The Death of an Irish Tinker Read online

  From behind the glass wall, which was a one-way mirror used by the staff of the squad to observe interrogations, McGarr, Ward, Bresnahan, Swords, and Sinclaire—each in turn—stood watch over Archie Carruthers for the next two days.

  They made sure he was provided with food, hot drinks, a comfortable cot with warm blankets, even soft lighting when he complained about his eyes. When he vomited, a steward quickly cleaned up. When he became incontinent, a clean prison uniform was provided, and his street clothes were sent to a laundry.

  The squad also made sure that the two television cameras at opposite corners of the ceiling continued to film the Monkey as his condition deteriorated. For the record, if ever needed.

  Sitting behind the glass with them at all times was a nurse trained in the treatment of opiate withdrawal syndrome. They also had a physician on call. Before Carruthers’s nausea or now—as the Monkey Man approached his thirty-sixth hour and roared for “Char! Bring me some hot bloody char!” in an accent that revealed the years he had lived in England—they began placing notes on his tray.

  “Chin up,” one said. “I’m trying to get you out.” It was signed, “T.” Another; “Duggan’s on the case.” Yet another; “When they let you out, see me straightaway.”

  “The Tod didn’t write that!” Carruthers screamed at McGarr, clipping the tray with a hand and pitching his dinner onto the floor.

  McGarr raised his hands in mock horror. “He didn’t? Well, maybe not, now that you mention it. It’s just a doodle I do. (Something wrong there.) You know, like friction. But I’ll wager you this—”

  Carruthers was shaking uncontrollably, his eyes sunken, his face gray.

  “—he’s thinking it this very moment. Came to me like telepathy, it did. He’s beside himself, doesn’t know what the Christ to do, till his Monkey Man is back behind the wheel of his Merc, driving him down the country. Someplace wild, romantic, and isolated, like a lake where the water’s deep. You know, beyond the Scalp.” It was a barren, rocky defile in Wicklow.

  “Know what I’m going to do.” McGarr went on. “I, me, personally—I’m going to drive you right up to Coolock my very self, the moment you get out, and deposit you in front of his lordship the Toddler. Drug baron and forgiving, benignant deity that he is. But not to worry. I won’t tarry and stay for a pint. Won’t embarrass you in any way, shape, or form. I’ll take myself off, instanter. Who am I to stand between friendship?

  “And won’t he be glad to see you sick and shaking or even fine, calm, and hale after having been given—correct me now, if I’m wrong, I’m certain you know more about this than me—naloxone, clonidine, or even methadone?”

  Magic words. Carruthers raised his head, and his eyes cleared, even though he was shaking so totally he had to hug his body to keep himself from spilling out of the chair.

  “Can I ask you a question? Under these circumstances it doesn’t much matter how you answer it. The entire statement, signature and all, would be tossed out of any decent court of law. Were you along for the ride the night Mickalou Maugham was put up in your aunt’s tree?”

  Carruthers blinked.

  “Who was with you? The Bookends?”

  Again he blinked.

  “What about Desmond Bacon?”

  Carruthers shook his head.

  “But Desmond Bacon, the Toddler, ordered the killing?”

  He nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say, Desmond Bacon ordered the killing of Mickalou Maugham. Raise your head and speak directly to the camera.” McGarr pointed to one of the two video cameras that were hung in opposite corners of the room.

  “Desmond Bacon ordered the killing of Mickalou Maugham and the Hyde brothers did it. Now—methadone.”

  “Will you swear to that?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “None that I know of. We put you back out up in Coolock, you’ll be dead within hours. And you know it. Or you should.”

  “Maybe I want to be dead.”

  McGarr moved toward the door. “Your choice. But I think what you’ll choose is methadone, which will be served after your statement. Instanter—my promise.”

  Two days later, while in restricted confinement, Archie Carruthers was served something else altogether. It was in a plastic bag under a warming tin on his dinner tray.

