The Wrong Kind of Blood (4 page)

I passed a sleek brushed-chrome-and-glass tram standing on the corner of the Green, cut across the Green onto Leeson Street, checked the address on the card I had been given at the funeral and climbed the steps of a Georgian terraced house. There was only one bell, for Doyle & McCarthy, Solicitors, and I pressed it.

After a short wait at reception, I took a lift to the second floor and was greeted by the slim, rangy, navy-suited figure of David McCarthy.

“Edward Loy, good morning, sir,” he said, his tone crisp and breezy. I followed him into a large conference room and we sat across from each other at a long, polished table. Light streamed in through the high sash windows and reflected off the diplomas and degrees that hung behind glass from the picture rail on the opposite wall.

“Nice to see you this fine morning,” David drawled, taking a black Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket and laying it on a pad of lined A4. “Do I take it this means you want me to sort out the old house for you?”

David McCarthy’s older brother Niall had been in my year at secondary school, and they had both shown up at the funeral. Niall was an accountant, David a solicitor in his father’s practice. Both possessed to the full the exemplary traits of the South County Dublin professional: an obsession with rugby and golf, an all-year tan, a complete lack of imagination, and a tendency to precede every other noun with the qualifier “old.”

“You do indeed, David,” I said. “I want to sell up and move back to the States as soon as I can.”

“Right. Well, we’ll try and make that as soon as possible for you. First off, even though both parents died intestate, it’s a straightforward old chain: your mother inherited the house from your father, and you inherit it from her; indeed, you’ve had a right to one-third of it since your father died.”

“That’s just it though. My father isn’t dead. Or at any rate, he may not be.”

“Lob that past me again?”

“He went missing. They never found him, or a body.”

“But that was a long time ago?”

“Over twenty years.”

“Right. Well, seven years is all you need. And obviously you’re going to need the old death certificate. So the first step is to have your father declared dead.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I got up, walked to a window and looked down into the street.

“Ed? Are you okay?”

“David, I… I’m not sure I’m ready to do this yet.”

“I understand perfectly. Day after the old funeral, many emotions, not the cleverest to rush into big decisions.”

“Maybe if I got back to you in a few days.”

“Absolutely. Take your time. And if there’s anything I can do in the meantime…”

David was rising, as if the meeting was over. I went back and sat down again, and after a moment, so did he.

“Well, yes, there is, that’s partly why I… I’m not exactly burdened with cash right now, so I was hoping to get some sort of document from you that I could take to the bank, let me borrow against the value of the house. Strictly short-term, of course.”

David cleared his throat and looked down at his Montblanc. He tapped it gently on the pad of lined paper.

“Right. Well, I can state to the bank my opinion of your intention to initiate probate. But only in an individual capacity. In terms of a document on behalf of this practice, I’d need you to have commenced the process, and only then would Doyle & McCarthy be positioned to give them a sensible estimate of how long it would take before you’d have your hands on the deeds.”

“And that’s the kind of letter the bank would need?”

“I can’t speak for every bank manager. But in my experience, that’s the only type of assessment upon which they’d be prepared to make, ahm, a cash advance.”

His voice had taken on a more distant, strained tone, as if the phenomenon of someone needing money was one he had heard of but regretted having to encounter directly. He unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and then screwed it back on again. I stood up, smiling, as if to reassure him that being broke was really no big deal.

“Not to worry. Well, listen, thanks anyway, David, and I’ll probably be back in to you soon enough.”

David walked me to the lift.

“Thanks indeed, sir,” said David. “See you round the old campus.”

We shook hands before the doors closed. I took the lift down and walked back the way I’d come, head down, angry and embarrassed with myself. It had never occurred to me that I would need a death certificate for my father. In L.A., I had simply put him from my mind, dead or alive. That’s what L.A. is for, to forget your past. But as soon as I got back to Dublin, I thought I’d see him on every street corner. I expected him to be at the funeral. I wasn’t ready to declare him dead, not yet. Not before I had some inkling of what had happened to him. It looked like I’d have to stick around after all. And since I’d had to borrow the airfare to get here, the first thing I was going to need was a job.

