Irish Eyes

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Huh!” Baby said, glowering. “You wanna eat a cake cooked by an old blind lady? How you know she didn’t put soap powder ‘stead of flour in that cake, like she did last week when she thought she was cookin’ grits and instead fixed up a big ol’ pan of Comet Cleanser for breakfast?”

  Sister ignored Baby. “You got plenty of silver polish for me, Miss Bettye? I hope so, ‘cause Baby over there, all she good for is runnin’ her mouth.”

  I left them with Bettye, promising her reinforcements would be along soon.

  It pissed me off, having to go through a metal detector before I could enter the new police headquarters at City Hall East. It pissed me off even more when the uniformed officer searched my purse for hidden knives, guns, or pipe bombs.

  We’re bomb crazy in Atlanta now. All over the South too, I guess. Ever since some right-wing losers started blowing up abortion clinics and gay nightclubs and even Olympic Centennial Park, there’s not a government office in town you can enter without being searched. I knew the reason behind it, but it still pissed me off.

  I took the elevator up to the criminal investigation offices. A civilian secretary frowned when I told her, no, I didn’t have an appointment to see Major Mackey, and, no, he wasn’t expecting me. She smiled smugly when she looked up from the phone. “He can’t see you right now. He’s with the chief.”

  There were two ugly orange plastic chairs pushed against the far wall of the office. I sat down on one of them. “Fine,” I said. “Could you call the major and tell him I said I’ll wait?”

  She didn’t like it, but she did it. I’d brought some paperwork along, so I pulled it out of my purse, and started reading the computer printouts. Edna keeps the House Mouse books, and she’d been working on our taxes for the past several weeks. I winced when I saw the numbers. In my old liberal college days, I’d railed against capitalist pigs. Now I was one, although only a very small-potatoes capitalist pig. Still, I hated paying taxes as much as old John D. Rockefeller himself.

  A door opened and a woman with blond upswept hair poked her head out. “Miss Garrity. Could you come back now?”

  I stood up and followed her down the hall past a warren of small offices and smaller cubicles. She was in her early to mid-thirties, trim, with heavily muscled calves, like a runner or a career tennis player maybe. She wore a conservative navy suit that looked on the expensive side for somebody making a secretary’s salary at city hall. The skirt was a hair on the short side, but not aggressively so. She stopped at a door at the end of the hallway and gestured me to go inside. But nobody was behind the desk.

  She stepped in behind me, closed the door, and sat down at the desk. That was when I noticed the nameplate on the battered city-issue metal desk.

  “Capt. L. E. Dugan,” it said. Bucky’s new girl.

  8

  Lisa Dugan was not the kind of cupcake Bucky Deavers usually went in for. I’d never known Bucky to date a woman born in the same decade he was born. Hell, come to think of it, he’d never dated a woman before, just a series of girls. Cute, fun-loving, airheaded girls were the Deavers type.

  Captain Dugan was beautiful, but she was no girl. There were fine worry lines at the corners of her hazel eyes, dark circles under those same eyes, and just a hint of sag to her chin. I couldn’t help it. What did he see in this chick? I wondered.

  She sat back in her chair and watched me watching her. The office was nothing special, just a desk, two chairs, a computer, and a phone. There was a bank of file cabinets behind her desk. A green plant, maybe a philodendron, draped limp leaves over the edge of the cabinet. There were some framed photos, snapshots of Lisa Dugan holding a puppy, Lisa Dugan and a little boy, and another picture of just a little boy. No photos of Deavers. I felt glad about that. Finally the phone rang. She picked it up, listened, said, “Thanks,” and disconnected.

  “That was the hospital,” she said. “There’s been no change.” She bit her lip. “Last night I talked to one of the doctors. I guess he figured, since I’m a cop, I could take bad news. He said there isn’t going to be a change. Not unless Bucky gets an infection, or pneumonia, something like that.”

  “Bullshit,” I said hotly. “He has no right to say something like that. There are other doctors in this town. This guy doesn’t know everything. Bucky talked to me last night, did you know that? He opened his eyes and looked at me and talked. So don’t tell me he’s brain dead. ‘Cause I was there. And I know Bucky. I know how goddamn stubborn he is.”

