Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You are,” he said. “What are you? Forty? Forty-five?”

  “Not even close!” I poured him a glass of milk to wash down the cake and set it down with a thud and a glare, making clear that the discussion of my age was off the table. “Anyway, she’s a lovely woman and always has been.” I watched him eat for a few minutes. “But back to the matter at hand. Why are you here? You’re very sick and traveling can’t be easy. Why did you come here?”

  “We had a plan, me and Pauline,” he said. “When we found out about…” He paused and looked up at the ceiling, not able to say the words. “About this, she promised to help me. To get the money I needed for treatment. To get me to…”—he paused as if trying to remember where he was—“the States.”

  “You were running pretty well for a guy with cancer,” I said.

  “Well, that run nearly killed me,” he said.

  “How was she going to get the money?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You’ve got me. She transferred ten grand in dollars to me a few weeks ago and said more was on the way.”

  Even I, with my limited experience in the medical world, knew that ten thousand dollars wasn’t going to come close to helping this very ill man whose face, at this very moment, looked like it belonged to a much older person. I had seen Cargan’s hospital bills after his recent stay there and they were well beyond ten thousand and he had good insurance that would cover most of the cost. “Did she say where she was getting the money?” I asked again.

  “No. But more was on the way. That’s all I knew.”

  The Manor was quiet, uncharacteristically. I brought Donnie up to a room on the second floor and set him up. I handed him the remote controls to the television.

  “About nine hundred channels but there’ll be nothing to watch. I guarantee you,” I said. “Make yourself at home. This room is en suite, so the bathroom is next to that closet there.”

  I found Dad in his studio, working on an installation. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Belfast!” he said, happy to see me. I hoped he was still happy when I told him we had a boarder. “What brings you here? Shouldn’t you be trussing up ducks for the D’Amato/Hanson wedding?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Listen, Dad. I have something I need to talk to you about.”

  He was bent over a large piece of wood on an even larger table and measured a corner. “What’s that?”

  “The plot has thickened a little bit where Donnie Kinneally is concerned.”

  “How so, Belfast?” he asked.

  I explained briefly what I now knew to be true. Dad blessed himself, kissing his thumb at the end of the gesture. “God bless the lad. Terrible thing, the cancer.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “But here’s the thing. You know that old motel out on the edge of town?”

  “Not fit for man or beast!”

  “Right. Donnie was staying there.”

  Dad looked up from the piece of wood. “He can’t stay there.”

  It had to be Dad’s decision even though it was already in progress.

  “How long?” Dad asked.

  “How long what?”

  “How long will he be staying?”

  “Don’t know, Dad. But he can’t stay at that motel.”

  Dad pulled a thick pencil out from behind his ear and marked the wood. “Put him in the room next to the bridal suite. It’s got its own facilities. I believe you and your fancy brother call it an ‘en suite.’ Make the lad at home.”

  Before Dad could pull out the power drill that was next to his right hand—or change his mind on the subject of Donnie Kinneally—I walked around the table and put my arms around him in a proper hug. “Thanks, Dad,” I said into his barrel chest.

  He pulled away, flustered. “Well, good, then, and all right, and it’s fine,” he said. We weren’t prone to any kind of public displays of affection in the family. Or private ones, for that matter. But Dad was a good egg and he needed to hear that from time to time even if it made him uncomfortable.

  Tonight should have been our family Sunday dinner, but for some reason it hadn’t materialized, the e-mail sent by Mom for the command performance not having gone out as usual. She was still in a stew about Helen but it didn’t matter to me. That meant I had a free night. Did I really care why Mom didn’t plan dinner this weekend? Not in the least. We were all working like dogs at the Manor and certainly had our fair share of togetherness. It’s not like we didn’t see each other all the time and without fail. Maybe Mom had finally come to the conclusion that it might not be the worst idea to take a break from one another every now and again. It could actually help our relationships and the boys’ in particular. That was a group who spent way too much time together.

  I left the studio and wandered around the grounds of the Manor for a while, at loose ends. What did I know? I reviewed everything in my mind. We had a girl who was married but not living with her dying husband, and not really respecting her vows. She had disappeared, seemingly without a trace, only to reappear and tell me that the poor sot who had died with his pants around his ankles at his own wedding, ostensibly of a heart attack, had been poisoned. She had been involved with a guy in town and one right outside of town, how deeply, it was hard to say. She had taken money from one and had made things difficult for the other with regard to the Health Department. To what end? Blackmail?

  Thinking about all of that helped me decide just what I was going to do that evening. I got in the Volvo and headed to O’Halligan’s.

  Angus Connolly was at the end of the bar closest to the door when I arrived, his eyes blackened, if I had to guess, hidden behind large sunglasses that looked more than a little feminine. I suppose it’s hard to find big, oval shades to cover your war wounds if you’re a dude, so Angus was rocking ladies’ sunglasses. I resisted the urge to laugh and put on my most sober face, the one that would tell him that I meant no harm and just wanted to set the record straight about what had happened the night before and the nights previous when I had crossed the threshold of his watering hole.

