Peeler (35 page)

It was a practised line, delivered with a well-worn leer and O’Keefe wondered, as he entered the house, if the doorman’s head was still sore from Starkson’s blow.

‘Right this way,’ the doorman said, directing him to the parlour to the right of the stairs.

O’Keefe stepped into the room and took in the two girls lounging on sofas. The room smelled of sickly sweet perfume rather than the stale smoke and booze he had smelled three days earlier. The two girls were wearing robes of silky material and one of them smiled at him from where she was reclining on a sofa against the wall. She made no move to get up, holding her bare legs out to the fireplace.

‘Care for a drink?’ The doorman went behind the small bar.

‘Whiskey,’ O’Keefe said, stepping over to the bar. ‘And I need a girl. There’s a particular girl. One with curly, dark hair, big eyes, big …’

‘Bella,’ the doorman said, taking a bottle from the bar shelf. ‘She’s working at the moment.’ He studied O’Keefe more closely now. ‘She’ll be busy for a while, boy. One of these two won’t do you?’

O’Keefe wondered when the man would suss him. ‘I’m sure they would if I was looking for any girl, but tonight only Bella will do me.’ He tried a smile.

Recognition flashed in the big man’s eyes. ‘You’re one of the …’

O’Keefe had his Webley jammed up under the man’s jaw before he could swing the bottle of watered whiskey. ‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘Never crossed my mind.’ The big man’s speech was slurred with the pressure of the muzzle. The smiling girl looked away, but the other girl put down her magazine. Lit a cigarette. Settled in for the show.

O’Keefe hoped to disappoint her. ‘I don’t want to give you another beating. I need talk to Bella is all. Now where’s the boss?’ O’Keefe had to pause to think of his name. ‘Noonan, is he upstairs?’

A smile formed over the man’s gritted teeth. ‘Noonan’s out. For fucking good. Your lads did a right number on him, I’m telling you.’

He relaxed the revolver under the man’s chin a little. ‘Put down the bottle.’ He watched while the doorman set the bottle gently on the bar. ‘What lads are you talking about?’

‘Your lads. The ones … Can you put that down?’

O’Keefe lowered the revolver and holstered it. The doorman rubbed the soft flesh under his chin, checking his hand for blood.

‘The ones who came with you and gave me the hiding, two, three days ago.’

‘They’ve been back since?’

The doorman nodded, rubbing his chin again. ‘Same night. Took Noonan with them and he hasn’t raised his head since.’

Mathew-Pare and his boys. And they had interviewed Barton as well.

‘Who’s running the shop now?’

The doorman smiled. He held out his hands, palms up. ‘At your service, sir. Brendan Coffey’s the name. Anything you care for, it’s on the house. Bygones be bygones, I always say. Always keen to do the Peelers … the
police
a turn, I am.’

O’Keefe returned the smile. This man’s promotion was similar to his own. Expedited by the sudden, violent removal of another man.

‘Bella’s room. Which one is it? Top on the left?’

‘You’ve been here before then?’ The newly promoted whoremaster winked and poured a dram of whiskey into the glass he had set for O’Keefe and drank it.

O’Keefe didn’t bother knocking. He knew the doors were kept unlocked for the girls’ safety.

The man’s head snapped up as O’Keefe entered the room. He was behind Bella, naked and pink, thin red hair going to grey at the sides, a corpulent, well-fed face unmarked by wind, rain or sun. O’Keefe thought of Councillor Ryan, and a dart of anger pierced him. The man was standing, working at Bella’s backside or working at himself, O’Keefe couldn’t tell which. Bella was on the bed on her hands and knees, her shift pushed up, the skin of her back pale and opaque. She had a look of bored vigilance on her face, putting up with the stout man floundering behind her. A working girl earning her crust like any other, but wary of any pain the punter might cause her in the bargain.

‘What’s this?’ The punter’s voice was indignant and scared.

O’Keefe crossed the room in long strides. ‘Get dressed and get out!’

Bella rolled away from the man and pressed her back against the bed’s headboard, bringing her knees up to her chest and pulling her shift down to cover them.

The naked man instinctively covered his cock and balls with one hand. He raised the fist of the other. A mistake. ‘Who do you think you are. I paid –’

O’Keefe jabbed him in the throat with stiff fingers and the man gasped, holding his neck, his pink face blossoming red. He gawped for air and went down on one knee.

