The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  “I crouched down and gave her a shove, like. ‘Miss Jo?’ says I again. But even though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she was dead from the blue color of her arms.”

  “Then what?”

  “Oh”—Mudd’s eyes came back to McGarr—“I came back here as quick as I could to ring up Father Fred.”

  “You didn’t go straight to the house?”

  Mudd shook his head. “I been told…I can’t count the times, not to go into the house. ‘It’s a holy place, and you’re a heathen,’ says she.”

  “Mary-Jo?”

  “No, no—not Mary-Jo. Not her. She told me to disregard the bitch.” Mudd swung his head to Noreen.

  “Sorry, ma’am. It’s just—” Then to McGarr, “Gerry Breen, the housekeeper.”

  “Who answered the phone?”

  “Father Sclavi, the other collar there. I told him what I thought had happened, but he didn’t cop on, I don’t think, even when he had me repeat it slowly. He’s”—Mudd looked off—“Spanish or Italian, I think, and his English isn’t good. And then”—he shrugged—“he just rang off.

  “I figured I’d got the message across, and I’d better get back up to Mary-Jo, to keep her company, like. So I rushed back up there to find Father Fred crouched down by her side. And him and me…well, we don’t get on. Haven’t ever. I don’t care to deal with him under the best of circumstances, so I just watched until he left, and came back here. Broke up, don’t you know. Mary-Jo”—as Mudd reached to stub out the cigarette, his eyes met McGarr’s—“was everything for me here. And without her I’m…” Mudd shook his head.

  Back in the drum, McGarr imagined, wherever it was he was on the lam from. Which could be the reason he thought he needed a solicitor. “What was Father Fred doing when he was kneeling beside Mary-Jo?”

  Mudd shook his head. “Dunno. Seeing if she was dead or alive, I guess, although…”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “The bike togs. Just got back, I’d say. Goes to hell-and-gone, he does, pumping up and down the mountains.” Again Mudd shook his head as though disapproving of the practice.

  “Then what?”

  “He jumps up and runs toward the house. He can do that too, despite his age.”

  “And you?”

  “I kept my vigil, there in the copse. Wonderin’, like.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Ah, well…you know”—Mudd’s hand moved toward his packet of cigarettes but he thought better of it—“what was going to become of me. Selfish?” He nodded. “Yah. I figured Mary-Jo had a long life, but me? Without her, well, I’m…”

  “Was there anything around Mary-Jo’s neck when you found her?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…a kind of necklace.”

  “Mary-Jo didn’t wear necklaces. Nor jewelry. She was very plain and simple. A saint.”

  “You didn’t see something that looked like barbed wire around her neck?”

  Mudd suddenly looked puzzled.

  “Or blood?”

  “I don’t get it. Is that the reason you’re here?” His eyes moved from McGarr to Noreen and back again.

  McGarr stood. “Show me the path to the garden.”

  “Through the wood?”

  Passing by the cottage, Noreen asked Mudd if she might use the facilities. “Too much coffee, don’t you know.” Of course, she drank only tea, and her eyes met McGarr’s when Mudd pointed to the door.

  The distance between the cottage and the patch of garden where the corpse had been found was a good three hundred yards, McGarr guessed. Paved with wood chips, it was a direct line, sheltered by towering beech trees, from Mudd’s dwelling amid the compound of maintenance buildings to the garden haggard near where the corpse had been found.

  “It’s my daily commute,” Mudd said, attempting a semblance of levity.

  “And a tough go, what with all the birdsong,” McGarr replied, playing along. “But somebody’s got to do it.”

  Which opened the interview to chat mostly about gardening, with Mudd knowing more about horticulture than the average gardener, McGarr judged.

  At the haggard, McGarr pointed to the surveillance camera at the corner of the fence. “What do you do with that when nature calls? I suppose you’re the porn star of Barbastro.”

  “Not a bit of it. I duck behind a tree”—Mudd pointed to the big trees at the beginning of the path in the copse—“or I do this when I can’t.”

