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Irish Eyes

Page 27

by Mary Kay Andrews


  “And that’s all right with Monique?”

  “She don’t like it, but she knows she can’t keep Faheem. She’s mad right now. Mad at that dude that killed Deecie, mad at me, mad at you, ‘cause you didn’t stop him. But she’ll get over it.”

  “What about you? Are you mad at me, too?”

  He had a right to be. I’d convinced Deecie I could keep her safe, then let her down in the worst possible way.

  He rocked a while. “No,” he said finally. “You couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it either. Deecie, she made up her own mind what to do when she left this hospital. She just thought she could take care of herself and Faheem without anybody else. But she couldn’t. That’s all.”

  I’d stopped at a gift store near the hospital, brought along a present. It was a small, fluffy, yellow giraffe. I took it out of the gift bag, tiptoed over to the rocker, and laid it in William’s lap. Faheem’s eyelids fluttered open. His lips smiled around the pacifier. The chubby hands closed over the giraffe, then he nodded off to sleep again.

  Monique was outside, leaning against the emergency room entrance, puffing on a cigarette.

  “I hear they’re trying to kick you out of your apartment,” I said.

  “Fuckers.”

  “Do you want to move?” If I were Monique Bell, Memorial Oaks would be the last place on earth I would want to live.

  She shrugged. “Bus stop is right there on the corner. Grocery store a block away. I got friends. Got me a good apartment in the corner. Where I’m gonna go if I leave there?”

  “Let’s take a ride,” I said.

  Memorial Oaks, the apartment complex Monique Bell lived in, was federally subsidized Section 8 housing. I didn’t know all the ins and outs of that program, but I was pretty sure the manager couldn’t kick Monique out without just cause.

  We found him in the hallway outside Monique’s apartment. He was a huge blubber ball of a white man, with the kind of high fleshy hips usually seen on women, not men. He was supervising two teenagers who were dragging all the furniture out of the apartment. A strip of yellow crime scene tape lay discarded by the front door.

  “Hey!” Monique yelped. “Get your hands off my shit.” She grabbed a kitchen chair away from one of the kids.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s happening here?”

  “I don’t know you,” the manager said.

  “Hey,” he called to the kids, “come on, get moving. I’m not paying you clowns to goof off.”

  “I’m Callahan Garrity,” I said. “I’ve been retained by Miss Monique Bell to make sure her rights are protected.”

  “She’s got no rights,” he said.

  “Does she pay her rent?”

  He looked at me. Annoyed, like you get at a mosquito. “What’s it to you? The cops said I could clear the place out, that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Unless she’s several months in arrears in her rent, I don’t believe you can just kick her out. And even if you were allowed to kick her out, you’d have to give her written notice and time to respond to that notice.”

  Bullshit, all of it total bullshit. But it sounded pretty good, even to me.

  “If any of her belongings are damaged or stolen,” I said loudly so the teens could hear me, “she could have legal recourse against you.”

  His face took on a mottled purple shade. “That carpet in there is ruined,” he shouted. “Blood all over the place. Door busted in. That’s cause to throw Monique Bell on the street.”

  “Her niece was the victim of a vicious crime,” I said, taking my cell phone out of my purse. “I think I’ll call a friend of mine at the newspaper. It’d make a good human-interest story, don’t you think? ‘Grieving Family Evicted After Niece’s Murder’? A photo of Monique standing forlornly by all her belongings. We’ll make sure to get the crib the baby slept in. That always gets people, when a baby is made homeless.”

  I started punching numbers on the cell phone at random. “City desk? I’d like to speak to Elliott Diggs, please.” Diggs was the newspaper’s city police reporter.

  “She’ll have to pay to have that door replaced,” the manager said, hedging. “And I’m not cleaning that carpet. That’s not normal maintenance.”

  I put my hand over the phone. “What’s that? What were you saying?”

  He turned and walked away. “I said she can stay, goddammit.”

  I gave the teenagers twenty bucks to start dragging Monique’s stuff back inside. While Monique started giving them orders, I walked ahead and went inside, pausing at the threshold to get a fix on the half-empty living room.

