Irish Eyes (17 page)

Her voice was groggy when she answered the phone. “Sis?” I said hopefully.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“How many sisters do you have?”

She yawned audibly, and I did the same. “God, what time is it?”

“It’s only nine,” I said. “I was sure you’d still be up.”

“I’m working a double shift at Piedmont Hospital tomorrow,” she said. “I took a sleeping pill an hour ago. I was in twilight time until you called. What’s wrong? It’s not Mom, is it?”

“Ma’s fine,” I assured her. “She thinks I should get married and move to Nashville.”

“That’s nice,” Maureen said.

“I could use some help,” I said hesitantly. “It’s about Bucky Deavers. You remember him? My old partner?”

“The detective who got shot in the head?” Maureen said. “I heard about that on the news. I’d completely forgotten you knew him. How’s he doing?”

“Not so good,” I said. “He’s at Grady. I can’t get any real information about him. And when I call, they say he’s not allowed any visitors.”

“He probably isn’t allowed any visitors except family. He’s probably in the SICU up on the seventh floor. Anyway, if he’s in as bad a shape as I think he is, he wouldn’t know whether you were there or not. So just forget about seeing him.”

“I’m not forgetting about it,” I said. “Bucky’s like my own brother. I can’t sleep at night, thinking about him. I really need to see him. I just need you to tell me how I can sneak up there.”

“Forget about it,” she said. “There’s a dedicated elevator serving that floor. And a security guard at the desk opposite the elevator doors. I’m telling you, Jules, they won’t let you in. Nobody gets past that guard unless they’re accompanied by somebody from social services. And social services won’t take anybody up unless they can prove they’re family.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “I’m the only family he’s got.”

“That won’t get it,” Maureen said. “Unless you can prove you’re his wife or something.”

“He hasn’t got a wife.” I was nearly shouting. God, my sister is irritating.

“I’m telling you, Jules. Forget it. Oh, shit. The phone woke Maura up. Bye.”

I pushed the end button on my cell phone. Another dead end. I couldn’t get in the hospital to see Bucky, because I wasn’t really family. And he didn’t really have any family, other than me. Except, I thought, Lisa Dugan.

Directory assistance had an L. E. Dugan in Kennesaw, which was nearly an hour north of downtown, and another in Garden
Hills, which I thought was a fairly pricey neighborhood for a cop. Still, I dialed the number and crossed my fingers.

A child answered the phone. “Dugan residence. Kyle speaking.” So grown-up, I marveled.

“Hello,” I said just as politely. “May I please speak to Ms. Dugan?”

“M-O-M-M!” he bellowed, forgetting to cover the receiver. I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“Find out who it is,” I heard a woman’s voice call back.

“Who is this, please?” the little boy asked.

“It’s the office,” I fibbed.

That got her attention. “Yes,” she said, all business. “This is Captain Dugan.”

“Lisa? It’s Callahan Garrity. I’m sorry to call you at home.”

“What do you want?” Lisa Dugan wasn’t nearly as polite as her son.

“I want to see Bucky.”

“You can’t. They’re only allowing family. I had to get a notarized letter from Major Mackey stating we were engaged before they’d let me go up there.”

I swallowed my pride for the second time that night. It was getting to be a nasty habit.

“Please.” I was wearing down my bicuspids, doing all this teeth-gritting.

“It’s not up to me,” she said. I thought maybe she was wavering.

“Look,” I said. “Could we meet somewhere? Talk about this whole thing? I know internal affairs has some crackpot idea that Bucky could have been involved in some robbery ring. I want to help.”

She was silent.

“There are rumors floating around,” I said finally. “The kind of rumors that could end a lot of people’s careers, ruin their lives.” I felt guilty hooking her that way, but it was the only leverage I had.

“Rumors,” she said, her voice cracking. “God. I can only imagine what the departmental grapevine has to say about all this. When did you want to meet?”

“Tonight?” I asked, crossing my fingers. “You’re in Garden Hills, right? I’m in Midtown right now. I could meet wherever you say.”

She was thinking about it. “I just walked in the door. We haven’t even had dinner yet.”

“We could meet for dinner,” I said. “Was that your son who answered the phone? You could bring him. I’m used to kids.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I’ll see about a sitter. All right. There’s a Church’s Fried Chicken on Piedmont. You know it?”

