by Dana Perry
Of course, there was no way to be certain his death had anything to do with the information about Maura Walsh. Walosin’s murder could have been about anything – robbery, personal dispute, another case he was working on. To suggest anything more than that at this point was just supposition, hypothesis and jumping to conclusions on my part.
Still, I was ready to jump to those conclusions.
And it sounded like he’d been killed soon after his phone call to me where he said he had “another customer” for the Maura Walsh secrets he knew.
He probably was already dead the last time I’d tried to reach him, when the phone just rang and rang in his office.
Did Walosin see what went down that last night in Little Italy with Maura Walsh? Did he know who her killer was? If he’d offered the material to the person who actually murdered Maura Walsh, the killer might have decided it was easier to eliminate Walosin instead of paying him. That all added up to a possible motive for murder in the Maura Walsh case too.
The police didn’t realize that though because they didn’t have the information I had – there was no reason to connect the private investigator’s murder to the death of a hero woman police officer the way I did.
But I still had to figure out where that link led.
Or if it led anywhere.
The biggest question I had was this: why would a sleazy private investigator like Frank Walosin, who specialized in keyhole peeping and cheating spouses and other low-level cases, be chasing after a police officer like Maura Walsh?
Blackmail?
Maybe. Maybe that’s who Maura Walsh had gone to see on that last stop. Frank Walosin. To pay him to keep the evidence of all the payoffs quiet and not alert the authorities to her illegal activities. Could that mean Walosin killed Maura Walsh? But why would he do that if he hoped to make money out of it from her? And if Walosin killed Walsh, then who killed Walosin?
None of this made any sense at all to me – no matter how many ways I tried to approach it.
Okay, I needed to look at it from a different angle.
Frank Walosin made a living getting paid by people to do sleazy snooping jobs. That meant someone must have hired him to snoop on Maura Walsh. There had to be a client. Maybe if I could track down the client, I could find out more about the connection between Walosin and Maura Walsh’s death.
I went through all the possibilities I could think of.
First, the people on Maura’s beat that were being shaken down. The escort service, the strip club – hell, even Sam Rawlings. Maybe one of them wanted proof of what she was doing. Except they already knew she was taking payoffs, so why would they need more corroboration beyond that? Maybe someone in the police department that was out to get her? But they would presumably just go through Internal Affairs or some other official agency, not go to a PI like Walosin.
Then there was Charlie Sanders. Walosin specialized in cheating spouses and girlfriends and romantic entanglements like that. Sanders said Maura had ended her relationship with him because she said she had “other things she wanted to pursue”. Maybe one of those other things was another man.
What if Sanders had hired Walosin to spy on Maura to find out if she was seeing someone? Walosin took the job, but then stumbled onto the payoff angle and figured he could get an even bigger payday from that than Maura Walsh’s sex life.
Yep, Charlie Sanders sort of made sense as Walosin’s client.
Except he didn’t really.
Sanders was a police officer. A pretty respected police officer from what I’d found out about him. He would never have gone to someone like Walosin no matter how much he wanted information about Maura Walsh and a new man.
The one name that intrigued me the most in all this was Dominic Bennato. I’d found out earlier that the mob boss owned two of the businesses – the strip bar and the escort service – where Maura Walsh had taken payoffs before her murder. And Bennato, from everything I’d heard about him, was certainly a man capable of murder. More than capable of it. He’d been linked to dozens of murders over the years, even though he’d never been convicted of any of them.
I asked Michelle Caradonna, who sat next to me, what she knew about Bennato. Michelle had done a big series for the paper a while ago called “Real-Life Tony Sopranos” – about all the mob bosses in the New York City/New Jersey area. Bennato had been one of the bosses she focused on.
“Scary guy,” she said to me.
“How scary?”
“Well, he seems like a decent and personable guy when you meet him. Almost likeable in a bizarre kind of mobster way. But then you find out the things he’s done – murders, kidnappings, beatings and a lot more. That’s the scary thing. The fact that you don’t realize how scary he is makes him even scarier when you find out about the real Dominic Bennato.”
I called Bennato’s number again, and I left another message that I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t really expect to get a response from this one – any more than with the previous messages I’d left there. And, even if I did manage to get an interview with Bennato, I didn’t figure he was going to admit knowing anything about Maura Walsh’s murder to me. So why was I wasting my time trying? Because that’s what a reporter like me does. I just keep asking questions, even if I don’t get any response. You never know. Sometimes it leads you to the right answers in the end.
Meanwhile, I still hadn’t heard back from my NYPD source about getting an interview with Deputy Commissioner Walsh.
I wanted that interview more than ever now because of all the things I’d found out were going on in the Walsh family – and also this new development with the murder of the PI Walosin.
Walosin’s death might have nothing to do with Maura Walsh. He was a sleazy PI who could have been killed because of some sleazy client or some sleazy case or some sleazy enemy he’d made along the way in his snooping. But I wouldn’t know that for sure until I found out more about what was going on with Maura Walsh at the end of her life.
