The Death of Love (12 page)

“Ruth—”

“Bresnahan.”

Frost said the name over to himself. “I know some Bresnahans. Grew up with a family by that name here in Sneem. There’s Tom still hereabouts. He has a daughter with the—”

“Guards,” she supplied. “Detective Inspector Ruth Bresnahan, actually. I’m helping Chief Superintendent McGarr.”

Frost looked down at his drink, then pushed himself away from the bar. Suddenly his visage was somber. “Ruth—can you take a bit of advice? I’ve asked your boss, and I’m asking you now. Don’t make too much of this. Paddy is dead, and all the country will want to know is that he died well. This conference can speed the process along. Don’t get in its way, it’ll mow you down.”

At the reception desk of the Waterville Lake Hotel, McGarr seized Dr. Maurice J. (“Call me Mossie”) Gladden by the arm of his greatcoat and pulled him around so he was facing the clerk. He then shoved him into the high counter. Gladden was also wearing his felt hat.

“Is this the man who dropped off the plastic sack for Nell Power?” McGarr demanded. The one that had been filled with photocopies of Paddy Power’s note cards, he meant.

The young woman’s eyes surveyed Gladden’s swollen and split nose, his blackened eyes. “It is not. Don’t you think I would’ve told you it was Dr. Gladden, had it been him? Dr. Gladden is the most…notable man in the area.

“Did
he
do this to you?” she asked Gladden, who turned and looked down on McGarr with a predatory smile.

“Had he asked me, I could have told him as much. But he insisted on this.” Gladden pointed to his nose. “A classic case of police brutality, I’d say. Might I have the use
of your phone? I’d like to ring up my solicitor, Kieran Coyne. I believe I should have a word with him.”

McGarr looked away. A bad investigation with government interference from the start was rapidly growing worse. He had hoped to cover any charge of police brutality with a thick patch of Gladden’s guilt. “How was the man different?”

The clerk, bending to the phone, did not answer.

“Shorter, taller, smaller? Younger, older? Is the coat the same? You can answer my questions here or in Dublin.” And McGarr was angry. If it hadn’t been Gladden who had dropped off the sack of photocopies, then who?”

The clerk turned her back to McGarr and spoke into the mouthpiece.

Somebody behind him said, “Phone up our own Guards. They’ll sort that man out.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

“Some pug, by the look of him.”

McGarr’s suit coat, shirt, and tie were caked with dried blood.

Said Gladden, “Doing anything tomorrow, Chief Superintendent? Say around eleven at the bridge in Sneem. It will be helpful, can you attend my press conference? I’d like to be able to point you out. You know, the ‘government’ man who did this to me. Or will I be holding my conference from a jail cell? It’s all one to me.”

McGarr’s temper squalled, but there was little he could do. If he charged Gladden and put him away for the duration of the debt conference, it would only lend credence to Gladden’s claim of a government cabal. Also, McGarr’s only witness was his wife, and questions about what exactly she had been doing with him during the investigation of the murder of one of the country’s premier citizens might prove embarrassing.

He turned and walked away.

MOTIVES ASIDE, THE case was really simple, reasoned Ruth Bresnahan as she stepped down a carpeted hall in Parknasilla toward the door of the room that Gretta Osbourne occupied.

If Paddy Power had been murdered but the evidence (a substitute pill bottle) had been removed, then there could only be three primary suspects, who were around Power at the time he was poisoned and knew enough about his heart condition to accomplish his death: Gladden himself, Shane Frost, and Gretta Osbourne.

Gladden’s reason for killing his best friend might have been the desire to use the death to stage his own political comeback at the expense of Sean Dermot O’Duffy, whom he hated and Shane Frost courted assiduously.

Frost’s motive might have been more direct—preventing a write-down of the national debt, which would cost Eire Bank money, while at the same time eliminating the political challenge to O’Duffy that Paddy Power had represented.

Finally there was Gretta Osbourne, at whose door Bresnahan now stopped. What did Bresnahan know about her? Only that Osbourne had been Power’s trusted assistant and onetime lover. And that the woman had enjoyed Power’s good opinion right up until the time of his death, as noted in the cards that had been found beside his body.

“What time is it?” asked Gretta Osbourne, offering
Bresnahan her hand in a practiced manner. She ushered Bresnahan into a sitting room that was sealed now at night by pleated drapes in some pretty floral pattern.

“Nine o’clock.”

“How long have you been trying to get ahold of me?”

“Since three.”

“That proves it then—I
am
a busy woman. I only wish some of these foreigners had thought to bring translators. One Japanese man told me he speaks English. He does. Five words ‘pé fe
wy.’”

Bresnahan smiled and looked around the room. The carpet was mauve, the furniture Edwardian, except for one item. A long conference table and eight chairs filled the middle of the room. On it were stacks of computer printouts and what looked like a series of brochures. The other room appointments—a desk, some chairs, a small portable bar—had been placed against the walls.

