The Death of an Irish Sinner (14 page)

Fitz remained in the doorway.

McGarr finished his drink and set the glass on the table beside his chair. “What strikes me, Chazz, is that you don’t seem to care who killed either party or if, in fact, Dery Parmalee was responsible. Or if the mur
derer, the real murderer, will ever be caught. I could be wrong, but it appears to me that you’re just looking for a convenient—”

“Solution to this mess?” Sweeney asked. “Right you are, Peter.” Sweeney heaved himself to his feet. “Nothing can bring Mary-Jo or the gardener back. More’s the pity. But as for Parmalee, if ever there was a candidate ripe for murdering or murder, ’tis he.

“Fitz, I won’t be troubling you any longer, and I thank you for making your son-in-law available to my counsel, which, I trust, he’ll value.”

“But can’t you stay, Chazz? Nuala’s—”

“I’m afraid not. I’m expected at the Piggotts’ instanter, and I can’t be late, it being more business than pleasure, if you catch me drift.” Lawrence Piggott was the chief justice of the Supreme Court. “Then it’s off to Greece.”

“Really, now? Ah, that’s grand.”

Sweeney handed Fitz his empty glass but turned his head to McGarr. “The wife is mad for the place, especially, I fear, all their bronzed gods.”

“In the museums?” Fitz asked archly, playing the perfect host.

“Forget that—on the beaches, in the nightclubs. You know Breda, of course. A good Catholic woman. It’s all imagination, I’m sure. But why she has to drag me through her midlife crisis is more than I’ll ever understand.”

“Don’t you care for Greece, Chazz?”

Sweeney closed his eyes and passed some air between his heavy lips. “
Lawless
is the word. Do anything you want—drive on the footpaths, park on the
grass. I don’t think that country has felt a touch of civilization since they invented the concept a few thousand years ago.”

The two other men laughed, and McGarr kept himself from noting that Greece, like every other civilization he knew of, proscribed murder and punished murderers severely. In the ancient world with stonings, he seemed to remember.

“That’s a fine collection of weaponry you have there, Fitz,” Sweeney remarked, passing toward the door. “But then, the lot of you are grand shots. Still have the skeet trap?”

Fitz nodded. “Noreen competes from time to time, but not me or Nuala. Peter here is only interested in peashooters, but he does well enough with those.”

In spite of the Georgian proportions of the doorway, Sweeney fairly filled the space. “I’ll say good-bye to Nuala and Noreen, now. No need to see me out.”

When Sweeney was out of earshot, Fitz explained, “I’ve no idea how long he waited for you. I was down in the village, and Nuala had gone riding with a neighbor. I walked in maybe an hour ago, and there he sat, larger than life.”

They could still hear Sweeney’s voice rumbling in the kitchen as he bade farewell.

“You know what this means, of course.” Fitz’s brow had knitted. “The fix is in, and I’d think twice about forgetting what was said here. If there’s a piece of unlovely work in this country, it’s Dery Parmalee, and in most circles you’d be judged a hero by putting him away. But”—he raised a palm—“who am I—or Sweeney—to tell you your business.”

McGarr nodded and looked down into the sip that was left in his glass. Out in the hall, the phone was ringing. “Where’s this flat of Parmalee’s?”

“Down in the village? Shall I take you there?”

“After dinner.” McGarr could not tell which was piqued more—his hunger or his curiosity—but the former, he judged, would be more quickly and easily satisfied.

Nuala appeared in the doorway. “Soup’s on, gentlemen. And I’ve news for you, Peter—you’ve got a big bunch of company down at the front gate, Dery Parmalee just called to say.”

“The press?”

“Television vans, klieg lights, the works.”

McGarr wondered who, of the now many who knew of the double murder, had told them.

Parmalee? Why? Unless he was planning a special edition,
Ath Cliath
would not come out until Friday, which was three days off.

“Come eat your tea now,” Nuala said, reaching for McGarr’s arm. “You’ll think better on a full stomach.”

