Sins of the Sons Page 2

  A client. I needed a client right about then, the bank account being what it was—redder than a Christmas candle and emptier than an old fruitcake tin.

  “Have a seat,” I said, gesturing with my free hand to the empty wood chair positioned in front of the desk. I sat down, set the whiskey on the desk beside the green bottle of Jameson. “Care for a drink?”

  He sat down, crossed his legs, and adjusted his round tortoise shell eyeglasses. I took note of his expensive charcoal suit under an even more expensive overcoat. The ball knot on his red and black rep tie was tied to perfection against a white Oxford. It was a contrast to his full head of dark hair, and his solid gold cufflinks must have set him back a couple grand alone. If it was the 1920s, he would have been the type to wear a bowler hat, leather gloves, and carry a cane. I smelled money on him like a hungry dog sniffs out people food.

  He pretended to glance at his watch.

  “It’s only eleven in the morning,” he said, a half smile painting his face.

  “Florence,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Florence,” I repeated. “Florence, Italy.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s five o’clock in Florence, Italy.”

  He issued a pretend, if not confused laugh, re-crossed his legs and I couldn’t help but notice his polished black Florsheims.

  “Oh, I get it,” he said. “As in, it must be five o’clock somewhere.”

  I pretended to laugh. “So, what can I help you with, Mister— . . .”

  “O’Connell,” he said. “Jim O’Connell. He sat up, reached across the desk with his hand.

  I guessed I had no choice but to take the hand in mine and shake it. I squeezed. It was a small hand, smooth and warm, lacking in strength. Definitely a man who’d never worked a blue-collar job in his life much less lifted a few free-weights at the gym. That is, if you could still find a gym that housed free-weights.

  Our hands released and we both sat back in our respective chairs. I cathedraled my fingers, elbows on the desktop, assumed my best Jack Marconi smile.

  “So, what can I help you with today, Mr. O’Connell?”

  “Oh, please, Jim. I’m a rather casual boy.”

  And rich . . .

  “Jim it is.” I pressed my lips together and went wide-eyed like I was waiting anxiously for him to spill whatever was on his mind.

  For a brief second or two, he looked up at the ceiling as though collecting his thoughts or trying to put words together in a very careful way. Too many individuals confuse private detectives for real cops. That said, we tended to make them nervous, especially when it came to sensitive subjects—like adultery, for instance. I was never a cop but instead, a prison warden, which is sort of like a cop who serves and protects the inside of a concrete and razor wire fortress.

  “I have a problem,” he finally admitted.

  “Don’t we all,” I said.

  He smiled nervously again. “He said you’d be like this.”

  “Who said what?”

  “The person who recommended you.”

  “Who recommended me?”

  “A man named Miller. Homicide detective at the Albany Police Department.”

  I nodded, pictured the tall, slim detective in my brain. I knew Miller well. We’d worked together on occasion on jobs the APD couldn’t handle on its own.

  “He’s a good man,” I said. “And yeah, I can be kind of a jokester, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes,” Jim O’Connell said. “It’s fine.” His face assumed a serious expression again. “You see, one of my best childhood friends recently passed away. His wake was this past Friday, and the funeral was Saturday. I work in Manhattan, so I came up by train.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I offered.

  He shook his head. “Thank you. The poor soul fell down the basement stairs. Tragic. He was such a fun-loving young man when I knew him.”

  “You weren’t still friends?”

  “I lost touch with my prep school pals after university. You know, life gets in the way, people move out of state or move on, anyway. We simply lost touch with one another.”

  Prep school. University. I could tell this guy loved himself.

  “But then he fell down the stairs,” I said. “Your friend, I mean.”

  “Yes, such bad luck. But he had other problems, as well. Like alcoholism. On several recent occasions, I visited him at his house in Loudonville, and he was in a terrible state.” He shook his head. “It was a sad thing to witness such deterioration in a man who was once so vivacious and strong. We played football together at the Albany Academy for Boys.” He smiled sheepishly. “Rather, I was the team equipment manager. He, however, was All-City. A nose tackle.”

