A Dark and Broken Heart (26 page)

Next item on the agenda was to find out all he could about this Valderas murder. East 115th. At least it was in the Yard. The case should have run out of here, the 167th, and that meant the files wouldn’t be too hard to find.

Madigan had been seated for no more than five minutes before Walsh appeared in the doorway.

“Vincent,” he said. “I wondered if you had a few minutes.”

Madigan looked up at Walsh, frowned, leaned back in his chair. “What’s up?”

Walsh seemed hesitant. He had his hand on the edge of the door. “Can I close this?” he asked.

Madigan knew what was coming. “Sure,” he said, “go ahead.”

Walsh closed the door slowly and quietly, almost as if he wanted
no one to know he was doing it. He paused once more, and then he approached Madigan’s desk and sat down. He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and said, “I have a situation, Vincent, and it is not a situation I have . . .” He shook his head, looked away toward the window.

“The case you’re working, right?” Madigan asked.

Walsh nodded.

“The three dead guys in the storage unit,” Walsh said. “The one . . . Larry Fulton . . . he had a friend, someone he knew, a guy called Richard Moran. You know him?”

Madigan thought for a moment. “Can’t say I do.” He could feel the tension between them. Madigan did not know exactly how much Walsh knew, and Walsh did not know that Bernie Tomczak had already spoken with Madigan.

“No mind,” Walsh said. “Anyway, this guy Moran was a friend of Fulton’s, and I went to see Moran. Moran told me something. He told me that the fourth man was a cop—”

“Bryant told me,” Madigan interjected. “You really believe that?”

“Hell, Vincent, I don’t know what to believe . . .”

Madigan didn’t know where this was going. Walsh looked really distressed.

“I told this guy Moran that I would help him out with something if he gave me the information. Now I don’t know whether the information he gave me was correct . . .”

“About the fourth man being a cop?”

“Right.”

“So what makes you think it’s not true?” Madigan asked.

Walsh shook his head. “That comes later. Something else happened. I made this agreement with Moran that I would help him out on a possession bust if he told me what he knew. He told me, and so I have to hold up my end of the deal otherwise any case I might build comes apart because Moran won’t confirm it. Anyway, I go and see Moran’s arresting officer on this possession thing. His name is Benedict. He’s a uniform at the 158th. He tells me that he can fix this thing about Moran if I help him with something else. He has an OIS review. He’s moved it twice, wants it moved again. So now I’m having to agree to that to get Moran’s bust lifted . . .”

“But you said that this information from Moran was not good, right? If the info he gave you was bullshit then you don’t have to get the bust lifted.”

“Sure, sure . . . But I don’t know if it’s good or not, and that’s not the worst of it.”

“There’s more?” Madigan asked, feigning surprise.

“There is,” Walsh replied.

There was silence between them.

“So?” Madigan asked.

“What we say here stays here, right?” Walsh asked.

Madigan frowned. “What? You have to ask me that?”

“Okay, okay . . . Christ, Vincent, this is one hell of a mess. I’ve never been in a situation like this before . . .”

“So tell me what happened.”

“You know a guy called Bernie Tomczak?”

“Yes,” Madigan replied, knowing that his name was all over Bernie’s yellow sheet. If he denied knowing Bernie he could so easily be caught out.

“I went to see him,” Walsh said. “Moran gave me his name. Bernie Tomczak was a buddy of Fulton’s too, and I tracked him down in some bar. I told him the whole story, and then he told me he wanted to make a deal.”

“He wanted a bust lifted as well?” Madigan asked.

“Not specifically, no,” Walsh replied. “He wanted me to get a weapon out of evidence, a .22 that his brother was busted for.”

Madigan tried to look confused. “But you haven’t done this, right? You haven’t taken the .22 out of evidence. What’s the problem?”

“He recorded the conversation.”

Madigan paused. He looked at Walsh. The expression on the man’s face was priceless. “He did what?”

“He recorded the conversation, Vincent . . . recorded everything I said. Everything about Fulton, about Moran, me making an agreement with him . . . And he denied that the fourth man was a cop. He categorically denied it, said that Fulton would never work with a cop.”