  I put up my hands to show I meant no harm. “Mr. Connolly, I’m sorry.”

  “You should be!” he said. “And you are no longer welcome here. Don’t make me get a restraining order.”

  “A restraining order? For using the men’s room?” I asked.

  “You know what you did,” he said. “Canadian, my ass.”

  I sat down on the bar stool next to him but didn’t go so far as to order a drink. I was on borrowed time; I knew that. “Listen, I’m sorry I lied and I’m sorry that I used your men’s room.”

  “And what else?” he asked.

  I was at a loss and looked at him blankly.

  “The fight!” he said. “You’re sorry about the fight you started!”

  “I didn’t start a fight,” I said. “A fight started around me but I didn’t start a fight.” I looked at my reflection in his sunglasses. “There’s a difference.”

  He sighed. “What do you want? Why do you keep coming here?”

  “Pauline.”

  “What about her?”

  “Did she blackmail you? Try to get money from you?”

  “I already told you all that.”

  “But the Health Department stuff. Did she try to extort money from you?” I couldn’t tell if the punch to the nose had addled his brain or he just didn’t want to tell me. I waited. What he didn’t know was that I was the family staring champion, having once stared down Derry until he almost cried when defeated.

  “Oh, fine!” He put his drink down on the bar with such force that the sound of it got the attention of the entire bar. “Yes. She got money from me.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five grand.”

  Holy crap. That was a lot of dough. Between that and the money she got from Jed Mitchell, she was amassing quite a lot of wealth. Sadly, if what she was doing was what I thought she was doing—saving money for Donnie’s tre
atment—she was way short. Thinking about her bedroom and its beautiful appointments as well as her luxury car, I wondered if she had done the unthinkable and used the money on herself. She had lied; the kid wasn’t abusive, just sick. In my mind, Pauline went from a minor nuisance to Public Enemy Number One.

  “Lot of money, huh?” he said.

  “To what end? To keep the Health Department away?” I said. “Seems like a lot of money for something that you could probably have made go away by just cleaning your kitchen, huh?” There was something else; there had to be.

  He looked away. “Mind your business. Go to Canada. Just get out of here and stay out of here.”

  The waitress who looked like Pauline drifted by, giving me the stink eye.

  “Her?” I asked. “Is she the issue?”

  He leaned in close and I got a whiff of whiskey-tainted breath. “Get. Out.”

  I had my answer. A dirty kitchen coupled with an angry waitress. Still didn’t seem like something that required a twenty-five-thousand-dollar pay off but what did I know? I slid off the stool and started for the door.

  “Hey!” Angus said.

  I turned.

  “If you find her…”

  I waited.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “Ah, it’s nothing. I’ve forgotten about her already.”

  He could say it as many times as he wanted but that didn’t make it true.

  CHAPTER Thirty-three

  On my way through the village, I passed an ambulance, lights blazing, siren blasting. Although it was coming from the direction of the Manor, I didn’t give it much thought; there was an assisted-living facility—sorry: fifty-five and better!—a few blocks away from my home and seeing an ambulance go by was an unfortunate common occurrence. I pulled into my usual parking spot at the Manor and spied members of my family standing on the front porch, one and all looking concerned.

  As I got closer, I could see that Dad, more than Cargan, more than Mom, was bereft. Cargan looked concerned and Mom looked nonplussed, as if what had just happened had interfered with her Pilates class and been a giant inconvenience but nothing more. When I reached the porch, however, I could see that she was crying and that what I took for annoyance was a grim set of her mouth that was stopping the floodgates.

  Dad shook his head. “Poor lad,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Donnie. He had come downstairs for a glass of water and collapsed. He’s a very sick boy, Belfast,” Dad said. “Sicker than we thought.”

  “Someone should be with him at the hospital,” I said.

  “I’m following the bus,” Cargan said.

  “Bus?” Dad, Mom, and I asked in unison.

  “Sorry. Ambulance.” He held out his hand and Dad handed him the keys to the Manor van, the one the boys used for those odd times they played off the premises. “Old habits die hard. That’s what we called it at work.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  I hadn’t been in the van in a long time but it smelled exactly the way I remembered: like boys and leather and cold cuts. It was a replacement Vanagon, the one we had had as children having died a spectacular death on the side of the Taconic State Parkway on the way to a feis, an Irish music and dance competition in upstate New York. I remember standing by the side of the road, everyone holding their instruments as cars whizzed past us, their drivers probably wondering what they were doing, a troupe of little boys, all clad in black-and-white, holding a violin, a guitar, drumsticks, and a keyboard. And why there was one little girl leaning into the engine of the van with one very red-faced man who had no idea what he was looking at.

  “I think it’s clear, Car. We’ve got to step this up a little bit. We’ve got to find Pauline. This whole situation is getting completely out of hand,” I said, holding on as we bounced along the gravel drive.

  “Getting out of hand?” he said. “It’s been out of hand for days, Bel. Was ending up in the police station any indication that we were beyond getting out of hand? Was bringing a dying man into the Manor a clue that things were beyond getting out of hand?”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s enough of that. We’re in this together, right?” I looked straight ahead, noting that he was going down a street that led away from the hospital. “Where are we going?”

