Saints Of New York Page 3

  Parrish reached the ninth and was ready to fold. He stayed for a while, leaning against the wall, heart thudding. A black woman opened the door of one of the apartments, looked him up and down like he'd gotten his dick out and shook it at her. She asked nothing, said nothing, closed the door again.

  He tried a deep breath, headed down the hallway, and let himself into Danny Lange's apartment with the key he'd taken from Danny's pocket. Everything else he'd signed over to Evidence Control and left for Crime Scene to pick up.

  The lights were on, and the place smelled ripe.

  She wasn't yet old enough to show any wear on her face, not even In her eyes - eyes that looked back at him with the quiet and hopeful surprise so evident in all unexpected deaths. She was naked but for her underwear, her skin the color of alabaster; white, with that faint shadow of blue that comes a little while after the breathing stops. The thing that really surprised Frank Parrish was that he was not surprised at all. A dead girl on Danny Lange's bed. Just like that. Later, he even remembered he'd said something to her, though he could not recall what it was.

  He pulled up a chair and sat for a while in silence. He guessed she was sixteen, perhaps seventeen. These days it was so hard to tell. Her hair was cut shoulder length and hung down around her face. She was beautiful, no question, and the care and precision With which she had applied red polish to her fingernails and toenails was something to behold. She was almost perfect in every sense, save for the livid bruising around the base of her throat. Confirmation of strangulation came when Parrish knelt on the floor and looked directly into her eyes with his flashlight. The tiny red spots of petechial hemorrhaging were there - present On her eyelids, and also behind her ears.

  He had not seen Danny Lange for a couple of years. Then, the guy had been a junkie and a thief, not a killer. But hell, times had changed. It wasn't that people did worse things than they had fifteen or twenty years before, it was simply that more people did them.

  Parrish called it in. Dispatch said they'd inform the Coroner's Office and Crime Scene Unit. Parrish went around the apartment - the front room, the kitchen, the narrow bathroom, then back to the girl on the bed. There was something strangely familiar about her, and then he realized what it was. She looked like Danny.

  Fifteen minutes later Parrish's suspicions were confirmed. He found a small bundle of pictures - Mom, Danny, the dead girl on the bed. A hundred-to-one she was Danny's baby sister. In the pictures she was no more than ten or eleven, bright like a firework, all smiles and freckles. Danny looked real, like he had yet to hit the dope. Mom and the two kids - a regular snapshot from the family album. Was there such a thing as a regular family, or did shadows lurk behind the front door of every home?

  He pulled a clip-top evidence bag from his jacket pocket and dropped the photos into it. Then he went and sat back in the chair near the bed. He wanted to stay with the girl until everyone else arrived.

  An hour and a half later Parrish was in a window booth in a diner on Joralemon Street near St. Francis College, a plate of food in front of him. He'd managed just a few mouthfuls, but that acid burning was back, somewhere low in the base of his gut. An ulcer perhaps. If he saw a doctor he would be told it was the booze. Cut back on the booze, the guy would say. Man your age should remember that the body hurts faster, heals slower.

  Parrish perused the half-dozen pages of notes he'd taken in Danny Lange's place. There was nothing much of anything. Deputy Coroner had shipped the girl out, tied and tagged, and she would be autopsied tonight or, more likely, tomorrow. Coroner's initial findings at the scene accorded with his own.

  'Thumb prints here and here,' he told Parrish. 'Fingers here and here and here. Marks are darker on the left side of her neck, which means whoever choked her was more than likely a rightie. You can't be absolute on that, but it's a strong possibility.'

  The DC had checked beneath her fingernails for skin, combed her hair and her pubes for foreigns, checked inside her mouth, looked for cuts, bruises, abrasions, bite marks, needle punctures, indications of tape adhesive on the ankles and wrists, rope-burns, signs of restraint, subcutaneous hemorrhaging, external residues of toxic elements, semen, saliva and blood. She was pretty clean.

