Bernie nodded. “Sure, why the hell not? JD straight, no rocks, no water . . . And make it a big one.”
Walsh got up and walked to the bar. He glanced back over his shoulder, and Bernie was already halfway to the door. Walsh took three or four strides and grabbed his arm.
“Bernie . . . seriously . . . I just need a word or two, that’s all. I buy you a drink, we sit down, share a few words, I go away. That’s it, no bullshit.”
Bernie seemed to hesitate then. He appeared to be considering the odds. Wrench himself free and run. Lull Walsh into a false sense of security, catch him off guard again, and then run. Or just let the guy ask the questions and then leave him to his drink.
Bernie nodded. He chose the latter. He just didn’t have the will or the strength to go haring down the street with a cop on his tail.
Bernie went back to the table, waited for Walsh to bring his glass of JD.
Bernie poured his drinks into one glass, leaned back and looked at Walsh.
“So who did the handiwork on your face?” Walsh asked.
“Is that what you came to ask me?”
“Nope.”
“Then ask me what you came to ask me and fuck off.”
Walsh nodded. “Larry Fulton,” he said.
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Now, there’s a surprise.”
“You knew?”
“I know a lot of things.”
“But you already knew that Larry Fulton was dead?” Walsh repeated.
“I knew Larry Fulton well enough to know that he was never going to be long for this world.”
“So his death doesn’t surprise you?”
Bernie smiled sardonically. “Nothing surprises me.”
“Did you know anything about the job he was doing?”
Bernie reached forward for his glass. He took a sip. He kept his eyes on Walsh but Walsh saw nothing, not even a flicker to suggest that he might possess any information that was relevant. That meant nothing. Bernie, according to his sheet, was a gambler, and gamblers practiced implacability.
“Bernie?”
Bernie put his glass back on the table. “What’s your name?”
“Walsh.”
“You a detective?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Which precinct?”
“167th.”
“Hey, that’s over here just a coupla blocks.”
“That’s right.”
“So how come we’ve never crossed paths?”
“Should we have?”
Bernie laughed. “Hell, man, if it has a uniform, or ever had a uniform, I have crossed paths with it.”
“Because I’m not in Vice or Robbery-Homicide,” Walsh said.
“So what the hell are you?”
“Internal Affairs.”
“No shit,” Bernie said, and not only was there surprise in his voice, there was also a sense of curiosity.
“No shit,” Walsh echoed.
“So what are you doing out here asking after me?”
“Working on a case.”
Bernie smiled sarcastically. “No shit.”
“So did you know anything about the job Larry Fulton was doing?”
Bernie sipped his drink again. “Do you know anything about me, Detective Walsh, Internal Affairs, 167th Precinct?”
“No, Bernie, I don’t.”
“Well, I’m gonna tell you something now, and this is for free. If I was the only person in the world who knew the answer to that question, and in telling you that answer we could bring peace to all nations, end all wars, solve world hunger, and bring about the second coming of Christ, I would put a pencil in each nostril and bang my head on this table before I uttered a single freaking word.”
“You feel quite strongly about it, then?”
“I do.”
“That’s a shame.”
“It is.”
“You know why that’s a shame, Bernie?”
“No, I don’t, Detective Walsh. And though I know you’re going to tell me, I feel a certain duty to inform you that I don’t give a rat’s ass why it’s a shame.”
“Just so we’re on the same page, right?”
“Sure, Detective . . . just so’s we’re on the same page.”
“Well, bear with me, Bernie, because this here is the deal. Larry Fulton is dead. So are two other characters, one by the name of Bobby Landry, another by the name of Chuck Williams. They got killed by a fourth man, and that man may or may not be a cop—”
Bernie’s eyes widened fractionally.
“I got your interest now?” Walsh asked.
“Go on,” Bernie said.
“Well, I was talking with a friend of mine called Richard Moran—”
Bernie laughed. “Shit, man, if you and Moran are buddies then I am the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
“We’re friends now, Bernie. Get me? Not yesterday, not this morning, but now.”
Bernie squinted at Walsh, his eyes like a lizard. “What’d he get from you?”
Walsh waved the question aside. “I am interested in anything Larry might have said, Bernie . . . anything that Larry might have said that could help me. You understand what I’m saying?”
Bernie didn’t move for a moment, and then he nodded slowly.
Walsh felt the air grow light and cool in his chest. This thing was moving even faster than he’d anticipated. Two guys from Fulton’s file, and both of them had songs to sing.
“So you have a think for a moment, Bernie,” Walsh said. “You have a think for a moment and see whether or not there’s anything you might know about this fourth man. His name, perhaps, might be a good place to start . . .”
“And if I do?”
“Well, if you do, then maybe we could see whether there’s some kind of arrangement we could come to.”
“Like maybe the kind of arrangement you made with Moran?”
Walsh said nothing. His heart was going at some rate. He was listening to himself, and he could barely believe what he was hearing. He had walked himself into a conversation that would give him the identity of the fourth man.
“Then, Detective Walsh, I believe there might be a strong possibility of a mutually beneficial arrangement . . .” Bernie left the statement hanging in the air between them.
