The Death of an Irish Tradition (14 page)

He knew it was wrong—he told himself as his muscles tensed and his torso twisted, cocking his body—that, if anything, understanding was now called for, that he should listen and learn what the problem was and try to help him, but that silly, grinning face taunted him. “Can the truth be any worse than the lie?” he roared.

The smile only spread across the face, crooked and loose, and Murray gave in suddenly, completely to his public self—the blusterer, the pompous bully, the man with money and power who wasn’t afraid to use either to get what he wanted.

His hand lashed out and caught the son on the side of the face, more like a hard, crossing punch than a slap, and sent the glasses careering through the pewter mugs that lined the sideboard of the small bar.

Murray stood over his son in a slight crouch, waiting for some small sign that he’d try to retaliate. He was puffing and felt the blood pounding in his ears, the delicious giddiness that venting his anger always brought. But more too—things were slightly grainy, and he didn’t hear the door open and couldn’t see his wife standing there until the son turned his head and looked up, challenging him, it seemed, with the blood that was trickling from his nose and the corner of his mouth and with those eyes.

They staggered Murray.

At first he didn’t know what he was seeing. They looked like the eyes of a fly but massive and popped and an agaty blue color with the merest pinpricks for pupils. And he was smiling—a dreadful, bloody, foolish smile.

Murray roared. It came from deep within him, and he found himself with the son’s arms in his hands, having lifted him right out of the chair. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—what have you done to yourself?”

But the son began flailing with his hands and elbows, catching his father in the face and chest and Murray let him go.

Turning to his wife, he said, “We’ve got to help him, Bridie. He needs our help.”

The son pushed by him and staggered, looking about wildly for the sunglasses, then thrashed out of the study and the house.

Murray began to cry. Tears gushed from his eyes.

The wife didn’t know what to do—to go after the son or to comfort her husband.

Murray thought for a moment of calling the police, of turning the boy in, of their getting the best help they could for him, over in England where they knew of such things.

Trinity—goddamn the place and goddamn the whim that had made him want to have his son go there. Ruined him, it did. Corrupted him. Made him into a bloody…degenerate.

But then it occurred to Murray, and for the first time, that drugs might not be all of Sean’s troubles.

He straightened up. Blearily, through his tears, he could see his wife approaching him, her arms out.

No—he clasped her to him—he remembered the agitation, the despair that had marked Sean when he had come to him saying he needed an excuse, an alibi, for the time during which the Caughey woman had been killed, that it was well known among his friends they had quarreled, that he’d been out “…just driving around” yesterday afternoon and in Ballsbridge. “Somebody might have seen the car. Would you know if they’ll check?”

Murray had thought of McGarr, and he had known they’d check, that there were probably dozens of such cars in the country. He knew of another himself. “But where in Ballsbridge were you driving? On that street?” He had nodded. “Why?” “I was just seeing if Mairead would be about, but I didn’t stop. Honest.” And there had been something in the way he had said that that had told Murray he was lying. But not about murder—that had never crossed his mind. Still, he knew the son well enough and thought it best to come up with something definite that he’d been doing at the time.

It was a mistake, he now knew. Better to have let the chips fall and be done with it. He was their son, but those things he took probably made him into somebody else entirely. Somebody violent and—.

He himself was only after knocking back the son’s salary, thinking it would make him more aggressive. What if, by so doing, he had inadvertently driven—.

Jesus! He rocked his wife back and forth—what had they gotten themselves into?

When they parted, she said, “It’ll all blow over, you’ll…And look, you got a splotch of blood on one of your new shirts.”

Murray tried to see the stain but couldn’t. He turned away. “I think he caught me on the chin—gave me a bit of a scratch.”

McGarr awoke first.

Noreen and he had taken lodgings in a small hotel in Leenane, and looking out the low, open window there on the second floor he could see the Eiriff River, nearly dry now with the warm weather, meandering down a stony beach to Killary Harbor. Beyond, steep treeless hills rose toward skies that patches of swift-moving clouds made seem very blue. There was a wind up and chop on the water, and McGarr was tempted to climb back into the toasty bed.

