Murder Scene

by Richard Montanari

  Will looked at the class. These agreeably cynical students were rapt.

  ‘I submit that it might be better procedure to quietly sneak up behind the subject, and place him in handcuffs. That said, this would not allow for the ubiquitous overturned fruit cart.’

  Kleinman again. ‘Are there any police shows you do like?’ he asked. ‘Do any of them get it right?’

  ‘I quite like the original Prime Suspect. Can’t go far wrong with Helen Mirren, can you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Then there’s Robson Green. Small but mighty. Touching Evil, Wire in the Blood, all that.’

  Will hit the pedal.

  ‘There used to be a show called Cracker. The main character was an alcoholic, degenerate gambler, an unapologetic womanizer called Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald. Fitz was a criminal psychologist, not unlike your esteemed Dr Hardy. Except for the unapologetic part.’

  A few polite laughs.

  ‘The character was played by Robbie Coltrane, who also played—’

  ‘Hagrid,’ Kleinman said. ‘In the Harry Potter films.’

  ‘Exactly. You know your crime shows.’

  ‘Don’t like them, don’t watch them,’ he said. ‘I know my Harry Potter films.’

  Will cleared his throat, headed for the finish line. ‘I also quite like Broadchurch. It’s a bit of a soap opera, but I think it’s one of the—’

  ‘Those are all British shows.’

  Another gauntlet. ‘I suppose they are,’ Will said, as if this was just coming to him for the first time. He’d spent a year abroad at Oxford and it was there that he began his love affair with British crime shows. Add to this his ten months of DVDs while attached to a British Army Intelligence unit in Iraq, and his tastes were all but set.

  ‘Aside from the ones you were paid to consult on, any American shows?’ Kleinman added.

  Will glanced at the wall clock. Was he really only forty minutes into his first class of the new semester? Did he really have another three months of this? He looked back at David Kleinman and asked:

  ‘Does Dragnet count?’

  3

  Growing up in Dobb’s Ferry, a small town in Westchester County, Will had never considered a life in academia, had indeed been nothing more than an average student of limited attention span and scant ambition. His sports were baseball and basketball; his music was whatever was in the top 40.

  Will’s father Michael had been a firefighter with FDNY, as well as an outdoorsman, shade tree mechanic and writer, introducing his only son in equal measure to the finer points of tying lures, changing the points and plugs on muscle cars, as well as the works of Jack London and William Trevor.

  After ten years working ladder companies in Brooklyn and Staten Island, Michael Hardy was assigned to Rescue Company One. Organized in 1915, the company was called in to incidents where rescue operations were needed, often to rescue injured or trapped firefighters.

  It took less than a year for Michael to receive his first commendation for bravery, and less than three years to be promoted. There were many in the company, and indeed across FDNY, who believed Michael Hardy was being fast tracked to captain.

  It all ended on a hot July day in Will’s tenth year.

  The call came in of a firefighter trapped in the basement of an apartment on 125th Street in West Harlem. Rescue Company 1 responded.

  As young Will would learn over the following weeks, his father entered the building through a broken window on the first floor, making his way to the basement laundry room, where the fire had started due to faulty wiring. There Michael Hardy found James Wilton, probationary firefighter, just twenty-three years old, a father with two small children.

  When Michael Hardy extracted the fallen firefighter, the barely conscious Wilton told him that there was a baby still trapped in the laundry room. Michael, against his captain’s orders, ran back in to the burning building.

  It was somewhere on the concrete steps leading to the lower level that a fuel oil tank exploded, the shards of steel slicing through his protective gear like bullets.

  It would be an hour before the captain of Rescue Company 1 would learn the truth, that James Wilton had been mistaken. The infant had already been rescued.

  Michael Hardy died during surgery that night in Mt Sinai Hospital.

  For the next three years, in the wake of his numbing grief, young Will Hardy read everything he could on the causes, nature and characteristics of fire, its mythos and lore. He studied everything he could find at the libraries regarding the mindset of those who started fires, their motives and twisted rationales, often attempting to absorb texts far beyond his reading comprehension level. He learned the difference between the mind of an arsonist and that of a pyromaniac. He learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the Hartford Circus fire, the tragedy of Our Lady of the Angels. He learned the names Peter Dinsdale and David Berkowitz.

  In the next three years, as only child, with no extended family nearby, Will also learned to care for his mother.

  Sarah Hardy was a brittle woman, even before the tragedy of her husband’s death. A lifelong sufferer of depression, she was often lost for weeks to her moods, but was always there for her family, if only in daily constancy, the mechanics and rote of suburban life.

  Each morning Sarah Hardy would rise before dawn, dress for the day as if she were going to an office, artfully apply her makeup and perfume. With breakfast dishes cleared, she would walk to the living room where she would sit for hours, china cup growing cold, the newspaper opened to the Style section, often unread.

  After her husband’s death Sarah grew increasingly morose and distant, sometimes going days and weeks without uttering a word.

