A Carra ring imm-6

by John Brady

  He looked over again. The multimillionaire hadn’t grown an inch since he’d last looked. The head like a boulder or the like, so out of proportion to the frame. Now she wasn’t much short of six feet, he decided. These were Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy’s parents, he thought as he stepped forward, and half-wondered where his annoyance had disappeared to: Mrs. Geraldine Shaughnessy and her former husband, Mr. John Leyne. The long and the short of it.

  The Mercedes soaked up the motorway with a faint whistle. Minogue glanced back at the cars following. Mrs. Shaughnessy had insisted on being shown the site where her son’s rented car had been found. Minogue remembered her jaw quivering, the handkerchief held to her nose. Leyne had stood beside her, pushing back long strands of hair teased up by the breeze. He’d studied the car park with a bleak gaze for a long time. Minogue wondered if the bored disbelief on Leyne’s face was just the shock, or was it from something else that had occurred to him quicker. The look of a tradesman, maybe, surveying an impossible job.

  Leyne turned to him. Minogue didn’t want to look at the man’s mouth, the yellow film stretching around his mouth like a fish or something. There was a sour smell in the car too that Minogue didn’t want to be aware of anymore.

  “So,” Leyne said. “Tell me, what’s really going on here?”

  Minogue focused on the driver’s eyes in the mirror of the unmarked Opel ahead. Mrs. Shaughnessy was talking to Declan King there, with Kieran Hayes looking around the front passenger headrest, glancing at the Mercedes every now and then.

  Freeman, Leyne’s assistant, was sitting in the passenger seat, chewing slowly on something. Minogue’s gaze went to the driver. The car was Billy O’Riordan’s, the driver an ex-Guard, apparently

  “Well,” said Leyne.

  The Irish accent seemed to have soaked through the twang Minogue had heard at the airport. Freeman sat forward a little and turned.

  “If this was back home, you’d think robbery,” he said. “A mugging, maybe.”

  “That’s definitely a line of inquiry,” Minogue managed.

  “Look,” said Leyne. “Let us know where we stand.”

  Minogue gave him a blank look.

  “You’re the expert, right,” he said “Tri… Tan… ”

  “Commissioner Tynan,” said Freeman.

  “That’s him. He says you’re the goods. But what else would he say? Now look, we need to get to the point here. You can speak your mind, you understand?”

  “I’ve told you what we know so far,” Minogue said. “There’s nothing to embellish. We’re going after leads the best we can. That’s about it so far.”

  Freeman adjusted his glasses again. He started to say something but Leyne waved him off.

  “Look, there, Inspector, is it?”

  “Matt’s grand ”

  “Matt. You can appreciate where we’re coming from. How we talk, the way things work. You know. The States? Have you been?”

  “No. Not yet. But I have a rough idea.”

  “Well I’ve been both sides. I watched the Yanks getting off the tourist buses, Christ, I don’t know when — Eisenhower, that’s how long ago. Looking for fairies and leprechauns, the half of them. All I’m saying is, level with me. I’m not going to give you shit. Hell, I’m in no position to. You’re not Dublin are you?”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  “Clare. West Clare.”

  “Family?”

  “Two.”

  “Grown up, are they?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “How long are you married?”

  Minogue looked out the window.

  “Sixty-seven years,” he said.

  The driver’s eyes locked on to his in his mirror. Freeman stopped his chewing and looked at the dashboard.

  “So it’s your first marriage then, I take it.”

  Minogue nodded. Freeman resumed his chewing.

  “They told you how much of a pain in the ass I am?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “How’m I doing?”

  Minogue looked across at him. Leyne’s eyes were more watery than he’d noticed earlier. The jaw was set even harder. There were blood vessels right up to the iris.

  “You’re doing all right so far.”

  “Only all right?”

  “The shock hits people differently, Mr. Leyne.”

  “Ever had someone close to you murdered? Die suddenly?”

  Minogue looked around the face. The skin was papery near the eyes too. “I don’t mind you poking,” he said. “But when I do, I’ll tell you. I’ve a job to do, that’s all.”

  Leyne turned back to the window. A sagging van belched clouds of diesel smoke.

