Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  Erin was thinking that it must be easier for everyone else, with their daily activities: Big Ed was back at work, Steven and Jodie were in finals week, Mick had gone off to ROTC drill camp, Jim Cavanaugh had his duties at church. Everyone had something to take the mind off it.

  She sat at the table in the breakfast nook, a cold cup of coffee at her elbow, her calendar open in front of her—the calendar by which she ordered her time, being there for everyone who asked, always finding the energy. Now she looked down at it. Slowly she turned the page back to the past week.

  All those appointments unkept. Look at them. Dinner plans with Ed for Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. His Knights of Columbus picnic (and her note “Make pasta salad”) on Sunday. Volunteer work at St. Mary’s Hospital. Take Mrs. Ryan to physical therapy. The S.I. women’s committee had their annual housecleaning—getting the classrooms at St. Ignatius prepped for the painters before summer school started. Babysit Lottie’s kids while she and Hal went to Monterey.

  And that was just the “public” list. There was also the general housecleaning for her perfect house. The screens had to go up. She had wanted to plant the impatiens for summer. The wallpapering . . .

  She and Jim Cavanaugh had had their usual Thursday lunch, although after last week . . .

  Well, he’d apologized for that, had called her that afternoon, broken up but managing to sound very much like his old self. What had gotten into him, wanting to kiss her? Naturally, she had known Jim felt something for her, but it was probably like the seven-year itch in marriage. The priesthood must have its own cycles. It had been her fault, really—listening to him so sympathetically over lunch. She had been stupid to ignore the signs. She knew them well enough with other men. Jim was a man, and all men, even priests, had their egos. She hadn’t meant to hurt him, of course, but . . .

  But really, that whole thing—God! less than a week ago—had happened in the far distant past. What did it matter now?

  She glanced down at the calendar. What did any of it matter now?

  She sighed. What if she had seen, one week ago, the real calendar? Monday, Eddie is killed.

  What would happen this week?

  She touched her face, her hand shaking. No, don’t start thinking like that. But she looked down anyway. The week held far fewer appointments, none of which she felt she had the strength to keep. She wondered who had taken Hal and Lottie’s children, if they’d gone on their vacation to Monterey after all. They hadn’t been at the funeral.

  “Stop it,” she said aloud. But her mind kept humming. She saw Eddie’s casket at Ging’s, heard Big Ed’s one sob as he knelt before it, saw Frannie almost go down at the gravesite.

  She shook her head again. Yes, the others had it easier now. It had been bearable, getting breakfast made because Big Ed had been there, next to her, touching as they passed each other. But now, with nothing to do but think and remember, she didn’t know if she could stand it.

  Maybe she should go and wake up Frannie?

  But Frannie, nowhere near as strong as she was, needed her rest. She was sure of that.

  “Hi.”

  There she was, in the doorway. Erin hadn’t even heard her. “Are you okay?” Frannie asked.

  “Sure. I’m just”—she motioned to the calendar—“The week . . . just seems kind of long.”

  Frannie came over next to her. She was barefoot, wearing one of Jodie’s robes, and ran her hand across Erin’s shoulders, leaving her arm draped there.

  Erin shook her head again, unable now to see the calendar. Why is that? she thought. And what is this rushing sensation? She turned into her daughter-in-law, hiding her face in the front of the robe. Frannie hugged her close, and suddenly Erin couldn’t hold back anymore.

  “It’s all right,” Frannie said, “it’s all right.”

  Over and over, as the tears wouldn’t stop.

  Bunch of dorks, Steven thought as the class filed out around him. Everybody talking about how tough the test was. What was hard was having to sit there after you were finished for twenty minutes while the rest of the class labored over this bullshit.

  Okay, so if that got to him, he’d just stay longer, until everybody’d gone.

  “You finished, Steven?”

  Mr. Andre, a major-league nerd, though he knew his math, stood up by the desk, waiting. Normally, he called Steven Mr. Cochran. All the kids here at S.I. were Mister. So maybe Andre felt sorry for him because of Eddie.

