Irish Eyes (32 page)

“Did Corky come home tonight?” I asked.

“Of course he came home. Where else would he go? He lives here. He played golf with a buddy this afternoon, came home and showered, and said he had to go to a wake. For that officer who was killed. He said he’d be late. A few drinks with the boys. He’ll be along home any minute now. What is this, Julia?” She peered over my shoulder, saw the cruisers at the curb.

She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus.” She clutched my arm, the nails digging into my flesh. “You have to tell me, Julia. What’s happened to him?”

“Corky’s in trouble, Marie,” I said. “We need to find him. Do you know where he might be?”

“I’ve got to call Chuckie,” she said, turning around, forgetting I was there. “Chuckie will know.”

I followed her into the kitchen. It was the kitchen I remembered from my childhood. The green linoleum was worn in places, but freshly waxed. A bowl of apples and bananas sat in the middle of the Formica dinette table. There was a plate sitting on the counter. Sliced chicken, rice and gravy, green beans. Nicely covered with plastic wrap, so she could warm up Corky’s dinner in the microwave, the way she always had when he came in late from work or a ball game or a church meeting. Tacked up above the kitchen window was a wooden crucifix. Looped around it was a bleached-out strand of palm. Palm Sunday is this Sunday, then April and Easter. She would burn the old frond, the way she always did, and replace it with a new one. That much was a constant.

Marie pulled open kitchen drawers, scrabbling for something. “My glasses,” she cried. “I can’t find my glasses. Chuckie and Heather just moved to Rockdale County. For the kids. The schools here are just terrible now. Coloreds, you know. Not like when you all lived here. I can’t seem to remember that new number. You’d think I could remember my son’s phone number, wouldn’t you? But it’s written down in my book. Right here in my green address book.”

“Marie,” I said gently. “Look at me. Don’t worry about calling Chuckie right now. Think. Where would Corky go if he were in trouble? Where would he go, Marie?”

“Why, he’d come home to me,” she said, smiling.

I thought about those closed garage doors.

“Marie, does Ila Jo Tice still live next door?”

“Of course,” she said. “Her kids want her to move to Florida, because of her arthritis, but you know how Ila Jo is. Set in her ways.”

The green address book was in the kitchen drawer with the
warranties for the microwave and the dishwasher. I found Chuckie’s number, called and woke him up, suggested he might want to be with his mother. Then I called Ila Jo Tice and woke her up too. It took a few minutes to find Marie’s slippers. We walked next door, arm in arm, and I told Marie that Edna was fine, and that no, I wasn’t married, and yes, Maureen had a big job as a nurse, and my brothers were all right and Edna had three grandchildren.

Ila Jo had shrunk, too. Or maybe I had gotten bigger.

Once we had Marie settled, Mackey and Rakoczy followed me inside the Hanlons’ house, and I showed them the door from the kitchen into the garage. The Chrysler’s hood was still warm. Corky was slumped over in the front seat and there was a smear of blood on the driver’s side window. A bloodspattered cap was on the car seat.

That cap. I’d seen it earlier in the day. The gray Chrysler too. Corky, the cap pulled down over his eyes, cruising past Memorial Oaks. Waiting. Waiting and watching for Deecie Styles to come out of her hidey-hole.

I went back inside and closed the kitchen door. Marie wouldn’t like it if we tracked mud and blood all over the place.

C
orky hadn’t had time for much of a farewell. The note was written on the back of an old envelope.

“Marie. I’m sorry.”

Mackey pulled a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket, slipped them on, picked up the gun, and looked at it.

“Ragan was killed with a bullet from a nine millimeter,” he said.

“You know many cops who don’t own one of these?” Rakoczy asked.

The cash, mostly twenties and fifties, was rolled up in foillined empty paint cans on Corky’s workbench. Mackey fanned the bills out on the workbench. “Maybe ten, twelve thousand,” he said. “Not so much, really,” he said, looking down at the worn bills.

“Not to you,” I pointed out. “But Corky was a sheriff’s deputy during the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. The most money he ever made was probably twenty-five thousand a year. He bought a house in the suburbs and put a kid through college on that. I don’t remember a time he didn’t work an extra job.”

Rakoczy jerked his head toward the driveway. “That’s a brand-new Cadillac out there.”

“For Marie,” I said. “I bet he paid cash for it, too. First time in his life.”

