Nasty Cutter

by Tim O'Mara

  Allison looked at them and said, ‘Helpful to whom?’

  ‘His firm’s client. Who do you think?’

  ‘Keep reading.’

  I turned to the next page. It had the date on top, and here my dad had written in something close to complete sentences, but mostly they were brief observations in bullet points. I could make out that someone with the initials SM was ‘unclear about what happened’ and would make … some kind of witness. It took me a few seconds to decipher the words ‘unreliable and unhelpful.’ Another interviewee – a TR – admitted to being high the evening of the incident and my father had made a note that TR also seemed high during the interview. My dad had put a circle around the initials and drawn smoke lines around it. I was reminded of my dad’s occasional bursts of humor.

  The next page had the following day’s date and started with the initials KW. KW had left the beach with the group, but only stayed at the house for a few hours. KW confirmed that everybody seemed to be touching everybody and felt what I first read as ‘uncontroversial’ about it, but then was able to translate that into ‘uncomfortable’ and KW claimed to have ‘left before everyone else.’

  Edgar came back into the room with some equipment and set it up at his worktable. He came in with a small piece of equipment, then connected some wires to it and his own desktop, which was already turned on.

  ‘I should know something soon, guys,’ he said. ‘How you doing over there?’

  ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘But my father only used initials when referring to the kids Marty interviewed. Let me know if you come up with any full names, OK?’

  ‘You got it.’ He went to work, plugging the old disks into his equipment.

  The notes on KW took up most of the page, so my father started the next page with the same date but another witness: BL. It took some time to figure out what my dad had written on this page, probably because the more he wrote, the sloppier he got. I had the same problem. What I originally read as ‘James Birch’ – a real name – I later figured out was ‘Jones Beach.’ ‘Horse’ became ‘house,’ ‘bronze’ was ‘booze,’ ‘pat’ was obviously ‘pot,’ and so on like this for a good ten minutes. In all, BL didn’t seem to have much more to say than the other interviewees, but at the bottom of the page, my father had clearly written ‘BT & BT’ and circled it with an arrow pointing at the initials ‘MM.’

  Allison pointed at the circle and said, ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘BT & BT?’ I said. ‘Bobby Taylor and Billy Taylor. I’m gonna guess and say that the arrow pointing to MM means they were both paying attention to Melissa Miller. We already knew that about the Taylor boys.’

  Allison turned the legal pad toward herself to get a better view of it. She gently flipped through the remaining pages and sighed. ‘It reads like this until the end. No offense, but your dad didn’t seem too interested in this case.’

  ‘He had his own cases to deal with,’ I said. ‘I know because that’s nearly all he did when he got home from the office.’ I looked over at Edgar, who was working his magic with my father’s old disks. ‘If Edgar’s able to pull anything off those floppies, it’ll more than likely be my dad’s case stuff. Not the Taylor case.’

  ‘Well,’ Allison said, ‘it’s not like we had anything else planned for tonight.’

  I could have argued that point but, once again, chose to keep my mouth shut. I flipped to the next page and found more of the same: initials, followed by more of my father’s almost-illegible handwriting. I laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Allison wanted to know.

  ‘My mom used to tease my dad that his handwriting made him more suitable to the medical profession than the law.’

  ‘Keep reading,’ she said. ‘I need to stretch my legs and use the bathroom.’

  When she had gone, Edgar whispered, ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘She just had to get the blood flowing and pee.’

  ‘I mean,’ he was still whispering, ‘is she mad at me or something?’

  ‘She’s a bit mad at me, Edgar. We had an argument earlier. You’ve done nothing but be helpful. Again.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But sometimes I don’t know. Especially with women.’

  Welcome to the club.

  ‘You’re fine, Edgar.’ I stood up myself and walked over to him. His setup was impressive. ‘You having any luck yet?’

  ‘I just put in a random disk. I’ll know in a minute or two. That’s the good part of this kind of work. If a disk is permanently corrupted, you usually know right away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything if it weren’t for you, man.’

  He shrugged, looked at the blank screen, and said, ‘Probably not.’

  It was good to see his sense of humor coming back. My knees were starting to ache, so I did a couple of deep knee bends and some runner’s stretches while holding on to Edgar’s desk. I needed to get back to Muscles’ again before he and my knees complained too much.

  ‘Bingo!’ Edgar said. ‘Looks like this disk is still readable.’

  I looked at his screen and saw the kind of computer image you only see in movies from twenty years ago: bright bluish-green letters and numbers, a lot of periods, and some flashing rectangles. All we needed was Matthew Broderick telling us he’d hacked into the Pentagon’s computer system.

  ‘Go through the bag with the disks,’ Edgar said. ‘See if you can find one with the dates you’re looking for.’

  There were about twenty disks, all of them labeled with white tape, and it took less than a minute to find the one with the year we wanted. I handed it to Edgar. He ejected the test disk out and inserted the new one. When the disk data appeared on the screen, Edgar pressed some keys. ‘What’s the name of the file we’re looking for?’

  ‘I’m guessing “Taylor” or something like that? If it’s even there.’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  ‘You boys playing War Games?’

