The good life imm-5

by John Brady

  “Oh well, what the hell,” he said at last. “Here’s to Hoey. Whatever else you could say about Shea Hoey, he’s no gom. He’ll soon learn to put the foot down. Did you see where she keeps her own name and everything? What’s the point, I’d like to know.”

  Minogue said nothing. He believed Aine’s maiden name, Moriarty, was too good of a name to walk away from. Kilmartin lit a cigarette.

  Minogue took another mouthful of lager. The Chief Inspector began tugging at the loose skin under his chin.

  “Eighty-eight quid actually,” he murmured. “That Waterford glass bowl I gave Hoey.”

  Malone made his way back to the two detectives just as the barman laid down another round of drinks. Kilmartin eyed Malone sorting a handful of change. He winked at Minogue as he called out to Malone.

  “Hoi,” he said. “What poor-box did you rob to get that fistful there, Molly?”

  Malone’s eyebrows inched up but he kept counting.

  He stepped on his cigarette and stared at the car. It wasn’t just the heat, he knew, that made him feel that his chest was full of smoke. His hands were tingling too. The dryness in his mouth had spread to his throat. He might get forty for the leather jacket on the back seat. Probably a tenner for the Walkman. As for the bloody racquets and the bag, he hadn’t a clue.

  The driver had activated the alarm with the remote on his key-ring. Tall type, hair-do, nice clothes. Tennis, etcetera. He’d probably gone to one of those snob schools where they played rugby. Daddy had bought Junior a car for his twenty-first. Not this model though: a GTI cost over fifteen grand. Junior must have gotten a job. Maybe he’d gotten the girl free with the car. How was it that rich people never looked ugly? He’d smelled perfume hanging in the air when he’d walked by the car the first time. He held up his watch and twisted it until he got enough light on it to read it. Five minutes to closing time in the pubs. He’d have to go soon or else forget it. Then he might have to do something stupid in broad daylight tomorrow to get back on track. Otherwise, it’d be shitsville. That had happened last week. He’d messed up by sleeping it out until nearly dinner-time. It had taken him until four o’clock to round up enough money to score. That was a day to forget: out there on the footpath boiling in the frigging sun all day, ready to grab people and throttle them until they dropped money in his hat. It wasn’t like he was begging, for Christ’s sake. He was an artist. It was art they’d be supporting. Jesus, people paid thousands for some painting to hang on a bloody wall.

  He couldn’t stop his mind wandering. He. imagined a huge drawing of Jim Morrison, a crowd half a dozen thick swarming around him, all oohing and aahing. Purples, yellows-the spotlights, maybe even some lyrics on the top. Put in Jimi Hendrix floating there somewhere too. Bob Marley. A black angel. That was the stuff to get tourists coughing up dough. You never know who’d be walking by on the streets during the summer. Dublin had a name for talent in the music scene. Some big exec from a record company might spot it: hey, we gotta have this guy doing our covers! Or something with a message on it? Save the whales. Just say no. Ah, there were too many iijits out pretending to be real chalkies now. He really should try looking for a steady. If he had a steady number for a job, he could plan. Join a fitness club or something. Get some exercise. Then he could handle it cold turkey. Not that he actually had a habit or needed to worry. It’d be no sweat when the time came. All it took…

  Something caught in his throat and he began coughing. The bloody city was full of dust and dirt. He looked up through the yellow light at the sky. Buildings going down, new ones being put up all over the place. His coughing began to ease and he looked across at the GTI again. Four cars back was the alley leading into a building site with a half-dozen ways out to other laneways and streets. The handles of the plastic bag holding the brick dug into his fingers. His fingertips had gone numb. He moved the bag to the other hand and swung it in short arcs. Its motion gave him strength. He imagined the car window shattering, a shower of glass in slow motion exploding around him. Ten minutes gone. He let two cars pass and stepped out into the street. He couldn’t stop staring at the GTI now. It seemed to move, to float. He put his palm on his chest but his heart thumped harder.

  “Deserved it,” he murmured.

