Storm Rising Page 6

  Olivetti waved him into a chair. After a few quick pleasantries, Jack got to the point. He spoke carefully. “I have a sensitive question to ask.”

  Olivetti chuckled. “This isn’t the CIA, Jack. Ask away.”

  “It’s ‘sensitive’ because it’s not my case.”

  “Understood.”

  “Do you think your office would be prepared to offer a sweetheart deal to a three-striker in return for information on a possibly corrupt police officer?”

  “Depends. What three-striker?”

  “His name is Thomas Mulvaney.”

  Olivetti didn’t miss a beat. “The BCB job.”

  “That’s the one. Any chance it’s your file?”

  “No. But I could make that happen.”

  “That would be helpful.”

  “Mulvaney … he’s the old guy.”

  “That’s right.”

  Olivetti chewed a lip. “Okay. What cop are we talking about?”

  “He’s dead—shot behind a derelict warehouse on Hobart Avenue, down near the Point. Case was never solved. This could explain why.”

  “You’re talking about that detective … Parrish.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re saying you have evidence that he was corrupt.”

  “More than that. Mulvaney says he was connected.”

  “The Mob.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Who have you told?”

  “Just you. My partner was out of the room when Mulvaney came up with this.”

  “Who was your partner?”

  “Don Bolton.”

  “Bolton’s an older guy.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me guess … Mulvaney figured the young cop would be more receptive than some old screw waiting for his retirement date.”

  Jack thought: This man doesn’t miss much.

  “That’s my guess, too.”

  “Any corroboration? Or is it too soon?”

  “Some.” Jack described his visits to the archive room … the folder filled with car theft reports … the fact that none of the cases were ever solved. Rather than complicate matters, he left Tait’s name out of his explanation. He concluded: “I’ve been working on an analysis … putting it all on a spreadsheet.”

  His account had clearly engaged Olivetti’s attention. The prosecutor was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “If there’s any substance to this, I think this office would be very interested. But I’d have to hear more before offering a deal to a three-striker, and I’d have to clear it with the boss.”

  “Understood. I’ll see if I can get a statement.”

  “I’ve seen this Mulvaney guy’s sheet. He’s been around the block. He may balk at signing anything this early in the game. If he drags anchor, get what you can, write it up, and come back to see me.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “Bolton was in here last week. He had a different partner with him.”

  Okay, Jack thought. Here goes …

  “I’m partnered with Ernie Tait. He was on leave when the robbery went down, and Bolton’s partner had a family emergency. So the boss teamed us up.”

  “Ernie Tait? Wait a minute—?”

  “That’s right. He was Parrish’s partner when he was killed. He found the body.”

  “You haven’t told him about Mulvaney?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “A couple of weeks ago, after I finished in the archive room, I told him I thought Parrish might have been corrupt. I didn’t tell him I’d been conducting a serious investigation. I just said I’d been looking at a few things. He didn’t even ask ‘What things?’ He didn’t seem to want to know. He just said it would do no good to investigate now. Said it would just embarrass the Department and bring down a lot of pain on Parrish’s widow and kids. It sounded like he was very close to the family.”

  “Embarrass the Department? Upset the widow? Kind of twisted logic.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Well, obviously, you won’t be discussing this with him again.”

  “Got that right.”

  Jack rose from his seat.

  “Hang on.” Olivetti took out a business card and wrote on it. He handed the card to Jack. “My cell number’s on the back. Call me when you’ve got something.”

  “Will do.”

  They shook hands and Jack left.

  * * *

  It took Jack a few days to arrange a visit with Mulvaney at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny. The bank robber hadn’t been able to make bail and was awaiting trial or—he clearly hoped—an offer of some kind of deal that would save him from a life sentence.

  A prison officer escorted Jack to a tiny interview room and locked him in. The miniscule space stank of mold and body odor, making Jack wonder—as he had on earlier occasions—if the standards in the rest of the facility were as bad as various activists’ reports alleged. Mulvaney’s opening remark after they were alone meshed perfectly with Jack’s impressions.

  “Detective! Thank God! Any way you can get me moved out of this shithole?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “These guards are animals! And half the inmates don’t even speak English. What’s with all the fuckin’ foreigners in a county jail? Rastas and ragheads ’n shit? Ain’t the Feds got their own jails?”

  “They ran out of space.”

  “Yeah? Well, let me tell you … Rikers was paradise compared to this place!”

  “Spent time there, did you?”

  “You know I did.” He leaned forward, rattling the chain restraints that secured him to the table. “Ready to tell me your name, Detective?”

  “Hendricks.”

  “Okay, Hendricks. Last time we were in one of these little rooms, you told me Parrish is dead and nobody cares. So why are you here?”

  Jack had already decided he wouldn’t tell Mulvaney that he had already spoken with a prosecutor. He’d also decided that he wouldn’t ask for a written statement. Instead, when he heard the prisoner escort’s key in the door, he’d activated a digital recorder in his jacket pocket.

