Those to be Forgiven

Published: 30 Nov 2017

You say that you stayed up most of the night thinking about the photos and the video file. What was going through your mind?

I was thinking about the kid. About Donny and what he must have been through.

Were you attracted to him?

To Donny? The kid was only thirteen in the photos!

But you said that you had stared at the photos longer than was necessary. That you picked out certain… features.

I’m a male. I appreciated the beauty of the boy but that was it. He looked exactly like the sort of kid that I found attractive when I was his age. All apple pie good looks and a winning smile. All American.

So you were attracted to him? Is that why you took the case?

I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. And I took the case because like I said… It was a real case that didn’t have anything to do with cheating husbands and law firms looking to get their rich clients out of cash payouts for the shitty things that they had done.

How were things at home? With your husband, David?

Things were fine. We’d been together since he was eighteen and had been married for a little over two years. We owned our own apartment. We both had jobs that we loved doing. Most of the time. We love each other very much. There’s nothing to dig around there.

How was the sex?

What?

Your sex life with your husband? How was it?

Why are you asking that? What’s that got to do with anything?

You said that he had gone to bed early the night that you had taken the case from Thomas Baldwin. That you had stayed up watching television and thinking about the photo’s of the young boy.

You’re kinda fucked up you know that? Are you married?

That’s not the question here.

Well you’re not wearing a ring but you did scratch at your finger when I spoke about my husband so I’m gonna assume you’re divorced. Am I right?

You’re very perceptive Mr Quaid…

(…)

Yes I’m divorced.

So you know that married life isn’t fucking every night working your way through the Kamasutra. That two adults in their mid thirties who have work obligations sometimes go to bed at differing times.

And at that time… did you and your husband have sexual intercourse often Mr Quaid?

Seriously? Are you trying to fuck with me? I don’t see how that has anything to do with anything!

It contributes to questions about your state of mind. To some of your more… questionable actions during the course of a rather sexually charged case. Please answer the question.

Fuck! Really?

(…)

I dunno… Two maybe three times a week. Do you wanna drag your mind out of the gutter now or what?

I just find it interesting that you admitted to me that you had become aroused looking at the photos of young Donny…

I never said that. I never said aroused. I’m careful about my choice of words. Always have been.

OK. That you admitted looking… admiringly? at the photos of the boy. Yet you didn’t later on expel that energy at home with your husband. I’m not casting any assumptions or passing any judgement here Mister Quaid. I’m merely saying that I find it interesting.

Well you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s nothing there for you to pick apart. David and I were very happy and I didn’t feel the need to “expel that energy” because there was no energy to expel.

OK Mr Quaid. Let’s move on for a moment. What happened next?

I had made up my mind to visit a friend of my father’s the next day…

Freddy Bianchi was a former detective with Shaolin PD – he’d been a beat cop in the late seventies and would have been involved in the search for Donny when the boy went missing.

Freddy had helped me out a couple of times in exchange for a bottle or two of whisky. Nothing major but he helped me get a look at the files on a few scumbags – helped me solve a few puzzles. He was good guy – had good instincts – could always tell the difference between the smell of bullshit and the scent of roses.

I’d ridden the Staten Island Ferry over from the city and felt that same dull ache in the pit of my stomach I always do whenever I go home. It’s not that I have bad memories attached to the place. Quite the contrary. It’s just… who likes going home again? You outgrow a place and the memories attached to it. When I was a kid: Staten Island was the whole world. Yeah – we could see the skyscrapers across the water and we may have made the trip a few times in our teens but… Manhattan was Manhattan. No we didn’t travel over with my parents. I didn’t leave Shaolin until I was fifteen – when I was younger it seemed just as alien to me as it would to some other kid in rural Missouri.

From the Ferry I took a cab – Freddy Bianchi lived at the South Shore in a moderate one storey two bedroom house. He’d stopped looking after the garden like he used to after his wife divorced him and the exterior walls could do with a lick of paint but for the most part it was clean.

When he stepped out of the front door and shook my hand I realised how long it had been since I’d last seen him. Eighteen months ago he’d helped me get a copy of the police file on some guy whose company were looking for an excuse to fire him.

