The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

  “I should have sued Walosin to get my money back,” she said. “Maybe I still will.”

  “Too late for that now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Frank Walosin is dead.”

  She seemed surprised to hear that. Or at least she acted like she was. I told her about his murder. If she made any connection at all between Walosin’s murder and his work for her, she didn’t show it.

  “There’s something I still don’t understand,” I asked her. “You said Walosin told you he didn’t find any evidence of an affair between Maura Walsh and your husband. And yet you seem convinced there was one. Why?”

  “Like I said, a wife knows. My husband denied it every time I confronted him about her, but I knew it was true. Don’t worry though, one day he’ll realize what he lost with his tawdry little affair. He’ll come begging me to take him back. That’s why I left him. To show him how much he’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

  I wasn’t really sure how to answer that.

  “I don’t think Maura Walsh was having an affair with your husband,” I said finally.

  But she really wasn’t listening to me.

  She was staring at herself in a mirror and smiling.

  “I’m thinking about going blonde,” she said, talking to herself more than me. “Wouldn’t that look nice? The men at my singles club will love it. And Billy will be so jealous the next time he sees me. He’ll realize what he lost. The best woman he ever had.”

  She was still staring at herself in the mirror when I left the apartment and went back into the heat outside.

  I got into the rental car, turned up the air-conditioner full blast and thought about what I’d accomplished in there. Not much really. Yes, she’d hired Walosin the private investigator. But it was supposed to be for a sex scandal. Instead, Walosin had stumbled onto the corruption scandal, which he thought could be a big payday for him. Except now he was dead.

  So who could tell me more about that?

  Well, maybe Billy Renfro could.

  I’d suspected he was hiding secrets the first time I talked with him, I just had no idea how big these secrets might be.

  My second conversation with Billy Renfro should be a lot more interesting than the first one was.

  I drove up to Fort Lee, N.J., then across the George Washington Bridge into New York City. I was around 72nd Street when I saw a police car behind me. I watched it in my rearview mirror, then tried to ignore it.

  Second police car I’d been aware of in the last few days.

  But there were a lot of police cars in New York City.

  Sure, I never noticed them before like this. But all the talk about police corruption and the rest had made me a bit jumpy and nervous, I guess.

  Talk about paranoia.

  It’s just a police car, nothing more, I told myself.

  And, sure enough, when I looked back into the rearview mirror again, the police car was gone.

  Thirty-Two

  The Central Park nightmares – the ones I’d been having since the attack on me more than twelve years earlier – weren’t the only nightmares that were keeping me awake at night.

  It was two a.m., and I’d just woken up from another hospital nightmare.

  Only it wasn’t me who was the patient in the hospital this time.

  It was my mother.

  I knew why I was having this nightmare about her too. I’d been thinking about my mother – and my confusing, troubled relationship with her – ever since the DNA/genealogy conversation I’d had with Ellen. I thought about it earlier that day when I went back to the Tribune office after my meeting with Linda Caldwell. I thought about it while I was working out on the treadmill for an hour, doing fifty sit-ups, a hundred leg curls and swimming a mile of laps at the swimming pool in my gym. And I was still thinking about it when I went to bed, going over and over in my head the questions I had about the father I never knew – and the mother I knew too well.

  Which was why I was sitting at the desk in my apartment in the middle of the night – having given up on trying to fall asleep for now – and logged on to one of the genealogy sites I’d signed up for after my conversation with Ellen.

  I’d found out my grandparents were originally from Pittsburgh, although they later moved to Cincinnati where my mother had grown up. And their parents – my great grandparents – had come to this country from Ireland. I even managed to get the date and number of the boat they traveled here on – and then the town in Ireland where they had come from.

  But none of this really helped me find out what I was looking for – more about my father.

  With that, I kept running into dead ends.

  And the more I went through all this stuff on the website, the more unhappy memories it brought back about me and my mother.

  Like I said earlier, I didn’t have a very happy childhood. On the one hand, my mom enveloped me in motherly attention, but she also never really included any love in that relationship. It was almost, I used to feel, as if I was an object for her to show the world how wrong my father was to leave her. She was constantly pushing me to be the best – no, even more than that, to be perfect – in anything I did. Which I never was, of course. And so I was constantly disappointing her.

  The culmination of our dysfunctional relationship came after the attack on me in Central Park. We didn’t talk a lot after that, even after I recovered and began a new career as a newspaper reporter at the New York Tribune. When I began getting front-page stories, I rarely sent them to her. And, when I did, she never responded.

  I hoped one day we could work it out and somehow salvage a mother and daughter relationship between us – even a strained and not so great one.

  But then she got sick. The last time I saw her she was in critical care in the hospital. I flew there – I felt it was my duty, just like when she came to see me in the hospital. But I was not prepared for the emotions I felt when I saw my mother, the only family I’ve ever known, in that hospital bed hooked up to life support equipment.

