The Color of Blood (23 page)

“Tell me what you remember about her, something, anything, no matter how trivial.”

“She wore a ring. She took it off before we started shooting. The stones were so big, they kept scratching us.”

“What kind of ring?”

“Red stones… they couldn’t have been rubies, but deep red. Two big ones, coming to points, like… I don’t know, like claws.”

Like crab claws. I remembered Anita’s words yesterday morning:
It’s not an engagement ring. It’s for protection. A talisman.

I stood up and walked around the room and came to rest in front of the photograph of the three towers that made up the Howard Medical Center.

“Do you think there should be a fourth tower built, Jonathan? I know that’s what your mother wants.”

“Of course I do. And Denis wants it too. It’s an expression of confidence in the family, of continuity, of tradition. It’s the only option.”

“Jessica didn’t agree. Neither does Shane.”

“Shane will come around,” Jonathan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the day to discuss plans of that sort. Is there anything else?”

“There’s one more thing I need to know. It’s about Emily, yesterday, in the house in Honeypark. Did she leave the house during the day?”

Jonathan nodded.

“And when she came back? How did she look?”

He shook his head.

“I understand, you want to be loyal to your cousin. And believe me, I don’t want to get your uncle off by putting Emily in the frame for her mother’s murder. But the Guards aren’t stupid, and if they get to her first, they’ll take her down.”

“And what, you’ll protect her? If she did it, if she killed David Brady, you’d try and cover it up, would you? Because that’s what I’d do.”

“Is that what you
did
? The house in Honeypark burned down today. Was there something there? Physical evidence?”

Jonathan shook his head again.

“I saw you nearby. In the Woodpark Inn with the Reilly brothers. Not long after the fire had started.”

Jonathan glanced uneasily at me and looked away.

“I… I needed them to keep quiet about what they knew.”

“What did they know? That Emily killed her mother?”

“Not her mother, my God.”

“You really think she killed David Brady? Jonathan?”

“I don’t know. She was so angry at him. She felt she had been forced to make the film, and she hated it. She went out that morning. When she came back, she was wild, distracted, like something really awful had happened. She went into the bathroom, had a shower, wrapped the clothes up in a bag and put it in the bottom of the wardrobe. Then she told me we had to have sex. In the middle of it, she started fighting, hitting me. Then crying. Then sex again. I was turned on, freaked out, all points between. I didn’t know what had happened, what was happening. That went on all afternoon, until you arrived. It was too fucked up.”

“And the bag? She just left it there?”

“I think so.”

“And the fire today?”

Jonathan breathed in slowly.

“If they couldn’t find any physical evidence, they couldn’t link her to the murder. But I don’t know anything about the fire.
I
didn’t set it.”

He looked up at me.

“Is Wendy… what’s happened to her?”

“The people who kidnapped her still had her tonight,” I said. “She saw your friend Sean Moon kill your friends Wayne and Darren Reilly.”

“Oh my God.”

“But then, she got away. No thanks to you.”

I went out into the hall, feeling as if I knew less than when I had arrived.

As I opened the door to the stairs, I thought I could hear the boy sobbing.

I walked down Westmoreland Street to the river and stared at it for a while, envying its steadiness of purpose. Groups of drunken men and women tumbled along the quays, screaming and howling, baying at the suffocating night. It sounded like they were trying to get the party back up to where it had been on Halloween, and like they were having to work just a bit too hard at it. I envied them too, though; tonight I envied everyone who didn’t know what I knew. I called Shane Howard, who told me he was at home and not in jail, and asked me did I get the little bastards, and I told him not to worry about them, and that I had his money; he was pleased about that, and laughed one of his crashing laughs that nearly deafened me, and then gave me Anita Kravchenko’s phone number and address.

Anita didn’t live on the North Circular Road, she lived on North King Street, a confusion I attributed to Shane Howard’s brain seizing up completely at the mere mention of Dublin’s northside. The cab let me out by a dingy strip of shops, most with steel shutters on their windows and doors; Anita lived above a dry cleaner’s called Eireann Fresh; I rang her and she came down and let me in. She and her sister were on the first floor in a room barely big enough for one, lit by a bare bulb, with a sink and a two-ring stove and two plastic chairs. Maria huddled on the mattress in a grey sweat suit, her knees drawn up to her chest, studying a television which showed an improbably coifed James Caan doing something unlikely in Las Vegas.

