“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.