by John Brady
“What?” said Hoey blankly, his attention suddenly stolen by the match he had at last managed to light.
“Manage,” said Minogue. “Carry on, like.”
“Off to see her nibs?” Hoey asked. “Eilo…?”
“Well,” said Ward, “I have to tell ye now-and don’t get me wrong- but my advice is, well, leave things alone for the time being. Can’t ye get back to your business soon enough?”
Minogue looked at Hoey. “It might be better if we were to get to her before she gets news of this here, em…”
“Incident,” said Ward.
“If we stop to think about things at all, we might never get going again,” he said. “That’s about the size of it.”
“I know what you’re saying, but ye’re here as, well, not as investigating officers, more like…well…”
Minogue saw Hoey shiver once and lick his lower lip with a raspy, dry tongue.
“We’ll stay with it, I’m thinking.”
Ward shrugged and left.
“All right, Shea?” Minogue whispered.
Hoey looked up bleakly, ready to refuse. Exasperation and weariness took over his face and he closed his eyes. He pursed his lips and looked out the parlour window as the ambulance drove off the curb. Minogue could almost hear his fretting thoughts. Hoey stood and walked out the door, banging his shoulder as he crossed the threshold. Ward stood by the hall door writing in his notebook. Minogue gave him a card.
“I gave one to the first Guard. Long nose, tall…”
“Dempsey.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you later.” Ward started to say something and Minogue stopped, ready for the warning or anger he had been expecting. Did you drive an old man to this?
“There’s no way in the world we thought he was going to do it,” Minogue declared.
“And you don’t know why he…? You really don’t know?”
Minogue shook his head.
“Maybe I should have picked up on the way he was talking after the row.”
Ward frowned.
“I was too busy trying to figure out what he was saying. He had drink on him. I hadn’t a clue in the wide world he’d come up with a gun, I can tell you.”
Ward’s deep breath suggested to Minogue a conscious effort to keep his temper in check.
“Okay, okay. Just…”
“I will,” said Minogue.
Hoey was already sitting in the passenger seat. A faint smell of vomit clung to his clothes. He didn’t look Minogue in the eye.
“We didn’t do it, Shea,” Minogue repeated. “Do you hear me? He did it. He wasn’t in control of himself, for that matter.”
Hoey said nothing.
“Like it or not, it means something to us. You know what he said. We need to follow up on it. What he told us, like.”
“So what’s the plan now?” Hoey’s voice was sharp. “Where can we go to do more damage?”
“ ‘She did better out of it than she deserved.’ Do you remember him saying that?”
Hoey looked at his watch and rolled down the window. He blew smoke out and let his arm dangle over the door.
“She kept something to herself that she could have-should have- told us-”
“Why the hell should Eilo McInerny tell us anything?” Hoey snapped. “What good would it do her? Screw up her life again?”
Minogue knew enough to say nothing.
“I mean to say,” Hoey’s voice rose and he flicked the cigarette long after any ash had fallen. “Who in their right mind would talk to us? All we bring is-”
“We didn’t kill him, Shea. You’ve got to understand that-”
“All for what? Christ Almighty, we’re the kiss of death around here.”
“What Naughton said tells me that we really don’t know what happened that night. Naughton did. Or at least he knew something, and what he knew was important enough-to him at least-that he wasn’t going to tell us.”
Hoey drew on his cigarette.
“How can we walk away from it?” Minogue asked.
Hoey’s eye was smarting from the smoke when he looked at his tormentor. Again he looked at his watch, but Minogue knew it was a gesture. Tralee would take an hour and a half.
“Take the back, then,” Minogue said.
Hoey slammed the passenger door hard. Minogue strode in the door of the Central Hotel. His heart began to beat faster. He dodged a somnolent lounge-boy who tacked across his path.
The receptionist’s perfume met Minogue ten feet ahead of her desk.
“Oh, hello,” she smiled, and put down the telephone. “You’re back. Would you be-”
Minogue flattened his hands on the counter and leaned in over it.
