by John Brady
“So,” Tynan went on, “You’re acting CO now. You may receive inquires from the media. That’s why we’re having a chat here. There are people who might let things slip by accident on purpose, if you take my meaning.”
Kilmartin had left bruises in his wake on investigations, Minogue knew.
“There could be inadvertent remarks,” said Tynan, “internal or external to the squad. Remarks that could be construed as lending credence to any innuendo leaking out of this article, this series.”
Tynan’s eyebrows crept up.
“Translation: watch your back. And watch who you say what to.”
“Why did Lawlor guest Gemma O’Laughlin into the Garda Club?”
Tynan’s eyes stayed on his for a moment. His jaw moved from side to side.
“Ask me a hard question, why don’t you. The idea was to allow her a glimpse of hardworking men and women relaxing off duty. The chat, the jokes. Good-natured, decent Garda officers. Sure, it was PR. But now we have her telling the public that the Murder Squad doesn’t know the difference between over seeing and over looking things in the investigation of the murder of a criminal.”
“Come on, John. The place is lousy with gossip. Always. She knows that.”
“Do you hear me arguing? The Larry Smith case is still open, isn’t it?”
“The Smiths would love to stick it to the Guards.”
“Sure,” said Tynan “But do you think that there are people who believe or want to believe that a death squad murdered Larry Smith because the law couldn’t get enough of him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Wrong answer. You’re not a tabloid man. So you’re not up on this.”
“You’ll get someone to plea bargain,” Minogue said. “Wait and see. Sooner or later we’ll have some gouger sitting waiting on his lift to court and he’ll decide to sell us whoever killed Smith.”
“But there’s been no movement in the case, is there,” said Tynan. “Flat, right?”
“Well Intelligence summaries float in every week. But there haven’t been any fresh leads for months now.”
“Jim’s still trying to ram the file back in the letter box of Serious Crimes?”
“Sorry. We’ve tried. Can’t touch them. Get the RUC on it.”
“Paramilitaries down from Belfast still?”
“We’d still be going for that, yes. A contract, maybe. Drugs in it somewhere ”
Tynan licked his fingertip, picked up a crumb from his plate and examined it. A cell phone chirped at the far side of the restaurant. Minogue watched O’Leary slip a phone out of his jacket, pluck out the antenna, and turn away.
“So,” said Tynan. “We can expect more of those damned posters going up all over town.” He glanced up and saw that Minogue didn’t get it.
“No,” he added, “not the Citizen Against Drug Dealers ones. The phony ones that Smiths got up.”
Right, Minogue remembered No one had discovered for sure who had paid for the ones that had appeared weeks after the Smith killing: WANTED FOR MURDER OF LAWRENCE SMITH, HUSBAND AND FATHER: THE STATE AND THE GARDA SIOCHANA. He, like others, had put it down to some kind of bitter retort by Smith’s family or cronies. Smith himself, Smith the pusher and ringleader, had appeared on CADD posters as wanted for murder by causing overdoses and even several suicides.
“Enough of that,” said Tynan. “Last night, the airport. The American.”
Minogue thought back to the wind whipping at the nylon tarp over the car.
“He was beaten to death, John,” he said “Left in the boot of a car he rented.”
“How long is he dead?”
“A couple of days anyway. He might have been still alive when he was dumped in the boot.”
Tynan was watching O’Leary now. The sergeant pushed down the antenna and nodded at the commissioner. Tynan looked at his watch.
“Was that our ten o’clock?”
O’Leary nodded. Tynan looked back at Minogue.
“Tell me again, Matt. Sorry.”
“He was badly done about the head. I didn’t spot signs of a scrap yet.”
“Two or three days you’re thinking?”
“Probably,” Minogue said. “It was there the whole time, I’d imagine,” he went on. “There was a dent, and a break in the seal under the spare tire. I’d bet the car was driven hard somewhere. Hit a rock sticking up in a boreen or a rock flying up under it maybe.”
“Why only yesterday evening then?”
“Derek Mitchell had his eyes open, if you’re asking. Security. He’s new.”
Tynan stared at the sugar bowl.
