by Dana Perry
“No, I was actually thinking about you.”
“What about me?”
“Everything you went through that night in the park. Do you want to talk about it?”
“What’s there to talk about? You read the articles. You know everything there is to know about it.”
“No, I meant do you really want to talk about it? That must have been quite an ordeal you went through. How are you doing with all that?”
“I’m fine,” I said, taking a big sip of my wine.
“Fine,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
I took another huge gulp of the wine now. Pretty much emptying the glass.
And thinking about what to say next to Sam Rawlings.
No, I’m not fine. I still think about it all the time. I have nightmares about it. I have friggin’ nightmares about it that are so bad I don’t want to go to sleep again. So I sometimes stay awake for hours at night. Does that answer your question? And no, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
Except I did. I realized it wasn’t the smartest thing to open up with all your fears and emotions to a guy you barely knew. Especially if the guy was someone you might be interested in pursuing a relationship with. But I needed to talk to somebody. And Rawlings was the somebody I was with right now. So in the end I totally unloaded on Rawlings. About everything that happened to me in Central Park. About everything that had unfolded after that until I’d discovered the truth. About how I now found myself identifying with the dead Maura Walsh, that I couldn’t get out of my mind the horror of her dying scared and alone in that alley – just like I’d been scared and alone in Central Park. And even about how Maura Walsh’s troubled relationship with her father raised questions for me about my own father, who I’d never even met.
By the time I was finished, I figured he’d want to run away from me as soon as he could.
“I’d really like see you again, Jessie,” he said instead. “How about reconsidering that offer of mine for a date?”
“Why are you so interested in me? A guy like you must have a lot of beautiful women who would love to spend time with you.”
“I like talking with you.”
“Talking? That’s all you want from me?”
“Well,” he smiled, “we can start out talking – and see where that leads.”
Twenty-Six
“What’s your endgame here?” Ellen asked me.
“What are you talking about?”
“This whole Sam business. Where do you want it to go?”
“Like I said before, I just think he seems very nice.”
“Let me get this straight. You meet a guy you’re attracted to. He asks you out, but you say no. He keeps asking, and you keep saying no. Then out of the blue you go to this guy’s bar to find him, and he asks you out again. But you still haven’t said yes. All you can tell me is that he’s… well, nice.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me just thinking he’s nice. It doesn’t have to be any more than that.”
“Of course it does. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to make a decision on this guy, Jessie.”
“I know.” I sighed.
We were back at the gym on Park Avenue South. Well, Ellen was back. I’m pretty much always there. Like my apartment, this place was my sanctuary from the uncertainty of the world outside. All I had to do here was worry about how many reps I did on the machines or how many minutes I spent on the treadmill.
That’s what I was doing right now.
Running on the treadmill.
With Ellen beside me.
“If you like this guy, go after him. Call him up yourself. Ask him to go out with you this time. Hell, show up at his door again and make it clear you want to see him. This is the twenty-first century, kiddo. We women can do a lot of things now we never did before. Take advantage of that.”
“I’m not sure I want to have a relationship with Sam. I’m not sure I want a relationship with anyone, ever.”
“That’s crazy talk.”
“I don’t seem to do very well in relationships,” I said. “Like with Logan. I don’t know that I want to go through all that again with someone else.”
Ellen sighed. The kind of sigh she gives me when she’s exasperated with me, but knows there’s no point in pushing the argument right now.
“Let me ask you another question,” she said as we continued to run side by side on the two treadmills.
“Sure.”
Around us the health club was beginning to fill up with more people. Men and women all trying to get in some early morning exercise before starting their workday. I looked at their bodies bathed in sweat – some fit, some less so – all around me. There was music blaring out of one of the loudspeakers in the room – something by Katy Perry, I think. I ran even faster on the treadmill as I listened to the music and felt the adrenalin from my running flow through my body.
“Have you done any more about that genealogy stuff we discussed the other day?”
“Not yet.”
“But you’re thinking about it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want the name of the genealogy investigator I used?”
“Later. I’m too busy right now working on the Maura Walsh story. I just don’t understand what was going on with her during those last weeks and months of her life. There’s too many moving parts here. My God, her life was a mess. I feel sorry for everything she must have been going through. Even if she was a dirty cop at the end, I don’t think she was a bad person. I think she just got messed up by a lot of things – including her father and the hallowed Walsh family NYPD tradition.”
Ellen didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Finally, she stopped running, got off the treadmill and began using a towel to dry herself off. I did the same thing, even though I knew I’d be sweating again the minute I left the air-conditioned gym – no matter how long I stayed in the shower – and went out onto the hot New York streets.
“Jessie, we talked about this. You’re getting too personally involved in this. You always need to separate yourself from a story, put up an emotional barrier between it and yourself so you stay objective.”
“This is just another story for me, Ellen.”
