The good life imm-5

by John Brady

  Malone ran his fingers through his hair.

  “What’s the use in giving us the run-around,” he said.

  “Who pimped for Mary, Patricia?” asked Minogue.

  Her mouth stayed open for several seconds. She rolled her eyes and looked away.

  “Who broke into your place?” Malone asked.

  “You’re asking me? Amn’t I supposed to be asking you that?”

  Only her arm moved, Minogue saw, and its arc up to her lips was of such grace and careless accuracy that he could only stare at her. He sat forward and ran his palm across the soft, loose skin on the knuckles of his other hand. Damn, he thought. She thinks she’s a bloody ingenue doing an audition for something. Would she be giving him as much grief if he had taken her down to CDU? He turned his hand over and began rubbing at the palm with his thumb. Tiny flecks of dirt escaped the folds of skin and collected in rolls. He didn’t look up when he spoke to her.

  “Listen, Patricia. We’re trying to work from the inside out here. Mary, her friends, what she did, where she liked to go. What she did or didn’t do that might be connected to what has happened. It’s a lot of stuff. Stuff you might know but you mightn’t think is important. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

  He glanced over. Her eyes had glazed over. She drew on her cigarette. He thought of giving up then. Here was a woman with no criminal record being a substantial pain in the arse to the Guards.

  “People know a lot,” he heard himself say. “They really do. They notice an awful lot, but they need to know something is important before they can drag it out of their memory. You can’t beat it out of people either. Things pop up and you can’t predict them: ‘Yes, she used to do that!’ or ‘Oh, that was the name of the fella she mentioned that night.’ There’s another way that’s less salubrious entirely.”

  “Is this the good cop-bad cop bit now?”

  Minogue thought of Kilmartin.

  “We work from the outside in too, Patricia. It’s like cracking an egg. We go after records, suspects, associates. It’s a bit like crowbarring into somebody’s life, looking all the time for the killer.”

  He engaged her look. She blinked once.

  “But it gets people’s backs up, Patricia.”

  Malone’s mouth twitched and he caught the Inspector’s eye. Minogue rubbed his palm again.

  “Cracking the egg often works though,” he went on. “But it takes time. Sometimes the inside of the egg isn’t hardboiled so it gets messy. Sometimes the egg gets ruined. Ends up on the floor.”

  “Eggs,” she murmured. “I don’t like eggs.”

  “Did Mary seem out of sorts at all the last while?” asked Malone. “Worried, like?”

  “I heard her getting sick last week. She said it was the gargle. She’d been out the night before.”

  “With who?”

  “I dunno.”

  Malone’s eyes had narrowed to slits. He was staring at her.

  “I fucking don’t!” she cried. “I keep on telling you! ‘Who was her boyfriend?’ ‘Who called to the flat for her?’ ‘Who’d she hang around with?’ ‘Why didn’t she talk to you about her life?’ Jesus!”

  “You never knew where she went, what pub or who with?” asked Malone. “Ah, come on now.”

  “Ah, come on yourself! Don’t you get it? I don’t fucking know!”

  Minogue waited for her to lean back against the counter.

  “Okay, Patricia. You saw her last yesterday morning. She was in the kitchen?”

  “Just before eight o’clock, yeah. I was up late.”

  “And you said she hadn’t been to bed.”

  “That’s right. She was just sitting there at the table. Smoking a fag, drinking a cup of tea. Didn’t hear her coming in. She was still dressed from the night before.”

  “How’d she look again?”

  “Tired, that’s how. Looked like she’d been up all night. Shagged.”

  “No remarks about where she’d been, nothing like that?” Malone tried.

  “Nothing. Nothing. I knew better than to ask.”

  Minogue stretched out his legs.

  “Patricia. You’re telling us that Mary kept to herself-”

  “You don’t believe me, do you. You’re thinking, ‘Well, the pair of them were into something, so that’s why she won’t tell us anything.’! Aren’t you? Yes, y’are!”

  Minogue took in the red-rimmed eyes, the blotchy face. She pursed her lips and lifted her cigarette.

