Obit (20 page)

I thought Declan’s heart was going to fail him, when I broke the news: Da and Mam are coming to New York! My father insists on seeing for himself that we’re all right. And if we’re not, I guess Dec will have to turn that gun on his own father-in-law to prevent him taking us all back to Dublin.

Jesus, Mary and all the saints be praised! Declan has us installed in a great brick house in a place called Sunnyside. And nearly everyone here is Irish. We moved just in time for my parents’ visit. No coincidence there, I’m thinking. He sat there and told them about the business he’s setting up, importing and selling Irish goods. I hope this means he can give up his job as security man at that nightclub. But I doubt it. He’ll be working two jobs for a long, long time to pay off the loan for this house. I don’t want to know where he got the money so fast, or how much he’s paying in interest! I keep telling myself: this too shall pass.

†

“By that point,” Maura told me, “Teresa and I had enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine. I asked her if she ever thought she should have married the boy next door. She just smiled and shook her head. Though one night, when things were a little strained between them, she suspected he had been with another woman. She acknowledged that this was not the most mortal of the sins he might have committed, but she said it was out of character. We didn’t dwell on what might have been ‘in character’ for Declan. We talked some more. Then, with what might have been a pointed look in my direction, Teresa wrapped things up by quoting Saint Paul: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.’”

†

The next day I heard from Deborah Feldstein, the lawyer. A few minutes later I received a hurried call from Judy Willman. She was the widow of Gerald Connors, and she was willing to speak to us. But her voice on the phone was no more than a whisper, and an overbearing presence was evident in the background. I could hear him interrupting her: “Who’s that on the phone?” The woman said she had to go, but could we come around at two o’clock. So Brennan and I were suit-jacketed Mormons on the doorstep again, this time at a small, dingy apartment building in the Red Hook area along the Brooklyn waterfront, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. We pushed the button marked Willman and were buzzed in immediately. The building was run down; it smelled of piss and stale cooking. We trudged up a dark staircase to the third floor. The veneer on the Willmans’ door was coming off in layers. We were greeted by a woman who appeared to be in her sixties. Time had not been kind. The skin around her small pale brown eyes was tired and wrinkled, and her lacklustre hair was dragged back from her forehead with metal hair clips. She was drying her hands on a tea towel.

“Come on in. Which one of you was I talking to on the phone?”

“You were speaking to me, Mrs. Willman. I’m Monty Collins and this is Brennan Burke.”

The room was indifferently furnished; the prize item seemed to be a huge faux-leather reclining chair set about four feet in front of a large television set. The carpet around the reclining chair was worn, and littered with crumbs. An overflowing ashtray teetered on one arm of the chair.

“Come and sit down. I’m not sure I have the information you need. You may know more than I do,” she said. She perched on the seat of the recliner; Brennan and I sat in armchairs.

“We know very little, Mrs. Willman. Brennan and I found out about this recently. But we’re determined to piece together certain events that occurred back then. The reason —”

“Good. Because I was never able to piece it together myself. I finally gave up trying to find out why my husband died the way he did.”

“Died,” Brennan repeated.

“One minute we were here, a normal young family; the next minute he was gone. Arrested, put on trial, taken to that place. And murdered. It was a nightmare from beginning to end. I never knew what was going on. I still don’t.”

Never got out of Attica. Murdered. Burke’s face had gone grey.

“Why don’t you tell us what you remember,” I said.

She took a deep breath and glanced towards the front door. “We were living over in Queens. Gerald, me and the babies. We didn’t have a lot to live on but we were doing fine. Gerry had a steady job in a printing company and there was room to move up. He never missed a day’s work. We were in a tiny flat, but we furnished it when we could, and it was cozy. Three years was the time limit we’d given ourselves there, then we would move on and up. Gerry —” her eyes darted to the door again “— was the sweetest guy you could imagine, a good husband to me, and he adored the kids. His dream was that the summer before Kathy started school, we would all go over to Ireland and see where his parents had come from. Somewhere in County Kerry. It sounded like a fine plan to me. I’m a mixed breed myself, never had any desire to go to any of the old countries my relatives escaped from. But for him it was different.” She rose from her chair. “Can I get you anything? A soda? Coffee?” We both shook our heads. “I’m going to have a cigarette. Anybody mind?”

