by Dana Perry
I eventually got up and went back into the kitchen. I made myself scrambled eggs with sausage and toast for dinner. I know that probably sounds weird but I’m one of those people who hardly ever eats a big breakfast, so sometimes I like to eat breakfast at night. I also make terrific scrambled eggs. Lots of milk and butter and usually cheese melted in it. I can’t fry an egg or make an omelet worth a damn, but I’m great at scrambled eggs.
I took my meal back into the living room, eating in front of the TV while I watched a news show about everything happening in the world today. My God, how did people live before there were 24-hour news channels? I realized as I was eating and watching TV so contentedly how comfortable I’d gotten living – and mostly being – alone. In other words, without a guy in my life. I thought about Logan, the last guy I’d been with. I even thought about Gary Bettig, my long-ago fiancé who had callously abandoned me while I lay close to death in a hospital bed. And mostly I thought about Sam Rawlings. What the hell was I going to do about Sam? I wasn’t sure about that.
It was easier to think about the story I was working on. So I was glad to finally pull out the file I’d taken from Walosin’s office and start going through it, looking for some kind of link or clue to Maura Walsh. Being a journalist was easy for me. It was the rest of my life that was so difficult.
The cases in the file I’d taken from Frank Walosin’s office weren’t easy to figure out. None of them included names. Each one was just labeled with a case number at the top, and the people in the documents only as Surveillance Targets A, B, C, etc. Walosin had clearly gone to great lengths to keep secret the identities of his clients and the people he was investigating. Probably in case someone else ever got their hands on his files (like I did now).
I kept reading through the details of each case, looking for some kind of connection to Maura Walsh.
And I finally found it.
One of the reports in the file talked about him staking out the 22nd Precinct and following two police officers from there on their nightly rounds.
It included details about the precise movements of a woman cop who obviously must have been Maura Walsh as she made her patrol rounds with her partner during several nights of duty. Including the night she died.
Which raised an obvious question: if Walosin was following Maura Walsh for some reason, did he see who shot her in Little Italy? Did he know who her killer was?
“I’ve got another potential buyer for this information,” he’d told me that day on the phone. “I’m offering that buyer the same deal as you. I’m open to the best offer. It’s a seller’s market.”
But I still had to figure out where that link led.
Walosin’s file certainly provided a detailed account of Maura Walsh’s illegal activities. All the payoffs and money she took and where she got it from. It never mentioned Maura Walsh by name – just referred to her as Surveillance Target B. But it clearly was Maura Walsh from the description of her actions.
Walosin had nailed down an airtight case of corruption against Maura Walsh.
But why?
Who hired him to follow her?
He never named the client either in the file. Instead, he employed the same code he did elsewhere – using a letter in the alphabet. The client was simply listed as “Surveillance Target B Buyer”. I needed to figure out a way to find out who that client was. And eventually I found one.
I got lucky.
Walosin turned out to be not quite as efficient as I thought he was at hiding the identity of his client. Yes, he’d meticulously removed every name from the file and replaced them with code names like “Surveillance Target B” and “Surveillance Target B Buyer.” He’d gone to great lengths to hide the identities of everyone he was involved in tracking and the person who hired him to do it.
But he’d forgotten one thing.
Attached to the back of one of the documents about Maura Walsh, I found a cancelled check.
It was for ten thousand dollars and it was made out to Frank Walosin from someone named Linda Caldwell. There was an address listed on the check too. The address was in Queens. Who the hell was Linda Caldwell? I sure didn’t know her, but I needed to find her to see why she apparently hired Frank Walosin to follow Maura Walsh.
There were a lot of Linda Caldwells from the New York City area online. Even more L. Caldwells. I checked out a few of them without success. But, when I figured out the answer, it was the address – not the name – that was the key. I googled Linda Caldwell’s address in Queens on a real estate website, and I found out the property was listed as being owned by William Renfro. Billy Renfro, Maura’s partner.
It didn’t take a whole lot longer for me to determine that Renfro’s wife’s name was Linda.
And, after more digging, I established the fact that her maiden name was Linda Caldwell.
And then the connection with Frank Walosin and his private eye services all made sense to me.
Billy Renfro’s wife had hired Walosin.
But Walosin wasn’t following Maura Walsh.
He was following Billy Renfro.
Thirty
“What made you decide to have lunch with me?” Sam Rawlings asked.
“I told you the other night that I would see you.”
“You said you might.”
“Okay, I’m here now.”
“I’m glad.”
We were sitting in a booth at Ted’s Montana Restaurant, a steak place near Rockefeller Center and down the street from the Tribune office. The steaks were good, and so were the hamburgers. Rawlings had ordered a cheeseburger with everything on it along with a side of fries. I decided to order the same. Even though eating something messy like a cheeseburger was a tricky proposition on a first date, I’ve found. Assuming that this lunch was a first date, of course.