  “I’m here to tell you that, maybe, somebody does care. I’m here to see if you’ve got something that’s more than just talk. If you do, I’ll speak to the prosecutor. If not,” he added, with a level stare, “the drive over here cost less than a buck in gas. Our budget can handle it.”

  Mulvaney returned Jack’s stare.

  But he blinked first.

  “Major league car theft.”

  “Major league?”

  “Yeah. High-end models … Jags, Mercedes, Rolls if they can get ’em. They steal them, then store ’em at different locations until they’re sure they don’t have tracking devices, and then ship ’em overseas. They make big money selling them to rich guys in Africa ’n Russia ’n places like that.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I ran a crew. Got out.”

  “Why did you get out?”

  “Because of Parrish. He kept showing up in my life, pressuring me, asking questions.”

  “He was a cop. Cops ask questions.”

  “He was a Bayonne cop. What was he doing in Jersey City? Up in Teaneck? Way down in Toms River? We stole cars from different towns and delivered them to different places. Always different places. Sitting in a bar after a delivery, there he was. Stop for a burger after a boost, there he was.”

  “We cops call it ‘investigation.’”

  “It weren’t that kinda investigation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He never interfered. Never showed up at a boost. He just wanted a name. Wanted to talk to the ‘higher-ups,’ he called ’em. He said certain people were interested. People who don’t take no for an answer. He squeezed one of my guys to get my name, then started on me. Kept saying he was just an ‘envoy.’ Liked that word. ‘I’m just the envoy,’ he kept sayin’. ‘You don’t wanna meet the people who sent me.�
�� I kept my mouth shut, but he kept coming back. I didn’t like the odds, so I made the healthy choice and moved down south for a while. Seeing that Parrish got whacked, guess that was the right decision.”

  “And you’re saying his visits … this was a Mob thing.”

  “Had to be.”

  “Why?”

  “The cars we stole were going out in containers. No one could run an operation like that for long without those guys muscling in. They control the unions, and the unions control the waterfront.”

  “What was the name you didn’t give him?”

  Mulvaney looked up, his eyes scanning the walls, the ceiling.

  “Got a piece of paper?”

  Jack opened his notebook to a blank page. He passed it across the table, along with a pen.

  Mulvaney scrawled something, his hand at an awkward angle, impeded by his handcuffs. Jack retrieved the pad. He studied the name Mulvaney had written. He took a long, careful breath. He was deeply shaken, but he kept his expression neutral.

  “Okay. Look … Tom, is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, Tom, I’m sure you know how it works. For this to be of any use to the prosecutors, you’ll have to give us chapter and verse. Everything you did—every felony, every misdemeanor. Also, anything you were doing down south that might come back to bite. And, you’ll have to give us more than this. You’ll have to describe every contact you had with Parrish, every conversation, every word you can remember.”

  “I’ll give you everything. But not until you get me a sit-down with a prosecutor who’s got the balls and the juice to cut me a deal.”

  Jack left the lockup and walked slowly back to the visitor parking area. Before he started his car, he opened his notebook. He tore out the page Mulvaney had written on. He folded the page into a small rectangle and slipped it behind his driver’s license in his wallet.

  That evening, after Lucy left for her yoga class, Jack went to the desk in their home office and started up the laptop. He attached a flash drive. The menu listed a single folder entitled “PARRISH.” It consisted of two documents: a 950 kb pdf entitled “NICB” and “SS,” the ever-expanding spreadsheet based on his late-night research visits to the BPD archive room. He set about adding the digital recording of his interview with Thomas Mulvaney. When the download was complete, he checked it to be sure the entire file had been copied. Satisfied, he erased the conversation from the recorder.

  After running a quick search to ensure that the audio file had not been replicated anywhere in the laptop’s drives, he ejected the flash drive.

  He swiveled his chair and looked around the room.

  9

  Lucy’s days were full.

  Five days a week she was in the shower by six in the morning, making breakfast for herself and Kevin, dropping him at pre-K (situated, thankfully, right on campus at the Oresko School), grabbing a large coffee from the staff room, and hitting the classroom by at least seven-thirty, sooner if she could manage it. Then came the real morning race. The hour or so before her students arrived wasn’t an oasis of quiet time to review the day’s lesson plans—she’d done that work the night before, after Kevin was asleep. No … that hour was spent photocopying handouts, clearing up leftover messes from yesterday’s classes, and lately, because of the current flu epidemic, wiping down every student desktop with disinfectant.

  And then there were the parents. It wasn’t just replying to the flurry of e-mails that routinely awaited her—it was dealing with the parents, mostly mothers, who deified their children. Mothers who had actually scheduled their pregnancies to mesh with school enrollment dates so their offspring could begin school at an optimum age. Mothers who had populated their children’s formative years with therapists and “play-date tutors.” Mothers who (in the words of one shrewd education professional) mistook cell phones for umbilical cords, and were so obsessed with enriching their children’s lives that a few of them had become a plague on Lucy’s.

  Somehow, she handled them.

