The Death of an Irish Politician

by Bartholomew Gill

  “I didn’t, Inspector. Megan will do.”

  “Well, certainly the people who lease the apartment must receive mail and an occasional visitor. What’s the name on the postal address?”

  “Five A. That’s all I’ve ever seen. If they have visitors, they answer the door themselves. I’ve got enough to do without playing parlormaid to the tenants.”

  They followed her up dingy back stairs from which a low door opened onto as bright and airy a foyer as Dublin possessed. McGarr’s yachting shoes scuffed on the deep plush of the beige rug. Walls to match held portraits in oil of sundry Irish historical figures. A tasteful chandelier of cut glass illuminated the landing on the third floor. “How much is the rent of five A?” Noreen asked, as they ascended.

  “Twenty-nine per.”

  “Month?” McGarr asked.

  The old lady turned to him with a thin smile on her lips. “No, lad—per week.”

  The apartment was no less agreeable than the hall. Immediately the porch attracted them. Sliding glass doors opened onto its rows of potted plants. McGarr peered over the railing and looked down upon the garden below, which, having thrived through an abnormally sunny summer, now fructified with such abandon that even he detected the aromas of apples, pears, and many flowers just past prime. The mélange was heady to his senses.

  The rooms contained simple but expensive furnishings in a style that McGarr called Continental, this is to say, that which Irish and British intellectuals might choose for their flats: bean-bag chairs, Plexiglas tables, circular fluorescent lights that craned from weighted bases and lit half the room. No one motif was dominant, each piece seeming to have been chosen for itself, but all was tasteful. The place was spotless and comfortable, yet strangely its ambience seemed sterile. Certainly, it had not been lived in recently.

  While Noreen admired the curious decor, McGarr examined the kitchen cabinets, finding only some tins of foodstuffs and a well-stocked liquor cabinet that contained a half case of Mt. Gay rum. The fridge was empty and switched off, the door slightly ajar.

  Meanwhile, the old lady kept up a monologue. “The place gets done out thoroughly once a week no matter how long they’re away. The heat goes on come-day-go-day.”

  That was when McGarr noticed the self-contained central heating system with which the apartment was equipped. It was composed of baseboard electrical units that operated at enormous expense in Ireland.

  “I sometimes bring my knitting up here when I water the plants what have a better life than half the poor of this city. I sit here”—she indicated a low couch of at least ten feet—“if only to allay such terrible waste. Every once in a while, when the house is empty, I hear the phone go off. It rang so long three weeks ago I finally climbed all the way up here only to have the operator tell me the call was from Rome. I speak English alone and a smattering of the mother tongue. So much more the shame.”

  Presently, McGarr was opening bureau drawers in the bedroom and carefully turning back the clothes. He had not found one written item, picture, or memento. He lingered for some time in the drawer that contained the woman’s underthings.

  Finally, the old woman said, “I should think such fluff would grow on a man in your profession, Inspector.”

  Noreen added, “He’s beginning to act like one of those, so to speak.”

  “Ah, there’s many a man with a worse failing. The whole country would be better off if the men kept their hands to themselves.”

  McGarr smiled wanly and walked out of the apartment. That made twice today his sexuality had been questioned. In spite of these insinuations, however, he had noticed that the female occupant of the apartment had a doubtless pleasing bust size of 38C and purchased her clothes at B. Altman and the other shops that figured as the origin of the clothes on the boat. As well, the wardrobe was large, the woman obviously shapely and chic. What troubled McGarr was how a man of Ovens’ rough-and-tumble demeanor might fit into this scene. The only men’s shoes in the closet were a pair of Topsiders, the American boating moccasin.

  The Dolphin was a working-class pub near the Dun Laoghaire docks. Today, the frosted glass door had been jammed open, and the crowd within had spilled onto the street. In spite of the sun and mild weather, all the men wore heavy raincoats and, even when nearly threadbare, a coat and tie below. Several old men scuttled from the bar to the turf accountant’s shop next door. As Noreen parked the car, the inspector remembered this was a race day in Britain, the steeplechase in particular.

