Bad Blood (23 page)

Mike bowed his head. “What did Duke do?”

Phin picked up his voice and tapped his cane. “I guess you could say he saved my life, if that’s what you want to hear, if that’s what you want to tell little Trish Quillian. Duke did what I told him to do. First we waited and waited for an ambulance — maybe four minutes, maybe six. I was getting dizzy and light-headed, and all I had the strength to think about was that I damn well wasn’t gonna die in that hole. Gave my entire life to digging tunnels and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna bleed to death in one of them.”

“So, what…?” I asked.

“I asked Duke for a flashlight, a bottle of beer, and a knife. Took him a few minutes to run up the track to where I had my lunch box and back.” Phin slowed his pace now, tapping the cane against the stone. “I drank as much of the beer as I could, held the light on my leg, and put the lip of the bottle between my teeth. I told Duke to cut off whatever part of my foot was stuck behind the agitator.”

Neither Mike nor I could speak.

“Sawed off my heel and some of the foot,” Phin said, raising his left knee with his hands, so that the black leather slipper slipped off. I could see that the lower part of his leg was a prosthetic device.

Mike started to say something about how tough Phin must have been, but the old sandhog didn’t want to hear it.

“I don’t recommend beer as an anesthetic, young man. Didn’t help worth a damn. And when I bit down on the bottle to fight the pain, the glass broke and a big piece of it lodged in the roof of my mouth. Sure as hell took my mind off my foot for a while.”

Phin Baylor refused Mike’s offer of a hand up from the bench, steadying himself with the cane, then limping to the edge of the rampart.

“So Duke got me out of the hole alive — that’s all I asked of him. Lost the rest of the foot at the hospital. Too much damage had been done to save it.”

“The Hassett boys are wrong about Duke, are they?” Mike asked. “Wrong about blaming him for their father’s death?”

“Now you’re asking two different things of me, aren’t you, Mike?” Phin said, looking overhead at a plane making its approach to La Guardia, across the Sound. “You wanted to know if Duke saved my life, so I guess the answer has to be yes to that. But first you gotta know how that agitator car got uncoupled in the first place. You gotta know how it got loose from the brake car, don’t you, before you reach your next conclusion?”

“You mean, you think it was Duke Quillian who — who did that? Intentionally?”

“There, you said it yourself. It isn’t a very good idea to wind up between a Quillian and a Hassett, especially when one of ’em’s armed with a twenty-ton weapon.”

I couldn’t understand how Phin could be so calm if he thought Duke had engineered Hassett’s murder and his own near-fatal injury. “But didn’t the police investigate this? Didn’t you tell them you thought Duke was responsible?”

His face wrinkled as he looked at me quizzically, as though he couldn’t fathom why I was asking what the police thought.

“Like I told the cops when they came to the hospital, I couldn’t see anything that far up the tunnel. I didn’t have no proof anybody tinkered with the cars. Besides, Duke couldn’t have known I was even in the hole. Just my dumb luck that Hassett asked me to go back in with him after I signed out for the day. He wanted to finish up the last part of the job before he knocked off. Needed a hand and I gave it to him. Didn’t know what it would cost both of us.”

Phin turned his back to me, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and lit up. “If you haven’t learned it yet, you’ll find we don’t put much stock in cops five hundred feet underground. We’re used to taking care of ourselves.”

“I’m surprised Duke lasted this long, with so many Hassetts around,” Mike said.

“The Hassetts thought they were getting some powerful help from above, Detective. Duke got real sick, maybe a month after all this happened. Had cancer so bad he almost died. What’s that hospital in Manhattan?”

“Sloan-Kettering,” I said. The world-renowned medical center specialized in treatment of cancer patients, one of whom had been Mike’s fiancée, Val.

“Duke spent a few months there. Never thought we’d see him again. By that time I’d cut all my ties to the job, had no need to look back.” Phin came as close as he had so far to a smile. “One thing I was always damn sure of — Duke Quillian wouldn’t die of old age.”

Phin Baylor swiveled on his good leg and leaned on the side of the battlement, looking over the water. Mike was beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Can you tell us
why,
Phin? Why you think Duke might have done such a thing?”

