by Ingrid Black
“And Kaminski?”
“Came right back here, packed his things, and made a bolt for it. In all the confusion, I forgot to keep a tail on him.” She slid her legs off the bed and walked to the wardrobe, opening the door to show me the empty hangers where Kaminski’s shirts had hung, the absence in the corner where his holdall had sat. “I screwed up. I was too tired. And now I can’t help asking myself whether the whole thing was a set up from the start.”
“You mean he created the confusion so that he could slip away?”
“He was the one who cried out Buck Randall’s name. I don’t think he saw a damn thing,” said Fitzgerald. “I don’t think Randall was ever there. There was no meeting arranged at the funfair. Kaminski just made it up to give him a chance to get out of our line of sight.”
“We had him backed into a corner.”
“He had to think fast.”
“And he did.”
I remembered that night at Dublin Castle following our visit to the graveyard, when he was brought in for questioning. He had somewhere he needed to be. Buck Randall had made contact. He was being threatened with a cell for the next 48 hours, 72 hours, he was going to miss whatever appointment he’d made with the man who killed his wife. The only way he could get out was to offer us a false meeting instead.
I recalled how he’d closed his eyes in his chair whilst he considered what Fitzgerald was telling him. He was searching for something inside his mind.
“And then it must’ve come back to him that he had the leaflet,” she said. “Someone probably handed it to him in the street as he walked by, he stuffed it in his pocket without thinking, and now it gave him the perfect bluff. He could say the leaflet was the message from Randall, go along with the charade, start a fight in the funfair, and sneak away under the cover of the ensuing pandemonium, leaving himself free to get to the real meeting alone.”
“It was my fault,” I insisted. “You said it yourself. I knew him better than anyone else in this town. I should’ve known he was spinning a line.”
“He was another good actor. The city seems to be full of them these days. And you know what? I don’t blame him for splitting,” she said, shutting the wardrobe door and dropping heavily onto the edge of the bed again. “Look how we screwed up last night. Why should he trust us to help him find Randall when we fell for a blatant ruse like that?”
“You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“You’re right. There’ll be plenty of other people willing to do that on my behalf. This certainly isn’t what the Assistant Commissioner was hoping for in her first week in charge.”
She stabbed a finger at the newspaper lying thrown onto the bed at her side.
Mystery Over Dublin Police Operation In City Fairground read the headline.
“I read it,” I said. “The story’s thinner than an anorexic ghost.”
“It’s thin now, but it won’t take them too long to flesh out what the surveillance team was really doing in Merrion Square,” Fitzgerald said. “They can’t be fobbed off for ever.”
“The press have the attention span of a crane fly,” I said fiercely. “Couple of days and they’ll have moved onto the next story. There was some trouble at the fairground, so what? Happens all the time. Just feed them a line about how it was an operation to round up illegal immigrants or crack down on drug trafficking. Reporters love that crap.”
“Even the press aren’t stupid enough to fall for that one,” said Fitzgerald. “Since when did the murder squad spearhead trawling expeditions against illegal immigrants? No, they know already there was more to it than that. All they have to do is put the jigsaw together.”
“Then be straight with them. Call a press conference. Tell them you’re looking for a man called Buck Randall. Give them his picture. Let them put it on the front page. There’s no point taking the softly, softly approach anymore,” I said. “What use is secrecy? Randall will probably guess last night was about him. The best chance of finding him now is to flush him out of wherever he’s been hiding. Make him a celebrity. Deprive him of his anonymity.”
“We might drive him underground instead,” said Fitzgerald.
“There’s always that chance. But it will also make him nervous, and nervous people make mistakes. He’ll feel watched wherever he goes. He’ll be a wanted man. And even if he doesn’t break cover, Kaminski might. He’ll know his window of opportunity’s running out.”
“Do you really think it could work?” asked Fitzgerald expectantly.
“It couldn’t hurt,” I said.
Fitzgerald got to her feet again.
She was restless, like she wanted to pace to think, but there was scarcely the space in that tiny room for breathing, let alone pacing. She was working out the permutations. Totting up what could go wrong and matching that against the possible benefits.
“Saxon,” she said eventually, “you’re either a genius or a fool. What say we find out which it is?”
**********
That my genius would be confirmed so fast came as a surprise even to me. Not that I’d ever doubted it, you understand, it just made a pleasing change to have the hard evidence.
There were sightings of Buck Randall at an amusement arcade in Westmoreland Street, a cinema in Poolbeg Street, a bar in Camden Row, and the outpatients clinic at St James’s Hospital. Either he was a very busy guy or there were a lot of cases of mistaken identity out there.
Most promising of all was the landlord in Kilmainham, not that far from where Marsha Reed had died, who called to say he’d rented a room to a man with an American accent who resembled the photograph of Randall which had been issued.
