The Death of an Irish Lass (8 page)

“…was carrying your child?” McGarr asked.

Schwerr nodded as much as he was able. His chin was resting on his chest.

O’Connor struggled to his feet and began walking toward the water, where the incoming tide was frothing through the rocks and up onto the small sandy beach.

“It was this business of an abortion,” Schwerr said. “I mean—” He turned his face to McGarr. “My parents, they loved her. She spoke German. She was…” He looked away. “And then her talk of her career, and the questions again.” He paused for a moment. “You’re McGarr?” He was looking out to sea.

McGarr nodded.

“Then you know what about, the questions.” His voice had just the merest foreign trace to it. Otherwise he sounded like a person who had gone to public school and university. “And I put it together. She was only interested in me because I was involved with the people she was doing some work on. I struck her—I admit it—again and again. I had never dreamed she’d refuse me. If she hadn’t shot me, I think I might have killed her myself. She said—” He glanced up at the moon again, “—she’d have it taken care of in New York. In passing. As if it were just some minor problem that…”

When he didn’t go on, McGarr asked, “So you left the pasture? Was that where you were?”

He nodded. “Just across from O’Brien’s Folly. I can remember seeing tourists with torches up there. But I fell down and maybe…I can’t remember. When I got to my feet I shouted for her, but I knew I was getting weak. I managed to get the car started and I stopped at the first farmhouse. I asked the farmer if he had seen May. He hadn’t, but saw I was bleeding. He brought me inside and called a doctor, who patched me up.”

“What did you tell him? A doctor is supposed to report all bullet wounds to the police.” McGarr then remembered Dan O’Malley’s implying that Dr. Fleming was currently the area’s only medical practitioner.

“He did. I heard him myself in the farmhouse. I told
him I stumbled with it in my coat pocket. It looks like that, don’t you think?” He tried to look down at the bullet hole in his side. “Anyhow, I’m licensed to carry that gun. When the gun licensee gets hurt with his own gun, the police don’t seem to care much.” He looked at McGarr.

“Depends on the circumstances.” The explanation seemed too lengthy to McGarr. He wondered why Schwerr was trying to protect Fleming. Or, if Fleming had reported the incident, McGarr wondered why the report had gotten lost in the course of the day. O’Malley would certainly have told McGarr about it. And then why hadn’t Fleming himself noticed the incident, the murder and the gunshot wound having occurred within a half mile of each other? And why hadn’t the doctor, if in fact it was Fleming, insisted on Schwerr’s being taken to a hospital? “Didn’t the doctor want you to go to a hospital?”

“Oh, yes. He argued. He told me I was a fool. But I had—” Schwerr tried to focus on his watch.

“To make a delivery? Where?”

Schwerr glanced at McGarr. It was obvious he was very tired. “In Galway. At the dance.”

“Don’t you mean Salthill? At Barry Hanly’s dance?”

Schwerr tried to study McGarr’s face, but his eyes were closing.

“How did the pitchfork that killed May Quirk get in your trunk?”

Schwerr closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“Did Hanly give you this manila folder with the money?”

Schwerr shook his head.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

“And who was the doctor? Did you get his name?”

Schwerr said nothing.

“What did he look like?”

Still nothing.

McGarr stood. He turned to Noreen. “When was the last time I took you dancing?”

“Dublin Horse Show. August seventeenth, last year.” She loved to dance.

“Well—we’re going tonight.”

“But it’s so late, and—” She looked at the burning Cooper, then at Schwerr.

“A good dance in this neck of the woods might last all night.” McGarr turned to O’Connor, who was coming up the beach. “How would you feel about accompanying us to a dance, Mr. O’Connor? Maybe it will help you keep your mind off recent events. In any case, I ask mostly because I want to borrow your car.” All the police vehicles at the Technical Bureau site on the Cliffs of Moher were official looking. McGarr wanted to keep a low profile. “You don’t have to come with us, but I’d prefer it.” In the car McGarr could question the young man in an offhand manner. He believed he knew far too little about the principals in the case, and O’Connor was very much a principal suspect.

O’Connor turned his back.

“We’ll have to wait for the ambulance anyway. We can’t leave Mr. Schwerr alone in this condition.”

O’Connor looked down at Schwerr. It was plain he would have preferred to have left him, dead.

“Give me the keys to your car, please.”

