Irish Eyes (24 page)

“Afraid not,” I said, taking their coats.

“She’s got a bug up her rear about Bucky Deavers,” Edna volunteered. “Friday, she took two of my eighty-year-old girls over to Memorial Oaks, where they proceeded to get mugged and shot at. Then, today, she got in a car, blindfolded, and went off with a bunch of strangers to who-knows-where.”

“That true?” C. W. asked.

“Not all of it,” I said. “We didn’t get mugged, and it wasn’t a gunshot, it was a rock thrown at the windshield. I think. Anyway, let’s eat first, before Edna’s cornbread gets cold. I’ll give you the run-down after dinner.”

The four of us tucked into Edna’s eight-bean soup like there was no tomorrow, with Edna beaming every time somebody dipped back into the kettle for another bowlful.

“Lord have mercy,” she said. “I thought I’d made enough soup for Pharaoh’s army, but y’all have about cleaned me out.”

“No lunch,” C. W. said, sounding apologetic.

“What?” Linda screeched. “The man ate two ham sandwiches and a quart of potato salad for lunch today. Don’t let him fool you, Edna, he just loves home cooking. And he doesn’t get much of it at our home, I’ll admit.”

“Linda knows every takeout place in town,” C. W. said, patting his wife’s hand.

“Takeout,” Edna said, sniffing. “When I was coming up, the only takeout in our house was when my daddy took out the trash to be burned.”

“Here we go,” I warned our company. “She’s off on the good old days.”

Edna shot me a look. “Atlanta’s changed,” she declared. “Too much crime, too many people, too much traffic.”

“I hear that!” Linda said.

“I think it’s time to move,” Edna went on. “Did Callahan tell you Mac’s been offered a wonderful new job in Nashville? He wants us both to move there with him, but Callahan pitched a fit and they haven’t spoken a word to each other since.”

“Nashville?” Linda raised one elegant eyebrow. “I think you forgot to mention that, girlfriend.”

“It’s not really up for discussion,” I said.

“She doesn’t want to leave her precious business. Cleaning other people’s toilets. Or this precious house. In a neighborhood where thieves steal anything that isn’t nailed down,” Edna said.

“Could we please change the subject?”

“Fine,” Edna said, getting up. “Who wants banana pudding?”

We took coffee and dessert into the den. C. W. settled back in a wing chair, sipped his coffee, then took out a pen and pad of paper.

“I found out most of what you wanted,” he said, looking down at his notes. “Although I don’t know what any of it means.”

“None of it means anything so far as I can tell,” I admitted. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

“For starters, Sean Ragan was a member of the Shamrocks,” C. W. said. “And he’d worked off-duty security too. At that Vietnamese market. The one where he was shot.”

“Good God,” I said.

“Not so fast,” C. W. cautioned. “His partner, a dude named Antjuan Wayne, worked security there too. And he definitely wasn’t a Shamrock. Not unless they’ve put a new definition on black Irish, with the emphasis on black.”

“Huh?” Linda said, doing a double take.

“Antjuan Wayne is a brother,” C. W. said. “And he was working for our old buddy John Boylan.”

A
ntjuan Wayne,” Linda repeated. “Seems like I know that name. How long has he been on the force, C.W.?”

“He’s no rookie,” C.W. said. “My guy said he’s been around for maybe seven or eight years. He used to work for the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office before he went with the city.”

I took a sip of coffee. “So Ragan and his partners both worked off-duty gigs through John Boylan, but only Ragan was a Shamrock. And he got killed. Bucky worked an off-duty gig through Boylan, and he was a Shamrock, and he’s also got a bullet in his head. What does any of this mean?”

C. W. and Linda looked at me expectantly.

“I saw Lloyd Mackey this afternoon,” I said. “And I tried to get him interested in the idea that cops were involved in this holdup gang. He went through the roof. Wouldn’t even consider the idea.”

“What do you expect?” C.W. said. “Even I think it’s kind of far-fetched.”

“There’s something else,” I added. And then I told them about Bishop’s friend Fiske and his ambush at the ATM machine.
“The holdup man wore a mask, but he forgot his gloves,” I said. “He was wearing an FBI Academy ring, C.W.”

“He’s sure of that?” C. W. asked.

“He saw the same ring on a cop in the men’s room at Manuel’s and almost passed out, it unnerved him so bad,” I said.

