The Death of an Irish Lass (5 page)

McGarr skimmed the article, written in the short, punchy writing style that some American newspapers favored. The article wasn’t long, but the questions May Quirk had asked the black leaders revealed that they had little evidence to support their contention. One picture showed her interviewing a man on the steps of a brownstone. McGarr glanced at the date—June 22, 1969. May Quirk was about twenty-three then, and the editor had doubtless selected the picture not because the man being interviewed was important but because the people who read the paper liked to see pretty girls. She had her left hand on her hip, one foot on the ground, and the other on the first stair. The picture was shot from the side. It looked like she was taunting the big black man with the prospect of her upper body. He looked like a hairy, unkempt rabblerouser, she like a fine piece of work who was showing him up in every sense. But he was smiling at her too, a smile that seemed foolish.

O’Malley was standing in the door. “I’m wanted across the way. It’s Cleary. He’s having trouble.”

McGarr put the paper aside. “Of what sort?”

“They say he’s been raving around. He broke up all the furniture in the house last night and burned it and his old car out in the yard.”

McGarr himself had seen a smoldering fire when
they had passed by. The shell of the car had looked like a Triumph Herald.

“His cousin found him sitting against the kitchen wall in a stupor. He hasn’t really been eating well, you know. Lives alone. Doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Rented out his good land to some wheat farmers from Wexford. They poured on chemicals and used it up. Now it’s going back to bush.”

McGarr pulled himself out of the chair. “I’ll go with you, if you think the Quirks will be all right.”

“Your inspector wants to talk to you first.”

It was Hughie Ward. He said, “Bernie got ahold of Scannell. You know, he’s the one Hanly says cashed his foreign currency. Well, it’s true, but not in big amounts. Five-and ten-dollar bills and never more than a couple hundred pounds’ worth at a time.

“Then I’ve been around to the bars to check on the bottle of C. C. I got a warm welcome in the one you stopped in to.”

“Tried to poison you, did they?” McGarr asked, keeping his voice very low indeed.

“Jasus,” said Ward. “I’ve been drinking tea since I returned. But listen to this—not one publican in Lahinch has sold anybody a quart of C. C. in months. Hanly lied to us there, too.”

McGarr also knew Hanly had lied to them two other times about how his car had come to be damaged, but he wanted to confront Hanly himself with that evidence. “Where’s Hanly now?”

“In the next room. Liam has him. I don’t know what he’s got against that fellow, but he’s leaning on him hard.”

McGarr thought of May Quirk again and knew how O’Shaughnessy felt. If a low type like Hanly was re
sponsible for May Quirk’s death, McGarr would be put out himself. “Good enough. That gobshite is keeping something from us and I want to know what it is and why. Keep drinking that tea, boy, and spell Liam after a bit. I’ll be there myself in a while.”

“And McAnulty has been in touch with Phoenix Park.” That was the site of Garda Soichana headquarters. “He wants funding permission to search the area below the Cliffs of Moher. Wants to hire some riggers and a mountain-climbing expert. He’s also alerted the subaquatic unit. He said you’ve requested all that. The commissioner wants you to call him at his holiday house in Cork. Do you have his number?”

“Yes.” McGarr hung up and called the commissioner.

“I’ve been waiting for your call.” Fergus Farrell had hired McGarr. He was a gifted administrator in his late fifties. Rumor had it that he had stomach cancer. He was a tall man with large eyes that tortoiseshell glasses made look sad, but he never once mentioned his malady or missed a day of work. And his sense of humor was renowned. True, he drank a good deal so that his face, which some former skin condition had pitted, was red, but he never got out of the way or lost his sagacity. “What have you got out there?”

“A chance for some good publicity, I believe.” Again McGarr kept his voice down.

“We need that.” Because of the trouble in the North, the recent bombings in Dublin, and the seeming impunity with which gangs on either side of the political issue had been shooting each other along the border, it appeared as though the police were powerless to enforce the laws of the country. The thousands of crimes they had solved during the past year had of course not
gotten the same attention in the press. Good news didn’t sell newspapers.

McGarr thought of May Quirk. “I think I can promise you some results on this one.”

“What do you know about the woman so far?”

“Tall, beautiful, a staff reporter for a big New York newspaper. Born and raised here in Lahinch. She may have been pregnant. She had twenty-seven thousand dollars on her person. Also, she was connected with an I.R.A. fund raiser in New York. The connection may have been romantic only, however.”

