by Dana Perry
And what if it wasn’t really true?
What if I was missing something important here?
I also thought about the interview I still wanted to do with Deputy Commissioner Walsh, Maura’s father. No way I’d get to talk to him if I wrote a story like this about his daughter.
Granted, this story might be better than an interview with the father at this point. But I still wanted to hear what he had to say. Especially before I blew the lid off this whole scandal his daughter was seemingly involved in with my story. Maybe he could fill in some of the missing pieces about his daughter’s life – and death – for me.
On the other hand, Maura Walsh’s secret life of corruption couldn’t stay hidden for long. There were trained investigators trying to find her killer who were presumably taking her life apart as I sat here. Someone else must have found out the same things I had. They’d been working on the case for three weeks. I stumbled across the damning information on the first day.
So why hadn’t they said anything about it? Why hadn’t they done anything about it? Or maybe they had. Maybe they’d already told Walsh what they’d found out about his daughter. Maybe that’s why he seemed so emotionless and seemingly uncaring at the press conference afterward. Maybe it wasn’t just his daughter’s death, but the circumstances about her life that caused the bottom to drop out of his own existence?
I needed to make absolutely sure my story about Maura Walsh’s corruption was accurate before I printed it. Or even before I told Danny or Norman or Lorraine or anyone at the Tribune about what I’d uncovered. I still needed more confirmation about what Maura Walsh had been doing before she was killed.
I made a list of people and places to check out further.
First, there was Charlie Sanders, the cop who was Maura’s ex-boyfriend. Normally, he would be a key suspect in her death. Romantic breakups are rarely completely amicable, and sometimes turn violent. Except Sanders had the perfect alibi. He was on duty in a squad car in the Bronx, miles away from Maura Walsh, when she was killed. Still, he might have known about some of the secrets going on in her life at the end.
Then there were the X-rated businesses she’d visited for payoffs: the strip club and the escort service in the apartment building. I didn’t believe that the people running those businesses at both places were the actual owners. There’s usually some kind of big money man – albeit an unscrupulous one – behind these kinds of shady businesses. It took me a bit of digging, but I eventually found out that both the strip club and the escort service were owned by a man named Dominic Bennato. Also known as Fat Nic Bennato. Fat Nic was a longtime mob figure in New York City, which I found interesting. Of course, mobsters don’t very readily grant interviews to the media. But I wanted to try to talk to Bennato.
And finally I still had Frank Walosin out there, the private investigator who seemed to know something about Maura Walsh and was trying to sell that information. I hadn’t heard back from Walosin, even though I’d tried calling him again a few times. But I did find an address for Walosin Investigations on the West Side just off of Times Square. I could go to the address and knock on his door.
I thought again about Aguirre using the “summertime blues” term to describe Maura Walsh’s murder – and I wondered if that was the way this story would turn out at the end. Nothing to do with any of the information I’d uncovered. Just a senseless crime for no reason.
When I was a young reporter, I interviewed a detective who had handled the infamous Preppie Murder. That was before my time, but he told me how that case still haunted him. On a sweltering August night, a handsome, nineteen-year-old named Robert Chambers met pretty seventeen-year-old Jennifer Levin at an Upper East Side bar. Both had big plans for the future. Levin was headed to college in Boston in the fall, while Chambers’ family had aspirations of him one day becoming a U.S. Senator. They left the bar together, walked into Central Park and made love under a tree. When it was over, Chambers strangled and beat her to death. The papers quickly dubbed it the Preppie Murder Case. In his confession, Chambers claimed Levin had forced him to have rough sex – that she had, in effect, raped him. He said he was only trying to protect himself when he accidentally killed her. Since he stood 6 foot 4 and weighed 200 pounds, while Levin was 5 foot 4 and 135 pounds, the cops never believed his self-defense story. But Chambers stuck to it through long hours of questioning. “Why didn’t she just leave me alone?” he kept saying. To this day, no one knows what really happened to set off Chambers’ murderous rage on that hot summer night in New York City.
“Summertime in New York City,” the Preppie Murder cop told me, “you can’t believe how much crazy stuff like that goes on out there on the streets during that time.”
Why were there so many senseless murders like that in the summertime?
Some cops claimed it was simply the heat, a simmering inferno that rose relentlessly out of the concrete canyons, the streets and the subways of New York during July and August – and somehow drove otherwise sane people crazy enough to commit such horrendous acts.
Others argued it was just a matter of chance that so many big murder cases happened in the summer. They pointed out that terrible crimes happened at other times of the year too. It was simply the luck of the draw that so many of the worst ones had been during the summer months, they said. These crimes could have just as easily have occurred in November or March or January.
