Dead Irish (4 page)

The water was a long way down, slate gray through the fog. Jim Cavanaugh, shivering, leaned out over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. His teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering, whether it was the cold or everything else. He should have grabbed a coat before rushing from the church, but he’d had to get out—get out now before he broke down in front of Dietrick.

So it had happened. Eddie was dead.

And Erin? What would become of Erin now?

He knew he ought to go see her, but would she want to see him? Would she ever forgive him?

Could he be a priest to the Cochran family ever again?

Last week he had tried to kiss her, to tell her . . . It had been a temporary weakness, that was all, but it had made a breach between them.

And now this, with Eddie.

The family would need him. He would have to be there now for them all. The kiss, her rejection and his flash of anger at her, now they could all be forgotten.

She would forgive him. He could live again.

He put his hands in his pockets and began walking back toward the tollbooths.

4

HARDY HAD LOVED his Suzuki Samurai when he’d bought it, but since learning that it tended to roll in strong winds or on weak grades, he had renamed it the Seppuku. Now he parked it at the corner of Tenth and Lincoln. The fleeting sun that had gotten him up had long since disappeared. The fog, the June freeze, insinuated itself into every corner out here, swirling, gusting. Hardy pulled his peacoat up around his neck.

Now he was staring at the sign over his place of employment, “The Little Shamrock, established in 1893.” He found himself marveling at man’s originality. The sign, cleverly, was shaped like a shamrock.

The sign itself had been established in its spot over the swinging double doors in 1953, and the green paint had chipped enough over the years that the sign at night now read “le rock.” Maybe it was a good thing, Hardy reflected, the shape of the sign. If it had been shaped like Gibraltar, people would think the bar was named the rock, or some French word that meant rock. Le rock. Maybe they should paint the
l
to look like a capital letter. Maybe they should have the neon repaired altogether.

But no, he thought, it fit the Shamrock. The bar wasn’t exactly run-down, but it didn’t place too much emphasis on fixing itself up. It was a neighborhood bar, and Moses McGuire, Hardy’s friend and boss, the owner of the place, didn’t believe in attracting an unwanted element (tourists) with too many ferns, video games or flashy signs. The Shamrock was an Irish dart bar, as nonpolitical as any of them got. It poured an honest (sometimes more than honest) shot and did a respectable business with locals, both male and female. Hardy had worked days there, Tuesday through Saturday, two to eight, for over seven years.

Every night Hardy worked, Moses McGuire followed him from six until closing at two, and then until he’d rung out and cleaned up, sometimes having an after-hours drink. Sundays and Mondays a thirtyish raven-haired beauty named Lynne Leish with an eighteen-inch waist and more than twice that on either side worked double shifts and brought in a crowd of her own. But she was a good bartender, a pro at it. Moses McGuire would have no other kind.

It wasn’t yet noon. Most days Hardy would arrive to open the bar and get it set up in ten or fifteen minutes. Today, between his thoughts and the memory that they’d closed without the usual cleanup last night, he thought he’d come down and kill some time.

So he wiped the bar, took the peels cleanly off the lemons with an ice pick, cut up the limes, checked the wells and stocked the back bar. He ran himself half a morning Guinness and whipped up the cream for the hated so-called Irish Coffee, for which he cursed Stan Delaplane, the Buena Vista bar and the Dublin airport.

There were some glasses and bottles out front, left from the hurried exit of the night before. Some of the tables hadn’t been wiped down.

The cash register. It hadn’t been rung out. He refilled his pint glass to the halfway point again.

Somebody knocked while he was counting the money. Through the door he saw that it was a retired schoolteacher, a regular named Tommy, who ought to know better.

“Two o’clock,” Hardy yelled, holding up two fingers. Tommy nodded and shuffled on by, past the front window.

Hardy went back to ringing out. He looked at his watch. Twelve-twenty.

“Slow down,” he told himself.

But he didn’t. In five more minutes he was ready to open.

He sat at the stool behind the bar, time weighing a ton and not getting lighter. He didn’t want to have that time to think. About the unaccustomed restlessness inside him. About ambition, where love had gone. Especially, he didn’t want to think about the ridiculous idealist Eddie Cochran and his wife, Frannie. He didn’t want to think that it might be important to help her in some way—maybe keep her from losing what he’d lost.

The inside pocket of his peacoat, hanging on its peg at the end of the rail, held his darts. The leather case, velvet-lined, worked on him like worry beads as he rubbed it gently, passed it from hand to hand. Finally he opened it on the bar.

