“Maura and her father?”
“Yeah, she seemed to resent him for some reason.”
Resented her father. Didn’t get along with him. Interesting. This was the second person in the department who’d suggested that Maura Walsh and her father had a troubled relationship. That was an interesting idea to pursue for my profile about her. Maybe even to ask her father about – if and when I ever got an interview with him.
“Look,” Renfro said, “I don’t really feel up to talking about this anymore right now. It’s still too fresh in my mind. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“She was my partner, and I let her down. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. She’s dead, and I blame myself for not protecting her better. A police officer is always supposed to be there for their partner. But I wasn’t there when Maura needed me. I was off somewhere buying a pizza!”
He shook his head sadly.
“Helluva thing what happened to Maura, isn’t it?”
“Helluva thing,” I agreed.
There was something wrong here.
For one thing, Renfro never looked me directly in the eye the entire time we discussed the specific details of Maura Walsh’s murder. Instead, he looked down at a beer he was drinking, across the bar at other people, at the floor – anywhere but me. This did not prove anything by itself, of course, but it was something I’d learned about people as a reporter. I called it lying eyes. Billy Renfro was lying to me about something, or at least he wasn’t telling me everything.
Second, I didn’t understand his story about the pizza. The 22nd Precinct – where they worked – was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, maybe a twenty-minute drive from where Maura Walsh was murdered. There were pizza places all over the 22nd Precinct. So why did they go all that way downtown to Little Italy for pizza? Was the pizza really that good at Delmonico’s? What the heck were they doing down there anyway?
Third, and most importantly, there was the problem of the missing hour of time. Billy Renfro said he’d gone into the pizza place at 10:30. He hadn’t realized Maura Walsh was missing until he got back to the squad car – and radioed in the first call for help at 11:30. That was way too long. The first rule for a police officer was to always stay in contact with your partner. If a police officer can’t reach their partner, he or she always expects the worst. But Renfro was out of touch with Maura Walsh for a full hour. A crucial hour in which she could have been saved, but died instead. It took Billy Renfro an awfully long time before he got worried about what had happened to her.
So what was Renfro hiding?
Who was he hiding it from?
And why?
Five
The heat hit me like a blast from a furnace when I left the air-conditioning of McGuire’s.
Within a short time, I was drenched in sweat and wondering why I was still in this city during a heat wave. Maybe Danny was right. Maybe I should go on vacation. Go somewhere where I could sit on a beach and jump in the ocean and drink cold cocktails by the pool. Except I knew that was never going to happen. Not while I had a big story to do.
I headed back to the Tribune office. I took a Lexington Avenue subway down from the Upper East Side to 51st Street. Then I walked across town the rest of the way to the Tribune, which was located near Rockefeller Center.
It’s really a terrific part of the city to work in. Rockefeller Center was where Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live and NBC’s Today Show had studios, so you’d sometimes run into celebrities on the street outside. Across the street was Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes and all their holiday shows, plus the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in December. In the other direction were the lights of Broadway and Times Square. No matter how many times I come here, I never get tired of the glamour and the excitement and the New York City feel of this area.
On my way into the newsroom, I passed Peter Ventura’s desk. He was wearing an extremely wrinkled shirt and drinking black coffee. No one was exactly sure where he spent his nights these days. A while ago, his wife had thrown him out of the house when he finally returned home after an unusually long bender. Now Peter probably just drifted from hotel to hotel or spent the night with friends or whatever women he met in bars.
He once told me about an emergency plan he’d devised for when he couldn’t find a bed: he’d simply go to a hospital emergency room and complain about chest pains. The standard procedure was for the medics to give him a cot in the ER and monitor his vital signs throughout the night. In the morning, when they couldn’t find anything wrong, he’d simply get up and be on his way. This plan worked well a number of times, Ventura said, until one night he was woken up by the sounds of doctors frantically pounding on the chest of a patient lying next to him. It turned out that guy really was having a heart attack. “I had nightmares for a long time after that – in fact, it scared me so much I almost gave up drinking,” he said in telling the story. “Almost.”
“Do you know Billy Renfro?” I asked Ventura now.
“Maura Walsh’s partner. Sure. I’ve worked on a few stories about him.”
“What do you think?”
“Good cop. Why?”
“No reason. I interviewed him for my story.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s pretty upset about what happened to his partner.”
Even with all his drinking, Peter Ventura probably had better police sources than any reporter in the city. Cops liked him, they talked to him, they confided in him.
I perched on the edge of his desk. “Say, what do you know about Maura Walsh?”
“Everyone said she was a good cop too. Even if her father is a real prick. The people who knew her, who worked with her, said she was okay. Real shame about what happened to her. I’ll tell you one thing I do know, though. The police brass are very worried about the lack of progress in the investigation. I found out they just shook things up and put somebody new in charge of investigating the Walsh case ’cause they’re getting nowhere. He’s called Lieutenant Thomas Aguirre. Hey, that could be a break for you! You must know Aguirre pretty well from what happened in Central Park?”
Oh, I knew Lieutenant Thomas Aguirre, all right.
I had mixed feelings about Homicide Detective Lt. Thomas Aguirre.
On the one hand, he was an arrogant, egotistical blowhard; a sexist charmer who routinely treated women as objects for his own amusement; and a media hound who would do anything to get his name and face all over the newspapers or on TV news.
On the other hand, he’d saved my life just a few months earlier.
So that last item probably trumped all the rest, I told myself as I went to see him in his office at the Midtown East Precinct, which had taken over the Maura Walsh murder investigation as of this morning.
That was the attitude I went in with anyway, but it didn’t last long.
“Jessie Tucker!” he boomed when he saw me. “The woman who made me a star! What can I do for you, honey?”
Yes, I’d made the guy famous. He’d shot and killed the person who was trying to murder me when I uncovered the true story of what had happened to me in Central Park more than a decade before. It put him on the front pages and certainly gave him a huge boost in his career. Probably one of the reasons why he was in charge of such a high-profile murder investigation now. But I still didn’t like him. Go ahead, call me ungrateful. But the guy just grated on me.