Black Irish (6 page)

Abbie turned in the mirror again, sighed—what good was it to lose a few pounds and look generally good if your skin looked like that?—and turned on the stereo. She pulled off her boots and it felt like her feet would bloom like balloons. Too many long days in a row. She lay down on the bed.

The disc player kicked into the CD she’d left in there the night before. Eighties music, preferably British and preferably sad, was all
she seemed to be able to listen to lately. Yaz’s “Only You” came on, with its swirling, hypnotic video-game beat. The singer breathed out in a husky voice, “Looking from the window above, it’s like a story of love,” and Abbie closed her eyes. She hated when people said they didn’t write songs like that anymore, but they didn’t write songs like that anymore. The searing pain of the vocal was backed by a ridiculous synthesizer beat that seemed so innocent an eight-year-old could play it. The contrast pleased her somehow.

Abbie began to drift off. Suddenly, she heard a sound like someone being strangled. She snapped awake and raised herself up on her elbows. Her father cried out, then sighed. A minute later she heard the soft rattle of his snore. She went into his room, using the light from the hall to see. They’d moved everything from his home off Abbott Road and preserved it here. It was like having a museum exhibit—Irish widower cop, circa 1977—in her spare bedroom. Commendations from the Department, his wife’s laminated funeral card from Reddington Funeral Home pinned to the wall above his bed, a calendar from his old church in the County, and a stack of library books on the Korean War on the rickety bedside table. There were no pictures of Abbie, no pictures at all.

He’d forgotten to take off his watch. She reached down and pulled the old-fashioned expanding metal bracelet open, like an accordion, and slid it gently over his knobby wrist. She looked at the watch, saw that it had stopped running. Her lips pressed together for a second, and she wondered how long it had been sitting dead on her father’s hand.

Abbie made a mental note to take the watch to the jewelry store for a new battery and laid it on his nightstand. Then she went back to her room, undressed, and got into bed.

The Alzheimer’s is slowly getting worse
, she thought as she lay under her white comforter. Not only that, he’d had two fainting spells in the last six months. The doctors hadn’t been able to explain why, and that worried her. Now he’d forgotten to take off the watch. It used to be part of his nightly ritual to lay it on the nightstand along with his comb and his loose change.

She thought of the disease as a destroyer of memories, tunneling through her father’s brain. She wondered which ones it would silently take tonight. Maybe the boyhood fall off a tall rock at Spanish Point on the Irish coast, the one that had resulted in a broken finger and left his own father furious. Or one of the clues that led him to catch the .22 Caliber Killer, Buffalo’s only serial murderer and the case that had got him on the front page of the
Buffalo News
. Or the name of his dead brothers back in Clare.

Maybe the face of Abbie’s mother, of whom no photographs existed.

I
N THE MORNING
, A
BBIE DROVE DOWN
E
LMWOOD TO POLICE HEADQUARTERS
in her beloved green Saab. The building was a lovely old brick monstrosity on Franklin Street that had been gutted inside to make way for modern offices. Homicide was on the third floor. She exited the elevator and saw that the 9 a.m. conference had already started.

Z nodded at her as she walked in. Perelli, her boss, looked up.

“Slept in, huh?”

“Yes, I did,” she said, but offered no explanation. Her father had been hacking up a lung in the night, and she’d run to the twenty-four-hour CVS for cough syrup. It was none of Perelli’s business.

“I was telling the squad that the preliminary autopsy is out on Jimmy Ryan. There are some things you’re going to want to see.”

O’Halloran, a broad-shouldered, bantam-sized detective with ginger hair and brooding blue eyes, passed her a pile of photos, eight-by-tens. They were blowups from the coroner’s report. She stared at the first one. It showed Jimmy Ryan’s face, cleaned of the caked and blackened blood. The sight was even more disturbing than she’d anticipated.

“Cause of death?”

“Strangulation. Looks like the killer used the nylon rope from the
truck, looped it around his neck and legs, and let him strangle himself to death every time he kicked out. There’s chafing on the neck that matches what you’d get with that type of motion.”