  'I can do a rape kit, confirm COD, and get word back to you within twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours,' the DC had said. 'Might be able to get a tox done, but that'll take a little longer. At a guess, she's been dead ... I dunno . . . about eight hours, I'd say. Laking indicates that this is the primary. I don't think she was moved.'

  They pressed latex and Parrish left.

  So Parrish went to a diner and had tuna casserole, a bagel, some coffee. The casserole was good but the appetite was gone. He kept thinking back to Eve, to the fact that he couldn't get it up that morning. Seemed he was losing everything by inches. He was on the way out. He needed to take some exercise, cut back on the smokes, the drinks, the hydrogenated fats, the carbs, the shakes and chips and Oreos. He needed a vacation, but he knew he wouldn't take one.

  His father used to say something: What do you want most? And what would you do to get it?

  To this he could now add his own variation: What do you fear most? And what would you do to avoid it?

  Right now, what he most wanted to avoid was another session with the psychotherapist.

  SIX

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

  'Why did you become a cop, Frank?'

  'Why did you become a shrink?'

  'I'm not comfortable with that term.'

  'Like I'm comfortable with being called a cop?'

  'Okay . . . why did you become a police officer?'

  'Why did you become a headpeeper?'

  'Very good, Frank. You seriously want to spend the next month playing games every day?'

  'No, not really. I want to spend the next month solving murders.'

  'Well, be that as it may, Frank, the fact is that unless you continue to see me on a regular basis then you're going to be suspended. That means either you can see me and continue to work, or you can refuse to see me and stay home. Which is it going to be?'

  'The first one.'

  'Good. So - I'm going to put my cards on the table. The particular aspect of therapy that I focus on relates, in the main, to parental relationships. We all know who your father was. We know his record and his achievements, and we know that he was a significant figure in your early life. This is something I want particularly to address with you.'

  'You want me to talk about my father?'

  'I do.'

  'What if I want to talk about my mother?'

  'Then there will be an opportunity to do so but, in the first instance, I will acknowledge you politely and ask you to talk about your father.' 'Seriously?'

  'Seriously.'

  'You don't want to know about my father.'

  'Yes I do, Frank, I want to know everything you remember about him.'

  'And you think this will have some value to me?'

  'I do.'

  'Well I can tell you it won't.'

  'Naturally, I can't force you to talk about him, but I must stress that progress along that line will be my main interest.'

  'And I will acknowledge you politely, and then tell you to go fuck yourself.'

  'Okay, let's start somewhere else. Tell me why you became a police officer?'

  'So I could find out all the things that my father never told me.'

  'Go on.'

  'Okay, Doctor Griffin . . . Marie . . . you don't mind if I call you Marie . . . You really want to know about him?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, my old man was a ballbreaker. He was OCCB.'

  'OCCB?'

  'Organized Crime Control Bureau. He was there when they got The Cigar in 1979.'

  'The Cigar?'

  'A nickname. That's what they called Carmine Galante, 'cause he always had a cigar in his mouth. Even when he was shot dead he had a fucking cigar in his mouth.'

  'Did your father tell you about this?'

/>   'Sure. He told me all sorts of things.'

  'About the work he did against organized crime?'

  'Yes.'

  'You want to tell me about that? Tell me about The Cigar?'

  'What's to tell?'

  'Whatever you like.'

  'I'll tell you something about the famous John Parrish. How about that? How about we go straight to the jugular if that's what you really, really want.'

  'Yes.'

  'My father was a badass, through and through—' 'To you?'

  'To pretty much everyone.'

  'He's dead now, right? When did he die?'

  'Sixteen years ago. End of September 1992.'

  'And your mother?'

  'She died in January of '93.'

  'How was their marriage?'

  'He treated her like a princess. He worshipped her.'

  'You have brothers and sisters?'

  'No.'

  'So did he want you to be a police officer?'

  'He wanted me to stay quiet and keep out of the way.'

  'You don't think he loved you?'

  'He loved me the way all Irish-American fathers love their kids. When I did good he didn't say a word, when I fucked up he gave me a good thrashing.'

