The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  “And you should use the name Manahan provisionally as well,” said Ward.

  “The jacket has not been found.”

  McGarr made a mental note to question Manahan about the jacket as well.

  “Also, Mudd’s name was, in fact, Mudd and not at any time Manahan. He was born Francis Jerome Mudd in Wexford. He expired the same.

  “According to Superintendent Ward”—McKeon turned a page—“Delia Manahan, on the other hand, was also born as she presently bills herself, but for a time lived under the rubric of Delia Foley. That was when she was married to F. X. Foley, solicitor and supposed blackmailer, who was himself murdered a decade ago in his office in Fitzwilliam Square.”

  McGarr’s head came up from his coffee cup.

  “You’ll remember the case, Chief—the office had been scoured, every trace of his law practice removed. And still unsolved.”

  McGarr did, it was where he had seen Delia Manahan Foley before—when he had interviewed her about her husband’s involvements.

  “I believe Brother Hugh has a homily to deliver.”

  As Ward began a somewhat expurgated version of his encounters with Dery Parmalee at the Claddagh Arms and later Geraldine Breen at Manahan/Foley’s, McGarr recalled the details of F. X. Foley’s murder, which remained unique—death by CPU. The murderer had disabled Foley, a man in his early fifties, then dashed the central processing unit of the office computer into his head. Several times.

  All files—every trace of his law practice—had then been removed. Where his file cabinet had sat, a square of greener carpet was left. And every other scrap of paper, computer floppies in a console, even the waste paper baskets, had been purged.

  Also, there had been no indication that robbery was the motive for murder, since in an office closet they discovered an array of pricey photo equipment, including several long lenses that pull in shots from afar.

  Foley, McGarr later learned through a tip by an anonymous letter, had been a blackmailer, which his lifestyle rather suggested. With houses on Killiney Bay and in the Azores, a trophy wife and an even younger mistress, two expensive cars, horses, and holidays but no real law practice as documented in any public records that McGarr could discover.

  McGarr remembered interviewing Foley’s fetching young widow in their Killiney home. She said she knew nothing of her husband’s professional involvements. She’d had her children and her houses to take care of, and she’d left “the making of money to F. X.,” he could remember her saying.

  “He was such a gentle man in the best sense,” she had gone on. “Do you know what his hobby was? Photographing songbirds. Tiny, shy creatures that you can only see from a distance. Everywhere we went—Madeira, the Midi—he’d take his binos and cameras. Birding gave him such great pleasure, and I thank God he enjoyed himself while he could.”

  And McGarr could remember her saying one other thing: “No sin goes unpunished. Ultimately.” Her final words to him as he had walked from her terrace toward his car.

  “Breen must have planned an escape route,” Ward was saying. “But it was my mistake. I should have requested backup the moment I caught sight of her through the gap in the drapes. She slugged me and took my Beretta, keys, and cell phone. Then she slashed the tires and trashed the radio in the car. And finally”—Ward raised his hands—“she left me shackled with my own cuffs in the bedroom. Opposite ankle to wrist. It took me hours to get free.”

  McGarr now remembered Dery Parmalee’s description of Geraldine Breen—that in addition to managing Barbastro, she provided security there as well. He glanced down at his wrist where she had struck him with the martial arts baton. It was still swollen and sore.

  Ward had finished his report of his run-ins with Parmalee and Breen. “I took the liberty of making a copy or two of the key to Parmalee’s place, in case we need to interview him again.” Ward put two of them on McGarr’s desk. “I have the original.

  “Granted he’ll arrange to have the lock changed sometime soon, but at the moment he seems to be occupied with other matters.” Ward settled back in his chair.

  “Recap,” McKeon continued. “Mary-Jo Stanton was murdered when, supposedly, she drank from a sports water bottle laced with digitalis. Before she could die, a sports jacket was hung over the lens of the security camera, and a—”

  “Cilicio,” Bresnahan offered.

  “—yet another sporting item was tightened around her neck to make it appear as though she’d been strangled by that instrument of priestly self-abuse. But she died from the digitalis.

