A Carra King

by John Brady

  “Is that true?”

  “Not sure,” said Leyne in a quiet voice. He let the smoke out slowly.

  “The clinic tested him for drugs. I made them. Jesus, I paid them enough. One of the conditions I put on Patrick, we put on him, was that he get tested every week at the very least. Last I heard it was good.”

  “A condition, you said.”

  “Geraldine and I worked it out. The fiancée thing was the last straw. We decided to cut him off if he didn’t get serious about his, his problems. Tough love, do people say that here in the old sod?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “The deal was he’d go to the clinic,” Leyne said. “He’d take the cure, however long it took. Move to a new place — whatever. I told him I’d stand by him, get him started up. He knew Geraldine would too, of course. He had to shake off that bunch of bastards he’d been running with, too. They were the problem. They were taking him for whatever they could. And he used to talk it up, you know, play the big shot. The name.”

  “Your name, is it?”

  “Right. He signed things, he promised things, that could have gotten him time in jail.”

  Leyne took a long pull on his cigarette. He coughed and waved away smoke.

  “Maybe I should never have bailed him out,” he croaked. Minogue watched the colour crest in his face and then fade. Brick red.

  “How was he doing then?” Minogue said. “After this treatment centre.”

  “Seemed to be okay,” Leyne said quickly. “I got him a start with a company near Boston. Denis Coughlan, property development. Denis’d get him trained and running, then he’d send him south. The Sun Belt. A lot of business is moving south. Patrick wouldn’t be running the show.”

  He spun the lighter again, stopped it and glanced at Minogue.

  “Patrick wouldn’t be able to run a bath. Denis would keep him on a short leash. Denis said good things about him actually. I was beginning to wonder, well, you know what I’m saying.”

  “So your son just wanted to have a chat. Nothing else?”

  “He wanted to meet me.”

  “Did you?”

  Freeman pushed at his glasses. Leyne stared at the tip of his cigarette.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Minogue looked at the cigarette rolling between Leyne’s fingers.

  “I was busy,” said Leyne. “I’m always busy. Christ.”

  He looked from face to face around the table.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of patience. I worked my ass off. I started from nothing. You know, when I went to people here first with the idea that people would want to go to their fridges and take out frozen french fries — well, whatever. . . Marriages don’t come with guarantees. But that doesn’t mean that someone can go around blaming his parents for being fu—, for being a loser?”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “He tried to. Anytime I’d go after him, you know, show him reality, well he’d pull that one. But I’d have to say he hadn’t been doing that for a while. No.”

  Minogue looked down at his notebook. Leyne rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed. He sat back and looked over at the window.

  “Did I want anything,” he muttered. “That’s what he asked me.” He held his cigarette close to his chin and fixed his gaze on nothing.

  “Guff,” he murmured. “Bullshit, you say here now?”

  “Both, Mr. Leyne. As a matter of fact I hear both terms used with frequency.”

  “Ah,” said Leyne. “The political crowd here never changes, does it.”

  “It was my daughter actually I was thinking of.”

  Freeman allowed himself a smile. Leyne chuckled again. He eyed Tynan.

  “Nice to see there are still some of the same Guards doing the job as I remember, Commissioner. The old guard.”

  Minogue didn’t look for Tynan’s reaction.

  “Do you put much stock in the psychology stuff here? Patrick did. It’s a bloody industry back in the States. He told me stuff about Ireland that he thought I was supposed to know. The Irish. Did I know any of the legends and that. Finn McCool. Christ, as if we’d gone to school together. If I did, I don’t remember him.”

  “Did he always have that interest, your son?”

  “We brought him here on visits when he was a kid, but back then he couldn’t get back on the plane quick enough. It was cold. It rained all the time. The people talked too much. Other kids here were out of it — all that. But then he started talking about things. I put it down to another shot at getting on my good side.”

  Put it down: the phrase circled in Minogue’s mind. He thought of Daithi, how he still seemed to need to make him dispute, argue.

  “Ah, some therapy thing there,” Leyne was saying.

