The Death of an Irish Sinner (16 page)

NOREEN MCGARR WAS
in the kitchen of Ilnacullin early the next morning preparing breakfast when the telephone rang. She answered it quickly, so as not to disturb the rest of the family, who were still sleeping.

“Noreen, luv. How’s by you?” intoned the deep masculine voice on the other end. “Have you a fair day there, or is it pissing? Here, it’s simply pissing, pissing all over my holiday.”

Which was immanent justice, thought Noreen, who despised the practice of people phoning without the courtesy of announcing themselves. Sublimely egocentric or, on the other hand, needy of validation, they assumed even casual acquaintances would recognize their voices on first hearing. If not, you loved them not, and immediately—even before any conversation was begun—you were guilty of a social faux pas.

“Who is this, please, who believes he can ring up this number at”—she glanced up at the clock—“seven blessed ten in the morning and appropriate my first name so blithely?”

There was a pause, then: “Ooops. Noreen, it’s Chazz Sweeney. Is your man about?”

“Yes, Mr. Sweeney. He is about sleep, which is where he shall remain until breakfast. Would you like to phone back at, say, half past nine? I’m sure he’ll be able to speak with you then. Or perchance you might provide me with your phone number, and he, my mahn,” Noreen pronounced broadly, as Sweeney had,

“will get back to you.”

“Noreen, perhaps you didn’t hear me. It’s Chazz Sweeney.”

There you have it, she thought. Mr. Control himself.

“I’m in Greece, and the time difference completely slipped my mind.”

Was there a time difference? Noreen wondered. “May I take a message?”

“No. I simply must speak to him. It’s imperative.”

“That’s not possible. Peter was up quite late last night and, in fact, for two nights running now, and he needs his sleep.”

“Listen to me—I
must
speak with him.”

Suddenly, Noreen was nettled, and she fought against the feeling, considering who Sweeney was—the “fixer” of Irish politics. Unfortunately, the Irish police were politicized at the very top of their administration, which inevitably filtered down through the ranks.

McGarr had weathered several changes in government, but so too had Sweeney, whose connections were reputedly potent, in spite of his checkered past. Or perhaps because of it. If Noreen had learned one thing from her well-connected father, it was that political insiders respected—no, they revered—survivors, hoping that they too could overcome their own indiscretions and illegalities.

Sweeney had done that in spades, it was said. But being no politician, Noreen did not have to honor that. “I’m sorry, sir. If you leave your—”

“You’re not understanding me, Mrs. McGarr. It’s imperative that I speak with him.
Now!
” he roared.

Noreen removed the phone from her ear and looked down at it.

“Do you care for your lives as presently lived?” Sweeney went on. “Do you value your husband’s position? Or are you simply an ignorant cunt!”

Noreen slammed the receiver into its yoke. After Sweeney attempted several other calls, she disconnected the line, which served the house from the kitchen and rang otherwise only in the front hall.

An hour later she plugged the phone back in, and it rang almost immediately. “Don’t you dare hang up on me. Get that bastard on the line immediately.”

Noreen placed the receiver on the counter, poured a cup of black coffee and a wee eye-opener into a snifter, and carried the two vessels up to her husband in their bedroom. There she woke McGarr and explained about Sweeney.

“Don’t hang up, but don’t say anything further to
him either.” Slowly, McGarr roused himself, drank part of each libation, then shaved and showered. After changing into fresh clothes, including shirt and tie, since inevitably the media would be snapping his picture or filming him coming and going, he went down to the kitchen.

There, too, he greeted his daughter and parents-in-law before picking up the phone. “If you ever dare speak to my wife like that again, I’ll beat you bloody,” he said into the phone. “And if you call here again today I’ll file a formal complaint against you for harassment. Now, what is it you want?”

“Ah, shit—let’s not stub our toe on this, Peter. I was only after wondering how you’re coming on the investigation and if you’ve announced that the Mudd fella murdered poor Mary-Jo before killing himself.”

“Remember my warning about phoning this number again,” McGarr said, before ringing off.

Turning around, he found all eyes on him. “Now, shall we have breakfast?”

Driving into Dublin, McGarr switched on the radio, and the news on every station led with Mary-Jo Stanton’s and Frank Mudd’s deaths, along with speculation that they were a murder and suicide.

