The Death of an Irish Tradition (29 page)

A HEAVY SUMMER
downpour had wet the city streets, and the tires hissed on the macadam.

“Isn’t it curious,” said Murray, “that after being kids together and all it should come down to this?”

McGarr reached for his flask and then, offering it, glanced at Murray’s puffy face. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No—indeed not, but it’s as good as dashed, my—” he gestured with the flask, “—life, you see.” His smile was thin. “But it’s curious too, you know. At least now there seems to be some…adventure in my future, if you know what I mean.”

It was a nice observation but odd, coming from Murray, and McGarr drove on.

He found Brady, and while Murray waited in the car he explained what he wanted.

Menahan was still at the piano when they arrived. He objected but put on the only suit that McGarr could find in the Caughey woman’s former—now Menahan’s—closet. It was made of some fine, light gray material and fit him well. And a derby. McGarr found that there too. Vanity, he thought, and pride.

The light at the bottom of the Caughey staircase wasn’t strong, and the setting sun, obscured by the rooftops of the houses across the street, cast only a pale mauve glow. But McGarr suspected the little lad’s eyes were sharp, and he had his father there with him in the closet for support.

McGarr handed the derby to Murray. “You first, Mick.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just put it on, open the door, and walk up the stairs.”

Murray looked down at the derby, turning it in his hands. “You wouldn’t happen to have—”

McGarr again reached for the flask, then opened the door and said into the empty hall, “Ready?”

He heard a muffled reply. Tony Brady, the boy, was standing in the dark with his eye to the crack between the stairs, his father behind him.

His mother was watching with Missus Herron, the two of them out on the front lawn with their arms crossed over their chests, cardigans hanging loose by their sides.

Murray handed the flask back to McGarr and fitted on the hat, his jowls rippling as he adjusted it. He seemed to gird himself, then reached for the handle, pulled open the door, and stood there a moment, diffident, before he moved forward.

When Murray returned, McGarr took the derby from him and moved toward the priest, who was smiling.

“You to play, Father.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here, Inspector. The word of a child, you know, isn’t admissible in any court of law.”

“Only the truth, Father.” McGarr glanced up the street. House lights had been extinguished, and people were standing in the darkened doorways. At least several press people had learned of McGarr’s whereabouts and were out on the sidewalk. “And I’m sure in all his innocence little Tony Brady can tell it us.”

Fergus Farrell opened the gate and approached them.

Still with the smile on his face—forced, it was, making him look more like a commercial traveler than a priest—Menahan raised the derby and fitted it on his brow.

But before he could move forward, Missus Brady stepped up to the hedges. “If all you’re after wanting to know is if Father John Francis came back on Friday afternoon, Inspector—he did. And didn’t I see him with my own two eyes, dressed as he is. Had his back to the door so I couldn’t see his face at first, and I heard Missus Caughey ask who was it and he gave no reply. It took her some time to get down the stairs, you see, so I had a…peek.

“The father said he forgot his key. Isn’t that so, Father?”

Menahan turned but not to her, only McGarr. What little of his smile remained made him seem ill. “That’s not enough, and you know it.”

“Ah, but I don’t, Father. The truth is sometimes—” he appropriated Menahan’s own words, relishing the opportunity, “—difficult, is it not? Just like the situation you tried to generate.

“Let me piece it out for you.

“You didn’t find it sufficient to shop the truth to Bechel-Gore two months ago. He paid you a full twenty thousand pounds, but he did nothing with it, so you turned to Murray here and made it work for you twice. You told him everything, about how Bechel-Gore had gotten Grainne Keegan pregnant and that the child had been taken by Grainne’s older sister and brother because they thought she wouldn’t be a competent mother and, later, they saw a way of getting back at Bechel-Gore.

“For Murray here, who was way out of his element in the horse business, the situation was ready-made. He’d committed himself to his operation, and if he could just get it going, make a showing, he’d be able to float another loan or unload it. At least he’d be able to keep his head above water.

“But in spite of the Skorpion you supplied Murray with—through Paddy O’Meara, your boyhood chum who was working for Bechel-Gore—he blew it. He hired Frayne and some others with I. R. A. connections to raid Keegan’s place in Drogheda, where he’d established an identity as Doctor Malachy Matthews. But instead of throwing a scare into Keegan and making him want to go for Bechel-Gore, they almost killed him. Murray himself took a slug and it made him wary. He’d had enough.

“It was then, Father,” McGarr said derisively, “that you saw your opportunity to—” he turned and faced Menahan directly, “—rid yourself of many of the people—Margaret Kathleen Caughey, in particular—who would keep Mairead from you.

“You murdered her, Father…”

Menahan went to object, but McGarr held up a hand. “…cold-bloodedly, right upstairs in front of that chair. And you then commissioned Jack B. Frayne, who was a psychotic and whose record was public knowledge, to initiate, along with several of the others who had worked for Murray, an attack on Bechel-Gore, to feed Kestral the apples, to shoot at him and miss. The whole attempt was to make it seem like a feud between Bechel-Gore and the people on whose former land he lived. They had wronged each other for years and it would appear that things were just working themselves out. And if the police could get beyond that, there was always Murray. He’d committed himself personally, even had a bullet wound that would tie him in.

