The Golden Girl

by Dana Perry

“Tucker, you’re not a lawyer. You’re just a newspaper reporter.” Williamson shook his head in disgust. “Look, I know who you are. Everyone in the department knows who you are. You’ve made a lot of news. But the only thing I care about here is that you’ve invaded my crime scene. I don’t like that. I’ve never worked with you before, so I’m not sure if I can trust everything you’re telling me. Do you know any of the other officers here?”

  I looked around the room. I didn’t recognize anyone. I told that to Lieutenant Williamson.

  “I generally work out of Manhattan,” I said.

  “Is there someone in Manhattan I could ask about you?”

  “Do you know a lieutenant named Aguirre?”

  “Aguirre, yeah. We’ve met.”

  “He’ll vouch for me.”

  Williamson walked a few steps away and took out his phone. He punched in a number, said something softly and then listened for a few minutes. When he was finished, he came back to where I was.

  “Okay, I talked to Aguirre.”

  “And?”

  He smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t put him down as a character reference on any job applications.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He says you’re a troublemaker, a busybody and a real pain in the ass. He says he’s glad you’re causing problems for me instead of him.”

  “Oh.”

  “He also says you have a disturbing habit of turning up around dead bodies.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  I couldn’t think of any other response to that.

  “However, he also said you’re pretty straight. So I’ll buy your whole story for the time being.”

  The Medical Examiner’s Office was here now. They took Renfro’s body out of the car and stuffed it into a green body bag. Then they picked it up, placed it on a stretcher and rolled it out to a waiting coroner’s vehicle. I turned toward Williamson.

  “What do you think happened here?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean, what do I think? Renfro killed himself. Hooked up the hose to the car, stepped on the gas and bye-bye world.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Why would he do it?”

  “He was depressed over the death of his partner. Blamed himself for it. I think it’s pretty obvious.”

  Yes, that was the obvious cause.

  But maybe too obvious.

  “What about his dinner?” I said. “He cooked himself a lasagna dinner and made a fresh pot of coffee before he went into the garage and turned on that motor. I saw them both in the kitchen. Why would he do that if he was going to commit suicide?”

  Williamson shrugged. “I don’t know. Force of habit or something, I guess. He made his dinner, brewed some coffee and then decided he was going to end it all instead. People who commit suicide do strange things. I remember one woman who cleaned her house from top to bottom before shooting herself in the head. You can’t figure these things.”

  “But it seemed like he was still fighting against suicidal tendencies, Lieutenant. I mean, he’d written down the telephone number for the police helpline. He sounded from the other comments he wrote that he was seriously considering make that call. Maybe he did. Can you check to see if there’s any record of calls from him to that hot line?”

  “We’ll check it all out,” Williamson said.

  “I’m just not sure it was suicide,” I told him.

  “We’ll check it all out,” he said again. “We’ll check everything out. We check everything out anyway in a case like this. But for now Billy Renfro’s death is listed as tentative suicide. Okay?”

  I nodded. It really was the obvious way for the police to go here. The only scenario that made sense.

  Maura Walsh, Renfro’s partner, had died because he left her alone. He blamed himself for her death. Even though he tried to go back to work, he was still so upset he needed to go back on sick leave. Probably he was under tremendous stress too because he feared Internal Affairs were closing in on him over the illegal payoffs he and Maura had been taking.

  Suicide was his only way out, and he took it.

  It made perfect sense on the face of it.

  Except I didn’t completely buy the suicide scenario.

  I had a nagging suspicion there was something more to Billy Renfro’s death.

  Thirty-Five

  I’d called in the story to the Tribune even before the police arrived. Once I got finished with Lieutenant Williamson, I got back on the phone and added more details. Including the fact that the police were tentatively calling it a suicide.

  I went online from my phone, clicked on the Tribune website and saw they already had a headline up that said: SLAIN WOMAN COP’S PARTNER KILLS HIMSELF.

  I worked the scene a bit more, kept talking to Williamson and other cops there and then filed a lot more to add to that original story.

  Eventually, after Williamson had left, I did too. I went back to the Tribune office, where I wrote an even more complete story that would appear in the print editions of the paper the next morning.

  I went with the official police version of suicide, but I mentioned Billy Renfro’s cooked dinner and his apparent attempts to seek help further down in the story. When I was finished with that, I wrote up a sidebar – about my earlier meeting with Renfro at McGuire’s, his anguish over his partner’s murder and also about how I discovered him dead inside that garage. It ran alongside the main piece on Page 1 under a headline that said: SAD, LAST DAYS OF TRAGIC COP.

  Norman Isaacs and Danny Knowlton were still there, standing around the news desk. I walked over and sat down.

  “Nice job,” Danny said to me. “It all reads great.”

  Isaacs didn’t look as happy.

  “Does someone want to tell me exactly what you were doing out there?”

  “Trying to come up with a new angle on the story, Norman.”

  “What story?”

  “The Maura Walsh murder.”

