The Bloomsday Dead (13 page)

“I’ll decide what’s relevant,” I said. I had to remind her that this was my conversation, not hers. I was not one of her employees.

She took another sip from her cup.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked to defuse the tension.

“No, thanks.”

She crossed her legs, rested her hands in her lap.

“Bridget, you’re going to have to trust me. What was the business you were doing here?”

She sighed, looked at me for a half minute.

“It’s really not important.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, um, ok. This was a bit of a one-off thing. Not drugs, not guns, not passports. Believe me, I’ve looked into it.”

“Just tell me anyway, Bridget.”

“Ok. Fine. Have you heard of a thing called outsourcing?”

“No.”

“It’s where they take American jobs and send them to countries where it’s cheaper to do business. A lot of services are moving abroad. You know, dialup help for computers and things like that. India is a very popular place, but so’s Ireland. It’s got a young, well-educated workforce who’ll take half the pay of kids in America. On this particular trip, I came with the president of our technical services union. I was in town to sign some contracts, making sure all those Irish jobs from American companies were properly unionized.”

“And that those unions were your unions. Right?” I said.

She nodded.

“That was the main thing, few other items, some other minor business. It all went very smoothly, I assure you.”

I shook my head.

“You’re bound to have made enemies. Could one of your, um, business associates have arranged to have Siobhan kidnapped?”

Bridget laughed. And for a moment the weeping mother left and the general came back.

“No chance. No chance at all. No one would fuck with me. No one who knew anything about me would touch my daughter. I’d burn their eyes out with a blowtorch. That’s why I thought she was safe, Michael; I’m well known in this town. I checked that angle out, anyway. Moran looked into it, as did the cops. There’s been zero paramilitary involvement. I talked to all my business partners. The heads of all the factions. I brought them up here. No one knows anything.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

“Ten million is a big incentive.”

“Ten million is nothing, Michael. We’re talking about trade between Ireland and America that’s worth billions.”

“I know, but remember this is Belfast.”

“Moran’s boys have been on it round the clock. The police, too.”

“Ok, so just to be clear, you guys don’t think there’s a paramilitary involvement in any of this?”

“No. I really don’t think so. The head of the IRA and the head of the UDA assured me that they knew nothing about her disappearance; and until we got this note, we all thought she had just run away.”

“Ok. I’ll check it out, regardless,” I said almost to myself.

“I’d expect you to.”

“How long have you actually been in Belfast?” I asked.

“We got here last Thursday, Thursday the tenth. We were supposed to be here six days. We were supposed to be going to Donegal today. I had a lot arranged. A lot to take care of and then we were going to spend a nice week doing nothing. I wanted to celebrate and chill out after taking care of business here and getting good news from Peru about y—”

“Me,” I said, finishing her thought.

She nodded, this time without embarrassment.

“Ok, so when did Siobhan disappear?”

“Saturday. We’d been fighting all morning and—”

“Fighting?” I interrupted.

“Yes, fighting. She wanted to go to Donegal. She didn’t want to be here. She was bored. But there was no way I was going to let her have the run of that house on her own. She was screaming at me. She said that I treated her like a baby. That I didn’t love her.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“She said she felt like a prisoner here in the hotel,” Bridget said.

“What happened then?”

“She stormed out of the room.”

“And then?”

“I caught her at the elevator. I asked her where she thought she was going.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she was going to the Malt Shop to get a drink, a milk shake.”

“You let her go?” I asked.

“It’s just a few blocks from here. She’d gone a couple of times before. I thought it would let her cool off. It’s been so tedious for her here. And besides, I think there was a boy she’d seen or something.”

“What boy?”

“One time we went for breakfast there was a boy there, she told me she thought he was cute.”

“You get a good look at him?” I asked.

Bridget shook her head.

“Excuse me for a moment, Michael, my head is killing me,” she said. She picked up the phone and said, “I need some aspirin, please.”

In a few seconds the white guy from the elevator came in with aspirin. She took two, gave him the bottle back, and he left. She swallowed the pills, looked at me.

“Where were we?” she asked.

“She went to the Malt Shop. Maybe she was meeting that boy?”

“I don’t know about that. It’s just one of those places where kids hang out.”

“Did you tell the police about the boy?”

“Of course.”

“Ok, so she went to this Malt Shop, what time at?”

“I don’t know, it was the morning, maybe around eleven.”

“What happened next?”

“She didn’t come back,” Bridget said, fighting back tears.

“What did you do?”

“Michael, she begged me not to have Ryan follow her, she said it made her feel like she was being watched all the time. She made me promise, and I told Moran to call him off. If he’d been watching her, maybe . . .”

“It might have made no difference,” I said trying to be reassuring.

She sighed. It was interesting watching her move between these aspects of herself. Between the mother, the businesswoman, the mob boss. Was she aware that her voice changed pitch, that her head lowered when she was talking about Siobhan?

I gave her a moment to embrace all those feelings of guilt and loss, and then I continued.

“Back to Saturday, what happened next?” I asked.

“I waited a few hours, and I sent a couple of my boys down to fetch her, but she wasn’t there and no one had seen her.”