  O’Connell was the football equipment manager. Now, there was a shocker. I played eight years of football back when the helmets were little more than thin plastic shells with chin straps and maybe a bar or two for a facemask. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t picture O’Connell taking a tackle much less giving one. So, team equipment manager made sense.

  “And?” I pressed, wanting desperately to get back to my whiskey and staring out the window while wallowing in my own self-pity.

  “And many people came into town for the funeral. Many of whom, if not most, I haven’t seen in almost forty years.”

  “We’re getting there,” I said.

  He sat up straighter, uncrossed his legs, planted both Florsheim soles on the wood floor.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know you’re busy. I’ll get right to the point.”

  “Now you’re cooking with gas.” I smiled.

  “You see, one of these persons who actually still lives in town also used to be one of my best friends at the Academy.”

  I pulled out a yellow legal pad from the top desk drawer along with a pen.

  “His name?” I asked.

  “Steve Long.”

  I wrote it down.

  “In fact, Steve and I and the deceased were like the three amigos back in school. As close as three lads can be. Engaged in school activities together. Ate lunch together. Hung out together on the weekends. We even took the same classes so we could be together all the time.”

  “The deceased,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Mark Mastrullo.”

  I wrote that down. “One S, two Ls, I assume.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Like I said, Mark, Steve, I and did everything together.”

  I also wrote down The Albany Academy for Boys. It was the most prestigious and expensive country day prep school in the area. All the governor’s sons went there, including the one who now had his own news show on CNN. Privileged kids that came from old Albany money, mostly.

  “You guys were preppies, weren’t you, Jim?”

  He laughed. “I guess we wore our share of pink Izod polo shirts if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he affirmed.

  “Collar up,” I said. “Defying gravity.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “You get the picture.”

  “Let me guess, Jim. The reason you’re here is that the death of one of your best friends has not only reunited you with the third best friend, but it has also caused something of the past to come back and haunt you, if not bite you on the ass.”

  His face went pale. “How did you know?” he said.

  “This isn’t my first hour on the job, Jim,” I said. “So, what happened and why are you here now?”

  “Steve Long,” he said. “Back in the day, you couldn’t find a more handsome, fun-loving kid. The girls loved him. And he loved them. He also loved to party. He was always drinking beers and doing shots of one liquor or another. The drinking age was younger then, you see.”

  “Fake IDs,” I said.

  “Precisely. We all had fake IDs. Well, you see, Steve has changed. A complete one-eighty, you might say. He no longer drinks, no longer indulges in illicit drugs, no longer philanders, and he’s found . . . how shall I say this . . . religion.”

  “He’s found Jesus,” I add. “Let me guess. Belongs to one of those new storefront Christian churches that have been popping up all over the place.”

  His eyes lit up.

  “Very good,” he said. “Alternative Christian I believe they call it. Steve’s church is called the Light of the Earth Church. They’ve bought out what used to be a Price Chopper Supermarket in Latham to the north of Albany. They even bought out the Pizza Hut next door, converted it into a visitor center.”

  “Waste of good pizza,” I said. Then, “Those churches make big bucks. So, what is it you want me to do about Steve the converted Christian?”

  He shifted himself forward as if what he was about to tell me was so sensitive, he had to whisper it even if we were alone inside my second-floor office—alone in the entire former Sherman Street garment factory, in fact.

  He inhaled and exhaled. Profoundly. Then, having worked up the courage to say what he came here to say, he let loose with it.

  “Something happened when we were seventeen. Something that started out innocently but ended very badly.”

  He paused. I issued him a swirling hand gesture like, “And . . .”

  “You see, we were a little drunk and even a little high, I must admit. We’d been drinking on the eighteenth green of the Wolforts Roost Country Club. You know the place?”

  I nodded. “Yup, I went through a golfing phase for about five minutes a couple of decades ago. When I discovered how much I stunk at it, I tossed the clubs into one of the Wolforts Roost ponds and never looked back.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that, being self-employed, I also couldn’t afford the monthly dues.

