by Dana Perry
“Look, there were a lot of things we never got answers for about what happened that night,” he said. “Or at least I never did. That’s why I wanted to talk to the teenaged sister Maura. Even though she wasn’t there when it happened. I really thought she might know something more about the events leading up to it if we talked to her. But Chief Palumbo insisted she didn’t, that she had no new information – and was as shocked as everyone else when she heard about her little brother’s death. Me, I wanted to question her some more. But Palumbo ordered me to stand down and leave her alone. Instructed me that I was not to bother the girl – or the father and the rest of the family – in any way. He said the investigation was closed.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but I was about to find out.
“What do you think happened that night?”
“Well… this is all speculation on my part, but I think it didn’t happen exactly the way we were told. But the chief, Walt Palumbo, took me out of the picture. Never let me talk to anyone in the Walsh family, including the sister. Then the family left Saginaw Lake. After what happened, nobody blamed them. Too many bad memories in that house. But I always wondered about the sister and what she knew or didn’t know.”
“Did you ever ask Walter Palumbo any more about it?”
“Walt refused to speak to me about the Walsh boy’s death. And then, not long afterward, he left to take a job with the NYPD in New York. Which was a job he had always wanted. I figured Walsh had helped set that up for him. In return for him not pushing further about the Walsh boy’s death. Again, I have no proof of any of this. But that’s when I quit the force. If that’s what being a police officer was all about, I didn’t want to be one anymore.”
“And you never confronted Palumbo about any of it?”
“Once I did. When he came back to Saginaw Lake on the force again as chief. He only stayed with the NYPD for a very short time. I’m not sure what happened. But I always had a feeling he had a guilty conscience about the way he had gotten the job.
“He said that pretty much to me that time we talked when he came back to Saginaw Lake again as police chief. I thought maybe I could get him to talk more, but then he died. Anyway, all of this came back to me when I heard about how Maura Walsh had died. What a terrible tragedy for that family. The accident that killed the boy. Then the daughter’s death like this.
“Completely different circumstances, of course. But it still made me realize the enormity of the tragedy that enveloped that family.”
Different circumstances, all right.
Obviously one death had nothing to do with the other. I kept reminding myself of that as Stovall talked about it.
But I heard another voice too, one inside me. The voice of my reporter’s instinct. That voice was telling me something else.
It was a helluva coincidence the brother and sister both dying from gunshot wounds, even if it did happen years apart.
And coincidences don’t happen that often, I’d found during my years covering crime stories for a newspaper.
“Do you have any idea why Maura Walsh would have come back to Saginaw Lake after all this time to ask questions about it?” I asked, telling him about her trips and visit to Chief Walt Palumbo’s son, who now ran the police force.
“No idea whatsoever.”
“Did she ever try to contact you?”
“No, I never heard anything about her until I saw her on the news.”
If Maura Walsh had been investigating the circumstances of the death of her little brother, she presumably would have tracked down Greg Stovall in Elmira, just like I had. Sooner or later, she would have had the same conversation with Stovall that I was having now. Except Maura Walsh just ran out of time.
Before I left, I asked Stovall if he ever missed being a police officer.
“Every day of my life,” he said. “It gets in your blood, I guess. I haven’t been a police officer for more than a decade, but I still feel like I’m a police officer inside. That’s why I get so upset when I hear about something bad that happens to one of my brothers or sisters in blue, like Maura Walsh. I just hope they find out who did it.”
“Me too,” I said.
Nineteen
When I got back to the city, I went to see Lt. Thomas Aguirre again to find out if he had anything new yet from his investigation. He said he did. He said that he’d solved the Maura Walsh murder.
Well, sort of…
“See that guy sitting in front of my desk?” Aguirre said, pointing to a short, nervous-looking man there. “His name is Elmer Tate. Elmer Tate just confessed to murdering Maura Walsh.”
I was stunned.
“That guy really confessed to killing her?”
“Among other things.”
“Huh?”
“Well, he also confessed to a kidnapping, three bombings and the murder of a top mob boss.”
“Oh, Lord!”
“No kidding, I’m thinking we can clean up a lot of other unsolved murders on our books with him. Maybe he even did the John F. Kennedy assassination? I don’t think he’s got an alibi for that.”
Whenever a murder gets a lot of attention like Maura Walsh’s did, crazy, confused people like this come out of the woodwork to confess to it. I’ve never been sure exactly what motivated them to do that. Maybe it gives them some sort of purpose in their lives to live out this bizarre fantasy, since their real lives didn’t have much purpose.
“No possibility that Elmer Tate here is telling you the truth?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know anything about the crime. He couldn’t describe her or the gun. And he wasn’t even sure where the murder took place. Other than that, he’s a perfect suspect.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“What else? I’ve called someone to take this fruitcake away to a hospital ward or whatever. I can’t waste any more time with him.”
