“What the fuck did he want with all that heroin?”
“Meet me on the beach across from the Bayview Hotel and I’ll tell you.”
“I’m meeting an investor for breakfast at the Royal Seafield,” George rasped.
“All right, I’ll meet you there. Is he up on the narcotics trade, this ‘investor’ of yours?”
George called me a variety of names, then said he’d see me on the beach.
“And come alone, George,” I said.
I had handed Delaney over to Dave Donnelly earlier that morning. Dave wanted me to bring him into the station, but I wasn’t convinced if I came in, I’d succeed in getting out, so we set the meeting for six-thirty in the pine forest car park in Castlehill. Before I took Dessie there, I let him talk to his girlfriend. I was in two minds about this, as I wasn’t sure he could be trusted, but I was in two minds anyway about why I liked Delaney when there was so much to dislike. Maybe it’s just that the good in him seemed to outweigh the bad. I always thought that was worth taking a chance on. I was often wrong.
I stood in the tiny hall of the house in James Connolly Gardens while he went upstairs and spoke to his girlfriend. After a few minutes she came downstairs and went into the kitchen. Delaney came down and nodded at me to follow her.
Delaney introduced her as Sharon. She had a hard thin face and cold green eyes and dyed copper hair and her cigarette looked like a part of her hand. I had seen her before, with Dessie on the Seafront Plaza. I wondered if she was using too.
“What about us?” she said. “Where are we going to go? We can’t stay here.”
I said it wasn’t up to me, it was up to the Guards to work out whether they’d be offered witness protection.
“Yeah, but now, where do we go now? Word gets out, Podge could have someone down here in five minutes, even from jail. The kids, anything.”
She wasn’t panicking, she was just looking for the right word. She wasn’t using, not smack at any rate. Those hard eyes were clear and smart. Delaney was lucky to have her.
“What about Collette?” he said.
“In Galway? How do we get there?”
Delaney looked at me. I nodded to whatever it was. He took a brick of money from his pocket and offered it to her. She looked at it like it was dirt, then she looked at him the same way. Delaney was coming apart as it was from the lack of heroin; I thought her gaze might send him under.
“Is that drug money?” She spat the words out.
“It’s money I gave him,” I lied. “Use it. Get a taxi to Heuston, take a train to Galway. I’ll see what the Guards offer, and then I’ll get in touch.”
She turned the gaze on me. It was strong stuff to take, particularly when you’d been up all night. I liked her. If Delaney wasn’t strong enough to make it, she certainly was.
“If rehab for him isn’t included, forget it,” she said.
I nodded.
The fridge had a freezer section on top, with three drawers. She pulled open the third drawer, took out packs of fish fingers and peas and potato waffles, then produced a plastic sandwich box, which she handed to me. I opened it. Inside, in a sealed sandwich bag, was a blood-filled syringe.
“The murder weapon, isn’t that what they call it?”
I looked at her in astonishment, and she almost smiled.
“When I was cleanin’ up Peter Dawson’s boat with Colm Hyland, I slipped it in me jacket,” Delaney said.
“Go on, wait in the hall a minute till I say good-bye to this bollocks,” she said.
From the hall, it sounded more like a mother with her son than a woman and a man.
When we left the house, Delaney was crying. It seemed like the right thing to do.
I took the wheel. On the way to the pine forest, Delaney took a wrap of heroin from his pocket. He was sweating and fidgeting; I could see he needed it badly. Then he wound down the window and tossed it out of the car.
“Why’d you do that?” I said.
“Cops hate junkies bad enough as it is. If I’m out of it, it’s only gonna make it worse.”
It was a gray morning, and the mist was cold and damp enough to make you shiver.
“Dessie, do you still have the postcard of that Greek island in your wallet?”
Delaney nodded.
“What’s the story with that?”
“My brother part owns a restaurant and bar there. Fifty grand and I could buy into it. Dream on, yeah?”
Dream on.
Dave Donnelly was standing by his car among the pines. I pulled in beside him and turned to Delaney.
“Do me a favor. Leave George Halligan’s name out of it.”
“He’s hardly in it.”
“At the ferry-house. Just leave him out.”
“Why? You’re not workin’ for him, are you?”
“No. But I need a favor from him. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I got out and greeted Dave.
“You’re looking pleased with yourself,” I said.
“Things turn around,” Dave said.
He told me that the National Drug Unit boys had shown up trying to take the case over, but that he’d brought O’Sullivan and Geraghty in, and they were making sure Dave got the credit.
I gave him the syringe and told him what it was.
Dave punched me in the arm, he was so happy.
I asked Dave about rehab and witness protection and he said he’d have to work it out with D.I. Reed, and maybe O’Sullivan and Geraghty too.
“What about Superintendent Casey?” I said.
“If Casey spends the rest of his days playing golf, he’ll be a lucky man,” Dave said. “Casey’s finished, he’ll do well to stay out of jail. The NBCI boys couldn’t believe the decisions he made on the Dawson and MacLiam cases.”
“He will stay out of jail though,” I said.
“Of course he will,” Dave said. “I was just imagining we lived in a different country there for a minute, where bad cops get what they deserve.”