“Church’s?”

“I haven’t eaten in two days. I need a grease fix,” she said. “You know the place?”

“How soon?”

“Thirty minutes,” Lisa said. “But I can’t stay long. I’m beat.”

She was sitting at a booth near the door, reading a Dr. Seuss book to a dark-haired little boy of about five. There was a bucket of chicken on the table, and she was sipping from what looked like a half-quart paper cup of iced tea.

“Lisa?”

She looked up. “Try finding a sitter at nine-thirty on a Friday night.”

I leaned over and looked at the book.
“Green Eggs and Ham,”
I said, giving the kid my friendliest smile. “Would you eat them in a box?”

He closed the book solemnly. “I would not eat them in a box. I would not eat them with a fox.”

“Smart kid,” I told him. “Stick to fried chicken.”

“I wish,” Lisa said, giving me a grudging smile. “Kyle’s strictly a cheesehead. Grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, cheese dip. Oh, yeah. He likes French fries, too.”

“How’s the chicken?” I asked, gesturing at the bucket.

“I think it’s the best fast-food fried chicken you can get,” Lisa said. “We like the ghetto dinner usually.”

“Ghetto dinner?”

“Two drumsticks, two wings, fries, and a roll. Kyle eats the fries and the roll, I take care of the rest of it.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

I went to the counter and ordered, then brought my box of chicken and large sweet tea back to the table.

“Your son has beautiful phone manners,” I said, making with the first shameless suck-up move of the night.

“I try,” she said, ruffling his hair. “People in Atlanta seem to put a lot of emphasis on manners. The preschool had him saying ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’ practically before he could say his own name.”

“Then you’re not originally from Atlanta?”

She laughed. “Nice try. You mean you all didn’t notice the accent?”

“Like you say, good manners rule down here in Dixie. If I had to guess, I’d say the accent is Midwest. Chicago probably. And by the way, ‘you all’ is plural.”

“Very good.” She nodded. “Kyle and I moved here from Chicago three years ago, after my divorce. My folks up home think I talk like one of the Beverly Hillbillies. They almost died the first time Bucky answered my phone.”

“Were you with the Chicago PD?” I asked.

“I was an investigator for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “But my dad was career with the CPD. Kind of runs in the family.”

“Mind if I ask what brought you here to Atlanta? It’s kind of a long way from home.”

She picked up one of the drumsticks and worked at the thick dark brown crust with a long manicured nail, nibbling delicately at the tiny pieces she broke off. It was the way a Yankee would eat fried chicken, I thought.

“My divorce. What else? Kyle’s father is chief investigator in my old office. I needed some distance. Atlanta needed an experienced investigator. It didn’t hurt that I was a woman. Or that my dad had friends here.”

I nodded. At least she was honest.

“You came along at the right time,” I told her. “When I quit the force ten years ago, it was because they wouldn’t transfer me to homicide. They told me it was because there weren’t
any openings, but that was bullshit. Two weeks after I quit robbery, Bucky got transferred over there. They’d never had a woman homicide detective, and the former chief didn’t see any reason why that should change.”

She took a sip of tea. “That would be the chief who got fired after his live-in girlfriend was busted for trying to smuggle a kilo of cocaine into the country when the two of them were coming back home from a weekend in Jamaica? The one who had the cocaine tucked down in her French-cut bikini panties?”

“You mean, alleged cocaine. And I didn’t know they were French-cut.”

“Bucky told me that. Maybe it was just one of his stories.”

We grinned at each other. It was a sister thing. Now we could get down to issues.

“Bucky and I were partners back then,” I said. “In robbery. We had a lot of good times. I know the man. He isn’t a thief. And he isn’t a liar. He wouldn’t get mixed up in this stuff. Not under any circumstances.”

She glanced over at Kyle, who’d started drawing a picture on a sheet of paper in a steno pad. I noticed Lisa kept twisting a slender gold ring on her left hand. It was a claddagh. My Aunt Olive had brought me one after a trip to Ireland years ago. It was still in my jewelry box, along with my monogrammed circle pin and a charm bracelet from the New York World’s Fair.

Lisa saw me staring at the ring. “He gave it to me,” she said shyly. “For my birthday. I gave him a matching one for his birthday. Kind of dorky, huh?”