  With the tin still raised in his hand, the Monkey was frozen by the sight, unable to do anything but stare down at the 3 cc syringe filled with what he knew was cocaine hydrochloride and a little glassine bag of Mexican brown that he’d do after, to mellow out. And it came with works: second syringe, butane lighter, spoon, and strap.

  Carruthers tried to put it together—how the Toddler managed to smuggle it in, what that said about the juice he had even within the police. And finally the big, the essential question: Would the T send him more, regular like? Enough to last through whatever was coming?

  It even occurred to the Monkey that it might be a hot shot, like the cop, McGarr, had kept saying about what the Toddler wanted for Archie: to be dead. But it was only a passing thought. Why? Because unlike the Toddler, who didn’t use, the Monkey was expert in dope. Nobody shot gear like the Monkey, who would know if it was right or not.

  To the Monkey’s way of thinking, the methadone that he was receiving by tablet was not a true drug. True drugs, real drugs, the only drugs that mattered were not swallowed; they were shot.

  In one motion he swiveled himself and the tray away from the observation slot in the old iron door. And in less time than you could say, “TOD’S TOT, THE TOTAL GEAR,” the Monkey had whacked the load into the one vein in his left arm that still worked.

  But not all at once. Instead he plunged the coke in and out of him, over and over, like the in and out of intercourse, manipulating the spike to repeat the intensity of the rush. Every time he pulled back the plunger, some of his blood was sucked out and mixed with the coke and was zapped back in him like a thunderbolt to the heart.

  And his head! Man, it was as if it kept exploding. Lights, bells, gongs, whistles—the lot. Even the hair on every part of his body felt it, standing out from the skin like the quills of a porcupine! Or the pelt of a blasted monkey!

  But he’d hardly begun, it seemed, when it was gone. It was always the way with a good thing. Not a drop left. Suddenly, precipitously the Monkey began to feel jumpy and anxious. Then nervous and jittery. Which was where the gear came in.

  He had to act fast. Soon he’d be shaking and unable to cook the bag. Also, the only vein he had left without taking off his clothes was in his neck, so he’d have to aim. He could use the warming tin as a mirror, feel with the fingers of his other hand, and then plunge. The vein was big; he wouldn’t have to pop it dead on. Though he’d try.

  But even in his condition, which was now jangly, the Monkey knew he should check the gear. Mexican brown was mean shit. Also, if the cop was right about the Toddler, it could have anything in it—not just impurities but strychnine or powdered battery acid. A mix of the two was the hottest shot of all.

  But it was hard to tell by taste. Strychnine, like heroin, was bitter. Powdered acid was hot—or so the Monkey had heard—but Mex. brown was too. Archie had snorted enough of that to know for himself. He ran a little across his tongue: bitter and hot. He waited as long as he could, and there he was still on his feet. All he could feel was his jones.

  So the Monkey asked Archie Carruthers, who was shaking so violently he could barely keep the spoon and lighter steady, to say nothing of filling the needle and raising it to his neck: Do we have a choice?

  And the warming tin—when he got it propped on the tray—it was so dim he could barely see himself. No problem, said the Monkey. We’ve done this before by feel. Which was when they got a break. Under his fingers the vein felt blessedly knobby. The Monkey pinched it, plucked it up, then rolled it between his fingers to make it swell, to hit the thick part, to make a good connection.

  Out in the corridor beyond t
he door, he heard the squeal of hinges and the clank of keys. The bloody guard was coming back to pick up the bloody tray!

  Christ! He couldn’t be found with a needle sticking out of his neck. Or, as bad, nodding with the rush of the fix. He should clean up the spoon and strap and shit and wait until the guard was gone.

  But the Monkey in Archie Carruthers would not be put off. He was now in control and decided to have just a bit, enough to get him through the tray and get the guard back down the hall. Then they’d shoot the whole bag. And feel like himself.

  Jabbing down, he spiked the vein, tapped the plunger, and sent a jolt of strychnine and powdered battery acid slamming up into his brain. Roaring, spinning for the door with the needle sticking from his neck like a silver barb, Carruthers clapped his palms against his temples, staggered, and fell. Dead before his body even hit the floor.

