by Con Lehane
I put the Christmas tree guys on alert and flagged down a northbound gypsy cab on Broadway. Barney was behind the meat counter when I got to the butcher shop on Bainbridge Avenue. Cheerful as ever in his white apron and white shirt, he looked like he belonged there, though he got shooed out from behind the counter a few minutes later. When he put on his coat and picked up a bag filled with hunks of meat of varied shapes and sizes wrapped in butcher paper, I realized he’d hired on as a deliveryman.
I walked along with him on his errand, despite the chill and my not having dressed for the out-of-doors.
“So, Brian, a lot has happened since last we met. The strike is settled?”
“We had to,” I said defensively. “We were going to lose it—and we would have had to take on Kelly.”
“No harm,” said Barney. “We’ll live to fight another day. And you, Brian?” His dancing blue eyes searched mine. “Are you doing well?”
“I’m okay.” It’s hard not to go soft under Barney’s concern for you.
“And poor Betsy, are you looking after her?”
“She’s holding up,” I said. “She’s got a lot to worry about.” He knew now, by virtue of the Daily News if not otherwise, about her coming for Katie the night I found her and about both of them spending the night at my apartment. But he didn’t seem to share everyone else’s—including now a couple of million New Yorkers after the tabloid stories—suspicion that we were shacked up together. Barney patted me on the back and turned to walk up the steps of an apartment building.
I paced the sidewalk in front of the building while he went up in the elevator with his delivery. Barney was disarming. He came at you with such openness, it was difficult to keep anything from him. Pop said to ask where-and-when questions, so the culprits might trip themselves up. I suppose what I really wanted was for Barney to explain things that needed explaining, like when he saw Betsy last, how much he knew about her dead husband’s campaign against him, whether he left a baby on my doorstep.
In the worst of worlds, Barney and Betsy conspired to kill her husband. No denying that this thought snuck into the back of my mind, even though the consequences of it being true were unimaginable to me. The reverberations of a murder are devastating. Of course, I hoped they didn’t kill anyone, that someone else did. Just because they had reason to kill Tierney didn’t mean they did kill him. And why would they kill MacAlister? I could come up with reasons for many of us, including me, to kill MacAlister, but not for anyone to kill Tierney. Betsy, and perhaps Barney, was the only person I knew better off with Tierney dead—unless I had overlooked something that connected Eliot, MacAlister, and Tierney. What could it be? For everyone’s sake, including my own, I hoped I could find out.
chapter eighteen
When Barney finished his chore, he suggested we stop at the Old Shillelagh for a quick one. I asked if he wasn’t worried about getting back to work, but he laughed. “The McNamara brothers are from near me at home. They’ve only taken me under their wing until I get on me feet. I’m little use to them. They’ll hardly notice if I’m not there.”
We took our pints of Guinness to a booth across from the bar. The Shillelagh was a no-frills affair, bearing little resemblance to newly minted, trendy Manhattan Irish pubs. On tap there was Guinness, Harp, and Budweiser; the house specialty cocktail was a shot and a beer.
I went straight to the heart of the matter with Barney. “They knew you at home? Where exactly was that?”
He could tell by my directness that I was on to something, so he considered his answer through a long swallow of stout. “What are you asking me, Brian?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to play games with him, so I told him what Pat Donohue told me.
He took it like a man, but I’d certainly deflated his cheerfulness. “It’s a poor man will lie to his friends,” he said, “but it wasn’t only myself I had to protect. I don’t know that you’re much the wiser knowing.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” I went over the police questioning Betsy again, my hooking her up with a lawyer, and the lawyer finding out things from the police he should have found out from her. “How much did you know about Betsy’s husband?”
“I knew enough of him.”
“What did Betsy tell you about him?”
“She was a very unhappy girl, Brian, as you well know. It wasn’t right for me to be talking to a married woman, but I did. The girl married young not knowing what she was getting into. He was a hard man. The pity of it was they had a child.”
“Did she plan on leaving him?”
