The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  McGarr’s nostrils widened as he tried to contain a laugh. “I get the feeling you don’t care for the Yank.”

  “In all candor,” the steward intoned, eyeing Martin malevolently as the old man dipped a hard-bristle pushbroom into the water and began scrubbing the blood from the dock, “I must admit I did not.” The gathering clouds parted briefly and a crescent moon flooded the bay with a brilliant, achromatic light. “This is a private club. He was flying the burgee of the New York Yacht Club when he put in here, and so we were forced to take him. I don’t know why a man such as he with such a boat such as that wouldn’t prefer to tie up at a breakwater where the dockage is gratis and one’s eccentricities are not self-consciously offensive to those who share the facilities.”

  McGarr furrowed his brow as though not understanding.

  The steward explained. “Well, the man gave me the most lugubrious sensation. To tell you the truth, what with his bald head, pug nose, and heavy beard, he reminded me of Jackson Pollock in decline. He not only drank like Pollock—desperately—but also smoked like the man, one cigarette after another—”

  McGarr made a show of drawing from his Woodbine.

  “—all the while staring at the hulk as though it were some wretched composition of his with which he wouldn’t be quite satisfied until it was an utterly insufferable eyesore or foundered.”

  “Pollock? I thought that was a type of fish,” said McGarr, playing the ignorant gumshoe.

  The steward glanced at him disdainfully.

  “Pompous ass,” Martin muttered.

  “His name?”

  “Ovens.”

  “First?”

  “Something ignoble the like of Bobby.”

  “Robert?”

  “Bob-by, I said.”

  “And yours?”

  “Hubbard.”

  “First?”

  “H. K. C.”

  “First?”

  “Is this really necessary?”

  McGarr smiled.

  “Horace.”

  “Address.”

  “Fitzwilliam Square.”

  “Dublin?”

  “Of course.” It was one of the most prestigious addresses in all of Ireland.

  McGarr turned to go. He stopped suddenly and pulled the bottle of Mt. Gay from his raincoat. He pried off the cork. “Drink?” he asked Hubbard, who averted his head. “To the Queen,” said McGarr.

  When he had replaced the bottle in his raincoat, he began to leave, but once more he turned back. “By the by, Horace Hubbard—where were you exactly when Ovens hit the water?”

  “On the dock.”

  “Here”—McGarr pointed to where they were standing, roughly abeam of the schooner—“or there?” He indicated the dock which formed an L and nearly met the bowsprit of the boat.

  “There.”

  “You’ll sign a statement to that effect tomorrow?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Good night, Billy,” said McGarr.

  “G’luck, Inspector,” said Martin, as though tossing back a jar in a pub.

  At the Khyber Pass, Hughie Ward had engaged the attentions of a nearly beautiful girl. She reminded McGarr of ripe olives and heady red wine from the cask. She had piled her long black hair on the back of her head. Her neck and arms were thin, facial features precise, complexion golden, and eyes deep black. Her short crimson dress, a chemical weave, adhered to her body in tight patches.

  “You know,” said Ward to the girl, whose name was Sheila Byrne, “you’re a wicked woman.”

  Her hand jumped for her pack of cigarettes. “Oh, really?” McGarr put her at eighteen years, hardly old enough to be in the lounge.

  Now storm clouds were racing across Killiney Bay.

  “Yes, really. You are.” Ward was staring at her fingers, which made her even more nervous.

  “Cigarette?” she offered. Her chin was dimpled, cheeks flushed.

  “No, thanks.”

  She offered the pack to McGarr, who showed her he already had one lit.

  She placed the cigarette at the corner of her mouth.

  Ward took the lighter from her hand, snapped it, and held the flame to the end.

  She had just begun to smoke—one eye squinted shut, lips too wet. “Do explain.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it needs explaining.” With a click, Ward laid the lighter on the glass-top table and allowed his eyes to slide up her thighs. He was animated, his smile full, all his attention concentrated upon her. “It’s quite obvious. Why, even the way you offer me a cigarette—there’s so much sophistication, so much promise, so much…I don’t think I can find the right word yet, I mean, at this point in our relationship, but it’s there…in your eyes.” He looked into her eyes, fixing her with his gaze.