Walsh—once again—said nothing. He didn’t know what else needed saying. All of a sudden he was in the perfect bargaining position.
“So we each have something to work with here,” Bernie Tomczak said.
“Seems we do, Bernie. So start talking.”
Bernie shook his head. “Not the way it works, my friend,” he said. He winced for a second, held the flat of his hand gingerly to the right side of his jaw, and then he seemed to relax. “You tell me what you want to know. I see whether I know it, or if I can find out for you, and then I tell you what I want in exchange.”
“You already know what I want, Bernie. I want to know who Larry was working with.”
“Whether it was a cop, and if it was a cop then what is his name, right?”
“Right.”
Bernie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Well, I’m gonna give you something for nothing, Detective Walsh. I can tell you right now that there wasn’t no cop involved in whatever Larry was into. Larry Fulton working with a cop? Not a prayer, my friend, not a freakin’ prayer. If you think Larry did business with a cop, then you didn’t know Larry.”
Walsh felt his heart miss a beat. He couldn’t understand what he was hearing. Fulton was not involved with a cop? If that was the case then what the hell was Moran talking about? And what had he himself now reported to Bryant?
Walsh shook his head. “Hey, wait a minute. Moran said—”
“Moran is a liar,” Bernie interjected, and then he smiled. “Okay, so I’m a liar too, but Moran is a worse liar.”
“Why should I—”
“Believe me before him? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not trying to make
a deal with you, see? Whatever the hell Moran asked for, well, you shouldn’t give it to him because he sold you a truckful of bullshit man, a truckful of bullshit. Larry Fulton would no more work with a cop than I would.”
Walsh leaned back. He didn’t know who to believe, and he didn’t know what to think.
“However,” Bernie added, “if the thing we were talking about earlier is still a goer, then maybe I can give you something that will point you in the right direction.”
“A name?”
“That’s right, Detective, a name.”
“Whose name?”
“The name of the man who put that job together.”
“The dealer’s house robbery—”
Bernie shrugged. “I don’t know where they robbed, or whose house it was, but I know it was the job Larry was doing.”
“How do you know it was the same one?”
“Because he told me where the money was coming from, and he told me who had it.”
Walsh raised his eyebrows.
Bernie smiled. “Let’s just say that by the time Larry Fulton and his crew got to that money, all the hard work had already been done. Make sense?”
It did. It made perfect sense. The hard work was the original bank robbery. “Yes,” Walsh said, certain that he and Bernie Tomczak were now talking about the same job.
“So I give you the name of the man you should talk to—and whether he was the one who whacked Larry and the others is another thing entirely—but I give you the name of the man who put that shit together then you and I got a deal, right?”
Walsh hesitated. “What do you want?”
“I want you to make something disappear for me.”
Walsh closed his eyes. He inhaled, exhaled slowly. They all wanted something to go away.
“What did you do?” Walsh asked. “What happened?”
“Not for me,” he said, “for my brother. And it ain’t no big deal.”
“You brother?”
“Right, my brother, Peter. It was all a mistake. He was holding something for someone, just a .22. It was a popgun, a peashooter. No big deal. Anyway, he gets himself pinched, and I need it to go away. That .22 is in your evidence lockup, and if that was to vanish then there wouldn’t be no case.”
“You expect me to make evidence vanish,” Walsh said.
“You can do anything you want to, Detective. Or you can not. If you don’t, then you ain’t getting nothing from me. You know this shit. This shit goes down all the time. You can’t play ignorant with me. You either want this guy’s name or you don’t.”
Walsh was suddenly agitated. An edge of panic had entered into his emotions, but he was nevertheless still driven. It was as if Bernie Tomczak had drawn him into a web and there was no way out but to carry on through.
“And if I agreed,” Walsh said, “then what’s to say I wouldn’t just renege on the agreement? You tell me what you know, and then I don’t carry through on the deal. I just go on like I never even spoke to you. What’s to stop me doing that?”
“Nothing,” Bernie said matter-of-factly.
Walsh leaned back. “You’re gonna have to trust me?”
“I am. Just like you’re gonna have to trust me to give you the right information.”
“But I’m gonna follow up on whatever you tell me and if it turns out to be bogus then we don’t have a deal.”
“Right.”
“So we’re still back to you trusting me to hold up my end of the deal.”
“We are.”
Walsh looked down, noticed his hand was shaking.
“Looks like you need a little time to think this over,” Bernie said.
Walsh put his hand in his jacket pocket and then withdrew it. For a moment it looked like the back wall was ever so slowly sliding to the left.
“No,” he said. “You need to tell me what you know.”
“You’re sure, Detective?”
Walsh didn’t answer.
“You’re agreeing with me that if I tell you what I know, then you and I have a deal. I give you a name and my brother’s .22 goes walkabout never to be seen again . . . That’s the deal we’re agreeing right here and right now?”
“Yes,” Walsh replied, the word like a bullet from his lips.
“Then I’m gonna go find out what I need to find out,” Bernie said. “Give me your card.”
“You’re going to tell me now, right?”
Bernie shook his head. “No sirree, not now.”
“What the fu—” Walsh started to get up out of the chair.