  Pulling off his hat, Mudd, who was a tall man, hung it over the barrel of the camera. “Ta-dah! And I’ll tell you this—sometimes I do it just to send a bit of wind up Fred’s shorts. He’ll come out here huffing and puffing, saying, ‘Don’t you know that we’ve paid thousands of pounds for security here, and you’re defeating our measures?

  “And I say to him, says I, ‘What do you mean, defeating your measures, your honor?’ ‘Your blasted hat, you oaf,’ he’ll say, or something like that. And he’ll pluck it off and chuck it down.

  “‘I had no idea, sir,’ says I to his back as he tromps off.

  “‘The hell you didn’t, you bloody thug,’ says he.”

  Bloody? McGarr rather doubted that Duggan—the consummate priest—would use the word.

  “This is the good part—because then I shouts to him, I shouts, ‘Please, your honor—please don’t tell Mary-Jo.’ Because, you see”—Mudd lifted his hat off the camera—“she hated them things worse than me.

  “We’d be out here or some other part of the garden working away, and she’d notice one was on us. ‘Francie’—it’s what she called me—‘where’s your jacket?’ she’d say. I’d cover it up, and we’d wait for Fred to come storming down on us.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Sometimes right way, like he really had been watching us. Other times, an hour or so, I’d say. But Mary-Jo would let the bastard…you know, the man speak. And then she’d say something like, ‘I’d like to remind you whose premises these are. Now, go back to your prayers, we’ve work to do.’ Which drove him crazy.”

  And which sounded very much like the feisty Mary-Jo Stanton that McGarr had known. “You’re religious yourself?” McGarr asked, as they moved back into the wood toward Mudd’s cottage. Above them a murder of crows were contesting a roost, their cries raucous and shrill.

  “Jaysus, no. Not a bit of it, which is what bothered them up there most, you know. I’m from the North—Antrim Town—and don’t I know the problems religions like theirs bring.”

  “You’re not Catholic yourself?”

  “Born and bred, like. But I’ve had enough for a lifetime, I tell you. Which is why”—Mudd stopped and offered McGarr a cigarette—“my days are numbered here, I’m sure.”

  Accepting the cigarette, McGarr waited.

  “The minute the will is read and they take firm control of this place, I’m out on me arse, count on it. They’ll put one of their own in here, not minding if he don’t know a lily from a daffodil. It’s the believing that matters to them, their style.”

  “And their style is?”

  “Total, like. You do as they say, work like a divil, and turn over what you make to them. They had one yoke in here—a bloody numerary, which is like a priest without the collar. He was a surgeon, he was, with an office and all in town. And didn’t they come and demand he turn over his wristwatch, saying he’d become too attached to worldly possessions. It had been a birthday gift from his family.

  “Well, sir—didn’t he do the right thing and tell them to feck off. After he left, they tried to ruin him altogether, I’m told.”

  Heard tell from whom, McGarr wondered. “Ruin him how?”

  “By spreading stories, having him up before some medical review board. They hounded him right out of the country, and it continues over in the States, I’m told.”

  “You’re well informed, Francie. May I call you Francie?”

  “Anything but late for last call,” Mudd quipped.

  “And them—they think just
because I’m a bloody agricultural man out here in the bloody wood that I’m a bloody ee-jit. Well, sir—there’s advantages to being out here in regard to the wind.”

  And which way it blows, McGarr suspected Mudd meant. “Tell me—who did this thing to Mary-Jo?”

  “You mean—you think it’s murder?”

  McGarr nodded.

  “Them.”

  “Why.”

  “Her money. Bags of it, the papers say. And then there’s this place, which they’ll never leave. Like rats, they are—once in, never out.”

  Back at the cottage, they found Noreen out front, sitting on a bench in the sun. “It’s so pleasant here, really warm and springlike.”

  “No wind,” Mudd remarked. “Sure, I wouldn’t trade this shebang for the best room in the big house. More’s the pity.”