Radio Telfis Eireann—the country’s state-funded outlet—even featured an interview with a former Garda commissioner who wondered why no announcement had been made declaring the case “what it obviously is,” and when that would happen.

Two other stations, which did not possess news-gathering staffs and borrowed stories from the newspa
pers, mentioned that print media were running the story on page one, and
Ath Cliath
had come out with a special “blowout” edition “splashing” the story.

Commentary included Parmalee’s allegations regarding Opus Dei’s
pillería
—all their supposed “dirty tricks” in Latin America and with the Vatican Bank—an excoriation of José Maria Escrivá, a capsule of Mary-Jo’s biography of Escrivá, and a rather accurate summary of her will. McGarr wondered how long Parmalee had been eavesdropping on Barbastro from the flat in Dunlavin.

At his cramped headquarters in an old former British Army barracks within the gates of Dublin Castle, McGarr found a copy of
Ath Cliath
in the hands of most staffers and one on the desk in his cubicle.

Skimming it before the morning briefing, he wondered if Chazz Sweeney had been in contact with Parmalee before publication and what that conversation might have entailed.

If nothing else could be said about the man, Sweeney had his ear to the ground. He had to have known about Parmalee’s planned exposé of Opus Dei and claim that its beatified founder was Mary-Jo Stanton’s father. What threats had Sweeney uttered to Parmalee? Or what inducements not to publish?

Bernie McKeon entered the cubicle to take a seat by the side of McGarr’s desk, where he would act as interlocutor between the morning-taciturn chief superintendent and the rest of the staff. They now filtered in, taking positions around the periphery of the desk.

McKeon glanced over at McGarr before shaking out the reports on his lap. “Now then, ladies and gents, the
first matter of concern, obliviously, is the situation in Dunlavin that is unfolding on the streets of Dublin’s fair city as I speak. You’ve all read the papers, scanned the reports, speculated unprofessionally about same without waiting for the facts that would help make your puerile observations more accurate and less
Ath Cliath
–like.”

“Just give us the facts, man,” said Bresnahan across the lip of her teacup.

“Nothing but the facts,” another added.

“And less of your Ass-
Cliath
verbiage,” she added.

McGarr cleared his throat volubly and reached for the cup before him.

“First, we have the complete postmortem report. It says factually that the ‘silly-sea-oh’ was applied to the poor woman’s neck before she died of a massive dose of digitalis that she had drunk sometime earlier. Which opens the question of—”

“Why a murderer who had already administered a fatal dose to his victim would then apply an instrument to her neck that could also have caused her death,” mused Bresnahan. She was wearing a puce tank top and sweats that fit her snugly. The stone of the brooch that hung on a silver chain around her neck was the smoky color of her eyes.

“Maybe he just wanted to make sure she was dead,” said Swords, who was seated on a table along with two others. Given the size of the cubicle and the nearly dozen staffers, the meeting resembled a scrum. “Murderers, as we know, always try too hard.”

“Then why didn’t he just throttle her with his hands?” said another.

Said Ward, “Because the murderer was sending a message, and that message was religious.”

Maybe Parmalee, thought McGarr, attempting to inculpate Opus Dei with the help of Frank Mudd. How else could he have installed listening devices in Barbastro and Mudd’s cottage? Hadn’t Mudd said he was banned from the house? McGarr would have to ask his sister, Delia Manahan.

“We can only assume that it was Mudd who removed the water bottle that—we also assume—delivered the digitalis. Said water bottle had the logo and name of G. Bass Outfitters stenciled on the front. A white plastic bottle with a black seal cap and drink nipple.”

McKeon sipped his coffee. “As for the jacket with the Stafford label that was placed over the video camera, we only have the word of Father Fred Duggan that it was Mudd’s, bought him by his ‘sister’—and I use that designation provisionally—Delia Manahan.”

“And you should use the name Manahan provisionally as well,” said Ward.

“The jacket has not been found.”

McGarr made a mental note to question Manahan about the jacket as well.

“Also, Mudd’s name
was
, in fact, Mudd and not at any time Manahan. He was born Francis Jerome Mudd in Wexford. He expired the same.

