The Death of an Irish Tinker (5 page)

The pattern of Tinker life, however, changed drastically after the Second World War with the appearance of cheap metal and plastic goods and mechanized farming that replaced seasonal labor. Forced to shift to the cities, Travelers were cramped onto small plots heaped with rusting auto parts, trash, and such. The men went on the dole; the women begged in the streets.

But the greatest tragedy—to McGarr’s way of thinking—was the effect city life had on Tinker children. Schools for them were segregated and poor, and few attended. With little to do and no place to play, many took to roaming the camps and the city. Vandalism led to more serious crime, drink, and drugs.

Government efforts to improve the Travelers’ lot had largely failed. Only half of Dublin’s seven hundred Traveling families were housed, usually in squalid, ghettolike neighborhoods, and the percentage and conditions of life for them countrywide were little better.

But McKeon had returned with the drinks, which he carefully lowered to the table in front of them.

“You were saying about your daughter and Mickalou Maugham?” McGarr prompted. “Ten months ago.”

Maggie Nevins nodded and picked up her new drink. “It’s what I come to tell you about. A Thursday last February. The very hardest part of the winter, though we were in great heart—me and the kids—since Ned had come back to our caravan from the Labor with pockets of money and a nice feed for us from the chipper.

“But I should have known better, for what did I hear when I opened the door”—she paused dramatically—“chatterin’ magpies.” Her eyes swung to McGarr, who shook his head. He did not know what she meant.

“Trouble comin’, and I should have known. For the truth is, I only got the washup done and the kids in bed when the door opened. Who should it be but Biddy in a huff and Oney
in her arms, saying she had trouble and had to shift? Could I take the baby for a while? She’d send for her when she could; she was going to get out of the country as quick as she could.

“With that Ned, who had nodded off, wakes up and asks her what it’s all about, but she says she can’t say. ‘If they thought you knew, you’d have to run too,’ was her words. And she scarcely said good-bye. ‘Speed it! Put it going!’ she gave out to Ned. And they left in a rush for Rosslare and the ferry to Folkstone.

“And”—Maggie sighed and looked down at her now-empty glass—“they be no sooner gone than an awful thumpin’ comes to the caravan door, and some man starts roarin’, ‘Get out o’ that! Get out o’ that, you Knackers!’ And another thump that fairly knocked the door off its pins.

“I look out and there’s two big
shadogs,
uniforms, buttons and all, the one with a big gun pointin’ right at me head. My God, the fret it give me. I was in bits, only half alive. ‘Open up, you Knacker bitch!’ he calls me. ‘Or I’ll blow yeh away!’

“I see lights goin’ on in other caravans, and I says to meself, says I, ‘If mindin’ me granddaughter be a crime, they can take me off.’ So I opened the door, and didn’t the one peg me from the top step right down into the mud at the feet of the other with the gun.

“He shoved it against my temple, roarin’ pure savage, ‘She in there? She in there?’ at the top of his Joxer lungs. ‘Who? Who?’ I got out. ‘Biddy, you fookin’ Knacker cunt!’” Maggie Nevins turned to Bresnahan. “Sorry, miss, but them was his words.

“The other one was already inside the caravan with a big white torch, shinin’ it around and tossing things about. Some of the kids was cryin’; the others was screamin’ for me. But nobody came out from the other caravans to help, and I don’t blame them with the uniforms and the guns and all.

“When I tried to get up, the one with the gun roared, ‘Down on the ground! Down on the fookin’ ground!,’ then
cut me legs out from under me and stood or somethin’ on the small o’ me back. When I howled out in pain, what did he do?”

The three of her listeners waited—Bresnahan’s pencil poised—while Maggie Nevins, obviously shaken even to recount the incident, tried to gather herself. She shook her head; tears had filled her eyes.

Suddenly the bar noise was almost palpable.

“Didn’t he spin me around and punch the bloody gun into me gob, pushing it down until I was chokin’?” With a finger she pulled down her lower lip to reveal two lower front teeth that had been snapped off at the gum.

“It was then a shadow came between me and the lights in the caravans. Legs it was. Trousers. That was all I could see. Then a voice said, ‘We’ll start with the youngest. Bring the youngest one out.’