I walked down Westmoreland Street, crossed onto O’Connell Bridge and stared down into the green water of the river Liffey. It didn’t smell anymore — in my childhood, the only respite from its seemingly perpetual stink was when the aroma of burnt hops from the Guinness Brewery up on James’s Street enveloped the city in a warm narcotic cloud. The North Quays too had changed: there used to be so many abandoned and demolished buildings that Bachelor’s Walk and Ormond Quay looked like a mouthful of ruined teeth; now a row of smart new restaurants and enhanced shopfronts seemed to testify that cosmetic dentistry had finally arrived in Dublin, as no doubt it had. There was money on these streets, after all, and the people who had it were wearing it on their backs, and around their wrists and necks: why not in their mouths too? What was the point of having money if no one knew you had it? For too long, the Irish knew the shame of not having an arse to their trousers; no one could ever be allowed to think that again, and if that meant a carnival of ostentatious vulgarity and greed, well, didn’t we wait long enough for it? Wasn’t it no more than we deserved? Didn’t it prove we were as good as anyone else? And anyone who said different was only a begrudger.

I followed the river down Burgh Quay to Butt Bridge and looked past the gray limestone dome of the Custom House to the new cathedral of economic prosperity in Dublin: the International Financial Services Centre, a gleaming complex of blue-tinted plate glass and gray steel. It was a powerhouse for banks and brokers and all manner of moneymakers, and it made Dublin look like any other city. I guess that was the point: at one stage in our history, we tried to assert a unique Irish identity by isolating ourselves from the outside world. All that did was cause half the population to emigrate. Now we preferred to avoid distinctive national characteristics of any kind. Having once been anxious to prove that Ireland was not a colonial province called West Britain, we were now sanguine about our recolonization, resigned to our fate as the fifty-first state of the USA.

There was a noise behind me and I turned. Three gray-faced, snuffle-nosed wraiths in grimy navy and white sportswear had encircled me. Maybe if I hadn’t heard them above the traffic’s roar, they would have made a move, but head-on, their eyes fell away. They were carrying fast-food restaurant cups full of bright yellow liquid you were supposed to think was lemonade, but which everyone knew was methadone. The woman was nudging the taller of the two men, but he was staring fixedly at the ground. The smaller man was nodding and grinning vacantly at me. He had scabs on his eyebrows and beneath his lower lip where his piercings had become infected.

I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and said, “All right for smokes, are you?” They each took a couple, and I nodded at them and walked off toward Tara Street station.

“Big fucking deal. Think you’re it now, do ya? State of ya,” the woman shouted at my back.

“Thinks he’s fuckin’ it now, so he does,” one of the men agreed.

Dublin, where no kindness goes unpunished.

I got the DART back and walked down to my mother’s house. I didn’t feel comfortable about keeping a gun belonging to Podge Halligan there, whether what Tommy Owens had told me about it was true or not. I took the Glock 17 and the ammunition from the sideboard, wrapped them in an old towel and put them in the scuffed leather bag I’d managed to keep from the airline’s clutches. Coming out of the house, I could hear Tommy at work in the garage. I locked the gun in the trunk of the rental car and headed for Castlehill.

Pale hardwood floors and bare white walls made the open-plan ground floor of Linda Dawson’s house look even larger and emptier than it already was, like an art gallery waiting for an exhibition. A floor-to-ceiling plate glass window ran the length of the curved back wall. Through it you could see half the county, from the mountains to the sea, all over Bayview as far as Seafield Harbour, and beyond it to Dublin Bay itself.

Linda’s hair was wet, and her face glowed; she wore a short black silk robe and her feet were bare. She stood at a granite counter beside a stainless steel double-doored fridge. A crystal jug of mint leaves and a bottle of Stolichnaya rested by her elbow; a bunch of keys hung on a hook above the counter, with a small sign that read: “Car keys, you idiot.” Linda threw ice cubes and mint leaves and grapefruit juice into a tall glass.

“I’m having a drink. Grapefruit screwdriver. Are you interested? Or is it too early for you?”

“I’m interested. But it’s half-eleven in the morning. The only people it isn’t too early for are sitting in doorways with cuts on their heads.”

“Is that a yes or a no? There’s a pot of coffee freshly brewed.”

“I’ll have the coffee, please. Milk, no sugar.”

