The Death of an Irish Lass Page 8

  That was when the Cooper went up. The little car was blown right over onto its roof in a ball of white fire that turned yellow, then orange, then white again as a second explosion—the gas line—rocked it another time.

  The tent in front of McGarr had small patches of flame the size of half crowns all over it, and something was burning McGarr’s back. He tore off his shirt, pulled out his pocket knife, and made a rent in the tent material. Noreen and Hughie grabbed opposite sides and tore the tent open.

  The two men staggered to their feet.

  Hughie Ward fished around for the gun and came up with a Mauser just like the one May Quirk had been carrying.

  O’Connor had only to realize that he was not going to burn to death before he gathered himself and lashed out at the other man. O’Connor had been in a crouch, and the punch came right up from the ground and caught the German under the chin. It raised him right off the ground and knocked him back several feet. He made an odd sound that seemed to come from inside his chest and did not move again.

  Nevertheless, O’Connor started for him.

  Hughie Ward jumped between them.

  O’Connor wound up to punch him, but Ward was too quick. When the punch swept over his head, Ward pivoted back on one leg and kicked out at O’Connor. He caught the big man, who was now off-balance, in the kidneys. The force of the kick drove O’Connor’s face into the sand. Ward followed him down, laying his knee on the inside of O’Connor’s left bicep while he jacked the other arm up and snapped handcuffs on the wrist. By the time the big man had thrown Ward off his back, his hands were cuffed behind him.

  McGarr waved the Mauser in front of his face and said, “Sit down.”

  Ward kicked one of O’Connor’s feet out from under him and shoved him back. O’Connor fell back onto the sand.

  McGarr went over to the blond man and rolled him over. He had a splotch of blood on the lower front of his green turtleneck sweater. His skin was waxen, like that of a man who had lost a lot of blood. His breathing was quick and shallow. McGarr lifted the sweater. There was a bloody gauze bandage covering his lower stomach. McGarr ripped the adhesive tape off that. The man had a bullet hole there with a drain in it. A professional medical person had worked on the wound. McGarr wished he hadn’t wasted all the whiskey in his flask on Hanly.

  Miraculously, however, another appeared in front of him. It was Noreen’s. She always carried a spare for him. McGarr tried to lift the blond man to a sitting position. Noreen had to help him.

  The man was young and very handsome in a Nordic way—broad forehead, long straight nose. He had a cleft in his chin. McGarr first wet his lips, then poured a drop or two on his tongue. The man jerked his head a bit but wanted more. He opened his eyes, which were blue beyond the glazing and seemed about a quarter-inch deep. He was in very bad shape.

  Hughie Ward returned from the Mercedes, where he had been rummaging about. “Tax stamp says his name is Max Schwerr. He’s not German at all. I mean, he lives in Blessington.”

  McGarr gave the young man another small dollop of whiskey. McGarr said the name over again. Two…no, three years ago he had investigated the theft of a race horse from the house of a family named Schwerr. They too had lived near Blessington, having bought a large tract of hilly, scrubby land after the Second World War. This they had successfully reforested. Now they were beginning to reap the harvest. McGarr could remember that he had been singularly impressed by the family. They had money, were foreigners of a sort, but were good citizens in every way—politically active and nationalistic, they had funded a chair at Trinity, built a wing for the new hospital in Wicklow, and generally taken an interest in the higher affairs (symphony, museums, opera) of the country.

  He gave Schwerr a little more whiskey.

  Ward added, “Here’s an envelope. I found it in the glove compartment. It’s full of money. Most of it’s foreign. And—” he paused, “—there’s a pitchfork in the trunk. May Quirk’s missing shoe is under the back seat.”

  McGarr turned to O’Connor, who was still sitting where Ward had dropped him. “How did you know he was here?”

  “Fleming told me.”

  “How did Fleming know he was here?”

  “He worked on him. Some farmer called him out here. May shot him, I guess. Before he killed her. I only put it together when you told me about her. He came into Griffin’s last night. She had been waiting to interview him.”

  “For what?”

  “An article she was doing.”

