Obit (27 page)

“I know. Gotta run.”

I wondered if this meant we would learn no more about the mystery of Declan and the attempt on his life.

I banished the whole thing from my mind as I headed out with the family for a walk on the Upper West Side. Everything was in blue that morning: a ninety-four-foot blue whale and the Star of India sapphire at the American Museum of Natural History, and the deep indigo sky luminous with stars at the Hayden Planetarium. We walked around all day, sightseeing. Then we hoofed it back to the hotel, got ourselves all dressed up and secured a table at the renowned Russian Tea Room. It was the last week of March; Maura and Normie would be returning to Halifax in a few days’ time, and I wanted to give them a big night out. Maura and I were able to converse like the rational, intelligent adults we were; come to think of it, she had not berated me lately about any of my recent marital blunders. Perhaps there was hope for us after all. Normie spent the time mentally renovating her mother’s Halifax kitchen with red leather banquettes and chandeliers. She conceded, however, that she would not be demanding caviar again any time soon. For my part, I would be in no hurry to drink vodka again.

I passed out when we returned to our suite at ten o’clock, and didn’t have another conscious thought until I heard a quiet knock at
the door. I ignored it and sank back into sleep, but it happened again. I looked over at the clock. It was only eleven-thirty; it felt like three in the morning. Finally I got up, pulled on a pair of jeans and stumbled to the door. It was Terry Burke, not looking much better than I did.

“Monty, I’m sorry but this is urgent. Can we go downstairs and talk?”

“Sure. Hold on.”

I grabbed a shirt and shoes, and we took the elevator down to the bar. I could feel the tension emanating from my companion. He didn’t speak until we had two beer in front of us. I couldn’t look at mine.

“I have a friend in the police department. Gabe. He arrived at the house tonight, told me to come out to his car.” Terry took a long swig of his beer, and I noticed a slight tremor in his hand. “Gabe told me he was doing me a favour. He was telling me something he shouldn’t, and I had to promise not to breathe a word to anyone in my family. I agreed. I don’t suppose it occurred to him I’d spill this to anyone outside the family.”

In spite of my queasy stomach, I took a sip of beer.

“The police got a tip or learned of this somehow — anyway, they found a box that was brought over from Ireland. There are traces of soil and plant matter in the box.”

“Yes?”

“Remember I said they found traces of Irish dirt or something on the gun or on the scrap of clothing that was left behind?”

“Yes. So they think this may be how the gun was transported.”

“Right.”

“Where was the box found?”

“He wouldn’t say. But that’s not the point. They found fingerprints on the box.”

All my senses were alert now. I looked at him and waited for the next shoe to drop. He wouldn’t be here if the prints belonged to some anonymous Irish smuggler.

Terry took another sip and wiped what could have been tears from his eyes. “They ran the prints and found a match. With my brother.”

“Your brother.”

“Francis.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Exactly. They had his prints from an old narcotics conviction, years ago. You know fucking well the soil tests are going to show the gun was in that box. The gun was wiped clean of prints but now they have the container. With Fran’s fucking prints on it. I imagine they’ll have to do a bit more investigating before they — if they’re going to arrest him, right?”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But we don’t know what else they know.”

“Christ Almighty. We have to get to Francis before the police do. But we can’t, you know, try to spirit him out of the country —”

“Forget it.”

“We have to question Francis without him catching on. Because you never know what he’ll do if he’s cornered. I mean, you saw how he was at a family luncheon! Still. As much of an arsehole and a fuckup as he is, and as much as the old man rubs him the wrong way, I can’t believe he’d try to kill our father. At a wedding with the whole family there? And another thing I really can’t believe is that he’d manage to pull it off. Get away, I mean.”

“There may be some other explanation,” I offered. Sure: the kind of other explanation I was forever trying to flog to the courts in my efforts to acquit my guilty clients.

“How are we going to handle this, Monty? I can’t very well go and take the little Christer by the throat and question him. I’ll lose it. And when it’s over, one of us will be dead on the floor. But if you talked to him, you being a lawyer . . . If we still have some time, before the police get their soil samples tested, you could approach him on some pretext. After all, he doesn’t know what the cops have found. He’s been hanging around as if everything’s business as usual.”

