City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  But here she is in Eden, and maybe this is the way to go, location by location, breaking the claims the past makes on her. She has especially missed Eden because it is such a beautiful room, with its great glass wall looking out onto Meeting House Square, its open kitchen the length of the ground floor, its swimming-pool tiling and the way the mezzanine level is perfectly integrated into the open-plan whole and yet secluded enough for privacy. When it opened, back in 1997, she remembers the astonishment that such a place could exist in Dublin: it felt like a restaurant in San Francisco or L.A. There was much about the Celtic Tiger that had been overpriced and overrated, but Eden got it exactly right: it had style and confidence; it said, we’re stepping up here. We’re ready. Because Anne and Kevin had been in business together, they had taken it as an inspiration.

  They sit upstairs. There are two twentysomething actresses, one American, one Irish, both very pretty, neither of whom Anne recognizes. Maurice has seated them with the visiting boy producers in an obvious manner Anne would have called gauche, but presumably when Maurice does it it’s cheeky, or Galway, or some such; the Americans don’t seem unduly worried, at any rate, about anything other than what kind of sparkling water is available. Anne has worked hard at avoiding Conor Rowan, whom it appears Ed wants to sit next to anyway, and she ends up between Mark Cassidy and Maurice Faye. She would have been opposite Jack Donovan, only Jack Donovan, who stumbled on the cobblestones coming up the lane, has vanished. Anne wouldn’t be surprised if that was it for the night, as he looked completely drunk to her, but he returns beaming, and kisses her hand and looks at her in some strange and knowing way that makes her feel like she is not just the only person in the room but the entire purpose of the evening, and that big bull’s head of his suddenly seems positively dashing, and then she notices Ed grinning at her and realizes this is it: this is the legendary Jack Donovan charm. It’s quite something.

  When the wine list goes around, she can hear Conor Rowan still talking about the Prosecco from the blue bottle, to Ed this time, and begins to wonder if he has some kind of high-functioning Asperger’s, but then Maurice and Mark and even Jack take up the refrain. It turns out they had all come across it in L.A. on their first American movie together, and it seems to have acquired a kind of sentimental, even a totemic, significance for them all: bottles have to be on hand for the wrap of every film the Gang of Four work on together, Prosecco dei Colli Trevigiani, someone says it was called. Eden don’t stock it, so they take the Prosecco they can get, which is priced at forty euros; Mark Cassidy recognizes it and tells Anne it’s to be had for nine-fifty in Oddbins in Blackrock, a three hundred percent markup, and, charming (and handsome) as Mark is, Anne can’t resist a shudder: for some reason, a woman pointing this out would not have been remarkable, but the whiff of meanness off a man always gives her the creeps.

  But Mark is sweet, really, and asks about the girls, and Sandymount, which he knows, and where exactly on Strand Road Anne lives, because he has friends who used to live there, near the Martello Tower, and the Irish actress is down the other end of the table spinning the Americans some line about the Irish and the Catholic Church and sexual repression, which, given she is spilling out of a flimsy silk dress that is barely there in the first place, seems to Anne to have had little impact on the actress personally, but the Americans are lapping it all up, the history and the view, sure isn’t that what they come here for, and Maurice is taking it all in and nodding and laughing along and saying very little. Anne wishes she could have some time with Ed, who is on Mark’s other side, but she has never seen him so grave, even if he tries to nod and smile in her direction every now and then, although the way he looks at Mark Cassidy occasionally she wonders whether he is jealous: the very idea.

  For a while, Anne sits saying nothing, just listening as the conversation swirls around her. Ed is talking to Conor and Mark about three bodies that have been found in a mass grave in Malibu, and how they may have been extras on a film Jack had made there fifteen years ago called Ocean Falls, which Anne watched last week on DVD and loved. Conor seems briefly interested but disengaged, as you do when you hear about terrible things that have happened to people you vaguely know but have trouble remembering; Anne smiles when Conor says that when he wasn’t working sixteen-hour days, he drank so much tequila and smoked so much dope that summer he can barely remember making the film, and has no recollection whatever of the girls: he says it in such a gruff, dismissive way, it seems to sum up perfectly his apparent disregard for what anyone thinks of him. Ed sounds as if he doesn’t quite believe Conor, and Conor sounds as if he doesn’t much care.

