Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “The interview between him and the writer, McNally,” Costello said, “it would have to have taken place before his disappearance.” He paused, then: “Tell me, would your father have been known among his own as Aengus?”

  “Yes, Inspector.” She was not going to sort out what to tell and what not to tell this man who knew more about the IRA and its splinters than she would ever know.

  “And who is it says they presume him dead, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “His widow, my stepmother, and I suppose the other people in the village.”

  “Are you impatient with me? Please don’t be,” the brawny detective said in a gentle purr.

  “I didn’t mean to be.”

  “The name of the widow?”

  “Edna O’Shea.”

  “The painter.” He sounded as though he’d now put everything in order. “Is it not remarkable that nothing of hers hangs in Ireland? Her work is well thought of in Britain. I wonder what it tells us about ourselves.”

  Julie was surprised, almost suspicious.

  He went on, “We shall have a forensic team arriving in Slievetooey in the morning, and they’ll go up from there. I wonder if they’ll see everything that you saw, Mrs. Hayes. Or will someone have tidied up after you? And for whom was the mine laid, and by whom? They could not have been expecting you. Troublesome questions. Could I have a drop more coffee, Mrs. Hayes?” Then: “Sergeant Carr, you’re wanting to get on to the murder of Edward Donavan, I know.” He settled back in the booth, his coffee cup and saucer in hand.

  “I am,” Carr said and took out his pocket notebook. “The inspector superintendent sends you his concern and greetings, Mrs. Hayes. If he’d not something greatly important on his agenda, he’d have flown from Dublin himself.” He glanced at an open page in the notebook. “Do you know a Kevin Bourke in the States?”

  Julie drew a quick breath. “Yes, sir. He runs an electrical equipment shop in New York.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “An acquaintance really.”

  “Why would a mere acquaintance hire a private security operative to convoy you through Ireland?”

  “He wouldn’t.” She could be sure now that the Gray Man had indeed been in the employ of Sweets Romano. Long ago it had been Kevin Bourke who first got Romano’s phone number for her; it was the very beginning of her relationship with the underworld figure. Bourke was a West Side man, a Saint Malachy’s parishioner. He would not want to be used by the gangster, but he was weak and vulnerable and therefore available to Romano, who never did anything—charitable or savage—in his own name.

  Carr waited, blinking his eyes as though to quicken her explanation.

  Finally she said, “The Murder Team must know by now from the New York police who really hired Mr. Donavan, even if he used Kevin Bourke’s name.”

  “Ah, but we don’t know that at all. The only information they gave us concerned yourself, the matter of your having been criminally assaulted, and with your alleged assailants having disappeared while awaiting trial. This was very new to us. Mind, I’m not saying we’d expect you to bring forth that information as though it was merely your purse that was stolen. But murder shatters privacy. And it should provoke cooperation. We expected the New York police to find and question this Mr. Bourke for us. A routine accommodation among jurisdictions. But we were handed off to the district attorney’s office, where they promised ‘to get back to us.’ Well, they haven’t got back to us yet.”

  She had to decide on the instant whether to try to hold in trust Lieutenant Marks’s information, his preparation of a case against Romano to take before the Grand Jury. She was still riding the tiger. She would try to tell them her own story only.

  “Okay. I think Mr. Bourke was being used as a front by an underworld character known as Sweets Romano. Romano’s a terrible man, really, and yet …” She shook her head, disgusted with herself for the qualification, the and yet. “I’m not going to try to explain or justify my association with him. I can’t. It’s years ago, but I went to him a couple of times for information—okay, for help for someone. Ever since then he’s seen himself as a kind of protector, and now maybe even an avenger. His henchmen are suspected of having roughed up the men who attacked me—strike that, who allegedly attacked me. But that’s not proven.”

  “Ah, now I begin to understand,” Carr said. “Both the prosecution of the crime against your person and the investigation of this underworld figure come under the district attorney. Am I right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not proven,” Carr said thoughtfully. “Couldn’t you be more specific, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “Sergeant Carr, I don’t feel at liberty to be any more specific.”