“The papers will be making a big thing of this one,” said Farrell. “They always do when it’s one of their own. But then there’s the expense of your request to consider. They could make a lot of that too, if—”

McGarr waited for Farrell to conclude the thought. He hadn’t managed to rise to the top of three separate police organizations by being a skilled detective alone. When Farrell said nothing more, McGarr suggested, “Perhaps then we’d better make it look like we’re breaking our backs on it. You know—as though we wouldn’t want it to happen again to any other members of the glorious fourth estate.” Also, McGarr wanted to bring Farrell in on the decision, just in case they spent large amounts of public money with no result. Many senior Garda Soichana officers resented the fact that McGarr hadn’t passed his entire career with the Irish police. Because he had been with foreign police agencies, McGarr had not been involved in domestic cases that might have revealed his political leanings. And since his return to Ireland, McGarr had taken great pains never to reveal his political point of view. Thus, he had enjoyed an extraordinary press from nearly all Irish sources.

“If you think the operation is necessary.” Farrell wasn’t anybody’s fool either. They were close, the two of them, but it was the affection that was built of mutual respect. If one of them had to go, there was no sense in the other being sacrificed too.

McGarr could have said, “McAnulty thinks so,” but he didn’t. He was sick of playing the organizational game, and he also really wanted to nab May Quirk’s killer. “Yes—it’s necessary. The dirty bastard who did this is going to the gallows, as far as I’m concerned.” McGarr hung up.

McGarr was glad he had said that. When he turned around, he found John Quirk right behind him, lighting the top of the cooker for tea. The old man reached out his hand and shook McGarr’s long and hard. “Thank you for everything, Inspector. You’re the man for the job, all right. Would you care for a cup of tea?”

McGarr shook his head and left.

He was glad to get outside where the air was clear.

THE COLOR OF
the house across the road was not much different from the stones of the surrounding fields and hills—a drab, weathered gray. It was as though the great pitted rock that was Clare was reaching up to reclaim the materials from which the house had been made and eventually would subsume the mean, three-story dwelling. And it wouldn’t be much of a shame, either, McGarr thought, since the building was an offense to both the eye and the persons who had the misfortune to live in it. McGarr knew its narrow windows made the interior dim and kept the rooms damp and mildewy, and that it was a cold, drear place in the winter but funky and hot in the summer. Several slates had been knocked off the roof and a quarter of the central chimney had fallen in a chunk onto the lawn.

Stepping out of the Cooper, McGarr and O’Malley had to walk carefully to avoid the cow pies that lay everywhere about the yard. Of the two towering cedar trees out front the nearer was dead, its needles gone
and only the spiny skeleton remaining. The farther one was diseased and looking as though it was suffering from a special sort of arboreal mange. The grazing animals had not bothered with the grass against the side of the house. It clung to the foundation and mortar like a scraggly blonding beard on an old man’s chin. There were two other autos in the yard—a Garda patrol car and an ambulance. The hulk of the Triumph Herald was still smoldering.

They stepped into the kitchen and McGarr had to catch his breath, step outside, and breathe again. The dank interior had the smell of a barn—ammoniac, pungent, the reek of animals and wet rotting straw. He ducked back in again.

Sitting in a battered rocking chair near an Aladdin paraffin fire, which a guard was trying to make burn evenly, was a man who looked crazed or ill or drunk. He had thrown his head of matted, greasy hair back on the rocker and was twisting his face from side to side. A patchy gray beard stubbled his face. McGarr guessed he was a very old fifty-five. A medical man was leaning over him, attempting to direct the beam of a small light into his eyes.

There was not one other item of furniture in the room besides the kitchen sink, which was filled with shards of broken dishes. Everywhere around the floor were newspapers so thick they felt spongy underfoot. The far window also had been covered by newspapers. McGarr poked his head into the adjoining sitting room. Newspapers covered those windows, too. In the dim yellow light he could see rusting food tins in a corner with some more broken dishes and pots. Heaps of newspapers were there too, but again not a stick of furniture. And that room was the source of most of the
stench. Piss, McGarr thought. James Cleary hadn’t been bothering to go outside.

Suddenly the man launched himself from the rocker, fell onto his hands and knees, and crawled in quick, spastic movements toward a corner of the kitchen, where he tried to vomit, with no result.

The doctor began preparing a hypodermic needle.

“His cousin says he’s been like this since early morning,” the guard explained. He had to speak over the man’s agonized spasms. “At first the cousin thought it was just too much to drink, although Jim’s a very moderate man usually. But the cousin returned later to find him burning more of the furniture, and that’s when he called for us.”

The doctor tapped the guard on the shoulder and they both approached Cleary. The guard, a big fellow, grabbed him under the arms and raised him to his feet. The doctor pushed up a sleeve of the greatcoat to expose an arm mottled with dirt and lice. The doctor had to rub a good while with a piece of moistened cotton before the spot for the needle’s point was readied. The guard and an ambulance attendant carried the man out.

