The Fury (2009)
Page 18
The autopsy concluded that Willingham had
lived between five to ten minutes after the shoot
ings, though the terminal damage to his brain pre
vented him from moving, speaking or doing
anything to save his own life.
Apparently the bullets did not completely de
prive Willingham of all of his motor skills during
that brief period he remained alive, because while
Willingham lay dying, his skull shattered by the
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183
slugs, he scribbled two macabre words on the
floor of his apartment, using only the blood leak
ing from his own body.
The Fury.
21
I spent the rest of the night rereading Through the
Darkness. It had been several years since I’d last read
it, and the sense of awe I gained by reading Jack’s work
was tempered by the sudden knowledge that a forgot
ten passage from the book was somehow relevant to two
murders today.
Most of the book came back to me, like seeing a
good friend after a long absence. Amanda woke up,
kissed me on the cheek and left for work, knowing how
important this was. There were no other explicit refer
ences to the Fury, no other mention of who it was, or
whether or not he or she even existed. People say some
strange things when they’ve been shot in the head.
I opened up the search engine on my computer and
looked for any old interviews Jack had done for the
book. Unfortunately most had either not been archived
digitally or they’d been lost, because only two came up.
Neither mentioned the Fury in any way.
Working at the Gazette, Jack’s presence was missed
on a daily basis. Now, his absence felt like a hole in my
stomach, an emptiness. I needed to talk to him, to see
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185
what he knew, what he remembered. But Jack was re
covering from his own battle with alcohol, and I
couldn’t bring myself to interrupt that. There was one
person, though, who might be able to help. Thankfully
he worked long hours, and started the day early.
Wallace Langston picked up on the second ring.
“Henry,” he said. “I was wondering when next I’d
hear from you. You do still work here, right?”
“How are you, Wallace?” I figured I’d ignore the
question.
“I’m doing well. Henry, what’s up? Or did you just
call to make sure I’d had my morning coffee?”
“Actually, that’s why I called,” I said. “ Seriously, I
need some help. Listen, Wallace, I need to ask you a
question. It’s about Jack.”
There was a moment of hesitation on the other end.
“What is it?” Wallace said curtly.
“I’d rather we talk face-to-face. It’s not about my job
or the paper. You can say no if you want…but I need to
know. It’s kind of personal.”
“My door’s always open, Henry. As long as you’re
honest with me about what you want and why you need
it.”
“You have my word. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
I was putting on my shoes before I even heard the dial tone.
The newsroom was loud, boisterous.
I heard Frank Rourke shouting at someone over the
phone, something about a report that the Knicks were
about to can their coach. I heard Evelyn Waterstone
chewing out a reporter who’d misspelled the word
borough on his story. All of these sounds make me
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smile. Who would have thought this kind of chaos could
be an antidote to everything that had been going on?
I made my way down the hall, toward Wallace’s office.
“Henry, what’s shakin’, my man?”
I turned slowly, eyes closed, my stomach already
feeling sick. Tony Valentine was standing in the
hallway, a goofy grin on his face. At first something
looked different about him, then I noticed how unnatu
rally smooth his forehead looked. And not many people
could smile without creating smile lines. I wondered if
he had a Botox expense account as part of his salary
package.
“Listen, Parker, I got something for you. I know
you’ve got a girlfriend—don’t we all? But there’s this
actress… can’t tell you her name, but it rhymes with
Bennifer Maniston. She’s a good friend of mine and she’s
in town for a few days. I was thinking the two of you
could go out to dinner. Nothing special or fancy, but
tomorrow it’s in my column. You get great press for ca
noodling with a star, she gets good press for dating a nice
young reporter who won’t ditch her for a costar. Sound
good? Say the word and you’ve got reservations for two
at Babbo.”
I stared at Tony for a minute, then said, “Goodbye.”
I turned around and headed for Wallace’s office.
He was sitting down, elbows on his desk, papers
splayed out in front of him. “Henry, sit down,” he said.
The last few months had been tough on Wallace. Jack’s
departure had hit the paper hard, but Wallace person
ally. Harvey Hillerman, the publisher of the Gazette,
had been eyeing the bottom line closer than ever.
