But I had a lot to tell him. I’d found out quite a bit since I’d talked to him last.
“No plans,” I said.
“I’ll come by for you. Fifteen minutes?”
“Make it twenty,” I said, “and don’t come around the front. In fact why don’t you pull up in front of Ralph’s Restaurant at Fifty-sixth and Ninth?”
I kissed Elaine and told her I didn’t know when I’d be back. “And go ahead and make phone calls if you want,” I said.
“I was thinking,” she said. “If I make outgoing calls from another extension, it won’t change the redial mechanism on that phone. Or am I forgetting something?”
“No,” I said, “I think you’re right, and I should have thought of that.”
“Then you wouldn’t need me.”
“Yes I would. But I think I’ll try it once more before I go.”
I punched redial, and *69 appeared in the little window, and after a moment someone’s phone rang. I was wondering how long to give it, and then in the middle of the fourth or fifth ring it was picked up. There was silence at first, and then a soft voice, a man’s, said, “Hello?’
The voice was curiously familiar. I willed it to say more, but when it spoke again the words were much fainter, as if he was talking to someone else and not into the phone. “There’s no one there,” he said, and there was another silence, and then the connection was broken.
“Bingo,” I told Elaine.
“It worked, huh?”
“Like a charm. That was brilliant, taking the phone off the hook. You’re a genius.”
“That’s what my father always said,” she said. “And my mother always told him he was crazy.”
I made a note of the time. In the morning I’d have to find someone at the phone company who could pull the LUDS on my phone, and I could find out who it was I’d just called. Because I didn’t think that was a pay phone. And if I could find out where it was located, I could find them when they thought they couldn’t be found.
I think a subscriber’s entitled to a record of his own calls, if you can find the right person to ask. I know a cop can get that kind of information in a hurry, and if I couldn’t find a cop who’d help me out I could always impersonate one myself. That’s against the law, but lately it seemed as though everything I did was against the law.
I rode down to the basement and went out the service entrance. Wister could have two teams watching the building, one in back and one in front, but I didn’t think he even had one. I took a look around, just to make sure, and then I went over and stood in a darkened doorway alongside of Ralph’s He didn’t keep me waiting long.
“A son to avenge him,” Mick said. “That’s more than the likes of Paddy Farrelly ever deserved.”
“He’s a son who hasn’t exactly covered himself with glory in the course of his young life.”
“A true son of the father, then. Say the mother’s name again.”
“Elizabeth Dowling.”
“I’ve known a share of Dowlings over the years, but I don’t recall an Elizabeth.”
“The woman in the Bronx called her Betty Ann. She was living there when the baby was born, and she may have been living there or nearby all along.”
“I wonder how Paddy met her. It could have been at a dance. That was how you used to meet Irish girls, at a dance on a Saturday night.” He had a faraway look in his eye. “I never knew her, and I doubt she ever knew me. But she must have known of me, and known it was myself put Paddy out of her life and his own. If the cow’d had any sense she’d have thanked God for the favor I did her. Instead she made a hero out of him and a villain out of me, and brought the boy up to kill me.”
“I guess he always liked killing,” I said. “He had no practical reason to kill those people in the store. All that did was turn up the heat. It pretty much guaranteed he’d get caught and do substantial time. He killed them because he wanted to.”
“The same with Kenny and McCartney.”
“And the same when the Vietnamese he met in prison sprayed bullets all over your bar, and his other prison buddy tossed a bomb. Moon’s name is Virgil Gafter, incidentally, suspected of a couple of felony-related homicides, but it was an assault charge that put him in Attica.”
“You learned a lot in that prison.”
“Everybody does,” I said. “Some of them learn to live within the laws, and the rest learn to be better at breaking them.”
“I think the cops know Chilton Purvis did the shooting at the Chinese restaurant,” I said. “They’d have found out the same way I did. Word got around, and somebody with a badge heard it from one of his snitches. And I think they went looking for Purvis and found him dead in his room on Tapscott Street, unless he’d already been picked up and they found him in the morgue.”
“And that’s why they came looking for you?”
“That’s why,” I said. “If they don’t know Purvis was the shooter, his death is just another homicide, presumably black-on-black, presumably drug related. Two men shoot each other and one walks away from it. But now they’ve got someone with a motive to kill Purvis.”
“Namely yourself.”
“They also found a blood trail,” I said, “so the reasoning would be that Purvis and I shot each other and I fled the scene. I’ll bet they checked hospitals, and I’ll bet when Wister showed up with his warrant he expected to find me in bed and bandaged up. Failing that, he’d have liked to find a .38 that would match the bullets they dug out of Purvis.”
“What happens when they catch up with you?”
“I can’t worry about that now. The funny thing is the blood might clear me. Because I didn’t get so much as a scratch when Purvis and I traded shots, and there’s no way they’ll get a DNA match between my blood and TJ’s. If they try to match the blood to him, well, that’s a different story, but they’d have to think of it, and I’m not sure they will.”
“I gather we’re going to the Bronx.”
