Where It Hurts (24 page)

(SUNDAY, EARLY MORNING)

I
liked the lobby late at night or very early in the morning. It was a place I had spent a lot of time in over the last year. Between runs to the station and the airport, it was usually where I sat reading those left-behind and forgotten novels. I didn’t usually go back up to my room. I didn’t like doing that. When I was at work, I was at work. Besides, my room could get awfully claustrophobic. My room, that’s where and when John would come back to me. The space of the lobby let me breathe easier. And I could talk to Slava or whoever was working the night registration desk. But reading a guest’s forgotten novel wasn’t why I was in the lobby at that hour.

When Jimmy Regan and Bill showed up, I’d been on my way down to the business center to do some nosing around about the Alison St. Jean case. I had tried to get a turn at one of our two computers several times during the evening, but with the hotel full and everyone shuffling to make new travel plans, there was actually a line out the door of the business center for several hours. So I spent some time in the club, lending a hand. The crowd was bigger than I expected it would be and, because so many of the people at the club had rooms at the hotel for the night, they drank way more than the regulars dared. The bar got a hundred dollars’
worth of my money, too. That just about covered the cost of Bill’s Chianti, my beer, and Jimmy Regan’s thirst for fine Irish whiskey. Another twenty went for their bill and tip to the coffee shop.

Part of me hoped Casey would show up and that I’d be able to explain more fully why I hadn’t been attentive enough. Part of me wished she would have showed so that I might talk her into my bed. Both of those parts of me were disappointed, probably for the better. There was no denying a woman like Casey would be well rid of me whether the sex was good between us or not. I was damaged goods, a dented can. Like I’d said to her, I was who I was, not who she had wanted me to be.

Afterward, when the crowd thinned out, I went up to my room, watched
SportsCenter
and slept for a few hours. Then, sometime around three, I made myself coffee with the one-cup machine in my room—coffee creamer, yuck!—and wandered back down to the lobby. The business center was finally empty, though it did look as if a bomb had hit it. At least one of the computers was still in working order. If I wasn’t such a low-tech kind of guy, I might have downloaded the app for how to do this on my smartphone.

I got several pages of hits even before I finished typing Alison St. Jean’s name into the search engine. As I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I went through the first couple of hits very carefully. Mostly they were newspaper stories recounting the very early stages of the investigation when it was believed Alison had been the victim of a sexual predator. Then, after the autopsy had been performed and the motive for Alison’s death became murkier, the reporting got less feverish. The area residents who consented to be quoted expressed an odd sense of relief. At least the killer, whoever he was, wasn’t a sexual predator. That was something to hang on to, wasn’t it? When the pins get knocked out from under you, you look for anything to hang on to. Anything. Things didn’t get really ugly until the deeper truth of what happened to Alison St. Jean came to light, when it was discovered that it was a group of neighborhood girls who had done this terrible thing and that two of
her killers had babysat Alison. Yet as chilling and horrifying as it was, none of it rang any bells for me in terms of the Delcamino homicides.

Halfway down the page, though, I found a site that bore a newspaper headline, and that headline rang the bells loudly and rattled my memory, all right. The headline read: “Hero Cop Speaks for Murdered Girl.” That hero cop’s name was James Regan. And when I clicked on the site, the full article appeared. There, side by side, were grainy black-and-white photos of Alison St. Jean and a very much younger Jimmy Regan in uniform. Although the events happened over twenty-five years ago, just seeing the headline and those photos brought most of it back for me.

The story goes that Regan, whose wife had recently given birth to a baby girl, and another uniform from the Fourth had worked off the clock for two weeks straight, talking to hundreds of people who lived in the vicinity of Brady Park and Millers Pond. Then they finally found an older gentleman who remembered seeing a girl who fit Alison’s description with a pack of older girls heading toward the park. Not only did he recall seeing a girl who resembled Alison with those girls, but he also remembered some of the costumes those older girls were wearing. It was easy police work from there, tracking down the girls who had worn those particular costumes. Once one of them talked, they were all finished. On the next page of hits was a piece detailing the promotion to detective of hero cop Jimmy Regan. The piece also mentioned the promotion of Neil Furlong to detective. Buried deep in the body of the story were a few lines about how Furlong had been a help to Regan in his quest to bring Alison St. Jean’s killer or killers to justice.

