The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI)

by Declan Hughes

  He turned back and said, “You’re supposed to be a detective. Work it out for yourself. And don’t pull a stunt like this again, Ed.”

  Then he was on his way across to join Mrs. Williamson.

  When I got back to the car, I checked the index cards I had found in the Dawsons’ bin. No Williamson there.

  The other list read:

  Dagg

  T

  L

  JW

  The T was Tommy Owens. The L was Linda. But before Linda arrived, Peter took off—to meet JW? Perhaps—except who was JW? Could the W stand for Williamson?

  I took the photographs from my pocket. The flyer I had found on my windscreen came with them. It highlighted the failure of Seafield County Council to ensure the survival of the community swimming pool, and warned of the danger of this public amenity being sold to private developers. It proposed a public meeting at the bandstand on Seafield Promenade, and a march from there to the pool. The flyer closed: “Issued on behalf of the ‘Save Our Swimming Pool’ campaign by Noel Lavelle and Brendan Harvey, Labour Party councillors, Seafield County Council.” The names seemed familiar.

  I looked through the list of fourteen names again: Brian Joyce, Leo McSweeney, James Kearney, Angela Mackey, Mary Rafferty, Seosamh MacLiam, Conor Gogan, Noel Lavelle, Eamonn Macdonald, Christine Kelly, Brendan Harvey, Tom Farrelly, Eithne Wall, John O’Driscoll. There were the Labour pair. What about the rest? Were they all local councillors? Another name on the list rang a bell: James Kearney. I got Rory Dagg on his mobile and asked about the Kearney whose office you had to sit outside to get building permits.

  “That’s Jim Kearney, yeah, what about him?” Dagg said. I could hear the chattering of small children in the background.

  “Is he a local councillor?”

  “No. But he works for the council. He’s the planning officer.”

  “Could you…if I read a list of names to you, could you say whether they have any connection with Seafield County Council?”

  “Depends how long the list. I’m solo here with three kids under five.”

  I ran through the list, excluding Harvey and Lavelle.

  “Yeah, most of them are either councillors or council officers.”

  “What’s Seosamh MacLiam?”

  “An epic pain in the hole, that’s what he is. Antideveloper, antibuilder, anti-fucking anything that wasn’t built two hundred years ago. We’d all be living on the side of the road if it was left to the same Mr. Williamson. Only he wouldn’t want any roads either.”

  A crash sounded down the phone, then a piercing scream and child’s wailing.

  “Gotta go,” grunted Dagg, and broke the connection.

  Mr. Williamson? Seosamh MacLiam. Of course: MacLiam—Son of Liam—is the Irish for Williamson. And Seosamh is the Irish for Joseph. I’d been away so long I’d forgotten Ireland has a language of its own—even if most of the Irish prefer not to speak it. And Mrs. Williamson was his wife, now his widow, come to identify the body.

  Joseph Williamson.

  JW.

  Peter Dawson’s disappearance and the councillor’s death looked like they could be connected. It was time to talk to Tommy Owens.

  When I drove along Seafield Promenade, MacLiam/Williamson’s body had been strapped to a gurney and was being loaded into the back of a Garda medical vehicle. An RTE TV crew were filming, and as I passed, I saw D.I. Fiona Reed flipping a reporter’s microphone out of her face. I turned off the coast onto Eden Avenue—twenties and thirties villas hidden from the road by great sycamore, ash and horse chestnut trees, their branches aching with green in the evening sun. In Quarry Fields, kids played on skateboards, and in the drive to what I hadn’t yet gotten used to calling my house, wearing a pair of battered old combat trousers and a “Give ’Em Enough Rope”–era Clash T-shirt, Tommy Owens was wax-polishing the 1965 Volvo.

  When he saw me, he came close and spoke in a low, urgent voice.

  “Ed, the gun is gone. I checked the sideboard—”

  “It’s okay, Tommy, I’ve got it.”

  “You’ve got it with you? Or—”

  “I’m looking after it. Don’t worry.”

  Tommy looked up at me from beneath furrowed brows. I winked at him and turned back to the car.

