The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  The latter being the case, McGarr assumed, upon stepping into the sitting room.

  “Well, there he is—the misnamed Peter McGarr,” said a veritable bear of a man pushing his bulk out of the wing chair by the hearth. “H’ow are yuh, Chief Superintendent?”

  McGarr reached for “Chazz” Sweeney’s paw, which engulfed his own. “Misnamed in what regard?” he asked, if only to be polite.

  Charles Stewart Parnell Sweeney—his complete and sardonically apt name—was a man whom McGarr thought of as more dangerous than any violent criminal in the street. Although only ever a Dail backbencher—and that time out of mind—Sweeney was said to virtually control the country through his contacts with the movers and shakers in commerce and industry. And connections with Fianna Fail, the political party that had exercised a virtual hegemony over the country since Independence in 1921.

  Nominally the director of a private merchant bank, Sweeney had a small, drab office on the Dublin quays. But he was said to have been the bagman for an older group of politicians who had been exposed, publicly shamed, stripped of much of their known wealth and even—a few of them—placed in jail several years earlier. But not Sweeney.

  The subject of innumerable articles, editorials, and supposed exposés by Ireland’s media—including a long diatribe by Ath Cliath—Sweeney was said to be so skilled at “engineering backhanders,” in Parmalee’s phrase, that “he would never be caught, no matter how well-conceived the sting.”

  Which had been tried and had failed. Sweeney had taken the Garda Siochana to court on an entrapment charge and won over a million pounds in damages, McGarr seemed to remember. Not much later, the investigating officer, who was a good friend of McGarr’s, was sacked on a trumped-up charge of negligence in a matter where he himself had been entrapped. But could not prove it.

  All the while, sitting behind a large desk in a dusty office with only one employee, Sweeney had maintained that he had nothing to do with the investigator’s downfall and that his bank was his only source of revenue. Its privacy was shielded from public scrutiny by laws that his shamed cohorts had rammed through the Dail at his behest, Ath Cliath and other newspapers had noted. And because of that bank’s holdings, which were unknowable but said to be vast, Sweeney still wielded great power.

  And there he stood, as big as life, explaining, “Sure, your father should have called you Seamus instead of Peter. Because you’re the veritable Seamus of Seamuses. The top cop in all of Ireland.

  “Why the praise? Amn’t I after being told—it’s all over town—you’ve cracked another big one, and a nasty piece of business it was. Poor gentle Mary-Jo, a saint by any measure. And you bagged the villain before, before the crime was ever picked up by them gob-shites in the press, led by that dung-beetle bastard Parmalee. Let’s see what he’ll write now about a holy order.

  “Bravo, Peter”—Sweeney raised his glass—“you saved the country and the Church from a heap of not-needed embarrassment. Haven’t we had enough of that lately?” Sweeney winked histrionically, obviously to mean some other of his acquaintances who were still being processed through the courts.

  That Sweeney equated country and Church with his fellow thieves and robbers, McGarr found interesting. But Sweeney was a guest, and McGarr had broken bread with the man during several large parties that his father-in-law had thrown in years past.

  “Hello again, Chazz. But I fear you’ve been misinformed.” McGarr glanced at Fitz, who raised both palms, as though to say—it wasn’t me. “There’s nothing conclusive yet.”

  Under bushy dark brows, Sweeney’s rheumy eyes—reddened from whatever drink Fitz had already supplied—widened in disbelief. “Didn’t the fella, the gardener there, the one that hung himself—it was him, sure, that done Mary-Jo, no?”

  Noting Sweeney’s grammar and his pretense of simplicity, in spite of degrees from Maynooth and some Spanish university, McGarr shook his head. “No. Or at least, we don’t know yet. Too many questions left unanswered.” Including how Sweeney, like Parmalee, could be privy to so much of what went on at Barbastro.

  “Questions like what?” Sweeney asked, easing his bulk back into the chair.

  “Peter—can I get you anything?” Fitz asked, playing the host and sensing McGarr’s wariness of the man. “You must be knackered. It’s been a long couple of days for you. Why don’t I ask Nuala to draw you a bath.”