McGarr noted that most of the papers were issues of the New York
Daily News
, then went back outside into the fresh air. Shortly after, the doctor appeared. McGarr offered him a smoke and introduced himself. “Has he been like this before?”

“Twice.” The doctor began walking slowly toward the van. He was young, no more than thirty. He had fine, pixyish features and a thin build. He was just a bit taller than McGarr and his accent placed him in Clare. When they had gotten beyond the ambulance and the other policemen, he said, “Nervous breakdown. I wouldn’t tell anybody else that, of course.”

“But I thought a nervous breakdown resulted from severe stress. You know, people who’ve got too much to do and no time and bills and…” McGarr’s voice trailed off. “—city people.” When it came to psychological classifications, McGarr was at sea. Once in Paris when he had investigated a series of murders involving mutilated corpses and aspects of gross indecency, he had immersed himself in books concerning deviant behavior. He had found them unavailing, since he had had to deal with an individual and not a type.

“Usually that’s the case. But out here, things have changed almost as rapidly and perhaps more drastically than in the city. Take Mr. Cleary, for instance. He’s got…” The doctor looked around the area in back of the house where the land was going back to scrub; in the distance a jackass was bawling, his gray head sticking over a wall. “…the mud and the weather, the house, maybe a neighbor forty years older than he, and not much else. He’s got no wife, no kids, no family and no hope of getting one. His brothers and sisters have left and the last time he heard from one of them was in 1954 on his thirty-first birthday, when his brother sent him thirty-one pounds and advised him to have a bellyful of beer. He wound up in the Galway City jail.

“Cleary doesn’t drink much anymore. He’s afraid he’ll go right off the handle again. So even the pubs are out for him. And anyhow, he’s a quiet, withdrawn man. I don’t think the pubs would help him even if he could drink regularly. And then the pubs in these parts aren’t what they once were. Have you been in one recently?”

“This morning. Jolly place.”

“It’s the weather. And the tourists. You should try one in January and February. More like morgues. Nobody talks. Everybody seems almost stunned.

“And then Cleary isn’t a religious man, either. There’s nothing to support him here.” The doctor squinted the cigarette smoke from his eyes and let his eyes scan the field and the hill beyond. “Emotionally, that is. All the young and the ambitious are off to Cork or Dublin or England or Canada. It’s the city and the factory for them, and the sort of life they can see for themselves on TV.”

McGarr had the distinct impression the doctor didn’t care for the new way of life much. After all, he himself could have chosen to practice someplace else and been rewarded with all the things the younger people in Lahinch wanted, but instead he had chosen this drear backyard and his patient, James Cleary, who was now resting in the back of the ambulance.

“Could something else have brought on this attack?” McGarr asked.

“Like what?”

“Like May Quirk. She’s home now. Wasn’t Cleary interested in marrying her?”

“That was years ago.”

McGarr had dealt with men like Cleary before, though—lonely, isolated men who had taken some small disappointment in their lives and built it into a tragedy, something to hang all their supposed failure on. “Has he ever talked to you about her, when, you know, you treated him in the past?”

The young doctor turned to McGarr. His eyes were small and dark and quick. “Certainly you don’t think me that much of a bumpkin that I’d tell you if he had, Inspector.”

“I don’t think you’re a bumpkin at all, Doctor. I’m only asking because May Quirk was murdered last night. I want to know if you think Cleary’s behavior to
day is in any way extraordinary, given the problems you’ve treated him for in the past.”

The doctor hadn’t even blinked at the mention of May Quirk’s name, although he must have been her near contemporary and probably had grown up with her. “No. He’d already burned the other furniture in the house. This was the last of it. The retching is usual too. I suspect he’ll start tearing down the walls next. One room at a time. If he lasts much longer.” He glanced back at the ambulance. “He hardly eats. He’s somewhat suicidal, too. I can see that aspect of his personality growing stronger now.”

“Couldn’t you put him away where he could get some steady treatment?”

“What treatment—locked doors, a steady regimen of pacifiers, and an institution full of crazies? That would finish him off. At least here he can die among some people who know him.”

McGarr looked at the diminutive doctor, whose shoulders were no wider than the spread of McGarr’s hands. He seemed strangely cynical for a man so young. Doctors, McGarr well knew, were like policemen in that they often had too much of people and had to protect themselves by becoming hard. It was just a veneer, however. A really hard man couldn’t continue in either profession very long without the censure of his colleagues. But there was a half-note of bitterness in what the young man was saying, too. McGarr said, “What I’ve been meaning to ask is if you think Cleary is capable of murder. And specifically, of murdering May Quirk.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a policeman.”