It was only 10:00, early by Irish standards, and, chilled now, he knew Noreen would feel warm and soft and he would sink back into that pleasant, dreamless state between waking and sleeping in which he became conscious of the pleasure the body took in being inert.

But that was cowardice, now that he was awake, and twice already a faint rapping on the door had told him that others knew of his whereabouts. There was no sense in further sequestration.

Dressing, he peered down at his wife—the tousled red locks, the slight freckling of the skin, the thin and straight nose, and the lips that were partially open in sleep. Like that, she always seemed to him so childlike, and yet again he marveled at the abandon with which she slept, on her back or sometimes on a side, but never like McGarr, who slept on his stomach, one pillow under his chest, the other over his head. He wondered what it meant, the difference. Probably nothing.

Downstairs was a bar and a general store, with a dining room off that.

Seeing McGarr on the stairs, the young girl behind the counter blushed and scurried toward the note pad near the telephone. The early-rising locals, dressed for Mass, quieted, making her approach to McGarr all the more painful.

Her voice was high and no more than a whisper. “Chief Inspector, you had several calls this morning. First, the Commissioner, Mister Farrell—”

“That’s fine, thank you. I can take it from there. You’ve got a lovely script.”

She was tall and full with brown hair and a milk-white complexion, and several of the men smiled to see her color even more. She turned her back to them and caught her breath. “And there’s somebody waiting for you in the dining room.”

McGarr looked up. He wondered who it could be.

“A man,” she went on, casting him a sidelong glance that made her brown eyes seem as big as buttons. “He was here when I opened. Bald, he is. And not young.”

McGarr was glad he had worn his hat and would have liked to know if she considered him young or old. “What paper is he reading?”

“The
Times
.”

Fogarty, McGarr thought, his nemesis. He wondered who had sicced the man on him. It could only be Ban Gharda Bresnahan, who was new to his staff. “Is there a phone in the bar?”

She nodded and smiled a bit.

“I’ll take my coffee in there then, if you don’t mind, and tell the missus where I am when she comes down, please.”

The bar was empty, a dark room with a flagstone floor and old, wooden porter barrels stacked up behind the counter as decorations. Small stools and low tables made the place seem fit for faeries or Lilliputians, but McGarr knew better. It was a sing-song pub with a dais and a mike, but anybody wanting to be heard could just stand.

McGarr looked for the bartender and discovered, behind the bar, an open trap that led down a flight of stairs to a cellar. There a light was on. Rather than disturb the man, he poured himself a large whisky and carried the note pad to the darkest corner. He wasn’t there a moment when Fogarty poked his head in the door, glanced around, and departed.

Striking a match to a Woodbine, he read the messages: Farrell had rung twice, each time asking that his call be returned. It was urgent. Ballydehob. McGarr’s office at the Castle twice as well, and McKeon from his home. Finally, McAnulty, chief superintendent of the Technical Bureau, had rung him only minutes before he came downstairs.

Carrying his drink to the phone, he called the Castle and found Ban Gharda Bresnahan on the desk. “I’ve told you before,” he said, “your Sundays are your own.”

“And your Sundays now, Chief Inspector, are they your own?” She was a massive young woman from Kerry, precise in her work and dedicated and not a little bit ambitious. She was also upright and quite religious.

“I’m in a lounge bar this minute with a smoke in me gob and a drink in me hand. I saw the insides of a church yesterday noon and it should last me ’til I die.”

Bresnahan got right down to business.

O’Shaughnessy had detained a garage mechanic who had claimed to have been working on Sean Murray’s yellow MG at the time of the Caughey murder. The superintendent had met with a magistrate late yesterday afternoon and had managed to obtain a court order for the service chits of Ballsbridge Motors Ltd., the concern involved. By the time he got back to the garage the manager had dropped his opposition to the request and willingly handed them over. Delaney then spent most of the night going through them and the internal accounts of the firm, and he had determined that the mechanic, Doyle by name, would have had to be working on three cars at once to have serviced the Murray car. The bookkeeping balance was short by the very amount that Murray had been billed and had, by his own statement, paid. But Doyle had kept to his story. He had a record, and they were still sweating him.

