by R.J. Ellory
“And where the hell do you think I’m gonna get eight grand from, Bernie? That’s a sizable chunk of cash.”
“I don’t know, Vincent. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care. You gotta help me. You gotta—”
“I ain’t gotta anything, Bernie. You can’t just up and ask me for eight grand—”
“I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay you back for sure, Vincent.”
“Just like you paid whoever you now owe this money to, right?”
“Anything, Vincent—”
“I want the phone,” Madigan said.
Bernie’s eyes widened. “The phone?”
“The phone you recorded the cop on. I want that phone.”
“But, Vincent—”
“Bernie, don’t bullshit me. You need eight grand. I can give you eight grand right here and now in cash.”
Bernie smiled weirdly, and then he laughed. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”
Madigan reached into his pants pocket. “That’s about three and a half right there,” he said, showing Bernie the bundle of notes as discreetly as he could. “I have another bundle like that in each of my jacket pockets, and I’ll give you eight grand right now if you give me the phone.”
Bernie blinked twice, and then he shook his head. “I can’t . . .”
“This money you need . . . Is it for Sandià?”
“No, of course it isn’t for Sandià.”
“Then you’re screwed,” Madigan said. “You give me the phone for this eight grand, and then you have nothing to barter for the Sandià debt, right?”
Bernie didn’t need to reply. The situation was obvious.
“Okay, Bernie, here’s the deal. I need you alive. This is a bullshit thing you’ve done here. You’ve been running a tab with some other loan shark bookie asshole, right? Whatever the hell you’ve done that’s got you into this much trouble for the sake of eight grand . . . Jesus Christ, I can’t even get my head on with you sometimes . . .”
“Vincent . . . man, seriously, I didn’t mean to—”
“Shut the hell up and listen to me, Bernie. I’m gonna give you the eight grand because I can’t have you die on me right now. I want the phone, okay? You need to give me the phone. You need to give it to me because I’m gonna look after it a helluva lot better than you, and also because if you screw something else up and get yourself killed then I’m in a hole, okay?”
“But, Vincent—”
“Bernie, what the hell did I say?”
“You said to shut the hell up.”
“Good, so shut the hell up a minute and hear me out.”
Bernie shut his mouth.
“Okay, so you give me the phone, I give you eight grand, you keep the hell out of trouble and stay alive for a few more days. I’ll give you another five hundred and you just go hide in a motel or whatever, and you’re on call to me, okay? You do nothing. You go nowhere without my say-so. You understand me so far?”
Bernie nodded.
“Good, so you go hide in a motel someplace, and you call me and let me know where you . . . No, better still, I’m taking you someplace and then I’ll know where you are, and when I call you and tell you to do something, you gotta do it, okay?”
“And what about Sandià . . . I gotta pay Sandià too.”
“I’m dealing with that,” Madigan said. “I’m handling it. I’ll keep my end of the deal if you do exactly what I tell you.”
“Yes, yes . . . Jesus Christ, Vincent, I don’t know what to say.”
“Then say nothing, Bernie . . . less likely you’ll get into trouble that way.”
“Right, right.”
“Good, so we’re going. Where’s this phone?”
“It’s in a rented mailbox place about three blocks from here.”
“Well, lead the way, my friend. Lead the way.”
They went on foot, and en route Madigan stopped at a phone store and bought a disposable cell with fifty dollars’ credit on it. He dialed his own number into the directory, called himself, then gave the phone to Bernie.
“You have my number now,” Madigan said. “Only number you need. That’s the only phone you answer, and this is the only phone you call out from, okay? When I see you I’m gonna check how many times you’ve called me and how much credit remains. If I find out you’ve been calling hookers or bookies or dealers or whoever, then so help me God I will drive you to see Sandià myself . . .”
“I promise, Vincent. I promise.”
“Okay, so let’s get this phone with the recording on it.”
The mailbox place was where Bernie said it would be, as was the phone. Madigan checked the recording. It was Walsh all right, no question.
