Chapter 18 The Seam #2
“It runs up through a stack of companies,” Murphy said.
“Each one owns the next. Each one harder to see into than the last. You climb it and you climb it and you get to the top and it’s a holding company that’s nothing but a row of names that aren’t real people.
A dead end. Built that way on purpose, so anyone who climbs it ends up standing on nothing.
” He let it sit. “But on the way up, before it disappears, it moves through your family’s money.
Branford money is paying for this. I can’t prove it in a courtroom. I can see it plain as I see you.”
I thought about every cheap beer I’d made a point of ordering at Conroy’s. Every gas-station sandwich. The whole long performance of a man who’d never owed anyone anything.
“That doesn’t mean my father,” I said. “A company isn’t a man. You said it yourself, the names at the top aren’t even real.”
“There’s more.” He didn’t enjoy it, I’ll give him that much. “Your transfer. Out of 52, into here. Did you ever once wonder why it went through in six days?”
“It went through in six days?”
“A transfer like that takes a month. Six weeks. Yours took less than a week, because somebody high up reached down and shoved it through. There’s a name on the order for who approved it.” He stopped, and I watched him decide to hand it to me. “Deputy Chief Charles Whitfield.”
The name was nothing and then it was everything. Whitfield. I’d shaken his hand once, years back, at something of my father’s. A good handshake. My father’s laugh living somewhere in his ear.
“He’s a friend of my father’s.”
“Twenty years of friend. The clubs, the boards, the charity dinners. We can’t tie the two of them to a crime.
We can tie them to twenty years of standing in the same rooms.” Murphy’s hand went to the back of his neck.
“And this morning,” he said, “the reason I pulled Hawley off your couch. A witness came in. With a lawyer. Someone placed close enough to watch the paper move, who decided to talk while she’s still got the nerve. A clerk. Records.”
A statement. He’d told me there was a statement. I looked at the desk, and the sound that came out of me had nothing good in it.
Luke didn’t say anything. His jaw was working, the small flex I knew meant he was holding a sentence behind his teeth.
He’d gone somber all the way through, and he was looking at me the whole time, not away, taking it, and somehow that was worse than if he’d flinched.
I wanted him to flinch. I wanted him to give me one clean reason to hate him.
He wouldn’t even do that. He just stood there in his beaten body and let me hit him with my eyes.
“Here’s the shape of it,” Murphy said, “and you’ll hate me for laying it out, but you’re a detective and you’d see it yourself in ten seconds anyway.
The operation was already pushing into 51’s ground.
This division was about to come apart at the seams. And somebody with reach took the one cop who’d already burned down in disgrace and set him right in the middle of it, where the fire was going to start.
So that when it went up, there’d be an obvious man to hang it on.
The one who fails twice. Nobody believes him a third time. ”
I could hear myself breathing. Too fast, and no way to slow it down.
“You’re saying I was put here to fall.” I knew there was more of it, more than just police business, but I wasn’t going to lay my father’s obsession with his heir out in front of my boss.
“I’m saying your own family put you here to fall,” Murphy said. “Through a friend. With nothing on a page a lawyer couldn’t laugh out of the room. Yes.”
“That’s what I’ve got.” Murphy spread his hands over the mess of paper, a long stretch of it.
“And it still isn’t enough. The money stops at names that aren’t names.
A friendship isn’t a crime. I’ve spent the best part of forever crawling at this sideways in the dark, and this morning, for the first time, I’ve got a crack in it.
A witness with her nerve up and a lawyer beside her.
” He looked at me, and there was no give in it anywhere.
“And I’m asking you, one time, as the man who took you in when you landed here and has kept a hand over you ever since. Do not take a hammer to it.”
I should have been doing the detective thing.
Pressure-testing it. Finding the hole. I couldn’t.
The reopening. The leash. The pain of being ground down to a nub.
Not the system. Not bad luck. Him. And the rage I kept waiting for didn’t come.
There was a wide cold nothing, and a long way under it, something starting to turn that I had no room for in here.