“Can’t be too many rings like that running around Atlanta,” Linda pointed out. “The academy only takes maybe one or two people from the same department any given year, and they don’t always take them every year.”

“Mackey says there’s maybe six people at the APD who are academy grads,” I said. “Not counting himself.”

“He went two years before me,” C. W. said. “I never bought a ring, though. Didn’t have the money to spare.”

“What about Boylan? Did he go?”

C. W. snorted. “You kiddin’? This is an elite outfit, Garrity. I bet I could name most of the ones from the APD who are grads. Mackey, the chief, the assistant chief, Major Yates in sex crimes, and Lieutenant Tolliver in operations.”

“You’re not counting people like yourself, who retired, or people who went to the academy before joining the APD,” I said.

“No, and that doesn’t count cops from other departments who’ve gone, either,” C. W. admitted. “There’s guys from the GBI who have gone to Quantico, and Fulton County Police and DeKalb too, for that matter.”

“What about women?” Linda demanded. “It’s not still the good old boys, is it?”

“There were a couple women when I went, back in eighty-eight,” C. W. said. “So yeah, there are probably a handful of women around Atlanta who went to the academy.”

I shook my head. “This is getting us nowhere. We’re grabbing at straws. Somehow we’ve gotta find out why. Why was Bucky shot? And how is it connected to Sean Ragan’s murder?”

“That videotape from the liquor store would be a big help,” C. W. said.

“It would be, if I could get Deecie’s boyfriend William to
trust me. But I can’t get Mackey to give me any guarantees about how they’ll treat Deecie. And I don’t feel right lying to her about it. I mean, let’s face it. We’re talking about crooked cops. Guys who think nothing of sticking a loaded gun in somebody’s face for a bag of money. I think I trust Mackey. I think he’s one of the good guys. But what if I’m wrong?”

“Mackey?” Linda said, shaking her head. “He’s a hardheaded sumbitch, Callahan, but I just don’t see him throwing in with the likes of Boylan.”

“Lisa Dugan is in charge of the case,” I said. “And she’s one of them. She’s the one who told Mackey I was trying to connect Bucky’s shooting to the ATM robberies. I tried to talk to her about it the other night. She wouldn’t even discuss the possibility.”

“You think Bucky’s girlfriend had something to do with the shooting?” Linda asked. “That is cold, girl.”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “She wasn’t at the St. Patrick’s Day party, even though Bucky was expecting her. She was supposedly out on a call. That’s something I need to check into. C.W., were you able to put together a list of guys working for Boylan’s outfit?”

“Not everybody I called was home over the weekend,” C. W. said, picking up his notebook. “But I got five or six names, yeah. Besides Bucky, Ragan, and Wayne, there’s Kevin Phelan, works out of Southside, Tommy Bourke in communications, Dennis Farrell and Tim McMahan in Zone Four, and Dick O’Dwyer at the airport precinct. It’s anybody’s guess about the guys from other departments.”

“How about the armed robberies? You got any information on them?”

“My sources aren’t that good,” C. W. said. “What did Mackey say about them?”

“Just that they were in various jurisdictions, not all City of Atlanta,” I said. “East Point, Roswell, and Smyrna County have all had ATM holdups which he says fit the pattern I described. Could be more, but he just didn’t know about all of them.”

The three of us sat there, stumped.

“You know what I can’t figure out?” Linda said, breaking the silence abruptly. “How Pete Viatkos fits in with any of this. I mean, why would he rob his own store?”

“Maybe he didn’t,” I said slowly. “Deecie swears she didn’t take the money out of the safe. So maybe it wasn’t there in the first place. Maybe this whole thing is about something else all together.”

“Hey, y’all!” Edna stood in the doorway in her housecoat and slippers.

“Turn on Channel Forty-six. I was watching the news in my bedroom. They’re saying something on the news about that cop shooting last night.”

I grabbed the remote control and switched on the news. We were able to catch only the tail end of what the reporter was saying, something about how “Wayne has been put on administrative leave without pay, pending the outcome of the city investigation.”

The reporter segued smoothly into a story about a homeless rabbit that had taken up residence in a city park.

“What was that all about?” I said.

Edna nodded knowingly. “I saw it all. They were saying that this fella Antjuan Wayne maybe didn’t do all he could have to save his partner’s life. Because he never fired any shots at the man who killed that boy. Not a single one. And when the police started asking him a lot of questions, he got himself a lawyer, and he says he ain’t tellin’ nothing to those cops, on account of the whole thing is a racist plot, since he’s black and the dead fella is white.”

