Black Irish (5 page)

Abbie was trying to keep thoughts of Patty Ryan out of her mind. She had the time about right. Jimmy Ryan had been dead about two or three days.

“Nobody suspects a church,” she said, studying Ryan’s left hand, tied behind the chair. The rope could be from his National Grid truck. She’d have to find it and check.

“People will search every frame house, every backyard shed before they come in here. They don’t put the church together with murder and violence yet. These places are still sacred for them. So it gives the killer extra time.”

“Unless they were altar boys,” Z said. “Right, Ab? Altar boys.”

Abbie shook her head. She was studying Ryan’s thick brown hair. It was matted down in a ridge behind the ears, the hair packed down tight in a straight line.

“Look at this,” she said.

“What?”

Z came next to her, stooped to see her finger as it drew a line around the back of Ryan’s head.

“Blindfold?” he said.

“Could be. But then the killer took it off. He made Ryan look at something. But what?”

Z stood. “Fucked if I know.”

“Let’s go upstairs. Call the techs and get them started down here.”

The nave was silent and dark.

“Got to knock on County doors,” Z said as they approached the front door. “Get ready for stupid time.”

T
WO HOURS LATER, THE SUNLIGHT HAD TURNED THE COLOR OF DIRTY PEWTER
, as if iron filaments were hanging in the air, leftovers from the blast furnaces at Bethlehem Steel. Dusk was two hours away and the forecast called for continued snow squalls off the lake. Z was off to talking to the neighbors, but Abbie wanted to find Ryan’s trail before it was covered over.

The rope was standard work issue from National Grid. It was from the back of Ryan’s truck, which they’d found parked three blocks away in front of a Dollar Store. Abbie had let Z process that scene, expecting little. The killer wouldn’t have taken Ryan at the truck, but in one of the backyards of the County, scanning the windows that looked out on the yard to make sure there were no invalids, grannies, stay-at-home moms looking down on the scene.

But how did he get Ryan to the church?

Abbie pulled the zipper of her jacket up to her chin. Her lean body had never held heat well, and she could feel the temperature beginning to plummet.

She walked to the rear of St. Teresa’s. There was a parking lot here closed in on three sides. The rear service door had been forced open, the one that let out into the northeast corner of the parking lot. This is where the killer had brought Ryan in.

Buzzing fluorescent lights beamed down on eight inches of snow, crisscrossed by footpaths. The killer’s footprints were here somewhere, but it was just as she’d feared. The County gossip machine, known as the newswire, had already revved up, and the lot was covered with footprints streaming in from every angle. Boots, shoes, sneakers, not to mention tire tracks. The people around here would lead their own investigation, probably better staffed and financed than her own. Some of the people looking into the death of Jimmy Ryan would probably be cops like her, but not working for the Department. Off the clock. County hours.

They protected their own here, and when one was culled from the pack, the killer was hunted down, dealt with, and then disappeared. The County was an organism that didn’t push much into the outside world. It consumed everything it produced, good and bad. Its official motto was “A Good Neighborhood to Grow Up In,” but it should have been “Nothing Escapes Us.”

Abbie knew there were a hundred phone conversations going on in the phone lines that hung from the poles above her, not to mention the chatter bouncing off the local cell towers. She had to get to the witnesses before friends and relatives did, telling them to be smart and shut their goddamn mouths.

She followed the footprints southwest across the parking lot, her eyes scanning left and right as she did. She came to the building that stood across from the church—the old rectory, which bordered Hayden Street.

The killer had either come this way or off of Seneca. Abbie guessed the former. Seneca, even though it looked like a second Depression had hit it, was still crawling with life during the day. Hayden, its dark canopy of trees blocking the light from above, was a much more inviting path. But how would he carry a man in broad daylight down a street filled with inquisitive eyes?

Impossible, she decided. Unless the killer had some kind of elaborate way to disguise him, Jimmy Ryan had been taken to the church in a car.

The sidewalk had been shoveled clear but she kept her eyes left,
looking for footprints emerging from behind one of the frame houses that receded into the distance. The yards were of two varieties: either choked with snow-covered weeds, rusting bikes, even what looked like stalks of alfalfa pushing through the icy crust—or clean, bushes trimmed under the caking snow. People who’d given up or moved away, and the holdouts still grimly keeping their plots of land respectable.

“What’re you doing here?”

Abbie turned. A dapper old man stood looking at her from under an Irish walking cap.

“Buffalo Police,” Abbie said, pulling her badge from her inside pocket. “Do you live around here, Mr.—?”

“Right across the street,” the man said, turning to point at a dark-green frame house with white trim. “James O’Malley’s my name.”

Everyone in the County was named James or John. She’d have to keep them all straight.

“Is this about Jimmy Ryan?” O’Malley said.

Abbie sighed. “Yes, it is.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”

“I hadn’t asked you if you did.”

He said nothing, only smiled.

“Were you in the neighborhood on Monday afternoon?”

“Where else would I go? Yes, I was here.”

“See anyone on the street? Strange cars in the church parking lot? Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

The man eyed her from underneath his walking cap. “Only the usual lot. The kids have no jobs these days, you know that.”

“Interesting. Which kids?”

“Oh, I don’t know their names.”

“Mm-hmm. Anyone out of the ordinary, Mr. O’Malley? Not from the neighborhood?”

“You mean the black men?” he said with a merry glint.

“Which black men?”

“The garbagemen! They come every Tuesday. County boys can’t get those city jobs anymore, I guess. Terrible shame.”

“Plenty do.
You
know that. Anyone else?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh. And did you hear anything? Screams?”

“I’m hard of hearing, sorry.”

“You seem to be doing pretty well today.”

