Habit of Fear (9 page)

“When the police asks me if I knowed a street person like her. I don’t know from nobody till Detective Russo says it’s you they do that to. I don’t owe him nothing, but I say to myself Missy got to stay with the sisters if she going to help Friend Julie. She don’t always come home at night.”

“I don’t like walls,” the woman said.

“I still say she better keep staying here in case they looking for her. They in big trouble when they mess up Friend Julie. She going to find them.”

W
AS SHE? SHE CARED
more about their being found than she had before, certainly. But what did she know about them now that she hadn’t known before? That the shorter one had red, longish hair, a thatch of which fell all the way down to his cheek. And she knew they were bullies as well as beasts: they had baited their trap for a woman who was aging, frail and not right in the head.

At her desk, to cleanse her mind, she looked up at the poem “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More” and recited it aloud. She concentrated on each phrase as though the poem was a mantra. Before going about the work by which she was earning her living, she looked up the literary agency of Walsh and Kendall, as Ginny Gibbons had suggested. It was now called Kendall Associates, John Walsh having retired. At least he wasn’t dead. The bookkeeping department gave her an address and phone number. She phoned, and John Walsh agreed to see her the next day.

She made her business calls—on to a Sardi’s Restaurant observer who was great on who was holding hands with whom, another to an apprentice printer whose boss turned out the postdated press released for a lot of celebrities. From another source she picked up an item about the entrepreneur who collected, processed and merchandised as plant fertilizer the droppings of zoo animals.

She reached the precinct station house in time to see Detective Russo before he went off duty.

“I knew she’d turn up the witness,” he said of May Weems in a self-congratulatory tone.

“I don’t know whether the police can get more out of her than I did or not.” She recounted her meeting with Missy Glass.

He picked up on the red hair immediately. “And the other one is taller and dark-complexioned by your description. That’s vital information, Julie. If they chum together in the neighborhood, we ought to be able to bring them in.”

“Why do you keep thinking they’re in the neighborhood? They had a car.”

“Could the witness describe the car? I suppose it’s too much to hope for a license number.”

“A lot too much. A small car that looked like an egg. I’d say a Volkswagen. But no color. Whatever that means.”

“That’s going to be the trouble. She’s not what you’d call a reliable witness.”

“There isn’t one good witness between us,” Julie said.

“That isn’t so. You’ll be a better witness than you realize once you make up your mind you want to do it. How about it?”

Julie escaped by looking around the dreary, ill-lit room. It was the old interrogation room, and they sat at one end of a long table, where someone had written “Fuck the Commissioner” in the dust. Not much happened in the precinct house since the booking of suspects had become a central operation located downtown at Number One Police Plaza. There were great empty spaces in the building. They exposed the dirty floors and walls, the dangling ceiling plaster. As though cops didn’t have a depressing enough job without working out of an 1890s ruin. “Yes!” she said with emphasis. “I want to do it.”

“Good girl.” Russo got to his feet. “Wait till I sign out and I’ll buy you a beer at McGowen’s.”

She doubted that McGowen’s was his regular bar. It was the hangout mostly of the Irish-Americans. Julie sometimes went there with Mary Ryan. “You didn’t tell me why you think they might be local men,” Julie said.

“A hunch, them being around here on a Sunday morning. They’re not on the work-site payroll, as far as we know. We’ll try again. If they are on the project, there can’t be too many redheads besides him. How about the beer?”

“Thank you,” Julie said.

Billy McGowen himself was behind the bar. He almost always was. He recognized Julie and gave the detective a nod of tentative recognition. There wasn’t much warmth in the keen blue eyes.

“Shall I introduce you?” Julie said. McGowen was mid-bar, drawing the beer. Several regulars were at the other end, watching the television above Julie’s and Russo’s heads.

“He’ll soon get to know me,” Russo said.

And sure enough, returning, McGowen said, “Here you are, Detective.” He stood for a moment, his hands spread on the bar, as though waiting for what would come next.

Julie said, “I thought maybe Mrs. Ryan would be here.”

McGowen straightened up and took a cloth to where the sweating glasses had ringed the bar. “She hasn’t been in since she lost that unfortunate mutt of hers.”

