The Color of Blood (11 page)

“What gives you the right to talk to us like that? Who the fuck do you think you are?” she said. She stepped in and raised her hand to slap me. I caught her wrist and held it.

“I thought I could trust you,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to.”

I let her wrist go. She held her hand in space for a moment, then reached for the back of my head, and her eyes widened and her lips parted as she pulled herself close to me and pushed her face at mine, and her smell was all salt earth and spice, and I could feel the blood in my chest, in my throat, and we were kissing, her hands in my hair, pressing my mouth to hers, her tongue on mine. She put my hand on her breast, and ran hers between my legs; we were pulling at each other’s clothes, biting each other’s lips. “Come on,” she said, and maybe she had a room in mind, but we didn’t get further than the stairs; she turned on the wide steps and pushed me down and lowered herself on me with a moan, and we fucked beneath a portrait of Dr. John Howard, and our cries echoed around the hall like memories, and when we finished, her eyes were wet on my brow.

“What is it?” I said.

She shook her head and put a finger to my lips and smiled.

“I’m sorry, Ed. I’m sorry Shane has drawn you into all this. Drawn you in here.”

She wouldn’t say any more. We fixed ourselves up and stood in the hall, not looking one another in the eye. I had a metallic taste in my mouth; I drew my knuckle across my lips and it came away smeared with blood; Sandra laughed and did the same. It was the kind of sex you spend your life dreaming about and doing your best to avoid, the kind that, even if you almost always regret it, makes you feel like you’re truly alive. There was a sound from across the hall, as if someone was approaching; when no one came, I thought it more likely that someone had been watching, then slipped away.

Sandra came out with me to my car. The mist seemed to have cleared a little, at least enough to make out bonfires south toward the mountains; the damp night air was thick with smoke. Sandra leant against the roof.

“You don’t have to know everything, Ed,” she said. “What happened twenty years ago may not be relevant today.”

“You thought it was in the case of Jessica. You think it is for Jonathan and Dr. Rock.”

“And what, we should share everything with you and let you decide what’s important?”

“That’s right,” I said, smiling because she was, smiles as steady and false as masks.

“And what does that make you? More father confessor than detective.”

“Call it what you will,” I said. “I’ll find it out anyway. What happened here didn’t start last week, and it’s not going to stop overnight. All you can do is slow it down. Once it’s begun, you can’t stop it. Unless you want to sacrifice Emily and Jonathan. Because they’re the ones who are suffering for your silence.”

This time I let the slap come. Sandra Howard hit me full across the face, and stared at me, trembling, blinking back tears, and then turned and walked back up the steps and inside the pale granite castle and closed the great doors of Rowan House behind her.

I got a number for David Manuel from directory inquiries, and rang on the drive down to Woodpark. Manuel’s wife answered, and was reluctant to hand the call over — I could hear conversation and laughter in the background — but I kept insisting until he came to the phone.

“David Manuel.”

His voice was quiet and precise.

“My name is Loy, I’m a private detective, employed by the Howard family. I found Emily Howard — I believe she’s a client of yours.”

Manuel said nothing.

“I’d like to talk to you about her, and about Jonathan.”

“I can’t tell you anything about what they’ve told me, that’s privileged.”

“Of course. But you might be a help in other ways. In what you know about the Howard family, for example.”

“I told you, that’s confidential—”

“Not all of it may be. Not all of it has to be. You’re not a doctor or a priest; you’re not bound by any real laws, after all. And they’re both in danger, you know, Emily and Jonathan.”

“In danger? Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Loy?”

“Maybe just a little. I’m certainly scared on their behalf. And I don’t scare so easily. They’d both be in jail if I told the Guards what I know. Can I come and visit you now?”

“Now? I have people here, I can’t just… no, that’s out of the question.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“I have a client at nine.”

“I’ll be at your door at eight.”

I ended the call before he could object.