  “Jesus, Tommy, are you done already?” I said. “Good work.”

  “Most of the work was done twenty years ago,” he said, a slow smile of pride spreading across his face. He made a long speech about pistons, rods and rings, camshafts and carburetors, bearings and bushings, transmission gaskets and seals. I nodded like I had a clue what he was talking about, and he said, “You haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, have you?”

  “No,” I said. “But if you give me the keys, I’ll be happy to drive the thing.”

  “It’s gonna need maintenance, Ed, and if it’s obvious you haven’t a notion, you’ll be ripped off, any garage’ll think, here comes some rich cunt with his weekend hobby, let’s make him pay.”

  “I’ll worry about that later, Tommy.”

  “Just be sure that you do. Anyway, there she is.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went into the house, picked up the Laphroaig, glasses, and a jug of iced water, and brought them outside. Tommy was sitting in the porch, rolling up a three-skinner, heating a small block of dope with a cigarette lighter and crumbling the edges into the tobacco. I sat beside him and poured a couple of drinks. A woman in her thirties came out of the house opposite with her two young children. At her gate, she looked across the road at us. I offered a smile and a wave, but she whipped her head away and hurried her kids out of our sight. I guess two middle-aged men drinking whiskey and rolling joints on a porch wasn’t her idea of adding value to the neighborhood.

  Tommy smoked the joint about halfway down, until his eyes were red and watering and a smile had plowed its way into his face. He offered it to me, but I waved it back at him, and he finished it off. He nodded and laughed a little, and took a hit of his drink.

  “So, Ed, what did you get up to today, man? Have a swim, get any sun?”

  “I spent my day asking people questions, Tommy. See, I’m looking for Peter Dawson.”

  “Peter Dawson? Why, what’s happened to him?”

  “According to his wife, he’s gone missing.”

  “His wife? And what, has she hired you to find him? I warned you about Linda Dawson, Ed—”

  “But you didn’t tell me you were with her in the High Tide last Friday.”

  Tommy’s grin had become a mask. “Was I? I can’t remember.”

  “And minutes earlier, you were drinking with Peter Dawson. Making you the last person to see him before he disappeared.”

  “If you say so, man. I bump into a lot of people. Maybe I should keep a diary, log what everyone says, case they go missing and I’m the only one who knows what their last words were. Only thing, I’d better warn them not to talk shite to me all the time.”

  “Tommy, what were you doing with Peter Dawson?”

  “Just…bumped into him in the street, you know? Thought we’d have a quick jar.”

  “In the High Tide? Don’t bullshit me, Tommy, there’d have to be a very good reason for you to go into a pub like that.”

  Tommy tipped his head back and grimaced. “I know, Jaysus, the state of the place, like drinking in a fucking hairdresser’s.”

  “So? What was that very good reason?”

  Tommy drank some whiskey, took a gulp of air into his lungs and exhaled slowly.

  “Peter owed me money. I was meeting him so he could pay it back.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “Sorry, millionaire’s son owes you money? What did he borrow, twenty quid?”

  Tommy frowned, as if he were about to get on his dignity, then laughed it off.

  “All right, man: truth? Weekend deal for Mr. D: fifty-bag of dope, fifty-deal of coke.”

  “Yeah? This you scamming the Halligans, creaming off the top of their stash? Or is th
at what you do now, Tommy? Are you one of Podge’s dealers?”

  “What if I am?”

  “A drug dealer. For a gangster. That it?”

  “It’s not as if…I mean, it’s just dope, coke, E: consenting adults all the way. Not as if I’m hanging round the playground pushing smack to schoolkids.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing much. I just wanted to get out of there.”

  “But you didn’t, did you? You stayed.”

  Tommy looked quickly at me, as if wondering which lie to tell, then stared at the ground.

  “Peter was…agitated. Excited, you know. Like something big was about to happen.”

  “What? He wasn’t branching into the drugs trade himself, was he?”

  “I don’t know. Not drugs. Anyway, he got a call on his mobile. Whoever it was wanted to see him earlier than they’d arranged. He asked me to stay and tell Linda he’d call her later.”