God bless you, Bernie
, Madigan thought.
God bless you, you dumb drunk gambling Pollock motherfucker
.

“Oh,” Madigan replied. “Oh Christ . . .”

Madigan paused to think of the Subway bag in his jacket pocket, the pieces of the .22 inside it.

“I don’t know what the hell to do, Vincent . . . I just wanted to—”

Madigan raised his hand. “Hold up there,” he said. He got up
from the desk and walked to the window. He buried his hands in his pockets, stood there in silence for a minute or so, his expression pensive.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “So Fulton does this job. He tells his buddy Moran that the fourth guy was a cop, but there’s no evidence to indicate this. Bernie Tomczak denies there was a cop. But you made an agreement with Moran about the possession bust, and then you have this situation with the uniform at the 158th.”

“Right.”

“But the worst thing is the conversation you had with Tomczak has been recorded.”

“Right.”

“Recorded on what?” Madigan asked.

“His cellphone.”

Madigan returned to the desk and sat down.

“So what do I do?” Walsh asked.

“You do nothing.”

“Huh?”

“You do nothing. Absolutely nothing. You go on dealing with your regular caseload. You drop this storage unit thing. Drop it like a stone. I’ll tell Bryant that I’m going to run it alongside the thing with the girl who was shot. The one in the hospital. They’re one and the same case, for Christ’s sake. It makes sense. I’ll speak to Moran. I’ll speak to Bernie Tomczak as well. I’ll twist his arm somehow and get the phone off of him. You have to step away from this now. You’re compromised. Anything you do has the potential to make the situation worse . . .”

“Vincent . . . Christ, I don’t even know how this happened. If you can help me on this, it would be—”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Madigan said. “We look after each other, okay? We take care of things. We’re on the same side here.”

“I’ll owe you, Vincent . . . Seriously, if there’s something I can do for you—”

“I’m sure there will be, Duncan. I’m sure there will be. But don’t worry about it for now. You go do whatever you have to do on your other cases. I’ll take care of this thing, and if there’s something I need from you to help out on it then I’ll let you know. Otherwise, this conversation never happened.”

“Vincent . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“Say nothing. You understand me? Don’t say a word to anyone. Like you said before, what we say in here stays in here.”

Walsh got up. He shook Madigan’s hand.

Madigan walked him to the door.

“I won’t forget this, Vincent,” Walsh said.

“Neither will I,” Madigan replied, and he opened the door for Walsh and watched him walk down the corridor to the stairs.

Even as Madigan closed the door, a faint smile on his lips, even before he had a moment to congratulate himself on the way this was playing out, his cellphone rang. He knew who it was before he looked at the screen. He pressed the green button.

“Yes,” he said.

“You gotta come see him.”

40
DESIRE

I
have all the pieces
.

Walsh is backed off. He has tied himself in knots around this thing, and he cannot move. He will do nothing on the storage unit murders. Not until I say so. Isabella Arias is an eyewitness to a Sandià murder, and no one knows where she is but me. Sandià will want to find her more than anything, but as yet he has not even spoken her name to me. He should have had someone at the hospital. How easy would it have been to find a nurse, pay her off, get her to report back to him regarding any visitors? Too easy. And David Valderas, whoever the hell he was, will be an out for me in the deal with Sandià. Bernie is on my side, God bless him. Jesus, who the hell would have expected that? Beat the guy half to death on Monday, and he comes back two days later as my savior. But then he wants out too. He wants his one-eighty debt to vanish, and then he can start over. Is that what we’re all fighting for here? A chance to start over? Even Sandià . . . Not from his life, not to escape from who he is, but to be free of the Valderas killing. That was a mistake. A big mistake. People like Sandià should never get their own hands dirty. That’s why they have people, people like me, people to break bones and dent heads for them. And then there’s Moran, but Moran is unimportant, a sidebar to the main story. And if I make all these pieces fit together, and they tell the story I want, then I will be home free. No debt to Sandià, no connection to the robbery, and thus no implication in the murders of Fulton, Williams, and Landry
.

