by Dana Perry
At first, I thought he hadn’t heard me clearly. But then I realized he had. The calm, emotionless expression faded from his face. He got up from his desk as if he was going to attack me. But then he just stood there hunched over and confused-looking, like a punch-drunk fighter desperately trying to stay on his feet after taking his opponent’s best left hook. His eye twitched, he was sweating and I thought he might faint. But then – drawing on some hidden reserve – he pulled himself erect, jutted out his jaw and said defiantly:
“My daughter died a hero.”
That’s the way I left him. Standing there in that office with the pictures of all the Walsh family members through the years. Seventy-five years of police tradition. And now it was over. His daughter was dead. His son had died years before. For a second, I almost felt sorry for him. But then I thought about the man who came home from work one day and threw out his daughter’s most prized possession – the fish in her aquarium that she loved so much – and my sympathy drained away.
“My daughter was a hero,” I heard him say once more as I walked out the door of his office.
Fifty-Five
“I want to go back to Saginaw Lake,” I told Danny, Norman and Lorraine when I got to work at the Tribune the next morning.
“Why in the world do you want to go to Saginaw Lake again,” Danny asked.
“Because I think that’s where the answers are to the Maura Walsh story.”
I was grasping at straws here, I realized that. There were all sorts of leads and investigative paths to pursue floating around in front of me right here in New York City on Maura Walsh. Dominic Bennato. Shockley and Janko and the dirty cops from the 22nd Precinct. Charlie Sanders. Sam Rawlings and other business people she was taking money from. The answers to what happened to Frank Walosin and Billy Renfro. And then, of course, there was Deputy Commissioner Walsh himself.
I had written a story for the Tribune front page that morning about my interview with Walsh. It was pretty dramatic stuff, even if he hadn’t really answered any of my questions. “MY DAUGHTER WAS A HERO” the headline said. This story was the day after I had broken the Charlie Sanders exclusive for the paper. I was on a roll at the moment, no question about it.
All I had to do was sort through all these angles – Sanders, Bennato, Walsh and all the rest – to find out who killed Maura Walsh.
And why.
But I had this crazy feeling – a reporter’s instinct, I preferred to call it – that the real answers for the Maura Walsh murder were back in Saginaw Lake where a little boy died a long time ago.
I believed that whatever Maura Walsh had figured out during her trips to Saginaw Lake had somehow set in motion a series of events that led to her own murder.
A peculiar configuration… as the cop once told me about another summer murder.
A perfect storm.
Now all I had to do was persuade Danny and Norman and Lorraine to let me loose on this. I was sitting in an office at the Tribune with all three of them. I’d asked to meet with them together, saying I had a possible big break on the Maura Walsh story. I was tired of playing this office politics game. They all agreed, which was one of the few times I’d ever seen them agree on anything. I guess they all had gotten excited about the idea of a big break in the Maura Walsh story, and they all wanted to be in on it with me.
But right now they looked confused.
“I know I’m stating the obvious, Jessie,” Danny said, “but the Maura Walsh murder was in New York City – not Saginaw Lake in upstate New York.”
“And whatever did happen in Saginaw Lake happened years ago,” Lorraine said.
“I don’t understand,” said Norman Isaacs, which was probably the most astute comment of all.
I didn’t understand either. Not yet. I told them that.
“Okay, maybe I’m crazy. Maybe Maura Walsh just had nostalgia for the old place where she spent summers as a young girl. Maybe she still had a childhood friend or something up there she wanted to reconnect with. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the city for a while. But she went back there – several times – during the time leading up to her murder. I’m betting there’s a connection. That’s what I need to find out.
“I want to look into little Patrick Walsh’s death all over again. There were five people I know who had some involvement with the case when it happened. Walter Palumbo, the Saginaw Lake Chief of Police; Greg Stovall, his deputy; the two EMT workers who took the body to the hospital and then to the morgue; and the friend who Maura Walsh supposedly was with at the time.
“Chief Palumbo is dead, and I’ve already talked with the deputy. That leaves three names for me to track down – the two EMT people and the friend of Maura Walsh. I want to find them and get their story.”
Isaacs shook his head no.
“That sounds like a wild goose chase, Jessie. Plus, you’re still messing around with the personal life of Walsh – and you know how that’s worked out in the past. I want you to keep working on this story, but I want you to do it here – not in Saginaw Lake.”
Danny and Lorraine both nodded. Jeez, I liked it better when they were fighting with each other. At least that way, I usually had one of them on my side.
I was ready for this response though. I’d come prepared with a Plan A to deal with it. And, if that didn’t work, I had a Plan B too.
“I’m going to do this story,” I said to them. “I’m going to do it any way I have to. For the Tribune – or for someone else. If I have to quit, I’ll do that. Or, if you decide you want to fire me for disobeying your direct orders, that’s okay too. But I am going back to Saginaw Lake. I’d prefer to do it for the Tribune.”
I was bluffing, of course. I wasn’t prepared to quit the paper for this story. And they weren’t going to fire me either. I knew I was bluffing. They knew I was bluffing. Everyone knew I was bluffing. So much for Plan A.
