The Death of an Irish Lass Page 16

  “There, that’s my identification. Where’s yours?”

  After McGarr had explained the May Quirk case to Simonds, the latter had said, “I know Paddy Sugrue well, and,” he had checked his watch, “I know where we can find him right away, if he’s in town.”

  Simonds had continued, “He’s cute. He keeps a low profile and he’s got the gift of gab. There’s not an important Irish cop in the city he doesn’t know on a first-name basis, including me.”

  “What do you know about May Quirk?” McGarr had asked.

  Simonds had shrugged. “Sometimes read what she wrote. I remember once I took a long look at her long legs and got myself a long thirst. I went home and picked a fight with my old lady.”

  Now McGarr was surprised to find Mickey Finn’s packed. It was just like a summer Sunday night in a resort town back home. But here most of the people seemed to be wanting to forget they had to go to work in the morning. Most were young men and women wearing expensive but designedly casual clothes. The men had on dark glasses, like those aircraft pilots used, even though the interior of the pub was dim. Some of the women wore glasses too, but they preferred the Italian kind that May Quirk had worn, each lens the size of McGarr’s palm, the frames outsized and ludicrous. As well, they used lots of makeup, a big patch of rouge on each cheek, their eyes heavily shadowed. Shag haircuts, tight-waisted jackets, and bell-bottom trousers made the men, young and old, look alike and, to McGarr, somewhat androgynous.

  Mixed drinks with fruit were flowing freely. Waitresses in short red dresses and black net hose were jockeying trays from the bar through the men standing near it to the tables in other sections of the tavern. Nobody could keep his eyes from the crevice of flesh that spilled from the tight bodices of the waitresses’ dresses. And McGarr had the impression he could touch the smoke that filled Mickey Finn’s. But it was the contrast between the empty, quiet street outside and the din of the barroom that interested McGarr most. It was as though the tavern was not simply a social center but rather a world apart, a better microcosm in which to pass one’s time.

  And Simonds was right.

  Sugrue sat at the far corner of the bar where it met the wall. The area was enclosed in deep shadow and separated from the other stools by the barman’s walk-way, which a chain covered with red velvet blocked. In front of Sugrue were a telephone, an ashtray heaped with spent butts, and a cocktail tumbler. He was tapping a fountain pen on a note pad, making dots all around the border. The pad had phone numbers on it.

  McGarr, glancing over Sugrue’s shoulder, saw they were Irish numbers—the Lahinch Garda barracks, McGarr’s Dublin Castle number, and three others he didn’t recognize. Near the wall was a copy of the New York Daily News. Before Simonds could introduce him to Sugrue, McGarr stopped him. McGarr stared down at the pad and memorized the three phone numbers he hadn’t recognized.

  McGarr would have preferred to have taken another barstool close by and to have observed the man for a time, but when the barman neared, Simonds said, “A drink for Paddy, me, and—what are you drinking, Peter?”

  “Bourbon,” said McGarr, trying to make his accent sound neutral.

  “Jack Daniels,” Simonds clarified.

  Sugrue was now looking at McGarr, who turned to him.

  Sugrue was a short, thick man with curly red hair. He was wearing a tan suit and his shirt, which was open at the neck, was blue. He had been drinking, but McGarr could tell he was in a mood that alcohol couldn’t touch. To expedite matters, McGarr reached over and picked up Sugrue’s pen. He drew a line through his office number and laid the pen on the paper.

  “What are you doing here?” Sugrue asked.

  “Looking for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “I read your letter, got your note at Shannon. I figured you knew her as well as anybody.”

  Sugrue drank off his old drink, put the glass down, and reached for the fresh glass. “Obviously not. If I had, I could have prevented this.”

  A man was passing down the bar, shaking hands and slapping people on the back. He knew everybody by his first name. When he approached Sugrue, the barman caught his eye and with a shake of the head warned him off.

  Another person then whispered in the man’s ear. The man grew suddenly grave.