  “‘Discovering your family’ or somesuch. Victim shit. ‘Reinventing your parents’ was one of the things he blathered about once. Jesus wept. I mean, I had it explained to me by the people who ran it. The bottom line was, Patrick could get out of this habit he was always falling into if he learned more about us, about Geraldine and me. Figure that one out. Twenty-eight hundred dollars a week for that.”

  “If he understood you as people, more than just parents, is it?”

  “I suppose. He thought he’d do all this reading about Ireland, that this would sort it all out. Ancient Ireland, for God’s sake. Me and Finn McCool, right?”

  Leyne pulled his chair tighter into the table. Minogue eyed the bald spot, the once curly hair. It reminded him of some strange silver decoration on a Christmas tree, that light-as-gossamer stuff you pulled out of a ball and threw at the tree.

  He spotted the top of the scar on his chest as Leyne straightened up. As though aware of the Inspector’s interest, Leyne tugged at his collar. The gap closed. A glance at Freeman told Minogue that he too had been watching.

  “So there,” muttered Leyne. “The Celts. Brian Ború. All the stuff I’d forgotten about fifty years ago. Talking about looking around for some university he could study it in. God, as if he had the marks to get into one. At the time he started this, I was just after getting into the foundation thing. I got talked into it a few years ago. What’s it now, Jeff, the scholarship bit?”

  “The Leyne Foundation,” said Freeman. “Scholarship to study in Irish universities and four for Irish students to study in the U.S. The Visiting Lecturer Chair will start up this year.”

  “So,” said Leyne. “I thought, well, Patrick saw an angle here. Sour, aren’t I?”

  “Let me go back to your son’s situation just before he left for Ireland. He was holding down a job?”

  “Yes. And he still had his own place, too.”

  “He lived alone there.”

  “That’s what he told me. He stayed over with Geraldine the odd time.”

  Minogue looked down at the page. Next time there’d be a tape, damn it.

  “Eight schools,” said Leyne. “Eight different schools. But he just didn’t find that aptitude, whatever you call it. That focus. We worked and we worked, Geraldine and me — Geraldine and I. You’d think we’d be bitter, but we weren’t. We’re not. Geraldine dumped me, Mike.”

  “Matt.”

  “Matt. Sorry. She did. Geraldine is a lady. How I blew it, was I had no discretion. I didn’t have those smarts then, patience. Why would I? I wasn’t born with a goddamn silver spoon in my mouth. I was hungry to make it. I went at a lot of things with the head down.”

  Minogue eased another tissue out of his package. He glanced at Leyne’s shirt collar again. It remained closed.

  “We don’t play the blame game,” Leyne said. “Geraldine and I. That’s why I came to offer you what I can. To ask your help. For the second time.”

  He stared at Minogue. The Inspector looked around the wall. The print of the mountains must be Rachel Tynan’s.

  “You’re steamed, aren’t you?”

  Minogue glanced up from his tissue. Tynan began flexing his fingers again.

  “You think: who
’s this fucking tycoon sitting in here, going around your back, pulling strings. Leyne Foundation, money to the university here — what’s the title?”

  “The Leyne Chair in Early Irish History,” said Freeman.

  “This is not about special treatment here, Matt. I’m here to help. So’s Geraldine. Patrick grew up with Geraldine. She did everything she could. She got him counselling and everything when he screwed up. It was her idea to start the private eye stuff.”

  Freeman began lifting three-ring binders from a bag on the floor next to his chair. They had a faux-marble finish. He slid them one by one down the table.

  “This was after the first one. We settled that. It took nearly two years. The lawyers made a killing. The two-year thing was good because he had it hanging over him. She was a hooker — I don’t care what anyone says. I still say he was set up. Her and that bastard who represented her at the hearings and all that.”

  He grunted as he slid the stack. Minogue made no move to take them.

  “How does this help our investigation, Mr. Leyne?”

  “I don’t know if it does or not. It’s my way of saying, of proving to you that I’ll do anything I can to help you find out who killed Patrick.”

  “What does this cover?”

  “There’s three and a bit years. The full-time was on for six months after he got stuck with that bitch.”