  “On what?” McGarr turned his back to shield the man on the ground. The wind had changed briefly and pushed a gust of smoke from the turtled and still burning Cooper toward him. The smoke was black and pungent with the reek of plastic, rubber, oil, and petrol. It snaked in thick ribbons from the wreck. McGarr had really enjoyed owning that thing until he saw it like that and realized how silly it had been for him to have invested his feelings in something so unimportant and fragile. How precarious were all things tangible.

  Ward was now trying to make the campers, who had gathered around the wreck, disperse.

  “The finances of the I.R.A.”

  McGarr assumed Schwerr had something to do with that as well. He had been selected for this aspect of the illegal organization because he was German and his appearance probably kept him above suspicion, to say nothing of his wealthy background and patrician parents. If May Quirk had shot him before he killed her, McGarr wondered where he had gotten the pitchfork, why he had chosen to use such a weapon, and why he hadn’t chucked it over the cliffs, as McGarr had suspected. That caused McGarr to think briefly about McAnulty and his crew and Commissioner Farrell.

  Schwerr stirred. McGarr gave him a bit more whiskey. He groaned and coughed. “Perhaps,” McGarr had only to say and Hughie Ward started for the Mercedes. “And park it down the road, Hughie. Then insinuate yourself among the people who are with McAnulty and, when he’s alone, tell him about the car. We’ll let him decide how he’ll say we found that pitchfork. Maybe he might want to work the car over right there in front of all those media types. That’ll pacify him some. I hope.”

  Schwerr had his hand on the bottle. McGarr was choking him with the stuff.

  McGarr lowered the bottle and asked, “She shot you, didn’t she? That’s why you jabbed her with the pitchfork.”

  Schwerr said nothing. He didn’t even blink. Suddenly his eyes cleared and he looked at McGarr.

  McGarr said again, “May Quirk is dead. You killed her with a pitchfork. After she shot you.”

  He turned his eyes back into the cloudless night sky overhead. He blinked once, very slowly, and reached for the flask. When he could, he said in a hoarse voice, “I don’t believe you.” He turned and looked at O’Connor, and then McGarr saw his eyes quaver. Schwerr realized what McGarr was saying about May Quirk was true. Why else would O’Connor have tried to kill him? He sobbed. He bit his lip. He tried to raise himself. The pain almost made him pass out again. “She shot me, that’s true, but that’s all. I’d never kill her. Never, never. I…she…” His voice broke.

  “…was carrying your child?” McGarr asked.

  Schwerr nodded as much as he was able. His chin was resting on his chest.

  O’Connor struggled to his feet and began walking toward the water, where the incoming tide was frothing through the rocks and up onto the small sandy beach.

  “It was this business of an abortion,” Schwerr said. “I mean—” He turned his face to McGarr. “My parents, they loved her. She spoke German. She was…” He looked away. “And then her talk of her career, and the questions again.” He paused for a moment. “You’re McGarr?” He was looking out to sea.

  McGarr nodded.

  “Then you know what about, the questions.” His voice had just the merest foreign trace to it. Otherwise he sounded like a person who had gone to public school and university. “And I put it together. She was only interested in me because I was involved with the people she was doing some work on. I struck her—I adm
it it—again and again. I had never dreamed she’d refuse me. If she hadn’t shot me, I think I might have killed her myself. She said—” He glanced up at the moon again, “—she’d have it taken care of in New York. In passing. As if it were just some minor problem that…”

  When he didn’t go on, McGarr asked, “So you left the pasture? Was that where you were?”

  He nodded. “Just across from O’Brien’s Folly. I can remember seeing tourists with torches up there. But I fell down and maybe…I can’t remember. When I got to my feet I shouted for her, but I knew I was getting weak. I managed to get the car started and I stopped at the first farmhouse. I asked the farmer if he had seen May. He hadn’t, but saw I was bleeding. He brought me inside and called a doctor, who patched me up.”

  “What did you tell him? A doctor is supposed to report all bullet wounds to the police.” McGarr then remembered Dan O’Malley’s implying that Dr. Fleming was currently the area’s only medical practitioner.