  She knew I was there and seemed happy about that. Or at least I thought she did. I couldn’t tell for sure because she had a breathing tube down her throat that wouldn’t allow her to speak.

  On the night I arrived, the nurse told me she believed my mother wanted to tell me something. And it sure seemed like she did. Except she couldn’t speak, and she was too weak to even hold a pen in her hand to write a note. I tried to communicate with her as best I could. Throwing out words or suggesting topics to which she could only reply with a slight nod or shaking of her head. It was very slow going. But at one point I said the word “father” and she nodded her head. I couldn’t get any more out of her that night though, no matter how hard I tried. She became more and more agitated over being unable to get her message to me – whatever that message was – and the whole thing was so upsetting that I finally decided to leave for the night. I told her I’d be back in the morning.

  That was the last time I saw her alive.

  And that’s what my nightmare was about. In the nightmare, I’m always hoping that I’m going to get my mother to reveal her secret to me this time. What it was that she wanted to tell me about my father at the end. But then – just as I think she’s about to tell me – I wake up and realize all over again that my mother is dead.

  Taking with her whatever she wanted to tell me about my father – or anything else – in her last moments on this earth.

  I’ve dealt with all this by putting it out of my mind most of the time. But now it all came rushing back as I went through the details I had of my mother’s life and background. It left me feeling sad and depressed. And, I suppose, a bit guilty too because I hadn’t really been there for my mother when she got sick and needed me – just like I’d been so angry at her for not being there for me when I needed a mother. Now I had no one left in my family. No mother. And no father. Unless I did something about it.

  I managed to get a few hours of sleep, but I was up at six a.m and e
xercising when I called Ellen.

  “What the hell are you doing up at this hour?” she said sleepily into the phone.

  “I’m on the treadmill.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “Long night?”

  “Yes, it was. Unlike you, I have a social life.”

  “I have a social life.”

  “Okay, unlike you I have a sex life.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Speaking of that, whatever happened with you and that Sam guy?”

  “That’s not why I’m calling.”

  I asked for the details of the investigative genealogist she’d told me about. I said I’d pretty much determined that I couldn’t do the search for my father alone. I needed professional help. She put me on hold, checked around for the information and then gave me a name and phone number.

  I thought about calling the investigator right away, but it was too early.

  Maybe I’d call later when I got to the office.

  Or maybe not.

  In the meantime, I got back on the treadmill and ran as fast as I could for as long as I could in hopes of pushing all the thoughts about my father and my mother and Maura Walsh and her father and all the rest out of my mind.

  It worked too.

  For a while anyway.

  Thirty-Three

  Before I’d left Billy Renfro’s wife in New Jersey, I got her to give me directions from Manhattan to their house. I checked first with the 22nd Precinct to see if Renfro had gone back to work, but they said he was still on sick leave. So I went to where Renfro lived in Queens.

  The house was on a quiet, tree-lined street about a mile from the Long Island Expressway. Nice, but not ostentatious. Just middle-class American families. And how was your day at work? Fine, I shook down three people and made $1000 in bribes. Oh, good – now could you take out the garbage?

  It was a white Cape Cod, with weather-beaten brown trim and shutters. I knocked on the front door. Nothing happened. Off in the distance, I could hear a dog barking. Somewhere I heard a car engine idling.

  I walked around to the side and knocked on another door. Still nothing. From there I could see a large structure of some kind in Renfro’s backyard. I realized it was a boat. He’d been building a boat, probably the one he planned to sail in Florida as soon as he retired.

  I walked back around to the front and tried the door there again, knocking as loudly as I could. Then I leaned over and peered in a window. No sign of movement inside the house.

  “Hey, get outta there!” a shrill voice yelled.

  I looked around and saw a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe and hair curlers sticking her head out of the door next door. She was scowling at me and shaking her fist.

  I walked over to her porch and up to her door.

  “Hi, I’m Jessie Tucker,” I said pleasantly. “I’m a reporter for the New York Tribune. I’m looking for Billy Renfro.”

  “Haven’t seen him,” she said in the same shrill tone.

  “Do you have any idea where I might find him?”

  “No. Now please just go away. We don’t want any trouble around here.”

  Then she slammed the door shut in my face.

  I walked slowly back to Billy Renfro’s house and stood in the driveway looking at it. The dog had stopped barking, but I could still hear the engine running. It seemed close by. I looked around, but I couldn’t see it. It didn’t seem to be coming from the street anywhere. More like from inside Renfro’s house. Or from his garage.

  I walked up to the garage door and listened. Sure enough, there was the sound of a car running inside. The garage door wasn’t locked, so I opened it and went in. I was only inside for a few seconds before I had to back out again, coughing and choking. It was long enough to know what had happened.

  The lady next door shoved her head out again and saw me.