  “Stubborn.” She said it with a sigh. Then she stuck out her hand and I shook it. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “Bucky told me all about you. He kept saying we had to get you over for dinner. Only I suck as a cook. And I felt sort of, I don’t know, funny, about meeting you.”

  “He took me to that party last night so that we could meet,” I said. “He talked about you all night long. To tell you the truth, I was getting a little jealous.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “We were buddies. Pals. It’s just that I hadn’t seen much of him in the past few months. I had no idea he was seriously involved with somebody. But it’s not like I was his girlfriend or anything. I never slept with him. He told you that, didn’t he?”

  “We didn’t talk a lot about who he had or hadn’t slept with in the past,” Lisa said. “We’re both adults. I knew he’d had a life before me, and I certainly had one before I met him. We didn’t talk about the past at all. But I figured you were special in a different way.”

  She was trying to butter me up. Why?

  “You said the doctor said there wasn’t going to be a change,” I said. “What’s the situation right now?”

  She paused.

  “Major Mackey said you’d talk to me,” I said. “I’m family, you know.”

  “The bullet was a twenty-two, we think. At least, the entry wound is small, and the gunman left a twenty-two at the scene, so that’s what we’re assuming. It’s still in there, lodged in his brain. The doctor said it did a hell of a lot of damage. He’s breathing on a respirator. And they’ve got him heavily sedated.”

  I felt numb, thinking about Bucky, in a hospital bed, tethered to a lot of machines.

  “What about the girl at the liquor store? I know she’s missing. Have they found her yet?”

  The friendly look on Lisa Dugan’s face vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  “You know I can’t talk about that.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Who am I going to tell? Come on, Lisa. You say you know how Bucky felt about me. I’ve got a right to know what’s going on with the investigation.”

  “You were a cop,” she said, emphasizing the past tense. “Now you’re a civilian. A civilian with a habit of butting her nose into police investigations. But that’s not going to happen this time. Major Mackey was very clear about that. And I’m very clear about it.” She gave me a level look. The hazel eyes could get very frosty. “Don’t fuck this up, Callahan. It’s too important. We’re gonna find the guy who shot Bucky, and when we do, we want everything right. You know the law. You know if the chain of evidence in this case gets messed with, it’s history. So be the friend you claim you are. Go home. Say a prayer for Bucky. Say one for me, too, if you would. And leave it alone.”

  “I’m not fucking anything up, Lisa. But I’m watching. And I’m listening. I was there when it happened, so it happened to me, too. And I want to know why. Why’d this guy just walk in and put a couple bullets in Bucky’s head? He didn’t take anything, didn’t shoot the clerk, didn’t look around to see if there were any other witnesses. He just shoots Bucky and leaves? And half an hour later, the only witness to the shooting also disappears? I got questions, you better believe. Like right now, I’m wondering, why is the chief already calling in internal affairs on this? And what’s this bullshit about saying Bucky broke department policy working an unauthorized job?”

  Dugan got out of her chair. “No comment,” she said.

  “Since when do cops have to get the chief’s p
ermission to make a living?” I asked. “Cops have always worked second and third jobs.”

  “No comment,” she said again. She opened the door and waited by it. I got up and stalked out of there, no wiser than I’d been when I went in.

  9

  At the hospital, they’d moved Bucky to the neuro ward. They wouldn’t let me see him, but a nurse there who recognized my name said she’d gone to school with my sister Maureen and worked with her in the ER.

  “He’s stable,” said the nurse, whose name was Veneta. “There’s a waiting room over there,” she added, pointing down the hall. “His doctor makes rounds after lunch, maybe you could catch him then.”

  I got a Diet Coke from a vending machine and went looking for the waiting room.

  The room was small and nearly full. I almost turned around and left when I saw who was sitting in the middle of a green vinyl sofa. John Boylan. He looked up when I came in, gave me a weak wave. Sitting on one side of Boylan was a white guy I didn’t recognize, but he had that unmistakable cop look about him: the polished shoes, the erect posture and short hair. On the left of Boylan was C.W. Hunsecker.

