St. Patrick's Day Murder (11 page)

“I know,” I said. Forgiving is never easy, and her nephew’s death must have weighed heavily on this old woman, especially since she had convinced him to remain on the job. Perhaps it was herself she was having trouble forgiving.

“I don’t know how I can help you,” she said.

“Did he talk to you about his work?”

“All the time. But one story ran into another.”

“Did he ever mention the name Scott McVeigh to you?”

“I don’t remember.”

I swallowed and took a shot in the dark. “Jack Brooks?”

She looked into the distance. “I’m not sure.”

During the drive home I was unable to get warm. The heater functioned perfectly, but I kept shivering. If I was looking for connections, there was certainly one here, and it had nothing to do with Scotty. Sister Benedicta thought Jack’s name rang a bell. Jack had known—and liked—Harry Donner. On St. Patrick’s Day, Scotty and Jack had switched cars on the way to the bar and in the dark it was possible the shooter had identified not the man but the car he drove. There was a chance that a case Jack was working on now connected with Donner, and the person who had killed Donner had now killed Scotty in error.

I drove faster than usual, bordering on recklessness. I wanted to reach Jack before he left the station house for his evening law classes. Suddenly I had changed my mind about meeting the anonymous caller in Damrosch Park. It wasn’t Scotty’s murderer I was looking for anymore, but someone who was out to get Jack. Everything else was error or coincidence. Ray was an accidental victim, picked because he had been stupidly generous first and stupidly aggressive afterward.

I pulled into my driveway and left the car there, too much in a hurry to open and close the garage door. I grabbed my mail without bothering to look at it. When I called the Sixty-fifth Precinct, they had to look for Jack, but while I held, they found him.

“What’s up?” he said in the casual tone I was used to.

“I’ve been to see Harry Donner’s aunt.”

“I thought you were dropping the case.”

“Listen to me, Jack. I don’t have time to argue. She’s a Dominican nun in an order that runs a hospital up the Hudson.
Donner talked to her about his work all the time. When I asked her if she knew the name Scott McVeigh, she said she didn’t remember. When I asked her if she knew your name, she said she wasn’t sure. She looked as if it rang a bell.”

“I’ve got a common name. Half the guys on the job are named John or Jack.”

“Listen to me!” I insisted. “You and Scotty switched cars when we went to the bar. The killer was watching the car, not the driver.”

“Chris, this is so farfetched—”

“It isn’t farfetched. Something may have passed between you and Donner, or maybe there’s a case you’re working on now that he once had something to do with.”

There was silence. “It’s possible,” he said. “I don’t know, honey. We didn’t work on any cases together, but I have a couple of old ones that haven’t been closed.”

“Will you check on them?”

“I’ll look into it, OK?”

“You have to check every possible connection you could have to Donner. I thought about the cars a little after it happened, but now I’m sure.”

“You know, Scotty and I look so different. You couldn’t see the two of us walking together and mistake one for the other.”

“That’s true. But the parking lot wasn’t lighted. The killer is sitting in a car at the back, waiting for you. He sees the two of you turn into the lot and he ducks down. He doesn’t even see which of you goes to which car because he doesn’t want you to know someone is sitting at the wheel of his car. He looks up and you’ve both more or less disappeared next to your cars. All he knows is that he’s after the guy who drove the BMW that night. He drives down to the car, shoots the person opening the door, and gets away. He doesn’t even know till the next morning that he’s killed the wrong man.” I had worked it all out on the drive home, and I had convinced myself that the events of that awful night were exactly as I now saw them.

“OK, it’s possible,” Jack said.

“It means he’s still after you, Jack. Whatever the reason,
he’s still after you. I think I have to go to Damrosch Park tomorrow night and find out what this informant knows.”

“Forget it.”

“Well, someone has to go.”

“It’s not going to be you.”

“Please watch yourself,” I said, my voice not as steady as I wanted it to sound. “He’s still out there—and he’s going to wait for the right time to get you.”

“I promise I’ll be careful,” he said.

“Damrosch Park,” I reminded him.