  The murderer had trashed the place. A stereo and television set were smashed against a wall, sofa cushions slashed open, bookshelves upended, drapes yanked from the windows.

  In the kitchen, pots and pans and dishes were thrown on the floor, packages of food strewn about, glasses and dishes smashed to bits.

  There were two small bedrooms. The larger of the two was littered with clothes, shoes, and jewelry. Dresser drawers had been pulled out, and the mattress had been pulled off the box spring. A path had been cleared in the room where the landlord had started removing the furniture.

  The bedroom where Deecie died smelled like a butcher shop. Most of the furniture had already been removed, revealing worn gold shag carpet that carried a deep red stain. In the adjoining bathroom, I saw the heat vent where Mackey said the detectives had found the missing moneybag. I took the key out of my pocket, tried it in all the doors in the apartment. Not even close.

  “Leave that mattress out on the curb,” I heard Monique screeching at one of the teenagers.

  Time to go. I wasn’t going to miss Memorial Oaks.

  I scrunched up against the hall wall to let the kids come by with a heavy chest of drawers. When I felt a tug at the hem of my jacket, I looked down.

  The little girl gave me a shy smile. Her hair was done in neat little plaits, each one secured by a different-colored rubber band. She wore a purple sweater and pink pants and bright yellow sneakers.

  “Hey, there,” I said. It was the little girl I’d seen the first time I’d come to Monique’s apartment.

  She looked away, watching Monique follow the boys into her apartment.

  “My name’s Callahan,” I told her. “You told me your name last time, but I can’t remember it.”

  “It’s Tanya,” she said, digging the toe of her sneaker into the carpet. “My mama say Deecie dead. The amb’lance men came and took her away, and Mama say Deecie ain’t coming back here no more.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I walked outside to check on my van, which I’d parked in a no-park slot at the curb. Tanya followed along behind me. It was still early. The ball players and drug dealers and kiddie prostitutes hadn’t yet begun to congregate outside. I sat down on the curb, and Tanya plopped down beside me.

  “My mama say a bad man cut Deecie and made her bleed. She say if I don’t mind her, the bad man might get me, too.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “That bad man went away and he’s never coming back here again.”

  “Okay,” Tanya said, inserting her thumb in her mouth. She sucked it for a while, and picked at the shoelace of her sneaker.

  “I got a secret from my mama,” Tanya said.

  “Is it a good secret or a bad secret?”

  She fidgeted. “Just a secret. Deecie told it to me.”

  “Did she? Would you like to share it with me?”

  “You got any candy?”

  I thought about it. There was half a pack of breath mints in the ashtray in the van. I got up and got the breath mints, and handed them to Tanya. I felt a little like a child molester, the classic stranger giving candy to a kid.

  “Ain’t you got no chocolate candy?” she asked, clearly disappointed.

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Oh.” She popped a mint in her mouth and made loud sucking noises.

  “You wanna see where my secret’s at?” she asked.

  “Sure.”
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  I stood up and she took my hand in hers. We walked through the breezeway connecting the apartment buildings, around the back of the block.

  The area had been a parking lot once, but the asphalt was cracked and broken, and rusted garbage cans, piles of tires, and two or three abandoned cars were all that was parked there now.

  Tanya walked up to a dilapidated white Toyota station wagon. The hood was gone and so was everything under it. The rear tires had been removed, making the car appear to be sitting on its haunches, like a dog awaiting a treat.

  The little girl reached in her pocket and brought out a key. I held my breath. Tanya wrinkled her forehead in concentration as she worked the key back and forth, finally getting the door lock to pop. With both hands she managed to wrench the driver’s side door open. She gestured grandly at the grubby interior. “This is my clubhouse,” she said. “You wanna come in my clubhouse?”

  “Sure,” I said. I walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. It smelled like mildew. The plastic seat coverings were cracked and peeling, but somebody had tried to cover them with faded pink bath towels.

  On the floor of the car was a stack of plastic fast food cups, a shoe box full of crayons, and a naked black Barbie doll.

