Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  “Cause of death?”

  “Strangulation. Looks like the killer used the nylon rope from the truck, looped it around his neck and legs, and let him strangle himself to death every time he kicked out. There’s chafing on the neck that matches what you’d get with that type of motion.”

  “What is that on his forehead?” she said.

  “A number.”

  The mark was crude, but it was clearly the number “1.”

  “Was it postmortem?”

  “No,” Perelli said, taking a sip of his coffee and grimacing. “The killer did it when he was still alive.”

  “Why would he do that? Just from a practical point of view, it would be much easier to make a clear mark if you waited until after death.”

  “He wanted to inflict pain.”

  “He did that in other ways,” Abbie said, paging slowly through the photographs. There was a circular cut underneath the belly button, and the coroner had made a notation in the margin of the photo. Incision, multiple indiv. cuts within.

  “This cut is an inch and a half deep,” Abbie said. “It looks like he was trying to carve a piece of flesh off him.”

  “But he kept stopping,” said Perelli. “Look at the hesitation marks inside the wound.”

  Abbie brought the photo closer, and nodded.

  “Extortion?” she said.

  “Judging from early information that Zangara got from his bank, Jimmy Ryan didn’t have shit to extort. Maybe the killer was trying to get something else?”

  “Like what?” said Z.

  “Information,” Abbie said.

  “We have anything similar statewide? Something that tells us he’s traveling and this could be his latest victim?”

  Alexander, the Department’s lone black detective, shook his head before shifting his enormous bulk in his chair. “Nothing. There was a prostitute in Syracuse two months ago with her right nipple cut off, but the detectives there like her live-in boyfriend for that one. They had a history of playing around with knives during sex and I guess it got out of control, he nicked her and she screamed, so he decided to go ahead and kill her.”

  Perelli nodded and spun away from the table in his chair. A few seconds later, he came wallowing back and pointed at Alexander.

  “Wait. You remember that thing three years ago, on the East Side?”

  Alexander looked at Perelli blankly, then nodded. “Oh, yeah. The old lady.”

  Abbie looked at both of them. “Wait, what was that?”

  Alexander turned to her. “It looked like a breakin robbery. A retiree living on her Social Security, black female, in one of the sketchier blocks off Delavan. The door was kicked in, some of her jewelry was gone. But then we looked at the body and it was obvious that the intruder had spent some time in the place. He’d left knife marks on her face.”

  “What kind of marks?”

  “He jabbed her in the cheek and forehead while she was laying in the bed, tied up.”

  “Could be he was finding out where the jewelry was.”

  “Could be,” Alexander said. “But the good stuff was in the top drawer. That didn’t take much looking.”

  “He didn’t take anything with him?”

  “Besides the valuables? Nothing.”

  Abbie nodded, then looked at Perelli. “Feels different to me.”

  Perelli sighed. “Look at the file anyway. What else do we know about Ryan?”

  After leaving the scene at St. Teresa’s, Abbie had gone to the Ryan home, interviewing the relatives who’d come by. A car had been idling out front as she pulled up, with two men inside. After she’d told Patty Ryan her husband was dead, two of her uncles had emerged from the car and come through the door to comfort the widow. Abbie wanted to ask them how they’d got the news so quickly. But she knew. The newswire.

  “The wife was … unable to talk to me. After I told her about the husband, she collapsed and had to be sedated.”

  “Background?”

  Abbie looked at her notes. “Jimmy Ryan was forty-eight, grew up in the County, attended Bishop Timon, where he played JV football and got solid C’s. He went to work for Mohawk Gas, which became National Grid. His brother told me there were no financial problems—no gambling, no drugs. I tend to believe him but I’ll be checking the credit cards and the mortgage payments. The marriage was unhappy but not to the point of anyone leaving. We’re going to be talking to his co-workers to see if they know anything, neighbors.”

  “Zangara?”

