The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  Bresnahan thought for a moment. Like most bold new initiatives, the Power plan sounded marvelous, and she wondered why it had not been thought of before. But of course Frost had said it had. “Isn’t Chile saddled by some atrocious dictatorship?”

  Frost smiled and nodded, carefully setting the brimming glass before him. “It was, when the restructuring occurred. Which is the point. It’s something that only a Paddy, who had no political ‘debts,’ as it were, could have gotten through. Somebody who was independent, new to politics, and enjoyed widespread popular support. And then not without a lot of help and by referendum.”

  Bresnahan nodded. Although a fait accompli, the 1992 SEA was still being hotly debated all over the country. But, say he had gotten the Irish people to accept his program and it worked, Power would have been canonized. He would have solved the central problem that was causing so much hardship and emigration. “What happens to the proposal now? Did it die with Power?”

  Frost shook his head. “Not in the least.” His eyes snapped up at hers. “Do you want Eire Bank’s opinion, or my own?”

  “Your own, surely. We’re being candid here, are we not?”

  Frost returned her smile, then raised his chin to look away, as though contemplating the future. He waited while she studied his severely handsome and chiseled features. “That in this, as in other matters, Paddy was a genius. A kind of seer. It’s undoubtedly an idea whose time has come and just might make the difference between Ireland’s foundering on the rocks of 1992 or our sailing off into prosperity. Without debt we could respond to the challenges of the SEA. With it…” Frost shook his head.

  “And that Paddy Power dead is probably more valuable to the Irish people than Paddy Power alive.” Frost glanced at Bresnahan to see if she was shocked. “In this situation. Sure, Paddy had personal force and charisma. And genius, that much is history. But what is also established was his record as a”—Frost looked away, as though having to choose his words carefully—“do-gooder and…crank. It was not for nothing he called somebody like Mossie Gladden his doctor and friend. And the Power Fund!”

  Frost returned his gaze to Bresnahan, and his eyes were suddenly glassy with contempt. “All that house-building and giveaway to people who are too weak, meek, or ignorant to help themselves. Encouraging them to”—he searched for a term—“procreate, for Jesus’ sake. He was just compounding our problem with them through further, innumerable generations. More good would have come had he taken the money out and burned it.

  “No”—Frost shook his head once, as though deciding with finality—“Paddy might have sold the program to the nation, but its implementation would have been botched. Politics is a fine art that is not learned late in life.”

  “And now?” Bresnahan encouraged.

  Frost’s eyebrows danced once, and he even smiled slightly. “The future of Paddy’s proposal?”

  Bresnahan nodded.

  “Why, it’s bright, of course. Now that it is in more capable hands. Done right, I can see it becoming a kind of…memorial to him, who was so much loved for his simplicity and generosity. You know, a kind of national paean to Saint Paddy the Second. We Irish are such a contrary people. We love nobody more than a—”

  “Martyr,” she suggested.

  “—and a man who—think of it—championed gross, unlimited debt, and then founded a bank to profit by the borrowing. Suddenly as rich as Croesus, he would have turned around and redistributed our money according to his own plan of how things should be. And for that he will be loved.”

  Which wasn’t quite fair, thought Bresnahan, according to Power’s history, which had been well documented in the press. Power had begun his fortune with Eire Bank, but made the lion’s share of it abroad with the Yanks and the Japanese. And then there were plenty of rich people the world over who never gave other human beings a passing thought. Also, Power had donated his time and worked for the poor, often with pick and shovel for weeks on end.

  “But who, then, if not Mr. Power?”

  Heated on her tangerine legs that were crossed in front of her, Frost let his smile climb her body and settle on her lips. “Who else but the sanest and most deft of the Irish politicians? Who is himself a self-made millionaire and throughout his career has been all for privatization and free enterprise. Who began his career with Paddy and after whom Paddy even named his first son.”

  “Sean Dermot O’Duffy,” said Bresnahan. The man who through his toady Fergus Farrell had as much as named the way Power had died. Or had been murdered.

