by Dana Perry
“So why did you ask the questions?”
“Because I’m a reporter. And that’s what reporters do. Ask questions to find out the truth. Someone taught me that a long time ago.”
“Good girl.” Ellen smiled. “You learned your lessons from me well.”
Ellen was a high-powered book and movie agent now, but she used to be a reporter. She was a helluva reporter too. In fact, she was the reporter at the Tribune who covered the original story of my recovery from the attack in Central Park. We wound up becoming best friends – and it was her who later got me a job on the Tribune and mentored me as a crime reporter. I still valued her advice.
“Okay, I see three possible scenarios here as far as the corruption angle goes,” she panted, easing up on her pedaling. “First, she was working undercover. Assigned by her father to root out dirty cops like it sounds her partner Renfro was. I’m sure you already thought of that possibility too?”
“Of course I did.”
“Except it really doesn’t make much sense if you think about it. Every dirty cop involved – especially Renfro – would be suspicious that the daughter of the deputy commissioner was a plant unless they were convinced she really was taking the money for herself. Also, once she got murdered, there would be no reason to keep that secret. The only reason for the cops not to talk about it was if she really was a dirty cop and they didn’t want that to become public in order to protect her father’s reputation.”
“That’s the way I figured it too,” I said, standing up to pedal harder. “So she’s not working undercover for her father. What else you got?”
“Second scenario, all the people who told you she was taking payoffs were lying. They were trying to set her up for some reason, maybe to get back at her father for something he’d done to them. Mike Walsh must have made a lot of enemies in his years on the force. But that seems like a reach too. You had a lot of people – different types, different locations – saying pretty much the same thing. That can’t be a coincidence.
“Scenario three – and this is the one I like the best – Maura Walsh was taking payoffs, but she wasn’t doing it for her own personal gain. She was doing it to embarrass her father. Maybe she even wanted to get caught. You said she had a lot of issues with her father, people told you they didn’t get along. What better way to get back at him than tarnishing the hallowed Walsh name in the NYPD with a scandal like this? Sounds crazy, I know. But daughters do get crazy sometimes over their fathers. I mean, you know that better than anyone, Jessie.”
I hadn’t really talked about my father in much detail with anyone, even Ellen. But she knew enough to be aware that I never had a father – and that it bothered me.
“Of course, the bottom line is,” I said, “that the corruption angle probably had nothing to do with her murder. It’s just interesting information that emerged when I started to peel back the layers of her life.”
I kept pedaling away furiously on my bike. Ellen was still on hers too, but she was barely moving her legs now. I could see she was ready to quit. Ellen didn’t take exercise as seriously as I did, but then the stakes were much higher for me. Exercise had helped me to walk again after all the injuries from Central Park and exercise kept my body in decent working order now, even if I’d never be in perfect physical shape again. So I was fine with doing as much exercise as I needed to make that happen.
The gym where we were was actually a pretty massive health club facility in the middle of Manhattan. It was located on the fifth floor of a big building on Park Avenue South, near Union Square, not far from where I lived. The place had everything I needed: a large workout area filled with free weights, dumbbells, barbells and other equipment like that; a cardio/exercise room with rowing machines, stationary bikes and treadmills; and a swimming pool on the floor above the main gym. This place was my home away from home.
“Have you told Norman or Danny or anyone else at the Tribune about Maura Walsh being on the take on her beat?” Ellen asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I want to find out more first. I don’t want to smear Maura Walsh’s reputation – or the reputation of her family – until I get all the facts.”
“I wouldn’t wait,” Ellen said.
“I know you wouldn’t. But I want to do the right thing.”
“That’s the trouble with you, Jessie. You have a conscience. That’s the one thing I was never able to teach you as a reporter. Having a conscience about a story always complicates things.”
She laughed and got off her bike. The workout was over for Ellen. Me, I kept going. I figured I’d do at least another fifteen minutes, then maybe swim some laps in the pool.
“Anyway, how’s the love life, Jessie? Is it definitely over with that Logan guy from the West Coast? I really thought something might come of that.”
I had too. Logan Kincaid had worked with me on a story about his dead sister that came out of all the Central Park stuff I’d written about… and we’d wound up in bed together. It lasted for a few weeks, but then he went back home to California. After that, the distance between us had pretty much doomed the relationship.
“We decided we would be better off just being friends,” I told Ellen.
“Friends?”
“Yes, it was a very amicable breakup. I might even go out there to see him sometime later in the year.”
“Three thousand miles is a long way to travel for a new ‘friend’, Jessie.”
I shrugged.
“Anyone else in the picture?”
I told her about Sam Rawlings asking me out when I went to see him about Maura Walsh.
Ellen seemed dubious.
“And he’s the manager of this restaurant you went to?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“Do you really want to go on a date with some long-haired guy in sandals who runs a restaurant? You can do better than that. Strike one against Sam Rawlings.”
“Well, he’s also a novelist.”