I got Delaney out of my car, and Dave put him in his. Then he leaned in at the driver’s-seat window.
“Ed, there’s something Jack Dagg said—”
“Ah, listen, away with Jack Dagg, Dave; I don’t have the time for it now.”
I started my engine.
“Go easy on Delaney,” I said. “He’s not all bad.”
Dave’s face was expressionless.
“If he helps send Podge Halligan down for murder, I’ll buy him a teddy bear,” he said.
The strand at Bayview was broad and stony and sloped down to a foaming gray sea. I stood on the shoreline and looked toward the land. The lights of a train flashed out through the mist as it snaked around the edge of the cliff. Its sound seemed muffled by the roar of the surf as it vanished silently into a granite tunnel on the northbound line.
George Halligan crunched his way through the pebbles in a navy suit and matching raincoat. He took a handkerchief from his top pocket and wiped the pebble dust off his black penny loafers.
“Fucking beaches. This is what people build swimming pools for,” he said, and coughed. The coughing went on for a while. I waited until he was finished, and then I waited some more. He took a Cohiba from its thick foil tube and bit the end off and lit it and threw the foil tube away.
“Pick it up,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“Pick it up.”
He looked at me warily for a second, then he picked it up and put it in his coat pocket.
“About that business up in the house,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to go that far. Truth be told, I was called away, and word got out you were there, and Podge got hold of you and…well, it shouldn’t’ve happened.”
“What should’ve happened? You slipped me the knockout juice yourself. What was it? Rohypnol?”
“Roofies and GHB cut together. Podge uses it.”
“Not anymore. What was the idea?”
“Just to scare you off. Stop you poking around.
You’d’ve ended up in your car down here or somewhere, with a big headache, and a message: Watch your step.”
George shook his head, like it was nothing to do with him.
“Podge got carried away. It was wrong.”
“You could have killed me. Rohypnol and GHB mixed, you could have fucking killed me.”
“Send me the bills. Dentist’s or whatever.”
George’s black eyes looked like shiny little bugs. He spat bits of tobacco over one shoulder, then turned away from me, as if the matter had been dealt with. I looked at his Italian shoes, his silk tie, his perfectly pressed suit, his pale blue shirt with the white collar. He was the boss who never gets fired, the killer who never gets caught, the general who never gets shot.
“Now, tell me about Podge,” he said. “I can’t hang around here all day.”
That seemed to make up my mind, or what was left of it. George was about six inches shorter than me, and maybe fifty pounds lighter. I picked him up by his coat lapels and flung him backward into the sea. The slope on the shore was very steep. He stumbled trying to keep upright, but I followed through and knocked him down, and then I was on him. We were in about a foot of water, and I held him under for a while, then let him up. I had a rock in my hand, and I was going to use it. I could see the fear in his eyes, and the shock that anyone would dream of laying a finger on him, then I felt the barrel of a semiautomatic hard under my chin. I don’t know whether I was too quick to react or too slow, or whether my synapses were simply refusing to pass vital information on, but instead of backing off, I just rammed George down again while whipping my head to the side of the gun. He got one shot off into the air, and I smashed the rock against his hand, and the gun dropped in the water. His legs started to kick frantically now, and his arms clawed at mine. Time seemed to slow down, and I tasted salt water cold on my lips and I wondered whether it wouldn’t be simpler just to drown him and have done. Then that wondering passed, and I let him up and dragged him ashore. He sat on the stones, coughing and wheezing and spitting, getting his breath back so that he could curse and threaten me. I went back in the water and found his gun. It was a SIG Sauer compact, with seven shots remaining from an eight-shot magazine. I showed it to him, put it in my pocket, lit a cigarette and watched him. After a while, he reached out a hand. I lit another cigarette and passed it over. He looked at me for a few seconds, his eyes cold and tight, then took the cigarette.
“Dessie Delaney was getting the heroin they were feeding Councillor MacLiam from Larry Knight across in Charnwood,” I said. “And last night, Podge bought a big supply from the same Larry. Story goes he was ready to start dealing all around the southeast. That’s not going to help the blind eye the Guards were turning on the Halligans, is it? And it’s not going to help your business schemes either.”
“How much is Delaney going to say?”
“Everything. How they hooked the councillor, the gambling, the heroin, the potential for blackmail, the need for him to change his vote, the night on the boat, Podge administering the double dose, you supervising the cleanup.”
“That’s the only place I’m connected to it, in the ferry-house. Everything else is Podge, or deniable. And I’m at the ferry-house to collect Peter Dawson and bring him up to his parents’ house. If I’m drawn into it, the Dawsons are as well. And that’s not gonna happen.”
“The NBCI are running the case now. And Superintendent Casey is going to be promoted out. That means the Dawsons are no longer off-limits.”
“What do you want? I don’t even know what I’m doing here, I should be briefing Podge’s solicitor—”
“You’re here because I know more about what happened than anyone else. Because I’m one step ahead of the cops on this one, and if we share information, you’ll be one step ahead too.”
“What information? What do you know?”