Then there were those people – and I was one of them – who believed there were sometimes greater forces of nature at work here. The cop in the Preppie Murder Case even compared it to those unexplained happenings in the Bermuda Triangle. Or like The Perfect Storm, he said – the story about three storm systems converging together to create a once in a lifetime storm of such ferocity and violence that it consumed everything in its path.
After years of covering crime on the streets of New York, I was convinced that there were indeed times when everything came together like that in a freak occurrence that superseded all the laws of logic and science.
A perfect storm.
Like Son of Sam.
Or the Preppie Murder.
Or maybe even Maura Walsh.
Eleven
I had the dream again that night.
The dream about being attacked in Central Park. At first, the dream was the same as it had been in the past. I was being chased through the dark woods of the park by someone wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. Of course, I know now who it was in the park with me that night, I know who did all those terrible things to me.
I wondered how long I’d keep having this dream. The original attack on me was twelve years ago, and yet I continued to replay it over and over again in my sleep. Even after I finally found out the truth about what happened to me. Would the dream ever go away? I remembered when I was younger having a recurring nightmare about my college finals. I was supposed to take my final exams, but I didn’t know where to go or even what courses I’d taken. I’d wake up in a panic thinking about that, but eventually that dream stopped happening.
Maybe that would happen to the Central Park dream too. Of course, what happened to me in Central Park was a lot different than hypothetically missing a final exam.
I was running in my dream again this time. Like I always do. Trying to get away. But then the person in the baseball cap is on top of me. Hitting me, beating me, doing awful things to me until I lose consciousness.
It always happens that way.
Except this time something was different.
Just before everything went dark, I saw a face. Not the face of the person in the baseball cap. I saw my face. Beaten and bloodied as I fought for my life. Except slowly, strangely, it became the face of someone else.
Maura Walsh’s face.
I woke up with a start then and I looked at the clock. It was only a little after nine p.m. I’d fallen asleep on the couch in my living room in front of the TV. I was too wound up to go back to sleep now, so I got up and went into the kitchen to loo
k for something to eat. I grabbed a bag of potato chips and took them back into the living room with me.
You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why I was suddenly seeing Maura Walsh’s face in my usual dream. I’d come to identify with Maura Walsh, especially after pulling together all that stuff about her and her relationship with her father.
I wandered over to the office area of my apartment, munching on a handful of chips, and sat down at my desk. Even in Manhattan, with its notoriously small apartments, I had a pretty spacious place – enough for a separate office area to do my writing in. Newspaper reporters don’t make a lot of money, certainly not in comparison to plenty of other occupations these days. But I’d become a national media star twice and all that publicity had translated into a bestselling book and even a made-for-TV movie at one point. Hey, I had never wanted to become famous this way, but becoming a celebrity crime victim (and surviving it) had helped me to live a comfortable life now.
Of course, the office in my apartment wasn’t technically supposed to be an office. It’s actually listed in the description as a “dining alcove”, and I’m told that’s what the previous tenants used it for. They apparently even had regular dinner parties there. But since I always had a lot of paperwork at home for stories I was working on (and never planned to throw any dinner parties), I figured a desk and filing cabinet would be a lot more useful than a dining room table.
There were printouts scattered around the desk at the moment. The printouts weren’t about a story, they were about me. Or, more accurately, about my father.
I’d thought for much of my life about looking for the man who was my father, but I had never really done anything about it. Then, after I finally got some sort of closure about the Central Park attack on me by finding out the truth after twelve long years of lies, I began thinking it might be satisfying to find out the truth about my father too.
So I’d googled his name off and on when I had time, just to see if anything showed up.
I looked down now at some of the stuff I’d downloaded. My father’s name had been James Tucker. Yes, my mother had kept his surname after he left – no doubt part of her effort to perpetuate this myth of him leaving us in some glorious and heroic fashion instead of dealing with the reality that he slipped out like a thief in the night.
James Tucker was a pretty common name. There was a long list of possible hits when I made my initial checks. But there were ways to narrow it down with his birthday, last known address (where he’d lived with my mother when I was born) and things like that. I just hadn’t decided whether or not to do that yet because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the answers that were out there.
My image of my father – no matter how flawed he was in it – might not be accurate. I’d only seen one picture of him – it was one that my mother kept. He was a good-looking man – very handsome with a roguish kind of smile that made him even more attractive. Maybe he didn’t look like that anymore. After thirty-six years, how could he?
Did I want to see him as an old man now?
Or worse, find out he was dead? Or in prison?
Wasn’t it better to just remember him the way he was in that picture and leave it at that?
I still remembered the day I found out the truth about my father. I was a little girl, in second grade, and we’d been assigned to write an essay about our dads for Father’s Day. I based mine on everything I knew about my father. All of which came from my mother’s story – or stories – about him dying a tragically heroic death.