Which was why I wanted to talk to her father.
Even though I was pretty sure Walsh – given everything I’d found out about his uptight personality – would never really open up emotionally to me or shed much light on most of those questions I had about his daughter’s murder or the death of her little brother in Saginaw Lake or anything else.
But maybe there was another member of the family who would.
His wife.
Maura’s mother.
Her name was Nora Walsh, and they’d been married for more than thirty years. But she barely had been mentioned in anything I’d read about the Walsh family, except for that police report in Saginaw Lake. I could make a formal request through the NYPD to interview her, but I didn’t think that would get me any further than my own efforts to meet with the deputy commissioner.
And I’d learned a long time ago as a reporter that the best way to score an interview was not to sit back and wait for it to happen – but instead to use some old-school journalism methods by just showing up and knocking on the door.
So I decided to go knock on Mrs. Walsh’s door.
Twenty-Two
Deputy Police Commissioner Walsh and his wife lived in Roslyn, an upper middle-class community in Nassau County out on Long Island.
It’s about a forty-minute ride on the Long Island Railroad to get there under normal conditions. But it took me nearly an hour and a half because of a lot of train delays at Penn Station. I used the time to think about the questions I was going to ask her, assuming she would even talk to me.
A little before eleven a.m., I stood in front of the Walsh address. It was a pleasant-looking two-story red brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac. There was a long green lawn sloping down to the street, with two mid-sized maple trees standing near the house. Near the front door were two metal swans along with a welcome mat that said, “Welcome to Our Home.”
The swans looked beautiful, but battered – as if they’d been standing at their posts in front of the house for
a long time. They’d probably been here ever since the two young Walsh children were growing up, and the swans were once supposed to signify the joy inside this house.
But now both children were dead, and I didn’t figure anyone inside cared much about the swans anymore.
I stared at the house for a few minutes before I went to the door. The sun was beating down on me. I wanted to get out of the sun, go into an air-conditioned house for a bit of relief. But I still dreaded what I was about to do. This was the part of the job I hated. Excuse me, Mrs. Walsh, but I’d like to talk to you about how your daughter was murdered. Oh, and I just found out your daughter was a crook and a shakedown artist too. What do you think about that? Our readers want to know.
Then I walked past the two metal swans, climbed up the steps and rang the doorbell.
The door opened and a woman of about fifty stood there. She had freckles on her face, traces of red mixed with gray in her hair – she looked like an older version of pictures I’d seen of Maura. Obviously her mother, Nora Walsh.
“Hello, can I help you?” she asked.
“My name is Jessie Tucker, and I’m a reporter with the New York Tribune.”
Nora Walsh stared at me and said nothing.
“It’s about your daughter. There are some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
More staring.
“Look, Mrs. Walsh,” I said finally, “it’s really hot out here. And I had a long trip out from New York City so I’m tired and thirsty. I really could use something to drink. Do you think maybe I could come inside for a few minutes? If you want me to leave after that, I’ll leave. Okay?”
She smiled slightly. “Okay.”
We went into the living room. It was a large, airy room, decorated in Early American style, with a big window overlooking the trees and the swan figures outside. On the wall were pictures of people in police uniforms. Mike Walsh. The grandfather. Lots of other relatives. And a big one overlooking the fireplace of Maura.
“Is your husband home?” I asked.
Mrs. Walsh shook her head. “Oh, no, he’s at work. He never misses a day of work. Even when… well, even with what happened with Maura, he still went to work the next day.”
Of course. I remembered him and the way he looked at the press conference. Standing tall, erect – almost proud. Daughter died in the line of duty, you know. Good for the family tradition. Police blue through and through.
“You said you’d like something to drink?” Mrs. Walsh asked.
“Sure. Iced coffee would be good.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any.”
“Okay, maybe just some regular coffee then?”
“Er… no, we don’t have that either. You see, my husband doesn’t believe in any kind of stimulants. Alcohol. Drugs. Even coffee. So we don’t have any in the house.”
Wow! Living with this guy must be a real bundle of laughs.
“We do have some juice,” she suggested. “Or herbal tea.”
“Tea would be fine.”
She returned a few minutes later carrying a silver tray with two cups and a teapot. I poured some tea into a cup and looked around for the sugar. There didn’t seem to be any. I asked Mrs. Walsh for some.
“We don’t have sugar,” she said.
“Don’t tell me – your husband doesn’t approve of it.”
“He feels sugar is unhealthy,” she said.
“Right.”
I took a sip of the tea. It tasted bland. There were several slices of lemon on the tray next to the teapot. I took one and squeezed it into the tea for flavor. I hoped that was okay with her husband.
“I’m trying to do a profile on your daughter for the Tribune,” I told her. “How she got on the force, her accomplishments, her aspirations. Sort of a life story.”
“It wasn’t much of a life, was it?” Mrs. Walsh said. “Only twenty-seven years. That hardly qualifies as a life at all.”