“Eilo McInerny. Where is she?”
The receptionist’s smile faded, rallied and faded even faster when she met Minogue’s eyes. She screwed on the lid of the nail polish.
“Well, now, let me think.”
“Is she working now?”
“Well, if she’s in…this is the afternoon…she’d be somewhere near the dining-room, probably, helping set it up for-”
Minogue strode to the french doors and opened them. A teenaged girl with short dyed hair stopped setting a table and looked over at him. He didn’t stop to close the door but said Eilo McInerny’s name to the waitress. The girl stepped back and nodded toward a swing door behind a counter at the back of the dining-room. He kept moving and pushed open the door. In the kitchen now, he saw a white tunic move between a counter-top and hanging pots that obscured the face.
“Is Eilo McInerny here?” he said, rounding the counter.
Under the lopsided chef’s hat, which reminded Minogue of a wayward cartoon rabbit, was a watery-eyed man in his forties. The chef’s eyes darted toward a stained, stainless-steel cabinet next to a collection of buckets. He stepped out into Minogue’s path.
“Who’s asking?”
“A Guard, that’s who. Step aside, mister.”
He heard a movement next to the buckets, and he skipped around the cabinet. Eilo McInerny was on her feet, her magazine on the floor. She stepped on her cigarette and brushed at her skirt. For a few seconds her eyes continued to betray her fright. Minogue spotted the tumbler, half-hidden by the door of the cabinet which had been held open to hide a chair.
“You again. I never expected to see you back.”
Minogue came to a sharp stop and stared hard at her.
“Matter of fact, I told you and what’s the other one, the pasty-faced silent type with the black eyes, get lost and leave me alone.”
Minogue looked over his shoulder at the chef and then back at Eilo McInerny.
“I was talking to someone that used to know you. Back in Portaree. In the old days.”
“Fuck off with yourself,” she said.
“I want to pass on to you what he told us,” Minogue continued.
She threw her head back but she couldn’t shake free of what her darting eyes told the Inspector.
“Go to hell. I don’t have to do anything.” Drinking, Minogue decided, but that wouldn’t stop him.
“We can have this out in front of your fella here, Mr Cordon Bleu, or-”
“He’s not my fella.”
“Or we can call for a squad car and do the job right.”
“You’re talking shite,” she scoffed. “Take it away with you.”
“Naughton. Garda Tom Naughton. You remember him, don’t you?”
Eilo McInerny shifted on her feet and folded her arms. Her eyes narrowed.
“Let’s talk somewhere,” said Minogue.
“There’s a crowd coming in from an office for a retirement do.”
Minogue returned the chef’s gaze.
“Come on, Eilo, before I have to have you hauled out of here.”
She shook her head once and made for a door by a set of sinks.
“I’ll be back in good time, Tom,” she said.
“No hurry,” said the chef. His limp, glistening eyes followed Minogue. Hoey opened t
he door as she put out her hand.
“Jesus,” she started, and stepped back on Minogue’s toe. “Where the hell did you come out of? You look wicked.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hoey muttered. They followed him to a door that led into an alley.
“Any fags?” she asked. “I left mine back in the kitchen.”
Minogue opened the passenger door of the Fiat first, turned the ignition. Hoey extended his packet and she plucked one before she sat in the car. She coughed with the first drag of the Major and her shudders and gasps shook the car. Minogue adjusted the heater.
“Christ,” she wheezed. “No wonder you’re so skinny. Coffin nails.”
She looked contemptuously at her cigarette and took another drag on it. Minogue leaned against his door and turned to her.
“You sold us a pup the last time, Eilo. Now I want to hear the bits you left out. No messing either.”
“What the hell can I tell you except what I done already?”
“Smarten yourself up, Eilo. I’m not codding.” Minogue waved away the smoke billowing from her cigarette. He saw the look of worry pass across her face before she recovered the pout. She looked out the window.
“You’re not codding,” she murmured.