Neil Furlong. Neil Furlong.
I repeated the name to myself over and over again. He had been a detective in the Second before I got on the job. I didn’t know him more than to nod at, and he’d been transferred out of the Second before I’d done my first year. He wasn’t exactly a friendly guy—pretty sour-faced and bitter, was my recollection—but there was something else about him that I should have remembered. I didn’t have to strain very hard because the Internet made refreshing
one’s memory pretty damned easy. When I typed his name into Google, I got several hits. Not nearly as many as I had for Alison St. Jean, but enough for my purposes.

In 1994, Neil Furlong had been caught in an Internal Affairs Bureau sting involving a joint narcotics/vice task force that had been set up to explore the long-rumored linkage between prostitution and drug distribution in Nassau and Suffolk counties. It didn’t take long for a few of the detectives involved to fall prey to the obvious temptations of that line of work. And it took even less time for IAB to jump on the accusations made against the task force detectives. Furlong escaped criminal prosecution, but he hadn’t escaped with much else. He lost his job and his pension.

When I walked out of the business center, I noticed there was a stir of activity in the lobby and that the sun had risen, if only barely. I smelled that the coffee shop was open and made my way there. I wanted to get some food in me and a few more hours of sleep behind me before I went digging into the past.

(SUNDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON)

T
he roads were mostly clear as I drove north to the LIE, then east toward Mastic, but the tracking device that had been planted under my front passenger seat wasn’t coming along for the ride. I’d thrown it in a sewer. The only place it would lead anyone was to a water treatment plant. I didn’t want any company with me where I was going. I made sure to check my mirrors frequently to be certain I was by my lonesome. Saturday’s storm and today’s clear skies helped me with that. There were many fewer cars on the road, and if anyone was tailing me, it was by drone.

As I approached the LIE, I turned my eyes right to look at Dr. Rosen’s building. It seemed like an eternity since I’d sat in his office, though it had only been twelve days. For two years, my world had been a sad and painful play reprised at irregular intervals by a close-knit troupe of actors whose only purpose it seemed was to deepen the wounds we shared. Murder had changed all that, shaking me from my grief-stricken sleepwalk. I owed Tommy Delcamino for that, and it was a bill I meant to pay.

I got off at William Floyd Parkway south. If I had gone north instead, I would have passed by the Brookhaven National Laboratory
and miles of wildlife-laden forest as I headed toward Shoreham-Wading River. But no, I was headed due south, deep into the heart of Long Island’s great contradiction: the areas of Mastic, Mastic Beach, and Shirley. So close to the south shore with lots of beachfront property and wetlands, so near Smith Point Park, yet still within a two-hour train ride of Manhattan, they should have been prime, thriving communities, maybe even a poorer man’s Hamptons. They weren’t, though. Don’t get me wrong, there were some beautiful houses down here and things had improved, but this area had always had a weird vibe and a somewhat dangerous rep. The rep wasn’t completely undeserved. Ask any cop who’d ever served in the Seventh Precinct.

But I wasn’t interested in any cop just at the moment. I was interested in Neil Furlong. Furlong lived on Neptune Avenue in Mastic, a short rock toss away from the Poospatuck Indian Reservation. Don’t be fooled by the enchanting Indian name. There were times the Poospatuck was seventy acres of hell surrounded on two sides by the Forge River and Poospatuck Creek. This smallest of New York State’s reservations was the realm of the Unkechaug Tribe. It was home to about three hundred people, double-wide trailers, cheap cigarette shops, and the same problems that plagued reservations everywhere: alcohol, drugs, crime, and hopelessness.

Furlong’s house was small and shabby. Someone had tried to vinyl-side the place, but seemed to have given up three quarters of the way through the job so that the east-facing flank of the house was covered only in foiled squares of rigid insulation and sun-bleached tar paper. Several of the vinyl strips on the rest of the place were either bulging or missing altogether. The cyclone fencing around the perimeter of the lot was more rust and memory than metal, and there were two cars up on concrete blocks in the driveway. The only thing missing seemed to be a nasty, drooling Rottweiler on a chain. The six inches of snow that had fallen yesterday were undisturbed on Furlong’s lot except for a lone set of raccoon prints. The blanket of white powder covered a multitude of sins, but it would have taken a blizzard to disguise them all. If not for
the steady stream of steam pouring out a dryer vent on the west side of the house, I might have thought no one was home.

I walked carefully up to the sagging wooden porch, not knowing what hazards might be hiding beneath the snow. I was smart to have been cautious. There were piles of uncollected newspapers and sales circulars lurking, the soles of my shoes slipping here and there on the plastic bags in which they were wrapped. Good thing I didn’t turn an ankle. When I got up to the porch, I noticed a wooden wheelchair ramp at the left end of the porch, screened by a tangle of overgrown hedges that hadn’t seen trimming since Obama and hope had been synonymous.