The three 20-gram tungsten beauties sat in their slots, awaiting their flights, the pale blue, dart-embossed bits of plastic that Hardy had made himself, and that in turn made those hunks of metal fly true. Carefully, he emptied the case and fitted the flights to the darts.

Over at the board, he threw some rounds, not really aiming. Not really shooting. Just throwing. Three darts. Walk to the board and remove them. Walk back to the chalk line. Do it again. Sometimes stop for a sip of Guinness. It didn’t matter where they hit, although, even without trying, Hardy put all the darts in the pie bounded by 1 and 5, with 20 in the middle.

Hardy, in the bar by himself, throwing darts.

Hardy, behind the bar, looked at the lined face of his friend, the oft-broken nose, the mountain man’s beard. McGuire’s eyes were shot with red. Moses had gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley when his deferment had run out. He hadn’t viewed being drafted as the tragedy many others had—he was a philosopher and believed that one of life’s seminal experiences was war. As it turned out, the war tempered both his philosophical bent and his intellectual appreciation of men killing each other and anything else that moved.

He was two years older than Hardy and, back then, only two steps slower, which, Hardy had told him six hundred times, explained his getting hit in both legs at Chi Leng while Hardy made it to cover, only to turn around and carry Moses back out, picking up some lead in his own shoulder in the process.

So, tritely, Moses felt he owed Hardy his life. When Hardy had changed careers, Moses had been there with the Shamrock and, owing him his life, had made a place for Hardy in the rotation, something he would have done for no one else with the possible exception of his sister Frannie.

“So?” Hardy asked finally.

McGuire looked into his glass, found it empty, twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. The bar still hadn’t opened.

Hardy reached to the top shelf behind him and brought down a bottle of The Macallan, the best scotch in the house, if not the world. He refilled Moses’s glass.

“This afternoon I gotta go see about getting the body taken care of. Frannie’s in no shape to do it. Especially after all the cops. They were all over the place, wouldn’t leave her alone. Why so many cops, you think?”

Hardy the ex-cop said, “Reports, bureaucracy, bullshit.”

Someone came and pounded at the door to the bar, still locked. “Let’s go where they can’t see us,” Hardy suggested.

They went back to the storeroom. Cases of bottled beer lined two of the walls. On a third, wooden shelves held assorted bottles of liquor, napkins, peanuts, dart flights, other bar paraphernalia. Against the back wall was the stainless-steel freezer for the perishables that more than once had held the fish Hardy would bring by after a successful trip. McGuire lifted himself onto it.

“The thing is, there doesn’t seem to have been any reason for it. I mean specific. Here’s a kid got the world on a string. What the hell? Why’d he want to kill himself ?”

“Who said that? That Eddie’d killed himself ?”

“Well, nobody exactly, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Shit, Diz, you know. They find him in a lot with a gun in his own hand. What do
you
think happened?”

Hardy leaned against the back wall. “I don’t think anything. It’s not my job.”

“You’re a warm human being, you know that, Diz?”

“Come on, Mose. You know, or maybe you don’t, that the police really do a number on any death, especially violent death. They don’t just call something a suicide out of the blue. They check into it—motives, opportunity, all that. They really do. I mean, even an old man they find who died in his sleep they check out.”

“So what do you think happened? You think somebody killed Eddie? You think he killed himself? You knew Eddie.”

Hardy kicked at some debris on the floor. “Yeah, I knew him. I’m sure not saying he killed himself. But the cops aren’t either, are they?”

“Not yet.”

“Believe me, they won’t.”

“Why won’t they? It could be, it could have been, right?”

Hardy scratched at nothing on his leg. “Mose, I’ve been a cop, right? Takes more than a gun in somebody’s hand.”

“Maybe there was more.”

Hardy felt a chill somewhere behind him. Was Moses hiding something? “What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything.” But Moses was looking down.

“It’s bad luck to lie to your friends,” Hardy said.

“What do you know?”

Moses fidgeted, his heels hitting against the freezer. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Probably, but what anyway?”

“Just that Eddie has been a little down. Been in the bar a little more than normal, that kind of thing.” Hardy waited. “You know, they planned things, Frannie and Eddie. Not like you and me. They had this savings plan, all that, for when he went back to school.” Moses was still struggling with it, sipping at some scotch for something to do. “Anyway, his job’s been fucked up lately, maybe ending. It looked like they weren’t going to have enough money, or what they planned on, anyway. I offered to loan him some, but you know Eddie.”