“They’re in the switch.”

Noreen turned and stepped through the sand. McGarr admired her narrow ankle and the line of her calf, the way the light green material of the summer dress crimped over her hips. Because of the heat she was wearing a tight, low-cut blouse. The skin of her upper chest was just delicately freckled and nearly the same color as her hair.

McGarr turned back to O’Connor. “Sit yourself down. It’ll be a while.”

McGarr himself sat near Schwerr. “Who’s your contact at the dance?”

Schwerr was beyond answering.

Phil Dineen, McGarr thought. He was a Provo C/O who was presently operating out of Galway City. He had been a childhood friend of McGarr’s. They had grown up in the Dublin slums together.

AS THE MOTOR
of the Datsun whined toward Galway City and Salthill beyond, McGarr asked himself what he knew about the murder of May Quirk.

She had been a New York reporter. She had been writing a story about the financial operations of the I.R.A. She had $27,000 to pay for information, but McGarr didn’t believe she would have needed that with Schwerr. She had had another sort of power over him, yet the pitchfork that had killed her, and her shoe had been found in his car. Also, she had shot him. She certainly knew she was being attacked when she was jabbed, since her hand had been on the gun. How Hanly could have managed to have ended up in her lap was a matter beyond explication.

Also, she was pregnant. At least three men had been in love with her: Schwerr, O’Connor, and the I.R.A. fund raiser in the States; and young Dr. Fleming, her childhood companion, hadn’t batted an eye when McGarr had told him she had been murdered. He hadn’t
told McGarr everything he knew, either, and an intelligent man such as he would have made the connection between the murder and the gunshot.

Everybody in Lahinch had been fond of May Quirk. She had been an extraordinary human being.

Where to start? McGarr usually began with the lies. Only Barry Hanly, the dance promoter, had actually told him falsehoods. Fleming had simply withheld information. McGarr had no reason to disbelieve what either Schwerr or O’Connor had told him thus far.

McGarr stopped in Kinvarra and put a phone call through to Bernie McKeon’s home in Enniskerry, a suburb of Dublin. His wife said he was still at the office.

McGarr dialed that number. He wondered why Hanly had said that the man Scannell at the Provincial Bank cashed all his foreign currency when, it turned out, he had never handled a large sum. “Still at it?” he asked McKeon. “And all for a gold watch and a pat on the back. Some people are satisfied with little or nothing.”

“At least I won’t have to walk.”

“So—you’ve heard about my car. Hughie has a big mouth.”

“I was trying to raise you on the blower at the time. The noise almost knocked me into the Liffey.”

“Would that the volume had been louder. Your head needs a good soaking.” McGarr was in a hurry, though. “Look it, Bernie—what do we know about this fellow Scannell at the Provincial Bank?”

McKeon chuckled. “I’m way ahead of you, chief. I’ve got a man on him now, another is going to check the Provincial books to see if Hanly might have been telling the truth, and yet another is putting out feelers
to see if he’s I.R.A. or not. I just couldn’t understand why Hanly would lie to you. He’s too experienced for that. Unless he didn’t lie and Scannell had been instructed to give that answer to any police inquiry. Why sacrifice the whole organization for just one man?”

“But he lied about buying a bottle of Canadian Club. And twice about how his car got banged up.”

“Probably too jarred to know himself. You know how he is—all that money will eventually kill him. Like a Midas of another sort, he’ll try to pass it down his pipe in a steady stream of rare aged rye. Which reminds me.” He paused. “Holy God, it’s almost ten o’clock.” The pubs would close in an hour and a half. “I’m off.”

The most salient oddity of the case, however, was how the pitchfork ended up in the trunk of Schwerr’s Mercedes. Certainly Schwerr, injured or not, wouldn’t have put it there and then forgotten it. He had had enough strength left to grapple with O’Connor, too.

When he got back to the Datsun, he said to O’Connor, “Tell me about your latest novel.” He started the car and headed for the highway. “What’s it called?”

O’Connor looked out the rear window of the speeding rented car at Galway Bay, which kept flashing a wavy image of the three-quarter moon. The surf was up. “
The Thunderbird of Madison Avenue
.” He seemed disinterested in conversation. He had to sit with his legs across the back seat. The interior rearview mirror was useless to McGarr, who was driving. O’Connor’s torso obscured his view.