  She couldn’t look away. She pulled a deep drag from the cigarette, held it for a long time—her eyes narrowing in a flicker of candlelight, lips parted slightly in a smile—and exhaled, pushing the smoke through her nostrils so the funnels hit the top of the table and billowed into Ward’s face.

  McGarr finished his drink and turned his Mini-Cooper back toward Dublin.

  It had begun to rain now, and the line of cars fleeing Dublin for the weekend was solid as far as Shankhill, yellow lights reflecting off the wet road as in a blurry mirror.

  McGarr dropped off the winch handle at the police laboratory in Kilmainham and fifteen minutes later parked the Cooper in front of his own house, a modest, two-story, brick Victorian, the ivy so entrenched here in Rathmines it stopped the gutters of the house twice yearly. A lamp cast a yellow glow through the parlor curtains. He could see just the top of his reading chair. He switched off the engine and went in to his supper.

  Noreen, his wife, had all the advantages of a small person: well-formed limbs and a grace of movement. Her hair was a glossy nest of tight copper curls and her eyes were green. McGarr discussed every aspect of his job with her, and she was scrupulously discreet about the details. “Two for the price of one,” a former minister for justice had always joked when introducing them.

  McGarr drew the rum bottle from his pocket and said, “First clue.”

  She was busy preparing supper, now whipping a mousse of fresh strawberries.

  “And second, this spot.”

  “Give us a sniff,” she said.

  He held the hanky to her nose. “Gun oil.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “Dammit,” McGarr said and walked into the pantry to mix himself a rum drink. In the past he had found her sense of smell to be very acute. Also, he had hoped the case would be straight police work, no politics; had hoped Ovens and the Virelay weren’t involved in anything like gunrunning.

  The phone rang. He stepped into the dining room to answer it. Liam O’Shaughnessy said, “The Lord did not grant the poor bugger a quick death. The doctor says he’s unconscious and might go into coma. Also, he’s debilitated from years of booze. Says it’s a miracle he was up and walking around to get clubbed.”

  “What?”

  “Says he couldn’t imagine a winch handle on a yacht striking a man three times. Once, perhaps, but unlikely. Twice, most improbable. Thrice, never. Says he had wanted to change his blood but he was too weak.”

  “What?”

  “Die-alley-sis.”

  “When do they expect him to come around?”

  “Doctor says he can’t tell yet.”

  “Where will you be if I need you this—”

  “Consider this call having been made from Galway.”

  “Take care.” McGarr decided not to bother O’Shaughnessy about Virelay’s arrival in Ireland yet. Sunday would be soon enough. He was a bachelor like Ward and visited his family in the West whenever police business was slack, which now was seldom.

  That the force of the winch handle had not killed Ovens, whose sconce was probably paper-thin like other inveterate alcoholics, bothered him. He wondered how even a drunken sailor could allow the holding tooth to slip fro
m the cog wheel, how the top of Ovens’ head could have come to be so low as to receive such blows, and finally, how he could have been struck three times. Could somebody have been waiting for him in the companion way and then have slipped out when Martin ministered to him and Hubbard went for help? What reason could either Martin or Hubbard have for wanting to kill the man? Quite obviously, Hubbard didn’t care for Ovens, but McGarr believed Hubbard was too smart to botch such a job and would never have chosen that occasion. But McGarr’s first impressions had been wrong in the past.

  McGarr phoned Internal Security and asked them to rescind the traveling privileges of Horace C. K. Hubbard of Fitzwilliam Square. He then called the Telephone Bureau and asked for the address of the phone number on the key float. The attendant told him he was not at liberty to divulge the address of an unlisted number. McGarr explained who he was, and the man replied testily, “I couldn’t care if you were Michael the Archangel descending” and hung up.