“Okay, so where do you have to get this eight grand to?”
“There’s a club up on Marin Boulevard—”
“You’re bullshitting me,” Madigan said. “Marin Boulevard. There’s only one person you could be dealing with if you’ve got to make a drop there. Jesus, Bernie, what the hell was it this time?”
“It was a ball game, okay? A dumb freakin’ ball game. I went double or nothing. It was an outstanding debt from a long way back.”
“Jesus, Bernie, sometimes I wonder what the hell is wrong with you.”
“It’s a sickness, Vincent . . . Gambling is a sickness . . .”
“Yeah, Bernie, sure as hell it is. Just like being a drunk or a junkie or a kiddy fiddler . . . It’s all a freakin’ illness and no one’s actually responsible.”
“Vincent, I’m sorry . . .”
“Save it, Bernie. We’re going in the car. I’m not walking to Marin Boulevard. And this eight grand . . . This is everything, yeah? This is not, Get me eight grand today and you’ll stay alive, but I want the rest by tomorrow? It’s not that kind of deal, right?”
“No. This is everything, Vincent, absolutely everything.”
“It fucking better be, Bernie, or I’m gonna—”
“It is, Vincent, it is. This and the one eighty I owe Sandià, and that’s it.”
“Just this and the one eighty to Sandià. That’s all. Man, you should hear yourself. Don’t know anyone in as deep a hole as Bernie freakin’ Tomczak.”
Madigan heard his own words. There was the lie. The hole Madigan had dug for himself was far, far deeper.
Madigan drove. Neither he nor Tomczak spoke for the duration of the journey. Madigan pulled up outside without even asking where they were supposed to be going.
He counted out the eight grand and gave it to Bernie Tomczak. Bernie looked like he was going to say something, and then he looked like he wasn’t.
“Okay, so go pay the man,” Madigan said, and Bernie got out of the car.
Madigan waited. Bernie was gone no more than ten minutes. While he waited, Madigan listened to the recording Bernie had made of his conversation with Walsh. It was a good recording—no doubt about the identity of the speaker, and no question what each of them meant. If this ended up in the hands of someone inside the PD, then Walsh’s career was done and over. He’d said he’d get rid of the evidence, and—by all appearances—he had.
Bernie Tomczak returned. He seemed relieved.
“They ask where the money came from?” Madigan asked.
“Do they ever?” Bernie replied. “Do they care?”
“No, they don’t,” Madigan said, and started the car.
He drove Bernie back across the river to Mott Haven, found a motel near St. Francis Hospital. He booked him in for a week, paid up-front, gave Bernie another five hundred in cash.
“That,” Madigan said, “is for coffee and cakes, a drink, some smokes, right? Nothing else. I come back and you’ve gambled that . . .”
“Vincent, enough already. I got it. I really got it, okay?”
“Glad to hear it, Bernie. Now, you take care. Stay inside, watch the porn channel, order food delivered in, a different take-out every time. Stay the hell here until I call you.”
Bernie nodded. He stood in the doorway of his new home. �
��I really appreciate it, Vincent. You know, despite all the shit that’s gone down between us, you really are a good—”
“Save it, Bernie. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Madigan drove back to the precinct, stopping only once at a secondhand cellphone place to buy an identical phone to the one he had taken from Bernie. He recorded the conversation between Walsh and Tomczak on the second phone, and put the first one in the glove box. Back at the precinct he found Walsh, asked him to come to his office. Walsh did so. Madigan sat him down, handed him the phone, and Walsh sat there in quiet disbelief for a good thirty seconds.
“This is the phone?” he said eventually.
“No, Walsh, it’s my mother’s cellphone. Jesus Christ, of course it’s the phone.”
Walsh looked set to cry.
“So we’re done, okay?” Madigan said. “Now will you go the hell home and get some sleep?”
Walsh got up. “Christ Almighty, I don’t know what to say, Vincent.”
