Red Herring (9 page)

“Did they ever,” said the cop. “You got a couple in I hope?”

“One or two,” said Molloy. “Steven, this is Al Furst, from San Francisco. Al, Sergeant Murphy, who’s in charge out here.”

“Mr Furst,” said Murphy, shaking Furst’s hand. “Johnny taking you sightseeing?”

“I’m working with Furst on a fraud case,” said Molloy. “This could be connected. Can you tell us anything?”

“Missing person at this stage,” said Murphy. “But between you and me and the lamppost it feels like suicide. We get a bit of that out here.” He pointed to an elderly man talking to the constable. “That gent was taking his dog for a walk along the beach earlier and saw a fella sitting on the sand staring out to sea. He said hello and that but the bloke didn’t respond, and when he came back the other way there was no sign of him except for a pile of clothing and a letter stuck down with a piece of driftwood. There’s a sort of rock shelf that goes out about fifty yards off the beach. It’s visible at low tide. At the end’s a sheer drop.”

“No body?” said Molloy.

“Not yet.”

“You got a name?” said Molloy.

“We have,” said Murphy.

“Was it Frank O’Flynn?” said Furst.

Murphy looked at him.

“Oh. Pardon me,” said Furst. He reached into his jacket and took a card from his wallet.

Murphy looked at it and turned it over. “Insurance investigator,” he said, unimpressed. “I see.”

“I had twenty years in the San Francisco Police Department,” said Furst. “Retired two years ago as District Chief of Detectives.”

Murphy nodded. “The letter was signed Frank O’Flynn.”

“Any chance we could take a look?” asked Furst.

“That’s how you’d do it in the San Francisco Police Department, is it?” said Murphy.

Furst put his hands up. “Fair enough,” he said. “Worth a shot, though.”

The policeman glanced around and stepped forward. He lowered his voice. “It’s a goodbye-cruel-world sorta thing. He stole some money the Australian unions had raised for the wharfies, and couldn’t live with himself.”

“Yeah, that’d be tough,” said Molloy. “You going to send someone out to look for the body?”

“In this rip?” said the policeman. “He’ll wash up in a couple of days.”

“If the sharks don’t get him first.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“What do you think?” said Molloy, closing his door with a wince and putting the key in the ignition.

“Not a lot,” said Furst, lighting a cigarette. “For a seaman he doesn’t have a lot of luck around water.”

“No,” said Molloy.

The office at the Piha camping ground had a few grocery items for sale, bread and milk, butter, lollies, soft drinks, yesterday’s
Star.
Molloy bought four bottles of lemonade.

Molloy drove in silence up the Piha Hill, keeping an eye on the heat gauge. Just before the top he began to smell steam.

“Uh oh,” said Furst.

Molloy pulled over and left the engine running. The two men got out. Molloy undid the bonnet. The motor was hissing and growling.

“Head gasket?” said Furst.

“Hope not,” said Molloy. “The radiator hose is frayed. I have to replace it, but I’ve been putting it off.” He got a rag from the boot and wrapped it round his hand, and slowly eased off the cap. Brown boiling water bubbled over the lip. He opened the lemonade and trickled it into the radiator. Both men stared into the core. There were no tell-tale bubbles.

They made it to Oratia and stopped at a bowser. There were pies in a warmer and they bought one each, and two bottles of Coca-Cola,
and sat on a bench in the sun while the mechanic replaced the hose and flushed out the radiator.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” said Furst, indicating Molloy’s battered face. “How did this Sunny feller know you were looking for O’Flynn?”

“I was wondering that myself,” said Molloy. “I only told two people. They know how to keep their traps shut.”

Molloy dropped Furst back at the hotel and went home. It was a bit early for tea, but he wasn’t hungry anyway. He closed the curtains and got undressed. The aspirin had worn off and he felt stiff and sore and tired. He sat on the edge of his bed, had a couple of belts from his flask, lay down and closed his eyes. He drifted off, and slept like a baby.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sergeant Pat Toomey liked his bacon crisp.

“What do you call this?” he said, waving a rasher above his plate.

Brigid was ironing. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll put it back in the pan.”

“Undercooked bacon and an overcooked egg,” said Toomey. “Good thing I didn’t ask for something difficult like toast. Or God forbid a cup of tea.” He dropped the rasher onto the plate and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “No wonder your miserable family couldn’t wait to shovel you off on me.”