  Well, fuck that. “I was done a half hour ago.”

  “Too easy?”

  Steven shrugged.

  Andre was stacking the other tests, cutting him all the slack in the world. “You want to bring it up?”

  He gathered his books, head hung down. Andre was standing right over his desk. “I’ll take it. I’m very sorry about your brother.”

  Thanks, that helps a lot, Steven thought as he squeezed out by him. “Yeah,” he said.

  Big Ed didn’t tell Erin that he called in sick. He figured not telling her didn’t break their rule about being truthful to each other, even when it would hurt. She didn’t have to know he’d come here. She’d only worry about him, and she had enough on her mind.

  The gravesite seemed different. They had put the stone up, was one thing. “Edward John Cochran, Jr.—1962-1988.”

  He wished he could somehow wipe off the last numbers, make them not have happened. Go back with his wife and kids to two weeks ago and just stop everything right there for all time.

  Kneeling on the wet morning ground, he thought out the last time he’d seen Eddie alive, the disagreement they’d had. He wished it hadn’t happened, the same way he wished every tiny event of the last week hadn’t ever been, as though any small change might have prevented what was.

  Anyway, the argument hadn’t been important. And it wasn’t as if father and son hadn’t gotten along in general. Sometimes Eddie got a little carried away with his brains, was all, maybe thought his dad was a little too salt-of-the-earth.

  Ed didn’t know. Maybe he was a little simple. Things seemed to work for him, though. What was so tough, you had to get all worked up over them? He didn’t get it. You just did your job, you were faithful to your wife, you stuck by your friends. That was it.

  Not, he knew, that there weren’t hard questions. Like Eddie’s problem with his boss. Sure, that wasn’t easy to figure out. Maybe the man was in trouble, and getting in deeper. But Big Ed really believed it wasn’t Eddie’s problem. If it got too serious, Eddie could just go get another job for a couple of months before starting graduate school. There were tons of options.

  All of ’em gone.

  He moved back into the shade and pulled himself up to sit on a horizontal cypress branch.

  He guessed he’d come up here to say a few prayers, but for some reason, they weren’t coming out very well. His mind kept jumping.

  Or rather, remembering . . .

  “What if,” Eddie had said, “what if you’d been alive in Germany in the thirties and had seen what was going on with Hitler? Would that have been your business?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “So where do you draw the line?”

  And Ed had sat there in the trophy room surrounded by the memorabilia of his family’s life and said: “It’s a commonsense thing. You figure where it’s going to hit you.”

  “So what if you weren’t Jewish and you had a good government job in the Third Reich? It wouldn’t have hit you at all?”

  “Yeah, but there you’re talking evil.”

  “God versus the devil, huh?”

  Big Ed realized how dumb that sounded. “I guess you also have to figure out if it’s a big enough issue. If it is, you get in it.”

  “How about if getting in it early might keep an issue from getting big in the first place?”

  He couldn’t help smiling as he thought back on it. How’d he raised this white knight?

  He had changed tacks. “What’s the matter, are you bored at home? Not enough to d
o?” Meaning it to be funny.

  But Eddie didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his notion of right and wrong. He hadn’t actually spoken harshly to his dad, but Big Ed could tell he’d said the wrong thing. “Sometimes,” Eddie said, “there are just things you’ve got to do, even if everything in your life is rosy, or it’s inconvenient.”

  “I agree with you,” he’d said, placating. “All I’m saying is you’ve got to pick your shots. You waste your ammo taking target practice, and when real shooting time comes you’re out of luck.”

  That’s really what he’d said, and suddenly it brought him up short. He had really talked about guns and ammo. And then, less than a week later . . .

  If there was a connection, he thought, between that talk and his son’s death . . .

  His brain jumped again. What had Eddie said about his boss—Polk at Army Distributing? Something about him and his wife and the business. Was it just that they were in some kind of trouble, or was that only what Big Ed remembered?