On the bed, Bella smiled up at O’Keefe. ‘You’re the copper was here about Janey and that other girl, the one from Barton’s Works.’

‘I am,’ he told her, taking the punter’s clothes up from a chair and throwing them out the open door into the hallway. He pointed at the man. ‘You. Shift it!’

The man lumbered to the door and out into the hall.

O’Keefe turned to Bella. ‘Sorry about that.’

She smiled brighter now. ‘Don’t be. I’ve his money already. And he’ll be back. Can’t stay away from Bella, he can’t, curfew or no.’

He pulled the photograph of Barton in uniform from his briefcase and set it on the bed. He did the same with Deirdre’s and Janey’s. Bella – with her brown ringlets and full bust, cleavage white and translucent, her wide brown eyes so innocent and beguiling, O’Keefe could almost understand why the pink man would be back – picked up Barton’s picture, giving it a good look. She didn’t touch the girls’ photographs but instead leaned over to her nightstand and took a cigarette from a tin box and lit it. Blowing out smoke, she said, ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know, Peeler.’ The innocence faded in her eyes and her smile was hard. ‘But you’ll pay me, by fuck. Or I’ll tell him you’re on to him and he’ll pay me a sight more than you ever could. Only for he’s a fierce cruel bastard and that boy of his, Bill Cole, would give you the shivers in places you’ve never had them. Only for that I’ll tell you. If you make it worth me while, Mr Peeler.’

Just as quickly as it had gone, the innocence was back in her eyes and her smile softened. O’Keefe took his wallet from his jacket pocket. He smiled, handed her two pound notes and reckoned that Bella would get on just grand in life.

***

In the dark, he watched O’Keefe leave Madam Grace’s and wondered if it wouldn’t just be better to kill the copper. Drive the tip of his knuckle-duster pick up into his brain and be done with it. Done enough already though, the boss had said. Follow the bastard and make sure he’s not sticking his nose in where it shouldn’t go. Wouldn’t have a thing to worry about if you hadn’t done that card sharp last night, the boss said.

Not that he hadn’t wanted it done at the time. Bloody country Joe taking the piss, winding up the boss ’til he couldn’t take no more. And the girls? Why’d I have to do ’em the same way, he asks? ’Cause that’s the way I do ’em, I say. You’ve your way, I say, I’ve mine, and let’s leave it at that. Let me top the copper and it’s bother over. Not yet, he says. Not just yet. This though, the little visit to Grace’s? No, he was sure the copper hadn’t stopped for a poke on his way back to the barracks.

He waited until the sound of O’Keefe’s footsteps had faded in the night air. The copper knew now. Too many mouths about, telling tales out of school. Only a matter of time before the copper rumbled it. Whores. You can’t trust fucking whores, not one bloody bit.

He dipped his hat brim lower. The knuckles of his right hand were covered in brass and held behind his back, the tip of the pick hidden in the folds of his trenchcoat. He mounted the steps of Madam Grace’s. He pressed the bell and waited.

***

O’Keefe made it back to the Daly house without seeing another soul on the streets, sticking to the shadows, using laneways and alleys when he could. Damp pavements. Shot-out streetlamps. Distant sounds of revving engines, bursts of gunfire.

‘There’s the man himself,’ Daly said, opening the door to O’Keefe. ‘Fine chap you are, arriving back after closing time.’

O’Keefe held up a bottle of Paddy whiskey he’d bought from Brendan Coffey at Madam Grace’s. He’d had to force the man to take his money, the muscle become master already seeking to cultivate his contacts in the police with a free bottle. ‘I’d say it’s watered a fair bit, but it’ll do you.’

‘Do
me
?’ he said, as O’Keefe slipped into the house.

‘And your good lady wife. I’m heading back to barracks. Wake up that fool of a DI and press for an arrest warrant for Barton and his man. I could use a cuppa for the ride though, if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Sure, who’s Barton when he’s at home?’

Muireann Daly stood up from where she’d been sitting reading a novel by the fire. The kitchen of the small house was warm and well lit. A welcoming place. ‘Never mind him for the moment, Séan. When did you ever go short of one in this house?’

‘Never, Muireann. But it’s late. I don’t mean to trouble you.’

‘Too late for the pub, thank God.’ She smiled as she filled the kettle from a jug of water and hung it on its hook in the grate over the turf fire. ‘Sit yourself down and take off your coat.’

