Hard as Nails

CHAPTER TWELVE

They kept the lights low in their office—just two shielded old metal desk lamps—but the neon blaze from the Chippewa Street clubs and restaurants filled the big window and spilled onto Arlene's desk.

Arlene loaded O'Toole's hard drive data into her computer, and then added the digitized scanned material. Kurtz understood just enough to know that essentially she was creating a virtual computer—O'Toole's—inside her own machine, but separated from Arlene's own programs and files by various partitions. The parole officer's computer memory didn't even know it had been hijacked.

"Oh," said Arlene, "I finished the research into Big John O'Toole, his brother the Major, and the amusement park search. I think you'll be pleased with some of the connections. You can read it while I open this stuff."

Kurtz looked on his desk for new files, but there weren't any.

"I e-mailed it to your computer. The files are waiting there," said Arlene. Her cigarette glowed.

"My desk is five feet from yours, and you e-mailed it to me?" Kurtz was finishing the big burger they'd picked up during the drive over.

"It's a new century, Joe," said Arlene.

Kurtz's head hurt too much for him to start expressing his opinion on that happy revelation. He fired up his computer, downloaded the files, and opened them while he ate and sipped a Coke.

Big John O'Toole had been a street cop in Buffalo for almost twenty years and had remained a uniformed cop the entire time. He was a sergeant and three months away from retirement when he'd been shot and killed four years ago, during a drug-bust gone wrong according to the Buffalo News. O'Toole had been acting alone—strange for a sergeant with that seniority—investigating a series of car burnings over on Hertel, in a neighborhood famous for torching their cars for insurance, when he'd seen a heroin deal going down and tried to make the arrest by himself. One of the three suspects—all had escaped despite a huge manhunt—had got the drop on O'Toole and shot him in the head.

Weird, thought Kurtz. An experienced cop, even a uniform, trying to bust several drug dealers without calling for backup? It didn't make sense.

There were several related stories, including one covering Sergeant John O'Toole's huge funeral—every cop in Western New York seems to have turned out for it—and Kurtz recognized a slightly younger and somewhat thinner Officer Margaret O'Toole standing in the rain by the crowded graveside. He remembered learning once that she had been a real cop, working Vice at that time.

Kurtz skimmed through the rest of the Big John O'Toole stuff—mostly citations, occasional community related stuff going back more than a decade, and follow-up stories on the fruitless search for his shooters—and then went on to the hero-cop's older brother, Major Michael Francis O'Toole.

Separate photos—the two didn't seem to have been photographed together—showed that the brothers looked vaguely alike in that blunt Irish way, but the Major's face was broader, tougher, and meaner than the cop's. Arlene had somehow gotten into military records—Kurtz never asked her how she did such things—and he printed these pages so as to read them more easily.

Michael Francis O'Toole, born 1936, enlisted in the Army in 1956, a series of American and European base assignments, then his first tour in Vietnam in 1966. This O'Toole had worked his way up through the ranks, been sent to OCS in the early sixties, and was a captain during his first combat tour. There were various citations, medals, and details of heroism under fire—one time running from a landed command helicopter, under fire, to rescue one of his wounded men who had been left behind during a confused evacuation. His specialty had been working with ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—Kit Carson Scouts, the high-morale, American-trained Vietnamese troops who did scouting, interrogation, and translation for the army and CIA in-country. O'Toole had been shipped Stateside after a minor injury, promoted to Major, promptly volunteered to return to Vietnam, landed at a forward area in the Dan Lat Valley, stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and had lost the use of his legs.

That was the end of Major O'Toole's active military career. After a stint in a Virginia V.A. hospital, O'Toole retired from the Army and returned to his family's hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Then there were some 1972 virtual newspaper clippings about Major O'Toole in Neola, New York, a little town of about twenty thousand people about seventy miles south of Buffalo, along the Pennsylvania border. The Major had opened a major southeast Asian import-export business there along with his Vietnamese partner, Colonel Vin Trinh. They called the little business the South-East Asia Trading Company, SEATCO, which sounded like just another stupid military acronym to Kurtz, who'd had his share of them during his stint as an M.P.

All right, thought Kurtz. The headache was worse and he rubbed his temples. What the hell does all this mean other than poor, dying Peg O'Toole had had a hero (if not too bright) cop for a father and a Vietnam-hero for an uncle?

As if reading Kurtz's mind, Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and said, "Read that last file before you go any further with the O'Toole brothers."

"The file marked 'Cloud Nine'?"

"Yeah."