HUGH WARD’S ANGER
had waned after his rousting of Dery Parmalee behind the Claddagh Arms. But the fear that had caused it—for his children and his “wives,” he guessed you could call Ruthie and Lee—had not.

For himself, Parmalee’s threat to expose them raised concerns only of what he’d do were he sacked from the Guards. He’d get by somehow—going into private or corporate security work would be easy, given his age and experience. Or he’d try something else entirely, perhaps even go into business for himself.

The spacious loft flat down on the quays that he’d bought for a song years ago was now worth a heap of money, given its drop-dead view of Dublin Harbor and its off-street parking. Apart from security checks, Ward had not set foot in the place for over a year. The
sale of that alone would give him a good start in a new direction.

But that there were people like Dery Parmalee who preyed upon the foibles and—Ward supposed—the sins of others for profit and, in Parmalee’s case, for perverse diversion still rankled.

Even if Parmalee exposed Ward, and Ward—in turn—set up and busted him, Parmalee’s life would go on perhaps more agreeably, given the publicity. And with a high-priced barrister, Parmalee would spend only a short time behind bars and end up romanticizing himself, à la Larry Flynt.

Ward would probably never end up owning one of the select hillside houses that he could see through the windscreen of the darkened car that he had parked near the top of Killiney Hill. He’d probably never fully recover his public stature in a country where a word behind a hand was enough to damn a person, especially when the charge was sexual, and those matters were judged by unfeeling clerics who were self-consciously ignorant of the panoply of human emotion and experience.

No. He would only be the loser in any public dustup with Dery Parmalee, he decided, jotting down the make, model, color, and number plate of each of the three cars that he could see. But he would go out with a roar, not a whimper.

Switching off the dome light before opening the car door, Ward made sure the car was locked before ambling up the street, noting which of the adjacent houses had lights in their windows. What he was about to do was surely illegal, unless, of course, Geraldine Breen
was presently in Manahan’s house, as Parmalee had said.

At the top of the street, Ward paused for a while. It was a soft spring night. Out on the Irish Sea in the direction of Wales, a half-moon had just risen and was casting a fan of achromatic light across calm silver waters.

From that perspective he could see all the way south to Bray Head—a massive promontory—and the Big and Little Sugarloafs, two mountains that he had climbed often with Ruthie and would again with his entire crew, kids and all. He promised himself.

There was that, he now realized, which could never be taken from him. The mountains and the crescent sweep of buff beach that stretched out from the base of Killiney Hill, all the way to Bray. No matter what happened, he’d always be able to tramp the hills or bathe in that shimmering water. Which thought cheered him somewhat.

Walking back down toward the house that Delia Manahan owned, Ward pulled out his notepad once more and recorded the number plates of the other cars on the street. At the low wall that bordered Manahan’s back garden, Ward vaulted the obstacle in one movement and found himself in the shadows of the house.

It had seemed almost modest from the street. But as he worked his way around toward the front, where he could see a light, he came upon a zigzag pattern of tall and wide windows that, he imagined, provided the front windows of the large house with a fractured 180-degree panorama of the sea, the bay, the wooded Shanganagh Vale, and the mountains in the distance.

What must the place be worth? Surely close to a million pounds. Had Manahan, as he had his loft, bought when prices were low? Or was her legal practice that lucrative and her financial commitment to Opus Dei not as complete as most critics assumed of numeraries?

The view from the wide deck that fronted the house was all that he imagined. The green port running light of a fishing boat that was motoring north looked like a brilliant emerald in a jade-colored sea. Now, as the breeze shifted, Ward could hear the gentle ticking of its engine.

Which was when Ward saw Geraldine Breen through a gap in a drape.

Wearing a housecoat, she was sitting on a divan with her legs folded under her in a position that resembled something from yoga. Yet she was watching the television.

The plackets of the garment had opened to display one decidedly taut breast for a woman of—how old could she be?—about Ward’s own age, which was forty-two. The rest of her—emphasized by her erect posture and shoulder muscles that were testing the material—seemed similarly fit.

