Everybody Dies (3 page)

Mick had a quick drink at the bar, and then we went out and got into the dark blue Cadillac and drove away from what a reporter had called "the headquarters of his criminal empire." The phrase, Elaine once pointed out, was infelicitous, because Mick's whole style wasn't remotely imperial. It was feudal. He was the king of the castle, holding sway by the sheer force of his physical presence, rewarding the faithful and drowning rivals in the moat.

And he was, I've always realized, an unlikely friend for a former policeman turned private investigator. The years have left his hands as bloodstained as his apron. But I seem to be able to recognize this without judging him, or distancing myself from him. I'm not sure whether this represents emotional maturity on my part, or mere willful obtuseness. I'm not sure it matters, either.

I have quite a few friends, but not many close ones. The cops I worked with years ago are retired by now, and I've long since lost touch with them. My saloon friendships wound down when I quit drinking and stopped hanging around bars, and my AA friendships, for all their depth and solidity, center on a shared commitment to sobriety. We support one another, we trust one another, we know astonishingly intimate things about one another- but we're not necessarily close.

Elaine is my closest friend and by far the most important person in my life. But I do have a handful of men with whom I have bonded, each in a different and profound way. Jim Faber, my AA sponsor. TJ, who lives in my old hotel room and serves as my assistant when he's not clerking in Elaine's shop. Ray Gruliow, the radical lawyer. Joe Durkin, a detective at Midtown North, and my last real hook in the Department. Chance Coulter, who once trafficked in women and now deals instead in African art. Danny Boy Bell, whose own stock-in-trade is information.

And Mick Ballou.

They don't run to type, these friends of mine, not as far as I can see. By and large, they wouldn't have much fondness for one another. But they are my friends. I don't judge them, or the friendships I have with them. I can't afford

I thought about this while Andy drove and Mick and I sat side by side in the big back seat. We talked a little about the new Japanese pitcher for the Yankees, and how he'd been disappointing after a promising start. But neither of us had a great deal to say on the subject, and mostly we sat in silence as we rode along.

We took the Lincoln Tunnel toNew Jersey, then Route 3 west. After that I didn't pay much attention to the route. We found our way through a sort of suburban industrial sprawl, winding up in front of a massive one-story concrete-block structure perched behind a twelve-foot woven wire fence topped with concertina wire. rooms 4 rent, a sign announced, which was hard to credit, as I'd never seen a more unlikely rooming house. A second sign explained the first: e-z storage / your extra room at low monthly rates.

Andy drove slowly past the yard, turned at the first driveway, coasted past the place a second time. "All peace and quiet," he said, pulling up in front of the locked gate. Mick got out and opened the big padlock with a key, then swung the gate inward. Andy drove the Cadillac in and Mick secured the gate behind us, then got into the car.

"They lock up at ten," he explained, "but they give you a key to the lock. You've got twenty-four-hour access, with no attendant on hand from ten at night to six in the morning."

"That could be convenient."

"Why I picked it," he said.

We circled the building. There was a roll-up steel door every fifteen feet or so, each of them closed and padlocked. Andy pulled up in front of one and cut the engine. We got out, and Mick fitted another key into this lock and turned it, then gripped the handle and raised the door.

It was dark within, but information was coming my way before the door was all the way up. I sniffed the air like a dog with his head out the car window, sorting the rich mixture of scents that came my way.

There was the smell of death, of course, of lifeless flesh spoiling in a warm unventilated space. With it was the smell of blood, a smell I've often heard described as coppery, but it has always reminded me more of the taste of iron in the mouth. An ironic smell, if you like. There was the burnt smell of cordite, and another burnt smell as well. Singed hair, for a guess. And, as unlikely background music for all these sour notes, I breathed in the rich nostalgic bouquet of whiskey. It smelled like bourbon, and good bourbon at that.