  “I spoke to his boss. Jimmy Ryan started in 1980 as a trainee, right out of high school. No major complaints but there never are right off. Respect for the dead and all that. I expect we find that Jimmy was just bumping along over there. Thirty-one years at the company and he was still walking through slush and dog shit to look at gas meters? Obviously he hadn’t impressed National Grid too much.”

  “So the question becomes, what was Jimmy Ryan talking about that caused him to get murdered?”

  “Well, good thing it’s the County,” O’Halloran said. “They’re probably lining up around the block to tell us.”

  The detectives laughed, but Perelli glared at O’Halloran.

  “I don’t want to hear anything about how difficult working South Buffalo is, all right? It’s like every other precinct. You have informants on the streets, you have skels in the bars who we give breaks to. Get them to talk to you. Work your sources. Do not let this County shit get in the way of carrying out your investigation.”

  The detectives were looking down at their notebooks.

  “Does everyone hear me loud and clear?”

  They nodded.

  “Okay, that’s it.”

  Abbie and Z walked back to their cubicles, glass-walled ones with black steel frames. Abbie sat down and began going through the crime scene photos more carefully.

  “And these,” Z said, leaning over and dropping another sheaf of photos onto her desk.

  Abbie picked up the new stack and paged through them slowly.

  “He could tie a knot, couldn’t he?”

  The way the rope was tied was complex, looped three times, forming a collar above the knot.

  Z nodded through the glass.

  “I wonder if those are Navy ties,” she said.

  Z shrugged. “Dunno. I was Marines. They only taught us how to kill people.”

  She went through the first batch a second time. A murder victim is brought to a church, she thought to herself, tied up in a chair. The killer cuts off both his eyelids and carves the number “1” in his forehead. What did the “1” mean—that this was the first of many?

  The killing looked staged. Churches were very public places, deeply meaningful stages for the people who went there to worship. The potential for shock was high. But paging from photo to photo, Abbie didn’t get the sense she was looking at a public announcement. More of a very intense private conversation. She looked at a color-saturated picture of Ryan’s face shot from the left side, the pink flesh of the eyelids sheared away, the mouth battered and slightly open, his face tilted upward.

  What are you seeing, Jimmy? What did he want to show you?

  She felt like she could almost hear the killer’s whisper. He wasn’t taking things away from Jimmy. He didn’t want anything. He was imparting something. He wanted Jimmy to know. To learn.

  A one-way conversation. Be very quiet and listen to what I say. The cut full of hesitation marks, down near the belly button, told her that.

  Maybe Ryan just wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t listen to what the killer wanted so desperately for him to know.

  “I’m going to his house,” she said after an hour.

  Z, chewing on a cinnamon roll, waved.

  It was a clear day, a blue sky arched over the lake. She jumped on the ramp to the Skyway.

  After exiting at Tifft Street, she drove toward South Park, the road hemmed in on both sides by tall grass. She’d gone here with her dad on Saturday mornings when she was just a girl. He would wake
her up and say, “Want to go chasing black rabbits?” and she would say yes because she knew how much he loved it, and because you didn’t say no to her father. Never, ever. They would park their sky-blue Nova at the little turn-in where the workers had their hut and then set out on foot, along the trails made by people she never saw, her father and her always alone out there, he with his long stick for chasing off dogs and her with a doll for company. This was when she was eight or nine. The grass, as high as a giant’s head, would swallow them up and they’d be lost to the world for hours. The grass even blocked out the sight of the mills and the hulk of the Bethlehem Steel plants to the south. That’s why her father had loved it, she thought. He could imagine he was back home in West Clare, climbing the hills near the farm, in the low rolling hills he’d described in such minute detail that she could have made her way from the tiny post office in Miltown Malbay to the bleak crossroads of The Hand two miles away, though she’d never been to Ireland, not once.

