Malarkey

by Sheila Simonson

  It occurred to me that Wheeler had probably owned shares in the company, and I remembered what my father had said of Stonehall Enterprises. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Steins had brought in another investor, an idea man. If that investor was Slade Wheeler, Wheeler's interest in the company had to have been substantial.

  When Grace's sobs began to subside, Kennedy jerked his head toward the open door. "Hop it, Artie. We'll take Grace home."

  Artie slunk out. We heard the motorcycle cough to life and roar off.

  Maeve helped Grace to her feet, made an imperious gesture to her own escort, and led the girl toward the door. Kennedy followed without protest.

  As they passed her, Barbara said, "We'll wait dinner for you, Maeve."

  Maeve frowned. "We'll be some time."

  "That's okay." Barbara's intense brown eyes glinted. "I want to know Grace will be all right. And whether she needs money for a solicitor."

  Maeve smiled. "Very well. Thanks. I'll phone if we're running too late."

  Grace's departure, with Maeve holding one arm and Kennedy the other, let loose a burst of conversation. I moved to my father's side.

  He looked well enough, if a trifle distracted. "Ah, Lark, do you remember Tracy Aspin?"

  I admitted I didn't, and he introduced us. Tracy offered her hand and shook briskly. Crisp and cheerful, she wore her hair in a short crop that suggested an eye for style as well as convenience.

  "Gosh, what a scene!" Tracy's shrewd hazel stare was bright with interest. "I didn't know Slade had it in him."

  The dark man at her elbow gave a snort of amusement. "You can say that again. I'm Mike Novak, by the way. Sorry I yelled at you over the phone yesterday, Mrs. Dodge. We had a crisis. We always have crises, though maybe not so many now Wheeler's out of the picture." He had the wisp of a beard and a malicious glint in his eyes.

  "Mike!" Tracy made a face at him, and so did Barbara.

  He flushed. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend I liked Slade. He was a jerk."

  Alex said, "He understood fiscal responsibility."

  "And I don't?"

  "No," Barbara said without heat. "You don't. Nobody expects you to."

  "What do you mean nobody? Slade was always in my face. The sucker counted my fucking paper clips."

  The quiet man standing beside him sipped red wine. "Wheeler was a boor and a bully, friends." He raised the glass and took another swallow. "Bad cess to him." He was Irish in his speech. Liam McDiarmuid, I deduced, though nobody introduced us. He was older than Novak and the Steins, in his mid-thirties, perhaps. I thought it was he who had said Grace's name.

  Tracy said, "He didn't understand artists."

  "He didn't understand people," McDiarmuid shot back. As if he had spoken with too much heat, he added in milder tones, "That business about smoking in the workroom, now."

  "Smoking is an unhealthy habit," Barbara said firmly. "I was in full agreement with Slade on that point."

  McDiarmuid heaved an elaborate sigh. "We know Stonehall is an American firm, and we know Americans are puritans—"

  "Hey!"

  "Come on, Lee."

  "Puritans?"

  His mouth twitched at the corners. "Puritans," he repeated. "Sure, it's a wonder you allow demon rum in the house, leave alone the vile weed. It could be worse. If you were Japanese, I daresay we'd have to do physical jerks on the parapet first thing in the morning."

  Everyone laughed.

  McDiarmuid cocked his head. "I don't smoke myself, as you know, but the data processors are smokers, to a woman, and their productivity sank like a stone the day your man told them no more fags on the job. 'Twasn't so much the idea, mind you, as the way he laid down the law. He gave them a lecture, and two of them old enough to be his mother. It's a miracle they didn't call in the labour council."

  Novak groaned. "Or strike. A strike is just what we need with the baroque disk in production." He turned to me and his eyes lit with manic fire. "It's a great disk. Classy."

  "Super," Tracy chimed in. "We call it Going for Baroque and it's got everything—architecture, sculpture, theater, music, Rubens up the kazoo. Liam did three major gardens, including Blenheim, for the Great Creating Nature bit."

  "What do you mean 'did' the gardens?"

  "Photographed them," McDiarmuid said. "Some video. Mostly stills. There are grand gardens at Powerscourt, by the by, Mrs. Dodge. Just up the Dublin road."