“Yeah, that’s him,” he said lazily, lifting the front of his T-shirt to scratch at his overhanging belly - but he wasn’t really looking at the photograph Fitzgerald had laid down flat on the desk in front of him. Instead he was staring at a young woman in the road outside, skimpily dressed for the heat, bending down to pick up something she’d dropped.
He was old enough to be her grandfather. For all I know, he was her grandfather. He didn’t look like he’d let a little thing like that get in the way.
His wife – bloated and sweating and squeezed painfully into a dress that looked like it was begging for mercy – sat next to him, watching him non-judgementally.
She hadn’t spoken a word since Fitzgerald, Patrick Walsh and I had arrived.
“Please look closely at the picture,” Fitzgerald’s voice rose louder to get his attention. “It’s very important that you’re sure this really is the man who stayed here.”
The man sighed and reluctantly forced his gaze away to look at the picture.
“It’s him. I already told you it was,” he said. “How many more times? He wasn’t using the name the police gave on the TV, mind. He called himself... what was it now? O’Brien. Said he was an Irish-American over looking into his roots. Soon as I saw his picture on the news at one, I knew it was him. Said to you it was him, didn’t I?”
That last remark was addressed to the wife, who suddenly seemed to be jerked out of her lethargy by the words of her loving husband. Roused at last, she managed a nod of agreement and then returned to the semi-catatonic state she’d been in since we got here.
He, meanwhile, narrowed his eyes and peered at Fitzgerald.
“It was you, wasn’t it? At that press conference?”
Fitzgerald confirmed stiffly that it was.
“Thought it was. I never forget a face.”
“That’s a useful habit to have.”
“You look a lot younger on TV.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. Must be all those lights. Still, don’t suppose you’d be so high up in the police if you were still nineteen, eh?”
And he chuckled to himself like he’d just told the world’s funniest joke.
Seemed like women to him were either there to be put in their place, leered at, or ground into passive, defeated submission like the one slumped next to him in her chair.
With the patience not so much of a saint as half a dozen saints combined, Grace managed to guide his attention back to the picture.
“When did you first meet him?” she asked, stressing each syllable coldly.
“Three weeks ago. I know, because the rent was due Friday.”
“How did he pay?”
“Cash. Two weeks deposit, rent one week in advance.”
“Did you ask for any ID?”
“I haven’t got time to be asking people for their passports and driving licenses,” he dismissed the question scornfully. “As long as they have the money and I’ve got a room for them to stay in, they’re welcome to it. I’m not their bloody nanny.”
“Can you remember anything about him?” Fitzgerald asked.
“Not much,” he admitted. “I hardly saw him much, and when I did he didn’t speak. Used to pass him on the stairs occasionally. He didn’t keep regular hours.”
“Did he say what he did for a living?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“He didn’t let anything slip?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“What about visitors?”
“None that I saw.”
“Phone calls in or out?”
“There’s a payphone out there on the wall.” He gestured to the door leading out into the hall. “Couple of times I saw him sitting out there, waiting for a call.”
“You ever listen in?” I said.
“I’ve got better things to do.”
Like lust after every young girl who passed the window.
“So you noticed nothing unusual about him, you didn’t know who he talked to, or about what, the whole time he was here, and then he was just gone?” said Fitzgerald.
“He must’ve left this morning,” the landlord said. “He was definitely here last night. I heard him moving about, didn’t I? Then, when I saw your press conference on the news, I went up to check he was still there and found he’d cleared out without a word.”
Randall must’ve seen the press conference when it was televised live that morning. Either that or someone else had alerted him to it. He knew his cover was blown so he ran.
If only the landlord and his wife had seen the press conference live instead of the highlights on the lunchtime news, he mightn’t have had such a head start.
“I suppose all this will get into the papers now, won’t it?” the man continued gloomily, starting off on his scratching again. And to be fair, he had a lot of flesh to scratch. “I almost wish I hadn’t picked up the phone. I don’t want people getting the wrong impression. I run a respectable business here. Still,” and he brightened visibly as an idea struck him, “at least I can say I’ve had someone famous staying here.”
“Famous?”
I could see that Fitzgerald was getting near to the point where homicide was looking like a good alternative strategy for dealing with this witness.
“This man you’re looking for,” he said. “He must be famous if you’re after him, mustn’t he? Stands to reason. So go on, tell me. What’d he do? Did he murder someone?”
He said the word with such relish, it was like he was tasting it on his tongue.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” said Fitzgerald.
The man’s eyes opened wide with affront.
“Excuse me for breathing, I’m sure.”
He was still muttering under his breath about who did the police think they were, and whose taxes did they think paid their wages, when we finally escaped upstairs to check out the room where the elusive Buck Randall had been staying for the past few weeks.
It made Kaminski’s original hotel room look like the Hilton. I was struck by the resemblances between the two men, both hiding out in a strange city in down at heel surroundings, their contact with the world around them reduced to furtive, obscure excursions on missions only they fully understood. And now, within the space of twenty four hours, the two of them had both cut loose and vanished into the city. Where were they now?
