Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  Poor Billy. My beautiful boy.

  “He called you today?”

  “Yes,” she said, barely audibly.

  “What time?”

  “Around thirty minutes before I came …”

  She saw the living room again, Billy looking as though he’d dropped from ten stories, his face a welter of blood.

  “Kearney, can you hear me? What did you two talk about?”

  “He knew something about the case. Something new.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No. He was going to tell me, but …”

  The tears seemed to sweep up from nowhere. She pressed her cupped hand over her mouth. Her eyes crinkled at the edges to prevent a flood of tears.

  She saw Perelli watching her, his eyes dry.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay.”

  He paused, then went on.

  “You had reason to believe he was going to tell you about the Clan case?”

  “Yes. He also …”

  “Yeah?” O’Halloran said.

  “He asked me if I’d opened his windows the other night.”

  “The other night?” O’Halloran again.

  “Yes. I went to talk to him about my father.”

  “Uh-huh.” Perelli now. “And what’s this about the window?”

  She looked at him.

  “I don’t know. Someone must have been messing with him. I came in through the front door.”

  He leaned toward her. “Listen, Abbie. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately. I know this case has been personal for you, with your father involved and all.”

  They’re all personal, she meant to say. But this one was more. Why deny it? She said nothing.

  “I want to make this easy for you. We found a toy monkey jammed into Billy’s mouth.”

  She closed her eyes but not before a single tear slid out.

  “It can’t be. It doesn’t fit.”

  “It fits.”

  “How?”

  Perelli gestured with his hand to O’Halloran. O’Halloran stared at her while he reached inside his Donegal tweed jacket and pulled out an evidence bag.

  Inside she saw the monkey. His arms reached straight up above his head, like he was being held up. She took the bag and turned it to scatter the glare from the overhead fluorescents.

  “This one …”

  “Yeah?” Perelli said.

  She heard the door close. She turned to see Z walking toward his desk.

  She turned back to the monkey. Something was different about it.

  “It looks newer.”

  “Oh, I think it’s the same idea.”

  O’Halloran reached into his pocket again. Another evidence bag. Like a magician with the many-colored scarves. She watched his eyes as he pulled it out and laid it on the table.

  It was a slug.

  “We dug this out of the ceiling in Billy’s living room,” Perelli said.

  “Just below where he was found,” O’Halloran said.

  Perelli looked at her. “Any ideas?”

  She felt as if she were stepping over a cliff in darkness.

  “It’s mine.”

  “We know,” O’Halloran said.

  She felt Perelli’s hand on her shoulder.

  “How’d it get there?”

  His voice was all wrong. He should have been furious. She’d discharged a gun and not reported it, a breach of Department rules. She looked up at him.

  His eyes were soft, softer than she’d ever seen him. And it hit her.

  “I’m not the killer,” she said. “Call Dr. Reinholdt at the Historical Society. I was with him until just before the murder.”

  “All you needed was ten seconds for Billy Carney to open the door and you to fire a warning shot into the ceiling, then slash his throat. Why’d you use a knife instead of your gun?”

  Abbie only stared at him.

  Perelli shrugged. “You get back in your car and circle back. Two minutes total. I drove it myself. Tell me how I’m wrong.”

  She wanted him to blow up, to pound the desk. Or tell her to stop talking nonsense. But instead he was treating her like some kind of invalid.

  “I didn’t kill Billy Carney,” she said.

  O’Halloran’s eyes were as hard as stone.

  “You killed all of ’em,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  Perelli took something out of his shirt pocket, a small black piece of plastic.

  “We found this in the bedroom. It’s a common listening device. Works on radio waves. Distance of two hundred yards. Someone was listening to Billy’s conversations.”

  He turned it over in his hands, studying its components. Then he looked at her.

  “Did you hear him talking to his friends at the Club? Telling them he knew who did Ryan and the rest? Is that what made you kill him?”

  “Why would I kill those men? Why?”

  “Goes back to when your father got you, I think. Is that it? He pulled you away from your real family and you hated them for it. Or was there more? Was there any kind of … abuse, Abbie, that all the boys were involved in? If that’s it, I can understand.”

  She stood and pushed the chair away, looking at the two men wildly.

  “Are you out of your minds?”

  “Sit down, Kearney,” Perelli said quietly, turning the chair toward her.

  “Chief.”

  He frowned sympathetically and nodded at the chair. “Sit down.”

  The black waves were coming. They were lapping at the back of her brain.

  “What about the blood?”

  “What—”

  “The techs sent out all the blood samples from Cazenovia Park. There was only one partial match, from a swab taken from one of the branches that Collins was tied to. He ran it against all the files of the investigators who worked the scene, to eliminate them.”

  Perelli leaned over.

  “You came up a match. There wasn’t enough to do a full DNA run, but he’s got enough for a 95 percent maternal match. Good enough for me.”

  “I … I cut myself.”

  “Stop bullshitting me, Abbie. You cut yourself after the samples were taken. You saw Michaels walk out. He had the swabs with him. That was the last time he visited the scene.”

