Queens Noir (18 page)

The Pole opened her eyes or woke, depending on what she'd
been doing. "All quiet," she said too quickly, not mentioning my face. She stood up. "I'm going to get something to drink."

"See the ass on that one-it's far too big," Dad sighed.

I knocked lightly on my wife's bedroom door. We'd had
separate rooms for years. There was no reply. I opened it as
quietly as I could.

She lay on the white bed. The duvet (as she always liked
to call it) had soaked up a lot of the blood, although I knew
there was positively none when I'd left her downstairs. I approached, calling her name softly. She looked as youthful as
the young Piaf I once loved.

This time there was no pulse.

I headed for the phone. As I shouted for an ambulance, I heard
the Pole on the stairs and my father asking, "Am I dying?"

The police weren't as sympathetic as I might have expected.
This was perhaps due to my face, which was beginning to
bruise up nicely. My story was disjointed, with periods that I
couldn't account for. They refused to let me call George, then
changed their minds and called him themselves. He came,
white-faced, but was of little help, as he hadn't entered the
house with me. He was escorted out, promising me that he'd
send someone straight away.

"Bail or bond?" he tried to crack wise as he left. It didn't
work.

The Pole was bossy and informative, giving remarkably precise
times and details of my comings and goings.

Naima was hurried out of bed for questioning and arrived
looking worried and hollow-eyed.

They even visited Dad's room, where Tony Bennett was
warbling, "If we never meet again ..."

"What are yis Navin'?" Dad asked the cops. Then: "Have
you a light on that bicycle?"

They went away and left him alone.

They took me with them.

Two days later I was home again. George went bail, with nothing proved or decided either way. The eight hoodies couldn't
be found, obviously, although George and Noureddine were
working on it. If those guys were from Astoria, they were dead
meat. If they were from elsewhere, I was.

I was just thinking about lots of fresh coffee when I heard
the door chimes and saw Jessica hobbling toward the door. I
could see Pepe pretending to trim something with shears in
the garden. Sean was slumped in a sofa, not sure whether he
was more angry with me than he was sorry for himself. I spoke
to him little. I didn't know how.

Jessica ushered four people into the hall, all looking like
Jehovah's Witnesses on the way to a ball. They said they were
real estate brokers, sent by Eddie to visit the house, swore blue
that someone had given them an appointment.

It was certainly beginning to look like a plot. I felt more
like Hamlet by the minute.

They checked out the house, came back to the hall again,
and asked to see the cellar. I said there was no cellar. They
informed me there was an extensive cellar. I changed my
tune and asked Jessica to get the key. She shuffled off to the
kitchen and returned after a while looking purple and perplexed. There was no sign of the key.

"Surely you have a second key," said one of the Jehovah's
Witnesses.

I hate people who use the word surely.

"No surely about it," I answered. "The door is reinforced, for the wine, and Dad lost the key before he lost his mind, or
shortly after. There was one key left, in the kitchen, always in
the same place. Nobody's been down there for a long time, the
wine was my father's baby."

I didn't tell them about my own (poor) taste in wine, or
the fact that Pepe thought the marquis on the bottles was my
father.

George arrived just then, got the measure of the scene,
and hooshed them out the door to their fancy car, saying, "It'll
take a locksmith, it's reinforced. We'll call you already."

Jessica joined in then, and Sean. "This house is in mourning!" they shouted. "Get outta here!"

The suits were so astonished, they just left, saying they'd
need an appointment to visit The Two Way Inn.

"Visit it," said George. "Anyone can. It's open from dawn
to dusk." Then to me, he said, "What harm can it do? You're
not married to 'em. Yet."

George spent the rest of the day calling the locksmith, calling
Noureddine, keeping me on the wagon, and driving me to my
bank, where a young man in a bad suit and eyeglasses told me
the Swamp Rat had cleared out all of our accounts. I thought
I caught a glimpse of the bank manager observing me through
sanded glass somewhere, but George said I was paranoid. "Ye
goin' perrenawd on me," was what he said.

The young man looked at me as if to say, Ya ain't the first
and ya won't be the last.

"Curiouser and curiouser," said George, which wasn't how
I'd describe it.

Back home Jessica fed its, then I tried to reach Eddie in
Vancouver. It took me awhile to hunt up the number, and it
cost me a great deal to dial it. Sean sat and watched. I'd never have managed it if George hadn't been there. Now I knew
how my mother used to feel.

There was no reply. I didn't think it funny he wouldn't
even have a servant, or an answering service.

We contacted several retirement homes for my dad. I
thought there might be a problem with proof of income and
all that, but George said it was best to have a place ready in
case the worst happened.

"So what's the worst can happen?" I asked.

"You in the clink," said George. "The rest of the family
can manage for themselves, your dad can't." Sean didn't look
like he agreed much.

A locksmith friend of George's was due to turn up after
work the following day and tackle the cellar door. I was all for
cancelling him and forgetting about the Jehovah's Witnesses,
but George thought we should go through the motions, at
least till we contacted Eddie.

A lady came out from a home to check Dad out. I thought
this untimely haste. She went up and explained to him exactly
what she was doing there.

"No bother at all. Work away," he replied, as if he'd understood everything. Then he said, "What time is the tea? I'd
eat a scabby child off the floor." He leaned over and put on
Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park."

The retirement home lady and George had gone when I
went up to spend ten minutes with Naima before she left.

"He's very restless," she said. "Something's upset him.
He's been through his box three times already."

