Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  “The older ones were the problem.”

  “Would there be one old enough to have a son dating Pauline?” I asked. “Just how old was the oldest Connolly boy?”

  “Not sure,” Cargan said. “But I should ask around.” He continued to look around, thinking. “What about the one in your class? He wouldn’t be that much older. Maybe ten years?”

  “Good point,” I said. “Where do we start?”

  “Why do we start? That’s the question,” he said. “She’s a big girl. She can do what she wants.”

  “I don’t know, Car. The girls seemed scared.”

  “That she left?”

  “I guess it’s how she left. That’s all I can come up with.” I picked up the police tape on the floor and pushed it into the garbage can. “And the money. She’s got our money.”

  He thought about it for a minute. “We can poke around a bit. I, for one, would like our money back.”

  “So where do we start?”

  “With the Connollys? Let me see what I can find out about the pub that one of them supposedly owns,” he said. He turned to face me. “But not you. Stay out of it. I’ll handle it.”

  “I’m already in it, Cargan,” I said. I pulled the piece of paper from my pocket with the names of Pauline’s three former flames, the ones that I had asked the girls to give me when we had chatted in the kitchen. “And here are a few more people to track down,” I said, glancing at the list before handing it to Cargan. Before it reached his hand, I pulled it back. “Now that’s interesting,” I said, looking at the list more closely.

  “What’s that?”

  I looked at Cargan. “Want to know one of the other names on the list?” Cargan looked at the list in my hand. “Jed Mitchell.”

  Cargan didn’t react. Jed Mitchell, Amy’s brother, was a cop in Foster’s Landing and very much married. Or so we thought. If the girls knew about him and his relationship with Pauline, maybe things had taken a bad turn with Cassie Montreaux, a girl that we had all gone to high school with and who Jed married not too long after graduating from the local police academy.

  “Where do the girls live?” I asked Cargan, figuring he knew better than I did. I had a vague idea of where Colleen and Pauline had an apartment but not an exact address.

  Cargan took one last look around the bathroom, getting a visual of the whole thing that I was sure would stay in his head, a clear and accurate picture that could be recalled days, weeks, and even months from now. I’m not sure why he needed it, but it was clear that he did. “Let’s find out,” he said.

  CHAPTER Ten

  The waitresses’ addresses were in a book that Mom kept in the office, a list that went back years and detailed every employee that the Manor had ever had with notations in Mom’s swirly script providing their positive attributes as well as their faults. But mostly their faults. Doreen Hogan had been “messy with unkempt hair; not a very hospitable server” while Fidelma Doherty had “a scowl that had clearly been placed there by the Devil.” Whatever that meant. Cargan quickly found what he was looking for and the two of us set off for the middle of Foster’s Landing in my old Volvo wagon, the one that Dad had procured for me when I had arrived home. Cargan, curiously, had a Vespa that he rode around the little village, an odd sight among the pickup trucks at one end of the socioeconomic spectrum and the fancy luxury cars at the other. But clearly the Volvo was better for this errand.

  Colleen and Pauline lived on the top floor of a tidy two-family house that I recognized as the childhood home of one of my old school friends, Veronica Mulroney. A check of the mailbox indicated that the Mulroneys were no longer in residence, their place on the ground floor having been taken by the Martinez family.

  Colleen appeared to have just woken from a nap when we arrived. She was surprised to see us when she answered the door after running down the long flight of stairs that led to her apartment. “Bel. Cargan? What are you doing here?” she asked, pulling her hair back into a messy ponytail.

  “We were hoping to take a look around Pauline’s room,” Cargan said. “You haven’t heard from her, have you?”

  Colleen led us up the stairs and into a tiny but immaculately kept apartment. The furniture was secondhand, or maybe third, the cushions on the couch sagging but clean. A handmade throw was draped over the back to hide what was likely a little wear and tear on the fabric. The kitchen was spotless; I could see why Colleen and Pauline had been employees for so long at the Manor and why next to their name in the employee book, there had been stars only, no negative comments from Mom. They were neat and fastidious about their surroundings, something that Mom valued in her employees.

