Stairway to the Bottom - a Mick Murphy Key West Mystery (6 page)

“He’s alone,” I said, following Walsh with binoculars.

Bob did a scan of the water and murmured a reply that I guessed meant no one else was approaching. “He’s got a boat in the mangroves.”

“Let’s talk first,” I said because Bob cradled the shotgun.

Walsh slowed down and did a quick ride around the
Fenian Bastard
, keeping his stare on Bob. With one hand, he tossed me a line tied to the double-seated Jet Ski’s steering wheel and I attached it to a cleat. He sat there and looked like he was considering what to do next, his baseball cap on backward. If he had a weapon it was under his loose shirt.

His appearance surprised me. He didn’t look like he had been on a Jet Ski for a long time. His fisherman’s shirt, with its many pockets, was dry. So were his shorts. He was barefoot.

“Coming aboard, Dick?” I said to break the stalemate.

“Why’s Bob got a fuckin’ shotgun?” He continued to sit.

“Well, Dick, you gotta understand my predicament.” I figured honesty might be the best policy in this situation, honesty not being my strong point, usually. “The cops think you murdered that woman in your kitchen and they make a strong case for it. You ran away and now you want to meet with me. I am not comfortable with any of it.”

I turned to Bob and nodded. He placed the shotgun on the cabin roof.

“I did shoot the bitch,” Walsh muttered and climbed off the Jet Ski onto the
Fenian Bastard
. “But it wasn’t murder.”

He was almost six-feet tall, and had a small paunch from eating and drinking too much, and a sunburned face.

Bob gave me a sharp look and moved a step closer to the shotgun.

“What was it?” I gave him a hand at the rail.

“I want to talk to you about it and why…and my whole damn life,” he said and sounded confused, but kept glancing toward Bob. “I need to trust you…and Bob, I guess…can I?”

He stood there, looking tired, and moved his stare between Bob and me.

“We’re here, Dick, but we’re being cautious,” I said.

“Okay,” he said with a nervous smile and sat down. “I killed the broad at the house, but it was self-defense, honest.”

“Answer a couple of questions and we’ll see how honest you are.” I sat across from him, watching where his hands went. “You called me for almost six hours, why me? Why not Padre Thomas who knew your background?”

“Why didn’t you answer my fuckin’ calls?” He turned an angry gaze toward me, ignoring my question and I could hear his paranoia.

I explained about the comedy club I’d been to. He didn’t look as if he believed me.

“So, why me?” I asked again and received an accusing stare.

“How much do you know?” He asked his sour expression a little anxious.

“Dick, the cops had me for hours and think I’m involved. They told me what they know and that’s very little. Seems your history is only a few years old. About as long as you’ve been hiding from the marshals.”

“You know anything else?” He looked edgy. “Do the fuckin’ marshals know you’re meeting me?”

“The cops told me the marshals are on their way and want to talk to me, too,” I said. “No one knows we’re meeting.”

Walsh squirmed. “Christ,” he moaned, bent forward and held his head in his hands. I expected him to cry. He didn’t. He laughed quietly. “They’re gonna fuckin’ kill me.”

“Why does everyone want to kill you?” I needed to hear his reply, even if he was paranoid.

“It seems that way, don’t it?” He frowned and looked behind us at the island of Key West.

Did he expect the marshals to come swooping in? Bob and I looked at each other and waited.

“You talked to Padre Thomas?” His attention was back on us.

“Yes.”

He waited for me to say more and when I didn’t he said, “He didn’t tell you?”

“You told him in confession, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” He laughed again, softly. “I wasn’t sure he’d fuckin’ honor it.”

“Religion isn’t a game to him, Dick. Whatever you think of him, Padre Thomas is a Jesuit and takes his vows seriously.”

“Funny, sometimes, ain’t it?” He muttered to himself, as if we weren’t there. “I walked away from all that fuckin’ religious crap, hell and damnation.” He quieted down with a cackle and went on. “All the fuckin’ saints they taught us about in Catholic school when I was a teenager and here I want to embrace the Church I walked away from. I want its forgiveness, its peace and I don’t deserve it. Death bed Catholic,” he muttered, looked at us and forced a small, guilty smile.

“Padre Thomas told me once we are all death bed Catholics,” I said. “Some all their lives because they believe and want to be prepared for death, others, like you, wait until the end to reach out, but ultimately, it’s the fear of death and the unknown that scares us into being believers.”

