He held his hands above his head in symbolic surrender.
“But … but why?”
“Why?”
“Why me? Why go to all that trouble for a washed-up Guard like myself. You said it yourself. I was damaged goods.”
Jordan leaned forward.
“You see there, Michael … was. You were damaged goods. But you’re back in the groove now. I think my pep talk at the gym was the catalyst. Would you admit that much, Michael?”
I was going to admit shit to him. He was right, though. His words had stung and I’d resolved to sort myself out. And to stop taking things lying down. But something still didn’t sit right with me.
“You dodged my question, Jim. Why me?”
Jordan stayed still and silent for a few moments. He eased into the chair and placed his hands back in that Abe Lincoln pose on the chair.
“I owed it to your mother,” he said and I wasn’t sure at first if I’d heard him correctly.
“I’m sorry. Did you say you owed my mother something?”
“I’ll explain, Michael, but I’m going to ask you to give me a full hearing. Don’t jump to conclusions until you have it all.”
I nodded. I felt sick to my stomach. I just knew Dad would be in there somewhere.
“Your father was an inquisitive fellow. And that’s putting it lightly. Always out for the big scoop. And he was good. I mean, really good.”
He paused as if considering the exact word he needed. One that wouldn’t send a spark onto the puddle of petrol I had become.
“Just to cut things off at the pass, to use one of my favourite expressions, I had nothing to do with your father’s … rather unfortunate end. I’ll swear on my daughter’s life on that score. And you know how much I love my daughter.”
I was stuck to the seat. My chest tightened and my breathing shallowed. I felt light-headed.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
I refused, told him to continue.
“The first time I met your father, he wasn’t investigating me. He was investigating the underground bare-knuckle scene. He was barely in his job at the Standard a wet week. He’d started with tinkers to burst the myth of the king of the travellers. People thought travellers fought in some kind of challenge match to dethrone the current king. But it was all about cash. Thousands of pounds, even in those days.”
One thing for sure about Jordan was that he could tell a story. To the point of making you want to spoon your eyes out. But I was riveted to my seat.
“You look a bit cold there, Michael. Can I get you a blanket?”
“No. Actually, yes.”
Jordan got up and opened a large wooden chest next to the fire. He took out a tartan blanket. Something like the Queen might have put across her lap when trooping the colours in her carriage.
“Sensible man. Putting up a front only gets you so far.”
He passed me the blanket and I draped it over my knees. They still ached, but the warmth of the blanket helped at least psychologically to ease the pain.
“One of the travellers told your father about the bare-knuckle matches I was involved with. I suppose it was an alternative to cock or dog fighting for the more civilized among us. That’s a dichotomy if ever there was one. It was an all-comers invitational type event. You could buy in to a bout with your own money or have someone sponsor you.”
Jordan’s throat seemed to dry up as his words became hoarse, so he took a sip of water before continuing.
“I was only nineteen when I started fighting for cash. I’d fight in the Irish amateur championships one day, go bare-knuckle the next for cash. There was this guy, Paddy. I did odd jobs for him. A beating here and a delivery there. You know how it goes.”
I nodded. It was his apprenticeship in the organized crime trade. Jordan was in full flow now.
“Paddy sponsored me. He’d pay the entry fee, give me a twenty-percent cut of the winnings after fees were deducted – referees and such. I never lost. I thought about asking for a bigger cut, but …”
“You didn’t go asking Paddy for things he might not like you to ask for,” I said.
Jordan nodded with soft, shallow nods. I can’t say for certain, but I think there was regret in the way he looked and nodded. Like maybe he recognized he’d been the same way with many of his own men. Some of them had disappeared.
“I did OK out of the arrangement, though. I put some money aside and before long I had enough to start up my own small-scale enterprise. Just a bit of Mary Jane at first. Oh, those were the days.”
I disliked his nostalgia for the good old days of drugs. I don’t believe in soft drugs. My experience on the streets of Cork showed me they were gateways to harder stuff. Heroine, coke, meth. Glue if the money ran out.
When Jordan seemed to be on a transcendental plane, I interrupted him: “And my father?”
He snapped back into reality. “Patience, Michael. I’m almost there.”
I reminded myself for the umpteenth time to breathe.
“It might have been my sixteenth or seventeenth fight. One of the last in fact. Your father showed up with a sponsor. Don’t ask me how he got this sponsor to back him, but whoever it was put up the three-thousand to enter your father into the bout.”
He paused again. He raised up a hand and slowly wagged a finger at me.
“I didn’t know who your father was from Adam. And the rules of the fight are the rules of the fight. It was of no consequence to me then what happened to your father. Now, your father was in decent shape, but he was no fighter. No fighter. You have to understand, and I say this as someone who can call himself a true fighter, there’s fighters who aren’t fighters. Do you know what I mean?”
Despite his minced words, I did. Some fighters only fought the easy fights when they could. But when they had to go into the deep waters with a better opponent, they either drowned or came up too fast for air.
“Maybe I take that back to some extent,” he said. “When I say your father was no fighter, I mean he lacked the skills. But he had heart and I respected him for that. He could take a beating, come back for more.”