“Is this because he was an American, John?”
Tynan glanced up and then resumed his study of the sugar lumps.
“Well he was booked into Jury’s for Saturday night,” said Minogue. “His ticket out was for Monday. Missing Persons told me the nearest they had was a stay in a bed-and-breakfast in Sligo on the Wednesday. The C65 went out a week yesterday.”
Tynan settled his cup on his saucer and turned the spoon to face Minogue.
“I’d be expecting better after we do a press release.”
“All right,” said Tynan. “You’ll need to know this. I had three calls from the States about Shaughnessy. One of these calls was from the State Department. Shaughnessy’s family was distressed to learn that he had not returned on schedule to the U.S. One call from our Minister of Justice.”
“We’re going as fast as we can. We phoned him in as probable just after we secured the car last night — ”
“- Let me finish now. The second call was from the American ambassador.”
Tynan gazed at Minogue.
“And he expressed his thanks in anticipation of our keen efforts in the matter.”
This was what unsettled Kilmartin the most, Minogue thought: Tynan’s faculty of transparent irony. Kilmartin took it to be sarcasm.
“Thanks in advance,” said Minogue. “That’s always nice. A sort of a bonus.”
Tynan’s eyes wandered the table top now.
“So Shaughnessy’s family were alarmed then,” Minogue tried.
“His father had an associate here in Ireland phone us. That associate told me Shaughnessy’s people were concerned — well before the missed plane.”
Minogue sat back.
“That associate is Billy O’Riordan. Hotelier, horseman, and bon vivant.”
Minogue recalled newspaper photos of a broadly smiling, chubby man holding the bridles of winning horses; cutting ribbons for new buildings. Shaking hands with public figures; Cancer Society; visiting sheiks; stud farms; helicopter rides to remote islands: the whole bit.
“He’d had calls from Shaughnessy’s mother too. She divorced the father twenty years ago. She had custody afterward. She’d been trying to get in touch with the son but couldn’t. O’Riordan wanted to help in any way he could.”
More offers of help, thought Minogue. Wasn’t that great.
“I hear you. What I mean is ‘we here in the squad hear you.’ ”
Tynan folded his arms.
“You know who Shaughnessy’s father is?”
“A Mr. Shaughnessy. Shaw-nessy.”
Tynan shook his head
“The mother went back to her maiden name. Something to do with the fact she got an annulment.”
“That’s the pope saying you were never really married, as I recall.”
“That’s it. The son came with her and he had his name changed to hers.”
“At her wish, or the son’s?”
“I don’t know,” said Tynan. “But she used to be Leyne. Yes, your case, well, his father is John Leyne.”
Minogue’s wandering thoughts, his cresting irritation disappeared.
“Well now I know,” he managed.
“Leyne’s Foods,” Tynan said. “As in probably billionaire by now. Irish emigrant makes good. Boston.”
Minogue stared at the patterns in the stained-glass window.
“Okay,” he said finall
y “We’ll be in the spotlight.”
Tynan nodded.
“Amicable,” Minogue muttered “Is that the word they use for a good divorce?”
Tynan paused before answering
“ ‘Happy families are all the same…’ ”
“ ‘Are all alike,’ you mean,” Minogue said.
Tynan almost smiled.
“You mucker,” he said. “And you from God-knows-where, the back of beyond in West Clare. Go after a bit of promotion, can’t you.”
Minogue was surprised at how fast his irritation returned.
“Leave me alone to do my job.”
“Is that about Leyne?”
“That too. He’ll take a number, like anyone else.”
“Did I suggest differently?”
“Well don’t poke me about promotion either. I don’t want to end up like Lawlor.”
Minogue tried to remember if he’d seen a photo of Leyne recently in the papers. Some acquisition or other, a takeover. As tough as any of the homegrown billionaires over there. He looked back at Tynan. The commissioner’s eyes had glazed a little.
“Here you are quoting Chekhov — ”
“- Tolstoy. And I didn’t quote him. It was you started it.”
“But you know it don’t you,” said Tynan. “The follow-up too probably.”
