The Patriots Club (15 page)

23

“Look who’s back,” said Detective Second Grade Mike Melendez as John Franciscus walked into the squad room. “Night shift ain’t enough for you, Johnny? Hey, I got a shift you can take.”

“Short Mike. How you doin’? Tell you the truth, heating’s going berserk at the house,” Franciscus lied, stopping at Melendez’s desk, rapping his knuckles twice as if knocking. “Place is like a sweatbox. Got a guy coming at noon to take a look at it. Just what I need. Put another C-note into the house.”

Melendez stood up from his desk, stretching his six-foot-eight-inch frame, and headed toward the hall. “You doing a four-to-one? Didn’t see you on the roster.”

“No. Figured in the meantime I’d take care of some paperwork, maybe catch a few Z’s in the duty room.”

Melendez gave him a look as if he were certifiable. “Make yourself at home.”

Franciscus walked to the back of the squad room, saying his hellos to the guys. A New York City detective’s day was divided into three shifts: “eight-to-four,” “four-to-one” (which actually ended at midnight), and the night shift. Twice a month you did a “back-to-back,” meaning you did a four-to-one and an eight-to-four the following day. Since most of the cops lived upstate, they’d fitted out the duty room with a couple of cots and plenty of fresh sheets.

The detectives’ squad room for Manhattan North was located on the sixth floor of an unmarked brick building on 114th Street and Broadway. They shared the building with SVU—the special victims unit—child protective services, and the local welfare office. It was a real crowd of jollies from morning till night. But the squad room itself was a haven: large, clean, and heated to a pleasant sixty-six degrees. A row of desks ran down each side of the room, separated by a wide aisle. The floor was old freckled linoleum, but spotless. The walls were standard-issue acoustical tile. A bulletin board covered with shoulder patches from visiting cops hung on one wall. Franciscus preferred it to the pictures that hung across the room. There in a row were the ranking policemen in the New York City Police Department. The big muckety-mucks. The commissioner, his deputy, the chief of police, and the chief of detectives. Once he’d dreamed of having his picture up there too, but things happened.

Just then, Melendez sauntered over.

“Pickup already go through?” Franciscus asked. Every morning at eight, a paddy wagon stopped by to haul the night’s take down to 1 Police Plaza, or “One PP,” for formal booking and arraignment.

“Half hour ago. Your boy went along nice and easy.”

“Still not talking?”

“Not a peep. What’s up with that?”

“Don’t know. I’m heading over to see Vicki. See if she can dig something up for me.”

“You got a name?”

“Not his, unfortunately. Something else the complainant was talking about.”

“Who? Mr. Wall Street?”

Franciscus nodded. “Amazing a kid like that can make it. You see his body art. ‘Never Rat on Friends.’ You love it? I had something nifty like that on my shoulder, they would have kicked my butt out of OCS.”

“Doesn’t matter where you come from anymore. It’s what you can do. How you handle yourself. Look at what Billy did with his GED.”

Melendez’s kid brother, Billy, had worked as a trader with a foreign exchange firm doing business out of Tower 2, eighty-fifth floor. No one above eighty-four made it out. “God bless, Mike.”

“Amen,” said Short Mike Melendez. “Oh, the lieutenant said something about seeing you later. He’s in his office, you feel so inclined.”

“You want to take odds on that?” As union trustee, Franciscus was in constant demand to answer questions about health care, retirement, and the like. The lieutenant had his thirty in, and was set to retire in a month’s time. For weeks, he’d been harping on how to take his pension.

Franciscus had hardly sat down and gotten comfortable when he saw Lieutenant Bob McDermott amble from his office. McDermott raised a hand. “Johnny. A word.”

Franciscus labored to his feet. “You still thinking of taking insurance? Don’t.”

McDermott shook his head and frowned, as if he wasn’t interested in talking about himself. “Got a sec? Need to tell you something.”

“Actually, I’m just on the way to IT. Got a lead I want to check on.”

“It’ll just take a minute.” McDermott put a hand on his shoulder and walked with him toward his office. Given the lieutenant’s easygoing nature, it might as well have been a stickup at gunpoint. McDermott shut the door behind him and walked to his desk. “Got a report here from your doctor.”

“Yeah,” Franciscus said lightly. “Saw him last week.” But inside him, his gut tightened.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Nothing to tell. Just the usual.”

“That’s not what it says here.”

Franciscus waved away the report. “Ah, that’s bullshit,” he said. “Just some minor blockage. He gave me a load of pills. No problem whatsoever.”