  “You’re a gentleman to spare Geraldine,” he said. “But I’d like to know. What’s your gut instinct?”

  Minogue looked through the back window. The security squad would be jumpy if the traffic slowed any more.

  “I can’t say. Your son was out of sight for quite a number of days. We’re trying to place him.”

  Leyne closed his eyes, let his head back against the headrest. He rubbed at his eyes and sighed. The driver pulled around the slowing traffic by Collins Avenue. He was directed through the junction by two Guards on motorcycles. Three kids waved at the cars. The Mercedes picked up speed again.

  “Jeff,” Leyne said then and opened his eyes. “Are we connected?”

  Freeman took a cell phone from his briefcase.

  “It’s Billy O’Riordan I want.”

  Freeman consulted an address book, he dialed, and he listened for a moment. He handed it to Leyne.

  The potato millionaire eased himself into the corner. His eyes lost focus.

  “Billy? It’s John,” he said. “Yes. Thanks. Christ, I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago.”

  Minogue eyed Freeman taking in Summerhill. Not that appetizing an entry to Dublin’s fair city even with the boom times. Freeman leaned in to him.

  “Definitely in shock,” he whispered.

  Minogue returned Freeman’s gaze. Concerned, sure, but hired concern?

  “We left Boston at four,” Freeman added. “Didn’t sleep much…”

  Minogue glanced at Leyne. He was pinching the bridge of his nose while he listened. His eyelids fluttered but they stayed closed.

  “It’s not personal,” Freeman whispered. “You can appreciate that, right? He’s used to running the show his way.”

  “Damn it, Billy,” Leyne said then. “The hell would I know?”

  An old man, Minogue realized. The suit and the tan and the darting eyes twitching and floating in the pouches of skin didn’t make him any less than sixty-eight years old.

  The Mercedes was waved through red lights by the bridge. Freeman spoke behind his hand now.

  “Mr. Leyne’s never forgotten his home country.”

  Leyne said all right and handed the phone back to Freeman. He looked out at the new offices by the quays.

  “Did Jeff give you more of the hard ass and soft heart routine there?”

  Freeman sat back with a rueful smile.

  “He better have,” Leyne went on. “That’s what he’s paid to do. Here, see that pub?”

  Minogue took in the newly tarted up pub as they passed.

  “I worked there for six months on the buildings,” Leyne said “Years and years ago. Carrying concrete blocks up to a black-haired bastard, a brickie. Jimmy Morrissey, from Leitrim. I had a row with him one night. The size of me, huh. He beat the shit out of me. A great education, he gave me that day.”

  He nodded at Freeman.

  “But Jeff here came up the veal route. Didn’t you, Jeff?”

  Freeman smiled.

  “Summer house on the Cape Aspen, Jeff?”

  “Aspen,” said Freeman. “Yes, sir. Worked two seasons in a pizza joint there.”

  Leyne tapped on the window.

  “That bastard Morrissey did me a big favor. I went home to those ten acres and got started on l
earning everything I could about chips. Potato chips. People thought I was mad. I got a job in Mitchelstown. Two jobs.”

  “Crisps we call them here,” said Minogue. “Chips you get out of a chipper.”

  Leyne strained to look back at a passing building

  “I hate Dublin,” he said. “Still. And I shouldn’t, should I. Things have come on a lot here, haven’t they?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Film industry, the music? Gone mad on the digital economy and all that?”

  The car turned sharply around Merrion Row. The trees seemed to be drooping very low over the railings in the square.

  “You have a garden, I hope.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you grow spuds?”

  Minogue thought ahead to Kathleen’s disbelief when he’d tell her tonight.

  “I do.”

  “You don’t care that you can get them dirt cheap from Cyprus?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t scorn Minogue heard in Leyne’s voice, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “It’s in the genes, is it? Since the Famine?”

  “There’s no way to know.”

  Leyne cleared his throat. Freeman looked at him and then at Minogue.

  “What would anyone know about that anymore,” Leyne murmured. “There’s only microchips or television or something. Video games. Stores — shops. Who cares. There’s no past anymore. History’s over, isn’t that it?”

