Irish Eyes

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Keep listening,” I said.

  He closed the file, picked up a pen, and started making notes as the rest of the tape played. When it reached the end, he pushed the “rewind” button and played it again.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Mackey scratched his chin with the end of the pen, pushed his chair away from the desk. “I think you should mind your own goddamn business.”

  “They called me,” I said. “Should I have hung up? Insisted Deecie turn herself in to you? That’s a lot of crap and you know it, Major. You heard what the girl said. Pete Viatkos is a cop groupie. He’s got a lot of buddies in the department.”

  “Not me,” Mackey insisted.

  “Viatkos is involved in that shooting,” I said. “And he’s got helpers. We know that. Now we just need to know who.”

  “Hell, I know what you think, Garrity. You think it was a cop shot Deavers. Lisa Dugan had a long talk with me after your little date with her. You shook her up pretty bad, you know that?”

  “That wasn’t my intention at all,” I said. “I just want to get to the bottom of this thing.”

  “What’s this crap about a gang of cops involved in holdups? This isn’t Chicago or New York, you know.”

  “There are rumors,” I said carefully. “A string of robberies. All of them at ATM machines in the metro area. The victims are people trying to make sizable cash deposits. The pattern’s the same every time. They approach the ATM machine, usually late at night, and a masked gunman takes the cash at gunpoint. So far, no violence and no clues. You could check it out, you know.”

  “I have checked it out,” Mackey said, grabbing a folder and opening it. “Total of seven armed robberies. Not all of them in Atlanta. East Point had one, College Park, Roswell, Smyrna.”

  “What about the businesses who were the victims?” I asked. “Did you check to see if they employed off-duty cops in any capacity?”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Just a theory,” I said pleasantly.

  “I know all about your theories, and I resent the hell out of them,” Mackey said, his face flushing crimson. “Our guys are out there every day of the year, laying their lives on the line for people like you. They get dirt for pay, dick for respect, put up with crooked lawyers and judges, get jerked around by the politicians and their own department, and get shot at and shit on by the bad guys. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna start pointing the finger at my guys for some penny-ante stickup jobs.”

  I was getting pretty worked up myself now. “People like me? What’s that supposed to mean, Major? Just because I’m a civilian I can’t look askance when I see police corruption? You resent it when I ask questions about ‘your boys’? Well, tough shit. You forget I was a cop myself. These guys aren’t all blue angels, you know. Take a look at a piece of work like John Boylan. Instead of getting pissed off at me, why don’t you look at Boylan? How come he gets such plum security gigs? How much city time is he spending putting together these shindigs for this Shamrock Society of his? Ask yourself what kind of relationship he has with Pete Viatkos, why don’t you?”

  Mackey stood up stiffly. “If you talk to those people again, tell them they’ll need to come in to see Captain Dugan. She’s in charge of that case. And we want that videotape. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you haven’t seen it and don’t have it. Otherwise, you could be charged with tampering with evidence. I’ve given you as much time as you’re going to get. Now I’ve got to talk to the chief about a funeral, then give a press conference. One of our men died yesterday, you know.”

  “I told you I was sorry about that,” I said.

  “Everybody’s sorry,” he said. “What about that tape? Are you going to leave it with me?”

  “Depends on what you plan to do with it.”

  His face darkened again. He put his hand out.

  I hesitated, then popped the tape out of the player and gave it to him. I turned to leave.

  “Just a minute,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  I stopped in my tracks, raised an eyebrow.

  “There’s something I want you to see,” he said, gesturing toward his desk.

  He rifled through a stack of manila envelopes on his desktop, opened one, pulled out some eight-by-ten color photos, frowned, and put them back. He did the same thing with three other envelopes until he found the one he wanted. He flipped through the photos, selected three, then placed them faceup on the desk.

  “You think I’m being hard on you? Take a look at that.”

  I looked down. The top photo showed a black leather jacket, the kind APD street officers wear. The jacket had been slit down the left side. A badge was prominent on the right side, a nightstick was lain across the jacket. An officer’s holster and service weapon was displayed across the bottom of the composition. Small flecks of red dotted the jacket and badge.

