Obit

by Anne Emery

  In the next carton I came across a long, flat box decorated with old Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wrappers. It was filled with letters to Teresa Burke, with a Dublin return address. I opened the first letter; it was from her mother. They all were. I was about to close the box when something fell out from between two of the envelopes. I picked it up.

  “Finding anything up there, Monty?” I started at the sound of Brennan’s voice. “Not a thing in their room. I feel like a pervert.” His head appeared and then he joined me in the attic. “I haven’t been up here in years. Lots of laughs, I imagine. What’s that?”

  “These are old bank statements from late 1954 to early in ’57. An account in Declan’s name. Kept separate from the other bank records. Money going out of his account at nearly regular monthly intervals. These were cash withdrawals. Usually three hundred dollars. A lot of money in those days, when you have a family to support.”

  He sat down beside me, looking miserable and exhausted. “You’re not suggesting blackmail! That’s the last thing I would expect of him. Why in the hell would he keep the records?”

  “He didn’t. Your mother did.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And here’s money coming in.” I pointed to the entries. “For every payment he made, there’s a deposit of money preceding it. He was obtaining, or diverting, money from somewhere to pay this. Then it stopped, in March of 1957. I wonder if Cathal Murphy was blackmailing him.”

  “Which Cathal? The competent, dedicated Republican organizer or the lovesick little man who was content to watch his beloved from a distance? Whoever did this would have to be one tough customer. Anyone Declan could intimidate would have failed in the attempt. We don’t have enough of a handle on Cathal to know whether he’d have the bottle to blackmail the old man. Nessie herself would have, but physically she could not have pulled it off.”

  He was probably right. We were looking for a tough guy. And that led me back to the White Gardenia, home of mobsters, enforcers and hangers-on.

  †

  I had no trouble finding the club in daylight on Saturday. I didn’t expect much in the way of dancing girls and, in fact, the place was fairly quiet. Canned music and a few scattered drinkers. An elderly maitre d’ I hadn’t seen before ushered me to the bar.

  “I was here the other night with friends, and I was introduced to Mr. Corialli. I don’t suppose he’s on the premises this afternoon?” I may as well have asked whether the Pope was leaning on the bar, telling tales and buying rounds. “He had another man with him, kind of a bulky fellow.”

  “None of Mr. Corialli’s associates are around today.” The man looked Italian and spoke with a Brooklyn accent.

  “This is quite an operation,” I observed. “The club’s been here for, how long? Forty years?”

  “Forty-one. But not always here. Started out in Manhattan. East Fifties. Then moved over here to Long Island City, under new management. Took a while to get into gear again.”

  I looked at him. “Have you been working here long?”

  “There and here. Since opening night.”

  “Really! What were you doing opening night?”

  “Same thing I’m doing now. Maitre d’. Of course I was on nights back then. We weren’t even open in the afternoon in those days. I worked Tuesday to Saturday till I was sixty, then I took kind of a semi-retirement. Or that’s the way I look at the early shift. Not as much action, but easier on the old legs. Easier on the head too.”

  “I’ve been kind of fascinated with this place ever since I came in the other night. I’m a musician myself but I’d hate to have to follow the act I saw here.”

  “The girls are really something, I gotta hand it to them. They can play the instruments too. A popular act.”

  “I’m sure. Vi Dibney got her start here, I understand.”

  “Yeah, she did. We knew her as Evie. She really packed ’em in.”

  “She has a good voice. A looker too, I’ll bet.”

  “She was a hot-looking broad. Come see for yourself.” He led me to a corridor behind the bar, knocked on a door, got no response, and went inside with me at his heels. It was a large office with a cluttered desk, two telephones and a number of mismatched chairs. The walls were covered with photographs in cheap frames. “There’s Evie.”

  It was an early colour photo of the singer in a low-cut white satin dress. Her lips, painted a bright red, were nearly wrapped around the microphone. Her frothy blonde hair was back combed and pinned up with a white rose tucked over her right ear.

  “She must have had the guys eating out of her hand,” I commented.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “So, did she meet up with a sugar daddy here in the club?”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. They made passes at her. How far she went along with it I don’t know. If anything went on, it was after hours so I didn’t see it. It wouldn’t have gotten her a husband so maybe she didn’t bother. You know Italians.” He smiled in a proprietorial sort of way. “They might have been looking for a girlfriend but they weren’t looking for a new wife. She was just a kid really, even if she didn’t look it. She stuck with this guy around her own age who worked here. That’s him there, Ray or something, his name was. Ramon.” He pointed to a picture of the club’s staff all grouped around a birthday cake ablaze with candles. “There it is. R. Jiminez. She was going out with him. Then one day he came in to work and she was gone. Without a word of goodbye. Got a job out in Vegas. This Ramon didn’t say a word about it but you could tell he was steamed. He met a nice Italian girl later and quit the club. Couple of years after Evie left. Some story about wanting to join a band, or write plays or something. Maybe he was going to live off the new girlfriend. Wouldn’t put it past him. He came back to us a couple of years after that though. He really hustled us about getting his old job back. You can always tell when a guy is in desperate need of money. Guess the new career didn’t pan out. He stayed on for a while, but if he heard from Evie he didn’t tell the rest of us.”