“Sweet,” I said. “I didn’t know Bucky had a sentimental side.”

“There’s a lot about him that a lot of people don’t know,” Lisa said, lifting her chin.

“All of a sudden, I’m finding that out,” I said. “All this stuff about Bucky I didn’t know. And I’ve known him for all these years.”

I was watching Lisa Dugan’s face. The overhead lights cast an unearthly green light on her cheeks.

“Like all this stuff with the Shamrocks. And Bucky suddenly being interested in his Irish heritage. I always understood Bucky was just a cracker.”

“His mother was a Healey,” Lisa said. “Her people were from Donegal.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I happen to know that Bucky’s mother worked in a school lunchroom in South Georgia. The only Dublin she ever heard of was Dublin, Georgia.”

“His mother’s people were from Donegal,” Lisa repeated. “And what about you? Garrity? Irish. You know, it really surprised me, when I first moved down here, how many Irish there are in the South.”

“Not so surprising,” I said. “Most of them came South in the eighteen hundreds, when the railroads were being built. Laying track was hard work. Killer work. Slaves were considered too valuable to risk. So they brought in the Irish. And they stayed. You ever been to Savannah?”

She tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “No. Bucky wanted to take me down there later in the spring. He says the azaleas are beautiful down there.”

“Savannah’s eaten up with Irish,” I said. “Originally, they got there because of the railroads, but a lot of them stayed and went to work as longshoremen down on the docks. That’s how my father’s people ended up in Georgia.”

“Why does it bother you that Bucky joined the Shamrocks?” Lisa asked.

“Look at the jerks running it,” I said. “John Boylan. He’s a scumbag, in case you haven’t noticed. And he’s the guy who organized this whole security gig, too. It makes me wonder, that’s all.”

“It doesn’t make me wonder,” she said coldly. “I made some phone calls after you and I talked. Major Mackey said he’d already talked to internal affairs, and that I should be expecting a call too.”

“You? Why?”

“We were living together, sort of. Bucky kept his old apartment, but most nights he stayed at my place. I guess somebody thinks I know something about these robberies.
Mackey wanted to know how many different jobs Bucky was working.”

“He was working more than one?”

She sighed. “He worked all the time. It was starting to cause problems for us. If he wasn’t working security at the Bottle Shop, he was working Wrestlemania at the Dome, or directing traffic at the Fox on the nights they had shows.”

“Why?” I asked. “He wasn’t getting rich on a cop’s salary, I know, but why all of a sudden was he so driven to make a lot of money?”

Lisa took a sip of iced tea. “We’d talked about buying a house together. I’m getting killed with my rent because I want to be in a good school district for Kyle. The night he was shot? It would have been his first night off in two months. That’s probably why he was so pissed off that I had to work late. I know he was buying that beer for us. Harp. He used to tease me about buying imported beer. I keep thinking about that. If he’d just picked up a six-pack of Bud at a convenience store, none of this ever would have happened.”

I bit my lip. I’d been wondering about the Harp ever since I’d seen it in the cooler in the back of the store. What if Bucky had gone in the storeroom to get the beer? Was it possible he’d surprised the robber back there, instead of the front of the store as Deecie Styles had claimed?

“Convenience stores get held up all the time,” I pointed out. I’d decided to keep my questions about the Harp to myself. “Was Bucky carrying the night he was shot?”

“No,” Lisa said. “His service revolver was under the front seat of the Miata. So he was unarmed. The bastard just shot him for the hell of it.”

Kyle glanced up, wide-eyed. “You said a bad word,” he said accusingly.

“I meant it, too,” Lisa said, her voice cracking. “But sometimes mommies say bad words. That doesn’t mean little boys can say them.”

“Oh,” he said. He picked up a purple crayon and went back to work. He was drawing some kind of rocketship, it looked like.

“There’s something hinky about all this, you know,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve been around,” I said. “In what way is this like any armed robbery you ever heard of? I mean, the bad guy took no money, not even any liquor. He shoots Bucky twice, right in the head. One bullet should have done the trick. That second shot was definitely a kill shot.”

“Are you saying a cop shot Bucky? One of the Shamrocks, maybe? Is that what you’re getting at with all this veiled talk about the rumor mill and the grapevine?”