A Dark and Broken Heart (27 page)

“Jesus Christ!” Sandià snapped, and he slammed the flat of his hand on the desk.

Madigan jumped, startled, but gathered himself quickly.

Sandià got up. He paced back and forth behind his desk, and then he slowed and stopped. He turned and looked at Madigan. Again Sandià held that distant expression, the absence of emotion, the absence of any real humanity. Suddenly the distance closed and his eyes flashed with anger.

“I need to know what happened, Vincent. I
need
to know what happened. You have any idea how this makes me look? I can’t even keep hold of my own money. I can’t even protect my own family. This makes me look weak, Vincent. It makes me look like a man who is losing control of his territory.”

“I am handling it, okay?” Madigan said. “You asked me to deal with this thing and I am dealing with it. I need you to tell whoever else you are working with on this, especially if this is someone inside the department, to just back the hell off and let me handle it. I really don’t need someone else muddying up the field here . . .”

“You have to promise me, Vincent. You have to promise me that you are going to take care of this, and fast—”

“I’ve had a day,” Madigan interjected. “One day. There was word that a cop might have been involved. You know where the information came from? A crackhead. Some dumb druggie loser. So I take a look. If it’s a cop then I am very interested. I speak to some other people, more reliable, straight-up people, and now
everything points to it
not
being a cop. Then you tell me I am pretty much useless because you got word from somewhere else that it
is
a cop. This is old, okay? This is half a day old, and I need you to give me free rein to sort this out, and I will.”

“Vincent, I understand—”

“What are you saying here? . . . You’re saying that you don’t trust me anymore?”

Sandià smiled.

Librium and Jack Daniel’s
, Madigan was thinking.
Librium and Jack Daniel’s. Shit, this stuff just puts me in a bad mood. Best place to be right now. Offense is the best form of defense
.

“Vincent, seriously, when have we ever really trusted each other? People like you and me do not found a relationship on trust. You tell me what I need to know, and I take care of things for you. It is simply a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“So let me do what you asked me do, okay? Just let me do what you asked me to do, and get whoever else might be involved out of my fucking way.”

Sandià leaned back in his chair. It creaked slowly, so audible in the tense silence that hung there between them.

“How long have we known each other, Vincent?” Sandià asked.

“What the hell is this? . . . You gonna be the Godfather now?”

Sandià smiled. “You go fuck yourself, Vincent Madigan.”

Madigan laughed. “You spend too much time worrying, you know that?”

“Hey, if I don’t worry, who will? My nephew is dead. He was a young man, pride of my sister, and whoever did this thing must pay. The money—” Sandià waved the comment aside. “The money itself is unimportant. Pocket change, you know? But it is the principle of the thing, the message it sends out. Sandià cannot take care of business. Sandià is losing his grip. Sandià can be taken over by some punk-ass kid out of the barrios . . .”

“Believe me,” Madigan said, “I don’t think anyone has such an idea.”

“I need to make sure no one has such an idea. I can believe all I want, but belief and faith and hope are redundant and worthless commodities in this business. I need to know who did this thing, and I need them dead.”

“And you need the girl’s mother.”

“Yes, Vincent, I need the girl’s mother. More than anything, I need that woman.”

“And the daughter?”

“The daughter is a bargaining chip, nothing more. When she is well enough to move, I will take her again. If I take her now she will die, and she is worthless to me dead. But if the woman is found then I do not need the girl.”

“So if you want me to find her you need to tell me everything you know about her.”

“What I know? What I know is her name. I don’t know anything else about her, and I don’t need to know anything else except where she is. If she is dead then fine, bring me her head in a bag to prove it. If she is not, then I need her however she comes—willingly, unwillingly, it doesn’t matter. She can believe she is coming to see me in order to save the life of her daughter, or she can come because she believes she can make a deal with me—”

“Why would she want to make a deal with you?”

Sandià rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. He pressed his fingertips together. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I ask questions, Vincent. I don’t answer them. I agree to back everyone else away and you will do your work. This is the agreement here. You find out who took my money, you find out who killed my nephew, and you owe me nothing. Your debt is gone.”

“And if I bring you the Arias woman . . . What then?”

“You bring me the Arias woman, dead or alive, and I will not only clear your debt, I will give you another fifty thousand dollars.”

Madigan nodded. “Okay, you have a deal. But I work this alone, at least the robbery and the murders. You can have whoever you like looking for this woman, but if I find her I get the fifty grand.”

