The Death of an Irish Lass (14 page)

“Cripes,” said McGarr. “I wouldn’t care to step on any side of you, what with all those bisons grazing on that nifty sarong of yours.”

The man howled in outrage and tried to reach for McGarr.

People around him began giggling.

One woman said, “Move it!”

“Get the lead out!” said another.

McGarr turned to Noreen. “Americans—I love ’em. Remorseless. They’d pig-pile a pope for his first peccadillo.”

“But they’re Irish-Americans,” said Noreen.

“And none more savage,” said McGarr. He could see the big man in the distance. He was turning around to stare in their direction. His face was scarlet, his jaw set.

At the information desk, McGarr said to a young woman with a round face and sloe eyes, “Who’s wanting May Quirk?”

“I’m afraid I must reserve that information for May Quirk.” It was the same dulcet voice. With fair skin and hair parted in the middle, the young girl wore a light green suit and a white blouse open at the neck. In all, she appeared to be innocent and inexperienced, like somebody who might easily be cowed. But McGarr
noticed the fire blazing in those dark eyes and decided he wouldn’t try to pass off Noreen as May Quirk.

Instead he showed her his identity card. “May Quirk was murdered yesterday. Perhaps you’ve seen the papers.”

The young girl nodded and wrote McGarr’s name on a pad in front of her. “What can I do for you?”

“You can tell me why you’re paging May Quirk.”

“I have an envelope for her. May I ask your name?”

Noreen told her. She noted that on the paper too.

Said McGarr, “I’d like to see it, please.”

Without blinking, the girl said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that without permission from an officer of Aer Lingus.” She smiled at McGarr. The smile wasn’t fresh, just disarming.

“Well, would you do that, please.” McGarr checked his wristwatch. As he had understood Paddy Sugrue’s letter to May Quirk, Sugrue was just stopping off at Shannon. Flight 509 was merely refueling here. McGarr wanted all that time to talk to Sugrue. But he wanted to know what was in the envelope first.

“As you can see, I’m all alone here.” Still the smile. She was like something nice and soft and fragile. McGarr could imagine himself crushing her.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t believe you understand the gravity of this situation. This is a murder investigation. You have my name. You’ve seen my identification. I’ll take all the responsibility. Time is of the essence.”

Yet she didn’t alter her smile or those damnably soft dark eyes for the longest time, until they quavered once slightly. She said, “All right.” She reached below the counter and picked up an envelope. “If you’ll give me one of the cards I saw in your wallet.”

McGarr complied.

Not only did she countercheck the card with the name she had on the pad, she also picked up a telephone and called the Shannon Airport barracks of the Garda. The officer there asked to speak to McGarr. He wondered if McGarr might need some assistance.

McGarr said, “There’s a black Mini with Northern plates parked someplace in the airport compound, probably in lot E,” which was where Noreen had parked O’Malley’s Triumph. McGarr turned and scanned the crowd around the information booth. Cupping his hand to the speaker, he asked Noreen, “Do you see the men?”

“Behind you, near the bank counter. They’re pretending to look at the exchange rates.”

McGarr asked into the phone, “Do you have Gardai in the area?”

“Seven, sir. All have radios. I can reach them immediately.”

“Good. But I’d advise you to send armed personnel and make sure there’s nobody about. Perhaps if you could wait for them at their car.”

“When do you think they’ll return to it?”

“How long do you think it’ll take you to get your men in there, find the car, and clear the area?”

“No more than five minutes.”

“That’s fine.” McGarr gave their descriptions and rang off.

He wondered why the I.R.A. had put a tail on him. It could only be that they believed his investigation of the May Quirk murder might expose them even more than it had already. That being the case, McGarr wondered what he had missed. There had to be something else. First they had tried to kill him, not caring if they got Dineen as well. Now they were watching his every move.

The young woman handed McGarr back his card. “I hope you can understand my reticence.” She still carried that little smile, which intrigued McGarr so much he almost wished his wife hadn’t accompanied him. “We’ve been fooled before by persons misrepresenting themselves.” Her hands were folded in front of her. She seemed so calm that McGarr wondered if she was breathing.

