Read A Dark and Broken Heart Online
Authors: R.J. Ellory
“Just let me know if there’s any significant changes, okay?”
“I might have to call you and tell you she died.”
“Had plenty of those calls before,” Madigan replied.
Nancy left the room.
Madigan took another step toward the bed. If the shot was a through-and-through then the bullet was still in that room somewhere. It would have pancaked for sure, but there’d be enough of it remaining to determine the caliber. He tried to recall the weaponry. He’d carried a Mossberg, had the .44 as backup but he could not remember if he’d fired it in the house. Even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. The storage unit would tell them what Madigan wanted them to believe. Williams shot Fulton with a .44; Fulton shot Landry and Williams with a .38. So Williams must have been
carrying the .44, and if a .44 went through the girl and into the wall then Williams must have done it. Neat as paint. That .44 was a lift from a crime scene. Trace that back and it’d wind up somewhere in Harlem, some dealer’s house, the scene of some other killing at some other time. It would never come back to Madigan. Madigan was a ghost.
He began to settle.
He took his cellphone from his pocket and held it up above her face. He snapped the picture, checked it, snapped again. It would have to do. He’d have to have something for people to look at if he was going to trawl around East Harlem and the park asking questions.
Collateral damage. That was the truth of it. That was what he told himself, what he tried to make himself believe.
Sometimes it was just your day to die.
Outside the room Madigan spoke to the uniform again.
“Fingerprints?” Madigan asked.
“They’re being run.”
Madigan shook his head. “They won’t find her that way. She has a mother somewhere, a father too, and someone’s gonna miss her before too long. I’m gonna head back there and start checking up on neighbors and whatever.” He started away, turned back. “You know if her picture was sent over for Missing Persons to chase up?”
“Not a clue.”
“Okay, I can do that too,” Madigan said.
“You want I should call you if anything happens?”
Madigan smiled dryly. “No, I’ll tell you what . . . Why don’t you write me a letter and post it a week from Tuesday?”
The uniform shook his head resignedly. Sometimes the only way they got on was to talk crap to one another.
Madigan handed over his card and walked away.
He didn’t look back.
I
t took the best part of an hour to drive home. He went Triborough, then 278 and 87, all the way up to the stadium before heading east on 161st.
Madigan took the bag of cash from the trunk, the shoes from beneath the driver’s seat, and walked it into the house. He upended the bag onto the kitchen table and looked at the money. He could smell it. It smelled used and dirty, like all money did.
He bundled it back into the bag, and then hurried upstairs. He pulled back the carpet at the end of the upper landing, lifted a floorboard, and pushed the bag down inside the cavity. He reached left, lifted out a small wooden box, and from inside he took a ziplock evidence bag. He tipped a half dozen pills into his palm, put one in his mouth, the rest in his jacket pocket, returned the bag to the box, the box under the floor, the floorboard to its rightful place, and tucked the carpet back against the wall.
He got to his feet and stood silently for a moment. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and then went left to his bedroom to get a clean shirt and jacket.
Back downstairs in his makeshift study he switched on the computer and plugged his phone in. He accessed the picture he’d taken at the hospital, tried his best to sharpen the image, soften the contrast a little, and then he printed off a dozen copies. While the printer did its thing, he made coffee in the kitchen, smoked a cigarette, waited for the lithium to stabilize him.
He collected his pictures and his shoes, went back to the stolen car. He had his own vehicle parked on Teller near the corner of 169th. He pulled up on Morris at the southwest edge of the park, wiped down the wheel, the dash, the glove box, the seats, everything. He covered the outer handles, the lid of the trunk, everywhere he’d touched. He knew what he was doing, had done it a dozen times before. He left the car unlocked, walked a half block, dropped the keys down a storm drain, and hurried across
the street. A day, maybe two, and the car would be gone for good—joyriders, out-and-out thieves who would strip it down to anonymity within an hour; whichever way, the car would be history before anyone from the PD realized there was another car to even look for.