  “What are you still doing here? I told you we don’t want any trouble in this neighborhood.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said, still trying to catch my breath.

  “Huh?”

  “You better call the police right away.”

  I read once that death by carbon monoxide poisoning is the most pleasant way to go. Much better than jumping off a building or putting a gun to your head. They say it gives you a feeling of euphoria at the end. No pain, no struggles. You just quietly go to sleep.

  I hoped for Billy Renfro’s sake that was true.

  While I waited for the police to arrive, I made my way through the fumes again and pushed open a door in the garage that led to the house. I knew I shouldn’t be doing that. But I wanted to see if there was anything in there that might be relevant to Maura Walsh or anything else before the cops arrived.

  The first thing I saw was a note on the kitchen table. It said:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  I’m so sorry about everything.

  God, please forgive me.

  Billy Renfro

  NYPD Badge 892

  Below that he had written the words, “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect.”

  The New York City Police Department motto.

  On a table in the living room, I saw a pamphlet from the Police Department Benevolent Association that told about how to get help for job-related stress disorders. There was a quote on the first page that said: “You help people all day, don’t be afraid to ask for help yourself.” It gave a telephone number to call.

  Someone, I assume it was Renfro, had written the words “today I make the call” next to the telephone number. Several other similar notes were below it. They were in different colors of ink, as if he’d written the words at different times while he tried to work up the courage to make the call. I wondered if he ever had. It didn’t really matter now.

  It was amazing to me how objective I could be about doing this. I mean, I’d just discovered a dead body in the garage. Later, I knew, the sight of seeing Billy Renfro like that would haunt me for a long time. It had to. But, for right now, I was just doing my job. Which meant trying to examine as much of this stuff in his house as I could before the police showed up.

  Looking more around the room now, I saw a lot of awards and pictures.

  Awards for bravery and heroism and outstanding work in the line of duty for Police Officer Billy Renfro. Like Ventura had said to me when I asked him about it in the beginning, Renfro was a good cop. Or at least he had been for a long time. Until it all ended tragically for him in a garage filled with carbon monoxide fumes.

  The pictures were like a scrapbook of his life. Him and his wife in happier times. His three children, when they were young and later all grown up. The boat I’d seen in the backyard that he dreamed of sailing to Florida one day. Lots of pictures of him in police uniform. One of them was him and Maura Walsh, laughing and standing with their arms around each other outside the 22nd Precinct. That must have driven his wife crazy. Another picture from outside the 22nd was Renfro with another police officer I didn’t recognize. Probably his previous partner, before Maura Walsh came along.

  Renfro’s house was a mess. Dirty clothes all over, dishes in the sink – it looked as if living alone without his wife and family hadn’t gone well for him. In the kitchen, I found a frozen lasagna TV dinner inside the microwave. He had cooked it, but never eaten it. I stuck my finger into the tray, then licked some of the lasagna off. It was cold. So it must have been in there for a while. There was also a fresh pot of coffee and an empty cup there too.

  Then I looked through the rest of the house. I found a note from his wife in which she announced she was leaving him. He’d kept that in a prominent position by his bed in the bedroom, for some reason. There were a lot of receipts in a drawer I opened that seemed to be far beyond a policeman’s salary.

  I went back into the other room and looked at the last words of Billy Renfro.

  I’m so sorry about everything, Renfro had written in his note. God, please forgive me.

  Did Billy Renfro kill himself out of guilt because
he felt responsible for Maura Walsh’s death?

  Did he do it because he knew the corrupt activities he’d been engaging in – the bribes and the kickbacks and the payoffs – were about to be exposed?

  Or was Renfro apologizing for something else in the note – some other secret I didn’t know about – which pushed him over the edge to suicide?

  Thirty-Four

  The cops showed up a few minutes later. The guy in charge was a lieutenant named Williamson. He was a muscular African American, about forty, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and yet as imposing physically as a linebacker for the New York Giants.

  He had a lot of questions for me, starting with the most obvious one:

  “What were you doing here? Inside Renfro’s house?”

  I told him how I’d come there to talk to Renfro about his partner Maura Walsh for a story I was working on about her death. That I’d heard the engine running inside the garage and then smelt the exhaust fumes inside. And then I went into the house afterward where I saw the suicide note.

  I did not tell him the part about going through the whole house and looking through all his stuff.

  Williamson was unhappy enough about the fact that I’d gone inside Renfro’s house, without getting into that kind of detail.

  “Did you know Renfro?” Williamson asked me when I was finished.

  “I interviewed him a few days ago about the Maura Walsh murder. And I’d run into him on stories before that over the years.”

  “So you just decided to drop by and say hello tonight?”

  “I’m working on a new story – a different angle – about Maura Walsh. I thought maybe he could help me with it.”

  “What’s the angle?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s privileged information.”