The good life imm-5

by John Brady

  Minogue dropped the head-set and went into the hall.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t pull that stunt again, Tommy. I thought he was going to go by on us.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We’d be nowhere if he’d clammed up.”

  Malone’s frown, his downcast glance, suggested defiant contrition to Minogue. The detective’s head came up and he smiled.

  “Feels good though,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

  Minogue grinned back.

  “You’ve more in common with the Killer than either you or he would like to admit.”

  “I want a word with him,” said Malone. “Lenehan. With the tape off though.”

  “Can’t do that, Tommy.”

  “I’m not going to put the heavy word on him or anything.”

  Minogue eyed him.

  “That’s right. You’re not, Tommy.”

  “Just a bit of advice for him? A minute?”

  Minogue continued to give Malone the eye.

  “I’ll be listening in then. I’ll scrub the tape for one minute. Don’t mess with your good luck, Tommy. And get John Murtagh out of the room. He shouldn’t have to carry anything.”

  The Inspector returned to the monitoring room. Murtagh gave a blank look at the glass as he left the room. Minogue put his hand over the recording button.

  “Did you find the number then?” Lenehan asked.

  Malone stared at him.

  “What number? I came back to tell you something.”

  Lenehan blinked and drew in his legs. Malone leaned over the table between them.

  “Do you know why you’re in here, Lolly?”

  “I got nailed, that’s why. Bad luck. Am I missing out on something deep here?”

  “Why you’re in such a bleeding mess, is what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do as a matter of fact. I was set up by the cops. Is that news around here or something?”

  “No, no, no. You just don’t get it, do you?”

  “Tell me then, know-it-all.”

  “It’s because you have no discipline, man-”

  “Aw, fuck, is this school or something? What the hell are you on about? Discipline?”

  “You had to slip up. That’s just how it is for iijits. You think you’re smart, that you get away with the odd trick. A lot of tricks even. All you gougers are the same. You’re going away for a long time, pal. And if I find out that you did for Mary-”

  “I fucking didn’t! Who’s the iijit around here now, that’s what I’d like to know!”

  “Or if you know who did, or if you are covering for someone who did…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be all over you, Lolly. You’re messing with me, I’ll fucking land on you.” Lenehan let his legs out again. He nodded as he drew on the cigarette.

  “Oh, now I get it. This is personal, man. In that case, I hope Terry fucks you over, man. I really do.”

  Minogue noticed that a line had appeared on Malone’s cheek.

  “Well, seeing as you brought up the matter. You know Terry, right?”

  A smile flickered around the corners of Lenehan’s lips. “Yeah, I heard of Terry.”

  “This is a message for anyone visiting you. Leave my brother alone. You got that?”

  Lenehan blew a very flawed smoke-ring. “It’s a free country,” he said. “What can I do?”

  Malone stood.

  “A bit late to be asking me, isn’t it?”

  He was on his feet and moving before he was certain it wasn’t a dream. His heart raced and now the weakness which followed the moment’s terror was flooding up from his knees. It was his own breath he heard snorting out. The dog stood off with its nose jabbing the air left and right. He took a step toward the tree and eyed the owner. The man didn’t want to look him in the eye.

  “Sea-musss! Sea-mus!”

  He looked back at the dog. It was a mongrel, but mostly spaniel with those big eyes, a yapper.

  “Fuck off now, dog,” he muttered. “Or else.”

  And the dog trotted off. Smart dog. The rest of the morning began to arrive to him: steady traffic on the Main Road through the Park, the sun over the trees. He tried to swallow. It was like swallowing sand. He looked at his watch: half-eight! He’d actually slept? Right here, in the dark, out in a wood in Phoenix Park? It was the dog’s panting woke him before the calls of its owner.

  His back was as stiff as a board. It felt like he’d been fighting with a thousand video Ninja madmen in his sleep. But he was alive, he was standing up. He had made it-whatever that meant. He found his cigarettes and lit one. Two left. He counted back. He must have been awake until three o’clock or even four. If he had fallen asleep with a fag in his hand and then woken up with that bloody dog lifting its leg on him! Get a laugh out of that someday.