Linda poured a large slug of Stolichnaya into her glass and brought me a mug of coffee. She sat on a cream-colored sofa that ran along the back glass wall, tucked her bare legs beneath her and gave me a smile. Her eyes looked out of focus somehow, as if this was not the first drink she’d had, or she’d scarfed some tranquilizers, or both. Her black robe probably had a lot of uses, but keeping her soft brown body covered was not one of them.

“So tell me, Ed: what do you want from me?”

“No, tell me what you want from me. Are you sure you want me to find your husband?” I said, trying to keep my eyes fixed on hers and failing.

“I told you last night. Of course that’s what I want.” She smiled again, aware of the effect she was having. “It’s not all I want though.”

“It’s not all I want either. But as I’m going to be working for you, I’m afraid it’ll have to do. Because if I’m sleeping with a man’s wife, I tend to lose interest in her husband. So maybe you could put some clothes on. Then we can talk about Peter.”

Linda’s smile vanished in an instant. She flushed, and seemed to flinch, as if she’d been slapped. She stood up and left the room without a word. I wished for a moment that I’d had that drink.

Out in the bay, the first few sails dotted the sea. They gleamed pearl white in the powder blue haze. Seagulls swooped down the cliffsides and skimmed across the rippling tides. It was going to be another glorious day.

Linda returned wearing a black trouser suit. She sat down on the sofa again and said, “I hope this is sober enough for you. All my dun-colored sacks are at the cleaners.”

She took a long hit of her drink. She looked frightened again, but there was defiance in the set of her red mouth, and a flash of anger in her eyes. Before I had a chance to, she brought up the subject of money.

“Since you are going to be working for me, I suppose we better sort the practical side out first. What is it they used to say in the movies, twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses?”

“That must be the silent movies you’re thinking of. Last job I worked, I got a thousand dollars a day.”

“A thousand dollars? I thought you said you were the monkey. You helped the organ-grinder out.”

“That’s how it started.”

“And then what happened?”

“The organ-grinder died, and the monkey took his place.”

Linda’s hand went to her throat, and her eyes widened.

“You didn’t tell me that. How did your boss die?”

“He was murdered.”

“Did you get the guy who killed him?”

“His wife killed him.”

“His wife?”

“It’s nearly always the wife. And yes, I got her.”

Linda finished her drink and lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking. She made them stop.

“Weren’t we talking about money?” I said.

“How does seven-fifty a day sound?”

“It sounds fine. All right then. Did you get those records?”

“They’re all gone,” Linda said. “I checked his home office this morning. Bills, correspondence, personal photographs, they’ve all been taken.”

“I thought you said they were here.”

“I thought they were.” She gestured toward a pile of box files on the kitchen table. “Everything is on file with Peter, right back to his birth cert. But these boxes have been cleaned out.”

I looked at the four box files. Each one was clearly labeled: Bank — Statements/Cheque books; Eircom/Vodafone; Property; Shares. And each one was empty.

“There’s no sign of a break-in, so…”

She waved a hand in the air and shrugged, as if to suggest that it was a mystery, or that Peter must have taken them himself, or that she was already so out of it that she didn’t care what had happened to them. Then she nodded her head violently, as if ordering herself to get a grip, and sat forward, staring at the floor, her hands clenched in small fists between her knees. It was exhausting watching her change personality and mood every thirty seconds, and impossible to know if it was guilt, or fear, or just the blithe shape-shifting of a drunk.

“Can I see his office?”

“It’s upstairs, last door along.”

The white hall curved in a spiral up the stairs. I walked to the end of the landing and opened the door to Peter Dawson’s office. The wooden blinds were closed, so I flicked the lights on. An entire wall’s worth of shelving was crammed with box files encompassing every aspect of Peter’s life. There were files dealing with school, university and work; files labeled Swimming, Tennis, and Sailing; there were even files devoted to stamp collecting, football cards and the Boy Scouts, and two files stamped “Scrapbooks — Pop” and “Scrapbooks — Sport.” Linda was right: Peter had his entire life filed away up here. I worked my way through each box, checking the contents off against the labels. The only other files that were empty, apart from a couple of unmarked boxes, were two labeled “Family 1” and “Family 2,” and another marked “Golf Club.”