“What happened to the bag, Tommy?”
“What bag?”
“The olive green canvas bag the gun was in.”
“Oh, yeah. I got rid of it. Too conspicuous, swingin’ a bag around the street.”
“As opposed to swinging a gun around my head.”
“Ah, that was just a bit of crack, man.”
Tommy’s face creased into a smile.
“Listen, thanks for this, specially the day that’s in it and so on.”
“The day that was in it was yesterday. It’s three in the morning tomorrow now.”
Tommy looked hungrily at the whiskey bottle, then shook his head, as if thinking better of it.
“Are you sticking around, Ed?”
“I’ve to sort out the house. What to do about it.”
“But are you going back to the States?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Haven’t had time to think, Tommy. I’ve had the funeral all day, Linda Dawson all evening, and now you.”
“Linda Dawson? What did she want?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Don’t get hooked in there. Steer clear, man. Big trouble. Poor little rich girl, black widow spider.”
“I can look after myself.”
“All right. Friendly advice spurned, don’t blame me. One more thing. Let me see your garage, man.”
At this stage, it seemed easier to do what Tommy wanted than to ask him why he wanted it. I led him out through the kitchen, unlocked the back door, turned down the passage, and slid the bolt on the rear garage door.
Inside there was a car covered in dust-darkened tarpaulins. Tommy began to haul on the heavy old cloths, and together we got them off.
Beneath was an old saloon car, racing green with curved lines, tail fins and a tan leather interior.
“I knew she’d be here,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. “Everything else is as it was, why shouldn’t this?”
“What is it?” I said.
“She’s an Amazon 122S. A Volvo, from the days when they weren’t built for mummies to fill full of kids and dogs and shopping and all. Nineteen sixty-five, I think. I worked on her with your old man.”
“It’s a beautiful car.”
“Your oul’ fella was no angel, but he had a lovely way with a motor.”
When Tommy Owens failed his Inter Cert, my father took him on as an apprentice in his garage. So while the rest of us were still slaving away in school, Tommy was earning money and buying a leather jacket and a motor-bike and getting the girls. But then my father ran into some money problems and his garage shut down. Not long after that, he walked out of the house one evening and was never heard of again. And not long after that, I found out that my mother was seeing another man, and that’s when I walked out. I took a flight to London, and then another to Los Angeles, where I stayed. Eventually, I paid for my mother to visit, and she told me that it was just one of those things, and I told her that it was none of my business, and she said that, given the way my father had abandoned her, she was entitled to whatever comfort she could find, and it was all over and done with now, and I agreed and apologized and that was the end of that. But I never went home. Every year, I’d arrange for her to come over. She was there when I got married, and she was there for the christening of my daughter, Lily, and she was there for the funeral. Lily, who had fair, tangled curls and the wrong kind of blood, died two weeks short of her second birthday. After that my marriage fell apart, and so did I, and the next time I saw my mother it was the day before yesterday, and she was lying in a coffin in the funeral home. I slipped her wedding ring from her cold hand and looked inside the rim. My father’s name, Eamonn, was engraved there. I pushed the ring back on her finger. When I kissed her forehead, it was like kissing a stone.
I suddenly felt very tired. Tommy was underneath the hood, muttering to himself. I said, “Tommy, I need to get some sleep.”
Tommy said, “This is in amazing nick, considering. Do you want me to bash her into shape for you?”
“Sure. If it means I can ditch the rental car, go ahead.”
I closed up the garage and saw Tommy out. He promised to return first thing in the morning to get going on the Volvo, so I gave him a key. I doubted whether Tommy’s first thing actually took place in the morning, but if it did, I didn’t want to be around for it. I locked doors and switched off lights and was climbing the stairs when the doorbell rang.
Fuck it. Whatever Tommy had forgotten, he could live without it for the time being. I continued upstairs, went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. But the ringing wouldn’t stop, and soon it was joined by a pounding on the door. I went downstairs, put on the hall light and opened the door, ready to reef Tommy out of it. But it wasn’t Tommy, it was Linda Dawson. Her hair shone bright in the moonlight, and her brown eyes glowed.
“I’m sorry, Ed,” she said, her voice hoarse and cracking, “but I told you, I just couldn’t take another night alone.”
It turned out, neither could I. I took her hand and pulled her into the house. I pushed the door behind her, and shut out the light.
We clung to each other in the dark. At one point, thinking of all that had happened in the past few days, my eyes filled with hot tears. Linda held me until they passed, and then until I slept.
I woke just before dawn. She was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, naked, smoking a cigarette and staring at the moon. She turned to me and smiled, and said, “Go back to sleep.” So I did.
Three
WHEN I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, LINDA HAD GONE. I washed and shaved, dressed in the black suit I had been wearing for the past three days and the last clean white shirt I owned. Then I called the airline to find out what had happened to my luggage. Between being put on hold several times and being passed to three different people, I was told variously that it had been found and would be couriered to me that day, that it had been mistakenly rerouted back to L.A., and that the person who deals with all this type of thing wouldn’t be in until later, and I should ring back then. Ireland hadn’t changed that much after all. I made some tea and toast and had it sitting outside beneath the pair of male and female apple trees in the back garden. They stretched out their branches toward each other, but never touched. They had been there as long as I could remember.