  “I have a lead. I think I know where Pauline is.”

  We headed out of town toward a little city north of us called Chesterton, one that was once down-at-the-heels but was now home to a burgeoning number of hipsters. Row after row of beautiful brownstones, some still abandoned, others with FOR SALE signs, and still others carefully and beautifully restored, sat on narrow cobblestoned streets. It was a town in the process of coming back to life and I took note of a coffee shop here and a farm-to-table restaurant there. Maybe this was where I would end up when I finally put down real roots, roots that didn’t have members of my family dragging them down.

  “Why are we here?” I asked. “And how did you find her?”

  “Well, I haven’t found her yet,” he said.

  We pulled up in front of one of the brownstones on a tree-lined street; with the leaves changing from green to a burnished, earthy hue, it made me feel as if we were walking into a painting. Gorgeous hues, the sun almost set, it lulled me into a false sense of security, a feeling that we had come a-calling, not preparing me for what would happen next.

  Cargan knocked on the door in a way that suggested he meant business. None of this light tap to let the inhabitants of the house know we were there, but more of a loud bang, the way I suspected he had knocked on more than one suspect’s door when he was working. When he didn’t get a response, he left the porch and went around back, me following like that annoying little sister who isn’t supposed to be on your playdate but who your mother says has to come along.

  The back yard was appointed with an aboveground pool and a cement-block porch that came off the kitchen. Cargan banged on the door again and, not getting an answer, tried the doorknob, which turned easily in his hand.

  “How did you find her?” I whispered as we stepped into the kitchen, the feeling of being where I wasn’t supposed to and definitely where I wanted to be causing contradictory emotions inside. The adrenaline rush, however, was all mine and all positive. This was what his job had felt like and this was why he loved it. Why he had stepped away was another story entirely.

  “It’s a long story,” he said, but I had a feeling it wasn’t. He was that good.

  We made our way through the kitchen and started into the dining room, beautifully appointed with an antique dining-room set, rich mahogany carefully tended throughout the years, not a mark on any of the pieces. From the corner of my eye, I spotted a blur, got a glimpse of a dark ponytail, and heard a door slam.

  It was Pauline and she was on the run.

  Cargan moved faster than I had ever seen him move, even years before when he had run track for two weeks because Mom made him. He was out the front door and onto the sidewalk before I could even find the wherewithal to move, rooted in place in the dining room, admiring the vast collection of original pieces of Waterford that resided on the glass shelves in the china cabinet. When I finally realized what was going on, I took off after him, spotting him just about caught up to Pauline, an impressive runner in her own right, and grabbing the back of her billowy blouse.

  When I finally reached them, out of breath and ready to pass out, I noticed that neither of them were winded or had even broken a sweat. That was the fastest two hundred meters I had ever seen and I haven’t missed one Summer Olympics.

  Cargan had a light hold on Pauline’s arm. “Where you going, Pauline?” he asked as casually as if he were asking her what she had had for breakfast.

  “None of your business, sweetheart,” she said.

  “Is this about Gerry Mason?” I asked.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Gerry. Gerard Mason. The groom you say was poisoned and not by me.”

  At that, her face pa
led and she tried to wrest free from Cargan’s grip. “It’s about a lot of things,” she said.

  “Yeah, you’ve left a trail of broken hearts,” I said, assiduously avoiding my brother’s gaze, “as well as a number of pissed-off ones, behind you in Foster’s Landing.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say about that,” she said. “Now, please. Let me go. I have to get out of here.”

  “Alleging a deliberate poisoning is a very serious thing, Pauline,” Cargan said. “I think we should talk to the authorities about that.”

  If by “authorities” he meant Kevin Hanson, well, that was a bit of a stretch of a description.

  “How was he poisoned? Who did it?” Cargan asked. “What happened?”

  “Let’s go in the house,” she said, looking around nervously. “I don’t want anyone to overhear us.”

  In the house, we sat in what was once the parlor but was now a cozy living room. “Whose house is this, Pauline?” I asked.

  “What’s it to you?” she asked.

  “It’s everything to me because you’ve made all of our lives a living hell since you split the Landing. So I feel like we should be asking the questions now and you should be answering.”

  She tried to stay strong, to keep up the brittle façade that she had perfected, but it all became too much for her and she sank onto a plush ottoman, hanging her head. “Where do you want me to start?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you start with why you abandoned your poor husband, the one with lung cancer, in Ireland, promising him that you’d come home, but never returning?” I asked, my righteous-indignation meter registering off the charts.

  She looked up. “What?”

  “The husband. Domnall Kinneally. The one with terminal lung cancer.”

  She laughed for the first time since the last time I had seen her at the Manor. “Donnie Kinneally?”

  “Yes,” I said, a weird prickly feeling starting in my spine and working its way up to the back of my neck. “Your husband.”

  She looked me dead in the eye. “Not my husband and no lung cancer. Jeez, Bel, I thought you were smarter than that.”