Irish Eyes

by Mary Kay Andrews

  I’d known Corky and Marie Hanlon all my life. They’d lived on our block in Sandy Springs; Corky had been my brother’s Little League coach; their daughter Betsy was our favorite baby-sitter. Their son Chuckie had been the recipient of my first preteen crush.

  “What are you doing here?” Corky asked, raising his voice to be heard over the din from the band, which was playing a Patsy Cline tune. “I thought you’d left the job.”

  “I did,” I said, turning to introduce him to Bucky. “My friend dragged me here tonight.”

  Bucky and Corky shook hands. “Friend?” Corky said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Not that kind of friend,” I said quickly. “Bucky was my partner. He’s a detective on the homicide squad. And he’s a member of the Shamrocks.”

  Corky gave Bucky an approving slap on the back. “Corky Hanlon,” he said. “Fulton County Sheriff’s Office. Or I was until I retired five years ago. Now I just hang around here with all the other old farts and talk about Viagra and Preparation H.”

  “The Preparation H part I believe,” I told Corky. “The Viagra? Never.”

  We stood and chatted for a while like that, Corky and I catching each other up on the families, Bucky sipping his beer and surveying the room, looking but not finding.

  Bucky drifted away once for twenty minutes or so, came back and ordered another round of beers for the three of us.

  The band segued into a medley of Irish songs. Bucky tugged at my hand. “Come on, Garrity, let’s dance.”

  We didn’t dance as much as we bumped butts with the drunken cops on the dance floor. Bucky was in a high old mood. He gripped me close to him and hauled me around in a whipsaw series of dips and swirls.

  “Peg o’ my heart,” he warbled in my ear. “I love you. Peg o’ my heart, I need you. Since first I heard your lilting laughter, it’s your Irish ass I’m after …”

  I laughed and gave him an affectionate thump on the back. “What’s your girlfriend going to say if she walks in on you carrying on like this with me?”

  “She’ll probably beat the crap out of you,” Bucky said. “Lisa’s little, but she’s mean as cat dirt. It’s what I love best about her.”

  “High praise,” I said.

  “Shut up and dance,” Bucky said.

  “Peg o’ my heart. I love you. We’ll never part. I love you. Dear little girl, sweet little girl …” His voice was loud and wondrously off-key.

  But the giddiness was infectious, I chimed in on the last verse. “Sweeter than the rose of Erin, are your winning smiles endearin’ …”

  Before the song was over, Corky Hanlon was tapping Bucky on the shoulder. “The next one’s mine,” he informed us.

  He was shorter than I by an inch but a practiced ballroom dancer. Now the band was playing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” They ran through the first verse and Corky joined in on the second.

  His voice wasn’t bad.

  “I’ve never heard that second verse before,” I told him.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know yet, Julia Callahan Garrity,” Corky said as he smoothed our way around the floor.

  “Tell me something,” Corky said. “If this Bucky fella isn’t your boyfriend, does that mean you’re still unattached?”

  I laughed at his lack of subtlety. “I’m attached,” I assured him. “But he’s out of town tonight.”

  I told Corky all about Mac. “His name’s Andrew MacAuliffe. He’s a planner with the Atlanta Regional Commission. We’ve been together about eight years now.”

  “MacAuliffe,” Corky said, letting the sound of it roll around on his tongue. “Irish or Scottish?”

  I winced, knowing what came next. “He’s Scots-Irish.”

  “Meaning he’s not one or the other,” Corky remarked. “And certainly not Catholic, I’m sure.”

  It wouldn’t do to get started down this road, so I tried changing the subject. “How are the kids?”

  But he would have none of it. “And why not married?” Corky demanded. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  He sounded like Edna. “Mac was married once. He’s got a grown daughter. But we like things just the way they are. He’s got his house and dogs, and I’ve got my house and the cleaning business, and I do a little private-investigative work every now and again. Why should we get married?”

  Corky tsk-tsked, and we finished out our dance in the same spot we’d started, near the bar. Corky looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows.

  “Better get going,” he announced. “Before Marie locks me out.”