  The first pulls on the cigarette had him light-headed and hawking. His stuff lay crumpled on the ground. The extra shirt he’d tried to cover himself with, the other jeans. His head began to clear. He remembered walking out to the road just to be near the lights for a while. Fragments from his dreams came back to him. Dreams about animals: hippos, ostriches, lions escaping from the bleeding zoo.

  He spotted two joggers running along next to the Main Road. He imagined himself there with them. He could still run. Maybe if he just changed his name-how did you go about that, anyway? Stupid idea. It’d cost a lot of money for starters, and then he’d lose his dole. If he could only slip out there into Cabra or somewhere, get a place, find a bit of work. Grow a beard. They’d never find him. He watched the joggers until they descended through the trees into a hollow.

  He ground the butt into the clay. There was no Coke left. He bit into a biscuit but the taste on his lips turned him off before he even chewed. He tossed it into the trees. He’d left the chalk drawings all wrapped up in plastic bags at the back of a demolished building down the quays. Why the hell had he asked the Ma to bring those stupid drawings anyway? Rolling them out on some footpath next to Grafton Street, trying to get a few quid in his hat? Everyone in the bleeding city could see him there. What had he been thinking about?

  The panic began to creep up on him. What the hell could he do, just sit here waiting for things to sort themselves out? He looked about at the empty Coke tins, the cigarette butts, the plastic bags of clothes. He’d often passed tinker camps by the side of the road and wondered how they could live like that, with clothes and rubbish thrown all over the place. He eased himself up slowly and began gathering the bags. He’d leave them hidden near here somewhere. It was about a twenty minute walk to the Gates. Once he got close to the gates, he’d make a quick dart out onto the quays. Down Stoneybatter toward the Markets, get a bit of something to eat there. A cup of tea at least, buy fags.

  He stepped out from under the trees and headed across the fields. The Wellington monument came up out of the trees ahead like the top of a rocket. Either the hunger or the cigarette had made him alert. He kept his eyes on the rooftops and the spires he could see over the trees.

  The stiffness in his body had eased by the time the Park gates came in sight. He had made it, he’d kept himself in one piece and even managed to sleep a few hours. So what if he was going to be knackered by the afternoon. Through the traffic he saw a stand with a big board on it. He waited his chance and ran across. It was a map of the Park. He studied the roads and traced where he had come from. His eyes fixed on a word in a box to the side of the map: Garda. Cop headquarters were back there, opposite the Zoo! Right in Dublin, right under their noses. He studied the map again. The Hollow, some place over the far end of the Park called The Wilderness. This place was even bigger than he had thought. How come he’d never known that?

  The noise of an accelerating motorbike startled him. He walked fast by the gates to the Park. Soon the city’s buildings began falling into place alongside him. He realized that he had been almost running. He knew what he would do. No way was anyone going to corner him or try to put one over on him. He was going to stay fr
ee, like an outlaw.

  THIRTEEN

  Minogue put down the phone, drummed hard with his biro and then pitched it in the air. Kilmartin looked over. “What’s the matter with-Hello? Hello? Yes. I’m trying to get in contact with someone who’d know about modelling agencies. Yes. Well, that’s the problem now, this one is gone out of business.”

  Kilmartin’s unseeing gaze roamed about the squadroom while he listened.

  “Exactly,” the Chief Inspector went on in a pleasing tone. “I’m out of Dublin a while and I wanted to look up a person I used to know. Yes.”

  He winked at Minogue.

  “Oh, yes. A very nice girl she was. That’s right-What?”

  Kilmartin’s face darkened and he slid off the edge of the desk.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Minogue heard the line go dead. Kilmartin dropped the receiver and stared at it.

  “Gave me the P.O. Did you ever hear the like? The nerve of him!”

  “Maybe it was the genuine article, James. A real modelling agency.”

  Kilmartin picked the receiver up and laid it gently on the phone.