  I got in. Tanya climbed up into the driver’s side and knelt. She grasped the steering wheel and began spinning it to and fro, making happy little motor noises in the back of her throat.

  “Are we going on a trip?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Where shall we go?” I asked.

  Her dark eyes sparkled. “We goin’ to Disney World. See Mickey Mouse and the Little Mermaid. And we gonna see Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and have some ice cream.”

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  She made more motor noises, and we steered the car down the imaginary streets of Disney World, with Tanya pointing out all the hot spots, which seemed to include McDonald’s, Burger King, and the ice cream store.

  “You wanna see a movie now?” she asked, finally tiring of the game.

  “Sure,” I said. “Is it a good movie?”

  “I don’ know,” she admitted. “It’s Deecie’s movie. That’s the secret. But Deecie’s dead. And my mama say she’ll whip my behind if I don’t quit playing in my clubhouse.”

  She clambered over the backseat of the car, reached under the seat, and brought out a black videotape cassette, which she handed to me. “Can we go watch Deecie’s movie now?”

  We walked hand in hand back to the front of the apartment building, where we were met by Austine Rudolph, the older woman who’d talked to me about Deecie the first time I’d gone to Memorial Oaks.

  “Tanya,” she scolded. “Where’d you get to, girl? I was worried to death ‘bout you.”

  Tanya looked down at her shoe. “I just showed the lady my clubhouse. Deecie dead. She can’t go there no more.”

  “I’m sorry we worried you,” I told Mrs. Rudolph. “She just wanted me to see her secret place. That white Toyota out back. Was that Deecie’s?”

  “Faheem’s daddy,” Mrs. Rudolph said. “That was his car. He left it here when it quit running. Left Deecie and Faheem too. Good riddance.”

  Mrs. Rudolph took Tanya’s hand. “Just don’t be going off with strangers no more, you hear me? Bad things happening around here. We don’t want nothing bad happening to you.”

  When I got home, the house was empty. I got a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and went into the den, where I popped the videotape into the VCR.

  The film quality was about what you’d expect: lousy, mostly out of focus, with grainy, ghostly images flitting in and out of what was vaguely recognizable as the Budget Bottle Shop.

  A time counter at the bottom of the screen started at 11:00 hours. I fast forwarded until the time was showing 23:00. The video’s plot wasn’t much better than the quality.

  There is the back of Deecie’s head. Her neck is long and slender. For a moment, I thought about that neck, necklaced in blood. Then I blinked and forced the image away. Customers come in. They browse, select their bottles and cans, pay, and leave. Business is steady. Why not, it’s a drinking man’s holiday. St. Patrick’s Day. When the counter shows 11:45, Bucky walks in the door. His tie is loosened, he’s left the jacket in the car. He looks around, waves at Deecie. She waves back. Not a care in the world.

  Bucky goes directly to the glass-doored beer cooler. He opens the door, stands there, looking. He closes the door, walks up to the counter, talks briefly to Deecie. They seem to be sharing a joke. The last joke. Now Deecie ducks down and when she stands up, she’s holding the baby. Bucky gives Faheem a little chuck under the chin. Cute kid, he seems to be saying. More conversation. Now Bucky goes to the door leading to the stockroom, opens it and walks in.

  I watched the time counter carefully. Three minutes passed. At 11:49, Bucky throws open the door of the stockroom and strides quickly toward the door, a six-pack of beer in his right hand. But there’s somebody else right behind him, coming out of the stockroom. It’s a man. He walks rapidly toward Bucky, his face turned away from the camera. When he finally comes into the camera range, I can see that he wears a dark stocking mask and holds a small pistol in his outstretched hand. Bucky turns, drops the six-pack of beer, and reaches for the mask. He rips it halfway off, and I can see the expression of fear and shock on his face. The gunman pushes Bucky’s hand away, points the pistol at Bucky’s skull, and fires. Bucky crumples to the ground. The gunman stands still, looking down at him, hesitates, then stands over Bucky and fires another time, directly into Bucky’s head. He stands up straight, looks directly at the camera, pulls the mask down, and approaches the counter. Deecie’s back is still turned to the camera, but I can see she is holding the baby. The gunman stands in front of her, the pistol pointed at her chest. He hesitates, looks toward the stockroom door. Another figure emerges from the stockroom, shouting, pointing at Deecie. He wears a baseball cap with a bill that shades his face, but the build is familiar. He’s wearing a dark blazer, a twin to the one Bucky wore earlier in the evening. He’s got a potbelly, walrus mustache. The gunman drops the pistol, turns, and runs toward the stockroom. Both men disappear. Now only Deecie is visible. Deecie, seen crawling on the floor. Now standing, she walks over, looks down at Bucky’s unmoving body. Waits a moment, then walks toward the stockroom. Two minutes later, she emerges, runs to the front door of the store and comes back. The tape abruptly turns to black.