  “What’s this?”

  “Crime scene photos. That’s Officer Sean Ragan’s uniform, the one he was wearing Saturday night when he was shot in the head,” Mackey said, his gray eyes watching mine. “They had to cut it off him in the emergency room, to see if he’d been hit anywhere else.”

  I swallowed hard and flipped to the next photo. Gray rainstreaked pavement, small brass casings scattered about, each one accompanied by a large numbered marker. A rain-sodden rubber-banded package of dollar bills. And a smear of red that needed no marker.

  “Keep going,” Mackey said.

  I swallowed hard and turned to the next photo. A close-up of a man’s head, the skull swathed in gauze, eyes swollen and bruised, face discolored, a plastic tube protruding from the nose.

  He thumped the photo with his index finger. For the first time I noticed he wore a ring on the right hand. A class ring with a colored stone. FBI Academy.

  “Officer Sean Ragan,” Mackey said. “This was taken in the emergency room, right after he was pronounced. We took this just before his widow was brought into the room to say goodbye. They had to clean the body up before they let her in to see him.”

  If Mackey was looking to get a reaction from me, he would be disappointed. I flipped back through the photos, to the first one.

  “Ragan,” I said. “Is that an Irish name?”

  “Get the hell out.”

  Edna set the kitchen table with her big Blue Willow soup bowls, blue-checked napkins, and the recycled jelly jars she likes to use for iced tea. She leaned down and opened the oven door, bringing out a black iron skillet full of cornbread.

  I lifted the lid of the kettle and dipped a strainer in to lift out the ham bone she’d used to flavor her eight-bean soup.

  “What time did you tell C.W. and Linda to get here?” she asked, looking down at the cornbread. “You think I oughta put this back in the oven so it doesn’t get cold?”

  “I told them to get here at seven-thirty, and it’s just now that time,” I said. “And no, the cornbread won’t get cold. You know how C. W. is about your cooking. When I told him you’d made soup, he was practically jumping for joy.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Told you,” I said.

  C. W. was carrying a bottle of red wine; Linda had a box of chocolate candy, which Edna put away in the pantry for “later.”

  “Where’s Wash?” I asked.

  “At my mama’s,” Linda said. “The two of them have a standing Sunday night date. Besides, I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a kid’s kind of night.”

  “Afraid not,” I said, taking their coats.

  “She’s got a bug up her rear about Bucky Deavers,” Edna volunteered. “Friday, she took two of my eighty-year-old girls over to Memorial Oaks, where they proceeded to get mugged and shot at. Then, today, she got in a car, blindfolded, and went off with a bunch of strangers to who-knows-where.”

  “That true?” C. W. asked.

  “Not all of it,” I said. “We didn’t get mugged, and it wasn’t a gunshot, it was a rock thrown at the windshield. I thin
k. Anyway, let’s eat first, before Edna’s cornbread gets cold. I’ll give you the run-down after dinner.”

  The four of us tucked into Edna’s eight-bean soup like there was no tomorrow, with Edna beaming every time somebody dipped back into the kettle for another bowlful.

  “Lord have mercy,” she said. “I thought I’d made enough soup for Pharaoh’s army, but y’all have about cleaned me out.”

  “No lunch,” C. W. said, sounding apologetic.

  “What?” Linda screeched. “The man ate two ham sandwiches and a quart of potato salad for lunch today. Don’t let him fool you, Edna, he just loves home cooking. And he doesn’t get much of it at our home, I’ll admit.”

  “Linda knows every takeout place in town,” C. W. said, patting his wife’s hand.

  “Takeout,” Edna said, sniffing. “When I was coming up, the only takeout in our house was when my daddy took out the trash to be burned.”

  “Here we go,” I warned our company. “She’s off on the good old days.”

  Edna shot me a look. “Atlanta’s changed,” she declared. “Too much crime, too many people, too much traffic.”

  “I hear that!” Linda said.

  “I think it’s time to move,” Edna went on. “Did Callahan tell you Mac’s been offered a wonderful new job in Nashville? He wants us both to move there with him, but Callahan pitched a fit and they haven’t spoken a word to each other since.”