There was talk then about the advantages and disadvantages of getting another dog when you were Mrs. Ryan’s age. “The thing is, you don’t get a puppy,” the detective said.

McGowen said, “You want to know what size it’ll be when it grows up.”

“And you want it trained.”

“That’s the main thing,” McGowen said. “You’ll never train a dog if you can’t be quick with it. And she’s an old lady.”

Russo laid a five-dollar bill on the bar. McGowen motioned it away, but the detective let it lie there. When the barman left them to check his other customers, Russo indicated the picture centered over the back-bar mirror and asked Julie, “Who’s that?”

By now she knew well, having asked the question herself sometime before. “Bobby Sands. He was an IRA hunger striker who died in prison.”

Russo sighed heavily. Julie didn’t want any more of her beer, but she didn’t say so. McGowen came back to pick up the conversation where they’d left off. “I’d take up a collection and buy her a real pedigreed frankfurter if I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“Mutts are better dogs,” Russo said. “McGowen, have you seen a couple of young guys around here lately that might be looking for trouble? One is medium tall and dark—not a black man—and he’s got a lot of hair on him. The other’s a redhead, shorter, and rolls like a sailor when he walks.”

Julie felt uncomfortable. She watched the barkeeper’s eyes turn stone cold.

“Nope, can’t say I have.”

A few stools down a customer looked their way. His eyes and Julie’s locked just for an instant. He looked up at the television and kept watching it while he groped an inside pocket for a cigarette. Something had clicked with him, Julie thought. Something.

McGowen picked up the five-dollar bill, went to the cash register and rang up a dollar fifty. He returned with the change and said a curt “Thank you.” The message was pretty clear.

On the street, Russo proposed to walk Julie to Forty-fourth Street. “What do you think?” he asked.

“They don’t like informers.”

“But did he recognize the description?”

“I think so. Somebody in there did.”

“I noticed. You’re very popular in the neighborhood, Julie. Somebody’s going to turn them in.”

“Maybe.”

“The question is can we hold them when it happens.”

J
OHN WALSH LIVED IN
an apartment hotel on lower Fifth Avenue and explained of the chaos of papers into which he conducted Julie that since his retirement he had been working on his memoirs. He swept a pile of letters to the floor so that she might have a chair.

“Now you should know why I did that,” he said, “so that you won’t think I’m a madman. There is something in one of those letters I simply cannot find. I know it’s there, mind you, and this will give me a fresh approach. All the same, there’s advice I’d give to anyone writing his memoirs. Like Macbeth on murder: if ’twere done, ’twere best done quickly. Sit down and don’t look so worried. They can’t find anything in the office these days either—Kendall has too many associates.”

He removed a tiger cat from an Eames chair, swung the chair around to face her and seated himself. The cat leapt up on his lap. A slight man with a tint of gold in his eyes and in his gray hair, he was someone Julie could fall in love with, so to speak, on the instant: amiable and soft-spoken … nonaggressive. “So, it’s a poet you’re interested in, and Ginny Gibbons told you to come and see me. …”

It hadn’t gone quite that way, but Julie let his version stand.

“It’s more than she’s done herself lately, you might remind her.” He drew from his pocket an envelope on which he had written the information Julie had given him on the phone. “Nineteen fifty-five—it’s not so long ago.” He looked at her quizzically. “To me. Were you born then?”

“Oh, yes.”

He put on his glasses and looked again at his notes. “Someone possibly your father. I’m not about to get your hopes up falsely, young lady, but I feel I’ve come on the name Mooney recently, and I can only suppose it would be in this conglomeration of hopes and miseries.” He tossed a hand to encompass the roomful of papers. “I don’t suppose you have a copy of the poem with you?”

“No, but I could recite it,” Julie said. “Or I could write it out for you. It wouldn’t take long.”

He smiled. “I’d much prefer that you recite it to me.” He leaned back, closed his eyes and with one finger scratched the cat’s head.

Julie was on the last stanza when he began to nod in recognition. She closed her own eyes in order not to falter with the new feeling of excitement.