  "Did you film them, too?"

  He shook his head. "Powerscourt's nineteenth century, too late for the disk."

  "Liam's a brilliant photographer," Barbara assured me, earnest. "He did combat footage in Bosnia for the Irish Times."

  McDiarmuid gave her another ironic salute with the wine glass. "Prepared me to fight off the hordes at Blenheim."

  "Lee's film of Blenheim," Tracy said with an ecstatic sigh, "is pure Bach."

  Alex smiled at her. "Tracy did the audio, Lark."

  Dad said, "I didn't know you were musical, Tracy."

  "The disk sounds fascinating." I was having trouble imagining how all those things could fit together. So far neither of my computers could read CD-ROM disks. "Is the disk, er, interactive?" I had at least heard that buzzword.

  All five of them hastened to assure me how thoroughly interactive their creation was. Dad listened with an air of bemusement. Alex poured another round of wine.

  The Stonehall shop talk, though confusing, was less uncomfortable than hearing them gripe about the late Slade Wheeler. I thought how quickly they had put Grace Flynn from their minds, but my judgment may have been unfair. They didn't know me, and only Tracy and the Steins knew my father. I wondered what they might have said of Grace had we not been there.

  My stomach was approaching lunch Pacific Standard Time or a late dinner Greenwich Mean Time. In other words it rumbled. I wondered whether my father was tired. I was tired, and I needed to call Jay. Abruptly I decided to do just that.

  Alex seemed the softer-hearted of the two Steins. I pulled him aside and explained. He led me down the hall to a small office with one of those intimidating devices equipped with fax, voicemail, intercom, and assorted mysterious buttons with asterisks. I have a simpler phone in my bookstore.

  He showed me how to get an outside line. "That should do it if the post office isn't on strike."

  "What?"

  "All public communications, including the post office and the telephone system, come under the aegis of one government department. The workers are a moody lot. They strike at the drop of a hat. I don't think they're out this week, though. You're in luck."

  I may have been in luck at the Stanyon Hall end, but I was out of luck at home. I got our message tape again and said something noncommittal. Jay was probably still at the college. If I had called him there, I would have got the building secretary or his voicemail. Discouraged but relieved, I hung up.

  As I made my way back to the salon, a voice hailed me from above. "Who're you?"

  I watched a black apparition descend the staircase. It had to be Kayla Wheeler. She wore black tights, a black mini-skirt, and a black tee shirt with the logo of some obscure band fading across her not insignificant bosom. Her hair was dyed dead black, and she wore grape-purple lipstick and a lot of black eye gunk against matte-white foundation. Her fingers were loaded with blackening silver rings.

  On a ninety pound, nineteen-year-old waif, the Transylvanian get-up would have been effective if a bit passé, but Kayla was almost as large as her brother had been and the poundage was less compactly distributed. She was also at least five years older. I was too dumbstruck by her appearance to respond to her question, so she repeated it.

  "Who the bloody hell are you?"

  I introduced myself without embellishment, explained that I had found her brother's body, and offered my sympathy.

  She wasn't interested. Her watery gray eyes wandered as I spoke. "I got lost down a fucking servants' stair. Some prick in the kitchen waved a butcher knife at me. Where is everybody? I wan
t a bloody drink."

  I understood Barbara's reluctance to sit in the same car with the woman. Kayla was wearing a heavy perfume over unclean underwear and stale smoke, and her voice sounded like a murder of crows. Her accent was California flat with an overlay of British punk idiom. The resemblance to her dead brother was striking.

  Silent, I led her to the drawing room. She made straight for the drinks trolley and whinged at Alex while he concocted a large gin for her. She pouted, she whined, she sneered at my father when Barbara introduced him to her, she lit a Player's and waved it in Barbara's face. I ought to have despised Kayla, but I found I was sorry for her. It was hard to tell how much of her unhappiness was the result of her brother's death and how much was endemic. The others said polite condolences that made their distance from her obvious.

  Kayla occupied the couch, gulped gin morosely, and scattered ashes on her black garments. Alex, who looked as unhappy as his guest, hovered over her. Barbara opened a window wide and left the room to parley with the chef.