“ ‘Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ ”
“Well thanks,” said Tynan. “Chances are, I wouldn’t be hearing secondhand about your damn views from the bar of the Garda Club spouting off about who had a hand in the fate of a washed-up criminal warlord, or capital punishment, would I, now?”
Minogue looked down into his cup. No divinations from milky coffee froth.
“James uses the term to refer to his long service as a hardworking Garda officer in the city of Dublin.”
Tynan pursed his lips.
“I’ll remember that,” he said. “Another thing about our friend Shaughnessy, or Leyne. O’Riordan left broad enough hints. ‘Some acrimony,’ he says. The mother kept young Shaughnessy away from the dad for a few years earlier on.”
Sudden sunlight flooded through the windows, caught glass, and dazzled Minogue. His sneeze erupted with barely a moment’s warning. He opened his eyes to see O’Leary watching him fumbling for a hanky.
“No effort spared,” said Tynan. “All resources necessary.”
Minogue wiped his nose slowly. No effort spared. A tycoon’s son. Sounded like a messed-up son. He crumpled the hanky into a ball and placed it on the saucer. No: a waitress shouldn’t have to deal with that. He dropped it into his pocket.
“When’s the PM?” Tynan asked.
“Early afternoon, I believe. Pierce Donavan freed himself up.”
“You’ll attend?”
“I’d better, I suppose.”
Tynan arranged his cup and saucer on his plate and stood.
“Phone me direct if you have any hitch in seconding staff.”
Tynan handed him a card.
“A new cell phone number for Tony O’Leary,” Tynan said. “You still have mine?”
Minogue took it. O’Leary was on the move already. He returned the limp wave.
“I’m going to check if it was Tolstoy, you chancer.”
Tynan’s eyebrows inched up, stayed. As close as he’d get to a smile, Minogue knew.
CHAPTER 4
Elis put down her cup. She placed her cigarettes and lighter in the drawer under her keyboard and she looked around the squad room. Like she’d just landed from Jupiter, Minogue thought. Eleven years they’d worked together. The “clerical” didn’t mean anything: she ran the place, not Kilmartin. Her gaze settled on Minogue. Kilmartin had phoned, she told him.
“That’s nice,” Minogue said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
She resumed her survey of the squad room. Minogue squinted at the power level on the cell phone. Was it faulty, or did it just drop to zero all of a sudden?
“On the head of that rira at the airport, says he.”
He looked up from the keypad. There was something extra in her voice now.
“And wants you to phone back.”
He nodded. She didn’t look away this time.
“Couldn’t reach you, he says. With that cell phone you have in your hand.”
Minogue cocked an eye at her.
“Says to remind you to think about the on/off switch on the phone. That it’ll make a big difference.”
“Thank you, Eilis.”
She turned away and picked up the phone. Was that a sigh he had heard out of her? A lot of herbal teas lately, shorter hair, fewer smokes. Kilmartin had heard that Eilis was going out with a civil servant, high up in Finance, a Euro-boy.
“Fergal Sheehy’s on holidays,” she said.
“You checked already, did you.”
“But Farrell’s in.”
Minogue knew that the officers he wanted drafted in from the pool had been on the move recently. Fergal Sheehy had been transferred to Stolen Vehicles. They were swamped and there had been a dander in the papers about it. Farrell had been in Serious Crimes for six years. He now floated between Drugs and Fraud task forces. Tynan had set up task forces to hit drug dealers when they tried to move their money. Sheehy had gotten in with the Farrell — Jesus Farrell — in part ownership of a racehorse called Stick-Up. The name had been Farrell’s idea. Sheehy maintained it gave the horse a psychological edge.
“Farrell,” said Eilis into the phone. “Tell him Kilmartin.”
Sergeant Eoin Farrell had come by his nickname three years ago after a meticulously planned setup engineered by himself and the then CO of Serious Crimes aimed at nailing a gang of bank robbers some years ago. The leader of the gang survived being shot several times in an exchange of fire on Moibhi Road only to awaken in a hospital bed with Farrell, his estranged boyhood friend from Rooskey, County Roscommon, watching him. The first two words he uttered then were to instantly cling as the definitive nickname for Farrell
That wasn’t all, however.
