The Death of an Irish Lass

by Bartholomew Gill

  “And what was his attitude to Schwerr?” McGarr asked. “No doubt he knew Schwerr was going to replace him. From what I can gather, it’s a soft spot. Plenty of money, no way to account for it, lots of booze and companionship. I don’t see Hanly doing anything more exacting for the cause.”

  Dineen shook his head. “He’s been well provided for. And he’s done more than his share in the past. At one time he had a Midas touch and earned plenty for us. Some of his investments were his own. He won’t suffer for much.”

  “What were his orders in regard to Schwerr?”

  “Just to follow him last night. The regular tail we put on Schwerr blew his cover, and we had nobody else available in that area over the weekend.”

  “But Schwerr must have known Hanly by sight?”

  “As I said, Hanly’s a pro. My bet is Schwerr never once saw him, drunk as he was.”

  True, McGarr thought, Schwerr had never once mentioned Hanly. Nor Hanly Schwerr for that matter, but that was understandable, given I.R.A. activities. Still, it struck McGarr that Hanly had been conspicuous. The men in the bar in Lahinch had described him right down to the odd brand of whiskey he drank. There was some discrepancy between what he was now being told and what had actually taken place. And the type and number of Hanly’s lies reinforced that feeling for McGarr. “But why was Schwerr being followed?”

  “Because of May Quirk.” Dineen paused to light a cigarette.

  The band had stopped now and McGarr could hear the crowd outside the windows of the room, taking a breather in the parking lot.

  Dineen continued, “She was a journalist of the worst sort. A badmouther, I’d say. The idea was to make all the little people who read her reports feel good whenever she slew another giant.”

  That didn’t seem far wrong. The Daily News was a little man’s newspaper. McGarr himself had read an article written by May Quirk that had had such a slant.

  “I had her checked out completely before I let her interview me, but we came to a decision about her I just couldn’t support. We decided that too many of the Irish-American Daily News readers identified with the I.R.A., and her editors there just wouldn’t let her do a job on us in the paper. I argued against it, but I was overruled. I told them I had gotten my facts from New York.”

  “Paddy Sugrue?” McGarr asked.

  That knocked Dineen back. “No, somebody else; somebody closer to her.”

  McGarr wondered who could possibly have been closer to her than Sugrue. He then thought of Rory O’Connor, downstairs with Noreen.

  “My thought was that she’d go for all the marbles with this story—you know, personal interview with I.R.A. finance chiefs—and try to set up syndication all over the States. If she did, her story could have hurt us bad. Above all else, May Quirk was a very ambitious young woman. But”—Dineen raised his palm—“we did not kill her. At least, I can tell you as an old friend I saw no order, heard no rumor, and wouldn’t believe it if you told me now that we had anything to do with her death. And you know as well as I, neither Hanly nor Schwerr would have been called upon to do the job if we had decided otherwise. They are—were—too important to us. Cut off our money and—” Dineen let the silence carry his meaning. He pulled the stacks of money out of the envelope. A red rubber band bound each. These he removed and began sorting piles according to currency and value. “I guess I’ve been proven right, after all. Because of her, both of them are now useless to us, and we might have lost all this money as well.”

  McGarr said, “I don’t see why you granted her an interview, feeling as you do.”

  “Orders. And if she was going to interview anybody, I wanted it to be me.”

  “And?”

  “I got the distinct impression she was going to flay us in the article. Most of the questions were something like, ‘Does it titillate your revolutionary ardor, Major, to know that your twenty-some-odd years of military expertise are being employed in the massacre of women and children?’ ‘Does your wife know she’s married to an archfiend?’ ‘What does she tell the kids when they ask if daddy’s coming home for Christmas? He’s over in London blowing Santa out of Harrod’s basement?’”

  McGarr smirked.

  “Not exactly that, but you know what I mean. Sure, she asked a lot of important questions, too, but every once in a while she came through with one off the wall. I got the impression she was up to no good.”

  “Were you supposed to answer the important questions?”