“I was clawin’ at the gun that was like a stake pricked through me throat. I couldn’t breathe. I was gaggin’. When the shade in the caravan came to the door with Oney, the third one said something, and the gun was ripped out o’ me mouth. I’d swallowed me teeth, and didn’t they come up in a cough. I was rollin’ in the dirt, gabblin’. I could hardly see for the pain in me throat.

“‘That your child?’ the third one asked. What I saw of him was smaller than the others. Older. Different-soundin’. ‘Isn’t she young for an old woman like you?’ I still couldn’t talk. I’d never been hurt so sorely in me life, not even in childbirth. It was like he quenched a poker in me lungs.

“And all I could think of was poor little Oney. She was so tired from running with her ma that through it all, she was still asleep in his hand and him holding her up—you know, over his head like a stone or somethin’.” Maggie Nevins raised a hand to demonstrate. “Like he’d rear back and chuck her into the night.”

Again she had to pause, and McGarr could not keep himself from thinking what a powerful witness she might be, could she be persuaded to testify, which he doubted. Trav
elers simply did not help the police, and those that did were never again trusted by their own. Added to that was the fright she had taken; obviously it was still with her.

“Then he—the little, older one—squatted down to look in me face, smilin’, mind. ‘I’ll ask but once,’ he says in a voice soft as butter. ‘I make no idle threats. If you don’t tell me, he’ll kill the baby. It’s hers, isn’t it? Biddy’s?”

“I was at sixes and sevens what to say, grass on me daughter and save her child, or play dumb and chance he wouldn’t. But I figured Biddy at least had been gone for a while, and she had her father with her. And when I looked into the man’s eyes, I could tell he meant what he said—that little smile and them devil eyes. That’s what they were. Happy like.

“Says I as good as I could through the blood, ‘She come in, gave me Oney, and begged her father to take her down the country. That’s all I know.’ And he knew I was lyin’.

“ ‘When?’ ” he asked.

“‘An hour? Maybe two, maybe three. I fell asleep.”

“‘Really?’ says he, sounding like a laird. “Two or three hours ago she was still drawing at the top of Grafton Street. You must not care for your granddaughter very much. Did Biddy tell you where she was going?’

“Me mind was racin’, tryin’ to suss out what I could say that he’d believe and keep him off Biddy and Ned. The car they’d come in was big and rich-lookin’, and if I said Rosslare, they’d catch Ned’s old van sure. At last I decided to tell him the truth, or part of it. ‘She said she wouldn’t tell me that either. “If you knew, you’d have to run too.” Them was her words.’

“That seemed to satisfy him. He stood. ‘What about in there?’ he asked the one in the doorway holding Oney. ‘Nut-tin’.’ ‘Put her back.’ And the bollocks just tossed her back into the caravan, where she cut open her head and started wailing.

“Says the little mahn, ‘Will you remember me?’ Says I to him, ‘I can’t even see yiz.’ With that, he turns, like he
was going to walk away, but instead he spins and kicks me in the ribs. And what a kick! I thought he dropped a stone on me heart. ‘Now I think you’ll remember not to remember. And buy a newspaper from now on. I’ll be sending Biddy a message just for her, down in the country.’”

Maggie Nevins turned her eyes to McGarr. “Now, this is why I’m here. When he opened the back door of the car, who did I see in there but Mickalou? He was lyin’ on his side with his face on the seat, and all he could raise to me was his eyes that was”—she shook her head—“all muddied up. I never saw the like.

“And it was then—come closer while I tell yeh—didn’t I pipe the man? The little one.”

“The one who kicked you?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “The Toddler, he’s called. I’d know him anywhere, because of the way he walks. And a viper. Years ago he’d come round with weeks of free gear for all our childer, and him with a gang of rough Joxers, so’s nobody could do nothin’ about it. And wouldn’t. Didn’t he murder Paddy McDonagh?”

McGarr cocked his head. “Who?”

Maggie Nevins repeated the name, and McGarr glanced at McKeon. He didn’t recognize it either.

Said Bresnahan, “Paddy McDonagh was the name of a Traveler who either fell or was defenestrated from a high floor of Switzers in Grafton Street just about this time last year.”