  Or so speculated the pathologist who conducted the postmortem exam. “Strychnine was once used as a rat poison. It kills by incapacitating the medulla oblongata, which controls breathing and the other involuntary functions of the body, like heart and lungs. An intravenous jolt like that would create instant paralysis. Of course, the battery acid just eats up every vein and organ it touches. Scorches, burns.”

  The pathologist shook her head. “If the point was to kill him, then the bolus of strychnine he shot would certainly have proved sufficient. The battery acid was…over the top.”

  Which was the Toddler’s MO, McGarr knew. To send the message, which was fear.

  Also, there was the matter of the man’s “connections.” Wondering why Desmond Bacon had never been lifted, much less hauled up on charges, McGarr had made his own discreet inquiry both on the street and within the Garda, only to learn that the man was “connected.”

  “Connected to who?” he asked Tom Lyons, the guard on the Drug Squad who had accompanied them to Coolock.

  Lyons shrugged. “Proof’s the problem. If I had it, I’d say more at the proper place and time.” By which he meant to the commissioner, McGarr gathered.

  Connected. Enough to have been selling dope and murdering anybody who threatened him for over a decade now. Connected enough to have obtained Garda uniforms for the Hydes, who then fired a handgun in Wicklow Street and beat Maggie Nevins the night that Gavin O’Reilly was chucked under the wheels of a bus and Mickalou Maugham disappeared.

  And now connected enough to have murdered Archie Carruthers in a secure holding cell in a prison that was known for its security. The guard was out, McGarr decided: Not only did he have a spotless record, but he had nearly returned to the cell before Carruthers could inject the dose that killed him. He had struggled valiantly to revive him and was plainly distraught by the entire episode.

  The kitchen was another matter. “We’re understaffed,” the prison cook said, waving a hand at the baker’s dozen workers under her supervision. “I don’t hire them yokes, and I can’t be watching all of them all of the time.”

  Over a two-day period, McGarr questioned each of them at length, ran background checks, even asked for and obtained urine samples. None was a drug addict. One, however, had a son who had been treated for drug addiction. Another lived in Coolock not far from the Toddler’s holdings. But there was nothing to indicate that either woman had anything to do with Toddler or the needle that had killed Archie Carruthers.

  “Why don’t we just lift him?” said Bresnahan, who had been elevated to the status of contributing to morning meetings.

  McGarr canted his head dismissively, since it would be counterproductive without cast-iron evidence. The Toddler was careful and on his guard in every sense.

  In the meantime he had another idea how to smoke him out.

  “Rut’ie, how’s your art?”

  “My what?”

  “Art. You know, drawing and so forth.”

  The big redhead blushed in an ingenuous manner that reminded McGarr that she was still very much a country girl of—what?—only twenty-three years of age. “Nonexistent. I can’t draw a straight line.”

  “Not to worry.” McGarr thought of his wife, Noreen, who would know somebody they could commission for a few days. “What about your hair? Would you consent to becoming a blonde for a few days?”

  “Who have more fun,” Ward put in.

  Bresnahan’s handsome head swung to him, “Are you braggin’ again, Inspector? Or is it just another of your prurient clichés?”

  Eyes were raised; glances exchanged. In recent weeks the rivalry between the two young staffers had become less one-sided.

  “If I can help as a blonde, Chief, blonde it is.”

  “Good lass.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Bang 2

  RUTH BRESNAHAN DID not know how anybody could possibly remember the thousands of details in a page from the Book of Kells, much less draw it exact.

  Especially not an illiterate Itinerant girl and heroin addict, as she knew Biddy Nevins was. Or had been. Biddy’s mother had not heard from her for months and was afraid she had met with foul play. Like her “husband,” Mickalou Maugham. Could they ever have been formally married before a priest in a church?

  Ban Gharda Bresnahan rather doubted it. She was on her knees at the top of Grafton Street, staring down at the footpath at one of the large flags on which an artist—hired by the squad—had drawn a page from the Book of Kells so early in the morning that nobody could have seen, not with the streets blocked off.

