A Dark and Broken Heart
Read A Dark and Broken Heart Online
Authors: R.J. Ellory
Contents
50. The House on Highland Avenue
Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
Dorothy Allison
Bastard Out of Carolina
T
he reason Vincent Madigan didn’t kill the guy was because the guy looked like Tom Waits. Okay, he was Polish and his name was Bernie Tomczak, but he still looked like Tom Waits. Like Tom Waits did some Eastern European girl and this A-hole was the result. Not only that, but Bernie didn’t squeal or cry or plead for his life. None of the regular drama. And Bernie didn’t try to be a hero either. He just took the beating, and somewhere after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time that Madigan smacked him there was a grudging respect coming in out of left field. Madigan could go with that. He could run most of the way to anyplace with that. And amid all the blood and all the grunting and the sound of teeth breaking or whatever was going on, Madigan wondered if Bernie wasn’t the toughest guy he’d ever . . . Ever what?
Madigan hit Bernie again, and whatever thought might have been there just disappeared. That always happened with bad coke and Jack Daniel’s. And then Madigan stepped back and felt this rush of something in his chest, and his chest was thin glass like a lightbulb, and he figured if someone hit him back he would just shatter like . . . like . . . like something that shatters, and the feeling in his chest became nausea, and then he started retching and then Bernie fell down and there was a smile on his face, and that smile accompanied the realization that Madigan didn’t have the will or the strength to hit him again.
“Jesus, Vincent,” Bernie said through his broken and bloody teeth.
“You shut the hell up,” Madigan replied. “Pay Sandià the money you owe him or I’m gonna come back and kill you.”
Bernie Tomczak tried to smile. It didn’t pan out and he just looked worse. “Vincent, seriously . . . I’m gonna pay the guy when I’ve got the money. But however long that takes, you ain’t gonna kill me. If you kill me then no one gets nothing . . .”
“Screw you,” Madigan replied.
A few minutes later Madigan got himself together, walked back down the alley, and got in his car. Then he drove away, and he figured if a motorcycle cop pulled him over for weaving back and forth all over the road, he would have to shoot the cop in the head and that would be another story.
Cars went by on all sides, and then he thought about his wife. The second one. Thought about the last time he’d seen her. Standing there in the doorway with that expression on her face. She had that look in her eyes, the look that told Madigan she wasn’t alone. He wondered who was in the apartment, what was his name, and most of all he wondered what the guy looked like. And she said,
Hey, Madigan
. . . Her tone was all sassy and she was half-smiling like she knew she was being a bitch and she just loved it. Hey,
Madigan, how goes it?
And he remembered when he met her and how she was just working so hard to be someone, to be
anyone
, and how that naïveté and innocence had seemed so appealing. And now she had half his money and half his balls and half his everything. And then he remembered the other one, the wife before that. She had the other half of every-damned-thing, and that was a different story as well. And Madigan? He had nothing. Like he’d started with nothing and had most of it left. And it was all because of her. Because of both of them. All of them. All the same. And Jesus Christ, he felt like crap.
A block and a half into the Bowery and Madigan couldn’t see the road anymore. He pulled over and got out and tried to stand upright, but it was no good. He got in the backseat and lay down, but the roof looked like it was coming down to crush him to death. So he sat up again, and that’s when he knew he was maybe going to be sick some more.
He got out and leaned against a streetlight, and then he heaved dry noise into the gutter. Some woman looked at him like he was a piece of garbage, and he told her, “Go to hell, lady,” and that shut her up. She hurried away and didn’t turn back. He looked up and saw the facade of the Rodeo Bar, and he remembered that place. Inside they had a bar made out of a bus. He saw some girl singer there a while back. Sexy. Had a smoky voice like Billie Holiday. Ingrid something. Italian-sounding name. Ingrid Lucia. That was it. Where the hell was he now? Murray Hill?
After a little while he felt better and he reckoned he could drive a straight line to pretty much anyplace. He got in the car and pulled away from the curb, and he went a good way up the street. Then
he remembered where he was going and made the turn. Places to go. People to see. Things to do. Important things. Most things in life are bullshit. Everything good is hiding. You got to look for it a long time, and when you find it you’re never certain it was exactly what you were looking for. You only know it’s worth something when it’s gone. Seems like life is there solely to teach you about all the ways you can hurt.
Six blocks and Madigan was there. There was a taste of coke in a twist of paper in the dash, and he hunted around and found it. Then he dabbed his finger moist, picked up most of it, and rubbed it in his gums. He waited a moment, and then he felt better—like he was coming alive again—and he opened the car door, got out, went up to the warehouse door and knocked, and they opened up and let him in.
“Hey, Groucho,” Chico said.
Madigan nodded. “Everyone here?”
“Harpo is; Zeppo ain’t. He called. Be here in five.”
“Good ’nough,” Madigan replied, and he took off his jacket and walked across to where Harpo was waiting to go over everything again in the most detailed detail imaginable. That was the way it had to be. Details were everything. The devil was in the detail.
“Groucho,” he said.
“Harpo,” Madigan replied.