And Luke had known the whole time. I looked at him and he looked back and didn’t look away, and I took it in the same flat numb way, that he’d carried this since the night I told him my name, that he’d come home to me every night since and said nothing, and I waited to feel that too and felt nothing, because the nothing had all of me now and it was the only thing holding me up.
“Let me help,” I said. The level in my own voice scared me. “Nobody on this earth reads my father like I do. I learned him to get through dinner. Point me at him. Use me.”
“No.” He didn’t take a second on it.
“Murphy. I’m the best tool you’ve got and you want to leave me in the drawer.”
“You’re the one tool I can’t use.” He stood.
“The second you go at him, he’ll see it coming, and the case dies in a week.
And the IA finishes what it started with you.
” The order came down flat, the one he doesn’t argue after.
“Tomorrow you go back to your partial duties and you behave like this never happened. Today you go home. You sit in your apartment and you breathe and you do nothing. That is not a request, Carlson.”
I looked at him. I looked at Luke, who still hadn’t said one useful word, who was watching me the way you watch weather come in off the lake.
And I nodded.
I don’t know why. Maybe there was nothing left in me to fight with.
Maybe some buried, trained, golden-boy part of me still did what the man at the head of the table said.
I nodded, and I stood, and I walked out through the bullpen, which had gone quiet, and out the side door into the cold, and I didn’t say one word to either of them, and that should have been the end of it for the day.
I got half a block.
“Ryan! Wait!”
I heard it before I felt it, the uneven sound of a man running, and I should have kept walking. I stopped. Even now. My feet stopped when he said my name, the way they’d been stopping all this time.
He came up beside me holding his ribs, breathing wrong.
“Don’t,” I said. “Whatever you’re going to say. I can’t have your voice right now, Luke.”
“One minute.” He was wrecked. “Please. Then I’ll go.”
I turned around. I hadn’t decided to.
“The men last night,” I said. “The three thugs. They were my father’s men? Did my own father send men to beat you up because of this investigation?”
He didn’t say no.
That was the whole of it, right there. He didn’t say no.
His mouth opened and what came out was my name, low, like a hand held out, and it was not the word I needed.
Not no, God, it was strangers, it was nothing.
The silence where that word should have been went down into my stomach like swallowed ice.
“Say it wasn’t him.” I wasn’t level anymore. “Say it. Lie to me, I don’t even care, I’ve had the practice today. Tell me the men who put you in a hospital weren’t sent by my father and I will go home like a good boy.”
“Ryan.”
“You can’t.” I was shouting in the street now, and a woman steered her kid wide of us, and I didn’t care.
“You can’t say it because it’s true. My father had you beaten.
He put three men with a bat on my partner and broke him on the pavement, and you knew it on the road, you knew it crawling home, and you got in our shower and let me say I loved you with it sitting in your chest.”
“I was keeping you out of it. That’s all it ever was.”
“I don’t care about the case!” It tore out of me and it was true, and the truth of it cracked something open.
“Do you hear me. I do not care about the case. I know how it works, I know there are things a partner carries that he can’t hand you.
I know that. I’d have forgiven you that.
I’d have forgiven the whole time of you keeping it off me, if that were all this was, two cops and a secret. I swear to God I would have.”
I had to stop and find the air.
“But you’re not a line in a file, Luke. You’re the one they hit.
He didn’t come after a case. He came after you.
My father looked at my whole life and found the one thing in it I love and he sent men to break it, as a message, and the message worked, it’s working right now, because all I can see is the next three thugs coming your way.
The ones he sends when a warning isn’t enough. ”
He reached for me. Of course he did. He’s Luke.
And God help me I wanted it, I wanted to put my face in his neck and let him tell me he had it handled, that he’d be careful, every soft lie that works.
That was the worst of it. That after all of it I still wanted his arms more than I wanted to be safe from him.
I stepped back, out of his reach.
“This madness needs to stop,” I said.
I left him there on the sidewalk, holding his ribs, shouting my name, and I walked, and I did not look back, because if I looked back I would have gone to him.