  Mark Cassidy seems more affected by the news, and says that now, on reflection, he does remember one of the girls, Janice Holloway. Ed looks at him like he can see beneath his skin, and they have the following exchange:

  ED: I thought you didn’t remember extras.

  MARK: I don’t, as a general rule. But…I’ve been turning it over in my mind since this morning. And I could be wrong about which girl it was, of course, but I think it was Janice who approached me and asked if I had seen Big Wednesday, and I said of course, and she asked what I thought of Bruce Surtees’s camera work. It was unusual, or I thought it was, for an extra to even know a DP’s name.

  ED: So what, did you guys hang out?

  MARK: No. We had a brief chat. To be honest, I think she was trying to curry favor, because she didn’t really have much to say. I mean, she knew the name, but not a great deal more.

  ED: And you didn’t take the relationship any further?

  MARK: (Laughing) No. The extent of the “relationship” was a five-minute conversation at the end of the day’s shoot.

  Ed nods, staring hard at Mark, like he knows there must be more but he can’t get it out of him. If he looked at Anne like that, she’d tell him anything he wanted to know and maybe a lot he didn’t, but Mark just laughs and makes the Monty Python joke about not having expected the Spanish Inquisition. All the while Jack is staring and saying nothing, which strikes Anne as strange, since he directed the film the girls had been in, but then Anne supposes he has worked with so many extras over the years, it must be difficult to remember them all.

  At the other end of the table, Anne thinks she hears a remark about extras going missing from the film set in Dublin, and the Californian boy producers seem startled until Maurice assures them there’s no problem at all, and Jack leans across and says people are confusing the Malibu extras with the Irish ones, and Maurice seems a little cross with the Irish actress, as if she has spoken out of turn, but Anne can’t be sure, and in any case it’s quickly forgotten because of what happens next.

  Ed has been in close colloquy with Conor, and just as the starters arrive, Conor pushes his chair back and stands up and nearly knocks two plates out of the waitress’s hands. Conor is even redder of face than usual.

  “I don’t have to take this, and I’m not taking it. I live my life and it’s none of your fucking business. So…”

  Conor shakes a fist in Ed Loy’s face, and drains his glass and stomps off. There’s a shocked silence, and the Americans’ eyes are out on stalks, and Maurice claps his hands and lets fly a bout of nervous laughter, and just as the boy producers look like they have questions to ask, Jack says:

  “Conor is mellowing in his old age. Time was, he’d’ve turned the table over. Remember the Mexican place in Silverlake?”

  And Maurice and Jack are off, telling tale after tale of Conor’s alcohol-fueled rampages. Soon the Americans relax. But the atmosphere is tense. Cabin fever, Anne supposes. She checks in with Ed, who makes himself smile at her. He is miles away—in Malibu, perhaps.

  Anne has the haddock smokies and the monkfish; the actresses both have chicken; the men without exception have fillet steak. Jack asks her about the girls now, and seems fascinated by the fact that she has two, and she feels somehow she’s been maneuvered into being exactly what she didn’t want to be, somebody’s mother. But fuck it, she is getting tire
d, and she doesn’t know what else to talk to them about, and she is somebody’s mother. She remarks on the coincidence that she has been at Geri Foster’s house today, and that she has been hired to redesign the interior. Jack seems utterly taken aback by this information, and she wonders if he is the father of Geri’s two girls, and worries that she has spoken out of turn, then feels relieved when Jack orders champagne (not Prosecco) before the dessert is served, and says he has an announcement to make. He seems very emotional, not to mention pretty drunk, and Anne can feel waves of tension emanating from Ed. There’s a turbulent, chaotic feeling at the table, as if the evening could easily spiral out of control. Anne stares at her place setting and plays her napkin through her fingers. Jack tugs on an index card which, as far as Anne can see, contains names and an address written in Ed Loy’s hand.