  Dineen’s forehead glowered a bit. “I had my limits.”

  “About where the money was going and for what?” They both knew much of the cash donated in New York and other places was simply being stuffed in the pockets of either the intermediaries along the way or the Provo commanders who weren’t as altruistic or well provided for as Dineen.

  Dineen looked away. “She kept laying on that angle. She wasn’t being straight with us. She had a hidden agenda. That O’Connor kid was different.”

  McGarr didn’t say a word. He just stared at Dineen.

  “Came along with her. Said he thought he’d write a book about us. I liked him. He asked questions that allowed us to put our best foot forward. He said we’d already gotten all the bad press we needed in the States. Also said the function of a critic was to try to understand a point of view thoroughly, to present it as completely as any of us would have it, and then step back to see how the reality of our efforts matched the ideal. You can’t ask for any more than that.

  “While he was saying that I watched her. She was just looking crafty, if you know what I mean. As though everything he was saying was just so much talk and she knew what she was going to do already.”

  “Maybe it was just talk. Did you investigate O’Connor too?”

  “Of course. Thoroughly.”

  “And was he what he said?”

  “More than she, who had only her New York Daily News ID and her word that she was going to write the piece. He had a contract with a New York publisher.”

  “What about the twenty-seven thousand dollars?”

  Dineen tilted his head. He didn’t know what McGarr was driving at.

  “Her editor in New York sent her twenty-seven thousand dollars to pay for certain special information from a Provo source.”

  Now Dineen was very interested. “He did? From whom?”

  “I’d like to know that myself.”

  Dineen thought for a moment.

  “She had the money on her when she was killed, but whoever killed her either didn’t know it or didn’t or couldn’t search her for it. Who else besides you and Hanly knew Schwerr was going to meet May Quirk in Griffin’s?”

  “Nobody else that I know of, but then again—” He let his voice trail off.

  McGarr understood that the I.R.A., Provisional wing or otherwise, was not as tight-lipped an organization as some would have it.

  Dineen said, “That’s a lot of money.”

  “For one man,” McGarr added. “The special information must have been pretty important stuff.”

  In a patently disingenuous manner Dineen said, “And I couldn’t imagine what that would be, Inspector.”

  But McGarr could tell he was worried. “Where did you meet them?”

  “In a pub in Lahinch.”

  “Does O’Connor know you use this place?”

  “Don’t think so. Of course, we won’t be using it much longer.”

  “Does Schwerr have a temper?”

  “Not that I know of, but I don’t know much about him personally.”

  “Did you know May Quirk was pregnant?”

  Dineen shook his head. “And, sad to relate, not by me.”

  “By Schwerr.”

  That interested Dineen. “She was a wily one, that one.”

  “Schwerr wanted to marry her. She mentioned abortion. He admits he blew his top. That was when she shot him.”

  Dineen thought for a moment. McGarr could tell the $27,000 and Schwerr’s alliance with May Quirk were bothering hi
m. “Even an I.R.A. man has a right to a little nonpolitical anger, you know, Peter.” He looked away. “But Schwerr could have compromised us seriously with her. I wonder how much he told her. Have you found her notes yet?”

  McGarr shook his head. “But I’ve posted an armed guard on her parents’ house.” That was a lie and Dineen knew it. He added, “If I find it, you can have it.” He didn’t have to add that he’d take a copy.

  “I hope you find it, Peter. I really do.” He paused. After a while he said, “You know, if I had known about her and Schwerr, I might have—”

  McGarr scoffed. “She was a beautiful woman, you said so yourself. Don’t tell me you’ve become a misogynist now that you’ve teamed up with these teddy boys.”

  But it wasn’t a light moment for Dineen. “I could tell just by looking at her she’d have the hammer out on us the minute she got back to New York. There she was,” he pointed to an empty chair, “all bright green eyes and chirpy like she hadn’t spent a day of her life outside Clare and thought an I.R.A. CO was as lofty as a messenger from God, but I’d just read a sheaf of her articles on dope dealers, prostitutes, gangsters, corporate gougers, the vice-president who got the sack, and a labor union that was bilking its members. She had squashed them all as flat as ants on a pavement. And we were next, no two ways about it.” He had the bottle out again. “Whoever did her in did us a favor. Have another drink, Pete.”

