Irish Eyes

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Rumors,” she said, her voice cracking. “God. I can only imagine what the departmental grapevine has to say about all this. When did you want to meet?”

  “Tonight?” I asked, crossing my fingers. “You’re in Garden Hills, right? I’m in Midtown right now. I could meet wherever you say.”

  She was thinking about it. “I just walked in the door. We haven’t even had dinner yet.”

  “We could meet for dinner,” I said. “Was that your son who answered the phone? You could bring him. I’m used to kids.”

  “No,” she said slowly. “I’ll see about a sitter. All right. There’s a Church’s Fried Chicken on Piedmont. You know it?”

  “Church’s?”

  “I haven’t eaten in two days. I need a grease fix,” she said. “You know the place?”

  “How soon?”

  “Thirty minutes,” Lisa said. “But I can’t stay long. I’m beat.”

  She was sitting at a booth near the door, reading a Dr. Seuss book to a dark-haired little boy of about five. There was a bucket of chicken on the table, and she was sipping from what looked like a half-quart paper cup of iced tea.

  “Lisa?”

  She looked up. “Try finding a sitter at nine-thirty on a Friday night.”

  I leaned over and looked at the book. “Green Eggs and Ham,” I said, giving the kid my friendliest smile. “Would you eat them in a box?”

  He closed the book solemnly. “I would not eat them in a box. I would not eat them with a fox.”

  “Smart kid,” I told him. “Stick to fried chicken.”

  “I wish,” Lisa said, giving me a grudging smile. “Kyle’s strictly a cheesehead. Grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, cheese dip. Oh, yeah. He likes French fries, too.”

  “How’s the chicken?” I asked, gesturing at the bucket.

  “I think it’s the best fast-food fried chicken you can get,” Lisa said. “We like the ghetto dinner usually.”

  “Ghetto dinner?”

  “Two drumsticks, two wings, fries, and a roll. Kyle eats the fries and the roll, I take care of the rest of it.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  I went to the counter and ordered, then brought my box of chicken and large sweet tea back to the table.

  “Your son has beautiful phone manners,” I said, making with the first shameless suck-up move of the night.

  “I try,” she said, ruffling his hair. “People in Atlanta seem to put a lot of emphasis on manners. The preschool had him saying ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’ practically before he could say his own name.”

  “Then you’re not originally from Atlanta?”

  She laughed. “Nice try. You mean you all didn’t notice the accent?”

  “Like you say, good manners rule down here in Dixie. If I had to guess, I’d say the accent is Midwest. Chicago probably. And by the way, ‘you all’ is plural.”

  “Very good.” She nodded. “Kyle and I moved here from Chicago three years ago, after my divorce. My folks up home think I talk like one of the Beverly Hillbillies. They almost died the first time Bucky answered my phone.”

  “Were you with the Chicago PD?” I asked.

  “I was an investigator for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “But my dad was career with the CPD. Kind of runs in the family.”

  “Mind if I ask what brought you here to Atlanta? It’s kind of a long way from home.”

  She picked up one of the drumsticks and worked at the thick dark brown crust with a long manicured nail, nibbling delicately at the tiny pieces she broke off. It was the way a Yankee would eat fried chicken, I thought.

  “My divorce. What else? Kyle’s father is chief investigator in my old office. I needed some distance. Atlanta needed an experienced investigator. It didn’t hurt that I was a woman. Or that my dad had friends here.”

  I nodded. At least she was honest.

  “You came along at the right time,” I told her. “When I quit the force ten years ago, it was because they wouldn’t transfer me to homicide. They told me it was because there weren’t any openings, but that was bullshit. Two weeks after I quit robbery, Bucky got transferred over there. They’d never had a woman homicide detective, and the former chief didn’t see any reason why that should change.”

  She took a sip of tea. “That would be the chief who got fired after his live-in girlfriend was busted for trying to smuggle a kilo of cocaine into the country when the two of them were coming back home from a weekend in Jamaica? The one who had the cocaine tucked down in her French-cut bikini panties?”

  “You mean, alleged cocaine. And I didn’t know they were French-cut.”