  McGarr tasted the whiskey and made a mental note to take some back with him. It was sweet without being cloying, had the bite that every good whiskey requires, yet there was a smoky, hickory dryness about it, too. Over crushed ice like this it was a special sort of American ambrosia.

  “Who killed her?” Sugrue asked. “That’s all I want right now.” The tightness in his voice was anger. “I figure you should know, McGarr.”

  “Not yet. Tell me about Rory O’Connor.”

  “Did he do it?” Sugrue started to rise off the stool.

  Simonds put a hand on his shoulder and eased him back.

  “What do you think?”

  Sugrue shook his head. “No. I can’t see that at all. At one time, maybe. When they were—together. Perhaps then, but now, I mean—they were like old friends. There was feeling there, but it was warm, not hot.”

  “Then Schwerr.”

  “Don’t know him. He’s new to the organization.”

  “She was pregnant by him.”

  Sugrue stopped drinking from the tumbler and slowly lowered it to the bar. He turned to McGarr. “This is a hell of a time to be saying something like that.”

  McGarr just stared at him. After a while he said, “Tell me about your relationship with her. How did it start?” McGarr signaled for another round.

  “This going to be all on one tab, Sid?” the barman asked Simonds.

  “Yes, mine,” said McGarr. He took off his Panama hat and placed it on the bar. In the past he’d found younger people more willing to confide in him when he looked like an old man, a father figure perhaps. “And do you think she might have developed you and Schwerr and Hanly,” McGarr studied Sugrue’s face closely, “only because she wanted to write the article on the financing operations of the I.R.A.?”

  Sugrue turned to Simonds. “This guy must think he’s back at Dublin Castle with a couple battalions of blue boys out in the yard—talking like this here and now.” He then whipped around on McGarr. “Hanly? Barry Hanly? You think May went and seduced Barry Hanly to get information out of him? Let me tell you something, copper. I was the one who first proposed that she do the article.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I figured if the average Irish-American wage earner could see how the cash got to those who need it the most, he’d be more willing to give. The way it is now, most of them think it’s just going into my pocket or some pack of gangsters back home.”

  McGarr didn’t care to pursue that line, although Sugrue seemed to be living well off the donations to the I.R.A. “The autopsy said she was six weeks pregnant. Could she have been pregnant by you?”

  Sugrue shook his head. He was irked that McGarr had continued to belabor the point. “No.”

  “You were in England.”

  “Yes—but not in Ireland. Don’t you check on this stuff first?” He pulled out his wallet and a small green book with a gold harp embossed on the cover. “I’ve just been declared an enemy of the state.” He scaled the book at McGarr.

  It hit him in the chest and dropped onto the bar. McGarr opened the book—Sugrue’s Irish passport. Stamped across the first page was, “Revoked 9th August, 1975.”

  “That’s why I couldn’t meet her at the airport.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell her that in the letter?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you just bawl out. And then—” McGarr waited.

  “—and then she had a dream, you know, of returning home one day for good.”

  That surprised McGarr, though he didn’t let on.

  “I didn’t want her thinking I’d never be allowed back. I didn’t want to hurt any chance I might have had with her.”

  McGarr said, “She slept with O�
�Connor and Schwerr. Did she sleep with Fleming too? How did you feel about that? You know, her being the girl you wanted to marry and all. She told Schwerr she wanted an abortion.”

  Sugrue cocked his body and launched a punch across the corner of the bar.

  McGarr only had time to pull back. The blow glanced off his chest. He grabbed Sugrue’s wrist and pinned it to the bar. With his other hand he tossed his drink into Sugrue’s face. “Simmer down. Did she sleep with Fleming or didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Fleming. I think maybe she did. So what? What of it? Things are different over here.”

  McGarr released his hand. The barman tossed Sugrue a bar towel. “Try to control yourself, Paddy. I’ve got my business to think of.”

  Most of the conversation at the bar had stopped and people had turned to them.