  In the car, Noreen said, “Bachelor digs with a few exceptions—a rather capacious push-up bra and bikini tights drying inside the press. Condoms in the med cabinet and a rather large variety of shampoos and conditioners in the shower for a rural swain such as he. And I found this in the litter bin.”

  It was a monthly lid of birth-control tablets, all of them having been removed. “Either your man is a mighty convincing cross-dresser or he has a constant visitor.”

  “Or visitors.”

  “Him?” Her turquoise eyes flashed at McGarr.

  “Please. A yoke like him should dedicate daily novenas to any woman, no matter how ugly or old, who would share his bed.”

  But surely not old.

  McGarr swung the car up the drive toward the big house.

  CHAPTER 11

  BY LUNCHTIME, Ruth Bresnahan had returned home to Dublin to nurse her new baby and to change into something that would catch Dery Parmalee’s eye more completely than slacks and a jumper.

  A full but shapely woman before her pregnancy, Bresnahan had discovered to her delight that—after losing the pounds she’d put on before delivering Fionnuala—she’d only added a little padding to her hips.

  Standing in front of a full-length mirror, she asked, “Well, then—how do I look?”

  “Altogether smashing,” said the nearly gray-haired woman who had a baby under either arm.

  Ruth’s smoky eyes flashed at Lee Sigal, wondering if she was having her on. Apart from their relationship being new, it was…well, different, to say the least, and the two women were still getting used to each other.

  Tall and statuesque with good shoulders and shapely legs, Ruth Bresnahan understood that she had probably never been more appealing. Gone were the jejune teens, when she’d felt a bit gawky, and the twenties, when she’d taken little care of her appearance and put on a bit of weight.

  Now, at thirty-two, standing five feet eight and weighing a hundred and thirty-two pounds, Ruth knew how to dress her angular frame, and with her auburn hair, which she kept long, and exotic eyes, she knew she could “stop traffic,” as Hughie Ward—her colleague/lover/shared husband—put it.

  “What about the skirt?” Bresnahan was wearing a chrome-yellow retro miniskirt and a white tube top that wrapped her torso like a second skin. Her legs, which she’d tanned during a long weekend holiday in Madeira, were bare.

  On her feet were a pair of white sandals with block heels. Her nails—fingers and toes—she’d painted the very color of the skirt. “Isn’t it a bit short?”

  “Not for the task at hand. I swear, as you stand there you have to be the most gorgeous woman in all of Dublin.”

  And you the most compassionate and understanding, Bresnahan thought, stopping at the babies to kiss them before departing.

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Hard to say. Depends on how much of a ladies’ man ex-Jesuit Parmalee is.”

  “You take care of yourself. Somebody murdered Mary-Jo Stanton, and certainly Parmalee was on the scene from what Hughie tells me.”

  “Is he asleep?” Ruth asked, glancing over the shorter woman’s shoulder at the door that was open across the hall. She couldn’t see into the darkness of Lee’s bedroom, but she knew Ward was in the other woman’s bed.

  “Knackered. He was half asleep when he walked in.”

  “Well, good-bye, girls.” Ruth gave each of them, including Lee, a bus on the forehead before turning toward the door.

  Her “credentials” as a journalist would have to be devised first, before she approached Parmalee directly. But she had an idea how to accomplish that by happy hour at the Claddagh Arms, where—she’d been told—the Ath Cliath staff hung.

  On the first ring, Father Fred Duggan answered the door at Barbastro.

  “Been here by the door long?” McGarr asked. “Or did you avail yourself of the technology?” He pointed at the surveillance camera concealed in the eyes of a plaster nymph that decorated a corner of the foyer.

  “I hope you didn’t place any credence in anything that…gardener, or whatever he is, said. Mudd’s a chancer altogether, and he’ll be gone from here soon. Mary-Jo sheltered every class of blow-in, he being the worst by far. Do you know his past?”

  McGarr and Noreen had moved into the front hall with Duggan at his elbow. “You mean about prison?”

  “He told you about that?”

  “Perhaps Fred couldn’t read our lips,” McGarr said to Noreen. “Someplace in the States, wasn’t it? He wasn’t specific.”