  Carr looked at her for a few seconds and then changed his tack. “For a man who takes so much power into his own hands, your ‘godfather’ made a weak choice of Irish representative in Ed Donavan. Or would he have left the choice to Kevin Bourke?”

  “No way,” Julie said. “Mr. Romano knows who he hires. And he is not my godfather.”

  “Bad form on my part. I apologize.”

  “It may be that the real job Mr. Donavan was hired for was to find the indicted rapists if they were hiding out in Ireland. Romano may have thought I came to Ireland to look for them.”

  “And is that the case, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “No, sir. I came for the reason I told Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald. But I saw one of the men at the Wolfe Tones concert in Donegal the night after I left Sligo.”

  “Huh!” Then: “What are their names?”

  “Frank Kincaid and James Donahue.”

  “I do have that somewhere … information out of New York. You saw but the one?”

  “Both are here, I feel sure.”

  He sat back and drew a long breath as though adjusting himself to a new start.

  Inspector Costello, the Special Branch man, said, “If I may ask, could it be that Joseph Quinlan is the defense attorney for those tow buckos?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re represented by his firm.”

  “When does their trial come up?”

  “Not until spring,” Julie said.

  “And in the States they’d be out on bail meanwhile, and easy targets for Mafia justice.”

  There was more to it than that if Kincaid and Donahue could be useful witnesses in the case Marks was preparing against the mobster, but Julie merely said, “That’s what a lot of people over there think happened to them when they turned up missing.”

  “So we have two American giants with what we might call international interests trying to outwit each other over a pair of miscreants. And their forces seem to have been brought together in Sligo on the occasion of Roger Casey’s funeral. Who could have predicted that?”

  “Mr. Quinlan was there himself, in person,” Julie said. “Roy Irwin interviewed him the night before, remember.”

  “Which would seem to have started the conflagration,” Costello said, and then to Carr directly, “Forgive me, old man. I’ve intruded.”

  Carr turned to Julie. “We’ve been able to put together an itinerary for Mr. Donavan from the time of your arrival in Ireland.” He reached for a dispatch case at his feet and from it drew a looseleaf notebook with tab markers. “It coincides, by the way, with your own account of your activities.”

  “That’s nice,” Julie said tartly, for she sensed something of approbation in his words.

  “You could be thought to have led a man to his death,” Carr said sharply. So much for the smile in his voice.

  “I suppose I could,” she said, “and for all I know I may have done just that. Am I responsible for Mr. Romano? Okay. Let’s say I am. But for the timing of Roger Casey’s death? Or that Richard Garvy wanted me to interview his grandmother, who lives in Sligo?”

  “There, now, you’re overwrought,” Carr said, all kindness again. “Shall I go over our profile of the victim so that we three know a little better the man we’re talking about? Forty-seven years old, inva
lided out of the Gardai Special Branch a year ago. In private security service between bouts of lung trouble. That, by the way, owed to chemical poisoning from an explosion. He was a bachelor, lived with and supported his sister, who attended his business accounts. You would think she might be of great assistance to us. Only on matters extraneous to this case. Ordinarily he operated in family or civil matters. In this operation he carried his notes, all information, on his person. And his assailants stripped him even of identification. They lifted his car, and it has not surfaced yet. He employed an associate, Thomas Riordon, to back him up in stake-outs or shadow assignments he could not manage alone. Riordon accompanied you to Wicklow.”

  “He did?” Julie had not seen anyone she suspected of following her. He’d have stayed on the bus and doubled back at the next stop, or followed her by car to the church and eventually to the house of her Great-uncle Crowley. Had he inquired at the pub of those old men about her visit among them? Those silent old men? He might have learned from them of her quest for Thomas Francis Mooney. “Sergeant Carr, what were the Gray Man’s instructions to his assistant?”

  “Well questioned, Mrs. Hayes. It’s the key to his own assignment. Riordon was to report on where you went, whom you met with and in what kind of neighborhood. He reported your Wicklow people as working-class. He was to intervene if he felt you needed protection. And it did not matter if you spotted him. But if you questioned him, he was to deny even knowing of your existence until that moment.”