  “How come I didn’t know anything about it?”

  “She’s been working on this angle about Maura Walsh’s partner for me,” Danny said, even though that wasn’t totally true. But I was sure Danny was happy to join in on the credit for my front-page story.

  “I’m the city editor here,” Isaacs grumbled. “I need to know what my reporters are working on.”

  “Do I have to clear everything with you, Norman?” Danny asked.

  “It would be nice.”

  “Okay, Jessie was working on the story about Maura Walsh’s partner Renfro for me. That’s why she was at Renfro’s house. And that’s why we have this front page exclusive. Okay? I’ve cleared it with you now. But, like you said, you are the city editor.”

  Isaacs glared at him. This was the office politics battle that seemed to go on more than ever now – as Danny became more confident about his position at the paper. Isaacs, on the other hand, was getting more and more paranoid about his job security. Not as paranoid as Lorraine Molinski, but pretty close. Me, I was caught in the middle of all this office distrust and backstabbing. Sometimes I could make it work for me, but not when it got ugly like this.

  “What are we going to do next?” Danny asked me now, emphasizing the word “we” as he continued to revel in taking credit for my scoop. A story that he had absolutely no part in. But that’s what a newspaper editor does. Takes credit when his reporters do something good, then delegates blame when they screw up. Danny Knowlton sure knew how to work that process to perfection.

  I told him and Norman about the Frank Walosin connection that had been the impetus for my going to Renfro’s house to try to talk to him again. About how the murdered private investigator had been spying on Renfro and Walsh for Renfro’s wife – and claimed he had information to sell about Maura Walsh.

  “How did you find out all this?” Norman asked when I was done.

  “I obtained access to Walosin’s private files.”

  “How did you manage to do that?”

  “Yo
u don’t want to know.”

  “Are you telling me you did something illegal to get them?”

  “Define illegal.”

  Danny smiled. Danny Knowlton was happy to get the information, no matter how I did it.

  “What do you think it all means?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter. I’ll write another story for tomorrow laying all this information out about the PI Walosin’s involvement, and we’re way ahead of anyone else in the media. Plus, I think this gives us an opportunity to raise questions in print for the first time about what Walsh and Renfro might have been doing before their deaths. I don’t specifically have to say they were on the take. But I can raise questions about their actions, especially on that last night of Maura Walsh’s life. What do you think?”

  “I think that makes sense,” Danny said.

  “Agreed,” said Isaacs, which kind of surprised me. “It’s a legitimate story.”

  “Okay, then.” Danny smiled. “Let’s go for it, Jessie.”

  It sure was nice to see everyone getting along, even if I knew it wouldn’t last.

  Thirty-Six

  “You stole the file out of the dead PI’s office?” Michelle said in amazement.

  “I didn’t technically steal it. I mean, the building manager gave me access to the office. Even though I did lie to him about what I was doing there. And Walosin, who owned the material in the files, was already dead. I’m not sure of the legal implications of that. But the bottom line is what I did could be looked at in different ways. It’s kind of in a gray area, legally speaking. I prefer to think of it as—”

  “You stole the damn file.” Peter Ventura laughed.

  “Okay.” I sighed. “I stole it.”

  We were back at the same bar again. A bunch of the reporters and editors were there with me – including Michelle, Peter and Danny. We were sitting at a round table, underneath a wall filled with pictures of famous front pages over the years, drinking from several pitchers of beer. My stories about the dead Billy Renfro and the private investigator and all the rest of it was the main topic of conversation when we started.

  But then everyone started telling other journalist stories, especially Peter – who had an endless supply of them from the old newspaper days.

  I never got tired of hearing them.

  “The greatest obit writer that ever worked on a newspaper in this town was Daniel Fullerton,” Peter proclaimed.

  “An obit writer?” someone asked.

  “Not an obit writer. The obit writer. Fullerton turned obituaries into an art form. It was the only thing he ever did. Death was his beat, I guess you could say. People said he even looked like an undertaker.”

  He took a big drink of beer.

  “Now, this was long before my time. I think he retired in the sixties or seventies, after one of the big newspaper strikes. But there were still all sorts of stories about him in the newsroom when I was starting out. A lot of them were about how he hated it whenever they took the death of someone famous away from him on the obit page and made it a news story up front. He thought the obits – all the obits – should be him. Just him, no one else.

  “Anyway, on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Fullerton supposedly came into the newsroom and saw everyone raving around, stripping wire copy and putting new leads on assassination stories. So he walked over to the managing editor and said: ‘Does this mean you’ll be taking the Kennedy story for Page 1?’”

  Everyone at the table laughed, including me.“Who was the toughest editor you ever worked for?” Danny asked.

  “Eddie Slotnick.”

  That got shrugs from everyone. No one knew him.

  “He used to be city editor here. Before Norman Isaacs.”

  “Before Norman?” Danny laughed. “God, that’s ancient history.”