McGarr opened the envelope. In it was an Aer Lingus ticket to New York. The booking was for flight 603, which would depart in less than an hour. The stub had been endorsed for a return flight at an open date. On a small sheet of paper a Telex message read: “Very busy flew direct N.Y. Please follow love Paddy.”

McGarr sighed. “Where was this sent from?”

The girl reached for the letter and McGarr handed it to her.

“London. Earlier today. Eleven forty-nine, Heathrow.”

McGarr checked his watch: 2:22. That made it mid-morning in New York.

McGarr sorely wanted to speak to Paddy Sugrue. He wondered if Sugrue had visited Ireland while in England. Also, he wanted to visit May Quirk’s haunts, to examine her apartment, her files, and just generally circulate in her milieu. True, it was a whim, but as in so many other cases when he’d been presented with a plethora of suspects, he had learned more about each only by examining the victim’s background more closely. And in this case, where as many as five men had some motive for murdering May Quirk, none had an overriding reason. Maybe McGarr might discover that in New York.

He turned to Noreen. “What say we subject Rory
O’Connor’s opinion of New York restaurants to an empirical test.”

Noreen was surprised. “How do you mean?”

McGarr waved the ticket. “The I.R.A. is paying your way, the Garda Soichana and Aer Lingus mine.” Officials of McGarr’s rank rode free on all Irish commercial flights.

“Are you serious?”

Even the girl in the information booth seemed shocked.

“But we haven’t anything to wear.”

“We’ll buy something there.”

“But our passports? We’ll need money. What about Commissioner Farrell?”

McGarr tapped his wallet. “I never go out of the house without my passport. You don’t need yours.” McGarr had had his amended to include Noreen. “We won’t really need any money, although I’ve got some. And Farrell is just a born worrier. We’ll give him something to chew on for the next couple of days.”

“Just like that?” the girl asked McGarr.

“No good in being an irresponsible Irishman unless it’s just like that, is there?”

Noreen was still stunned. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York, but not exactly on the spur of the moment like this.”

“It’s the only way to go to New York and not be disappointed. This way you’ll see all the good things and ignore its monumental ugliness.” McGarr reached for the phone again. He imagined that the Gardai were now in place and the area around the Mini cleared of people. He dialed the barracks number, then turned toward the two I.R.A. men still standing near the bank exchange-rate chart.

When one of them glanced over at McGarr, he waved to the man, then pointed to the phone.

The first man nudged the second. They both looked over at McGarr.

Again McGarr pointed to the phone.

The two men swapped glances and bolted. They couldn’t get very far very fast, however, since the terminal was still clogged with tourists. McGarr imagined it would take them at least ten minutes to get back to their car.

“Where’s the Telex?” he asked the young woman.

“There’s one at the Aer Lingus office over there.” The girl’s smile had changed somewhat. Now there was interest in it. She wouldn’t have minded going off to New York with McGarr, just like that.

And McGarr wouldn’t have minded taking her along with both of them, just like that. During other times in the old pre-British Ireland, monogamy was unknown. But Noreen’s hand on his arm brought McGarr back into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, McGarr found this imaginary womanizing most enjoyable, especially when the dilemma posed necessitated a choice between two particularly fine beauties. And then again, McGarr passed through Shannon many times each year.

THE FLIGHT WAS
pleasantly uneventful. McGarr never felt comfortable on an airplane. There was no margin for error. One fault and the whole ship and its passengers were dashed to bits or, worse, immolated. McGarr enjoyed gambling in all its forms, but the odds against surviving an air disaster were just too unequal.

But after the first meal had been served, he felt drowsy. Noreen rested her head on his shoulder, the curtains were drawn for the movie, and they both nodded off.

McGarr’s sleep was fitful. Occasionally he awoke and glanced at the screen, which offered the saga of a South African goldmine venture, or out the window at the clouds or the ocean far below. Flying due west, they were chasing the sun. Newfoundland and Nova Scotia seemed like barren islands, as treeless as Clare. The Maine coast was rugged, but low cloud cover quickly obscured the rest of New England.