  McGarr didn’t object. He was wondering about O’Connor and why he had lied to him about being here in Ireland. He was also wondering about May Quirk. Her image was beginning to tarnish a bit. She had been devious, ruthless, and inordinately ambitious. And McGarr knew Dineen to be a rare judge of character.

  “Now what?” Dineen asked him.

  “Don’t know. Poke around a bit. Hanly lied to me about several things, not just the money.”

  “You’d think with how good we’ve been to him, he would have tried to play us straight.”

  “O’Connor lied to me as well. A certain doctor by the name of Fleming didn’t tell me everything he knew, either.” McGarr took a sip of poteen. Dineen had lowered his eyes at the mention of the name. “Do you know the man?”

  “Which one?”

  “Fleming.”

  “A doctor, you say he is?”

  McGarr could tell Dineen was about to lie to him.

  And Dineen knew McGarr knew. They had been friends too long. Dineen laughed. “Sure, I know him.” He opened his suit coat and pulled his shirt from his pants. His ribs were wrapped. “Some bastard in Fermanagh tried to break me in half.”

  “Does Fleming work for you often?”

  “That’s a state secret. What state, you ask? Why, the state of being a doctor in the military sector that I control.”

  So that was the reason Fleming had not told McGarr about Schwerr’s gunshot wound. McGarr kept staring at Dineen until the latter added, “He’s a good boy, Fleming. The best. Never asks for a farthing. Late at night, early in the morning. He’s performed successful operations in barns by the light of a pocket torch on fellows that were half blown away. He’s kept us in his office, his farmhouse. He gave us the loan of his car a couple of times. Fleming is a very special person to us. We wouldn’t want a thing happening to him.”

  McGarr was a bit taken aback. “That’s not a threat or a warning, I hope.”

  “Nope. Just a statement of fact. If Fleming got lifted, I don’t know if I could restrain some of the crazies.” The thought made Dineen’s features glower.

  McGarr stood. “Noreen’s downstairs. Why don’t you come down and have a snort on me.”

  Dineen shook his head. “Can’t. Wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

  “Ah—I don’t care about that.”

  “But I do. May Quirk’s death puts me in a bad light with the other CO’s. They knew I didn’t care for her. Then Hanly and Schwerr show up and get lifted at the scene. They’re my men. At best they’ve only exposed themselves; at worst one of them gets charged with murder and the whole lot of us have got to run to ground. And then there’ll be the charge of countermanding a council decision. No, Peter—somebody might misinterpret our drinking together in public. We wouldn’t want that.”

  McGarr offered Dineen his hand. “You give me a ring if you need me, Phil. If you’re in a jam, I promise I’ll do everything I can. How are you fixed—”

  Dineen stopped him. He tapped one of the piles of currency. “All I want.”

  That was when the bulb went out.

  Then the door opened and McGarr heard something being slid over the floor.

  The door was closed with a clap.

  When McGarr heard Dineen fall to his knees and scramble toward the door, he knew what it was.

  He jerked his head to the windows. His pupils had yet to dilate in the darkness, but through the yellow shade he could see the faint glow of the lights from the parking lot outside. At this he rushed and hurled his back into it.

  Only when he felt the windows catch the weight of his body, buckle, then burst did he remember he was on the second floor of the building. McGarr tried to control his fall, to tuck in his appendages and shield his head, but the force of the bomb blast roaring hot from the shattered window drove him out across the parking lot in a wild tumble. He landed, back down, on the roof of a car and felt it collapse like a soft hat. The heels of his shoes smashed the windshield. He was then showered with debris from the explosion. Before the big stuff could fall on him, he had sense enough to roll off. He fell into the darkness between the parked cars and just lay there. Shards of wall and framing timber clattered over the sheet metal of the automobiles. The damp earth was cool on his cheek and temple.