“I’ll talk to you when I get back from my class.”

Arnold called after I’d picked at my dinner and decided I wasn’t very hungry. He had seen Joo and would represent him, but he said the chances were Joo would never again get a license for a handgun. Failure to report its loss was taken very seriously by the police department.

A little while later Jean called. “I just talked to him,” she said.

“Will he make it during the day?”

“He says daylight is out because he can’t take a chance of being recognized. And he works nights, so midnight is the earliest he can get there. He’s calling me back later.”

“Tell him I’ll be there.”

“You’re crazy,” Jean said.

“I’m not saying I’m going. I just want to make sure he’ll be there.”

“Have you found out anything?”

“Not very much. I talked to an old aunt of one of the cops killed a few years ago. Scotty’s name didn’t ring a bell.”

“Don’t go tomorrow, Chris,” Jean said. “This will work itself out somehow. It’s not worth your getting hurt to find out what happened.”

“I’ll see what Jack says,” I told her.

Jack called when he got home. He said he still thought my scenario was wild, but he had worked something out for tomorrow night. A friend who owed him a favor had agreed to watch Joe Farina from the time he left work until midnight. If Farina went anywhere near the West Side of Manhattan, we would know, whether we saw him at the park or not. The
friend had a cellular phone in his car; we could check with him during the evening to see what Farina was doing.

“What about the meeting?” I asked.

“Come down to Brooklyn tomorrow when you get out of church. We’ll have dinner and we’ll drive over to the park early and look around. I haven’t been there for a while, but there may be some construction in the area where I can get a look at where you’re supposed to make the meet.”

“What about me?”

“You can sit in the car … out of the way.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

“Chris, why don’t you leave this alone?”

“Because you’re involved. And that makes me involved.”

“You know, you’re starting to sound more and more like those tough old nuns of my childhood and less and less like that sweet girl I met last summer.”

“Are you taking back your offer?”

“My mother won’t let me.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sister Benedicta had said very little more to me after I had asked her if she recognized Jack’s name. I was very curious about the reason she had taken a leave of absence in the fifties, although it had nothing to do with either Harry Donner’s death or Scotty’s, but I felt she would have volunteered the information if she had been so inclined. I was equally interested in the reason why Harry Donner had wanted to leave the job, although that had been some time ago and surely had nothing to do with his subsequent murder.

What I wanted to do now, or rather what I thought I should do, was talk to Ray Hansen. I caught him at home Friday morning before he left for work.

“It’s Chris, Ray,” I said.

“Oh, Chris, yeah, hi.”

“I’d like to talk to you. Can you meet me for lunch?”

There was enough of a pause so that I knew he was thinking of how to say no. “I don’t usually eat lunch, Chris.”

This man really brought out the worst in me. “Make an exception today. Give me a time and place I can meet you.”

“Yeah, OK. There’s a little Italian place. How’s twelve-thirty?”

“Fine.”

He told me where it was and how to get there. When we finished, I would go to church. Today was Good Friday.

Before leaving I called Melanie Gross and told her I had a strange favor to ask.

“You want to borrow a child for a day or two?” she asked hopefully.

I laughed. “If you have an old coat, I’d like to have it till I can get mine cleaned.” I didn’t want to explain about the bloodstain, but it had begun to bother me.

“Take your pick. They’ll all be a size too big, but you can have your choice. Come on over.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I took my winter coat out of the closet and emptied the pockets. I would need the gloves, but the rest of the stuff could go into the garbage, except maybe for a safety pin, which I put in a drawer. There was a dirty Kleenex, a couple of supermarket receipts, and a folded-up envelope that I didn’t remember putting there. Smoothing it out I hoped it wasn’t an overdue utility bill.

It wasn’t. It was an envelope with no return address—and it was addressed, in ink, to Ray Hansen at his precinct. That was crazy. How could a letter addressed to Ray find its way into my coat pocket?

I had no right to read it, but I had a right to know how it had gotten there. The last time I had seen Ray was Monday morning during the search. I had taken my coat off, and Ray had hung it in the closet. The police had come and … And what? When they had gone to the closet, he had made a point of saying this was my coat. Then he had given it to me. I pushed my memory back a little further. When the doorbell rang, he was at the closet.