“That’s less remarkable than some of your feats of detection,” he said, “as we’re nearly there.”
“Where are we going?”
“Perry Avenue.”
“Where Tom lives.”
He nodded. “You’ll remember we dropped him there, after the trouble at Grogan’s.”
Trouble in the Irish sense. In America, trouble is something a kid has learning algebra. In Ireland it can be a bit more dramatic.
I said, “Because you couldn’t reach him on the phone?”
“He’s a lodger in an old woman’s house. Has a room and kitchen privileges, and can watch television in the parlor of an evening. Takes his meals there, breakfast and dinner, if he’s there to eat them.”
“So?”
“The phone is hers,” he said, “and she’s always home to answer it. And today it rang unanswered every time I called.”
“She couldn’t have stepped out?”
“She never does. She has the arthritis, and it’s a bad case of it. It keeps her at home.”
“And when she needs something from the market . . .”
“She calls the corner store and they deliver. Or Tom goes for her.”
“There’s probably an explanation.”
“I fear there is,” he said, “and I fear I know what it is.”
I didn’t say anything. He stopped for a red light, looked both ways, and drove on through it. I tried not to imagine what might happen if a cop pulled us over.
He said, “I’ve a feeling.”
“I gathered as much.”
“I’ve surely told you what my mother said.”
“That you’ve got a sixth sense.”
“Second sight is what she called it, but I’d say it amounts to the same thing, a sixth sense or the second sight. ‘Twas herself I got it from. When my brother Dennis went to Vietnam, we both knew we’d seen him alive for the last time.”
“And that’s the second sight?”
“I hadn’t finished.”
“I’m sorr
y.”
“One day she calls me over. Mickey, says she, I saw your baby brother last night, and all robed in white he was. And I turned white myself, for hadn’t I heard Dennis’s voice in my ear that morning. I’m all right, Mickey, says he. You needn’t worry about me, says he. And not that day but the day after she got the telegram.”
I felt a chill. I get hunches and feelings, and I’ve learned to trust them in my work, though I don’t let them keep me from getting out and knocking on doors. I believe in intuition, and in ways of knowing the mind knows nothing of. Still, stories like that give me a chill.
“I had a feeling before I called his house. Before the first time that it rang and went unanswered.”
“And I gather the feeling persisted.”
“It did.”
“But you waited until you reached me before heading up here.”
“You or Andy. You were the first I reached. But you’d be wondering why I didn’t go on my own.” He was silent for a moment. “It’s an answer does me no credit,” he said. “It’s for fear of what I might find, of what I know I’ll find. I don’t want to come upon it alone.”
“You’ve got your gun?”
“You gave me two,” I said, “and I’ve got them both.”
“Good job she hid the one where the cops wouldn’t find it. In the basement, was it?”
“In our storage bin down there. Even if they’d known it existed, I don’t think their warrant would have covered it.”
“Ah, she’s a smart one,” he said. “That was quick thinking.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, and told him about her trick with *69.
“So that’s why she took the phone off the hook. And he left you a message? Was it Paddy’s boy himself?”
“I don’t think so. The voice sounded familiar, and I think it was the fellow I took the gun away from. Donnie Scalzo, that would be.”
“From Bensonhurst, wasn’t it? Another nationality heard from.”
“But I may have heard Dowling’s voice,” I said, and told him of the last phone call before I left the apartment, with a soft voice saying hello, and then telling someone else that there was no one there.
“You wouldn’t think he’d have a soft voice.”
“You wouldn’t. And his voice seemed familiar to me, and I don’t know why it would.”
“When would you have heard him before?”
“I don’t think I ever did, and I wish this voice had had more to say, because there was something familiar about it and I can’t say what or why. Unless it was just that it sounded Irish.”
“Irish,” he said.
“There was a hint of brogue.”
“Well, Farrelly and Dowling, that’s Irish on both sides. You could say he came by it honestly. Paddy had nothing you’d call a brogue. I’ve the Irish way of talking, but that’s my mother’s doing. Some lose it and some don’t, and I never did.” His eyes narrowed. “A hint of brogue. A familiar voice, a hint of brogue.”
“I’ll trace the call tomorrow,” I said, “and clear up some of the mystery.”
* * *
The house on Perry Avenue was self-standing, a little two-story box on a small lot. The lawn in front was brown in spots, but neatly mowed. I suppose a neighborhood kid took care of it for the old woman, or maybe Tom ran a mower over it once or twice a week. It wouldn’t take him long. Then he’d go in and have a beer, and she’d thank him for doing such a nice job.
We parked two doors away, right next to a fire hydrant. I pointed it out, and Mick said nobody’d be around to ticket us at that hour, much less to tow the car. And we wouldn’t be on the premises for long, anyway.
Nor were we. We went up the walk to the front door and knocked and rang the bell. The door was wood, set with a window divided into four mullioned panes, and he didn’t wait long at all before drawing the gun from his belt and using the butt of it to break out one of the panes. He reached through the opening, turned the knob, and let us in.
