A Killing Night (9 page)

CHAPTER 9

I
was on the beach with a borrowed straw hat on my head and sitting under a wide umbrella. The breeze had gone flat and the ocean surface was calm and rolling like the slow swelling hide of some big sleeping animal.

I’d brought two sand chairs down after calling Richards and arranging to meet her here. My skull was still throbbing. I’d washed the blood out of my hair in the shower and poured peroxide on the wound last night. My attempt at a bandage came off during a twisting, turning sleep so I elected to leave it open to the sea air. A sure cure for open cuts, according to all those grandmothers who never lived near the ocean.

I was reading more of Adams’s years in France when I heard her sharp whistle. I turned and Richards was up on the bulkhead, two fingers pronged into her mouth, the other hand shading her eyes against the morning sun. She waved me up but I shook my head and waved her down. Then I watched all her body language of frustration as she took off her business pumps and made her way down the wooden stairs in her dark slacks. She’d be pissed. But I never liked being called to someone’s side like a dog to its master. She knew that, didn’t she?

“Good morning,” I said. “Too nice out here to resist. Here, I brought you down a chair.”

If she was angry, she swallowed it and sat down in the low chair in the shade, taking obvious care to brush away any sand.

“How’s the head?”

“Only hurts when I laugh.” I tapped the straw hat and smiled.

“Well. Your carjackers aren’t laughing. Sergeant Rhodes tells me one guy had to have his jaw wired and the other has four broken ribs.”

There was no question in the statement. So I didn’t reply.

“He says he’s doubtful that you would be able to cause such damage alone, despite your extensive law enforcement background.”

It still wasn’t a question.

“Neither one of these gentlemen wanted to bring charges against you and refused to give statements. I told Rhodes that you’d probably do the same.”

She was quiet and might have been listening to the brush of water on sand but I doubted it.

“I already gave him a statement,” I said.

“Right. That you surprised them while they were breaking into your truck and they attacked you. You alone.”

This time she waited me out. I knew what she wanted.

“I talked with O’Shea in Archie’s,” I said.

“And?”

“He was hard to read. It’s been a while,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “He admits he hops a lot of local bars. He admits he knew Amy Strausshiem. He went out with her. And he has no idea where she is.”

“He brought it up?”

“Sherry, he saw me coming a mile away,” I said. “Just like he made you.”

She looked, out at the water, seeing some vision stuck in her head, thinking.

“I know you must have interviewed other bartenders, managers? Did they give you anything on O’Shea? Or anybody else you looked at?” I said

“Christ, Max. As soon as you put the idea of a serial abductor in their heads they start thinking gargoyle. Who’s the ugliest, creepiest guy in the room,” she said. “This generation doesn’t even know who Ted Bundy was.”

But they do know about the Gainesville Killer who slaughtered three University of Florida coeds and took out a boyfriend in the process. Give them some credit, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.

“The guy that looks like Freddie Kruger isn’t going to get anywhere close to these women,” she said.

I’d worked with detectives who focused on their convictions before, refused to back up and look wide.

“Look,” I said. “O’Shea said he dated lots of women. You talk to any of them?”

“A few.”

“He scare them?”

“No. They went out with him, had a good time on a date or two. Some he stayed friends with. Some he never called back.”

I concentrated on not even moving my chin. She was watching for “I told you so.”

“Maybe they weren’t what he was after,” she finally said.

“The missing girls have anything else in common?” I said. “Physically? Emotionally? Were they addicts?”

“No, goddammit! They were smart, lonely women who didn’t have close families and were bartenders, Max.”

I shut up and let her fume. She’d probably done this same dance with her supervisors half a dozen times. I could tell she was out there on her own on this one, obsessed. Maybe too much.

“The guy takes advantage of that loneliness, Max. The woman behind the bar is the one who runs the room and all the men who want a drink and a peek at her ass,” she said and I was getting uncomfortable with the way she was staring out at the sea. “I see him as a guy who doesn’t act like the others. He’s smart. It’s like a challenge to him. He’s nonthreatening, likable even. He brings their guard down somehow. Just like O’Shea.”

“And then what?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Kills them for the thrill and disposes of their bodies without a trace? That’s kind of Jekyll and Hyde,” I said.

“Are you denying that O’Shea is a violent man, Max?” she said. “You saw him. You saw him boot stomp that guy last night. That was the two of you in the street, wasn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

“You wouldn’t cripple a man like that, Max.”

“All right,” I finally said, turning my face to the water. “The guy’s got issues.”

I knew it was a bad choice of words when I heard it come out of my mouth.