  “Huh. Any luck, you?”

  Minogue shook his head. Kilmartin pulled a face.

  “Sure, there’s no jobs in the country,” he said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if a girl’d turn to you-know-what. The trade.”

  The Chief Inspector’s eyes closed. The fart, a prolonged one, reminded Minogue of a rusty door-hinge. Kilmartin opened his eyes again.

  “At least inflation’s holding steady,” he whispered.

  Minogue made for the room-divider toward Malone.

  “Are you there, Tommy? Let’s try that place.”

  “Which one?” Kilmartin called out. “That ‘Just You’ one?”

  “That’s the one, Jim. On George’s Street. It’s the only place so far with an address. The rest are just phone numbers: ‘We’ll meet you at so and so’s.’”

  Kilmartin lumbered up behind Minogue.

  “Telephone girls, hah?” He yawned. “They’re getting to be like the banks. Pick up the phone, by God, and they make money. Not a stroke of work, real work as you and I would understand about.”

  “Stroking’s hard enough work,” said Malone as he wrote. “If it’s done right.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. Let me tell you, I know fellas do their day’s work on the phone. And they’re well paid too. Sure, that’s not the real world, I tell them. Know what they tell me when I ask them what the hell goes on in the line of real work in those bloody glasshouse-looking places? Like those efforts made of glass you can’t even use to look through? Christ, they’d blind you, and you trying to see where you’re going.”

  “You can see out but you can’t see in, Jimmy.”

  “Oh, a genius amongst the common rabblement here. Thanks. Well, anyway. Do you know what they say, cocked up in the chairs in the lounge with the Jag parked outside and the boxes of wine and the daughter married to the doctor, etcetera, etcetera?”

  Minogue was wary of another fart. He beckoned to Malone.

  “The suspense is killing me, Jim,” he muttered.

  “‘This is the Information Age, Jim,’ they say. La-di-da. Like I’m a gom just in from the bog, you know? ‘The borders are coming down, Jim.’ ‘Jim, you only have to be in the right place at the right time.’ ‘Timing is everything, Jim.’ ‘Jim, the basic ingredient for making money is time.’ All paper money, says I. Tricks. Magic money with nothing behind it. The eighties gone mad: all money, no value.”

  “Well, Christ,” he added as Minogue and Malone made for the door, “says I to one of them, a fella I know well and would ordinarily take halfway seriously, they were wrong about the oldest profession in the world. Do you get it?”

  Malone let back the seat and leaned his arm out the window. Minogue drew a squeal out of the tires as he accelerated through the amber light onto the quays.

  “Wouldn’t mind spending the rest of the day up in the Park,” said Malone.

  Minogue looked at the greenery of Phoenix Park as it receded in his rear-view mirror. The Citroen picked up speed. He opened the sunroof completely. The breeze which blew his hair asunder barely stirred Malone’s crew-cut.

  “Were you in the Park for the Pope’s mass there, back whenever?” asked Malone.

  “Kathleen went all right,” murmured the Inspector. “I sort of prefer watching the deer myself.”

  He took in Malone’s turn of the head, the second’s scrutiny.

  “Okay,” he went on. “Tell me how you’d like to work this call now.”

  The car was an oven. He thought about parking it in the shade somewhere, but Malone might not spot it. He looked at his watch. He’d give him ten more minutes. He couldn’t shake scraps of the conversation he’d had yesterday with Iseult out of his head. He checked the stand-by and the charge light again and shoved the phone into the door pocket of the Citroen. The sun was hot on his head, too hot. He turned the ignition and pushed the button to close the sunroof.

  Malone opened the door, climbed in and slammed the door in one fluid movement.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Got something anyway.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah. I let her know right off the bat that I could come in heavy if she wasn’t on the ball here. Swore on a stack of Bibles she had nothing to do with brassers or that.”

  “So why did she give you the come-on over the phone?”

  “She thought I just wanted pictures.”

  “That’s what she has?”