“What is that on his forehead?” she said.

“A number.”

The mark was crude, but it was clearly the number “1.”

“Was it postmortem?”

“No,” Perelli said, taking a sip of his coffee and grimacing. “The killer did it when he was still alive.”

“Why would he do that? Just from a practical point of view, it would be much easier to make a clear mark if you waited until after death.”

“He wanted to inflict pain.”

“He did that in other ways,” Abbie said, paging slowly through the photographs. There was a circular cut underneath the belly button, and the coroner had made a notation in the margin of the photo.
Incision, multiple indiv. cuts within
.

“This cut is an inch and a half deep,” Abbie said. “It looks like he was trying to carve a piece of flesh off him.”

“But he kept stopping,” said Perelli. “Look at the hesitation marks inside the wound.”

Abbie brought the photo closer, and nodded.

“Extortion?” she said.

“Judging from early information that Zangara got from his bank, Jimmy Ryan didn’t have shit to extort. Maybe the killer was trying to get something else?”

“Like what?” said Z.

“Information,” Abbie said.

“We have anything similar statewide? Something that tells us he’s traveling and this could be his latest victim?”

Alexander, the Department’s lone black detective, shook his head before shifting his enormous bulk in his chair. “Nothing. There was a prostitute in Syracuse two months ago with her right nipple cut off, but the detectives there like her live-in boyfriend for that one. They had a history of playing around with knives during sex and I guess it
got out of control, he nicked her and she screamed, so he decided to go ahead and kill her.”

Perelli nodded and spun away from the table in his chair. A few seconds later, he came wallowing back and pointed at Alexander.

“Wait. You remember that thing three years ago, on the East Side?”

Alexander looked at Perelli blankly, then nodded. “Oh, yeah. The old lady.”

Abbie looked at both of them. “Wait, what was that?”

Alexander turned to her. “It looked like a break-in robbery. A retiree living on her Social Security, black female, in one of the sketchier blocks off Delavan. The door was kicked in, some of her jewelry was gone. But then we looked at the body and it was obvious that the intruder had spent some time in the place. He’d left knife marks on her face.”

“What kind of marks?”

“He jabbed her in the cheek and forehead while she was laying in the bed, tied up.”

“Could be he was finding out where the jewelry was.”

“Could be,” Alexander said. “But the good stuff was in the top drawer. That didn’t take much looking.”

“He didn’t take anything with him?”

“Besides the valuables? Nothing.”

Abbie nodded, then looked at Perelli. “Feels different to me.”

Perelli sighed. “Look at the file anyway. What else do we know about Ryan?”

After leaving the scene at St. Teresa’s, Abbie had gone to the Ryan home, interviewing the relatives who’d come by. A car had been idling out front as she pulled up, with two men inside. After she’d told Patty Ryan her husband was dead, two of her uncles had emerged from the car and come through the door to comfort the widow. Abbie wanted to ask them how they’d got the news so quickly. But she knew. The newswire.

“The wife was … unable to talk to me. After I told her about the husband, she collapsed and had to be sedated.”

“Background?”

Abbie looked at her notes. “Jimmy Ryan was forty-eight, grew up in the County, attended Bishop Timon, where he played JV football and got solid C’s. He went to work for Mohawk Gas, which became National Grid. His brother told me there were no financial problems—no gambling, no drugs. I tend to believe him but I’ll be checking the credit cards and the mortgage payments. The marriage was unhappy but not to the point of anyone leaving. We’re going to be talking to his co-workers to see if they know anything, neighbors.”

“Zangara?”

“I spoke to his boss. Jimmy Ryan started in 1980 as a trainee, right out of high school. No major complaints but there never are right off. Respect for the dead and all that. I expect we find that Jimmy was just bumping along over there. Thirty-one years at the company and he was still walking through slush and dog shit to look at gas meters? Obviously he hadn’t impressed National Grid too much.”

“So the question becomes, what was Jimmy Ryan talking about that caused him to get murdered?”

“Well, good thing it’s the County,” O’Halloran said. “They’re probably lining up around the block to tell us.”