  The interior of the pub was a fug of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, the sweet reek of constantly draining porter taps, and a din almost palpable. Most of the men, arguing in groups over race bets, hushed noticeably as Noreen and McGarr pushed by them.

  McGarr thought it was because many recognized him. He was wrong.

  “Hey, mister,” said one. “You’ve got a tear in your britches.”

  McGarr stopped and twisted around to check.

  “From the knees down,” the old man added, then popped open his toothless jaw and laughed, his friends echoing his mirth.

  “What’s a stumpy runt like him doing with a handsome, sporting woman like her?” McGarr heard another ask.

  “Hold your tongues. That’s Peter McGarr, the detective.”

  “I don’t care who he is. He’s in our bar now and should dress appropriately.”

  Livid, McGarr squeezed into the seat of the snug beside Sheila Byrne. Most of the patrons were now chuckling, looking back at McGarr and shaking their heads.

  “Mornin’,” he said to the pretty young woman.

  Noreen, Ward, and a man who introduced himself as Brud Clare comprised their party.

  “Never mind them, Inspector,” said Sheila, pulling his arm to her chest, “I think you look…dashing.”

  Ward couldn’t help himself now, and shielding his face behind Clare’s shoulder, began a stifled laugh that made the others smirk.

  “Watch it, boyo,” said McGarr, “or you’ll find yourself tracking vagrant tinkers in Donegal.”

  “Mr. Clare,” said Noreen.

  “Brud.”

  “What can you tell us about Bobby Ovens and the Virelay?”

  The old man who had made the first comment about McGarr’s shorts was still staring over at them, his eyes twinkling. His jaw swirled as he worked a plug of chewing tobacco. When McGarr looked up at him, he nudged a companion and began laughing again.

  Hughie Ward had made sure the boatyard boss was well into his cups by the time the McGarrs arrived, and Clare was now voluble. “Not one whole hell of a lot. The facts are these.” He straightened up and blinked his watering eyes. He was a small man whose calloused hand—the nails black with caulking pitch—bent around his porter glass like a casting. A lit cigarette bristled from between the first two fingers. Above the bar, the television announcer began listing the race entrants. Clare kept his eyes on the box while he spoke.

  “He came into the yard about thirteen months ago. The engine of the boat was blown, shrouds busted, had a leak only a man with a strong right arm might contain. Sailed her right into the ways single-handed and doused sail.” He leaned over the table so he could talk past Ward and Sheila Byrne. “That’s a lot of boat for one man.

  “It seems—now and I’m only specalatin’, you know—he sailed her from someplace on the other side. I say this because everything he owned was manufactured over there.”

  “You mean Canada or the United States?” McGarr said, if only to show the others he wasn’t still outraged.

  Clare blinked once, pulled on his cigarette, and redirected his gaze to the screen. “The engine itself is the strangest case I’ve run up against in forty-two years at the yard. It sprung an oil leak while he was motoring in a calm not far from Galway. Again, I say this not because Ovens told me so, but because I’ve seen his charts—”

  “Which have a transatlantic route that ends on the Isle of Inishmore.”

  Eyes still on the screen, Clare twisted his head to one side, which is a
sign of concurrence in the Dublin area.

  McGarr had become aware of Sheila Byrne’s taut breast on his arm. He turned to her and she smiled at him. His wife, however, noticed this, and when he glanced at her, she too smiled, but wryly, and looked up at the horses that were jogging through the paddock and onto the track.

  “Most sailors would have despaired. It was the late spring and the western coast of this country is treacherous. Somehow, the man had a store of graphite lubricant aboard, which, after he fixed the oil leak, he melted down, mixed with whatever motor oil he had left, and poured into the crankcase of the ship’s diesel. You see, as long as he kept the engine hot, the graphite wouldn’t seize. Have you seen the galley?”

  McGarr nodded, now realizing that the charring had resulted from no ordinary grease fire.

  Noreen was exulting. She had been right; graphite was the base of some types of gun oil.