  “So she didn’t find herself a rich Italian businessman. Maybe she should have tried for an Irish one.”

  “Irish?”

  “Well, the guys I came here with last time were Irish, and one of them was around in the early days of the club.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Declan Burke.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “Whoa!”

  “You knew Declan?”

  “Did anybody know him? Not exactly a back-slapping, lemme-show-you-a-snapshot-of-the-wife-and-kids kind of guy. But, hell, I don’t know you either. What’s your name?”

  I put out my hand. “Monty Collins.”

  “I’m Al Dipersio. Did you say you were here with Burke the other night?”

  “Yes. I’m a friend of his son. We sat with Mr. Corialli. They talked over old times.”

  “Yeah, well, Burke worked security here, at least for a while. Him and Mr. Corialli may have had other business. If they did, I never knew what it was.”

  “Al, did you know there was an attempt on Declan’s life?”

  “No!” His surprise was genuine. Not the kind of gossip that makes the day-shift circuit, I concluded. “Who did it?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “You and the NYPD.”

  “I imagine they’ll get there first. But this may have been some kind of paid hit, and the gunman may not do much talking. It’s all speculation, of course. We simply have no idea.”

  “Can’t help you there.”

  “One thing we do suspect is that somebody was blackmailing him back in —”

  Al snorted with laughter. “Not a chance. Burke would cut the guy’s throat before he’d give in to blackmail.”

  †

  I drove to Sunnyside after enjoying a solitary meal at the White Gardenia, and joined Brennan in the family room. I recounted my conversation with Al Dipersio. “So. Ramon was steamed about Evie’s defection. When exactly was this, the doomed love affa
ir between Evie and your father?”

  “It wasn’t a love affair,” Burke snapped. “It was just a rub of the relic. A couple of hours in her flat.”

  “It was what? A rub of the relic? Is that what they call sex in sacramental Ireland?” He waved a dismissive hand in my direction and I continued: “All right, we’ll call it the night with Danny, ‘Danny’ being a code name for the unwilling drinking companion, Desmond. The alcoholic. He apparently managed to stay off the booze till when, July of that year? Just before his daughter’s wedding, according to her diary.”

  Desmond had resisted the luscious young Evie, showing her snapshots of his family while they danced. That sounded right. Mary Desmond’s diary made it plain: Desmond loved his family. A fun dad, quoting the Irish greats. What had Mary written? He kept them up reading from Joyce on Bloomsday. And what had Brennan’s brother said about Bloomsday? The family observed it unless it fell on the same day as a religious feast, or was it the other way around? Desmond and Declan Burke, not so different from one another perhaps, with one crucial difference: Desmond’s fatal attraction for alcohol. What happened in July of 1952? Desmond lost his job as a port watchman. Just after the incident between Evie and Declan, a rare moment of weakness on Declan’s part. Which may mean Declan was under stress at that time. Or, no, that wasn’t July. What had Evie said?

  “Brennan. When did Evie hop the wagon train out west?”

  “Summer of ’52.”

  “Yes, but when?”

  “Didn’t she say something about the first day of summer? It was steaming hot out in —” he shuddered “— Nevada.”

  “June then. Just how quickly did your father bundle her off?”

  “Days, it sounded like.”

  “The middle of June.” I tried to focus my thoughts. “When’s Bloomsday? The same time as, what was it, the Corpus Christi procession?”

  “Are you trying to catch me out here, Monty? The old fellow never let me live it down, the time I suggested we spend the day eating, drinking and whoring, when in fact it was Corpus Christi Thursday. But in truth we never actually did anything to observe Bloomsday. It’s just —”

  “What’s the date though? Bloomsday.”

  “June 16, 1904. The day James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first —”

  “June 16.”

  “Corpus Christi, on the other hand, falls on a different date every year because it is the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which in turn is —”

  “It wasn’t Desmond.”

  “What?”

  “The guy in the club that night with your father and Evie, the guy they called Danny. It wasn’t Desmond. We have to start looking for someone else.”

  “But —”

  “I remember what Evie said. She worked her last four shifts, then flew to Las Vegas the morning of June 21. I think she said she didn’t take any nights off. Worried about money, and no wonder. So her last four nights would have been the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth. Which means the night with Declan was June 16. But we know from the Desmond girl’s diary that Desmond —”

  “Spent that night — Bloomsday night — sober and slumped over a cup of cocoa at his kitchen table.”

  “Right.”

  “So. It was someone else being recruited at the club.”

  Brennan got up and went to the bar for a bottle of Jameson’s, raised it, waited for my distracted nod, and poured us both a glassful. He handed me my drink and sat down, lit up a cigarette, inhaled the smoke and let it out with an exasperated sigh. “Are we going to get to the bottom of this, Monty?”

  I shrugged and took a sip. And another. “We may have to face the possibility that we just won’t find the answer, Brennan. What have you heard from the police on the shooting?”