  “Bucky told me that. Maybe it was just one of his stories.”

  We grinned at each other. It was a sister thing. Now we could get down to issues.

  “Bucky and I were partners back then,” I said. “In robbery. We had a lot of good times. I know the man. He isn’t a thief. And he isn’t a liar. He wouldn’t get mixed up in this stuff. Not under any circumstances.”

  She glanced over at Kyle, who’d started drawing a picture on a sheet of paper in a steno pad. I noticed Lisa kept twisting a slender gold ring on her left hand. It was a claddagh. My Aunt Olive had brought me one after a trip to Ireland years ago. It was still in my jewelry box, along with my monogrammed circle pin and a charm bracelet from the New York World’s Fair.

  Lisa saw me staring at the ring. “He gave it to me,” she said shyly. “For my birthday. I gave him a matching one for his birthday. Kind of dorky, huh?”

  “Sweet,” I said. “I didn’t know Bucky had a sentimental side.”

  “There’s a lot about him that a lot of people don’t know,” Lisa said, lifting her chin.

  “All of a sudden, I’m finding that out,” I said. “All this stuff about Bucky I didn’t know. And I’ve known him for all these years.”

  I was watching Lisa Dugan’s face. The overhead lights cast an unearthly green light on her cheeks.

  “Like all this stuff with the Shamrocks. And Bucky suddenly being interested in his Irish heritage. I always understood Bucky was just a cracker.”

  “His mother was a Healey,” Lisa said. “Her people were from Donegal.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “I happen to know that Bucky’s mother worked in a school lunchroom in South Georgia. The only Dublin she ever heard of was Dublin, Georgia.”

  “His mother’s people were from Donegal,” Lisa repeated. “And what about you? Garrity? Irish. You know, it really surprised me, when I first moved down here, how many Irish there are in the South.”

  “Not so surprising,” I said. “Most of them came South in the eighteen hundreds, when the railroads were being built. Laying track was hard work. Killer work. Slaves were considered too valuable to risk. So they brought in the Irish. And they stayed. You ever been to Savannah?”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “No. Bucky wanted to take me down there later in the spring. He says the azaleas are beautiful down there.”

  “Savannah’s eaten up with Irish,” I said. “Originally, they got there because of the railroads, but a lot of them stayed and went to work as longshoremen down on the docks. That’s how my father’s people ended up in Georgia.”

  “Why does it bother you that Bucky joined the Shamrocks?” Lisa asked.

  “Look at the jerks running it,” I said. “John Boylan. He’s a scumbag, in case you haven’t noticed. And he’s the guy who organized this whole security gig, too. It makes me wonder, that’s all.”

  “It doesn’t make me wonder,” she said coldly. “I made some phone calls after you and I talked. Major Mackey said he’d already talked to internal affairs, and that I should be expecting a call too.”

  “You? Why?”

  “We were living together, sort of. Bucky kept his old apartment, but most nights he stayed at my place. I guess somebody thinks I know something about these robberies. Mackey wanted to know how many different jobs Bucky was working.”


  “He was working more than one?”

  She sighed. “He worked all the time. It was starting to cause problems for us. If he wasn’t working security at the Bottle Shop, he was working Wrestlemania at the Dome, or directing traffic at the Fox on the nights they had shows.”

  “Why?” I asked. “He wasn’t getting rich on a cop’s salary, I know, but why all of a sudden was he so driven to make a lot of money?”

  Lisa took a sip of iced tea. “We’d talked about buying a house together. I’m getting killed with my rent because I want to be in a good school district for Kyle. The night he was shot? It would have been his first night off in two months. That’s probably why he was so pissed off that I had to work late. I know he was buying that beer for us. Harp. He used to tease me about buying imported beer. I keep thinking about that. If he’d just picked up a six-pack of Bud at a convenience store, none of this ever would have happened.”

  I bit my lip. I’d been wondering about the Harp ever since I’d seen it in the cooler in the back of the store. What if Bucky had gone in the storeroom to get the beer? Was it possible he’d surprised the robber back there, instead of the front of the store as Deecie Styles had claimed?