  Back in the kitchen, Noreen was moving quickly from range top to oven, to icebox, to sink. Most women, he noted, did not know how to use their feet and slapped them down as though they disdained the earth, their buttocks trembling, calf muscles quaking. Noreen, however, had a body so perfectly proportioned, McGarr experienced an actual physical pang of hunger watching the pale green of her dress slide over her hips, her steps precise and decorous.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE STORM HAD passed and the morning was brilliant, what McGarr believed to be the last week of good weather before the winter rains set in. He carried his breakfast tea into the living room and sat in the full sun as he leafed through the morning papers. The heat made him lazy and his mind wandered pleasantly. In the distance, a toneless bell was ringing and only audible on the near rock of the cradle when the clapper fell like a hammer onto a boiler plate. Across the cloudless sky, a jet was embossing twin tracks that merged, sank, then disintegrated in hyphens. It was windy and crisp outside.

  Thus, McGarr was infused with a feeling of profound well-being when he heard his wife’s light feet on the stairs. She was dressed in a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater, cream linen shorts to match, and canvas yachting shoes that they had bought while he was on assignment in France.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “The near murder of a visitor to the land of a thousand welcomes. I, for one, am going to protect your reputation for doggedness. I’ve put your boating gear out on the bed and will call the Khyber for a luncheon reservation. Tramping around the hill to locate whoever was using those high-powered glasses should make us good and hungry.”

  “Are you daft? This is Saturday.”

  “And well I, who have been cooped up in Rathmines all week, know.” Noreen’s legs were at once tanned and freckled. The bulky sweater made her seem fuller in the chest.

  “It’s not as simple as all that. I’ve got to put certain things in motion first.”

  “Your backside and what else?”

  McGarr stood. Sleep was still upon him and his limbs were stiff. “Well, first this number.”

  “Give it here.”

  He took his pen from his shirt pocket and wrote on a corner of the newspaper the phone number they had found on the key float. “And then I’ve got to send McKeon down to the yacht club to take statements from Martin and Hubbard. And then—it’s too damn early and too damn nice to be arsing around with police work.”

  The phone was only a few feet away and already Noreen was dialing the department. “Hello,” she said, “this is Chief Inspector of Detectives Peter McGarr’s secretary.”

  Even from the parlor McGarr could hear the howl.

  “Listen, Bernie, this is Noreen. Peter wants you…”

  McGarr coerced his legs up the stairs to the bedroom. Among the Irish, McGarr thought, it wasn’t unusual to marry a younger woman. At that moment, however, the custom seemed to him just another atavism that harked back to an even more barbarous age.

  While he was dressing the phone rang. It was Ward, who told Noreen he had located a lock that accepted the key they had found on Ovens.

  In his shorts, McGarr took the steps downstairs two at a time. Noreen handed him the receiver. “This soon? What have you got?” McGarr’s knees were stubby and pink.

  “You know the girl I was with last night at the Khyber? Her father keeps a boat on the breakwater in Dun Laoghaire. That key is to the shower facilities at the boatyard nearby. She recognized it right away.”

  “Was that Ovens’ official port of entry?”

  “Don’t think so, but Virelay was hauled here and the engine removed.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At the boatyard. I thought you might like to talk to the yard boss. He tells a whopper about Ovens. I’ve taken him to the Dolphin, since he knocks off at eleven of a Saturday. Do you know the place? I’ll stand him a round or two, if the department will cover my losses.”

  “You do a lot of thinking for an under-assistant, a lot of talking, and far too much round-standing whenever there’s a hint the expense might be justified. How many are there in your party?”

  “Forty-seven. I’ll get a receipt.”

  McGarr hung up. His interest was now thoroughly aroused. Noreen had gotten no answer from the telephone number on the key float.

  All Ireland, it seemed, was marketing in Dublin today. The streets were jammed, sidewalk vendors hawking produce at bargain prices. The crops were definitely bumper; all summer the weather had been glorious.

  Noreen couldn’t find even a taxi stand that a vehicle with a police pass might occupy and finally got caught in a snarl opposite Moore Street. McGarr hopped out and jogged through the milling crowds until, near the corner of O’Connell Street, he was able to nip in a side door of the General Post Office.

