The Death of an Irish Lass (17 page)

In all, McGarr decided, a rather complex young man.

A loud knock came to the front door just as Nora Cleary was setting a tray with a decanter of amber whiskey and two glasses on the desk in front of McGarr.

She rushed to answer it.

McGarr poured himself a drink, wondering what the folders on O’Connor and Fleming had really told him: that, as he had supposed, the relationship of the three Clare emigrees had become complicated once they had arrived here in this Babylon; that both men had had a sort of falling out with May Quirk; that she had then pursued each of them while ostensibly practicing her journalistic profession but had failed in her obvious purpose of portraying them as in some way inadequate to the challenges that the city had offered them; that there was an essential contradiction in her wanting O’Connor to reject the lure of the metropolis for art and wanting Fleming to accept the challenge in the name of science and fame.

McGarr heard Nora Cleary shout, “Villain! Blackguard! You dirty, shameless heathen!”

McGarr rushed into the living room.

Simonds, the New York detective, had one of Nora Cleary’s arms pinned behind her. His other hand was on her wrist. She was holding the Mauser. Simonds shook the wrist. The gun fell onto the carpet. In back of Simonds were two other men. At one glance McGarr could tell they were cops. Paddy Sugrue was standing farther down the hall.

Simonds said, “You’re not licensed to carry this gun. You pointed it at a policeman. That’s a felony. Consider yourself under arrest. You have the right to consult a lawyer, the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be taken down and held against you.”

“Low-life!” she shouted. “Scum!”

He clapped the handcuffs over each of her wrists.

“You broke and entered here earlier. Take that down if you dare. They’ll have you in a blue coat and arch-support shoes before I’m done with you.”

The other policemen took her away.

Simonds explained to McGarr, “We can’t have people running around with toys like this in their hands.” He was hefting the Mauser. “But she’s got a point. She wasn’t exactly running around with it, was she.”

Said McGarr, “No, but it was unlicensed. And it was a question of pride, was it not?”

Simonds reddened a bit. “You’re damn right it was. Being in, you know,” he waved the gun, “public relations, I don’t get much chance to—”

“Muscle up old ladies,” said Sugrue.

“—to
serve
the public in my usual capacity.” He was chewing his cigar butt now, trying to justify the arrest. “And you get soft, out of shape. You tend to think making arrests is somebody else’s job. You begin to wink at crimes, let criminals go. But—”

“What are you going to do with that thing?” McGarr meant the Mauser. He imagined that Simonds was well suited to his public relations job.

“Evidence. We’ve got to impound it.”

“Could you run a ballistics test on the thing and send me a copy of the report?”

“Sure.” Simonds looked down at the gun. “Why? You don’t think that old babe—”

“And I wonder if we could learn if she’s left this country recently.”

Simonds thought for a moment. “We can check the status of her passport with the federal government. Maybe she’d surrender it voluntarily. If not, we could—” Simonds cast his flat black eyes around the apartment, “—subpoena it, if we believed she had committed a felony and could convince a judge of her probable guilt. And then Paddy and me could take another of our celebrated long walks down a short hall. I’ll be in the stairwell, having a confab with the cockroaches.” He sauntered out the door, which McGarr closed.

After a long search McGarr found Nora Cleary’s passport in a battered black handbag at the back of a closet in the bedroom the old lady used.

She was an American citizen now. The slim blue booklet had a Shannon entry date inscribed “12th August” and a Kennedy Airport return stamped “8/13.”

McGarr then went into the kitchen, where at a small desk he had seen a collection of bills and correspondence in a hand different from that of May Quirk. He sat and leafed through the pile until he got the copy of the past month’s telephone bill. It listed calls to three numbers in Ireland, all of them outside the Dublin area. Alongside these McGarr wrote the numbers he’d seen over Paddy Sugrue’s shoulder. Two matched.

On the pad of his pocket secretary, McGarr made note of all the numbers. He then picked up the phone, dialed customer service, and claimed that he was about to leave the country and wanted to pay his bill beforehand. If she could go through his current bill telling him his long-distance calls, the dates and amounts, he would pay them. But the woman told him all charges for the current month were in the computer
and he’d just have to wait. She thanked McGarr for his concern but allowed as how the New York Telephone Company would doubtless survive the interval without his payment.