“Did he mention where he had been last night?”

“I only got here a few minutes before you.”

“Where would Cleary have gotten a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey?”

“I’ve already told you as much as I know of his drinking habits.”

“Did you know May Quirk?”

“Yes. Of course. We went to school together.”

McGarr flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it. He wondered why he smoked. He got such little pleasure from it. The whole process of lighting one up was automatic, a habit. “I’ve been having some trouble finding out who she was. Her parents, naturally, are distraught, and—”

“She left when I went to university. Only she never came back.”

“Until now.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did she go?”

The doctor glanced at McGarr. He realized McGarr knew the answer to that question. “Right into the center of the storm. New York City. She made a big hit. Everybody knew she would. Big-time reporter, they tell me. Tens of thousands of pounds per year. Powerful friends and a lot of power herself. Not an Irish-American in the ‘New Land’ who wouldn’t invite her home for Christmas dinner.”

“I.R.A. connections?”

“They say that too. It’s the in thing, I suspect. Among all the protorevolutionaries in Manhattan.”

“How would you know?”

“I went to medical school at Columbia.”

“Then you
know
she was a staff reporter for a big New York daily?”

He nodded. “The biggest. The
Daily News
. Hard-hat
newspaper. The sort of newspaper an I.R.A. gunman would read.”

“And you read what when you were there?”

“The
Times
, of course.”

“The university man’s newspaper. The sort a bright young medical student, who wanted to help his people in a way different from that of a May Quirk, would read, eh?”

Again the doctor looked at McGarr. “Exactly.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you very much that she’s been murdered.”

“No more than when any of my patients dies. No less.”

“What did you treat her for, Dr….” The young man had not given McGarr his name.

“Fleming. She had missed her period. She wanted to know if she was pregnant.”

“And?”

“She was.”

“Do you know who the father was?”

He shook his head. “Could be about anybody.” He smiled slightly, then added, “Although that’s not fair. I know nothing about May Quirk’s sexual indiscretions. And don’t want to know, either. Now that she’s a historical figure, as it were, I’m sure the countryside will be crawling with types just like she was, all of them trying to dig up any squalid rumor about her past. I’m sure it’ll all make interesting reading for some.”

McGarr didn’t care for this nasty young man. He doubted that Fleming was as disinterested in May Quirk’s past and her untoward fate as he claimed. “Where were you last night, may I ask?”

“You may. I suppose it’s the price I must pay for
having been candid with you. I treated a local man for gout.”

“Who is he, and what time was that?”

“Daniel Quirk.” Fleming smiled wanly at McGarr. “He lives in the village. He was May’s uncle.”

“Yes; I know the man.”

“Then I stopped in Griffin’s, which is the pub on the corner across from the traffic standard.”

McGarr raised an eyebrow. “So you drink?”

“I returned to Ireland, remember? It’s my right, wouldn’t you say? Anyhow, May was there with her following.”

“Drinking?”

“Not really. She never ever really drank liquor. She’d buy one for herself as a prop, and she’d buy for anybody else who wanted one too.”

“And her following?”

He shook his head. “As I just explained to you, Inspector. They’re the kids who want to get out of Lahinch and Clare and maybe Ireland itself. They don’t drink, on principle.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a pub crowd.”

“May made up for it. She made everybody merry with her banter and jokes. She had a tongue in her.”

McGarr wondered if that was a wistful thought. His tone was unchanged, however. “Were you a part of May Quirk’s ‘following’?”

“Me?”

“For a different reason.”

“And what would that be?”

“Love. Hate. Maybe you liked to look at a pretty girl.”

Suddenly his delicate features froze. He looked Mc
Garr right in the eye. “Let me tell you something, McGarr. If May Quirk was pretty, it was only skin deep. To me she had lost her looks. She wasn’t very pretty. Not very pretty at all.” He turned and walked back to the ambulance van. He jumped in and the driver backed them out onto the road, where they drove toward Lahinch.

“What do you make of him?” McGarr asked O’Malley, meaning Fleming.

“Just a daft farmer. A loner. Probably got himself a proper snootful last night. A couple of days in hospital, a bath, and a few good meals and he’ll be on the mend. I’ll get a social worker to look in on him from now on. Maybe the priest can organize a work crew to come out here and clean up the house a bit. The kids in town will do that now, you know. Sure, there’s not much work for them lately.” O’Malley looked at the house and shuddered, then walked over and shut the kitchen door.