“I hope you haven’t grown impatient?”

The question was pleasant enough, thought Bresnahan, but the tone was probing, of the sort asked by an executive officer of a subordinate. Again she reminded herself of McGarr’s technique of letting the interviewee talk, all the more in this case, which was not a murder investigation. Or at least not yet.

“I must tell you that I didn’t like, but I admired, the way you dealt with Shane at the press conference this morning,” Osbourne went on. “I can’t remember—did you identify yourself as a Garda officer?”

Bresnahan allowed her eyes to sweep the rest of the room, noting the several telephones, one with a red call light blinking. A portable computer that opened like the shell of a sea clam was also activated and showing an amber bar graph. There were fax and photocopy machines, and what Bresnahan guessed was a paper shredder. In all, the place had the look and feel of an exclusive business office or command center.

“Do you have some now?”

“Some what?”

“Identification. I always like to know to whom I’m speaking. You as much as destroyed the possibility of this
conference accomplishing anything with your irrelevant questions this morning.”

Bresnahan handed her her photo I.D. “It would have come out sooner or later.” The truth, which could hardly be irrelevant.

“Later would have been far, far better.”

“With Dr. Gladden outside distributing leaflets calling Mr. Power’s death murder?” Bresnahan could see one on the conference table; Gretta Osbourne was obviously a person who kept herself well informed.

“Who says it was murder apart from him?” Osbourne took a seat at the head of the table, where she began copying Bresnahan’s name and identification number into a diary/journal. She used a large black fountain pen with a gold nib and wrote with her left hand.

Bresnahan looked over her shoulder. Except for six hours of sleep each night, most of the hour headings from Sunday through Saturday of the current week were filled in. “Nobody that I know of. But given Dr. Gladden’s charges, would you not want his allegations investigated?”

“Your boss, McGarr?”

“Not that I know of.”

“If he did think it was murder, to whom would that be reported?”

“The commissioner, in the daily report.”

“Fergus,” said Osbourne, meaning Fergus Farrell. “Would the press know what’s in those reports?”

“Not unless you tell them.”

Gretta Osbourne looked up at Bresnahan and smiled, as though having been waiting for her to assert herself. She handed back the I.D.

Osbourne had knotted her silver-blond hair at the back of her head; black half-glasses sat on the bridge of a long, thin nose. She was a handsome woman, Bresnahan decided, or at least sexy in the way that Bresnahan herself was.

There was an interesting tension between the breadth of her shoulders, the narrowness of her waist, and the graceful shape of her long legs. She was wearing a black silk dressing gown, which was slightly diaphanous and revealed in oblique light a gray silk liner that was slashed
with silver chevrons. Between the plackets of the gown, Bresnahan could see the lacy fringe of a costly chemise. On her feet were black silk flats decorated with the same silver pattern; given the soft lighting in the room, which cast a few shadows across her rough complexion, Gretta Osbourne looked elegant and enticing. She was also wearing the same expensive scent that Bresnahan herself had bought a small quantity of specifically for this assignment.

Osbourne now pushed herself back into the chair and peered up over the frame of the half-glasses. “Yes—Shane told me you had him off a second time at noon. Smartly. Got him to speak his mind and only afterward told him who you were.

“Sit down, please. Coffee, tea? Or would you care for a drop of anything?” She waved a hand toward the portable bar.

Bresnahan only sat.

“You’re a local girl, Shane tells me. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? How so much talent, intelligence, ambition, and guile can have originated from one small, unlikely village in benighted Kerry. There was Paddy, and there is Shane. And now you. It must be the water. Or the air.” There was a noticeable, sharp twinkle in Osbourne’s clear gray eyes; she was enjoying herself. “That’s a brilliant outfit you’re wearing. Just perfect for here and the—is it?—undercover role you’re playing.”

Bresnahan kept asking herself what sort of accent she was hearing. Irish, like her own,
new
Dublin drawl. Or was it more an American drawl, something southern. She believed she had once heard somebody from South Carolina speak that way.

“Well—you’re doing it again, I fear. Getting your target to talk. Tell me what Shane said to you. After the conference.”

Why, Bresnahan thought, when Frost—carrying messages still—had doubtless told the woman in detail? “Does he work for you or you for him?”

“Sometimes we work together. At other times we agree to disagree and work apart.”

“As now?”

Osbourne crossed her legs, and Bresnahan noticed that
she was also wearing shimmering silver stockings. She wondered what else the gown might conceal and if, perchance, Osbourne had garbed herself for some other activity that had not been penciled into her diary. “Officially Shane is president of Eire Bank, and I am merely senior director, presently on leave of absence.”

“To the Paddy Power Fund.”

She nodded. “Come now, Ruth. Loosen up. Tell me what Shane said this afternoon. I’m bursting to know.”

“Why?”

