The Judas Heart

by Ingrid Black

  “Any more messages for me,” I asked him, “or are you planning to save them all up and give them to me tied up with a silk ribbon for Christmas?”

  “Christmas isn’t for months yet,” he said blankly.

  “That’s the point, Hugh, it was a... oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.”

  I pushed open the door and stepped out into the evening air just as Kaminski appeared at the foot of the steps. He’d put on a jacket, shaved, combed his hair. It was an improvement.

  “I expected you to be late,” he said when he saw me.

  “Why?”

  “I figured you’d want to make me wait in punishment for having gone cold on you.”

  “It’s true I thought you were pissed at me,” I said, “but it never crossed my mind to take it out on you. I’m tired of playing games. I want to know what’s going on, that’s all.”

  “It wasn’t that you couldn’t wait a moment longer than necessary to see me then?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Kaminski.”

  “I’m way past flattering myself,” Kaminski said. “I was just jagging you. Must be the excitement of hitting the social scene again. You know, this is my first night out since my wife died. Most nights I just sit alone in front of the TV flicking channels.”

  “You sound like my doorman,” I said.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “If you’d met him, you wouldn’t have to ask. So tell me, where are we going?”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “I hate surprises,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re talking to me again. I never wanted to make you mad. I only wanted to help find the man who killed your wife, and I thought my way was the best way. I thought you weren’t thinking right at the time.”

  “It’s water under the bridge,” Kaminski said. “Things have moved on.”

  “What is it? I can tell from your voice that something’s up.”

  “You could say that.”

  “What happened?”

  “What’s happened is I’m making progress at last,” he said.

  “Tell me, come on, don’t make a meal of it.”

  “Patience,” he said infuriatingly.

  And he stopped any further questions by hailing a cab, and we climbed in the back whilst he gave an address written down on a scrap of paper to the driver up front.

  The driver took one look at it and then made his way to the lights at the corner and continuing straight on past University College on our right before turning left onto Camden Street and away from town until we were over the canal and onto the Rathmines Road.

  As we drove, a light rain began to brush the windshield, the fulfilment of the vague promise in the clouds I’d seen above the bay earlier in the day.

  I wondered if the tail was keeping up.

  “Here,” said Kaminski as we drove along.

  He handed me a scrap of newspaper out of his pocket. At first I thought it was the same story I’d found under his bed in his first hotel, until I noticed the typeface was different.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Take a look.”

  I took a look. It was an ad from the personal columns of a local newspaper. The In Memoriam column. It read: Cecilia, fondly remembered, a friend of a friend from Texas.

  “It was in yesterday’s edition,” he said.

  “Who put it in?” I said.

  “A friend of a friend from Texas,” said Kaminski. “Can’t you read?”

  “Why would Buck Randall want to put a message like this in the local rag?”

  “Because he knows I’ll be looking for traces of him everywhere. He wanted me to see it. To show me that he’s still in town. Still in the game.”

  The message would certainly confirm what Fisher had been tentatively suggesting earlier that evening: that Randall might have killed Mark Hudson as a tribute to his late friend Howler. But had Kaminski got it confirmed that Randall paid for the message to go in?

  “The newspaper wouldn’t tell me who placed the message. Customer confidentiality. But I had a hunch. I went along to the cemetery where she’s buried, and I was right. There were fresh flowers on the grave. The gardener who tends the place told me that fresh flowers had come for Cecilia Corrigan every morning for the past three weeks.”

  “Becky might’ve sent them,” I said, though it didn’t sound like something she’d do.

  “The niece? I thought of that,” said Kaminski, “so I went there this morning and talked to the guy who delivered the flowers. He said an American came in three weeks ago, put down a bundle of cash and instructed them to send flowers every day for the next month.”

  I remembered the rough bouquet of flowers which had been stopped at customs a couple weeks after Cecilia’s funeral, purporting to come from Death Row.

  “Randall?” I said.

  “None other. The delivery boy IDed the picture.”

  That man was everywhere.

  Where the road forked beyond the Town Hall, we now continued left and soon disappeared into the maze of well-behaved residential streets and squares that dwelt in the enfolding arms of Rathmines Road on one side and Ranelagh Road on the other. A mellow mid-evening mood had settled on the district. Inside the houses, I imagined the city’s tribe of urbane, well-dressed, well-paid couples sharing a glass of wine over spaghetti.

  But where were we going?

  I got my answer as we pulled up outside a small wooden door set into a wall and covered with graffiti. The back entrance to the cemetery.

  Kaminski sure knew how to show a woman a good time.

  The rain was getting harder as we climbed out. It was nothing much by Dublin’s standards, but I still wished I’d brought a jacket with me as Kaminski handed money through the window to the driver and the cab pulled away from the kerb, leaving us alone.

  “So this is your idea of a night out?” I said to him.

  “I thought you’d want to see it for yourself.”

  “The morning would’ve been just fine.”