“EKGs don’t lie.” McDermott settled his gaze on Franciscus. “Johnny, did you know that you had had a heart attack?”

“It wasn’t a heart attack. It was just a . . .” Franciscus tried to keep up the bluster, but couldn’t quite bring it off. The thing about the lieutenant was that he was truly a good guy, probably better suited to the clergy than the police. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue,” he said, at length. “I just took it for another lousy day. You know . . . the job.”

“Says here you have an eighty percent occlusion of five of your principal arteries. Eighty percent! Johnny, your heart’s a walking time bomb. Why haven’t you scheduled a procedure?”

“A procedure?” Franciscus pulled a face. “Come on. I quit smoking five years back. I haven’t had anything stronger than a beer in ten years. I’ll be okay.”

“Look at you. You’re gray as a ghost,” said McDermott with genuine concern.

“It’s friggin’ winter. What do you expect, George Hamilton? Besides, you don’t look so hot yourself.” Franciscus looked away, feeling miserable for the cheap shot.

McDermott tossed the manila folder that held Franciscus’s future onto his desk. “Sit down.”

Franciscus took a seat. “Look, Bob, let me ex—”

“Please, John.” McDermott rocked in his chair for a moment. The two men exchanged glances. Franciscus shrugged. McDermott said, “I looked at your file. You got thirty-four years in, plus three military. Some people would call that a career. You should be following me out the door.”

“And then what? You got a job lined up at OTB for me, too?”

“I’d be happy to. You know that.”

“Don’t bother. I don’t want to be a fink, looking over a guy’s shoulder making sure he’s not slipping an extra twenty out of the till.”

“Here’s what you do. Have the procedure. File for disability. You retire on four-fifths pay for life. Nontaxable. You know the rules, Johnny. No police officer is allowed to work with a life-threatening condition.”

“This ain’t the balloon the doc was talking about,” said Franciscus. “It’s the friggin’ chain saw right down the middle. No cop’s allowed back on the job after open-heart surgery.”

“You got eighteen months to go before mandatory retirement. What are you trying to do to yourself?” McDermott twirled in his seat and threw a thumb toward the window. “You want to die out there?”

For a few moments, the two sat in silence. Franciscus listened to the sounds of the office: the clicking of the computer keyboards; the sudden, raucous laughs and catcalls; the constant opening and closing of doors. All of it added up to the rattle and hum of a vibrant, necessary organization. He’d always thought that being a detective was the greatest job in the world. God had to have invented it, it was so much fun.

“You’re telling me it’s over,” he said, hardly a whisper.

“You’re sixty-two years old, John. Think of the rest of your life.”

“I got more to give.”

“Of course you do. Give it to your family. Give it to your kids. Your grandkids. I want to see the paperwork requesting surgery by this afternoon. Something happens to you now, with you knowing about your condition and not doing anything about it, you’ll be on your own. Insurance won’t touch you. This can’t wait.”

“I’ve got something else that can’t wait,” said Franciscus. Rising from his chair, he felt more like a hundred than sixty. “Excuse me, Lieutenant.”

McDermott pushed back his chair and pointed a finger at the retreating figure. “I want those forms on my desk by five!”

Franciscus made his way to the rest room and splashed cold water in his face. Yanking a few paper towels free, he dried his cheeks, his forehead, his chin, while studying himself in the mirror. Funny thing was that he couldn’t see the disease that was ravaging his heart, robbing the muscle of its precious blood supply, causing its very walls to decay. He was gray, but then he’d always been that shade. It wasn’t a question of eating badly. If anything, he was too skinny. For six months, he’d been following that low-carb diet, and now, like half the other guys in the squad, he was bone thin, his eyes looking like Super Balls ready to pop out of their sockets. He didn’t even feel too bad, not counting getting a little more winded climbing the stairs than he used to, and the way he sweated like a racehorse at the drop of a hat.

Franciscus chucked the towels into the trash and stood up straight. Shoulders back. Chin up. Like a cadet on graduation day. He felt something in his back pop. Grimacing, he let his shoulders fall where they wanted. He sure as shit wasn’t a cadet anymore. He smiled sadly at his reflection. He’d been lying about not noticing the heart attack. In fact, he’d had two of ’em. Both times, he’d been aware of a sharp, piercing pain radiating from his chest up the side of his neck, extending down his left arm, making his fingers tingle. The pain had been fleeting, lasting maybe a minute or two. He’d written it off as a pinched nerve, or a bout of bursitis. But he’d known. Somewhere inside him a voice had whispered the truth.