  “My great-grandmother was the only one left,” said Minogue. “Out of nine. A Quaker family in Galway took her in.”

  Leyne made to say something but he stopped. Minogue watched the back gates of the Dail swing open to admit a car. Too many damned Mercedes in Boomtown Dublin now this last while. He returned Leyne’s gaze.

  “The man she married had buried seven brothers and sisters,” he said.

  “Enough left to take on the landlords though? And then the Black and Tans.”

  “I suppose. I’ve a brother keeps score, over the centuries.”

  Leyne sighed.

  “British Queens, my da used to grow,” he said. “Duke of Yorks. The Kerr’s Pinks. Idaho Reds. Sir Walter Raleigh and the glorious spud. Rotting in the fields. People dying in ditches. But I’m no scholar. No. I’m too busy working for a living. I pay people to study something, and then I pay them again to explain it to me. I must be mad.”

  Two Garda motorcycles blocked the traffic at the lights by Baggot Street. The Mercedes surged ahead. One circuit of Stephen’s Green and they’d pull up at the Shelbourne. Minogue looked at the Opel ahead. What was there in Geraldine Shaughnessy’s manner, her appearance, that he’d recognized but couldn’t detail as he’d watched her standing in the airport car park by the tape? A teacher maybe, a nun?

  “Microchips or not I hear Dublin’s falling apart,” said Leyne. “How bad is it?”

  Minogue recognized a newspaper seller at the foot of Harcourt Street. The man, a boy when Minogue first knew him, with a loose eye and sloping drag-foot gait, squinted at the cars. Behind him on a bus shelter was an ad for GOD. It was the original one, the close-up black and white of a shaved head with a tattoo on her neck and a ring in her eyebrow. The mocking, hollow eyes staring at him from any point he looked. Would Leyne be satisfied to know that the suicide rate was now ahead of England’s?

  “Cup of good coffee’s nearly a pound,” he said. “Bistros. New television channels.”

  “That’s all you can tell me?” asked Leyne. “Not the part about Dublin being full of drug addicts? Or that there are Irish farmers paid not to grow things?”

  The trees in their full spread and the glimpses of the pond between the shrubs lifted Minogue.

  “Not what DeValera and the 1916 crowd had in mind, I tell you.”

  I tell ya, Minogue repeated within. The American and the Irish had him off balance yet. But more than the accent, he had heard something familiar in Leyne’s talk. Steeling himself for a news conference, no doubt: the inevitable intrusion of police and gawkers and cranks. Revisiting old scars too, maybe. A past marriage, a return bout in a private struggle against the old country he had turned into a villain so he could escape it. Better not tell him the Irish weren’t emigrant laboring men anymore.

  Minogue stole a glance at Leyne This short multimillionaire had gone far. He’d parlayed a crop that had kept his ancestors alive — and then decimated them — into convenience food, and he’d made a big pile of money at it. And no, it wasn’t bitterness he’d been hearing in Leyne’s asides. It was something else, and he had heard it before. It was that zest and disenchantment which came out too often as scorn, and maybe that lasting ache was a watermark in Minogue’s fellow citizens no matter where they ended up. Always returning, always leaving, he wondered. Everything counts, and nothing matters?

  The car pulled over to the entrance of the Shelbourne. Minogue counted three squad cars, a half-dozen uniforms, and as many in plain clothes stepping out onto the roadway. He spotted the hard chaws further back, eyes everywhere, one talking into his lapel, another with his jacket unbuttoned, the pistol jammed up under his arm. He looked at the faces of people held back on the footpath.

  “Christ,” Leyne said.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Freeman soothed. “You’ve taken your six o’clock — ”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Leyne snapped. He turned to Minogue.

  “We’re going to have to hang tough, right? You know what I’m saying?”

  Minogue took in the wet eyes, the raspy breathing. He saw veins under the skin along Leyne’s neck now.

  “You have your own people to answer to, I know,” Leyne said. “All I ask is, don’t make it harder for Geraldine or me.”

  He nodded at the small crowd on the pavement.