  I poured myself another glass of wine and drifted back to Dad. He was listening to Tracy tell him about her post-graduate accomplishments. She was, it seemed, a sound engineer. Novak and McDiarmuid were having a low-voiced argument over the work schedule. I pretended not to listen. It was chilly with the window open.

  I wondered how Maeve's mission to Grace Flynn's father was progressing. Maeve had the confidence of a woman with a university degree in a country in which relatively few have access to universities. She seemed to know exactly what to do, and it was also clear she had a support system in mind that was not limited to the convent. Things were changing for Irish women, as the election of Mary Robinson as President ought to have suggested. I don't know why I was surprised.

  When Barbara returned she announced dinner. Her chef insisted. He was an Irishman trained in Paris and New York, she told me as we lined up for the buffet in the dark Victorian dining room. He had burned out operating his own restaurant in Kinsale and liked the idea of running the Stanyon kitchens while he thought his options over. I gathered he was a formidable personality. He had promised to save something for Maeve and Sgt. Kennedy.

  All of us, led by Kayla, loaded our plates, and I was relieved to find a long dining table to sit at. I dislike balancing a plate on my knees. Little touches of fancy cookery let us know the chef could pull out the stops if he wanted to, but the meal was basically plain fresh food cooked just enough. I have never tasted more delicious veggies, but I did wonder at the appropriateness of the main course. The chef's tribute to the late Slade Wheeler was a large, perfectly roasted capon.

  I sat between Kayla Wheeler and Liam McDiarmuid. Kayla ate with morose intensity. She had clearly decided I was no bloody use, so she didn't trouble me with conversation. I asked Liam about his adventures in the Balkans.

  He was a slight, mousy man who tended to fade into the background. Close to, I saw that his eyes, dark gray and thickly lashed, were quite beautiful. He shot me an ambiguous look and the eyelashes dropped. "Ah, the ladies. They always want to hear tales of gore."

  Few things annoy me more than generalizations about the ladies. As I spooned a bit of the starter—an artistic mèlange of minced tomato, basil, scallion, and lime juice in an avocado half —I considered making a sharp response. I did the next best thing. I fluttered my eyelashes at him and tittered.

  He got the point. Not stupid. "Sure, it went over a treat with the girls of County Wicklow."

  "Grace Flynn, for instance?"

  His spoon clattered on the plate but he said, with composure, "Grace is young for the likes of me."

  That was true.

  After a moment, he added, "I was a stringer. Do you say that?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm fond of that part of Europe. I used to holiday in Dubrovnik. As the war began to spread, I saw the opportunity, so I went out to Sarajevo."

  "My God."

  He nodded. "It was a horror. Still is. I helped document mass execution of prisoners of war for Amnesty International. A fine time we had of it digging up skeletons." He took a sip of wine. "So my 'adventure' wasn't entirely self-serving, but it did bring my work to Alex's notice."

  "And you took this job."

  "I thought virtual reality would be an improvement on the mundane kind."

  I finished my starter. "And is it?"

  He toyed with his spoon. "I've worked in the States, but I needed high tech credits."

  "You should have a substantial reputation in the trade when the baroque disk hits the media stores."

  "I hope so."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "Ah, you're a hard woman. I'm an artist, trained to present the truth, so to speak. There's all kinds of fakery involved in the images we create. That's one reservation I have."

  "And?"

  "The game playing." He shoved his starter aside without finishing it.

  Game playing.

  "Interactive disks developed from computer games."

  "Nintendo?" Like a great many women, I had found the early computer games boring and faintly repulsive because they seemed to involve little beyond zapping an imaginary enemy.

  He said softly, "The corpses we dug up were boys in their teens and twenties playing at war. When I heard of Slade's war gaming I was appalled. He was writing an elaborate game program whilst teaching Irish lads guerrilla tactics. I'll admit drilling boys in the art of war is not unheard of in these parts, but the Provos at least have a cause."

  I recalled that the Provos were the provisional branch of the Irish Republican Army. "Ulster?"