“According to Superintendent Ward”—McKeon turned a page—“Delia Manahan, on the other hand, was also born as she presently bills herself, but for a time lived under the rubric of Delia Foley. That was when she was married to F. X. Foley, solicitor and sup
posed blackmailer, who was himself murdered a decade ago in his office in Fitzwilliam Square.”

McGarr’s head came up from his coffee cup.

“You’ll remember the case, Chief—the office had been scoured, every trace of his law practice removed. And still unsolved.”

McGarr did, it was where he had seen Delia Manahan Foley before—when he had interviewed her about her husband’s involvements.

“I believe Brother Hugh has a homily to deliver.”

As Ward began a somewhat expurgated version of his encounters with Dery Parmalee at the Claddagh Arms and later Geraldine Breen at Manahan/Foley’s, McGarr recalled the details of F. X. Foley’s murder, which remained unique—death by CPU. The murderer had disabled Foley, a man in his early fifties, then dashed the central processing unit of the office computer into his head. Several times.

All files—every trace of his law practice—had then been removed. Where his file cabinet had sat, a square of greener carpet was left. And every other scrap of paper, computer floppies in a console, even the waste paper baskets, had been purged.

Also, there had been no indication that robbery was the motive for murder, since in an office closet they discovered an array of pricey photo equipment, including several long lenses that pull in shots from afar.

Foley, McGarr later learned through a tip by an anonymous letter, had been a blackmailer, which his lifestyle rather suggested. With houses on Killiney Bay and in the Azores, a trophy wife and an even younger mistress, two expensive cars, horses, and holidays but
no real law practice as documented in any public records that McGarr could discover.

McGarr remembered interviewing Foley’s fetching young widow in their Killiney home. She said she knew nothing of her husband’s professional involvements. She’d had her children and her houses to take care of, and she’d left “the making of money to F. X.,” he could remember her saying.

“He was such a gentle man in the best sense,” she had gone on. “Do you know what his hobby was? Photographing songbirds. Tiny, shy creatures that you can only see from a distance. Everywhere we went—Madeira, the Midi—he’d take his binos and cameras. Birding gave him such great pleasure, and I thank God he enjoyed himself while he could.”

And McGarr could remember her saying one other thing: “No sin goes unpunished. Ultimately.” Her final words to him as he had walked from her terrace toward his car.

“Breen must have planned an escape route,” Ward was saying. “But it was my mistake. I should have requested backup the moment I caught sight of her through the gap in the drapes. She slugged me and took my Beretta, keys, and cell phone. Then she slashed the tires and trashed the radio in the car. And finally”—Ward raised his hands—“she left me shackled with my own cuffs in the bedroom. Opposite ankle to wrist. It took me hours to get free.”

McGarr now remembered Dery Parmalee’s description of Geraldine Breen—that in addition to managing Barbastro, she provided security there as well. He glanced down at his wrist where she had struck him
with the martial arts baton. It was still swollen and sore.

Ward had finished his report of his run-ins with Parmalee and Breen. “I took the liberty of making a copy or two of the key to Parmalee’s place, in case we need to interview him again.” Ward put two of them on McGarr’s desk. “I have the original.

“Granted he’ll arrange to have the lock changed sometime soon, but at the moment he seems to be occupied with other matters.” Ward settled back in his chair.

“Recap,” McKeon continued. “Mary-Jo Stanton was murdered when, supposedly, she drank from a sports water bottle laced with digitalis. Before she could die, a sports jacket was hung over the lens of the security camera, and a—”

“
Cilicio,
” Bresnahan offered.

“—yet another sporting item was tightened around her neck to make it appear as though she’d been strangled by that instrument of priestly self-abuse. But she died from the digitalis.

“After the coat was withdrawn, and Mudd, supposedly, went to Mary-Jo’s side and found her dead, suddenly the video shows the fatal water bottle missing. Only Mudd could have taken it.

“Mudd, however, in his interview with Peter appeared to be merely your common agricultural sod with a criminal past who had—”

“If you say
gone to ground,
Bernie, I’ll—”

“—buried himself there at Barbastro. His crime? Lookout for an armed robbery team over in the States.
In a plea bargain, he grassed on his co-criminals and, knowing them all too well, believed he should subsequently go to ground.”