  “Certain details, of course, would have to be changed.”

  “What about the write-down? Is that one of the details that will be changed?”

  Frost’s smile fell slightly, and he released her hand. “May I ask you something and expect a candid answer? Where did you get that?”

  “Another shareholder in Eire Bank. How many are you, by the way? Is there a list of shareholders available?”

  Frost said nothing, only regarded her.

  “What share is yours?”

  “Nell Power told you,” he said.

  “Will she inherit Mr. Power’s share?”

  “I don’t believe you. Nell would never—”

  “Ask her.”

  “She’s here?” Frost’s eyes strayed to the sun room that they could survey through French doors.

  Bresnahan thought of another question that McGarr had asked her to put to Frost. “What about lending as love? Power’s idea or yours?”

  Elaborately Frost unbuttoned his suit coat and spread the lapels. Turning his body, he looked down at himself. “See anything you need the loan of?”

  Bresnahan laughed. He had a sense of humor, which rather softened her hard opinion of him.

  “My turn with the questions. What about dinner tonight? Away from here. I know a hotel in Kenmare with a three-star Michelin rating. Their other accommodations are more agreeable still.”

  Bresnahan tried to look flattered, but it was all too apparent from Frost’s easy delivery that he was used to receiving a yes. “Why don’t you start by asking my name.”

  “Ruth—”

  “Bresnahan.”

  Frost said the name over to himself. “I know some Bresnahans. Grew up with a family by that name here in Sneem. There’s Tom still hereabouts. He has a daughter with the—”

  “Guards,” she supplied. “Detective Inspector Ruth Bresnahan, actually. I’m helping Chief Superintendent McGarr.”

  Frost looked down at his drink, then pushed himself away from the bar. Suddenly his visage was somber. “Ruth—can you take a bit of advice? I’ve asked your boss, and I’m asking you now. Don’t make too much of this. Paddy is dead, and all the country will want to know is that he died well. This conference can speed the process along. Don’t get in its way, it’ll mow you down.”

  At the reception desk of the Waterville Lake Hotel, McGarr seized Dr. Maurice J. (“Call me Mossie”) Gladden by the arm of his greatcoat and pulled him around so he was facing the clerk. He then shoved him into the high counter. Gladden was also wearing his felt hat.

  “Is this the man who dropped off the plastic sack for Nell Power?” McGarr demanded. The one that had been filled with photocopies of Paddy Power’s note cards, he meant.

  The young woman’s eyes surveyed Gladden’s swollen and split nose, his blackened eyes. “It is not. Don’t you think I would’ve told you it was Dr. Gladden, had it been him? Dr. Gladden is the most…notable man in the area.

  “Did he do this to you?” she asked Gladden, who turned and looked down on McGarr with a predatory smile.

  “Had he asked me, I could have told him as much. But he insisted on this.” Gladden pointed to his nose. “A classic case of police brutality, I’d say. Might I have the use of your phone? I’d like to ring up my solicitor, Kieran Coyne. I believe I should have a word with him.”

  McGarr looked away. A bad investigation with government interference from the start was rapidly growing worse. He had hoped to cover
any charge of police brutality with a thick patch of Gladden’s guilt. “How was the man different?”

  The clerk, bending to the phone, did not answer.

  “Shorter, taller, smaller? Younger, older? Is the coat the same? You can answer my questions here or in Dublin.” And McGarr was angry. If it hadn’t been Gladden who had dropped off the sack of photocopies, then who?”

  The clerk turned her back to McGarr and spoke into the mouthpiece.

  Somebody behind him said, “Phone up our own Guards. They’ll sort that man out.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “Some pug, by the look of him.”

  McGarr’s suit coat, shirt, and tie were caked with dried blood.

  Said Gladden, “Doing anything tomorrow, Chief Superintendent? Say around eleven at the bridge in Sneem. It will be helpful, can you attend my press conference? I’d like to be able to point you out. You know, the ‘government’ man who did this to me. Or will I be holding my conference from a jail cell? It’s all one to me.”