“Issues? He’s got issues?” She stood up. “What? Are you defending him now? You guys have a few beers, relive old times and then go out and kick some ass together and become brothers in arms all of a sudden?”

I stayed in my chair, knew I hadn’t played it well.

“He knows you’re after him, Sherry,” I said quietly.

“I
am
after him, Freeman. And whether you help or not, I’ll still be after him.”

It is hard to storm away from someone in soft sand. But Richards was a woman with talent and she did it effectively.

I stayed on the beach for an hour after she left, watching people walk the water’s edge. The old shell hunter staring down into the sand who made a pouch for her collection in the folds of her long dress. The jogger with curls of gray hair on his chest and headphones clipped over his ears and his mouth moving to a song only he could hear. A young woman walking alone, her narrow shoulders down and her sunglasses pointed out at middle distance, not in a hurry, not with a purpose, her lips in a tight seam. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

I could sit here and let the blue drain out of the sky and the water. I could let Sherry Richards chase her obsession alone. I could let a man who had once saved me from a bullet twist in the wind. I could let the unknown fates of a number of innocent women remain just that, unknown. I could just listen, “no different than anybody else had done,” Richards had said. Even though I couldn’t change the world, “it’s worth it to k-keep trying,” Billy had said. But all the roads in this case led back to Philadelphia, a place I had run from long ago.

I sat and listened to the surf whisper and watched the light go out of the sky until the horizon disappeared. Then I got up and went into the bungalow and made some long-distance calls to voices I had not heard in years.

CHAPTER 10

I
changed my plans the minute I walked out of the terminal of the Philadelphia International Airport. I’d have to stop somewhere to buy a coat and at least another pair of socks. I was freezing my ass.

The sky was solid gray and sat low over the city like a dirty tin bowl and I had to search to find the wiper knob on the rental car to clear the cold drizzle off the windshield. I got on Penrose Avenue and coming over the George Platt Bridge I could both see and smell the smoke and steam coming up out of the refineries below. I tuned the radio to KYW and listened to that familiar sound of a newswire machine chinking in the background and the patter of a deep-voiced announcer accompanying working folks through their day. I had spent my entire life in an intimate dance with this place. I should not have been surprised by the way I remembered the steps, both the easy ones and the moves that were ankle breakers, but I was.

I turned up Broad Street and saw both the day Tug McGraw led a World Series parade and the night I killed a maniac in an abandoned subway tunnel just below. Farther north I passed South Philly High and in my head found the smell of fresh-cut grass on the football field and three blocks later the odor of chemotherapy drugs dripping into my mother’s veins at St. Agnes Medical Center.

A horn blasted behind me and a taxi driver was tossing his hand up at the now green light. I ignored my instinct to flip him off and when I heard an advertisement for a coat sale at Krass Brothers I turned east and moved on into the old neighborhood. The years in Florida had thinned my blood if not my memories. February in Fort Lauderdale is eighty degrees and sun. I needed to get warm and I had work to do.

Before I’d left Florida I told Billy about my confrontation with Bat Man and his unfortunate sidekick and the warning about union organizing and the cruise ship workers. He didn’t seem concerned. I told him I didn’t have their names yet and he said he’d get them off the public records on the police run sheets and incident reports and then check them out.

When I’d told him I was going to Philadelphia the thought had silenced him in a way I’d never seen before. Billy is never stunned, by calamity or foolishness or the myriad whims of humans. He stared into my eyes as if he were looking for some truth in them and then quickly gathered himself.

“I w-will stay in closer contact with Mr. Colon,” he said. “You will do, my friend, what you need to do.”

He then helped me find a series of electronic clippings from the
Philadelphia Daily News
and the
Inquirer
databases on the disappearance of Faith Hamlin and the subsequent investigation of five police officers. Colin’s name and suspicion were prominent, especially after the others confessed and supposedly came clean. I thought I recognized two of the other names but couldn’t be sure.

Billy also found the present name and address of O’Shea’s ex- wife, through the divorce records he got from an attorney contact in Philly. With a name and date of birth, we found her address in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, across the river from the city. Then I called my uncle Keith. He was still a sergeant in the Eighteenth District and he was understandably shocked to hear from me.

“Jesus Christ, Maxey. Is that you? Where the hell are you, boy? You in trouble? Christ, we thought you fell off the fuckin’ edge of the world. You coming to town? You’re coming over to the house then, right? No. No. Better you come over to McLaughlin’s first. You know your aunt. We’ll have a couple before that whole scene. You know she still goes to visit that church your mother turned to in those last years and she says feels her sister there. Damn, Maxey, it’s good to hear your voice, boy.”