It was true that all reports of questionable death passed across Bresnahan’s desk before being processed. But McGarr wondered how much her command of seemingly every detail of every case was a matter of interest and acumen as it was simply overcompensating for being the squad’s only woman.

“Shall I go on?” she asked.

McGarr opened a hand and closed it—his gesture for “Why not? But at your peril.” He did not suffer tyros gladly.

“There was a question about how McDonagh managed to get the window open and himself out of it without being seen. It was a heavy thing without a counterweight and would have had to have been propped open. But it was found closed.”

“And all for thirty-three pounds fifty,” Maggie Nevins put in. “Which was what he owed the shagger.”

“You were a witness?” McKeon asked.

Maggie Nevins shook her head.

“You know of a witness?”

Again. “And I fancy there wasn’t one. It’s not the way that yoke works. But it was known about Paddy and him—the money owed.”

“For what?”

“Ah, the bleedin’ gear. Didn’t most of the young ones that were let run loose end up with the Toddler, one way or other?” Her eyes swung to the bar.

Bresnahan cleared her throat. “May I ask a question?”

McGarr nodded, competence having its rewards.

“Do you remember the date that your daughter came to your caravan and you were attacked?”

Maggie Nevins set her empty glass on the table. “Darlin’ girl, I don’t go by no calendars. I couldn’t read one if I tried.”

“Could it have been the eleventh of February?”

“It could. But all I remember is it was rare bitter and the ground where I fell was froze.”

“I mention the eleventh of February, Chief, because that was the evening Gavin O’Reilly was knocked down and killed by a bus at the top of Grafton Street, just there at the corner and the gates into Stephen’s Green.

“Isn’t that where your daughter—”

“Biddy.”

“—did her chalk drawings?”

The older woman nodded.

To McGarr and McKeon, Bresnahan added, “O’Reilly was a known drug dealer. Small time, compared to Des
mond Bacon, but he was competition nonetheless. Word on the street was he’d been peddling to the Toddler’s clients. That’s evidently a no-no, punishable by death.”

“Who’s Desmond Bacon when he’s at home?” Maggie Nevins asked, now seeming a bit tight. She pulled a packet of cigarettes from her purse and offered them around. McGarr took one, it being bad form for all of them to refuse.

“Desmond Bacon is the Toddler,” Bresnahan continued. “O’Reilly’s Achilles tendons had been cut, and he would not have been able to walk. The file says it’s difficult to imagine that the man had crawled out into the street. Also, the driver of the bus swore he saw nobody in front of the vehicle, but he did see a group of men on the footpath when he turned the corner, including two uniformed guards. The conductor said he saw them too.

“Minutes later it was reported that guards were seen chasing a young blond woman in Wicklow Street, where one of them pulled out a gun and fired at her, knocking out a plate glass window. She ran out into Dame Street and presumably escaped. But there was no report of any guard firing a weapon on the evening of the eleventh anywhere in the country.”

This time the look that McGarr and McKeon exchanged was more lengthy, as though to agree that Bresnahan might be more valuable than simply note-taking and office help.

Maggie Nevins shook her head. “And to think them bastards would have killed Biddy.”

And you and the baby, McGarr was now certain. “Who filed those reports?”

Bresnahan shrugged one shoulder and looked away. “Inspector Ward.” There was something between those two, and McGarr wondered if it was professional jealousy alone.

“In the morning I want them on my desk. And everything you can find on this Toddler yoke. As Toddler. As Desmond Bacon. The works.

“But discreetly. Don’t request any files from Drugs, until we decide how to proceed.” He meant the section of the
Serious Crimes Unit that was known as the Drug Squad.

McKeon smiled. Folding his arms across his chest, he began humming a little tune. This Toddler was too cute by half. And in making his thugs don Garda uniforms to commit murder and felonious assault, the man had crossed a line, and he would pay, one way or another. McKeon hoped it would be the other.

“And tear up those notes, Rut’ie. It was after hours, and we came here to Hogan’s for a jar or two. There was a woman sitting here—you forget her name—and we spoke.”

“Just chat,” McKeon put in.

“Chat,” Bresnahan repeated, suspecting that some decision had been made but having no clue to what. And then she was a bit flustered, having been called Rut’ie by the chief for the first time ever.

“Where’s Biddy now?”

“England.”