Phin took a long drag on his cigarette.

“You’ve had more than enough time to figure it out, haven’t you?”

“He was a mean bastard, Detective. What’s the difference why he did it? I’m not ever going dancing again, even if I knew. Got me out of the hole, in the end, which probably adds twenty more years to my life.”

Mike wouldn’t give up. “But why was he after old man Hassett? Why did Duke hate him?”

“Might be no more than the grief Hassett gave Duke — gave his father, really — about Brendan. Taunting them constantly about how weak Brendan was, how he couldn’t make it in the tunnel. Used to say he wasn’t even half a man. Stuff like that. Used to drive the Quillians crazy because Brendan’s goals were such a rejection of their roots in this country and the work they’d been bred to do. Here’s two families that for generations have dedicated their lives, if you will, to building New York from the very bottom up. That’s part of the irony of them destroying each other. Taking pleasure in it as well. A real blood feud between them, that’s what it was.”

“Did they fight about—”

“They fought about everything, Chapman. Maybe it was money at the root of all this, maybe it was the girlfriend that old man Hassett and Quillian once shared, and maybe it was simply the fact that Duke Quillian knew every one of these stories and simply liked to hurt people. There’s miles of trouble beneath these city streets, making it all work up above — and some very rough dealings go into staying alive.”

Phin crushed his cigarette and flicked the butt over the side of the fort. “That’s all I have for you. Better push on and do your work.”

Mike motioned to me that he was ready to leave. “Can we give you a lift over to the house?”

“No, thanks. The air here is good for me.” Phin leaned an elbow on the massive granite battlement and exhaled a row of smoke rings. “You see that crazy Quillian girl, Mike, you give her a message for me.”

“What’s that, Phin?”

“Tell her she’ll live a lot longer if she keeps her yap shut, will you? Tell her nice as you two are, I’m not interested in any more company, thank you very much. She ought to dig for the bones in her own backyard.”

I waited for Mike at the car. He had waved me off and stayed behind to talk to Baylor.

“What did Phin mean by that last shot?” I asked when he joined me ten minutes later.

“Just what he told us. That the Quillians always made their own trouble — he’s got no use for any of them. Says Trish ought to mind her own business before she goes pointing fingers at anyone else.”

“That’s all you got from him? He must have been making a point.”

“Like your interrogation techniques are any better than mine? The guy hasn’t squealed in more than a decade — had the fortitude to hold the flashlight while somebody amputated half his foot — and you think he’s going to go belly-up ’cause I’m butting heads with him over something that nitwit said to us back in the bar? I’ll let you out, blondie. Try playing footsie with him and call me tomorrow.”

Mike saw there was a message on his cell phone and held it to his ear.

“Sorry,” I said. “It just sounded like he had more to say. Did you ask him if he remembered Bex?”

He flipped the phone shut. “Yes, ma’am. Says he used to scare his own daughter by reminding her of what happened to the Hassett girl for hanging out with those bums in the park. ‘Lay down with dogs, you’re gonna have fleas.’ Life according to Phin.”

“That’s a tough old bird.”

Mike made a U-turn. “Want a look at the file?”

“You serious?”

“The message is from Spiro. If we stop by Bronx Homicide right now, he’ll take us into the Cold Case Squad. The Hassett file is sitting there, waiting its turn in the middle of a pile for one of the guys to pick it up and see whether any of the old evidence is suitable for DNA analysis.”

“I’m in. It’s only six thirty,” I said, looking at my watch. “Why not?”

Although prosecutors in America had been introduced to DNA technology in the mid-1980s, before I’d even dreamed of a career as a prosecutor, no court admitted evidence of genetic fingerprinting in a criminal case until 1989. The accuracy of this scientific technique revolutionized the criminal justice system, linking perpetrators to crime scenes with complete certainty, and allowing the exoneration of others mistakenly accused or wrongly identified.

Not until the start of the twenty-first century — after DNA testing methodology had undergone a decade of refinement — were state and national data banks established. In the infancy of this forensic breakthrough, evidence that had yielded enough DNA to create a unique human profile could only be compared to a specific donor — suspect or witness — who surfaced on the radar screen in an investigation.