  How could her—

  “Someone put my blood there.”

  “Okay, O.J.,” O’Halloran said.

  Perelli shot him a look. Then he leaned down until his face was eye level with hers.

  She didn’t want to look at him.

  “The scene was sealed off immediately after the body was discovered. No one came in or out.”

  “Then it was a cop, Chief. You know O’Halloran was running a parallel investigation. They’d prepared this ahead of time for the next crime scene. Why can’t you see that?”

  Perelli’s eyes were eighteen inches from hers, magnified by his steel-rimmed glasses. The warm sympathy had drained away. He looked at her like he would a noxious bug on a slide.

  She could not speak.

  “You’re insane, Abbie. You don’t even know it. You tell me what happened and I’ll personally escort you to EC Med for a psych evaluation. They have real nice facilities there—you know that, you’ve escorted prisoners there yourself. It’s a hospital, not a prison. You belong in a hospital right now, Abbie. Until we can get this figured out.”

  “Stop calling me Abbie.”

  Something flitted in the back of her mind. She started in her chair.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head violently. It can’t be, she thought. Something was squeezing her brain. Her lips twisted violently. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw O’Halloran’s eyes widen.

  “What is it, Abbie?”

  “I couldn’t have done those things,” she whispered.

  “You’re right.”

  “I’m right?!” she shouted.

  “You’ve heard of split personality disorder. I think that�
�s what we’re looking at, don’t you? It wasn’t you, Abbie, it was someone else inside you.”

  “How can you say I killed those people? I wasn’t even there.”

  “We checked your whereabouts for all four cases. You were unaccounted for, as far as we can tell. We’ve rebuilt your last two weeks. There’s room for the murders.”

  O’Halloran leapt up from his chair, his teeth gritted and his blue eyes ablaze.

  “You killed them, you fucking cunt. You thought you were smarter than all of us, with your Ivy League bullshit. But we got you.”

  “You framed me is what you mean.”

  O’Halloran’s fist had smashed across her face before she even saw it coming. Her head whipped sideways and pale stars exploded inside her head.

  When she opened her eyes, Perelli was shoving O’Halloran back in his chair.

  “Sit down. Sit the fuck down. What did I tell you, O’Halloran?”

  The Irish cop was snorting with hatred, staring her down. His eyes never moved off Abbie’s.

  “I knew Jimmy Ryan. She’s probably got his eyelids in her goddamn pocket, Chief.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Sit down and stay down.”

  Perelli turned to her.

  “Tell me about Jimmy Ryan,” he said.

  “I was first detective on scene,” she said. Her voice sounded suddenly robotic to her.

  “You mean St. Teresa’s? The church you grew up going to? People tell me you knew that place like you were raised in it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “How did you find out about the Clan? Your father was part of it. Did you hear him talking on the phone one night? Were you playing amateur detective in high school? Just tell me, Ab.”

  “Chief, I’m not—”

  The sound of his hand on the table was like a pistol shot.

  “Tell me!”

  Abbie shook her head.

  “I have one more thing to show you. I wasn’t going to—the DA asked me not to—but I’m going to do it as a courtesy to a fellow cop.”

  His eyes loomed larger as he leaned in.

  “Then you will talk to me. Or you’re going to a cell in the holding center, mixed in with general population, where no cop should ever be. And I’m going to personally hang your badge around your neck as you walk in.”

  He went to the cabinet in the corner. Abbie’s eyes followed him.

  Perelli opened a drawer and pulled out a book. She couldn’t see the cover.

  This had all been planned out, she thought. But was Perelli part of it too? It was essential to know that. Who else was part of the frame?

  O’Halloran was smiling at her now. She wanted to say something smart, but she didn’t feel smart.

  Perelli came back, holding the book in his hand. But it wasn’t a book. It was a picture album with a faded green cover. Abbie stared at the album as Perelli dropped it to the table.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “We found it in your basement, along with an old Bible. Do you know who they belong to?”

  “My father.” He’d had it forever, adding pictures to it as the years went by.

  The room seemed to grow dark. She felt claustrophobic, brightly colored spots appearing in the corners of her vision and shimmering there. She felt the black wave washing closer and closer to her eyes.

  Perelli opened the photo album’s cover, standing over her as he flipped through the heavy pages. As if they were relatives looking at loved ones, long gone now.

  Pool party. Fantasy Island. High school graduation. The last picture—her and her father in Niagara Falls. Smiling their lies.

  “That’s it,” she said, her voice choked.

  “No, it’s not.”

  He turned the two blank pages. Then she saw it, stuck under the inside flap of the jacket cover. The corner of a faded photo, the old kind from the eighties that had no white borders. Perelli’s thick fingers reached under and plucked it out.

  With a cold shock, she remembered it. Remembered not the picture but the moment. She’d been around two years old. Her and her mother in the cold place off of Main Street. One of their many homes, always cold, always dirty. Hunger in her eyes.

  She couldn’t look at her own face in the picture. Abbie’s gaze fell to her hands. And in the right one, what was that, pushed up toward the camera to show how much she liked the gift?

