The Death of an Irish Lass (15 page)

Again Sugrue shook his head.

McGarr reached over and handed him his drink.

“Jesus, McGarr,” Sugrue said in a rush. “You’re putting me in a terrible spot. I want to help you, sure I do. But—” he brought the glass to his mouth and the liquor spilled over his chin, “—the most I can say is that you should look at Fleming’s place closely.”

“His house?”

“That’s all I’m going to say, so don’t ask me any more. And that’s got to be between the two of us.” He looked behind him.

Simonds pretended he was looking at a waitress who was passing.

McGarr said, “I didn’t get the impression Fleming was much of a friend of hers.”

“That was the case only after the article she wrote about him, the one that said he was throwing away great opportunity here to go back home and treat a bunch of farmers and fishermen. She as much as said he was an oddity and there was some flaw in his personality that made him want to escape.”

A thought struck McGarr. “And did she write about O’Connor too?”

Sugrue nodded. He sipped his drink.

The barman placed another bourbon in front of McGarr.

“What was the tone of that piece?”

“That he was wasting his talents, too. His last novel—”

“The Thunderbird of Madison Avenue?”

“—that’s it. She said it was unnecessary, that Rory was a man who had quit on his talent and was now just satisfying his avarice. And then, when the game he invented came out right after, she really let him have it.”

“Game?” McGarr questioned.

Simonds cut in. “It’s called Potlatch. After them Injuns out on the Coast. My kids are nuts about it. O’Connor must have made three fortunes on it. It’s a craze.”

Sugrue was talking now, and sounding a bit drunk, too. “She did a comparison of him with another writer, some guy nobody but book reviewers and professors had ever heard of. She showed how both of their first books were about equal in talent, and from there each took a separate way.”

Simonds said, “O’Connor opted for the bucks, the other guy for immortality. Personally, I never ate me no immortality, so I wouldn’t know. Hey, Sandy,” he shouted at the barman, “you got any immortality on that menu? Give me a big slab of it, rare.”

Everybody else in the bar was talking about as loud as Simonds. McGarr judged it was the loudest single room he had ever been in in his life, but nobody seemed to mind.

“The article didn’t do O’Connor much good,” Sugrue went on. “He started trying to write artsy-fartsy short stories for the
New Yorker
. Then he just stopped
writing altogether. He can retire, you know, with just what he’s got from the game. But I don’t think that’s what he wants.”

McGarr waited at least several minutes, watching Sugrue and the others drinking and the barman making them refills. Everybody in the bar looked prosperous and slightly overfed. And nobody seemed hesitant about drinking, either. People were bashing them back without pause. At tables in the dining area he could see men and women talking animatedly over food they could barely see. Their eyes were bright and flashing, and McGarr could tell booze wasn’t the only cause—deals were being made this Sunday evening. He could hear as much from the snatches of conversation that came to him through the din. These Americans were a busy people, self-confident, talented, and not a little bit crass. They seemed to like it that way, so much so that they were changing the world to their point of view.

McGarr could imagine May Quirk getting caught between the two worlds in a way that was similar to the choices Rory O’Connor and Dr. John Fleming had made but was poignant as well, for May Quirk had been called upon to judge the dilemmas of the other two and their decisions. She labeled Fleming’s choice escape, when he returned to Ireland, and O’Connor’s crass commercialism, when he chose to please American readers. Another thought struck McGarr. One of the poet’s functions in Gaelic Ireland had been satire—that of ridiculing the words and deeds of those who had strayed from accepted standards, in order to reassert the traditions of the society. People had feared the tongue of a poet perhaps even more than the wrath of the priest. McGarr remembered the description of May Quirk in Griffin’s Bar. Nobody dared match wits
with her; her tongue could singe. “Could it be that she was a badmouth and—”

“—had the hammer out on everybody?” Sugrue cocked his head as though listening to some special voice. “I’ve thought of that. It sometimes seemed so. Why even she and me—well, that’s how I met her. Being so short, I’m a bit sensitive about my height and—”

“But can you ever remember her backing anybody wholeheartedly?”

Both Simonds and Sugrue tried to think of somebody but couldn’t.

McGarr asked Sugrue, “Did she work at home?”

“If you mean did she do the writing at home, yes.”

“Do you have a key to her place?”

“No—May was a great one for privacy.”

“What’s the address?”

Sugrue wrote it on his note pad, then handed the sheet to McGarr. “Are you going there?”

McGarr nodded.

“Can I tag along? My staying here won’t do May much good.”

McGarr paid the tab and they left.

AT THE DOOR
to May Quirk’s apartment Simonds asked, “Can you pick it?”

There were few locks McGarr couldn’t. “Think so.”

“Good. I’m going to walk up the hall and around the corner so when I return I’ll find the door open. Paddy, you’re my witness.” McGarr watched Simonds saunter up the hall. The way he put his feet down, he probably never wore out a shoe.

The apartment wasn’t empty.

An old woman, her gray hair braided and piled on top of her head, stood in front of them. A Mauser automatic no different from those McGarr had recently dealt with in Ireland was pointed at his chest. “Come in and shut the door.”