  “So you met Linda that night? She never mentioned it.”

  “Nah, she wouldn’t,” Tommy said, with sour emphasis.

  “And how did you find her?” I said.

  “The usual. ‘Lady Linda talks to the little people.’ This expression on her face, like someone might spot her talking to me.”

  “Was she drunk?”

  “I’ve never seen Linda Dawson drunk.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t mean she doesn’t drink all the time. But she can hold it. She’d drink you and me under the table. It’s a useful part of her act, though.”

  “What act?”

  “Her whole ‘I’m a sensitive soul on the edge’ bit. Sobbing and then being brave about it, she’s so lonely, she can’t take much more. She does it in Hennessy’s about once a month. Then she goes home with some dupe who’s given her a shoulder to cry on. It’s pathetic.”

  “Sounds like it’s personal, Tommy,” I said.

  Tommy flashed me a look of cold rage, then drained his glass and sat with his head down, breathing heavily through his nose.

  “Tell me this: What’s the deal with that marriage? How did the most beautiful girl in Bayview end up with a bloated rich kid like Peter Dawson?”

  Tommy held his left hand up and rubbed thumb against index and middle fingers.

  “Makes the world go round,” he said. “Linda did the whole arty thing in her twenties. Tried to make a go of it as a painter, went out with mad beardy blokes, lived in dives, suffered for her art. She didn’t make it. After ten years, she thought, time to trade that dream in. And she was determined it was going to be a cash deal. So she went after Peter Dawson.”

  “Surely she had a wider choice. Rich men form a queue for a woman like that.”

  “Ah yeah, but she wanted to be sure, you know?”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure she wouldn’t fall in love with the guy. And with Peter, that was guaranteed, at least as far as she was concerned.”

  “What kind of woman would want to guarantee herself a loveless marriage?”

  “The kind of woman who doesn’t have an ounce of love in her,” Tommy said bitterly. “The kind of woman you should have nothing to do with, Ed. Steer clear, man, steer clear.”

  The dope and the whiskey had proved no match for Tommy’s nerves: he was tapping his feet and nodding his head, as if the arrhythmic vibrations of his past were working their way through his bones. He was bound up with Linda and Peter in ways I didn’t know about yet, but there was no point in asking him straight out: Tommy would always tell a lie in preference to the truth, as much out of habit as strategy. Better to drop a hard fact and see if it caused a ripple.

  “Tommy, do you know a local councillor name of Seosamh MacLiam?” I said.

  Tommy gave me his thinking face, meaning either he was checking his dope-addled memory or he was stalling.

  “Because they fished him out of the sea today.”

  That did it. Tommy looked like someone had walked across his grave.

  “Joey Williamson is dead?”

  “I think that’s who Peter Dawson was due to meet the day he disappeared. Probably it was Williamson who called his mobile when he was with you in the High Tide.”

  “Jesus. I don’t believe it.”

  “Did you know him, Tommy?”

  “Everyone knew him, he was…well, he was a councillor, but he was really sound, you know? Against the developers, the builders, he led the protests when they were going to build on that old Viking site in Castlehill. He was in favor of legalizing weed too.”

  “What was Peter Dawson’s connection with him? I understand he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular with the building trade.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You weren’t really in the High Tide to sell Peter Dawson drugs, were you? What were you meeting him about, Tommy?”

  He stood up and dragged his ruined leg halfway across the garden. The sky had clouded over now. It was clammy, and the midges were beginning to bite. Sweat glistened like sequins on Tommy Owens’s darkening face.

  “What is this, Mr. Private Fucking Dick? Do you think I know where Peter is? What the fuck are all these questions for?”

  The swear words rang out like chimes of menace in the hot suburban night.

  “Keep your voice down. All I’m trying to do is establish the facts.”

  “Well you don’t have to give me the third degree while you’re doing it,” Tommy said sulkily. “Fucking Gestapo tactics.” He was pouting like a thwarted boy, and I smiled in spite of myself.

  “I haven’t pulled your fingernails off yet, have I?”

  “Only a matter of time,” said Tommy, but he smiled too, and tossed his head like a dog, as if he was trying to shake his mood away.

