Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (2 page)

The staff at Posada always gave me a lot of slack.

When I’d been on the force, my credentials alone had kept trouble from the bar. My new line of work was just as effective, if not more so. I had often been allowed to sit in the back room after hours, with a selection of friends, and drink away the morning.

Of course it wasn’t always friends I invited to stay. It could be anybody really. It could, for instance, be a drunken Irishwoman who thought someone was out to kill her.

So with the pub locked it was just the two of us. Mary was an impressive drunk, a different class of drinker. She never lost her composure or showed anything much in the way of emotion. She sat comfortably in the booth in the small back room and smiled occasionally out of the corner of her mouth while blowing that stray hair up out of her face. She didn’t slur her words, and she wasn’t flirty. She became steadily more intense as the night wore on. Her head tilted to one side when she looked up at me, reminding me of Lauren Bacall.

Her taste in drink never wavered. She stayed with the open bottle of vodka placed on the table between us.

“You’re in trouble, then?” It seemed the best place to start.

“Yes.”

I could tell she had more to say. Worse, I wanted to ask.

“It sounds complicated.”

“Not really,” she said, then finally opened up. “My boyfriend—my ex-boyfriend—well, we had an argument.”

“Lovers’ tiff?”

Her lip curled. “I guess so. It got serious, and he kicked me out. Threw all my stuff into the street.”

“Really, where is it now?”

“Still in the street, probably.”

I wished I could stop asking questions. But I suppose deep down I hate a mystery.

“Well, it was…it’s complicated. See, he thought that I owed him.”

“Money?”

She hesitated. “Yeah.”

It was a lie, and we both knew it. There was something else there. One thing I had learned in the force is that if you keep asking the same question, one of the answers you get will be the truth. The skill is knowing when that happens. If her boyfriend had really wanted to kill her, he could have done it while he was kicking her out. But it was difficult finding a tactful way to explain that.

I gave it my best shot.

“Look, if he really wanted to kill you, he’d have done it while he was kicking you out.”

“He’s always making threats, like he’ll kick me out or he’ll hit me or something. I can tell when he’s bullshitting, but this time he sounded serious.”

“You let him threaten you?”

She gave me that Bacall look again, and somehow everything I’d said seemed foolish.

“Do I look like I’d let someone actually hit me?”

She didn’t.

“I see. So this guy thinks you stole something, and he’s kicked you out for it and threatened to kill you. Crap boyfriend, if you ask me.”

“What are you, an agony aunt?”

I liked her sense of humor; it showed me no respect at all.

“No, just opinionated. Wish I’d thought of that, though. That would have really pissed off my dad.”

“And that’s how you make your career choices?”

“Is there any other way?”

She laughed again, then poured herself a drink from the bottle. She hadn’t touched it for a while now. Things were slowing down. “So what are you working at these days?”

I cleared my throat. I nodded a couple of times, doing that awkward bobbing that men do when they don’t know how to explain something. I didn’t like to say out loud that I was working for the Mann brothers.

“I do favors, find people, things, you know? I’m saving up to move away, follow my blood.”

“Your blood?”

“My dad is Romani. You know”—I paused before saying it—“a Gypsy?”

She blew the hair out of her eyes again, then looked me over again, seeing me in a different way, noticing now my darker features. I can pass for white, but I can also pass for everything else between England and India.

“Yeah, exactly. I’m one of those people who scare the shit out of councils and neighborhood watch schemes. Well, half of me is. My mom was
a Gorjer
—a settled person.”

“Aren’t Gypsies Irish? I mean that’s what they all are on TV, those programs with the big weddings and all that. I always feel like the shows are making fun of my accent.”

“No, they aren’t Gypsies. We’re a whole other thing.”

I stopped dead. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d opened up here. It was time to pull things back around.

“So this thing that he thinks you stole—”

“The money?”

“The money, whatever it is, a Russian doll for all I care—”

“OK.” She nodded. “Whatever it is.”

“He’s willing to kill you for it?”

She didn’t say yes, but I could see the direct look in her eyes and read the word at the back of her throat. Did I want the truth? Yes. But I was drunk and tired, and I wanted a kiss even more.

“Want to come back to my place?”

“Sure.”

She said it too quick. She’d known the question was coming. There’s always the rational part of my brain that wonders why a woman would go home with me, but there’s also the male part that thinks I look like Sam Rockwell. That part shouts loudest.

We walked back to my house, both feeling the loosening effects of the alcohol even more once we got out into the autumn air, stretching a five-minute walk out to fifteen. My house was too big for me. I’d taken on the mortgage in what felt like a previous life, when I was married and pretending to be happy. I’d told my wife I liked it because of its location opposite a public park and because it was big enough to start a family. I’d told my friends I liked it because it was only two streets over from Molineux, and I’d never have to miss a Wolves game again.

This was back when I cared about things like that, when the world mattered to me. Now the house was just a building that was too big for me to heat and too quiet for me to think.

We both paused for a second before I put the key in the door. I hesitated like a schoolboy, and she laughed. She
slipped her hand underneath mine over the key, replacing my grip with her own, and turned the key. She stepped into the dark hallway and turned back to me with her bittersweet grin.

“Would you like to come in?”

She was smiling, teasing, which seemed like a good opening. I stepped inside and leaned in for a kiss, but she sidestepped it with a playful smirk and turned to look around. She stooped after kicking something and came back up with a pile of white envelopes, all identical, all addressed to me, and carrying the same post mark.

“Ignoring someone?”

