The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI)

by Declan Hughes

  “There’s something written on the back,” I said, turning the photo over and showing her. “See?”

  ma Courtney

  3459.

  “You don’t know who that might have been, Barbara, do you? Someone called Courtney? From the old days?”

  Barbara shook her head, her lips set.

  “I flung that past as far from me as I could, Edward,” she said. “Haven’t kept so much as a photograph. Don’t like to see anything that reminds me. I date my life from the year John built the bungalows over on Rathdown Road and we moved up to Bayview Heights.”

  My mother had always tracked my father’s decline from the moment the Dawsons moved to Bayview Heights: suddenly, John Dawson had outpaced him. Bayview Heights was considered very much more the thing than Quarry Fields, and with each passing year, the Dawson construction business grew and grew until finally, to crown their triumphal ascent, John and Barbara bought a Victorian mansion in extensive grounds at the top of Castlehill. When John Dawson put up the money for my father to open a garage, it was viewed by everyone as an act of loyalty, a tribute to where they had come from. My father had been drinking heavily for years, and working fitfully, and had it not been for my mother’s job behind the perfume counter in Arnotts, the family would have gone under. The garage represented one last chance for my father, but as so often with people who need one last chance, he probably didn’t deserve it, certainly hadn’t prepared for it, and blew it comprehensively and, it seemed, willfully. I put the photograph back in my pocket,

  Barbara was fumbling with her purse. She took a brown envelope from it and thrust it at me.

  “My family thanks you,” she said, her eyes full of tears, “and I thank you.”

  I took the envelope. Inside, there was a wedge of hundred-euro notes.

  “What’s this for? I can’t take this,” I said.

  “For all you did, Edward,” Barbara said. “You’ve been a great help to Linda.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t find Peter. I don’t know who murdered him.”

  “If it was murder.”

  “If it was murder? He was shot twice, Barbara. What are you saying?”

  “The police said it could be suicide.”

  “The police what? Detective Donnelly said a suicide can shoot himself twice?” I said.

  “Superintendent Casey said it was perfectly possible. The trigger finger can go into spasm. They’re waiting for the pathologist to complete the postmortem.”

  “And how did his body get onto the boat? It wasn’t there yesterday, I searched it myself. Someone must have moved it there after he was dead.”

  Barbara shook her head, then raised her eyes to heaven, as if that was one of those mysteries only God Himself could solve.

  “Why would Peter commit suicide?”

  “Living in the shadow of a great man like his father,” Barbara said, her voice tremulous, her tone solemn and elegaic. “Every passing day, the boy would feel increasingly diminished by comparison. And then of course poor Linda couldn’t have children. So all in all…”

  All in all, what? It’s what he would have wanted? It’s better this way? Barbara sounded as if she were talking about another mother’s son entirely, like a churchyard ghoul tying a neighborhood tragedy up in cod-psychological ribbons and bows. Maybe it was shock, or grief shackled by the steeliest of self-control, or that she did consider her son an inferior manifestation of his father, who was better off dead by his own hand. Whatever it was, it was scaring the hell out of me.

  “I don’t know what the details of the postmortem were, Barbara,” I said. “But when I spoke to D.S. Donnelly and D.I. Reed, they were treating it very much as a murder inquiry.”

  Barbara smiled tolerantly.

  “Yes, well, Superintendent Casey…” she purred, as if seniority of rank were the only deciding factor. “Of course, we may never know exactly what the circumstances were. There may have been any amount of drunken carrying-on and shenanigans in the run-up. But no matter. I believe my poor boy took his own life.”

  She nodded tragically, clutched her purse in both hands and walked out into the hall.

  I followed her to the front door and tried to return the money she had given me.

  “Barbara, I can’t take this money,” I said. “It’s way too much. Besides, Linda has already paid me for the work I did.”

  “It’s only money,” she said, the beloved catchphrase of those who never have to worry about it. She looked around at the shabby, damp-stained walls, the grimy wallpaper, the chipped and rotting window jambs and the threadbare rugs, then turned her gaze on me, all of a sudden not bothering to disguise her contempt.

  “Course, you were going to make a show of us all, weren’t you?” Barbara said, a glint of malice in her smiling eyes. “A doctor, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “A doctor, indeed. And look at you now. The cut of you! You might have made Daphne proud, God rest her. And sent the few bob back to put manners on the house. Crumbling around her, it’s a ruin so it is.”