“Last time in his life,” Mackey said dryly.

They found the knife wrapped in a towel, shoved under the front seat of the Chrysler. The crime-scene technician held it out for us to see. “Blood and tissue on the blade,” he said. “This is good.”

I thought of Deecie Styles, and of Faheem, and I gagged.

“Some cop,” Mackey said, laughing at my discomfort.

“Tonight? For once I’m proud to say I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”

“What about the rest of them?” Rakoczy asked. “Boylan and those guys? And Viatkos?”

“Corky Hanlon didn’t dream up this scheme all by himself,” I told Mackey. “Somebody recruited him. My money is on John Boylan.”

“You really hate that guy, don’t you?” Mackey asked.

“You think he’s not involved? You think he’s an innocent bystander in this whole deal?”

“What I think doesn’t matter. I’ve got to have proof. Once I get that, I’ll knock Boylan’s fat mick ass in prison so fast his head will spin.”

“What about Antjuan Wayne?” I asked. “Seems like he might have something interesting to say about all of this.”

Mackey shrugged. “For now, it’s up to the feds. Antjuan’s lawyer wants to cut a deal. Wayne’s saying he found out about the ATM robberies after Ragan got drunk and bragged about the new Rolex he’d bought himself. Wayne claims all he wanted out of Ragan was a chance to work some of those big money security jobs. So he told Ragan unless the Shamrocks cut him in on the action, he’d turn them in. Ragan supposedly referred Wayne to Viatkos, and Viatkos, who didn’t give a shit about ethnic Irish loyalties, suggested Wayne might be useful working at some of the black nightclubs on the Southside. Wayne swears he only did one robbery, at a strip club down there. After that, he claims, he told Viatkos he was through.”

“What does he know about the Budget Bottle Shop robbery?” I asked.

“He won’t talk about that,” Mackey said, shaking his head. “And he’s definitely not talking about Ragan’s murder. Not unless the feds cut him a deal.”

“What I’d like to know is, where’s the money coming from to pay David Kohn?” Rakoczy asked.

“The African American Patrolmen’s Association,” Mackey said. “These folks take care of their own.”

It was dawn by the time Mackey and his men finished their search of Corky Hanlon’s house. When I heard the thud of a newspaper hitting the driveway outside, I went out on the front porch and sat in a wooden rocking chair and watched my old neighborhood come to life.

Cars flashed by. A yellow school bus rumbled past, stopping at the same corner where my sister and brothers and I waited for the bus. Three kids clambered aboard the bus, dressed in the unisex uniform of the moment, baggy jeans that drooped around their hips, T-shirts, and ball caps turned backward. Two of the kids were black, one white.

Ours had been the house across the street, a split-level ranch much like the Hanlons’, except ours was red brick, with a dark blue front door. The spindly little azaleas my mother had tended reached nearly to the porch roof now, and the new owners had converted the garage to a den with a big bay window.

I glanced over to the right and saw Marie Hanlon silhouetted in the window of Ila Jo Tice’s kitchen. She was standing there, drinking coffee, watching her house, and the invaders who’d taken possession of what used to be her life. Chuckie’s blue minivan was gone from her driveway.

I stood and stretched, then walked across the lawn to the Tices’ house, feeling the crunch of the browned-out winter grass beneath my boots.

Ila Jo met me at the front door. She wore a print blouse and dark slacks, her hair was neatly combed, fresh lipstick in place, even though the circles under her eyes told me she had not slept the night before.

“Is it true?” she asked, her voice low. “Marie says Corky was in some kind of terrible trouble. He’d been drinking. That’s why he did it.”

I didn’t answer at first. “Do you think she’d mind talking to me?”

“She’s been talking all night,” Ila Jo said. “First to the detectives, then to me. She’s trying to make sense of things. Chuckie didn’t want to hear a word against his daddy, of course. But Marie says she knew Corky was in trouble.”

“Julia?” Marie called from the other room. “Come on in, honey.”

Her hair was still wrapped up in those curlers, but she’d exchanged the green bathrobe for a fuchsia warm-up suit Heather had fetched from the house the night before.

Ila Jo poured me a cup of coffee and the three of us sat down at the kitchen table.

“He was drunk,” Marie announced. “Corky never would have killed himself if he were sober. So he can still have a Catholic burial, don’t you think?”

