Bad blood

43

“You got that dark green SUV?” Mike said to the detective in the driver’s seat.

“Ford Explorer. I wrote down the plate soon as he headed up the stoop.”

“Follow him.”

“I got orders to sit on the house.”

Mike passed his card to the driver and smacked the hood of the car. “And I’m giving you orders to get off your ass and follow him. I’ll take over the sister. Tail him, wherever he goes, and call me every fifteen minutes. Chapman. Homicide.”

The two cops looked at each other and drove off after O’Malley’s SUV.

“They got as much chance seeing Brendan Quillian coming to call as they do of ever seeing Jimmy Hoffa’s body again,” Mike said, flipping open his phone and asking to speak to Lieutenant Peterson.

We walked up the steps of the house and I knocked on the door while Mike made his call.

“Loo? Better find out who’s got the team sitting on the Quillian crib. I just sent them off on a chase, so I guess you’ll need to replace them,” he said, pausing to listen to a question from his boss. “O’Malley. My pal Teddy O’Malley. Can’t imagine why he’d be dropping in on Trish-especially without letting me in on it-but I told the two flatfoots to tell me what he’s up to.”

Trish Quillian answered the door in the same black polyester track suit she had worn to the station house, with an apron around her waist.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked.

“There’s no good one for seeing you two,” she said, untying the apron and balling it up.

“I’m sorry. Were you helping your mother with something to eat?”

“What do you care? She’s asleep. Let her be.”

“May we come in?”

Trish held the door tightly in place for a moment. Then she stepped back, leading us into the small parlor of the still house. She sat on an ottoman and Mike steered me to the sofa opposite it. The room looked as if it had been frozen in time, like photographs I’d seen of the 1950s-cabbage roses had faded on the fabric of the furniture, worn antimacassars covered the arms of most of the mismatched chairs, photographs of family members and a large framed picture of Pope Pius XII hung on the striped wallpaper, which was rolling up at the seams.

“You didn’t finish asking me what you need? You gonna keep interrupting my business every single day?” she said, looking back and forth between us, seeming more fearful than she had before.

“Your mother get many visitors, Trish?”

“You got more sense than that, Detective. Nobody much knows she’s alive.”

“And you?”

“A regular social club. Don’t it look it?”

I took in the family snapshots that represented happier days. Trish Quillian in her Communion dress; Mrs. Quillian with her young brood at the beach in Queens, where Brendan’s accident had occurred; Brendan and Duke-I guessed-as teenagers, posing with their father at an assortment of construction sites-subway and tunnel entrances, work yards filled with heavy equipment that towered over the kids, familiar landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall, and the Empire State Building.

“So, Teddy O’Malley, he just happened to be in the neighborhood?”

The veins in Trish Quillian’s neck stood out like blue lines in a road map as her jaw tensed and she glared at Mike.

“You watching me now? You peeking through windows and-”

“We drove up just as Teddy walked down the steps. We’ve met him, Trish. I recognized him, is all.”

“Then you know he’s the union rep. We had business, him and me. Business to clear up about Duke. Union benefits is all it is,” she said, looking down as she twisted the ties on the apron strings.

Mike leaned his elbows on his thighs. “You gonna be all right, Trish? Do you and your mother get taken care of?”

She closed her eyes and clamped her lips together, fighting back tears as she shook her head up and down.

From the hallway, up the stairs, I could hear the soft groaning noise that I assumed was coming from Trish’s mother. I knew we had to be here asking these questions, but the raw misery of this woman’s life was difficult to witness.

She wiped her eyes with the apron. “I got things to do. What is it you want now?”

“Like I said before, we’re still looking for Brendan.” Mike lowered his voice. “You’ve talked to him, Trish, haven’t you?”

“Why don’t you just move right in here, Detective? I’ll set an extra place at the table for you. Bring your own whiskey. No, I haven’t been talking to him.”

Mike stayed on her, gently but firmly. “He called you just hours after the shooting in the courthouse, Trish. Why would you lie for him after all these years?”

She stood up as the groaning sound became louder.

“I’ve got no need to lie for anyone. I got more important things to do.”

“Can you come with us down to the station house?” Mike asked.

“You’ve had your best shot at me already. Can’t leave my mother.” She pointed over her head.

“Make arrangements for tomorrow, then. You’ll need help, won’t you?”

“The help of God, Mike Chapman.” Trish walked toward the front door, mustering a laugh. “Wasn’t my spit any use for you?”

“It was, actually. Led us right back to Duke. Right to how you saved his life.”

The frightened young woman stopped in her tracks. “What about Duke?”

“We learned about the transplant,” I said. “We found his medical records from all those years ago. He must have been very grateful to you, Trish.”

She bit into her lip again. “Maybe he’d have been grateful if he’d lived a little longer. What’s that got to do with my saliva? It’s the blood I gave him.”

Mike brushed back his hair and tossed his head at me. “You come down to my office tomorrow and I’ll explain everything.”

He knew he wasn’t getting any more from her today. He wanted to tease her to take the next step with us in finding her estranged brother.

Mike put his hand on the door handle to let us out as Trish started up the staircase to her mother. “We’ll tell you all about that autopsy, too. Your friend Bex-I guess she kept some secrets to herself back then.”

Trish had one hand on the banister, gripping it as she turned slowly in response to Mike’s bait.

“What kind of secrets, Detective? There wasn’t nothing she didn’t tell me.”

“I don’t mean to shock you when you’re already so upset over other things.”

“I’m too numb to shock anymore. Speak what you mean.”

Mike squared his back against the frame of the door. “Bex Hassett was pregnant when she died, Trish. She was almost three months pregnant.”

“Those bastards,” she said, rocking back and forth as she stood in place on the second step. “Those little bastards took such advantage of that poor girl. Find them for me, Detective, that’s what you can do. Go to the Dominican Republic if you have to and lock their asses up. I’d kill whoever did that to her if I could get my hands on him.”

Mike took a step toward her and spoke softly. “Then help us with this.”

She was staring down at the step.

“Look at me, will you?” Mike said, waiting for her to lift her eyes to meet his. “It’s not what you’d like to think it was. It’s your brother Brendan who impregnated Bex Hassett. It’s Brendan who was the father of her baby.”

Trish Quillian crumpled to the floor as if a baseball bat had slammed against the back of her knees. She slid off the steps onto the landing, the balled-up apron rolling across the scuffed wooden floor.

I grabbed it as I kneeled to help her, and a torn envelope dropped from the apron’s pocket.

“Don’t!” she shouted at me.

Her mother’s mumblings got louder, perhaps because of the commotion we were making.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Don’t touch that,” she said as I picked up the envelope, torn at the corners as though it had been stuffed with something at one time.

I could see a postmark and noted that the recipient had been Duke Quillian. I passed it to Trish, who stretched out her bony thumb-not quite fast enough to cover the return address of her brother Brendan-as she pulled the paper from me and buried it in her lap.