Obit (37 page)

“The man is just sitting there. I’m hungry and Terry is making me mad. He’s climbing the trees and you’re not allowed to. I hope he gets in trouble. This is no fun. The man didn’t go to his house, so we can’t find out where he lives. Da is going to kill us for being away so long. He’ll give Terry a crack on the arse and send me to my room. I have to pee. I already did, Terry says. Where, in the bushes? Look! The man is getting up. He’s following that other guy that just walked past the bench. Terry is whispering that our guy is Number One and the new guy is Number Two. Bet they wouldn’t like those names! There they go, out of the park. That’s Number Two’s car. There’s a bunch of boys peeking in the windows of the car. They’re gonna get in trouble. Number Two is yelling something at them; I
can’t make it out. The boys are taking off. Both the men are getting in the car. Driving away. Now we can’t follow them. Now we have to find the bus home. What number was it?”

We could see Bridey becoming agitated, a little girl in Brooklyn, with no idea how to get back to Queens.

I signalled a question to Patrick.
The car?

“What does the car look like, Bridey?”

“Black and shiny. Brand new.”

“What’s happening now?”

“I’m scared. We’re at the bus stop. Terry’s telling this lady we’re orphans and the Sunnyside Orphanage bus forgot us and we don’t have any money. But we do! The lady is patting his hair and giving him two bus tickets. We’re waiting. She’s giving us two candy bars! She says get on this bus that’s coming now.” Bridey stopped abruptly.

“So you get home . . .” Patrick prompted.

“And we’re in trouble. Mam was worried. Lucky Da’s not here.”

What had Bridey said the other day? Something about Terry, and a fight. It sounded like the kind of day that would wind up in a crying spell. I found a pen and paper and scribbled a note:
She and T had a fight.

“Are you and Terry talking about what happened?”

“We’re in a fight. We were going to make a big announcement at dinner time, that we followed the man who loves our mother. Now we don’t want to tell. And Terry’s saying it wrong.”

“Saying what wrong?”

“Some word. I just punched Terry in the face. He’s mad and he says he’s saying it right. But we both gave the guy his nickname, Mack. That’s where it came from.”

“Where did it come from, Bridey? I don’t understand.”

“From Potomac! That’s what it is. I say it’s ‘Po-
TO
-mac’ and Terry says it’s ‘
POT
-o-mac,’ but it’s okay because both ways you get Mack, and that’s what we’re going to call the man from now on.”

Patrick looked at me and shrugged. I mouthed a question:
Why Potomac?

“You’re telling us about Potomac, Bridey. Why did that word come up?”

“His car. Man Number Two’s car. It had a sticker on the back that
said ‘Potomac Auto Rental.’ We got all excited, because you can rent any car you want. We’re going to get Da to borrow one a lot fancier than our car and take us for a drive.”

Patrick brought her out of her hypnotic state, and the three of us sat in his office trying to fit the new information with what we already had. I would have to be careful not to let anything slip about Francis.

“It sounds to me as if Cathal — the man following your mother — was playing a double game,” I said. “The police knew he was running guns to the old country. But they couldn’t catch him at anything except a minor offence. Now we have him meeting, and following some kind of tradecraft, with a guy from Washington. Imagine how that would go over back home, their man in New York meeting an
FBI
agent. When did he turn informant, I wonder. And now, all these years later, Cathal’s sister is murdered.” Drop it, Leo had warned. Whatever the Irish connection to the shooting of Declan, and whatever Francis’s role in it, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that the Irish were involved in the death of Nessie Murphy.

I was about to speak again when a low-pitched, pleasant ring issued forth from Patrick’s phone.

“Yes? Put him through. Terry! Change your mind? Care to put yourself under my power and — I’ll take that as a no. Yeah, I think we did. A Washington connection, it seems. Just to muddy the waters even more. Yes, he is. Here, I’ll put him on.”

“Hi Terry.”

“I heard from our skip tracer. We’ve found Gerard Willman. Why don’t we meet at O’Malley’s and figure out where to go from here.”