Randall had left little behind him, save for a couple of odd socks, a shirt still hanging in the wardrobe, and a shaving brush next to the sink in the bathroom.
Not exactly much to go on.
There was a stale smell in the room too of sweat and unwashed flesh.
Fitzgerald right now was standing by the TV. There was a tape left in the VCR. She pressed the switch and ejected it.
“Muff City,” she read when it came out. “Charming.”
“I think I’ve got that one on DVD,” Walsh whispered to me. “It’s very good.”
“Tragic how the Academy Awards always overlook the best films,” I replied.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Fitzgerald. “He needs to hide out, not make himself too conspicuous, but he still takes the risk of popping along to the local perverts’ pleasure palace to pick up a copy of this crap.”
“Actually,” said the unexpected voice of the landlord from the doorway at our backs, “that’s one of mine.” He must have followed us upstairs to eavesdrop on the conversation. “Mr Peters must’ve taken it from my library downstairs. Can I have it back?”
In the middle of everything, it was reassuring to see some people still had their priorities in the right order.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Walsh stayed behind at the rooming house to continue the search whilst Fitzgerald and I returned to Dublin Castle. She had to brief the Assistant Commissioner later, both on the case against Solomon and also on what had happened last night, and now she had today’s events to add to the mix. She needed to make sure she was up to speed on the investigation.
That meant getting through the reports which had been gradually mounting in the last couple of days on her desk. The reports so far covering the attack on Rose Downey were scant. That was still being handled as a simple assault, whatever hunch we might have had about it being connected in some way with Marsha’s murder.
In that respect, Rose was fortunate it hadn’t gone far enough for any possible similarities to emerge.
It was the reports on Marsha Reed which were going to take time to get through. First up there were statements from confidential informants at the S&M club to which Marsha Reed belonged, and the transcript of an interview with one of the men Marsha had contacted on internet chat rooms to share her fantasies of being murdered. He turned out to be the happily-married owner of a health food shop in the city centre who had no idea that the woman he’d been corresponding with online was the same one who’d been found murdered less than a week ago. His story was that the whole exchange between the two of them was nothing more than a fantasy, and that he’d stopped once she suggested meeting up and maybe trying out a few scenarios.
Solomon’s arrest at least seemed to put him in the clear. Lucky for him, the police didn’t intend telling his wife about the matter either.
I would have.
Added to that were the profiles on Marsha’s fellow students in the class I’d taken, though again it all seemed somewhat redundant in light of subsequent events, and page after page of messages left on the email hotline which had been set up following her murder.
An accompanying detailed fingerprint analysis of the necklace found in Solomon’s office showed, frustratingly, that it had been wiped clean and had no fingerprints of any kind upon it. Forensics did, however, confirm that microscopic traces of mud and grass matching those samples taken from Marsha’s house had been picked up in the same office, though the finding of the Shoe Identification and Retrieval team was that there were no footprints matching his at the scene itself.
A number as yet remained unidentified.
There was also the psychological report on Solomon from Fisher, who’d interviewed him briefly since his arrest. Solomon had not been forthcoming, to say the least, and indeed found the very idea of being psychologically profiled offensive and absurd.
Fisher could come to few conclusions, save that Solomon was a domineering personality, controlling and narci
ssistic, which struck me as something which could be said about most of the people in the theatre. As to whether he was capable of such extreme violence, Lawrence didn’t say but I could read between the lines. Solomon was as capable of extreme violence as we all were, but Fisher didn’t think him particularly high risk.
There was also a rundown of everything that was known about Solomon’s movements in the days before and after the killing of Marsha Reed, and especially his whereabouts on the night itself. There was undoubtedly a black hole in the record now that his alibi had collapsed. He’d left the Liffey Theatre when the night’s performance ended shortly after 11pm, not staying for his usual drink, and no one could place him anywhere until the following morning when he had a late breakfast at Bewley’s coffee shop in town with a postgraduate student who was writing a profile of him for a journal called Dublin Theatre Studies.
The student revealed that Solomon had been hungover that morning and in bad form, and also that he’d attempted unsuccessfully to lure her into bed, promising that he could help her get her play produced in London. It seemed to be something of a pattern with him.
Like all police reports, getting through them was a thankless task, giving, as they did, the distinct impression of having been written by people with only a passing acquaintance with the English language and rules of grammar. Paragraphs came at random, or not at all. Spelling was atrocious. Unintentional malapropisms abounded. Many simple pieces of information, from dates and times to further contact numbers, were omitted entirely. It’s no wonder so many criminal cases fall down when they come to court because the police reports are so badly written. Often contradictory, and speckled with information which cannot be properly verified, they’re a goldmine for unscrupulous defence attorneys.