  “Convenience stores get held up all the time,” I pointed out. I’d decided to keep my questions about the Harp to myself. “Was Bucky carrying the night he was shot?”

  “No,” Lisa said. “His service revolver was under the front seat of the Miata. So he was unarmed. The bastard just shot him for the hell of it.”

  Kyle glanced up, wide-eyed. “You said a bad word,” he said accusingly.

  “I meant it, too,” Lisa said, her voice cracking. “But sometimes mommies say bad words. That doesn’t mean little boys can say them.”

  “Oh,” he said. He picked up a purple crayon and went back to work. He was drawing some kind of rocketship, it looked like.

  “There’s something hinky about all this, you know,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve been around,” I said. “In what way is this like any armed robbery you ever heard of? I mean, the bad guy took no money, not even any liquor. He shoots Bucky twice, right in the head. One bullet should have done the trick. That second shot was definitely a kill shot.”

  “Are you saying a cop shot Bucky? One of the Shamrocks, maybe? Is that what you’re getting at with all this veiled talk about the rumor mill and the grapevine?”

  “Think about it,” I said, leaning closer to her. “The bad guy had to have been back in that stockroom when Bucky went into the store. I think Bucky saw him, maybe recognized him, and that’s why he got shot. Then the shooter bolted out the back door. And I think that clerk disappeared because she knew something about it. And she was scared. Scared shitless.”

  Lisa shook her head, as if it would shake the idea of a killer cop loose.

  “You don’t know the shooter was already in the store. You said yourself that you were almost asleep. The shooter could have gone in the store without you seeing him. And the clerk boogied because she could. She probably thought it would look like the robber had taken the money.”

  She tugged Kyle’s arm. “Come on, sport. Time to go home.”

  “You know I’m right,” I said as she pulled her son out of the booth and helped him put on his jacket.

  “I know you’re not helping Bucky with all this talk,” she said, biting her lip.

  “Lisa?” I tugged at her hand. “Please. Stay and talk to me. I need to understand what’s going on. And I want to see Bucky.”

  “Go to hell,” Lisa said. She grabbed her pocketbook with one hand and her son with the other and literally ran out of the restaurant.

  21

  I slept late that night, and badly. Blue and red lights flashed through my dreams, where I was strapped down to a table, with tubes running in and out of every orifice. And all the while, through a billowing white mist, I could hear a distant piper’s mournful skirls.

  In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen. Edna was gone. In the middle of the floor, though, was a towering mound of pink cotton smocks. I curled my lip. Laundry day. For years we’d gotten the House Mouse cleaning smocks through a uniform service. On Mondays the service dropped off clean smocks, and Fridays they picked up the soiled ones. Earlier in the year, though, Edna had fired the service on one of her economy kicks. She’d gone to a supply house and bought three dozen smocks and declared that we would launder them ourselves.

  Today was my turn.

  I scooped up an armload of smocks and marched into the laundry room, where I dumped the first load into the washer.

  While the water was running into the tub I looked idly down at the wad of pink. Uniforms. Identity was just a question of the right uniform.

  I snatched up the cleanest smock from the dirty pile, grabbed a caddy of cleaning supplies, and headed over to Dunwoody. Maureen lived in Dunwoody. She had uniforms. Lots of lovely uniforms. And she was already at work.

  “Ca’han!” At the sight of me, Maura’s face was wreathed in smiles. Also in oatmeal.

  Steve Cucich, my brother-in-law, did not look nearly as excited to see me. Maureen’s husband and I have an unspoken, if tacit, agreement. We pretend to tolerate each other, at least in front of civilized society. Since it was just the two of us, not counting Maura, who was busy hugging my knees, he dropped the civil act.

  “What do you want?” he asked, eyeing the cleaning caddy.

  “It’s a peace offering,” I said. “I woke Maureen up last night, and I’m feeling kind of cruddy about it.”

  “You should,” Steve said. “She didn’t get back to sleep until almost midnight. I had to drag her out of bed this morning.”

  “I know, and I’m really sorry,” I said. “Edna says I’m a thoughtless bitch. So I thought I’d try to make it up to her.”

  “How?” Steve wanted to know.