McGarr began to feel queasy and knew it would get
worse. He could skimp on either sleep or food, but never on both. Thus, he forced himself to eat some of the two undistinguished meals that were served aboard the jet and also later a fine dinner at the Irish consulate in New York.

That began with a Caesar salad of crisp romaine lettuce, progressed to roast chicken rosemary served with Franconia potatoes and fresh asparagus tips hollandaise, and ended with a lovely Black Forest cake from which McGarr’s sempiternal bing cherries were gushing. “But they belong in the cake,” McGarr observed, and Noreen nodded. The wine was a hearty California red with lots of body and just the hint of muskiness that McGarr enjoyed, especially with the aroma of the rosemary in the chicken. Cuban cigars and cognac completed the repast, and, if the venture to New York proved no more useful than to have assuaged McGarr’s yen for a good meal, he believed he would think it well worth the cost, for he was a belly bourgeois.

From Shannon, McGarr had Telexed for a consulate car to meet them at JFK Airport. McGarr dreaded driving in New York as much as driving in New York with a New York cabbie, and thus he had trusted in his own. The choice had been correct. An ancient Hibernian with a face as creased and folded as that of a lizard had guided the long Cadillac into the city. In a deep green hush it whispered through the dark canyons of the metropolis. It was Sunday here too, and, although the streets in the center of Manhattan near Central Park were crowded with strollers, there was little vehicular traffic.

Now the Cadillac pulled to the curb outside Mickey Finn’s on East Sixty-third Street. McGarr had an official from the New York Police Department with him.
Noreen was back at the consulate resting up. Tomorrow the consul’s eldest daughter was going to take her to a Pierre Lesage retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Later Noreen wanted to tour the art galleries in Soho. Of course, there was the question of clothes to be bought. And the consul had invited them to dinner at what he claimed was one of New York’s finest restaurants.

The N.Y.P.D. official was a tall man who had arrived at the consulate after dinner. He was wearing a shiny gray suit, like a weave of some special alloy, and walked like a duck. His nose was flat, his face sagging, and his lips seemed very wet from the long green cigar that stuck between two fingers of his left hand. All in all, however, the impression he created was that of a still handsome and jaunty man.

His arms had swung slightly with each odd step he took through the long room toward the consul and his guests. He hadn’t waited for the consular official to introduce him. “Simonds here. I’m from the commissioner’s office. Don’t worry about my name. I’ve worked with so many Irishmen in my time I’m greener than the guano on the bells of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

“Just look at this.” He had reached into the jacket pocket of the gray suit coat. Somehow the material didn’t bend in any recognizable way and was more like armor than cloth. Simonds had extracted a long pocket secretary, which he opened. From this he took cards, as he said, “Gaelic Hurling and Football Club, Hibernians Unlimited, Friends of the Knights of Columbus, the Dingle Club, the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Non-Irish Cops—that’s a joke—and, of course, the St. Columcille’s Boys Club. I’m not going to bore you with the names of the several dozen Irish
barrooms I subsidize whenever my boss wants to talk in private.

“There, that’s my identification. Where’s yours?”

After McGarr had explained the May Quirk case to Simonds, the latter had said, “I know Paddy Sugrue well, and,” he had checked his watch, “I know where we can find him right away, if he’s in town.”

Simonds had continued, “He’s cute. He keeps a low profile and he’s got the gift of gab. There’s not an important Irish cop in the city he doesn’t know on a first-name basis, including me.”

“What do you know about May Quirk?” McGarr had asked.

Simonds had shrugged. “Sometimes read what she wrote. I remember once I took a long look at her long legs and got myself a long thirst. I went home and picked a fight with my old lady.”