  McGarr’s temper squalled, but there was little he could do. If he charged Gladden and put him away for the duration of the debt conference, it would only lend credence to Gladden’s claim of a government cabal. Also, McGarr’s only witness was his wife, and questions about what exactly she had been doing with him during the investigation of the murder of one of the country’s premier citizens might prove embarrassing.

  He turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER 10

  Debts Illuminated

  MOTIVES ASIDE, THE case was really simple, reasoned Ruth Bresnahan as she stepped down a carpeted hall in Parknasilla toward the door of the room that Gretta Osbourne occupied.

  If Paddy Power had been murdered but the evidence (a substitute pill bottle) had been removed, then there could only be three primary suspects, who were around Power at the time he was poisoned and knew enough about his heart condition to accomplish his death: Gladden himself, Shane Frost, and Gretta Osbourne.

  Gladden’s reason for killing his best friend might have been the desire to use the death to stage his own political comeback at the expense of Sean Dermot O’Duffy, whom he hated and Shane Frost courted assiduously.

  Frost’s motive might have been more direct—preventing a write-down of the national debt, which would cost Eire Bank money, while at the same time eliminating the political challenge to O’Duffy that Paddy Power had represented.

  Finally there was Gretta Osbourne, at whose door Bresnahan now stopped. What did Bresnahan know about her? Only that Osbourne had been Power’s trusted assistant and onetime lover. And that the woman had enjoyed Power’s good opinion right up until the time of his death, as noted in the cards that had been found beside his body.

  “What time is it?” asked Gretta Osbourne, offering Bresnahan her hand in a practiced manner. She ushered Bresnahan into a sitting room that was sealed now at night by pleated drapes in some pretty floral pattern.

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “How long have you been trying to get ahold of me?”

  “Since three.”

  “That proves it then—I am a busy woman. I only wish some of these foreigners had thought to bring translators. One Japanese man told me he speaks English. He does. Five words ‘pé fe wy.’”

  Bresnahan smiled and looked around the room. The carpet was mauve, the furniture Edwardian, except for one item. A long conference table and eight chairs filled the middle of the room. On it were stacks of computer printouts and what looked like a series of brochures. The other room appointments—a desk, some chairs, a small portable bar—had been placed against the walls.

  “I hope you haven’t grown impatient?”

  The question was pleasant enough, thought Bresnahan, but the tone was probing, of the sort asked by an executive officer of a subordinate. Again she reminded herself of McGarr’s technique of letting the interviewee talk, all the more in this case, which was not a murder investigation. Or at least not yet.

  “I must tell you that I didn’t like, but I admired, the way you dealt with Shane at the press conference this morning,” Osbourne went on. “I can’t remember—did you identify yourself as a Garda officer?”

  Bresnahan allowed her eyes to sweep the rest of the room, noting the several telephones, one with a red call light blinking. A portable computer that opened like the shell of a sea clam was also activated and showing an amber bar graph. There were fax and photocopy machines, and what Bresnahan guessed was a paper shredder. In all, the place had the look and feel of an exclusive business office or command center.

  “Do you have some now?”

  “Some what?”

  “Identification. I always like to know to whom I’m speaking. You as much as destroyed the possibility of this conference accomplishing anything with your irrelevant questions this morning.”

  Bresnahan handed her her photo I.D. “It would have come out sooner or later.” The truth, which could hardly be irrelevant.

  “Later would have been far, far better.”

  “With Dr. Gladden outside distributing leaflets calling Mr. Power’s death murder?” Bresnahan could see one on the conference table; Gretta Osbourne was obviously a person who kept herself well informed.

  “Who says it was murder apart from him?” Osbourne took a seat at the head of the table, where she began copying Bresnahan’s name and identification number into a diary/journal. She used a large black fountain pen with a gold nib and wrote with her left hand.