“It’s your house, Mrs. Willman,” Brennan said. “And I’m a smoker myself.”

“Oh, would you like a cigarette? And call me Judy.” She reached to a side table and picked up a pack. She opened it and appeared to be counting the cigarettes.

“Why don’t you have one of mine?” Brennan suggested quickly. He offered her his pack; she took one out and he lit it for her. He lit one up himself, and leaned back.

“A few weeks before this all happened, maybe a month, I don’t know, Gerry started staying out late. He’d never done that before. He wasn’t drinking a lot, sometimes one or two drinks, sometimes nothing at all. I got worried and kept after him about it. He wouldn’t tell me why he was going out, but he told me it was nothing to worry about. What he meant was he wasn’t cheating on me with another woman.”
She gave a snort of bitter laughter. “Like that’s the worst thing in the world. Husband arrested for robbery with violence, sent to Attica and killed? At least he didn’t have another girlfriend!” Her voice broke and she got up and walked out of the room. When she came back, she was wiping her eyes with a Kleenex.

“When he was in prison I would visit him. Sometimes I’d bring the girls. It was horrible. The other prisoners were terrifying. And all through that time Gerry wouldn’t tell me what was going on. He didn’t let me attend the trial, and I couldn’t have anyway, with the kids and no money coming in. I know somebody got him into all that. He didn’t go from being a law-abiding citizen one day to a violent criminal the next day without someone setting him up.”

We heard a key scratching around the lock in the front door. Judy flinched, then dabbed hurriedly at her eyes. She tucked the Kleenex into her sleeve and set her face in what she meant to be a pleasant, welcoming expression. “Hi, Garth!” she called out brightly, in a voice too loud for the small room.

A large unkempt man in his sixties made a noisy entrance. A loud nasal snort sounded as if it would end in a gob of phlegm being expelled. “Who’s this?” He directed the question at his wife, and jerked a thumb at her two visitors.

“Garth, we have company. This is Mr. Burke and Mr. Collins. They’ve come to —”

He turned on us. “Whaddaya want?”

Brennan looked as if what he wanted more than anything was to get up and tackle the man to the floor. He opened his mouth to reply, and I overrode whatever he was going to say. “Good afternoon, Mr. Willman. We’re here to ask for your wife’s assistance with —”

“She can’t help you.”

“Now, how would you know that, if —” That was Brennan.

Again, I talked right past him. “She may not be able to. We haven’t had a chance to ask her yet. We just arrived.” I shot a glance at Judy, and she stayed silent. The husband eyed the long ash on the end of her filtered cigarette. “We were hoping that some information about her former husband, so many years ago, might provide —”

“The jailbird! Forget about it. Gets her upset.”

He parked himself on the arm of his wife’s chair. She immediately
slid out of the seat, and he took her place. She sat on the arm and busied herself with her fingernails. The husband lifted a huge hand and scratched his unwashed hair. A cloud of dandruff fell from his head and landed on his shoulders. I caught Brennan staring at it as if it were the bodily manifestation of a mortal sin.

“She has a lie-down at this time of day. Why don’t you go in for your rest now? I’ll answer their questions if they have any before they go.”

I decided to shift the conversation onto another track. “Your children?” I looked to a pair of photos atop the television. One showed a wan-looking young woman with three squirming children seated on a rust and gold flowered couch. The other woman had done better for herself. She stood in the driveway of a double garage with an elaborately dressed little girl, an expensive car behind them, and palm trees in the yard.

“Those are my girls, yes. Our girls I mean, of course. They’re Willmans now. That’s Sheena with the three kids, and Kathy with the one. Kathy’s down in Flor —”

“Kathy forgot you’re alive,” Willman butted in. “When’s the last time you seen her? Seven years? She’s got it made down there, him with his Pontiac dealership and her with her country-club membership. Rollin’ in dough. But does she spread any of it around? Not up this way.”

“And your other daughter? Does Sheena live in the area?” I asked.

Judy said: “Yes, less than a mile away. Life hasn’t been easy for her, but she’s starting —”

“She’s livin’ off taxpayers like me and you, that’s what she’s doin’. On welfare, the pack of them. Maybe the next boyfriend will get a job. Though why should he, with the welfare payin’ the shot?”