  I walked past him into the kitchen. “A day of House Mouse,” I said brightly. “And because you’re family, I’ll throw in my ultra-exclusive baby-sitting service.”

  “You’re cleaning our house?” he asked. “That’ll be a first.”

  I picked up the caddy I’d set down on the kitchen counter. “Okay, suit yourself. I’ll leave. Make sure you mention to Maureen that you turned down an offer to have her house cleaned, laundry done, and child entertained.”

  “Whoa!” Steve said, holding up his hand. “Never mind. I just wanted to make sure I understood you clearly. Are you serious about watching Maura? She’s a handful, you know.”

  A bowl of tapioca pudding would have been a handful to Steve Cucich, who, Edna likes to say, is “one ant shy of a picnic.”

  “No problem,” I said, reaching down and picking Maura up. “We’ll play house, won’t we, punkin?”

  “House!” Maura agreed, nodding her head vigorously.

  I set her down and gave her the smallest pink smock we had. It reached to her ankles. I handed her a spray bottle with her name on it.

  “Whoa!” Steve said. “Chemicals? I’m not sure this is such a good idea, Callahan.”

  “It’s just water,” I assured him. “Maura always plays house with me and Edna when she comes over, don’t you, punkin? She’s even got her own feather duster and her own little broom.”

  I produced both and handed them to Maura, who immediately began sweeping her daddy’s shoe tops with the broom. She spritzed his knees with the water, then pretended to wipe them off.

  “Well,” he said hesitantly.

  “Run along,” I said, making a shooing motion with my hands. “Isn’t there some kind of boy thing you’d like to do today?”

  “There’s the auto show down at the World Congress Center,” he said, his face brightening.

  “Go, go, go,” I said. “I’ll give Maura lunch and put her down for a nap afterward.”

  “All righty then!” he said, punching the air with his fist. “I’m outta here.”

  “Thank God,” I said under my b
reath.

  Maureen, of course, is the world’s most fastidious housekeeper. It was downright depressing, trying to find something to clean. In the end, I disinfected all the bathrooms, mopped and waxed the kitchen floor, vacuumed all the carpets, cleaned out the refrigerator (actually, all I did was dispose of one aging head of lettuce), and straightened the sheets and towels in her linen closet.

  While Maura and I swept and mopped, I ran the laundry, which amounted to only two paltry loads. Child’s play. I found Maureen’s stack of hospital scrubs on a shelf in her closet. Pink ones, blue ones, green ones. The greens looked closest to what I’d seen nurses wearing at Grady. I locked myself into the bathroom and squeezed into the pants, which were so tight I could barely breathe. In addition to being hideously clean, Maureen is also much thinner and shorter than I. The pants only reached to the top of my ankles. Looking at myself in the mirror, I had to admit I looked slightly clownish. Still, they would have to do. Maybe if I skipped lunch the pants would get a little looser.

  I lucked out on one account, though. In the jewelry box on top of her dresser, I found Maureen’s clip-on Grady I.D. badge. Although she’d worked full-time in Grady’s emergency room for at least a dozen years, after she and Steve had adopted Maura, my sister had gone to work for a nursing temp agency, which meant she subbed for staff nurses at any one of a dozen hospitals around the Atlanta area. And she had badges for all of them.

  I slipped the uniform and badge into the suitcase-sized pocketbook I’d brought for just such a purpose, then helped myself to a stethoscope, which I found hanging from a hook in the closet. One of the rubber earpieces was missing, but it would do. Might as well make the disguise believable, I thought.

  Maura and I had the laundry washed, folded, and put away by eleven o’clock. After that, we watched her Barney video a couple times, and then I disobeyed my sister’s strictest orders by tuning in to The Simpsons, which made us both laugh so hard we nearly wet our pants. Actually, Maura did wet her pants.

  “What shall we have for lunch?” I asked, standing in front of the open refrigerator door. Another depressing sight. Maureen is big on nutrition. Three kinds of low-fat yogurt, a carton of low-fat cottage cheese, all kinds of fruit juices, and a row of containers filled with carrot sticks, celery sticks, and broccoli flowerets.