  “He did. I heard him myself in the farmhouse. I told him I stumbled with it in my coat pocket. It looks like that, don’t you think?” He tried to look down at the bullet hole in his side. “Anyhow, I’m licensed to carry that gun. When the gun licensee gets hurt with his own gun, the police don’t seem to care much.” He looked at McGarr.

  “Depends on the circumstances.” The explanation seemed too lengthy to McGarr. He wondered why Schwerr was trying to protect Fleming. Or, if Fleming had reported the incident, McGarr wondered why the report had gotten lost in the course of the day. O’Malley would certainly have told McGarr about it. And then why hadn’t Fleming himself noticed the incident, the murder and the gunshot wound having occurred within a half mile of each other? And why hadn’t the doctor, if in fact it was Fleming, insisted on Schwerr’s being taken to a hospital? “Didn’t the doctor want you to go to a hospital?”

  “Oh, yes. He argued. He told me I was a fool. But I had—” Schwerr tried to focus on his watch.

  “To make a delivery? Where?”

  Schwerr glanced at McGarr. It was obvious he was very tired. “In Galway. At the dance.”

  “Don’t you mean Salthill? At Barry Hanly’s dance?”

  Schwerr tried to study McGarr’s face, but his eyes were closing.

  “How did the pitchfork that killed May Quirk get in your trunk?”

  Schwerr closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

  “Did Hanly give you this manila folder with the money?”

  Schwerr shook his head.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “I can’t say anything about that.”

  “And who was the doctor? Did you get his name?”

  Schwerr said nothing.

  “What did he look like?”

  Still nothing.

  McGarr stood. He turned to Noreen. “When was the last time I took you dancing?”

  “Dublin Horse Show. August seventeenth, last year.” She loved to dance.

  “Well—we’re going tonight.”

  “But it’s so late, and—” She looked at the burning Cooper, then at Schwerr.

  “A good dance in this neck of the woods might last all night.” McGarr turned to O’Connor, who was coming up the beach. “How would you feel about accompanying us to a dance, Mr. O’Connor? Maybe it will help you keep your mind off recent events. In any case, I ask mostly because I want to borrow your car.” All the police vehicles at the Technical Bureau site on the Cliffs of Moher were official looking. McGarr wanted to keep a low profile. “You don’t have to come with us, but I’d prefer it.” In the car McGarr could question the young man in an offhand manner. He believed he knew far too little about the principals in the case, and O’Connor was very much a principal suspect.

  O’Connor turned his back.

  “We’ll have to wait for the ambulance anyway. We can’t leave Mr. Schwerr alone in this condition.”

  O’Connor looked down at Schwerr. It was plain he would have preferred to have left him, dead.

  “Give me the keys to your car, please.”

  “They’re in the switch.”

  Noreen turned and stepped through the sand. McGarr admired her narrow ankle and the line of her calf, the way the light green material of the summer dress crimped over her hips. Because of the heat she was wearing a tight, low-cut blouse. The skin of her upper chest was just delicately freckled and nearly the same color as her hair.

  McGarr turned back to O’Connor. “Sit yourself down. It’ll be a while.”

  McGarr himself sat near Schwerr. “Who’s your contact at the dance?”

  Schwerr was beyond answering.

  Phil Dineen, McGarr thought. He was a Provo C/O who was presently operating out of Galway City. He had been a childhood friend of McGarr’s. They had grown up in the Dublin slums together.

  SIX

  A Thunderbird Trinity

  AS THE MOTOR of the Datsun whined toward Galway City and Salthill beyond, McGarr asked himself what he knew about the murder of May Quirk.

  She had been a New York reporter. She had been writing a story about the financial operations of the I.R.A. She had $27,000 to pay for information, but McGarr didn’t believe she would have needed that with Schwerr. She had had another sort of power over him, yet the pitchfork that had killed her, and her shoe had been found in his car. Also, she had shot him. She certainly knew she was being attacked when she was jabbed, since her hand had been on the gun. How Hanly could have managed to have ended up in her lap was a matter beyond explication.

  Also, she was pregnant. At least three men had been in love with her: Schwerr, O’Connor, and the I.R.A. fund raiser in the States; and young Dr. Fleming, her childhood companion, hadn’t batted an eye when McGarr had told him she had been murdered. He hadn’t told McGarr everything he knew, either, and an intelligent man such as he would have made the connection between the murder and the gunshot.