Then the light came on, a single overhead bulb, and showed me what my nose had led me to expect. Two men, both wearing jeans and sneakers, one in a forest green work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the other in a royal blue polo shirt, lay sprawled just a few feet left of the center of a room some eighteen feet square and ten feet high.

I walked over and had a look at them, two men in their late twenties or early thirties. I recognized the one in the polo shirt, although I couldn't remember his name, if in fact I'd ever heard it. I'd seen him at Grogan's. He was a fairly recent arrival fromBelfast, and he had the accent, with his sentences turning up the slightest bit at their ends, almost like questions.

He'd been shot through the hand, and in the torso, just below the breastbone. He'd been shot again, and conclusively, just behind the left ear. That shot had been fired at close range, the blast singeing the hair around the wound. So it had indeed been singed hair that I smelled.

The other man, the one in the dark green work shirt, had bled abundantly from a bullet wound in the throat. He lay on his back, with the blood pooled around him. Again, there'd been a coup de grace, a close-range shot into the middle of the forehead. It was hard to see the need for it. The throat wound would have been enough to kill him, and, judging from the blood loss, he may well have been dead before the second shot was fired.

I said, "Who killed them?"

"Ah," Mick said. "Aren't you the detective?"

Andy waited outside with the car, guarding our privacy, and Mick lowered the steel door to screen us from any chance passerby. "I wanted you to see them exactly as I found them," he said. "I didn't care to walk away and leave them like this. But how could I tell what clues I might be disturbing? What do I know of clues?"

"You didn't move them at all?"

He shook his head. "I didn't have to touch them to know they were beyond help. I've seen enough dead men to know one on sight."

"Or even in the dark."

"The smell was less a few hours ago."

"Is that when you found them?"

"I didn't note the time. It was early evening, with the sky still bright. I'd say it was between seven and eight."

"And this is exactly what you found? You didn't add anything or take anything away?"

"I did not."

"The door was lowered when you got here?"

"Lowered and locked."

"The cardboard carton in the corner- "

"Just some tools in it that it's useful to keep here. A pry bar for opening crates, a hammer and nails. There was an electric drill, but I guess they took that. They took everything else."

"What was there for them to take?"

"Whiskey. Enough to fill a small truck."

I knelt down for a closer look at the man I recognized. I moved his arm, lined up the wound in the hand with the wound in the torso. "One bullet," I said, "or at least it looks that way. I've seen that before. It seems to be instinctive, holding up a hand to ward off a bullet."

"And have you ever known it to work?"

"Only when Superman does it. He was beaten up, did you notice that? Around the face. Pistol-whipped, probably."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "He was just a lad, you know. You must have met him at the bar."

"I never got his name."

"Barry McCartney. He would be telling you he was no relation to Paul. He'd not have bothered saying that at home inBelfast. There's no lack of McCartneys inCountyAntrim."

I looked at the hands of the other dead man. They were unmarked. Either he hadn't tried catching bullets with them or he'd tried and missed.

He looked to have been beaten around the face and head as well, but it was hard to be sure. The bullet to the forehead had distorted his features, and that was enough to explain the discoloration.

To me, at any rate, if not to someone who knew what he was looking at. I'd been to my share of crime scenes, but I wasn't a medical examiner, I wasn't a forensic pathologist. I didn't really know what to look for or what to make of what I saw. I could pore over the bodies all night and not pick up a fraction of what an expert eye could tell at a glance.

"John Kenny," Mick said, without my having to ask. "Did you ever meet him?"

"I don't think so."

"From Strabane, in theCountyTyrone. He lived in Woodside, in a rooming house full of North-of-Ireland boys. His mother died a year ago. Saves having to tell her." He cleared his throat. "He flew home, buried her, and came back here. And died in a room full of whiskey."

"I don't smell it on them."

"The room was full of whiskey, not the lad himself."

"But I smelled whiskey when I walked in the door," I said, "and I smell it now, but not on them."

"Ah," he said, and I looked where he was pointing. Broken glass covered a few square feet of the concrete floor at the base of the wall. Five or six feet above the heap of shards the wall was stained, with the stain trailing down the wall to the floor.