“Where in England?”

Maggie Nevins only closed her eyes and shook her head.

“NO DRUGS FOR him. Doesn’t drink, smoke. Nobody’s even seen him take tea,” said Tom Lyons, who was their contact from the Drug Squad. “The ten months I been scoutin’ the yoke, I’ve never seen him in a chipper, cafe, restaurant. Just the pub there, where he sits in a corner and watches things. Eats with the granny at the house, or at least he must.”

Since Desmond Bacon did not look in need of a meal, thought McGarr, who was standing with a clutch of other men on the roof of the Cadbury chocolate factory about a half mile away from the Toddler’s pub in Coolock. It had just been raided. A baker’s dozen of mainly young people were lined up on the footpath by the door to the bar. Along with the Toddler.

Six uniformed guards were looking after them, while a team of detectives combed the pub for anything illegal. Anything at all. McGarr needed an excuse to “interview” the man, his way.

He adjusted the eyepiece of his binoculars and focused in on Desmond Bacon, alias the Toddler.

Bacon was a short but heavily muscled man with a round build. But he was not fat. Rumor had it he was a health and fitness buff and a martial arts expert, though that had yet to be corroborated.

Balding now at twenty-nine, he kept his remaining hair, which was dark, clipped short. He was wearing a gray double-breasted suit with the jacket open. Beneath it was a black turtleneck jersey. His black shoes were gleaming, and earlier McGarr had noticed a glint of gold on a wrist.

A dark beard shaved close made Bacon’s fleshy face look older. But apart from the grandmother—reportedly an ancient woman who lived two streets distant—Bacon had no family in Ireland. Or any involvements that they could discover, female or male. His
trade
was his life, though he never practiced it himself directly. Those who did it for him were either loyal or dead.

“The most we’ve ever learned,” Lyons went on, “is he was born on Gibraltar, son of a Belfast Royal Marine and an American woman. Got into trouble there, big time. Irish-English thing, the police file says. When the Brits ganged up on him, he gored the leader with sharpened forks, plunged them right through the other kid’s hands.

“He was sent to a reformatory in England for two years. First day there he nearly killed another inmate with a bench when Bacon found him going through his kit. They gave him another year.

“From there he emigrated to the States and his mother’s people in California. The Vietnam War was on then, and he joined the Marines, where he was assigned to reconnaisance.”

“What’s that mean?” McKeon asked. “Office work, or was he out on point? You know, alone.” He himself had spent ten years in the Irish Army with stints in The Lebanon, and he knew from personal experience that reconnaisance duty as remote observer or sniper or both was perhaps the most hazardous mission in any army during war.

Lyons shook his head. “Dunno. That was all the file said. But he liked whatever it was well enough to reup. And he got medals, awards, citations—the lot. Promotions to sergeant major when his time was up and the promise of officer training were he to stay.

“He decided to get out, and they gave him the choice of destinations, anywhere in the world. They’d send him there gratis. He chose Dublin. And the legend is he arrived here in full dress uniform with a chestful of medals and two duffel bags of China White that were never checked.”

Drug surveillance then being nearly nonexistent, McGarr knew, especially for a returning war hero. Or someone who looked the part. He had probably been waved right through customs.

“And he was in business,” Ward said.

“What’s he doing with his head?” McKeon asked. Both were also holding binoculars to their eyes.

“Dunno,” Lyons replied. “It’s what he does whenever he’s got business. Or trouble.”

It was something like a tic, McGarr decided. Bacon kept tilting his head twice to one side, then once to the other, as though trying to pop a kink in his neck. Which made him all the more the Toddler, when he wasn’t moving forward, flat-footed but stiff, as though too heavily muscled and “tight” to walk normally. As he did now, stepping to the curb to scan the street.

“He’s on the lookout for the solicitor. Probably paged him the moment we walked in.”

The small black plastic box clipped to the Toddler’s belt was a pager, McGarr knew, though he wasn’t sure how they worked. It was a device that had only just arrived in Dublin and that some in the Garda thought the police should have.

“There’s not a person who works for him who’s not using. Or not on the piss. Pays them in gear and Guinness, it’s said.”

“Like effin’ slaves,” said Bernie McKeon, who had a daughter who’d had a problem with drugs; McGarr had a
niece and Ward a cousin the same. It was a big problem and growing.