Kurtz dropped the other stuff offscreen and opened 'Cloud Nine. It was a puff article from The Neola Sentinel, dated August 10, 1974, about the wonderful amusement park being opened in the mountains above Neola. It was expected that this new, state-of-the-art amusement park would attract patrons from all over Western New York, Northern Pennsylvania, and North-Central Ohio. The park included a one-third-scale train that would hold up to sixty youngsters and which would follow tracks almost a mile and a half across and around the mountaintop. The park also boasted a huge Ferris wheel, a roller coaster "second only to the Comet at Canada's Crystal Beach," bumper cars, and a host of other amusements.

The park had been built "as a gift to the youth of Neola" by Major Michael Francis O'Toole, president of South-East Asia Trading Company of Neola, New York.

"Ahah," said Kurtz.

Arlene stopped her typing. "I haven't heard you say 'ahah' since the old days, Joe."

"It's a specialized term known only to professional private investigators," said Kurtz.

Arlene smiled.

"Only this time, you're the investigator. I didn't do a damned thing to dig up this information. It's all you and that computer."

Arlene shrugged. "Have you read the file labeled 'Neola H.S. yet?"

"Not yet," said Kurtz. He opened it.

Dateline The Neola Sentinel, The Buffalo News, and The New York Times, October 27, 1977. A high-school senior, Sean Michael O'Toole, 18, entered Neola High School armed with a.30-.06 rifle yesterday and shot two of his classmates, a gym teacher, and the assistant principal, before being wrestled to the ground by four members of the Neola football team. All four of the shooting victims were pronounced dead at the scene. It stated that Sean Michael O'Toole is the son of prominent Neola businessman and owner of the Cloud Nine amusement park, Major Michael O'Toole and the late Eleanor Rains O'Toole. No motive for the shooting has been given.

"Wow, pre-Columbine," said Kurtz.

"Do you remember when that happened?" asked Arlene.

"I was just a kid," said Kurtz. Although it would have been the kind of news item he'd have taken an interest in even then.

"You were already in Father Baker's then," Arlene reminded him. The court sent kids to Father Baker's Orphanage.

Kurtz shrugged. The last thing in that file was the January 27, 1978, court hearing for the Major's kid. Sean O'Toole had been judged by a battery of psychiatrists to be competent to stand trial. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane in Rochester, New York, for further testing and "continuing evaluation and therapy in secure surroundings." Kurtz knew about the Rochester nuthouse—it was a dungeon for some of New York State's craziest killers.

"Did you read the last bit of the Cloud Nine file?" asked Arlene.

"Not yet."

"It's just a Neola Sentinel clipping from May of nineteen seventy-eight," said Arlene, "announcing that the Cloud Nine Amusement Park, already beset by financial difficulties and low attendance, was closing its gates forever."

"So much for the youth of Neola," said Kurtz.

"Evidently."

"But if her uncle was running this business and park in Neola, why wouldn't Peg O'Toole know about it?" Kurtz mused aloud. "Why would she show me those photos of the abandoned park—assuming it's Cloud Nine—and not know it's her uncle's old place?"

Arlene shrugged. "Maybe she knew the photos weren't from her uncle's abandoned park. Or maybe she didn't even know that Cloud Nine existed. Her father, Big John, didn't move to Buffalo and start his cop job here until nineteen eighty-two. Maybe the Major and his cop brother were estranged. I didn't see the Major and his wheelchair in the photos from Big John's funeral four years ago. You'd think the uncle would be right there next to Ms. O'Toole since Peg's mother was dead."

"Still…" said Kurtz.

"Remember you telling me that one of the overturned bumper cars in the photo you saw yesterday had the number nine on it?"

"Cloud Nine," said Kurtz. "It's all there. It just doesn't make sense. I'll be right back."

Kurtz got up quickly, hurried to the tiny bathroom back by the purring computer server room, knelt next to the toilet, and vomited several times. When he was done, he rinsed his mouth out and washed his face. His hands were shaking violently. Evidently, the concussion didn't want him to eat yet.

When he came back into the main room, Arlene said, "You okay, Joe?"

"Yeah."

"Do you need any other searches related to mis?"

"Yeah," said Kurtz. "I want to find out what happened to this kid, the shooter. Did he stay caged up in Rochester? Is he out now? And I need some details of the Major's specific history in Vietnam—not just his medals, but names, locations, who he worked with, what he was doing when."

"Medical records and military records can be two of the hardest things to hack into," said Arlene. "I'm not sure I can get any of this."

"Do your best," said Kurtz. His cell phone rang. He turned to answer it.

Daddy Bruce's voice said, "You wanted to know when that Big Bore Indian came back to the Blues hunting for you again, Joe."

"Yeah."

"He's here."