“She gave it a thought,” said Barney, “but it was a Catholic marriage. The families are close. She had a mind to persuade him it would be well for both of them to part, but she hadn’t the nerve. She was afraid of him.”
“Did she plan on leaving him for you?”
Barney’s face colored. “She was a married woman, Brian. We talked about no such thing. No such thing at all.”
I was confronted by the alien morality of my forefathers. The idea that marriage and propriety could be so honored seemed foreign to my godless secular soul. Humbled now myself, I laid my cards on the table. “What I’m getting at, Barney, is for how long did this guy Tierney have it in for you.”
Barney’s eyes danced once more, the irrepressible mischievous smile flittering around his lips. “I know what you’re getting at, Brian. The Lord knows it looks like I’ve murdered Betsy’s husband. Here I’m a firebrand rebel from Ireland, leading a strike and threatening the hotel manager, making up to a man’s wife, and the both of them found dead later. But Brian, me lad, I didn’t kill anyone.
“Your man Eliot is the likely murderer. Didn’t he have enough to fear from MacAlister to want him safely underground, where he’d be silenced forever and not be talking about the affairs that went on between them? MacAlister was the kind of man would turn on you in a second, not a man to share a secret with, not a man to be trusted. He would easily be holding out on him, or worse, holding something over his head.”
“Why would the gangsters be after us if Eliot did the killings?”
“Sure, Eliot could have taken the killings upon himself without telling his superiors a thing about it,” answered Barney. “He wouldn’t want them to know he’s the responsible one. So why not put the blame on us poor blokes? Bejaysus, we might have played right into his hands, with going out on strike and setting up a reason for one of us to kill MacAlister.”
“Maybe. How would Betsy’s husband fit into this?”
Barney eyes darkened. “I can’t tell you for sure, Brian, but I’ll tell you this. Dennis Tierney was an evil man, with no conscience. Some men serve in the garda with honor. You know yourself, there are bad ones. In the North, the RUC was rife with bullies and blackguards, a bad lot who used their badges and their uniforms to steal from Protestant and Catholic alike. Uniformed hoodlums was all they were. Couldn’t this happen in New York as well—a hoodlum with a uniform? God forgive me for speaking evil of the dead, but who knows if Tierney might not have been in league with Eliot and MacAlister, with none of us the wiser?”
“But doing what, Barney? We don’t know that any of this is true.”
His eyes were clear and penetrating, his jaw set, the picture of determination. He held up his damaged paw. “I’ve a score to settle, Brian McNulty. We’ll go after Tom Eliot yet. First is to let your man know we’re on to him and then watch him like a hawk. At home, I more than once haunted the killers of Irishmen until they gave themselves away.”
I was willing to buy the possibility that Eliot was the killer and that if we put pressure on him he’d panic and reveal himself. As much as I liked Barney, though, I had to admit he hadn’t told me much when I asked what he knew about Betsy’s husband and when he knew it. I’d still have to find out from Betsy, for her own sake, if she could tell a straighter story than Barney did. But right now, I needed to go to work. I’d called in and found out I was on the schedule.
Whe
n I went home to shower and change, I found a note from Kevin telling me he’d gone to try out for a basketball team in Brooklyn. That was it. Brooklyn, reputed to be the nation’s fourth largest city, with a couple of dozen teen basketball leagues, and I’m supposed to know where he is. What was I going to do? I couldn’t go looking for him, so I left him a note asking him to call me at work as soon as he got home. I wrote the note politely, while I secretly planned to break his neck as soon as he was safely home. The cat was in, so I closed the window. At least I could hold on to him. He was sitting beneath the window meowing when I left.
It was strange walking through the door of the hotel again, like testing out a leg that had been in a cast for a while. I walked gingerly across the lobby rug, not recognizing anyone behind the front desk, and entered the lounge as if it were someone else’s house. Ducking under the flap at the end of the service bar and coming up on the other side, I felt, as I often did, like a boxer entering the ring. I barely kept myself from dancing in place and shadowboxing. Sam was putting the bar in order after the day shift and gathering up fruits and juices for a banquet bar he was working that evening. Betsy was the night cocktail waitress. I was glad to see both of them. I can’t say I ever loved my job, but I felt a real contentment being behind the stick again—a sure thing in a life of chaos.