  There was no doubt about it now, he surmised—the I.R.A. had something to do with May Quirk’s murder when they were willing to sacrifice one of their senior officers to sidetrack the investigation. Or could Dineen’s disaffection for the cause have been deeper than he had let on to McGarr? Did certain of them see it as a chance to get rid of two thorns in their side? Or were they, as Dineen had said, just a bunch of crazies whom he couldn’t control himself?

  McGarr could hear the crackle of flames and the shrieks of the crowd, which was pushing from the lower levels of the dance hall in panic. He pulled himself to a stand. Fortunately, he was still numb. At first his legs wouldn’t work and he had to use the sides of the cars like crutches.

  He didn’t stop at the dance hall entrance to assist the Salthill Garda. He knew he wasn’t up to it. He caught a glimpse of O’Connor at the front of the crowd and, by standing on a bumper, he saw Noreen near him. McGarr managed to push his way toward them, and they helped him to O’Connor’s Datsun.

  The front bucket seat wrapped McGarr’s back like soothing hands. “Drive slow,” he advised O’Connor. “Very, very slow. And avoid any rough spots, please.”

  “What happened?” Noreen had waited until then to ask.

  “An attempted double assassination.” McGarr thought about Dineen. The only way he might have escaped was through the door. McGarr imagined he hadn’t had the time.

  “Phil Dineen and you?”

  McGarr nodded.

  “When it happened, we were waiting for you near the ticket window in the front lobby,” Noreen explained. “There was that terrible roar and then he came tumbling down the stairs, his face all covered with blood. He picked himself up, ripped off his jacket, which was on fire, and walked out the door as though nothing had happened. He collapsed when he got outside. Some men put him in the back seat of a car and drove off. Oh, Peter—that was a close call. I was so—” She couldn’t complete the thought.

  McGarr could see she was troubled. Her forehead was wrinkled, eyes wide with fright.

  “Where do you hurt? Hadn’t we better get you to a doctor?”

  “I’m all right.” He offered her his hand. “The hospitals and doctors will be busy treating all those people who got trampled. Did you see them?”

  O’Connor was shaking his head. “Reminde
d me of a sheep dip.”

  “It was awful,” said Noreen. “Are you sure? Where do you hurt?”

  “I landed on my back. Tomorrow—” McGarr turned his face to the window. He knew how he’d feel tomorrow. His back would be a universe of pain and mottled with blue and green bruises. His neck and elbows were cut, too.

  Noreen was holding a handkerchief to his neck. “Why you?” she asked. “What have you ever done to them? You’ve never gone out of your way to make trouble. You’ve even avoided arresting them, when you could.”

  “Why Dineen is the even more interesting question,” O’Connor said. He was driving now. “Aside from the interest we have in your still being alive, of course.”

  McGarr turned to O’Connor. He was a cool one. “Why Dineen, why me, why a department store in Belfast or a restaurant in London? I don’t understand why. These people are this island’s deepest mystery. Madmen, capable of wreaking havoc for a cause that is votes and jobs one day, Holy Mother Ireland the next, and just bigotry and ignorance most of the time.”

  O’Connor was shaking his head. “No—this is different. As far as I know, Dineen is different. They need men like him, if they’re going to drive the British out of the North. There’s something else going on here.”

  McGarr let a few miles pass. Truly he was confused. Could it have been simple jealousy of Dineen—that he was a hard man in an organization not used to discipline and had provoked the attack? He looked over at O’Connor again. “What’s in your literary future, Rory?”

  The question caught O’Connor by surprise. “Another novel, I guess.” The dancing with Noreen had seemed to cheer him.

  “What about?”

  “Maybe the I.R.A.”

  Noreen said, “That sounds like a change for you.”

  “I’ve always wanted to work in a realistic mode, but what with television and the movies, it’s pretty hard to do it credibly. I’ve never really felt my talents were up to it. Maybe now—”