  She taught Language Arts and Social Studies and she had a solid routine for her classes. But after working with students for over six hours, with at best thirty minutes for lunch, her working day wasn’t close to being over. Now came the balancing act: She needed to collect Kevin and walk him to the nearby daycare that was costing her a small fortune, but she also needed to be available for pupils who asked for extra help. So she’d set appointment times, deliver Kevin into the custody of Geraldine Taunton, the sharp-featured woman who ran the daycare, and then spend the rest of the afternoon helping students, answering the day’s crop of e-mails, dealing with clockwork visits from Helicopter Moms; grading tests, sometimes attending staff meetings, and, twice a week without fail, working out at a gym. Even staying fit took a bit of organization. Luckily, one of her male colleagues—married, with kids, and monumentally unimpressed by staff room gossip—was quite happy for Lucy to drop off Kevin two evenings a week for playtime with his children.

  During the week, the only “quality time” (she detested that worn-out phrase) she had with Kevin was from around six in the evening, when she finally left the school, until bedtime at eight or a bit later on days when he’d had a nap at daycare. It was a grind for Lucy and it was a grind for Kevin, but, from the outset, the boy had displayed uncanny maturity about the whole routine. He seldom complained. In fact, his docility was worrying.

  In one respect, the demands of her job, and the antisocial hours they imposed, suited Lucy well. It made it easy to avoid happy hour bar crowds and the singles scene. Her logical mind instructed that, after five years, a new relationship might offer some long-missed comfort, but she still could not accept the idea.

  There was no one … no one … like Jack. And there never would be again.

  And there was another factor.

  It did not take long for Lucy to notice that some of her fellow teachers kept their distance, even though they had been friendly in the past, in the old days before Jack’s death. She easily guessed the reason: The swirl of media coverage after Jack’s murder had included rumors—published in brazen disregard of either the facts or the feelings of his young widow—of his alleged connection to organized crime. While the frequency of those articles had eventually dwindled, it hadn’t helped that shortly after her return to Bayonne, yet another story had run in the Newark Star Ledger. The headline, “Murdered cop’s widow resumes teaching post,” had clearly just been an excuse to recycle the old speculations about Jack. One male teacher, new in the community, who had initially showed interest in Lucy and seemed to be angling to ask her out, backed off after reading the story.

  Lucy had never been a combative personality—far from it—but this was the limit. While she would not have accepted her potential suitor’s offer of a date, her anger was roused by his craven demonstration of rumor-driven backpedaling. She consulted an attorney recommended by Garrett Lindsay. Floyd Jackson worked at a boutique law firm in Newark, where he specialized in personal injury work. Lucy told him she wanted to sue the newspaper—not only for once again smearing Jack’s memory without a shred of evidence to support the allegations, but also for using the outdated press coverage as a means to defame her personally.

  “That article has lowered me in the estimation of my fellow teachers and, more important, in the eyes of all my students’ parents!”

  Jackson replied with a surprised smile, “You’ve been doing some legal research, Mrs. Hendricks.”

  “Call me Lucy, and yes, I have. I’m sick of this, and I want it to end! If the only way to achieve that is to take them to court, then that’s what I want to do.”

  Jackson was an old friend of Garrett’s and he seemed genuinely interested in trying to help. He studied the news article that Lucy brought with her, and listened intently as she outlined the background. He asked her to come back to see him on the following day. He said he wanted to do a bit of research himself, and he promised he wouldn’t charge her for his time.

  When she
returned, the news wasn’t good. Jackson had run an Internet search of all media websites for the tristate area, as well as those of the wire services. He’d printed off every archived story he could find. After reviewing them all, he concluded that any defamatory statements in the most recent article—most of which he was unsure would actually meet the legal test for libel—were not about Lucy, but exclusively about Jack.

  “Your husband is a deceased person. He died over five years ago. For a defamation action to be sustainable after death, the defamation must have occurred during the life of the victim. That didn’t happen here. Even if it had—even if Jack had been defamed in this way during his lifetime—New Jersey has what we lawyers call the ‘Survival Statute.’ That law requires that executors or administrators of a decedent’s estate file an action within two years of the claimant’s death.”

  “What about me?”

  “I was getting to that. The journalist who wrote this latest article was either very smart, or his editor took legal advice before they ran the story. The paper cleverly avoided any innuendo—innuendo is a legal concept that I will explain in a moment—suggesting that you either knew of your husband’s alleged activities or participated in them in any way. In defamation law, the word ‘innuendo’ means a statement which shows the defendant’s true intended meaning by reference to antecedent matter. In your case, that would require a statement such as this: ‘Detective Hendricks and his wife, although supporting themselves on the salaries of a low-ranking police detective and an elementary school teacher, owned a waterfront home at Bergen Point and are known to have made several trips to Florida during their marriage. Just four months before his death, Hendricks and his wife spent a week in a luxury suite at the Avenida Miramar Resort in Key West, a reputed Mob hangout, where even the most modestly priced rooms go for six hundred dollars a night.’”