“Owns the pub, the bookie shop across the road. All the shops to either side. Houses as far as the motorway.” Which was a throw of two hundred yards with most of the dwellings attached. How many? Twenty-some at least. It was quite a holding.

“There’s not a person in them that doesn’t think he’s God. You know, the god of the syringe or pipe or tablet.”

And the god who would make them dead without a qualm, thought McGarr, though Bacon didn’t look very godlike—a short, pudgy fella with a tic.

The others?

“They look normal enough,” Ward concluded. “For here.” By that he meant for a working-class area on the North Side.

The men were wearing leather bomber jackets or short, tight windcheaters that were left purposely open to display gold chains. Otherwise brush cuts, black crew-neck jumpers, black shoes or runners completed the uniform. And tight stone-washed jeans.

The women wore those too, along with stark white half boots with pointy toes and jackets to match. Those were padded in the shoulder but gripped the waist tight, so as to suggest more bosom than any probably possessed. Left open, the plackets revealed strands of gold chains, plunging V-neck jumpers that were pink in color and made of something like angora, and mounds of skin.

All were blondes, save for one whose hair was some unlikely shade of magenta. Layers of cosmetics made their faces seem lurid even under a pale winter sun, to say nothing of their long, lacquered talons and what McGarr thought of as the “cornered” look: felonious eyes that darted this way and that, as though for a way out. But mainly at the Toddler. Perhaps for direction. Or chemical salvation.

“What about the girls?” McKeon asked. It was a generous description but probably accurate; few were over twenty, but all could pass for thirty.

“Sure, they’re renters. By the hour, by the night, long as you’ve any readies left. Big trade with foreign businessmen looking for a bit of different. It’s said he ships them out as well. Middle East, Madagascar, Djibouti—wherever blondes is in. Two birds with one stone. See the odd girl out?”

“With the purple hair.”

Lyons nodded. “They call her the Grape. Disappeared for seven weeks, she did. We thought for sure her body would surface in a canal. But when we checked immigration, didn’t we find she’d skipped to Syria in September on a Syrian government jet. Came back the same way with four ‘diplomats,’ each carrying a stuffed diplomatic pouch.”

“Business as well as pleasure,” McKeon put in.

“She wasn’t back a day before the word in the street was ‘brick.’ And still is.” It was another name for hashish. “But far be it from him to sell bricks. Grams is all, and the markup is fantastic.”

When the Toddler now tried to step out farther into the street, a uniformed guard put up a hand and gently pushed him back. That made the largest two of the Joxers, who seemed to be guarding the Toddler, move forward truculently.

“Who’re they?”

“The Bookends, they’re called. Hyde and Hyde. Twin brothers who grew up here, two doors down from the Toddler’s granny. Hard cases even before he got back from Vietnam. But shortly after he did, they left school. When the father gave out to them, they thumped him, put him in hospital. Critical. On the mend he wouldn’t say word one. Rumor is, they promised to kill the mother if he did. And would.”

Again McGarr could feel his gall rising to think that this little gang of—how many?—two dozen or so that he could see had been able to act with such impunity for so long, killing people at will, shooting at people in city center, attacking an old woman and her children while masquerading
as gardai. And here in Coolock the Toddler had virtually taken over the main street.

“Drugs?” McKeon asked.

“Who? The Bookends? For personal use, I’d say so. Anything they want. It’s how he keeps ’em loyal. But no trade. Nobody around the Toddler is allowed that. If they do—and some have—they end up in the Liffey.”

Or under a bus or up in a tree, thought McGarr. He made mental note to ask Bresnahan to compare the names of murder victims in open cases against known associates of this Toddler. The Drug Squad would have a list. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

“He ever been lifted?”

“The Toddler? Not that I know of. Not in this country.”

“Why not?” McKeon asked.

Lyons shook his head. “Maybe he’s been careful.” But his eyes said he didn’t think it was his place to say.

McGarr made a mental note to find out why.

“Who’s the monkey?” Ward asked.

He meant the small young man who was dressed in a tight black—was it?—chauffeur’s uniform. With a dark galways and gaunt body, he looked like a stick figure wearing a paste-on beard. Or an organ grinder’s monkey, cap and all.