  “How long did you share the place with her?”

  “A year and a bit.”

  “Where did she live before she moved in with you?”

  “I don’t know. Some fella maybe.”

  “A fella? Did she ever say his name?”

  “I don’t know! I’m only guessing, that’s all! Jesus! Do you think I used to come home here and start firing questions at her the minute she walked in the door? Sure, she was hardly home, ever.”

  “How long did you know Mary then?”

  “Two years, about. I met her doing a thing for manicuring. She was always good for a laugh. Used to see her the odd time after that. Then about a year and a half back I bumped into her in a pub.”

  “What pub?”

  She curled her lip.

  “I don’t remember. What do you think I am, a computer?”

  “You went into a flat with her,” Minogue said.

  “So? She didn’t tell me her life story.”

  “You knew she worked the trade though,” said Malone. “How?”

  “I found out one night, didn’t I. Met someone. We were talking about people we knew. The usual chatting. I mention Mary and he goes, ‘Is she still at it?’ So I ask her later. She got mad at me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “‘What’s wrong with getting money for it?’ ”

  “Freelance, like?” Malone asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “With the Egans?”

  Minogue didn’t get the outburst he expected. She folded her arms and waved the cigarette around.

  “Look. All I know about them is that she knew one of them. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” repeated Malone. “Why should the person who did this get away with it, Patricia? You’re helping them.”

  “No, I amn’t.”

  “You’re scared,” said Malone. “And it shows. Just like your da.”

  “Drop dead. What do you know about anything?”

  “Mary was your friend, wasn’t she?” said Minogue. She pushed off suddenly from the counter.

  “I told her, and I told her!” she burst out. “She didn’t listen! She wouldn’t!”

  “Wouldn’t what, Patricia?”

  “Ah, Christ, I don’t know! That’s the problem! Can’t you get it through your thick skulls? She wouldn’t tell me! She had all these secrets. I warned her.”

  “About what?”

  She settled back against the counter and looked out the window.

  “So Mary was still on the game,” said Malone.

  “I don’t know. I suppose she was. Maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know.”

  “She had no pimp, you seem to be telling us,” said Minogue. “But you were warning her against something. Was it people you saw back at the flat, people she told you about? People you heard about?”

  “She used the flat as a place to hang her clothes,” she said. “So don’t be asking me again where she spent her time. All I know for sure is that Mary did manicures over at Tresses. There were times I wouldn’t see her for days. A week, even. I was getting tired of it, I tell you. I didn’t like being there on me own. That wasn’t the idea, like.”

  An image came to Minogue: Patricia Fahy poking around amongst Mary’s stuff.

  “Of moving in together, like?”

  “Yeah. It worked out okay, splitting the cost and everything. But you’d want company, you know? I went out with me fella just to have company sometimes.”

  Malone flipped back a page in his
notebook. She glared over at him.

  “He’s my alibi. Isn’t that the word? So’s I don’t have to keep on telling yous I didn’t do it?”

  Malone looked up from his notebook. She returned his glare with a studied pout.

  “Try to think, now, Patricia,” said Minogue. “There must have been people phoning the flat or coming around looking for her. Family, friends-anyone.”

  She looked up at the lampshade.

  “Look,” she said. “Mary told me that the last people she’d want calling around would be family. She told me she had no brothers or sisters. She said her oul lad was a bastard. She wasn’t keen to talk about her ma. I thought it was kind of, you know, strange, like. But I wasn’t going to be nosy like, was I? She wanted her own life, fair enough, like. That a crime?”

  She dabbed her cigarette in the ashtray and then held it under her thumb. Minogue let his cheeks balloon with a held breath. He imagined questions floating around trapped in his mouth. How did she know? What else did she know? What was she leaving out?

  “Well, there was one iijit,” she murmured as she released her thumb from the cigarette. “Yeah, now I remember… I mean, I don’t know if he’s…”

  “Who?”

  “Just a, well, Mary called him a gobshite. I don’t even know his real name. He showed up at the door once. She answered, that’s why I forgot until now. Yeah. Skinny fella. What’s that artist’s name, the famous one, he’s dead? Leo… Really famous, like?”