I switched to Plan B.
“Norman, you remember a few months ago when I didn’t believe the official story of what happened to me in Central Park? All of you thought I was crazy. But you let me do the story, Norman. And we wound up breaking a huge exclusive all because you had faith in my instincts. Show some faith in me again. Let me do this story the way I want to do it.”
Norman Isaacs didn’t say anything right away. Neither did Danny. But then Lorraine, bless her heart, was the first one to back me up.
“Aw, what the hell!” she said. “Jessie’s a great reporter, we all know that. So let’s let her report. Sure, she could get us in trouble nosing around Walsh’s personal life like this if it turns out there’s nothing there. But I’m willing to take that chance. Let’s send her back to Saginaw Lake and see what happens.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. As managing editor, Lorraine had the authority to make the decision on her own. But I wanted Danny and Norman on my side for this too.
I figured Danny was all right about me going, but didn’t like the idea of sharing the glory if I broke something with Norman and Lorraine. He would have preferred being the only editor working with me. So he’d go along, but he wasn’t happy about it.
Norman, on the other hand, was still wary of the potential pitfalls of focusing like this on Deputy Commissioner Walsh, because of his ties with powerful political figures as well as the owner of our own newspaper. I wished I could reassure him about that, but I really couldn’t.
“How much do you need to focus on Walsh himself for this story?” he asked.
“Walsh is the story, Norman.”
“I know, but—”
“I think he’s the key to Maura Walsh’s murder.”
“Wait a minute, are you saying—”
I was. I’d been building up to this idea for a while now. I’d kept rejecting it though because it seemed so unbelievable. But now, after everything I’d found out, it was the only scenario that made sense to me. Maura Walsh had gone back to Saginaw Lake seeking to uncover long-buried secrets about her family. Specifically, about the death of her
seven-year-old brother, Patrick. Which presumably would have reflected badly on her father, the deputy commissioner. Maybe even curtailed his career. And then she wound up murdered before she could tell anyone about it.
Okay, it was – on the face of it – an unbelievable scenario.
An unthinkable one.
But I’d been thinking about it anyway.
“I think there’s a real possibility Walsh murdered his own daughter,” I said.
Fifty-Six
There was a message on my voice mail when I got back to my desk from Wendy Carruthers, the genealogy investigator.
My God, the last person in the world I wanted to talk to again was Wendy Carruthers. She said on the message that it was important she talk to me. What could be so damn important? She’d already told me the man I thought all my life was my father wasn’t really my father. Was she going to tell me my mother wasn’t my mother either? I did not want to deal with this anymore.
But I’m a reporter.
And a reporter hates unanswered questions.
So I called Wendy Carruthers back to find out what she thought was so important.
“Jessie, I know you were upset when you left my office. Extremely upset. But, as I tried to tell you then, this is sometimes a very long and frustrating process.”
“What process? My father’s dead. And he’s not even my father. End of process. Period.”
“No, James Tucker was not your biological father. But someone was your biological father.”
“How do I even know that? Maybe I was a test tube baby. Maybe my mother got the sperm from some anonymous donor in a lab and then made up all the rest of it. That’s the kind of thing my mother would do. You didn’t know her. She was—”
“You had a biological father, Jessie.”
“Says who?”
“Says the DNA results I’m looking at on my desk right now.”
I sat there in stunned silence, waiting for what she would say next.
“I believe I know who your biological father is, Jessie. He is alive. And I know how to find him. I figured you’d want to know that.”
I hadn’t really thought about this possibility. Or, maybe I had. But, in my anger and frustration and disappointment over the news about James Tucker, I’d pushed it out of my head. It was the logical next step, though. If James Tucker was not my father, then someone else was. And that someone might still be out there.
“How did you find this out?” I asked her, ignoring the obvious question for the moment of exactly who this man was.
“We got lucky,” she said. “Do you remember we talked about the DNA results from the genealogy websites? How if you found someone who matched your DNA sample – or even a family member of someone who did – that could help track a missing parent like your father. Sure, it was a long shot, but I wanted to try. And it paid off.
“A little girl in New Jersey got a DNA kit as a birthday present. She got very excited about tracking her family roots and submitted her DNA sample as part of that process. She even got other family members to help her by doing it too. Including her grandfather who lives in Florida. That’s the person we’re looking at.”
“His DNA is a match for me?”
“Without question.”
I sat there silently for what seemed like an eternity.
Never saying a word in response to this shocking news.
But I realized I was squeezing my phone so hard it had begun to hurt my hand.
“Don’t you want to know, Jessie?” Wendy Carruthers asked.
“Know?”
“Who he is?”
“Yes,” I heard myself say mechanically and without emotion, almost as if my voice was coming from someone else.
“His name is Nathan Wright. He’s sixty-three years old, which is certainly the right age. He went to college at Dayton with James Tucker. In fact, they were roommates there. And he lived in Cincinnati later when your mother and her husband, James Tucker, were living there. So that all matches.