I sat down.
Ray had put the letter in my pocket so that the search team couldn’t touch it
. If I had stayed till they left, he would have taken it back before I put my coat on.

But I hadn’t and he hadn’t. I had told Jack I would not try to clear Ray; I would simply try to find Scotty’s killer. In my
hand was a potential piece of evidence. I pulled the single folded sheet out and opened it.

It was very brief. It read:

Dear Ray, It was terrific. Let’s do it again. Love, Jean.

Ray was coming down the street from the opposite direction when I got to the restaurant. He looked the way he usually did, no sign of strain and no sign of anything else. At least when Jack was happy or irritable or angry, there was a visible sign.

We said our hellos and went inside. Ray steered me to a table for two in the back, and we gave our orders to a waitress who was obviously no stranger to him.

“So how’s it going?” he said.

“I’ve been looking into the unsolved police murders: Roscoe Boyd, Gavin Moore, and Harry Donner.”

“I remember them.”

“Did you know any of them?”

He pursed his lips into a negative. “Don’t think so. Boyd was the one up in Harlem. Moore, they found him in a park in Brooklyn when he should have been somewhere else. Maybe he was visiting a girlfriend.”

A rather different explanation from Moore’s wife’s. “You think a girlfriend did it?”

“Probably some neighborhood punks. They’ll get ’em.”

“You remember Donner?”

“He was an older guy. Jack said he used to know him.”

“I met his aunt yesterday. She’s a Dominican nun in her eighties.”

A very faint smile. “So you had something in common with her.”

“A little,” I said. “Very little.”

“You find out anything about where Scotty was born?” Ray asked, changing the subject abruptly.

“Jean didn’t know anything last time I asked.”

“That’s the key to this thing. Scotty obviously led a double life. Someone crossed the line from the other one into this one and wasted him.”

“Why?”

“I figure he did something once, hurt someone. Someone kept a grudge, looked for him, found him, shot him.”

“It would have had to be a long time ago. He was married in his mid-twenties, and he’s been on the job almost that long.”

“Some pain doesn’t go away.” He said it as though he were talking about himself.

“What could have happened when he was in his teens or early twenties?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question; it was something I would have to think about.

“The way I see it, something happened that kept Scotty out of the army. Whatever it was, he couldn’t deal with it. He made up the whole story about being in the army to cover up the truth and seem like a regular guy. Everybody else had an army record, so he had one, too. You listen to enough stories, you can make up your own pretty easy.”

It was a lot of words from a man who rarely acknowledged my existence. I wanted to keep them flowing because it was clear he had done a lot of thinking about Scotty, more than I had. “Let’s push it a couple of steps further. Those .44-caliber bullets they found in your apartment, they weren’t yours, were they?”

“Hell, no. They were planted. I was gone all day Sunday. Anyone could have gotten in and put them there.”

“That’s what I think. I asked some of your neighbors if they saw anyone Sunday.”

His eyebrows went up. “And?”

“No one saw anything. Most of them weren’t home that day.”

“Figures.”

“Ray, if someone killed Scotty because of something he did a long time ago, why would they set you up as the killer?”

“There’s a lot of pressure to close a case like this fast.”

“But a fellow police officer?”

“Let me explain something to you. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a nice Irish cop. I’m not a member of the Emerald Society. My behavior isn’t as upstanding as some people think it should be. I’m not living with my wife and
I have a girlfriend. It boils down to I’m an easy guy to sacrifice. ‘Brother officer’ only goes so far.”

It gave me the shivers. “What do you think they have on you?”

“If someone’s been tailing Scotty, he knows we’re friends.”

“But does he know you lent Scotty money?”

“If he’s a cop, he does. The story of our little fight has made the rounds by now, and Scotty probably left my letter in his locker. So it’s evidence.”

“But it can’t be a cop if it’s someone from Scotty’s long-ago past,” I said. “It doesn’t fit together.”