Whether Jack had lost a few miles of his fastball was
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187
to some extent irrelevant. He still brought readers to the
paper, and he knew New York City better than anyone
alive. His name off the masthead hurt our readership,
bit into our circulation and took a bite from our adver
tising revenue. There was no replacing him. We were
all praying for his recovery, but Wallace was praying for
more than that. He needed Jack for the paper. For his
job. For all our jobs, in a way.
I envisioned myself as the kind of reporter who could
ease the Gazette into the next generation, but I never
saw that happening without Jack. He wasn’t someone
who simply disappeared. He had to leave on his own
terms, when he was ready.
And having known Jack for a few years, having
gotten close enough to him for the man to confide in me,
I knew that before his battle with the bottle nearly killed
him and his reputation, he had no desire to go quietly
into that good night.
“Thanks again for seeing me.”
“No problem,” he said. “My door is always open.”
I laughed. “So I wanted to talk about Jack. Specifi
cally something he wrote a long time ago.”
“Shoot.”
“It wasn’t for the paper.”
Wallace leaned back, curious.
“What is it then?”
“Twenty years ago, Jack wrote a book called
Through the Darkness. It was about the rise of drugs and
drug-related violence. Do you remember it? Jack was
working at the Gazette when it was published.”
“I sure do. O’Donnell took a year off to write that
book, and after it came out and became a bestseller
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son Pinter
none of us expected him back. We figured he’d take the
money and work on books full-time, especially when
Hollywood came calling. But the news runs in that
man’s veins. Leaving never even occurred to him.”
“It still hasn’t,” I said. Awkwardness choked the
room. I had no idea if Wallace had even been in contact
with Jack since he left, but the man’s downcast eyes let
me know he was happy to talk about Jack’s past, but
less so discussing the man’s future. Part of me felt as
if Wallace and Hillerman bore some responsibility for
Jack’s condition. They knew his alcoholism had been
getting worse, but other than a few halfhearted BandAid measures they’d stand by, let him turn in substan
dard material, drinking Baileys with his coffee during
war room meetings at nine in the morning. Perhaps
they let it slide because they didn’t want to believe it
could destroy a man with his reputation. Or maybe they
turned their backs because they needed to. Needed him.
“So what about the book?” Wallace asked, his voice
sounding less patient, a little less happy I was there.
“Butch Willingham,” I said. “He was a street dealer
killed in ’88. His death would have gone unnoticed—
like most of his colleagues, if you will—except that
unlike the others he survived his execution for a few
minutes. He had just enough time to write two words,
using his own blood. Do you remember what those
words were?”
“No, I can’t say I do. I haven’t read the book in at
least a decade.”
“I remember,” I said. “Not too often you forget some
thing like that. The two words Willingham wrote were
‘The Fury.’ Do they ring a bell now?”
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189
Wallace sat there without taking his eyes off me. I
waited, unsure of what he was going to say. Instead, he
just sat there, waiting for the blanks to be filled in.
Since Wallace’s memory didn’t seem to be jogged
much, I pulled a copy of the tattered paperback from my
pocket. Moving around to the side of Wallace’s desk—
and realizing I hadn’t ever viewed the room from that
perspective before—I showed him the passage it came
from.
“Look at this,” I said. “Tell me if you remember
anything about it, or Jack writing it.”
Wallace took a pair of thin reading glasses from his
desk drawer, slipped them on and read the passage.
After a few seconds, he took the book from my hands
and began to read further. I could tell from his eyes and
intense concentration something was coming into focus.
He was remembering. Excitement surged through me.
This was something, I knew it. It had to be.
“The Fury,” Wallace said. “If I recall correctly, it
was a big nothing.”
I stepped back around, sat down, confused. “What
do you mean?”
“I remember when this happened, the Willingham
case got a little press for a day or two, mainly over the
gruesome details.You’re right, it’s not too often someone
writes words in their own blood while dying, and the
press, present company often included, loves the chance
to hyperbolize and scare people to death with Stephen
King–style visuals. O’Donnell did look into this, inter
viewing dozens of dealers, punks and scumbags.”
“And?”
“For a while he was convinced that there was
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an…entity…I guess that’s what you could call it…
named the Fury. It was the kind of word that existed
only on the lips of people involved in drugs, mainly
dealing. The Fury was some kind of mythical demon,
some kind of human being so cold-blooded and cruel
that nobody dared cross it.”
“All those people killed during those years,” I said,
the picture coming into view. “Jack thought this Fury
was behind it all. I have no idea if that’s a person, an
organization or a code for something else. But it’s in
there for a reason.”
