St. Patrick's Day Murder (9 page)

Since I was in Queens, I decided to drop in on Jean McVeigh. I didn’t really want to drop in on her unannounced, but I was out of change and it’s hard to come by in New York. So I drove over and rang the bell.

“Oh, Chris, I’m glad you’re here,” Jean said when she saw me. She looked bedraggled and her eyes were red. “Come on in. I’m doing something I don’t want to do and you’re a good excuse to stop.”

“I know I should have called first, but—”

“It doesn’t matter. Just make yourself comfortable. Want some coffee?”

“Only if you do.”

“I should really cut down.” She dropped into a chair in the living room. “I’ve been going through Scotty’s clothes.” She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose.

“Maybe it’s too soon, Jean.”

“Sure it’s too soon. It was too soon for him to die, too soon for me to be alone. My mother picked up the kids this morning and it just seemed like the right time to get started. Tell me how things are going.”

“I’ve got a great idea,” I said. I told her about the Happy Times Grocery and the offer they had made. “Put your coat on and let’s drive over there now. I’ll sit in the car and you can go in and get a bag of apples for the kids.”

“That sounds good. Let me wash my face and we’ll go.”

I put my coat back on and took my keys out of my bag. Jean returned looking a lot fresher, a little color in her cheeks and on her lips. She opened the closet and took out a huge black shawl and wrapped it around her. “Nice?” she said. “We found it in a shop that sells Scottish woolens. I just love it. When it’s cold out, I wrap it around my head like this.” She flipped it up, so it covered the red hair, and my heart took a tumble. She was the woman I had seen Sunday night hurrying down the street away from Ray Hansen’s apartment as Jack and I were arriving to talk to him after his arrest. We had been at Petra’s when he called to say he was going home and would not see her that night.

“What’s wrong?” Jean said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You were at Ray’s apartment Sunday night.”

“No. What makes you say that?” Jean gave a nervous little smile.

“I saw you leaving. You were wearing that shawl around your head.”

We looked at each other. She knew she’d been caught, and I didn’t want to say anything to gloss over it. There was no question in my mind what had happened. Ray had called her, either from the police station or when he got home, and she had said she would come over. But he had also told Petra he would come to her place, and he had had to cancel one of the two meetings. If Jack and I had arrived five minutes earlier, we would have walked into a very big surprise.

“I just wanted to tell him I believed in his innocence, Chris. He needed to know that. He was arrested out of the blue. I didn’t want him to think—” She stopped, but I didn’t fill the silence. “I wanted him to know I believed in him.”

“Come on. Let’s get you some fruit.”

As we drove, I told her about my brief look into the lives of Gavin Moore and Harry Donner. She was familiar with their cases but was sure she knew nothing else about them. We tried to fit Scotty into some kind of pattern that would include either of the other two but couldn’t.

“Scotty was never out of uniform,” she said. “He was never in a precinct where Donner was. I can’t imagine they ever saw each other even by accident.”

“And Moore?”

“Scotty never did undercover work. If he was once in the same precinct as another guy on the job, well, that’s probably true of hundreds of them. Brushing shoulders isn’t a connection, Chris. I don’t know why this happened, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with Ray.”

“Besides the three thousand,” I said, “was there anything else?” I made the question broad enough to include anything she might want to confide in me.

“Not that I know of.” Jean looked straight out the windshield.

I parked at a hydrant across the street and a little bit down the block from the Happy Times Grocery. Jean went in, and she disappeared from my view. I looked around at the shops I had passed on my walk yesterday. If someone in one of them had had a grudge …

But it had to be more than that. Just because you have a grudge, you don’t necessarily know how to steal a car so cleanly you don’t leave a trace of your identity. Having a grudge doesn’t automatically mean you own a handgun. Scotty had been followed, and that took planning and time and a certain expertise. I looked at a paunchy man smoking a cigar in front of his video store. What were the chances he could have pulled off such a clean killing?