“But Frayne—now, he’s the
interesting
case,” McGarr’s voice was icy. “He turned out better than your wildest dreams, didn’t he? At least for a while.” McGarr studied Menahan’s facial features closely, the fleshy cheeks and the bright, dark eyes that held his gaze. “He just liked to kill and it didn’t matter much who—Bechel-Gore, if he could have gotten a clear shot at him, his accomplices in the kip, the Netherlander we found in the back of the car, and, alas, he even tried to kill your Mairead.”

Menahan’s slight smile was set, stonelike and implacable.

“Frayne was a—” McGarr remembered Descartes and tried to think of a term that was mathematical, “—variable. Wild and unpredictable and a liability because he knew enough to incriminate you. So you sent him to the Horse Show, thinking he’d create some sort of havoc, perhaps slay the mother or Bechel-Gore, if Keegan himself didn’t get them first. Only Paddy O’Meara could put a bend on you, and you knew him too well. He’d keep his mouth shut if you could just get him away. It was he who was waiting for Frayne in the back of the van at the Show Ground and with the final, the sixth Skorpion.

“Now,
why
is the curious point, is it not, Father?” McGarr spoke through his bottom teeth, remembering the way that Menahan had spread himself across the front seat of the Cooper that morning, godlike, his tone patronizing, his gestures didactic. “You saw your chance here,” McGarr swirled his left hand and the man flinched, “to play at god, didn’t you? The mother said she was going to take Mairead away from Dublin, and you, you decided it would be easy and perhaps a bit of fun to manipulate all—” what was it Menahan had said during the first interview?—“all God’s pap, the coarse and talentless, just to keep her with you.

“Bechel-Gore’s knowing of her would open up another direction. She’d probably want to stay with her parents out there in Galway and you’d remain as her teacher at least a while longer. But the money you extorted from him showed your true ‘nobility,’ Father—you being one of the ‘big’ persons yourself. And it titillated you too, didn’t it? With enough of it—why, you wouldn’t need Bechel-Gore or Murray or any of them. And if you played things right you could find yourself suddenly with quite a bit of it and in control of a big talent, like hers, and she a handsome young woman who stood to inherit a smart sum herself.

“Just like—” again McGarr remembered Menahan’s dossier, “—a mathematical equation, you could reduce things down to zero or at least one, Mairead, or perhaps two,
you
and Mairead, when in fact the equation solved out to no more than avarice and lust and a particularly repulsive piece of corporeality, physical and otherwise, Father, namely yourself.

“We’ll see how ‘god’s pap’ judges seven deaths and perhaps an eighth, and she—” McGarr gestured with his hands, “—your big talent.”

Menahan only closed his eyes and folded his hands across the top of his belly in a manner that was definitely priestlike.

“Don’t you feel anything, even for her?” McGarr demanded.

Slowly Menahan opened his eyes. “Oh, surely, Mister McGarr. Most definitely. But you see—” he turned his head to him, his smile soft, almost beatific, “—Mairead will survive. That’s assured.”

“By whom?”

Menahan only closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “And I must warn you here and now,” his voice still carried the soft, pleasant tone, “if you arrest me, I’ll slap a lawsuit on you and, mind, I’ve got the will and the money to make it stick. And after triple damages I’ll have to consider you a benefactor.”

McGarr’s body tensed, but he held himself back. “Hughie!” he called to Ward. He was willing to take the chance.

Sinclaire again enjoyed the flight, which had begun early in the evening that seemed to fall rapidly as they headed out over the Atlantic. They had a few drinks, a snack, played cards, and he even managed to get a little sleep. But waking every now and again, he kept half an eye on the tall, blond man who said he was a groom.

He had arrived at the airport only minutes before they took off, but the pilot said one of the Murray partners, from whom he, as Holohan, had bought two horses, had arranged for the service, and Sinclaire was genuinely pleased.

An hour after they were up, Sinclaire knocked on the cockpit door, pretending to want a look at the controls. He made small talk as he showed the pilot his Garda Soichana badge and the note he had written in the toilet.

Now, as the new day was dawning, the plane banked gently toward an island that appeared small and very green from afar, its beaches buff against the silver-gray sea.

“What’s that?” the young man asked, standing to look out the windows that were canted toward the earth.

“The Azores,” said Sinclaire. “We’ll refuel and get to stretch our legs.”

“Janie, but don’t it look—” His eyes fell on Sinclaire, who removed the newspaper on his lap.

The barrel of the Walther was pointing at O’Meara’s belly.

“I’ve been instructed to take you alive, Paddy, but it’s all one to me.”

McGarr, O’Shaughnessy, and McKeon were waiting at the Dublin Airport for the plane to put down.

Ward was at the Coombe Hospital where the girl had been moved from the intensive care section to a private room.

BARTHOLOMEW GILL
was the author of sixteen acclaimed Peter McGarr mysteries, among them
Death in Dublin, The Death of an Irish Sinner
and
The Death of an Irish Lover.
A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Mr. McGill wrote as Mark McGarrity for the
Newark Star-Ledger.
He passed away in the summer of 2002.

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