The company sold high value jewelry and they suspected that he had his hand in the honey pot but couldn’t prove anything. The file that Freddy had helped me get had shown that he’d helped himself to nearly forty thousand dollars from his previous employers – for which he’d received a suspended sentence and a few hundred hours of community service. He’d lied in the interview about where he had worked prior and he’d lied on the application form about having a criminal record. His employers had me use a couple of contacts and release the information of his new employment to a couple of reporters in the local press. The rags wrote up a few lines about his previous job, the crime and where he was now working… Then they fired him from bringing the company into disrepute.

The shitty thing about all that – well the shittier thing – was that it wasn’t him. He hadn’t taken a dime. After the company was still losing jewelry at the same rate at which the poor schmuck had been given the boot, they had me look into it. I found a woman selling items on ebay – dirt cheap and after getting in contact with her I found that she’d been fencing them for a sales rep from the company. He’d walk into one of the stores – check their stock and help himself to a few items. He’d change the inventory and walk out before selling the items to this woman from Nebraska. Both the rep and the fence were charged – a different judge turns out different results and the rep went to prison for a year – he’ll be out by now. The fence went to jail too.

I know, I know… I do feel a little shitty about the other guy. But he’d lied to employers and if you learn anything in life it’s that the truth will find you out eventually. You can spin bullshit all you like and maybe buy yourself a little time – but the truth is hiding right around every corner.

Anyway – Freddy Bianchi hadn’t aged well in the eighteen months since I had last seen him. He’d gotten a little rounder in the gut and his eyes looked a little more hollow. I’ll take a drink but Freddy treated cheap whisky like it was water. Around his left forearm was the bandage that had been there as long as I’d known him. He’d caught me looking at it once when I was seventeen and told me it was from a burn he had gotten in Korea and he hated the way that it looked – so he kept it covered.

“Freddy you look like shit!” I smiled and shook his hand.

“Ramsay you’re a charming mother fucker as always.” He pulled me into a hug and we slapped each other’s backs to keep it all nice and masculine.

“What did you bring me?”

I opened the brown paper bag I’d been carrying since picking it up at the liquor store beneath my office and showed him a bottle of Johnnie Walker double black Label.

“You’ve always been good to me.” He smiled and smacked his lips as I handed him the bottle. “Come on inside. Let’s get this open and into a couple of glasses.”

I sat at his kitchen table and noticed how little if anything had changed; the same old cooker and fridge he’d had since the late eighties, the pots and pans too big for the cupboard under the sink – the door always slightly ajar, the photos framed on the burnt orange painted walls of Freddy and the boys in uniform – standing on parade and ready to receive commendations.

He passed me the same glass I always got. A half pint highball with semi-naked hula girls painted dancing around the outside – a souvenir from his one trip out of the state of New York – Hawaii for his honeymoon.

“So…how’s life treating you? David still a journalist?” he sat next to me and took a swig of the whisky – letting the liquid dance across his tongue.

“He’s never been a journalist Freddy. He’s in PR. Public Relations.”

“Same difference.” he poured himself another drink.

We bullshitted like that for half an hour: His ungrateful kids doing well in California. His “bitch of an ex wife” now living in Brooklyn with a security guard for NBC. He always peppered references to his ex with colourful expletives that do women (or Freddy Bianchi) few if any favours. My favourite was always “Cock Sucking Cunt Whore.” But he’d only get to calling her that after a couple more hours of drinking had passed us by. He asked me how my parents were doing and I told him that they seemed to be enjoying Canada more than I thought they would. His response to Canada was always to proclaim it a nation of liberal pansy assed fags – then he’d apologise to me. I never took offence. I knew it was about Canada. Not the fags.

“So pleasantries outta the way, you wanna tell me what you need?”

I popped my briefcase up on the table: “I took a job that I think you might be able to offer some insight into. You were working the beat around Shaolin in seventy-seven right?”

He nodded. “Mostly Willowbrook and Port Richmond but yeah.”

“You remember a kid going missing in July of that year? Donny Baldwin?”