  Across the cemetery, through the trees, a black limo was pulling slowly up the hill, leading another group of cars to another hole in the ground.

  No, he was sure Eddie hadn’t said what it was. Big Ed kicked at the ground, then stood up. Goddamn, he thought. I should have listened to him, not argued with him. Maybe I’d have some idea now about the why of it all.

  They’d laid the sod over Eddie’s grave. It was a good job, he noticed, all but seamless. As he’d done countless other times working at the park, he walked the sod’s edge, pressing it into its bed. He wanted the grass over this grave to grow.

  Nobody home.

  No surprise there.

  He put his books on the table adjacent to the front door and walked back to his bedroom.

  Probably out do-gooding somewhere. Making Frannie feel better by taking her to lunch or a museum or a park. Never mind it’s my last day of finals, never mind how I might feel about Eddie being gone. Never mind anything about ol’ Steven.

  And Eddie was gone. He was dead. Eddie dead. Say it say it say it.

  She hadn’t made the bed again. Well, that experiment had certainly worked. Sure, Mom told him it was his job, but funny, it hadn’t been Eddie’s, or Mick’s. Or if it had been, they hadn’t done it and Mom had covered. But she didn’t cover for him. Not one time. And every day he left the bed unmade, hoping she’d come in, as he’d seen her do every day with his brothers in their room. She’d cluck disapprovingly—but then make the beds.

  He turned on the television. Game shows. Give me a break. He couldn’t believe all the smiling and crapola for a couple of questions that he’d known every answer to since he was about six.

  He and Eddie, testing each other on dumb things, but loving it:

  What island is Tokyo on?

  Name the Pharaoh who believed in one god. What was that god’s name?

  Who was Alben Barkley?

  What kind of books did Yogi Berra read on the road?

  Yeah. Well, that was over.

  He punched the remote and killed the sound. Watch a game show without sound someday if you want to see what they’re really all about.

  So, he thought, summer vacation!

  He pulled the window blinds up and looked out onto his backyard, with its orderly flowers and its fence that he and his dad would patch for the hundredth time in the next few weeks.

  Back to the bed, into the drawer there next to it. Snap the switchblade—open and shut. And there was that guy’s card. What does the dart mean?

  He closed the switchblade and laid it on his stomach, then crossed hands behind his head on the pillow. You think that guy Hardy was really doing something about Eddie? What could he do? Eddie was in the ground, so what could it matter?

  He blinked hard, wiping a hand over a leaking eye. Standing up abruptly, switchblade in pocket, card in pocket, he went to the window again and stared at the fence. Pop was going to have to fix it himself. That wasn’t his summer.

  He looked back at the unmade bed and nodded. That told him everything he needed to know. What a joke hanging around waiting for something to change. It was all right here to see if you opened your eyes.

  It might be hot now, but it wouldn’t be tonight, so he grabbed a jacket and carried it outside over his shoulder. Uncle Jim crossed his mind—maybe he ought to go and talk to him? Sometimes he said a few things that made sense. Not always, but once in a while.

  But he’d already walked two blocks down to 19th, which was the opposite direction anyway, and it would be just too much trouble—one last little fling at trying to salvage what he knew couldn’t be.

  Time to grow up, Stevie.

  He stood at the corner of Taraval and 19th, watching the traffic line up, waiting for the light, southbound. He stuck out his thumb.

  14

  ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY. This was getting weird, Hardy thought as he opened the window in his bedroom to let in the fragrant air.

  Eddie Cochran and Jane Fowler were playing tag around in his mind.

  If someone had told him he would make love to his ex-wife ever again in his lifetime, he would have bet the ranch against it.

  So here he was last night, wandering this house from office at the back to living room up front, wondering how it could have happened. And at how he felt now.

  That, he supposed, was the thing. How can someone who he’d been with so intimately seem like an entirely different person? Had she changed that much? Had he? Or had they both just forgotten?

