The Wrong Kind of Blood (15 page)

Barbara gave me a cold stare, then her face softened; she clasped my face with both hands and pulled it to hers, kissed me on the lips, hoped God would bless and save
and forgive
us all, then clipped out the door. As she walked down the drive and across the road to her car, she stumbled suddenly on the concrete, and was instantly transformed into an old lady, stooped and frail. She waited by the car for a chauffeur, in a black suit, to open the door for her; then, having regained a little poise, she sat in and vanished behind tinted glass. The car was a charcoal gray Lexus, and as it drove away, I came as far as the gate to check the license plate. It was the same car I had seen parked outside Linda’s house last night.

The perfume of night-scented stock hung thick in the garden air. I sat on the porch for a while, trying to sort through the details of the case, but they wouldn’t arrange themselves in any order or pattern. A sheaf of junk mail in the letter box caught my eye, so I pulled it out and sorted through that instead: flyers for pizza delivery and garden maintenance, night classes, a local play school and so on. I scrunched them up into a ball and went into the kitchen to trash it. The sight of the mackerel on the draining board reminded me I hadn’t eaten that day. I put potatoes on to boil, gutted and cleaned the fish, coated them in oatmeal and fried them in butter. I shelled the peas and threw them in with the potatoes for the final few minutes, then drained the lot. While I ate, I retrieved the ball of junk mail from the bin and read through it all again.

An ad for a new real estate agent’s announced: “to whom it may concern — and if you’re a homeowner, it concerns you. Get the best price on the market for your home. we do all the work; you make all the money.”

It went on in that delirious vein for a while, but I was stuck on that most conventional of openings: “to whom it may concern.” If you dropped it into lowercase, you had “to whom it may concern.” And if you were using that as the title for a document, you wouldn’t want to go to the palaver of spelling it out each time, so you’d probably just use the initial letters of each word: “twimc.”

That was what the document on Peter Dawson’s computer was called, the one that had been wiped on Tuesday while Linda was at the funeral. twimc: to whom it may concern. The receipt from Ebrill’s stationery store in Seafield showed that Peter had bought envelopes, writing paper and address labels. Taken together, those two facts could mean a variety of things. But one of those things could certainly be that Peter intended to kill himself, and that he wrote a farewell note and posted it to somebody, or to several people.

And maybe that was it. Never mind about corrupt payments to councillors to influence planning decisions, never mind about Peter Dawson’s links to Seosamh MacLiam’s death, never mind about the part organized crime in the shape of the Halligan gang played in all this, or why all Peter Dawson’s and my family photographs had been stolen, or who moved Peter’s body onto his boat; just mark it down to suicide, hush it up and move on. That was what Barbara Dawson wanted, that was seemingly what Superintendent Casey wanted too. Maybe it wasn’t what Linda wanted. Maybe that’s why she hired me: because she had an inkling of what was up, but wanted to get at the truth — wanted the truth, but was afraid of the truth. Well, too bad. Her husband was found, and there’s an end to it. If you want the truth, maybe a private detective is the last person you should come to.

Night was falling fast. I dumped the dishes in the sink, locked the house, went to bed and slept for eight dreamless hours. When I woke up, rain was pouring from a slate gray sky. That was more like it. That was the kind of Irish summer’s morning I remembered. It made the previous few days seem like some kind of delirium, a post-funeral fever dream. As I drank a cup of tea, I knew exactly what I had to do. It was simple: I would have my father declared dead, then hand responsibility for the house over to Doyle & McCarthy. They could organize an executor’s sale, subtract their no doubt exorbitant commission and send me the balance. In California. Because that was where I was going, as soon as I could get a flight. I’d had it with Dublin, where everyone was someone’s brother or cousin or ex-girlfriend and no one would give you a straight answer, where my da knew your da and yours knew mine, where the past was always waiting around the next corner to ambush you.
It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas
. Well, I wasn’t going back there. I was going to the place you went to when you’d had enough past, enough family, enough history, the place where they let you start again, make yourself up, be whoever you wanted to be. A happy orphan, in a land where no one knew my name.