The next day, after I handed the essay in to the teacher, I was ordered to go to the principal’s office. The school counselor was there too. They asked me questions about why I had made up such an outlandish story. I had no idea what they were talking about. Finally, they asked my mother to come to the school. Eventually, the truth came out.
I was never sure about all the details of what really happened between my parents. All I knew was that my mother had given birth to me in the hospital, and my father had been there for that. Sometime soon afterward, when they had brought me back home, my father went out for a pack of cigarettes or something and never came back. He sent my mother a note explaining why he had left, which she found later. But she never told me exactly what was in that note.
I always wanted to ask her about what happened – to find out the truth about him leaving so suddenly and abandoning us like that.
But I never did.
You see, my relationship with my mother was a very troubled one too, even before I’d found out about the lies she’d told me.
My mother had decided that if she couldn’t have the perfect marriage, she’d have the perfect daughter. And that’s what she demanded of me in every aspect of my life when I was growing up: perfection. School grades, swim team competition, piano lessons, even the boyfriends I had – you name it. I had to be the best. Not for me. For her. That was an awful lot of pressure to put on a young girl already struggling to deal with missing father issues. And so, as soon as I was old enough, I moved away from her and never went back.
The final disillusionment with my mother came after I’d been brutally beaten – and nearly killed – during that horrendous attack on me in Central Park. She flew to New York and was sitting by my bed when I woke up from the coma I’d been in. Her first words to me were: “How could you be so stupid as to go walking through the park by yourself like that at night?”
I was in tremendous pain. I couldn’t walk or hardly move, and my face had been bloodied and bruised. I needed love, not criticism from her. But I never got that love. Soon after, she went back home and left me to recover from all that had happened to me on my own. I knew why too. I wasn’t perfect anymore.
My mother was dead now.
The only family (if you could call him that) I had left would be my father.
Assuming he’s still alive.
I took another bite of potato chip now as I looked again at the printouts of information in front of me. Lots of James Tuckers there. Maybe one of them was my father. Yep, the answers were out there somewhere, if I really wanted to learn about my father. All I had to do was go find them.
Twelve
The next morning I was drinking coffee in a Bronx station house with Charlie Sanders, the police officer who’d been dating Maura Walsh until just a few weeks before her death. I’d drunk a lot of coffee in a lot of station houses with a lot of cops over the years. It was a tradition if you were a police reporter: you bought the cop a cup of coffee and hoped that would be enough for him to open up with you. It usually worked. The coffee/cop bond was a very important one for a police reporter like me.
Charlie Sanders was a youngish-looking guy – probably no more than thirty. He was good-looking, had an infectious smile and curly red hair, not unlike the red hair I’d seen in pictures of Maura Walsh. I thought about how they must have made a cute couple.
“When did you and Maura break up?” I asked him.
“Right before Memorial Day weekend. I remember because I expected to take her to the Jersey Shore for our days off, but she said she didn’t want to go. Then she also told me it was over between us, at least for a while. She said ‘we just need to take a break’.”
“What was the issue that led to it?”
He shrugged.
“There’s always a lot of issues in a relationship.”
“Name one between you and Maura.”
“Commitment.”
“Meaning marriage?”
“That’s right.”
“She wanted to get married, and you didn’t?”
“No, it was the other way around. I loved Maura, I wanted to marry her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. But I guess she wasn’t that into me. For a while now, we’d been growing more and more apart.”
“Any idea why that was?”
“If I did, I would have tried to fix it. But I think it was about more than just me or anything I was doing or not doing. She seemed to be having doub
ts about everything in her life. I asked her what was wrong and she just told me she was ‘re-evaluating things’. When I asked her what she was re-evaluating, she said: ‘everything’. I guess that included me. But it even included her being a police officer too.”
“She was thinking of leaving the force?”
“I’m not sure. But she kept talking about how her father had pushed her into joining the NYPD. How he’d pushed her into everything in her life. And that she was tired of being pushed into doing things by him, now she was going push back on her own. I had no idea what that meant. And she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Tell me more about your actual breakup,” I said.
“Why? What does that have to do with what happened to Maura?”
“I’m just trying to get a good picture of her for the story I’m writing, Charlie. I’d like to write something that can help people remember her for the kind of person she really was. Not just another crime statistic.”
Which was almost true.
“Well, there’s not much to tell about our breakup,” Sanders said. “There was no big dramatic moment. It was more gradual. She got more irritable and stressed out and defensive about anything I asked her toward the end.”
“Do you think she was seeing someone else?” I asked.
He seemed uncomfortable with the question.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She denied it. She said it was all about her. She needed to be alone to deal with some things going on in her life. Whenever I tried to press her about what those were, about what was bothering her, she’d snap back at me that it was none of my business. But I guess the final straw came when I tried to get answers from her about the money.”