  'And if he were alive now, sitting right here, what would you say to him?'

  'I'd tell him to go fuck himself.'

  'Even though he was a decorated officer?'

  'You checked up on him.'

  'Briefly.'

  'Then why give me the impression you don't know who the hell I'm talking about?'

  'I need you to talk, Frank, that's what this is all about.'

  'Oh yeah? If you're gonna put your cards face-up, then put them face-up. Don't bullshit me. Say, "Hey, Frank, your father was some big dick on campus wasn't he? He got Christ-only- knows how many citations, and by the time he was gunned down in the fucking street the Mayor of New York was all set to give him the Congressional Medal of Honor." Tell me that. Tell me what you know, and then I can fill in the gaps. If we're gonna get up close and personal here, Doctor Griffin - Marie - then we might as well be playing in the same freakin' ballpark.'

  'Sure.'

  'Good. So let's start over.'

  'Your father was a decorated cop. He was involved in the Organized Crime Control Bureau and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. I understand that he was instrumental in some of the most effective investigations into corruption in the construction industry, waste haulage, JFK, and the fish and garment businesses—'

  'You sound like you read an obituary on Google.'

  'I did.'

  'Well, whatever you might have read didn't include all the truth. He was a good cop, at least for the most part, and yes, he did all those things they write about. But he did a lot of things that they didn't write about, and maybe they never will. And those things went with him to his grave.'

  'And are they things that you think people need to know?'

  'God no! Let 'em believe what they want to believe. People have got to have faith in something. You can't take it all away otherwise we'd all be neck-high in shit.'

  'Do you want to tell me about some of these things?'

  'Why? You wanna hear old war stories from the day? You wanna hear how my father and his buddies kicked the Mafia out of New York in the Eighties? Or do you wanna hear the truth?'

  'The truth?'

  'Sure, the truth. What you read isn't so much as the tip of the Iceberg as a handful of snowflakes.'

  'He wasn't what they said he was?'

  'My father? Jesus, no. He was anything but.'

  'Do you want to talk about it?'

  'Not today.'

  'Why is that?'

  "Cause I got to go see the Coroner and get an ID on a dead girl I found, and then I gotta figure out what the fuck Danny Lange was doing in an alleyway with a bullet in his throat.'

  'Well, I'm glad you kept the appointment, Frank.'

  'Hell, Doctor Marie, if I gave up on every girl after the first date I'd never get laid.

  '

  SEVEN

  'Rebecca Lange is the name we've got,' Deputy Coroner Stanley Duggan said. 'Crime Scene found her purse in another room, with a video rental store card in it. We traced her on the Child Services system. Picture they had confirmed ID. As best as I can determine, she was killed somewhere between eight and twelve hours before you found her. No secondary laking, so I think she died in that apartment, right there on the bed.'

  They stood on either side of the steel table. Frank Parrish breathed slowly and silently, conscious of such a sense of sadness engendered by this dead girl. By the futility of a wasted life. There was something utterly desperate about her. About the red nails. Her hair. The fact that she seemed perfect and unblemished, except for the neck bruising. Unblemished except for that.

  'Sixteen years old,' Duggan went on. 'Date of birth, March sixth, 1992, COD strangulation. Good possibility he was right- handed, like I said, and he had big hands. There was nothing under her nails, no foreign hairs in her pubic region.'

  'Rape kit?' Parrish asked.

  'She wasn't raped, but she'd had sexual intercourse recently. Found lubricant, spermicide, no semen. Hard to tell precisely when, but there's minimal bruising and no internal abrasions.'

  'Drugs?'

  'Some alcohol. Not a great deal.' Duggan reached in back of the shelves behind him and withdrew a half-gallon glass jar. Three or four inches of brownish, viscous liquid swirled in the bottom. 'This, and a bunch of fries, some hamburger and pickles.'

  Parrish looked back at the girl. He could imagine her alive, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed with color, the wind through that hair.

  Hey, Frank.

  Hey, Rebecca.