Anita went over and whispered to her sister; Maria shook her head; she wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t say I blamed her; if I were she, I wouldn’t look at an Irishman again as long as I lived. Anita turned the volume down on the television, then came back and we sat down on the plastic chairs opposite one another.

“Mr. Loy, thank you, my sister thanks you too. She is too upset to speak.”

“I’m not surprised. Are you sure you’re safe here? Does anyone else know where you are?”

“Mr. Howard only. And Jerry.”

“Jerry Dalton?”

“Yes. He tried to help too.”

“I need to get in touch with Jerry Dalton.”

“I should not say.”

“But you’ve been helping him, no? Leaving messages for me on my car?”

“Yes. I do not know what they mean.”

“Neither do I. I’d like to talk to him to find out.”

Maria made a sound, which Anita retreated to the bed to interpret.

“Maria says of course, because you helped us. He will be at the rugby club tonight, he is working.”

“Thanks. I don’t even know… where are you from, Anita? Poland?”

“Kiev… Ukraine.”

“Do you have papers?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m not with the Guards, Anita.”

Anita said nothing for a while. I could hear the sounds from the other rooms, men quarreling, babies crying, a couple having very noisy sex; then a lull, during which I could hear, and see, Maria sobbing.

“No, we have no papers. That’s why I cannot ask Mr. Howard to help. I am afraid he will fire me.”

“How did Jerry know to help?”

“He met me at Shane’s house and talked to me. He was with Emily, but he talked with me for a while. He is interested in me, not like most Irishmen, only one thing.”

“How did your sister get drawn into this?”

“She is working in a pub, went for drink with a man who comes there, she thinks she goes to other pub with him, but it is his house. Suddenly he beats her, she must sleep with other men. Anything he says.”

“An Irishman? Was that Sean Moon? Was Sean Moon or Brock Taylor the man, Maria?”

Maria’s sobs had now turned to insistent, shrill wailing. Anita went to her, and they whispered together.

“No names. It is too frightened,” Anita said.

“Does he know where you live? Do any of the men who harmed you… do they know where you live?”

Maria looked me in the eye for the first time.

“Yes. They know.”

“Okay. It might be an idea if you didn’t stay at home tonight.”

“We have nowhere to go,” Anita said. “If we go to the Guards, we have no papers, we get sent home. Nothing there. Not for us.”

“Nothing except pimps,” Maria spat.

I found it was easier to say it than to think about the wisdom of it:

“All right, get your stuff. You can stay at my place. I probably won’t be there tonight. You go there, and you lock yourselves in a bedroom, and you don’t answer the door. Is that all right?”

Anita looked at Maria, but her sister was already nodding.

“You are good, Mr. Loy.”

“No I’m not. I’ve got no choice, is all. I’ll wait for you downstairs. Take everything.”

I hailed a cab, then let it go because the first remark the cabdriver made was about the cushy fucking number all these fucking immigrants had round here; by the time I’d found another, the girls were on the street. Everything turned out to be a small fabric suitcase each. The cabdriver promptly got out and put the bags in the trunk, which I took to be a good sign. I asked whether they needed to tell their landlord; Anita began to explain that they owed some rent; Maria, whose English was patchier than her sister’s but effective, said, “Landlord is cunt. Fuck him.” Revolutions have been fought for less. I paid the driver, tipped him well, made sure he knew exactly where he was going and gave Anita Tommy’s key.

No names. It is too frightened.

I FOUND THE PAGES JERRY DALTON HAD LEFT BENEATH
my windscreen when I was looking in my pockets to pay for a pint of Guinness and a double Jameson. I was sitting on a barstool in an old-style pub waiting for Martha O’Connor, who had called and arranged to meet me. The pages were copies of press clippings. One, from 1999, was an obituary of Dr. Richard O’Connor, who it said had died suddenly. It gave a straightforward account of his medical and rugby careers (he had played for Seafield back in the preprofessional days, and was capped for Ireland A teams, but never played a full international game), the violent death of his first wife Audrey and the happiness of his second marriage to Sandra Howard. The second page was a short article that had been downloaded from some kind of forensic pathology Web site about how an overdose of insulin could make a diabetic look like he’d had a heart attack.