  They’d spot the white feet flashing in the grass as the rabbit turned to run and they’d give chase, her father’s stick knocking against rocks and she struggling to follow the path of his muddy boots. They never actually caught a rabbit. Most times they would follow the serpentine trails until they emerged into a large clearing and found themselves at the edge of a huge pool of stagnant water. There were three or four of them near the Tifft Nature Preserve and they each had a different color, green or orange or yellow, as bright as antifreeze or Tang, glowing so intensely that they seemed lit from below. Curiously, there were never any mosquitoes flitting on the surface. And they would look at the Day-Glo surface of the pond, and Abbie would say, “Why is the water that color, Daddy?” and her father would say nothing but stand there as the gusts of wind from the lake blew his thin wool pants tight around his legs. Then they’d walk back slowly to the Nova and go home.

  Now she knew that the tiny lakes were acid runoff from Bethlehem Steel, left behind even after the steel work went to China and India and the plants locked their enormous gates for good. The pools were now hidden by reeds that soughed in the wind whenever she stopped by to walk the paths.

  In sixty seconds, Abbie was past the preserve. She drove to the Ryan house and parked out front. Someone had come by and shoveled the driveway, she saw. Patty Ryan would be the responsibility of the neighborhood now. In the County, if a loved one died of natural causes, you got hot food and sympathy. If they were murdered by persons unknown, you could expect months of complete attention. The kids would be invited over every afternoon to different houses. Meals would be prepared and dropped off around 4 p.m. (people in the County ate dinner early, still timed to the end of the shift at the steel plants). A friend would come by and hold your hand and when you came downstairs you’d find the air scented with Febreeze and the room cleaned down to the grouting. If you forgot to pay your bills, hands would sort through the mail and pay the overdue notices with checks from your checkbook, or from their own, without a second thought.

  It was the other side of the County. Here, you were looked after. When you were weak or in pain, you could feel the pleasant crush of people who asked you no questions, who barely talked but who would stand outside your door day and night and guard your privacy, let you grieve and mend. It was invisible, unspoken, centuries deep.

  Sometimes she missed it.

  She rang the doorbell. Within ten seconds, the door was pulled open and an old woman with enormous round glasses was peering out at her.

  “Who’re you then?”

  “Good morning, ma’am. Detective Kearney, Buffalo Police.”

  The door opened wide and the woman reached for the handle of the screen door.

  “Ah, come in. Come in.”

  The screen door screeched as Abbie pulled it open and followed the woman, dressed in faded jeans and a blue sweatshirt with an embroidered nativity scene on the front.

  “I’m Jimmy’s mother,” the woman said as they sat.

  “Mrs. Ryan,” Abbie said, startled. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  The woman ignored the words and tilted her head, her snow-white hair. She studied Abbie’s face, inch by inch, unembarrassed. Her face looked weathered, but the expression was serene.

  “You’ve grown so, Abbie.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Mrs. Ryan smiled. “I used to be the crossing guard at McKinley and Red Jacket Parkway. I watched you go to Mount Mercy every morning and come home every day at 3:45 sharp. You had a backpack, green and pink.”

  The memory of the backpack—a beloved JanSport that she’d kept through high school and then lost somewhere—shot through Abbie like an icicle. She smiled.

  “I remember you, too,” Abbie said. “You had an orange slicker for rainy days. I always wondered why it wasn’t yellow like everyone else’s.”

  “My husband worked for Harrison Radiator, he got it for me. It came from the plant. You’re not going to charge me with stealing it, are you?”

  Abbie studied the old woman’s eyes, looming huge and cornflower blue behind her rimless glasses. Mrs. Ryan looked back expectantly, as if they were going to talk about Abbie’s classmates, what had become of Mary Beth Myers and that slut Kathleen Raftery, instead of her son, tied up and slaughtered in St. Teresa’s.

  “I think the statute of limitations has passed. Mrs. Ryan, is Patty here?”

  “Upstairs sleeping. The doctor gave her something.”

  Abbie nodded.

  “Then can you and I talk about Jimmy?”

  Something darkened in the woman’s eyes, as if a few flecks of the blue irises had suddenly rotated and turned black.