  “Seems the more I practice the worse I get.” Jim shakes his head. “But I digress.”

  “Yes, you were saying, Jim?”

  “So, myself, Mark, and Steve were getting drunk on the eighteenth green in late November when we witnessed an older couple having a bitter argument outside the dining room.” He rolled his eyes. “Older couple. Gee whiz, they were probably somewhere around our ages now. Perhaps younger. That is, he was. But when you’re seventeen . . .”

  “I get it,” I assured him. “Go on.”

  “Her name was Tracy, a beautiful blonde who had money of her own from a first marriage. And his name was Martin. Martin Finnegan. Everyone called him Marty.”

  The name struck a bell, and it had nothing to do with the book, Finnegan’s Wake. But I decided not to let on about it.

  “You see, Tracy and Marty had recently gotten engaged and even bought a house together. By all accounts, they shared a bank account. Well, you see, Mr. Marconi, things weren’t going so well in the relationship. They fought a lot. Bitterly. Sometimes in public.”

  “Like they were the night you were getting drunk on the green.”

  “Yes. Apparently, he had emptied out one of their accounts, and she wanted her portion of the money back on the spot. But he was leaving her.”

  Now I truly recalled the story. Marty Finnegan, prominent Albany real estate attorney and Fin Shane supporter. He was found dead in a patch of woods not far from his mansion in the nearby sleepy suburb of Niskayuna. His death was determined a freak accident—a heart attack. But the family were convinced it was the result of foul play. The case went cold, and it’d been in the freezer for more than three decades now. I could have revealed my knowledge of the story to O’Connell, but this was his show, and I wanted his unbiased take on what might have happened to poor old Marty all those years ago.

  “This thing you’re about to tell me . . . It’s very difficult for you to admit, isn’t it, Jim? Like, could get you in a world of hurt kind of difficult?”

  His face went pale, and I swear to Christ, tears formed in his eyes. That’s when I opened the bottom drawer, pulled out the second drinking glass I kept there for guests who needed a belt—like O’Connell no doubt needed right now. I poured him a shot and set it on the edge of the desk. He reached out, took the drink, and stared into the golden liquor.

  “It is five o’clock in Florence, Italy,” he said contemplatively.

  I looked at my watch.

  “Five ten now,” I said.

  He drank down the shot, set the empty glass back on the desk. “I’ll take another if you don’t mind, Mr. Marconi.”

  “Call me, Keeper,” I said. “I’m a rather casual boy, too.”

  Chapter 2

  It took three belts before Jim O’Connell, self-confessed preppy, could work up the courage to tell me his story. And what a doozy of a story it was. It was the kind of story that, should it surface in the papers, could potentially land the prominent New York City attorney in a whole lot of legal jeopardy, if not prison.

  So, here’s the gist of it: Jim and his two pals decided to have a little fun that night. When Marty Finnegan left the country club, they sped out of the Wolforts Roost Country Club parking lot, caught up with Marty’s car, followed it to, of all places, the Albany Airport. Marty was driving a black Mercedes Benz four-door sedan, and the boys were in Steve’s dad’s big Suburban. Along the way, they all dressed in the hunting gear belonging to Steve’s older brother and father. They even camo’d their faces with green camo paint. By the time they arrived at the airport’s long-term parking lot, their physical identities were completely hidden. They were also fairly wasted on vodka and pot.

  Having parked far enough away from Marty, Mark took hold of Dr. Long’s lever-action .30-.30 and, according to Jim, all three approached Marty Finnegan. Mark, the tougher one of the group, especially with that rifle in his hands, did all the talking. He demanded Marty give them all his money. “Do it or die,” were his exact words. A stunned Marty stood there in the cold, his hands raised in surrender. “Don’t hurt me,” he apparently responded.