  He got up when he saw me, we hugged, sat back down.

  “You hear anything?” C.W. asked, his voice low.

  “He’s stable,” I said.

  C.W. frowned. His blue-green eyes were red-rimmed, and his face was much thinner than the last time I’d seen him. “What’s the matter,” I said teasingly, “Nickells got you on a diet?”

  Linda Nickells was C.W.’s wife and one of my best friends. They were both cops, that is, former cops. C. W. had been captain of the robbery squad when both Bucky and I worked there; Linda, his second wife, was a homicide detective whom I met when I was working for an antiques-dealer client accused of killing a teenage girl.

  We had a lot of history, me, C.W., Bucky, and Linda.

  C.W. struggled to his feet, reached for his canes. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, looking around.

  It was painful, watching him walk like that. Linda assures me that he isn’t in pain, doesn’t mind the canes, but it hurts me just the same. The sight of him always reminds me that he needs those canes because of me, because a homicide suspect had shot him when I’d been too slow-moving. After the accident, they’d given C.W. a desk job. Not long after that, he took a disability pension and bought a security business. And not long after that, Linda, worn out from trying to be a good cop and a good mother to their two-year-old son, Wash, had quit too, to work in the security business with C.W.

  I followed C.W. out to the vending area. He got a pack of gum, offered me a stick. “Sorry. I didn’t feel like talking about Bucky in front of those Irish assholes back there.”

  “Boylan,” I said. “He’s not one of my favorites either. The other guy, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know Michael Kehoe?”

  I thought about it. “I’ve heard his name recently, but I don’t know the guy.”

  “You wouldn’t,” C.W. said. “Kehoe is with the DeKalb S.O.”

  “Since when did these guys get so tight with Bucky?” I asked. “I never heard him mention them before. And what’s with the Irish assholes bit?” I asked. “Remember who you’re talking to here, laddie.”

  “You may be Irish, but you’re not one of them,” C.W. said. “Sorry. I just can’t take their racist bullshit, you know?”

  It dawned on me then. “Kehoe. He’s the one who’s president of the Shamrock Society. With Boylan. Bucky’s new best buddies.”

  Now it was C.W.’s turn to be surprised. “Since when did Deavers get buddy-buddy with those guys?”

  “Recently, I guess. Bucky came over last night, wanted me to go to this St. Patrick’s Day party they were throwing. He wanted me to meet his new girlfriend. She never showed, but I did have an unhappy reunion with Johnny Boylan.”

  “Your old boyfriend,” C.W. said.

  “We went out once. I didn’t know he was married. The guy makes my skin crawl. I can’t understand how Bucky got mixed up with a loser like Boylan.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” C.W. said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I wanted to know.

  C.W. gestured toward the waiting room. “Those guys—those assholes. Supposed to be some damn Irish-American police fraternal organization—right?”

  “I guess. That’s how McNabb described it. They march in parades and drink green beer. Harmless fun.”

  “That’s a load of crap,” C.W. said vehemently. “Boylan. You know what he’s famous for?”

  “Besides chasing anything in a skirt? What?”

  “Bashing in heads down in the projects. Loves to beat up the brothers, then come back to the squad room, trade nigger jokes with his buddies. He worked for me once, back in the early nineties. I had him transferred down to the airport precinct, get him out of my sight. How he’s stayed in the department this long—and the chief’s black and knows the score—I don’t get it.”

  “So he’s a bigot,” I said. “The world’s full of bigots, C. W. We Irish do not have the exclusive franchise on hatred.”

  “Those guys do,” C.W. insisted. “They might as well be the Klan. You take a look at their membership roster. All white, all good old boy. All asshole.”

  C. W. was a third-generation Atlanta police officer. His grandfather was one of the first black officers sworn into service with the city, back in the days when black cops weren’t allowed to arrest white citizens or even shower in the same precinct with white officers. But three generations of Hunseckers had made a career of policing, and C.W.’s own career had been pretty impressive until the shooting.