“It comes and it goes, miss.”

“Detective.”

He seemed amused by that.

“Let me ask you a question. What was the purpose of you coming out of your house for this little conversation?”

“We’re friendly people around here. And what concerns the Ryans concerns us.”

She took out a card and offered it to the old man.

“That’s good to know. Please let your neighbors know we need their help to catch the killer.”

The man only looked at the card fluttering slightly in the wind. “God willing, he’s burning in hellfire already.”

O’Malley tipped his hat and turned. Abbie watched him walk off, his shoe heels striking off the pavement like iron.

After stopping by headquarters downtown, Abbie parked in front of the Department of Health, ran in, and spoke briefly with a bow-tied clerk at the information desk. A few minutes later, he emerged from the warren of cubicles and handed her two pamphlets. She thanked him and walked back to her car, tapping the pamphlets against her open palm and thinking about the wounds on Jimmy Ryan’s face. She took the Skyway back to the County, white-knuckling it all the way, and parked in front of the house of the mountain man who cut up roadkill. She walked up onto the swaybacked wooden porch, noted the peeling of the paint on the house front, and lifted the thin metal lid of his mailbox. She placed the two brochures, “Disease Precautions
for Hunters” and “Wild Game Hunting and Food Safety,” inside.

When she got back in the car, she started the engine, then looked up at the third-story window with the Dora stickers. The curtain didn’t move.

What if he can’t read?
she thought.
What good will the pamphlets do then? What if he finds them and beats the little girl, because the pamphlets he can’t read triggered a world of rage and shame inside?

She thought back to Miami, and the memory caused her to twist uncomfortably in the car’s worn vinyl seat. After six months there, she’d had a nice career with an upward trajectory, a condo overlooking the sparkling Atlantic, even an article in the
Herald
that called her a crusader for abused children. Six months after that, she’d woken up one morning in Liberty City crying her eyes out. She was fifty thousand dollars in debt because she bought things she didn’t need and paid school tuition for the children of violent crime victims. In her spare time, she was stalking suspects in unsolved child abduction cases. She was lost.

Can’t go down that road again
, Abbie thought to herself now. She glanced again at the third-floor window. Then, with a sigh, she started the engine. Illiteracy was beyond her means at the moment.

The neighborhood seemed to ooze bad vibes. Where were the kids playing on the sidewalks? Where were the men shoveling snow or shouting to each other as they took down the Christmas lights from their front porches? There was a string of blue and white colored lights blinking in a picture window two doors down, but they didn’t alleviate the gloom of the street. Two of the bulbs had burned out, and they were the wrong color anyway.

As much as she’d resented being an outsider here growing up, she’d always known that the Irish were as thick as thieves with each other—and she’d envied that. Now it seemed even that was gone.

A phrase she’d heard in the Cuban neighborhoods of Miami came back to her: “Man,” they said there, “is wolf to man.”

Abbie drove home and pulled in front of her apartment building on Elmwood Avenue, close to downtown and a good fifteen miles from the County border. Kids from the University of Buffalo were roaming the street in pleasantly wasted gangs, on their way to the bars on Chippewa Street. She pulled her coat around her as she searched for the key. When she was inside, she kept the lights low and walked softly across the bare wood floor.

She peeked in the second door.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

Her father looked up from the leather recliner set next to his bed. Detective John Kearney had turned seventy-eight the year before, but his arms still looked like cords of cherrywood, red and thick, and his chest was broad. His eyes were sharp and the bluest blue she’d ever seen. It was his mind that was going.

“Is it you then?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

He put down the book of crosswords he’d been doing. She sat next to his recliner, on the bed.

“Did you eat your dinner?” she asked.

“Some of it. I don’t need much these days.”

He didn’t look at her, his eyes pointed toward the corner. When he talked to her, it was always as if he was listening to another, more interesting conversation.

“I had the scanner on,” he said, his accent still bearing the traces of County Clare in Ireland. “You found a body at St. Teresa’s?”

“Dad, please turn on the radio instead of that thing. It’ll only send your blood pressure up.”

“What kind of animal would kill somebody in a church?” John Kearney demanded, the cords on his neck standing out.

She sighed. “It might have been just an abandoned building to them. We don’t know yet.”

“I know a construction worker who lives across the street.”

“Was his name James?” Abbie deadpanned.

Her father looked up sharply. “And how did you know that?”

His eyes were oddly aflame.
What’s he so worried about?
Abbie thought.

“Just a joke, Dad. Do you remember his last name?”

“James … James …” He searched the patterns in the crocheted blanket on his lap. “He was from Connemara,” he said finally.

He’s probably been dead thirty years
, thought Abbie.

“Did the neighbors see anything?” her father mumbled.

“It’s the County, Dad. Everyone was watching TV, curtains drawn. Blind, dumb, and deaf. You know that.”

“ ’Tis a good place. I wish I was back there.”

Abbie stared at him, trying to control her breathing.

“I don’t want to talk about that now. Are you going to sleep now? Why don’t I help you into bed?”

Her father said nothing, just stared at the blanket.

If you wait up for me, why won’t you talk to me? Why won’t you ever talk to me about something important?

Abbie went into her bedroom, undressed slowly. She checked her shape in the mirror, turned to the side. She’d been losing weight lately, mostly because of working twelve-hour days. Her skin had gone beyond pale—which contrasted nicely with her dark hair—all the way to anemic-looking. Her wide-set eyes, bright and intense, stared back at her. Her glossy black hair was pulled back in a ponytail; everything else took too much time. Her cheekbones were high—maybe there was some Native American blood in her family, on her father’s side—her nose was pert, and there was a tiny shell-like scar above her left eye, the origin of which she’d never known.