Malarkey (35 page)

I turned onto the Killaveen road. "Then you suspected
him?"

Jay nodded. "And Novak. I'm not the only one. Joe Kennedy
suspected Liam, because of the daub of paint and because of Grace
Flynn. They were cousins."

"You know that?" I felt a twinge of resentment I immediately
suppressed. Jay was never going to tell me all he knew of a case.

"Joe told me."

Old boy's network. What a bore. I was not going to be
secretive. I told Jay Maeve's theory about Diarmuid and Grainne and
the mark on Diarmuid's forehead.

He listened intently. When I wound down, he said, "Yeah,
there could be some connection. The love mark would have appealed
to Liam's sense of humor."

I drove slowly through Killaveen. The car park of the pub
was jammed. I didn't see anything funny about the legend. "Maeve
said the disposition of the body was poetic."

"Imaginative, anyway." Jay craned for a glimpse of the trout
stream then sank back in the seat. "The hell of it is I kept fading in
and out and so did Liam. What I heard was pretty disjointed."

I waited for a car full of kids to turn onto Suicide Lane ahead
of me. "I suppose Liam despised Slade for corrupting the game
players."

Jay nodded, but he was pursuing his own train of thought. "I
wish I could have answered him. There was a lot of self-serving
rationalization in what Liam was saying. He told me about an
experience he had in Bosnia."

I thought of our early visitors. "Alex said the Serbs forced
him to witness atrocities."

"Yes. He came away from that convinced that the terrorism
in Ulster—on both sides—was the same kind of stupidity, and he
hated Wheeler for feeding into it."

That fitted with what Liam had told me at dinner the day I
met him. "I can almost respect that."

Jay touched the dressing on the side of his head. "He kept
saying Wheeler had perverted the meaning of war. I wish I could
have argued with him."

War was a subject I avoided discussing with Jay. I had no
experience of it, and he had too much.

After a moment, he said, "Liam liked the Steins. He kept
saying they had European minds. Whereas Wheeler was a real Yank
icon, a violence junkie with no principles and no traditions."

"You disagreed with that."

He waited while a petrol tanker flashed past before he
spoke. "It seemed to me that Wheeler boiled the structure of combat
down to its essentials, but then I'm an American. I think like
one."

"Maybe Liam was right."

"Come on, Lark," he snapped. "Wheeler's the victim here. He
was a game junkie, if anything. He was dumb, and insensitive to local
complications, but he understood one thing. The violence was
already there in the kids. He choreographed it. To some extent he
defanged it. The gamers didn't kill anybody, and they didn't kill each
other."

"Well, okay, but—"

He was intent on making his point. "The fact that Slade
didn't pour a lot of windy ideas about freedom and justice and
fatherland into their heads is to his credit, as far as I'm
concerned."

I was coming up on our turn-off. The lot at the church hall
looked empty so I pulled into it and stopped. "You sound as if you
approve of war gaming."

"No. Wheeler was a schmuck, but I don't see how attaching
principles to what the gamers were acting out would have made it
better. The violence would just have perverted the principles. Liam
didn't see it that way. He saw a wicked American corrupting Irish
youth. He read me a real sermon on Yank ignorance. I think he saw
himself as some kind of hero for ridding the country of Wheeler's
influence."

"A hero? Surely not."

"Even cynics can con themselves. If Liam had been honest
with himself he would have called the Gardai and told them the fight
got out of hand. Instead he desecrated Wheeler's corpse to show the
world how clever he was."

"Isn't desecrated a strong word?"

"You thought Slade had been shot in the head, didn't
you?"

"For a few seconds." We sat silent, I remembering the scene
in the potting shed.

Jay cleared his throat. "Liam and Tommy moved Slade's
body twice, you know, once to conceal it and once to display it. It's
the display part I find disgusting. That and the killing of Kayla
Wheeler. I told Mahon to check the trunk of Liam's Saab. I'll bet
there's a camera there with undeveloped pictures of both
corpses."