  They’d met at a party her father had thrown for her graduation from Columbia, to celebrate her return to San Francisco. Hardy had been hired for the night as a rent-a-cop, moonlighting, finishing out his last few months on the force before starting law school.

  There had been some good years, he admitted. Diz in law school, thinking he was coasting after Vietnam and police work, married to the beautiful daughter of a judge.

  Yes, he remembered, thank you. The memories had kept him up until dawn, which was why, when he’d finally slept, it had been until noon.

  Now sitting at the kitchen table, sipping espresso, when the telephone on the kitchen wall rang, he bolted up, knocking over his coffee cup. He hoped it was Jane, forgetting that his number was unlisted and he had, intentionally, not given it to her.

  “I don’t know,” Glitsky was saying. “The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.”

  “It bothered me the first time.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a genius, Diz. Me, I’m just a street cop.”

  “So you are looking into it?” The pause was a little too long. “Hey, Abe. Yo!”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Glitsky let out a long breath. “I had a talk with Griffin this morning.”

  “A rare pleasure.”

  “All too.”

  “And what did the talk encompass?”

  Hardy could imagine Glitsky’s face, angles sharpened by intensity. “I don’t know, Diz. The more I think about it, the harder time I have with it. It’s like I’m being set up.”

  “For what?”

  “Remember the politics we talked about?”

  “Is Griffin part of that?”

  “We’re both up for lieutenant.” As though that might mean something to Hardy.

  “So?”

  “So it’s Griffin’s case, no matter how I feel about it.”

  “But he’s wrong.”

  “He’s not necessarily wrong. You don’t get to homicide being wrong a lot.”

  Hardy waited.

  “Maybe he wants me to make a wave, then wipe out on it.”

  Hardy’s kitchen window faced across the Avenues in the direction of downtown. The top of the Pyramid and a couple of other skyscrapers floated over Pacific Heights like mirages, shimmering silver against the deep blue sky. “So why are you calling me?” he finally asked.

  “You got something at stake here. I don’t.”

  “I got zip,” Hardy said. “This is mostly a favor I’m doing for Moses.” Ev
en as he said it, it didn’t ring very true.

  “Okay, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get officially involved, be wrong, and look like a horse’s ass.”

  Hardy played reasonable. “Abe, don’t you think the whole might of the force would have a better chance of finding something than me by myself?”

  Glitsky snorted. “I’m a professional investigator. I’ll be around to bounce things off.”

  “Okay.” Hardy took a breath. “How ’bout this—I found out why Cruz might have lied.”

  He ran it down, though it, too, seemed somehow flimsier in the daylight. Glitsky evidently shared that feeling. “People lie, especially to cops. You know that. Doesn’t mean they kill.”

  “I never said it did.”

  Glitsky sighed again, loudly into Hardy’s ear. “You know Griffin’s report wasn’t completely worthless, don’t you?”

  Hardy waited.

  “I mean, we ran paraffin and Cochran did fire the gun. There weren’t anybody else’s latents on the weapon. No witnesses saw anybody else leave the area.”

  “Yeah, he aced himself. I guess I’ll quit—”

  “Hardy . . .”

  “Motive, Glitz. I’ve got this old-fashioned idea that people don’t just yawn after dinner, get up and blow their brains out without some reason.”

  “But in a week you haven’t found one?”

  “Four days.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay yourself.”

  After he hung up he stared for another minute out the window. His job was simple. He didn’t have to find who’d killed Ed. He only had to come up with enough evidence to have the coroner conclude that there’d been a homicide—by person or persons unknown would be fine for his purposes.

  He reached into his pocket, took a piece of yellow paper from his wallet and dialed again. No answer at Frannie’s. What he was lacking was a sense of the sequence of events. He wondered what time Ed and Frannie had finished dinner.

  Glitsky’s call wasn’t any kind of help, but it made him feel better, as though he wasn’t in so much of a vacuum. Through Abe, he could (maybe) get his hands on lots of information if he could come up with the right questions. Just now, though, he didn’t have them.