It was slow at the bar, but busy enough to keep me occupied. Betsy had only a couple of tables after an early flurry. Since the hotel hadn’t yet recovered from the strike, there was only one bartender, one waitress, and no entertainment.
“I saw Barney,” I told her during a lull.
“Oh, good,” she gushed, as she leaned across the service bar. “I’m glad you thought of him. How is he?”
“He’s okay. When did you see him last?”
Betsy shifted her glance away from me. When she turned toward me again, her smile had lost some of its radiance. “Not since all this began. The night on the picket line when—” She looked away again.
“The night your husband attacked him?”
She nodded.
“Did your husband know MacAlister?”
Betsy looked perplexed. “From in here, I guess … knew him a little bit.”
“No dealings with him?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Who do you think killed your husband?”
She started to answer, but lost her composure and stopped. Her glowing, cheerful expression drooped into that of a beleaguered, worried young woman. “I don’t know,” she said softly enough to be a whisper.
“No one you can think of?”
“Someone from his past. Someone he arrested who wanted revenge. That’s what I thought in the beginning.”
“Did you ever think it might have been Barney?”
“Barney?” She shook her head violently from side to side, as if to physically ward off the idea. “Why would you say that?” Her nostrils flared; her eyes flamed. I thought she’d go for my throat.
“Because other people are saying it, so you and Barney need to do a better job answering questions than you’ve done so far.”
“Oh, Brian.” She opened those deep blue pools of helplessness. “I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do or who to trust.” Those big sad eyes tugged at my heart. “What should I do?”
I held myself in check. “The funny thing is, I don’t know who to trust, either. I don’t know if I can trust you.”
Oh, the pitiable smile, the guilt and the sadness. “Oh, Brian, I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Could I have caused all this?” She stood back from the bar now, stoop-shouldered, a tear trickling down her cheek, waiting for me, as if I were the last person on earth who could help her, waiting for me to comfort her—something I knew was no good for either of us. She called to me anyway. I could feel her pulling me toward her, feel it in my heart, so I went under the flap of the bar, went to her passionately, not to comfort her but to pull her body to mine, wrap my arms around her back and her hips and pull her body into mine so her pelvis ground against me and her breasts flattened against my chest. I yanked her head back by the hair and crushed my mouth against hers—and that’s where we were when I heard someone clear his throat and opened my eyes to see Detective Sergeant Sheehan watching us from the lobby doorway.
Talk about getting caught in the sack! Betsy and I both jumped about a foot up and three feet back. This drove me right into the bar, where I smacked my spine and my elbow. We stared at Sheehan. He looked calmly back at us.
“If you can tear yourself away, McNulty, I’d like a word with you. You, too, Mrs. Tierney, when I finish with the bartender here.”
I went back behind the bar, rubbing my elbow with one hand and my spine with the hand that was connected to the sore elbow. Sheehan sat on a stool at the far corner, away from the service bar. Betsy hurried off to the kitchen.
“We’re looking for a friend of yours. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him.”
“Who’s that?”
“The Wild Colonial Boy.”
“Barney? Why are you still looking for him?”
Sheehan blinked a couple of times and pursed his lips. “I thought I’d be asking the questions.”
“You want something to drink?”
“Coffee?”
Poor Betsy had to bring it. Her face was red, her movements jittery; she looked as harried as if all the tables in the lounge were full, instead of just one.
Sheehan watched her walk away. I wouldn’t say she slunk, but she had that crouch people have when they expect they might get hit from behind.
“Pretty girl,” Sheehan said. “I hope you take this the right way. What you do with her is none of my business, but the police business is that she’s connected to this guy Barney Saunders. Been seeing him for a while on the q.t.”
I’m sure I stiffened, that my jaw went square, but I kept quiet.