He took another drink and sighed: “Shit! Like that’d be easy to forget! I was on the team that was searching the Greenbelt around Willowbrook.”

Willowbrook was a shitshow if ever there was one… The way Fresh Kills Landfill had made Staten Island the dumping ground for New York’s trash, Willowbrook State School made it a refectory for the cities unwanted kids. They closed the place down in eighty-seven – forty years too late if you ask me – amid reports and footage so horrifying that it’d shake the foundations of even the world’s strongest believer in a benign God. Malpractice and questionable medical experiments – kids crying naked in hallways and eating and sleeping in their own shit. The place was a nightmare realm right out of a Dante’s Inferno. If you get the chance to look at the footage that Geraldo’s show used to blow the whole thing wide open… Don’t! No good will come of it. You just won’t be able to sleep so easy for a few nights. It was around Willowbrook that the legend of Cropsey came about. The boogeyman who would steal away the children of the burrough and take them beneath the hospital and into the unending maze of narrow tunnels and dirt rooms that had hidden so many foul secrets.

As kids we used to sneak out to the ruins of Willbrook to smoke a joint or two and drink from bottles of beer and scotch liberated from our fathers booze cabinets – always daring each other to do the most stupid shit. Each of us pissing ourselves at the slightest sound. It was rite of passage for the kids of Shaolin. Still is.

“The mother… Diana I think her name was… She was real pain in the departments ass.” Freddy took another drink and looked off into the middle distance beyond me. “I get it though. If that were my kid that had gone missing I’d have been no different.”

“Donny’s brother, Thomas, came to see me yesterday.”

“Yeah?” He looked directly at me then.

“He wants me to find out what happened to his brother. He didn’t say so directly but somehow he know’s I’m from here.”`

“Part of being from the forgotten borough I’m afraid. Everyone knows everyone. What’s he expect you to find? The kid went missing forty years past. Most likely a runaway.”

“Runaways don’t leave their bikes leaning against trees on the corner of streets Freddy.”

“Be as that may, that’s what he did. We searched every inch of Staten Island and there was no trace of the kid. It’s shitty but it happens. You know how many kids are reported missing every year in this country?”

“Eight hundred thousand… According to the latest statistics.”

“That’s what? Two thousand per day?”

“That’s the math.”

“Like I said. It’s shitty but it’s the world we’re living in.”

“And you just accepted it?”

He poured himself his fourth glass while I was still working on my first. “Look, Ramsay, I don’t think you get it. Everytime a kid went missing he was a runaway. That somebody would grab a thirteen year-old boy off the street back then? It was just unthinkable… We came at it from every angle. We searched Shaolin and there was no trace. We investigated the parents and from what we could tell the family life was fine. Real loving home by all accounts… There was no sign of a struggle where his cart and bike were found and no eye-witnesses of anything untoward. The boy just took a notion and ran away.”

“The Brother said that the cops were slow to react.”

“We acted exactly as we should have.”

“A kid goes missing and you guys don’t lift a finger for several days after? The way I hear it, it was the neighbourhood who did most of the searching.”

“Hey!” he pointed a finger at me and leaned forward in his chair. “Exactly. As. We. Should have! You won’t know this because you weren’t born and the law didn’t change until eighty-four maybe eighty-five… but we had to wait seventy-two hours before a child could legally be considered missing.” Sitting back he took another sip of his whisky. “There was no witnesses. We had no crime.”

“What about his best friend? Mikey O’Hare? He saw Donny talking to the driver of a silver Ford LTD.”

“Maybe he did but that was like what? …maybe the third or fourth best-selling vehicle that year? The kid couldn’t give a description of the driver or the registration plates. Probably just some guy looking for directions. There was no link and no one else saw the car. There was nothing for us to investigate”

“I’m going to see Mikey this evening. He lives in his parents old house with his own family now.”

“Yeah?” He finished his fourth drink and started pouring his fifth. “Well ain’t that a thing.”

“You think you can get me a copy of the files on Donny?”

“I could try.” he sighed. “For all the good it would do you. Esther left the department. Retired six months past… but there are still a few people there who owe your Uncle Freddy a favour or two.”