  Frank . . . didn't want to mention it, but you don't look so good.

  I'm okay, sweetheart. Now you - you're one to talk.

  I don't have to look good, Frank. I'm dead.

  You wanna tell me about that?

  Shit, you're starting to sound like Doctor Marie.

  You're a funny girl.

  I was, Frank, I was.

  So we're not gonna talk about what happened to you?

  Can't help you, Frank. It's the rules. The dead don't talk to the living. At least not to divulge the secrets.

  'Detective Parrish?'

  Parrish snapped to.

  'Anything else you need me for? I got a half dozen bodies backed up.'

  Parrish smiled. He reached out and touched Rebecca's hand. Red nails. Redder than blood.

  'No,' he said. 'We're all done.'

  'Good enough. I'll zip her up and put her on ice. You got maybe a week, and if there's nothing going on we'll turn her over to State Mortuary. Far as I can see there's no parents, no next of kin.'

  'Aside from the brother, and he's dead too,' Parrish said, and then recalled the woman in the picture. Probably the mother. Where was she while her daughter was lying dead? 'The brother got done yesterday as well. GSW up through the throat into the brain?'

  Duggan nodded in recognition. 'Yeah, yeah, I know the one. Their deaths are connected?'

  'Hard to avoid the coincidence, but right now there's nothing that puts the scenes or the killings together. He died about three O'clock in the afternoon, she died somewhere between eight a.m. and noon on the same day.'

  'You know what they say,' Duggan interjected. 'Sometimes the Obvious—'

  '—occludes the truth, and sometimes things are exactly as they appear.'

  'Well, we'll do tox next, but any other tests you need, you have about a week.'

  'Appreciated,' Parrish said.

  He looked back one last time through the porthole in the door. Such a beautiful girl. Such a painful and tragic waste.

  Walking away from the mortuary, Frank Parrish thought of Doctor Marie Griffin. She was a looker, no question. A little hardness around the eyes, maybe, like she'd seen - or heard - too much that upset her. A Police Department counsellor. Maybe he shouldn't have been
so tough on her. All the psycho-the-rapist shit. He was an asshole sometimes. He knew that.

  He remembered the last counsellor, fellow by the name of Harry something-or-other. He asked the question they all asked.

  What do you see when the lights go down, Frank?

  Darkness.

  But inside the darkness. What do you see there?

  I see your wife, Harry, and she's got my dick in her mouth.

  Always the bravado. Always the wide swing that missed. Truth was, these counsellors had no fucking idea. Hell, he had no idea. Sometimes it took a fifth of Bushmills to put him down. Honestly, it didn't matter whether it was darkness or daybreak, he still saw the dead ones. Sometimes the women. And the teenagers, girls like Rebecca. All gone, smashed to fuck. But mostly it was the children. For the children there was no reason, no rationale, no excuse. And his father was always back of it - drunk-ass son-of-a- bitch that he was. No-one knew the truth about John Parrish. What he did, how he did it, how he covered up all that garbage with a clean white layer of virginal snow. Dead for sixteen years and Frank Parrish still couldn't exorcise the motherfucker. He didn't become a cop because of his father; he became a cop despite him.

  Maybe he would share the stories with Doctor Marie: JFK Airport, the McClellan Committee report, Local 295 and The Teamsters. Jimmy fucking Hoffa and the New York State Investigation Committee. The Gambinos, the Luccheses, the Gottis, the Lufthansa heist in '78, the Kennedy Rackets Investigation, Henry Davidoff, Frank Manzo and the Lucchese capo regime, Paul Vario. It was all there - United States vs. International Brotherhood of Teamsters - and Detective John Parrish was right in there with them, his citations for bravery and exemplary conduct falling out of his ass by the handful. Motherfucker.

  Parrish got off the subway at Hoyt Street and walked to the precinct.

  Homicide Division at the 126th was a blunt and brutal fuck of a thing. Working here, someone once said, is like watching a slow- motion car crash. You know what's gonna happen but you can't stop it, and you sure as shit can't look away.