Even with the bandage plaster across her swollen nose, she was not an unhandsome woman, Ward judged, with regular features and blondish hair that had only begun to gray. What he could see of her stomach was a narrow washboard. She exercised regularly, he imagined. Strenuously.

The picture on the television changed to show McGarr in Noreen’s Rover, politely but firmly declining to
comment about anything, Ward could tell. One of the journalists pointed at his swollen face, doubtless wondering how it had happened.

While Breen was distracted, Ward decided to try the handle of the deck door. It was locked. But a strident klaxon began sounding at the side of the house, and in a flash Breen was up and out of the room.

Ward did not know what to do—smash his way into the house or rush toward the street to prevent her escape. She could hardly get down the mountainside with its nearly sheer drop to the sea. And now he was on firm legal footing, given the fact that she was wanted on a criminal charge.

But could she be armed? Is that what she had gone for? Could he have precipitated a gunfight or, worse, a standoff that would further involve the press? Ward did not want that.

Stepping back, he raised a leg and with three well-placed thrusts shattered the frame and was into the room, his Beretta 84 held before him. Cautiously he began moving through the large sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen, which was furnished with every class of modern convenience.

Until he heard a car door slam out on the street and the squeal of tires as a car roared away. She had taken the black BMW, the new Schwarzwalder model with the powerful V-12 engine that cost…what? Nearly sixty thousand quid.

Digging out his notebook, where he had copied down the number plate, Ward reached for his mobile phone to call it in.

By the time McGarr located the chemist over whose shop Dery Parmalee rented a flat in the village of Dunlavin, it was well after midnight.

“This is really quite extraordinary,” Joan Daley, the pharmacist, complained yet again, twisting the key in its lock.

Dressed in a housecoat, she had her dark hair studded with hot-pink curlers, and there was something like a meringue of mud on her face. The tops of her bedroom slippers were punctuated with blue pompoms. McGarr’s phone call had got her out of bed, she had told him more than once.

Switching on the lights, she stepped back as though to let McGarr enter first.

“Please, lead the way,” he said. “The more quickly we get this over, the sooner you’ll get back to bed.”

All chemist shops smelled the same, McGarr believed—a saccharine mélange of soaps, perfumes, and lotions with a hint of more powerful substances emanating from behind the counter where the prescriptions were made up.

But not all chemist shops contained what amounted to a little shrine in one corner with a barren cross and a devotional rail where waiting customers could kneel and pray.

“You’re religious, I see.”

“Which is none of your business.” Using a key to open a door between the counter and the shrine, the woman switched on another light and again stepped away from the door.

“If you’re going up there, you’re going up yourself,”
she advised, her eyes bright with contempt. “You’ll not make me a party to any police illegality. If you insist on violating Mr. Parmalee’s privacy, you’ll do it yourself over my stated objections.”

Smiling slightly, McGarr nodded. “Perhaps you’d like to return to your bed. I could show myself out.”

Her head went back. “I’ll wait right here.”

Not trusting him, McGarr imagined, because she knew herself too well.

The staircase up was dark and lined with stacks of books and magazines, one of which was dated six years earlier, he saw as the beam of his pocket torch slid over the cover.

And the flat was dusty. From the cobwebs in the corners and the dust balls on the hardwood floor, McGarr judged that the place had not been cleaned in some long time. At the top of the stairs, he found another switch.

The apartment was two long rooms following the T-pattern of the building, the larger, where he stood, being a work area. Tables, chairs for six, and three desks ran the walls, with what appeared to be a mini–command center in the middle of the space.

The collection of tables held a veritable array of electronic equipment—computers, printers, faxes, a telephone console, and the like. Along with a bank of other devices that McGarr only recognized partially but assumed were the electronic eavesdropping devices that Parmalee had lied about having in his car.

McGarr attempted to activate one of the devices, but nothing happened. Nor with a second and a third. Things were happening so fast in electronics that it
was impossible for somebody not involved in the field to keep up with the advances.

It had taken McGarr a good fortnight to master the intricacies of his cell phone—voice mail, call forwarding, messaging, beeping, conferencing, and so forth—and his adolescent daughter sometimes had to help him open files sent via e-mail to his home.