  “Nashville?” Linda raised one elegant eyebrow. “I think you forgot to mention that, girlfriend.”

  “It’s not really up for discussion,” I said.

  “She doesn’t want to leave her precious business. Cleaning other people’s toilets. Or this precious house. In a neighborhood where thieves steal anything that isn’t nailed down,” Edna said.

  “Could we please change the subject?”

  “Fine,” Edna said, getting up. “Who wants banana pudding?”

  We took coffee and dessert into the den. C. W. settled back in a wing chair, sipped his coffee, then took out a pen and pad of paper.

  “I found out most of what you wanted,” he said, looking down at his notes. “Although I don’t know what any of it means.”

  “None of it means anything so far as I can tell,” I admitted. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

  “For starters, Sean Ragan was a member of the Shamrocks,” C. W. said. “And he’d worked off-duty security too. At that Vietnamese market. The one where he was shot.”

  “Good God,” I said.

  “Not so fast,” C. W. cautioned. “His partner, a dude named Antjuan Wayne, worked security there too. And he definitely wasn’t a Shamrock. Not unless they’ve put a new definition on black Irish, with the emphasis on black.”

  “Huh?” Linda said, doing a double take.

  “Antjuan Wayne is a brother,” C. W. said. “And he was working for our old buddy John Boylan.”

  30

  Antjuan Wayne,” Linda repeated. “Seems like I know that name. How long has he been on the force, C.W.?”

  “He’s no rookie,” C.W. said. “My guy said he’s been around for maybe seven or eight years. He used to work for the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office before he went with the city.”

  I took a sip of coffee. “So Ragan and his partners both worked off-duty gigs through John Boylan, but only Ragan was a Shamrock. And he got killed. Bucky worked an off-duty gig through Boylan, and he was a Shamrock, and he’s also got a bullet in his head. What does any of this mean?”

  C. W. and Linda looked at me expectantly.

  “I saw Lloyd Mackey this afternoon,” I said. “And I tried to get him interested in the idea that cops were involved in this holdup gang. He went through the roof. Wouldn’t even consider the idea.”

  “What do you expect?” C.W. said. “Even I think it’s kind of far-fetched.”

  “There’s something else,” I added. And then I told them about Bishop’s friend Fiske and his ambush at the ATM machine. “The holdup man wore a mask, but he forgot his gloves,” I said. “He was wearing an FBI Academy ring, C.W.”

  “He’s sure of that?” C. W. asked.

  “He saw the same ring on a cop in the men’s room at Manuel’s and almost passed out, it unnerved him so bad,” I said.

  “Can’t be too many rings like that running around Atlanta,” Linda pointed out. “The academy only takes maybe one or two people from the same department any given year, and they don’t always take them every year.”

  “Mackey says there’s maybe six people at the APD who are academy grads,” I said. “Not counting himself.”

  “He went two years before me,” C. W. said. “I never bought a ring, though. Didn’t have the money to spare.”

  “What about Boylan? Did he go?”

  C. W. snorted. “You kiddin’? This is an elite outfit, Garrity. I bet I could name most of the ones from the APD who are grads. Mackey, the chief, the assistant chief, Major Yates in sex crimes, and Lieutenant Tolliver in operations.”

  “You’re not counting people like yourself, who retired, or people who went to the academy before joining the APD,” I said.

  “No, and that doesn’t count cops from other departments who’ve gone, either,” C. W. admitted. “There’s guys from the GBI who have gone to Quantico, and Fulton County Police and DeKalb too, for that matter.”

  “What about women?” Linda demanded. “It’s not still the good old boys, is it?”

  “There were a couple women when I went, back in eighty-eight,” C. W. said. “So yeah, there are probably a handful of women around Atlanta who went to the academy.”

  I shook my head. “This is getting us nowhere. We’re grabbing at straws. Somehow we’ve gotta find out why. Why was Bucky shot? And how is it connected to Sean Ragan’s murder?”

  “That videotape from the liquor store would be a big help,” C. W. said.