I’d smelled death through the broken window and walked in the door to see it close up. The old woman, her gray hair thinning and her legs hugely swollen, sat in her wheelchair in the front room, her head hanging to one side, her throat cut. The whole front of her was soaked with her blood, and there were flies buzzing in it.
Mick let out an awful groan at the sight of her, and crossed himself. I hadn’t seen him do that before.
We found Tom Heaney in the kitchen, lying on the floor, with gunshot wounds in the chest and temple. There was a heel mark on his face, as if he’d been kicked or stepped on. His eyes were wide open.
So was the refrigerator door. I could picture Tom standing at the open refrigerator, helping himself to a beer or the makings of a sandwich. Or maybe the hard work of murder had built an appetite in one of the killers, and he’d stopped for a snack on the way out.
Mick bent over and closed Tom’s eyes. He straightened up and closed his own for a moment. Then he nodded shortly to me and we got out of there.
“Ah, ‘tis I again, Mrs. Buckley, disturbing you one more time. Has he returned yet, do you know? Ah, that’s good.” He covered the cell phone mouthpiece with his hand. “She’s getting him,” he said.
We were in the car, parked on the opposite side of Bainbridge Avenue from the Buckley house. We’d taken a roundabout route to get here, with Mick turning up one street and down another almost at random, the big Caprice making its way through the Bronx like an elephant lumbering through high grass. Neither of us talked while he drove, and the silence was heavy in the roomy old car, heavy and thick. There’d been too many deaths and it felt as though they were in there with us, all those mean acts of murder, the bodies heaped in the back seat, the souls displacing the air itself.
Now he said, “Andy, good man. Your own car’s right across the street from you and us inside it waiting for you.”
He folded the phone, put it back in his pocket. “He’ll be a minute,” he said. “It’s a relief to find him at home.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “it was relief enough when she answered. His mother. Now that the bastards are after killing old ladies.”
I watched the door across the street, and in a matter of minutes Andy came through it, wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans with the cuffs folded up and carrying his leather jacket. At the curb he stopped long enough to put the jacket on, then trotted on across the street. Mick got out and Andy sat behind the wheel. I got out as well and sat in back, and Mick walked around the car and got in front next to Andy.
“Crazy day,” Andy said. “I couldn’t reach anybody. I tried what numbers I had for you, Mick, and I called a couple of bars looking for you. I didn’t really think you’d be there but I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”
“I tried you and could never find you in.”
“I know, my old lady said you called. I was out all day, I took my cousin’s car and drove around. I was going stir crazy, you know? I even went into Manhattan and drove past the bar. You probably already seen what it looks like, all plywood and yellow tape.”
“I drove past it myself the other evening.”
“And I called you, Matt, but I hung up when the machine answered. And then I called a couple of times and the line was busy. I figured the two of you were talking to each other and that was why I couldn’t get through to either of you.”
He put the car in gear, and when the traffic thinned he pulled away from the curb. He asked if he should head anywhere in particular. Mick told him to drive where he liked, as one place was no worse than another.
He drove around, coming to full stops at stop signs, keeping well under the speed limit. After a few blocks he asked if either of us had spoken to Tom. “Because I was trying to reach him, too, and nobody answered, and you know the woman he lives with never leaves the house. All I could think of was he took pity on her and took her to a movie, or she had a stroke or something and he took her to the hospital. Or there was some
thing wrong with the phone, so I went over there and leaned on the doorbell.”
“When was that?” Mick wondered.
“I don’t know, I didn’t notice the time. Maybe an hour ago? I rang the bell and knocked on the door, and then I went around and rang the back doorbell and knocked on that door, and when I saw nothing was happening I got back in my car. You want to give him a call? Or even go over there, because I’ll admit it, I’m spooked.”
“We’ve just come from there,” Mick said, and told him what we’d found.
“Jesus,” Andy said. He hit the brake, but not as abruptly as Mick had done when he learned TJ had been shot. He checked the mirror first and braked to a smooth stop, pulled over and parked. “I got to take this in,” he said evenly. “Give me a minute, huh?”
“All the time you want, lad.”
“Both dead? Tom and the old woman?”
“They shot him dead and cut her throat.”
“Jesus Christ. All I can think, that could have just as easy been our house, and me and my mother. Just as easy.”
“I was glad just now when she said you were home,” Mick said, “but before that I was glad just to hear her voice. For I had the same thought myself.”
Andy sat there, nodding to himself. Then he said, “Well, this just adds to it, doesn’t it? Reinforces it.”
“How’s that?”
“Why I was trying to get in touch,” he said. “Something I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“About them coming after us the way they’re doing. Picking us off one by one. I had an idea.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“There’s just the three of us left. I think we got to stick together. And I think we got to pick someplace that’s safe. I’m out here in the Bronx, and anyone comes for me, all they got to do is kick the door in. Matt, you’re in a doorman building, maybe it’s a different story, but you can’t stay inside with the door locked all the time. And even if you do, what’s to stop them from shooting the doorman like they been shooting everybody else, and then going up and kicking your door in?”