“So Duke got me out of the hole alive-that’s all I asked of him. Lost the rest of the foot at the hospital. Too much damage had been done to save it.”
“The Hassett boys are wrong about Duke, are they?” Mike asked. “Wrong about blaming him for their father’s death?”
“Now you’re asking two different things of me, aren’t you, Mike?” Phin said, looking overhead at a plane making its approach to La Guardia, across the Sound. “You wanted to know if Duke saved my life, so I guess the answer has to be yes to that. But first you gotta know how that agitator car got uncoupled in the first place. You gotta know how it got loose from the brake car, don’t you, before you reach your next conclusion?”
“You mean, you think it was Duke Quillian who-who did that? Intentionally?”
“There, you said it yourself. It isn’t a very good idea to wind up between a Quillian and a Hassett, especially when one of ’em’s armed with a twenty-ton weapon.”
I couldn’t understand how Phin could be so calm if he thought Duke had engineered Hassett’s murder and his own near-fatal injury. “But didn’t the police investigate this? Didn’t you tell them you thought Duke was responsible?”
His face wrinkled as he looked at me quizzically, as though he couldn’t fathom why I was asking what the police thought.
“Like I told the cops when they came to the hospital, I couldn’t see anything that far up the tunnel. I didn’t have no proof anybody tinkered with the cars. Besides, Duke couldn’t have known I was even in the hole. Just my dumb luck that Hassett asked me to go back in with him after I signed out for the day. He wanted to finish up the last part of the job before he knocked off. Needed a hand and I gave it to him. Didn’t know what it would cost both of us.”
Phin turned his back to me, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and lit up. “If you haven’t learned it yet, you’ll find we don’t put much stock in cops five hundred feet underground. We’re used to taking care of ourselves.”
“I’m surprised Duke lasted this long, with so many Hassetts around,” Mike said.
“The Hassetts thought they were getting some powerful help from above, Detective. Duke got real sick, maybe a month after all this happened. Had cancer so bad he almost died. What’s that hospital in Manhattan?”
“Sloan-Kettering,” I said. The world-renowned medical center specialized in treatment of cancer patients, one of whom had been Mike’s fiancée, Val.
“Duke spent a few months there. Never thought we’d see him again. By that time I’d cut all my ties to the job, had no need to look back.” Phin came as close as he had so far to a smile. “One thing I was always damn sure of-Duke Quillian wouldn’t die of old age.”
Phin Baylor swiveled on his good leg and leaned on the side of the battlement, looking over the water. Mike was beside him, shoulder to shoulder.
“Can you tell us why, Phin? Why you think Duke might have done such a thing?”
Phin took a long drag on his cigarette.
“You’ve had more than enough time to figure it out, haven’t you?”
“He was a mean bastard, Detective. What’s the difference why he did it? I’m not ever going dancing again, even if I knew. Got me out of the hole, in the end, which probably adds twenty more years to my life.”
Mike wouldn’t give up. “But why was he after old man Hassett? Why did Duke hate him?”
“Might be no more than the grief Hassett gave Duke-gave his father, really-about Brendan. Taunting them constantly about how weak Brendan was, how he couldn’t make it in the tunnel. Used to say he wasn’t even half a man. Stuff like that. Used to drive the Quillians crazy because Brendan’s goals were such a rejection of their roots in this country and the work they’d been bred to do. Here’s two families that for generations have dedicated their lives, if you will, to building New York from the very bottom up. That’s part of the irony of them destroying each other. Taking pleasure in it as well. A real blood feud between them, that’s what it was.”
“Did they fight about-”
“They fought about everything, Chapman. Maybe it was money at the root of all this, maybe it was the girlfriend that old man Hassett and Quillian once shared, and maybe it was simply the fact that Duke Quillian knew every one of these stories and simply liked to hurt people. There’s miles of trouble beneath these city streets, making it all work up above-and some very rough dealings go into staying alive.”
Phin crushed his cigarette and flicked the butt over the side of the fort. “That’s all I have for you. Better push on and do your work.”
Mike motioned to me that he was ready to leave. “Can we give you a lift over to the house?”
“No, thanks. The air here is good for me.” Phin leaned an elbow on the massive granite battlement and exhaled a row of smoke rings. “You see that crazy Quillian girl, Mike, you give her a message for me.”
“What’s that, Phin?”
“Tell her she’ll live a lot longer if she keeps her yap shut, will you? Tell her nice as you two are, I’m not interested in any more company, thank you very much. She ought to dig for the bones in her own backyard.”
23
I waited for Mike at the car. He had waved me off and stayed behind to talk to Baylor.
“What did Phin mean by that last shot?” I asked when he joined me ten minutes later.
“Just what he told us. That the Quillians always made their own trouble-he’s got no use for any of them. Says Trish ought to mind her own business before she goes pointing fingers at anyone else.”
“That’s all you got from him? He must have been making a point.”
“Like your interrogation techniques are any better than mine? The guy hasn’t squealed in more than a decade-had the fortitude to hold the flashlight while somebody amputated half his foot-and you think he’s going to go belly-up ’cause I’m butting heads with him over something that nitwit said to us back in the bar? I’ll let you out, blondie. Try playing footsie with him and call me tomorrow.”
Mike saw there was a message on his cell phone and held it to his ear.
“Sorry,” I said. “It just sounded like he had more to say. Did you ask him if he remembered Bex?”
He flipped the phone shut. “Yes, ma’am. Says he used to scare his own daughter by reminding her of what happened to the Hassett girl for hanging out with those bums in the park. ‘Lay down with dogs, you’re gonna have fleas.’ Life according to Phin.”
“That’s a tough old bird.”
Mike made a U-turn. “Want a look at the file?”
“You serious?”
“The message is from Spiro. If we stop by Bronx Homicide right now, he’ll take us into the Cold Case Squad. The Hassett file is sitting there, waiting its turn in the middle of a pile for one of the guys to pick it up and see whether any of the old evidence is suitable for DNA analysis.”
“I’m in. It’s only six thirty,” I said, looking at my watch. “Why not?”
Although prosecutors in America had been introduced to DNA technology in the mid-1980s, before I’d even dreamed of a career as a prosecutor, no court admitted evidence of genetic fingerprinting in a criminal case until 1989. The accuracy of this scientific technique revolutionized the criminal justice system, linking perpetrators to crime scenes with complete certainty, and allowing the exoneration of others mistakenly accused or wrongly identified.
Not until the start of the twenty-first century-after DNA testing methodology had undergone a decade of refinement-were state and national data banks established. In the infancy of this forensic breakthrough, evidence that had yielded enough DNA to create a unique human profile could only be compared to a specific donor-suspect or witness-who surfaced on the radar screen in an investigation.