  "The six counties." He pulled his plate toward him with the air of a man about to do his duty. His tone was light, mocking. "Ulster is the ancient province. It's not Ulster without Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal, or so my grandfather would have it. He's a strong Sinn Fein man is my grandfather."

  "The North, then."

  "The North, God help it." He shoved at a bit of new potato. "I saw what the Serbs and the Croats were doing to each other. The so- called ethnic cleansing is sectarian slaughter, the Orthodox killing Catholics and vice versa, and everybody murdering Moslems. There's no end in sight. I kept seeing the obvious parallels. Car bombs are bad enough. I'd hate to see a Bosnian bloodbath in the streets of Derry or the fields of Antrim. It could happen if enough lads were willing to play the game."

  "Was Wheeler—"

  "Political? No. That was the horror of it. He thought he was a conservative, but he'd no philosophy. The man had never heard of Edmund Burke. He was as ignorant as my grandda's dog about Irish history, too." He stabbed a bit of potato. "Of course, most Americans are."

  "My father isn't," I said peaceably.

  "True for you." He chewed. "'Twas the skills of warfare that interested Slade. I wanted to do a photo essay on his game players, but he told me he'd break my hands if I tried."

  "Nice."

  He shrugged. "I doubt he could have. He liked that kind of talk. But it made me wonder what he didn't want photographed. And all the while his lads were sneaking through the Stanyon woods zapping each other with paint the color of fresh blood."

  "I'll say they were." Neither of us had been paying attention to Kayla Wheeler, but something of what McDiarmuid was saying must have got through to her. "One of those yobboes killed Slade and shot him with a paint gun after he was dead. The Garda inspector told me when he phoned me in London."

  She had a penetrating voice. Her remark brought the hum of conversation to a dead stop. My father looked appalled, the others, in varying degrees, avid.

  "He had a splash of red paint on his forehead when I found him," I admitted, since Kayla had let the cat out of the bag anyway.

  "And you didn't mention it?" Barbara sounded affronted. My father gave me a reproachful look. He was pale.

  I felt my cheeks burn. "Sergeant Kennedy asked me not to."

  Barbara snorted. That seemed to be her ingrained response to Kennedy in his police role. She turned her attention back
to the dead man's sister. "Did they tell you whom they suspect?"

  Kayla ripped a piece of bread in half and slathered it with butter. "One of the wargamers. Mahon didn't name names." She snickered. "Slade was playing around with a local girl. Maybe somebody got jealous."

  Universal shuffling and mumbling. Silverware clanked. Nobody was meeting anyone else's eyes.

  Incredible as it seemed to me, Kayla had missed Grace's performance. I wondered whether anyone would bother to tell her what had happened. I also thought of the motorcyclist, Artie. Had he been one of Wheeler's toy soldiers? His relationship with Grace was unclear. Protective? Possessive? He could have been a friend, a lover, an old schoolmate, though I thought he must have left school several years before. If he were a significant wargamer, a lieutenant of some sort, he might have felt a need to protect his dead captain's woman.

  "Who's Slade's heir?" Mike Novak drooped over his plate with unconvincing innocence, but the question quivered on the air.

  "I am." As if aware that her tone registered smugness, Kayla set the bread down. She dabbed at her eyes and left an unappetizing black smudge on the linen serviette. "I'm his nearest relative. Our parents died in a car wreck while Slade was in high school." She sniffled. "Now I'm alone."

  I made an involuntary soothing noise which she ignored.

  She picked up her knife and fork and attacked a slice of capon with bruising energy. "Whoever did it, I hope the cops nail his hide to the wall. Me and Slade had our differences, but he was my brother." She speared the meat, American style, and poked it into her mouth. "Bloody sods."

  We ate in uncomfortable silence. Liam picked at his food. So did my father. I was wondering how soon we could make a graceful exit when Maeve reappeared looking cheerful. She was without police escort.

  Barbara and Alex rose in unison and began fussing over her.

  Alex poured her a glass of wine. "Where's Joe?"

  "I left him at the station. He said he had to finish a report."

  "But dinner—"

  "The man can open a tin of beans," Maeve said callously. "We settled Grace in at the safe house and telephoned Caitlin Morrissey. The old man was drunk."