  “I haven’t heard from her and I don’t know what you think you’d find in her room,” Colleen said. “I don’t know how I feel about you looking in there, either.”

  “Just a quick look around,” Cargan said.

  “Well, you know it’s locked,” she said.

  Cargan smiled. “Not a problem.”

  I could tell that Colleen considered Cargan someone in authority, her boss. “Do I have a choice?” she asked, stepping aside and motioning toward a door. “Don’t make a mess,” she cautioned, flopping onto the couch and examining her nails.

  Cargan approached the door and, with some kind of sleight of hand, was in the bedroom in no time. I whistled. “Nice work, brother. The old credit card trick?”

  “If I told you…”

  “You’d have to kill me?” I asked. “There’s a joke that never gets old.”

  We stood in the doorway of Pauline’s room, taking it all in. Pauline’s tips must have been better than I thought because her room was beautifully appointed. As a matter of fact, I had ogled the entire bed ensemble in the Pottery Barn catalog just the week before, noticing that if I bought everything for my old queen bed, it would have cost close to a thousand bucks, about nine hundred and eighty bucks I didn’t have. “Is that a Waterford lamp?” I asked, touching the linen shade lightly.

  Cargan poked around the room. “There’s a lot of nice stuff in here. Could she afford all of this on a waitress salary?” he asked.

  “Banquet server!” Colleen called from the living room.

  “My apologies,” Cargan whispered, pulling a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and donning them. He opened drawers slowly and poked around while I wandered around the room, which rivaled some of the best hotels in which I had ever stayed.

  I touched a framed picture of Barack Obama that hung on the wall across from the bed. “This is an interesting design choice,” I said. “Obama?”

  “His mother’s people are from Tipperary,” Cargan said. “One of us. Like Kennedy before him.”

  “Offaly!” Colleen called from the other room. “Not Tipperary. It’s on the border, but it’s not Tipperary.”

  “Again, my apologies.” Cargan peeked into one of the drawers in the beautiful antique dresser.

  Colleen appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. “There’s a Barack Obama Plaza in Ireland. Best roast beef sandwich you’ll ever have.”

  That got my attention. “Really?”

  “Would melt in your mouth,” she said, leaning on the doorjamb.

  “How do they make it?” I asked, thinking that a mini roast-beef sandwich might find its way onto the cocktail-hour menu.

  “Not a clue,” she said. “Marinate it in buttermilk maybe?”

  “Maybe,” I said. That was a real old-school method but one I had never tried.

  Cargan shot me a look and in that look was the declarative statement: focus.

  “What do you think you’re going to find?” Colleen asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said, getting a side-eye from Cargan that meant I should distract her. “You know what would be great now?” I asked.

  “A glass of wine?” she said, looking at the clock. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

  “A cup of tea,” I said. I wanted to keep a clear head.

  “Grand,” she said. “I’ll put on the kettle
.”

  I walked through the living room and spied a large bouquet of freshly cut flowers sitting on a side table. If they weren’t from Mom’s garden, they were from someone who had the exact same flowers that Mom had planted in the spring. I looked up and saw Cargan in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Mom’s?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Just a little something to take home from work,” he said, turning, the blush on his face giving him away again.

  I followed Colleen into the kitchen. “I’m worried about Pauline, Colleen.”

  She turned from the stove and looked at me. “Me, too.”

  “You’ve overstayed your work visas, haven’t you?” I asked as gently as I could.

  The words came out in a steady gush. “We have but your dad pays us in cash and we make good money. I send some home for my little sister who wants to come to college here in the States.” She looked down. “It just happened. I always intended to go back but there was never the right time. I met a fellow. I broke up with the fellow. I met another one.” Her eyes were shiny with tears. “You know how it goes.”

  I did. “So you don’t want to go to the police?”

  “If we do, they’ll find her for sure and send her back.”