  “Leonardo da Vinci?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A fella called for Mary,” said Malone. “A fella by the name of Leonardo da Vinci?”

  “What are you looking at? I told you I didn’t know his name. Mary said she knew him years ago. He must have found out where she lived. Scruffy-looking type. No wonder she wasn’t keen on hanging around the likes of him.”

  “Scruffy-looking,” said Malone. “Skinny fella? What else about him?”

  “Average height. Got the feeling off him he thought he was something, but he wasn’t. A gobshite. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was into something, you know.”

  “Criminal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he stay over at the flat?” Malone asked.

  “It was Mary answered the door. She was pissed-off he was there. I came back later on and he was gone. So was she.”

  “Not what you thought of as her boyfriend then,” said Minogue. She shrugged.

  “Said that he was a gobshite, didn’t she?”

  The air seemed almost watery now. Minogue moved to the edge of the chair and tested his biro on a page of his notebook.

  “To your knowledge, Patricia, did Mary take drugs?”

  Instead of the sarcasm he expected, Minogue’s question drew silence. He looked up from the notebook. She was staring at the ashtray and biting her lip.

  “Okay, Patricia,” he said. “We’ll finish off here for now. Think back more to this Leonardo da Vinci. When he came to the flat, a bit more on what he looked like?”

  She glanced from Minogue to Malone and back, but her eyes were blank.

  The air was still full of dust and glare. The sun’s orb seemed to have broadened. The Inspector hoped that somewhere behind this tarnished air there was a more proper blue than Dublin was stuck with today. His aches had localized themselves to his neck and shoulders. Malone’s hair stood out in slick bristles. He finessed his way through the hordes spilling out off the paths by O’Connell Bridge and let the Nissan find its way down the quays toward Kingsbridge.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I can’t tell. Is it shock or is she just plain scared shitless?”

  “Well, there was no point in trying to come the heavy.”

  “I just couldn’t figure out how much she was lying. I mean, I’m not totally down on her, like. The Egans are animals.”

  “Being pregnant,” said Minogue.

  “What?”

  “Being pregnant. That was the fuse lit, I’m thinking.”

  Malone looked over.

  “Tried to get the father to wear it and he wouldn’t?”

  “Maybe, yes.”

  “So she laid it on the line for him, he loses the head and clocks her? I wonder how many fellas Mary had on the go.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll know quicker than we thought. This Liam Hickey that Eilis got from the alias search looks good. He grew up two roads over from Mary. We’ll know better when we get back to the Squad.”

  Minogue let his eyes sweep along the buildings and the derelict sites turned car-parks along the Liffey Quays. Cheap furniture from hucksters’ shopfronts cluttered the path. He had a hard time remembering what had preceded the rash of boarded-up buildings awaiting demolition. For every tarted-up pub and pastiche of Georgian facades, there was a half-dozen scutty shops flogging junk. Grime, noise, carelessness. They passed Capel Street bridge and the Inspector saw that the tide on the Liffey was beginning to ebb. Soon the people lined up along the quays for their buses home would have the slimy walls of the Liffey banks and the mantle of lumpy masses to either side of the riverbed for company.

  The Four Courts, which hid behind its stately facade much of the drab bulk of the State’s legal apparatus, slid by the two policemen. With its legions of barristers and solicitors and hard-faced, chain-smoking defendants and their families awaiting their turn in court, the place had always depressed the hell out of Minogue. Though rebuilt after its almost complete devastation during the Civil War, its echoing warren of hallways and rooms smelled of futility from the first day Minogue stepped into a courtroom there. People got lost in there, he believed, and not just criminals either. He didn’t want to be one of them.

  The Nissan slowed for roadworks. In an alley next to a locked and boarded church whose name he couldn’t remember, Minogue spotted a man and a woman swaying and arguing. Both had red, swollen faces and tousled hair. Two bottles stood next to them on the footpath. If he hits her, Minogue thought, they’d have to get out. Couldn’t avoid it. Malone was talking.