“God’s all about fuckin’ fear, ain’t he? Well, I fear the wrath of God,” he said. “What about you? Padre Thomas reach you?”

“Oh yeah, a few times,” I said thinking of the times he saved my sorry ass from the screeching Banshee. “But I think I fall somewhere in between the true believer and you. I still have questions that I can’t answer, not yet.”

“Don’t wait too fuckin’ long,” he whined. “It only gets worse.”

Walsh stood up, Bob moved toward the shotgun and, nervously, I stood up next to him. He looked into the main cabin. Bob scanned the water.

“You live on the boat, right?” Walsh said without turning toward us.

“Yes. I have for a while.” I looked at Bob and hunched my shoulders because I had no idea what was happening.

“You’re a journalist, so you have a tape recorder?” He stared into the cabin.

“Yeah,” I said, figuring less was better.

Walsh turned to us with a determined look and said, “Can we go below? I want to tell you my story. If something happens to me, I want the fuckin’ truth to be known. Someone needs to know. That’s why I called you, Mick. I want to document that I shook hands with the fuckin’ devil in Boston and I want to make sure everyone knows about it. You can do that, right? Get the story told.”

“I can’t promise anything.” I put the engine in gear and left Bob on watch as the
Fenian Bastard
moved forward on autopilot.

“Leave the hatch open,” Bob whispered, as he stood by the wheel.

Walsh and I went below. I got my small tape recorder and cassettes from the chart table while he tried to make himself comfortable on the settee. I sat across from him and put the recorder on the table. He squirmed about, never finding a comfortable spot.

“The fuckin’ devil can promise you anything, Mick, and in his own way, he keeps his fuckin’ word,” he said cynically. “Just promise me you’ll do whatever you can, especially if something fuckin’ happens to me.”

“Dick, until I know what it is you’re talking about, I can’t promise anything.”

He thought for a moment and then nodded his head. “Sounds fair. Let me tell you the fuckin’ story of how I took the stairway to the bottom and it all began in Boston and I bet you know of some of the players.”

I turned the on recorder and placed two empty cassettes on the table.

“I killed for Whitey Bulger,” he said without emotion. “For Whitey and the Winter Hill Gang. You with me, so far?”

I nodded. Whitey Bulger was Dick Walsh’s devil and recently captured by the FBI after sixteen years on the run.

“I didn’t kill their girlfriends or someone straight that pissed Whitey or Steve Flemmi off. All that shit that’s made the papers. They killed them, they fuckin’ enjoyed it. I killed anyone that tried to fuckin’ cheat Whitey or someone in his way on business and, of course, he required I get rid of a few Dagos. I killed them. By our standards, they deserved what they got. It was business to me.”

It took Walsh six profanity-filled hours to tell his story and then answer questions I wrote down as he spoke. When I realized what he was telling me I found a notebook and began taking notes, questions I had about what he said, but kept the questions until he was done. When we were done, I had no blank tapes left. Bob used the head twice, or said he needed to. I think he was checking on me. We reached Sand Key and I felt the boat turn toward Key West.

When it was over I lit a cigar and sat back.

“Walsh ain’t my real name,” he said with a shallow laugh. “Write my story and I’ll tell you what it is.”

He was in the witness protection program, he admitted, because he traded testifying against Whitey and admitting helping him escape in exchange for not being tried for murder. Now Whitey was caught it was time for him to testify.

“I took Whitey money from Boston to New York City, Miami, New Orleans before the fuckin’ FBI caught on to me,” he said, almost with pride. “Now they got him, they need me to testify.”

Whitey trusted him, but Walsh rationalized that turning informant was okay because Whitey had been an FBI informant all along, so had Steve Flemmi.

“You can’t rat out a fuckin’ rat,” he said using old gangster slang.

Walsh had been in the program since the mid ‘90s, a few years after Whitey Bulger escaped an FBI arrest because his friend and handler in the FBI warned him about it. The agent was doing prison time, Flemmi received life without parole, and the FBI finally caught up with Whitey and his girlfriend.

“Why are you running from the marshals,” I asked when he had finished.

“I was tired of someone looking over my fuckin’ shoulder all the time and I know I’m sick,” he said. “I had a good ID and money stashed in Boston, so I got it and came here. I was pretty public, if they wanted me they could’ve found me.”