He looked at me. It was as if he was seeing beyond me.
“Like you, Michael. Like you.”
He continued to look through me. It was almost trance-like. He only broke his glassy gaze when I spoke some half-minute later.
“And my father’s death?”
“I had nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing. Your father was like that annoying fly that gets trapped inside the windscreen of your car while you’re driving. The one that, when you swipe at it, you keep missing and take your eye off the road.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I mean, I would warn him off in the strongest non-violent terms. But it did not deter him. I had a soft spot for him after the whipping he took from me, so I tolerated him. Ultimately, it’s probably what got him killed. That he didn’t heed warnings.”
I’d heard my Dad called reckless. Dirty too.
“Those that have blackened my father’s name. Was he into anything? You know … illegal?”
He looked at me with coolness.
“If there is one thing on this good Earth – and it is good, Michael, believe me – one thing that you can believe without hesitation, it’s that your father was clean. He got into murky waters more than once, but he always came out smelling of lavender, if you’ll forgive my poor attempt at metaphor.”
Except for that one time he didn’t come out. He was left in the boot of that car not smelling of lavender but decay.
I thought about the note. The one that fell from Billy Budd.
“Does the name Starman mean anything to you?”
Jordan’s chin lifted suddenly.
“Starman?”
“Yeah, Starman. And don’t mention David Bowie or Jeff Bridges to me.”
Jordan didn’t seem to understand the name drops.
“In the context of your father, I know what Starman would mean.”
He paused and I felt like getting out of the chair to rush over and shake it out of him.
“We used to call this guy Starman. He dealt in acid in those days. Tabs, microdots, postage stamps. Whatever you’re into.”
“Who was it, Jim?”
“He lived up in Farranree –”
“A fucking name!”
Jordan stopped, saw I meant business. I think if he had held out any longer I might have strangled him. What with it being my most basest of reactions and all that.
“Jimmy Dorgan.”
The Eel. Starman and the Eel were one and the same. I put a hand to the back of my head, rubbed the nape of my neck.
“Need I ask?” Jordan said.
I shook my head. “It’s for another time, I think. Something for me to deal with on my own.”
“If you need help, you know where to call. But a warning on Jimmy – you don’t mess with the Eel.”
I could tell he meant it on both counts. Then I remembered what he had said a few minutes earlier.
“You said you owed my Mam … what did you mean by that?”
Jordan smiled. “Before your father knew your mother, I did. We grew up on the same lane together off Barrack Street. Not too far from The Lough. She was a gas girl. A real tease. She was a couple of years older and I had a big crush on her. But then my parents moved to Ballinlough and we lost touch.”
It doesn’t rain, but it pours.
I considered asking to go home. I thought I would just grab my stuff and leave the country. After I dealt with Jimmy the fixer. Assuming Jordan ordered Hognatt to give me back my gun.
However, I’d come so far that week. There was another outstanding issue.
“What about Moolah?” I asked.
“Poor old Johnny Fitzmaurice. He was an unfortunate casualty.” He held up his palms to me. “But not at my hands – not even indirectly.”
“Who then?”
“I’ve gone from puppet master to all-seeing, all-knowing deity have I? I don’t know is the honest truth. But I have my suspicions.”
“O’Brien?”
“That’s possible. But I always got the sense that O’Brien didn’t have the stomach for that kind of thing. Not like I did. Not like I did. He’s not a fighter. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I nodded. He continued.
“It’ll cost him in the end. You see, when you’re on that mountain and the guy below you is hanging from a rope around your waist, you don’t hesitate in cutting the rope.”
I thought about Savage as a possibility for the murder, but didn’t say anything.
“And the man with the red hair?” I asked.
“Doolin. A fatuous man, a fatuous man. All bluster. Thinks he amounts to something when he’s not fit to grace the sole of my boot.”
“You gave him a warning.”
“Precisely. Precisely.”
“Not a punishment beating.”
Jordan smiled. “No. Just a warning to stop taking my name in vain.”
Like the Lord. Maybe he did think of himself as a deity.
“And Hognatt?”
“Hognatt is a results-oriented man like myself. Very black and white, unlike myself now. Unlike you too, Michael, I would like to think.”
I didn’t know about that. I had become more black and white over the past week. I was done reasoning with people. I’d been discovering that a gun in the face is more effective than any of my old cute-hoorism. But I was sitting opposite Jordan, chastened, a mad man outside with an armour-piercing submachine gun.
“Did you know he had a machete in Churchfield?”
“I saw it in the police report.”
“Do you condone that?”
“I cannot say I do and I cannot say I don’t. Did he cut you with it?”
I shook my head. But you didn’t just cut with a machete. You hacked.
“Then there’s your answer. No harm done.”
My arms tensed and I gripped the arms of the chair.
“Easy, Michael. Easy does it. I understand your perspective. Really I do. But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, as I often say. And if you knew what Hognatt had seen in Somalia, I think you’d understand.”
I didn’t think I would. But I’d graduated from fist to gun, hadn’t thought twice about it, so maybe there was an atom of truth in there somewhere.
Jordan looked at his watch. “How time flies. It’s getting on for seven-thirty. I’d say that was breakfast time, wouldn’t you, Michael?”