  “I suppose so. What do you want to know?”

  Abbie shifted on the couch, pulled her white reporter’s notebook out of her lapel pocket and found her pen. “Did he have anyone who was angry with him?”

  “Besides Patty? I suppose there were a few. See, Jimmy was my youngest, and the youngest is always the wildest. It was born in ’im. When he was fifteen, I’d hear a thump from his bedroom and know he’d fallen out of the top bunk he shared with his brother Michael. Crash, in the middle of the night. Stone drunk from hanging out on the street corners. Abbott Road, I’m sure you spent a few nights there yourself.”

  Abbie nodded, smiling ruefully. Abbott Road had been the meeting place for high schoolers up and down the County. You would meet your friends in front of Abbott Pizza, buy a slice and a Coke, and then hang out on the corner for hours. The boys would have tallboy cans of beer in their pockets and would shyly offer you one like they were thin bars of gold.

  “A few nights. Was Jimmy getting in trouble then?”

  “When was Jimmy not in trouble in high school? He would come home with his clothes torn or I would find him in the bushes in front of the house in the morning. He was too ashamed to ring the bell when he was in that state. He would be cut up, horrible-like.”

  Mrs. Ryan turned to look at the fake fireplace, now switched off in the cold room.

  “And—”

  “Yes?”

  Mrs. Ryan’s lips worked, but she said nothing.

  “Mrs. Ryan,” Abbie said quietly, “everything you tell me can help me get to the person who did this.”

  The woman looked stricken.

  “Jimmy stole,” she whispered.

  In the County, breaking someone’s orbital socket in a brawl, blackout drinking, and crashing cars into storefronts were only signposts on the way to manhood. But stealing was a terrible thing.

  “What did he steal?”

  “Money out of my purse, to begin with.” She let out a breath and it was as if she’d shrunk inside her weathered skin. “Then cars, money out of registers when the bartender wasn’t looking, bottles of liquor from the corner liquor store, anything he could get his hands on.”

  “Was he arrested?”

  “A couple of times. We told him if it happened again, we’d leave him to rot in jail with the coloreds.”

  Abbie frowned. “What about drugs?
Did Jimmy ever get involved with them?”

  Mrs. Ryan’s cheerful mood seemed to be slowly disintegrating.

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “I have to know what he was involved in. Who he associated with, who might want to harm him.”

  Abbie stared at the old woman, and it was Mrs. Ryan who first looked away.

  “I heard things, but I never saw him with drugs. Just the alcohol.”

  “Where did he hang out at night?”

  “Down on Chippewa, mostly. Then, later, the Gaelic Club.”

  She knew it. It was a faux-grand building with two three-story-high Greek columns on the east end of Abbott Road. Irish immigrants had built the place, literally, with their own hands. Her father had been a member, and she’d swum in its pool. A memory of the locker room’s smell came back to her: chlorine and decay.

  “What they did with Jimmy was nothing but a miracle,” Mrs. Ryan said proudly.

  “He gave up stealing?”

  Mrs. Ryan’s chin shot up as if she’d been slapped. “You wouldn’t have recognized him. Started going down to the Club, working the bingo nights. He’d put money in my purse for me to find when I was out shopping, ’stead of taking it. Never said a word, he’d just put twenty or thirty dollars in for me to have something extra.”

  The corners of her eyes filled with tears. For the first time, Abbie felt she was watching a woman mourn. She reached out and touched Mrs. Ryan’s knee.

  “That must have been lovely.”

  “It filled my heart with joy. Only those who have kids know the worry of one going wrong. Have you any?”

  Abbie shook her head.

  “You ought to. Our young are all leaving us. I thought when we left Ireland and came to America we were done with all that. The Irish haven’t any luck, Abbie, despite what you’ve heard. We came to Buffalo, thinking we’d be the first generation to watch our grandkids grow up, but now they’re scattered to the four winds, just like our parents.”