Jean emerged from the grocery. She was smiling broadly. As I watched, she bent over to hug the little woman, then the young woman who had left her place at the cash register, then the young man I had seen with a broom. I felt my eyes tear. They had told her good things about Scotty, shedding their own fears and inhibitions. The last one out was Mr. Ma. He was carrying two shopping bags that were bulging with produce. Jean pointed to my car, and he started across the street. She threw kisses to the others and followed him.

I got out of the car and opened the back door for the bags of fruit.

“Thank you for bringing Mrs. McVeigh,” Mr. Ma said. “Very nice lady. My mother happy to meet her.”

Jean joined us before I could say anything. Her face was tearstained. “Thank you, Mr. Ma. Thank you so much.” She
wrapped her arms around him and was rewarded with a smile. “You’re very kind.”

She got into the car, and I pulled away as she daubed at her face with a tissue. “What nice, warm people,” she said. “I can’t believe anyone would think they’re cold. They said such wonderful things about Scotty. He was such a good person, Chris.… Hey, let’s find a place to have lunch, my treat.

Take a left up ahead. I’ll show you where to go.”

I drove feeling the situation was muddier than before. The Koreans had smiled, and Jean had gone to Ray’s apartment after his arrest, and Jack had heard rumors about Ray. Nothing was making any sense, and although I had no idea about it then, it was all about to get much worse.

Jack called a little while after I got home. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get you.”

“In Queens, trying to find out something about Harry Donner. What’s up?”

“What’s up is that I did a little digging and turned up something that somebody missed. You know that Korean grocery you went to? Happy Times?”

“Yes. Jean and I went there again this morning. They were wonderful to her, said all kinds of nice things about Scotty.”

“There may be more there than meets the eye. The guys working on the case checked along Scotty’s beat to see if any storeowners had a registered handgun. This guy Ma, who’s listed as the owner, doesn’t have one. But there’s another guy who works there, someone named Joo. Guy in his late twenties.”

“I saw him.”

“He’s probably a cousin or something. He has a .44-caliber automatic registered in his name. I called the team and turned it over to them.”

I didn’t know what to say. The police had probably shown up on the heels of our departure, making it look as though I had betrayed them.

“You having a crisis of conscience?” my guy asked.

“Yes.”

“Chris, honey, somebody did it. If it turns out to be this guy, it’s not your fault. You know that.”

“I know. I just don’t believe it. They’re such hardworking people. They were so nice to Jean. It wasn’t a put-on. They were genuinely happy to meet her because they genuinely liked Scotty.”

“If you’re right, the gun’ll check out. All this guy Joo has to do is turn it over and Ballistics’ll make a determination.”

He was right, and I assured him I knew it. But it didn’t make me feel any better. At least, I thought, looking for the bright side, the police had one small piece of information they could follow up on in a case they wanted to close.

I made a salad for dinner, and sat down at the table with the
Times
. The metropolitan section seemed to be a mirror of the international news, full of ethnic violence and hatred. There were articles about trouble between Dominicans and Colombians, between some blacks and Koreans, between a group of Jews and a group of blacks, between two high school basketball teams, one Catholic and the other largely Protestant. It was enough to make poor old Thomas Jefferson turn over in his grave.

Last summer a group of Oakwood citizens had fought tooth and nail to prevent my cousin Gene’s residential home from moving to town. The reason had been pure fear of the unknown, fear of a group of retarded men and women who had never hurt anyone in their lives but who, our good citizens said, might. That “might” almost kept Greenwillow out of Oakwood. Happily, it didn’t. They have been here since January, and not only have there been no incidents, but the residents are contributing to the community in a way they were never able to in their old home. Several of them have been hired to perform useful tasks in the town, and last year’s grumbling has all but disappeared. Somehow, I felt, it ought to be possible to work something out on a larger scale.

I had switched from metropolitan ethnic strife to the pleasures of food and drink in the next section when the phone rang. It was Jean and it was clear she hadn’t called to rehash the day’s events.

“I just got a crazy call,” she said. “From a man. Did you have the feeling we were being followed today?”

Icicles down my back. “No, I didn’t. What’s going on?”

“He just called. No name, no kind of identification. He said he wanted to talk to you.”