I thought it might be a good idea to lay down some ground rules to him right at the beginning.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“This is just a lunch. No more.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” I blurted out.
“Okay.” He smiled. “Well, I’m glad we got that settled before eating…”
“I’m serious.”
He picked up his cheeseburger and took a big bite.
“Do you always do this when a guy is interested in spending time with you, Jessie?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Go into attack mode, instead of just enjoying the moment.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Sure, you do.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I guess maybe I do.”
“My current plan,” he said slowly, “is to eat more of this terrific-looking cheeseburger. Then maybe have coffee – or even dessert – with you. After that, we’ll see where everything goes between us. If something more does happen at some point, that’s great. If not, well… let’s not ruin this nice lunch.”
We talked about a lot of things after that.
He asked me about my job. More about the Central Park attack and the more recent incident there where I finally solved the case. About my brief, ultimately unsuccessful bi-coastal romance with Logan, who I’d met doing that story. And, when he asked me more about my romantic past, I even told him about Gary, my ex-fiancé.
“This guy Bettig actually said he didn’t want to be saddled with the burden of taking care of a cripple?” Sam asked.
“It was even a bit harsher than that.”
“Hard to believe.”
“I know, but he said it. I remember it all too well. I was there. Lying in that hospital bed when he walked out on me.”
I wanted to stop talking so much about me, so I asked some questions about him. Like where he lived, for instance. He said he had an apartment in a high rise off Second Avenue in the East 70s, just a few blocks from where The Hangout restaurant was located. I knew that was a pretty expensive area to live.
> “I thought struggling writers were supposed to live in garrets or something,” I said.
“That’s kind of a myth. Besides, garrets generally don’t even have electrical outlets. No place to plug in or charge a computer.”
“Hemingway never used a computer.”
“Hemingway actually wrote everything out longhand,” Sam said. “Did you know that? Well, the descriptive stuff anyway. He used a typewriter when he was doing dialogue. He said the typewriter captured the pattern of the way people speak. You know – a rat-a-tat-tat kind of thing. I read that once.”
“You’re a big Hemingway fan?”
“How could an aspiring author not be? Hemingway wrote something else about being a writer that I’ve thought about a lot. He said the thing you need to do is find out at some point whether or not you have what it takes to be a writer. Sometimes a person digs deep down inside himself and finds out that the talent simply isn’t there. He quits his job, tries to write the Great American Novel and comes up empty. Hemingway said that disappointment can be enough to kill a person.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? That you’ll find out someday you’re not good enough to be a writer?”
“There’s something that scares me even more than that.”
“What?”
“That I do have the talent, but no one else besides me will ever know.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Let me tell you my big nightmare. I think about it when I’m really depressed about my writing career. It goes like this: I spend my whole life writing novel after novel and none of them ever gets published. All these manuscripts sit in some drawer or closet in my apartment for years, and no one reads them until I die. Then somebody finally says: ‘Wow, this guy could really write. Too bad he’s not still alive so we can tell him.’ Or even worse, no one ever reads the damn things. They just get thrown away as garbage after I’m gone. I have had no impact whatsoever on the literary world. I’ve wasted my life.”
I laughed. “That is pretty scary, but probably unlikely?”
“Hey, you asked the question.”
“Would you let me read something you’ve written?”
“Do you really want to?”
“Yes. Then if I like it, I can tell you what a great writer you are before you’re dead.”
“What if you don’t like it?”
“I’ll lie.”
“You’ve got a deal.” He grinned.
It turned out to be a long lunch. A nice lunch. But, at the end, the inevitable question came up. Could he see me again?
“Look, I’m going through a lot right now,” I said. “I’m kind of on emotional overload. Everything from what happened in Central Park. The Maura Walsh story. And some personal stuff too involving my family.”
Or my lack of a family, I thought as I said it.
“Is that a ‘no’ then?”
“Um…”
“Well, that’s better than ‘no’.”
“I need time to sort all these things out before I’m ready to start seeing someone again.”
“How long will that take?”
“I’m not sure.”
Sam took out a piece of paper and a pen, then wrote something down.
“What’s that?”
“My phone number.”
He handed it to me.
“Call me when you’re ready,” he said.
Thirty-One
It turned out – after I did some more checking – that Billy Renfro’s wife had left him a month and a half ago. That was about the same date on the check she’d paid to Frank Walosin to spy on her husband. But what exactly was she looking for from Walosin? Evidence of Billy’s police corruption – taking bribes and payoffs – that she could use as leverage against him in a divorce settlement, perhaps?
I needed to talk to Billy Renfro again. I had a lot more questions for him now than I did the first time we met.
But first I wanted to talk to his wife about Frank Walosin.