“Really?”
“Well, you know, an aspiring one.”
“Strike two.”
“He’s also a lawyer.”
“Practicing anywhere?”
“Uh, no… he said he didn’t like it.”
“Strike three and he’s out! This guy really sounds like a loser.”
I sighed.
“I dunno, he seemed nice, Ellen.”
“Nice?”
“Yes, there’s a lot to be said for spending time with a nice person.”
“Are you going to have sex with this guy?”
“I haven’t even gone out with him yet.”
“Not always a prerequisite for sex.” She smiled.
Nine
The 22nd Precinct – where Maura Walsh worked and where her father had once been the commanding officer – was familiar territory for me. I’d covered plenty of stories from there over the years since I’d become a crime reporter: murders, robberies, sexual assaults and a lot more.
But it had been a while since I’d been there, and some of the faces at the 22nd had changed. They were younger too, and there were more African Americans, Hispanics and women. There used to be a time when a woman cop was a rarity. That wasn’t true anymore.
But it didn’t mean the life of a woman cop was any easier. I remembered Billy Renfro telling me about the harassment that Maura Walsh had to put with. How he was surprised at how many male cops still didn’t think a woman – even one who was the daughter of the deputy police commissioner – belonged on the force.
“Boys will be boys” was the excuse that was always given for how they behaved. I wondered if that would ever change.
Even now, there were probably cops in this precinct who said privately that Maura Walsh’s murder simply proved that women weren’t tough enough to be out on the street.
The commanding officer of the 22nd Precinct was a captain called Lee Florio. He’d worked at the 22nd for a long time, starting way back when Mike Walsh was in
charge. Florio was supposed to be a protégé of Walsh, and he’d kept climbing rapidly in the ranks. No doubt, his close association with the deputy police commissioner had helped that ascent. I hadn’t been there in a while and I wasn’t sure he’d recognize me at first, but he did.
“Jessie, Jessie,” he said when I walked into his office, “you’re a sight for sore eyes. You look great!”
Always nice to get a compliment. I’d lost a few pounds since I’d seen him last, so maybe that was it. Or maybe Florio was just being polite.
“I guess I’m getting better, not older,” I said.
“The newspaper business must really agree with you.”
“Actually, I think it’s not drinking that lousy coffee you used to brew downstairs when I was hanging out here more often covering stories.”
“We send out for cappuccinos now.” He chuckled.
“Gee, if I’d known that, I’d had come back to see you sooner.”
I do this kind of banter with people all the time, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The idea is to put them at ease, make them feel good – and then ask them the questions you really want to ask. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
In this case, Florio brought up Maura Walsh before I did.
“We’re all in a state of shock here. It’s always tough to lose someone on your squad. But especially someone like Maura. She was so young, she was so good and she had so much to live for.”
He shook his head sadly.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are some things about her murder that don’t make sense to me,” I said to Florio. “Like the fact that her partner, Billy Renfro, goes to buy a pizza and Maura Walsh walks away from the squad car on her own for no apparent reason. Why would she do that?”
“Hey, things happen. Believe me, you’re asking the same questions we’ve asked ourselves a thousand times in the past few weeks. Especially Renfro. The poor guy’s a wreck. He’s going to have to live with this for the rest of his life. Losing your partner is a terrible thing for any of us on the force. And because it was Maura and because of the way it happened… well, this was even worse for him.”
“Is Renfro around?” I asked. I had been hoping to grab him for a few more questions while I was there.
“He’s on sick leave. Still dealing with everything that happened.”
“I thought he came back on duty?”
“He did. But he wasn’t quite ready. Like I said, Maura’s death really affected him pretty badly.”
“How long is the sick leave for?”
“Not sure yet.”
“That does sound pretty bad.”
Then I put my next question to him as delicately as possible to see what his reaction might be.
“Was there anything going on with Maura Walsh that could have played a role in her murder, Captain?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, personal problems?”
“She’d broken up with her boyfriend, but it seemed pretty amicable. They still talked, I’m told. And, as I’m sure you know, he was on the other side of the city when she died. So he was immediately ruled out as a suspect.”
“Anything else?”
“Such as?”
“Drinking problems? Drugs? Gambling?”
“No, nothing at all like that with Maura.”
“What about corruption?”
“Huh?”
“Is there any possibility at all that Maura Walsh could have been involved in some kind of illegal activity on the street – bribes, payoffs, extortion – that got her killed?”
“What in the hell are you talking about? She was a clean cop. I mean squeaky clean. She had to be. She was Mike Walsh’s daughter, for goodness’ sake.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Everyone seemed to say that.
“Maura was a wonderful police officer and she was a wonderful person too, Jessie. That’s why this is all such a senseless tragedy for us to deal with here.”
I spent some time talking to a few other people in the precinct who I knew, and I introduced myself to some of the new ones who I didn’t. None of them told me anything particularly interesting.