YOU CAN’T WASH IT AWAY. HOT WATER ONLY FIXES THE
stain, and bleach turns it green. Cold water cleans the visible stain away, but it’s still there, clinging to the floor, the walls, the curtains, the fireplace. And you can sand the boards and change the drapes, replaster and repaint, you’re still going to miss a drop, a splash, a smear. It’s no longer even the same fireplace now, not the same as the one he was standing in front of when they shot him. And it’s true to say
they
shot him. He took the first shot, she did the rest. He was supposed to do it all. She was just there to watch. But you know how it is, when you’re dealing with blood, things never work out quite the way you want them to.

She said it would be cleaner if they used a gun. But that’s only true if you know
how
to use a gun, and he didn’t. His hand was shaking, and the expression of shock, of disbelief, and then of fear on his old friend’s face made things worse. She was screaming at him to shoot, and for a moment, he felt like shooting her, but then he steeled himself, and closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit her husband in the groin and punctured an artery. In an instant, there was so much blood it was like someone had stuck a pig. The gun fell out of her lover’s hand and clattered on the floor. Her lover looked at his old friend, who was on his knees, screaming in pain, and threw up. The woman picked the gun up off the floor and pointed it at her husband. It was hard to make out what he was saying, or indeed if he was using words at all, but you could tell that he was pleading with her, begging for his life. Too late. Blood was spreading in a dark pool beneath him. She looked around her. Her lover had stopped puking; now he was weeping. She looked at him, not with contempt, but with resignation, the sense that she probably should have known she would bear the brunt of it.

She was wearing open-toed sandals, and she could feel the blood between her toes. She thought momentarily of being a child, getting her feet wet walking home in the rain. Then she thought of the sea. Then she shot her husband twice in the back. He stopped screaming, but you could still hear his breath. Her upper arm and shoulder hurt from the pistol’s recoil. The trigger was stiff, and she wondered whether she had the strength to squeeze it again. The sound of weeping told her she better had. She held the gun butt with both hands and shot her husband twice in the head.

She dropped the gun in the blood where the shell casings fell, and went to cradle her lover in her arms, wiping his tears away and kissing his cheeks. Now, she thought. Now, at last, her life could begin.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too.
The trouble is that most of them are married.

R
OSS
M
ACDONALD
,
The Zebra-Striped Hearse

I WAS ON THE POINT OF RINGING DAVID MCCARTHY TO
set probate in motion when the telephone rang. Maybe it was McCarthy ringing me, I thought, somehow anticipating my plans. But of course, it wasn’t.

“Is that Edward Loy?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Loy, my name is Aileen Williamson. I understand you’re a private detective.”

Here it was again, the old fever dream. You understand I’m a private detective, do you? Well, could you explain it to me?

“Mr. Loy?”

“I’m here. What can I do for you, Mrs. Williamson?”

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I’m sorry about your husband’s death.”

“My husband’s murder.”

“Have the Guards declared it a murder investigation?”

“Do you think we could meet?”

“I’m not sure what good it would do, Mrs. Williamson. You see, if it is a murder investigation, the Guards will be conducting it. And Seafield Garda warned me off, directly.”

“It’s not a murder investigation. But it should be.”

“I still don’t see—”

“I got an anonymous phone call. A woman. She told me you were searching for Peter Dawson, the builder’s son. She said his death was connected to my husband’s, but that the Garda investigations into Peter Dawson’s case and my husband’s were being undermined.”

“Undermined by whom?”

“Senior officers, anxious not to offend powerful individuals.”

Superintendent Casey? Despite what Linda had said, did John Dawson still have the clout to influence a Garda investigation? And why were he and Barbara seemingly so keen to have Peter’s death declared a suicide?

“And what has this to do with me?” I said.

“This woman said you didn’t care about offending powerful individuals. In fact, she reckoned you’d relish it. If that’s true, Mr. Loy, I’d like to hire you to find out who murdered my husband, and why.”

Fever dream. Delirium.

“Who was this woman who called you?”

“As I said, it was an anonymous phone call.”

“No clue as to who she might have been? Her accent, her manner?”

