St. Patrick's Day Murder (14 page)

A couple walked by me. As they passed I heard the woman say something about me. I almost laughed out loud, wondering if she thought I might be a hooker in Mel’s proper winter coat, my blue jeans, the colorful cotton knit sweater, and the bulletproof vest.

I started pacing to keep warm. Jack had said give him twenty minutes and then go back to the car. It was twenty minutes now, and although I had given up entirely, I waited. Maybe he’d had a flat. Maybe Sal had seen him stop and gone to help him, feigning coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t Farina. Maybe it was someone who had taken the subway, and the train had stopped in a tunnel for fifteen minutes for no
reason anyone could imagine, the way they always seemed to do. Give him till twelve-thirty. If he calls Jean tomorrow and tries to set something else up, tell him to forget it. I’ve had it.

There was a sound like a gunshot; I drew in my breath and turned toward Columbus Avenue. A dark figure was suddenly running across the street toward me.

“It’s OK,” Jack’s voice said calmly. He put his arm around me.

I was shaking now, more with fear than with cold.

“A car backfired, that’s all it was. It’s OK. He didn’t come. Let’s go home, baby. It’s all over.”

I was ashamed of my fear, angry that I hadn’t stayed cool. Jack held me as we walked to the car.

“The homeless man,” I said. “He came back. He sat down in the same place.” I was shaking like a leaf.

“We’ll check it out.”

We got into the car, and Jack circled around and drove back to where I had been parked. A car with signs in the windows in English and Spanish, proclaiming the absence of a radio, had taken my space. There was a suspicious lump along the fence. We both got out, although Jack had told me to stay put.

The lump was covered with blankets. Jack flashed his light along it. There was no movement. Then he switched the beam to the sidewalk. Next to the sleeping man was an empty pint bottle.

“Let’s go,” Jack said.

We drove home.

I had never thought of fear as an aphrodisiac, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe it was the removal of fear, the relief, the sense of peace in being warm and out of danger, but that night something turned us on as nothing before had. Instead of fatigue, I felt awake, alert, alive, full of incipient passion. The bulletproof vest fell to the floor with the rest of my clothes, with his, with ours, here, there, this room, that one, a trail to the bed, to the quick inevitable. It was over almost as it began, leaving me weak, panting, happy, clinging, grasping.

He was the same. He kissed me and held me, keeping me close. “Maybe I was wrong,” he said finally. “What I said on the phone. About you being like the nuns of my childhood.”

“What if I am?” I said. “What if we’re all the same?”

“Oh, my misspent youth,” he said.

The call came after I had fallen asleep. Jack got it on the second ring.

“Sal. Where the—? I know. I tried you about eleven-thirty.… He
what?
Yeah. Yeah … I don’t believe this…. Yeah, I’m listening.” He listened for some time, then thanked Sal and got off the phone. “I hate coincidences,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Farina drove into Manhattan and went straight to the Midtown North Precinct. Sal followed him inside. There was a crowd; he asked what was going on. It seems two guys were just arrested for a misdemeanor and they found one of them carrying a police .38. The suspect admitted to being part of the group that killed Gavin Moore. Says he wasn’t the shooter and wants to deal the information.”

“Any chance he killed Scotty?”

“Sal says it doesn’t look that way.”

“Why was Farina there?”

“Someone at the precinct called Mrs. Moore to tell her they had a suspect. Farina came down to see what was going on. He’s not our man, Chris, and there’s no connection between Moore’s death and Scotty’s. Go to sleep.”

“That nun has to know something,” I said.

“She probably knows a lot, but I think it’s a long shot she can help us.”

The only times Jack can study are weekends and early mornings. We fit our time together in small blocks before and after work and study, his and mine. Sometimes I hang around reading the paper or a book while he studies in the other room, but I know I’m a distraction. He feels if I’m
there we should be doing something together, I’ve had a hard time getting him to believe that I’m happy doing in his apartment what I would otherwise be doing alone in my own house.

