The Law of Second Chances

2

Mary Walsh never answered the phone after ten o’clock. With thirty years of marriage to a cop, the last twenty of which he’d been a homicide detective, she was used to the late-night-sometimes middle-of-the-night-calls, and she wanted no part of them. The hairs on the back of her neck always stood up when that damn phone rang past ten and her husband Nick answered it.

“The murder has already been committed,” he’d invariably tell her. “I’m just mop-up duty.” But Mary never bought it. Every time he walked out that door, she was afraid that he might not come back. All she had to do was read the papers to be assured of that possibility.

This night was no different. When the phone rang at a few minutes to eleven, Mary wouldn’t go near it.

“Can you get that?” Nick yelled from his seat in the bathroom. Mary picked up the phone without answering it and walked it to the bathroom. She opened the door and extended her arm and the phone to her husband without looking in.

“Here,” she said. Nick was able to reach out and grab the phone while maintaining his seat on the throne.

“Walsh,” he answered, just like he was in the squad room. That frosted Mary. The man was never off duty, even at home-even on the toilet.

“Nick, this is Severino.” Anthony Severino was Nick’s latest partner in homicide. They’d been together for almost a year. Nick was the senior man by about ten years.

“Yeah, Tony, whaddaya got?”

“Some high-powered guy got whacked about an hour ago on Seventy-eighth and East End. The captain wants us down there right away.”

“All right, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Nick and Mary lived in the same rent-controlled apartment on Ninety-seventh and Park where Nick had grown up with his parents and two younger brothers. It was the only way they could afford to live in the city. Mary’s dream was a house upstate, or in New Jersey or Rockaway Beach-they could never afford Long Island-but Nick wouldn’t hear of it.

“People get murdered all over the city at all hours of the day and night,” he told her. “I can’t be driving in from the suburbs like some commuter. I gotta be there right away. Besides, you’re living on Park Avenue.” It was a quip that had always made Mary laugh in the early years. The real Park Avenue ended at the imaginary line south of Ninety-sixth Street. Nowadays, after all the years of being a cop’s wife and making the necessary sacrifices, she simply ignored the remark.

Twenty minutes later Nick was standing over the body of Carl Robertson, his eyes exploring every detail of the dead man’s body-searching for the obscure clue. It was one of the things that separated him from the run-of-the-mill homicide detective. In this case, there was nothing subtle about the fact that Carl had met his demise as a result of a gunshot wound to the head.

The place was swarming with uniformed police officers, gawkers, and reporters from both print and television. Nick was the guy in charge, and he looked the part. He was a big man, a few inches over six feet, with broad shoulders and an ample waistline that he carried well, even though it seemed to be growing an inch or two each year. He was constantly telling himself that he was going to start working out “one of these days.” Tony Severino, on the other hand, worked out like a madman, but in some respects it did him no good. At the end of the day, Tony was still short and stocky.

A perimeter had been set up with tape before the two detectives arrived. The perimeter was supposed to secure the crime scene, but too often everybody-cops included-just walked through like it was Disneyland. That wasn’t going to happen on Nick Walsh’s watch.

“Get those uniforms outside the tape line,” he told Tony. “I don’t want the crime scene destroyed. Have them do crowd control or something.” Technically, uniforms and detectives were the same rank, but at a homicide scene the detectives were in control. “And get the fuckin’ press as far away from here as you can,” Nick added. He hated the press. They had a tendency to report what they wanted to report, regardless of the facts-although Nick wasn’t above using a reporter from time to time to put out a story.

Tony set about giving the uniforms assignments outside the lines and moving the press and everybody else out of the way.

When he had finished his initial investigation of the corpse and the immediate area surrounding it, Nick strode over to the assistant medical examiner on the scene, Dan Jenkins, who was standing just a few feet away directing his people and making notes.

“Whaddaya got so far, Dan?”

“It seems open-and-shut, Nick, although you and I both know it’s never open-and-shut.” Nick nodded. They both had been doing this long enough to know that nothing was as it seemed. “It looks like death was caused by a single bullet to the brain. I don’t know if you have this yet, but the woman who called this in said she heard a noise that sounded like a gunshot a few minutes after ten. She looked out her window and saw the deceased there lying on the ground. She also saw a man-apparently the shooter-kneel over the deceased while he was on the ground, then get up and run away. She was too far away to give a description and she didn’t know if he took anything from the deceased or not.”

“What about time of death?” Nick asked.

“It’s a little early to say definitely”-it was a disclaimer Nick always expected and usually received-“but rigor mortis has not set in yet, and from the coagulation of the blood in the ankles I’d say offhand that everything shut down about ten o’clock.”

Coroners, Nick thought. They have such an interesting way of describing death.

“Thanks, Dan. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the next few days and weeks.”

“Yeah,” Dan groaned. “You know, Nick, I was scheduled to be off tonight. Just my luck to get one of these high-profile cases where everybody is breathing down your neck.”

“I’m with you,” Nick replied. “Who the fuck was this guy anyway?”

“Some super-rich oil guy.”

“Jesus. Let’s see if we can put this to bed as quickly as possible.”

“Sure thing, Nick. Okay if I take the body? I want to get it out of here before the reporters start sticking their heads down his shorts looking for a scoop.”

Nick laughed. It wasn’t far from the truth. “He’s all yours.”

“Thanks, Nick.”

As Nick watched Dan Jenkins assemble his people and equipment to transport the body to the morgue, the assistant chief, Ralph Hitchens, sidled up next to him.

“Looks like a robbery gone bad,” he said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about. In twenty years in homicide, Nick had never seen Ralph Hitchens at a murder scene before.

Nick stifled the urge to say, No, Sherlock, it looks like a murder. Instead, he just nodded in agreement as he watched Dan Jenkins’s young assistant load the body onto a stretcher. He didn’t like to miss any of the details, especially in a high-profile case like this.

“Any thoughts so far, Detective?” Hitchens asked.

Nick couldn’t bring himself to ignore the question. The assistant chief was nothing more than a glorified pencil pusher: they had entered the academy together and graduated at the same time, but while Nick went directly to the street, old Ralphie boy became some captain’s clerk. Nobody who knew Ralph Hitchens back then would ever have picked him as a leader of men. They might have picked him as the guy most likely to piss his pants in a gun battle, but that was about it. He rose in rank the way most of them did, sticking their nose up enough asses until they were rewarded for the endeavor. Politics, Nick thought with that exact picture in his mind. No wonder it stinks!

“Well, it’s definitely a homicide, Chief. Bullet wound to the head,” Nick deadpanned. Over to his left, Nick noticed that Tony Severino, recently returned from his crowd-management duties, was fighting to keep from laughing out loud.

Ralph Hitchens’s jaw tensed. He clearly was not amused by the remark.

“I want this case wrapped up quickly, Walsh. You’ve got an eyewitness.”

Is this shithead for real? Nick fumed to himself. Yeah, Chief, there’s an eyewitness who saw someone next to the body. That narrows it down to eight million people, you schmuck! He decided to pull the prick’s chain a little longer. What the hell, I’m vested.

“I’ll get right on it, Chief. An unidentified male shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

As he said the words, Nick realized all he needed was a description to solve the case. Whoever did this crime was probably in the system somewhere.

Thanks, Chief! he said to himself. I wouldn’t have thought of that right away if I hadn’t been busting your balls.