  “Esteemed colleagues, dear friends, distinguished visitors, Ed Loy…who is all of these things and more, who remains, as Duke Ellington said of Ella Fitzgerald, beyond category…many of you know I was once, briefly, married. So briefly, it seemed like a dream. Its brevity was no fault of the lady concerned. As many of you know well, the general principle holds good: when something goes wrong, Jack’s to blame. And so I was, very much. And I walked away…and I got lost…”

  There is a long pause, during which Jack seems overcome with emotion. Anne twists her napkin into a tight rope. The sound of other diners seems to get louder and louder, like the menacing roars of an approaching mob.

  “And then…and then…our paths crossed again. And…as most of you do not know…I became…I am…the father of daughters. Twin girls…who I have not…but whom I’m going to…whom it is my task to…my duty…to be their father.”

  Jack looks around, beaming. He looks a little foolish. Everyone smiles desperately, and a crackle of applause sparks but doesn’t catch. Anne is mortified for him, and hopes he will just sit down.

  “I rang her,” he said to Ed. “I rang her just there. She spoke to me. I’m going to see her. To see them all. I, who was an outcast, have escaped, alone, to tell you…I want to tell you all…”

  The clapping starts up again, and stops just as abruptly, but Jack still stands there, beaming, nodding his head, looking like a man in the midst of some great crisis, or a man who has come out without his wallet and has forgotten where he lives.

  And then he begins to sing.

  At first, Anne thinks it will be the single most embarrassing moment of her entire life. Jack is swaying, and he starts in the wrong key and has to correct himself and start again, and Mark groans and sighs and mutters. But the voice, my God, the voice, he’s barely two lines in and the room is completely hushed. It’s Tosca, Recondita armonia, her father used to love it. Anne tries to control herself, but there is really no possibility of that; the raw shock of such unearthly beauty pushes tears into her eyes in a molten rush. Jack doesn’t quite make the last high C. He leaves his mouth open in silence, and points into it with a finger, a cartoon O of outrage, as if the note has been stolen, but Anne swears she can hear it anyway.

  And then the entire restaurant erupts, and it is as if the night has been elevated, and then, this being Dublin, Anne hears someone shout, “Pity he didn’t sing that on The Late Late Show,” which brings the house down, and Jack raises his hand and nods, ruefully conceding the point. The boy producers look entirely stunned, and Anne wonders if they think this kind of thing happens in Dublin all the time, and reckons they probably do, and realizes that this is what people love about Jack Donovan, that even though the movies are shot through with sentimentality and corn, he can make you believe in something bigger, bigger than just The Way Things Are. Jack Donovan can make you believe in love everlasting, and life after death, in fate, and in grace, and in miracles. Jack Donovan can make you believe in a Dublin where men announce out of nowhere that they are reconciling with their long-estranged wives and children, then sing Puccini arias and bring packed restaurants to an unearthly hush. Jack Donovan can make you believe, and, Anne thinks, as she walks arm in arm with Ed on their way to the pub for the after-dinner drink without which no trip to an Irish restaurant is complete, everyone wants to believe. Everyone.

  CHAPTER 22

  In the pub, things start to catch up with me. I feel exhausted, having had no sleep last night, and emotionally exhausted in any case from the rigors of the day. I know momentum is the big thing, sometimes the only thing, on a case, but I’m not sure I can function usefully through a second sleepless night. All I want to do is go home and go to sleep and start afresh in the morning. But that’s not going to happen.

  The TV in the pub is not tuned to the sports channel like it usually is, it’s on Sky News, and Sky News is focused exclusively on the Three-in-One Killer case, and a map of the greater L.A. area flashes up on the screen with a graphic of a crucifix marking six separate locations where bodies had been discovered, making eighteen in total. Mark Cassidy says, under his breath but loud enough for me to hear, “Weird one, we shot a movie pretty close to most of those locations,” and Maurice Faye overhears, and realizes it to be true. As it happens, the boy producers, whose names are Ben Epstein and Todd Carter, are about to fly out on the studio’s private jet. Maurice looks at me, and I nod my weary assent, and Maurice lays out crisply the possible implications of what Mark has said to Ben and Todd, and suggests that a man on the ground who knows the case and knows Don Coover would be in the studio’s interest. And the upshot is, instead of going home and going to sleep, I am going to fly to L.A. tonight.

