Bad blood

22

Mike followed Schurz Avenue down to Pennyfield, an eclectic mix of row houses and white stucco buildings that resembled the sides of small cruise ships, with railings that fronted on the unusual waterfront setting. The smell of the salt sea air was a refreshing change from the odors of the liquor and beer in the dark bar.

“You seem to know this area well,” I said.

“Fort Schuyler. Built in 1833, named after General Philip Schuyler. You probably don’t know anything about our seacoast fortifications,” he said.

“Guilty as charged.”

Mike always shifted into high gear when he could display his knowledge of military history.

“After the French revolution,” he said, “the Founding Fathers were afraid we’d be drawn into the European wars that broke out all over. They started to build military forts for defense along the coastline, calling them the First System. They started the Second System in 1807, when Great Britain became a threat, too.”

“Not much help, I guess, if you count the War of 1812.”

“Brilliant deduction, Coop. You can tell they hadn’t been very successful with the first two stages. So this one-and Totten, across the sound in Queens-were built as part of the Third System, later on.” He got out of the car and slammed the door, pointing as he surveyed the vista. “The idea was to be able to use cannon fire from these two fortifications to stop any enemy ships that tried to enter the Sound in order to approach New York City.”

The monumental building across the strait, an impressive partner to Fort Schuyler, had its granite bastion jutting out toward the water like the prow of an ancient Roman sailing vessel. I caught up with Mike, marveling at another cityscape that was fresh to me, fascinated by the locals so obviously enjoying this slice of beach life on the walkways and porches of the small cottages that bordered the road.

He led me through the entrance to the interior courtyard of the enormous pentagonal fort. There were a few visitors, some of whom were descending the large stone steps that took us up to the top of the ramparts.

The solid mass of building was punctuated by eyebrow-shaped windows on each of the three sides that faced the waterway. “See those? They were the casements for two tiers of guns. The men could fire from every angle on those sides. It’s a brilliant location for the protection of the city.”

Several kids were shooting at imaginary pirate ships from the top of the dramatic walkway, and alone on a bench at the very tip of the battlement was a man who fit Phin Baylor’s description-a sixteen-ounce beer bottle in one hand, a week’s grizzle on his face, bedroom slippers on his feet, and a wooden cane resting beside his outstretched leg.

He turned to look as we approached him but said nothing. “Mr. Baylor?” Mike asked, showing him the blue-and-gold badge. “Mike Chapman. NYPD. This is Alexandra Cooper, with the DA’s Office.”

“My daughter put out a missing person’s report?” he asked with a laugh, looking back out at the view, small sailboats slicing through the blue water and powerboats creating wakes below the span of the long bridge.

Mike stepped in front of Baylor, balancing against the wall of the old fortress. “She expects you home for dinner, I think. May I call you Phinneas?”

“Phin. Just Phin. Who’re you looking for?”

“We’re fishing right now. Looking mostly for information. I’m working on that accident-”

When Mike said that word, he got Phin’s attention.

“…that accident in the tunnel midtown. Water Tunnel Number Three. Duke Quillian, you know they’re waking him today?”

Phin lifted his bottle in the direction of the sun, sinking in the sky to the west. “What goes round comes round, like they say. Seen it on television the other night and can’t say I lost any sleep over him. I’ll take a pass on the receiving line at the funeral home. Seen you on TV, too. You’re the woman prosecuting his brother, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Brendan Quillian. Now there’s a boy who should never have grown so high and mighty. Strange kid, he always was. Wanted no part of his family, no part of any of us. Guess he won’t have Duke to fight his battles anymore,” Phin said. “That’s the only thing that kept Brendan alive on the street as a kid, was his big brother. He’s gonna need some protection if he winds up where you’re trying to send him.”

“Did you know Brendan well?” I asked.

“Nah. He had no stomach for the hole, hard as his father fought him about it. Even tried to make the kid a pencil. Let him use his head if he wanted to, but stay in the business.”

“A pencil?”

“Men who can’t do the physical labor. The engineers, the contractors-the guys who push pencils all day,” Phin said with a trace of disdain in his voice. “Tell me, Mike, will you? Duke’s death wasn’t no accident, was it?”

So far, the police and the medical examiner had not released any details of the severed finger to the public. It would only be a matter of days before too many insiders knew about it and the news leaked, but for now it was a crucial piece of information, intentionally withheld until further leads were developed in the case.

“What have you heard?”

“I’ve learned to mind my own business. Not many of his friends even remember I’m alive. I was already too long in the hole when I got hurt, and that’s going on more than a dozen years ago.”

“I was hoping we might trouble you to tell us about that-that day,” Mike said.

Phin squinted into the sun as he looked up at Mike. “You weren’t going to say that word accident again, were you now? That day, as you called it?”

“We don’t know what happened. We only heard you were there-that you got hurt-the day old man Hassett was killed.”

“Who’s blabbing to you?” Phin asked.

Mike didn’t answer.