  “Yeah. ‘What sort of a project do you have in mind?’ says she. ‘Project.’ That’s when I flashed the card. Big change. Anyway. So far as I can read between the lines, she’s an agency for models. No actresses or that, just fashion and advertising. It’s a room with fancy chairs and stacks of fake flowers and all. There’s folders like you get when you’re going to get married, photographs and all, with her clients. Models. Nothing wild now. Bikinis is as far as they go. She didn’t know anything about Mary Mullen. I tried the names of the other places we’ve dug up so far. ‘1001 Nights’ got her going. Turned up the nose, admitted she’d heard of it. ‘One of those places that gives the business a bad name.’ ”

  “What do you think then?”

  Malone scratched at his bristly crown.

  “Hard to say. Says she, ‘You have to be very careful these days.’ She’d heard that ‘organized crime’ had moved in and was dragging the profession into the dirt.“

  “‘Profession,” said Minogue.

  “She said she’d thought of getting out of the ‘profession’ but couldn’t do it to her clients.”

  “Is she scared?”

  “Hard to say. She’s happy enough to pass a fella on to someone who does a different kind of photography though.”

  “What’s in it for her?”

  “I reckon she’s in on it somewhere. Far enough out to be able to hold her nose and walk away from any poking we can do. But I bet she gets a backhander for passing someone on to the other end of the business.”

  “Just a front?”

  “No. I saw ads and clippings in the model’s port…what you call it. I suppose she’s legit.”

  “Portfolios.”

  “Well, I got a phone number that we didn’t have before.”

  Minogue started the engine and the Citroen rose up smartly on its suspension.

  “Lift-off,” said Malone. The Inspector worked the car down off the curb.

  “What are we looking at, Tommy?”

  “Pictures. ‘Models.’ Mary Mullen. Prostitution. I don’t know.”

  “Who tossed her place?” asked the Inspector. “What did they want?”

  Malone tapped the door panel.

  “And was she already in the canal when the place was done?”

  Minogue took the phone out of the glove box. Murtagh was back.

  “Thanks, Eilis,” he said. He studied the crowds on South Great George’s Street.

  “Johnner? Me and Tommy
are out here baking away in the car. How’d it go with Lollipop?”

  “Oh, we kept after him but little else came of it. It was Tommy woke him up in earnest.”

  “We’re still working that angle about, er, modelling, John. Did Lenehan spit up any more about this modelling thing?”

  “No. He was talking about dirty pictures, he said.”

  “Of Mary.”

  “Right. That’s the same as he told us earlier on. He didn’t budge on it.”

  Minogue heard the yawn.

  “Book off, John. You’ve been on all night, man. Call after a snooze, will you?”

  There was nothing in the paper. Where would he get hold of yesterday’s? He should get batteries for the Walkman and get some news. He looked around the restaurant. The lunchtime mob had gone and the shoppers and the unemployed and the chancers were sitting around. What was that long-haired bollicks looking at? He got up and stepped out onto the footpath. Probably trying to score a hit, thought he looked the part. Jesus. Did he look that obvious?

  He moved along Capel Street close to the shops. The hamburger and milkshake were moving around like snakes somewhere in his guts. He stopped by the open door of a pub and squinted into the dim interior. A pint of something, anything.

  He ordered a pint of lager and drank half of it in his first draught. The barman eyed him as he loaded the fridges. He could stay here all day just nursing pints, that’d be perfect. He’d be off the streets; he could think, figure out a plan. What was the bloody barman looking at? It felt like the cold lager had slushed around his brain. He looked around the pub at the handful of customers. There were two fellas with aprons from the Markets. A middle-aged guy with his tie loose and his face all rubbery from the drink was moving in on a woman with a tube skirt. She kept trying to laugh him off, crossing her legs and talking to the barman who was trying to ignore her. Maybe there was a reward. He saw himself talking into the phone, a cop at the other end. His eyes came back into focus: he was staring at his face in the mirror. He grabbed his glass but one finger jabbed it. It whirled before falling.

  “Shit,” he hissed.

  “Look here,” the barman said and stood up.