McGarr put down the phone, wondering why everybody in New York had to have a smart last word.

That was when Simonds appeared in the kitchen door. He said, “I’ve got nine fifteen, shamus. That’s a howling hour of a Sunday night.” The brogue he was putting on was thick but accurate. “I’ve told a bunch of the lads up in Queens about you, and they’re dying to get the message from the olde sod. Big beery police types and not a one of them that don’t get misty when hearing Dennis Day do ‘Danny Boy.’ Kate Smith works them over pretty good, too. I’ve told them you’re a real Irish cop, not the inflated pink hippo variety from Jamaica Plain.”

The situation was even worse than Simonds had intimated. The beer joint had no windows. From the outside it looked like a squat fortress of yellow brick with a heavy cast-iron grate over the door.

Inside, only a dim lamp by the cash register, some bulbs under the bar, and the blue glow from the jukebox and television set, which were battling each other for auditory dominance, lit the interior. The place stank of cigarettes, the sweet reek of cheap blended whiskey, lager beer, and a chemical cleanser that came from the open door to the latrine.

Simonds was welcomed volubly, and before they could reach the clusters of men who were squeezed into the bar the proprietor had poured them shots of Jameson and glasses of stout from small amber bottles.

All eyes were on McGarr, the smallest man there.
The bar conversation had died. McGarr judged he was expected to knock back his drink. He removed his Panama hat and placed it on the bar, then raised the shot glass. Most of the men, he had noted, were uniformed New York policemen. They wore blue trousers and white short-sleeved shirts. Some had on windbreakers to cover their badges and name tags, but from the hips of most bristled the walnut and cold blue butts of Smith & Wesson service revolvers. McGarr had the feeling of having stepped onto the set of a special sort of American western movie, one staged in the East at a saloon filled with pistol-packing good guys who could not afford to be as lenient with desperadoes as had the heroes of the old horse operas. McGarr also realized why they had insisted that Simonds bring him there: they needed reinforcement, needed to see the genuine version of what they purported to be—the Irish cop who was at once tough on criminals but gentle with friends, capable of utter ruthlessness in situations requiring action, yet supportive and helpful at other times, interpreting the law on terms that were somehow fairer than the cold print on the pages of the law books.

McGarr imagined it must be extremely difficult to be anything but a hardened professional here in this megalopolis. For instance, most of the buildings McGarr had seen in the neighborhood outside the bar looked as though they’d been ravaged. Many had been razed and were now just piles of brick or gullied lots with pools of fetid water, trash, and—McGarr had assumed from the stench that a torrid wind had wafted to him as he had stepped from the large police car—garbage. The structures that remained were dilapidated, the wooden porches of the apartment blocks
faded and sagging, the bricks city-worn, the small houses shabby behind chain-link fences and plastic overhangs on the front doors. It seemed as though the denizens of the area, few of whom were on the street, had abandoned the idea of community for a perverse sort of isolation. It wasn’t only behind the gates of a plumbing wholesaler that McGarr had seen a large Alsatian guard dog but in the backyards of several houses as well. Bright red alarm bells and warnings to would-be thieves were numerous.

Thus McGarr told them what they wanted to hear. “To Irish cops,” he said in a loud voice. “The world over. And especially to Irish cops who started with two shoes, two fists, a hard head, and a big heart. The shoes may have been worn to a frazzle, the fists to scars, even the head taken on a shine,” he touched his own bald pate. “But the heart, gentlemen—in spite of all the bastards we’ve had to run in—that’s where we’re special. We’ve got heart.” McGarr drank off the shot.

The others followed suit, and before any of them could speak, McGarr added in a rush, “I say this with authority, having consulted my cardiologist before coming over here. He said no fatty foods, no smoking, and most of all, no booze. Bartender,” McGarr tossed a blue ten-pound Irish bank note on the bar, “pour a round of drinks on the Garda Soichana.”

A huge policeman almost wrenched McGarr’s arm stuffing the note back in his hand. The others pushed their own separate piles of American money toward the barman.