Madigan knew their names. All three of them. They didn’t know his. He knew everything about them. They knew nothing in return. This was the upper hand, the royal flush against a pair of jacks, a three of aces against a something of whatever else. They looked the way such people always looked. They spent their time in the joint just working out, putting on muscle, and once they were out they let it go. They smoked too much, drank too much, maintained a minimal level of personal hygiene. They would all go unnoticed in a crowd—regular height, dark-haired, clean-shaven, but who they really were was in their eyes.
Madigan sat in the chair, lit a cigarette, and closed his eyes for a moment. Harpo said, “You okay, man?” Madigan looked up and smiled. “I wanna do this thing,” he said.
“Tomorrow is the day,” Harpo said.
“I know tomorrow is the day,” Madigan replied. “But I wanna do the thing now. This waiting bullshit is . . . is—”
“Bullshit?” Harpo ventured.
Madigan smiled. “Bullshit is what it is,” he said. He smoked his
cigarette and waited for Zeppo—aka Laurence Fulton, an ugly son of a bitch who did three-to-five upstate for a GTA beef, another term sometime before that, now had another thing pending with the DA for accomplice to armed robbery; a man with more balls than sense, a raw red fist of a temper. Most important of all was the rape charge. The rape charge that never stuck. His word against that of a thirteen-year-old Hispanic girl out of East Harlem. Fulton was always late. Always apologetic.
My old lady
this,
My old lady
that. More crap from people who’d had a lifetime’s experience of talking crap. Hell, what did they think? That other folks had a never-ending appetite for it?
Madigan dropped his cigarette on the floor. He put it out with his heel and then put the butt in his jacket pocket. Leave nothing behind. No prints, no beer cans, no food wrappers, nothing. We were here, and then we were gone. Gone like ghosts. And this place was so damned far from his own haunts that they could look for months and find nothing. Like looking for a handful of air in a paper bag; you knew it was in there, but you just couldn’t see it.
Fulton arrived. He started up about something-or-other, everything tagged with a sad apology, but Madigan didn’t listen. The four of them sat around the plain deal table in the middle of the empty warehouse, and they got out the plan of the house, the plan of the street, the plan of the park and the surrounding block. Then they went through it one more time, and then another time for good luck, and Madigan believed they’d got it enough for him to call it a day.
He looked at the three of them—Laurence Fulton, Chuck Williams, Bobby Landry. Print their sheets in one go and you could wallpaper a duplex. Fulton and Landry were two strikes down, Williams was a one-time deal. All three of them—among so many other things—were sex offenders, the kind that slid like oil off glass. Nothing ever stuck. Those cases were the hardest to prosecute, the easiest to defend. These three were somewhere out beyond the lower levels, the bottom-feeders. That’s why he used them. If they wound up dead then it was no one’s loss, everyone’s gain. And Madigan himself? He had never been inside, intended to keep it that way. If he went inside, knowing what he knew, he was dead, no question. Fulton and Landry were both lifers if they were pinched, though Fulton was in the end zone compared to Landry. Landry was dangerous, unpredictable, even psychotic, but Fulton? Fulton was an out-and-out sociopath. Hell, they were all lifers if
this thing went the wrong way. This was the kind of deal where a good number of people were going to die on the scene. They had a matter of minutes for the in and out. Soon as there was gunplay there could be soldiers running from all quarters. Silencers were out of the question, even homemade ones. Hit like this it was best to go in noisy. The shock factor played in your favor. At least there would be no police, not for this gig. Not until later. But hell, anyone who figured
any
plan was a cert was dumber than a box of sand. That was the trick: Anticipate every which it could go wrong, and you upped the odds on it going right. And if the thing didn’t go down, then Madigan knew his whole sorry life would be history anyway. The heist was a straight fifty grand apiece, maybe seventy-five. The moment they got inside they had to be all over that money like stink on shit. If the money made it out the back door, they were screwed. That’s why timing was of the essence. This was the deal. Mess this up and it got deeper than a hole through the bottom of hell. The better part of a quarter mill was going into a house up near First and Paladino at ten in the a.m., Tuesday the twelfth, and Vincent Madigan, Laurence Fulton, Chuck Williams, and Bobby Landry would be in for that money at 10:05. At 10:10 they had to be out of there and running. Madigan needed the money for the lawyers. He owed more than twenty in alimony alone. And then there was Sandià himself. That was the bitterest irony of all. He could give the lawyers ten and keep them in the woods for a few more weeks, but Sandià needed everything else. That was where his cut needed to go. Forty grand toward a seventy-five-grand debt. Mr. Sandià—loan shark, bookie, dealer, pimp, King of East Harlem, and all-round Man of the Year. Like the Bernie Tomczak gig that morning—chasing up Mr. Sandià’s other debtors bought Madigan time, but never a discount. And if the house job came back to him, then Madigan was in deeper than he could ever comprehend. He could imagine the meeting that would take place between him and Sandià.
Vincent . . . I know it was you. I have the evidence here. You killed my people and you stole my money to pay your debt to me. You paid me back with my own money. And don’t insult me by telling me you didn’t. Tell me the truth and I’ll kill you quickly. Lie to me and I will have someone torture you for a month
.