by Dana Perry
“But Maura was headstrong and insisted she wanted to do something else with her life. That’s when I used her guilt over Patrick to bring her back into line. I said she was the reason her brother wasn’t here to take over that role, so she needed to join the force to make up for what she did. She acquiesced in the end, and she became a police officer. And then she died.
“I’m responsible for all of this. I’m not sure what punishment you’ll decide on for me, but it can never be worse than the punishment I’ve been putting myself through every day.”
“That’s an amazing story, huh?” I said to Norman, Danny and Lorraine in the Tribune newsroom after I broke the latest exclusive on Walsh’s confession.
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“Except for one problem,” I said. “I just found out Walsh’s story wasn’t true.”
“What do you mean?” Norman asked.
“Let me rephrase that: it wasn’t the whole story.”
I told them then how I’d gotten a call with the latest update from Aguirre and Rawlings and Russell Garrison on the questioning of Walsh.
“None of them could quite believe that Walsh – a man who had lived his life upholding the integrity of the police force – would have thrown all of that away so easily just to protect himself. And, after intensive questioning, Walsh has now revealed that he was protecting someone else – not himself.”
“Who?” Isaacs asked.
“Yeah, who?” Danny said. “Who else was there? He’s already made clear that his daughter wasn’t even in the house when the boy died.”
It was Lorraine who figured it out, even before I told them.
“But there was one other person in the house,” Lorraine said. “His wife. Nora Walsh.”
In the end, that was the real story of what happened that day in Saginaw Lake at the Walsh family house.
Nora Walsh had lived her life under the thumb of her domineering husband. She loved him, but she also feared his wrath and his anger. Most of all, she always desperately wanted to please him. Which wasn’t easy with a man as demanding as Mike Walsh.
For a long time, Nora Walsh had felt a sense of guilt because she was not able to give him the son he wanted. Maura was already nine years old, and there was still no son to carry on the Walsh family tradition with the NYPD. Walsh and his wife tried a lot of birth methods for a period of years, and eventually they were successful with Patrick. Her husband finally had the son who would follow in his footsteps as a police officer one day, just like so many other Walsh men had followed the family tradition in the past.
But now Nora Walsh felt under tremendous pressure to raise Patrick to be everything her husband wanted him to be. No little boy could meet the high standards she – and she believed her husband – wanted from him. And so she began to feel guilty over that, blaming herself for not being a good enough mother.
As the stress and demands from her husband about little Patrick grew, she turned to the bottle for solace. Nora Walsh became an alcoholic. She drank constantly at home, even when she was supposed to have been taking care of Patrick. Which was probably the reason she’d gotten so mad at her daughter Maura that day for breaking into the liquor cabinet and getting drunk herself.
After the argument with Maura, Nora was so upset that she did what she always did when she felt that way: she began drinking.
She drank a lot that day.
So much that she completely forgot about Patrick in another part of the house.
The seven-year-old boy loved playing Superman. Which was what he was doing. Dressed in his Superman outfit and cape. But he wasn’t old enough to understand what was real and what was fantasy. His hero Superman could fly. So he thought he could fly too. He climbed up onto the roof of the house, a superhero in a cape in his young mind – and leaped into the air. Instead, he landed head-first on the concrete driveway below.
When Nora Walsh found him dead, she panicked. All she could think about was that her husband would blame her because she was too drunk to be watching him properly. She didn’t want him to know it was her fault.
And so it was Nora Walsh who used her husband’s service revolver – the spare one he kept in the closet – to shoot the dead boy in the head and carry his body back into the house in an effort to eliminate the evidence of what had really happened.
To make it look like Patrick had accidentally shot himself with the gun.
That way, she reasoned to herself in her drunken state, it would be her husband’s fault too because it was his gun and he would blame himself – not her – for having left the weapon in a place their son could reach it.
That was the story Nora Walsh first told her husband when he came home on that tragic day.
But afterward, when she sobered up and confessed to him the truth – how she’d lied to him, the EMTs and the Saginaw Lake Police about what really happened, Mike Walsh had done everything he could to protect his wife.
“She stopped drinking,” Walsh said. “That was why I never allowed any alcohol, or any stimulants of any kind, in my house anymore. Because of my wife. She had a lot of emotional and mental issues, but I love her. I always will. She didn’t mean to let Patrick die or do what she did afterward. I’m not sure she even knows what really happened, any more than Maura remembered anything about that day. You may find this hard to believe, but my wife and I have never talked about what happened since then. Not in all these years. You have to understand why I did what I did. I had already lost my son, I couldn’t lose my wife too. That’s why I was willing to do anything I had to do in order to protect her. But now that’s all over. And my daughter is gone too. I’ve lost them all.”
So what about the bruises and scars on Patrick Walsh’s body? Who had beaten the boy in the past?