A short while later, two EMS officers strode in. A young guy who looked like he didn’t need to shave yet and a woman with long blonde hair she had bundled up inside her hat. They started to take Elmer Tate away, but he began to protest violently. Said they were supposed to put handcuffs on him.
“Other people get handcuffs,” he said in a whiny voice. “I see it on TV. Why can’t I get handcuffs?”
The two young cops looked over at Aguirre for advice. He shrugged and told them to put the cuffs on. The blonde-haired woman took a pair of handcuffs off of her belt and cuffed Elmer Tate’s hands behind his back. Then they took him away. He looked happy.
“Does that answer any questions you have about how the investigation is going?” Aguirre asked me when they left.
“I’ve turned up a few leads that might help you.”
“Lucky me.”
“Do you want to hear what I found out or not?”
“Go ahead.”
“First off, did you know Maura Walsh had been making regular trips in the weeks before her death to Saginaw Lake in upstate New York? That’s where her family had a summer house when she was growing up. And where her little brother died in a gunshot accident when she was a teenager. She was asking a lot of questions up there about her brother’s death.”
I gave him a rundown of what else I’d found out up there.
“So what?” he asked when I was finished.
“It seems like very unusual behavior.”
“How could the accidental death of a little boy years ago have anything to do with the murder of a police officer on the streets of Manhattan today, Tucker?”
“I don’t know, I’m just flailing around here.”
“Gee, I sure hope the other leads you want to tell me are better than this one.”
I decided to run the payoff stuff past him and see what his reaction was.
“I’ve heard rumors that Maura Walsh may have been corrupt – taking bribes and payoffs and kickbacks from businesses.”
“The deputy commissioner’s daughter? That’s crazy.”
�
�I got a call from a private investigator. He said he’d been trailing her for some reason and had evidence of illegal things she was doing. He offered to sell me the information.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Aguirre said. “He was probably just talking, trying to make a quick buck for himself. Sounds like a real shady operator.”
I told him then about people at the various spots she’d been on her last night who said Maura Walsh was taking payoffs, but I didn’t give him any specific names. Not without checking first with Rawlings or any of the others. So he pretty much shrugged that off too as hearsay evidence.
“You haven’t found out anything at all about the angle that Maura Walsh might have been a corrupt cop?” I asked.
“No, and I’m not going to go around talking about something like that in this building either. Not with the deputy commissioner himself breathing down my neck on this case. He wants results, and that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t have time to chase down crazy rumors like that. Especially irresponsible ones that might ruin the reputation of his daughter and his family.”
But these weren’t just rumors. The evidence was there. I’d found it out pretty quickly. So had Walosin. Why couldn’t the police find the evidence that Maura Walsh was dirty? Or maybe they had and they were all trying to cover it up to protect the reputation of the Walsh family. Would they really do that? Maybe, if they believed the corruption had nothing to do with her murder. Which seemed so far to be the case, from what Aguirre told me.
“Look, it’s like I told you before. 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 for no reason at all. Those are the toughest kinds of murders to solve.”
Twenty
“I need your advice on something,” I said to Ellen.
“Personal or professional?”
“Personal, I guess.”
“Yikes!”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that whenever you come to me for advice about your personal life, it usually gets messy. Like it did with Logan. This isn’t about Sam Rawlings, is it?”
I shook my head no. “There’s nothing happening between Sam and me. It was just a few minutes of flirtation between us. That’s all.”
“So, what did you come here for my advice on?”
We were sitting in Ellen’s office in a skyscraper downtown not far from Wall Street. It was an impressive office. Ellen had done well for herself since leaving journalism. She’d done well for me too, helping to guide me through the media onslaught that threatened to envelop me during all the publicity over the Central Park attack. Both in the years after the original attack – and then the latest one where I broke the big story about it all.
But this time I was there about something different. I remembered a few years ago Ellen had made a lot of money representing an author who’d tracked her family roots back to the days of being a slave in the Deep South – then written a moving, very emotional and highly acclaimed book about what it meant to her life today. It wound up being a bestseller; she was interviewed on Dr. Phil and a lot of other programs; and the book even got turned into a TV movie. Ellen mentioned to me back then that she’d been so intrigued by the idea that she’d signed up for Ancestry.com or one of those services to look into her own background. I didn’t ask her a lot of questions about it at the time, but now I was interested in finding out as much as I could about the whole process.
“Genealogy,” I said now.
“Genealogy?”
“More specifically, finding a parent through genealogy.”
I thought she might laugh or make a smart-ass remark or at least act surprised. But she didn’t bat an eye or do any of those things.