I went indoors and looked around the house. Nothing had changed from my childhood, and now everything was torn and frayed, chipped and stained and damp, and all over a smell of must and mold, a spoor of neglect, of decay. Tommy had been right: state of the place. I sat on the stairs and looked at the telephone. It was an old black Bakelite telephone with a brown cord that looked like a coarsely woven shoelace. Beside it on the cheap pine table there was a bowl of pinks and an address book. The pinks had a sweet, spicy smell that reminded me of summers long ago, and of my mother. The address book was open to my name. The woman who lives next door, a Mrs. Fallon, had found my mother collapsed on the porch and called an ambulance. Then she looked up “Loy” in the address book and called me in Los Angeles. By the time I got the message and rang St. Vincent’s Hospital, my mother was dead. On the evidence of these rooms, it felt like she had been waiting for that death for a long, long time.
The phone rang.
“I tried you earlier, but it was engaged. I didn’t want you to think I’d just ducked out on you,” Linda said. Her voice was husky, her tone a little too bright.
“It’s still too early to think anything much,” I said.
“I know what you mean. I have those papers you asked for. You know, Peter’s phone records and so on. Do you want to come over and get them?”
I told her I’d see her later and hung up. But I didn’t want to see her later. I wasn’t sorry we’d slept together, far from it, but I knew if I set out to find the husband of a woman who had just shared my bed, we would both be sorry soon enough. Besides, I had a train to catch.
The DART—Dublin Area Rapid Transit, as nobody calls it—shares thirty miles of the railwa
y track that runs up the east coast of the country, from Rosslare in the south to Belfast in the north. I took a train to Pearse Station. I crossed Westland Row and followed the horde of office workers filing in the back gate of Trinity College. The campus doesn’t exactly provide a shortcut to the city center, but I guess a walk through an Elizabethan university first thing in the morning might not be the most stressful way to start your day. As I strolled through College Park, past the Old Library and across the cobbles toward Front Gate, I thought about what my life would be like if I had studied medicine here like I was supposed to, all those years ago. The road not taken.
On College Green, I turned south past the provost of Trinity’s house (dream address: number 1 Grafton Street) and walked through Dublin’s upmarket shopping quarter. It had a sleek sheen to it now, a brash, unapologetic confidence about itself that had been thin on the ground in Ireland twenty years before. It also had a derelict in every doorway: most stores hadn’t opened yet, but security personnel were beginning their patrols, so the homeless were gathering up their cardboard boxes and bedding, ready for another day of whatever you did when you had nowhere to go and nothing to do once you got there.
At the corner of South King Street and Stephen’s Green, I was expecting to see Sinnott’s, where Tommy Owens and I once drank, and which I had dreamt of over the years, but it had been replaced by a towering white shopping mall with fussy decorative work around the windows and roof that made it look like a giant wedding cake. Sinnott’s had migrated down the street, transforming itself during the journey from an atmospheric old Victorian pub with a long dark bar counter into a generic North American–style sports lounge.
I passed a sleek brushed-chrome-and-glass tram standing on the corner of the Green, cut across the Green onto Leeson Street, checked the address on the card I had been given at the funeral and climbed the steps of a Georgian terraced house. There was only one bell, for Doyle & McCarthy, Solicitors, and I pressed it.
After a short wait at reception, I took a lift to the second floor and was greeted by the slim, rangy, navy-suited figure of David McCarthy.
“Edward Loy, good morning, sir,” he said, his tone crisp and breezy. I followed him into a large conference room and we sat across from each other at a long, polished table. Light streamed in through the high sash windows and reflected off the diplomas and degrees that hung behind glass from the picture rail on the opposite wall.
“Nice to see you this fine morning,” David drawled, taking a black Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket and laying it on a pad of lined A4. “Do I take it this means you want me to sort out the old house for you?”
David McCarthy’s older brother Niall had been in my year at secondary school, and they had both shown up at the funeral. Niall was an accountant, David a solicitor in his father’s practice. Both possessed to the full the exemplary traits of the South County Dublin professional: an obsession with rugby and golf, an all-year tan, a complete lack of imagination, and a tendency to precede every other noun with the qualifier “old.”
“You do indeed, David,” I said. “I want to sell up and move back to the States as soon as I can.”
“Right. Well, we’ll try and make that as soon as possible for you. First off, even though both parents died intestate, it’s a straightforward old chain: your mother inherited the house from your father, and you inherit it from her; indeed, you’ve had a right to one-third of it since your father died.”
“That’s just it though. My father isn’t dead. Or at any rate, he may not be.”
“Lob that past me again?”
“He went missing. They never found him, or a body.”
“But that was a long time ago?”
“Over twenty years.”
“Right. Well, seven years is all you need. And obviously you’re going to need the old death certificate. So the first step is to have your father declared dead.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I got up, walked to a window and looked down into the street.
“Ed? Are you okay?”
“David, I…I’m not sure I’m ready to do this yet.”
“I understand perfectly. Day after the old funeral, many emotions, not the cleverest to rush into big decisions.”