“Oh, by the way, Nathan Wright is a writer too. Like you. He’s an author of historical books. Lived right here in New York City for a long time. Hell, you could have passed by him on the street without having any idea who he was. He moved to Sarasota, Florida, a few years ago. Wright has a son and a daughter, and three grandchildren. Including the one who sent the DNA sample in for her genealogy tracking. His wife died a few years ago.
“He knew your mother and her husband very well at the time of your birth, Jessie. In fact, they were all close friends. Let’s assume he impregnated your mother and James Tucker, her husband, found out. Maybe James Tucker demanded a paternity test because he suspected he wasn’t the father. In any case, once he found out the truth, he left your mother. And that’s when she made up all those stories about what happened to him. That’s just a scenario, but it makes sense. It would also explain why James Tucker never contacted you. Because you weren’t his child.”
“What about this Nathan Wright guy? Why didn’t he do something? Why couldn’t he have tried to find me or contact me during all these years?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were the result of your mother carrying on an affair with this man – or maybe only sleeping with him once or a few times – he probably wouldn’t have realized that he, and not James Tucker, was the father of her baby. Maybe your mother wanted to keep up the pretense that you were her husband’s daughter, not the result of an affair she had with her husband’s best friend. And, when that failed because James Tucker figured out the truth, she made up all those other stories to make it sound better to the world. Nathan Wright could just be as surprised about who you are as you are surprised at who he is. I know this is a lot to take in for you, Jessie. But I believe there is a strong possibility that this is what happened when you were born thirty-six years ago.”
I nodded, still numb from the news. “Have you contacted him yet?”
“No. And I won’t, unless you ask me to do that. Or you can contact Nathan Wright yourself, if you’d prefer. This is a very delicate thing to deal with so I always leave the decision on how to proceed up to the client. That means it’s completely up to you what you do next.”
She sent me the specific information she had about Nathan Wright.
Historical author.
Lives in Florida.
Has a son and daughter and three grandchildren.
Plus, of course, one daughter he might not even know about.
After I hung up with Carruthers, I sat staring at that information for a long time. I went online and googled Nathan Wright. He certainly was an historical author. I found stuff there about his books. Civil War, Revolutionary War, he appeared to be pretty acclaimed in his field. There was a picture of him too. A gray-haired man in his sixties. Not bad looking, not great looking. He looked just like an ordinary man, so much different from the rakish, handsome picture of a young James Tucker I’d carried with me all these years as the image of my father. Like Wendy Carruthers said, I could have passed by him on the streets of New York City and never given him a second glance.
There was contact information too. A Twitter handle. A Facebook page. Even what seemed to be a working email.
“This is your decision, Jessie,” Wendy Carruthers had said. “Whatever you decide to do, it’s up to you.”
I shut off my computer, put the information I’d gotten from Wendy Carruthers in a drawer and went home to begin packing for my trip to Saginaw Lake.
I’d opened too many doors already.
I wasn’t ready to see what was behind this door.
All that mattered to me right now was the Maura Walsh story.
Fifty-Seven
The name of Maura Walsh’s teenaged friend back in Saginaw Lake was Melissa Soroka. She still lived there. In a pleasant, split-level ranch not far from the same neighborhood in Saginaw Lake where she’d grown up.
She was a computer consultant who worked f
rom home and her husband had some kind of a sales job that kept him traveling a lot. They didn’t have any children yet, a decision they’d made partly because he was away so much. But he was in line for a new job that would keep him closer to Saginaw Lake, and then they planned to start a family. Four children, she told me. Two boys and two girls. Of course, you could never count on that, but it’s what they were hoping for.
I let her talk about this – and a lot more – and pretended like I was interested. I’ve always found this was the best way to conduct an interview. Let the person talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. Until it was time to talk about what I wanted to talk about.
“I understand you and Maura were good friends when she used to come up here in the summer with her family,” I finally said to her.
“Oh yes, we were the best of friends during the summer. Melissa and Maura. We used to call ourselves the M-girls! We had a lot of good times, Maura and I.”
“Tell me what you remember about her.”
I’d told her that I was there because our readers at the Tribune wanted to know more about Maura as a person, and I was hoping to write a full profile about her in life. Including the time she’d spent growing up when she was in Saginaw Lake. Which was sort of the truth. Just not the entire truth.
“We only saw each other during the summer, of course, when her family came up here. But we had so much fun. Especially Maura, I think. Her father wasn’t around much, he would come up here on weekends to be with the family after working at his job in the city. So Maura got to do a lot of stuff she couldn’t do when he was around. And we sure did some wild, crazy stuff for a while. We went out on our first dates together back then. We smoked our first cigarettes together. We drank alcohol for the first time together. Jeez, we had great times. Until, well… until Maura stopped coming here.”
“You mean when the family sold the house after her young brother died?”
“Right. It all happened so fast. One minute she was here, then she was gone. The whole family. What a terrible tragedy that was for them. And, of course, I was so close to it all.”