“What reason could I possibly have for talking to him, that he would believe?”

“You’ll think of something!”

I sighed. “Where does he live?”

“I’ll try to find out.”

Terry was a worried man when he left the hotel bar. I tried to get back to sleep but was assailed by images of Francis Burke’s angry face at lunch; his sardonic manner when he showed up a few days after
the shooting; Leo at the crime scene, wondering how the scrap of material had been snagged; the gun wiped clean of prints. The gunman had likely worn gloves, and he would have wiped everything down. That would take a cool head. What did he wipe everything with? Something from which the scrap of fabric had come? How long had he been waiting behind that plywood door before his victim — his father? — had come within his sights in the gym? Then various pretexts for talking to Francis came into my mind, some so nonsensical that I laughed at them even in my dreams.

Late the next morning Terry called to report he’d had no luck in finding his brother’s current address. But he did have the phone number of Fran’s old girlfriend. I told him I would call her and carry on from there. Maura and Normie headed out to the Children’s Museum of the Arts; I stayed behind and made a date with Marta Lesnik to meet in a Brooklyn pub. I fabricated a story about a court case in which the defendant had given me Francis Burke’s name as a possible character witness. I wanted to find him and I wanted to know what kind of person he was.

†

The Between the Bridges Pub was situated, as the name suggested, between the Manhattan and the Brooklyn bridges. A red awning shaded the length of the bar from the glaring sun. A lighted Guinness sign beckoned from the window, and I could hear rock music coming from the sound system. I went inside. Three men were arguing and gesturing with their glasses at the bar on the right. There was only one single female in the place, and I made a beeline for her table. She got up when I approached, and we introduced ourselves. Marta Lesnik was tall and athletic with dark blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail; the style accentuated her Slavic features. We ordered beer and engaged in a bit of small talk; then I asked her about Francis Burke.

“Oh, God, I went with Frankie on and off for years. I don’t know why. I can’t see what either of us got out of it. Where he’d be now is anybody’s guess. He travels a lot on the cheap, bumming around Mexico or Ireland. When he’s in town he usually crashes with friends
or lives in a rooming house. And there’s no need of that; he could have done a lot better for himself. The rest of his family did well. Frankie is a nice guy deep down, but he’s a mess.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he was always quitting his work, then taking courses at some college or other, then quitting those. At one point he was taking psychology. A lot of good that did him. Ever notice some of the people who get real keen on psychology, and can’t see their own problems, which are practically stamped on their foreheads for the rest of the whole world to see? That was Francis.” She shook her head. “And sometimes — sometimes things didn’t go all that well between us. As guy and girl. You know.”

This I didn’t want to hear. “Yeah, well —”

“But other times he was perfectly normal. When we had problems it was usually after some ruckus with his family. Or he’d drink too much and start yammering on about his brothers or his father. On those nights, I just put on my flannel nightie and let him talk himself to sleep. Anything else? Fuggedaboudit.”

“He didn’t get along with his father?”

“Who did? From what I hear anyway. Tough old buzzard. I only met him a couple of times. Frankie went around in circles to avoid taking me to his house. The only place I ever saw his brothers was in this bar. It’s near my work so Frankie would meet me before my shift and we’d have a couple of beers. His brothers came in once in a while. That would ruin Frankie’s day of course but I got a real kick out of them. One time they all trooped in and sat up at the bar beside me and Frank. They were half in the bag already, and so was I. Probably didn’t make my shift that night. Anyway, I said: ‘Good afternoon, Father.’ One of the Burkes is a priest. ‘I see you’re worshipping outside the parish again today.’ The parish being O’Malley’s, the pub they practically live in, over in Queens.

“So Brennan, the priest, says: ‘I heard there were a lot of sinners in this area, so I came over to hear confessions. Anything you’d like to tell me, young lady?’

“And I said — like I told you, I had a buzz on — ‘I had lustful thoughts about a young man, Father, someone sitting at this bar right now.’

“Brennan says: ‘Did you act on these sinful thoughts, my child?’