Brigid’s reply was lost in the hissing of the iron.

Toomey put down his fork. “Beg your pardon?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Don’t tell me fibs, Brigid,” he said. “What did you say?”

“Ma didn’t want me to go with you at all,” Brigid said, the words coming out in a rush. “She saw you from the first for the sleeveen you are.”

In 1948, Toomey, a nephew of Monsignor Toomey from St Patrick’s Cathedral in Wyndham Street, had received a special dispensation from the Church to have his late mother cremated, and making liberal use of a State Advances loan had taken her ashes back to Ireland to be buried next to her parents in the graveyard of St Theresa’s in Clonakilty, on the coast in County
Cork. He had met Brigid through the parish priest of St Theresa’s, Father Donovan. She was the sixth of eleven children of a clerk with the Rural Electrification Scheme. Her father suffered from the drink and the family’s circumstances were modest. At twenty-three and unmarried, her prospects were not unlimited. Toomey looked like a catch.

“A
sleeveen
?” he said, standing and loosening his belt. It was thick leather, smooth and polished, and came out in an easy sweep. He doubled it over and smacked it into his hand, coming round the table, a black look on his face. She tried to run but the kitchen was tiny and he caught her easily, backhanding her with the belt, the leather drawing blood above the eye.

“I will not,
stand,
for that sort of, bog, Irish, traveller
filth,
in my
own house,
you hear me?” he said, hitting her from every angle until she collapsed in a corner.

It was over in seconds. He picked up a folded handkerchief from the ironing board and wiped his face, breathing heavily.

“I wish I was dead,” she said through tears.

“I’ll be home at six,” he said, putting his belt back on, squaring the buckle. “For tea, God help me.” He removed his uniform jacket from its hanger on the back of the kitchen door.

She touched her fingers to her mouth and looked at the blood. “I’ll go to the station and report you to the superintendent, that’s what I’ll do,” she said. “Your own pals will arrest you.”

“Try that and they’ll certify you, Brigid. You’ll be locked up on Pakatoa Island with the nutcases and the inebriates and never heard of again.”

“I won’t be here when you get back. I can’t stay with you no longer.”

“You will be,” he said, combing his hair in the hall mirror. “You’ve nowhere else to go. For my sins I’m stuck with you.”

He picked up his helmet from the telephone stand. “Good day, Brigid,” he said, closing the door quietly on his way out.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Molloy went to Leo O’Malley Menswear in Karangahape Road to replace his suit, ruined in the run-in with Sunny Day. Leo talked him into a new white shirt to go with the Cambridge two-piece.

He had scraped more of the scabbed blood off his nose and chin, leaving the skin in both places red and a bit raw but starting to settle, and his body no longer felt like it had been run over. He had had a good long shower at the Municipal Baths and that helped, and he had gone to Julian Maloney’s barbershop in Victoria Street for a shave and a haircut.

He decided to treat himself to bacon and eggs and a pot of tea at the Piccolo. He read about the fighting round the 38th parallel, and the imminent arrival of the England cricket team, and in the Personals column, the source of a surprising amount of work, he saw a notice, inserted by the WWU, respectfully inviting friends of the late Francis Xavier O’Flynn to a memorial service later that morning. How Jock Barnes must have hated handing money over to the
Herald,
Molloy thought.

There was a crowd in front of the Trades Hall in Hobson Street, talking and smoking and gradually shuffling inside. Molloy parked his car round the corner and joined them. The hall was full, with people crammed in at the back and along the sides. Molloy stood just inside the main doors. There was a line of wooden chairs across
the stage, with a lectern in the middle and an upright piano off to one side. A canvas backdrop hanging behind the seating depicted brightly coloured scenes from the eternal struggle of the working man woven round the stirring IWW declaration,
If Blood Be the Cost of Your Cursed Wealth, Good God! We Have Paid in Full!

The Waterside Workers’ Union executive — Mark Thomas, Malcolm Walker, Dennys Watkins, Peter Winter and John Green, with Toby Hill and Jock Barnes in the lead — clumped onto the stage and took their seats. The audience gradually stopped talking. Barnes stood in front of the lectern. He turned back and leaned down to whisper something in Hill’s ear. He hitched his trousers and adjusted his tie. He took some sheets of paper from his pocket, shuffled them and put them down. He looked towards the ceiling at the back of the hall, turned to check that his officials were in place, and began.