No one knew the answer to that for sure. Walsh insisted that was him, saying he’d lost his temper – but never meant to hurt his son. But investigators thought he might still be covering up for his wife. That she had beaten Patrick in her desperate efforts to make him the perfect son for her husband. Which would explain why he went to such great lengths to keep the beatings the boy had suffered a secret – to protect his wife, not himself. Or maybe they both had been guilty of physical abuse.
Either way, it was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.
Mike Walsh had wrapped himself in the cloak of duty and loyalty and service to the NYPD as his family for all these years.
But, in the end, it had cost him his own family.
Sixty-Five
“Internal Affairs is still interrogating Shockley and Janko and Florio the rest of them from the 22nd Precinct,” Rawlings said to me. “From what I hear, they’re all talking their heads off – trying to blame each other. At the same time, the DA’s people have really zeroed in on Bennato. They think they’ve got the goods on him this time. His lawyer Edelman is trying to make some sort of a deal with Bennato flipping on other big mob names to cut time off of a prison sentence.” He sighed. “There really is no honor among thieves, is there?”
“Did they kill Maura Walsh?”
Rawlings shook his head no. “Doubtful. They deny it and it looks like they’re telling the truth about that. Apparently, none of them suspected Maura Walsh was working undercover, even though Renfro had begun to figure it out. But none of the other cops he mentioned his suspicions to took it seriously. That’s how good her cover worked as a dirty cop taking big money payoffs. Everyone thought it was going fine. Until Maura got herself killed in Little Italy that night. We found out that she and Renfro had gone there to pick up another payoff from one of Bennato’s people. That’s who she was waiting for when Renfro went to get the pizza. But, when the person with the money showed up, she was already dead.”
“And that’s what set everything off?”
“Yeah. First there was the private detective Walosin. Now Walosin wasn’t much of a private detective, probably had trouble finding his own coffee in the morning. His real specialty was blackmail. So when he stu
mbled onto the cops taking payoffs, he figured he could make some money out of it. He talked to you, but he also contacted Renfro – figuring blackmail might pay better than selling tips to a newspaper reporter. Only Renfro told his boss Florio, the head of the 22nd Precinct. Florio passed the information on to Shockley and Janko and Bennato. Bennato sends Shockley and Janko to pay a visit to Walosin’s office. Bye-bye, private detective.”
“What about Renfro?”
“He panicked. First, he still blamed himself for Maura Walsh’s murder, then he found out Walosin had been killed. He decided he was in over his head, and he tried to go to the authorities. Only Shockley and Janko found out and got to him first. They then tried to make his death look like suicide.”
Just like they wanted to do with me, I thought to myself. They must have forced Renfro to write that suicide note the same way they wanted me to do it. And it wasn’t difficult to convince people that a police officer like Renfro would take his own life because he was depressed and feeling guilty over the loss of his partner.
“That still leaves us with one big question: who killed Maura Walsh?”
Rawlings shrugged. “We’re back to square one. It’s just like we figured in the beginning, it was probably a random kill. Had nothing to do with any of the rest of this. Funny how those things work, huh?”
Meanwhile, Rawlings said Maura’s mother Nora Walsh was undergoing psychiatric care. She kept babbling about “my darling little boy” and how she had let her husband down and didn’t deserve to live. It was a sad case on so many levels.
I asked him what he thought was going to happen to Mike Walsh.
“Funny thing about that, it looks like he never took a dime of money for anything. He just let it happen, without stepping in to stop the corruption he knew was going on. It’s kind of tragic when you think about it. A man who supposedly dedicated his life to the integrity of his job and the NYPD. But he threw it all away to protect his own family secrets. I don’t know if he’ll get jail time for any of it, either the corruption or what happened with his boy in Saginaw Lake. There’s a lot of mitigating factors here, including the fact that he cooperated with us at the end. But his life is ruined.”
There was something else I still didn’t understand though. Why did Maura Walsh suddenly start investigating what happened to her brother back in Saginaw Lake after all this time? Rawlings said he didn’t know and neither did anyone else. Maybe there was no reason for why she did it. Maybe Maura Walsh just impulsively decided to go looking for answers about her past one day. Maybe she did the same thing I did with my father, and she found out things she didn’t expect. No news story is ever perfect. There are always loose ends, unanswered questions. “I wonder what she really did want from her father?” I said. “The truth, I guess. And, when she found out she’d been lied to all of her life, she lashed out at him in the best way she could. It’s very hard to spend your whole life believing something about your family that you’ve been told – and then to have your whole world turned upside down.”
“So Maura’s anger at her father – and everything she did – actually makes some kind of sense to you?”
“Yeah, I can relate to a woman being lied to all her life,” I said.
I guess I should mention that Sam Rawlings and I were talking about all this while eating dinner at a restaurant on Madison Avenue.
“So is this a date?” Sam asked me over dessert.
“Why would you call it a date?”
“Well, you’re a woman and I’m a man…”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“We’re out together in a restaurant.”
“Okay.”
“That sounds like a date to me.”
“It’s not technically a date.”
“What is it?”
“A business meeting.”