I went over and had a look at it. "They were stealing your whiskey," I said, "and they broke a bottle."

"They did."

"But it didn't just slip out of their hands and break on impact," I said. "Somebody deliberately smashed the bottle against the wall. A full bottle, too." I poked around in the debris, found the piece of glass with the label on it. "George Dickel," I said. "I thought I smelled bourbon."

"You still have the nose for it."

"McCartney and... Kenny, is it?"

"John Kenny."

"I gather they both worked for you."

"They did."

"And it was your business that brought them here?"

"It was. Last night I told them to drive out here sometime today and pick up half a dozen cases, scotch and bourbon and I don't remember what else. I told them and they wrote it down. John had a station wagon, a big old Ford consumed with rust. Plenty of room in it for a few cases of whiskey. Barry would give him a hand. They'd be coming during the day, so they wouldn't need a key to the padlock. I had extra keys to this unit, and I gave them one."

"They knew how to get here?"

"They'd been here before, when we unloaded the truck the whiskey came in. They weren't part of the taking of the truck, but they helped in the unloading. And they were here another time or two over the months."

"So they came to pick up some whiskey. And they were to deliver it where?"

"To the bar. When they didn't show up I called around looking for them. I couldn't find hide nor hair, so I got in my own car and came out here myself."

"You were worried about them?"

"I'd no cause for worry. The errand I sent them on was of no great urgency. They might have put it off for a time."

"But you were worried all the same, weren't you?"

"I was," he admitted. "I had a feeling."

"I see."

"My mother always said I had the second sight. I don't know if it's so, but sometimes I'll have a feeling. And we needed whiskey at the bar, and I'd nothing else to do, so why not run out and have a look?"

"And this is how you found them?"

"It is. I added nothing and took nothing away."

"What happened to the station wagon?"

"I've no idea, beyond that it was nowhere to be seen. I'd say whoever killed them drove off in it."

"But there was more whiskey than would fit in a station wagon," I said. "That would do for the half dozen cases, but to clear out the whole room- "

"You'd need a panel truck."

"Or a couple of station wagons, each making several trips. But they'd want to get it all in one trip. They wouldn't want to come back to a room with dead men in it. They had a truck, and one of them drove away in it and the other drove off in Kenny's station wagon."

"You couldn't sell the thing," he said. "Not even for parts. Take away the rust and there'd be nothing holding it together."

"Maybe they needed the space. Maybe the truck or van they brought wouldn't take the whole load, and they had to stuff the extra cases into the station wagon."

"And had one bottle left over," he said, "and smashed it against the wall."

"It's hard to make sense out of that, isn't it? It's not as though the bottle just dropped. Somebody heaved it against the wall."

"If there was a scuffle- "

"But there's no sign of one. The killers got the drop on your boys and pistol-whipped them and shot them. That part seems clear, and it's hard to fit a broken bottle into that scenario." I bent down, stood up. "The bottle was opened," I said. "Here's the neck, and the cap's off and the seal's broken." I closed my eyes, trying to reconstruct the scene. "Kenny and McCartney are in here. They've loaded the cases and they're having a drink before they head out. The bad guys come in with guns in their hand. 'Calm down, have a drink,' Kenny says, or McCartney. He hands over the bottle, and the gunman takes it away from him and heaves it against the wall."

"Why?"

"I don't know, unless you got knocked off by Carry Nation and the Anti-Saloon League."

"All this talk of whiskey," he said, and dug out his flask and took a short drink. "They wouldn't have found an opened bottle, man. All the cases were sealed. They'd have had to open a case if they wanted a drink, and they wouldn't have done it."

I returned to the bodies. There was a little flake of glass floating on top of the blood that had gushed from John Kenny's throat. "The bottle was broken after the men were killed," I said. "They killed them, then broke open a case and had a couple of drinks while they loaded the whiskey. And smashed the bottle. Why?"