“Donny didn’t run away Freddy. There’s more to this case that the PD closed in seventy-eight.”

“What makes you say that?”

I opened my briefcase and handed him the manilla envelope containing the three photo’s of Donny.

“What’s this?”

“Thomas had this sent to his house a week back. Have a look.”

I kept my eyes on Freddy as he pulled the photographs from the envelope. Their white backs to him – he flipped them over and I watched as all the colour drained from his face. His hands began to shake as he looked from me to the photos of the boy bound and gagged on the bed.

“What’s this shit?”

“It’s Donny, Freddy.” I downed the last of the Johnnie Walker in my glass and watched as he spread the photos out on the table. “It’s him. I’ve checked with older photos. The placement of freckles across his nose. The dent at the top of his right ear. It’s Donny.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“The department got it wrong Freddy. Donny was kidnapped that morning while on his paper route. He was taken. Probably in the back of that silver Ford LTD. There’s more than the photo’s in front of you too.”

Freddy looked up from the photo’s and into my eyes: “What else?”

“The same person who posted these photo’s to Thomas also sent him a USB stick a few days ago.”

“What’s a USB stick?”

“It stores data. Documents, files, photos, music… video.”

I’m pretty good at reading people’s faces, the little twitches in the corner of their eyes – the turns at the side of their mouth – when they choose to flare their nostrils… It was the shadow that crossed Freddy’s wrinkled old face at that moment that first made me suspect that he knew more than he was letting on.

“What… What video?”

“It’s just a clip. Less than a minute. Shot on 8mm and digitized. Donny and a couple of other boys sitting by a pool.”

“When was it taken?”

“About the time he went missing.”

Freddy gathered up the photos that he had laid out on the table and put them back inside the envelope: “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll get you a copy of the files. Shit! I didn’t know Ramsay. I… I didn’t know! If I had… If any of us had then maybe things would have been different.”

“Why would no one at the department take the claims that he had been abducted seriously?”

“It just… Shit like that didn’t happen back then…”

“John Wayne Gacy… Son of Sam… all happening at the same time. Shit! Dean Corll in ‘73. This sort of thing was hardly unheard of.”

“Berkowitz didn’t go after kids… And Gacy was Illinois and he wasn’t found out and arrested until ‘78. Corll and that Candyman shit! Didn’t even cross our minds. I don’t think you understand how alien the idea was back then that anyone would want to abduct a boy for this… this shit!” He handed back the manilla envelope and as I reached for it he looked me dead in the eyes and said: “But I have to warn you. You turn over old rocks… Rocks that have been sitting peacefully for forty years… you don’t know what you’ll find underneath them.”

“I’m a big boy Freddy. Not much will scare me.”

“No? As your father’s best friend for nearly fifty years… As someone who watched you grow up from the skinny lick of shit you were to the grown man before me today… I’m gonna give you some advice. I’ll get you the files but then you should hand everything over to the professionals and be done with it. You hear me? Wash your hands of this Ramsay. From the looks of it… You don’t want no part of this.”

“I am a professional Freddy. I’ve seen the shit people do to each other. For money, For love. For some misplaced sense of revenge. This is no different.” I put the envelope back into my briefcase and and snapped the latch shut. “Is there something you want to tell me Freddy? Before I get any deeper into this?”

He shook his head: “I’ll get you the files. What there is… But you have to hand everything over once you’ve seen them.”

“That’s not gonna happen Freddy.”

We said our goodbyes on his doorstep and he promised that he’d have the files couriered to my office in the next couple of days.

With time to kill I walked the streets of the South Shore and headed toward Willowbrook – allowing memories to play in the back of my mind like the flickering images on the canvas of an old reel to reel cinema. The streets I grew up in hadn’t really changed over the years – maybe that was why I always felt nervous about coming back here. I was glad when my Mom and Dad moved to Ontario – I thought it would mean that I’d not have to come back.