“Sit down, Detective,” Bernie said. “We’re gonna do this, then we’re gonna do it my way. I go away, I check something out, I call you, you tell me that .22 has disappeared, and then you find out what you need to know.”
“This is bullshit,” Walsh said. “This is fucking bullshit. No fucking way. This is not what we agreed. You tell me what you know now, or the deal is off—”
Bernie reached for his glass and drained it. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “We have an agreement,” he said quietly. “And the agreement stands. I find out what you want to know, you take care of my problem.”
“Screw you,” Walsh said.
“Oh, I don’t think you got a choice Detective Walsh,” Bernie said, and from his jacket pocket he withdrew a phone. “This,” he said, “is one hell of a phone. It takes pictures, it keeps me reminded of my appointments—and I have so many important appointments. Know what I mean? And it also has a recorder on it.” He smiled. “The whole conversation, my friend, the whole fucking conversation, and that—whichever way you look at it—gives me a straight flush. You are on tape, my friend, agreeing to make that evidence disappear, and that—as we say in the trade—is a home run—”
Walsh lunged forward and tried to snatch the phone from Bernie’s hand. Bernie took two steps back, turned and started walking.
Walsh was up and past the table. He closed on Bernie rapidly, faster than Bernie expected, had Bernie by the arm, was wrenching him back.
And then he was aware of people moving, people who knew Bernie but did not know him, people who looked a great deal more threatening and dangerous than Bernie ever could.
“You need some help there, my friend?” someone said, and in their tone was such an undercurrent of aggression that Walsh just let go of Bernie’s arm and stood there.
“I think we’re good here, thanks,” Bernie said. He looked at Walsh. He smiled. When he spoke his voice was hushed but emphatic. “I have everything I need, Detective Walsh. You are in the deepest shit imaginable. You agreed to removing evidence. You made the trade-off. You said what you said. This winds up in the press, you are screwed. Only way out is to hold up your end of the deal. You make the .22 vanish, you get the name you want, you bust that case wide open, and you’re the hero. You let me down, my friend, and this is the end of your career. If you’re lucky, you can look forward to security duty at J.C. Penney.”
There was nothing Walsh could do. People were looking. People were waiting for him to back down, to let Bernie go whichever way he was going.
Bernie Tomczak took a step. Walsh didn’t move. Bernie took another, yet another, and then he had made it to the door. He glanced back. Walsh caught the fleeting sly smile on his face, and then he was gone.
Walsh stood there for a minute, and then he sat down heavily.
The sense of overwhelm he felt just sucked all the air right out of him. He could barely breathe, couldn’t think straight at all. He had no choice. He had to make the .22 disappear. Dead if he did, dead if he didn’t. Moran, Benedict . . . and now Bernie Tomczak? What the hell was he playing at? What kind of game did he think he was playing?
He could not believe the situation he had created for himself, could not believe the words that had come from his own lips.
34
SORROW KNOWS
She had finally looked at him in the stairwell, and there must have been something in his eyes that gave her sufficient pause, because
she just said, “Get me out of here,” and Madigan did. She didn’t say a word as Madigan drove, and he drove her somewhere where no one connected to Sandià would know her. Madigan had asked her nothing—not where she’d been living, not where she got the nurses’ uniform, not who she thought had shot her daughter or killed her sister.
He asked her nothing.
Every once in a while he just said a few reassuring words. It’s okay. I can help you. You can tell me what happened. Take your time. Take your time.
Marion’s Continental at 354 Bowery was a place that easily forgot you after you’d left. It was a place with history, and Madigan had forgotten how many times he’d fallen drunk in the restroom and been carried out. The sink in there had been replaced four times, broken beneath the weight of couples screwing. Despite it being a haunt of celebrities and aesthetes, their no paparazzi policy kept away a great deal of people—the kind that wanted to see celebrities, the kind that wanted to be seen. Madigan found it sufficiently discreet and off the usual beaten tracks to suit his needs. It was a good place to remain anonymous. In all the years he had frequented Marion’s he had never seen another cop there, and that was reason enough to patronize the place.
It was here that he got Isabella Arias into the men’s restroom and helped her clean up her face, got her to straighten up the skirt and T-shirt that she’d been wearing beneath the nurses’ tunic. No one interrupted them for the few minutes it took, and Madigan was grateful for this. Once done, he sat with her at a corner table, watched her drink brandy, and waited and waited for her to wind down and settle out. Her eyes were red-swollen. Looked like she’d cried for a week without a break.
At one point Madigan glanced at his watch. It was late, past eleven, and he had no idea how long they had been sitting there.
Eventually she spoke. “I am hungry,” she said. “Can we go somewhere to eat?”
“We can eat here,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “I do not want to stay here. I want to go somewhere else.”
Madigan didn’t resist. He helped her up, walked her out, opened the car door for her, and walked around to get in. He drove toward home, back to the Bronx, and he kept on driving until he found a regular haunt up on Grand past the park and the museum. He came around again and opened the door. She looked at him but said nothing. She was exhausted. He could see it in every step she took, every motion of her body. Tired and weak and scared and confused. He tried to imagine how he would feel if it had been Cassie there in the hospital, a bullet wound . . .