Home free
.

What could go wrong?

Everything, that’s what
.

Everything could go wrong, and if there is one thing I have learned by experience it’s that everything that could go wrong
will
go wrong
.

Never expected a smooth ride, but I didn’t expect anything as rough as this
.

You want something? You just have to desire it enough
.

It’s a tightrope
.

Have to step careful now
.

The drop is long and sudden and I would never survive it
.

41
BAD INDIAN

M
adigan couldn’t help it. He had to take something before he went out to see Sandià again. Just a little something—three inches of Jack Daniel’s to wash down a couple of Librium—and the edges wore off a little smoother and he felt grounded.

By the time he got out to Paladino he was less anxious. He felt settled in what he had to do. The game had changed, and changed fast, but it had swerved in his favor. Having Isabella in his house was a three of aces, but Walsh’s confession and request for help was a royal flush.

Madigan believed that Sandià wanted nothing more than a progress report on what had been learned about the robbery, but when Madigan entered the room, there was something about Sandià’s manner that told Madigan that he was there for a different reason.

“It’s not possible,” Sandià said.

Madigan walked forward, took a seat.

“It is not possible for someone to simply vanish into thin air.”

“Who are you talking about?” Madigan asked.

“I am talking about a woman called Isabella Arias.” Sandià smiled. “There, I’ve said it. My new policy. Tell the truth. Speak of things as they are. I need this Isabella Arias woman found, and I need her dead.”

“Can I ask who she is?”

“She is the mother of the child who is in the hospital.”

Madigan’s nostrils cleared. The line around him, the parameter within which he could operate, had all of a sudden narrowed a thousandfold. The distance between himself and the sheer number of things that could go wrong had decreased dramatically.

“You need her dead,” Madigan repeated.

“Yes, Vincent, I need her dead,” Sandià said, and he came away from the window and sat on the other side of the desk. “And, yet
again, I am speaking the truth. No hesitation, just the truth as it is.” He smiled. “It is somewhat liberating.”

“Can I ask why you need her dead?”

Sandià smiled. “You can ask, Vincent, but I will not answer you. Business is business.”

Madigan nodded. “So I didn’t ask.”

“So tell me, my friend, what news of these people who took my money and killed my nephew?”

“I am working on it. I have spoken to a lot of people. I am getting closer—”

“But you have nothing specific.”

“No, nothing specific.”

Sandià shook his head. His expression was cold, distant. “Then you are of less use to me than I thought.”

“Sorry?”

“Well, you say you have nothing specific, and at the same time I have discovered something very specific. That means that my intelligence network from outside the police department is better than the intelligence network you have inside the police department, and if that is the case then it means that you are redundant.”

Madigan smiled. “Someone spun you a line.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You’re telling me that you have some information that I don’t have?”

“Yes, I am.”

“About the fourth man, right?”

Sandià hesitated, and Madigan knew what he was dealing with immediately.

“The fourth man was a cop. Someone told you this, right?” Sandià didn’t reply.

“You have been told that the fourth man was a cop. Is that so?”

“You believed yourself the only bad Indian in the camp, Vincent? You think you’re the only person who tells me what I need to know?”

“I’m the only person who tells you the truth, it seems,” Madigan replied. He could feel his palms sweating. Had it not been for the Librium his heart would have been racing.

“What? You’re telling me that it wasn’t a cop?”

“Who told you this? Someone inside the department?”

“Who told me is my business, Vincent, you know that. You
would appreciate it if I gave out your name every time someone asked me how I learned of something?”

“Well, if this information came from inside the department, then it’s already been contradicted. There are people involved here, people who want other people to believe certain things, and they have their own vested interests and motives, and they want certain people implicated who have nothing to do with it. The story you’ve been told is yesterday’s story, and today’s story is a different thing altogether.”

“Vincent, I’m getting angry now . . . What the hell is this you are telling me?”

“I’m telling you that whatever you heard is old news. Leave this thing with me. I will find your man. It may be a cop; it may not be. Right now it looks like it isn’t, but tomorrow everything could change again.”