I shook my head and tutted. I was only in the mood for going home.
“Come, come, Michael. A bit of grub, as you would probably say. It can only do us good.”
He got up despite my protestations and went to the kitchen off the living room.
“There’s plenty in the refrigerator, Michael. Plenty.”
I walked into the kitchen. Jordan had the fridge door wide open. I could see an assortment of food, healthy and not. I could see black pudding on the bottom shelf. I don’t think anyone would have blamed me for partaking.
Hognatt walked into the kitchen some time later when I was chewing a morsel of black pudding. Jordan had remarked how it was farm fresh. The old secret recipe of an old East Cork farmer. I didn’t think there was better than the Clonakilty, but what I ate that morning gave it a good run for its money.
“Grab some breakfast, Matt,” Jordan said. “Most important meal of the day, as I like to say.”
He said it like he’d invented the received wisdom.
Hognatt took a saucepan from the draining board and retrieved three large eggs from the fridge. While Jordan and I continued talking, he made scrambled eggs with toast.
“You did some solid work tailing O’Brien to Limerick. Solid work. The man you photographed is an interesting man by the name of Moose. I think there’s no more to the name than its similarity to Morrisroe, his real name.”
It made sense to me. And I suppose it made sense that Jordan would have the resources, the connections to identify Moose.
“Interesting how?” I asked.
“Interesting in the sense that I respect his methods. He’s canny. He doesn’t sully himself with feuds. No tit-for-tat like the other Limerick gangs. To put it another way, he does what’s best for business, and I can drink to that.”
He lifted a glass of orange juice momentarily in salute, then took a sip of it. It bothered me the way he could celebrate thuggery, however calculated.
I knew much of this from speaking to Cotter, but I pretended like I knew none of it.
“So he’s a gang leader?”
“Yes, Michael. And a good one at that. He started out small in Ennis. There’s a parallel with myself that I find endearing. For me it was weed, but for Moose it was X.”
“And now?”
Jordan nibbled on a slice of toast like a gerbil. While I was tucking into a full Irish, Jordan was satisfied with two small slices of toasted rye bread. He cleared his mouth.
“Now it’s meth. At first he imported through his connections in Shannon. The kind of connections I would have envied back in the day. Port authority, shipping companies, customs – a clear path for his imports.”
“And then?”
“Then he started to cook his own. Good purity. Ninety-five percent plus. But only in small batches and he’s looking to expand.”
“And you think O’Brien could help him?”
A look of disdain from Jordan.
“O’Brien piggybacked on my network. I had connections on the continent. Hard-earned connections. That’s what Fitzmaurice was up to. Smuggling crystal from Spain via Mexico. He’d fly out to Spain and bring a load in on a chartered yacht. Nohoval Cove was his last such trip.”
“The stuff in the TVs?”
“Correct.”
“That was destined for Moose?”
“That’s what I believe, though I can’t be certain. I can be certain that you photographed him giving Moose a sample from a new batch
. I don’t have any intel on that shipment or where O’Brien is keeping the stash.”
Hognatt scraped the scrambled eggs onto a plate just as his toast popped.
There was a question that had been formulating in the back of my mind about me minding Druid on my lonesome.
“If there was half a mill in drugs just lying around the warehouse in Churchfield, then why just the one security guard?”
“I asked myself the same question. At first I wondered if he didn’t want to draw suspicion, satisfied with hiding the drugs in plain sight. But that would be to give the idiot too much credit. Then I heard some chatter.”
Jordan took another bite. Even in retirement – if I could believe that – Jordan had his contacts. Jordan cleared his mouth with a sup of orange juice. He continued.
“It seems O’Brien has some Guards on his payroll. Our belief,” he said nodding his head in Hognatt’s direction, “is that they were patrolling the area to keep an eye on the goods. Matt here had done his reconnaissance.”
Hognatt sat at the table to eat his scrambled eggs. He had eaten only a single mouthful when Jordan brought him into the conversation.
“Tell him about that night, Matt. About how we nearly called it all off. The whole thing was done at such short notice. I had only learned of the drugs that morning.”
Hognatt looked at me like I didn’t belong at the table, then looked at Jordan. He didn’t waste any more time.
“Two hours before the operation I checked the perimeter of the distribution centre, assessing the fencing, the lighting, the view from other buildings.”
I realized then that Hognatt had been out there that evening. He’d watched me pace around, smoking my cigarettes, urinating, scratching myself no doubt. I felt violated.
“It didn’t take long,” Hognatt continued, “to realize that there were two separate patrol cars keeping an eye on the place – one marked, the other unmarked. I timed the distance between them – always at least six minutes and never more than eight. But it wasn’t like clockwork, so I couldn’t be certain of any gap.”
The first marked Garda car had arrived only a few minutes after I made the call. It had seemed suspicious then, but now I knew why. Savage and Dominic arrived two minutes later in their unmarked car. Again I made the decision to keep Savage for myself. Could have been that Jordan knew about him anyway.
The Murk Beneath: A Cork Crime Novel (Mickey Bosco Series Book 1) Page 23