  Allison had returned. She was a bit of a film buff herself.

  ‘Edgar’s looking for the file. He was able to do the conversion.’

  She patted me on the back. ‘I can see that. How about I take you boys out for some Pac-Man and Space Invaders if we luck out?’

  ‘Luck,’ Edgar said, ‘has nothing to do with it. And, if we are successful, I’ll take you up on your offer and you can take us to Barcade.’

  He was referring to the bar over by the L train that not only specialized in vintage video games but also had a hell of a beer list. Something for the both of us.

  With Allison and me looking over his shoulder, Edgar maneuvered around the new screen/old data, pressed some more buttons, and found the file we were looking for. It was marked ‘Taylor.’

  ‘Now let’s see if it’ll print,’ he said as he pressed another key.

  It did, but only came out to one page.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked Edgar.

  ‘That’s all he wrote.’ He giggled at his own little joke.

  Edgar pulled the page out of the printer and handed it to me. Allison took it before I could read it. It might have been my father, but it was her story. I let it go.

  She walked away and glanced at it for a few moments. She turned around and asked me, ‘What was the name of Bobby Taylor’s girlfriend who Billy said left with Bobby the night of the party?’

  I gave that some thought. ‘Maura,’ I said when it came to me. ‘Maura …’

  ‘O’Neal,’ she finished. ‘Maura O’Neal.’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  She handed me the page and waited while I read it. I let out a breath when I came to the part she was referring to.

  ‘What is it?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘The girl who left the party with Bobby,’ I said. ‘Essentially giving him an alibi? His only alibi.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Billy said she helped him remember the details of that night.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘It says here she and Bo
bby not only got into a fight before leaving the party, they got into one after they left, at her house.’

  ‘I’m still not following you, Ray.’

  ‘Maura told Marty and my dad that Bobby was so pissed he told her he was going back to the party.’

  Edgar thought about that and said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Shit.’

  For the next hour or so, the three of us worked our computers, trying to find out as much as possible about Maura O’Neal. At one point, Allison complimented Edgar on the amount of bandwidth it must take for us all to be on the Internet at the same time working at such speed. He shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘even some of his neighbors could be hitchhiking on his Wi-Fi right now.’

  ‘Some people have stuff,’ Edgar said. ‘I have megabits.’

  Allison checked all the newspaper sites and was able to come up with zilch on the Maura O’Neal we were looking for. In fact, she was never mentioned in any of the scores of print articles about the Taylor case that Allison had been able to find. I came up just as empty. I checked the White Pages, Yellow Pages, and the software Edgar had installed on to my laptop – legal, I allowed myself to believe – that allowed me to search other databases. There were a lot of Maura O’Neals, but none matched the one we were looking for. Then Edgar said the magic words that told us he’d hit pay dirt: ‘Cool beans!’

  We both turned to him. ‘What’d you find?’ I asked.

  ‘I found Maura Delaney,’ he said.

  ‘You sure it’s her?’ Allison asked.

  Edgar started his ‘duh’ face but stopped. Instead, he patiently explained, ‘I searched for their high school website. What I found was they had their twentieth reunion not that long ago and were kind enough to put their program on their events page.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘And one of the attendees was Maura (née O’Neal) Delaney. She lives in Seaford with her husband and two children.’

  ‘Nicely done, Edgar,’ I said. ‘What else do we know about her?’

  ‘She’s been married for just over ten years,’ he said. ‘She’s a member of the Chamber of Commerce, Independent Women’s Business Association, and about a half dozen other organizations.’

  Allison asked, ‘What kind of business is she in?’

  He clicked a few more keys. ‘Says here she owns her own beauty salon, also in Seaford. Been in business for almost twenty years.’

  ‘Not too long after the case was resolved,’ I said, doing the simple math.

  ‘Schooling?’ Allison asked.

  A few more strokes of the keys. ‘Two-year degree from Long Island School of Beauty and Fashion.’

  I did a little more mental math. ‘How does someone barely twenty years old get enough money to buy her own business?’

  We all thought about that for a few seconds, and Allison offered, ‘Maybe her family has money?’

  Edgar moved his fingers across the keyboard again. ‘Both parents are – were – schoolteachers, and she has four siblings.’

  ‘A loan?’ I asked.

  ‘To a twenty-year-old kid just out of trade school?’ Allison said. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Give me a few,’ Edgar said. ‘Let me see what else comes up.’

  Allison and I went into the kitchen and straight to the leftovers. I grabbed a cold pierogi, dipped it in some warm sour cream, and she took the last piece of pork. Good thing neither one of us is a germophobe. It wasn’t long before Edgar called us back into the living room.

  ‘Either of you ever hear of Taylor Made Holdings?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Allison said. ‘That’s the company Bobby Taylor started. They own all the car dealerships, a few apartment buildings, and two sporting goods stores upstate.’

  ‘Wanna guess what their first business dealing was?’

  It took me a beat or two before saying, ‘You’re shitting me, Edgar.’

  ‘I shit you not, Raymond.’ He pointed at the text on his computer screen. ‘They bought the building where Maura O’Neal Delaney started her beauty salon. She owns not only the business – The MODern Look she now calls it – but also the building.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ my girlfriend said. ‘They bought her off.’