  “And you, right?” I said. “They’ll send you back, too, right?”

  “She would never betray us,” Collen said, defiant.

  “If that’s the case and you really believe it, what would be so bad about that?” I asked. Better than being in the weeds, wandering around looking for a safe place to land. “What would be so horrible about her getting sent back to Ireland, provided that she didn’t spill the beans on you and Eileen?”

  Her answer was swift. “If she goes back, her husband will kill her.”

  CHAPTER Eleven

  Pegeen Casey’s tearstained face was one of the first things I saw the next morning when I entered Shamrock Manor. I was thinking about husbands killing wives and how Pauline was on the run, probably, from an abusive relationship so was already distracted; I couldn’t imagine what our formerly blushing bride could want with us again. Colleen couldn’t tell us much about Pauline’s husband, but she knew that they had married young, been together for two years, unhappy most of that time. Pauline had split and come over here, her dad an old acquaintance of my dad and all that, so there was a job waiting for her.

  Cargan’s ears had turned red at the thought of the girl being harmed by her husband and it was in that physical clue that I saw what was really going on here: he had a crush on the girl, if not more.

  Pegeen stood in the lobby of the mansion with a man, staring disconsolately at the door to the dining room where just days earlier she had danced with her new husband.

  “Pegeen?” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, interrupting her depressed reverie.

  “Oh, Belfast. Hi,” she said. “Is there somewhere we could go to talk?” She turned to the man standing next to her; I recognized him from the wedding. “You remember my brother, James?”

  He held out a hand. “James Casey. I don’t think we officially met at the wedding. We apologize for dropping in on you unexpectedly but hope you can help us.” Like his sister, he was dressed pretty formally for morning; his suit had an impeccable cut and his tie was knotted expertly. Pegeen wore a pencil skirt and a crisp white blouse, a strand of pearls around her neck. He noticed my taking in their attire. “Pegeen left here in such a hurry that she may have left a few things behind,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. I took a furtive second look at him; why hadn’t I taken more notice of him at the wedding? He and his sister resembled each other but not their parents; the siblings were tall and lean with fair skin and dark hair. The parents were short, stout, and with ruddy complexions. Whatever genes had missed a generation had been kind to Pegeen and James; their poise, looks, and bearing spoke to being related to another Casey family, not the one who dabbled in importing and exporting and who the girls had whispered had connections to the Irish underworld, if there was such a thing.

  We went into Mom and Dad’s office; it was early and Mom was teaching a Pilates class in her studio and Dad was who knows where. My guess is that he was foraging for items to use in his latest art installation, rocks, sticks, old pieces of metal, and other discarded artifacts that were his stock-in-trade. I took a seat at Mom’s desk, noticing happily that the old-fashioned register that she used for bookkeeping looked healthy and robust. More black than red, literally and figuratively. We were making money. All we needed was for more bad press to upend what we had carefully created over the last several months, my food being an integral part of our newfound success.

  Pegeen sat across from me, holding a very expensive purse in her lap, her hands worrying the thick leather strap. James sat beside her, their legs almost touching. I couldn’t decide if it was weird or a close bond. I decided to go with the latter. Better that way.

  “I can’t believe this, Bel,” she said. “That just a few days ago I was the happiest person on the planet and now I feel as though I’ll never laugh again.”

  James reached over and patted her hand. No ring. I don’t know why I noticed, why I cared. I blushed red at the thought that I was thinking about that in this setting, on this occasion. You are an awful person, Belfast McGrath, I thought as I drew a circle with my finger on the desk.

  I didn’t know what to say and I knew this wasn’t the right time to bring up our mutual acquaintance, my cousin and her friend, Caleigh. Sure, I had had a broken engagement at the beginning of the year but my sadness didn’t approach Pegeen’s. Although I would have loved to see my ex, Ben, have a massive heart attack in front of me, I tamped down the memory of my revenge when I saw just what a toll this death had taken on this woman’s life. I poked around the desk but didn’t see anything with Pegeen’s name on it. Mom and Dad hadn’t mentioned coming up with anything belonging to the bride so it was hard to know what she might have left behind.