“Historically inaccurate, but emotionally sound—if one can be emotionally sound.” He sat up and sent the cat off on its own. “I’d have thought it was written by a Michael Desmond.”

“His best friend,” Julie cried. “Or at least the best man when he married my mother.”

“And your mother’s name?”

“Katherine Richards.”

“Ah, well, now I have it. I came on the name in a letter from Michael Desmond. It was a letter of introduction of his friend, Mooney. Was he a merchant seaman?”

“I was always told he was a diplomat.”

“Well, I could be wrong,” John Walsh said.

“So could I.”

“Now, you see, what’s wrong with the poem you just said for me: he’s talking about Irishmen in exile, a long way from home. But the far place he’s talking about is Van Diemen’s Land in Australia. And while many an Irishman was exiled to Van Diemen’s in the nineteenth century, they were not Wild Geese. The Wild Geese emigrated on their own to Europe after the penal laws in the seventeen-nineties. Never mind, it’s a fine piece of imagery, and poets don’t necessarily make good historians. But at least they get the spirit right, wouldn’t you say?”

Julie nodded.

“Well, you don’t need a lecture on truth in poetry, do you? And I should tell you I did not know a Wild Goose from a clay pigeon myself when I sent the poem on. Nor did anyone at the magazine, for they went ahead and printed it.”

“Ginny thinks they were soldiers in Napoleon’s army.”

“And some might have been. … But let me start with Michael Desmond and try to work my way into this logjam of a memory of mine. Michael was a press representative with the Irish observers at the United Nations before the Republic was admitted, and I think he was with the Mission for a time afterward. In any case, he was an Irish newspaperman and very keen on theater. My father, who was a playwright, sent him to me. He may well be alive still. He was younger than me, but I’ve not heard from him in years. He did send me some cherished clients, and among them was your father.” He rested and must have enjoyed what he saw on Julie’s face. “I assume you are by now convinced we are speaking of your father?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I wish I could tell you I met the man. I never did. But first he sent me a letter about this biography he proposed to write. Of John Mitchel. There—how’s that for a break in the logjam? Whether he ever wrote the book, I have no idea.”

“If he did, it wasn’t published in this country,” Julie said.

“You went that route, did you? Good for you. I hadn’t thought there was much of a market for it here, and I suppose I told him so, for he sent me the poem next and he suggested I read a journal John Mitchel had written in jail. It’s odd how it all comes back once you get a lead into it.”

“I never read the journal, but I did look up John Mitchel … or talked to someone. At some point in his career this Young Irelander—that’s what his group was called; the IRA of their day—became editor of a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper. He was a rabid pro-slavery man. The nineteen-fifties did not seem an auspicious time to look for an American publisher for his story. But about the poem and my asking you your mother’s name: if I got it published, I was to send the money to her. And I did. And there’s an end, I think, to my brief association with Thomas Francis Mooney. Would he have settled out there among the koalas and the kangaroos?”

Julie smiled a little.

“What I can do for you is look up the latest address I have for Michael Desmond and maybe you can get onto him. If he’s alive, that is. The trouble with my address book—it’s getting to look like an obituary column.”

A
T THE SHOP
she wrote a letter to one Michael Desmond at his last known address on Kevin Street, Dublin. Then she called Father Doyle at Saint Malachy’s and asked if she could see him.

“Anytime, Julie. Anytime.”

He held her hand all the way from the rectory door to the office, no great distance, but far enough for two brief, reassuring squeezes. He looked perfectly in place taking the chair behind the desk under the picture of Pope John XXIII. Julie had the more recent two at her back. She told the priest about her belated start on a search for her father and Mrs. Ryan’s suggestion that she talk to him.

“So she’s at it again, is she?” the priest said. “God forgive her, I sometimes think she invents miracles on my behalf in order to involve herself in other people’s lives.”

“You’re right,” Julie said. “Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless, the belief in miracles runs deep. … Where do we start?”

“I’d like to know why the marriage was annulled. They were married at Saint Giles’s Church by a priest, although my mother was a Protestant. I think the proceedings toward an annulment must have started sometime before I was born. I was baptized a Protestant and given my mother’s maiden name. No mention of my father at all on the baptism certificate.”