  “Sorry, Tommy?”

  “I know Patricia Fahy has no record, but do you want to bet she’s on the game too?”

  Minogue shrugged.

  “Doyle can’t help us much there, he says.”

  Mary Mullen had been pregnant. Pressure on her, a countdown, running out of time. How much did an abortion cost? Did she want one? Some ultimatum, he thought. Blackmail? Her flat had been trashed. An address book, an appointment book. Did anyone write love letters these days? Photos, mementos, letters. Leonardo da Vinci, someone she’d known growing up. Also connected to the Egans?

  Malone inched the car by the yellow and white oil drums. They had a free run to the Squad car-park. Kilmartin was writing on the notice-boards. Minogue stood back and studied them. The timetable for the last week of Mary Mullen’s life was in Murtagh style: bright green and red. Minogue felt something drop in his stomach when he saw the blank spaces. He rubbed his head and looked again.

  “Anything?” barked Kilmartin.

  “Nothing that’d matter right now. Any news on this Leonardo Hickey fella?”

  “A car dispatched to the house. He’s not home. I have his record here in front of me. A proper little shite, so he is. Break and enter, possession of stolen property. Drunk and disorderly-he was in a crowd that wrecked a patrol car outside a pub three years ago.”

  “What’s under ‘Associates’?”

  “Nothing, oul stock.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Divil damn the bit. Hickey is a fifteen-watt gouger. But you never know.”

  “Give us some good news, can’t you? Any yield on the canal bank stuff yet?”

  “Four hundred and fifty two tons of shit, six thousand tons of-”

  “All right, Jim. I get the idea. What about Mullen’s taxi?”

  “Shag-all. Yet. They’re still swabbing and poking it. Don’t hold your breath, I say. That’s why I started the door-to-door already. Murtagh is up to his neck building up likelies from the files. Ther
e was a fella released the day before, finished a sentence for rape. He’s chasing that one this very minute.”

  “No fix yet on whether Mary worked after quitting the Tresses place?”

  “Wouldn’t I tell you if there was?”

  Minogue squeezed the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, what about this Egan thing?”

  “Christ, the questions being fired at me! Amn’t I after telling you that I talked to Mick Hand in Serious Crimes? We know her there, says he. She used to come and go with one of the Egans. So I try to finagle the latest surveillance they have on the Egans, see if we can place her for the last while. They’re still looking. Some of the stuff is not in the computer yet. ‘We’re a bit behind in the updates, Jim,’ says he. ‘Volume of stuff,’ etcetera. Sure, says I. The old story: we’ll milk our own cows. Anyway. He’ll have them done up and copied for us by the morning. He’ll bring them along to our pow-wow.”

  Minogue flopped into a chair. Kilmartin jammed the cap on his marker and threw it toward Murtagh’s desk. All watched it skitter across the desktop and fall to the floor.

  “Christ,” said the Chief Inspector. He cocked his head and looked at Malone.

  “Don’t you love it, Molly? No witnesses. Nobody saw anything, heard anything. And this is a high-traffic area in the middle of Dublin! Gurriers broke all the bloody lights by the banks. Only we know the locks are closed, we’d be faced with the bloody prospect that she went in anywhere along the canal, back up to Crumlin or somewhere- Christ, the River Shannon even! We don’t know where the hell this Mary Mullen spent her time. We don’t know for certain where she was killed, even. Did she have a falling-out with her fella? How the hell do we know she even had a fella? Her own father and mother hardly knew her this last few years.”

  Malone shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall.

  “Come on, lads, for God’s sake,” said Kilmartin. “A whole heap of rubbish, a filthy scene, no sign of a weapon, a girl with a record, a family that fights like cats and dogs…”

  Minogue stretched out his legs. Kilmartin turned toward him.

  “What about this flatmate? Surely to God she knows more about the bloody person she was living with. Didn’t they have friends in common? Is this Fahy one on the game too and only letting on? Logic now, lads, logic! Almighty God, can’t Doyle and the rest of them in Vice come up with more? Matt?”