  “They keep saying they’re confident, but they don’t have a suspect yet.”

  “Well, I’m confident they’ll pull somebody in for it. Maybe all we can hope for is that whoever did it will eventually talk. That may be the only way we’ll hear the full story.”

  “Maybe we won’t want this gunman to do any talking,” he groused. “And the gunman isn’t the only one who knows the story, don’t forget. He got his cue from that obituary. Or so I assume, given the timing. There must be something in that obit, Monty. This fellow caught it; we didn’t.”

  “So let’s read it again.”

  He pulled out his wallet, unfolded the crumpled piece of paper and began to read. Something struck me, and I realized it had given me pause once before. “Brennan, read the last bit to me again. Start with the ‘members of a generation’ or whatever it said.”

  “‘When the members of a generation pass away, the family is often left with little more than its memories; the telling details are locked away in a trunk and never get out of the attic. A better way — Cathal’s way — was to celebrate and live the past as if — ’”

  I raised my hand and said: “I must be losing it. Like you. But I heard ‘Attica.’” I reached over and gently slid it out of his grasp. “Locked away, never got out of Attica. Please tell me that doesn’t make sense to you.”

  He removed the cigarette from his mouth and looked at me, unsmiling. “I hope we don’t get to a point where it makes sense to either of us.”

  Once more, we lapsed into silence. We had limited time, we had an uncooperative client in Declan Burke, we had a gap of nearly forty years and now we were faced with a brand new avenue of inquiry.

  “I can’t imagine the authorities at Attica prison helping us with our ill-formulated inquiries,” I grumbled, “especially since we don’t have a name.”

  “A name would help.”

  “At least we know the time frame, 1952 or 1953, if the guy was caught soon after the event in mid-1952. So. Court records or some slogging through old newspapers.”

  “If we want to deploy my little army of Irish Volunteers, namely my young relatives, it had better be the newspapers. In the library. That, they can handle. What should they be looking for? Criminal cases in 1952 or 1953, involving Irish names and —”

  “Guns, obviously. To think I ridiculed your suggestion that the names Brendan and Armand meant Bren gun and Armalite rifle. Sure, you’re brilliant when you’re daft. And the New York waterfront, if we haven’t written off Desmond altogether. He did get fired as a port watchman. Of course the story has to end with someone being sent to Attica.”

  “I’ll give the young ones their marching orders. Then we’ll have to wait.”

  Above us, we heard people coming into the house; then the object of our speculations stumped down the stairs and greeted us.

  “You fellows still here? When are your mother and I going to have some peace and quiet without you snooping around?” His face was flushed and his speech a bit slurred; he had been partaking of strong waters. “Go away and do good deeds.”

  “We’ll be gone when we think you can take care of yourself, Da. When you come clean about who your enemies are, so we can help the police track them down, put them on trial and send them away where they can’t harm a hair on your dear old head. The sooner you talk, the sooner we’re out of your life.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. As I may have stated recently, I don’t know who shot at me.”

  “He didn’t shoot at you. He shot you. Nearly killed you. Now, who do you think it was?”

  “Have you lost your hearing, Brennan? I said I don’t know.”

  “Someone in the Corialli organization?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know. Forget it.”

  “How do you know, is what I asked you.”

  “And I told you I know. I got a message from Corialli after we went to the club. It wasn’t any of his people. He made that clear.”

  “What about somebody else from your days at the club?”

  “Like who, for Christ’s sake?”

  “How about that fellow Raoul?”

  “I never heard of any Raou
l.”

  “Not Raoul, Ramon. That was it. Could it have been this Ramon?”

  “That gutless little gouger. He wouldn’t have the bollocks to shoot me. Now piss off, the pair of you.”

  “Well, was there some —”

  “Find yourselves another topic of conversation. Nobody’s ever been at a loss for words in this house. Call on that gift now, why don’t you.”

  “Let’s try some other names.”

  “What did I just fucking say, Brennan?” The patriarch thumped his hand, hard, on the table. “Leave me alone. If I knew who was responsible, I’d have told the police. Eventually I expect the police will tell me.”

  “I wonder if the police have had any luck finding that mandolin player who gave us a song at the reception.”

  “They haven’t. Oh, you had a phone call.”

  “Who from?”

  “A Father Mac — what was it? Mackasey?”

  “Dave Mackasey?”

  “That’s the man.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wants you to do what you’re trained to do. Say Mass, perform the sacraments, not skulk around into things that are none of your affair. I wrote his number by the phone in the kitchen.”

  “At Holy Trinity?”

  “No. He says he’s at Saint Kieran’s now. Pour me another thimbleful out of that bottle before you go, will you Monty?”

  “Certainly, Declan.”

  We went upstairs and Brennan called his fellow priest. He agreed to say a Latin Mass at the crime scene, Saint Kieran’s, later in the week.

  “Shite,” he said after he hung up.

  “What?”

  “That’s the day Leo Killeen is flying home. He’ll be coming over for lunch before his flight. I’ll want to see him before he goes.”

  “You’ll have time, don’t worry about it. So. What do we make of that little exchange with your father?”