  Minogue looked at the logo on the spine of the folders.

  “Shawmut’s a small agency,” said Freeman. “But it’s done a lot of corporate stuff. Has a very good name.”

  “They did great stuff for people I knew,” said Leyne. “They were trying to figure out how their competitors were always two steps ahead. They couldn’t nail this Alison one on anything for us but they kept us clear on Patrick. It was to protect him. Us too, of course. There were people who’d like to have worked him and run one by us, I’m sure. Like that first one.”

  Minogue glanced at O’Riordan. He hadn’t uttered a word. Sitting there, with a grave expression all through this.

  “It’s not pretty,” said Leyne. “And I hate damn near every word of every fucking page in here. That’s my son in there, but it’s like he’s a specimen. I paid for this, you know, and it kills me. Isn’t that something?”

  Minogue saw his eyes well up and he looked away. O’Riordan pursed his lips and patted Leyne on the shoulder. Leyne rubbed at his eyes, he took a deep breath and set his jaw. Minogue thought he heard a sigh. O’Riordan’s hand stayed on Leyne’s shoulder and he looked at the faces around the table. It was over then, was it, Minogue registered. The urge to sneeze had gone. Tynan pushed his chair back and slowly stood.

  THIRTEEN

  “G reat,” said Malone. “Fucking great. A ton of books telling us who or what he did three thousand miles away. What a load of crap, for Jases’ sake.”

  Minogue flipped by dividers. Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy had been a restless man. Maybe he should be cross-referencing these to phases of the moon. He stopped on a page that described a club called Coasters. June last year. Patrick had stayed for an hour. Left with a patron named “Laura.” Stayed at her apartment until exited at eleven-fifteen the following day. What was NCR? An adding machine?

  “Talk about hopping the ball, boss. Mind if I puke?”

  No Criminal Record — of course. She worked in a fitness club.

  “What?”

  “He’s trying to steer the case, boss! Wake up, will you? You with me now?”

  To the Exchange, lunch. Exited three-thirty with Karen Weiss to 301 Hyacinth Boulevard. Exited five-forty-eight on foot to street. Taxi to apartment. . . Nice work, this property development job.

  “Twenty-four hours a day, this crowd,” he murmured. “That’d cost.”

  “Huh. To get him whatever his oul lad rigged up for him.”

  Exited apartment in car, 328 BMW convertible. Minogue closed the folder and stacked it on top of the other two. Malone examined his nails.

  “We’re thinking he flew over on his own,” he said. “But maybe he’d arranged to meet someone.”

  “Who?”

  Malone looked over his fingers again.

  “This Hartnett one. We could start in on whether he phoned her.”

  “Say he knew her,” said Minogue. “Knew of her anyway. To do what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever screwed-up millionaire brats do. Hang around with cool people. ‘The scene’? There’s probably a south side thing over there in Boston too, wait’ll you see. Losers and bollockses on the south side — ”

  “The usual hard-working salt-of-the-earth labouring men on the north side?”

  “Exactly.” Malone nodded at the folders. “And we’re going to look for leads in this mountain of stuff? Huh. This is a screen, boss. It’s to buy time for something. What do you think someone followed him here from the States to pop him here? Oh, that’ll be great for us. Bleeding marvellous.”

  Minogue stood and stretched. The long-time companion ache in his lower back was announcing itself clearly. He looked around the meeting room. He wouldn’t mind an office like this looking out onto Harcourt Street.

  “He’s dirty, boss. Clattering women and that. A druggie. Come on, now.”

  “Yes, Tommy.”

  “Record or no record. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not out to nail him just because his oul lad’s loaded. Stuff doesn’t square up, yet in anyhow. Look: he got clobbered for something here. Someone saw him in action, decided, well, here’s a hit: rich, stupid — pissed even. Maybe he dropped the hand on someone’s ’mot.”

  “You don’t put much on any roots thing, do you?”

  “What, the ancient Ireland stuff, all the glory?”

  “Yes.”

  Malone cracked his knuckles.