  I stop the film, rewind it, and watch it, twice more. The film quality is atrocious, but I can see enough. In slow motion, I can see Sean Ragan’s frightened face as Bucky rips the mask away. The other man’s face is not visible, but the figure is one I’ve seen before. Despite the middle-aged paunch, he stands erect, the way the nuns taught him to stand all those years in parochial school. He would have been their favorite altar boy, clever, nice manners. Smart. How proud the nuns were, when they heard he’d become a police officer, later a much-decorated detective. The nuns never would have recognized their Johnny Boylan now.

  43

  It was a day of blinking lights. First the VCR, then the answering machine. Two calls from clients who wanted to discuss scheduling a spring cleaning date, and a message from C. W.

  “Callahan!” His usually laid-back voice had a new tone of urgency. “Uh, you could have been right about Lisa Dugan,” he said. “Part right, anyway. I checked the call-out sheet for the night Bucky was shot. She was where she was supposed to be. But there’s something funny about the sheets for the night Sean Ragan was killed. She was supposed to be off that night, but instead she showed up at the scene and helped canvass the area for suspects. Call me.”

  Dugan. What was it about that woman that made me all twitchy? I knew for certain now that she didn’t have anything to do with Bucky’s shooting. Still, I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook. Not yet.

  There also was a message from a voice identifying himself as Agent Halstead with the FBI, urgently requesting a meeting.


  Agent Halstead wasn’t in. I left a voice mail. I tried calling Lloyd Mackey. His secretary said he’d be gone all afternoon, but she graciously allowed me to leave a voice mail for him, too. I was starting to get lonely for the sound of another real live human being.

  In the kitchen, I started to make myself a sandwich, till I glanced at the clock. Noon already. Sean Ragan’s funeral was scheduled for one o’clock at Sacred Heart Church downtown. Damn. Wedged into the downtown hotel district, Sacred Heart was a beautiful old cathedral, with almost no parking. No question that I would go to the funeral. Certainly not for Sean Ragan, the murdering bastard. Not even for poor old Corky Hanlon, who’d probably be denied a proper Catholic burial of his own. I would go for Bucky.

  I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing a black turtleneck tunic and black leggings. No time to change now. At least the color was appropriate.

  Traffic in Midtown was heavy for a weekday. And as soon as I turned onto Peachtree Street I knew why. I was in trouble. A cop stood in the intersection ahead, directing traffic away from the church. I turned down a side street and found another cop directing traffic at the next intersection.

  When it came time to turn, the cop motioned for me to turn right. I rolled my window down and stuck my head out the window. “I’m trying to get to Sean Ragan’s funeral,” I called. “Where’s the best place to park?”

  “Macon,” he shouted back. Then he waved for me to move forward. I gave him a grateful nod and ignored the resentful honks from the line of cars in back of me.

  Both sides of the streets leading to the cathedral were lined with police cruisers, parked nose to nose, with barely enough room for one car to creep through what was left of the center lane. I made it up one block and could see it was no use to try going forward. The streets ahead were a solid wall of more cruisers. I turned right onto International Boulevard and saw four television camera vans with their extended satellite antennas parked on the sidewalk that ran alongside the Marriott Marquis. I pulled up behind a blue van from the local ABC affiliate, found a piece of notebook paper, and scrawled on it. “NBC NIGHTLY NEWS PRODUCER. NO TOW!”

 

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