The doorbell didn’t work and the glass pane was missing from the top of the storm door. So I stuck my hand through the storm door and rapped my knuckles against the steel-clad front door. It didn’t take long until I heard a woman’s voice come from the other side of the door.

“Who is there?” She had a clear, strong voice that was very Haitian.

“My name’s Gus Murphy. I’m here to speak to Mr. Furlong, if I could.”

That was met with momentary silence. Then, “
Ne
quittez
pas!
Please wait.”

I heard footsteps, some muffled voices.

She was back. “What is this about, that you wish to speak to Mr. Neil—Mr. Furlong?”

“Jimmy Regan.”

I might just as well have said “Open Sesame,” for after a second or two, the door pulled back.

The woman who greeted me was very heavy and very dark-skinned with a lovely kind face. She was dressed in blue nurse’s scrubs. She told me her name was Fernand and that she was Mr. Furlong’s home health care aide. When she walked me into what passed for the living room, she didn’t have to explain any further. Furlong was in a wheelchair, one that he had been in a long time. You could just tell. And you could tell he was a broken man. I’m not referring to the fact that he was missing
his right leg or that he had plastic tubing that led from his nostrils, over his ears, behind his shoulder to a small metal tank attached to his chair. It was the look of his unshaven face, the stained white T-shirt, and the empty, faded nature of his eyes. He noticed me noticing.

“Yep, Gus, I hit the daily double: diabetes and emphysema. Just a race to see which one kills me first.” He winked. “My money’s on cancer.” He laughed, but after a few seconds, he gasped for air and coughed.

Fernand walked quickly over to him and turned up the flow of oxygen. She stroked his back to calm him.

“Now, Mr. Neil, you must not excite yourself so,” she scolded, then turn her scowl to me.

I saluted her. “Message received.”

“
Bon.
Good. I will leave you men to your talking. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

She left the room, her smile back on her face. When she did, I sat down on a beat-up old wing chair next to Furlong’s wheelchair. In the few photos I had seen of Furlong, he’d looked like a pretty sturdy guy, though not as big as Jimmy Regan. Regan looked a lot better for wear, but those were old photos and their lives had gone very separate ways.

“You a reporter?” he said when Fernand was out of earshot.

I shook my head. “Was on the job until three years ago. Mostly in the Second.”

“You one of Jimmy’s boys?”

He may have been sick, but not too sick to notice the confusion on my face.

“Every few years, Jimmy sends one of his ass-lickers around. Sometimes they say they’re reporters. Sometimes lawyers or PIs, but I’m still sharp. My mind ain’t half as in shitshape as my body.”

“Why would he do that, send people to play head games with you?”

“To see if I’ll talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“About what I know.”

“Know about what?”

“See,” he said, stopping to collect his breath, “I might be inclined to tell you if every one of these conversations didn’t start out exactly the same way. So you better start dancing a little faster or you can get the fuck outta here and tell that sanctimonious hypocritical prick that his old pal still has his mouth clamped shut.”

After I finished telling Furlong the whole story of how I came to be sitting in his living room on the Sunday morning before Christmas, I said, “Was that dancing fast enough?”

“Yeah, Murphy, that was fast enough and I got a story to tell, but I don’t see how it’s gonna help you any.”

“Let’s hear it and we’ll see.”

“First thing to tell is that it was me who found the old guy on the St. Jean case, not Jimmy, but it was Jimmy who combed the girls that killed her out of the statements we got. He got all the press, all the recognition, not me.”

“But you got the bump and the commendation, just like he did.”

“Yeah, back then Jimmy was good that way. He told the brass that it was the both of us who worked the case. That it was both of us down the line, so that if he got the bump, I had to get it, too. But you see, he was already maneuvering, negotiating. I shoulda gotten the bump on my own merit, not because Jimmy Regan negotiated it for me. See what I mean? He made it so that I would owe him. He was good at that stuff. That’s Jimmy. He could see the angles in anything. He could see how to use it to climb the ladder. Me, I wasn’t interested in that and I didn’t have the blarney in me like him.”

I’d heard a lot of sour grapes in my life and this one-legged, barely breathing man had a lot to be bitter about, so I wasn’t buying Furlong’s story like it was gospel. I challenged him on it.

“So you’re saying that Jimmy Regan’s rep as a cop’s cop is bullshit.”

“No, Murphy, you’re missing the point. Jimmy was a great cop. I’ll
never say different. All that stuff about him being the first through the door, it’s true. But Jimmy always had an eye out for how to turn things to his advantage, is all I’m saying.”