He left the rest room and walked to an office down the hall. “You in, Vick?”

A pretty, generously bosomed Hispanic woman answered from her seat at a bank of desktop computers. “Oh, hi, Johnny. Always open for you.”

Vicki Vasquez was the class of the squad. She wasn’t a cop, so to speak, but a data administrator, meaning it was her job to deal with the deluge of paperwork Franciscus and his fellow police officers generated. As usual, she was dressed nicely, wearing gray slacks and a neatly pressed white blouse with a string of pearls at her neck.

“Got a name I need you to run.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Bobby Stillman.”

“One
l
or two?”

“Try either way.” Franciscus pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. He could never get enough of her perfume. Rosewater and almonds. He loved the stuff. There was a time when he and Vicki had been hot for each other, but nothing ever came of it. Franciscus had been married at the time. As much as he wanted to jump Vicki’s bones, he couldn’t do it to his wife and kids.

“I’m not expecting anything. Just a name a guy mentioned last night. Made me curious.”

Part of Vicki’s job was to run prints, B-numbers, and aliases through the mainframe at 1 Police Plaza downtown. People kept talking about installing a system where the detectives could do it on their own, but Franciscus figured that was a long way off. They were still getting used to e-mail.

“Nothing with one
l,
” said Vicki. “I’ll try two.” She typed in the name a second time, chatting all the while. “Did you hear that the lieutenant is retiring? Isn’t that a shame? Maybe it’s time you took his place. Can’t be a first grade forever.”

“Yeah, I heard. Bob’s been chewing my ear off for a month about what kind of pension he should take. Either standard or with—”

“Oh my,” said Vicki Vasquez suddenly, putting a hand to her mouth.

“You got a nibble?”

“Oh my,” she said again. “It’s an alias. Bobby Stillman, a.k.a. Sunshine Awakening, Roberta Stillman, Paulette Dobrianski . . .”

“Sunshine what?” Franciscus scooted closer, his nose up in the air like a bloodhound who’d caught a scent.

“Sunshine Awakening.”

“You mean we’re talking about a woman?”

“Roberta Stillman, yes,” said Vicki Vasquez. “Open warrant in connection with a capital homicide. You really hit the jackpot here.” She read from the screen. “ ‘Sought for questioning in connection with the murders of Officer Brendan O’Neill and Sergeant Samuel K. Shepherd. July 1980.’ ” She spun in her chair, practically pushing her boobs into his face. “Don’t you remember? Bunch of leftover hippies that bombed some computer company in Albany. They called themselves the Free Society. There was a big shoot-out. They killed the officers who’d come to question them. SWAT came and trapped them in this house. The standoff was on TV live. I sat in my kitchen eating ice cream the whole time. I think I gained five pounds.”

“You shittin’ me? Pardon my French. “

Vicki Vasquez shook her head. “Your Bobby Stillman is a cop killer. Reward’s still open. Fifty thousand dollars.”

Franciscus brushed the hair off his forehead. A cop killer with fifty thousand dollars on her head. No kiddin’. He was done feeling like an old man. He was back to twenty with wild hair.

“Thank you, Vick,” he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her forehead. “You’re a beaut!”

24

Bolden threw open the door to Jenny’s classroom without knocking. He stepped inside and met a sea of gaping faces.

“Yes? May I help you?” asked the teacher, a slight Chinese woman.

“Jenny.” Bolden looked around the room. “This is Jenny Dance’s class. Where is she?”

“You are?”

“He’s Thomas,” volunteered one of the students. “He’s her squeeze.”

“Her main man,” came another voice, to a crescendo of chuckles and wisecracks.

“Yo, Tommy, you lookin’ all a mess,” shouted someone else.

Bolden didn’t acknowledge any of them. “I’m Tom Bolden,” he said, stepping inside the classroom. “I need to speak with her. It’s important.”

The teacher took in Bolden’s clothes and motioned for him to join her in the corridor. She shut the door behind them. “Jenny’s not here,” she said, visibly agitated.

“Didn’t she come to work?”

“Yes, she did. But she left the class twenty minutes ago and she hasn’t come back since.”

“She didn’t tell you she was leaving?”

“She didn’t tell anyone. The students said a man came to the door asking for her. She told them to wait quietly while she spoke with him. No one said anything when she didn’t come back in. These kids”—the slight woman shrugged—“well, they’re not exactly scholars. Finally, one of them came and got me.”