Now McGarr was surprised to find Mickey Finn’s packed. It was just like a summer Sunday night in a resort town back home. But here most of the people seemed to be wanting to forget they had to go to work in the morning. Most were young men and women wearing expensive but designedly casual clothes. The men had on dark glasses, like those aircraft pilots used, even though the interior of the pub was dim. Some of the women wore glasses too, but they preferred the Italian kind that May Quirk had worn, each lens the size of McGarr’s palm, the frames outsized and ludicrous. As well, they used lots of makeup, a big patch of rouge on each cheek, their eyes heavily shadowed. Shag haircuts, tight-waisted jackets, and bell-bottom trousers made the men, young and old, look alike and, to McGarr, somewhat androgynous.

Mixed drinks with fruit were flowing freely. Wait
resses in short red dresses and black net hose were jockeying trays from the bar through the men standing near it to the tables in other sections of the tavern. Nobody could keep his eyes from the crevice of flesh that spilled from the tight bodices of the waitresses’ dresses. And McGarr had the impression he could touch the smoke that filled Mickey Finn’s. But it was the contrast between the empty, quiet street outside and the din of the barroom that interested McGarr most. It was as though the tavern was not simply a social center but rather a world apart, a better microcosm in which to pass one’s time.

And Simonds was right.

Sugrue sat at the far corner of the bar where it met the wall. The area was enclosed in deep shadow and separated from the other stools by the barman’s walk-way, which a chain covered with red velvet blocked. In front of Sugrue were a telephone, an ashtray heaped with spent butts, and a cocktail tumbler. He was tapping a fountain pen on a note pad, making dots all around the border. The pad had phone numbers on it.

McGarr, glancing over Sugrue’s shoulder, saw they were Irish numbers—the Lahinch Garda barracks, McGarr’s Dublin Castle number, and three others he didn’t recognize. Near the wall was a copy of the New York
Daily News
. Before Simonds could introduce him to Sugrue, McGarr stopped him. McGarr stared down at the pad and memorized the three phone numbers he hadn’t recognized.

McGarr would have preferred to have taken another barstool close by and to have observed the man for a time, but when the barman neared, Simonds said, “A drink for Paddy, me, and—what are you drinking, Peter?”

“Bourbon,” said McGarr, trying to make his accent sound neutral.

“Jack Daniels,” Simonds clarified.

Sugrue was now looking at McGarr, who turned to him.

Sugrue was a short, thick man with curly red hair. He was wearing a tan suit and his shirt, which was open at the neck, was blue. He had been drinking, but McGarr could tell he was in a mood that alcohol couldn’t touch. To expedite matters, McGarr reached over and picked up Sugrue’s pen. He drew a line through his office number and laid the pen on the paper.

“What are you doing here?” Sugrue asked.

“Looking for you.”

“Why me?”

“I read your letter, got your note at Shannon. I figured you knew her as well as anybody.”

Sugrue drank off his old drink, put the glass down, and reached for the fresh glass. “Obviously not. If I had, I could have prevented this.”

A man was passing down the bar, shaking hands and slapping people on the back. He knew everybody by his first name. When he approached Sugrue, the barman caught his eye and with a shake of the head warned him off.

Another person then whispered in the man’s ear. The man grew suddenly grave.

McGarr tasted the whiskey and made a mental note to take some back with him. It was sweet without being cloying, had the bite that every good whiskey requires, yet there was a smoky, hickory dryness about it, too. Over crushed ice like this it was a special sort of American ambrosia.

“Who killed her?” Sugrue asked. “That’s all I want
right now.” The tightness in his voice was anger. “I figure you should know, McGarr.”

“Not yet. Tell me about Rory O’Connor.”

“Did
he
do it?” Sugrue started to rise off the stool.

Simonds put a hand on his shoulder and eased him back.

“What do you think?”

Sugrue shook his head. “No. I can’t see that at all. At one time, maybe. When they were—together. Perhaps then, but now, I mean—they were like old friends. There was feeling there, but it was warm, not hot.”

“Then Schwerr.”

“Don’t know him. He’s new to the organization.”

“She was pregnant by him.”

Sugrue stopped drinking from the tumbler and slowly lowered it to the bar. He turned to McGarr. “This is a hell of a time to be saying something like that.”