O’Keefe pulled a chair from the table up to the fire, between Jim and Muireann’s, but didn’t take off his coat. ‘I can’t stay. I have to make it back and get my notes in order. Get things ready. That bastard Barton knows something. I have him. Once I pull him in, I can break him. I know I can.’ There was something more as well – something he couldn’t put his mind to that he knew would back up his arrest. Like a word one couldn’t recall; there in the memory but inaccessible. It would come, he told himself, if he gave it time. It would come if he had Barton in front of him in an interview room.

‘Whoa there, son. Pull the brakes a bit.’ Daly sat down and stirred the coals of the fire with a poker. ‘You know you’re going to put the mockers on the DI’s commendations, medals, knighthood and general elevation to grand poo-bah of the RIC with this. He won’t take it well at all, at all.’

‘No, but he won’t have a choice when I lay it out for him. I have proof that Barton knew the three victims. All killed in the same manner. I can tie him to all three. Well, to two of them, killed in the same way.’

‘
Three
victims?’

‘One: James McKenna. Farming equipment salesman. Played cards with a shower of toffs, Barton being one of them. Mopped the flagstones with Barton, so the word is. Found behind the Central Hotel with a tiny hole in the back of his head. Same wound as Deirdre Costelloe’s. Same cause of death.’

Daly considered it.

‘They were seen leaving together, this Barton and the salesman?’

‘No, Barton left later. This morning in fact.’

‘Time of death?’

‘About three, four in the morning.’

‘Working girls use that lane behind the Central, you know that don’t you?’

‘A working girl who can kill a man instantly, one blow with an ice pick?’

‘Stranger things under the sun.’

‘Come on, Jim.’

Daly shrugged, not conceding the point but not rejecting it outright.

‘So who’s the third body? I can see the connection between Deirdre Costelloe and this card-player. Too much of a coincidence, both jabbed in the back of the head like that. But a third?’

O’Keefe told him about Janey Plunkett. ‘I don’t have it for certain that she was killed with a pick like the other two, but she did know Barton. She was one of the girls he brought to the parties.’

‘Barton? Are you on about Richard Barton, as in the Tractor Works’ Barton?’ Daly said.

‘The very same.’

Daly gave a low whistle. ‘You know how to choose ’em, I’ll give you that. Your first whack at a murder case of your own and I pull for you the biggest assassin in all of Ireland – a man with direct ties to your victim – and what do you do? You go out and try to pin it on the son of the second or third biggest employer in Cork.’

‘What kind of parties were they?’ Muireann asked.

O’Keefe turned to her. ‘Card parties. Some kind of a monthly drinking club. Held in a Big House in the country. Near Bandon, the girl from the Marsh reckoned.’

‘
Reckoned
? She doesn’t know the actual house then?’ Daly scoffed.

Lighting a cigarette and holding the box out to his friend, O’Keefe shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s a problem, but … The link is Barton. He brought Janey, Deirdre and Bella to these parties as the entertainment.’

Daly held up his pipe in place of the offered cigarette. ‘Hold on a tick. You said the Costelloe girl wasn’t on the game. You said she worked at the factory. A typist or something.’

‘She did and she wasn’t on the game. But she liked dodgy men. Her friend told me so and Bella, the working girl at Madam Grace’s, confirmed it. Said Deirdre liked the attention she got from the men at the parties and liked to see herself as one of the “fast girls”. But Bella thought she didn’t like what went on when the card game ended. Said she only ever went to one of the parties and she didn’t go back in the same car with the other girls. And then her body’s found not a week later? The killer was at the party. Barton was at the party. He knows who else was. He’s the man I need to pump. I’ve enough now to pull him in and sit him down at least.’

Daly thought about it for a minute, puffing on his pipe, filling the room with tobacco smoke. ‘So you’ve got it on the word of some young doxie that Barton knew Deirdre Costelloe and … who was the other girl?’

‘Janey Plunkett. Connolly put me on to her, said she was doing private parties for a rich fella. Bella confirmed it. Ended up dead in a lane just over a month ago.’

‘And she was stabbed in the head as well?’

‘Officially? No. She was throttled, but the surgeon who did the post-mortem did it for form’s sake. Never looked under her hair. With bruising at the throat, he wrote it off as a run of the mill strangulation. An angry punter or some mad-in-the-head with a thing about working girls. Of no importance.’

‘So you’re assuming that because the Plunkett girl knew Barton and worked these parties and is dead, she must have been killed in the same way?’