  McGarr said, “It’s just that I want you to put yourself in my shoes, Paddy. I’ve got plenty of suspects with all sorts of motives. I’m just looking for the handle now. You loved her; help me out. Who or why. Think, give me an impression. She was writing an article on your bunch. You know all of them. You know O’Connor, Fleming, Hanly. You know something about Schwerr. If you want to do something for May, tell me something. Anything. Even if you think it’s unimportant.”

  Sugrue blotted his face. It wasn’t just the liquor he was drying. McGarr could see tears in his eyes.

  Sugrue said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about that. Ever since—” He reached for his drink. “And—” He shook his head with a snap that tousled his red curls. “I can’t. Believe me, McGarr. I can’t. It’s not just May we’re talking about. It’s—well, it’s me and the army. Do you understand me now?”

  It was McGarr’s turn to shake his head. “It’s May and nobody else. I broke the news to her parents—two big, honest, and worthy country people who had lost their only child. And I made a promise to John Quirk. I told him I’d see the bastard who did it in the dock, and I aim to keep my promise. Help me.”

  Again Sugrue shook his head.

  McGarr reached over and handed him his drink.

  “Jesus, McGarr,” Sugrue said in a rush. “You’re putting me in a terrible spot. I want to help you, sure I do. But—” he brought the glass to his mouth and the liquor spilled over his chin, “—the most I can say is that you should look at Fleming’s place closely.”

  “His house?”

  “That’s all I’m going to say, so don’t ask me any more. And that’s got to be between the two of us.” He looked behind him.

  Simonds pretended he was looking at a waitress who was passing.

  McGarr said, “I didn’t get the impression Fleming was much of a friend of hers.”

  “That was the case only after the article she wrote about him, the one that said he was throwing away great opportunity here to go back home and treat a bunch of farmers and fishermen. She as much as said he was an oddity and there was some flaw in his personality that made him want to escape.”

  A thought struck McGarr. “And did she write about O’Connor too?”

  Sugrue nodded. He sipped his drink.

  The barman placed another bourbon in front of McGarr.

  “What was the tone of that piece?”

  “That he was wasting his talents, too. His last novel—”

  “The Thunderbird of Madison Avenue?”

  “—that’s it. She said it was unnecessary, that Rory was a man who had quit on his talent and was now just satisfying his avarice. And then, when the game he invented came out right after, she really let him have it.”

  “Game?” McGarr questioned.

  Simonds cut in. “It’s called Potlatch. After them Injuns out on the Coast. My kids are nuts about it. O’Connor must have made three fortunes on it. It’s a craze.”

  Sugrue was talking now, and sounding a bit drunk, too. “She did a comparison of him with another writer, some guy nobody but book reviewers and professors had ever heard of. She showed how both of their first books were about equal in talent, and from there each took a separate way.”

  Simonds said, “O’Connor opted for the bucks, the other guy for immortality. Personally, I never ate me no immortality, so I wouldn’t know. Hey, Sandy,” he shouted at the barman, “you got any immortality on that menu? Give me a big slab of it, rare.”

  Everybody else in the bar was talking about as loud as Simonds. McGarr judged it was the loudest single room he had ever been in in his life, but nobody seemed to mind.

  “The article didn’t do O’Connor much good,” Sugrue went on. “He started trying to write artsy-fartsy short stories for the New Yorker. Then he just stopped writing altogether. He can retire, you know, with just what he’s got from the game. But I don’t think that’s what he wants.”

  McGarr waited at least several minutes, watching Sugrue and the others drinking and the barman making them refills. Everybody in the bar looked prosperous and slightly overfed. And nobody seemed hesitant about drinking, either. People were bashing them back without pause. At tables in the dining area he could see men and women talking animatedly over food they could barely see. Their eyes were bright and flashing, and McGarr could tell booze wasn’t the only cause—deals were being made this Sunday evening. He could hear as much from the snatches of conversation that came to him through the din. These Americans were a busy people, self-confident, talented, and not a little bit crass. They seemed to like it that way, so much so that they were changing the world to their point of view.