  We said our good-byes and promised to keep in touch.

  Bucky stood watching the dancers, sipping another beer.

  “She’s still not here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She got called out on a case around three this afternoon. A couple crackheads found a woman’s body in the backseat of an abandoned car over on Glenwood Avenue. Maybe she’s still tied up with that.”

  “You’re dating a cop?” As far as I knew, this was a first for Bucky. His usual variety of cupcake was young, blond, and clueless. They tended to be waitresses, aerobics instructors, or dancers.

  “Wait until you meet her,” he said. “She’s nothing like the others. She’s not like anybody, Callahan.” He took a gulp of beer, tugged at the collar of his shirt. “No kiddin’. If I believed in soulmates, she’d be mine. She’s that perfect.”

  I’d heard it all before, but the thing about Bucky was, he always meant it. He fell in love hard and fast and often. From my perspective, he was a thoughtful and tender suitor—with the attention span of a two-year-old. Once, a few years ago, a group of us had been at dinner in a fancy downtown restaurant when Bucky’s squeeze du jour got up to go to the ladies’ room. When she got back, Bucky was standing at the bar, asking one of the waitresses for her phone number.

  “You want to try to call her?” I asked.

  “I already paged her twice,” Bucky said. “Come on, let’s eat.”

  We sat at a tiny table at the edge of the dance floor and Bucky shoveled in the corned beef and cabbage, greasy fried chicken, and potato salad. I picked at a pile of potato chips and dip. It was one of those parties with a lot of noise and a lot of people, but nobody you really cared to talk to.

  Bucky didn’t seem to notice. He table-hopped around the room, slapping backs, shaking hands, always watching the door for the arrival of his soulmate.

  Bored, I drank three more beers and found myself glancing at my watch in between sips.

  “Having fun?”

  I looked up. John Boylan placed a casual hand on my shoulder. I forced a smile.

  “Just grand,” I said.

  “A pretty lady like you all alone without a date?” Boylan asked, sitting down without waiting for an invitation. “That’s what I call a shame.”

  “I had a date,” I said pointedly. “He went to get us a beer.”

  “Who, Deavers? Thought he was all tied up with Lisa Dugan.”

  I looked around the room now, hoping Bucky would come back and rescue me. But all I saw were swirls of various shades of green. A dull throbbing was starting in my temples.

  “Bucky and I are old friends,” I told Boylan. As if he didn’t know.

  “And what about us?” he asked, leaning closer. “Aren’t we old friends?”

  3

  Back in the late seventies and early eighties, or P.M.—pre-Mac—I’d had what could euphemistically be described as a “free-spirited love life.” I never thought of myself as someone who slept around; rather, I preferred to think of myself as serially monogamous. There were maybe half a dozen serious relationships back then. It was in the days before I instituted my policy of never dating anybody I worked with. So I “went with” a couple of cops, along with a lawyer and a salesman and a professional grad student and a guy who never really had a job but always seemed to have plenty of money.

  In between those “serious” relationships, I partied with the guys in the office, meaning cops. It was
fun and carefree back then. We were all young and ambitious, intense in our belief that we’d make the world a better, safer place to live.

  Looking back on it now, those singles summers have a dreamlike quality, like one long coed softball game at Piedmont Park, followed by endless smoky afternoons hunched over cold beers at Manuel’s Tavern.

  I was a cute young thing at the time, and pretty damn vain about how I looked in my PAL baseball jersey and tight cutoffs. It was after one of those games—we were all sitting around Manuel’s, watching the Braves on TV—that John Boylan sat down next to me and whispered in my ear that he’d been watching me all afternoon.

  It was heady stuff for me. Boylan was a big deal, in his thirties, a star in the homicide unit, the man who cracked the Bathtub Murders.