“Just my doctor.”

I took the letters from her and dropped them back on the floor before waving for her to look around. There’s not a lot of stuff in my house, no unnecessary furniture, no books that I’ve never read or music that I’ve never listened to, no food that I don’t eat. My wife had never allowed any posters on the walls; she liked them bare and painted. The minute she moved out, I covered those pastel colors with film and concert posters.

Punk rock and seventies cinema are the last revenge of the failed husband.

The only part of the house that had always felt like mine was the kitchen. Cooking was one of the few things I still found any pleasure in. Both of my parents had been good cooks. My mother was a domestic encyclopedia, able to make any meal I challenged her with. My father was a mad genius, combining any variety of herbs and spices with recipes he claimed were passed down through his family. They were never more of a couple than when they were together in the kitchen, laughing and teasing each other as they experimented with food. I had a cupboard dedicated to my father’s spices, and in my lowest moments I locked myself
away in the kitchen and cooked, throwing in ingredients until I’d invented something new.

Mary was standing in my living room, looking through the CDs, when I brought in the open bottle of wine from the kitchen.

“You’re one of
them,
aren’t you,” she said. “Men in their thirties who manage to ignore popular music and obsess over people who can’t sing.”

“You’ve never heard of any of them, then?”

“I didn’t say that. I dated a musician once, back in Dublin. He didn’t think a band was any good unless they’d had a career of failure and sang about whiskey.”

“Sounds like my kind of guy.”

“He left me to come over to London and find fame and glory in his own band.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I assume he failed and sang about whiskey.”

I handed her a full glass of wine and retreated to lean against the doorframe. She seemed like she needed space. She frowned again, but it was barely noticeable this time. She sat on the sofa with one of my Tom Waits CDs. She was staring at the cover and seemed lost in memories for a moment.

“We went to see him play in London once. Cost a bloody fortune, and we got lost afterward. Spent two hours walking the city looking for our hotel.” She snapped out of it and peered at me. “So there’s no girlfriend or wife hiding in any of these rooms?”

I almost coughed into my glass. That was a bit of a jump, but I had known the question would come.

“No, not these days.”

“What was it, a girlfriend or a wife?”

“Wife. We’re still married, but we haven’t been a couple for quite a while.”

I didn’t know anything about this woman, I realized.

Well, that wasn’t true. I knew her name and that she was single. I also knew she liked to drink. I knew she thought someone wanted to kill her. All told, that was more than most first dates, but not enough to shake the apprehension I was feeling. That rational part of my brain was fighting back again, asking why I had a strange woman in my house when she’d said someone was trying to kill her. Then I watched her wiggle to correct her skirt over her legs, the material stretching a little between her thighs, and I decided the rational part of me could shut the hell up.

She stood up and walked over to lean opposite me against the doorframe. She was close enough that I could smell her perfume.

“It didn’t feel like stealing at the time.” She tilted her head up, like she was looking for approval. “I mean, I’d thought about it for quite a while. You can rationalize anything if you try hard enough, especially after the economy took a shit on us.”

She took a sip of wine. The green of her eyes looked darker than it had in the pub, as if great clouds had rolled in. “I just kept thinking I just need one lucky break. One push to get me out of the life I’d been living. I knew how to live the way I wanted, but I just couldn’t get there on my own. If everyone could just look the other way, just once.”

I kissed her. I’m stupid like that.

I don’t remember either of us moving from the door, but soon we had both stumbled up the stairs and into my bed. I made the run to the bathroom for a condom and stood fighting with the wrapper, trying not to think of cold things or waterfalls. By the time I got back into bed she was snoring. It was a soft snore, very cute. I kissed her on the forehead and covered her with the sheets.

I pulled my jeans back on and trod carefully down the stairs, ignoring the noisy step and steadying myself on the banister to stop the world spinning around me. I dropped onto the sofa, and as I closed my eyes, I could feel the booze taking me under.

I stirred for a moment, not knowing if my eyes had been closed for seconds or hours. The thought of making a coffee crossed my mind, but then the sleep came again like a blanket. It wasn’t until sun hit my face that I woke up again, daylight streaming in through curtains I’d forgotten to close.

I sat up slowly, squinting against the light and feeling my head throb. As far as hangovers went, this wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t the worst I’d had. It felt more like a rugby match than an all-out war. I climbed the stairs and leaned into my room. Mary was almost as I’d left her. Lying in the bed, wrapped in the sheets.

Almost the same.

Except she was dead.

Don’t panic
.

Don’t panic. Hold it in, concentrate.

Fuck it
.

Panic
.

I was wrong. I had to be.

I touched her skin and it was cool. It felt like a waxwork model. I felt for a pulse at her wrist. When I couldn’t find one I tried for a heartbeat. I brushed her cheek with my hand, hoping for some kind of reaction or a flutter of her eyelids. Anything.

She’d been dead for a few hours, and the realization connected somewhere between my head and my gut. I felt empty, as if someone had pulled a plug in my stomach.

She was wearing her underwear. The rest of her clothes were still piled on the floor where we had left them. There were needle marks on the inside of her right arm. I hadn’t pegged her as a junkie, but she could well have shot up after I fell asleep. Or someone may have done it for her. The second option was more likely, because I tore through her pile of clothes but didn’t find any drugs or needles.

That wasn’t what killed her, though.

I could see marks around her neck, a thick band of skin that was raised and swollen where something had squeezed.
One of my old work ties was on the floor with her clothes, and it hadn’t been there the night before.