  Mister GTI had been in such a bleeding hurry to get into the pub for last call that he’d parked in a stupid place. He was probably a wheeler-dealer who made money just picking up a phone. Maybe he played the stock market or something. He had holidays in Spain or the States, someplace where all the women have blonde hair and look like models. He looked over the roof of the car at the glass-sheathed building behind it. Christ, he thought, and shuddered. All glass: someone could see out but he couldn’t see in. No, he thought then. If it was dark outside. The lights in the building were on so you could see in and they couldn’t… or was it? The glass held only the violet and yellow of the night street. Even the cleaners’d be gone home now.

  He stepped out of the shadow. In the window opposite he saw himself sliding, misshapen and jerky across its surface, the bag beside him. He felt a sudden rage at his own fear and his weakness. He really should try to get someone else in on these jobs, even if it meant splitting the take and having to do more. Was that perfume still hanging in the air? Leaking out of the bloody car. Bastards have everything they want. He swung the bag and turned as the weight pulled his arm up. The bag rose to its full height overhead, came down with a thump on the hatchback window and fell through.

  The car alarm shrieked. He yanked the bag out of the hole and swung again. It hit dead on. The hole in the glass was the size of a television screen now. The perfume coming out of the hole in the clouded window stung high up in his nose. He grabbed the leather jacket and threw it to the ground. His fingers scrabbled at the limit of his arm’s reach for the Walkman. He leaned in until his feet came off the pavement. A camera too. Must have been under the coat. The alarm’s shrieking seemed to be lighting up the whole street, knifing into his brain. The tennis racquets came out handy enough. He used one to tap out more glass. Headlights turned into the street. He scooped up the jacket, stuffed the Walkman and the camera into it and held the racquets over the bundle. Someone shouted from far off as he entered the alley. It swallowed most of the alarm’s shrieking. He kept going. This bit was a kick in itself. He was proud of how he could still run. The close, thick air rubbed against his face. He was grinning. The alarm began to fade behind him.

  Minogue was massaging his feet in the kitchen when the beeper went off. He closed his eyes, rubbed his face and swore before plucking it from his belt and clicking it off. It was half past one.

  Kathleen tripped down the top of the stairs, her dress over her arm.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  Minogue looked up from the pager.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  He went upstairs and changed while Kathleen filled a plastic bag with a sandwich, a banana, two biscuits and two tins of soda water. He picked up the beeper, looked again at the dot-matrix display flowing across the face and plotted his shortest route to the canal. At least he’d travel in style. He reversed his new car, a Citroen with electric everything and the new-car smell as potent as ever, out onto the road. He yawned most of the journey to Donnybrook where he nicked a red light at fifty-five, slowed a little for the bend and sped up again along Morehampton Road. He was awake and even alert in plenty of time to flout the no-right-turn at Leeson Street bridge. A satisfying rasp of tires came to him over the rush of night air in from the sunroof. He crossed Baggot Street bridge and parked under the trees where a small crowd stood. The yellow plastic cordon tape was up already.

  Kilmartin was on him as he stepped out of the car.

  “How’s James. Long time no see.”

  Kilmartin yawned and peered in the window behind Minogue.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “Hard to miss that UFO of yours there. How do you figure out all those fecky-doo buttons on the dash there? Anyway. Looks like Molly beat us to it. Jeepers
creepers, why’d we buy those beepers?”

  Minogue saw that Malone already had gloves on.

  “Howiya, Tommy,” he said. “Long here?”

  “Five minutes,” replied Malone. Kilmartin nodded at the gloved hands.

  “You didn’t jump in for a swim and look already, did you, Molly?”

  “No. I taped it off. Waiting for the lights. It’s a woman. I called the Sub Aqua.”

  Kilmartin turned on his heel and made a slow examination of the street.

  “Yeah,” said Malone. He nodded at a couple sitting on a bench being interviewed by a Garda. The girl was shivering.

  “That pair there. It was the girl saw her first. Green stuff on it, weeds and things.”

  Tings, thought Minogue. Gree-an.

  “They better get married after that carry-on,” Malone added. “He’d dropped the hand.”

  “What?” asked Kilmartin.

  “He had his hand in her knickers when she saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “The body.” Malone had left just enough of a pause to suggest humour to Minogue.