  “As he did himself in Sligo,” Julie said.

  “So we noted. Mrs. Hayes, were the men who violated you in New York working-class?”

  “Blue-collar, yes.”

  “But you would not say that of the lady you visited in Ballina?”

  “Oh, no,” Julie said. “Who followed me there?”

  “Donavan himself. But he phoned his Sligo hotel booking from there, picked up a carry-out lunch, and went on ahead. The lunch container was found in the waste bin near where he parked his car in Sligo. It would be extremely useful if we could find out what first alarmed him at Sligo. Both his sister and the assistant insist he had no premonition of personal danger in this assignment. I might say here he was paid a handsome retainer—out of which he provided a holiday for his sister. Payment was made in the form of a bank transfer from an account in the name of Kevin Bourke …”

  “Is that how you got onto Kevin Bourke?” Julie wanted to know.

  “We had two sources on him, the bank and information provided by Special Branch. Inadvertently, if you’ll forgive me saying so, Inspector Costello. We have been able to reconstruct his modus operandi in this case: it was his practice to ring a New York City number—collect—and ask for Kevin Bourke. The call was not accepted, but the number from which he telephoned was taken, and someone, presumably Kevin Bourke, phoned back within minutes. Riordon confirmed Donavan’s practice of reporting the day’s information to his client from a public kiosk every evening.

  “Now here’s the maddening bit: Special Branch was monitoring calls in and out of Sligo that night, and they wiped out Donavan’s call as having no political content—a private matter, in other words. Someone at the exchange, however, remembered the name Kevin Bourke and the calls to and from New York. The Dublin exchange has reported a similar pattern of calls earlier. But with no billing, there is no record of the number. So, you see, Mrs. Hayes, without your information, we’d still be looking for daylight in a very dark corner.”

  Julie recognized Romano’s practice in the telephone rigmarole. He never took a direct call, always called back. She could almost hear that velvety voice: “Romano here.” She asked, “Did you try to reach Kevin Bourke at the number listed in the Manhattan phone book?”

  Carr laughed. “You are sharp. It took us much too long to come up with that simple idea. By then, apparently, word of Donavan’s death had crossed the sea. Mr. Bourke has been out of town since we first tried the number.”

  Julie had never known the man to leave his shop, morning till night, except for a funeral, and then he would close up. It was a one-man operation. His only travel was to and from the Willoughby Apartments on foot. Where Mary Ryan also lived. In spite of all, Julie felt a twinge of homesickness.

  “Shall we go back now and pick up Donavan from his arrival in Sligo—from the time he put in at the Lupins Hotel, parked his little car in the courtyard and went in with his bageen to claim his booking? Everything was in order, apparently. He sat down to a public tea and awaited your arrival. Why didn’t you see him in the lounge, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “I entered from the other side of the room, and it was crowded. There was a lineup at the phone. Anyway, I didn’t,” she said impatiently.

  He raised his hand placatingly. “Hardly a man in the room but knew you were on your way to the Garvy house on John Street after your use of the telephone. Donavan went out shortly after you, and we have no sighting of him in the next two hours. Are you sure you had none yourself?”

  “Not until I returned to my room from the state funeral the next day.”

  “And him entirely dead by then. Was he at Greely’s, where most of the night’s action was taking place? He must have been, since you were. He must have followed you to and from the Garvy house before that. Did it alarm him that you stopped at Greely’s and asked for Maisie Craig? He’d have known her by reputation, a strong supporter of the IRA. Did he see Irwin get roughed up? We’re still missing two critical hours in the man’s life. About six o’clock, with no one having seen him return to the hotel, he came down the stairs, his wee bag in hand, and asked at the desk that you be given the room he was vacating.” The Murder Team detective sat back and folded his arms. “Something had occurred between four and six that altered his plans. It was a fatal alteration.”