“Working with you is never complicated is it, Vincent? It was always the money, right?”

Madigan smiled wryly. “Hey, what the hell else is there? You got enough money then all the shit just goes away.”

“You believe that?”

“I never had enough money to find out one way or the other.”

“But you’re working on it.”

“Aren’t we all?”

Sandià rose from the chair and came around the desk. Madigan stood also. Sandià gripped Madigan’s shoulders. He looked directly at him. “I continue our relationship because you are a thief and a liar and a murderer, Vincent Madigan. I continue it because you
and I are almost the same person. You do this thing for me and your life will be a great deal simpler, I assure you.”

Sandià released him. Madigan turned and walked to the door.

“You find out anything important—I mean really important—and you let me know, okay?” Madigan asked. “Half the game here is knowing what everyone else knows.”

“Well, there’s the difference between you and me, Vincent,” Sandià replied. “I couldn’t give a damn what anyone else knows. Only thing that concerns me is that I know more.”

Madigan smiled. He opened the door, stepped out into the hallway, and closed it silently behind him.

42
THUNDERHEAD

T
hese were new curves. Not only had Sandià spoken of Isabella Arias, but he had admitted the presence of someone else inside the department. To say that this came as a shock to Madigan would not have been correct. Had Madigan thought about it, well, it would have made perfect sense. It was just that he had never really thought about it. Which division, which unit, which precinct—there was no way to know. He could have people anywhere, and—knowing Sandià—he more than likely did. But the closeness of it disturbed Madigan—the fact that Sandià had another incoming line on the robbery and storage unit homicides. And Sandià’s concern for Isabella Arias had been single-minded and definite. Sandià wanted her gone. He
needed
her gone. It confirmed what Isabella had told him. Fifty grand was nothing to keep Sandià away from a homicide rap, but Sandià would not have wanted to alert Madigan to the seriousness of the task by offering some huge amount. Sandià would have paid five million to avoid the homicide beef, but he was not about to telegraph that to the world. Madigan was still a cop—good, bad, indifferent, he was still a cop—and Sandià could not afford to let his guard down or display all his cards. As Sandià had said, he stayed powerful because he knew more than others. He stayed powerful because of others’ ignorance.

Madigan returned to the precinct. He needed to find out about David Valderas, the murder that the Arias sisters had witnessed. He wanted to know who was on that case, and whether or not they were on Sandià’s payroll.

There was a message at the desk. Bryant wanted to see him. Madigan went on up, knocked and entered.

“The little girl,” Bryant said, getting up from behind his desk. “She’s gonna make it for sure. She’s a tough cookie, this one, and I need you to liaise with whoever’s looking after her and get the heads-up when she’s able to talk.”

“Should think it will be a while,” Madigan replied.

“Whatever, Vincent, I just need you there the moment she is given the go-ahead for some questions.”

“Will do.”

Madigan hesitated.

“Something else, Vincent?”

“Yes,” Madigan replied. He sat down. “I have to be honest with you, Sarge. I have to tell you that I think it’s a mistake to have Walsh all over these homicides.”

“How so?”

“Because he’s been a desk jockey too long, and even a month in IA gets you looking the wrong way.”

Bryant didn’t reply for a moment, and then he seemed to nod in affirmation of Madigan’s concern. “Okay,” he said. “So I’m thinking I should put Charlie Harris on it.”

“You don’t need to. I’ve got it covered. They’re the same case, no question. You’ve got a fourth man somewhere, and we just need to find him.”

“Any more on this rumor it was a cop?”

Madigan shook his head. “That came from the crackhead, like you said. I don’t think there’s any truth in that. I mean, for Christ’s sake—”

“Vincent, you’ve been around the block. Something like that would really surprise you that much? It could have been a cop. Jesus, it could have been the freakin’ ADA.”

Madigan laughed.

Bryant laughed too.

The tension dispersed.

“So what do you want to do?” Bryant asked.

“Just let me run both cases as one.”

“You want Charlie to work it with you?”

“Nah, just give me a uniform for the legwork as and when.”

“You can handle it?”

“No, Sarge, I’m gonna just make one royal fuck-up of a disaster—”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Bryant interjected. “Go do your worst.”

Madigan got up.

“And, Vincent?”

Madigan looked back at Bryant.

