slide for a while, it being Christmas an’ all, but I reckoned I could only let it go so far. People I answer to don’t know the meaning of compassion, if you know what I mean. Besides, I hadn’t seen them for a good few days. Figured they might have gone visiting with family or something, considering all that had happened. So I waited a couple of hours and then I knocked on the door. No answer. Not a sound. I imagined they’d just gone out again without me hearing them. I went over the day after New Year’s, knocked again. Same thing. Left it a couple more days and still there was no answer. I kinda got worried then, because like I said, I was rememberin’ what happened to her sister an’ all—”
“Her sister?”
“Sure, her sister, Maribel. Pretty girl. Really pretty. Ever such a sweet girl, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thereabouts. Anyway, considering what had happened to the sister I got a little worried—”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Young, I need you to back up here. What was it that happened to her sister?”
Elizabeth Young frowned. She looked at Madigan like the comings and goings of Maribel Arias were common knowledge. “She was murdered. Murdered just the day after Christmas.”
The hairs rose on the nape of Madigan’s neck. “Murdered?”
“Sure. Yeah. It was all over the building. They found her head in a Dumpster someplace, the rest of her a block or two away. You didn’t know about that?”
“No,” Madigan said. “I didn’t even know she had a sister.”
“Yes, she definitely had a sister, and that sister definitely got herself murdered. Anyway, as I was saying, I kinda got worried seein’ as how this thing had happened to Maribel, so I opened up the apartment and took a look inside. Nothing to see. Everything looked like it had before. I got to thinking that maybe she just got scared or whatever, and she just decided she was going to take off someplace. That was the only thing I could think.”
“And did you report this?”
“What’s to report? People bail out on their rent all the time. There was nothing to tell anyone. She was there, and then she was gone.”
Madigan was quiet for a moment. He was trying to think, trying to put something together. “I want to see inside,” he said eventually. “You have the keys?”
“Sure do,” Elizabeth replied, and then she hesitated. “You need a warrant or something?”
“Unpaid rent, tenant gone, and your brother’s the super? I don’t need a warrant. I just need you to say it’s okay.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Okay with me.
” She went back into her apartment to get the keys.
She opened up, left him alone in there, went back to her own place. Inside it was as the woman had described. Madigan stood for a while in the silence of the room. The air inside was musty, a little dry. No air-conditioning, no open windows for two weeks, that was all. He walked through the living room into the kitchen, opened drawers and cupboards, opened the fridge, the microwave. He went back through and looked in both bedrooms, the small bathroom, an adjacent closet. Someone could be home any moment now. That was how it felt. On the floor of the girl’s room were a couple of dolls, a coloring set, a scattering of cheap toys, the kind that came with fast food kids’ meals. Didn’t appear to be any missing clothes. The mother’s room was the same—a cheap dresser, cosmetics on top of it, a bed that had been slept in and left unmade, the cupboards and drawers full of clothes. Where is it that people go where they need to take nothing with them?
Madigan went back to the living room and stood in the middle of the rug. He closed his eyes. The mother and daughter were seen two weeks ago. They vanish within a couple hours of being seen. They leave all their clothes and possessions behind. A week or so before that the mother’s sister was murdered—decapitated, her head found in a Dumpster, the rest of her elsewhere. There had to be a connection, and that connection—Madigan suspected—possessed a great deal to do with the little girl’s presence in the Sandià house. It was this thought that chilled him.
He went through the rooms again, looked more carefully, looked beneath the rugs, behind the fridge, behind the TV.
In the bathroom he stopped. Behind the door, low and near the ground, there were a series of dark scuff marks on the paintwork. Madigan closed the door, put his shoulder against it, and then pressed the edge of his shoe against the lower part of the door. The scuff marks were in precisely the position they would be had he tried to prevent someone getting in. Had someone come here for the girl and the mother? If so who, and why? Sandià? What would Sandià want with a woman like Isabella Arias? More to the point, what would he want with her daughter? And did their disappearance relate to the death of the sister, Maribel?
That would be the first port of call—to find out about the sister. When had she died, when and where had she been found, and who had found her? It may have been handled at the 167th, and if so it made his life a great deal easier. The last thing he needed was to officially involve another precinct in this mess.
He left the apartment, knocked on Elizabeth Young’s door.
“I’m done in there for now,” he said. “Before I go, I just want to clarify these dates. The sister was murdered on the twenty-sixth, right?”
“Well, I don’t know when she was murdered, but that was when they found her.”
“Okay, and then you saw Isabella and Melissa on the thirty-first, New Year’s Eve?”
“Yeah, New Year’s Eve.”
“And you hadn’t seen them at all between the twenty-sixth and the thirty-first?”
“No, not a sign of them. Like I said, I figured they’d gone away visiting family or something, the sister having died an’ all.”
“Okay,” Madigan said. “And between the time they arrived and when you knocked on the apartment door a couple of hours later you heard nothing suspicious?”
The woman smiled and shook her head. “My brother is deaf like a plank. He has the TV on so damned loud I have to go shut myself in the kitchen. World War Three could break out in the lobby and I wouldn’t hear a damned thing.” She hesitated, and then she frowned. “Why? You think something happened here? She gone and got herself killed as well?”
“I don’t know, Ms. Young. I really don’t know. I’m just trying to find her right now, that’s all.”