“And you think Eddie might have killed himself over a little money? Come on, Mose, not the Eddie we knew.”

“Yeah, I know, but the cops might think it. I mean, with that and the possible note . . .”

“Abe—Glitsky—told me the note was bullshit. Just some old trash in the car.”

“I don’t know. It might be. I’m just thinking that the note along with the other stuff . . .”

“Well, if they do, it doesn’t really matter, does it? It isn’t going to bring him back.”

“Yeah, but it matters. It matters they don’t call it a suicide.”

Hardy suddenly felt very tired. “Why, Mose?” Thinking he knew what his friend was going to say next.

“Frannie, mostly, I guess.” Moses slid off the freezer and spun his glass, empty again. “If they . . .” He ran his fingers hard across his forehead. “Shit, this is hard.”

“If what?”

“If they come up with suicide. I mean, think about Frannie. Rejected for good, know what I mean? And there’s also some money involved.”

Hardy cocked his head to one side.

“Insurance policy doesn’t pay on a suicide, though there’s double indemnity on violent or accidental death. The policy was for a hundred grand, Diz, and I don’t want to see Frannie screwed. She’s already been through enough.”

“Well,” Hardy said, “then let’s hope he didn’t kill himself.”

“He didn’t.”

Hardy said nothing.

“I just want to . . . I don’t know. Protect Frannie’s interests, I guess. Feel like I’m doing something.”

Hardy figured Moses had been reading his mail. “I don’t know what you can do. Be there for her. What else?”

“I thought I’d ask you if you’d watch what the police do. Make it your job for a week or two. Take a few weeks off here and just check it out.”

Hardy couldn’t bring himself to look at his friend, who kept talking. “I mean, you used to be a cop and all. You know the procedures—”

“Mose, I was a street cop a couple years before law school. That’s a long way from homicide.”

“Still, you could find out some things. Make sure they’re doing it right.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t do that anymore.” He looked down. “And I’m out of Guinness.”

“Fuck the Guinness.”

“And fuck you.”

The two stared it down. “Well, I don’t know, Mose. Maybe I’ll ask around a little. That’s all. No promises.”

“Okay, but I want to pay you. And I’ll pay you for the time off anyway.”

“Don’t pay me. That makes it like a job.”

“That’s what makes you tick, Hardy. Call something your job.”

“How about I do it for Frannie?”

“And what’ll you live on?”

“Sponge cake, man, shrimp and Guinness. Same as now.”

McGuire threw a round. “How about twenty-five percent of this place?”

“The Shamrock?”

McGuire looked around. “Yeah, that’s this place.”

Hardy sat down on that, drummed his fingers on a table. “Why don’t we first wait and see what the cops come up with?”

“And what if that’s suicide?”

Hardy threw a dart. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I could look into it.”

5

CARL GRIFFIN KNEW he had to get over it, but it wasn’t easy. He’d gone up for his performance review on Monday, yesterday, knowing that his performance had been more than adequate, and knowing it might not matter at all. Glitsky and Batiste, a mulatto and a “Latin surname”—Christ, he loved that, Frank being as absolutely white as he was—were also up for promotion, and there was a formal mandate in the entire city and county bureaucracy to move minorities up. He thanked God there wasn’t a gay guy in homicide. He’d be a shoo-in for the next lieutenant. On the other hand, maybe Griffin should announce that he was gay, was coming out of the closet and because of his new status should be acclaimed the next lieutenant.

So he’d entered the office for his review with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. What he actually said was: “Look, I got any chance for this or not? ’Cause if not, let’s cut the bullshit and I’ll go back to work.”

And Frazelli had looked over at Rigby, the chief, and they’d both gotten that uncomfortable expression that seemed to come with upper management, passing it along to Carl’s union rep, Jamie Zacharias, who had said: “If Glitsky or Batiste fuck up at all, you’re in.”

So Carl, before he’d even sat down, found his interview over. What had they been planning to talk about? he wondered. He’d gotten the bottom line out of them in about a second. Waiting for Glitsky or Batiste to fuck up would be like waiting for one of them to die. Eventually they would, but you didn’t want to set your watch by it.