  “Why would you do that, when he has a wife who will do that for him?” Noreen said from the door.

  Again Sweeney lumbered from the chair, to greet Noreen. After father and daughter had left the room, Sweeney said, “They care for you here.”

  As they should, being family, went unsaid.

  “And we do as well.” As befit a man of his size, Sweeney’s voice was a low rumble.

  McGarr studied the man’s features—his nose, chin, and cheeks—which were also large. But his face was…meaty, McGarr decided—lumpy and ill-formed, as though some final smoothing process had been missed. Which only made the burn of his eyes, shadowed in deep sockets, seem more intense.

  “We?”

  “We who cared for Mary-Jo. Did you know that she was a close personal friend of mine and of many other prominent people—people like the former Taoiseach?”

  Who had been disgraced but was still popular among the developers and large farmers whom he had enriched.

  Leaning back, Sweeney twined his fingers over his significant chest. “And the less bloody bother we have about this, the better. We. Think.” It was the message Sweeney had come to deliver.

  “We might even just”—he shook his head and turned to the hearth, where the cracked red eye of a peat fire was hissing—“clamp a lid on this bloody thing. You know, limited press coverage. A simple release of the facts about this Mudd character, his criminal background and so forth. And have done with it. Finito. Over and good-bye.”

  Releasing information was McGarr’s area of responsibility only when asked to do so by the commissioner. Otherwise, he stonewalled the press as a matter of policy.

  Fitz appeared in the doorway with a drink for McGarr. “You okay, Chazz?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll leave you, then. Nuala needs me in the kitchen, don’t you know.” Fitz melted back into the shadows of the hall.

  “What about the commissioner?” McGarr asked, meaning the head of the Garda Siochana. He sipped from the drink.

  Sweeney flapped a large hand. “He’s on board. I’ll have him call you. Better—let’s ring him up now.” From out of a jacket pocket, Sweeney pulled a cell phone.

  “Please yourself.” McGarr wondered just how much juice—he believed the current term for influence was—Sweeney still had.

  After listening for a while—his mottled eyes staring at McGarr unblinking, like the mask of a Gorgon—Sweeney lowered the phone. “Busy.”

  What—no voice mail, no message? No ring me back, please?

  One take was: Sweeney’s experience in the courts had chastened him, and he was wary of leaving his voice on tape. But it could also be that other politicians, of whom the commissioner was one—the post being a political appointment—were chary of such a controversial figure. Courtesy of Dery Parmalee.

  But how to know that?

  McGarr tugged on his drink.

  A rather lengthy silence ensued, during which McGarr suspected he was supposed to avert his eyes from Sweeney’s stony gaze.

  “What about the cilicio?” McGarr asked, not sure that he had pronounced the word properly.

  Sweeney had no problem with it. “The thing about Mary-Jo’s neck? Ah, yes, that’s your fallback position should the simplicity—and not the elegance—of murder/suicide trouble you and the other Seamuses on your staff.”

  Sweeney pulled his massive body up in the wing chair. “In that scenario—and I’m only putting this out here for discussion, Peter, mind?”

  McGarr dipped his head once in agreement; he would hear the man out.

  “In that scenario, which has
a salient advantage over the first, one Dery Parmalee—bête noire, muckraker, nevertheless beloved by us all—is the perpetrator of both crimes. He worked Mary-Jo’s death to implicate the larger us, about whom he was poised to write an exposé. All he needed was a ‘hook,’ or peg, as journalists say. A salient public event or occasion or—better yet—a murder to hang his excoriation of us upon.

  “The second murder, then, the murder of Mudd? Why that?” Sweeney opened his large hands, before twining them over his paunch. There was now a kind of twinkle in his ravaged eyes.

  “Why not? It only added proof of our capacity for blood and intrigue, that we would murder a perfectly—let us not say innocent—but an altogether agricultural sod to conceal our vicious and fatal attack on Mary-Jo.

  “But would we as much as ‘sign’ her murder with a cilicio?” Sweeney’s pronunciation of the word seemed rather more perfect to McGarr’s ear than his own.