  “Waiting is for fools,” said Kaminski. “Besides, I got a call about an hour ago from someone who works here saying he’d seen someone hanging around the grave. I thought it might be worth checking out, and figured you wouldn’t mind missing dinner to help me.”

  “I guess it’d be a silly question to ask how we’re going to get in?” I went on, trying the handle and finding it locked.

  “Since when did you let a little door get in the way?”

  I hoped he wasn’t going to suggest we climb over the wall. I’d hate to fall off and have to explain to the docs in the emergency room that I’d been breaking into a cemetery.

  People can be funny about things like that.

  “Then aren’t you glad I have a key?” said Kaminski, and he produced it from his pocket with a flourish like some street corner card shark pulling out an Ace from his sleeve. “You’re not the only one who knows how to bribe the staff to get inside where they’re not supposed to be,” he said, and he laughed to himself too loudly. I was beginning, I must confess, to finding his manner disconcerting. There was something giddy about him.

  Excitable.

  “Let’s get it over with then,” I said.

  Right now, I wanted to be off the street and out of sight, even if the graveyard was the only alternative. The company of the dead had never bothered me. They couldn’t hurt anyone. Besides, there were old bones everywhere. Just because you couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there. Cemeteries were just places to gather the bones up tidily.

  Kaminski unlocked the door and we stepped inside. Thankfully, it was still light enough to see by, though the rain was quickly dimming the light as it got heavier. Puddles had started to form on the footpaths between the neatly-tended graves.

  Kaminski didn’t hesitate, but headed straight into the heart of the cemetery, ignoring the paths and weaving instead among the headstones to where he needed to get.

  That was a grave in a far corner, by the wall, overhung w
ith the thin rain-dripping branches of a weeping willow tree. By the time I caught up with him, he was standing mutely in front of it, staring down at the brown mound of earth topped with a large bouquet of flowers that marked the spot where Cecilia Corrigan was buried.

  To be honest, I couldn’t see why he’d needed to bring me here at all.

  There was nothing to see beyond what he’d already told me about in the cab, and I was about to say so scornfully when I became aware that he hadn’t moved a muscle since I’d caught up with him at the graveside. After his earlier restlessness, there was something unnerving about that too, and I looked across at him to check that he was alright.

  “Kaminski?”

  His eyes were wide.

  “Someone disturbed the earth,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s been digging,” he said, and he knelt suddenly in front of the mound of soil and began to claw at it with his hands, oblivious to the wet dirt that soon caked his hands.

  “Kaminski, stop it, you can’t do that.”

  He only dug all the more furiously.

  “What are you -?”

  My voice failed as he stopped digging and held up something between his fingers.

  Something shiny.

  It was a ring.

  “Marsha,” I breathed.

  But there were tears in his eyes as he held it up, and I realised it couldn’t be Marsha Reed’s missing ring. Why would he cry over that? It was Heather’s. He didn’t need to tell me.

  “I have to call Fitzgerald,” I said.

  I sensed him bristle with alarm.

  “What has this got to do with her?” he snarled, and his fingers gripped the ring more tightly as if afraid I was about to take it off him. “This is between Randall and me.”

  I realised I’d given away too much, but it was too late to back out.

  “Hudson’s body was found today,” I said.

  “What?”

  “His car was lifted out of Dublin Bay,” I said. “Hudson was in the trunk.”

  He clambered to his feet, his knees brown with wet earth, and something of the fight seemed to have gone out of him.

  “This changes everything,” he said bleakly.

  “In what way?”

  “Everyone in this damn city is going to know about Buck Randall soon,” he said. “How long do you think the press will take before they find out who he is? And how long do you think Randall’s going to hang around in Dublin once his cover’s blown? I’ve lost him.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! I know what he’s like. I’ve been following his trail long enough. If he sees that Hudson’s body’s been found, he’s going to be out of here faster than a fucking jet plane. It’ll ruin everything. He’ll not be there, I know he won’t.”

  I realised there was something else going on here that he wasn’t telling me about.

  “He’ll not be where, Kaminski?”

  Kaminski turned his head away and wouldn’t listen.

  “He made contact again, didn’t he?” I said. “That’s what you were hinting about earlier outside my apartment when you told me to be patient? Shit, Kaminski, if you have any idea where Randall is, you have to tell the police, can’t you see that?”

  “I don’t have to tell anyone anything,” he said bitterly. “I thought I’d give you a second chance tonight to help me, but there’s no way I’m going to let him slip through my fingers a second time.” And I knew from the cold way that he spoke that he’d made up his mind. I also knew there was only one way I could get him to change it.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I can’t believe you did this to me,” said Kaminski.

  “I told you once before,” I said. “If you’re not thinking straight, then I’m going to have to do your thinking for you.”

  It was 3am.

  The trip to the cemetery had ended abruptly when police called to arrest Kaminski on suspicion of having entered the country using a false passport. It had been my idea. Whilst he knelt at the graveside, I’d silently texted Fitzgerald and told her I thought Kaminski had information on Buck Randall that he had no intention of sharing willingly.

