by Dana Perry
“Many of the guys at the precinct – well, they’re not exactly the most politically enlightened people. Even after all these years, they still don’t like the idea of a woman on the street. Made Maura’s life pretty tough sometimes. They put tampons in her locker. Left obscene messages and pictures on her desk. Made her get coffee for everyone like she was an errand girl or something. I thought being Mike Walsh’s daughter might have saved her from some of that, but it didn’t. Lots of other people – hell, even my own wife – had trouble dealing with the idea someone like Maura was able to do the job. They thought she was there because she was Walsh’s daughter and she was cute and the NYPD was under pressure to make a quota or whatever. Maura never complained though. Me, I got mad when people said stuff like that to her, but she just shrugged it off and said it came with the territory. She handled it really well.”
I waited until I thought it was the right time to ask Renfro about her murder.
“Tell me about that last night on the street, Billy.”
I could see how painful those memories were to him. I knew from all the previous stories I’d done about cop deaths that losing a partner was one of the most traumatic experiences that a police officer could face – almost the same as losing a member of your family. You felt guilty, you felt angry and you felt powerless. But I had to ask these questions. It was my job, just like his job was being a police officer and dealing with all the not so pleasant things that went along with that.
“There’s not much to say,” Renfro told me. “It was just like any other night. Our shift started at five p.m., we made maybe half a dozen stops at places – routine stuff, all of it – and then went on Code 7 to get something to eat at about 10:30. I left Maura in the car and went into a pizza parlor – a place called Delmonico’s down in Little Italy, they make really good pizza – to get a pie. Sausage, extra cheese, but no anchovies – Maura didn’t like anchovies. My God, I’ll always remember that now. Anyway, that was the last time I ever saw her alive. When I got back to the car, she was gone.”
“Do you have any idea how she wound up in that alley where she was found?”
“None at all.”
“Something she saw or heard? Meeting with a contact? Responding to a call for help?”
“Who knows? Believe me, I’ve asked myself the same question over and over again too.”
“What did you do when she wasn’t there?”
“I waited by the car. I figured she’d just wandered off someplace to the can or something. After a while though, I began to get concerned. So I went looking for her. That’s when I found her in the alley. I radioed the call in of an officer down, and the ambulance showed up right after that. But it was too late. She was already gone.”
“What time was your call?”
“About eleven-thirty, I guess?”
He shook his head and stared down at his beer.
“It was just one of those things.” He shrugged sadly. “Nobody’s fault. It just happened.”
“Right,” I said.
But I think he was trying to convince himself of that more than me.
“Just one of those things,” he repeated.
I nodded solemnly.
“Did you ever meet her father?” I continued. “The deputy commissioner?”
“Once. He stopped by the precinct in some official capacity, but he and Maura didn’t spend much time together. Maura was really uptight about her family connections, always seemed to want to put a lot of distance between her and the Walsh tradition. She wanted to make sure no one ever gave her any special treatment. Besides, I don’t think they got along that great.”
“Maura and her father?”
“Yeah, she seemed to resent him for some reason.”
Resented her father. Didn’t get along with him. Interesting. This was the second person in the department who’d suggested that Maura Walsh and her father had a troubled relationship. That was an interesting idea to pursue for my profile about her. Maybe even to ask her father about – if and when I ever got an interview with him.
“Look,” Renfro said, “I don’t really feel up to talking about this anymore right now. It’s still too fresh in my mind. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“She was my partner, and I let her down. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. She’s dead, and I blame myself for not protecting her better. A police officer is always supposed to be there for their partner. But I wasn’t there when Maura needed me. I was off somewhere buying a pizza!”
He shook his head sadly.
“Helluva thing what happened to Maura, isn’t it?”
“Helluva thing,” I agreed.
There was something wrong here.
For one thing, Renfro never looked me directly in the eye the entire time we discussed the specific details of Maura Walsh’s murder. Instead, he looked down at a beer he was drinking, across the bar at other people, at the floor – anywhere but me. This did not prove anything by itself, of course, but it was something I’d learned about people as a reporter. I called it lying eyes. Billy Renfro was lying to me about something, or at least he wasn’t telling me everything.
Second, I didn’t understand his story about the pizza. The 22nd Precinct – where they worked – was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, maybe a twenty-minute drive from where Maura Walsh was murdered. There were pizza places all over the 22nd Precinct. So why did they go all that way downtown to Little Italy for pizza? Was the pizza really that good at Delmonico’s? What the heck were they doing down there anyway?
Third, and most importantly, there was the problem of the missing hour of time. Billy Renfro said he’d gone into the pizza place at 10:30. He hadn’t realized Maura Walsh was missing until he got back to the squad car – and radioed in the first call for help at 11:30. That was way too long. The first rule for a police officer was to always stay in contact with your partner. If a police officer can’t reach their partner, he or she always expects the worst. But Renfro was out of touch with Maura Walsh for a full hour. A crucial hour in which she could have been saved, but died instead. It took Billy Renfro an awfully long time before he got worried about what had happened to her.