“What’s it about?” Noreen asked.

After a while, O’Connor said, “I suppose you could say it’s about the collapse of a city and a civilization.”

“I meant,” she qualified, “what happens in the novel. Tell us its plot.”

They waited at least a minute. The traffic was fairly heavy and McGarr kept trying to nose the Datsun by the rear of a lorry so he might see to pass it, but he didn’t quite trust the little car. It certainly didn’t have the spunk of his Cooper. Also, the shirt Hughie Ward had brought him from the Technical Bureau van was too small, and it bound on his shoulders and arms. That was bothering him. He just didn’t feel right behind the wheel of the car.

In a bored monotone O’Connor told them the complex plot of his novel. To McGarr’s mind there were too many characters, too many untoward or unbelievable occurrences. The people he described just didn’t seem real to McGarr, who had to be convinced. But he didn’t pretend to know much about the fiction or Manhattan, which was the setting of the novel.

“Then you’re a Mannerist, I take it,” said Noreen.

“What’s that?”

“I suppose it’s a term that’s applied only to painting now but once was used to describe that sort of literature which is fantastical and—as I trust your writing is—polished, as opposed to literature that’s based on experience.
Mannerismo
is art that is stylishly stylistic, like much of sixteenth-century painting.”

Said O’Connor, “I don’t know anything about that. I just write the books.”

McGarr asked, “How did May Quirk feel about New York?”

“She loved it.”

“And your character in the novel—did he have a love relationship with his wife or girl friend or somebody?” McGarr watched O’Connor watch the southbound traffic flow by them.

“You mean to ask what my relationship to May Quirk was?”

McGarr said nothing.

“At one time you could say we loved each other.” He paused for a long time. “But New York makes people different, especially two people with such different careers.”

“But you were both writers,” said Noreen.

“After a fashion. I’m a writer. She was a journalist.”

McGarr said, “Which means you did your work in a room, at a desk or a typewriter, and she was out among people every day.” McGarr could see O’Connor look at the back of his head.

“Yes.”

“Were you jealous?”

O’Connor didn’t answer.

“Of her career, her success?”

He laughed slightly. “There’s more prestige, at least in New York, in what I do. And in an actual sense I was more successful than May.”

“You were? But she was
very
successful,” said Noreen.

O’Connor said nothing.

Finally McGarr asked, “Did you live together?”

“Yes. Right from the first. I mean, when she arrived in New York.”

“About a week after you?”

“Three weeks. She took a boat from England.”

“And, naturally, neither of you was successful then.”

“No, but that was the best time.”

Noreen asked, “How many years?”

“Three and a half.”

“What did you do for livings?” asked McGarr.

“May tried this and that. I wrote copy for the public relations department of an insurance company and wrote my novels when I could, usually in the early hours of the morning before I went to the job.”

“That must have been difficult, grueling,” said Noreen.

“I only remember it as fun. The years just flew by.”

“And then?” McGarr offered O’Connor one of his Woodbines.

“And then,” O’Connor breathed out as though this were hard for him to say, “a publisher became interested in my work. More importantly, I made some contacts. My first novel got good reviews. They published the second right after, a third the next year. The fourth sold well.

“In the meantime, I began meeting many of the New York media people. May mentioned how she’d like to get into the newspaper business. She was a natural. She could make the pope confess to her and thank God he had.”

McGarr said, “And that was the end of it?”

O’Connor said nothing.

McGarr continued, “You either stayed home every day or went to your office, but you had to work hard and all alone to meet that next deadline or the expectations of your publisher or your readers. She, on the other hand, was out in the world and meeting all types—big people, little people, white, black, criminals, professors, day laborers, cops, and derelicts. How could a novelist not be jealous of that?”

“What do you want, an admission?” O’Connor struck a match and lit his and McGarr’s cigarettes. “Okay. At first I loved her all the more, and she me. How could we have helped that—both of us success
ful, young, big people.” O’Connor paused for a moment. In present company that was something of a faux pas. “We were invited everyplace. Television people were trying to interview us. We couldn’t go anywhere without somebody snapping a camera at us. And then—

“And then—I guess I realized—no, that’s not right, I didn’t
realize
anything.” He paused again.

In the rearview mirror McGarr saw the head of the burning Woodbine glow bright as O’Connor drew on it.