The Woodpark Inn had a bar with lino on the floor and tables and chairs laid out and some unspeakable celebrity talent show at maximum volume on the television and fluorescent lights glaring and a dartboard and fifty or so people who wouldn’t see fifty again drinking pints and whiskey and lemonades and arduously not smoking. They looked like they’d been coming here all their lives, and they probably had. The lounge was relatively quiet: couples with nothing to say to each other and subdued groups of ill-assorted women in their forties sat beneath the skeletons and pumpkin balloons like adults in their children’s bedrooms, wondering how they’d grown too old to enjoy the action but not old enough to feel relaxed about missing it. There was no sign of Sean Moon, or the Reillys, or Brock Taylor. The action — the Halloween Battle of the Bands — was taking place in a hall that must originally have housed dances, maybe bingo nights. The bouncer had a shaved head and a big black mustache; he looked at me and smiled and said “Too old” in an Eastern European accent. I said, “Record company.” He inclined his head toward the racket that was emerging, looked back at me in a skeptical kind of way, then shrugged elaborately, as if human folly was beyond his control, and let me pass.

I paid twenty euro to a bored-looking girl in white baggy sportswear with lacquered hair tied tight in a topknot and went inside. The bouncer was right: I was too old. The hall was full of goth kids and surfpunk kids, metal kids and indie kids, kids who were trying to look like all of the foregoing and failing, groomed and styled OMIGOD girls in party frocks and burly-looking rugby boys with their hair gelled into fins. There were a few older faces, casualties from the culture wars, the type you see at rock gigs everywhere — plump, bikerish alcoholic women with purple hair and tattoos, tiny wrinkled men with dirty grey ponytails — but basically, it was a room full of kids, and I was a forty-three-year-old man in a suit among them. I felt pretty sleazy, but then, I’d been feeling pretty sleazy the whole day, ever since Shane Howard had shown me pornographic pictures of his daughter and, amidst the pity and indignation I felt on Emily’s behalf, I hadn’t been able entirely to suppress the rather less noble feeling of lust, or subsequently to banish the lurid images from my heated brain. I got a pint of Guinness at the bar and found out from an elfin barmaid with enormous eyes and short plum-colored hair whom I also let believe I was from a record company that The Golgotha Pyre wouldn’t be on for a while. The band onstage were dressed in ruffles and lace and floppy white shirts and wore a lot of makeup; I couldn’t work out if they were impersonating the new romantic bands from the early eighties or the current wave of bands who impersonated them. I finished my drink and got a second; the barmaid pointed Jerry Dalton out to me across the hall, and told me they’d already had a lot of interest, but that no one had done a deal yet, and that whoever signed them was going to be very lucky; her great eyes glowed with passion as she spoke, as if she were more than a little in love with Dalton herself; I asked her if she knew if Emily Howard was Dalton’s girlfriend, and she shook her head and smiled pityingly at my middle-aged literal-mindedness, and said all she cared about was the music.

Jerry Dalton was tall and lean with a dark mop of wavy black hair that came to his shoulders and a goatee that failed to disguise the clean line of his lantern jaw; he wore a black T-shirt with
GOLGOTHA PYRE
written on it in letters of flame, black jeans and black boots with thick metallic soles. An inverted crucifix hung around his neck, and he wore a lot of rings and bracelets with skulls and serpents’ heads on them. He was standing at a tall circular bar table with a bottle of Budvar talking to a faintly insane-looking guy with very long ginger blond hair cut in a fringe and black-rimmed glasses, who vanished when I introduced myself.

“A private detective? Whoa, deadly,” said Jerry Dalton. “What can I do for you?”

“I want to ask you about your girlfriend, Emily Howard.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Is she not? I thought she was.”

“You thought… what business is it of yours anyway?”

“Emily went missing. Someone was blackmailing her father. I found her. She said you were the connection through which the blackmail threat came to David Brady. Now Emily is home, and David Brady is dead, and I want to find out who’s behind it all.”

Jerry Dalton looked stunned.

“David Brady is dead? Dead how?”

“He was murdered. Beaten, then stabbed; whoever did it wanted to make sure. So, Jerry, on whose behalf were you giving David instructions? Brock Taylor?”

Dalton drank some beer and shook his head.

“Brock Taylor? I don’t think so. I don’t know, to be honest.”

“How could you not know? Emily said you were the go-between.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true. I work part-time at Seafield Rugby Club, yeah? Well, I come on shift last weekend — Friday night, about ten to seven. And Barnesy, Tony Barnes, the manager, tells me there’s a letter waiting for me behind the bar. I open it, and there’s a sealed envelope inside, and a note asking me to make sure David Brady gets it.”

