another cityscape that was fresh to me, fascinated by the locals so obviously enjoying this slice of beach life on the walkways and porches of the small cottages that bordered the road.
He led me through the entrance to the interior courtyard of the enormous pentagonal fort. There were a few visitors, some of whom were descending the large stone steps that took us up to the top of the ramparts.
The solid mass of building was punctuated by eyebrow-shaped windows on each of the three sides that faced the waterway. “See those? They were the casements for two tiers of guns. The men could fire from every angle on those sides. It’s a brilliant location for the protection of the city.”
Several kids were shooting at imaginary pirate ships from the top of the dramatic walkway, and alone on a bench at the very tip of the battlement was a man who fit Phin Baylor’s description-a sixteen-ounce beer bottle in one hand, a week’s grizzle on his face, bedroom slippers on his feet, and a wooden cane resting beside his outstretched leg.
He turned to look as we approached him but said nothing. “Mr. Baylor?” Mike asked, showing him the blue- and-gold badge. “Mike Chapman. NYPD. This is Alexandra Cooper, with the DA’s Office.”
“My daughter put out a missing person’s report?” he asked with a laugh, looking back out at the view, small sailboats slicing through the blue water and powerboats creating wakes below the span of the long bridge.
Mike stepped in front of Baylor, balancing against the wall of the old fortress. “She expects you home for dinner, I think. May I call you Phinneas?”
“Phin. Just Phin. Who’re you looking for?”
“We’re fishing right now. Looking mostly for information. I’m working on that accident-”
When Mike said that word, he got Phin’s attention.
“…that accident in the tunnel midtown. Water Tunnel Number Three. Duke Quillian, you know they’re waking him today?”
Phin lifted his bottle in the direction of the sun, sinking in the sky to the west. “What goes round comes round, like they say. Seen it on television the other night and can’t say I lost any sleep over him. I’ll take a pass on the receiving line at the funeral home. Seen you on TV, too. You’re the woman prosecuting his brother, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Brendan Quillian. Now there’s a boy who should never have grown so high and mighty. Strange kid, he always was. Wanted no part of his family, no part of any of us. Guess he won’t have Duke to fight his battles anymore,” Phin said. “That’s the only thing that kept Brendan alive on the street as a kid, was his big brother. He’s gonna need some protection if he winds up where you’re trying to send him.”
“Did you know Brendan well?” I asked.
“Nah. He had no stomach for the hole, hard as his father fought him about it. Even tried to make the kid a pencil. Let him use his head if he wanted to, but stay in the business.”
“A pencil?”
“Men who can’t do the physical labor. The engineers, the contractors-the guys who push pencils all day,” Phin said with a trace of disdain in his voice. “Tell me, Mike, will you? Duke’s death wasn’t no accident, was it?”
So far, the police and the medical examiner had not released any details of the severed finger to the public. It would only be a matter of days before too many insiders knew about it and the news leaked, but for now it was a crucial piece of information, intentionally withheld until further leads were developed in the case.
“What have you heard?”
“I’ve learned to mind my own business. Not many of his friends even remember I’m alive. I was already too long in the hole when I got hurt, and that’s going on more than a dozen years ago.”
“I was hoping we might trouble you to tell us about that-that day,” Mike said.
Phin squinted into the sun as he looked up at Mike. “You weren’t going to say that word accident again, were you now? That day, as you called it?”
“We don’t know what happened. We only heard you were there-that you got hurt-the day old man Hassett was killed.”
“Who’s blabbing to you?” Phin asked.
Mike didn’t answer.
“Must be one of the Quillian boys. Tell ’em not to worry, Detective. I’m long over my tunnel days. I look out at the sea and the sky and don’t know how I lived so far underground as I did for so long.”
Mike looked to be trying to think of another way to ask Phin to talk, but the sandhog code of silence seemed to be thicker than the walls of the fortress.
“Is it fair to say it was a bad place to be-between a Quillian and a Hassett-when they had a beef to settle?” Mike asked.
Phin’s expression didn’t change.
“Nothing to the rumor, then, that Duke Quillian saved your life?”
Phin threw back his head. “Gave yourself up there, Mike. That’s the crazy sister you’re talking to, isn’t it? What’s her name? Trish. That girl has never been right in the head.”
Mike looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.
Phin Baylor smiled. “I’ll tell you about ‘that day,’ as you call it.”
He was ready to talk. He liked Mike, and something Mike had said moved him off the starting block.
Phin nodded and took a swig from his bottle. “I was working the first piece of the dig for the new tunnel, right here in the Bronx, over in Van Cortlandt Park. Must have been six of us down there that day-me and Hassett, Duke Quillian and his father-he was supervising the drill-maybe two other guys left by the end of the shift.”
“What did you do exactly?”
“We were building the rib cage, you know? After the hole is bored in the tunnel, we’ve got to build a concrete hull around the sides. Support the walls, smooth them out as the tunnel goes forward.” Neither of us wanted to interrupt him, so we let him go on with the details we had learned firsthand last week about how the cylinder was created.
Phin pulled a pair of shades out of his pocket and put them on. I didn’t know whether it was the glare from the sun on the water or simply to make it impossible for us to see his eyes.
“The shift was just about over. That’s why so few of us were left,” he said, getting back to the narrative, pausing as a mother dragged her two whining children off the battlement and over to the exit. “You know what an agitator is?”
I looked to Mike, who answered, “Those giant cement mixers?”
“Yeah. That’s what we were working with at that point. Hassett and I were down at the bottom of a steep incline-you know how the water has to flow downhill, all the way into the city? So three of the railroad cars at the top of the slope, inside the tunnel, had been fitted as agitators.” Phin tapped his cane on the cobblestone walkway. “So that we could do the work down in the shaft.
“One of those mothers broke loose-twenty tons of steel loaded with cement steaming away on a sharp downhill grading. Hassett didn’t have a prayer. Crushed him into the bedrock like he was an ant.”
“And you?”
“I was up on a ladder with my trowel. Last thing I remember is the noise of that frigging thing barreling down at me.”
Mike started to ask, “Couldn’t you-”
“Get out of the way? Forget it, son. There wasn’t nowhere to go. I was already flat up against the wall.” Phin leaned forward and stowed the bottle under his bench, putting his head in his hands.
Mike swallowed. “So it caught you, too, along the way?”
“I don’t have any recollection of being hit. Doctors say I never will. I can see that damn thing coming down the track, picking up speed for more than half a mile, and it’s screeching like a banshee. But that’s all I know and I gotta thank God for that. Doctors say I’ll never have any memory of it, the way the brain works. The agitator car must have slammed into my ladder and wedged me against the concrete side of the tunnel.” Phin paused for a minute. “No lights, no noise, till I began to make it myself. All I could hear was the sound of my own screams.”
“Was anyone around to come to help you?”
He looked away. “Duke Quillian. First man to get to me. First one I saw when I came to after passing out. Couldn’t even get close in, Duke. Had no way to move the agitator car. You’d have needed a derrick to do it.”