  Out on the street, McGarr had been an object of great interest to the passersby, even the shabbiest of whom was dressed, Dublin fashion, in conservative attire, but in the GPO he became an excuse for the civil servants there to stop work and strike up a conversation that would surely last ten minutes. His heavy white sweater was slightly large for him and tended to ride over his buttocks. His Bermuda shorts emphasized the girth of his shanks. Finally, without a hat, his bald and nearly pink head, curly red temples, and plain face were unrecognizable to Fran Wilder, who, when he saw this oddity in white approaching him, pretended to busy himself in one of the many thick phone directories that surrounded him. Wilder had the communications registries of the world at his fingertips.

  “Francie, may I speak with you a moment?” said McGarr. They had grown up together in Inchicore.

  Wilder didn’t stir from a squinting perusal of the thick books.

  “Francie, it’s Peter McGarr.”

  Wilder looked up. He had a narrow face with a long, bony nose. Close-cropped sideburns and a veritable spray of dark hair on the top of his head made him look like an extinct flightless fowl. “It is?” From staring into phone books half his life, Wilder was myopic. His head turned haltingly as he scanned the switchboards and work area of the busy phone system. He was squinting and blinking. “Where is he?”

  “Here, Francie. I’m McGarr.”

  Wilder’s head snapped toward him, and he minutely examined every aspect of the inspector’s garb. “So it is, and there for a moment I thought you was a painted Willy. With legs like that I’d be ashamed to walk the streets. Sure and if the fireplugs in Dublin was white, you’d get pissed on for sure.”

  Wilder told McGarr the number was listed as that for flat 5A, 17 Percy Place, which was a posh address in Ballsbridge.

  Like many in Dublin, the street was a row of eighteenth-century brick houses with long flights of stairs to the second floors. McGarr knew that the porter lived on the ground floor, his door under the stairs, that a garden in back ran to an alley and garages. Begonias in green window boxes lined the porter’s windows. The Grand Canal was across the street.

  “Inspector Peter McGarr and wife, Noreen,” McGarr said to an old woman. But for
the flower print of her blue dress and thick black shoes, she was wrapped in a grey shawl. “May I ask you a few questions?”

  “You may, not that I promise I’ll answer. Give that here.” The woman meant his badge, which he handed her. From under the shawl she retrieved a pair of thick bifocals with yellowing frames that hung on a black band around her neck.

  “McGarr,” she said. “Such an odd name.”

  “Flat five A. May I inquire who leases it?”

  “You may until you’re blue in the face, but I don’t know. Won’t you come in.” She stood aside, and Noreen and McGarr stepped into her sitting room, from which a small paraffin heater was chasing the dampness of the night’s storm. Even its dull blue flame was cheering in the dim interior of the room.

  “The monthlies arrive in the form of cashier’s checks, so they tell me. But you’ll have to get that information from the property owner, whose lawyer manages the finances of the building.”

  “His name?”

  “Greaney on Leeson Street. I don’t believe I’ve seen the occupants more than a dozen times in the past two years. That’s how long they’ve rented the flat out. Traveling people, I assume they are.”

  “They?” Noreen asked.

  “A man and woman. Husband and wife I should think.”

  “Age?”

  “Not young, not old. He’s aging some, balding like your man.”

  “And she?”

  “A pretty woman like yourself.”

  “Ah, thank you, luv,” said Noreen, preening self-consciously.

  “’Tis only the truth. There’s a noticeable difference in your ages. Have you any wee ones?”

  The McGarrs had none by choice, which was a subject more controversial in Ireland than the political disposition of the Six Counties.

  “May we see the apartment?” McGarr asked.

  “Have you a writ?”

  The old lady’s knowledge of the law surprised McGarr. He examined her closely. Once handsome, her skin had grown dark with age and now hung on her face in creases and folds. Her blue eyes were still clear, however, and her teeth were her own. Braided hair, snow white, had been piled on top of her head. She was taller than he and once possessed a full figure, her ankles narrow nonetheless. “What did you say your name was?” he asked as she reached toward a ledge on which the flat keys of the house lay.