“Must be one of the Quillian boys. Tell ’em not to worry, Detective. I’m long over my tunnel days. I look out at the sea and the sky and don’t know how I lived so far underground as I did for so long.”

Mike looked to be trying to think of another way to ask Phin to talk, but the sandhog code of silence seemed to be thicker than the walls of the fortress.

“Is it fair to say it was a bad place to be-between a Quillian and a Hassett-when they had a beef to settle?” Mike asked.

Phin’s expression didn’t change.

“Nothing to the rumor, then, that Duke Quillian saved your life?”

Phin threw back his head. “Gave yourself up there, Mike. That’s the crazy sister you’re talking to, isn’t it? What’s her name? Trish. That girl has never been right in the head.”

Mike looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

Phin Baylor smiled. “I’ll tell you about ‘that day,’ as you call it.”

He was ready to talk. He liked Mike, and something Mike had said moved him off the starting block.

Phin nodded and took a swig from his bottle. “I was working the first piece of the dig for the new tunnel, right here in the Bronx, over in Van Cortlandt Park. Must have been six of us down there that day-me and Hassett, Duke Quillian and his father-he was supervising the drill-maybe two other guys left by the end of the shift.”

“What did you do exactly?”

“We were building the rib cage, you know? After the hole is bored in the tunnel, we’ve got to build a concrete hull around the sides. Support the walls, smooth them out as the tunnel goes forward.” Neither of us wanted to interrupt him, so we let him go on with the details we had learned firsthand last week about how the cylinder was created.

Phin pulled a pair of shades out of his pocket and put them on. I didn’t know whether it was the glare from the sun on the water or simply to make it impossible for us to see his eyes.

“The shift was just about over. That’s why so few of us were left,” he said, getting back to the narrative, pausing as a mother dragged her two whining children off the battlement and over to the exit. “You know what an agitator is?”

I looked to Mike, who answered, “Those giant cement mixers?”

“Yeah. That’s what we were working with at that point. Hassett and I were down at the bottom of a steep incline-you know how the water has to flow downhill, all the way into the city? So three of the railroad cars at the top of the slope, inside the tunnel, had been fitted as agitators.” Phin tapped his cane on the cobblestone walkway. “So that we could do the work down in the shaft.

“One of those mothers broke loose-twenty tons of steel loaded with cement steaming away on a sharp downhill grading. Hassett didn’t have a prayer. Crushed him into the bedrock like he was an ant.”

“And you?”

“I was up on a ladder with my trowel. Last thing I remember is the noise of that frigging thing barreling down at me.”

Mike started to ask, “Couldn’t you-”

“Get out of the way? Forget it, son. There wasn’t nowhere to go. I was already flat up against the wall.” Phin leaned forward and stowed the bottle under his bench, putting his head in his hands.

Mike swallowed. “So it caught you, too, along the way?”

“I don’t have any recollection of being hit. Doctors say I never will. I can see that damn thing coming down the track, picking up speed for more than half a mile, and it’s screeching like a banshee. But that’s all I know and I gotta thank God for that. Doctors say I’ll never have any memory of it, the way the brain works. The agitator car must have slammed into my ladder and wedged me against the concrete side of the tunnel.” Phin paused for a minute. “No lights, no noise, till I began to make it myself. All I could hear was the sound of my own screams.”

“Was anyone around to come to help you?”

He looked away. “Duke Quillian. First man to get to me. First one I saw when I came to after passing out. Couldn’t even get close in, Duke. Had no way to move the agitator car. You’d have needed a derrick to do it.”

“Where was Duke’s father? Wasn’t he supposed to be supervising?”

“Went back up in the Alimak to get help. So he said. Seemed like forever.”

“And you…?”

Phin was rubbing his left thigh while he talked.

“Pitch-black in there. Nearest lightbulbs had been crushed along with Hassett’s body. But my left leg was pinned behind the railroad car, split open down the middle.” Phin made a line down his calf with his hand. “Too dark to see the blood, but it was seeping out of me like a steady stream. I could feel it covering me, all thick as it was. I could smell it, too.”

Mike bowed his head. “What did Duke do?”

Phin picked up his voice and tapped his cane. “I guess you could say he saved my life, if that’s what you want to hear, if that’s what you want to tell little Trish Quillian. Duke did what I told him to do. First we waited and waited for an ambulance-maybe four minutes, maybe six. I was getting dizzy and light-headed, and all I had the strength to think about was that I damn well wasn’t gonna die in that hole. Gave my entire life to digging tunnels and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna bleed to death in one of them.”

“So, what…?” I asked.

“I asked Duke for a flashlight, a bottle of beer, and a knife. Took him a few minutes to run up the track to where I had my lunch box and back.” Phin slowed his pace now, tapping the cane against the stone. “I drank as much of the beer as I could, held the light on my leg, and put the lip of the bottle between my teeth. I told Duke to cut off whatever part of my foot was stuck behind the agitator.”

Neither Mike nor I could speak.

“Sawed off my heel and some of the foot,” Phin said, raising his left knee with his hands, so that the black leather slipper slipped off. I could see that the lower part of his leg was a prosthetic device.