McGarr didn’t move.

She was wearing a gray dress, an apron, and heavy black shoes. “Get a move on. Quick. Quick.” She jerked the gun. “I can hit a pig’s eye at thirty paces, and the two of you are closer than that. They’ll not put
an old woman like me in jail for shooting a couple of gunmen.”

“Nora Cleary,” Sugrue began to say, “it’s me, Paddy—”

But she cut him off. “Muscha, it’s you all right. A gunman like the ones who stuck my May. Put up your hands and face the wall.”

When McGarr and Sugrue had complied, she said, “Now lean your hands against it and step back three paces.”

She walked over to a table, took the receiver from its yoke, and began dialing a number.

But a knock came on the door.

“Who is it?” she yelled.

“Police.” The voice was Simonds’s.

She cautiously moved to the door, keeping the Mauser trained on them. “Prove it.”

Simonds slipped his identification through the mail slot.

She opened the catch box, took the card out, and studied it. She then went to the phone and dialed the number on the card. She listened for a bit, hung up the phone, and went to the door. She opened it.

Simonds stepped in.

“Raise ’em,” she said. She had backed into a corner where she could cover the three of them.

Simonds put up his hands.

“What’s your assistant’s name?”

“Amucci.”

“What’s his rank?”

“Detective sergeant.”

“All right. Frisk them two fellers and if they’re packing shooters I want you to chuck them on the couch. Then lift that feller’s wallet. Toss that on the couch
too.” She waited until Simonds had done that before she said, “Now, take off your jacket and sit on the floor.”

Simonds shook his head. “Geez,” he began, “I been made a monkey of in my time, but—”

“No yap. Just do it,” she said in a manner that cut him short. He did it.

After a while she said, “You, McGarr—come over here.”

McGarr kept his hands in the air as he turned and walked toward her. He judged her to be a woman of her word who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot any of them, Simonds included.

“Where were ye born?”

“The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.”

“When.”

“July twenty-second, 1927.”

“Father’s name?”

“Hugh Frances.”

“Mother’s.”

“Cecilia Agnes Ford.”

“Says here your eyes are blue. Look gray to me.”

“It’s fear,” McGarr said. “I’m not used to you New Yorkers.”

She snorted. “I’m not a New Yorker. What are you doing here?”

“Trying to find out who murdered May Quirk.”

“Here?”

“I want to read her files.”

The old woman thought about it. She had a red, bulbous nose and a square jaw. Her forehead was low. She wore glasses. Her own eyes were gray, too, and quick. “What do you need them for?” She meant Sugrue and Simonds.

“One to hold the files, the other to turn the pages.”

“You’re from Dublin, all right.” She turned to the other men. “You two. Get out.”

“But I’m—” Simonds began saying.

“I couldn’t care if you were the man in the moon. Beat it.”

“Aw, Nora—” Sugrue pleaded.

“Don’t ‘Aw, Nora’ me, you worthless little shite. Now that May’s gone you’re not welcome here, and if I had had my way you’d never have shown your tinker’s fishy head in this house and she’d be alive today.

“Now scram, before I give you what you deserve.”

When the door closed, she threw the night latch and turned to McGarr. “Tea?”

“Love some.”

“You’ll find what you’re after in the bedroom, over there.” She pointed to a door. It led to a room two walls of which were glass.

McGarr was presented with a magnificent vista of lower Manhattan at twilight from this the thirty-seventh floor of a new high-rise. He walked right by the desk and filing cabinets, opened a sliding glass door, and stepped out onto the balcony. The hot, sulfurous stench of a city that had been baking under the summer sun rose to him.

In the distance McGarr could see the curve of the island packed tight with buildings, bristling with piers and jetties. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, two outsized boxes taller even than the Empire State Building, were straight ahead. In comparison, the older big buildings (perhaps only twenty years less recent) seemed like relics of a more refined age. Whatever little gilding or grace each possessed welcomed the eye: the gentle ripples on the Chrysler Building’s dome, the
treed tiers of older hotels on the East Side, even the neon sprawl of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Forty-second Street. At least the scale of those areas was somewhat human.

Nevertheless, the view that May Quirk had had from this balcony was spectacular. Above the Palisades, across the Hudson River in New Jersey to McGarr’s right, a flame red sun was sinking into a bank of purple clouds. The lights of the city were just going on and the brilliant specks rivaled the majesty of the heavens. McGarr felt suspended in an interstellar void with stars above and below him.

Even now, on Sunday night, the city was noisy. The sounds of jackhammers and rivet guns, the droning of tugs in the harbor, and more than one jet overhead assaulted the ledge.

McGarr stepped back inside and closed the door. The noise died quickly and all he could hear was the hush of the air-conditioning system.

In addition to the bed, which was a huge, canopied affair at least a hop off the floor, the room contained an oak roll-top desk with banks of metal file cabinets on either side. One group contained May Quirk’s research, the other, old articles, correspondence, and personal affairs. Everything seemed to be in order, the files neat and arranged according to chronology. The desk also was uncluttered. The drawers held office equipment, paper, pens, pencils, a box of typewriter ribbons, carbon paper, supplies for a copy machine that sat in the corner.