  “It would be, if I could get Deecie’s boyfriend William to trust me. But I can’t get Mackey to give me any guarantees about how they’ll treat Deecie. And I don’t feel right lying to her about it. I mean, let’s face it. We’re talking about crooked cops. Guys who think nothing of sticking a loaded gun in somebody’s face for a bag of money. I think I trust Mackey. I think he’s one of the good guys. But what if I’m wrong?”

  “Mackey?” Linda said, shaking her head. “He’s a hardheaded sumbitch, Callahan, but I just don’t see him throwing in with the likes of Boylan.”

  “Lisa Dugan is in charge of the case,” I said. “And she’s one of them. She’s the one who told Mackey I was trying to connect Bucky’s shooting to the ATM robberies. I tried to talk to her about it the other night. She wouldn’t even discuss the possibility.”

  “You think Bucky’s girlfriend had something to do with the shooting?” Linda asked. “That is cold, girl.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “She wasn’t at the St. Patrick’s Day party, even though Bucky was expecting her. She was supposedly out on a call. That’s something I need to check into. C.W., were you able to put together a list of guys working for Boylan’s outfit?”

  “Not everybody I called was home over the weekend,” C. W. said, picking up his notebook. “But I got five or six names, yeah. Besides Bucky, Ragan, and Wayne, there’s Kevin Phelan, works out of Southside, Tommy Bourke in communications, Dennis Farrell and Tim McMahan in Zone Four, and Dick O’Dwyer at the airport precinct. It’s anybody’s guess about the guys from other departments.”

  “How about the armed robberies? You got any information on them?”

  “My sources aren’t that good,” C. W. said. “What did Mackey say about them?”

  “Just that they were in various jurisdictions, not all City of Atlanta,” I said. “East Point, Roswell, and Smyrna County have all had ATM holdups which he says fit the pattern I described. Could be more, but he just didn’t know about all of them.”

  The three of us sat there, stumped.

  “You know what I can’t figure out?” Linda said, breaking the
silence abruptly. “How Pete Viatkos fits in with any of this. I mean, why would he rob his own store?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” I said slowly. “Deecie swears she didn’t take the money out of the safe. So maybe it wasn’t there in the first place. Maybe this whole thing is about something else all together.”

  “Hey, y’all!” Edna stood in the doorway in her housecoat and slippers.

  “Turn on Channel Forty-six. I was watching the news in my bedroom. They’re saying something on the news about that cop shooting last night.”

  I grabbed the remote control and switched on the news. We were able to catch only the tail end of what the reporter was saying, something about how “Wayne has been put on administrative leave without pay, pending the outcome of the city investigation.”

  The reporter segued smoothly into a story about a homeless rabbit that had taken up residence in a city park.

  “What was that all about?” I said.

  Edna nodded knowingly. “I saw it all. They were saying that this fella Antjuan Wayne maybe didn’t do all he could have to save his partner’s life. Because he never fired any shots at the man who killed that boy. Not a single one. And when the police started asking him a lot of questions, he got himself a lawyer, and he says he ain’t tellin’ nothing to those cops, on account of the whole thing is a racist plot, since he’s black and the dead fella is white.”

  She paused, breathless. “Did you ever?”

  C. W. buried his face in his hands. Linda sighed, reached over, and started to massage his shoulders.

  “You know what’ll happen now?” he asked, looking up. “They’ll pin that boy’s killing on Antjuan Wayne.”

  “How?” I said. “Antjuan Wayne was his partner. Surely the department doesn’t think he had something to do with Sean Ragan’s killing. That’s too much, C. W., even for me to believe.”

  “You watch,” he said sadly. “The department’s already suspended Wayne. He’s probably got himself a union lawyer, telling him to sit tight and keep his mouth shut. In the meantime, cops’ll be all over that crime scene twice as hard as they already were after Ragan got shot. They might not be able to charge Wayne with homicide, but they’ll sure as hell find a way to place the blame at his door one way or another. Negligence, dereliction of duty, no tellin’ what they’ll call it. But it’ll happen. I guarantee. And his life won’t ever be the same again.”