†

Terry, Patrick, Brennan, Bridey and I shoved two tables together at the back of O’Malley’s, where we sat with pints of Guinness and shots of whiskey according to taste. Mickey was presiding as usual, and regulars lined the bar, poring over their racing sheets in the dim light. At one point they all roared a greeting to a man who was the head of something called the Hay Ho Haitch, which, I was told, was an approximation of the initials of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Patrick was the first to get down to business. “All right. What are we going to do about this fellow Gerard?”

“Break his kneecaps,” Terry suggested.

I looked at him as if to say:
The kneecaps you break may be those of your brother.
He closed his eyes and raised a hand as if to ward me off. I knew he had built his hopes up about Gerard, and who could blame him? But the fact remained: brother Fran had imported the gun. And skipped town.

“What do we do about the police?” Patrick continued, as if his brother had not spoken.

“We can’t keep this information to ourselves,” I answered, “if it turns out Willman is connected.”

“What do you mean,
if?”
Brennan asked.

“But we do have a problem,” I went on. “What is he going to say? More to the point, what is he going to say that will implicate your father?”

“Obviously, we have to get to him first,” Brennan declared.

“Let’s go round him up now. A posse of four.” Terry again. “Four? There are five of us by my count. Does this mean you’re chickening out, Terr?” Bridey asked with deceptive sweetness.

“I won’t chicken out if you go in first. You seduce the guy and when he’s preoccupied, I’ll jump out and —”

“Let’s be serious here,” Patrick urged. “One of us will meet him and it won’t be you, Terrence.”

“Fine with me. It shouldn’t be hard to pick one of you three to do the job. People confess to Brennan, they tell Pat all their problems, and Monty cross-examines them for a living. Brennan knows sinners, Pat knows loonies and Monty knows criminals.”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I said. “So we can’t discount the possibility that something will set him off. If emotions are going to run high, that’s more likely to happen with a member of Declan’s family than with an outsider. Even though I’ll have to make it clear I’m representing the family.”

“We’ve put you in harm’s way once too often on this trip. Let’s not do it again,” Brennan stated. “I’ll go.”

I shook my head. “You don’t have the patience. I don’t even want to think about you in the same room with the guy who tried to kill
your dad.” What I didn’t say was:
I already saw you in the same room with Francis, the guy who probably did try to kill your dad; you didn’t even know it and you laid waste to him.
“Forget it. I’ll do it. But I’ll try to engineer the meeting in a safe place.”

“He may not go along with that.”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we? Where’s the phone? Let’s hope he’s there.” They all pointed to a pay phone at the back of the bar.

“He’s there,” Terry promised.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I called his number just before I got here.”

“Now for the small matter of what to say, to lure him to a meeting.”

“How well do you do voices?” Terry asked. “Maybe you can imitate the old doll over the phone. He probably doesn’t know she’s dead, so —”

“We can’t assume that. We can’t assume anything. We don’t know Gerard Willman, or what he’s done, or what else he knows by now.”

“Tell him you saw him at the wedding reception, or you have proof that he was there,” Bridey suggested.

I shot a glance at Terry, who seemed to be avoiding my eyes. Like me, he had good reason to doubt that Willman had been anywhere near the Saint Kieran’s gym when Declan was shot. It was Francis who had imported the rifle. And it was Francis who let slip the implication that there were two targets that night: “Maybe somebody just meant to scare them,” he had said to me. What role Willman played — but I was being prompted by my companions. They had come to an agreement.

“Give him the old line, that you have the photographs,” Brennan suggested.

“Nobody saw the guy. How could anyone have photographed him?”

“He can’t be sure of that,” Brennan countered. “It should cause him concern that you’ve linked him to the wedding reception. Give it a try.”

I got up and dialled the number. It rang and rang. No reply. Deflated, I returned to the table.

“Nobody there.”

“Sit awhile longer, then try him again,” Terry advised. “So, Bridey, what did you tell Doctor Strange-Spell today? Nothing about how your brothers are the root cause of that little twitch in your eye, I hope?”

“I don’t have a twitch in my eye.”

“You will now. Just thinking about it will bring it on.”

“Feck off.”