I nodded sympathetically. “She accomplished a lot of admirable things in those twenty-seven years.” I pushed the payoffs and the corruption out of my mind. “More than most people do in a lifetime. That’s what you should remember.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Walsh smiled.
I decided I’d said a good thing, I was proud of myself.
She did start talking then about Maura. She talked a lot. As if she didn’t get a chance to talk that much with her husband around. She talked about Maura’s childhood, about raising children in a police family, about all kinds of things. Here and there, I would ask her a question along the way. One of them was about the death of her young son Patrick at the house in Saginaw Lake a long time ago.
She wouldn’t say much about that, just mumbled something about it being a “terrible tragedy”. I was hoping she might shed some light on why Maura was so interested in it again recently, but I didn’t want to push her too much. Just the mention of Patrick Walsh’s name upset her, even after all this time. So I focused instead on the other thing I’d found out about Maura.
“I’ve been told by some people that there was tension between Maura and your husband,” I said as diplomatically as I could. “She apparently refused to talk about him with anyone. And I’ve heard your husband and Maura weren’t even speaking to each other at the end. Can you tell me why?”
Mrs. Walsh stared down at her now empty teacup for a long time.
“My husband can be a very difficult man sometimes,” she said finally. “A good man, but very stubborn. Very rigid.”
I wasn’t going to disagree with that.
“Did he put a lot of pressure on Maura to become a policewoman, to follow in the Walsh family tradition?”
“Yes, it was very important to him. He wanted a son so badly. And when Patrick was born, he was already talking about him growing up to join the NYPD. But then after Patrick was…” she hesitated, the tragic death of her young son was clearly still difficult for her to deal with “… after he was gone, my husband convinced Maura to do it. The Walsh family has always put its children on the force. He wanted to continue that tradition.”
“Is that what Maura wanted to do?”
“Oh, she was very happy in her work. She loved being a police officer.”
I thought again about my conversation with Charlie Sanders, who said she was re-thinking her career with the NYPD.
“Are you sure about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t she ever say she might rather do something else with her life?” I wasn’t sure where I was going with this line of questioning, but somehow it seemed like something I wanted to know. “Maybe be a firewoman instead? Or a lawyer? Or a brain surgeon? Anything else besides being a policewoman?”
“Well, I really don’t—”
The telephone rang, cutting her off in mid-sentence. She walked over to a phone in the dining area, about fifteen feet away, and picked it up. Close enough so that I could hear what she was saying. And figure out who she was talking to.
“Hello, dear, how are you?” she said.
There was a brief pause while the person on the other end said something.
“Oh, no, Mike, everything’s fine.” Her husband. “Yes, there’s a very nice lady visiting with me. Her name is Jessie. She’s from the New York Tribune and she’s very interested in Maura and—”
The tone of the conversation changed then. Whatever her husband was saying at the other end wasn’t good. When she spoke again, her voice sounded strained. Tense.
“I don’t know why you would say that. It’s just a little conversation about our daughter.”
Another pause.
“All right, I know she works for a newspaper. But I don’t really see why… Hello! Hello!”
Mrs. Walsh stood there, holding the phone in mid-air, almost frozen like a statue. She wasn’t talking anymore Obviously her husband had hung up. Finally she put the receiver down and walked back to where I was sitting.
“I hope I’m not causing you a problem,�
�� I said. I felt uncomfortable.
She sat down on the couch across from me.
“If you’d like me to leave now, I understand.”
“Marine biologist,” Nora Walsh said.
“Pardon me?”
“You asked me before if Maura ever wanted to be anything else besides a policewoman. Well, she wanted to be a marine biologist. Talked about it all the time. Read everything she could get her hands on. Even had this big aquarium in her room that she filled with all sorts of exotic fish and sea plant-life.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Her father wouldn’t hear of it. Especially after we lost our son. So, he went to work on Maura. Discouraged her from wanting to study marine biology. Berated her for even talking about it. And then one day, while she was at school, he went into her room and threw away that aquarium and everything in it. Maura cried for days over it.”
I nodded. “So, in the end, she gave in and became a policewoman.”
“In a manner of speaking, she gave in. But I was never really sure if she gave in or not. Sometimes I think she just did it to prove something to him – to show him she could do it. And that sometime – somehow – she planned to throw it all back in his face.”
Nora Walsh began to cry then. Her body heaving and sobbing as if she’d held it inside her for all this time. Maybe her husband didn’t allow crying in the house either. I comforted her as best I could, then made my way out the door. When I turned around and looked back at her on the couch, she was still crying. In a way, I felt glad about that. After all I knew about her husband, it was good to see some kind of emotion coming out in this family.
I walked down the steps, across the lawn and past the two metal swans again. They didn’t look any happier than they had the first time I saw them.
“Yeah, I know how you feel,” I said softly to the swans. “This house is trouble.”
No question about it, the Walsh family was hiding a lot of secrets.
I’d found out about some of them.
But I had the feeling I had only begun to scratch the surface.