“Well, like I just told Bernie, why don’t you keep your mouth shut for a while and stay out of trouble?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”
“Good, now get the hell out of here. I have things to do.”
Walsh left. Madigan could imagine him exiting the precinct, sitting in his car, playing that conversation over and over and then deleting it, all the while asking himself how much of an idiot he’d been. If such an experience had taught Walsh anything, it would have to be that there was a line. Step over it and you better know what you were doing, and if you didn’t . . . well, you’d end up like Bernie Tomczak. Hiding in some two-bit piece-of-shit motel in Mott Haven and scared to go outside.
And maybe, Madigan thought as he left his office once more, that would be his own fate too.
There had been other plays. The game had moved on. Now it was time to bring it all to a close.
48
FIRE SPIRIT
Charlie Harris was at his desk. He seemed agitated before Madigan even started speaking, and when Madigan opened with, “Charlie . . . another question about this Valderas killing, the one with the screwdriver,” Charlie looked up at him with this vexed expression on his face. It was then that Madigan knew he was aggravating an open wound. Charlie Harris had something on this case, and he didn’t want Madigan pulling threads out of it.
“What?” Harris replied, in his voice an edge of suspicion.
“Just something that’s been bothering me.”
“Jesus, Vincent, I’m really busy here. I got a reassignment from some dickhead at the 158th because a CI we once used— Ah Christ, you don’t even wanna know.” He shook his head and leaned back in the chair. “So what is the problem now?”
Madigan took the other chair, hesitated for just a moment, and then said, “The witnesses?”
“Witnesses? What the hell are you talking about? I told you I got nothing, jack squat, nada . . . absolutely nothing on this one.”
“Inside the house.”
Harris seemed confused. “What about it?”
Madigan then took his turn to frown. “What about what?”
“Jesus, we gonna do this square dance all day? You ask me about the witness in the house, and then you look surprised because I’m asking you what you want to know about the witness in the house. You even mentioned this girl, the one who got sliced and diced. It’s all in the file.”
Madigan shook his head. “There’s nothing in the file about any witness in the house, Charlie.”
“Sure there is. I wrote the damned thing up myself. Go take another look.”
“I’ve gone through every page. There’s no report about a possible witness in the house.”
“What?”
“Seriously, Charlie, there’s nothing there.”
“Well, sure as shit there was someone in the house, and sure as shit I wrote it up. If some doofus in admin has screwed it up and lost a report, then that’s their problem.”
“What was in the report?”
“Look, Vincent, it’s real simple. We get there. There’s a DB on the deck with a freakin’ screwdriver sticking out of his face like an aerial. Maybe he’s trying to catch the WKLM evening show, I don’t know. We clear the house, we make sure no one’s hiding anyplace with a socket set and a monkey wrench, right? Then I’m in the bathroom, and all of a sudden I’m standing in a pool of piss, right? Someone’s peed on the bathroom rug. Then Crime Scene shows up, late as ever, and they’re looking at the pooling around the DB’s head, and they come back and tell me that there’s the edge of a woman’s shoe print in the blood, okay? So two plus two makes four. This footprint comes after the blood, not before. So we’re straight now. There’s someone in the house, some chick, and she’s hiding in the bathroom. She’s terrified, she knows what’s happening. She waits for the perp to leave, she comes out, she’s checking out aerial-head, and even as she’s standing there the blood pool reaches the edge of her shoes or whatever. Then she takes off—”
Madigan thought of Maribel Arias—decapitated, her torso and body parts divided, bagged, dumped unceremoniously in various locations. A week ago it had seemed insignificant. Now it seemed like a nightmare from the worst of all imaginations.
Madigan wanted to ask Charlie Harris how they had become so cynical. At what point had these people ceased to be people? He caught himself even as he voiced the question in his own mind. Something was happening to him. A week ago he would no more have thought such a question than confess to the Sandià house robbery and the three DBs in the storage unit.