“Maybe if I got back to you in a few days.”
“Absolutely. Take your time. And if there’s anything I can do in the meantime…”
David was rising, as if the meeting was over. I went back and sat down again, and after a moment, so did he.
“Well, yes, there is, that’s partly why I…I’m not exactly burdened with cash right now, so I was hoping to get some sort of document from you that I could take to the bank, let me borrow against the value of the house. Strictly short-term, of course.”
David cleared his throat and looked down at his Montblanc. He tapped it gently on the pad of lined paper.
“Right. Well, I can state to the bank my opinion of your intention to initiate probate. But only in an individual capacity. In terms of a document on behalf of this practice, I’d need you to have commenced the process, and only then would Doyle & McCarthy be positioned to give them a sensible estimate of how long it would take before you’d have your hands on the deeds.”
“And that’s the kind of letter the bank would need?”
“I can’t speak for every bank manager. But in my experience, that’s the only type of assessment upon which they’d be prepared to make, ahm, a cash advance.”
His voice had taken on a more distant, strained tone, as if the phenomenon of someone needing money was one he had heard of but regretted having to encounter directly. He unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and then screwed it back on again. I stood up, smiling, as if to reassure him that being broke was really no big deal.
“Not to worry. Well, listen, thanks anyway, David, and I’ll probably be back in to you soon enough.”
David walked me to the lift.
“Thanks indeed, sir,” said David. “See you round the old campus.”
We shook hands before the doors closed. I took the lift down and walked back the way I’d come, head down, angry and embarrassed with myself. It had never occurred to me that I would need a death certificate for my father. In L.A., I had simply put him from my mind, dead or alive. That’s what L.A. is for, to forget your past. But as soon as I got back to Dublin, I thought I’d see him on every street corner. I expected him to be at the funeral. I wasn’t ready to declare him dead, not yet. Not before I had some inkling of what had happened to him. It looked like I’d have to stick around after all. And since I’d had to borrow the airfare to get here, the first thing I was going to need was a job.
I walked down Westmoreland Street, crossed onto O’Connell Bridge and stared down into the green water of the river Liffey. It didn’t smell anymore—in my childhood, the only respite from its seemingly perpetual stink was when the aroma of burnt hops from the Guinness Brewery up on James’s Street enveloped the city in a warm narcotic cloud. The North Quays too had changed: there used to be so many abandoned and demolished buildings that Bachelor’s Walk and Ormond Quay looked like a mouthful of ruined teeth; now a row of smart new restaurants and enhanced shopfronts seemed to testify that cosmetic dentistry had finally arrived in Dublin, as no doubt it had. There was money on these streets, after all, and the people who had it were wearing it on their backs, and around their wrists and necks: why not in their mouths too? What was the point of having money if no one knew you had it? For too long, the Irish knew the shame of not having an arse to their trousers; no one could ever be allowed to think that again, and if that meant a carnival of ostentatious vulgarity and greed, well, didn’t we wait long enough for it? Wasn’t it no more than we deserved? Didn’t it prove we were as good as anyone else? And anyone who said different was only a begrudger.
I followed the river down Burgh Quay to Butt Bridge and looked past the gray limestone dome of the Custom House to the new cathedral of economic prosperity in Dublin: the International
Financial Services Centre, a gleaming complex of blue-tinted plate glass and gray steel. It was a powerhouse for banks and brokers and all manner of moneymakers, and it made Dublin look like any other city. I guess that was the point: at one stage in our history, we tried to assert a unique Irish identity by isolating ourselves from the outside world. All that did was cause half the population to emigrate. Now we preferred to avoid distinctive national characteristics of any kind. Having once been anxious to prove that Ireland was not a colonial province called West Britain, we were now sanguine about our recolonization, resigned to our fate as the fifty-first state of the USA.
There was a noise behind me and I turned. Three gray-faced, snuffle-nosed wraiths in grimy navy and white sportswear had encircled me. Maybe if I hadn’t heard them above the traffic’s roar, they would have made a move, but head-on, their eyes fell away. They were carrying fast-food restaurant cups full of bright yellow liquid you were supposed to think was lemonade, but which everyone knew was methadone. The woman was nudging the taller of the two men, but he was staring fixedly at the ground. The smaller man was nodding and grinning vacantly at me. He had scabs on his eyebrows and beneath his lower lip where his piercings had become infected.
I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and said, “All right for smokes, are you?” They each took a couple, and I nodded at them and walked off toward Tara Street station.
“Big fucking deal. Think you’re it now, do ya? State of ya,” the woman shouted at my back.
“Thinks he’s fuckin’ it now, so he does,” one of the men agreed.
Dublin, where no kindness goes unpunished.
I got the DART back and walked down to my mother’s house. I didn’t feel comfortable about keeping a gun belonging to Podge Halligan there, whether what Tommy Owens had told me about it was true or not. I took the Glock 17 and the ammunition from the sideboard, wrapped them in an old towel and put them in the scuffed leather bag I’d managed to keep from the airline’s clutches. Coming out of the house, I could hear Tommy at work in the garage. I locked the gun in the trunk of the rental car and headed for Castlehill.
The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Page 3