McGarr just stared at him. After a while he said, “Tell me about your relationship with her. How did it start?” McGarr signaled for another round.

“This going to be all on one tab, Sid?” the barman asked Simonds.

“Yes, mine,” said McGarr. He took off his Panama hat and placed it on the bar. In the past he’d found younger people more willing to confide in him when he looked like an old man, a father figure perhaps. “And do you think she might have developed you and Schwerr and Hanly,” McGarr studied Sugrue’s face closely, “only because she wanted to write the article on the financing operations of the I.R.A.?”

Sugrue turned to Simonds. “This guy must think he’s back at Dublin Castle with a couple battalions of blue boys out in the yard—talking like this here and now.” He then whipped around on McGarr. “Hanly?
Barry
Hanly? You think May went and seduced Barry Hanly to get information out of him? Let me tell you something, copper. I was the one who first proposed that she do the article.”

“Why?”

“Because I figured if the average Irish-American wage earner could see how the cash got to those who need it the most, he’d be more willing to give. The way it is now, most of them think it’s just going into my pocket or some pack of gangsters back home.”

McGarr didn’t care to pursue that line, although Sugrue seemed to be living well off the donations to the I.R.A. “The autopsy said she was six weeks pregnant. Could she have been pregnant by you?”

Sugrue shook his head. He was irked that McGarr had continued to belabor the point. “No.”

“You were in England.”

“Yes—but not in Ireland. Don’t you check on this stuff first?” He pulled out his wallet and a small green book with a gold harp embossed on the cover. “I’ve just been declared an enemy of the state.” He scaled the book at McGarr.

It hit him in the chest and dropped onto the bar. McGarr opened the book—Sugrue’s Irish passport. Stamped across the first page was, “Revoked 9th August, 1975.”

“That’s why I couldn’t meet her at the airport.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her that in the letter?”

“It’s not the sort of thing you just bawl out. And then—” McGarr waited.

“—and then she had a dream, you know, of returning home one day for good.”

That surprised McGarr, though he didn’t let on.

“I didn’t want her thinking I’d never be allowed
back. I didn’t want to hurt any chance I might have had with her.”

McGarr said, “She slept with O’Connor and Schwerr. Did she sleep with Fleming too? How did you feel about that? You know, her being the girl you wanted to marry and all. She told Schwerr she wanted an abortion.”

Sugrue cocked his body and launched a punch across the corner of the bar.

McGarr only had time to pull back. The blow glanced off his chest. He grabbed Sugrue’s wrist and pinned it to the bar. With his other hand he tossed his drink into Sugrue’s face. “Simmer down. Did she sleep with Fleming or didn’t she?”

“I don’t know. Ask Fleming. I think maybe she did. So what? What of it? Things are different over here.”

McGarr released his hand. The barman tossed Sugrue a bar towel. “Try to control yourself, Paddy. I’ve got my business to think of.”

Most of the conversation at the bar had stopped and people had turned to them.

McGarr said, “It’s just that I want you to put yourself in my shoes, Paddy. I’ve got plenty of suspects with all sorts of motives. I’m just looking for the handle now. You loved her; help me out. Who or why. Think, give me an impression. She was writing an article on your bunch. You know all of them. You know O’Connor, Fleming, Hanly. You know something about Schwerr. If you want to do something for May, tell me something. Anything. Even if you think it’s unimportant.”

Sugrue blotted his face. It wasn’t just the liquor he was drying. McGarr could see tears in his eyes.

Sugrue said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about that.
Ever since—” He reached for his drink. “And—” He shook his head with a snap that tousled his red curls. “I can’t. Believe me, McGarr. I can’t. It’s not just May we’re talking about. It’s—well, it’s me and the army. Do you understand me now?”

It was McGarr’s turn to shake his head. “It’s May and nobody else. I broke the news to her parents—two big, honest, and worthy country people who had lost their only child. And I made a promise to John Quirk. I told him I’d see the bastard who did it in the dock, and I aim to keep my promise. Help me.”