I saw another photo display, on a table in a corner of the room. There were pictures of soldiers, along with medals, ribbons and other military paraphernalia. One of the photos was of Garth, in better days, standing with a young man in his late teens or early twenties. Both were in US Army uniforms. “Our son,” Judy said.

“Private G.G. Willman,” Garth confirmed. “I pulled some strings and got him into my old Army unit. I should take Sheena over to the sergeants’ mess with me some night. See if she can meet a guy who’s
willing to get off his ass to serve his country and bring home a steady pay packet.”

The final photo that caught my eye was Garth and Judy’s wedding portrait. The date was emblazoned in gold script on the frame: May 7, 1955. Thirty-six years with Garth. Judy looked apprehensive even then.

“Now have you found out everything you want to know?” he asked with belligerence. Then to his wife: “Go rest. You’re tired.”

“I don’t mind trying to help them, Garth. All they want to know is a bit of ancient history really.”

“All this stuff from the past rattles her nerves, as you can see. So if you have all the information you came for,
adios.”

“No, we haven’t, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m not sure Mrs. Willman can help us, Brennan. She didn’t seem to know anything about the few points we raised. We should be going.” I got up and he reluctantly followed my lead. “Thanks again, Mrs. Willman. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

The husband lumbered to his feet and corralled us to the door. Judy slipped quietly from the room. I started out the door, but Burke could not leave it at that. He turned to the glowering man and said in an undertone: “A word to the wise, Willman. Your wife has a tongue in her head and she can speak for herself. But just in case she’s too polite to mention it: go and have a wash. You’ll be doing her a kindness, and one that’s long overdue.” He turned on his heel and walked away. The slam of the door reverberated behind us.

“Imagine putting up with the likes of that,” he fumed as we left the building. “And of course he’d arrive on the scene in the middle of the conversation.”

“Whether we like it or not, she thinks she does have to put up with him. So we don’t want to make it any worse for her. And anyway, I suspect she doesn’t know anything more. Whatever started her former husband on his criminal course, she wasn’t privy to it.”

“We can’t just leave it! She thinks Connors was murdered. We have to know what happened.”

“We’re not going to find out today.”

†

We didn’t find out the next day, either. When I called her number, Garth Willman answered and hung up when he heard my voice. I tried again a few hours later and got Judy, but she whispered: “I don’t know. I never did.” The call ended with a soft click. I phoned Brennan to let him know that we wouldn’t learn anything more from Judy.

“I’d like to know more about this Willman.”

“Just because he has dirty hair doesn’t mean he’s a criminal.”

“There’s something about him I don’t like.”

“Yes, I was able to infer that with my sharp lawyerly mind.”

“Well, one inference I’m trying desperately not to draw is that my father had something to do with the death of this young fellow in prison. To silence him. I can’t allow myself to think that.”

“Brennan, we don’t know that.” Though it was hard to avoid the suspicion. I knew exactly how he felt.

†

It was Thursday. Maura and Normie announced their intention to spend the afternoon and evening shopping for gifts for Tommy Douglas and everyone else back home. Normie seemed to think that everybody, young or old, would be more than happy with something from F.A.O. Schwarz, the toy emporium. And she was probably right. I had a late lunch and settled down in front of the television to watch a movie. This was something I rarely did but I could never resist
Dr. Strangelove.

In the evening I drove to Queens to see what Brennan was up to. Turns out he had a plan, and he was dressed for the occasion, in faded jeans, a worn-out T-shirt with Italian writing on it, and a battered black leather jacket. He hadn’t shaved. “You’re just in time, Monty.” He grabbed the keys to his father’s car from a hook by the front door.

“We’re going down-market?”

“Possibly. I’ll fill you in on the way.” We got into the car, drove to Queens Boulevard and turned left. “Patrick counsels a group of ex-convicts.
As you can imagine, the composition of the group varies from session to session. He remembered that one of the ex-cons was in Attica in the early fifties. This fellow is supposed to be attending therapy but he never shows up. Pat said he’d try to get the man into the office. But we’re not going to wait for that. I got a phone number from Pat, the number of a place where this man is a regular. I called, and he’s going to meet us there.”