“No, it isn’t. You’ve established some kind of personal connection between Maura Walsh’s life and your own. You just admitted that to me. It’s almost like the two of you were soul sisters or something. You believe you feel her pain and understand all the problems she went through. The reason for that is pretty obvious: all the troubles she was having with her father. You don’t know exactly how to deal with your own daddy issues so you’re throwing yourself into this story instead. It’s too late to save Maura Walsh, but you think maybe if you can find out the answers to what happened to her, maybe it can save you now. This isn’t just about Maura Walsh, Jessie. It’s about you.”
That’s one of the problems when you have a best friend like Ellen.
You can’t hide anything from them.
They know you too damn well.
Twenty-Seven
For twelve years after the night I’d been attacked and left for dead in Central Park, I never went back to the place where it happened.
The nightmares were all still too real for me.
And returning to the spot where my ultimate nightmare happened seemed just… well, it was a door to the past that I never wanted to open up.
But that had all changed now.
What was once a symbol of my weakness as a crime victim was now a symbol of my strength as a survivor.
I’d returned there – to that infamous place in New York City that I once dreaded – time and time again over the past several months for inspiration and hope and optimism for my future.
The location of my original attack had been on the south side of Central Park, near the 79th Street Transverse Road leading out to Fifth Avenue. I’d been walking through the park on my way home twelve years ago – I lived just
a few blocks away then – when my attacker jumped me.
I stood at this spot now and looked around at it all in the daylight of a hot New York City summer day.
Everything was still there. The path I was walking on when I’d been attacked. The clump of trees I’d been dragged behind. A hilly ravine I’d been pushed down after the attack and where they found me unconscious the next morning.
For a while, people had left flowers and prayers and cards wishing me well in my recovery at this site. But that was a long time ago. Back when I was front-page news as a victim, not as a crime reporter. Now there had been other crimes and other stories that had replaced me on the front page. Many of them I had written myself.
Today everything here seemed perfectly normal. There were joggers, cyclists, children playing and people enjoying a summer day in the park.
But twelve years ago, I’d been left for dead in this same spot.
Just like Maura Walsh was left for dead in an alley a few weeks ago.
Except I’d somehow survived.
And she didn’t.
I thought about that and a lot of things as I stood there now under that hot summer sun in Central Park, where the unthinkable had once happened to me. I thought about the pictures of Maura Walsh I’d seen – so young, so pretty, so full of hopes and dreams for the future. I thought about her father and how cold and aloof and unfeeling he’d appeared to be. I thought about the cruelness of her father in throwing her aquarium filled with fish away and how she cried for days afterward.
I thought about my own father too and the tears I’d shed over a man I never even knew.
I needed to find out the truth.
About everything.
Maura Walsh.
Her father.
And my father too.
Twenty-Eight
The police didn’t seem to know or care much about the murder of Frank Walosin, which made sense since he was just a small-time PI with no apparent link to the Maura Walsh case.
Even after I went back to Aguirre to tell him that Walosin was the private investigator who had called me trying to sell information he claimed to have about Maura, Aguirre still figured it was more likely that Walosin had been murdered over a sleazy case he was working on for one of his sleazy clients.
Aguirre was probably right, but I couldn’t shake a feeling they were connected.
Frank Walosin’s murder was still a loose link for me in the story. And I hate loose links. So I used all my training and experience and skills as a reporter to come up with a sensible way to find out more about what Walosin was working on when he was killed. I couldn’t think of a sensible way to do that.
Instead, I decided to try something that made no sense at all.
And wasn’t exactly legal either.
But, on the positive side, it was the only option I could think of.
I checked back in my notes, found the address I’d located for Walosin’s office after he’d called me and headed over there.
It turned out to be a run-down-looking building on W. 47th, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. I let myself into the lobby and checked the directory. Walosin’s name was still there. That was good, maybe the landlord hadn’t moved out his stuff yet. The rest of the businesses seemed a bit on the shady side – mail-order houses, sex equipment distributors, an escort service or two. That was good too. I found a buzzer that said, “Building Mgr.” and pushed it.
A minute later a squat, middle-aged man appeared. He was wearing green work pants and a white T-shirt and carrying a cigar. The T-shirt had a reddish stain down the front that looked like spaghetti sauce. The end of the cigar was wet with saliva. He put it back into his mouth, chomped down and said to me between his teeth:
“What can I do for you, lady?”
“I’m looking for some office space. You got anything available?”
He nodded. “Yeah, something did open up recently. The previous tenant… uh, suddenly relocated.”
Sure. He relocated. No sense in telling a prospective tenant he was murdered in your building. Might hurt the place’s spotless reputation.
“Can I see it?” I asked.
“I haven’t had time to move all of the previous tenant’s stuff out yet.”