“And I said: ‘God knows, I tried to!’ Francis turned scarlet! I just meant it as a joke, the kind of thing anyone would say; I wasn’t talking about our problems. Jesus, he was sensitive. They wouldn’t have known anyway, unless they saw him turn red and get all upset. But he was always like that about those guys. I used to refer to Brennan as ‘Father What-A-Waste,’ the standard joke about a handsome priest, right? Frankie thought I had a crush on Brennan. Hell, I’m a little Polish girl from Greenpoint; I respect priests! And he has a brother Patrick who’s a psychiatrist; I used to call him the sexologist. No reason, just a joke. Again, Frankie thought I had my eye on Patrick. And the airline pilot, Terrence, well, naturally I must have been scheming to get into the cockpit with him.

“That day I’m telling you about, when they came in and Frank got upset, Patrick’s wife showed up. Dressed to kill. She was one of these icy blonde types. ‘Patrick! Why do I feel as if I’m in a particularly baaahhd Irish film, having to park our vehicle in this sort of neighbourhood so I can drag my husband out of a bar? You look drunk, just to complete the scenario.’ She commanded him to leave.

“And she stalked out, without even speaking to the rest of them. It was funny, they all lifted their pints at the same time, all eyeing her sideways as she went out the door. It looked choreographed but it wasn’t, just brothers with the same habits. Even Francis. Patrick got up and pretended he was being dragged out by his tie. ‘Henpecked Husband Disorder. Hirschfeld and Rosenblum in their monograph on the subject stated blah, blah.’ What a bitch. Frankie told me Pat had a really nice girlfriend all through high school and college, then he met up with this ice queen when he was in med school. As my mother used to say, she was looking to get her
MRS
.

“That night Francis was all weird, accusing me of telling his brothers about his ‘infrequent’ difficulties. But I hadn’t told them! You didn’t have to be Doctor Freud to know he was intimidated by these high-powered brothers, and the tough old boot of a father. Come on!”

“So you haven’t kept in touch.”

“Not for a year or so.”

“Any idea where he’s living now?”

“There’s a house he stays in from time to time, in Astoria. One of those illegal basement apartments. He and the landlady don’t get along, so he comes and goes. Here’s the address if you need it.” She grabbed a coaster from the table, took out a pen and wrote it out for me. “You know, I hope he’s met another girl. Ideally, someone from out of state, so he can keep her apart from his family! If that’s still a problem for him.”

Still a problem indeed.

†

So there I was at the door of Francis Burke’s basement apartment in a red-brick two-family house in Astoria. The house was in need of maintenance but it was swept and scrubbed. I had worked out a pretext and tried to ignore the pang of conscience I felt for using my little daughter’s name in such a sordid affair. The door opened in answer to my knock, and Francis did a double-take when he saw me. He was unshaven but clean, and was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a faded T-shirt. There was a faint smell of dope in the air. Neither of us spoke for about thirty seconds, then he came up with something to say.

“Let me guess. You’re here to defend my sister’s honour.” What? Oh yes, the ill-starred luncheon. “But you needn’t have bothered. I called and apologized to her. I have nothing against Bridey. Though she
was
stealing glances at you across the table. In case you’re interested. I never got along with her husband, so I don’t give a shit. He’s not good enough for her, never was. So. If that’s all, I’ll let you get on your way.”

“That wasn’t it, actually, Francis. May I come in?”

He looked wary, but shrugged and moved aside. The room was like the building: rundown but not dirty, except for a few beer bottles that had not been rinsed. There was a small collection of books in the studentesque brick-and-boards bookcase: Irish history, radical politics and a bit of psychology. His music ran to Celtic, heavy metal and — I was surprised to note — Gregorian chant. There was only one photograph that I saw: of his mother looking very young and exceptionally attractive.

“I made three calls of apology in a single day,” he said, “one to my
sister, one to my poor long-suffering mother, and one — as you probably know — to your daughter. She seemed to take my apology in good grace. I didn’t apologize to that prick Brennan or to Declan. The old
sagart
— the priest — had left by the time I was in a mellow enough mood to pick up the phone. So. Why are you here? Want a toke?”