Maybe he should have asked if Abe or Frank had done anything better than he did, were better cops. But he knew it wasn’t that. They had to pick somebody, and in today’s San Francisco if that somebody was a honky on any level, there had better be a compelling reason. This was a city where people like Ralph Nader and Cesar Chavez were considered near-Fascists by some. Hell, Griffin had interviewed people who believed that Karl Marx himself had been right wing because he hadn’t invented women’s lib, while he was at it, along with communism.

So he’d stomped out, slamming the door, then sulked in his cubicle the rest of the day, leaving his interviews to Giometti, then letting Abe follow up the Candlestick stiff, which left him the only logical choice when, an hour later, the call from down in China Basin had come in.

Now Carl Griffin was sitting in his car outside his partner, Vince Giometti’s, apartment on Noe Street. The fog almost completely obscured the streetlight at the intersection in front of him, forty yards away. The steam from the cup of Doggie Diner coffee clouded the windshield. The stuff seemed to stay hot about half a day. Maybe it was the acid they put in it.

His partner and he had been up until after two, breaking it to the wife. So today was starting late. He honked his horn again. C’mon, kid, put your pecker back in your pants and come to work.

Christ! he thought. They ought not to let homicide guys be married. So what if he was married—it wasn’t anything to talk about. It had never kept him home and never would, that was for sure.

He kept thinking about instinct.

If there was one thing that separated the good cops from the very good, it was instinct. You didn’t want to overdo it, Griffin knew, and ignore evidence, but every once in a while a situation came up that seemed to point in an obvious direction and your instinct made you stop and reevaluate.

Glitsky was up for lieutenant. He was up for lieutenant. Frank Batiste likewise. Okay. So at this moment one of those two was standing in the roadway, trying to direct traffic, point Griffin in the obvious direction.

Nine years a homicide cop, and not once before had Abe Glitsky showed up at a scene with his two cents’ worth.

Why do you think that could be?

Maybe Glitsky knew something he didn’t know. Okay, the Cochran kid could have done himself, maybe not. But why would it benefit Glitsky if he—Griffin—came down for a homicide, which was the direction Glitsky was pointing?

Did he know something? Who was that guy he brought to the scene?

Giometti, cleanly shaved, smiling, opened the door. He had a thermos of what was probably fresh coffee with him, a paper bag full of goodies.

“Want a bagel, Carl?” he said.

“Something tells me Cochran might have done himself,” he replied. He took the bagel.

“But the gun was fired twice.”

“Yeah, I know. First time could’ve been three weeks ago, two months, a year even.”

“And the wife said—”

“Wives don’t know how their husbands feel about squat.”

Giometti, he could tell, was thinking about saying something and decided against it. He chewed his bagel. “What changed your mind?” he finally asked.

Damned if Griffin was going to tell him everything. People talked, even partners. Word got around. It would be good for Glitsky’s career if he fucked up. And Glitsky was pushing him—okay, subtly, but it was there—to decide it was a homicide. And Glitsky, he was sure, knew something he didn’t, something that led in another direction.

Put it together, Carl, he told himself. Make damn sure you’re not being set up.

“Instinct,” Griffin said.

Charles Ging’s nose was a map of capillaries, and his breath smelled like gin. His son didn’t often get close enough to smell him, but now, leaning over the blond desk in his father’s office, it was nearly overpowering.

He was leaning over in anger. His own face was smooth, as though he hadn’t started shaving yet. His eyes were pale blue, hair light brown. He was impeccably dressed in an Italian suit.

What he was saying was, “It’s beyond me. Absolutely. You think you’re doing the right thing, you’re the nice guy, doing everybody a favor. It’s bullshit, man. What you’re doing is gambling with my future. And don’t reach for the goddamn bottle, please.”

Ging shrank back into his padded chair. “I don’t like you to use that tone of voice to me, Peter.”

“The hell with my tone of voice! Listen to what I’m saying, will you? We get blackballed by the Catholic Church and I am personally screwed. You understand that?”

“Of course, but we’re not going to be.”

Peter slammed the desk. “Yes, we are. Don’t you see that? Times are changed. Not changing, changed. Past tense. You don’t play straight, it ever comes out, you’re dead. And it doesn’t matter to you, you’re already finished. Me? I gave up being a doctor to get this place, continue the clean business of covering people with dirt, and now you put the whole thing on the line for what? For a favor to some asshole owns a bar? Jesus, it kills me.”

The telephone on the desk rang. The older man went to pick it up; his son put his hand on the receiver. “Let the machine get it, would you? It’s after hours.”