I tried to steer the conversation back on course. “Let’s return to the scene in the Botanic Garden, Bridey, when the stranger showed up in the Potomac rental car.”

“Okay.”

“What did the man look like, the one who had the car? How was he dressed?”

She was silent for a moment. “I just picture him in a suit and tie. I think he had short light brown hair. I’m not sure how much of this is memory and how much is imagination. I wish I could be more specific.”

“And you didn’t hear him say anything.”

“He yelled something to the boys hanging around his car. It was loud but I didn’t understand it.”

We sat and nursed our drinks for a while longer, making small talk. Eventually I got up to try the phone. It rang for a long time again. I was about to hang up when the receiver was finally picked up and a pissed-off voice came on the line.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Willman?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is a guy who’s standing here looking at a grainy photo of you, Mr. Willman. It shows you someplace you weren’t supposed to be, doing something you weren’t supposed to do.” That should cover it, if he had been up to anything untoward at all.

Silence.

“Mr. Willman?”

“What?”

“I thought you might like to see my photos. Before I take them downtown.”

“Fuck you.”

“The police don’t know about you yet. But I do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Brooklyn voice insisted. “So, like I said, fuck you!”

Slam. End of conversation. I reported to the others; we stayed on and drank a few more rounds, but alcohol did nothing to ease the frustration.

†

The next day I had another conversation on the phone, and it took all my lawyerly acting skills to hide my surprise. “Declan!”

“I just got a call from someone named Sullivan. An Irishman. Says there’s something I should know about Francis.” Declan seemed to bite off his words almost before he got them out. “And that, if I want to find out what it is, I have to meet him in the gymnasium where I was shot.”

“Declan —”

“Don’t interrupt me, Montague. Sullivan said Francis left something for me in the gym. ‘Unintentionally,’ because, as Sullivan put it, ‘you can’t expect perfection from Frankie.’ I told him Francis was in Mexico at the time of the shooting and Sullivan laughed at me. Said my ‘private dick’ must not have filled me in. I asked him who the fuck he was talking about, and he said: ‘The blond guy with the accent.’ That must be you, Montague, with the Canadian accent. What the fuck is going on? Do you know something about Francis you’re not telling me? You’ve got some explaining to do and you can start when you meet me there at seven, with this man Sullivan.”

“Declan, there’s a lot about this I don’t understand and —”

“Understand this, Monty. I expect to see you there at seven.” Click.

I would do better than that; I would be there early. Sullivan would likely arrive ahead of Declan in order to have the advantage. To position himself in the spot where he said Francis had left something behind. With any luck, I would be able to deal with Sullivan and defuse what could be an explosive situation.

†

There was nobody in sight when I got to Saint Kieran’s gymnasium. I stood by the main door and waited as dusk began to fall. Then there was a loud bang as someone slammed down on the bar and sprung the door open from inside. A man stepped out.

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed in a thick New York accent.

He stood in the doorway facing me. Despite the late hour, his eyes were obscured by sunglasses, but I had a feeling he had me in his sights like a sniper. Obviously, my presence was an unwelcome surprise. The man had a shaved head and overdeveloped muscles, which could be seen straining against his black polo shirt and the cheap sports jacket he wore over it.

He didn’t ask me who I was. I looked at his face in the fading light. There was something familiar about him. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said next.

“We meet again, Collins. Only this time my name’s Willman. By the way, I didn’t like your attitude on the phone.”

Gerard Willman! But we hadn’t met. And I hadn’t given him my name over the phone. Yet I was sure I knew the guy.

“Take off the shades, Willman.”

It took him a few seconds to make the decision. Then he whipped them off. Without the wild red hair and beard, he was the spirit and image of the man in Francis Burke’s sketch. This was how he looked when he met Francis all those months ago. The bright green eyes regarded me with amusement. Colm Sullivan was Gerard Willman. Always had been.

The Sullivan brogue was nowhere to be heard. “You’re not the guy I wanted to see here tonight, Collins. I’m waiting for Burke.”

My telephone call had obviously flushed Willman out, and he intended to confront Declan. This wasn’t about Francis at all.