“Well, if you do find her tell her to get her ass back here pronto. Another two weeks they’re gonna come empty the place out, paint it maybe, and then it’ll be someone else’s apartment.”
“If I see her, I’ll tell her. And is there anything else that you think might be useful for me to know . . . people who came over, recent visitors, anything out of the ordinary?”
“Not that I can think of,” she replied. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“That’s really appreciated, Ms. Young.”
Madigan gave her his card, asked her to call him if there was any news of Isabella Arias or her daughter. He did not tell the woman that Melissa Arias was lying in a bed in Harlem Hospital. Such a piece of information would be everywhere in the building, everywhere in the neighborhood, before nightfall. And the last thing he needed was for word to get back to Sandià that he was looking into the murder of Maribel. He did not see how they could be anything but connected. The sister is murdered, the woman and her daughter disappear, and the daughter is found in Sandià’s house. Two plus two makes four.
He left the building, and as he walked back to his car he began to appreciate that whatever concern Sandià possessed about Melissa Arias, it was a great deal more important than three hundred grand and the death of his nephew.
Madigan was scared. There was another facet to everything now, another factor to take into consideration. Something was going on, and that something was important enough to have justified the killing of Maribel Arias and the kidnap of the child. Maybe Isabella was dead too. Maybe she’d been cut up and scattered around some other part of the city, and it was merely a matter of time before someone found her.
Madigan, however, did not think so. He believed that Isabella Arias was out there. Hiding, terrified, perhaps unaware of what had happened to her daughter. Above all else, she needed to be found, and found fast. Madigan needed to get to her before Sandià.
He started the engine and headed back to the 167th. There were case files on the sister’s murder that he needed to locate, and if those files were outside the Yard then he was screwed.
More than he already was? For sure, no question about it. If there was one thing he knew from hard-won experience, it was however deep the hole there was always a way to dig it deeper.
27
CLEOPATRA DREAMS ON
There is usually one way to get things right, but there are countless ways to get it wrong.
Among the things you don’t want to get wrong are your family, your marriage, your kids, your career, your finances. All the important shit.
The little things don’t matter. They get fixed or they fix themselves.
With me, it’s always been the other way around, and in hindsight I have recognized the problem. I am short-sighted. I see today, tomorrow, maybe next week. Guys who get things right—the important things—look a little farther. They have five-year plans. I can’t comprehend five years. What does that even mean? Sometimes twenty-four hours is a struggle. A day. A single day. And I’m expected to be planning the next two thousand? Some kind of joke that is.
No, I have been short-sighted. I have listened to the epithets and clichés. People who aim for nothing are sure to hit it. Some people dream of success while others get up and work hard at it. To hell with that. You need a hit. Just one good hit, and it’s all done and dusted. Sandià’s money was going to dig me out of a hole. Hell, the guy can afford it. He makes that much money between every heartbeat. But me? No, not me. I get it organized, I get it straight, I get it all figured out—all the details. But I miss the important shit. I miss the vitally important life-or-death significant keystone that holds the whole thing together. You don’t ever crap in your own backyard. I should’ve known that. What was I thinking? Chewing pills like M&M’s, drinking a fifth before dinner, another fifth before bed. Jesus, could I have been dumber? Sure I could. Have been dumber than that before. Dumb enough to get involved with Sandià. Kind of bullshit stupid thing was that? Well, it wasn’t at the time. Smartest thing I could’ve done. That’s what I thought. I can play both sides. I can make a little here, a little there, keep the PD happy, make some busts, all the while the left hand is right behind me taking a fat bonus from Sandià for keeping the noise down arou
nd his place.
And now? Now I have only one advantage. It’s simple really, too simple to ignore. Sandià trusts me. Why else would he ask me to take care of this thing? He needs the girl alive; he needs to know who took his money and killed his nephew. So who does he call? He calls Vincent. Good old Vincent. Vincent will take care of it. Vincent can play both sides. Vincent can see around corners. This is what Vincent does. This is Vincent’s specialty.
And it all comes down to the money. Only thing you need to get anyplace at all.
Am I dreaming?
Is this all a figment of my imagination?
Have I just taken too many pills and emptied too many bottles to even remember where reality and imagination divide?
Jesus, what the hell have I done here?
What the hell am I doing now?
And if I get this wrong? If I screw this up? Hell, I don’t even want to think about it.
I think a thought, and it’s a strange thought, an uncharacteristic thought—at least for me. For a second—just a second—I wonder what it will do to the children. Cassie, Adam, Lucy, and Tom. What would it do to them if they found out the truth about their father?
Angela, Ivonne, Catherine . . . what they think doesn’t matter now. They’re all grown up. They can handle it. They knew what they were taking on, and if they didn’t when they started they sure as hell did by the time they were finished.
It was a game. That was all. Just a game.
And then it became something else. What, I don’t know, but it became something else. It got serious. It started to mean something.
I have to get back to how I was. I have to be the old Vincent Madigan, the one who didn’t give a damn for anything but today, right now, the next five minutes.
Right now anything else would be suicide. It’s all right to give a damn, but you have to give a damn about the right things. That money has to wind up somewhere, and that will be the clincher. Someone has to take the fall for this and then it will all settle down. I got to think fast, think both ways at the same time, and then we’ll get through and out the other side.