  The only times Sarah Hardy would talk, really opening up to her son, was when she came down from her manic states. In those rare moments, late at night, she would tell Will about her childhood, her hopes and dreams as a young girl, her fantasies and fears. In these times Will saw the woman who had lived a life of imagination and insight, a woman who felt the grass beneath her feet, the sunlight on her face.

  On the day Will Hardy’s world ended for the second time he came home from school a few minutes late. It was a Wednesday afternoon in mid-March. Will found his mother, still in her robe and slippers, sitting on the couch instead of her favorite chair. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded. At first Will thought she was asleep, but his mother never took naps during the day. She barely slept at night.

  When Will stepped closer he saw that something was wrong with her makeup. She had applied it too heavily, too hastily. It gave her a spectral, clownish appearance. When he saw the empty pill vials neatly arranged on the end table, their caps orderly placed on the seat cushion next to her, he knew.

  He watched for many minutes, waiting and hoping for his mother to draw a breath, to stir, to open her eyes. She did not. In those long minutes Will lost all sense of time and motion. He would later recall standing in the basement at his father’s workbench, the smells of natural gas and 3-in-One, the flinty redolence of oil on sandstone.

  The first recollection that stayed in his memory was sitting on his bicycle in Gould Park. He remembered riding home as fast as he could, certain that when he arrived he would find himself mistaken, that he would discover his mother in the kitchen methodically preparing their supper, finding that all would be as it was when the day began.

  But he did not return to find his nightmare dissolved.

  He returned to an inferno.

  4

  The Palladium Athletic Facility was on East 14th Street. In addition to its deep-water pool, and 3,000 square foot weight room, it housed a lower level with state of the art stair-steppers, treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bicycles.

  When Will turned the corner, at just after noon, he saw Trevor standing near the entrance. One of his closest friends, NYPD Detective Trevor Butler was a barge of a man, broad through the waist and chest, with fiery red hair and beard to match.

 
; They’d met when Will was studying at Oxford. Trevor had lectured on the psychology of community policing, a concept in its infancy at the time, and the two men became fast pub mates.

  While Will had never considered joining any branch of the armed services – had indeed fully expected to apply to FDNY, only to decide in his junior year in college that he could be of greater service as a behavioral therapist and teacher – Trevor Butler was a reservist with the Territorial Army. Third generation soldier, third generation cop.

  Before the UK military launched Operation Telic, and Trevor was called up, he told Will of an attachment that was deploying with the regular army. Trevor’s interest and education in psychological operations placed him in a unit that interrogated captured prisoners in the field, and he put in a word that Will might be a good fit for an American contractor of civilian deployment.

  Will had thought the idea insane, but after a few weeks of coaxing from Trevor, along with more than a few bottles of Jameson, he agreed.

  What had started as a fast friendship in the pubs of Oxfordshire, became a bond forged on the sand-choked highways of Fallujah.

  As Will got closer to his friend, who had agreed to start an exercise regimen with Will as his taskmaster, Will noticed that the big man’s hoodie and matching sweat pants still had the price tags on them.

  Will tried not to look.

  As they warmed up on their stationary bicycles Trevor told Will about some of the cases he was working. As a detective in the 112th Precinct, there was never a shortage of tales.

  In turn, Will told Trevor about his first day, specifically about being grilled about Brooklyn Steel. Trevor Butler also consulted on the show.

  ‘The student asked me what TV cop shows I liked,’ Will said.

  ‘You didn’t mention Broadchurch, did you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Oy.’

  Will laughed. ‘What is everybody’s problem with that show? I kind of like it.’

  ‘I think it’s a David Tennant/Doctor Who thing. Once you play The Doctor . . . ’

  While Will was in half-committed training mode for an upcoming triathlon in Lake Dunmore, Trevor Butler was here because of a recent health scare. Doctor’s orders to lose twenty pounds and cut out all added sugar.

  Will had a kyokushin session scheduled for one o’clock. He’d considered inviting Trevor to the full-contact karate class, but decided to take this one step at a time.

  As they began to slow, and Trevor could once again breathe, he asked: ‘Whatever happened with that kid? The one from the video store. What was his name again?’

  ‘Anthony,’ Will said. ‘Anthony Torres.’

  A few weeks earlier Will received an email from a member of one of his professional organizations, the New York Behavioral Therapy Association. He did not know the sender of the email, but that was not unusual. Along with curriculum vitae and publishing history, the organization’s registry listed a brief biography and special areas of interest of its members.

  The email contained a short case history of a fifteen-year-old boy named Anthony Torres who had recently been arrested for stealing merchandise from a West Village video store. The NYBTA member tagged the email with the note that suggested Will might be interested in taking the boy on as a pro bono patient, if time and circumstance allowed.

  Will was interested. He immediately called Trevor and had him pull Anthony Torres’s file.

  If the boy was convicted of this crime, which had the potential to become a strong-arm robbery charge, there was a chance he would be forced to leave his current accommodation, a minimum security group residence called Near Home, and be placed in a much tougher juvenile facility upstate.

  Will had not done much patient work in the past few years, but it was clear that Anthony Torres was on the cusp of going deeper into the system, and looked to be heading to Riker’s Island. His plight, and specifically his history, got Will’s attention.