“Brothers. And, ah, sisters, of course,” he said. “Welcome. Sad day. As you’ll have no doubt heard, our comrade-in-arms, Frank O’Flynn, has, ah, passed away, God rest his soul. O’Flynn was a true son of Ireland and, of course, a watersider. I spoke to Father Delaney earlier and the good Father felt that under the circumstances he’s most likely to be in Limbo presently, given the whatchamacall, the current difficult circumstances, rather than, ah, you know?” He glanced down at the floor. “I think those of you who are RC in particular will appreciate that reassurance. Thank you, Father.” Delaney nodded graciously from his seat in the front row. The parish priest of St Joseph’s was one of those clerics who had, in the words of Pat Booth from the
Auckland Star,
enlarged the definition of papal infallibility to include himself.

Barnes looked at the lectern for an awkward few seconds. “Now, you’re going to hear all sorts of stories about Frank putting his hand
in the till and that, and I want to tell you it’s pure bunkum from end to end. That’s what the ruling class wants you to believe, see, because divide and conquer’s how they play the game.”

He patted his pockets until he found a handkerchief, unfolded it, and blew his nose loudly. It seemed to go on and on. Two little boys in the second row began giggling. A woman leaned over and clipped one of them hard on the ear. The boy turned and looked at her, shocked and wounded, his little face saying, “What was that for?” And then he caught his pal’s eye and they were off again, hunched over, their little shoulders going up and down like pistons in a tiny, speeding car. Barnes folded his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

“When a man,” he said, “takes his own life, who can understand it? Certainly, he was under pressure. It looks like, ah, he buckled. Well, that’s no good. It’s what the employers and the Government and Holland and the Yanks and them want, see. Capitulation. Well, it’s not going to happen. So, ah, that’s that.”

Barnes took his notes off the lectern and left the stage. The executive turned in sync to watch him go and then turned back and looked at one another uneasily. The room was quiet.

“How do you spell
perfunctory,
Mr Molloy?” a voice whispered from behind him. Molloy turned. It was Caitlin O’Carolan, her hair tied under a black scarf.

“The only big word I know is
retainer,
Miss O’Carolan,” he whispered back, after a moment.

Caitlin caught his arm. “Gosh,” she said. “What happened to you?”

“Tripped on a rug,” he said.

“Mr Barnes doesn’t appear to be terribly upset by Mr O’Flynn’s passing,” said Caitlin.

Molloy looked at her. “Jock’s probably the sort of bloke who does his bawling in private,” he said.

Caitlin snorted.

Toby Hill stood up and walked to the lectern.

“Um, thanks, Jock, for those moving words,” he said. “Yeah, no, good. Now, some of the boys would like to perform a song in Frank’s memory. Frank was over there in Spain, a premature antifascist as our good friends the Yanks like to say, wounded and that, brave thing to do, so, ah, gents?”

The Watersiders’ Chorale — Dave Galler, Eddie Mee, Peter Rogers, G.R.C. Howie and the Gillies brothers — lined up on stage. Paul Jeffrey, a seagull and part-time music teacher at Seddon Tech, who occasionally sat in for Crombie Murdoch with Ted Croad’s big band at the Orange Ballroom on a Saturday night if Crom was out on the ran-tan with Ross Burge, and who dreamed of one day going to New York and playing those joints on 52nd Street — or Sydney, Sydney would be good, there was a scene in Sydney — carried a chair over to the piano. He began with an arpeggio in the hand-over-hand style of the Kansas City boogie-woogie master Pete Johnson, but funereally paced, as if the latter was suffering from a particularly bad case of the blues and didn’t feel like stretching out. Jeffrey’s versatility was dazzling. He stopped and cracked his knuckles. There was some coughing and shuffling from the crowd, and then silence. He squared his shoulders, nodded to Dave Galler, and gently played the opening chords of “Red River Valley”.

“There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama,” Galler began in a high, sweet voice, with the others joining in on the second line, Eddie Mee’s earthy
basso profundo
providing a pleasing counterpoint at the bottom end.

It’s a place that we all know so well