  Now Ruth was supposed to color it in, but even that was beyond her, the difference in shades being so slight She had to keep glancing at the photocopy that she had concealed in the “Tinker’s muff,” where she had also concealed the 9 mm Glock—a light but powerful weapon—that Chief Superintendent McGarr had given her the loan of.

  Tomorrow, she vowed, she’d make sure the artist completed all the hard bits of coloring and left her only the big patches to fill in, if there was to be a tomorrow. She only hoped the Toddler lived up to his reputation for vigilance and murderous vindictiveness. She was no nun, and there was only so much kneeling on the pavement she could tolerate, albeit on a padded rag that Chief Superintendent McGarr had thoughtfully supplied.

  Pushing the brass-bright ringlets of dyed and permed hair out of her eyes, Ruth reached for a piece of amber-colored chalk and compared it with the crib sheet that was a photograph of the photocopy.

  “The next shade darker,” said a voice in her ear. Hugh Ward placed a lidded paper cup on the footpath beside her.

  “What’s that?” She pointed to the cup.

  “Coffee. Blond. I thought you might prefer it that way this morning. Having fun? I bet there’s not a handful of artists in Dublin who make a living doing their stuff. And here you are, fresh out of a hair salon, making a go of it.” He tossed a coin into the tin she had brought with her for alms.

  Bresnahan shook her head, her brow wrinkled in disbelief.

  “Something wrong?”

  “It’s a mystery to me how it’s said you’re so successful with women.”

  “Not by me.”

  Bresnahan piped a small note of pique. “Don’t give me that, Inspector. It’s said—and you take pride that it’s said—that you’re the quintessential swordsman.”

  “By whom?”

  “Ach, the squad over their tea, the lads down in Hogan’s. Sure, you must know it’s all over town. Which some women actually find tempting. Can you believe it? But of course, you do.”

  “What? Me? Christ! I don’t, I never say boo. Something like that, getting around, would—” He left off, having said too much.

  “Only be counterproductive?” Bresnahan laughed a bit. “Can I tell you now, so you know? I really admire you. The way you’ve stuck—you stick to your, er, guns. You know what you’re like? You’re like some throwback to a bigger, grander, more heroic age.”

  Ward waited. He’d never heard her so glib. Was she setting him up, or could she actually mean it? Or was she coming on to him?

  No. That wasn’t possible. She had no cha
nce with him, even though, he now realized, she looked better than she ever had as a Tinker wench busking on a footpath, which revealed just how far she had to go to attract his attention.

  Ward romanced only women who looked like women, who dressed like women, and who comported themselves like women in regard to him. And busting his…chops, albeit playfully, humorously, maybe even flirtatiously, was something he only permitted from women who were women.

  Still, he couldn’t keep himself from asking, “And what age would that be?” Knowing he’d made a mistake even before it was out.

  “Why, the age of the troglodyte, since you asked. You’d fit right in doin’ the Darwin number all over cavedom.”

  Ward sighed. “Certainly not with you.”

  “Of that you can be sure.” Bresnahan turned back to her drawing. Or rather her coloring, having scored one for modernity. Pity there’d been nobody close enough to hear.

  She could imagine the sort of vain, stylish, self-absorbed, up-market tarts who would find his sort of modishly sullen, saturnine masculinity irresistible. Hugh Ward was simply too full of himself and his physical presence, from the way he trained and pampered his body to the care he took with his clothing and suits that fitted him like a manikin in a window.

  That was it: He was like a walking, talking, shopfront dummy, albeit a frightfully handsome one. Reaching for a piece of chalk in the proper shade, she bent to her task.

  Thus it went for most of the day. Ruth would color a little, and every so often a coin would clank into the tin. With food and drink provided by Ward.

  Around two she was relieved for an hour by McGarr’s missus, Noreen, who, dressed like Ruth, was herself in Traveler mufti, filled in the dicey bits and made the whole presentation look more like the page from the book. Even the money in the tin increased. Tomorrow Noreen would come earlier, it was agreed.