We agreed he might have understood about the retirement home.

As we settled him and fluffed his pillows, I noticed something odd on the white sheet, under his ass. It was a warm key.

"The ship's name was Murphy and the boat's goin' up a
hill," he said, looking at me and giggling.

It turned out to be the key to the cellar, of course.

The Pole was in place and a thick fog had crept in from the
river when George came by for a nightcap, later. I was sitting
in my TV seat, as usual, watching nothing.

"Is The Two Way Inn running itself these days?" he asked.

"They'll rob no more and no less, they know the score."

I told him about the key. He was enthusiastic.

"Let's do it," he said, "before those assholes in the suits
come back."

Armed with flashlights and warm pullovers, we headed
down there. I thought we might bring up a few bottles of real
wine as well.

The cellar had more rooms than the ground floor, since
some of them had been made into smaller spaces for storage.
I reckoned nothing down there but the wine would be usable after years in dust and damp. Even the central heating
and air-conditioning had been installed in a building off to
the side of the ground floor, so nothing varied the conditions
down here. You could feel the fog oozing in from the street
and garden. I noticed a half-dozen shed snakeskins.

George was going through the wine and I was giving a last
check to each corner, when I almost stumbled on something
soft that gave with my foot. It stank.

There were two bodies, one lying flung over the other. By
their clothes, I could tell that the one underneath was a woman,
the one on top a man. I gagged. George came running.

Before I even got a proper look at them, he waved me
upstairs to call the cops.

I didn't think they'd believe me this time.

We all waited for them in Dad's room. I was still coughing
stuff out of my throat.

"Throw it up," said Dad, "the chickens'll ate it."

"I quit," said the Pole.

"So do I," I replied.

I tried calling Eddie one more time. There was still no
reply. I was beginning to think I knew where he was.

The cops took me with them again. It was more complicated,
although they probably reckoned that even if I'd killed the
Swamp Rat, it was still manslaughter and not first-degree
murder. Much as I disliked her and wondered what she'd done
with my money, I wished it was neither.

George and the Pole stood and watched me leave. They
looked as if they were beginning to believe I'd done something
bad. I felt I might be better behind bars for a while. I'd have
time to think. It would force Sean to get serious, and reassure
him that I was being punished for killing his mother, although
I was still sure I hadn't.

I got back again some hours later. The house was crawling
with forensics people, plugging the causal breach. I wondered
if they'd sort this one out. Why was the cellar locked, and how
come Dad had the key? What if Dad was the killer?

Soon they announced that the bodies had been down
there for six months.

I did a quick calculation. "That's when Mom skipped out
and Dad lost the plot."

"One of the bodies is your mother, Mr. Nulty, the other
appears to be your Uncle Eddie, from Vancouver. Your mother
was shot. We haven't found the weapon, but the bullet is an
old-fashioned one."

"Sunuvabitch!" said George. "And the uncle?"

The cop ignored him and continued to address me. "Your
uncle had his head smashed in by a blunt weapon."

There was a lot of legal stuff to handle after that. Eddie's
estate was protected by some Canadian legal thing. It
looked like no one would get at it for a while, least of all
the inheritance-hunters who had set the ball rolling. It also
looked as if his remaining brothers and sisters would inherit.
The Irish legend of the Canadian uncle would become a reality. The real estate people were slapped down by my lawyer.
House and bar were declared private for the receptions and
funerals. (I did wonder if the Armenian would consider himself in or out, and then I wondered why he hadn't showed
up lately.)

Sean began to throw his weight in and help with the
arrangements.

Noureddine and George got a private investigator to come
up with some loose threads: "An out-of-work Yugoslav brute
called Niko is throwing money around. Turns out he got it
from the Armenian. We're trying to find out why."

They got Niko up a dark alley one night. He admitted
he'd found the door open and gone for it. He refused to admit
anything else.

They called the cops, who found out the Armenian was
in some kind of smuggling thing with Russia. The Swamp Rat
was either in, or else she never knew about it. No one could
figure out what had happened to the money. The Pole had
disappeared and was suspected of working for the Armenian,
among other things.

It didn't stop there. George and his pals found someone
Niko'd boasted to about knifing my wife. It could never be
proved that he'd done it for the Armenian, although the cops
suspected this. They also suspected that Eddie had killed my
mother, but couldn't prove that either. Nobody knew why, although she might have had something on him that she tried
to use, or threatened to use. No gun was found. They reckoned my father had then killed Eddie, but couldn't prove that
either. He might've hid the gun, but then why didn't he try to
hide the bodies too?

"He lawst his mind, remember?" said George.

NaIma slept in the house until I found someone to replace
the Pole. We got a clinic to take Dad for a week while the funerals were happening. The heat soared to over 100, and we
mopped our brows and showered a lot and drank too much
alcohol.

When all the bodies were buried-we did it the same day,
same time, three hearses and three coffins had never been
seen before except after an accident-Naima and I went to
see my father in the clinic.

"How are things at home?" he asked me. "How is everyone? How's She?"

I presumed he was talking about the Eternal Feminine, his
mother, his wife, his daughter-in-law. Whatever.

"What kind of work are they doin' on the farm?" he
asked.

"That's a great man for his age," said an Irish voice from
the next bed. They keep 'em in twos so one keeps an eye on
the other. Cuts down on staff.

I couldn't see its owner due to a screen, but recognized it
as a Monaghan accent. I wondered if this was an accident, or
if someone had actually tried to group them.