  I put my face closer to the screen, as if that would help clarify things.

  ‘Is there any way to prove that, Edgar?’ I asked. ‘Can you find anything related to the transfer of ownership? Are there online records of real estate sales, small business startups, things like that?’

  ‘Raymond,’ Edgar said, like me talking to one of my kids, ‘everything’s online. Just give me another minute or two.’

  It literally took him three. Later than he’d promised, but there was a good reason for the sixty-second discrepancy.

  ‘Bobby Taylor bought the building, all right,’ he said, ‘with the help of his parents taking out a second mortgage on their house.’

  ‘Before he signed with the big leagues,’ I said.

  ‘Two years before,’ Allison said, looking over Edgar’s shoulder. ‘His folks must have been pretty convinced he was going to make it.’

  ‘Sure enough that they set up a company and weren’t going to risk his ex-girlfriend screwing things up for him before he got into college.’

  An unpleasant thought crossed my mind. It was a moment before I could verbalize it. Then I knew the answer just as the words were coming out of my mouth.

  ‘Which law firm handled the transfer of deed ownership?’

  He gave me the look I expected.

  ‘My dad or Marty?’ I asked.

  He paused and squinted. That was Edgar’s go-to face when having discovered something unpleasant. Again, I had my answer.

  ‘Sorry, Ray,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Edgar. But it does help explain why my father kept such crappy notes on this case and almost nothing on his computer files.’

  Allison put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You said so yourself, Ray. It was Marty’s case, not your dad’s.’

  I know I had said that, but it must have bothered my father to have been party – in any capacity – to what the three of us figured had happened. Second to the Church, the Rules of Law prevailed in the Donne household. The few times we had dinner as a whole family, my father would constantly figure out a way to work The Law into our mealtime conversations. To see it bent in such a horrible way must have eaten away at him. Hell, it was twenty years ago and it was giving me a pain in the gut right now.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Just so it’s out there. It looks like the Taylor family bought Maura O’Neal’s silence by giving her the money to start her own beauty shop. They also used my dad’s firm to facilitate the deal.’

  ‘But can we prove any of that?’ Allison asked.

  Do I want to?

  ‘After twenty years,’ I said. ‘I highly doubt it. They have lawyers who could provide half a dozen viable reasons why the family did what it did. And there’s few things cops dislike more than having to reopen a case that’s been closed for two decades.’ I paused for a few seconds. ‘The real question,’ I said, ‘is can any of this be used in your stories in any way?’ I looked at my reporter girlfriend.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so, Ray. This is exactly the kind of stuff that gets newspapers tied up in court for years. I can’t allege that the Taylors bought Maura’s silence. I’d probably lose my job before I hit send.’

  She was right, and I knew it. But maybe there was another way.

  ‘You can’t be sued for printing facts, can you?’ I asked.

  She laughed. ‘We can be sued for anything, Ray. It’d be almost impossible to lose a suit if we only printed the facts, though. We have to be able to prove to a judge there was an absence of malice on our part.’

  I thought about that. ‘But some of this can be used to help someone, right?’

  ‘I’m not following you, Ray.’

  ‘Here’s what I think we should do.’


  ‘We?’ Allison asked.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I woke up alone the next day at my own apartment. Allison and I – was this happening a lot lately? – had decided to spend the night at our own places. It was the first Saturday morning in a long time I didn’t find myself in a bed with Ally. I lay there for a few minutes considering how that felt. I didn’t like it. As much as I didn’t want to think about a long-term commitment right now, I liked having Allison in my life and didn’t want to imagine that ending.

  I grabbed a quick shower and shave, a coffee and bagel downstairs, and took the subway to Laura Feldman’s office in Midtown Manhattan. When I got there, about ten minutes early, I noticed a family of four waiting outside. It had to be The Feldmans because the man did have one of the coolest goatees I’d ever seen.

  ‘Laura?’ I said as I approached.

  She looked at me and then at her phone. ‘Raymond?’ she asked. ‘You’re nine minutes early!’

  ‘You’re doing me the favor. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t late.’

  She looked at her husband and said, ‘How thoughtful of you.’

  I stuck out my hand to the husband. ‘Raymond Donne.’

  ‘Kenny Feldman,’ he said. ‘So you’re friends with Edgar, huh?’

  ‘Yep. For quite a few years now.’

  ‘He’s an interesting fellow,’ Kenny said.

  ‘That’s a pretty good word for him.’

  ‘I love Edgar!’ Laura said. ‘He knows so much about so much. He’s been a big help to our firm.’

  ‘What exactly does he do for you guys?’

  Before answering my question, she looked over at her son and daughter, who were keeping busy on their phones. ‘Kids! Come over here and say hello to Mr Donne.’

  Both children dutifully came over. The boy looked to be about thirteen, the girl a few years younger. She wore a pair of bright blue eyeglasses you’d expect to see on Elton John’s daughter. They both somehow hid how excited they were to take their attention away from their phones and meet Mommy’s new friend.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘I’m Raymond.’

  The boy gave me a quick wave and said, ‘I’m Max.’