“There’s not much of a record on this Saunders guy. Usually people have a past. He materialized in Manhattan one day about three years ago—makes you wonder.”
“If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him. Is he wanted? Do you have a warrant?”
Sheehan shook his head. “Just to talk.”
“Why are you involved in this, anyway? I thought the investigation was out in Brooklyn.”
“There was a murder here, too. Remember?”
“Did you check on the guy I told you about, Eliot?”
Sheehan nodded. “We know him. I’m sure he’d swindle his mother. But we don’t have anything to tie him to MacAlister, just contact in the line of work.”
“MacAlister was paying him off.”
“Says you.” Sheehan relented before I could say anything. “I wouldn’t put it past him. Matter of fact, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t doing something like that, but we’d have to have more than you saying it, McNulty.” Was that a twinkle in his eye? “Even if you are an upstanding citizen.” He finished his coffee. “Would you ask Mrs. Tierney if I could have a word with her?”
I got Betsy and told her I’d watch her table. “You’ve got a lawyer now. You don’t have to answer any questions.” She gripped my arm, her fingers digging in. It felt like Kevin clutching me when he was a kid and didn’t want to get in the dentist’s chair. “Remember James Cagney,” I said. “Don’t tell him nothin’!” It was interesting, I thought as I went to check on her table, that I assumed she had something to hide.
Later that night, Betsy and I clung to each other in the back of a cab for the ride uptown. To someone looking in at us, I’m sure we looked like two terrified children on a roller coaster. After Sheehan left, Betsy had fallen apart, crying, angry. When I asked what was wrong, she wouldn’t tell me.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Betsy said when we got to my apartment. “I should be home with Katie. Everything is so horrible. I wish I’d never been born.” She flopped onto the couch Kevin had vacated when I shooed him off to bed in my room.
Things
were getting out of hand. I didn’t know what Betsy was doing in my apartment, either, when she should be home with her baby. She was in too many places at the same time. I couldn’t figure her out. The thought kept creeping in that she was playing games with me, setting me up to do something for her, the way she might have set Barney up to kill her husband. It felt like she’d cast a spell on me. I never intended to get tied up romantically with her. All she did was bat her eyes and I went crashing through the bar like it was rutting season. Now, she sat on the couch patting the space next to her. I held back this time, and the cat took my place. She petted the cat.
“Look, Betsy, I understand you gotta watch out for yourself, and you should go ahead and do that, whatever it takes. But I gotta take care of myself, too, and Kevin.” I paced around my not so large living room while Betsy and the cat followed me with their eyes. Every time I looked at Betsy, her wide-eyed innocence, I lost my nerve. People should be hard in the city. They couldn’t be as gentle and guileless as Betsy seemed. So maybe she wasn’t. It might be an act.
“Somebody killed your husband,” I said. “That’s a big fucking problem. It’s not like the fucking wicked witch is dead and everyone’s going to live happily ever after. No. Someone’s going to get royally fucked over this—” I realized I was shouting and then realized that Betsy was sobbing.
“Great,” I said to myself. I wanted to kick her but tried to comfort her instead. She wasn’t having any of it, just waved me away and kept sobbing while I stood helplessly over her. After a while, I began pacing again, trying to explain myself. Finally, I blurted out, “Betsy, God damn it, you haven’t told me the truth.”
She stopped crying.
For a moment, I was overcome with doubt. She, too, might be better off with her secrets. Besides, if I didn’t trust her based on her keeping things from me in the past, why would I believe what she told me now? But it was too late.
“I don’t know why I thought I could do this,” she said. “Something’s wrong with me.” She spoke as if she were in a trance, speaking with her eyes as much as her voice, which was cold and lifeless. “I thought once Dennis was gone I would be free. I never would have wished for it to happen this way, but once it did, I felt relief. Isn’t that terrible, to feel relief when someone is dead, someone I loved once, or thought I did, who was the father of my baby?” Her eyes opened wide, as if something horrible were happening right in front of her—and she was looking at me. That helpless look, those sad searching eyes, she was pulling me to her again.