  Bresnahan looked over her shoulder. Except for six hours of sleep each night, most of the hour headings from Sunday through Saturday of the current week were filled in. “Nobody that I know of. But given Dr. Gladden’s charges, would you not want his allegations investigated?”

  “Your boss, McGarr?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “If he did think it was murder, to whom would that be reported?”

  “The commissioner, in the daily report.”

  “Fergus,” said Osbourne, meaning Fergus Farrell. “Would the press know what’s in those reports?”

  “Not unless you tell them.”

  Gretta Osbourne looked up at Bresnahan and smiled, as though having been waiting for her to assert herself. She handed back the I.D.

  Osbourne had knotted her silver-blond hair at the back of her head; black half-glasses sat on the bridge of a long, thin nose. She was a handsome woman, Bresnahan decided, or at least sexy in the way that Bresnahan herself was.

  There was an interesting tension between the breadth of her shoulders, the narrowness of her waist, and the graceful shape of her long legs. She was wearing a black silk dressing gown, which was slightly diaphanous and revealed in oblique light a gray silk liner that was slashed with silver chevrons. Between the plackets of the gown, Bresnahan could see the lacy fringe of a costly chemise. On her feet were black silk flats decorated with the same silver pattern; given the soft lighting in the room, which cast a few shadows across her rough complexion, Gretta Osbourne looked elegant and enticing. She was also wearing the same expensive scent that Bresnahan herself had bought a small quantity of specifically for this assignment.

  Osbourne now pushed herself back into the chair and peered up over the frame of the half-glasses. “Yes—Shane told me you had him off a second time at noon. Smartly. Got him to speak his mind and only afterward told him who you were.

  “Sit down, please. Coffee, tea? Or would you care for a drop of anything?” She waved a hand toward the portable bar.

  Bresnahan only sat.

  “You’re a local girl, Shane tells me. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? How so much talent, intelligence, ambition, and guile can have originated from one small, unlikely village in benighted Kerry. There was Paddy, and there is Shane. And now you. It must be the water. Or the air.” There was a noticeable, sharp twinkle in Osbourne’s clear gray eyes; she was enjoying herself. “That’s a brilliant outfit you’re wearing. Just perfect for here and the—is it?—undercover role you’re playing.�
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  Bresnahan kept asking herself what sort of accent she was hearing. Irish, like her own, new Dublin drawl. Or was it more an American drawl, something southern. She believed she had once heard somebody from South Carolina speak that way.

  “Well—you’re doing it again, I fear. Getting your target to talk. Tell me what Shane said to you. After the conference.”

  Why, Bresnahan thought, when Frost—carrying messages still—had doubtless told the woman in detail? “Does he work for you or you for him?”

  “Sometimes we work together. At other times we agree to disagree and work apart.”

  “As now?”

  Osbourne crossed her legs, and Bresnahan noticed that she was also wearing shimmering silver stockings. She wondered what else the gown might conceal and if, perchance, Osbourne had garbed herself for some other activity that had not been penciled into her diary. “Officially Shane is president of Eire Bank, and I am merely senior director, presently on leave of absence.”

  “To the Paddy Power Fund.”

  She nodded. “Come now, Ruth. Loosen up. Tell me what Shane said this afternoon. I’m bursting to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Well”—she looked away—“call it professional curiosity or the fact that with Paddy’s death everything is up for grabs.” She sounded not a little cheered by the prospect, and certainly neither she nor Frost seemed to be grieving Paddy Power in any way, shape, or form. Unless the black gown and what it concealed were for mourning. “As a woman, I need every advantage I can muster. Certainly you of all people can appreciate that. I’m told you’re the only woman in your agency with a group of men who are—how shall I put it tactfully?—unreconstructable.”

  How had she learned that? Bresnahan had not told Frost anything of the sort, and certainly McKeon or Ward, who were working with “beards,” as it were, would have said nothing.

  No. Bresnahan’s eyes slid over the stacked computer printouts in front of her. Here was an informed and careful woman, who had used the delay of the meetings she had attended to do some checking of her own.