“And then what?”

“I called the cops. They came immediately. They said that she had probably just run away and she’d be back before dark. But she didn’t come back, so they sent a team of detectives out looking for her. She didn’t come back all night.”

“Has she ever run away before?”

Bridget closed her eyes.

“One time in the city, she skipped school and didn’t come back until ten o’clock.”

“Why did she run away that time?”

“Oh, it was the stupidest thing, the school was having a trip to the Galápagos.”

“The Galápagos?” I said surprised.

“It’s a fancy school.”

“Sorry, please continue.”

“Well, we made a deal and I said she could go if she maintained a B average, and she hates math and she got a D in math, and I said she couldn’t go.”

“You’re pretty hard-core,” I said, but with a smile to show that I approved of her setting limits, since both of us could have done with some when we were that age.

“No,” she said to herself. “You can never win.”

“What exactly happened on that occasion in New York?”

“She called me from school on her cell and she said that this was the last day to sign up for the trip and what was I going to do about it. I told her that we had discussed this and she wasn’t going. So she said ‘I hate you,’ and she hung up the phone and she didn’t come back from school. She left a message on the machine that she was running away, she was taking a bus from Penn Station. I went crazy. I got everyone who worked for me down to Penn Station, dozens of guys, I called the police, I called Greyhound, but she’d never even gone there. She’d spent the whole day in Washington Square Park playing chess with all those crazy people down there. And then she’d gone to some café and called her friend Sue, and told her she was running away, and Sue told her that I was frantic and she should go home.”

“She came home after that?”

“Yeah, she came home at about ten o’clock.”

“Did she call Sue this time? Did she call anybody?”

“No. She didn’t make any calls on her cell that day. And the police told me that according to Verizon that was very unusual.”

“How many calls did she make on a normal day?”

“About a dozen.”

“And none on the day she disappeared?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.”

“What does it sound like to you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, although the lack of phone calls scared me. That made it sound a bit premeditated. That boy had told her not to call anyone in case she got cold feet. It seemed to make it more likely that the boy was the agent for the kidnappers. Either that or he’d planned to run off with her, or rape her, or whatever, and then he’d found out who she was and panicked. Perhaps killed her and faked that note to throw the police off the scent.

I took a pad from the writing desk, grabbed a hotel pen.

“You better tell me details.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, everything you remember about the boy.”

“You think the boy might be involved?”

“Describe him.”

“I didn’t even really look at him. A teenager, I thought, red hair, thin.”

“Distinguishing marks, tattoos?”

“I didn’t get a good look. He came behind our table to get a salt shaker. I couldn’t see him, but Siobhan’s eyes were all over him and, well . . .”

“Well what?”

“I thought maybe he smelled a bit,” she said dismissively.

“What do you mean?”

“There was a smell off him, you know, a funky teenage smell.”

“What kind of a smell?”

“I don’t know, Michael, I’m not even sure it was him behind me.”

“What kind of a smell?” I insisted.

“Jesus, I don’t know, aftershave, pot, spot cream, I don’t know.”

“Pot?”

“I don’t know, Michael.”

“When was this? When did you see him?”

“On Friday morning, I took her to the Malt Shop for a pancake breakfast. She’d been there on her own the previous day to get a milk shake, and before she’d said something like ‘There’s a boy who’s always there that I like, I think he’s really cute.’”

“So she’d mentioned him several times before or just that once?”

“I’ve been so busy, Michael, she could have, but I don’t really remember.”

“That’s ok. But you saw him on Friday?”

“Yes.”

“Working there?”

“No.”

“Just hanging out?”

“Having a milk shake.”

“What was he wearing?”

“I honestly can’t recall,” she said.

“Bridget, think,” I insisted.

“I don’t remember, I didn’t pay him any attention. I had a lot on my mind. She’s too young to have crushes on boys, so I didn’t take it seriously. Maybe a black sweatshirt.”

“Anything on it? Logos? Letters?”

“I don’t know, I’m not even sure about the color. There could be a bird or something.”

“What type of bird?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Ok. Did she speak to the boy on the Friday?”

“No.”

“How did you know that that was the boy she’d been talking about?”

“She was looking at him and I asked her if that was the boy she thought was cute and she told me to mind my own business, but I could tell.”

“So you don’t actually know that the redheaded boy in the black sweatshirt was the one she’d been talking about.”

“She didn’t actually say it, but I think that was him.”

“And you didn’t get a good look at him?”

“Not really. I couldn’t even do a sketch for the police.”

“That’s ok. And then you perhaps smelled pot on him?”

“Maybe.”

“What is this Malt Shop?”

“It’s a place a few blocks from here. It’s one of those diners, one of those nostalgia places. It’s full of kids. There were cars outside. Siobhan went there her first day here, I think she saw an ad for it on TV. She dragged me there on Friday and we had pancakes and a couple of malted milk shakes.”

“Siobhan liked it there?”

“She really liked it, it was full of boys. She went there a few times, maybe to practice flirting or something, who knows.”

“Flirting at her age?”