“Did they see who it was?”

“Just that he was white. A few thought he was a policeman. Is there anything we should know about? Is something wrong?”

Bolden began to walk back down the hall.

“Is there anything wrong?” the teacher called again.

“Mr. Guilfoyle, I have something that might interest you,” said a nasal, South Asian voice.

Guilfoyle rose from his chair and walked down the stairs to the work area. It was Singh, a young Indian they’d picked up from Bell Labs. “Yes, Mr. Singh?”

“I was doing a cross-check on Bolden’s insurance records to see if he might have visited a pharmacy in the area regularly. I drew a blank, then I checked this Dance woman’s records.” Singh leaned closer to his monitor, his eyes narrowed. “Her medical insurance records indicate that she’s recently had a prescription filled at a pharmacy on Union Square once a month. On Wednesdays, around twelve o’clock. Like today.”

“What’s the prescription for?” asked Guilfoyle.

“Antivert.”

“Never heard of it. Any idea what it’s for?”

“Why yes,” said Singh, swiveling his chair so he faced Guilfoyle. “The active drug is meclizine. It combats nausea. As a matter of fact, my wife used it, too. It’s for morning sickness.”

“Thank you, Mr. Singh.” Guilfoyle crossed the room and put a hand on Hoover’s shoulder. “Bring up the pharmacy, would you?”

A light appeared on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Union Square West.

“Get me the phone number of all restaurants within a four-block radius of that pharmacy. Then, I want you to cross-check them against Bolden’s phone records. Cell, private, and business.”

Hoover pursed his lips and looked over his shoulder at Guilfoyle. “This will take a few minutes.”

“I can wait.”

At Canal Street, Bolden purchased a pint bottle of orange juice from a corner vendor and guzzled it in ten seconds. Tossing the container into a garbage can, he caught sight of something dark and mottled on his sleeve. He looked closer, touching it with his fingers. It was blood. Sol Weiss’s blood. He dropped his hand as if he’d been shocked. He looked down the street as memories of another day flooded his mind. There was blood on his sleeve that day, too.

“Come to Jesus. Come to Jesus.”

Chanting.

Bolden heard it building in his ears, the rhythmic chant of the twenty boys who had encircled him in the basement of Caxton Hall at the Illinois State Home for Boys. The room was large and low-ceilinged, dimly lit, smelling of piss and sweat. It was the room they called the Dungeon, and at some point, the name had simply been shifted to the school.

“Come to Jesus.”

“Are you with me, Bolden?” demanded Coyle, a determined, muscular kid of eighteen who’d lived at the Dungeon for six years. They called him the Reverend.

It was midnight. They had come for him in the dormitory, wrapping a pillowcase around his head, binding his hands and dragging him downstairs to the basement.

“No,” said Bolden. “I’m not.”

Coyle smiled sourly. “Have it your way.”

He came at Bolden, knife held down low, blade turned up, circling him slowly. The vain, sure smile had faded from his sallow face. His eyes were steady. Black marbles, dead as a shark’s.

Bolden threw his hands in front of him and bent low. He’d seen it coming. He’d been at the school a month, and a month was long enough to learn the rules. The rules said that either you went to Coyle and asked to be part of his crew, one of his “choirboys,” or he came to you. Coyle was a bully and nothing more, a big, strong kid, older than his years, who preyed on anyone who was smaller, fatter, weaker, or slower than he was. Bolden didn’t like him. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s choirboy. And he knew that Coyle was scared of him. Coyle never waited a month.

The knife flashed and Bolden jerked backward. He felt cold and emotionless. He’d known how to fight his entire life without ever being taught. He knew that he had to keep moving to draw Coyle in. You never stayed still. Never. He glanced behind him. The circle had tightened. It didn’t matter that he was surrounded. Get out of here and he still had nowhere to run.

“Come to Jesus.”
The voices continued chanting. Coyle’s paean to his righteous Catholic upbringing.

Suddenly, Coyle lunged forward, knife outstretched. Bolden jumped to the side and toward Coyle, turning at the waist, closing the gap between them, the blade slicing his T-shirt. The move caught Coyle off guard. For a moment, he was exposed, arm extended, foot forward, off balance. Bolden lifted his arm and drove his elbow into the larger boy’s neck. At the same time, Coyle twisted his head to look back at him. The blow landed with a sickening crunch. The elbow seemed to bury itself in the outstretched neck. To go down and down forever. Coyle collapsed like a rag doll and lay motionless on the floor. He didn’t get up. He didn’t cry out. He just lay still.