Best of all I liked him to visit me in Oakwood, although that was difficult during the semester. By now I had gotten over my ambivalence at having an overnight guest, although I’d been told one of my neighbors didn’t like it when his car was there in the morning. I wasn’t angry at the neighbor and I didn’t talk to her about it; I was just sorry that something I would not change in my life caused pain in hers.

On the Saturday morning after the Damrosch Park no-show, we breakfasted together before Jack went out to do his weekend chores. Then I called Jean to give her the news.

She answered quickly. “Chris? I tried you at home. What happened?”

I told her and listened to the disappointment in her voice.

“Have you heard from him?”

“Not since he called Thursday night to make sure you were coming.”

“Have you heard the news about Gavin Moore?”

“A friend of Scotty’s called a little while ago. He said there probably isn’t any connection.”

“That’s what Jack heard.” I was stalling, trying to decide how to ask her what she would prefer not to talk about. “Jean, have you gotten Scotty’s birth certificate yet?”

She hesitated. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Maybe if we sit together …?”

Suddenly she was in tears. “I don’t know.”

“May I come over?”

“Sure,” she said, her voice tight. “Why don’t you meet me at my mother’s? She’s here with the kids. We’ll have some peace and quiet.”

Jack said to come back later and we’d go out to dinner. I had time before meeting Jean, so I got in my car and drove to Scotty’s beat.

I went down the whole ten blocks, stopping for lights, looking at the people crowding the streets on this last Saturday in March. At this point, I no longer knew whether Scotty had been the gunman’s target or had been killed in error, but
there were questions that needed answers and maybe the answers were on his beat.

I went back to the used-car lot and pulled the car onto the blacktop. The man I had spoken to earlier in the week came out of his office as I got out of the car. Today he was wearing a plastic badge that said Cappy.

“It’s you,” he said, recognizing me.

“Good morning.”

“You decide you want a car?”

I patted mine fondly. “Not yet. I want the truth about how much Scotty McVeigh paid for the BMW.”

“What is it with you?” he blustered. “You ask me questions even the cops don’t ask.”

Maybe they should, I thought. “Tell me.”

“I told you already. I gave him a trade-in and he gave me a thousand dollars.”

I looked at him.

“Two thousand,” he corrected himself as he avoided my eyes. “That what I said last time? Two thousand?”

“But that isn’t the truth,” I said.

“It’s what you want to hear, lady. And that’s all I’m telling you.”

He turned his back on me, and I got into the car. He would never give me the truth now. I was angry at myself, not him. I had been too direct, too confident he would tell me the truth. I took a right at the corner, thinking that I would stop in and see how Mr. Joo was doing, but there was no place to park. I went several blocks before someone gave up a space. Then I started walking back, looking in shop windows. I knew the street had been canvassed, but I stopped into a pharmacy and asked about Scotty. He was a wonderful man, the pharmacist told me, honest and helpful. Made you feel safe having him around. The dry cleaner next door said pretty much the same thing, as did the woman behind the counter at the variety store.

The next shop was a jewelry store. I stopped and looked at the display. Several small gold items lay on black cushions and draped white satin. The name on the window was
Bedrosian
. I went inside.

There were two men and a woman, all obviously members
of the same family. I introduced myself and told them I was a friend of Officer McVeigh’s. They all started talking at once.

The woman—the sister?—shushed her brothers. “You know the family?” she asked.

“I’m a friend.”

“Tell us what to do. Officer McVeigh ordered a birthday present for his wife a few days before he died. It isn’t finished yet. Should we send it or give her the money back?”

“He paid for it?”

“Every penny. It was almost a thousand dollars. Wait, I’ll show you.”

She went into the back and returned with a wooden tray containing several intricate links of gold. She arranged them, so I could see what the whole would look like when it was finished.

“It’s magnificent,” I said.

“Eighteen karat. Every piece we make by hand.”

“I think she would love to have it,” I said, hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake. She might need the money, but she would never have anything so beautiful again.

They seemed happy with my decision and asked for Jean’s address. Scotty had been going to pick it up himself and take it home. I gave them the address, and we all shook hands. When I got to the car the meter had expired and it was time to go to see Jean. Joo would wait for another day.