Linda Renfro – or Linda Caldwell as she called herself now – was living in Edgewater, N.J. There was no easy public transportation to get there from Manhattan, so I rented another car to make the trip. I figured Danny wouldn’t be happy about that expense. That’s why I didn’t tell him – or anyone else at the paper – what I was doing. I’d worry about it later when I filed my expense account. If I came up with a big story out of this for the Tribune, they’d be happy. If I didn’t… well, no one would be happy. Including me.
She lived in a high-rise apartment building with a view of the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline across the water. I wasn’t sure at first if she’d be willing to talk to me. But she invited me over. I soon found out why.
“Where’s the photographer?” was the first thing she asked me when I showed up.
“What photographer?”
“Don’t you want to take a picture of me?”
“Why?”
“For the interview you’re going to print in the Tribune. About me. Everything I had to put up with being a police officer’s wife and all that?”
I’d given her a cover story when I called to set up the interview about why I wanted to talk with her. I said it was because her husband’s partner Maura Walsh had died in the line of duty and I wanted to get a better picture of the stress and worry and dangers of being a police officer through the eyes of his wife. Or some kind of crap like that.
“I’m not writing an article about you, Mrs. Renfro. I’m here to ask you questions about your husband. I’m trying to piece together information about the events leading up to Maura Walsh’s death, and I thought maybe you could help.”
“What would I know about that?”
“Nothing, I’m sure. But maybe you could tell me a bit more about the effect it had on your husband.”
She looked disappointed.
“Well,” she said huffily, “I wish you had told me that before you came here.”
She was a dark-haired woman who must have been in her fifties (based on what I knew about Billy Renfro’s age and their children), but was trying hard to look a lot younger. She had on a silk top that was too tight, a skirt that was too short and heels that must have been six inches high. It did give her a kind of sexy look, I suppose. But there was also something about it all that seemed… well, desperate.
“What happened between you and your husband?” I asked.
“We split up.”
“When?”
“Oh, a few months ago.”
“And you moved here then?”
She nodded.
“I told him he could keep on living in that damn house. Our kids are grown up and have moved out. I didn’t want to live in Queens anymore. I wanted to grow as a woman and as a person. So he agreed to rent this place for me to live in. It’s fine for now. But I’d like to move into Manhattan so I can grow even more. It’s very important for a woman to keep growing as a person. I’m sure you understand that.”
I didn’t understand anything this woman was saying. It sounded like something from a “self-help” book she had read. But I didn’t want her to stop talking. So I simply nodded and smiled.
“I’m taking a painting class. I’m taking dance lessons. I belong to a singles club here where I’ve met a lot of nice men. Men who appreciate a woman like me. Not like my husband, who never has time for me anymore. I hope to travel soon too. I’m enrolled in a night school course to learn Spanish. I want to be able to speak the language when I go to exciting places like Cancun and Rio de Janeiro. I’ve spent my entire life taking care of Billy and raising a family. Now it’s my time to live. And that’s what I’m going to do. Watch out world, Linda Caldwell is coming!”
I thought about telling her that Rio de Janeiro was in Brazil, where they speak Portuguese – not Spanish – but I kept my mouth shut. No point in ruining this woman’s fantasy.
“Why exactly did you leave your husband after twenty-five years of marriage?” I asked her.
“He
was cheating on me.”
“There was another woman?”
“Damn straight there was. I found out about it. He denied everything, of course. But I knew about what he was doing.”
“Who was the other woman?”
“That little bitch who was his partner.”
“Maura Walsh?” I said in amazement.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“A wife always knows. Billy had a romance going on with her. I confronted him about it – and then I left.”
Wow, I thought to myself. Maura Walsh and Billy Renfro? I didn’t see that coming. But it sure explained a lot. Including why Mrs. Renfro had hired a private investigator like Frank Walosin. She was looking for dirt on her husband. And found out Renfro and Maura were carrying on an affair. Or were they? I had some trouble believing it. I remembered the way Renfro had talked about Maura like a daughter, not like a girlfriend. But middle-aged men do get smitten with young women, maybe that’s what happened with Billy Renfro and Maura Walsh on all those long, lonely nights in a patrol car?
“Did you hire a private investigator named Frank Walosin to spy on your husband?” I asked her.
“How do you know about Walosin?”
“That’s how I tracked you down – I got your name from his records.”
“Okay, I hired him. No harm in telling you that, I suppose. I knew my husband was carrying on with Maura Walsh and I wanted proof. So I hired Walosin to watch Billy on the job and get pictures and other evidence. I wanted to confront Billy with it. To show him he couldn’t carry on an affair without me knowing about it. To make him feel guilty for his infidelity – and to feel guilty over the way he didn’t appreciate me the way he should. After all I put into our marriage.”
“Did Walosin get proof of an affair?”
“No, he claimed he couldn’t find any. But he kept my ten-thousand-dollar retainer. Said he’d done everything he could do and now he needed to move on to some other big job. Can you believe that?”
The “other job” must have been selling the information he’d stumbled onto about Renfro and Walsh taking payoffs.