That rang true, but I needed more than this to make headway.

“Okay, Furlong, I get it. Jimmy stole some of your thunder and he had ambition, but you did get the bump.”

“Boy, there’s some stuff you don’t know about the great St. Jimmy, isn’t there?”

“That’s why I’m here. And before you go into it, I know he has a drinking problem.”

Furlong laughed again, but made certain to not lose it the way he had before. “A drinking problem! That’s like saying a fish kind of likes water, as if he could take it or leave it.” His face rearranged itself into an all-out sneer. “Hell, when we were on that task force together . . .” He paused purposely to see my reaction. He must’ve gotten the reaction he was looking for. “That’s right, Gus, Jimmy and me were on that task force together, but I bet you didn’t see his name mentioned anywhere in them reports you were reading, huh?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, we were on that task force, partnered up together, too.” The sneer on his face vanished, replaced by something that was wistful and happily so. “We stepped in shit, the two of us. There were all the girls you could handle and drugs and drug money up the wazoo. And did I mention there were girls? Christ, now I can’t even get fat old Fernand to give me a second look. Ain’t I a catch?”

I ignored his riff of self-pity. “You’re telling me that Jimmy Regan took drug money.”

“No, not St. Jimmy. I’m not saying he wasn’t tempted, but he didn’t take it. He wouldn’t. No, it was me. I took the money,” he said without any hesitation. “But it wasn’t like Jimmy was bathing in holy fucking water, either. He was hooked up with one of the girls pretty steep.”

“With a pro?”

The sneer returned to his face as he nodded. “Jimmy was drinking
heavy in those days. You can say what you want about him, but he had an eye for beauty, did Jimmy Regan. He fell hard for her. Hard with a big H. That wasn’t just about humping neither, that relationship. It was about true love, at least for him. I think Jimmy was drinking so much because he was actually thinking about leaving Kathleen and his girls for her.”

I repeated, “Was she a pro?”

“She was kind of the boss, the madam of a massage parlor in Wyandanch. Fucking gorgeous black chick with white features, kinda like Halie Berry’s younger, almost-as-good-looking sister. She ran the girls, but we knew she was connected to the drug trade. It was her who tried buying us off, and she didn’t make that kind of cash from having ten girls hooking and kicking up to her.”

“Okay, Furlong, I get that you resent Regan stealing your thunder on the St. Jean case. But I don’t see what the thing is with the task force. Guys hook up. They do stupid things when it comes to women, really stupid things, but it was you who took the money. It was you who pissed on the shield by warning people about raids, putting other cops in danger.”

He laughed again, but cruelly. “I’m not making excuses for what I did and I’ve paid for it plenty, but I wasn’t the only one who got jammed up. Jimmy got caught, too, not for taking money. His woman, a convicted felon, mind you, got pulled over by Highway Patrol in our car with a loaded gun under her seat, Jimmy’s gun. And there was a few grams of coke on her, too. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as what I did, but you don’t just walk away from that with your ass intact and become chief of the department.”

“Fuck.”

“That’s right, Gus. You seem like a smart man and a good cop. I think you can see where this is going.”

“He gave you up, didn’t he?”

Furlong nodded, tears streaming down his face. I let him cry and gave him a few minutes until he was ready to start talking again.

“He rolled on me. I deserved it. Like you said, I pissed on the shield, but Jimmy got away clean and look at him now. That ain’t right. I’m going to die soon and—”

“So why keep quiet for all these years?”

“Because part of the deal he made was to keep me out of jail. The DA confirmed it for me. She said that Jimmy insisted that jail time for me was a deal breaker. Imagine that, even in the middle of getting jammed up, that cocksucker found a way to come out looking like he was throwing himself on the sword for me. And I’ve kept it quiet because he’s been giving me money all these years. When you’re in the position I’m in, you take the money and shut your mouth.”

“Why tell me?”

“Because I needed to tell someone before I died. Someone else had to know. But here’s the thing,” he said, “I don’t see how this helps you. I got jammed up in late ’93, early ’94. Jimmy cut off his relationship with his woman after she got arrested. He went to the honor farm to dry out. When he got off the farm, he was assigned to the Fourth Precinct detective squad and then Homicide. As far as I know, he’s never strayed since. See, by the time he got off the farm, Kathleen, that’s his wife, had their third girl. His girls mean everything to Jimmy. He could be a tough motherfucker and a backstabbing son of a bitch, but he doted on his girls. They are his pride and joy. I think the idea that he once risked losing them has kept him in line all these years.”