The second room contained only a large, circular bed and a magnificent hand-carved armoire fronted with a tall mirror. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the glass sparkled, its purpose being—McGarr assumed—to present the occupants of the bed with a clear view of themselves. The bed was unmade and, from the arrangement of the pillows, had last been occupied by one person only.

In the armoire, McGarr found only a jacket and several pairs of trousers, with socks and underwear in the lower drawers, which had not been opened in some time. McGarr had to tap them back into place.

Between the mattress and its box spring, where it could still be felt, he imagined, but a pillow would cushion its shape, was a Sokolovsky .45 Automaster, the engraving said. Handguns were something McGarr knew well, and the large, heavy, and powerful gun was something of a rarity.

While its smooth lines probably did not disturb Parmalee’s comfort much, it was the sort of weapon that could be pulled out and fired quickly. All controls, including the safety, were contained ingeniously within the trigger guard.

But at what cost. The last McGarr knew, the 3.6 pounds of an Automaster weighed in at close to fifteen
hundred quid. Conclusion? The editor-in-chief of
Ath Cliath
slept in Dunlavin in fear of his life.

But since Dery Parmalee could not possibly possess a license to own such a weapon under Ireland’s strict gun laws, McGarr removed the clip, checked the chamber, and slipped the gun under his belt.

Back in the other room, he looked for the documentation, all the instruction manuals, advisories, warrantees, and the like that inevitably accompanied electronic devices. Perhaps he could find out how to switch the equipment on.

Finding nothing of the sort in the filing cabinets or desk drawers, he began looking behind the machines for a dealer’s sticker or something that might give him a lead.

Again he came up empty, except for a business-sized card under one of the machines that McGarr had switched on. Obviously rather old, with tattered edges, it had been taped to the surface of the table.

On it in tight script, somebody had written: M-J, 1; Duggan, 2; Breen, 3; guest A, 4; guest B, 5, and so on through many of the rooms of Barbastro, McGarr guessed, including Mudd office, 14; Mudd cottage, 15.

With the blade of his penknife, McGarr cut the tape around the edges of the card and turned it over: “Dery Parmalee, Ph.D.,” it said. “Publisher, Editor-in-Chief,
Ath Cliath
.” And then in smaller type near the bottom, “Dear, dirty Dublin revealed for what she is—a strumpet and a whore.”

Although jaded and over the top like much of what Parmalee’s tabloid ran, it was not a new observation, Joyce and Plunkett having given voice to the thought
during the last century, and Swift in his own way before that.

Down in the chemist shop, McGarr found Joan Daley waiting by the door.

“How long ago were those machines brought into the flat?”

Her eyes shied. “What machines? I don’t go into Mr. P.’s flat. I have no idea what’s up there, nor do I care.”

“Surely he comes and goes when you’re here.”

“And when I’m not. He has a key.”

“You trust him, then—with your shop?” And all the drugs it contained, went unsaid.

“
He’s
a gentleman. Are you through?”

“Is Fred Duggan your priest?”

She opened the door and pointed toward the darkness. “If you mean
Father
Fred Duggan, that’s none of your effing business. I hope I’m understood.”

At his car, McGarr rang up Barbastro. “Fred—Peter McGarr here. I’ll be there in five minutes. I want you to open the gate.”

“Why?”

“I take it you’re the executor of Mary-Jo’s estate.” It was a guess, but—

“That’s right.”

“Her will—you have it there?”

“Yes, but—”

“I want to see it.”

“Oh, Peter, isn’t this highly unus—”

“Five minutes.” McGarr rang off.

It took Ward several hours to search Delia Manahan’s house in Killiney. Beginning in the basement, he worked his way up.

What was plain from the outset was the woman’s dedication to sport. Yes, she had two children, a girl and a boy from the look of the bicycles and other outdoor paraphernalia stored in the cellar, but much of the hiking, camping, even technical mountain-climbing equipment had to be hers. Ward counted over a dozen different kinds of hiking boots and climbing boots in the one woman’s size.