It would be faster back to East Harlem. The traffic would be better. An hour, maybe an hour and a half and it would be dark. He wanted to find out who the girl was before she died. If she was still alive people would be more helpful. Once she was dead she became part of the history. It didn’t matter so much anymore. Even if they did answer up, what good was it going to do? It wasn’t going to bring her back, was it?
Madigan made two detours, the first at the precinct to give a copy of the girl’s picture to the duty uniform in Missing Persons.
“Start looking soon as you can,” he said.
“Without a name?”
Madigan shrugged. “Way it goes, my friend,” he said, and smiled.
“You know how many pictures we got back here?”
“Oh, I reckon maybe ten or fifteen, twenty at most,” Madigan replied.
“Jesus, you guys are unreal,” the uniform countered. He turned his back and disappeared.
The second detour was to an auto-salvage place he knew. Here they crushed cars, recycled windscreens and tires, other such things. They also possessed a small incinerator unit where they burned what couldn’t be sold. It was into this unit that his bloodstained shoes went, and he slipped a fifty to the owner, an old acquaintance. Madigan had turned a blind eye to a few stolen vehicles over the years, and they had an understanding.
Madigan headed back up First. As far north as 128th, west to Third, east to the FDR, and south to 110th. That was the deal. That was the zone, the territory. They called it the Yard. That was all. Just
the Yard
. Eighteen blocks up and down, eight from left to right. Little more than a mile one way, three quarters of a mile the other. Never ceased to amaze Madigan how much garbage could be packed into someplace so small. Gentrification was overdue here. Hell, maybe they could do it as well. They’d worked some on the Bronx, the Village, the Fulton Fish Market, Tribeca. It was all going upmarket. East Harlem was the latecomer. Maybe the Yard wouldn’t make the qualifiers, would never make it to the Big
Show. Did it matter? Hell, no. Not to Madigan. He was going to take what he could and run. Staying here was not an option. He’d been good for too many years, smart for too few. Right back to July of ’89 when he’d taken the academy exam, he was looking for the angle. No one
wants
to be a cop. That never happened. There were some who
had
to be a cop, some who
needed
it, but none who wanted it. That was not the way it worked. This wasn’t a job. It was a vocation. And if it wasn’t a vocation, well, it was an angle. You heard the stories, and for sure they were true. Little kid sees the tapes go up someplace, the black and yellow crime scene tapes. He sees the big guys in the blues, the even bigger guys that the blues saluted, and those guys didn’t come in uniforms; they came in slacks and sports jackets and they had shirts and ties and there was a holster on the hip and a badge folded outside the breast pocket, and they went right on inside wherever and saw whatever shit had been done. And most often it was some bad shit, and how bad it was no one knew except the guys with the hip holsters and the sports coats. The kid makes a decision.
I wanna be that guy. I wanna see what that guy sees. I wanna know it all
. But the
knowing
wasn’t the end-all. Knowing had a reason. Always had a reason. You wanted to know something because . . . Because what? Because it would get you rich or laid or powerful or free or safe or protected, or something. What it did, well, it didn’t matter. Different for different people. And maybe the kid on the sidewalk watching those guys go in the house where the family had been shotgun slaughtered for forty bucks and a wireless had no inkling of what he wanted to know, even why he wanted to know it, but he knew enough to recognize the truth. The more you knew, the stronger you were. Dead people were dumb. That was the simple fact. The dumber you were, the deader you got. Not old people. That’s a different thing. We’re talking people dying ahead of nature, ahead of the natural order of things. Those were the dumb ones. And usually it came down to one thing. They say “wrong place, wrong time.” Well, that didn’t make sense. It could only be one or the other, never both. More often than not people got killed because there was one thing about which they were ignorant. Had they known that one thing, well, they’d still be alive.
Life wasn’t complicated. At least Madigan didn’t believe so. Life was simple. Take or be taken. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed.