But data banks offered a much broader capability for solving crimes. In every state, legislation mandated the creation of arrestee or convicted-offender DNA files, filled with profiles of growing numbers of miscreants, against which crime-scene evidence could be searched by computer. Matches were now being made daily all over the country — unsolved cases being connected to others in different jurisdictions by “linkage” data banks even as jailed felons and parolees were regularly being identified for crimes most law enforcement officials had assumed would go unpunished.

Homicides, in particular, were being reexamined by police and prosecutors with new forensic tools not available when the cases had occurred. Unlike violent felonies in most states, no statutes of limitation exist for murder cases, and detectives everywhere began digging through old files and forgotten pieces of evidence in unsolved cases in hopes of striking the ever-satisfying “cold hit” — the match to a DNA profile of a known subject in a constantly growing network of data banks.

We left Throgs Neck for a less gentrified section of the borough — 1086 Simpson Street — home of the Bronx Homicide Task Force. Sunday night in the squadroom was as quiet as I had expected. The approaching days of summer in the city, when asphalt streets were more likely to come to a boil and the murder rate usually spiked, would bring more weekend action to this group of specialists. For now, Spiro Demakis and his partner, Denny Gibbons, seemed content to be catching up on the tedious paper-pushing that was a hallmark of good detective work.

“You don’t got enough to do in Manhattan?” Spiro asked, walking us down the hallway and turning on the lights in the small, empty office that housed the borough’s cold-case files. “I’m sitting on four unsolved shootings — all drug-related, without a single witness who could put his hand on a Bible and be believed. I got two domestics — one guy took out the girlfriend’s mother and three kids just for spite. And last week I picked up a drive-by with a dozen spectators on the sidewalk who saw zilch. It ain’t the bright lights of Broadway, but if you’re into making cases in the Bronx, I’ll take the help.”

“Coop may be looking for new digs if she blows her trial.”

“You got that rich boy that hired someone to off his wife, don’t you? Thin ice, Alex. Newspapers read like you’re on thin ice.”

“Stay tuned, Spiro. I’ve still got a few surprises left.”

“I don’t envy you going up against Lem Howell. He wiped the floor with one of the Bronx prosecutors a few weeks ago. Three-month trial and deliberations barely lasted through lunch.”

Spiro unlocked a file cabinet and tossed a couple of manila folders on one of the desks. “Whoever the squad boss was at the time must have dumped this one. Guy who had it wasn’t one of our sharpest. Retired about a year later. Doesn’t look like he did all that much detecting.”

Mike dragged a second chair over and sat beside me. “You know him?”

I started to skim the first few pages of documents.

“Only by reputation,” Spiro said from the doorway. “Looks like he had a confession and all. Perp skipped back to the Dominican Republic, so nobody went after him. Might keep it myself. Sounds like an easy collar. Help yourselves. The Xerox machine is over on our side.”

“Where’s the confession?” Mike asked, sliding the folder over as he picked through it.

“‘Rebecca Hassett. Female Caucasian. Sixteen,’” I said, reading aloud. “‘Found in a drainage ditch off the side of the fairway on the eighth hole of the golf course.’”

“There’s your girl,” Mike said. He studied two photographs that were in a small envelope stapled to the side of the folder, then passed them to me.

The first was from a school yearbook, probably taken just months before her death. Bex was unsmiling, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair — the color of Mike’s — framing her pale face in a layered cut. She looked older than her age, or perhaps it was the makeup she used to achieve that effect. She was rail thin, wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a plain crucifix on a chain around her neck.

“Pretty kid,” I said.

The second picture was one of the Polaroids taken by the detective at the crime scene.

He had obviously stood over the body, shooting down at Bex’s face and upper torso. I would never have recognized the solemn young woman who had earlier posed for the camera at school. Her head was turned to the side, against the ground — the once pale skin cyanotic and the swollen tongue protruding from her mouth. The sweater she was wearing was opened halfway down her chest, and abrasions lined the tip of her chin. Faint oval bruises were apparent on her neck, probably the fingertips of the killer.

“What’s this mark?” I asked Mike, pointing to a pattern within the discolored patch of skin.