I didn’t have to ask questions. I just let Angela run with it.
“Was Daddy there? I told you so. The community center is where Shipley ran the show from. You know that. He controls all those protests against you guys. Against the police.”
Cops hated Hal Shipley. I tried to keep that in the back of my mind so it didn’t infect how I looked at Wynan Wilson’s murder.
“Gotham City Humanity Activists, Detective. I know you know that operation. You know what smart folks in Harlem call it, or don’t you? Every organization has an acronym these days, doesn’t it?” Angela said. “Use those first three letters of Gotham, put them together with the rest of the first letters of his city humanity activists. We call it GOTCHA!”
I smiled for the first time since meeting her. GOTCHA. The guys in the squad were going to love this one.
“I like your smile, Detective.”
“And I like your candor. Do you know Shipley?”
“Hate’s a strong word, and I don’t use it often. But I hate that man.”
“But it’s fair to say, isn’t it, that your father didn’t feel the same?”
“Shipley paid the bills for Daddy, didn’t he? I mean, not literally. But he trusted my father to take home those bunches of little envelopes, the ones filled with cash. Those fools who’d send in money from direct-mail advertising. Fifty dollars from a widow in Pittsburgh or twenty from an ex-con in Memphis. For the reverend to carry on his noble work.”
“What did your father do with the money?”
“Sat in front of the TV at home, just opening those envelopes and stacking up the cash. Too many nosy people in the community center. Planted it under his mattress for safekeeping.”
“Then how did he get it back to Shipley?”
“You’re gonna make yourself bald, you keep stroking your hair like that, Mike,” she said.
“How do you think he got it back?” I said again.
I wanted to hear it from Angela without suggesting an answer to her. I didn’t expect what I got.
“Takeesha Falls is the Reverend Shipley’s whore, Detective. You need a fancy gold shield to figure that one out?”
“I don’t know the players, Angela.”
“Here’s the scorecard, Mike. Nobody loves-loved-my daddy more than I did. Warts and all, he was a sweet man.”
“I hear that.”
“You think Keesh falls in love with an overweight, out-of-work alcoholic who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up? Don’t give her no bling or take her out for cocktails more than once every two weeks? Hooker with a heart of gold? I sort of doubt it.”
“She’s Shipley’s-?”
“I’m not sayin’ she was ever in bed with him. Not necessarily speaking of that kind of whore. But she’s on his payroll, too. Does all his bidding, sexual and otherwise. Shipley introduced her to Daddy, knowing my father’s fondness for a particular type of woman. She encouraged his drinking habit to stop him from too many demands on her body. Most of all, Keesh was supposed to be the watchdog, keeping Daddy honest and delivering the cash to the reverend, at the time and place most appropriate for his receiving of it.”
What at first glance seemed to be a straightforward domestic homicide was sprouting wings that would carry it all the way to City Hall, where Shipley had unfettered access to the gangly new mayor, who didn’t seem to take a step-or make a misstep-without the reverend. This unorthodox treatment of the cash proceeds of the Gotham activists’ fund-raising went hand in glove with Shipley’s personal history of tax fraud. Coop was going to love this twist.
“Let me ask you this, Angela,” I said, as too many random thoughts of how far up the ladder this killing would lead raced through my brain. “Does your father have a gun?”
The handkerchief was in her lap. She played with its rolled edges.
“Did he. You mean did he have one?”
“Yes. Sorry for that.”
“Course he did. Small one,” Angela said. “Don’t know what you call them-pistol or revolver-but a small black one. It’s not there tonight. I looked for it.”
“Where did he keep it?” I had opened the night table drawers for the same reason.
“Right by the front door. On the stand under the TV. It was the best place to have it, so that nobody got in that he didn’t know.”
“You-you didn’t take anything out of there, did you, Angela?”
“Like the gun, Detective? Like I’ve been talking crazy enough so you think maybe I shot my daddy to put him out of his misery?”
She was all puffed up now, full of outrage at me.
“Not the gun. No, I wasn’t thinking of the gun,” I said. I took the chance of smiling at her for a second time. “In my book, everyone’s a suspect till I put the cuffs on the killer. Can’t ever rule out the first one who finds the body.”
“You think I hate Keesh enough to set her up, don’t you?”
“I believe you loved your father. That’s why it’s also hard to ask you whether you think he ever helped himself to any of the reverend’s money. But I’ve got to do it. I’ve been wondering, with all that cash, if you think he-”
“I hope to God he did, Detective. I hope he took fistfuls for himself,” Angela Wilson said. She was on fire now. The whites of her eyes, streaked with ruptured blood vessels from hours of crying, glistened as she talked to me. “I hope Daddy had it hidden well enough that his bitch didn’t find any of it.”
“Did you search for that, too, Angela?”
“You got a real mean streak, Detective. You know that? Start out nice and easy, but you got a streak.”
“I’ve been told. You haven’t seen that side yet. I got no reason to show it. I’m asking you the same thing I’d ask anyone else in this position.”
“I didn’t say I searched anywhere, did I?”
“You looked for the gun.”
“Damn right I did. I called 911 just as soon as my hand stopped shaking so bad I could actually dial the three numbers. Then I looked for the gun in case Shipley or any of those felons he collects showed up at Daddy’s bedside before you gentlemen did.”
Angela Wilson was weeping again.
There was a soft knocking on the apartment door.
“Give me five more, Lee. We’re almost done,” I said, without taking my eyes off Angela.
“Right now, Chapman,” he said, cracking the door to talk to me.
“Back off, will you? Five minutes.”
I was getting everything I wanted and more from Wilson’s daughter. I didn’t need Petrie to interrupt her mood swings or the flow of her information.
“Pretty urgent,” Lee Petrie said. “The Most Reverend Hal Shipley is here to offer a moment of silent prayer over the body of Wynan Wilson.”
ELEVEN
“Mike Chapman. Homicide.”
“Hal Shipley. The Reverend Hal Shipley. Pleased to meet you.”
I didn’t want to remind him that we’d met before. The circumstances were never happy ones when a police officer crossed the path of a self-righteous charlatan. I almost put his lights out when he led a protest at the wake of a cop who’d been slain by a teenage psychopath. I’d wanted to collar him ten years back when he’d lied about a young woman who had fabricated a rape case and identified an innocent man as her assailant. He had sneered at me on the steps of City Hall and in the stairwell of a housing project where a parolee had ambushed a rookie cop.
“You mind stepping out of Mr. Wilson’s apartment? It’s a crime scene.”
“Wynan Wilson is a dear friend of mine, Detective. I’d like to see him, be alone with him for a moment. Pray for his soul.”
“Not possible. Just kindly back out into the hallway. You shouldn’t have been allowed in, in the first place.”
“I’m his spiritual adviser,” Shipley said, putting the palm of his hand on my chest. “You don’t understand.”