Left Turn at Paradise
Page 23
When one of the killers stepped forward to cut off his head with a bowie knife, the sun shone through the overcast sky for the first time that day, illuminating the yard. The butcher’s hand froze, the four who had fired the killing shots dropped their muskets, and the fear of an angry God scattered the rest.
* * *
Two nights later a select group of Saints met in the cellar of the Temple to take a sacred oath. They called themselves Danites, the avenging angels of the Nauvoo Legion. Porter Rockwell, Lewis Dana, Bill Hickman, and Alonzo Stagg formed the sharp edge of a very bloody sword.
In the flickering light of forty candles they donned their special garments, then sang a hymn of vengeance. When it ended, Sidney Rigdon held out a bucket containing slips of paper with the names of the traitors and said, “Here you go, boys. Take these men that you can’t do anything with but cut their throats and bury them. You’ll be saving a wicked man’s soul by spilling his blood on the ground like Joshua of old.”
Lewis Dana picked the first slip. He grimly nodded when he read the name of his friend, Jonathan Dunham. The fate of Frank Worrell, a jail guard who had let the mob pass through the front door, belonged to Porter Rockwell. Bill Hickman selected Governor Ford, leaving Colonel Williams for Alonzo Stagg. But the latter insisted on trading with Hickman for the governor.
As the men prepared to leave the cellar Alonzo Stagg looked at each and proclaimed, “Because it was I who was used by the villain to take our beloved lamb to slaughter, I will avenge the blood of the Prophet in my lifetime; and I will teach my children to avenge the blood through the taking of the murderer’s children and then have them teach their children and children’s children to the fourth generation as long as there is one descendant of the murderers upon the earth.”
Sidney Rigdon clasped Alonzo in his arms and through manly tears declared, “Thy will be done!”, then took from the table his own Book of Mormon, one given him by Joseph Smith many years earlier. He inscribed something on the front page, dated it, and silently handed it to Stagg, who accepted the gift with the solemnity of an avenging angel.
Chapter One
A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY YEARS LATER
“Who was the deceased?” I heard Buford Higgins, the investigator from the coroner’s office, ask as the fire department EMTs packed up their respirator. “And why is he dressed in that get-up?”
Rolls of flab stuck out between the corpse’s deerskin shirt and breeches. The long scarlet wig had slipped off the bald pate; a cheap replica of a torque hung just under the double chin. On a nearby chair, someone had set a pair of leather dancing pumps and a plastic shield. A long spear, its rubber tip bent at a forty-five degree angle, leaned against the makeshift stage.
No one in the small crowd of mostly mothers and their preteen daughters responded to the question. They were still recovering from the shock of witnessing a fifty-year-old man, who, half an hour earlier, had—with left leg extended horizontally before him, right foot tucked neatly under his bum, and back straight as the letter I—elevated twenty inches above the deck before crashing to Earth in a lifeless heap.
The kids had thought it was part of the act and laughed. Now they simpered in the arms of their mortified parents. With one notable exception, the girls were dressed in fifteen-hundred dollar Irish dance outfits that had nothing Irish about them except for elaborately embroidered Celtic designs.
It befuddles me how traditional Sean-nos and step-dancing evolved to where it’s not only required for children to look like Las Vegas showgirls—sprayed-on tans, elaborate makeup and Camelia rose tiaras in glittering shades of pink, red, blue, and white—but to also cover their heads with cascading wig ringlets that would have embarrassed a seventeenth-century English lord.
The exception was a frail girl of ten or eleven years. She wore soft-toed shoes like the other dancers, but the plaid skirt and light blue blouse were her Catholic school uniform. Perfectly straight hair, pale as an August moon, hung below her shoulders. Colorless, too, was her skin, so much so that I might have mistaken her for an albino had it not been for the emerald-colored eyes that gazed straight ahead as if in a trance.
“This is no time for shyness,” urged Higgins. “Who’s the unfortunate fella?”
Lisa Doolan, she of the fiery step and mad eyes who ran the Doolan Academy of Irish Dance, piped up with equal bits sorrow and wonder as if the body belonged to the Savior himself. “That’s Liam O’Halloran, you old fool.”
“Eh? Not the O’Halloran of Bog Swirl fame?”
“The very same. A few years past his prime, of course.”
“More like an eternity.”
Pushing aside the EMTs who had rolled a stretcher next to the stage, Higgins knelt beside the corpse to better study the face.
When he spoke again his voice was reverent.
“So it is, Miss Doolan. Sure, and he’s a long way from Carnegie Hall.”
During O’Halloran’s salad days he and the supporting cast of Bog Swirl had indeed performed the Cattle Raid of Cooley in that prestigious New York City venue. The Raid was his signature epic, played hundreds of times before thousands of enraptured fans wherever in the world the Irish diaspora planted its tricolor flag. Millions more became acquainted through his performances on public television so that almost overnight three-quarters of the English-speaking world claimed to have a touch of the green in their genes.
O’Halloran, whose real name was Augustus “Augie” Tater of Ottumwa, Iowa, rode the wave for five years, culminating in command performances for the Taoiseach in Dublin and the Prince of Wales at The Royal Albert Hall. Tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t be caught dead attending a ballet were thrilled to watch the ginger-haired dancer, shillelagh in one hand and pagan maiden in the other, kick, leap, and prance across an enormous stage to the sounds of thundering drums and trilling pipes.
But it couldn’t last. The end of Bog Swirl came in 2001 when O’Halloran broke his leg doing one too many signature back-flips at a national Knights of Columbus convention in Allentown, Pennsylvania. After the last of the pipers was lured away by the siren call of a Carnival Cruise gig, O’Halloran fell to drink and dissipation.