  Those murders—five young women brutally raped and slashed to death, all found in bathtubs full of water—were the talk of the town that spring. The murders happened within a ten-day span in early April. Women who lived alone were buying Rottweilers and shotguns and security systems. Until John Boylan noticed. He noticed the victims’ cars. All shiny clean, with little pine-tree deodorizers hanging from the dashboard. It was Boylan who’d traced the deodorizers back to a car wash on Roswell Road, Boylan who interviewed a nervous attendant who couldn’t account for his whereabouts on the nights of the murders, Boylan who’d found the murder weapon—a box-cutter, hidden behind a false panel in the attendant’s black Camaro.

  John Boylan in those days was quite the stud. He had the early Burt Reynolds look down pat—big dark handlebar mustache, hair that tickled his open shirt collar, skin-tight blue jeans, high-heeled cowboy boots, and an ever-present cigarette.

  Boylan bought me a beer, then another beer. He suggested we go somewhere for a quiet dinner. I was thrilled, of course. I needed a shower first, so we went back to my apartment, which was in one of those singles complexes that had sprung up all over Atlanta in the seventies and eighties. The only thing that makes me proud about that evening was that I didn’t sleep with the guy. Oh sure, there was a lot of heavy necking and heavy breathing, but Boylan’s beeper went off before we got around to actually doing the deed.

  It wasn’t until the next day, when my girlfriend Paula asked me where I’d gone after Manuel’s, that I discovered my new boyfriend was married with three little kids.

  Later that day, when Boylan got into his unmarked city unit, he was displeased to find a steaming-ripe dog turd carefully placed on the driver’s seat, alongside a note from me. Funny—he never called again.

  Funny, too, how Boylan’s star status had dimmed over the years. He’d had two divorces that I knew of, and no particular success since the Bathtub Murders. The blue jeans had been replaced with one-size-fits-all sweat pants and the handlebar mustache was gone, as was most of the rest of the hair on his head.

  “We had some good times back in the old days, didn’t we?” he said now, winking broadly.

  “Did we?” I said. “I honestly don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do,” he said, stroking my shoulder.

  Bucky walked up then, holding a beer in each hand. “Boylan!” he said, his face lighting up. “Great party, man.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Where’s your lady?”

  “Working a case,” Bucky said. “A Jane Doe in an abandoned car. She said she’d meet me here, but it’s getting kind of late.”

  “Really late,” I said, standing up, as though he’d given me my cue. “And I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Bucky, you think you could give me a ride home?”

  Bucky frowned. “Right now? Everything’s just getting hopping. The band’ll be back from their break any minute now. And Lisa still might make it.”

  “I could give you a ride,” Boylan offered. “I was just saying my good-byes to everybody.”

  I gave Bucky the signal, tugging on my left earlobe. After all the years, he knew it well. He shrugged, took a long swig of his beer, put them both down on the table.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s late. I’ll take her home.”

  I was fuming by the time we got to the car.

  “Thanks a lot for making me beg,” I told him.

  “What? What’d I do?” Bucky said.

  “Boylan. You know I can’t stand the guy. You saw him standing there, his hands all over me. And yet you did nothing. Jeez.”

  He started the car, muttering under his breath. “What?” I said sharply.

  Bucky shook his head. “What’d you want me to do? Draw down on him? Challenge him to a duel? He was just being friendly. Boylan’s not a bad guy. Loosen up, for Christ’s sake.”

  He revved the Miata’s engine and spun out of the parking lot doing at least forty miles per hour. When he ran the red light at the next intersection it dawned on me that I’d seen Bucky down at least five beers within the past hour.

  I glanced over at him. “Are you sober enough to drive?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “You wanna nag me about that, too? Christ. No wonder you’re still single.”

  “Just let me off at the corner,” I said, doing a slow burn. “If you want to get stopped for DUI, maybe hit and kill somebody, be my guest. Only let me out of the car first.”

  “Christ,” he said again, taking the next corner at an even higher speed. “I told you, I’m fine. I didn’t even finish most of those beers. Kept setting them down, and when I went to pick ‘em back up, they were empty.”

  “Yeah, that happens when you suck it down like water,” I said. “Slow down, Bucky. I mean it.”

  “Fuck you very much,” Bucky said, again under his breath.