He was losing it. He wasn’t drinking as much. He wasn’t swallowing pills like they were M&M’s. Yes, he was definitely losing it.
“Okay,” Madigan said, and started to get up.
“Anyway, you have any other questions about this bullshit you ask someone else, okay? I got too much on my desk to be dealing with history right now.”
“I think I’m done, Charlie . . . I was just puzzled about the witness in the house thing.”
“Well, we’re straight on that now. All done and dusted, right?”
“Right.”
Madigan looked back as he left the office. Charlie wasn’t watching him, and Charlie had really seemed pretty much the way he always was. And the report from the file? The report that was no longer there? Maybe Charlie wasn’t the lead to Sandià. Ron Callow? Hell, it could have been anyone in the precinct. Everyone had access to files, or could get access to them without difficulty. All Sandià had to do was give a nod to whoever he had in the system, get them to keep tabs on an ongoing investigation, keep him informed of what was happening with it, and “lose” the odd document or two to slow down the proceedings. Madigan knew it could happen that way. Why? Because he’d done the very same things himself.
No, intuition told him that this went further than Charlie Harris and a lost piece of paperwork, but he couldn’t think who . . .
Back in his own office he put Bernie Tomczak’s phone in an evidence bag and locked it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he changed his mind, took it out, and hid it way back behind the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet. He counted the few remaining hundreds of Sandià’s ten grand, and he wondered what his next step should be. No one else was looking into the Sandià robbery and the three homicides. No one else was looking into the Melissa Arias shooting. The Maribel murder and the killing of David Valderas were on the back burner. With Walsh taken care of, no one was even looking at him. Charlie Harris wasn’t filing any more reports, and neither would Madigan. That way, whoever was feeding information to Sandià would run dry very quickly. That would make Sandià dependent upon Madigan. That would also prompt someone—perhaps—to come asking about progress on the cases. Madigan remembered a scene from The Godfather. The garden, Michael talking with his father, and Vito told him to look out for whoever came to propose the reconciliation meeting. It was the same here. Whoever asked for progress—nonchalantly, as an aside, a Hey, Vincent, anything ever hap
pen on that Sandià bust . . . You know, the one where those three guys got whacked in the storage unit or whatever?—well, that was the man. That’s what he had to watch for.
Resolved in his own mind that things were as under control as they could be, Madigan left the office. He took the stairs, headed out of the building, and drove home. It was nearly three, he’d eaten no lunch, had been on-shift since eight that morning. Officially he had a couple of hours left, but no one would miss him. He wanted out for a while. Just a little while. He wanted to be elsewhere—away from this, away from the madness and the lies and the killing.
Something had shifted. Was it the fact that he had Isabella Arias in his house? Was it the fact that he wasn’t drugged out of his head half the time? He hadn’t even thought about it, but he was taking fewer and fewer pills. He reached his car, got in, and searched through the glove box for the hip flask. It was full. He drank half of it, maybe a little more, and then he leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. The warmth of the spirit filled his throat, his chest, and he could feel the knot of muscle easing at the base of his neck and across his shoulders. There was that ever-present anxiety in the base of his gut. Always there, always reliable . . . the tension that came with living this life. At the end of every phone call is another disaster. No victims are created equal. When your day ends, my day begins. Lord God, if nothing else, just grant me one more day . . .
Madigan set the hip flask aside and started the engine. He pulled out of the underground parking lot and turned right toward home. He was going to stop on the way and get food. He knew a Thai place a half dozen blocks from his house. He would get food for them both, and he would make believe that he was a normal guy with a normal life and that everything that happened today had no bearing on tomorrow or the next day or the next.
For a little while—perhaps—Sandià would not exist, nor Maribel in a Dumpster, nor Valderas with a screwdriver through his face, nor a little girl in a hospital with a bullet hole through her guts. Perhaps.
49
SEXBEAT
“I don’t eat oriental food usually,” she said, “but that was good.”