It was Kate Phelan, the executive director of the K.C. Irish Center, who heard he was living in Omaha and invited him to appear. The plan was for him to reminisce for a few minutes about the good old days, then take a seat to watch the youngsters from the Doolan Academy perform.
Liam O’Halloran’s name still carried sufficient star power to entice women of a certain age who remembered his vulpine looks and the scandalous way he winked at the audience before leaping to save sacrificial Druid virgins. And, despite their initial shock at seeing what the years and drink had done, his fifteen-minute talk had gone well.
Clothed in his Hound of Ulster costume, he’d reminisced in a soft Irish lilt that none of the actual immigrant Irish in the audience could quite place—Dan Regan, the Kerryman, thought it was from Connacht; the Dubliner Bannon guessed Mayo; and Mrs. Hurley, always the cynic, suggested somewhere south of Pittsburgh—but his stirring rendition of “The Hunt of Sliabh Truim” proved that, no matter his origins, O’Halloran was a great Gael.
Many hundreds were in pursuit of the deer
Around us on the southern hill,
The battalions were on the watch for them—
Fierce was the onset!
The only boy in the Doolan Dance Academy stood off to the side as the EMTs rolled the body away. The ginger-haired lad was dressed in a canary-yellow suit that made him look like a cross between Elton John and a doorman at the Hilton.
“It was Bella Phelan’s fault,” he said to Higgins, sticking out his arm so that his hand nearly brushed the girl’s cheek.
“Here now, Rory,” his mother scolded. “There will be none of that.”
“But it started with her, like it always does.”
I don’t know what he meant by “always,” but something strange certainly did happen when the child made her presence
known. Beautiful in one sense, horrific in hindsight. O’Halloran had finished his talk, answered a few questions, and started to climb off the low stage to polite applause when the pale girl began to sing in an amazing soprano voice.
It was like crystal glass, shimmering and in a strange language that might have been Gaelic, but possibly something else, something that came before that ancient tongue. Bella Phelan sang standing off to the side, apart from the other dancers. No one moved or spoke. We just watched and listened, mesmerized by the sound.
None, however, was more seduced than O’Halloran. He stood silent, looking intently at the girl until she shifted her eyes to him, locking them in some kind of mystical embrace. Then, she abruptly stopped singing and returned to her chair.
“If you don’t mind, Miss Doolan,” O’Halloran had said, stepping back onto the stage, “might you play a reel for me to strut to? Just one for ol’ time’s sake, then we’ll let the girls have their show.”
“I’ve ‘Toss the Feathers’ here,” Lisa Doolan said, pulling a CD from a box near the portable disc player.
“It will do fine.”
Soon the room reverberated with the rhythms of the fast fiddle. O’Halloran sprang into action as if he were twenty-five again.
With arms resolutely straight by his side, he quick-stepped to the 4/4 beat, his feet matching the ever-increasing accents on the first and third beats repeated at every eight bar segment until he was in full glory, the great Cú Chulainn once more shedding the scales of time.
With every twirl and leap the crowd applauded and hurrahed, oblivious to the swelling of the carotid arteries in their hero’s neck. And then, just as Lisa Doolan was about to shut off the music, there came that final leap—accompanied, I regret to say, by a tremendous fart—and the Hound of Ulster landed on the flat on his back like a collapsed balloon.
Some in the audience later commented that for him to die of a heart attack while performing his signature backstep sweep was as fitting as it was tragic.
“Poor man,” Sister Mary Catherine Browne said. “He’s gone to heaven, no doubt.”
“Perhaps,” her cousin Mary Margaret Scanlon replied. “But he won’t like God.”
It was only after the EMTs had wheeled the body through a side door that Higgins spotted me hovering in the back of the room holding a 1762 edition of Edmund Burke’s Account of The European Settlements in America.
I hadn’t planned on seeing the performance. I was there because in a weak moment six months earlier I’d agreed to appraise four thousand rare books that had been donated to the Center by a wealthy Irish-American from Paola, Kansas.
“How’s the shop doing, Mike?”
“Couldn’t be better, thanks.”
“That was quite a reopening you had. Beautiful books.”
“Yeah, we were fortunate to get them.”
“You deserved a break after all you been through.” He was going to say something else, but stopped. “Anyway, give my best to Josie. Maybe we can get together for a drink sometime.”
“We’d like that, Major.”
As soon as the word came out, I regretted it.
Higgins, former lead homicide detective for the Kansas City Police Department, no longer held that august position. After an impeccable thirty-year career that included the department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor, the big man had repeatedly punched a handcuffed prisoner. It didn’t matter that the victim, a pedophile who had molested and tortured a five-year boy, declined to press charges. The prosecutor had no choice. An hour after being charged, there came a hastily negotiated plea resulting in two years probation, one hundred hours of community service, and thirty days of jail “shock time.” Also, Higgins could never work in law enforcement again.
The fire department would have offered him work, but he was too old and fat to clamber up a ladder. And, by his own admission, he didn’t have sufficient chemistry smarts to be a hazmat inspector or arson investigator. But he could ask the right questions, take good notes, and, more important, wasn’t overly bothered by gore—qualities that the Jackson County Coroner’s Office considered essential.
Compared to most of the grisly things he encountered in his line of work, the O’Halloran matter was a piece of cake.
Suddenly, the boy named Rory appeared at our side again. Looking directly at Higgins, he demanded, “Well, aren’t you going to ask her?”
“What would you have me ask, lad?”
The kid stared at Higgins as if he were dumber than a post. Then, quietly so his mother couldn’t hear, he asked: “Why does she always sing when someone is about to die?”
Every great mystery needs an Alibi
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