“Well”—she looked away—“call it professional curiosity or the fact that with Paddy’s death everything is up for grabs.” She sounded not a little cheered by the prospect, and certainly neither she nor Frost seemed to be grieving Paddy Power in any way, shape, or form. Unless the black gown and what it concealed were for mourning. “As a woman, I need every advantage I can muster. Certainly
you
of all people can appreciate that. I’m told you’re the only woman in your agency with a group of men who are—how shall I put it tactfully?—unreconstructable.”

How had she learned that? Bresnahan had not told Frost anything of the sort, and certainly McKeon or Ward, who were working with “beards,” as it were, would have said nothing.

No. Bresnahan’s eyes slid over the stacked computer printouts in front of her. Here was an informed
and
careful woman, who had used the delay of the meetings she had attended to do some checking of her own.

“Now, about Shane,” she repeated.

Why not, Bresnahan thought. McGarr had also told her to stir things up, if she could, and she quickly recounted how Frost had blamed the debt on what he had called the Irish welfare state.

Osbourne’s smile was contemptuous. “Ah, yes—Shane, the elitist, he blames the debt on Joe and Joan Soap, those two greedy freeloaders from Ballyrathdrum who are responsible for the shambles of the economy.” Suddenly Osbourne was on her feet, and Bresnahan caught the complex scent of some exotic perfume.

“They insisted on free housing, free health care, free university educations for their layabout kids, who emi
grated with their Irish degrees to cushy jobs in Frankfurt and New York. Now they’re sending back tax-free remittances and the like that are fueling the underground economy.

“But not even that is enough for the grasping Soaps, who are also lazy, unproductive, and don’t want to see themselves or the country go ahead. There’s the dole for Joe, whenever he feels like a paid holiday, and finally some fat citizen’s pension for both of them as a kind of reward for their having avoided work for fifty years.”

Bresnahan smiled. To the list of Osbourne’s other attractions, she now added passion and sarcasm, the last being of no little value in the country she was describing. If not to her heavily made-up cheeks, color had risen in Osbourne’s long, smooth neck.

“What about Paddy’s plan? My plan now, I suppose.”

“He outlined it.”

“And concluded?”

“That the proposal has a greater chance of being accepted with Mr. Power dead than alive.”

“As, say, the ‘Sean Dermot O’Duffy Proposal’? You know, a program of economic restructuring that will lead Ireland into the twenty-first century? Do you want my opinion of that?” Osbourne had stopped at the drinks cart and splashed some whiskey into two glasses. “Neat, isn’t it? Water on the side?” She opened a bottle of Ballygowan Spring Water and clinked some ice into another glass.

Frost had left nothing out, Bresnahan observed. Not even her choice of drink.

Back at the table Osbourne placed the glasses in front of Bresnahan; when she sat, she leaned both elbows on the table and looked into Bresnahan’s eyes. Hers were a curious gray color, lighter even than McGarr’s or—Bresnahan now remembered—Shane Frost’s. Close, like that, Bresnahan could see the ridges in Osbourne’s face. Why hadn’t modern reconstructive surgery, which doubtless she could afford, been able to help her? she wondered. Or had the woman chosen to keep her disfiguration? Why?

Osbourne reached for a whiskey glass and clinked it against the other. “To candor.”

Bresnahan only regarded her appraisingly.

“The economic pump Shane mentioned? It required priming. Did he mention how much?”

Bresnahan shook her head.

“To date, twenty-seven billion Irish pounds. That works out to thirty-five billion U.S. dollars, which is the currency much of it will have to be paid back in.

“If the borrowed money had simply been divided equally and distributed, Joe and Joan Soap would probably have been better off, to say nothing of the Treasury, which at least would have been able to collect taxes on the money.

“There are three-point-five million souls in Ireland, which works out to some seventy-seven hundred pounds per man, woman, and child. A family of five would have had thirty-eight thousand pounds. A family with five
children
, which is not unusual, fifty-four thousand pounds. How many people do you know who have derived benefits anywhere near those figures?

“Even most of us who have gotten jobs because of our miraculous economic transformation haven’t seen that value.”

Bresnahan blinked. Her salary was close to twenty thousand pounds per year.

“Subtract what you would have made in the original economy, the incredible double-digit inflation of the late seventies and early eighties, and the sixty-five percent tax rate that comes right off the top of your salary and the eighty-two percent off mine. I won’t be petty and mention the other taxes on gasoline, tobacco, automobiles, alcohol, appliances, and so forth that make us among the most heavily taxed people in the world and virtual workers for the state.

“And what have we got for it? A large number of low-pay jobs that might evaporate in 1992. A diaspora of new, shoddy housing estates that will soon be unsightly slums. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, air pollution, crime, and drug abuse. All the sordid details attendant to an industrial society that you in the police see every day in Dublin or Cork or Limerick. Even sometimes out here, which twenty years ago was unthinkable.”