  His mobile rang—the ringtone was the eleven-note riff to Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar,” a record we played to death as schoolboys, proud they were the first Irish band to make it onto Top of the Pops—and he hobbled as far as the gate to answer it. When he came back, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “That was Podge Halligan,” he said. “He wants to meet me tonight, in Hennessy’s. Bring the gun and everything.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “‘And we’ll take it from there.’ That’s all he said.”

  “What do you think he meant? Is it a loyalty test, or does he want you to use the gun?”

  “Maybe both,” Tommy said. Fear showed in his tiny eyes. “I can’t do it, Ed, I can’t…what am I gonna do?”

  He sounded like he was going to burst into tears. I felt a surge of anger flood my brain: at Tommy Owens’s weakness, his inability or refusal to do anything to help himself, his complacent assumption that whatever lie he told or drug he sold, whatever act of small-time criminality he committed, everything would be fine—despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary.

  The dark green Volvo gleamed in the sun. I walked around it, running my hand along the bodywork, tapping on the windows and opening and closing the hood, as if I were a prospective buyer, inspecting the car for flaws. Even if there had been any, short of a flat tire I wouldn’t have been able to spot them. The car had belonged to my father, had evidently been a source of pride to him, and on some level—a level way below thought—maybe I was trying to feel that pride too, feel some vibration, some distant echo of the man he was. But it was useless. I didn’t know enough about my father, and I didn’t know anything about cars, and all I ended up feeling was foolish on top of angry, like someone trying to look as if he knows what he’s doing and failing. Sweat pinpricked my brow and the roots of my hair.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Have you got the keys?”

  “Do you want to drive it now?” Tommy said.

  “No, I want to put it in a museum and charge admission. Have you got the keys?”

  “They’re in the ignition.”

  Of course they were. Being angry makes you behave like a fool, but realizing it doesn’t make you stop. I got in the Volvo and started the engine. Tommy
came around to the driver’s window, eyebrows aloft in his anxious face.

  “I’ll meet Podge Halligan for you, if you like,” I said.

  “Oh God, man, would you?”

  Tears actually did appear in his eyes, and he reached into the car and clutched my arm.

  “Provided you tell me the truth: why did you meet Peter Dawson on Friday?”

  Tommy exhaled slowly.

  “To give him money.”

  “Tommy, for fuck’s sake—”

  “Not my money.”

  “Who did it come from then?”

  Tommy looked around him, then leaned in the window and spoke softly in my ear.

  “George Halligan,” he said.

  Seven

  THE CLUTCH ON THE VOLVO WAS A BIT STIFF, AND THE engine roared, and it rattled as I picked up speed, but it was a smooth ride, and I hit sixty for a short stretch coming along the coast road past Bayview. The sun had dropped behind the hill, and a fresh salt breeze gusted in off the paling sea. I passed the train station and pointed the car up the drive of the Bayview Hotel. A smart wedding was in full swing, and refugees from the dance floor, the men in disintegrating morning suits, the women in pristine charcoal and aubergine two-pieces, spilled out onto the terrace and sat smoking in the grounds. I parked the car and went to reception, where a TV was announcing the death of Seosamh MacLiam.

  Before I left, Tommy Owens told me he assumed the money—a “bag of cash,” he called it—was some kind of sweetener from the Halligans to Peter Dawson—for what, he didn’t know, but the Halligans ran legitimate site security for builders all over the Southside, so it could have been a tender for future work in that line, or a bribe to help them keep the contract. He denied being a bagman for George Halligan, and said that was the only time he had made such a payoff. We agreed it made sense for him to lie low in Quarry Fields tonight.

  I got a telephone directory, sat in the shade of an old eucalyptus to the rear of the hotel, ordered a pint of Guinness from a passing waitress and began to work my way through the list of councillors and council employees. It took a while, as there were several entries for most of the names. Three weren’t listed at all—Leo McSweeney, Angela Mackey, and the planning officer, James Kearney. Brian Joyce and Mary Rafferty weren’t at home, but I got office numbers to ring in the morning.