“If this
is
a cop then I need to know before anyone else. I am not naive. I know how dirty this business is. I know what these guys go
through day in and day out. I know how easy it is to fall by the wayside, to lose sight of the bigger picture. I know that one mistake can destroy a career, and a wrecked career more often than not means a wrecked family.” He shook his head slowly. “I really do give a damn about the guys that work here. All of them. Their wives, their kids, whatever the hell their personal circumstances are, well, they put it all on hold to do something that is frustrating and thankless at the best of times. The more heads-up I have, well, the more damage control I can do. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, Sarge, I understand exactly what you’re saying.”

“So keep me in the loop. Whatever you know, I need to know it next, right?”

“Right.”

Madigan walked to the door, stepped out into the corridor, and it was only as he reached the stairs that he realized his heart was going ten to the dozen.

Back in his own office, the small sanctuary within the madness, Madigan went back over the Maribel Arias file. The head in the Dumpster, the rest in garbage bags behind North General. Christ, Sandià was a freaking animal. If he had done this thing . . .

Madigan thought of his name—the Watermelon Man. Yes, Sandià could so easily have done this to Maribel Arias. He would not have blinked an eye.

And then he went on the trail of David Valderas. On the system he was listed as an active homicide, case registered on Wednesday, December 23, 2009. ME’s report said that Valderas had died approximately eighteen hours before on the Tuesday, his body having lain undiscovered in his house on East 115th. Again, Madigan took note that the address was the same one that Isabel had given him.

Cause of death had been a fatal puncture through the right eye into the frontal lobe of the brain. The murder weapon—a flat-head screwdriver, just a regular $1.99 cheap screwdriver available from a thousand places in any fifteen-block radius—had been left protruding from the socket. The driver’s shaft was all of five and three quarter inches, and it had been buried to the hilt. Paralysis of the entire nervous system would have been instantaneous, consciousness lasting no more than a handful of seconds, but in that handful of seconds David Valderas would have been aware of
his own imminent death. A hell of way to go, and so much like Sandià. When there was no way that someone could say anything further, then Sandià would want them to know everything.

Valderas’s case had been picked up by the second duty detective, and that evening it had been Charlie Harris. Charlie had canvassed the street, spoken to a half dozen neighbors, had come away empty-handed. Had anyone known it was Sandià, they would have said nothing. People in the Yard knew enough to know nothing. Always the way. Charlie was a good cop—thorough, methodical—and had the case been originally assigned to Madigan he doubted he would have found out any more. But then he doubted that Charlie Harris would have spoken to the same people as he would have. The irony was immediately evident. Had this been some other case, some other homicide, the first person Madigan would have contacted would have been Sandià himself. A murder such as that would’ve had to be sanctioned, or at least bought off. From the jacket, it seemed that Valderas had in fact been busy. Three pickups on possession, one of possession with intent, two grievous-with-intents, a GTA, a B&E, a spell in the pound for illegal firearms, a couple of community service orders with no indication that he satisfied them, finally a pending warrant for the robbery of a 7-Eleven. His house, right there on 115th was a stone’s throw from Paladino Avenue. With Valderas’s sheet, well, there was no way he was working for anyone but Sandià. So if someone other than Sandià had wanted Valderas to disappear, Sandià would’ve had to have given his blessing. If it had been advantageous to Sandià to lose Valderas, then the blessing would have been cheap. If the beef had been legitimate but personal—perhaps Valderas had raped some other big shot’s kid daughter or some such—then the big shot could have paid for the privilege of dispatching Valderas to the hereafter. Going rate was two years’ profit. Whatever Sandià made from Valderas, double it, and that would have been the fee. So Sandià would have known about the killing, and maybe he would have given some information about it to Madigan, but there would have been a cost to Madigan for that. Let some other wife-beating, vest-wearing Hispanic hothead off of a possession-with-intent rap, and Sandià would have given the nod on the perp. Madigan gets a line on the killer, picks up the homicide bust, Sandià gets the killer’s territory for safekeeping while he’s up at the Big House, and everyone is sweet. It was the way it worked, the way it had always worked, the way it would
work from here on out. In one hand and out the other, and everyone looked lily white and perfect. Organized crime had always been there. The Mafia wasn’t 1940s Sicily. The Mafia went back hundreds of years. The Asians weren’t the Triads; they were the Yakuza, the Ronin, and way back a thousand years to the first time one guy wanted another guy’s rice paddy and was prepared to kick his ass to get it.