“I began to feel cheated. First from a more active life. Every day she came home with stories of this and that, this one or that interesting person. I was getting all my information second hand. People
she
had met and written about started appearing in
my
books. At first I told myself what was the difference, as long as those characters were interesting and I was doing essentially what I wanted with my life and she with hers, but then it flagged—the workroom, the desk, the typewriter, the mail, the reviews, the business of being a recluse for pay.”

“Big pay,” said McGarr.

“
Any
pay,” said O’Connor. “It was me, too, you know. I was the one who became bitchy. All was not right with me. I tried to pick a quarrel with her and she wouldn’t have any of it. That made me madder. My sixth book wasn’t the smash it was supposed to be. It ‘got out,’ by which I mean that nobody lost any money on it, but the people in the business began questioning my ability to write one hit after another. And I just couldn’t handle that. I’d been too successful in the past, too long on my own.”

“And so you took it out on her.”

“Exactly. I told myself I was jealous. And then I became jealous. I followed her, made scenes in public.
Eventually, she left me. I don’t—didn’t blame her. My seventh book came out then and went straight to the best-seller list and right to the top for thirty-two weeks. But it was too late. May was gone. I tried to get her back, but whenever we’d go out, she’d always go back to her place.”

Noreen asked, “And that made you even more jealous of her affections?”

“Yes, initially. But I managed to tell myself that what we had become in New York was better than what would have become of us if we had gotten married and raised a tribe back home in Clare.

“And then, at the time, I began trying to write about us in an attempt to get it out of my system.”

Noreen said, “It must be a different book from the one you described.”

McGarr said, “I’d very much like to read that book.”

“It didn’t sell at all,” said O’Connor. “My publisher did it just as a favor to me.”

“And the reviews?” asked Noreen.

“Mixed. The papers out in the boondocks loved it. New York, Chicago, L. A. said it was old hat.”

In spite of his temper, O’Connor didn’t seem to McGarr like a man who could kill somebody with a pitchfork, especially May Quirk. She had shared too much of his life, and if he could be believed, O’Connor had been resigned to their drifting apart. On the other hand, however, this was a man who had proved himself very successful at telling all sorts of stories. “Did you have other girl friends?”

“Yes.”

McGarr tried to see in the darkness. He imagined that a rich, successful young man with O’Connor’s
dark good looks would not want much in the way of female companionship. How many of these other women could have been persons on the order of May Quirk, however, McGarr could guess. Very few indeed. “And where was the good Dr. Fleming during all of this?”

“Around. He was in medical school at Columbia and later interning at Roosevelt Hospital.”

“And you saw him?”

“Of course. Regularly.”

“What was his attitude to May?”

“If you mean did he hate her, would he kill her? I think you’ve got him wrong.” Suddenly O’Connor seemed on the defensive.

“You mean she and he didn’t get along.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that they both became different persons. At first, when we had just gotten to New York, it was like we had a conspiracy, the three of us. Us against the big merciless city.”

“And then?” Noreen asked.

“I don’t know. He chose to come back here, that’s all.”

McGarr said, “And for him you two had become the city.”

O’Connor opened a rear window and chucked the cigarette stub out. “I can’t see how you can say that. He was as good at what he did as we were at our careers. He got offers to stay on at Roosevelt as a resident. Let me tell you—that happens to very few young doctors indeed. He got other offers, too. I just never could see why he chose to come back.”

“And May?”

“No. She even tried to talk him into staying. They had a big argument over it too, in Mickey Finn’s. It’s
the place we met every Sunday afternoon for a drink and some talk.”

McGarr said, “Do you know a fellow name of Paddy? He’s not half your size. He’s got curly red hair and a thick body. A dapper fellow. Likes to smile.”

“Paddy Sugrue,” O’Connor said in a neutral voice.

“What do you know about him?”

“Fund raiser.”

“I.R.A.?”

“Ah—”

“Don’t worry. Nothing will come of this.”

“I think so. Yes—why not admit it. He is. Provos, too.”

“What about him and May?”

O’Connor laughed once. “Jesus—he’s like a hound dog, that guy. He’s got an eye for all the women and none more than May. While she and I were together, he just stood off in the wings and worshiped her from afar. I like him, mind you, but he’s got all the vices—loves to drink, he’d gamble on a change in the weather, and he’s always in some wrangle over a woman.”