There was something in the air over Staten Island that was particular to me and it just fed into my distaste for the place. The streets were as clean as you would expect and it was the start of Summer so the laughter and hollering of kids was drifting on the breeze… No. There were no real bad memories attached. No horror stories from my own childhood. Just the feeling that you can’t go home again. There’s a name for that you know. Shit, there’s a name for everything! Nostophobia: the fear of going home.

I found a diner that occupied a space once filled by an Italian Deli. With no history attached to it I sat down and ordered a Brisket. It’s Willowbrook – so everything was kosher. The diner was clean and quiet and the plump waitress who served me was pleasant and didn’t ask too many questions – so she’d earned her tip. I texted David and told him to eat without me that night – that I was still in Shaolin and was unsure about when I’d be back. His response was as sweet natured as it always was – he told me to make sure I ate properly and didn’t drink too much and that if I got back late I was to wake him regardless of the time.

You asked me about my relationship with my husband earlier – while casting your own aspersions. It was like that all the time. Sometimes I’d get in late because I was chasing down leads or hopping bars in the hope of catching someone at their worst. Sometimes he was late because he’d have to walk a client through the best way to bury the news that their company was about to lay off another hundred employees in the city. Sometimes we wouldn’t see each other in daylight for days at a stretch… But there was always time made for each other. Even if it was just sitting in bed for an hour at three o’clock in the morning while we drank a cup of his god awful herbal tea and talked about our days. No one has ever simultaneously asked less or expected more of me. And I love him for it.

It was after texting David that I remembered that I hadn’t called Pickman back from the day before, so I asked for a refill on the coffee and ordered a slice of pecan pie before I dug him out of the contacts. The phone barely got through two rings when he picked up:

“What took you so long. I’ve been trying to call you for the last twenty-four hours?” His voice was all over the place – either high or frightened. Over the phone I couldn’t tell.

“I’m working a case. Did you need something?”

“Didn’t you check your messages?”

“I only just saw them,” I lied. “Don’t leave voicemail. It’s annoying. Just text me if you can’t get through. What’s so urgent any way?”

“I need your help man…” He sounded skittish. More so than usual.

I’d known Peter Pickman (I know… I know…) for about five years. He was working at an adult bookstore in SoHo when we met. I was tailing a client’s husband and followed him in and up the stairs. There are a lot of ‘adult only’ stores in SoHo but most have cleaned up their act. They’re catering less to the dirty mac crowd and more to the professional women who’ll still watch ‘Sex and the City’ on a loop while facetiming their friends. ‘Sweet Dreams’ was not one of those stores. Old school to the point that it still had back rooms that for a couple of dollars you could watch a dirty movie while sitting on a semen stained sofa. I hadn’t thought that those places still existed until I went in. The client? Oh, she believed that her husband was cheating on her with another woman but wasn’t sure. The usual signs were there: working late, ignoring messages, withdrawn at home and protective over his cell.

When the husband disappeared into the backroom to one of the changing areas I struck up a conversation with Pickman. He was tweaking but he knew his stuff. Over the years Pickman has worked every less than minimum wage job you you can think of. He doesn’t need to, his real business keeps him well above the breadline. Pickman trades in information and connects people. He’s the human form of Tinder for the underworld. The jobs he takes just help him make more contacts. I could tell straightaway that he was sly, high on smarts and low on scruples.

The husband? No he wasn’t cheating. Pickman did show me footage from hidden camera’s that the store had rigged up in the back rooms though… I’ll just say that he’d found a hobby that he preferred to enjoy alone… in a latex suit… with the biggest fucking dildo you’ve ever seen!

“What do you need?” I asked him while taking a sip of the coffee. Regardless of what I needed, what Pickman needed always came first. He’d proven to be the most useful connection I’d made in this trade and I never knew when I’d need him next.

“He’s after me man! He’s fuckin’ after me!”

“Wait! Who’s after you?” To be honest it could have been anyone of any number of people. I’d mentioned that David thought Pickman was creepy… well he was, so my mind was swirling with the possibilities. But… we’ll get to that later.

“I don’t wanna say over the phone! Can you meet me?”

“Can’t right now I’m on the island working a case.” I picked up a fork full of the pecan pie and squashed it into my mouth.

“Liberty?”