She paused, breathless. “Did you ever?”

C. W. buried his face in his hands. Linda sighed, reached over, and started to massage his shoulders.

“You know what’ll happen now?” he asked, looking up. “They’ll pin that boy’s killing on Antjuan Wayne.”

“How?” I said. “Antjuan Wayne was his partner. Surely the department doesn’t think he had something to do with Sean Ragan’s killing. That’s too much, C. W., even for me to believe.”

“You watch,” he said sadly. “The department’s already suspended
Wayne. He’s probably got himself a union lawyer, telling him to sit tight and keep his mouth shut. In the meantime, cops’ll be all over that crime scene twice as hard as they already were after Ragan got shot. They might not be able to charge Wayne with homicide, but they’ll sure as hell find a way to place the blame at his door one way or another. Negligence, dereliction of duty, no tellin’ what they’ll call it. But it’ll happen. I guarantee. And his life won’t ever be the same again.”

“Depressing, but true,” Linda agreed. “Makes me glad all over again we got out while the getting was good.” She tugged at C. W.’s hand. “Come on, big man, let’s get our baby and go on home.”

I stood and started gathering up the coffee cups and dessert plates.

“Antjuan Wayne knows how Sean Ragan got killed,” I said. “And why. And if he knows that, I’ll bet he knows something about what got Bucky shot in the head.”

“And he’s gonna tell you?” C.W. asked, doubt in his voice.

“Why not?”

O
nce a month, we hold a staff meeting, on Monday mornings usually, to discuss business and air grievances, but mostly as an excuse to eat cake for breakfast.

Edna had gone all out this time. She’d been rattling pots and pans since at least five
A.M.
By the time I staggered into the kitchen at eight o’clock, the counters were lined with her creations. A towering, three-layer carrot cake with maple-cream cheese frosting sat on my mother’s good milk glass cake stand. Next to it she’d placed an applesauce spice cake with caramel frosting. A lemon pound cake was cooling on a wire rack, and she was just finishing the icing on a red velvet cake when I walked in.

“Good Lord,” I said, sticking my finger in the pan of seven-minute frosting, “I can feel my blood sugar rising just standing here.”

Edna dropped the pan and her spatula in a sinkful of soapsuds. “Can you get the coffee started? The girls will be here any minute now. Cheezer was picking up Baby and Sister on his way over here.”

“What about Neva Jean?” I asked, spooning coffee into a
filter. “She didn’t get arrested again over the weekend, did she?”

“Not as far as I know,” Edna said. She put one of her flowered luncheon cloths on the kitchen table, then got her garden shears out of the junk drawer under the microwave.

“I saw the first red tulips in bloom out there by the side of the garage,” she said, thrusting the shears at me. “How about clipping me a centerpiece?”

“Tulips already? Isn’t it a little early?”

“It’s nearly April,” she reminded me. “These are an early variety I got out of a mail-order book. Come Easter, the whole yard should be in bloom.”

The tulips were right where she said they’d be. And nestled in the tall pale green grass beside them I found a few tiny grape hyacinths too, which I added to the bouquet, along with a stem of peach blossoms from the tree by the back fence.

Back in the house, I put the flowers in an old blue medicine bottle and set them in the middle of the tablecloth.

Edna cocked her head and smiled approval at the effect of the red flowers; blue vase; and red, white, and yellow cloth.

“Not bad for poor white trash,” she said, by way of a compliment.

She went to the windowsill, opened the window, and leaned out.

“Gonna be spring any minute now,” she said. “And a pretty one too, all this cool, rainy weather we’ve had. Did you see my New Dawn rose on the fence? It’s covered in buds. And I swear, there must be a thousand jonquils in that bed out front.”

She’d set herself up; it was too easy for me to close in for the kill. I gestured toward her garden, pregnant with bud and bloom. “And you want to leave all this? For Nashville?”

She turned and smiled serenely. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m gonna dig it all up and take it with me.”

Neva Jean slid a hunk of carrot cake onto a plate already piled six inches deep with spice cake, pound cake, and red velvet cake.

She took a forkful of maple–cream-cheese frosting and rolled her eyes.

“I swear, this is the first solid food I’ve been able to put in my mouth in four whole days,” she said. “That being in jail just tore up my system somethin’ awful. I think I got one of them jail bugs. Ever since I got home from there I been living on thin broth and Nabisco saltine crackers.”