  “Was that all then?” asked the Chief Inspector.

  “Hard to say. He might’ve gone the whole hog if she hadn’t started screaming-”

  “I didn’t mean that!” barked Kilmartin. “I meant if she saw or heard anything in the bloody canal!”

  Solemn-faced yet, Malone shook his head.

  “I just had a few questions with them,” he murmured. “Then I let what’s-his-face get on with an interview. The uniform from Harcourt Street. Fallon.”

  Kilmartin looked up and down the banks. Streetlights played on the sluggish waters under the trees, themselves looming, black masses darker than the night sky. Minogue smelled beery breath from the gawkers. He looked at the banks and spotted small pieces of styrofoam, coloured and slick things he took to be plastic bags. Kilmartin was talking.

  “Why’s there not more of her on the surface, I’d like to know.” He grasped the railing leading up to the boards which formed the lock’s foot-bridge.

  “She drifted maybe,” said Malone. “The hair got caught in the lock. Then the undercurrent pulled the feet and the legs in tight?”

  Minogue noted Kilmartin’s expression. Malone might well be right. A body in water often floated almost upright. Kilmartin was looking from light to light.

  “Several lights out of commission,” said Minogue. “It shouldn’t be so dark here.”

  “Gurriers no doubt,” Kilmartin grunted. “Pegging rocks at the street-lamps. Is this news? Dublin’s fair city, my arse. Any sign of our crew yet?”

  “Here they are now,” said Minogue. Kilmartin looked over the other side of the lock-gate. A cascade of water arched from the brimming canal below his size twelve brogues and splattered far below. He turned back to Minogue and looked over his shoulder at the crowd.

  “Get the lights up,” he said to Malone. “Video. Pronto.”

  “Damn,” Kilmartin went on. “Wouldn’t you know it? I have to water the horse.”

  Minogue yawned as he made a quick survey of the scene, and then made his way through the crowd. Air thick with the smell of the canal seemed to settle in his lungs. There were about two dozen gawkers now. He searched the faces close to him. An intense light flared suddenly beside him before it shifted down over the water. He turned to find Paddy Dillon, a Cavan man known for wearing his tweed jacket every working day of the year. The cut of Dillon’s jacket had become misshapen by his constant storage of batteries, clips, bolts, tapes and tools. Dillon hefted the camera onto his shoulder.

  “How’s Paddy.”

  “Ah, Matt, me oul standby. Steady, boy. Struggling, but steady.”

  “Close again tonight, Paddy.”

  “Aye, surely!” Dillon’s accent gave his voice a plaintive tone. “Close isn’t it, now. It must be the weather we get for throwing in our lot with a united Europe. Oh, yes. I must say now that I can do without this degree of heat. Yes, I can.”

  Minogue gave Dillon’s tweed jacket a lingering glance but Dillon was already absorbed in something else.

  “Run up and down the banks first, Paddy. Anybody moves off from the crowd, get a good look, will you? We’ll be on the prowl.”

  Malone led Dillon down the bank.

  The quartz light turned the black water khaki. The hair was too blonde to be natural, Minogue thought. Just below the surface, the face and neck looked phosphorescent in the glare. The shoulders were covered. He began to move through the gawkers.

  “What’s the story here, Chief?” The query came from one of a trio of men in their twenties. All three bore the tired, blurry expressions of men who had been drinking.

  “There’s somebody under the water,” said Minogue. “For an undue period of time, if you take my meaning. Has a Guard taken your names yet?”

  “Jases, no! Sure I’m only walking by on me way to get a taxi. What would you, you know?”

  Minogue had his notebook out.

  “To be sure,” he said. “But we have procedures, now. Naturally ye’d want to help.”

  The questions came automatically. Minogue knew the pub the men cited. He squinted at the three in turn while they spoke. The alarmed righteousness in their voices grated on him less because of its boozy earnestness than because it sounded exactly banal enough to be the truth. Instead of listening closely to the men, the Inspector found himself following the canal back inland in his mind’s eye. Fed from the River Shannon, it entered the city of Dublin channelled along by terraced houses and blocks of flats, past derelict warehouses and sheds. He thought of the grassy banks out by Crumlin, the skinny kids swimming by the locks years ago. Portobello, the pillars.