“What kind of note?”

“Handwritten. No signature. I still have it, I think.”

He pulled up a long black leather coat from the floor, searched in the pockets and came up with a fistful of paper; amidst receipts, flyers and ticket stubs he found a folded piece of grimy cream notepaper. I unfolded it. In a neat hand that looked strangely familiar, in ink, was written:

Jerry, please see David Brady gets this.

“Did Barnesy say who left it?”

“He didn’t see.”

“And what happened then?”

“There was a match that night. David Brady was in after, with all the rugby guys, big night on the beer. I gave him the envelope, a little while later he came back up and asked me if I knew who dropped it in. He was pretty agitated, I suppose.”

“What do you mean, you suppose?”

Dalton put the flat of his hand against his mouth, as if he was about to say something against his better judgment, then lifted it above his head.

“Well, David wasn’t the most… don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he was kind of an abrasive guy, you know? And he had a lot of people who’d laugh at his jokes, which were usually at someone else’s expense… and he was pretty aggressive with the bar staff, he’d stand at the bar, wouldn’t speak, would expect you to know what he drank, then when you gave him his drink, he’d go: ‘And the guys?’ So you were also supposed to know what
they
drank, and if you didn’t, he could be pretty obnoxious… ah, it sounds a bit petty, all I’m saying is, I don’t remember registering whether he was freaked out about the letter in particular, ’cause his general manner was so hostile, I kind of let it flow past me, you know?”

“Tell me about Emily. You’re in her class in college?”

“Yeah. We met up about a month back. Freshers’ week, all the new kids. We went out, hung around, couple of times, I was into it, she was casual, I didn’t push it. We’d’ve seen more of each other if it was up to me. But she’s not the kind of girl you boss around.”

“You were out to her house?”

“I met her mother. She’s pretty full on.”

“Tell me what you know about Brock Taylor.”

Dalton looked around him uneasily.

“I don’t mean his record, we all know that. Just current form.”

“He owns this place, but he’s not here much. He’s around Seafield Rugby Club a fair bit. In a suit, being a hale and hearty rugger kind of guy when he’s not quite born to it. But he’s getting his feet under the table there ’cause he has so much bread, which he’s happy to donate to their building fund and so on. So whatever he did in the past is forgiven, or forgotten.”

“What about the Reillys? Have you seen them around?”

“Around SRC? They’re officially barred. You see them in the car park, dispensing their wares.”

“Coke?”

“And E, a little dope. Mostly coke. As if the guys needed any assistance in being obnoxious.”

“David Brady a good client of theirs?”

“Oh yeah. That’s why his game was for shit. Brady was the only one would bring the Reillys right into the club. No one would say a word to DB.”

The band onstage finished in a synthesizer crescendo. Applause drifted across the room in gusts. The lights came up harsh and unforgiving on even the youngest faces. Jerry Dalton stood up.

“We’re on next, Mr. Loy. But if there’s anything else, get in touch with me. I really like Emily, and I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

I took his phone number. The ginger guy with the fringe was onstage, assaulting a drum kit. I guess that helped explain his insane look. Jerry Dalton picked up his coat and gave me his hand. I gestured to the cross hanging upside down from his neck.

“What’s that about?” I said.

He fingered the cross, looked around the room and made a sweeping pass with his hand.

“It’s all about hypocrisy, Mr. Loy,” he said.

I wasn’t about to argue with that.

The Guinness was good, so I had another pint and waited for the band to start. The Golgotha Pyre were a metal trio. Jerry played guitar and sang and a guy with a ZZ Top beard wearing a black overcoat played bass with his back to the audience. They sounded like seventies heavy metal and nineties grunge, very doomy and tortured, and they could play a bit; they had songs called things like “Lake of Fire” and “Judgment Day” and “Blood on the Wind.” At first they made me smile, but soon they just made me feel old. I had lost the facility for listening to music when my daughter died; so far it hadn’t returned; when it did, I doubted whether heavy metal would be the form it took. But they were sincere, and Dalton’s voice was at the lower end of the balls-in-a-vise scale. When I finished my drink and left, there were kids headbanging into the speaker bins.