“That’s right,” Wallace said. “If I recall, the first
draft of this book was a good hundred or so pages
longer, but Jack’s publisher balked at a lot of what he’d
written about in the chapters on the Fury. There were
no eyewitness accounts. It began and ended with Wil
lingham. Nobody was willing to talk. They felt Jack was
stretching too far with the blood angle, and by printing
chapters about some boogeyman, some all-powerful
kingpin, it weakened his other arguments. Made him
look like he was aiming for sensationalism rather than
good, solid journalism.”
“Who won the argument?”
“Well,” Wallace said, “you see how long your edition
of the book is? It was going to be another hundred or
so longer.”
“So why did he leave that one part in?” I asked. “If
everything else relating to this was taken out, why did
they let him leave Butch Willingham writing that
before he died?”
“If I remember—and you’ll forgive me if my
memory bank doesn’t access twenty-year-old informa
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191
tion as readily as it used to—Jack threatened to pull the
plug on the whole book at that point. They’d already
paid him, I believe a good six-figure sum, quite a penny
for a book back in those days. And if they’d refused to
publish, they wouldn’t have recouped a penny since
they would have been in breach of contract. So they
allowed Jack to keep that one bit in. Kind of an appease
ment. Jack considered it a footprint that couldn’t be
erased by time. And because what Willingham had
written was in the coroner’s report, it was a matter of
public record and could stay in. Everything else, they
felt, was conjecture.”
“So Jack thought there was more to the Fury, then.”
“I believe so, but again I’m speaking from what I
recall twenty years ago. Jack and I haven’t spoken about
that book or that story in years. He’s written half a
dozen books since then, most of which made him a lot
more money than Through the Darkness. And with no
new leads to track down, no other proof or witnesses,
it was on to new matters. In a city where new stories
materialize every day, if you spend your time hoping a
fresh angle will pop out of the ground you’ll miss ev
erything going around right beside your head. Jack’s a
great reporter, but he’s not stupid.”
“He’s not a coward either,” I said. “He kept that bit
in there for a reason. Like you said, a footprint.”
“Maybe he did,” Wallace said.
“I need his files,” I said.
“Henry,” Wallace said, folding his hands across his
chest. “You know better than that. Besides, company
policy states that any work, research or otherwise, done
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“He must have something here,” I said. “I’ve seen
Jack’s apartment. He barely had any furniture, let alone
files. Please, do me a favor. Let me see Jack’s files. I
know there’s a storage room here. I swear I won’t take
anything that doesn’t pertain to the Willingham case.
And I’ll even do the digging for you.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Wallace said. “But I’ll meet
you halfway. I’ll go through it myself and send it over
to you if I find anything. I’m going to err on the side of
caution, though, so don’t expect much.”
“Thank you,” I said. I stood up, prepared to leave.
Then I saw a copy of that morning’s Gazette on
Wallace’s chair. I looked up at him, raised an eyebrow.
“Go on, take it,” he said, grinning. “But after today
you don’t get diddly-squat for free until I see your name
below a story.”
22
The subway was hot and humid as I went back uptown.
I had no idea how long it would take for Wallace to get
me those files. The man had been gracious enough to
offer, and frankly I didn’t expect much going in. I des
perately wanted to know what Jack knew, what else he
knew about the Willingham murder. And what, if
anything, it had to do with Stephen Gaines.
The strange thing was, the deeper I looked into this,
the further away it seemed to go from Gaines. From him
to Beth-Ann Downing, from Rose Keller to Butch Wil
lingham, there seemed to be a pattern of behavior that
went back twenty years. I had no idea how long, if at
all, my brother had been dealing. But I was damn sure
that it had somehow gotten him killed.
Now, I’ve read the books. I’ve seen the TV shows. I
read as much news as I can take until my eyeballs hurt.
I’m well aware that pushing is not a profession made
for duration. People get into it hoping to make a quick
buck, usually because they have no other options. They
have neither the education to get a job punching a clock,
nor the desire to work for a corporation that can termi
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nate them without a moment’s notice. There was some
thing romantic about the notion of a drug dealer, some
thing that went against the system. But when I saw
Stephen Gaines that night on the street, I did not see a
man defiant in the face of unspeakable odds stacked
against him. I saw a defeated, emaciated, broken-down