“You haven’t said why everyone wants you dead.”

“Because I know too fuckin’ much,” he said with a little disgust in his voice. “The marshals and FBI, they’ve got to everyone. Including the local cops. Rumor is that FBI didn’t want Whitey caught because more than one agent was involved, some of ‘em way up the ladder now. Now he’s caught and if he goes to trial and talks…” He let his words end.

“So, why all these years later do they want you dead?”

“Whitey is old,” he muttered. “Capturing him was good for the FBI’s fuckin’ image. I’m the only witness they’ve got willing to testify. The only one alive that knows the who and the what…where the fuckin’ bodies are buried.”

“Nothing personal, Dick, but you’re a confessed killer with a dozen or so victims, why would a jury believe you?”

“The FBI has used fuckin’ Flemmi in cases and the juries believed him.” He grinned. “I’m an altar boy next to the Rifleman,” he said referring to Flemmi’s nickname.

Chapter 12

I
wouldn’t have used altar boy to describe Dick Walsh after our six-hour talk, but who was I to judge him, especially against someone as notorious as Flemmi. We were on our second pot of coffee and Bob stood in the hatchway. Walsh stopped taking notice of Bob about an hour into his diatribe.

“So, bring us up to speed on yesterday, tell me what happened at the house.” I drained the last of the cold coffee from my mug and stubbed out the cigar. “Who was she?” I stood to stretch my legs.

“This is where things really get fuckin’ strange,” he said. “I don’t know who she was.”

I wondered what a man who could murder a friend from the back seat of a car as they talked, or while a victim begged for his life, on his knees, thought was strange. I remembered how my mother assured me it took all kinds to make the world go around. I doubted she was talking about Bulger and his type, but maybe she was because my family had lived in South Boston for a time—Southie the locals called it.

“Well, strange I need to hear about.” I gave Bob a shake of my head and we waited for an explanation. I had a headache and the reasons for it sat in front of me.

“She asked about me at the shop,” Walsh said and sat back, still unable to get comfortable after six hours. “My crew told me a broad showed up askin’ questions. That was my first warning.” He sat forward and put his elbows on the small table. “Bitch shows up at the house last night…” He hesitated, thinking. “Eleven, I guess it was, the news was on the TV. I opened the door and the broad has a fuckin’ gun in my gut before I can say hello.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what happened. “A broad gets the drop on me. My first thought was, how the fuck did this happen?

“She has me sit on the couch and called me some foreign fuck’s name that means nothin’ to me. I tell her, ‘You got the wrong guy, lady.’ Bitch speaks to me in a language, I don’t know, maybe German, hell, maybe Greek. I don’t understand a word, but she keeps on. Finally,” he pushed back from the table, “she begins to talk English. She wants to know who I am. I tell her the story the marshals gave me. She don’t fuckin’ buy it. I figure, somehow, she’s from Whitey or one of the old Southie goons, maybe the fuckin’ goombas settling old scores. If I tell her who I really am, I know she shoots. I stick to my story. She don’t ask nothin’ ‘bout Southie, but a lot of stuff about fuckin’ cities I ain’t never been to.”

“What cities?” I sat back down and asked when he stopped to take a breath.

“London, Paris, Moscow…them I knew, but she had a few more that didn’t mean fuck-all to me.” He sighed. “You know, I’m in the middle of the couch and just out of reach are the fuckin’ guns I’ve hidden for this kind of situation.”

“Did she ever explain why she was there?”

“Mick, you ain’t stupid,” he said with a sour laugh. “The bitch has a gun aimed at me with a silencer, what else would she be there for?”

“Why not just shoot you?”

“I told you, fuckin’ strange right? Her questions go on for an hour, maybe longer. She shut the TV off and there’s no clock in the room, so I’m guessing. Questions that make no sense. Bitch walks around the room, but never takes the gun off me. I ask her name, she don’t respond. I ask who sent her, bitch keeps her trap shut, but opens it to ask more fuckin’ lame questions.”

“What do you think she wanted? Because she didn’t shoot you.”

He laughed loudly and pounded his chest. “She didn’t fuckin’ shoot me because I shot her first. She delayed shooting and that was the bitch’s mistake. Should’ve done it at the door and walked away, I would’ve.”

“She’s on the kitchen floor,” I said. “How’d you get from the living room to the kitchen?”