I nodded, unsure.

She went on, the words pouring out, like a spigot that had been suddenly unstoppered. “Will it be in the papers, do you think? Chuckie is so upset. He doesn’t want the kids to know their Paw-Paw was in any trouble. He’s going to tell them it was an accident, that Paw-Paw was cleaning his gun and it went off.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. I thought it was a terrible idea to lie to kids, but then I didn’t have any of my own, so I wasn’t an authority on such things.

“Corky has been so upset,” Marie went on. “He didn’t sleep. He’d get up in the middle of the night, and go into his office or out to the garage, and he’d stay for hours, just tinkering and piddling. He was drinking more, too, with those Shamrock fellows. Seemed like they had a meeting every night. He knew I didn’t like that, but he didn’t care.”

“Did he talk about the other members? John Boylan? A woman named Lisa Dugan?”

Marie looked shocked. “A woman? They let a woman in?
Corky told me it was just the boys. He talked about somebody named Johnny. And there was a Sean, and some other men.”

“What was he tinkering with?” I asked.

“Just things. He had his gun case out in the garage, and he liked to get his guns out and clean and oil them. He’d work on that old Chrysler of his. Or he’d go in his office and lock the door. We put a desk and filing cabinet in there for an office for Corky, after Chuckie got married and moved out.”

“What made you think he was upset?” I asked.

“He wasn’t himself,” Marie said, her eyes filling with tears. “I’d ask him a question, just a simple question, and he’d bite my head off, really cuss me out good. Then he’d turn around and cry like a baby and beg me to forgive him. ‘Forgive what?’ I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

“How long had he been like that?”

“A year, maybe? I thought it was because he was working those security jobs. He didn’t really like to work nights, but he said the money was too good to turn down. And he worked Sundays. He hadn’t been to Mass with me in months. You know that’s not like Corky. He said it was just temporary. Easy money, he called it. We were going to take the whole family on a cruise to Alaska. That’s what he was saving for.”

“Where was he working?” I asked.

“Different places,” Marie said. “A grocery store on Buford Highway. He didn’t like that place at all. The Vietnamese man who owned it wanted him to go out in the parking lot and bring in the shopping carts. He was hateful to Corky, but Corky said that wasn’t his job. Sometimes he worked at a liquor store in downtown Atlanta. He liked that better, because he mostly just sat at the counter and talked to the clerk.”

“A liquor store? Was it the Budget Bottle Shop?”

“Bottle Shop?” Marie wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. “That could be right. Near the new police station. He knew almost all the old-time officers. Not so many of the younger ones, though.”

“Did he ever mention a clerk who worked there? A girl named Deecie?”

“That’s the girl the detectives kept asking about,” Marie said, looking up from her coffee cup. “Was she a skinny colored girl? Had a baby?”

“That’s right,” I said eagerly. “Did Corky work with her?”

“Sometimes,” Marie said. “I told the detectives that. Later on, Corky told me she stole a lot of money from that store, and that Pete, that’s the owner, wanted to find her and make her give the money back.”

“Did Pete ask Corky to help find her?”

“She lived over in colored town,” Marie said. “You know how those people are. Won’t say a word to a white person. Terrible neighborhood. Corky said a little boy no bigger than our grandson Adam tried to sell him some of that dope.”

Marie rambled on some more about Corky and his plans for their family cruise, and how she needed to talk to Father Drennen about funeral arrangements.

She stopped talking suddenly. “Was he in pain, do you think?”

“No,” I said. “It was very quick.”

Some solace.

I went home and took a long hot bath. My knees were scraped and my hip was bruised from the previous night’s acrobatics.

Edna was talking on the phone when I came out of the bathroom into the den. She hung up, her face stricken. “That was Ila Jo Tice,” she said. “She told me about Corky Hanlon.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“Poor Marie. Ila Jo says the police asked Marie about that girl Deecie. Do they think Corky killed her?”

“It looks that way.”

“Why? That foolish old drunk. He was harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

I wanted to tell her about my experience the night before, looking down the barrel of Corky’s 9-mm, about scrambling away from the bullets he intended to kill me. About the blood-stained
knife Corky had drawn across Deecie Style’s neck. Instead I took a comb and tried to bring some order to my tangled mop of curls. I yanked and tugged and nearly combed myself bald.