“Tom Naughton said you did better out of Portaree than you deserved. What did he mean?”
“Ask him, why don’t you?” she muttered.
Hoey cleared his throat before he spoke. “Tom Naughton blew his own brains out not four hours ago. Right in the middle of talking to us.”
She looked away from the window to Hoey and blinked.
“So we’re not in the humour of playing games here now,” said Minogue. “You’ll appreciate.”
His words seemed to have no effect on her. She stared right through Hoey.
“Look, Eilo, this is what he told me. I’m not going to hold anything back. You have to know we’re not trying to trap you into anything or play off what you say against anything else.”
She let the smoke out of the corners of her lips, like white paint poured into a slow eddy of water.
“You knew Naughton, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I knew him, all right.”
She had spoken in a voice so soft that, for a moment, Minogue wondered if she were the same woman he had confronted not five minutes ago. He knew that she believed them now because her eyes shone with hatred and joy.
“Everything comes to them that wait,” she murmured.
“What do you mean?”
She ignored Hoey’s question. “I always heard that and I believed it, too. I prayed for that to happen a thousand times. Everything comes around again.”
She let out a mouthful of smoke but, like a waterfall reversed, she snorted it back into her nose. Then she blew out the smoke. The ferocity slid away off her eyes and her gaze dropped to the dashboard.
“So Naughton did for himself, did he,” she muttered. “Well, by Jesus, there’s a cure for everything.”
“You got something out of your time in Portaree,” said Minogue.
“You fucking iijit!” she lashed out suddenly. “I got heartache and misery!”
“And what did Naughton have to do with that?”
“He was like the rest of them, only worse. He was the Guard. He should have been on my side.”
“In what?” Hoey asked.
“He knew I was telling the truth. With that dirty smirk on his face.”
“He knew what?”
“He knew what they were like, Tidy Howard and the rest of them. Oul’ goats like him. Hah. Tidy towns and clean streets. There’s a joke like you never heard before, mister. They all sat and talked with one another too, I can tell you. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Tidy and Doyle and Naughton, sitting in the parlour after they had cleared the shop. ‘Eilo! Make up a bit of something! Eilo! Run up a sandwich for the Guards here now!’ One o’clock in the morning sometimes, can you credit that? Sure Howard had them in his pocket-”
“Wait a minute,” said Minogue. “What do-”
“Ah, you’re not that much of a thick, are you? The Guards’d come by the odd night to make sure we weren’t serving drink after hours. They’d make a big fuss about clearing the pub and the rest of it. Then they’d go behind the counter and start up gargling themselves. Tidy knew what nights they’d be in, so for every one night they’d show up, there’d be weeks and weeks of him pouring drinks up to twelve o’clock.”
“That’s the size of it then?”
“Do you think he’d tell me what games he was playing, is it?” she shot back at Minogue. She looked away and her glare softened.
“‘Eilo! Run up a bit of something!’ Hah. And Naughton laughing all the while. He had dirty eyes.” She darted a look back at Minogue then.
“I asked a nurse I met in London once about strokes, after I heard about Tidy collapsing. She told me that the mind can be working fine and well, but that the body could be paralysed. Just think, that oul’ bollicks trapped inside his own body. The price of him, I say.”
As though ashamed of her feelings, she looked down at her hands. Hoey was about to say something, but Minogue flicked his head at him. They waited.
“When I got to the hotel first, there’s Tidy telling me he’d look after me like a father. What kind of a father would do that though? But what did I know? All I knew was that I could lose me job and he could make up stories about me. I’d never get a reference off him. That’s what Naughton said. The bastard.”
“What happened?” Hoey asked.
She looked up under her eyebrows and Minogue believed she was about to launch herself at one or both of them. Her words issued out in a purr.
“None a your fucking business, you whey-faced iijit.”
“You have your own life now, Eilo,” Minogue argued. “You won. So help us out and don’t be throwing things at us.”