Until I talked to one woman cop who said she’d been a friend of Maura’s.
“It’s a shame about Maura and her father,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Their fight?”
“Maura and her father had a fight?”
“Sure, a real blowout. It happened right in the middle of the precinct. God, everyone was talking about it. And why not? The deputy police commissioner himself standing screaming at his daughter at the top of his lungs, right here in the station house. He kept yelling at her, ‘How can you do this? How can you embarrass the Walsh family name like this?’ I’m not sure what it was about. Maura wouldn’t talk much about it afterwards, even to me, and I was pretty close to her. But she did tell me at one point that her relationship with her father had been really strained for a while. It’s such a shame – I imagine her father feels so badly about that argument now that she’s gone.”
“Do you have any idea at all what they were arguing about?”
“Maura never told us. Believe me, I tried to find out. But she kept it a secret until the very end.”
Maura Walsh had kept a lot of secrets. I was finding that out the more I dug into her background.
The question was if any of these secrets had gotten her killed.
On my way out of the precinct, I stopped to look at a plaque that had been put up on the wall in honor of Maura Walsh. There was a picture of her standing in front of the precinct building – looking jaunty and confident in her blue uniform. Nearby, there was a picture of her father from when he’d been the commanding officer here at the 22nd.
“The thing is, we’re like a family here,” a voice said behind me.
I turned around. There were two uniformed police officers standing there. One of them was older, and the other one looked no more than thirty. I didn’t recognize either one, but I looked down at their name tags over their badges. The older one was named Shockley, the other one Janko. Janko didn’t say anything, Shockley was clearly the one in charge here.
“A family doesn’t tell its secrets to outsiders,” Shockley said, his voice low and serious. “A family doesn’t dishonor its dead. The bond between the police officers at this precinct – and on the whole force – is something very special. We watch out for each other, we protect each other and, most importantly of all, we make sure that whatever happens in this family always stays within the family. You’ve been asking questions about Maura Walsh. You need to make sure that you don’t do anything to dishonor her memory. It’s very important that you understand that.”
I had a feeling at that moment he was trying to send me a message. Or a warning.
I’m not sure which.
“Maura Walsh was a good cop,” he continued. “That’s what your newspaper story should say about her. That’s what you should write about in your article.”
“I just want to tell the truth.”
Shockley looked over at Janko, then back at me and nodded.
“I’m sure you’ll do the right thing, Ms. Tucker,” he said.
Ten
I had a decision to make.
I was sitting on what seemed to be a big story.
The prevailing theory so far by law enforcement authorities was that Maura Walsh was the victim of a random murder. She accidentally ran into someone or some unrelated crime on that street in Little Italy that resulted in her death. Wrong place, wrong time. That left the police with a lot of potential suspects.
But what if she was the target of the killer all along? What if the killer was someone she was doing business with – the illegal business of payoffs and graft – and something had gone terribly wrong between them? That meant the people she had come into contact with on that last night of her life took on a new importance in the scheme of things.
I sat in front of my computer in the Tribune newsroom and thought about the lead for a story I could write about it all, based on the information I’d uncovered.
Three weeks ago, a woman police officer named Maura Walsh – the daughter of NYPD Deputy Commissioner Mike Walsh – was gunned down in Lower Manhattan.
At first, it seemed to be simply a random murder.
But now a Tribune investigation has uncovered a secret web of police bribery, payoffs and extortion that could have led to Walsh’s murder.
Here is the story as we know it:
At a little after eight p.m. on the night of July 12, Police Officer Maura Walsh walked into the Hands On club on the East Side. According to sources at the bar, she was there to shakedown the owner for a payoff. She was paid $500 – and then left. She then went through the same procedure at several other locations in Manhattan, collecting many hundreds more.
According to numerous people the Tribune talked with, it wasn’t the first time Police Officer Walsh had taken payoff money.
But it was the last.
A few hours later, she was murdered while her partner was ordering pizza at a nearby location.
There are many questions about the circumstances of Maura Walsh’s death.
And more questions about her life before that.
Who killed Maura Walsh? And why was Maura Walsh killed? And why are police apparently holding back on revealing some of the details of this tragic murder, only the third female police officer to die in NYPD history…
I stopped writing and stared at the words on the screen in front of me.
The truth was, I was uncomfortable going with a story like this. It still didn’t make sense to me. Why would someone from such an esteemed NYPD family background like Maura Walsh turn her back on all that for some easy money? Why weren’t the cops all over this as a motive for her murder? And, maybe my most immediate concern of all, what would be the fallout for me as a journalist if I printed a story like this?
I was a police reporter. I needed police sources to do my job. I would become the most unpopular reporter in town with the NYPD for smearing Maura Walsh’s reputation (and the reputation of the Walsh family) by making this public – even if it was true. Just like the two cops at the 22nd, Shockley and Janko, had warned me about. I’m sure there were many other police officers who felt the same way.