  “After the coat was withdrawn, and Mudd, supposedly, went to Mary-Jo’s side and found her dead, suddenly the video shows the fatal water bottle missing. Only Mudd could have taken it.

  “Mudd, however, in his interview with Peter appeared to be merely your common agricultural sod with a criminal past who had—”

  “If you say gone to ground, Bernie, I’ll—”

  “—buried himself there at Barbastro. His crime? Lookout for an armed robbery team over in the States. In a plea bargain, he grassed on his co-criminals and, knowing them all too well, believed he should subsequently go to ground.”

  Bresnahan shook her head.

  “Permanent, like. We all know his fate—four sheets to the wind in the seed room, having been hoisted on his own come-along.”

  “Four sheets?” somebody asked.

  “The three that loosed him onto the rocks that we found in a glass beside his corpse. And the fourth that strung him up.”

  “Now that’s a stretch.”

  “Questions: One, could he have accomplished the feat on his own in his condition, which was jarred? Two, how could a murderer, not possessed of significant strength, have helped him along? Cranking the lever of the come-along would have required muscle.

  “There’s the matter of the nifty and appropriately titled ‘blood hitch’ that was tied to the hook of the come-along. In other manipulations around the estate, Mudd seemed capable of only the half hitch and unimproved clinch knot, according to a memo by Inspector Swords, who sails.

  “Also, we have the complications of Dery Parmalee, who seems to know all, courtesy of the bugs he deployed around Barbastro. He, as we know from today’s Ath Cliath and an earlier report by Peter, is not a disinterested party, pursuing a…vendetta, it would seem, against Opus Dei and being capable of every class of troublemaking. I have that on good authority.”

  McKeon’s eyes glanced off Ward’s. “Consider, as well, the priests, Fred Duggan and…Sclavi, who like all people from his neck of the woods has eyes either like a hangman or a pelota player.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Sinclair. “My mother is Spanish.”

  “Really?” McKeon paused dramatically, canting his head to one side. “Which team does she play for?”

  The grumbles and complaints were immediate.

  “Setup,” one said.

  “That joke is older than yehr mudder.”

  “In ahn-ny case,” McKeon went on in broad Dublin tones, “one of the collars, Duggan himself, stands to gain millions with Ms. Stanton’s death. With by far the biggest beneficiary being Opus Dei.

  “They were on the premises, Duggan had control of the security system, and again Peter reports”—McKeon shuffled the documents until he found yet another report—“Duggan has no aversion to pork.” He looked up and scanned the small room, his dark eyes merry.

  Ward shook his head. “Bernie, you’ve used this before.”

  “I have? When?”

  “Only last year.”

  “Well, don’t ruin it then. You seem to be the only one who remembers.”

  Said Bresnahan, “The report says that Duggan’s demeanor, both when seeming to remember the existence of the security system and its tapes, and later, when telling Peter how he searched his copies and noticed that Mudd had removed the water bottle, seemed rather histrionic. Ergo, Duggan was…” She paused so the others could join her.

  “Hamming it up,” several said toge
ther.

  “I like yous,” said McKeon. “Yous have got potential and a certain…shtick sense of humor. Which brings us to Geraldine Breen, who we can conclude is prone to violence and is often good at it. And Delia Manahan Foley, about both of whom we just heard Superintendent Ward speak. Both were present when the Stanton woman was slain. Yet only Breen will benefit from her death. Manahan is not mentioned in the will.

  “Finally, Peter has filed yet another report regarding Charles Stewart Parnell—‘Don’t-call-him-Ape-neck’—Sweeney, who, you should know, has tried to butt into the case. It seems said sempiternal bagman and hale-fellow-well-wet has turned detective and knows definitively that Mudd did Stanton and then did himself. Over and out, case closed. We might expect more of him.

  “So”—McKeon straightened the reports and, reaching over, placed them before McGarr—“who done it?”

  “Acting for Parmalee, Mudd did Stanton, then Parmalee did Mudd,” said Bresnahan, doodling on a notepad.