  “Eventually, his fuel ran out. I’ve got the engine in the yard, if you’d care to look.”

  The horses had begun lining up for the race.

  “What sort of man is he?”

  “Different, entirely,” said Clare. “He put the boat in with me and asked us to work on it whenever the press of other yard business wasn’t severe. That’s just the sort of job we like—keeps the crew busy, the yard making money. Everything he wanted done, a complete fitting out. When the big boss asked him if he could pay, the man said, ‘I’ll pay you. It may take time, but you’ll get your money,’ in such a way we believed him. I was there, I heard him. That man doesn’t say much, so that when he does, it’s got punch.”

  With a shout that caused all the bar patrons to look up, the horses got off.

  Clare had to raise his voice and speak directly to McGarr. “And so sometimes when we were slack, we had a full gang of men, maybe a half dozen or more, working on that boat. Because the law keeps an alien from working a job that an Irishman might take, the bloke was prohibited from working along with us. He sold his compasses, sextant, and binoculars and rented a garage on Loretto Avenue, about a quarter mile from here. Using whatever scrap lumber he could scrounge and some old tools, he began making furniture, beautiful stuff that sold to all the nobs in Ballsbridge as quickly as he could produce it. It was miraculous what he could knock up from nothing. Often we’d take a couple dozen bottles of stout over to his spot after closing and he’d still be working away.”

  “Did he drink heavily?” McGarr asked.

  The horses had completed a half lap and the bar crowd was roaring at the screen. Clare cupped a hand to his ear.

  “Drink?” McGarr repeated.

  “I’ve got one, thanks.”

  “No—Ovens drink?”

  “Rum,” said Clare, “but not then. It wasn’t until later he started hitting it early in the day. Before that he was steady, and for a short time almost managed to keep pace with the work on the ship.”

  “Did he have a wo-man?” McGarr enunciated precisely.

  Several men standing near their table turned and looked at him, then at Sheila and Noreen, who winked. One man raised an eyebrow and turned back to the screen. Horses were serious business in the Dolphin, which no woman or the mention of her should breach.

  “I’m coming to that. None of us thought so at first, and one man tried to fix him up with his sister, you know, home to dinner and all that. About the time we had repaired the hull, applied bottom paint, and refloated her, two things happened that changed him completely. Ovens was then way behind, over a thousand pounds, on his payments. First, on a Friday afternoon a big Mercedes pulled into the yard so fast it must have slid ten feet when the woman at the wheel hit the brakes. She got out, ran up to him, and he took her behind a boat where we could hear her talking to him in a loud voice. He got in the car and drove off with her.

  “Next morning, a Saturday like this, she returned. I was the only boss on the job. She wanted to know if Virelay was fit to sail. I said she was fit but not right, if you know what I mean. She was still a mess and the engine had yet to be overhauled. We were waiting for parts from the Caterpillar company, an outfit from the States.”

  Two men pushed themselves closest to the television and began hitting the bar, calling out the name Spindrift.

  “She then asked to see the boat’s account, which I told her I could not do since it was a private business matter between the yard and Bobby Ovens. To be honest, she was a lovely-looking woman and her smile had a special plea in it. But when she said she wanted to pay the balance, that was another matter altogether—if we could collect ten shillings on the pound for every debt that’s owed us, we could pay our own bills—and so I showed her the tab.

  “She opened her purse and paid over seventeen hundred pounds in notes so crisp I thought they was counterfeit. She asked me to estimate how much the rest of the work would cost, and I said that much again. Once more she divvied out the sum without batting an eye. Then she asked me if I knew who she was. I had seen her face, mind you, but couldn’t decide on where.

  “She slapped a hundred pounds on the desk to help me forget and walked out.”

  “What did she look like?” asked McGarr.

  “I forget.”

  “We could take you downtown, you know.”

  “I know, but you won’t.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “Tall, small, heavy?” Noreen asked.

  “Suffice it to say she was—present company excepted, of course—probably the prettiest woman in all of Ireland, although I’m not sure to this day she’s Irish.”

  The horses had just entered the third lap of the race, and the shouts and curses were dizzying.