  ‘Are you going to follow up?’ Trevor asked.

  ‘I already did,’ Will said. ‘I talked to him on the phone for an hour last week.’

  ‘Wow,’ Trevor said. ‘Most of the kids I collar don’t say two words.’

  ‘He’s a smart kid. Probably fronting most of his thug behavior. I’ll let you know in the next few days.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’m meeting with him this afternoon.’

  Abandoned on the steps of New York Hospital at the age of eleven months, Anthony Torres entered the foster care system, being placed with his first permanent family at two. The boy seemed to thrive. The father was a lineman for Con Ed; the mother was a seamstress who took in work from department stores.

  When Anthony was seven, a case worker for ACS noted bruises on the boy’s arms. An investigation uncovered a pattern of abuse from Anthony’s older foster brother, a boy named DeAndre. The adult DeAndre Tillman was serving a five-year sentence for aggravated assault.

  Anthony was removed from the home, and not placed until two years later, this time with a family in Harlem. During the next few years he got into minor scrapes with the law, including a number of incidents surrounding fires being set at his grade school. Nothing was ever proven, but the suspicions were enough for Anthony’s foster family to petition to have him removed from their home. He was.

  Since that time Anthony had bounced around the system, not staying in any one facility more than six months.

  Will had also read the summary of Anthony’s recent arrest for shoplifting. When apprehended on the sidewalk outside the video store, Anthony had four items in his possession; DVDs for which he had not paid. The movies were Backdraft, Ladder 49, and Frequency, as well as a boxed set of the first season of the Denis Leary TV series, Rescue Me.

  All stories of firefighters.

  All stories of fire.

  5

  They met at the McDonald’s on West Third. Will knew that Anthony Torres, who had been released pending his court case, was currently in Non-Secure Detention. An NSD facility was a supportive, home-like environment housing about a dozen kids, with close supervision. Anthony had to return to the facility by five-thirty.

  At just after two o’clock Will noticed a shadow to his right, near the entrance.

  Even though Will had the boy’s particulars in the file, had a pair of recent photographs, he was bigger than Will expected.

  Anthony was about two inches shorter than Will’s six-foot-one, but more muscular. As Will watched him enter the restaurant, looking around for the man he was supposed to meet, Will noticed a slow, deliberate grace.

  Will stood, got the boy’s attention.

  ‘Anthony,’ he said.

  The boy looked over. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Will Hardy.’

  ‘So, let me get this straight, you say the ’61 Yankees would’ve taken the ’69 Mets in four straight?’ Anthony asked.

  They’d begun their small talk with the weather. It was Will’s idea, and not a good one. It never was with a teenager. They quickly moved on to sports.

  ‘If they let the series go, say, seventy games, the Mets might’ve scored three runs total,’ Will said. ‘It would’ve been a bloodbath.’

  Anthony shook his head. ‘No way. The Amazins had Tom Seaver and Cleon Jones and Donn Clendenon. Nolan Ryan, man.’

  In the lore of the city, and the sport, the 1969 Mets – the first expansion team to ever win the World Series – had been dubbed the Amazing Mets, instantly shortened to the Amazins.

  ‘All honorable men,’ Will said. ‘Fine baseball players who rose to the challenge. They’re just not Yankees.’

  It was an argument as old as the Mets franchise. That said, Anthony Torres wasn’t yet old enough to know the true heartbreak of being a Mets fan.

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Anthony nodded as he drained his Coke. ‘Mantle and Maris,’ he said. ‘That would’ve been the bomb, man. I was born too late.’

  Will wanted to add that he, too, was born too late to see the 1961 Yankees, but kept
it to himself.

  It did not go unnoticed to Will that Anthony had called him man. This was good. It implied a level of camaraderie and kinship.

  At that moment an FDNY ladder truck siren rose in the near distance. Will tried not to look at Anthony; Anthony looked anywhere but at Will. After a few moments the truck passed, turning the corner onto Avenue of the Americas.

  The shrill sound brought them to the reason they were meeting in the first place, and how their time was moving quickly along.

  Before Will could attempt a segue, his cell phone chirped. He usually turned his phone off during a session, but today was different. He was waiting to hear from Amanda. He glanced at the screen. She had texted him.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Anthony said. ‘You gotta get that.’

  ‘I do.’

  Anthony shook his head. ‘Shrinks.’

  ‘Gotta represent,’ Will said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  ‘I’ll be right here.’

  Will stepped out of the restaurant for a moment, tapped his Messages icon. He read his wife’s text.

  We on for Friday?

  Will texted back, hoping it wasn’t too soon, therefore revealing the excitement and desperation he felt.

  Friday is good.

  Seconds later:

  OK. Let me know where.

  While the text itself was the best news he could imagine, the postscript sent his heart soaring. After the word where she had typed:

  xo

  Will put his phone away, floated back into the McDonald’s.

  ‘All good?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘Golden.’ Will pointed at the counter. ‘You want anything else?’

  Anthony shook his head. ‘Stuffed. Thanks.’