  Carr referred again to his notebook. “He went out to the car, unlocked the boot and put his bag in it. The chef was having a cigarette outside the kitchen door and watched him go along to the street the back way. There’s a kiosk alongside the ‘Ninety-eight memorial, and it was probably from there that he made his call to New York. We catch sight of him once more alive: he’s alone at the bar, lingering over a beer that he didn’t drink. Who was he waiting for? Why was he there? Did he think he was safe there, or what? Why didn’t he go into the dining room and have a meal? Afternoon tea was his last meal. The newspaperman Roy Irwin saw him leave the lounge about eight-thirty in the company of a man he swears he can identify as one of those who lifted the tape of his interview with Quinlan.”

  Carr swung around on Inspector Costello. “I can’t believe Special branch did not have a man or two in the hotel bar that night. I’ll even allow whoever was there didn’t know Donavan from the service. But he was a conspicuous figure, we’re all agreed, and your boys are paid to use their eyes. Have your people nothing more to offer on the man he was seen with?”

  With a sad downward tug of his mouth that deepened the scars on his chin, Costello said, “I think you’ve already been given whatever’s coming your way.”

  “In other words …”

  Costello held up his hand, “Don’t be putting other words into my mouth, man. I think you’ve made remarkable progress, and I’m going to build now on the foundation you’ve both laid down. If you’ll indulge me. Mrs. Hayes, it goes without saying, does it, that Romano is a rich man?”

  “Fabulously,” Julie said. “He has an art collection that any museum could be proud of.”

  “Does he? And is there anything of Edna O’Shea in his collection?”

  It took Julie a second or two to respond. “I don’t think so. Not to my knowledge … no, no. That’s wild.”

  “As you say, wild, but so are any number of possibilities. Where does his money come from?”

  “Real estate, nightclubs, prostitution, pornography, gambling …” Julie thought back to the numerous sordid affiliations of which she had heard. “Now I’ve got to say that it’s all hearsay as far as I’m concerned.”

  “What would
you say to firearms, to the kind of munitions terrorists might want?”

  “I could be wrong,” Julie said, “but it doesn’t feel like a Romano thing to me.”

  “But he would know whose thing it was in ‘the family’?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s not much going on either in the family or out of it that he doesn’t know.”

  “Then I think we can put in place one piece of the puzzle and fit others around it: how Romano came to employ Edward Donavan and not any other of a number of private operatives registered in Dublin. The ONI has attempted to purchase arms through the Mafia. We know they have made contact. Mr. Romano would have gone to the family branch with the Irish connection to recommend a private eye. They in turn would have rung up their ONI connection. And the ONI man, always on the alert for something that might prove useful, recommended Edward Donavan, a man of proven weakness, shall we say, someone in much the position to them as Kevin Bourke is to Romano. They knew they could break him, and probably did. I think they got what they wanted from him. Information they could use.”

  “Did they have to kill him?” Julie said finally.

  “They must have thought so. Even they don’t kill without reason. It is axiomatic among their community: if they can break a man, thereafter anyone can break him.”

  “What you’re saying is, the information they got from him cost him his life.”

  “To be more specific about it, the use to which they intended to put that information cost him his life. He was alive for fourteen hours, remember, after leaving the bar. I don’t think it took that long to persuade him. I think there was consultation among their top command about what could be done with the information.

  “We’ve got to keep in mind that Donavan seems to have had nothing on his mind save his job until he got to Sligo. Even for a couple of hours after he got there, and he must have known from the moment he walked into that hotel the affiliations of some of the men who were on hand there. Yet he sat in the open drinking tea and nibbling biscuits. You, Mrs. Hayes, were his only concern. But something was happening among the hierarchy of revolutionaries that met in the back room of Greely’s Bookstore. We can be reasonably sure a majority of the represented groups voted to refuse the ONI participation in their council and, most particularly, representation at Casey’s funeral. They were an angry lot by then and, like a bunch of football touts on a rampage, they mussed up Irwin and took the tape of the Quinlan interview from him, and when they spotted Donavan, they got onto him and thereupon discovered something that gave them a new lease on life.”