  James spoke finally, holding his sister close while he did, trying to comfort her. “Gerry had been fine. A little under the weather right before the wedding but we thought it was just nerves.”

  “Nerves!” Pegeed said, crying even louder.

  “It was just so sudden,” James said. “And on their wedding day.”

  “My wedding day!” his sister said.

  James looked around uncomfortably. If his family was as Irish as my family, Pegeen’s display was making him uncomfortable. We keep everything inside, for the most part, stoicism being lauded in our culture.

  I didn’t know what to say so I did what I did best: I babbled. “Well, his job as a private investigator must be very stressful. It’s stressful, right? Doing that kind of work?”

  “And Gerry was retired from the NYPD,” Pegeen added. “He probably had a lot of pent-up stress that I didn’t even know about.” She wiped her eyes with a dainty hankie procured from her expensive purse. When she saw my face, though, the question about how such a young man could have retired so young, she clarified. “He was injured in the line of duty.”

  My mind went to Cargan, his own affiliation with the NYPD, how his work had scarred him so much that he had taken a leave of absence from “the Job,” as he referred to it, resting in his room in the Manor, playing his music, trying to get his mental equilibrium back. I don’t know what he had seen or what he had had to do, but clearly it had left him slightly broken.

  “Your husband was a very nice man,” I said.

  She bristled. “He was. A nice man, that is. He was the nicest,” she said, her tone defensive.

  I let it go. She was in pain and I had been there myself not that long ago. Words were misconstrued, feelings heightened. Sensitivity and defensiveness become your armor and make communication difficult at times. “I’ll speak to my parents and see if they found anything after the wedding. What is it that you lost?”

  “It’s a purse. Do you have a lost-and-found department?” Pegeen asked. “Somewhere I could look to see if it’
s there?”

  “Maybe?” I said. I actually had no idea. I opened a closet in the office and, sure enough, a box on the floor contained a bunch of odds and ends that looked like they had been compiled from a variety of weddings. There were some extra favors from “Doreen and Jake’s” nuptials the October before, a couple of little bottles of wine, the liquid now discolored and probably undrinkable; weirdly, a shoe that had been dyed purple to match some unfortunate bridesmaid gown; two pairs of socks; and a little bag that had been designated to hold wedding gifts, most likely. “Well, here’s something,” I said, pulling out the box. “Doesn’t look like a purse is in here, though,” I said. “What did it look like?”

  “Large. Black.” Pegeen looked at the box’s contents and then up at me quickly. “No.”

  “Was there anything else that you’re missing?” I asked. “I can ask Mom and Dad when they get back,” I said, thinking that if this is how they ran their business, disappearing in the middle of the day, it was no wonder the Manor was going under before I had returned home.

  James jumped in, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Thank you, Bel. We appreciate it. It’s just Pegeen’s purse, the one she brought that day. If you find it, please let us know. It was worth a bit of money.”

  Import/export must have been a lucrative business because the bag in her lap was also worth a small fortune. I led them out of the office and into the foyer where Dad was hanging a new painting, this one almost indescribable, a postmodern take on … the sun? Who knew? It was a big splash of yellow paint strewn across an otherwise blank canvas, and larger than any of his other paintings. He was hammering a nail into the gorgeous wainscot that lined the grand staircase, eyeballing its placement. Never a good idea but Dad wasn’t one for convention. Or levelness.

  “Oh, Pegeen!” he said, running down the stairs, the scent of turpentine and paint thinner all around him, like a cloud. “You poor girl! How are you holding up?” he asked.

  Seeing my father, she let loose the tearful floodgate she had been holding back. With customers, Dad showed a warmth he had never displayed to his progeny and with this girl, someone he had met only a few times and knew only in a business sense, he opened his arms and let her in, holding her while she cried.