  “Was he any good?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but a real ball-buster. He used to write these brutal memos. One time a columnist’s wife died. The guy did a column titled ‘My Wife’ that was a long, personal memory of the woman. It really had no place in a newspaper.”

  “Slotnick killed it?”

  “No, he let it run.”

  Peter took another sip of his beer as everyone waited to see what was going to happen next.

  “Now a couple of days go by and it’s time for the guy to turn in his next column. This one’s titled ‘My Wife: Part 2’. Slotnick kills this one and sends the guy a memo. Know what it said?”

  Everyone shook their head no.

  “One wife, one column.”

  There was more laughter.

  “Who was the most colorful guy?” Michelle wanted to know.

  “Larry Egan. The greatest rewriteman of all time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’d do anything to get a front-page story. Of course, every once in a while he went too far.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “One time there was a big hostage drama and Egan told the city editor he’d gotten an exclusive telephone interview with the gunman. The paper put it on Page 1: THEY’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, GUNMAN VOWS. The next night the gunman gives up without firing a shot – and it turns out he’s a deaf mute. The city editor demands an explanation. Egan says: ‘Gee, boss, he never told me that.’”

  “Yeah, I guess that was going too far.” Danny laughed.

  “Just a little bit,” Michelle said.

  “It’s a tough call sometimes,” Peter said. “How far do you push a story before you cross over that line? The one between aggressive reporting and doing something really unethical.”

  “Give us an example of something really unethical,” someone said.

  “Janet Cooke.”

  “Who?”

  “She was a reporter for the Washington Post. She did a series of articles a few years ago about an eight-year-old drug addict that won her a Pulitzer Prize. Only it turned out there really was no eight-year-old kid. She’d made it up. They had to take the Pulitzer Prize back.”

  “Where is she now?” Michelle asked.

  Peter shrugged. There were blank looks all around the table. No one knew what had happened to Janet Cooke.

  Before we left, someone asked me what I planned to do next on the Maura Walsh story. Of course. Every reporter always wants to know what the next story was going to be. Well, I had an idea about that.

  There was a quote I’d used in the Billy Renfro sidebar story I’d done that stuck in my mind. Something he said to me that first day in McGuire’s about Maura’s death. “She was my partner, and I let her down. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. She’s dead, and I blame myself for not protecting her better. A police officer is always supposed to be there for their partner. But I wasn’t there when Maura needed me. I was off somewhere buying a damn pizza!”

  A police officer always stands by their partner, no matter what.

  That’s one of the unwritten rules among the men and women who belong to the NYPD.

  Yep, no question about it, the bond between partners for cops on the street like Billy Renfro and Maura Walsh was an incredibly strong one.

  Except I realized now that I’d completely forgotten about another partner.

  Billy Renfro’s ex-partner.

  The one I’d presumably seen in the picture with him at his house.

  Maura had been Renfro’s partner for six months before her death. But Sam and the others had told me that Renfro had been picking up payments at their places before that. With his previous partner.

  So what happened to that partner?

  Thirty-Seven

  I called Capt. Florio at the 22nd Precinct.

  “Who was Billy Renfro’s partner before Maura Walsh?” I asked.

  “Matt Wysocki.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “In the line of duty?”

  If Renfro had two partners who died in the line of duty within six months of each other, then it
could be more than a coincidence.

  “No, a heart attack.”

  “Was there anything suspicious about it?”

  “Now why would there be anything suspicious about a man having a heart attack?”

  “Just wondering.”

  I managed to convince him to give me the address of Matt Wysocki’s widow.

  It was a small house in a middle-class neighborhood on Staten Island. A sad-faced woman opened the door.

  “Mrs. Wysocki?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about your husband.”

  “My husband is dead.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You people,” she said, shaking her head, “if you people in the department paid this much attention to Matt when he was alive, maybe none of this would have happened.”

  “I’m not with the police department, Mrs. Wysocki.”

  “Whatever—”

  “My name is Jessie Tucker, and I’m a reporter with the New York Tribune. I’m not here to hurt you or the memory of your husband. I’d just like to find out a little bit more about him for an article I’m working on.”

  Her face relaxed a bit. She opened the door and let me in the house. We sat down in the living room. There were pictures around of two children – a boy and a girl, both from when they were growing up and now as adults. There was an old wedding photo of Matt Wysocki and his wife on the mantel. And a shot of the entire family next to a Christmas tree, holding up their presents and smiling for the camera. The happy pictures seemed out of place in this house now. There was a sadness here – personified by Mrs. Wysocki – that permeated everything.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’d like you to tell me about your husband’s death.”

  “There’s not very much to tell. You live with someone for so many years, and then they’re gone just like that. In a matter of seconds. You don’t even have time to say goodbye.

  “We were in bed when it happened. I woke up and heard Matt gasping for breath. At first, I thought it was a bad dream. But then I realized something was terribly wrong. Matt was clutching his chest and moaning in pain. I was helpless. I couldn’t do anything at all to save him.