I hadn’t managed ten words. When he finally took a breath I told him I was coming in on business. I was working for a lawyer in Florida and did he know anyone in internal affairs that might help me out?

“IAD and lawyers, Maxey?” I could see him shaking his old Scottish head. “The devil and his henchmen. But for you, son, we can find someone maybe we can trust.”

I had planned to go straight to my uncle’s but on South Street I stopped at Krass Brothers. When I stepped out into a puddle of slush in my Docksides, I made a mental note to hit the Army/Navy on Tasker for some boots. In the store the terse, clipped speech—“Whattaya, forty-two long?”—caught me off guard at first. South Florida isn’t exactly Southern, but I hadn’t realized how much of my own whipcrack city-speak I’d lost. When I told the guy, “Something warm but I’m not going skiing,” he tried to get me into a knee- length cashmere. When I told him I wasn’t working for the stock exchange he pushed a three-quarter leather on me.

“Hey, I’m takin’ my pops to the Flyers’ game here!” I said, trying to regain a bit of Philly speak.

He found me a tan, goose down waist-length with cloth elastic cuffs. I thanked him very much.

“Yo, I thought you was just offen’ your yacht or somethin’,” he said, looking without shame at my shoes.

I got a pair of lace-up work boots on Tasker and then drove through the neighborhood.

The streets seemed too narrow, the stoplights too frequent. People on the sidewalks had their heads down in the sleet, not that I would recognize anyone. On Tenth I got caught behind some joker double-parked but I just sat there five doors down from the house I grew up in the next block past Snyder. I waited, looking at the old stoops and the front window of the house where a kid I knew named Fran Leary used to live. It was still ringed in Christmas lights. A young guy wearing the same leather coat I’d just turned down came out of a doorway and waved at me before he got in to the double- parked car and pulled away.

I moved up until I could see the cut-stone steps and the wrought iron rail that led up to the house I grew up in. The second-floor window that looked out on the street was to my room, where I had spent nights reading books and fantasizing about Annette the cheerleader and listening to the Allman Brothers Band on a tinny old record player. It was also the place where I cowered and tried to ignore the sound of my father’s heavy, drunken steps and the sharp snap of a backhand and the muffled protests of my mother. I was one hundred feet away but did not want to see my front door and feel the ugly memories that I’d closed behind it. I had seen both of my parents die in that house. My father, a broken and shamed former cop, fell to a slow and deserved poisoning. My mother, who came home from the hospital to die, convinced that God had filled the hole left by her treachery with cancer.

I turned east instead and then up Fifth and past South Street to the Gaskill House, a bed and breakfast where I’d reserved a room. The place was a redone coach house built in 1828 just a block from Headhouse Square. The manager of the Gaskill had befriended me when I was walking a beat there by showing up with hot coffee at eleven o’clock each night at the corner of Third. His name was Guy and now, years later, he met me at the door with a handshake and what may have been the same huge ceramic-and-steel coffee cup.

He was envious of my winter tan and Florida address. I was, as always, envious of his collections of antiques and the stone and wood eat-in kitchen down on the basement level of the house.

“Your friend Mr. Manchester called and faxed three pages for you, Max,” Guy said. “I put them in an envelope on your bed upstairs. We got a cancellation so I’ve given you the blue room at the top.

“Remember, breakfast eight to ten,” he said as I climbed the stairs.

The room was done in Colonial-era furniture, poster bed, writing table, a small fireplace on the west wall. The thick comforter and window treatments were blue and muted yellows and dark burgundy, colors you rarely saw in Florida. I pulled out some paperwork and sat at the desk and called Colin O’Shea’s ex-wife. I’d put off contacting her until I got here, not wanting to give her an easy excuse to dismiss me. She was now listed as Janice Mott. It was past five when I called and introduced myself as a private investigator from Florida, which at least keeps people on the line if only for the sake of curiosity.

“I was a Philadelphia officer with your ex-husband, Colin. We actually grew up close to each other in South Philly,” I said, a dose of familiarity.

“If Colin has debts, Mr. Freeman, I have no idea where he is. I haven’t seen him in years,” she said.

I could hear kids in the background. I thought I was going to lose her.

“No, ma’am. I know where he is. I just saw him two days ago,” I said quickly, taking a chance, a gamble, that she would care.

She lowered her voice.

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“No, Mrs. Mott. He’s all right. He kind of got jammed up down in Florida and I’m, uh, trying to find out more about his, uh, domestic background.”

Once again, I knew I’d used the wrong wording.