  “Why would Parmalee want Mudd dead in a manner that looked like suicide?” Swords asked. “If the purpose of his shrift, as detailed in today’s Ath Cliath, is to blacken the name of Opus Dei?”

  “Two things,” said Sinclair, a handsome older man with silver hair and precise features. “To shut him up and also make it look like an impossible suicide, a murder masked as suicide. We’re dealing with a smart—perhaps a brilliant, but definitely bent—man in Parmalee. He knew Opus Dei with its Sweeneys would jump on Mudd’s supposed suicide and want to wrap everything up in a neat packet to quell any suspicion of their involvement and close the investigation into Stanton’s death.

  “And from his listening post in the village, Parmalee would have been monitoring both our investigation at Barbastro and whatever went on between Duggan, Sclavi, and Manahan, perhaps phone conversations with Sweeney, and whoever else they consulted. He would have known the level of their concern.”

  “But how would he have got onto the property to do it.”

  Sinclair shrugged. “Didn’t Duggan tell Peter that he’d deactivated the security system? Parmalee also said he’d spent some time at Barbastro writing a book with Stanton. He hinted broadly that he’d been her lover.

  “Given the…snoop that he is, Parmalee could easily have discovered Mudd’s past and blackmailed him into doing what he wished. Also, he would have known Mudd’s weakness for whiskey, and Mudd would have drunk with him, if only for the free liquor. And finally, I think it would have taken the strength of a man to have strung Mudd up.”

  “You’re all wrong,” said Bresnahan, whose drawing was that of a corpse hanging from a rafter. “It’s the two women, Delia Manahan and Geraldine Breen. They have a relationship, that much is plain, living together in two places, taking trips together, even co-mothering her children when they were younger.

  “I don’t know what sort of relationship they have, sisters in the spirit or the flesh, but it doesn’t matter. They were there and could have worked in concert, orchestrating both deaths.”

  “But we know Mudd removed the water bottle,” said Ward.

  “And what’s their motive?” McKeon asked.

  “Mudd could have been brought into it by Manahan. Didn’t Peter say in one of his reports that Noreen noticed evidence of a woman—a brassiere, a lid of birth-control tablets—in his cottage that had disappeared after his death?

  “As for motive, the millions of pounds that Breen was bequeathed would be enough for the two women to retire in great comfort for the remainder of their lives.”

  “But why murder the woman?” Swords asked. “And why in that fashion? She was elderly, she wouldn’t live forever. And we can’t assume that either woman knew—knows—the terms of the will.”

  “Also, Breen is a…wombat,” Ward put in. “A zealot of the worst sort who—Parmalee claims, and Peter and I can tell you—has been trained to enforce.”

  Silence ensued, and the others looked toward McGarr.

  He glanced up at Bresnahan and raised his coffee cup, meaning he’d like more. As the most recent addition to the staff, she was the gofer. It was too early—in the day, in the case—to form conclusions.

  “What else have we got pending, Bernie?”

  McKeon picked up another folder from the stack on the floor by his feet.

  Noreen McGarr had planned her morning to be anything but dull. First, she would take a long ride with her mother and daughter. Maddie was becoming a fine horsewoman.

  Later, she would shoot skeet with her father, who had been an excellent shot himself and was her shooting coach. Noreen harbored ambitions of entering the competition to represent Ireland in the over-forty European women’s championship that would be held in Denmark in the fall.

  But it was while she was finishing up the breakfast dishes—and she knew the others were down at the stables—that she got the distinct impression somebody was in the room with her.

  Turning around, she found Delia Manahan in the doorway. “Ooo—you startled me. How’d you get in here?” Noreen reached for a dish towel.

  “The front door was open. I called out, once, but I don’t think you heard me. You were busy with breakfast, and I decided not to disrupt you. I waited in the sitting room.”

  “Really?” It had been a good half hour since breakfast. “And how may I help you?”

  “I’d like to have a confidential word with you, if I may. Which is why I came here. Barbastro really isn’t secure, if you know what I mean.”

  “A word regarding what?”