The detectives laughed, but Perelli glared at O’Halloran.

“I don’t want to hear anything about how difficult working South Buffalo is, all right? It’s like every other precinct. You have informants on the streets, you have skels in the bars who we give breaks to. Get them to talk to you. Work your sources. Do not let this County shit get in the way of carrying out your investigation.”

The detectives were looking down at their notebooks.

“Does everyone hear me loud and clear?”

They nodded.

“Okay, that’s it.”

Abbie and Z walked back to their cubicles, glass-walled ones with black steel frames. Abbie sat down and began going through the crime scene photos more carefully.

“And these,” Z said, leaning over and dropping another sheaf of photos onto her desk.

Abbie picked up the new stack and paged through them slowly.

“He could tie a knot, couldn’t he?”

The way the rope was tied was complex, looped three times, forming a collar above the knot.

Z nodded through the glass.

“I wonder if those are Navy ties,” she said.

Z shrugged. “Dunno. I was Marines. They only taught us how to kill people.”

She went through the first batch a second time.
A murder victim is brought to a church
, she thought to herself,
tied up in a chair. The killer cuts off both his eyelids and carves the number “1” in his forehead. What did the “1” mean—that this was the first of many?

The killing looked staged. Churches were very public places, deeply meaningful stages for the people who went there to worship. The potential for shock was high. But paging from photo to photo, Abbie didn’t get the sense she was looking at a public announcement. More of a very intense private conversation. She looked at a color-saturated picture of Ryan’s face shot from the left side, the pink flesh of the eyelids sheared away, the mouth battered and slightly open, his face tilted upward.

What are you seeing, Jimmy? What did he want to show you?

She felt like she could almost hear the killer’s whisper. He wasn’t taking things away from Jimmy. He didn’t want anything. He was imparting something. He wanted Jimmy to know. To
learn
.

A one-way conversation. Be very quiet and listen to what I say. The cut full of hesitation marks, down near the belly button, told her that.

Maybe Ryan just wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t listen to what the killer wanted so desperately for him to know.

“I’m going to his house,” she said after an hour.

Z, chewing on a cinnamon roll, waved.

It was a clear day, a blue sky arched over the lake. She jumped on the ramp to the Skyway.

After exiting at Tifft Street, she drove toward South Park, the road hemmed in on both sides by tall grass. She’d gone here with her dad on Saturday mornings when she was just a girl. He would wake her up and say, “Want to go chasing black rabbits?” and she would say yes because she knew how much he loved it, and because you didn’t say no to her father. Never, ever. They would park their sky-blue Nova at the little turn-in where the workers had their hut and then set out on foot, along the trails made by people she never saw, her father and her always alone out there, he with his long stick for chasing off dogs and her with a doll for company. This was when she was eight or nine. The grass, as high as a giant’s head, would swallow them up and they’d be lost to the world for hours. The grass even blocked out the sight of the mills and the hulk of the Bethlehem Steel plants to the south. That’s why her father had loved it, she thought. He could imagine he was back home in West Clare, climbing the hills near the farm, in the low rolling hills he’d described in such minute detail that she could have made her way from the tiny post office in Miltown Malbay to the bleak crossroads of The Hand two miles away, though she’d never been to Ireland, not once.

They’d spot the white feet flashing in the grass as the rabbit turned to run and they’d give chase, her father’s stick knocking against rocks and she struggling to follow the path of his muddy boots. They never actually caught a rabbit. Most times they would follow the serpentine trails until they emerged into a large clearing and found themselves at the edge of a huge pool of stagnant water. There were three or four of them near the Tifft Nature Preserve and they each had a different color, green or orange or yellow, as bright as antifreeze or Tang, glowing so intensely that they seemed lit from below. Curiously, there were never any mosquitoes flitting on the surface. And they would look at the Day-Glo surface of the pond, and Abbie would say, “Why is the water that color, Daddy?” and her father would say nothing but stand there as the gusts of wind from the
lake blew his thin wool pants tight around his legs. Then they’d walk back slowly to the Nova and go home.