  “Hey,” I said. “Look at the African American Patrolmen’s Association. I don’t see any white names on their roster. Does that mean they’re racist? Come on, C.W., I can’t believe there’s anything sinister about a bunch of dumb micks who wanna dress up in kilts and pretend to be leprechauns every March seventeenth. What’s the harm?”

  C. W. chewed his gum agitatedly. “I hear things, okay?”

  “What kind of things?” I asked, wanting to defuse his anger. “Boylan’s the one who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?”

  “Funny,” he said. “But I can’t believe you didn’t recognize Kehoe’s name. Think—you don’t remember hearing about a Michael Kehoe a few years back? When the issue was discrimination? Only he charged that it was reverse discrimination?”

  I glanced back at the waiting room. One of the men was standing up, reading notices on a bulletin board. He was tall, with thinning blond hair and a high forehead and pants that rode low on bony hips. That Michael Kehoe?

  “Okay, I remember,” I said. “Didn’t he used to be a priest before he went into law enforcement?”

  “Not quite a priest,” Hunsecker said. “What do you call them before they graduate from priest school?”

  “A seminarian.”

  “Yeah. A seminarian. His summer assignment was to assist as a chaplain in the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office. But he liked cop work so much he quit the priesthood and went to the academy instead,” Hunsecker said. “He was supposedly in line to be assistant chief deputy, but then he got passed over for the job—by a black guy.”

  “And Kehoe sued for reverse discrimination and won.”

  “Won big,” Hunsecker said bitterly. “The court ordered the sheriff to make him assistant chief deputy. The other guy, Oscar Braymore, got shoved into some nothing job in warrants. He quit the department; last I heard, he’s selling used cars. But Kehoe? He got his back pay plus damages of, what I heard, nearly a million dollars.”

  “He’s a rich man, then,” I said, not taking my eyes off Kehoe. “What’s he want with some dipshit sheriff’s job?”

  “Revenge,” Hunsecker said. “Wants to stick it in everybody’s face. He was a white man and he was wronged and he made ‘em pay. Besides, he claims the lawyers got most of the money.”

  “He must be real popular over at the S.O.,” I speculated.

&n
bsp; “They made him assistant chief deputy of nothing,” Hunsecker said with some satisfaction. “He pushes paper, punches the clock, spends most of his time organizing these Shamrock clowns.”

  “So Kehoe’s a jerk and Boylan’s a bigot,” I said. “I’ll give you that. What kinds of things are you hearing? You never heard anything bad about Bucky, right? You know he wasn’t like them.”

  Hunsecker’s face softened. “Deavers. Damn. I don’t want to believe anything bad about him. I saw that thing in the Constitution this morning. About internal affairs investigating. Then I see Boylan and Kehoe in there, weeping and wailing, it makes me wonder, that’s all.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Nothing,” C.W. said. “Let’s get out of here. The doctors won’t tell us nothing, anyhow, and I’m thinking a chili dog might taste good about now.”

  I knew what he was thinking about. “Nickells lets you eat that stuff?”

  “How’s she gonna know unless you rat me out?”

  “Okay,” I said. “My van’s in the garage. I’ll fly if you’ll buy.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  The Varsity sits high atop North Avenue overlooking Interstate 75 and the nearby Georgia Tech campus like an aging fifties battleship. It’s probably the last place left in Atlanta with curb service.

  I pulled into a slot on the top deck, gave the carhop our order: three chili dogs, an order of rings, a fried apple pie, and a Coke for C.W., and a plain hamburger and Diet Coke for me.

  “You getting prissy on me, Garrity?” C.W. asked. “Was a time, you could outeat anybody, anytime.”

  “Ten years ago,” I said. “Right now, my idea of middle-aged crazy is having half-and-half in my decaf espresso.”

  He shifted his weight in the front seat of the van. I knew he was trying to get comfortable.

  “What’s so bad you couldn’t talk about it in the hospital?” I asked. “You’re giving me bad vibes, Hunsecker.”

  “It’s not me putting out the vibes,” he replied. “It’s those Shamrocks.”