McGarr guessed he was in for a wet night. He could hear somebody asking Simonds, who was standing as close as he could to McGarr, “What’s his job back in the old country?”

Simonds said, “He runs the place, at least the investigative aspects. The chief himself will be here in a couple of minutes.”

“He’s sure got a lot of malarky. That son of a bitch almost made me cry.”

Other policemen were now squeezing through the door.

After the second drink in less than as many minutes, McGarr decided he had better ease off, and thus at the public phone, which was a pay station hung on the wall near the jukebox, he placed a call to his office in Dublin.

Simonds had been right. A melodramatic tenor voice from the jukebox began lilting through “Danny Boy.” A wiry policeman with a flame red face was punching the buttons. He selected “The Soldier’s Song,” “The Brave Colonial Boy,” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The operator told McGarr it would be a few minutes before she could check on his credit-card number, put through the call, and get back to him.

McGarr’s hand was weary by the time he got to the bar, and there in front of him he was faced with a half-dozen whiskeys. “Could you put these in a large tumbler with lots of ice?” he asked the bartender.

Through all the noises he could just barely hear the phone ringing.

A policeman picked it up, listened, then shouted, “I’ll be goddamned if it ain’t Dublin!”

On his way by, McGarr saw a policeman handing Paddy Sugrue a twenty-dollar bill. “For the army,” he said.

McGarr stopped.

Sugrue said, “Unsolicited.” He placed the bill in a large wallet. “Right?” he asked the policeman.

“Right. Anything I can do. I only wish I could afford more.” He could see the question in McGarr’s eyes. “It’s for the people at home, ain’t it? I mean, if we’d all pulled together a couple hundred years ago, I wouldn’t have to be living here. Don’t get me wrong,” he added quickly. “This is the greatest nation in the world, but Queens—” His voice trailed off.

McGarr patted the man’s arm and went for the phone. There was no use explaining that the I.R.A. and the Irish Republic were two different and often opposed political entities, but McGarr doubted the man had ever been “home.” It could well be he was a second or third or even a more distant generation American, yet still he nurtured the feeling of being Irish. Perhaps it was a necessary identity here among two hundred and ten million people. Because of the diversity of the sprawling country—more a collection of many different countries than a single nation state—the term
American
really couldn’t mean much. To say you were Irish was something else. Ireland had only four million Irishmen, England about the same if nothing but names were counted, and America perhaps eight or nine million whose ancestry was traceable to the olde sod. The twenty dollars had probably made the policeman feel very Irish indeed and was for him money well spent.

McGarr wished he could trace the transit of the money and find out where and how it was spent. He didn’t doubt that Paddy Sugrue was a fairly honest man or that the cause he represented was dedicated solely to the establishment of a united Ireland, but he wondered how that man would feel if he knew that his twenty dollars had been spent to purchase the explosive used to blow some innocent Londoner out of his
seat in a restaurant five hundred miles distant from the trouble in the North. Would he then have thought twice? McGarr believed so.

In McGarr’s mind the problem really didn’t rest with the man who gave the twenty dollars alone but with the I.R.A. leaders who had chosen terror as a guerrilla tactic. McGarr himself longed for a united Ireland, but at what price—the labeling of the Irish for good and all as a people more savage than any in Europe? In that light the twenty dollars was wrong.

“Peter? Peter?” a voice was saying through the receiver. It was Bernie McKeon at McGarr’s office in Dublin Castle, where it was three in the morning. “I’ve been waiting for your call. What gives over there? Sounds like a tinker’s wedding or a free-for-all. Who’s the bloke with the busted throat in the background?” He meant the music, but he didn’t wait for McGarr to answer. “Got a full report on the pitchfork we found in Schwerr’s trunk. It can’t be the murder weapon. The prongs are spaced too far apart. They don’t match the punctures on her chest nor the width of the scratches on the car. But we did find where it came from—the farm nearest the murder scene. Fellow named Cassidy owns the place. The one Schwerr stopped at to get help and where Fleming patched him up. Cassidy has a whole bunch of sons.”

“So a whole bunch of pitchforks,” said McGarr.

McKeon never heard him. “So a whole bunch of pitchforks.”