So what was Renfro hiding?
Who was he hiding it from?
And why?
Five
The heat hit me like a blast from a furnace when I left the air-conditioning of McGuire’s.
Within a short time, I was drenched in sweat and wondering why I was still in this city during a heat wave. Maybe Danny was right. Maybe I should go on vacation. Go somewhere where I could sit on a beach and jump in the ocean and drink cold cocktails by the pool. Except I knew that was never going to happen. Not while I had a big story to do.
I headed back to the Tribune office. I took a Lexington Avenue subway down from the Upper East Side to 51st Street. Then I walked across town the rest of the way to the Tribune, which was located near Rockefeller Center.
It’s really a terrific part of the city to work in. Rockefeller Center was where Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live and NBC’s Today Show had studios, so you’d sometimes run into celebrities on the street outside. Across the street was Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes and all their holiday shows, plus the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in December. In the other direction were the lights of Broadway and Times Square. No matter how many times I come here, I never get tired of the glamour and the excitement and the New York City feel of this area.
On my way into the newsroom, I passed Peter Ventura’s desk. He was wearing an extremely wrinkled shirt and drinking black coffee. No one was exactly sure where he spent his nights these days. A while ago, his wife had thrown him out of the house when he finally returned home after an unusually long bender. Now Peter probably just drifted from hotel to hotel or spent the night with friends or whatever women he met in bars.
He once told me about an emergency plan he’d devised for when he couldn’t find a bed: he’d simply
go to a hospital emergency room and complain about chest pains. The standard procedure was for the medics to give him a cot in the ER and monitor his vital signs throughout the night. In the morning, when they couldn’t find anything wrong, he’d simply get up and be on his way. This plan worked well a number of times, Ventura said, until one night he was woken up by the sounds of doctors frantically pounding on the chest of a patient lying next to him. It turned out that guy really was having a heart attack. “I had nightmares for a long time after that – in fact, it scared me so much I almost gave up drinking,” he said in telling the story. “Almost.”
“Do you know Billy Renfro?” I asked Ventura now.
“Maura Walsh’s partner. Sure. I’ve worked on a few stories about him.”
“What do you think?”
“Good cop. Why?”
“No reason. I interviewed him for my story.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s pretty upset about what happened to his partner.”
Even with all his drinking, Peter Ventura probably had better police sources than any reporter in the city. Cops liked him, they talked to him, they confided in him.
I perched on the edge of his desk. “Say, what do you know about Maura Walsh?”
“Everyone said she was a good cop too. Even if her father is a real prick. The people who knew her, who worked with her, said she was okay. Real shame about what happened to her. I’ll tell you one thing I do know, though. The police brass are very worried about the lack of progress in the investigation. I found out they just shook things up and put somebody new in charge of investigating the Walsh case ’cause they’re getting nowhere. He’s called Lieutenant Thomas Aguirre. Hey, that could be a break for you! You must know Aguirre pretty well from what happened in Central Park?”
Oh, I knew Lieutenant Thomas Aguirre, all right.
I had mixed feelings about Homicide Detective Lt. Thomas Aguirre.
On the one hand, he was an arrogant, egotistical blowhard; a sexist charmer who routinely treated women as objects for his own amusement; and a media hound who would do anything to get his name and face all over the newspapers or on TV news.
On the other hand, he’d saved my life just a few months earlier.
So that last item probably trumped all the rest, I told myself as I went to see him in his office at the Midtown East Precinct, which had taken over the Maura Walsh murder investigation as of this morning.
That was the attitude I went in with anyway, but it didn’t last long.
“Jessie Tucker!” he boomed when he saw me. “The woman who made me a star! What can I do for you, honey?”
Yes, I’d made the guy famous. He’d shot and killed the person who was trying to murder me when I uncovered the true story of what had happened to me in Central Park more than a decade before. It put him on the front pages and certainly gave him a huge boost in his career. Probably one of the reasons why he was in charge of such a high-profile murder investigation now. But I still didn’t like him. Go ahead, call me ungrateful. But the guy just grated on me.
“Don’t call me ‘honey’,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not appropriate in today’s world to refer to a woman doing her job in those kinds of terms. You can call me Ms. Tucker. Or Jessie, if you prefer. But not ‘honey’.”
Aguirre just shrugged and sat down behind a desk in his office. I sat down too.
“What brings you here today, Miz Tucker?” he said, exaggerating the “Ms. Tucker” for effect.
“Maura Walsh.”
Aguirre shook his head sadly.