Lyons lowered his glasses. “Know him?”

Ward shook his head.

“The Monkey is what he’s called. And not just for the costume and the beard. He’s a heavy hitter, a great one for the gear.” With two fingers and thumb, Lyons pantomimed pushing the plunger of a syringe into his other arm. “He’s your man’s driver. Some say he even provided the car that the Toddler took title to in payment of his heroin debt. Archie Carruthers is his name. He’s been driving for the Toddler for—lemme think—maybe two years.”

“Carruthers?”
McKeon asked.

Lyons nodded. “Comes from an old family down the country.”

“Wicklow?”

“Could be.”

“Glencree?”

“Dunno. But he’s nothing special. Just your common, garden-variety gearman, thinner than most. Do anything to score.”

And probably had in the “Cliquot” tree on his—mother’s? aunt’s?—property with the help of the Bookends or some of the others McGarr could see through the binos.

“Let’s lift him,” McKeon muttered to McGarr. “Take him back to the Castle,” where McKeon and McGarr would grill him. They were good at it.

But what if Carruthers didn’t come across and they had to let him go? How long would he last back here in Coolock? Where he would come. Inevitably. Being a monkey man in the worst sense and not being able to help himself. Then again, Archie Carruthers—Monkey Man—had chosen who he was and how he would live at least two years earlier, when the robbery had occurred at the Glencree estate.

“I’ll break him without even asking a question.”

McGarr glanced at McKeon, suspecting he could, but he had to be certain since the mere act of taking him into custody would be like signing his death sentence. “Give me a moment.”

Down in the car McGarr radioed his office, and Bresnahan patched through a phone call to Miss Eithne Carruthers, who came on the line after a short wait. “Tell me about Archie.”

“My nephew?” There was a pause, then a sigh. “It occurred to me I should have said something about him last spring. But only after you were gone. Archie’s my sister’s only child, you understand.”

And you his enabler, McGarr imagined. “How long have you known about his drug problem?”

“Years, of course. We’ve done everything we can: doctors, hospitals, clinics, even a rehabilitation center over in
the States. Two years at enormous expense! Now it’s up to him. He’s got to want to stop himself.”

And be able to. McGarr knew of addicts who’d been helped simply by being put in a place where using was impossible. Like jail. It made
wanting
to quit easier. “And after your break-in, did you tell the police about your nephew?”

There was another pause. “No, I couldn’t bring myself to do that either.”

“What about the car, the Mercedes? When did Archie steal that?”

“During his last slip. Two years ago. No, three.”

“And you reported it?”

Her sigh was audible. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because—because I didn’t want it to
be
Archie. Because it
was
Archie—I told myself—why, sure, wouldn’t it be his car someday anyhow?”

“Since you have no children.”

“That’s right.”

“And there’s only you and your sister.” Left in the family, he meant.

“Yes. And she a widow.”

Little wonder the Toddler had kept Archie Carruthers close. The Monkey Man had brought him a marque automobile and whatever was boosted from the estate during the theft, and finally he had even helped him commit murder.

No. The Toddler had been nowhere near the murder. He’d been back in his pub or some other public place where people could see him.

“Do you think Archie is involved in…was it murder, Superintendent?”

Procedure dictated that McGarr remain noncommittal since her sister and she might hire a solicitor who would only make the investigation more difficult. But maybe not in this case. Maybe what the Monkey would now need was
somebody who could talk some sense to him. “It was murder.”

“Where’s Archie now?”

“About to be taken in.”

“And charged?”

“Perhaps. It all depends on how cooperative he is. Maybe it wasn’t his idea at all. Maybe it was the drugs.”

“Of course. Without a doubt. It was the drugs. Archie may be many unfortunate things, but I know in my heart he’s no murderer.”

McGarr wished he had a pound for every time he’d heard that.

“Where will you be taking him?”

“My office.” He thanked her and rang off.

A few minutes later he pulled the unmarked blue Ford Granada into the curb by the pub where the Toddler and his minions were still lined up. Climbing out, he removed his Garda ID from a pocket and flashed it at the other guards, saying, “Peter McGarr, Murder Squad.” Loud, so the Toddler and his solicitor would hear.