  Everybody in Lahinch had been fond of May Quirk. She had been an extraordinary human being.

  Where to start? McGarr usually began with the lies. Only Barry Hanly, the dance promoter, had actually told him falsehoods. Fleming had simply withheld information. McGarr had no reason to disbelieve what either Schwerr or O’Connor had told him thus far.

  McGarr stopped in Kinvarra and put a phone call through to Bernie McKeon’s home in Enniskerry, a suburb of Dublin. His wife said he was still at the office.

  McGarr dialed that number. He wondered why Hanly had said that the man Scannell at the Provincial Bank cashed all his foreign currency when, it turned out, he had never handled a large sum. “Still at it?” he asked McKeon. “And all for a gold watch and a pat on the back. Some people are satisfied with little or nothing.”

  “At least I won’t have to walk.”

  “So—you’ve heard about my car. Hughie has a big mouth.”

  “I was trying to raise you on the blower at the time. The noise almost knocked me into the Liffey.”

  “Would that the volume had been louder. Your head needs a good soaking.” McGarr was in a hurry, though. “Look it, Bernie—what do we know about this fellow Scannell at the Provincial Bank?”

  McKeon chuckled. “I’m way ahead of you, chief. I’ve got a man on him now, another is going to check the Provincial books to see if Hanly might have been telling the truth, and yet another is putting out feelers to see if he’s I.R.A. or not. I just couldn’t understand why Hanly would lie to you. He’s too experienced for that. Unless he didn’t lie and Scannell had been instructed to give that answer to any police inquiry. Why sacrifice the whole organization for just one man?”

  “But he lied about buying a bottle of Canadian Club. And twice about how his car got banged up.”

  “Probably too jarred to know himself. You know how he is—all that money will eventually kill him. Like a Midas of another sort, he’ll try to pass it down his pipe in a steady stream of rare aged rye. Which reminds me.” He paused. “Holy God, it’s almost ten o’clock.” The pubs would close
in an hour and a half. “I’m off.”

  The most salient oddity of the case, however, was how the pitchfork ended up in the trunk of Schwerr’s Mercedes. Certainly Schwerr, injured or not, wouldn’t have put it there and then forgotten it. He had had enough strength left to grapple with O’Connor, too.

  When he got back to the Datsun, he said to O’Connor, “Tell me about your latest novel.” He started the car and headed for the highway. “What’s it called?”

  O’Connor looked out the rear window of the speeding rented car at Galway Bay, which kept flashing a wavy image of the three-quarter moon. The surf was up. “The Thunderbird of Madison Avenue.” He seemed disinterested in conversation. He had to sit with his legs across the back seat. The interior rearview mirror was useless to McGarr, who was driving. O’Connor’s torso obscured his view.

  “What’s it about?” Noreen asked.

  After a while, O’Connor said, “I suppose you could say it’s about the collapse of a city and a civilization.”

  “I meant,” she qualified, “what happens in the novel. Tell us its plot.”

  They waited at least a minute. The traffic was fairly heavy and McGarr kept trying to nose the Datsun by the rear of a lorry so he might see to pass it, but he didn’t quite trust the little car. It certainly didn’t have the spunk of his Cooper. Also, the shirt Hughie Ward had brought him from the Technical Bureau van was too small, and it bound on his shoulders and arms. That was bothering him. He just didn’t feel right behind the wheel of the car.

  In a bored monotone O’Connor told them the complex plot of his novel. To McGarr’s mind there were too many characters, too many untoward or unbelievable occurrences. The people he described just didn’t seem real to McGarr, who had to be convinced. But he didn’t pretend to know much about the fiction or Manhattan, which was the setting of the novel.

  “Then you’re a Mannerist, I take it,” said Noreen.

  “What’s that?”

  “I suppose it’s a term that’s applied only to painting now but once was used to describe that sort of literature which is fantastical and—as I trust your writing is—polished, as opposed to literature that’s based on experience. Mannerismo is art that is stylishly stylistic, like much of sixteenth-century painting.”