  “Attica. In New York. Hard time for an armed robbery in which a policeman was shot and killed.”

  “By him?” McGarr stopped at the stairs to the upper floors.

  “Who knows? Could be.” Duggan’s dark eyebrows, which formed a continuous line across his forehead, were now hooded. “Didn’t he grass on the others to save himself. Got off with a six-year sentence reduced to less than two. And then he fled back over here.”

  To hide out from those he’d sold out, here in a walled and gated compound with security cameras and a daily regimen as strict as any jail, if Dery Parmalee could be believed. “What’s the connection?”

  “Delia Manahan.” Duggan glanced up the stairs.

  “His sister.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Top of the stairs, take a right, last door on the left. Here—I’ll show you.”

  McGarr put out a hand. “No need, Father, thanking you just the same. We’ll find our way.”

  “But perhaps you’d like me to introduce you.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  At the top of the stairs, McGarr and Noreen couldn’t find a light switch, and they had to wait a moment until their eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  “This place is vast,” Noreen said as they approached the door, behind which they could hear a woman speaking or praying. The voice was rhythmical, almost a chant.

  McGarr knocked. And a second time, harder.

  “Do you think this place is bugged?” Noreen asked.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to interview people down at the barracks or in town?”

  Perhaps. But that might encourage the parties to arrive with a solicitor, which was never helpful. “We’ll see.”

  The door opened an inch or two, and a deep blue eye appeared there. It took in McGarr and then Noreen. “Yes?”

  McGarr pulled back the placket of his coat to expose his Garda ID, which was fixed to the lining. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Please.” Putting a hand on the door, McGarr pushed it open.

  “And you are?” she demanded.

  “Police.”

  “I’ve already spoken to the police.”

  Delia Manahan was a rather tall woman with a narrow waist and an expanse of bosom. Her hair had either turned a brilliant shade of white prematurely or she took great care of her skin, McGarr judged. The contrast between her smooth and buff-colored skin and her hair—which she kept in a ponytail, à la Mary-Jo Stanton—was startling. How old could she be? McGarr wondered, as she turned toward a wing chair near the he
arth.

  Dressed simply in a white pleated silk blouse and slacks the same blue color as her eyes, the woman took a seat, crossed her legs, and twined her fingers. “I hope this won’t take too long. I’ve my prayers, and Father Fred is to say mass in the chapel. I hope you can appreciate the importance of that. Today.”

  Thirty-eight, McGarr guessed glancing at the back of her hands, the skin of which had only just begun to wrinkle. Unlike her brother’s, Delia Manahan’s nose was not pugged nor her chin weak.

  With a slightly aquiline nose and chiseled features, she had the sort of classic good looks that McGarr not infrequently viewed in the art of museums that Noreen dragged him to.

  McGarr had the feeling that he had seen the woman before, but it was some time ago, and he could not remember where or in what regard.

  Noreen sat on a love seat opposite her, while McGarr moved to the window and looked out at a sweep of terraced lawn ending in a sculptured lily pond. A fountain there was jetting mist into the morning sunlight, while two fat robins tested the wet grass for worms.

  In the far distance was the garden where Mary-Jo Stanton had died, and on a table near the window stood a pair of binoculars. McGarr picked them up and held the glasses to his eyes.

  And there was Frank Mudd in the haggard that was used as a staging area for the garden, pottering about.

  “Do I know you?” McGarr asked, moving back to the two women.

  Delia Manahan only glanced at her wristwatch.

  Beyond her, the hearth was patterned with small chips of multicolored tiles in the manner of majolica. The scene pictured Christ with his disciples on the pinnacle of some mountain. It reminded McGarr of his own ignorance of matters religious.

  Reading the Bible and knowing its stories had never been part of his education, not in church or in the church-run schools that he had attended. Only knowledge of prayers and some knowledge of the several rituals was insisted on, which, he supposed, all celebrated some aspect of Christ’s life. But because they had been in Latin and only partially explained in English, he remained ignorant of the full canon of biblical belief.