  “I don’t know what these journalists are like here but I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on one of them if he was on fire.”

  Leyne’s piercing eyes darted around the scene for several moments more.

  “It’ll come out sooner or later,” he whispered. “Every family has its things.”

  Hayes opened Leyne’s door. The food tycoon grabbed Minogue’s arm.

  “My son was murdered,” he said. “The money’s no good. I can’t get him back. I can’t go back to fix things. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  Minogue nodded. Leyne stared into his eyes again.

  “You’re thinking, ‘Some goddamned Yank,’ right?”

  Minogue watched Freeman adjusting his collar.

  “I’m an Irishman. I wandered off, I suppose. But I’m an Irishman. Okay?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “I’m a pain in the arse all my life. And I look like hell, don’t I?”

  “You’ll be okay. Just go easy on yourself. Don’t react to stupid questions.”

  “I don’t mean appearing on TV here,” said Leyne. “Hell, that’s nothing. What I mean is the father bit. The parent thing. You’re the old school there, are you? No divorce or that, Mass on Sunday, all that…?”

  “No.”

  Leyne grabbed his arm again, squeezed.

  “Listen,” Leyne said. “ Do I look like a man who’s interested in bullshit? In my condition? Let’s talk man-to-man here. I never stopped being Irish. An Irishman, do you get it? The main thing here is, whatever you do, remember I’m behind you. All the way. You hear me?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Leyne leaned in, pushed a nest of the microphones back. Minogue wondered what it was about Leyne’s face that now reminded him of a fish. Another journalist placed a recorder on the table. Minogue stopped counting, there must be a dozen Guards around the room. Tynan sat in next to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “They want to start right away?”

  “I suppose. What do I tell the parents that I don’t give to a press conference?”

  Tynan raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t be dragging your feet,” he said.

  Minogue eyed Gemma O’Loughlin chewing on a pen at the back of the room.
/>   “I’m giving the bare minimum, John.”

  Tynan put on his Easter Island face, looked out at the small crowd. Mrs. Shaughnessy was now sitting next to Leyne. He leaned toward her and said something. He put his hand on her arm. She seemed not to notice the hand.

  King read the release. He didn’t use the word appeal. That was left for him, Minogue realized. The lights dazzled him. He almost missed his cue but a television camera swiveled and settled on him. He heard himself begin, and he flinched at, but was grateful for, the cliches that flowed easily. Minogue looked over to Leyne and Mrs. Shaughnessy several times. The light had done something to her face. She sat upright, with that out-of-reach look Minogue hadn’t learned to type conclusively over the years. Anger, sure, he supposed. Grief, tiredness, helplessness; disbelief. All of it.

  Leyne sat forward and studied some point in the far corner of the room. Minogue took in the dogged, strained face. The pope was right, but something neanderthal about the jutting jaw too.

  Minogue’s armpits began to prickle. He moved the sheaf of papers he’d used as a prop and glanced at King. King cued Mrs. Shaughnessy. She blinked and a tear slid down. She held up a finger to stop it. She sounded close to breathlessness. Leyne’s hand went to her arm again. There was a sudden flurry of camera shutters. Minogue saw the journalists writing more.

  It occurred to the inspector that Mrs. Shaughnessy did not like asking for help. That she had practiced what she was going to say. That she was not going to lose her poise. She called her son her only son. She said she had a deep affection for Ireland and his Irish roots. That his visits to Ireland had been high points in his life. She paused and bit her lip. Her son had even thought of moving to Ireland to live. Her voice wavered, she closed her eyes. Thirty-something years in the States and her accent almost wholly Irish still, Minogue realized. Her mother and father, two brothers and two sisters still lived in County Cork. They were strong farmers, well up.

  Justice, she said then. Her son would rest but his parents could not until — Tynan was sliding a note across. It had been folded once. “Release cause?” Minogue shook his head. Mrs Shaughnessy finished. To Minogue’s surprise, Leyne said nothing but rose. He and Mrs. Shaughnessy were ushered away from the table. Minogue tried to count the flashes but gave up after ten. Two Guards in uniform blocked reporters from following the couple. Then King threw the conference open for questions.