A cousin of Farrell’s had gone character witness for the wounded gang leader but the sentence was fifteen years all the same. Kilmartin heard a rumor that Farrell had later met that cousin at a point-to-point horse race some weeks later and gotten into a barney over some words exchanged — set-up and shot-seven-times. The cousin did not press charges after Farrell gave him a hiding, Kilmartin reported, because the cousin claimed not to have known that the gunman had actually opened up with a submachine pistol on a Garda pursuit vehicle.
“Curse of God on it,” Eilis hissed. She had definitely dyed the hair, Minogue decided. Titian, was that the term?
“Voice mail. It’s a damned disgrace, that’s what it is. I hate it.”
“I’ll be attending on the PM, Eilis.”
“Well who’s the ringmaster here for this, so?”
“John Murtagh. I don’t know who’ll work the airport yet. Fergal, I’d like. Tommy Malone and myself will be pairing up for today at least.”
Eilis nodded at the door to Kilmartin’s office.
“Will you be wanting in there?” she asked. “The extra line, the leather chair?”
Minogue put down the photocopies of the overnight faxes from the States, the Missing Persons press releases. He peered through the blinds at Kilmartin’s office.
James Kilmartin had been as quick to scorn as he’d been to get on the right side of the Euro-junket-consulting-conference carnival that had become mainstays of upper-level positions in the public service. And he’d played the fittings and furniture game shrewdly. New office furniture, made-to-measure suits, and requisitions for conference facilities had followed in short order. Kilmartin had made Minogue try out his new leather chair, rabbitting on about ergonomics and invisible stress. The time was long gone, Kilmartin had declared, when the head of the most respected unit in the Gardai had to hang his head when he had VIPS domestic and foreign coming through his offices.
Minogue felt a sneeze coming on. Co
nducting site work in the pissings of rain for a few hours last night was hardly conducive to health. He stood very still, his eyes on the blank Trinitron at the far end of the conference table in Kilmartin’s office. The sneeze didn’t come.
“Are you storming the palace, is it,” from Eilis. “For the duration, like?”
“No,” he said “I won’t bother me head. It’s only a holiday, not a coup.”
He trudged back to his own partitioned cubicle. Malone called it the Art Gallery, Kilmartin called it Bedlam, Eilis checked regularly to see if Minogue had put up new Magritte postcards. He dropped the Shaughnessy file on his desk. He didn’t believe Kilmartin’s excuse for not catching the Boston flight this morning. The diversions to Shannon or Manchester would’ve all been swallowed up by now.
There was a section of a newspaper folded on top of the phone. He opened it and turned it around. He barely saw Iseult’s name at the beginning of the first paragraph before a sneeze made him buckle. It hurt. He leaned on the table and waited, his teeth clenched. Damn, was that prostate? Prostrate from the prostate.
He sat up again. It was one of these free papers they gave out, three-quarters advertising. Garden furniture, vaccuum cleaners, new kitchens. He didn’t recognize the thing in the picture. It looked kind of like a sausage. Maybe it had been arranged with the harsh lighting to show up the shadows of the barbed wire so sharply. Vicious, really. He wiped his nose. Eilis was standing in the doorway when he turned to sneeze again. John Murtagh had shown up from somewhere too.
“Nice one there,” Murtagh said “A bit of celebrity there boss.”
“Nice what?”
“This gets delivered around our place,” said Eilis. “Does she know about it?”
Minogue wiped his nose again He picked up the pages. The Holy Family? He knew Iseult had been working with modeling clay recently. He knew because he’d caught her trying to lift what felt like a hundredweight of the damned stuff up the stairs to her studio. Six months pregnant, up till all hours working on things. Hormones were no excuse.
The Holy Family…? The dinner plate looked real. The eggs and rashers and brown bread were close but they looked a bit dead. But that was probably the idea. Plaster, it must be. Or could it be plasticene — then his eyes locked onto the words: “… father a senior officer in the Garda Murder Squad… ”