“Staten! Why would I be working a case on Liberty Island? .”

“Tonight then? Tomorrow?” he was sounding desperate.

“I can get you tomorrow afternoon and you can tell me whatever you did to piss off whoever you’ve pissed off now.”

“Don’t make light of it man. I’m fuckin’ shittin’ myself here.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll drop by yours when I’m free.”

“I’m at safehouse D! You remember where that is? Use your key. I’m not answering the door to anyone. And bring me some food! I’m out of food. I need some food.”

“Tomorrow.” I hung up on him. I wasn’t overly concerned when I spoke to him. He’s an ex tweaker and can be pretty highly strung or tightly wound or whatever. One night he called me mid acid-flashback and warned me about a giant vagina that lived in a palace of mirrors in the caves under Mars blasted red surface.

Finishing my pecan pie, I had another coffee and waited in the diner until it was time, mostly I was researching the Donny Baldwin disappearance. Looking up articles online. Found a few really out there conspiracy theories that aren’t worth mentioning. And a few that are… But we’ll get there when we get there.

I arrived at the front door to Mikey O’Hare’s house at seven pm on the dot. He looked just how I expected. A smiling man with with a trim physique and a black and silver moustache. I could hear the television on behind him and the sound of his young children laughing.

I introduced myself, we shook hands, and he invited me in. We passed the living room and headed straight for the kitchen – where he closed the door and offered me a seat at the table. I declined a beer but accepted a coffee – black no sugar – and we began:

“Why are you looking into this now?” He asked me while he stirred the sugar into his own coffee. “Forty years is forty years.”

“You’re not the first person to say that to me.” I sipped slowly at my drink and tried not to burn my tongue. “Donny’s brother, Thomas, hired me to look into it. I think he just wants some peace of mind.”

“I can tell you what I told the police back then but that’s about all I can do.”

“Please. Anything you can give me.”

“Donny and I had met up on the corner of his street at five thirty in the morning the way that we always did. We both had our bikes and we both had the carts attached at the back to carry the newspapers on. It was the back end of July so it was already pretty light out.”

“You guys met up everyday?”

“Everyday at five thirty” Mikey smiled. “Mr Quaid…”

“Ramsay. Please call me Ramsay.”

“Ramsay… Donny was my best friend. Damn it he was one of the few friends I had and at thirteen years-old you couldn’t have asked for a better one than Donny Baldwin. I put up with a lot of shit as a kid. Comes from my mother marrying an Irishman and moving us way out here. What age are you? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’m thirty-six Mr O’Hare.”

“I’m fifty-four years-old and twenty years makes some difference. Things were different then. In this neighbourhood back in the sixties and seventies my mother and I were two of only a handful of people of colour amid a sea of Italian and Jewish faces.”

“Must’ve been hard for you.”

“It wasn’t easy. But I had Donny. I moved out here from Harlem when I was nine after my mother married my stepfather. He was a good man. Not just because he took on someone else’s son. Not just because he fell in love with my mother. He was a good man through and through. But he knew it would be tough for us out here and he did his best for me. These days the mix around here is a little better.”

“The make up seems a little more diverse. Even more than when I used to live around here.”

“You still got all them Wigga’s running around South Shore appropriating the culture of a people that they openly despise mind you.”

“That’s the same everywhere Mr O’Hare. There are always pockets of people who show us the worst of humanity.”

He sipped at his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “I’m not much of a religious man but I do believe that Donny was heaven sent. We’d been friends since that first week I’d moved out here. He saw me sitting on the sidewalk with my bike on the ground. I’d not been paying attention and hit a pothole. Crying like a baby, I was. When this blonde kid rode up to me, dropped his bike, and sat down on the curb beside me. He asked me what the matter was and then spent the last of the change in his pockets on two lemon chocolate ices and a plaster for my knee.”

The look on Mikey’s face as he told me that story… I could see his eyes welling up as he thought about his friend. Mikey O’Hare was a sentimentalist.

“So you two had been friends for a while before he went missing.”