No one else in the room moved either. The chanting stopped. The circle of boys stood frozen.

Bolden kneeled down next to him. “Terry?”

Coyle blinked, his mouth working, but no words came.

“Get a doctor,” said Bolden. “Call Mr. O’Hara.”

Still no one moved.

Coyle’s depthless black eyes were filling with tears, imploring him to do something.

“You’ll be okay,” Bolden said, knowing it was a lie, sensing that something terrible had happened. “Just got the wind knocked out of you, that’s all.”

Coyle’s mouth moved. “Can’t breathe,” he managed in a pained whisper.

Bolden stood and forced his way out of the circle. He ran to the headmaster’s cottage and summoned Mr. O’Hara. When they returned, the other boys were gone. Coyle lay in the center of the floor. He was dead. The blow to the neck had fractured his second vertebrae. He had suffocated to death.

“You killed him,” said O’Hara.

“No, he had a . . .” Bolden looked at Coyle, and then at the rip in his shirt where Coyle had cut him. He ran his hand over his belly and his fingers came away red with blood. His eyes searched the floor for the knife, but the others had taken it. “A knife . . .” he tried to explain, but like Coyle, he could no longer talk.

Bolden blinked and the memory faded. A knife. A gun. A man dead. Coyle. And now Sol Weiss.

Using his BlackBerry, he pulled up Diana Chambers’s company e-mail. He wrote, “Diana, please contact me as soon as possible. Who did this to you? Why? Tom.” It was a futile gesture, but one he had to make.

Bolden replaced the BlackBerry on his belt, and set off down the street. A stiff wind blew intermittently, the gusts driving the drizzle in horizontal sheets that stung his cheeks. He needed a hot bath, and fresh clothes. He weighed going home or to Jenny’s apartment, but decided both were too risky. Any number of interested parties might be waiting for him: the police and Guilfoyle, to name two. He was no longer confident that one was independent of the other.

He lowered his head and turned up the collar of his jacket. If the temperature dropped another degree or two, the sleet would turn to snow. He hurried down the street, avoiding puddles and patches of ice. He tried not to think about Jenny.

First, there was the picture of Diana Chambers. If the photo was genuine—and he believed it was—someone had to have punched her in the face. It was no fairy kiss, either. It was a rock-solid blow. Something “Iron Mike” Tyson might have thrown in his prime.

What did they offer you, Diana?

He’d always picture her as the chirpy Yalie who sang “Boola Boola” to the corporate finance department after he’d suggested everyone do a few tequila slammers to liven up a company-sponsored Circle Line cruise around Manhattan. How had they convinced her to go to the police and incriminate him? Did persuasion have anything to do with it? Or was it coercion, plain and simple? He couldn’t imagine that Diana was thrilled with her new makeup. An orbital fracture, according to Mickey Schiff.

Bolden blew a long breath through his teeth. Someone at the firm was working with Guilfoyle. There was no other way to explain how they had gotten to Diana Chambers so quickly, or how they could have manufactured the flirtatious e-mails and planted them on the company’s mainframe on such short notice. There was too much evidence in too little time. The more he thought about it, the more reckless their actions became.

Bolden tilted his head and looked into the sky. A fat snowflake landed on his nose and he wiped it away. The great reckoning, he was thinking. The scales of fortune tilting against him after a run of good luck. He wasn’t surprised.

As a kid, he’d hardly been an angel, granted. But when he’d been given a chance, he’d grabbed it with both hands. He studied and scrimped and saved. He worked tirelessly. And when success finally arrived, he gave back. First out of duty, then from enjoyment. He’d done nothing to deserve this. He hadn’t stolen a twenty out of his foster father’s money clip, or beaten up the latest bully at his latest school. He hadn’t lied about where he’d been the night before, or how it was that a picture of someone else’s parents had gotten into his wallet.

He had done other things, though. Things that could not be easily forgotten. Things that
he
could not forget, no matter how he tried.

Hurrying his pace, he wondered if retribution had finally found him. If this was just one more disaster in a recurring line, or if it was the final act of abandonment that had begun when he was six, and had held him hostage ever since. Bolden laughed at himself. Bitterly and with disdain. Somewhere in his past, someone had loaded his mind full of Eastern ideas of karma. Of good energy and bad energy. Of chi and the balancing of the scales. It was all nonsense. The past. The future. There was only now.

Bolden never looked back.