  Like Jim said, the boys were drunk and high, and it was all they could do not to burst out laughing. Marty seemed so scared, they were convinced he was pissing himself. Mark demanded that he give them the money, or he would blast the lawyer’s brains out. He even cocked the rifle, just for drama’s sake. But the rifle apparently wasn’t even loaded.

  Still, the sound of the rifle cocking was all it took for Marty to empty his pockets and hand over all his cash to the boys. That’s when Mark demanded he get down on the ground. Face down. He was not to get up until they were gone-baby-gone. Marty started to cry. He was hyperventilating. Slowly, he got down on his knees, then laid himself out onto the pavement face-first.

  The boys turned, ran back to the Suburban, got in and took off.

  “In the end,” Jim went on, “we ended up with around eight-hundred dollars and some change. Not exactly a fortune, but a fortune for us. We had planned to hand the money over to Tracy since we’d look like heroes. But naturally, we quickly deduced that if we were to do that, we’d reveal ourselves as the robbers. So, in the end, we just decided to keep the money. We split it three ways and spent it on stupid stuff, like beer, junk food, and records.”

  “Must not have taken all that long to spend it.”

  He nodded. “I suppose not. It was so long ago now, I can’t really recall.”

  “Nowadays, CCTV cameras would have captured the robbery on digital video.”

  “But that was then.”

  “And this is now, Jim. So, what happened when you discovered that Marty Finnegan not only didn’t make it to Vegas but that he was found dead in a patch of woods not far from his house that very same night?”

  The blood once more flushed from his face. I could have poured him another shot, but it didn’t seem worth the effort now that he’d revealed his story. Most of it anyway.

  “You know about Mr. Finnegan, Keeper? Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “I’ve been in law enforcement for a lot of years, Jim,” I said. “Everyone knew about Marty’s death. And not everyone was convinced he died of natural causes. Especially his son, who wasn’t much older than you boys at the time.”

  “Well, now that you mention Mr. Finnegan’s death, I don’t mind telling you how afraid we all were that we would be found out. That we had actually robbed him in the airport parking lot not long before he suddenly died.”

  I sat back in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest. “So, tell me the truth, Jim,” I said. “Did you kill him?”

  He shot up out of his chair. “My God,” he spat. “How could you even suggest such a thing? I am a well-respected Manhattan attorney. I’m a principal partner in my firm. I have a wife and three children, all of whom attend prestigious colleges and universities across this great land of ours.”

  “So, what’s your point? You were never capable of a profound fuck-up back when you were a prep school brat?”

  He just looked at me like I could see right through his clothes to his silk boxers, his mouth agape, jaw dropped to somewhere around his sternum. I uncrossed my arms, sat up.

  “Sit down, Jim,” I said, my tone lighter. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just playing with your head in the interest of getting at the truth. Now, what is it you wish to hire me for?”

  “Steve Long,” he said along with a profound exhale, “he wishes to go public with the robbery all these years later.” He sat back down. “He believes he owes it to himself, his newfound sobriety, his family, and to Jesus.” He rolled his eyes again. “I would like to pay you to dissuade him from coming forward.”

  “You mean, you want me to rough him up? That’s sort of illegal. If you like, I can refer you to some low-level Italian mobsters down in Schenectady who can take care of this for far less money.”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. How would they say it in a literary novel? He shook his head . . . vehemently. “I don’t wish for you to do anything illegal. I only wish for you to follow him for a while. See what he’s up to. See if he goes to the police or the press or both. I want you to find out what his intentions are so I can act accordingly.”

  “Accordingly, meaning what, Jim?”

  He cocked his head over his shoulder. “Well, if he goes to the press and/or the police, I believe it would be wise to retain the best lawyer I can find. An act that in itself will not go unnoticed in New York City. But ,if perhaps you can stop him before he makes a move like that, maybe talk some sense into him, convince him that his actions will not only stir up a thirty-five year-old hornet’s nest, that it could potentially ruin the lives of not only me but my wife and children, not to mention his own children, then there will be no reason to have to act accordingly.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he repeated the words, act accordingly.