“I won?” she almost laughed. The contempt froze on her face but her eyes ran up and down Minogue, the disbelief plain. He noticed for the first time that she had bags under her eyes-how had he missed that before?
A teenager with the back of his head shaved and a long piece flowing down from the crown freewheeled by, no hands, on a bike painted fluorescent pink. Minogue looked at Hoey. The silvery film of fatigue and suspicion was clear on his colleague’s eyes. Blotches of colour by Hoey’s nostrils gave him the look of a child in from cold weather.
“Tidy Howard took me… had me,” she said.
“He…?”
“Yes, he did,” she whispered. “He took me and he dragged me and he pulled at me-and he choked me. Then he was on top of me. I couldn’t move. I wasn’t always this, what’ll I say…”
“Comfortable?” Minogue tried.
“Jesus,” she almost smiled. “You’re the sweet-tongued bastard. Anyway. A big heavy pig of a man and his false teeth coming loose-I could feel them pressed onto my teeth, I remember. My lips were bleeding. Pushing on me. I thought I’d faint. I couldn’t breathe. I stopped fighting ’cause I thought I wouldn’t make it out from under him. That’s the truth.” She puffed out a ball of smoke and blinked.
“And when you tried to…?”
“They were in cahoots. Drinking ’til all hours. The next day there’s the oul’ bastard on the front page of The Clare Champion, shaking hands with some German that was opening a knitwear factory.”
“You told Naughton what had happened?”
“I did. And what an iijit I was to go and do a thing like that.” She paused. “When I think of it…” She took a long drag from the cigarette, grimaced and cast about for an ashtray.
“Fire it out the window, can’t you?” said Minogue. She looked down over her shoulder at the Inspector.
She rolled down the window and flicked the butt expertly across the street. Minogue was surprised at the distance she achieved with such economical effort. She turned to him with a piercing look.
“So what are you going to do now? What can you do? Naughton’s dead, so you tell me. Tidy Ho
ward is up in the nursing home with his plot bought and his box picked out and ready. There’s nothing left. So what are you two after?”
“What did Naughton mean about you doing well out of it?”
“Fuck Naughton,” she hissed. “I’ll tell you what Naughton said to me. I’m sure ye’d like to hear. You want to hear the dirt, don’t ye? So you can tell your pals back up in Dublin one night and ye having a few jars. I’m only sorry I don’t have a few pictures to show ye.”
“It’s not like-”
“Don’t give me lectures about what it is and isn’t like! This is all the help Naughton was to me: ‘Did someone ride you right?’ was what he said to me. ‘Did he ride you straight and did you get cured?’ says he. Fucking worm. And him a Guard.”
Minogue kept his eyes on the Fiat insignia on the horn. An urge to lean on the horn and hold it came to his hands.
“Only sorry he didn’t have a go himself,” she whispered. “He knew everything. I’m sure Tidy Howard told him, and them sniggering and drinking.”
“Knew what?” Hoey asked.
“About me. About Jane Clark. Her and me. That’s what he meant about ‘straight,’ you thick. With a man, like. Here. Give us one of those Majors.”
Hoey held out the packet opened already. She didn’t light it but studied it instead, as though it were a weapon.
“So what did you get out of this, then?” asked Hoey. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
“I knew things,” she murmured. “I knew about Jane and what she was doing. But she told too. She was like that. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She laughed in their faces. ‘What century do you think you’re in?’ she’d say. That’s what she was like. And I liked that about her. She could say things that I’d…”
She shook her head as though trying to dislodge a bee caught in her hair and reached across to thump in the cigarette lighter.
“Does this part of your limo work?” she asked.
“Wait and see,” said Minogue. “But listen, you lost me there.”
“Ah! Dan Howard and Jane. Jamesy Bourke and Jane. She told me. She kind of saw it like a big adventure and a bit of a comedy too. Oh, Christ, but she’d have me in stitches. ‘You can learn all you want about Irish history and civilisation when you have one of them burrowing away at you’ she told me. The things they said to her when they were, you know…close.” The lighter popped out.