  I made a show of checking my seat belt to make sure it was buckled tightly, but there was nothing else to do. I sat very straight and quiet, and when I looked down at my lap, I noticed my hands were clasped so tightly both knuckles were white.

  A mile from home Bucky took a sharp left into a small strip shopping center on Ponce de Leon. He parked in front of a liquor store. The neon sign in the window said it was the Budget Bottle Shop. The windows were covered with beer and liquor signs. He cut the engine. “Be right back,” he said.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “The last thing you need is more booze. Take me home, dammit. Right now.”

  “Just hold your water,” Bucky said. “Gotta pick something up in here. Be right back. Swear to God.”

  He slammed the door and I reached over and pushed the power lock button. The parking lot was dimly lit, and the only business that looked open was the liquor store.

  I sat and fumed. Should have stayed home, I told myself. By now, Mac would have called from Nashville. He’d gone up there at the first of the week for a job interview. I was both dreading and anticipating hearing from him. He’d been dissatisfied with his job for more than a year, and I hated it that he was hating his work, but on the other hand, I couldn’t contemplate his moving to Nashville. Us moving to Nashville. He wanted me to go too.

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. My temples were throbbing. I wanted a hot bath and some aspirin and my bed and my house. My house. Not some fancy new house in a subdivision in Nashville, Tennessee. My wood-frame Craftsman bungalow on Oakdale suited me just fine. My life suited me too. Why couldn’t it suit Mac?

  And where the hell was Bucky? I sat up and peered at the front of the liquor store. It was impossible to see inside with all the posters and beer signs in the store’s window. Damn him. I wondered what his new girlfriend would think about his coming home with a snootful of beer. Things had changed in Atlanta. In the old days, a cop wouldn’t ticket another cop. If you got stopped for running a red light or weaving from lane to lane, all you had to do was flash your badge, and all was forgiven. But not anymore. The new chief of police was a woman full of reformist’s zeal—a real ball-buster. If Bucky—or any other cop—got stopped for DUI, he could be in deep shit with the bosses.

  I thought about tapping on the car horn. Piss him off royally. Like I was pissed off. Thought better of it. My head hurt. I leaned back and clo
sed my eyes again. Come on, dammit.

  The Miata’s clock ticked off a couple minutes. I opened my eyes when I heard the pops. They were faint. Two of them. Pop. Pop. I sat up, blinked, looked around the parking lot. There was one other car in the lot, a rusty white Buick LeSabre. Traffic on Ponce was what you’d expect for that time of night—busy. The pops could have been a car backfiring, maybe.

  Just then the front door of the liquor store was flung open. A woman—young, thin, black—ran onto the sidewalk. She had pink sponge rollers in her hair, and her mouth was twisted wide open. She was screaming. “Jesus! They done shot him. Jesus, Jesus. Somebody help.” And then the screaming turned into sirens, sirens from every direction, shrieking through the cold, thin night air.

  4

  She was crouched down, screaming her lungs out, clutching her head as though it might break apart. I raced past her into the liquor store.

  Bucky was on the floor, facedown, facing the door. A cardboard six-pack carrier lay on the floor beside him. Harp. Three of the bottles were smashed. Bits of glass were splattered all over the floor. A foaming yellow puddle spread around Bucky’s outstretched hand. Blood trickled from a damp place on the side of his head.

  I knelt down beside him. My ears were buzzing. Screams. The woman wouldn’t quit screaming. I put my fingers below Bucky’s carotid artery, felt a thin, thready beat.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I yelled, turning around to look at her. “Tell them it’s a code three. Signal sixty-three, you hear? Officer down. Tell them it’s an officer down. We need an ambulance.”

  The crying was high-pitched, not real. The girl squatted down behind the counter, stood up. Now she was holding a largish bundle, wrapped in a blue-and-yellow-striped blanket. The child kicked a bare foot, screamed louder. He had a thick halo of dark fuzzy hair, and angry tears streamed down the fat little face. How old? Maybe nine months?

  “He coulda killed my baby,” she cried, rocking the child to and fro. “I was holding my baby and he looked at me, pointed the gun, then run out.”