  Clare continued. “But the strangest thing happened when Ovens found out. When the big boss told him of his fortune, it was like somebody stole his spunk. He stood there dazed, then asked where a good grog shop might be. That’s when he started on the rum. He wouldn’t let us tighten a spring line on the ship in a storm, just mooned over the thing like it was dying and there was nothing nobody could do. After a while, the boss got sick of seeing him, paid him off the credit balance, and asked him to clear out, which he did in the neatest bit of sailing I’ve ever seen. He tacked back and forth through the fleet of prams and sailing dinghies, against both wind and tide, then eased off and ran her south with the wind.

  “Later, I saw her docked at the Killiney Bay Yacht Club, and him on the dock, staring at the boat in that same dazed way, you know.”

  “Which garage is it on Loretto Avenue?” McGarr asked.

  Suddenly, in the stretch of the final lap, the lead horse fell after vaulting a hurdle. The contenders, right behind, also stumbled, and the bar crowd hushed so totally the silence seemed louder than the former uproar.

  “Third garage on the right. Wooden frame, white, and kind of tumbledown,” said Clare in an ordinary tone that was audible throughout the bar.

  McGarr thanked Clare.

  The TV announcer said, “And there, near the edge of the track, is number thirty-one—let me check my roster—” That horse, way on the margin of the hurdle, jumped clear of the pile-up and surged into the lead. “Fine Haven, a dark horse if there ever was one at fifty-six to one.”

  Standing, McGarr shouted, “Come on, Fine Haven!”

  The entire crowd turned to him as he and Noreen left. McGarr knew some of these men had wagered as much as a week’s earnings on this race. “And what are you drinking tomorrow, Paddy?” he said to the old man who had made fun of his short pants.

  Using the phone in the turf accountant’s shop next door, McGarr asked the desk sergeant at the Dun Laoghaire Garda barracks to seal the garage that Ovens had used as his work shed. He also asked the Garda to keep an eye on the place.

  But on the dock of the Killiney Bay Yacht Club, where weekend boaters were toting gear and supplies aboard their yachts in anticipation of perhaps the last fine weather of the season, McGarr felt very conspicuous. “Count it the last time I’ll attempt to dress out of character in this country,
” he said to Noreen.

  The yacht-club members seemed comfortable in their clothes. None of the men wore shorts, certainly not a fisherman’s sweater, nor the canvas boating shoes the McGarrs had on. Also, most of them were tanned, or even if fair, at least burnt. Gardening in the backyard and a daily round of tennis had given Noreen a delicate tan, but McGarr, whose work kept him in his office or in pubs or trains or automobiles or indoors, was as pallid as only a red-haired Celt can be.

  Hubbard, the steward, didn’t conceal his mirth as McGarr approached. “Disguised today, I see.”

  That small statement browned-off the inspector. The jibes of the bar crowd in a working-class pub he could tolerate, but it was not the same from a self-conscious snob like Hubbard. This man wanted to make him feel uncomfortable and out of his depth. Secure in his image as chief inspector of detectives as he had been yesterday, McGarr might have suffered the criticism of a dozen Hubbards, but today he felt like a clown, mucking about in a getup more suited to a beer party in somebody’s backyard than the docks of this yacht club. Noreen pulled on his arm as though wanting an introduction.

  McGarr said, “I never asked you if Ovens has a lady friend.”

  “Not all of us are so fortunate.” Hubbard touched the peak of his yachting cap and smiled at Noreen.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Has he?”

  “Of course not. The man was something of a wretch. Interesting to a jaded sensibility, I should think.” He smiled at McGarr as though retasting his breakfast. “But, you know, he was rather raw.” Hubbard retained that most damnably superior smile and made it appear he was talking more to Noreen than the inspector.

  A cabin cruiser, made heavy with a large party on its afterdeck, hooted twice to the club launch, which piped back. The glare off the water made Noreen shield her eyes with her hand. McGarr had begun to swelter. There wasn’t the hint of a breeze in the lee of the clubhouse.