He looked down at the hand covering his father’s. “Jesus, Pop.”

The machine clicked. They heard the woman on the recorder, another voice struggling for control, calling for arrangements. It almost didn’t register for Peter anymore. He thought for the hundredth time maybe he’d made a mistake deciding to take over the business. The endless parade of grief still got to his dad. And look what it did to the guy. When he finally died, he’d already be pickled. Either that, or if they went to cremate him he’d go up like an alcohol lamp.

Charles reached for the bottle again, and Peter let him—even grabbed a couple of ice cubes from the refrigerator. Dilute it a little; maybe it would help. Then he sat down.

After the first sip, his father sighed. “What do you want me to do, Pete? Tell the guy, who I happen to know, that there’s nothing I can do? His brother-in-law apparently killed himself, and the Church says he can’t be buried in holy ground. You call that charity?”

“Fuck charity. This is business.” And Peter suddenly knew he couldn’t deal with the business on this level much longer. He had to get his dad out of it; the man didn’t see reality anymore.

“Look, Pop, you tell this guy—What’s his name?”

“McGuire.”

“Right, you tell McGuire there’s a chance it’s not a suicide, you think that’s the end of it?”

“There is a chance it’s not a suicide.”

“You saw the powder burns, the wound, the whole thing. The guy shot himself.”

“Still, there’s a chance he didn’t—”

“So you tell Cavanaugh there’s reasonable doubt . . .”

“I didn’t tell him that. Father Cavanaugh and I go back a long way. He told me he guaranteed it wasn’t a suicide. The boy was like a son to him. And Jim Cavanaugh and I, we understand each other.”

“And it’s all good old boy, isn’t it? You defraud the Church, Cavanaugh goes along with it, nobody loses, right?”

“I know you don’t agree, but right.”

The son looked at the father, shook his head.

The father lifted his glass and drained it.

Hardy, his shift over, back at home in early dusk, was looking at a picture of himself and Abe Glitsky in uniform. Glitsky’s broad unlined forehead, he decided, was the only part of his face that couldn’t terrify. The rest of it could keep small children awake with nightmares—hatchet nose, overlarge, sunken cheeks, eyes whose whites were perennially red, thin lips with a scar through them upper to lower, the result of a teenage parallel bars accident, although Glitsky told his fellow cops it was an old knife wound.

Abe chewed ice on the telephone. Sometimes he was easier to talk to when you weren’t looking at him. Hardy heard the ice crunching like rocks. Glitsky chewed some more, and Hardy pictured him tipping up a cup and hitting the bottom to loosen the last of the ice. He kept chewing.

Hardy blew again on a cup of espresso at his kitchen table. He waited, thinking Glitsky could make an ice cube last as long as a stick of Juicy Fruit.

“I’d just like to see the pm, check the file, see if I’m missing something,” Hardy said.

Glitsky must have flicked at the near-empty cup. “Yeah, I know what you want.”

“Come on, Abe. I’m not getting paid for this. It all comes down to insurance for the widow. I’d rather have you guys find it a homicide, and that’s what Moses wants me to check into. I have no interest beyond that.”

“You don’t think we’re competent to do that, to find that out? ’Cause that’s what it sounds like you’re saying, and that kind of pisses me off.”

Hardy sighed. “Are we a little defensive here in our declining years, or what?”

Abe chewed on some more ice. “You don’t understand what it’s like here lately.”

“Yeah, but I’m not asking for much, either.”

“You’re asking to get in somebody’s face around their investigation. That’s pretty much.”

“Well, then you do it for me.”

Glitsky laughed. “Yeah, that’d work.” Hardy knew that the humor he heard wouldn’t ever get to his eyes. “Do you even know what we’ve got? Why don’t you wait a day or two? If it’s a homicide, we’ll likely decide it’s a homicide.”

“I know that.”

“And don’t brownnose me.”

Hardy had forgotten that he’d never been much good at getting things by Glitsky. He was beginning to remember. “Look, Abe,” he said, “it’s not like I’m a private investigator wanting to go around you guys. I’d just like a little information, that’s all.”

“That’s the line, huh?”

“It’s the line, but it’s also the goddamn truth.”

Glitsky flicked at his cup—rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. “Griffin and I aren’t exactly sleeping together,” he said. “You’ll have to play it very straight.”

“I just want to meet the guy,” Hardy said. “I’ll dazzle him with my Irish charm.”