Liam as snuff artist? My mind rebelled, but the insight made
too much sense to dismiss it out of hand. "Let's hope the press
doesn't find the film."

Jay gave a wry grin. "A gruesome thought."

With the engine off, the car had begun to cool. I shivered.
"Why did Liam kill Kayla? That doesn't make sense to me. You said it
was murder."

"Yeah, he got cocky. He thought, wrongly, that he wasn't a
suspect in Slade's death and decided he might as well get rid of
Kayla, too."

"Get rid of her?"

"That's what he said. He planned the second killing in detail.
It was pretty nauseating. He went on about his cleverness, how he
had flopped Kayla's dying body around to make it look as if she
resisted."

"My God." Nauseating was right. My stomach clenched.

Jay leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. "He
counted on Kayla's solitude and her alcoholism. He killed her in cold
blood and faked a fight scene. He was good at stage settings, and he
gloated over that one. And he bragged about how he hid out waiting
for Kayla in the bathroom, how he got rid of the nylon rope he used
as a garrote, even how he laundered his clothes and showered
afterwards, at home, to make sure there would be no physical
evidence to incriminate him."

"But why?" I burst out. "What had she ever done to
him?"

Jay opened his eyes and turned his head. His eyes were dark.
"Nothing. Kayla was a non-person to him, a gross inconvenience. He
decided Stonehall would run smoother with her out of the
picture."

"Did he do it for Grace?" I was looking for comfort, or
logic.

Jay shook his head. "Only in the sense that he thought he
could manipulate Grace and Grace's child. Mind you, he didn't spend
much time talking about Kayla or Grace. They were women and
peripheral. He was too busy making sure I understood why he
challenged and fought Slade. Kayla didn't interest him."

I was shaken. I had liked Liam. I said so, adding, "I must have
lousy taste."

"He had a lot of charm—and some conscience. I think he did
suffer post-traumatic stress over the Bosnian experience. I suspect
he could have used that as a defense, even for Kayla's murder. But in
all the elaborate explanations he gave me—mind you, he thought he
was dying—he never once saw a connection between the Serbian
atrocities and the atrocities he committed himself."

The irony of that made me writhe. I started the engine.

Jay said, "Nobody except you and George has tried to
present the viewpoint of the victims. The Steins thought Kayla was
tacky, and Slade was, at best, a convenient source of funds."

I eased the car onto Suicide Lane and headed for Stanyon.
"Mike Novak loathed Slade's interference and thought he was stupid.
So did Tracy."

"The Wheelers are dead. They didn't 'ask for it.'" Jay said the
phrase with contempt. "As far as I can tell neither of them committed
a crime worthy of capital punishment."

I said hesitantly, "Slade did make a game of war."

Jay snorted. "Slade made a parody of war." His voice
softened. "He was an overgrown kid, but he didn't kill anyone
himself, and, unlike his Serbian counterparts, the ones Liam kept
comparing him to, he didn't egg the kids on to kill anybody
either."

That was true. A motorcycle roared past, and I thought
briefly of Artie. I turned onto the graveled drive.

Jay said, "I don't think Slade was a saint or even an innocent.
I don't doubt he was hard to put up with on the job. If he was
anything like his sister, he must have been an unhappy man. As for
Kayla, when I saw her I was reminded of the profile of victims of
child abuse, especially incest."

He had to be right, though it would have taken me a long
time to reach the same conclusion. "Her drinking?"

He nodded. "And the ponderous flirting and the eating
disorder. She needed help. She sure didn't need what she got."

I had come to the Y. I stopped and looked down at Stanyon.
A fairy tale castle. Most fairy tales, I reminded myself, are grim. I
turned right and passed beneath the blood red blossoms of the
rhododendrons.

Jay said, "You asked me how I felt about Liam McDiarmuid.
Sad, I guess. Angry. Maybe relieved that he's dead."

I crept toward the cottage in first gear. "He tried to save
your life."

"So he said." Jay gave a short, unamused laugh. "I guess he
decided I was an acceptable European-style non-tacky Yank. If my
mouth hadn't been taped shut I could have set him straight. I hope I
would have said something about Kayla."