“She knows you, not me. Sounded ordinary, soft Dublin accent. Friendly. A little nervous.”

“Anything else?”

“I have her phone number.”

“You do? How’d you manage that?”

“Joseph had caller ID phones installed.”

“Joseph or Seosamh?”

“No one who knew him called him Seosamh. I think that was a sop to the Irish-language constituency. The Guards advised him to get caller ID to deal with crank calls, nuisance calls, menacing calls. Of which he received a number.”

This was my chance to escape, to get on a plane and never come back.

Apparently, I didn’t want to take it.

“Mr. Loy?”

“Give me your address, and I’ll meet you in an hour.”

Aileen Williamson gave me her address. She also gave me the phone number the anonymous call came from. I dialed it, and a tired-sounding woman said hello.

“Hello, Carmel,” I said. “It’s Ed Loy.”

“Ed. Good to hear your voice.”

“Is it?”

“Very much so.”

“I assume your home number is unlisted.”

“Of course. All cops’ phones are.”

“Aren’t you curious how I got it?”

“Maybe Dave gave it to you.”

“You know he didn’t.”

“Well. You’re a detective, aren’t you? I suppose you… detected it.”

“You know you can conceal your number from people with caller ID telephones.”

“You know you can turn that facility on and off.”

“So if you wanted someone to find out your number—”

“Yes, if you wanted that.”

There was a long silence. Carmel broke it.

“Dave is in a state over this, Ed. I’m not saying he told me to call Aileen Williamson… or that he’d be able to protect you in any way if you fuck up.”

“Don’t you mean, when I fuck up?”

“I love men. They’re always telling women what we mean.”

“Does Dave think there’s a cover-up of some kind?”

“Dave would like the chance to find out. He’s been pulled off the Dawson case.”

“Why?”

“Operational logistics, is what he was told. Because he believes in police work, is why. The whole thing stinks. But he’s not giving up on this one. Will you help him?”

“I’ll need stuff only the Guards have access to: forensic details, ballistics reports.”

“You’ll get them.”

“You sure Dave will be up for this, Carmel?”

“I’ve already spoken to him. He’ll be in touch. Mind yourself, Ed.”

Carmel hung up. I sat and listened for a while. The silence on the line sounded like the voices of the dead. If they knew anything, they weren’t talking.

Aileen Williamson lived in Ballsbridge, on a broad tree-lined street of detached Victorian and Edwardian villas. There were half a dozen embassies and the occasional solicitor’s office or dentist’s surgery; the rest were private residences. Most showed the signs of recent building work: a tasteful extension, or a new perimeter wall, or freshly cleaned or painted stone and brick. The cars were expensive but discreet: Audis and Volvos, rather than Mercs and Jags: this was old money, Dublin 4 money, the kind of money that doesn’t have to draw attention to itself. I couldn’t imagine how much one of these houses cost; I guess it’s like upscale shops that never display the prices of the goods: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

The rain had been nothing more than a heat-weary cloud caught short; the air was so humid and the ground so warm that no trace of damp remained; blue and white rent the slate gray sky asunder.

The Williamson house was a double-fronted three-story-over-basement redbrick villa. The drive crunched with those pale little stones that stain your shoes gray. Granite steps led up to the front door, which had stained glass panes set around its elaborate architrave. A Filipina maid in a black and white uniform directed me around to the back of the house. A gardener was training white jasmine up a trellis; another was weeding around a fine magnolia. They were talking to each other in a central European tongue, Romanian it sounded like. At the foot of the garden there was a raised wooden deck on which sat a long maple table and chairs.

It sometimes seemed to me as if there was an entire generation of women who dressed almost entirely in black: Linda Dawson was one, and Aileen Williamson looked like another. She sat at the head of the table in a long black velvet skirt and a black silk blouse. A silver crucifix hung around her long neck. Her jet black hair hung straight to her waist; her oval face was pale and without makeup, her blue eyes gleamed. Her white hands rested on a stack of newspapers. With a small motion of her slender wrist, she bade me sit down; without a word she pushed the pile of newsprint toward me.