“A terrible tragedy.” He frowned. “I feel so badly for her father.” He said it like he meant it too. Then I remembered reading somewhere that Walsh had been one of Aguirre’s mentors in the department, who’d helped him advance to the rank of detective lieutenant. Maybe Aguirre had some feelings after all.
He brought me up to date on the investigation. Not that there was much to tell. There had been very little progress in the case so far, he said, which was one of the reasons he’d been brought in to take it over during the last few days.
I asked him about Billy Renfro.
“He didn’t have anything to help us,” Aguirre said.
“Don’t you wonder what he was doing while Maura Walsh was killed?”
“He was eating pizza.”
“For an hour?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That he must have eaten a lot of pizza?”
“C’mon…”
“His story doesn’t sound right, Lieutenant.”
“So what do you think? Billy Renfro shot her himself? Or else he deliberately went off to eat pizza so someone else could shoot his partner? My goodness, the guy feels terrible about what happened. He knows he screwed up by being out of contact with her for so long, but nobody follows the regulations all the time. You’re barking up the wrong tree on this, Tucker. There’s nothing going on there.”
“Any possible suspects or motive at all?”
“Not yet. We wondered about her boyfriend at first. Well, her ex-boyfriend. They broke up a few months ago. He’s a cop too, name of Charlie Sanders – works out of the Bronx. Breakups can get nasty, especially when both parties are armed like Sanders and Walsh were. But Sanders has got a pretty airtight alibi. He was on some stakeout in the Bronx the entire night of the murder.
“Look, Maura Walsh was probably killed by a junkie or crazy person or someone like that. He took her gun, killed her and then fled. Probably didn’t even have a real motive or reason for it. Just a random act of violence – she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those are the toughest kinds of murders to solve. We’ll catch the killer – hopefully one day soon – when her gun turns up on a hopped-up addict shooting up in another alley somewhere.”
Aguirre shook his head. “Summertime blues, Tucker. Summertime blues. D’you know what I’m saying?”
I understood. “Summertime blues” was a term cops used for the spike in murders – many of them senseless ones – during the summer months in New York City. It always happened: when the temperature soared, so did the violent crime on the streets. Maybe it was because there were more people outside during the summer months. Or maybe it was the heat that made people crazy enough to kill for no apparent reason. But it made the job of a police officer even tougher than it usually was. Which was why many of them referred to July and August as “the summertime blues” from the old rock song sung by Eddie Cochran and The Who and a lot of other people. That’s the way police officers sometimes felt about it too.
“And so, Lieutenant, you’re sure it was just some crazy person – a senseless crime with no real motive – that cost Maura Walsh her life?”
“What else could it be?” Aguirre asked.
Six
The first place Walsh and Renfro had been to that last night together on the street was an Upper East Side strip club called Hands On.
I went to visit the place. I had no reason to think that what happened there had anything to do with Maura Walsh’s murder a few hours later in an entirely different part of Manhattan but I decided to check it out anyway. Because that’s what a reporter does. We check things out, we check out everything. It was a newspaper rule I’d learned a long time ago, and I’d followed it faithfully since on every story I did.
And since Maura Walsh had visited there first on the night she was killed, I decided to start there too.
I pushed open the door and walked inside. It was only the middle of the day, but the place was already crowded. I guess there must be a big audience for watching scantily clad women dance for men. Who knew? There was a stage, complete with poles for the dancers to slide up and down on, in the center of the room. Next to that was a long bar where men sat drinking and watching the entertainment. There were a few other women in the room, but because of the way they were dressed (or, more accurately, not dressed) I assumed they were working. Me, I had on a tan V-necked blouse I’
d gotten on sale at Macy’s and an old pair of dark brown slacks – I definitely stood out like a sore thumb. Or, as Raymond Chandler once put it in a book I read a long time ago, I was “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake”.
Sure enough, the bartender hurried over and asked me what I was doing there. I told him I wanted to talk to the manager. He said the manager was busy in a back office, but would be out in a few minutes.
“Hey, sweetie!” some guy yelled at me. “Aren’t you on the wrong side of the bar?”
“Yeah,” another one laughed. “Get up on stage and let’s see what you’ve got.”
I ignored it all until a door opened in the back, and the manager came out to see me. He was a balding, trim man of about sixty in faded jeans and a leather vest.
He cleared his throat nervously when he reached me. “Ma’am, I think you may have inadvertently wandered into the wrong place? I really don’t think you want to be here.”
“And who are you?”
“My name is Martin Clauson. I’m the manager here.”
“Hey, that’s great, Marty. You’re just the person I want to talk to.”
I introduced myself and handed him my press card. He looked at it carefully, then shook his head and handed it back to me.
“Sorry,” he said, “I don’t like talking to the press.”
I grunted. “Right. I’m sure you get a lot of media interview requests, huh?”
Next to me I heard a woman snicker. Clauson whirled around and glared at her. “Shut up, Bubbles!” he snapped.