  One of the men was getting agitated. He had remembered talking to the barman at exactly ten o’clock. Ten, wasn’t it, Lar, he kept saying to one of the others. Ten, right? Ruygh, Lar, waznit? Kilmartin would goad Malone plenty if he heard a Dublin accent like that. Minogue told him to calm down. He didn’t bother to ask him why he appeared so frantic to reassure a Guard.

  Here in the south city centre, the canal water idled in the shade of trees. The architectural glacier which had begun to grind through Dublin in the early sixties had left the city pitted with office buildings so ugly that they absorbed light and space from the streets they had been driven into. Many of the most ferociously insipid of those buildings had been deposited by the canal. Pockets of older houses still remained by its banks, however, and several times over the years, the Inspector had noted the glossy red doors and the restored brickwork, the Saabs and the freshly painted railings. Sunday supplement style or not, he commended people for wanting to live here by the canal. Along with the daily ebb and flow of office workers and cars, they had soaring rates of burglary and car theft to contend with for their troubles.

  “…and then I switched to the rum and Cokes. That was at last call, right, Lar?”

  Minogue eyed Lar who gave him a tired smile and shrugged.

  “So then we were sort of wondering where we’d go, you know? I was all on for getting a burger. Remember, Lar?”

  Minogue scratched at his scalp with his pencil and stared out over the man’s head into the shadows beyond the lock. He remembered stopping the car by the canal bank some weeks ago to eye a nearly completed block of apartments by Percy Place. Sharp, aggressive corners, he recalled; windows in odd places and green-shaded glass; a lot of industrial-looking metalwork. Within a mile of where he now stood, the canal emptied into the docks where the River Liffey met Dublin Bay. Few craft came inland through those locks any more. Barges which had ferried Guinness and turf were decades disappeared from the canal, and aside from the few pleasure craft, the trickle of passenger traffic on the canal came from sporadic efforts to restore barges enough to get a licence to run cruise-and-booze trips between locks.

  Episodic clean-ups had dredged up disheartening and marvellous tons of scrap from the canal. A youth group had found a 1957 Triumph motorbike in the canal some years a
go and restored it to working order. A badly rusted rifle thought to have been thrown in during the Civil War had been placed in the museum. More people decried the degradation of the canal year by year. Something would have to be done. Minogue noted the same words cropping up in the Letters to the Editor: architectural rape; heritage; dastardly. There had been a symposium on the rebirth of the canal system, proposals of strict controls on planning permission, keen talk of demolishing some of the grosser buildings, of a rebirth.

  “So there we are,” said Lar. “That’s how we got here.”

  Minogue looked from face to face. They looked like schoolboys caught in a prank. One of them was swaying slightly. Someone stifled a belch. The Inspector let his eyes linger on the one who appeared most drunk. Then he checked his notes by asking one of the men the same questions about what he had been drinking. He eyed Lar, their erstwhile leader. They weren’t planning to drive home, were they? Christ, no-no way! Lar was very emphatic. His cohorts shook their heads a lot and murmured. Minogue checked their addresses and telephone numbers again. He eyed them again and let them go. He watched the lights playing on the surface of the water.

  Minogue had walked the canal banks some weeks ago with his daughter, Iseult. It had been after a lunch when she had asked him some very odd questions about when he and Kathleen were courting. He had watched insects humming in the green light over the water while his daughter talked about her work. Lulled into a dreamy state by the lunch and the summer heat, he had fancied the stately passage of a barge as it glided by Pale towns and pastures of two hundred years ago. Over the low roar of traffic he even heard the ladies murmuring to one another under their parasols, the horse’s soft clop on the tow-path, the occasional calls of the bargee.

  Minogue yawned and began to cast around for a ranking uniformed Guard. He caught sight of a sergeant. Callinan had a brother in HQ in the Park. He headed down the bank toward him and shook hands. Callinan, Donal Callinan, tugged at his ear and shifted his weight. His gaze stayed on the banks while he listened to the Inspector.