  “Ah now . . .! Robbing and killing’s the main event, boss. It’s like Kilmartin says. Them’s the stats this last twenty-year here on the squad, right?”

  Minogue began counting pigeons prowling the footpath below.

  “Tell me what’s missing, that’s my approach,” said Malone. “You want to bet he was carrying? Cash, I mean. Maybe the American Express routine. Yeah, don’t leave home without it — someone else’s like. Jases, boss, there’s hundreds of gougers walking the streets here who’d have a go at the likes of Shaughnessy if they thought they could get anything. Someone could be swimming in Margaritas on the Costa Brava pretending to be Shaughnessy right now.”

  Minogue turned back from the window. He lifted the folders. It’d be a couple of days at least before they’d have any track of someone using stolen cards in Shaughnessy’s name. A week even, if they were smart how they used them.

  “Here, hard chaw,” he said to Malone. “You carry them. We have other things to be thinking about at the present time.”

  Minogue held the door open for Malone. The hallway was empty, but the door to Tynan’s office was ajar. Minogue looked through the crack in the doorway.

  “You’re off then,” Tynan called out. Minogue pushed the door open.

  “We are. We have our bedside reading.”

  Tynan looked over Minogue’s shoulder at Malone.

  “You know what he’s after, don’t you?” he said to Minogue.

  “I think so.”

  “What about yourself, Detective Malone. Are you wised up?”

  “Me ma says no. But she’ll always say that.”

  Tynan pushed his Biro into his tunic pocket.

  “John Leyne wants us to prepare for the worst,” he said. “Mrs. Shaughnessy would not be party to that last visit we just had. You know why, do you?”

  Malone shifted the folders against his chest.

  “She’d be in denial,” he said. His voice had a tart edge to it.

  Tynan nodded and looked up and down the hall.

  “Did your ma ever tell you you should get on with your Sergeant’s exams?”

  “Yeah, she did. Sir.”

  “So are you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?�
��

  “Too busy fighting crime. Sir.”

  “Get a bigger stick then. Stripes, Garda Malone: we need you.”

  “Another brick in the wall,” said Malone again.

  He turned the Nissan off High Street. He managed to find the largest of a series of potholes first. Minogue listened for new hums and noises from the car.

  “What wall?”

  “Mr. Excitement. Tynan. Throwing things at you out of the blue. His MO.”

  “He wouldn’t prod you if he didn’t think you could handle it.”

  “There’s a pair of you in it. ‘What about yourself Detective Malone?’ Jases. ‘We need you.’ Is he gay or what?”

  “I’ve seen him merry, Tommy.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You told me once that denial was a big river in Egypt.”

  Malone stood on the brakes and swerved to avoid another pothole.

  “Very funny, man. So very funny. I can be the gas-man Dub, if you can hide behind being the Clare culchie.”

  “I am a Clare culchie. Ask Kathleen.”

  “You are on your bollocks. Am I blind or what? You and your shagging Magritte postcards all over the kip. Jases. The books — them snaps of those oul rocks there on the wall next to your desk.”

  “They’re not oul rocks.”

  “What are they so? Houses the Martians built on their last trip here?”

  “You win, Tommy. How did you know?”

  “No wonder Kilmartin does be looking over his shoulder. That frigging carry-on of yours.”

  He knew the Nissan’s speed wasn’t a good gauge for Malone’s annoyance.

  “We’re not going back to the squad to be sitting and reading this stuff.”

  “Do you hear me fighting?” said Malone. “But we keep the head straight.”

  “Aoife Hartnett, you’re telling me.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think she’s hiding, Tommy?”

  “No I don’t,” he said. “I think she’s dead.”

  The rain started in earnest at eight. It kept going until nearly nine when Minogue went out to the car park to retrieve a box of Anadin from the glove box of his Citroen. It wasn’t any one particular thing that had given him such a clanger. Not the call from Serious Crimes to tell him that so far their informants had come up dry on gang activity at the airport. Nor was it the call to Eimear at the lab to tell him that Shaughnessy had no booze in him, that the whiff Donavan had noted must have been decomposition effects.