“I know that after you brought Peter Dawson up to his parents’ house that night, you hung around. I know that when he killed himself, or when he was murdered, you took the body, or you directed Podge to take the body, and stashed it somewhere and then stowed it on his boat a week later. I know the murder weapon was lying around Podge Halligan’s house, that Tommy Owens stole it, that it was in my rental car, that you got it back when you trashed my house, that you planted it with Peter’s body on the boat. I know that you’re up to your neck in the cover-up of Peter Dawson’s death.”
George Halligan shook his head.
“There’s nothing there. A lot of words, but no case.”
“It’s not about a case against you, George. It’s about finishing you as even a semilegitimate businessman. Do you think all those nice lads from the good schools with the few bob to invest are going to consider you for a second? Bad enough you’ve got a psycho for a brother, but to know the full extent of your connections to how many murders? Three? More?”
“I didn’t kill Peter Dawson. Podge didn’t either.”
“And Linda?”
“Why would we? What’d be the point?”
“She knew too much.”
“About what? I don’t get it. Listen, tell me what you want.”
“I want you to pull the Immunicate boys out of the Dawson house. It’s in your interest too, the cops will be all over there soon enough, and if the place is overrun with Halligan gang members masquerading as security guards, well, that’s another link in the chain that binds you to all this. But whatever about you, I want to go in there alone, before the cops get there. I want an hour with John Dawson, alone.”
“Why?”
Why? Because he started all this when he had an affair with my mother. Because he cheated and bribed his way to a fortune he doesn’t deserve. Because he killed Kenneth Courtney. Because he killed my father. Because he’s sitting there at the top of the hill, waiting for me to come and tell him it’s over at last. “Because I need to know the truth.”
“And you think you’ll get it from him? Good luck.”
George stood up and shook himself like a dog. He took off his coat and wrung it out.
“You know how much these clothes cost? I should have you killed,” he said.
I took the gun out of my pocket and held it out to him. He looked at me uncertainly, then took the gun and pointed it at me.
“Remind me again why I shouldn’t have you killed,” he said.
“Because you’d be caught,” I said. “Anyway, look at all I’ve done for you.”
“What’s that again?” George said.
“I’ve been doing it. I’ve told you about Podge, about Delaney. No one else did. None of Podge’s boys picked up the phone. Neither did Podge. They were all preparing to become smack dealers. That wouldn’t’ve been good for business at all, George. Now you’re equipped to brief your own solicitor. And you’re advised to go into quarantine, and not be making a show of yourself with the kind of people who won’t want to know you. And then in a few months, you can quietly sell the land on again. Now it’s rezoned, it’s not going to drop in value.”
George slipped the gun into his pocket. He ran a hand over his face and through his hair, leaving a grin on his creased features.
“I’d do well with you on my side,” he said. “Situation’s still vacant, I’m not coddin’ you. But I don’t know that there’s enough there for a deal.”
“Delaney’s not going to mention you.”
“In the ferry-house?”
“In any of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I asked him not to. Of course, I could change my mind.”
“Don’t change your mind.”
George Halligan picked up his mobile and spoke first to his solicitor, and then to someone who took orders without asking any questions. And then he told me what he knew. “It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas,” he began.
By now, the words sounded like the tolling of a bell.
Twenty-seven
THE BLACK IRON GATES TO JOHN DAWSON’S HOUSE WERE open. I parked on the road outs
ide, and walked past the granite gate lodge and down the long tree-lined gravel drive. The house was an enormous redbrick mansion in the Victorian Gothic style; it reminded me of St. Bonaventure’s, but it was larger and more forbidding than the nursing home; the towers and turrets were higher and more numerous; the stained glass windows were grander; as I approached it through the mist, the yellow-and-slate-colored brickwork seemed to glow, making it look like some unreal castle in the clouds.
The charcoal Lexus was parked in front of the house; there were no other cars visible, nor were there any Immunicate vehicles. I went to the side of the house where the sheds and outbuildings were. An old-style garage with wooden doors for about six vehicles looked like it had been recently abandoned. Other garages were closed; some with locks on the doors. I spotted three cars: a black Volkswagen Polo, a racing green Jaguar XJ6, and Linda’s red Audi convertible.
The heavy front door was ajar, and I pushed it open and walked into the marble-floored hall, which was of double height; a mahogany stairway rose and turned at the far end, while a crystal chandelier hung from the landing above. The walls of the hall were covered in portraits of dour-looking individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: merchants and professionals, rather than royalty; they wore dark clothes and sported complacent expressions of well-to-do respectability on their well-fed faces. I wondered who they were, and who they were intended to be, and what on earth connection they had to the people who lived in the house.
One of those people stood by the mantelpiece in a living room that was about half the size of a football field. The room was a riot of styles: every twelve feet you moved from Regency stripes to paisley swirls to Chinese patterns; there was leather and silk and wool, ruched curtains and slatted blinds, carpet and rugs and polished boards, sofas and chaise longues and armchairs and, behind a white upright piano, a pink corduroy beanbag. It was as if whoever lived here refused, or had been afraid, to make a decision about what kind of room it was, what kind of house it was. It was a study in visual uncertainty, in social insecurity. It was a mess.
The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Page 28