“He knew my name?”

“No. He called you my friend who’s working on Scotty’s murder.”

It certainly sounded as though I’d been followed. How else could anyone know I was more than just a friend of Jean’s or of the family? Unless … “Is that what he said, ‘Scotty’s murder’?” I asked.

“I think so. No, he said ‘your husband’s murder,’ or maybe ‘the murder of your husband.’ I grabbed a piece of paper when I realized what was going on, but I was only able to jot down a word here and there.”

“Why does he want to talk to me?”

“He said he has something to tell you, something about Scotty and Ray.”

“Did you tell him to go to the police?”

“Yes, I did. I said he should do it right away. He said he couldn’t. He asked me for your name and I practically told him to go to hell. He said how about the phone number? I said nothing doing. He said he had to talk to you—and if he couldn’t call, you’d have to meet him somewhere. He gave me a place and time.”

I picked up the envelope that the bill from the water company had come in and turned it over. “I’m listening.”

“Friday night at midnight in Damrosch Park. Do you know where that is?”

“Frankly, no.”

“He said it’s on Sixty-second Street, near Lincoln Center, near the ramp to the underground garage. There’s a sign on the wall with the name of the park. And in case you haven’t been watching TV lately, he said to come alone, that you’d be perfectly safe. I guess he doesn’t watch the news.”

The appointed day was Good Friday. “Jean, it’s crazy,” I said. “If he calls back, tell him it has to be daylight. Is that it? Do you remember anything else? Background noises or anything like that?”

“It was quiet. He kind of talked as though he was keeping his voice down so no one would hear. But that’s all I can remember.”

“Anything more on Scotty’s birth certificate?” I asked.

There was a silence. Then she said, “Nothing.”

I thanked her and got off the phone. On Monday morning
I had left Ray’s apartment near the end of the official search. I had sat in my car till the search was over, then asked his landlady and some neighbors if they had seen anyone around Ray’s place the day before. If someone had been watching me, he would have seen that not only was I connected to Ray, but I was doing a little investigating on my own.

I took my notebook out of my bag and flipped back a couple of pages. I had had lunch with Jean that day, establishing a connection there if someone was following me. But it certainly looked as though he hadn’t followed me home or he’d know how to reach me in Oakwood. Unless …

There it was again. I had given my name to Sharon Moore and Joe Farina. Although Scotty’s connection to Gavin Moore was very tenuous, maybe there was something there after all—and maybe Joe Farina didn’t want me to find out about it. A police officer would have no trouble tracking down a license plate, and my car had been parked in the driveway when he came home.

So why hadn’t he called me himself or driven up to Oakwood? I got up and drew the curtains in the living room. The thought of being followed was very frightening. My car, my license, my address. And then it hit me. It was still less than a year since I had last registered my car. The address on record was St. Stephen’s Convent, a healthy drive up the Hudson River. As I was still living in New York State, I didn’t have to reregister when I moved here last spring, and Motor Vehicles did not as yet know my change of address because I had neglected to inform them, probably some kind of misdemeanor I was not going to worry about at this point. Much as I didn’t want to admit it, the best way to find out if Joe Farina was the caller would be to show up at Damrosch Park on Friday night and see if he was there.

But suppose it wasn’t Farina? Suppose it was some elusive person who was following me? He could have tailed me easily enough on Monday from Ray’s apartment, but I couldn’t see how he could have picked me up on Tuesday. I’d started from the college and driven to Brooklyn to the Happy Times Grocery, and then to Sharon Moore’s. And today I’d started in Queens, in Harry Donner’s old neighborhood, and then
gone to Jean’s. Maybe it was Jean he was watching. But then why wouldn’t he talk to her?

As for meeting someone in a park on the West Side of Manhattan at midnight, forget it. I wanted all the information I could get on Scotty’s killing, but I wasn’t about to risk my life to get it. I decided that although Jack would want to hear about this new development, it could wait for morning. Nothing was likely to change overnight.

I talked to Jack sooner than I had expected. He called shortly after eight Thursday morning, while I was sipping the last of my coffee.