  And if he wouldn’t share it willingly, then unwillingly was the only other way.

  Right now, Kaminski was on the wrong side of an interview desk in Dublin Castle, whilst Fitzgerald and I sat on the other side, a sergeant at the door on guard, waiting for the realisation of his situation to hit him, at which point he might become more cooperative.

  There was no sign of it happening yet.

  The room was taut with Kaminski’s rage.

  I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  “I can’t believe you did this to me,” he said again. Then he corrected himself. “No, now I think of it, what I really can’t believe is that I let you do this to me again. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. I should’ve learned my lesson the first time you betrayed me.”

  “You use that word too easily,” I told him.

  “It’s the right word.”

  “It’s the wrong word, and you know it,” I said. “Come on, Kaminski, stop playing the wounded innocent and start looking at things the right way up. Buck Randall’s in the city someplace, you don’t know where he is, we don’t know where he is, and even if you do find out where he is he’s going to be waiting for you to come get him. You don’t stand a chance.”

  “And you think your friends in this dump do?”

  “They stand a better chance than a guy who’s acting like he’s lost his mind and suddenly thinks he’s Superman or something. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Leon Kaminski, flying through the air in search of the man who killed his wife.”

  “That’s a cheap shot,” said Kaminski, looking at me with disgust.

  “I’m just trying to make you see you need help,” I said. “You can’t do this alone.”

  “I managed to get this far on my own.”

  “The only reason you managed to get this far was because he told you where he was,” I reminded him. “If Buck Randall hadn’t made contact with you and given you the come on, you’d still be bumming around Texas trying to pick up his scent.”

  “I’d have found him,” he said thickly.

  “Maybe you would’ve, maybe you wouldn’t, we’ll never know,” I said. “What we do know is that he’s here someplace in the city right this minute, while we sit here swapping pleasantries, and if you seriously want to bring him down then you’re going to have to start understanding that we can’t let you run around Dublin like a grenade with the pin taken out, ready to blow. If you really want Randall brought in, you’re going to have to get over this chip on your shoulder about the police and start cooperating - beginning by telling us what message he’s given you this time. And don’t bother pretending you don’t know what I mean.”

  “I’ve told you already, I’m not saying a goddam thing.”

  Fitzgerald, who’d been sitting quietly the whole time, leafing through a sheaf of papers on her knee, tutted softly at that and shook her head, and she went on tutting softly without raising her eye once from the page, like everything she was reading there was shocking her profoundly, like she’d never known such a miscreant in all her days.

  In the end, she sighed melodramatically and threw the papers face up onto the desk, before leaning back in her chair and fixing Kaminski with a faintly amused look.

  “Do you know what the penalty is if you’re found guilty of entering the country on a false passport?” she asked him.

  “No. Should I?”

  “If you’re going to be travelling round the world on false passports, it’s the sort of thing you should probably bone up on. To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself what the penalty is. Immigration law isn’t my speciality, and that department’ll be closed till nine this morning. Pity. But it couldn’t be that severe, could it? It’s not like this is North Korea.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Kaminski said sarcastically.

  “Then again,
” she added, “yours is a particularly provocative case. I just got a preliminary list there of what my officers found when they searched your hotel room.” She nodded at the thin sheaf of papers. “It makes fascinating reading. One false passport I can understand, two even, but how many was it you had again? I’ve forgotten.” She picked up the papers and flicked through to the relevant page. “Five, that was it. That’s a lot of false passports. Any judge worth his salt is going to think you were up to no good, Mr Kaminski.”

  “We both know that, once I get an attorney, this case has no more chance of reaching the courtroom than Saxon here has of winning this year’s Miss Charm contest.”

  “True,” agreed Fitzgerald. “She probably would struggle, though she’s been working hard at her manners lately, haven’t you, Saxon? Some of her handlers think they might even be able to start introducing her to polite society in the next few months.”

  “Is there a point to this pantomime?” groaned Kaminski.

  “Just killing time,” said Fitzgerald cheerfully. “We’ve got another two or three days of each other’s company to get through, so we might as well enjoy it.”

  “Two or three days?”

  The truth was slowly dawning on the poor klutz.

  “That’s how long we get to hold you before we either have to charge you or release you,” said Fitzgerald. “So even if you’re right and there’s no chance of you being convicted of travelling on a false passport, or you are convicted and given a token fine in sympathy for your situation, the point remains that you’ll still be spending the next 72 hours here with us. Or 70 rather, because we have to take off the two you’ve already been under arrest.”

  “You wouldn’t do it,” said Kaminski but he didn’t sound too confident.

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  “You can’t,” he said, and I thought I detected the first note of panic in his voice. “I can’t spend the next three days here. It’ll mess up everything.”

  “Have somewhere to go?” asked Fitzgerald disingenuously.

  “You know I have somewhere to go,” Kaminski spat back. “It’s what this whole thing has been about. It’s what it’s all been leading up to. If I don’t get out... Saxon, help me.”