tackle, you were center.”
The detective was still staring at me. For a second, I thought I’d made a mistake, but then he smiled and said, “Holy shit, Tommy fuckin’ Russo. How the hell are you?”
We shook hands.
“I can’t believe you didn’t recognize me,” I said. “What, I look so much different?”
“Well, you look like you might’ve put on a few LBs.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said.
We laughed.
“So what’ve you been doing for, what, the past fifteen years?”
“I work here,” I said.
“I see that. What are you, a bartender?”
“Bouncer,” I said.
“Tough guy.”
“Yeah, you know how it is. What about you? How long you been a cop?”
“I’ve been with the department eleven years, a detective for three.”
“I always knew you were gonna go places.”
“I’d love to catch up, but we better just get down to business here,” Mike said. “This is all routine, but I just gotta ask you a few questions here.”
“Shoot,” I said.
He asked me some questions—how long have I been working at the bar, did I know Debbie O’Reilley, and other questions I could’ve answered without even thinking. Then he said, “And can you tell me what your whereabouts were last night?”
He must’ve seen the look I was giving him because then he said, “This is all routine. We just try to get little snapshots of the way things were last night and it helps us put a bigger picture together.”
“I was working at the bar,” I said.
“When did you arrive?”
“Around six.”
“And when did you leave?”
“Early—around eleven-thirty. I was fuckin’ zonked. I got home from Vegas three o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
“What were you doing in Vegas?”
“Losing my balls, getting laid. The usual.”
Mike smiled, writing in his notepad.
“Let me ask you something else,” Mike said. “Do you think Gary O’Reilley would kill his stepmother?”
“That’s what the reporters were asking me before. Jesus, I don’t know. I mean I know the kid was hotheaded, but I hope he didn’t do something like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘hot-headed’?”
“I don’t wanna bad-mouth the guy, but let’s just say he had a problem with the way Debbie treated Frank.”
“For example...”
“He’d say things to me about how much he hated her. I mean, I don’t know if you heard, but Debbie was a real slut. She’d come in here all the time with guys, shooting her mouth off in front of Frank, and Gary wouldn’t do anything, but you could tell it was pissing him off. Then he’d say things to me, about how he wanted to kill her, get rid of her, shit like that.”
“He said he wanted to kill her?”
“Yeah, I guess he did. I’m not saying I think he meant it. I mean a lot of people say shit like that when they’re mad. But he did say it—a couple of times.”
“How many times?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Two or three. Maybe it was more than that.”
“Did he tell you anything specific? I mean did he say he had a weapon of any kind?”
“No, nothing like that. Like I said, it was just talk.”
“Did you see Gary O’Reilley yesterday?”
“Nah, I haven’t seen him since Monday night, when he stormed out of here.”
“Why’d he do that?”
“He had a fight with Frank. Frank wanted to make me manager of the bar when he moved to Arizona and Gary was pretty pissed off.”
“Detective Edwards here tells me that you were the one who saw Gary outside the bar the night the safe was robbed.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What about Frank O’Reilley?”
“What about him?”
“You think he could’ve killed his wife?”
“Frank? No way.”
“How could you be so sure?”
“First of all, whoever killed Debbie was an animal and Frank doesn’t have a sick bone in his body. Second of all, the guy loved his wife.”
“You said Debbie O’Reilley was always showing him up to his face. Maybe it got to him and he snapped.”
“I guess it’s possible,” I said. “I mean you know what they say—you never know people. But I’d really be surprised.”
Mike finished writing in his notepad.
“Well, that about takes care of it for now. You know, you better give me your phone number and address because I got a feeling we’re gonna need some more info from you.”
I gave him my info then I said, “So you got any hot leads?”
“We have your boss down at the precinct in Brooklyn right now and some colleagues of mine are talking to him. Most likely, one of her lover boys rubbed her out. The wrong guy answered one of her ads and she got whacked—it happens all the time.”
“Sick fucks.”
“You got that right.”
Mike went back across the bar to talk to the other detective. The two cops who came in before—including Cheryl—were gone. They must’ve taken off while I was talking to Mike.
The next hour or two were pretty boring. Mike and the other detectives were sitting at a table talking and Gil was sitting at the bar, reading some book. Kathy hung out awhile, then she went home. Rodrigo and the other guys from the kitchen took off too. I wanted to leave, but I knew that wouldn’t look good. It would be better to stick around—make it look like I had nothing to hide. Mike said that Frank was going to be escorted back to the bar, after he was through at the precinct in Brooklyn, and that’s another reason I wanted to stay. Frank seemed like he was in pretty bad shape before and I wanted to be around when he came back, just in case there was anything I could do to help him.
I brought over a round of Cokes for the detectives, then I turned on the TV and watched hockey highlights on ESPN. I watched a basketball game on TNT—the Suns and the Sixers—even though I hated pro basketball and I didn’t care who won.
Frank walked into the bar at around eleven o’clock. His eyes were red and swollen and his thin gray hair was a mess. He sat down with the detectives for a while, answering more questions. He wasn’t crying anymore but he looked out of it. After about a half hour, the detectives got up to leave. Mike came over to the bar and shook my hand. He said he might be in touch, if not he hoped we ran into each other again sometime. Then he leaned over the bar and whispered in my ear, “You might want to make sure your boss gets home all right tonight, buddy.”
When the detectives were gone I went over to the table and sat down across from Frank. “You want me to put you in a cab?”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I could use a nice stiff one though.”