I hoped he would have, too.

When we entered the cottage Dad greeted us with
sandwiches and tea. It was almost like coming home.

And think of my happy
condition,
Surrounded by acres of clams.

American song, sung to the Irish air, "Rosin the Beau"

Jay called the Dean, who had watched the eleven o'clock
news. The Dean was very solicitous. Jay had been hospitalized? He
should by all means recover completely before he tried to fly home.
Sick leave was something the Dean understood. Since Jay never used
it, he had accumulated nearly a term's worth, so he invoked it and
stayed until Saturday. I flew home with him.

Mother's flight from New York arrived before our flight to
Seattle took off, so all four of us had a nice reunion in Dublin Airport,
and Joe and Maeve showed up before the plane left, too. One benefit
of Jay's ordeal was that Maeve and I were now good friends, and
Jay's hormones had decided he didn't need to challenge Joe to a
duel.

We had spent our six remaining days in Ireland very
happily, though the press hovered, and Jay underwent two intensive
interviews with Chief Inspector Mahon. Whenever Jay was free, I
whipped out my itinerary and we took off. We did see Glendalough
with its round towers and Celtic crosses. When we weren't dawdling
around Quaker villages, we visited neolithic sites. We even drove
north to Newgrange.

We walked in the Stanyon Woods, too, partly to exorcise
Jay's demons. He thought the wall-paintings in the folly were
hilarious and wished he'd seen them before Tommy incarcerated
him under the dolmen. I never did find my incised stone, though I
looked for it.

Maeve called me from Dublin a couple of weeks after Jay and
I got home. She'd introduced my mother to the Wicklow poets, and
she also wanted to tell me that Grace was doing well. The lawyer was
pressing for the child's rights. The Steins were mounting a
retrospective showing of Liam's photographs. I suspected that the
idea for the exhibition came from Maeve herself, though she didn't
claim credit for it. Stonehall Enterprises had hired an Irish MBA to
replace Slade Wheeler.

In October, Maeve called me again. She sounded shy.

"Joe and I have decided to do it."

"Do what?" My mind tossed up images of Regency porn.

"Get married."

I was delighted and said all the appropriate things.

"When?"

"After Easter."

"Wonderful. Why don't you fly west and honeymoon on the
Pacific? We'd love to see you both, and it should be reasonably
peaceful here by that time."

The honeymoon idea startled her, but she didn't reject it
outright. We discussed the possibilities. Finally she said, "What do
you mean peaceful? Are you expecting civil disturbances?"

"Only in a manner of speaking." I felt shy, too, and I shifted
on the kitchen chair. "The twins should be sleeping through the night
by then."

"Twins?"

I cleared my throat and tested an Irish phrase I had
overheard in a pub. "I'm up the pole."

"Pregnant?" Maeve cackled like a moorhen. "Don't put it that
way, idjit. It's very rude language." Her turn to ask when.

"Early December. Little Scorpios. Two of them."

"Aren't you overdoing it?"

"Overcompensating maybe. Uh, Maeve—"

"What is it?"

"That double spiral design on the megaliths. Does it have
any significance?"

A crackling pause followed, but Maeve is not slow. "If you'd
found a sheila-na-gig I could tell you it was a fertility symbol. We're
not sure about the spirals."

"I'm sure."

"Are you happy?"

"As a clam."

In mid-December, at about the solstice, I gave birth to
healthy fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. We called our son George
James after his grandfather and his father. Our daughter we named
Erin.

I was born in Montana, raised in eastern Oregon, graduated
from the University of Washington, and have advanced degrees in
English and history. I taught at Clark College in Vancouver WA for
many years before retiring to write fulltime. Of my fourteen
published novels, Malarkey is number nine, the last of the Lark
Dodge mysteries. I have a new regency, The Young Pretender,
available from Uncial Press, and my current mystery, Beyond
Confusion, is available from Perseverance Press in trade paperback
and in Kindle format from Amazon.com.

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