  “My relationship with Opus Dei and my…friend, Geraldine Breen. I rather got off on the wrong foot with your husband yesterday and thought perhaps you and I might chat more easily.”

  Which sounded reasonable to Noreen, having been with McGarr during that painful noninterview. “Let’s go into the den where we won’t be disturbed if my family comes in.”

  As they passed down the long hall to the other end of the house, Delia Manahan admired several of the furnishings. “Has Ilnacullin been in the family long?”

  Noreen shook her head. “My father bought it as a near ruin from a family who had squandered their fortune on race horses.”

  “Hence the vast stables where I parked my car.”

  Noreen nodded. “Actually, they’ve come in handy now that so many more people can afford horses but have no place to board them.”

  “What about all this weaponry?” Manahan swept her hand at the gun cases that lined one wall of the den.

  “Actually, the guns are mine and my father’s.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I read it in the papers. You’re the left-handed gunwoman.”

  The word, which had been used in decades past to describe women members of terrorist organizations, made both of them laugh.

  Noreen gestured a hand to a chair and sat across from the woman. “So.”

  “So.” Manahan drew in a breath, her hands twined at her waist in a way that emphasized the expanse of her bosom. “So, I entered Opus Dei almost a decade ago, after my husband was murdered.”

  Noreen’s eyes widened.

  “Gerry, who had been a client of F. X.—my husband was a solicitor—came to the wake and funeral and was very helpful to me and my children. And later, when we were grieving. She was an assistant numerary, as she is now, and very religious.” Her light gray eyes met Noreen’s. “Belief, you know, provides the only solace.”

  Noreen nodded, imagining that belief could be a great help during trying times.

  “And over the years, Ger’ and I have become the closest of friends. She even has her own room in my house in Killiney.”

  “And you at Barbastro.”

  “But—don’t get the wrong idea. The relationship is strictly platonic and religious.”

  Manahan could be a pretty woman, Noreen judged, studying her. If she didn’t insist on such a severe image.

  She was wearing a plain gray suit with what looked almost like a clerical collar. On her feet were a pair of silver Mary-Janes. The plu
cked eyebrows and absence of makeup or jewelry only added to the effect. On her wrist was the sort of functional watch that you could buy in an electronics shop.

  “Now, this is what I came to tell you, so you can pass it on to your husband. Dery Parmalee murdered Mary-Jo and—I suspect—Frank Mudd.”

  “Your brother.”

  Manahan’s eyes canted off. She shook her head.

  “He’s not my brother, either. But it’s because of Frank that I know Dery killed M. J. You see”—she paused dramatically, raising one of the crescents of flesh that had been an eyebrow—“Frank told me in confidence that Dery had forced him—blackmailed him—into helping him do it.”

  Noreen waited, as she knew McGarr would in such a situation. The woman had more to tell her.

  “You see, after my husband died and before Opus Dei came into my life, I needed…I don’t know what I needed, but holding on to somebody of a night seemed like at least a temporary answer. And there was Frank, whom I hired to do all the things around the house that I couldn’t. I was so…needy I even grasped at the straw that he had the same first name as my husband.” She shook her head, as with shame and regret.

  “Fortunately, he emigrated to America and I discovered that it was belief—and not a man—that I truly needed. But when he returned about five years later, he told me his tale and how he was afraid for his life. He begged me to take him in, and when I wouldn’t because of my religious commitment and my children, he begged me to help him in some way.

  “I thought immediately of M. J., whose gardener had just passed away. It was Frank’s trade, and behind those walls he’d probably be safe. Well”—the eyes rose again—“I admit I lied to Mary-Jo, telling her Frank was a half brother, a by-blow of my father. Being a by-blow herself, I knew she’d fall for it.

  “But that utter…bugger, Dery Parmalee, found him out and used him first to plant listening devices in the house, and then to murder M. J. in an attempt to lay the crime on the doorstep of Opus Dei—that’s what the cilicio was all about.

  “Frank told me he disabled the camera with his jacket and on Parmalee’s instructions wrapped the ghoulish thing around her neck, twisting the clamp down until she was dead.