  A toy monkey, as clear as day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PERELLI HAD BEEN AS GOOD AS HER WORD. SHE WAS TAKEN TO THE HOLDING center.

  “Name?”

  “Absalom Kearney.”

  The female cop looked up, her face scouring Abbie’s for a full few seconds.

  “Middle name?”

  “Margaret.”

  “Let’s get your fingerprints.”

  No special privileges. They had to segregate by sex, so she was thrown in with the female drug dealers and the gang members and the whores and skels, and they parted like the Red Sea for her, and she’d found her way to the corner. Ninety-five percent black, with one lonely Latino girl nursing a cut above her eye. The blood dripping to the floor in splashes. She felt she could hear the blood hit the floor, like a raindrop in a puddle, but that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  The place was dark, and it stank of gin and vomit and unwashed clothes. The walls were slab concrete. She pressed her back into the corner.

  Oh, Absalom, what have you done? What brought you back here to Buffalo? You should have stayed away stayed away stayed away.

  At 2 a.m., the screeching began to die down. The meth freaks came off the tops of their high and huddled together for warmth. The cage grew cold. Abbie waited, hunched in the corner, seeing the skels fall asleep one by one, feeling like a gargoyle watching over a doomed city.

  At 9 a.m., she was brought before a judge and charged with the murder of Billy Carney. The other charges would follow. Bail set at $1 million. She watched the entire scene as if she were looking at a TV. Even her “Not guilty” seemed to come from the mouth of an actor.

  The sound of metal scraping metal. Abbie’s head snapped up. Something told her it was near dark.

  “Kearney, Absalom.” The cop at the door had a long chain of keys hanging in his hand. He was looking at her with a face made blank by effort.

  Her limbs were frozen stiff. She unfolded painfully from her crouch and began picking her way through the curled-up bodies on the floor.

  “You’ve been bailed.”

  “By who?”

  “Zangara, the stupid fuck.”

  “You put up your house” was the first thing she said to him.

  He was silent, all the gregariousness drained away.

  He nodded.

  “Linda’s going to kill you.”

  “Linda,” he said. “is the one who made me do it.”

  She looked over at him. “Do you believe me, Z?”

  Z, her fort, her friend. He turned away, looked out his side window as they drove down Delaware. They’d taken the back way out of the holding center. Z had managed to keep her away from the cameras that were no doubt stationed out front.

  “I told you to get help.”

  “Help for stress, Z, not for being a serial killer.”

  She couldn’t see his face, but she heard the sigh.

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  “Thank you anyway.”

  He made a left.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “You tell me. We can’t go to your place, unless you want to walk into a media circus.”

  “Take me to the Reverend.”

  Z nodded.

  If he’ll have me, she thought. Where else is there to go?

  “Z, I need one more favor.”

  He looked straight ahead.

  “I need the list of IRA fugitives, the one I found in Marty Collins’s Bible.”

  Z sighed. “It’s in Perelli’s office. He’s not handing out copies right now. They want to control the investigation.”


  “You have to get it for me. The killer is on that list. I need to find him.”

  Z turned to look at her.

  “I can’t lose my badge, Ab. I can’t do that to my family.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  She tried to think.

  “Don’t call or text me, don’t come by the Reverend’s. Just leave the names in the third booth at Mighty Taco, the one near the window. Tape it under the table. I’ll pick it up in an hour.”

  Z nodded.

  He pulled up to 278 Hertel and she opened the door as he slid to a stop.

  “Ab.”

  She turned and leaned in the car window.

  “Yes?”

  “How’d the killer know about the monkeys?”

  Her fingers curled in her palm.

  “I wish I knew.”

  John Kearney watched the door open and saw the nurse come in. She was new. Rosemary was gone. This one was tall and red-haired, with wide hips, and he didn’t recognize her.

  The new nurse was young. She walked toward him with her left arm held tightly by her side, the hand hidden.

  Sure, you don’t have to hide it from me, he thought. I’m a corpse laid out. I can do nothing to ye. She must feel guilty. How much are they paying her? Or have they told her the old story, and is she doing it for the Gaelic boys?

  The nurse approached, tapped the tube full of clear liquid that led down to his arm.

  “How are we this morning, Mr. Kearney?”

  The surface of his face lay calm and impassive, like a lead blanket over his mind, which never seemed to sleep.

  I’m fine. How do I look?

  “Just a shot for the pain.”

  Nothing can touch the pain, he told her with his eyes, and she looked away. John Kearney thought of Abbie, and something burned in his heart.

  The nurse injected the milky liquid into the tube as he watched. When the plunger was fully depressed, she took it out. She looked at him like you would a wax statue, her eyes avid to see the living dead man.

  As John Kearney watched her go, something caught his attention. She’d done something different from Rosemary. The routine—the small bit of chat, the syringe, the milky substance into the tube—was all the same. But there was something missing.

  What was it? His mind couldn’t latch onto details like it used to. It glided over things, unable to fasten on their edges, their meaning. There was a detail here that mattered.