  Ben and Todd’s car is waiting, so I kiss Anne good-bye, and tell her to take care of herself. Because of what I knew of the killer’s MO, I discount the possibility that she might be in any danger: if he is operating in Dublin, he is looking for a dark-haired young woman to complete his trio. Nonetheless, when Mark Cassidy offers to see her home, I say that won’t be necessary, and insist she ride along with us until we hit the taxi rank on Stephen’s Green. It isn’t just Mark: I wouldn’t have let Maurice or Jack or Conor see her home either. I know she is vaguely irritated that I am being so protective, but I don’t care: I have slipped firmly into Do The First Thing You Think Of. I can make it up to her later. I hope.

  We have to swing by my apartment to get my passport. I tell Ben and Todd I’ll follow them to the airport, and give them my details so they can alert the Department of Homeland Security. I pack a light bag with a change of clothes and my laptop computer. I duck out back and stow the Glock in the glove compartment of my car. Tommy Owens appears out of the shadows and I bring him up-to-date. With typical directness, he asks me what the point of going to L.A. is.

  “What are you going to find? I mean, the cops’ll be all over the burial sites, there’ll be media everywhere, rubberneckers and ghouls and probably hawkers selling Three-in-One Killer fucking baseball hats, and you don’t know, is your man going to have time to deal with you? Detective Coover, did you say? Not if he’s just caught himself a case the size of that, Jaysus, they’ll be writing true crime books about this cunt from now until doomsday, he’s not going to have time for some PI from fucking Dublin, are you joking me? Take a number, get in line, we’ll see you sometime next September.”

  “I know. You’re probably right. But…I have to do something, Tommy, what’s the alternative? I’ve talked to the four lads, I’ve more or less accused Jack…if one of them is responsible for, looks like eighteen murders, if there’s three in each grave, and if this is happening in Dublin, well, this guy is not just going to burst out crying because I confront him. I have to make a case. And if they don’t know what’s been happening here—there’s no telling whether they’ve made a connection to the film company, to Jack. If I can make that connection, Coover will have to see me.”

  “Do you think it’s Jack, Ed?”

  “Honestly? I don’t think so. But he’s in a weird place right now. There’s so much I don’t know about the guy, nothing would surprise me.”

  “On the other hand…Naomi said Jenny’s been
getting texts from the missing girls. What happens if they show up tomorrow morning?”

  I look at Tommy.

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I say. By the look on Tommy’s face, neither does he.

  I’VE FLOWN ON a Gulfstream before, back in the days when I was Jack Donovan’s carousing buddy, and there’s no doubt that walking straight onto the plane and it taking off within fifteen minutes is preferable to the tedious alternatives. But I’m not really in the mood to appreciate the luxury; all I want to do is, in the first instance, turn over the case as it stands, and once I’ve taken that as far as I can, I hope very much that I can get some sleep. Ben and Todd have other ideas, however; I don’t know what exactly Maurice Faye has told them (he enlisted Jack’s help also), but evidently my polling numbers are soaring with Hollywood boy producers that night. We face each other on cream leather chairs. It’s like sitting in the bar of an old-fashioned, expensive hotel.

  They kick off with some corporate boilerplate about not bringing the studio into disrepute, and alerting the press office if any connection between the Donovan movies and the killings were to be made, and I assure them that I will do everything I can to be discreet, and that the number of camp followers and trade suppliers—from groupies and fan boys to craft services, security, transportation, etc.—that Jack’s movies have attracted over the years means it would be impossible to narrow it down simply to the creative personnel on the movies. And since I don’t mention, and since Maurice Faye has succeeded in keeping from them, the major reason I suspect exactly the people who would bring unholy scandal crashing down on the studio’s heads, the disappearance of Nora Mannion and Kate Coyle, they are operating at a lower level of panic than I am.