Six months academy, four years patrol officer at the Twelfth, thirteen months as suppression officer in the Manhattan Gangs
Division, three years in Investigative, two years in Vice, six years in Robbery-Homicide to secure Detective First Class, a year in Organized Crime Control Bureau, and then a requested transfer back to Robbery-Homicide. Six one-eighty-ones for excessive force, eleven officer-involved shootings, thirteen commendations from the mayor’s office via the police chief, a fifty-one-percent average arrest-to-charge rate, thirty-one lifers, countless ten-to-fifteens and six-to-tens, a taxable salary of ninety thousand, additional sources of income bringing in another hundred or so. He’d do a year or two more of this, and then cut out for greener pastures. Pick up another twenty a year in Nassau, Suffolk, maybe Westchester or Rockland, someplace where people didn’t crap in their own backyards and expect the stink to vanish by itself. Someplace where the bureaucrats possessed some organizational skills, a basic understanding of manpower assignment and resource utilization. Down here they couldn’t organize a blowjob in a whorehouse.
Madigan had been back in Robbery-Homicide since September 2008. Forty-two years old, two marriages, one mistress, all gone by the wayside. Four kids, youngest three, oldest seventeen. He had his issues. He smoked too much, drank too much; he slept around some. He had his medicinal predilections and proclivities, but nothing he couldn’t control. It was all a question of balance. Too much coke, take a Xanax. Too much Adderall or Dexedrine, well, just smooth off all the rough edges with some lithium, a couple of ’ludes, maybe a Percocet or two. The road of excess did not lead to the palace of wisdom. Blake might have been smart on everything else, but he was dumb on that one. Look at that poor, dumb fool Jim Morrison. Where the hell did a philosophy like that get him? Less than thirty years old and he was in a hole in the ground in Paris, that’s where.
It was true. New York was nobody’s city. And because it was nobody’s, then—in a way—it was everybody’s. And Madigan was as good an
everybody
as anyone else.
He pulled over to the sidewalk on 117th. He picked up the pictures of the little girl from the passenger seat and looked at her.
He felt what he felt, but he convinced himself he did not. He could not afford to feel anything.
Maybe she would die, maybe she wouldn’t. Ballistics wouldn’t get him, and he did not believe the girl had seen any faces. Landry, Williams, and Fulton would be found in the storage unit. Two
and two would make four. It was a home run, and he wasn’t even out of breath, hadn’t even skidded to base.
It was all collateral damage.
Madigan tried to smile, gave it up as a bad idea, opened the door, and started walking.
T
his is the thing. People are not the same. It’s that old adage: All victims are not created equal. Sure, that’s the case wherever you go. Like the fire chief said, “I ain’t never put out a fire in a rich white guy’s house.” You live up in Chelsea or someplace, then you’re gonna get the best of the best. Some upmarket Detective First Class Gold Shield shiny-shoed son of a bitch, and he’s gonna be all over your case until someone’s in the hole for whatever they did to you. Down here, here in the Yard, you’re gonna be one of twenty-nine homicides I’m investigating, and three weeks after the coroner signed you off I’m still gonna be chasing a requisition form for Crime Scene snaps
.
I do this for an hour and I’ve already had enough
.
First guy I talked to was some dirty-faced, semi-incoherent white guy with filthy hair woven into ratty dreadlocks. He smelled like a penitentiary toilet in high summer
.
The only thing I’m thinking while I’m talking to these people is, “Why are these motherfuckers lying to me?” Not about the girl. Not that. About everything else. Their lives are lies. Lies upon lies upon lies. Layers of lies. They lie to their husbands, wives, their kids, their neighbors, and they lie to themselves. And those are the biggest lies of all, the ones they tell themselves every goddamned day: I am different from everyone else. I am different from all these people around me, and things are gonna get better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Soon they will get better, and I will be out of here. This is not my life. This is a way station, a bus stop, nothing more than that
.
Bullshit. You’re born here, you live here, you die here. It ain’t never gonna change. You ain’t gonna win the lottery. You ain’t gonna sing one time and find some Warner Brothers A&R guy was just happening by, and lo and behold, all of a sudden you’re Beyoncé or Alicia Keys. Not a prayer. That shit happens in other peoples’ lives
.
I see the lies in the eyes of the guy who serves me at Chicken Shack. He knows I’m a cop. He can see it in my attitude, in the way I walk and talk, in the bulge of my hip holster
.
He thinks I’m a piece of shit. He thinks I’m no one. Less than no one
.