Her mother’s house was quiet and empty, no children, no cake in the oven, no hovering mother, maybe just some nice old memories. Jean tossed her coat on a chair and dropped on the sofa. I could see her as a teenager doing the same thing. But she looked a lot older than seventeen today, her face worn and prematurely aged.

“Those fruits are really something,” she said, and I had to think a minute before I remembered our visit to the Korean grocery. “They really loved him.”

“Tell me about Scotty,” I said.

“His name wasn’t even McVeigh.” She opened her bag and took a paper out and handed it to me.

It was a birth certificate for a seven-pound baby boy
named Scott Allan. The mother’s name was Carol Hanrahan. The father was listed as Unknown. The place of birth was a hospital in Brooklyn. He had told the truth about that.

“Maybe she had to give him up,” I said.

“I don’t really care what happened. I don’t care if his mother was a lioness. Why didn’t he tell me?” Her voice shook and her eyes were wet.

“Because he couldn’t,” I said. “Because he didn’t know how. Because he was afraid of what you would say. Because he had suffered and he didn’t want to inflict his suffering on you.” I threw the reasons out knowing they didn’t answer the question, that no answer would be adequate.

“I was his
wife.”
She said the word with such vehemence that its meaning was crystal clear. She had not been a woman he was sleeping with or living with or who had borne him children and baked him bread. She had occupied the supreme position in his life. And he had failed to tell her who he was.

“Jean, I didn’t know him well, but I feel—”

“I don’t know who I am now. Am I still Jean McVeigh? Should my name be Hanrahan? Or maybe it should be ‘Unknown,’ for that man who got his mother pregnant. What do I tell my children about their father?” She had gotten up and was walking around erratically, her red hair moving this way and that as her anger flashed.

“You’re you, Jean. You’re Jean McVeigh. It’s the name Scotty picked for himself or was adopted into. You’re his wife and you’re the mother of the children you both created. And you’re your own self, the person who grew up in this house, who made a certain kind of life.”

“I didn’t make
this
life. I’m not ready for it. I’m not ready to be a widow or a single mother. I appreciate the help everyone’s been giving me, but I hate the pity. I just want Scotty back. I think I’ll want him back the rest of my life, but it’ll never happen. And you know what else I want?” She was crying now, but she started to laugh. “I want to kick him for doing this to me, for not telling me, for thinking I wouldn’t understand. I would have understood anything.”

“I’m sure he knew that,” I said. “It was the burden he was sparing you.”

“He really spared me a burden.” She wiped her face with
her hand. “I want that bastard who killed him. I will never forgive him. I won’t even try. Forgiving is for the last scene in a TV movie, when the good guy has the killer in his sights and he drops his gun and lets him be arrested. I’m not one of those good guys. I’d pull the trigger myself if I had the chance.”

I thought of Sister Benedicta, who had been trying for three years to forgive. “Jean, do you think there’s any chance Ray could have done it?” There were those two bullets in his drawer and no one had seen anything the day Ray was arrested. If they’d been planted, it had been done by an expert. But there was a chance Ray had left them there himself, confident that no one would find them because no one would consider him a suspect.

“Chris, that’s just ridiculous. Ray’s been good to us. What reason would he have to kill Scotty?”

Dear Ray, It was terrific.…

I couldn’t think of anything I was ready to say out loud. “You said Scotty was expecting some money. Would you tell me where it was coming from?”

“From a bond my dad bought us when we got married. My dad had crazy ideas about money. He said we both had good jobs and we didn’t need anything, but seven years later we would. So he got us a treasury bond. It paid us interest twice a year and after seven years it would come due. It just did. Ray’ll get his money back just like Scotty promised.”

The birth certificate was still on my lap. I handed it to her; she looked at it sadly before putting it back in her bag. “I started calling Hanrahans out of the phone book yesterday. I even found a Carol, but she was seventeen years old. She’d have to be at least fifty now, right?”

I agreed. I wondered how I could ever find out anything about her. Besides her name, the birth certificate had shown only the hospital where she had given birth.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jean said. “We can have lunch somewhere. There’s a place a couple of blocks from here we can walk to.”