“She did all her work in that bed, with the curtains drawn. The poor, darling girl!” said the old woman, placing a tea tray on the desk. “She ate here. Breakfast and, when she needed it, tea.”

McGarr had opened the folder marked I.R.A. It was thick—loaded with newspaper clippings, notes from a work diary, and other trivia. McGarr set this near his teacup.

“I see you went right to the source,” Nora Cleary went on. “Them being the low-lifes who are responsible for her demise.”

“How can you be so sure?” McGarr asked, although he continued to leaf through the folder.

The tea was black, some Oriental variety with a delicate jasmine scent. Hot scones, the aroma of which McGarr had been smelling since he had entered the apartment but only then placed, were also on the tray, alongside a boat of unsalted butter.

“Wasn’t she working on them when it happened? Didn’t it happen back there in some bog? I tried to warn her off that tinker Sugrue and his ilk, but no, she was strong headed. I’ve tried to call her folks, with no luck. And what’s to happen to all her stuff and this apartment and the car in the garage and all her bank accounts and things? She owns this place, you know, McGarr. It’s a con-dome-inium.” She paused. “And another thing, what’s to happen to me?”

“Have you no savings, no relations? Couldn’t you find another job like this one?” McGarr asked, if only to make conversation. He was still leafing through the files, munching on one of the scones. The taste was light, buttery, with just the hint of soda beyond. “The way you handle a gun, I could probably put you to work back home.”

“I suppose a job like yours makes a person hard. Death doesn’t touch you.”

“To tell you the truth, it usually doesn’t, but her death did. That’s why I’m here.”

“Can you tell me about it?” she asked, her voice suddenly old. “I hope you can understand me wanting to know. I’m not a ghoul nor nothing like that. It’s just that she was from my village. I’ve been with her lo these ten long years and she was like me own daughter.”

McGarr looked up from the file. It was only then that her name struck him. “Are you related to James Cleary?”

She looked up from a bit of knitting she’d been doing while McGarr talked. Through her octagonal glasses McGarr could see she had been crying, but silently. She blinked several times. “Indeed, he’s my youngest brother. The baby of the family.” Her voice was thick. “Why do you ask?”

“He had an attack the day after May was murdered.”

She cocked her head. “An attack? What do you mean? Jamie was always as strong as a bull, never had so much as an extra hour in bed.” She thought for a moment. Then her eyes seemed to clear and she stood. “Certainly you don’t think he—” She then caught her breath. “Oh, my God!” She took a step toward the file cabinets, but stopped. She turned her head to McGarr again. “What do you mean by an attack?”

“He had a fit of despondency. The doctor said it was a nervous breakdown. Spasms of nausea. And he tried to damage himself, too.”

She caught her breath, bit her lower lip. Standing in the middle of the modern room like that she seemed massive and out of place, a huge, matronly West Irish woman dressed as she would have been in any Clare kitchen. “Then maybe you should see this. As much as I love him, his being my baby brother and all, May was worth a thousand Jamies, and murder is murder. God help me!”

Her step was more a waddle. She opened a drawer of the cabinet marked C, and took out a thin folder. In it were three letters, all written in the labored script that McGarr recognized as the sort taught in the Irish national schools. His own hand was little different, though fluid.

The first, which was now over eight years old, was a simple statement of intent: James Cleary was asking May Quirk to marry him. He straightaway set out the advantages of such a match—the propinquity of their farms and families, his desire to have children, and most particularly his admiration and affection for her. It closed on a note that was almost fawning:

Sitting as he was in the desk chair of a former staff reporter for one of the world’s most powerful newspapers, McGarr was filled with profound pity for Jamie Cleary. Here was a simple peasant’s plea for perhaps the only woman in his life who might have made him an acceptable match, and she had been so worldly and contemporary that she could only have thought of his proposal as ludicrous or pitiable too. There had never really been a chance that she might have consented to marry him when she was still back home, but the prospect for the aging bachelor once she had established herself here in New York was hopeless. Although separated from each other by a short, affordable plane ride alone, they were whole worlds and centuries apart in their expectations.

The next letter had been mailed a year before, in the spring. The tone was strident. It even contained a veiled threat.

Said his sister, looking over McGarr’s shoulder, “She wrote him a long, kind letter telling him she had
indeed changed and had no intention of marrying, ever. Here,” she said, placing a photocopy of a typed letter in front of McGarr. “Jamie is—” she paused, “—a country man. He—” She was on the verge of tears again.

“You don’t have to explain. I’ve met Jamie,” said McGarr. He turned to the final letter, dated two months before. It read:

“And to think,” his sister said, “that he then would have killed her. Ah, God—life is strange.”

McGarr stood. “I see no reason to assume your brother murdered her.”

“You don’t know him like me, McGarr. He was the youngest and as spoiled as any old cow’s calf.”

McGarr remembered then having heard just about the same remark about Rory O’Connor.

She continued, “My mother doted on him. He had everything he ever wanted, which gave the poor man a temper. I once saw him break down a door to get a new
pair of shoes that were locked in the bedroom when my father was away.