“I’m listening,” she said
I talked about the genealogy stuff she’d told me in the past. “I was hoping you could tell me more of what you found out. How to go about it. What should I do or not do. How much it costs. Anything you can still remember…”
“I assume this is about you looking for your father?”
I’d told Ellen some stuff about what happened to my father and how he fell off the face of the earth after I was born. But I’d never gone into much detail with her. This time I did. I went through it all – including my recent efforts to find some trace of my father on the Internet.
“Do you think your father wants to be found?” Ellen asked when I was finished.
“Probably not.”
“That makes it harder.”
“Or he could be dead.”
“Even more difficult.”
“Are you saying it’s impossible then?”
“I’m saying it wouldn’t necessarily be easy. And it may not be successful. And, on top of that, it can cost a lot and take a lot of time. But, if you’re determined to hunt down your father, I’ll take you through what I know about the process.”
She said the first step was to find out whatever information I could through the biggest genealogy sites out there. She also told me to send a DNA sample to them. You submitted your DNA to them, she explained, then they tried to match it with other DNA samples in their database.
“The problem is that there’s a separate DNA base for each site. So if your father submitted his DNA at some point to Ancestry, and you’re on another site, you won’t be able to find a match. You’d have to sign up for all the sites to get a real shot at finding someone. Or at least the biggest ones.
“Now if your father never submitted DNA to any of the sites – which he probably didn’t, unless he went looking for you too – then there’s still a chance you might find other relatives who will help you find him. Still, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
We talked more about my preliminary efforts on Google to get names that could be my father – and how difficult it was to narrow that long list down to real possibilities.
“I’d suggest going to a genealogy investigator,” she said. “They use a lot of methods – including old-fashioned investigative ones – to track down relatives. Maybe they could do it with your father? Or at least tell you what happened to him. I’ll give you some information to contact one of them. Let me warn you about one thing though: a genealogy investigation like this can take a long time and eat up a lot of money. Take my word for it, Jessie.”
“Wow, you know a lot about this,” I said.
“I should. I spent a lot of time on it. I hired a genealogy investigator myself after that book deal. I really got hooked on the idea.”
“Who were you looking for?”
“My birth parents.”
Now I was the one who was surprised.
“I’m adopted,” Ellen told me. “Given away at birth. Sorry if I never mentioned, but the thing is, my adoptive parents are great. I didn’t need to find my biological parents for them to tell me they really loved me or any of that crap. No, my reason was more practical. I learned that my biological mother had a lot of health problems, even at a young age. The kind of thing that’s genetic so I wanted to know what my medical background was. From what I was able to find out, I had a bad family history. Lots of relatives dying very young. I could too if the pattern holds. Maybe that’s why I do some of things I do – why I’m in such a hurry to make money and make a name for myself in this business I’m in now. I don’t know how much time I have left. So I want to take advantage of every minute of it I can.”
I nodded solemnly. This was all news to me, but clearly Ellen hadn’t wanted to share it until now.
“Did you ever find out all the answers you were looking for?”
“Oh, I found both of them.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I decided I didn’t want to contact them. I didn’t want to find out any more about them. I was afraid the answers would be something I didn’t like. Sometimes you’re better off not knowing about your past. Did you ever think about that wi
th your father? Maybe you don’t want to find out he’s dead or sick or whatever really became of him.”
I knew exactly what Ellen was saying. It was why I never went looking for him in the past. But that had changed now.
Maybe because finding out what really happened to me in Central Park had finally given me a sense of closure (or at least as much closure as I could ever have) about that horrific event – but still left me wanting answers now about the rest of my life.
Maybe because all the things I’d learned about Maura Walsh and her troubled relationship with her father had unleashed long-buried feelings and emotions inside of me about my own family past.
Either way, and it was probably a combination of these two things, I had decided it was time for me to confront the one truth I’d been running away from all my life.
“I want to know about my father,” I told Ellen.
Twenty-One
I was back at my desk in the newsroom the next morning, reading through the Tribune to catch up on any news I might have missed while I was out of town, when I saw a story that almost made me spill my coffee.
It wasn’t on Page 1. Not Page 2 either. Or Page 3 or 13 or even 23. It was a column the Tribune ran called The Crime Blotter, buried at the back of the paper between the crossword puzzle and horoscope. The article was three paragraphs long and said only:
A man was found shot to death in a Times Square office building yesterday.
The victim was identified as Francis (Frank) Walosin, who operated a private investigation service on W. 47th Street.
Police said Walosin had apparently been dead for several days, possibly for as long as a week. There was no known motive for the shooting, according to authorities.
Frank Walosin, private investigator. Friendly rates, friendly service. He had some information about Maura Walsh, he said. Wanted to sell it to someone. And now here he was murdered.