“Four years. And he didn’t go missing Mr Quaid… Sorry. Ramsay. He didn’t go missing. He was taken. Donny Baldwin was a responsible kid. He had a good home life and did well in school. He wouldn’t have taken off like that. Not without reason and not without saying something. And he wouldn’t have left his bike and half the papers still sitting on his truck.”

“The silver car?”

“Yeah.”

“What can you tell me about the car? About the driver?”

“Same thing I told the cops forty years ago. It was a silver Ford LTD. There was mud smeared over the registration but I could still see that it had Iowa plates. The car rode around the block a couple of times and slowed when it passed me and Donny. Then we split so I could head up Woodbine while he continued along Caswell Avenue. I looked back when I got down the other side of the street and saw him talking to the driver. The light wasn’t great but it was bright enough to make out that it was a young guy. Maybe thirty or so? Dark hair and glasses, he had a little beard. Something like a soul patch that was trendy with beatniks.” The way he looked into the cup of coffee in his hands as he spoke – I could see that he was remembering it clearly.

I took a loud slurp of my own coffee to bring him back. He lifted his eyes and looked at me blinking. I cleared my throat and said: “The reports at the time said that you couldn’t identify the driver.”

“You don’t have to tell me what the reports said. The police didn’t believe me. Thought I was making shit up. I went round to Donny’s house the day after he disappeared and told his folks what I saw. They believed me. They raised all sorts of hell but the newspapers and the police didn’t pay a blind bit of attention.”

“Do you think their reluctance to believe you was racially motivated?”

“At the time that’s what my Mother said. Now though… I’m not so sure.”

“You think that the police didn’t want to hear what you had to say for different reasons?”

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Little green men, gay frogs and secret Jewish Cabals are the realm of fantasists Mr Quaid. The world is round, not flat and there ain’t no reason to believe anything other than what we’re taught in our school books about the way things are. But they chose not to report my statement. Other than the description of the car.”

“But not the Iowa registration.”

“Yeah. Not that.”

We talked a little more about Donny and the friendship that the two boys shared. The scrapes that they got into over the years that they knew one another – how the Baldwins became a second family to him. How it hurt him to see the slow collapse of that family after Donny was abducted… and how, even now, he regrets that he couldn’t do more to help them. I watched his eyes well up as he described visits to the house in the months after. Donny’s father had become withdrawn and eventually stopped going to work. The mother – constantly busying herself with visits to the police station and the local newsrooms. Thomas – only six at the time – always asking when his big brother was coming home – only getting the basic attention each parent could afford. The effect that the loss of a child can have on a family can be devastating. And I’m not using that word in the same way that some teenage girl would tell you that she was ‘devastated’ because some teen idol of hers had gone and hooked up with some celebrity that she didn’t like. I’m talking total decimation of the soul. Not all families, some pull through if they’ve a network. Some just can’t, even with family and friends at their side.

I told him about my involvement. How Thomas had visited me. I didn’t tell him about the photos or the film clip. I spared him that. He walked me out of the front door and to the end of the path by the front gate. I handed him my business card and looked at my watch. Eight thirty.

“If there’s anything else you remember Mr O’Hare… No matter how small… Give me a call or leave me a message. I’m just across the water there.”

The handshake we started turned into a warm bear hug as he pulled me into him: “You find out what happened to Donny, Mr. Quaid. You find the son-of-a-bitch that took my friend.”

I didn’t respond other than to hold the old man tighter to me. As we broke the hug and he turned back to the house I could hear his sobs being carried in the evening air. I guess forty years isn’t just years and not everything can be put behind us so easily.

I arrived back in my office a little after ten thirty. I hung up my coat – reached into my drawer and poured myself a whisky before sitting down at the desk to make notes about the day. There was a message on the answer machine from Freddy Bianchi: he’d managed to get a copy of the files quicker than I had thought he would and they’d be couriered over to the office for early afternoon the next day. He gave another brief warning about turning over all my findings to the appropriate authorities as soon as I could and that I should drop the investigation. Maybe I should have. But for the world of me I couldn’t agree that police incompetence and negligence wouldn’t just reach across the years… No. This was the sort of case that I had always wanted. I was going to do my best work. I had convinced myself of that.

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