“And our business together being what?”
“This is a follow-up to my story. You’re a part of the story. We’re talking about the story, that’s our business here together. Ergo, this is a business meeting. Now do you understand?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
“I love that dress you’re wearing, by the way,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“You look really hot in it.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Your hair is very sexy tonight too.”
“You’re coming on to me.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I’m not sure.”
We sat there eating in silence for a few minutes.
“The truth of the matter is,” Sam finally said, “I’ve been having second thoughts about not taking you up on your offer when I had the chance at my place that night.”
“I was drunk. It would have been wrong.”
“You weren’t that drunk.”
“I was definitely drunk and I was very emotionally upset. You did the right thing, Sam.”
“Are you drunk or emotionally upset now?”
“No.”
“Do you want to sleep with me tonight then?”
“Now I think we’re officially on a date.” I smiled.
I didn’t really harbor any illusions that Sam Rawlings was Mr. Right for me and we were going to get married and live happily ever after.
I actually didn’t know Sam that well, and what I did know about him wasn’t promising. For one thing, he was an undercover cop – and I wasn’t sure what would happen to him next. Some sort of other secret assignment. Maybe he’d even have to go into hiding and disappear forever if the mob came after him as revenge for taking down Bennato.
But he was here now, and so was I.
And that was enough for the moment.
“So what do you think?” Sam asked me as we lay there in bed together afterwards.
“Definitely a date now,” I said.
Sixty-Six
If I thought New York City was hot and uncomfortable in the summertime, Sarasota, Florida was absolutely brutal. The heat hit me in the face the minute I stepped out of the Tampa–St. Petersburg Airport and walked to my rental car. The air-conditioning in the car helped, but I was still sweating profusely from the heat and, most of all, the oppressive humidity, when I checked into my hotel.
I’d managed to locate the address of Nathan Wright, the man I now knew to be my biological father. I did some more old-fashioned sleuthing on him too. I found out he lived alone, his wife had died a few years earlier of cancer, he wrote during the day and then taught history classes at a local community college. After his class was over, he regularly stopped in at a place called Molly’s not far from the school for a beer before heading home.
And so I was waiting in Molly’s that night when Nathan Wright came in.
That was the easy part.
But I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do – what I wanted to do – next.
I recognized Nathan Wright from the picture I’d seen as soon as he walked into the place. Gray hair, in his sixties. Somehow he looked even more ordinary in person than he had in that picture. He was wearing tan slacks, a white short-sleeved shirt and I noticed he had a bit of a pot belly under the shirt. He sure looked nothing like the dashing man in the picture my mother had kept. That was the image I always had of my father, not this man.
Wright sat down on a barstool, greeted the bartender and ordered a beer. When it came, he sipped on it while watching a baseball game on a TV screen in front of him. This was my father. Jeez.
I could have just knocked on his door where he lived, I suppose.
Or shown up at his class at the community college instead of tracking him down to this bar.
Just like I could walk over to Nathan Wright right here and now and announce to him: “Hello there, I’m your long-lost daughter.”
But I wanted to check him out a bit first. Find out more about Nathan Wright before I sprang my big surprise and told him who I was. If I decided to tell him. I still wasn’t sure about that.
I was still mu
lling all that over – sitting a few seats down from him at the bar, and trying to figure out my next move – when something completely unexpected happened.
Nathan Wright got up off his barstool and walked over to me.
“Hey, I know who you are,” he said.
My God! He actually recognized me! After all these years…
“You’re Jessie Tucker. That newspaper reporter from New York. I saw you on TV. That big story about the mobster and police corruption that made all the news shows. You are Jessie Tucker, right?”
Of course.
He didn’t know me as his daughter.
He knew me as Jessie Tucker, media celebrity.
“Guilty as charged,” I told him.
“What are you doing all the way down here in Florida?”
“Working on another story,” I said, throwing out the first thing I could think of as an answer to that.
“A big story?”
“One can only hope.”
“I guess you never know how big a story is until you actually do some investigating into it, huh?”
“That’s what a reporter does.”
“So some of them have told me.”
“You know other reporters?”
“I’ve talked to a few people in the media over the years. Mostly book reviewers, though. I write history books – as well as teach history. My name is Nathan Wright.”
He put out his hand. I shook it. I wasn’t really sure how to handle this. He’d thrown me a bit off my game. I decided to just wing it in the conversation with him and see where it went. Of course, I had to pretend I didn’t know anything about him. I had to pretend I didn’t know this was my biological father that I was meeting for the first time. It wasn’t an easy act for me to pull off.
“What kind of history do you write about in your books?” I asked.
“I concentrate mostly on the Civil War era. It was such a terrible and bloody period, but yet a fascinating piece of American history. I’ve read and written about it pretty much all my life. I’ve done a dozen books and a lot of essays and talks. My best-known book is called Brother vs. Brother: The Real Story of the Civil War. It actually made a few bestseller lists. Did you ever hear of it?”