I had finished both drinks and was ordering more when a voice behind me said, “And a pint of Carlsberg.”

Martha O’Connor was about five nine and, as Dan McArdle had said, a fine big girl, heavy without seeming overweight (at least, not unless you looked too hard at models in glossy magazines, which it didn’t look like she did), in a loose cotton polo shirt and a fleece jacket and faded jeans and Timberland boots; her dark brown hair was cropped short at the back and sides, long at the front, like an English public schoolboy’s; her complexion was dark, as were her eyes; her eyebrows were unplucked, and she wore no makeup. She didn’t resemble her half brother in the slightest.

“I didn’t think I looked that obvious,” I said.

“You probably don’t. But this is my local; everyone else here either works on the paper or is a regular.”

She sat on the stool beside me and nodded greetings to a variety of faces. The drinks arrived. Martha O’Connor looked at my whiskey and pint combination and smiled.

“You’d fit in here, no problem,” she said. “Ed Loy. You worked the Dawson case, right?”

I nodded.

“Don’t think we heard the real story there.”

“Doubt it,” I said. “A lot of lawyers made sure of that.”

“How’d you like to tell it? The truth, by the man on the inside…”

“When I retire, you’ll be the first to know.”

“If you keep on drinking like that…”

“Here’s to drinking,” I said. “Who wants to retire?”

I raised my pint, and she grinned and clinked hers against it.

“I’m working on a case that involves your stepmother now,” I said. Her grin took on a strained quality.

“Has she ensnared you yet? Cast her Sandra-spell? She’s good at that, captivating men, inspiring them with her goodness and nobility and beauty, until the poor sods are so cuntstruck they can’t see through her.”

A couple of men turned their heads in Martha’s direction, as if appalled that a woman should use such language, only to turn away without comment when they saw who it was.

“What should they see? When they see through her?”

Martha shrugged.

“Calculation. Ambition. Ice,” she said. “My stepmother and I did not get along, not from day one. Understandable enough, I suppose, ten-year-old girl loses her mother, then her beloved daddy to another woman two years later, it’s textbook stuff. And I didn’t think of my father, that’s true, what he might have needed, I just thought of myself. But you know, why not? I was the little girl who’d seen her mother stabbed to death. I needed my father to myself for as long as I felt like it. Why couldn’t he have waited? I’d be an adolescent soon enough.”

The pain sounded true and clear in her voice, and as fresh as it had happened yesterday.

“So I just withdrew. Insisted on being sent to a boarding school run by fucking nuns; then went to Oxford. God knows why I came back.”

“In the absence of His wisdom, why
did
you come back?”

“I don’t know. To settle some scores.”

“With your family?”

“And with the Church. And with the whole fucking country.”

“And how’s all that going for you?” I said.

“Pretty fucking good so far,” she said, and lilted, “You’re never short of a score to settle, in dear old Ire-land.”

She drained her pint and caught the barman’s eye.

“Pat, a Carlsberg, and… do I have to buy you two drinks? Fuck’s sake, pricey date.”

“Just the pint. The Jameson’s done its work.”

“And a Guinness. So, how’s it looking up there anyway? Is the murder triangle theory going to hold? Are they going to charge Shane? Poor Jessica, I always liked her, she was very sexy.”

“Are you working now?” I said.

“‘Sources close to… ’” she said.

I shook my head.

“I can’t do that, not yet.”

The drinks came, and we paid them some attention.

“I wanted to ask you about Dr. John Howard,” I said.

“Now that…
that’s
a work in progress. Speaking of scores. But information doesn’t come for free. If you won’t show me yours…”

I looked at her. She was grinning, but she was a serious person, and the work she did was intense and scrupulous and valuable.

“Okay, what I’m going to tell you, you cannot say to anyone until this case breaks for me, do you understand?”