  “No—of course not. But Parmalee wanted to make it all seem patently obvious and”—the hands broke apart again—“journalistic. It’s his game, after all.”

  Sweeney leaned forward. “Let’s admit one thing between two men of goodwill, Peter. Parmalee is over the top. How much better we would be if he just…dropped off the face of the earth. Or some other great height.”

  McGarr took another sip. “How would Parmalee have got onto the property?”

  “Barbastro? Hadn’t he worked with Mary-Jo on writing projects in the past and maintained…ah, an amorous attachment to that comely person. Which was never, as he claims, mutual, I can assure you.

  “Parmalee would have known the blind spots in the security screen, ways to conceal himself. Didn’t he inform you himself, shortly after the murder, that he knew all about it because of eavesdropping equipment in his motorcar, which you later determined was a lie when you impounded the vehicle?”

  How Sweeney knew that, McGarr could only guess. Was it possible that somebody on his own staff was an Opus Dei mole? Or could the commissioner or some other senior Garda official have taken a look at the daily reports, say, late at night when the desk sergeant was taking tea or otherwise occupied?

  “Perhaps he had—has—such equipment in the flat that he has maintained over the chemist shop down in the village since his supposed liaison with Mary-Jo two decades ago.

  “But one way or another, it puts him on the scene, doesn’t it?” Sweeney looked into his now empty glass. “Fitz. Fitz!” he shouted, as though summoning a servant.

  At length McGarr’s father-in-law appeared in the doorway.

  “Tell him what you told me about the flat Dery Parmalee maintains in the village.”

  Fitzhugh Frenche nodded sheepishly. “Chazz here and I were chatting, don’t you know, about the whole Barbastro thing and how, this morning, I poked around down in the village, asking this one and that what they think went on. And didn’t the chemist tell me your man Parmalee has maintained the flat over her shop since he worked on the book with Mary-Jo, the one about some saint.

  “Now it’s not like he lives there, mind. Over the years he wouldn’t appear in a month of Sundays, the chemist says. But recently it’s like he’s moved in permanently.”

  Sweeney picked up from there. “The jacket that was placed over the lens of the camera in the garden? The one with the Stafford label. Parmalee could have nicked it from Mudd’s cottage.

  “The water bottle? Parmalee might have paid Mudd to remove it. What would it have taken? Twenty quid or a bottle of whiskey, I’m thinking.

  “Or perhaps the two of them were in cahoots with each other until Mudd made some demand upon Parmalee, and Parmalee strung him up.”

  Sweeney swung his head to the fire.

  Fitz remained in the doorway.

  McGarr finished his drink and set the glass on the table beside his chair. “What strikes me, Chazz, is that you don’t seem to care who killed either party or if, in fact, Dery Parmalee was responsible. Or if the murderer, the real murderer, will ever be caught. I could be wrong, but it appears to me that you’re just looking for a convenient—”

  “Solution to this mess?” Sweeney asked. “Right you are, Peter.” Sweeney heaved himself to his feet. “Nothing can bring Mary-Jo or the gardener back. More’s the pity. But as for Parmalee, if ever there was a candidate ripe for murdering or murder, ’tis he.

  “Fitz, I won’t be troubling you any longer, and I thank you for making your son-in-law available to my counsel, which, I trust, he’ll value.”

  “But can’t you stay, Chazz? Nuala’s—”

  “I’m afraid not. I’m expected at the Piggotts’ instanter, and I can’t be late, it being more business than pleasure, if you catch me drift.” Lawrence Piggott was the chief justice of the Supreme Court. “Then it’s off to Greece.”

  “Really, now? Ah, that’s grand.”

  Sweeney handed Fitz his empty glass but turned his head to McGarr. “The wife is mad for the place, especially, I fear, all their bronzed gods.”

  “In the museums?” Fitz asked archly, playing the perfect host.

  “Forget that—on the beaches, in the nightclubs. You know Breda, of course. A good Catholic woman. It’s all imagination, I’m sure. But why she has to drag me through her midlife crisis is more than I’ll ever understand.”

  “Don’t you care for Greece, Chazz?”