Mike started to say something about how tough Phin must have been, but the old sandhog didn’t want to hear it.

“I don’t recommend beer as an anesthetic, young man. Didn’t help worth a damn. And when I bit down on the bottle to fight the pain, the glass broke and a big piece of it lodged in the roof of my mouth. Sure as hell took my mind off my foot for a while.”

Phin Baylor refused Mike’s offer of a hand up from the bench, steadying himself with the cane, then limping to the edge of the rampart.

“So Duke got me out of the hole alive-that’s all I asked of him. Lost the rest of the foot at the hospital. Too much damage had been done to save it.”

“The Hassett boys are wrong about Duke, are they?” Mike asked. “Wrong about blaming him for their father’s death?”

“Now you’re asking two different things of me, aren’t you, Mike?” Phin said, looking overhead at a plane making its approach to La Guardia, across the Sound. “You wanted to know if Duke saved my life, so I guess the answer has to be yes to that. But first you gotta know how that agitator car got uncoupled in the first place. You gotta know how it got loose from the brake car, don’t you, before you reach your next conclusion?”

“You mean, you think it was Duke Quillian who-who did that? Intentionally?”

“There, you said it yourself. It isn’t a very good idea to wind up between a Quillian and a Hassett, especially when one of ’em’s armed with a twenty-ton weapon.”

I couldn’t understand how Phin could be so calm if he thought Duke had engineered Hassett’s murder and his own near-fatal injury. “But didn’t the police investigate this? Didn’t you tell them you thought Duke was responsible?”

His face wrinkled as he looked at me quizzically, as though he couldn’t fathom why I was asking what the police thought.

“Like I told the cops when they came to the hospital, I couldn’t see anything that far up the tunnel. I didn’t have no proof anybody tinkered with the cars. Besides, Duke couldn’t have known I was even in the hole. Just my dumb luck that Hassett asked me to go back in with him after I signed out for the day. He wanted to finish up the last part of the job before he knocked off. Needed a hand and I gave it to him. Didn’t know what it would cost both of us.”

Phin turned his back to me, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and lit up. “If you haven’t learned it yet, you’ll find we don’t put much stock in cops five hundred feet underground. We’re used to taking care of ourselves.”

“I’m surprised Duke lasted this long, with so many Hassetts around,” Mike said.

“The Hassetts thought they were getting some powerful help from above, Detective. Duke got real sick, maybe a month after all this happened. Had cancer so bad he almost died. What’s that hospital in Manhattan?”

“Sloan-Kettering,” I said. The world-renowned medical center specialized in treatment of cancer patients, one of whom had been Mike’s fiancée, Val.

“Duke spent a few months there. Never thought we’d see him again. By that time I’d cut all my ties to the job, had no need to look back.” Phin came as close as he had so far to a smile. “One thing I was always damn sure of-Duke Quillian wouldn’t die of old age.”

Phin Baylor swiveled on his good leg and leaned on the side of the battlement, looking over the water. Mike was beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Can you tell us why, Phin? Why you think Duke might have done such a thing?”

Phin took a long drag on his cigarette.

“You’ve had more than enough time to figure it out, haven’t you?”

“He was a mean bastard, Detective. What’s the difference why he did it? I’m not ever going dancing again, even if I knew. Got me out of the hole, in the end, which probably adds twenty more years to my life.”

Mike wouldn’t give up. “But why was he after old man Hassett? Why did Duke hate him?”

“Might be no more than the grief Hassett gave Duke-gave his father, really-about Brendan. Taunting them constantly about how weak Brendan was, how he couldn’t make it in the tunnel. Used to say he wasn’t even half a man. Stuff like that. Used to drive the Quillians crazy because Brendan’s goals were such a rejection of their roots in this country and the work they’d been bred to do. Here’s two families that for generations have dedicated their lives, if you will, to building New York from the very bottom up. That’s part of the irony of them destroying each other. Taking pleasure in it as well. A real blood feud between them, that’s what it was.”

“Did they fight about-”

“They fought about everything, Chapman. Maybe it was money at the root of all this, maybe it was the girlfriend that old man Hassett and Quillian once shared, and maybe it was simply the fact that Duke Quillian knew every one of these stories and simply liked to hurt people. There’s miles of trouble beneath these city streets, making it all work up above-and some very rough dealings go into staying alive.”

Phin crushed his cigarette and flicked the butt over the side of the fort. “That’s all I have for you. Better push on and do your work.”

Mike motioned to me that he was ready to leave. “Can we give you a lift over to the house?”

“No, thanks. The air here is good for me.” Phin leaned an elbow on the massive granite battlement and exhaled a row of smoke rings. “You see that crazy Quillian girl, Mike, you give her a message for me.”

“What’s that, Phin?”

“Tell her she’ll live a lot longer if she keeps her yap shut, will you? Tell her nice as you two are, I’m not interested in any more company, thank you very much. She ought to dig for the bones in her own backyard.”