Perfect. Of course, I still had to hope the police hadn’t spent too much time going through Walosin’s office when it was a crime scene. But, based on Aguirre’s reaction, I was betting they hadn’t.
“That’s fine,” I told him.
“Okay, let me get the keys.”
He disappeared into a little cubbyhole off the lobby. Inside I could see a small unmade bed, a hot plate and a small TV. The TV was tuned to one of those daytime courtroom shows where the people were yelling back and forth at each other. He got the keys, and we went up to the third floor where he said the office was.
“What’s your business?” he asked as we climbed the stairs. “You with an escort service or something?”
I looked at him sternly. “You from the Better Business Bureau?”
He shrugged. “Nope, it’s nothing to me. You pay your rent, don’t do anything to bring the law here – hey, it’s fine. That’s the way me and the landlord like it.”
“Great.”
We got to Walosin’s office and he let us in with the key. It looked pretty much the way I expected it would. Small and cramped. Dusty file cabinets. Paint peeling from the walls.
“Like I said, I haven’t had time to move the previous tenant’s stuff out yet. He left in a hurry without it. If you’re interested, I could probably make you a good deal on some of it – assuming no one shows up to claim it.”
“I might be interested in that,” I said, pretending to think it over. “Say, do you think I could have a few minutes to look around here? To help me make up my mind for sure?”
“No problem,” he said. “Just close the door on the way out. I’ll be downstairs in my place.”
After he was gone, I went through Frank Walosin’s drawers and files. What I found was about what I expected. Bedroom pictures. Tapes of lovemaking. Eavesdropping equipment. Walosin was clearly one of those private investigators who operated on the very edges of the law. And, more often than not, he went over the edge. Divorce dirt. Blackmail. Extortion. You name it, it was available for a fee at Walosin Investigations.
One thing about Frank Walosin though: he was organized. All the filth was neatly accounted for and labeled. Except I couldn’t find anything in Walson’s files about Maura Walsh. Nothing in the W file or the Ms either. Of course, if that really was what Walosin’s murder was about, the killer would have made a point of getting his hands on that before he fled.
Still, he might not have had time to do a thorough search.
And the police probably didn’t spend too much time looking through the stuff in this office either, a low rent killing like this didn’t get a lot of attention from them any more than it did in the media.
So maybe there was still some other clue in Walosin’s files about what he knew or what he was doing in regard to Maura Walsh. It took about ten minutes more of looking, but I finally found something. A file folder that contained documents on all his cases from the current year. There were a lot of them, too many for me to go through before the building guy might come back to check on me. But Maura Walsh must be in there somewhere. So I took the file, stuffed it in my purse and got the hell out of there.
Back down on the ground floor, I could hear the sounds of the TV still coming from the little cubbyhole. It was tuned to some kind of Jerry Springer show now. A woman was screaming at her boyfriend, accusing him of sleeping with both her sister and best friend. He admitted that and then revealed that he’d slept with her mother too. The audience howled with laughter, and I could hear the guy with the T-shirt and cigar laughing too.
I slipped quietly past the open door, through the dingy lobby and out onto the street. When I got there, I noticed a police car sitting at the curb across from Walosin’s building. When I started walking
toward the subway station, it began moving in the same direction as I was. Were the cops watching his office for some reason, even though Aguirre had dismissed the idea of a link to Maura Walsh’s murder? That made me a bit paranoid since I had just stolen documents out of there. I quickly ducked down into the nearest subway station. As I got off the train again at Rockefeller Center, I looked around on the street there for the police car. But it was gone. Just my imagination running wild, I guess.
Twenty-Nine
I didn’t read the Walosin file right away when I got back to the Tribune office. Partly because I got busy doing a lot of other stuff there for the rest of the day, but also because I didn’t want anyone to see me reading the file and asking me questions about what it was. I was very aware that I had not obtained this through normal journalistic channels. What I had done to get it was not strictly ethical. I didn’t want to reveal that to my bosses or anyone else at the Tribune. Not yet anyway, until I knew more about exactly what was in the file. So I put it in my bag to take home with me to read in private.
When I did finally get back to my apartment on Irving Place later that evening, I pretty much collapsed onto the couch for a few minutes before I did anything else. It had been a long few days for me working on this story, and I was exhausted. Both physically and emotionally. My right leg – it’s the weaker of the two, and I still on occasion had to use a cane – was really bothering me now. That was why it felt so good to just sit there in the peace and quiet of my apartment like this.
I got up, poured myself a glass of wine and went back to the couch. Below me, I could hear the sounds of traffic on the streets of Manhattan. Outside my living-room window, I saw the Empire State Building and other parts of the New York City skyline. I turned on the TV, drank some wine and snuggled more comfortably into the couch. Ah, this was the life. My happy place. Oh, it might be better if I had a man to share it with. Or a dog or a cat or even a goldfish. But, for now, this would do just fine.