“A record for what?”

“The superintendent doesn’t say here.”

“Could you check on that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then Ward had determined that Sean Murray kept company with a group at Trinity who were suspected of using drugs. He had checked further with other of his contacts in Dublin, but it seemed that, if he was a user himself, his source of supply was not Dublin-based.

It wouldn’t be, McGarr thought, for a young man with money and doubtless friends who left and reentered the country often. He then thought of Murray’s father’s horses and wondered if that was the means.

Otherwise, Ward had reported, the Caughey girl’s statement had been verified except for a short period of time during which she claimed to have tried to visit the National Library that had been closed because of repairs.

At the R. D. S. Show Ground McKeon had made contact with a man who resembled J. J. Keegan in all particulars except for the mustache he now was wearing. McKeon couldn’t be sure until he checked the man against the snaps McAnulty was developing. He wanted to know what he should do.

McGarr thought for a moment, tasting the smoky peat flavor of the whisky there in the darkness of the empty barroom. Keegan or Matthews or whoever he was calling himself now had not really committed any major crime. He could be questioned about the discharge of firearms at his residence near Drogheda, and then there was the question of his practicing veterinary medicine. But McKeon would be wrong and collaring the man would blow his cover, and McGarr thought it best to hold off for a while. Perhaps he had some idea about who had murdered his sister and would lead them to that person, if he were kept under strict surveillance.

“Have him continue according to my prior orders, but detail Delaney and Greaves to him. I want them to be sure of the man’s whereabouts at all times.”

He waited while she made the notes. “Anything else?”

“Ah—let me see—. Oh yes. Commissioner—”

“I’ve got that.”

“And Superintendent Mc—”

“And that too.”

“Well then, there’s nothing more, Chief Inspector.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well—you did have another call or two, but they weren’t strictly official nor your wife, so I did as per your instructions.”

“Good—” McGarr hesitated, almost having said “girl,” a term which the young woman eschewed, “—job. And what did you say to Mr. Fogarty from the
Times
?”

“Only that he needn’t be ringing here on the quarter hour, hour by hour, since you were on the other side of the country with the missus and wouldn’t be back ’til the morrow.”

“And he asked if I was on holiday?”

“His very question. The man—he’s remorseless.”

“And you said?”

“I said, says I, I should hope not, not with a murder investigation on his hands.”

“I wonder,” McGarr asked, touching the Woodbine to his lips and glancing toward the bar, where the barman was stacking cases of bottled beer, “if you would know who might be sitting in the dining room of the place I’m now in?”

She let out a short, sharp laugh. “You must be joking.”

“Oh, I’m not. Not in the least.”

She paused. “Then I haven’t the faintest.”

For a moment McGarr considered upbraiding her, but didn’t think it would do any good. She was from the country and only constant, daily exposure to people like Fogarty would make her any wiser. “I just thought you might have a spare vision, of a Sunday morning.

“Thank you, now.” McGarr went to ring off.

“But wait—who?” she asked, a laugh in her voice.

McGarr sighed. “Fogarty,” he said precisely and depressed the lever.

McAnulty said the blood on the towels was not J. J. Keegan’s, a record of which they possessed because of his prior incarcerations. The cigar ash found near the windowsill in the upstairs bedroom was rare, from some handmade, all leaf, Cuban variety, and the bureau was still trying to identify it exactly. Given the firing-pin impression on the shell casings, the gun that had been fired most at Keegan’s was a type of machine pistol. McAnulty wasn’t sure, but he thought they might be from a Skorpion, a new and powerful weapon that had been developed as a hand gun for tankers in the Czech army. It could be fired comfortably from one hand in a single-shot manner, but could, in an emergency, supply suppressive automatic bursts as well. But it was an expensive, a rare, and also an illegal weapon. One casing, however, was from a .38. They had found it in the drain pipe of the kennel roof.