  McGarr could imagine May Quirk getting caught between the two worlds in a way that was similar to the choices Rory O’Connor and Dr. John Fleming had made but was poignant as well, for May Quirk had been called upon to judge the dilemmas of the other two and their decisions. She labeled Fleming’s choice escape, when he returned to Ireland, and O’Connor’s crass commercialism, when he chose to please American readers. Another thought struck McGarr. One of the poet’s functions in Gaelic Ireland had been satire—that of ridiculing the words and deeds of those who had strayed from accepted standards, in order to reassert the traditions of the society. People had feared the tongue of a poet perhaps even more than the wrath of the priest. McGarr remembered the description of May Quirk in Griffin’s Bar. Nobody dared match wits with her; her tongue could singe. “Could it be that she was a badmouth and—”

  “—had the hammer out on everybody?” Sugrue cocked his head as though listening to some special voice. “I’ve thought of that. It sometimes seemed so. Why even she and me—well, that’s how I met her. Being so short, I’m a bit sensitive about my height and—”

  “But can you ever remember her backing anybody wholeheartedly?”

  Both Simonds and Sugrue tried to think of somebody but couldn’t.

  McGarr asked Sugrue, “Did she work at home?”

  “If you mean did she do the writing at home, yes.”

  “Do you have a key to her place?”

  “No—May was a great one for privacy.”

  “What’s the address?”

  Sugrue wrote it on his note pad, then handed the sheet to McGarr. “Are you going there?”

  McGarr nodded.

  “Can I tag along? My staying here won’t do May much good.”

  McGarr paid the tab and they left.

  ELEVEN

  In the Shadows of Many Gunpersons

  AT THE DOOR to May Quirk’s apartment Simonds asked, “Can you pick it?”

  There were few locks McGarr couldn’t. “Think so.”

  “Good. I’m going to walk up the hall and around the corner so when I return I’ll find the door open. Paddy, you’re my witness.” McGarr watched Simonds saunter up the hall. The way he put his feet down, he probably never wore out a shoe.

  The apartment wasn’t empty.

  An old woman, her gray hair braided and piled on top of her head, stood in front of them. A Mauser automatic no different from those McGarr had recently dealt with in Ireland was pointed at his chest. “Come in and shut the door.”

&nb
sp; McGarr didn’t move.

  She was wearing a gray dress, an apron, and heavy black shoes. “Get a move on. Quick. Quick.” She jerked the gun. “I can hit a pig’s eye at thirty paces, and the two of you are closer than that. They’ll not put an old woman like me in jail for shooting a couple of gunmen.”

  “Nora Cleary,” Sugrue began to say, “it’s me, Paddy—”

  But she cut him off. “Muscha, it’s you all right. A gunman like the ones who stuck my May. Put up your hands and face the wall.”

  When McGarr and Sugrue had complied, she said, “Now lean your hands against it and step back three paces.”

  She walked over to a table, took the receiver from its yoke, and began dialing a number.

  But a knock came on the door.

  “Who is it?” she yelled.

  “Police.” The voice was Simonds’s.

  She cautiously moved to the door, keeping the Mauser trained on them. “Prove it.”

  Simonds slipped his identification through the mail slot.

  She opened the catch box, took the card out, and studied it. She then went to the phone and dialed the number on the card. She listened for a bit, hung up the phone, and went to the door. She opened it.

  Simonds stepped in.

  “Raise ’em,” she said. She had backed into a corner where she could cover the three of them.

  Simonds put up his hands.

  “What’s your assistant’s name?”

  “Amucci.”

  “What’s his rank?”

  “Detective sergeant.”

  “All right. Frisk them two fellers and if they’re packing shooters I want you to chuck them on the couch. Then lift that feller’s wallet. Toss that on the couch too.” She waited until Simonds had done that before she said, “Now, take off your jacket and sit on the floor.”

  Simonds shook his head. “Geez,” he began, “I been made a monkey of in my time, but—”

  “No yap. Just do it,” she said in a manner that cut him short. He did it.

  After a while she said, “You, McGarr—come over here.”