  Sweeney closed his eyes and passed some air between his heavy lips. “Lawless is the word. Do anything you want—drive on the footpaths, park on the grass. I don’t think that country has felt a touch of civilization since they invented the concept a few thousand years ago.”

  The two other men laughed, and McGarr kept himself from noting that Greece, like every other civilization he knew of, proscribed murder and punished murderers severely. In the ancient world with stonings, he seemed to remember.

  “That’s a fine collection of weaponry you have there, Fitz,” Sweeney remarked, passing toward the door. “But then, the lot of you are grand shots. Still have the skeet trap?”

  Fitz nodded. “Noreen competes from time to time, but not me or Nuala. Peter here is only interested in peashooters, but he does well enough with those.”

  In spite of the Georgian proportions of the doorway, Sweeney fairly filled the space. “I’ll say good-bye to Nuala and Noreen, now. No need to see me out.”

  When Sweeney was out of earshot, Fitz explained, “I’ve no idea how long he waited for you. I was down in the village, and Nuala had gone riding with a neighbor. I walked in maybe an hour ago, and there he sat, larger than life.”

  They could still hear Sweeney’s voice rumbling in the kitchen as he bade farewell.

  “You know what this means, of course.” Fitz’s brow had knitted. “The fix is in, and I’d think twice about forgetting what was said here. If there’s a piece of unlovely work in this country, it’s Dery Parmalee, and in most circles you’d be judged a hero by putting him away. But”—he raised a palm—“who am I—or Sweeney—to tell you your business.”

  McGarr nodded and looked down into the sip that was left in his glass. Out in the hall, the phone was ringing. “Where’s this flat of Parmalee’s?”

  “Down in the village? Shall I take you there?”

  “After dinner.” McGarr could not tell which was piqued more—his hunger or his curiosity—but the former, he judged, would be more quickly and easily satisfied.

  Nuala appeared in the doorway. “Soup’s on, gentlemen. And I’ve news for you, Peter—you’ve got a big bunch of company down at the front gate, Dery Parmalee just called to say.”

  “The press?”

  “Television vans, klieg lights, the works.”

  McGarr wondered who, of the now many who knew of the double murder, had told them.

  Parmalee? Why? Unless he was planning a special edition, Ath Cliath would not come out until Friday, which was three days off.

  “Come eat your tea now,” Nuala said, reaching for McGarr’s arm. “You’ll think better on a full stomach.”

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 14

  HUGH WARD’S ANGER had waned after his rousting of Dery Parmalee behind the Claddagh Arms. But the fear that had caused it—for his children and his “wives,” he guessed you could call Ruthie and Lee—had not.

  For himself, Parmalee’s threat to expose them raised concerns only of what he’d do were he sacked from the Guards. He’d get by somehow—going into private or corporate security work would be easy, given his age and experience. Or he’d try something else entirely, perhaps even go into business for himself.

  The spacious loft flat down on the quays that he’d bought for a song years ago was now worth a heap of money, given its drop-dead view of Dublin Harbor and its off-street parking. Apart from security checks, Ward had not set foot in the place for over a year. The sale of that alone would give him a good start in a new direction.

  But that there were people like Dery Parmalee who preyed upon the foibles and—Ward supposed—the sins of others for profit and, in Parmalee’s case, for perverse diversion still rankled.

  Even if Parmalee exposed Ward, and Ward—in turn—set up and busted him, Parmalee’s life would go on perhaps more agreeably, given the publicity. And with a high-priced barrister, Parmalee would spend only a short time behind bars and end up romanticizing himself, à la Larry Flynt.

  Ward would probably never end up owning one of the select hillside houses that he could see through the windscreen of the darkened car that he had parked near the top of Killiney Hill. He’d probably never fully recover his public stature in a country where a word behind a hand was enough to damn a person, especially when the charge was sexual, and those matters were judged by unfeeling clerics who were self-consciously ignorant of the panoply of human emotion and experience.

  No. He would only be the loser in any public dustup with Dery Parmalee, he decided, jotting down the make, model, color, and number plate of each of the three cars that he could see. But he would go out with a roar, not a whimper.