“He never hit me, Mr. Freeman,” she said, the words now almost a whisper.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mott, he…”

“Colin never physically abused me when we were married,” she said.

The statement held both a sense of strength and apology.

“I know they called it domestic abuse, but it wasn’t physical.” She hesitated. “It was a way out.”

A way out, I thought. She’d already left him by the time O’Shea got caught up in the disappearance of Faith Hamlin.

“I, uh, really don’t know anything about the details of your past relationship, Mrs. Mott,” I said. “But honestly, that is the area I’m trying to explore,” I said.

“To help him or hurt him, Mr. Freeman?”

She was smart and blunt. And she would see right through any bullshit answer I might toss her.

“Honestly, I don’t know, Mrs. Mott,” I said, and waited.

“Colin does have that effect, doesn’t he?” she said.

“Confusion,” she answered her own question. “It’s his stock-in-trade.”

She agreed to meet with me, in a public place. Her son had an ice hockey game at three the next day. Meet her there, with identification, and we could talk. No promises.

I pulled around to the back of McLaughlin’s at eight. It was already dark and I had missed the transition from daylight. There was no fade of color, no blue to disappear, no rose-tinged cloud of sunset. The gray had simply turned a deeper gray and then been overtaken by the dusty glow of city light. The sleet had turned to light snow and up in the high streetlights it drifted down and swirled in whatever wind current caught it off the buildings. It turned to slush on contact with the concrete and car tires slashed through it on the street. I was hatless and shivered and then heard the music in McLaughlin’s buzz against the window and went inside.

The place was full and conversation was battling with an Irish melody on the speakers, neither winning. For someone used to the natural humidity of the subtropics, the hot, dry air was enough to make you want to drink just to dehydrate. It was a cop bar, dominated by clean-shaven faces, working men’s clothing, the pre-game show to the 76ers game, an appropriate locker room level of loud voices and the guffaws of a joke badly told. The few women present were older wives and the young ones’ impressionable girlfriends.

I spotted my uncle at a table in the back. He was flanked by a couple of cronies his own age. As I worked my way back I saw his eyes pick me up halfway and make a decision before the smile started. He was out of his chair, rattling the pitcher and glasses on the table with his girth before I reached him.

“Christ in heaven, Maxey boy,” he said, embracing me with his stovepipe arms and wrapping me in the smell of cigar smoke and Old Spice aftershave.

“You are as skinny as a fuckin’ sapling, boy,” he said, standing back at arm’s length. “And dark as a goddamn field hand.” A few heads turned, but not for more than a look. My uncle was an old- timer. Gray-haired and thirty years with the department, his language and his political incorrectness was grandfathered in. He introduced me to his friends, both with over twenty years themselves, and we sat. There was a pitcher of beer on the table with a frozen bag of ice floating in it. An open flask of what I knew was Uncle Keith’s special blend of Scotch stood as its companion. He poured shots all around and raised his own for a toast.

“To the wayward son, what took the money and run,” he announced with a wink.

“Aye,” said the others, and we drank.

For the next three hours we drank and they told old stories. Carefully and with loyalty to my uncle no mention was made of my father, the legendary one whose death would always remain a secret of the brotherhood of the blue. We drank and I described only the beauties of Florida, and their eyes went glassy with reverence of a dream of golf and sun. We drank and my uncle exhorted me to show the bullet wound scar in my neck and they toasted Mother Mary for bad aim and mercy. We drank and they bitched about pensions and union stewards and the job in general and when I found an opening and asked Keith about an IAD contact they stopped drinking.

“We got a guy there, I called and gave him a heads-up, Maxey,” my uncle said. “His name is Fried. He got attached over there a few years back after blowing out his hip in a pileup with a fire truck responding. He was with the detective squad up in East Kensington. He’ll give you what he can.”

I nodded my head and watched the others doing the same, avoiding my eyes. I could feel the vacuum at the table.

“IAD and lawyers, Max,” he said, echoing his words on the phone from Florida. “Can I ask what it is you’re into, son?”

We leaned our heads in together and the others tried unsuccessfully to pay no attention.

“I’m actually checking in on a former cop, a guy from my rookie class, Colin O’Shea, from the neighborhood,” I said. “Any recollection?”

Since I was a pissant kid I’d known my uncle’s brilliance for names and descriptions. He was the human equivalent to getting Googled. When he hesitated I knew it wasn’t because he was stumped. He was considering his answer as he looked around the table and caught the glances of his crew.

“That would be the O’Shea of the Faith Hamlin situation?” he said, now watching my eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “I did some research.”