  Her teeth were bared, her smile a lurid mask, her trim, neat body shaking with passion.

  “Gonna make a show of us all, weren’t you? And now look at you! Well, I don’t doubt you’ll find some use for that money. I’m only sad I didn’t give it to Daphne herself. Course, she wouldn’t have accepted it. Too proud, you see. Pride, yes, pride.”

  Her voice faltered. She brought the aubergine handkerchief to her bowed face and stood in the doorway, making sobbing sounds. I couldn’t tell whether Barbara was on the level or faking, but her words had cut deep; the condition of my mother’s house had filled me with shame the moment I saw it; I should have helped her, and I hadn’t.

  Barbara dabbed her face. She was muttering something under her breath; it had the rhythm of prayer without the serenity; for all her willed composure, all her pantomimed gestures, grief was animating every breath she drew. How could it not?

  “How is Linda?” I asked.

  “In a terrible state, the poor child. She’s going to stay with us for a while. She’s been through so much, and of course, she’s extremely vulnerable,” Barbara said. “It’s hard not to feel she’s been taken advantage of. Especially recently.”

  Barbara gave me a cold stare, then her face softened; she clasped my face with both hands and pulled it to hers, kissed me on the lips, hoped God would bless and save and forgive us all, then clipped out the door. As she walked down the drive and across the road to her car, she stumbled suddenly on the concrete, and was instantly transformed into an old lady, stooped and frail. She waited by the car for a chauffeur, in a black suit, to open the door for her; then, having regained a little poise, she sat in and vanished behind tinted glass. The car was a charcoal gray Lexus, and as it drove away, I came as far as the gate to check the license plate. It was the same car I had seen parked outside Linda’s house last night.

  The perfume of night-scented stock hung thick in the garden air. I sat on the porch for a while, trying to sort through the details of the case, but they wouldn’t arrange themselves in any order or pattern. A sheaf of junk mail in the letter box caught my eye, so I pulled it out and sorted through that instead: flyers for pizza delivery and garden maintenance, night classes, a local play school and so on. I scrunched them up into a ball and went into the kitchen to trash it. The sight of the mackerel on the draining board reminded me I hadn’t eaten that day. I put potatoes on to boil, gutted and cleaned the fish, coated them in oatmeal and fried them in butter. I shelled the peas and threw them in with the potatoes for the final few minutes, then drained the lot. While I ate, I retrieved the ball of junk mail from the bin and read through it all again.

  An ad for a new real estate agent’s announced: “to whom it may concern—and if you’re a homeowner, it concerns you. Get the best price on the market for your home. we do all the work; you make all the money.”

  It went on in that delirious vein for a while, but I was stuck on that most co
nventional of openings: “to whom it may concern.” If you dropped it into lowercase, you had “to whom it may concern.” And if you were using that as the title for a document, you wouldn’t want to go to the palaver of spelling it out each time, so you’d probably just use the initial letters of each word: “twimc.”

  That was what the document on Peter Dawson’s computer was called, the one that had been wiped on Tuesday while Linda was at the funeral. twimc: to whom it may concern. The receipt from Ebrill’s stationery store in Seafield showed that Peter had bought envelopes, writing paper and address labels. Taken together, those two facts could mean a variety of things. But one of those things could certainly be that Peter intended to kill himself, and that he wrote a farewell note and posted it to somebody, or to several people.

  And maybe that was it. Never mind about corrupt payments to councillors to influence planning decisions, never mind about Peter Dawson’s links to Seosamh MacLiam’s death, never mind about the part organized crime in the shape of the Halligan gang played in all this, or why all Peter Dawson’s and my family photographs had been stolen, or who moved Peter’s body onto his boat; just mark it down to suicide, hush it up and move on. That was what Barbara Dawson wanted, that was seemingly what Superintendent Casey wanted too. Maybe it wasn’t what Linda wanted. Maybe that’s why she hired me: because she had an inkling of what was up, but wanted to get at the truth—wanted the truth, but was afraid of the truth. Well, too bad. Her husband was found, and there’s an end to it. If you want the truth, maybe a private detective is the last person you should come to.

  Night was falling fast. I dumped the dishes in the sink, locked the house, went to bed and slept for eight dreamless hours. When I woke up, rain was pouring from a slate gray sky. That was more like it. That was the kind of Irish summer’s morning I remembered. It made the previous few days seem like some kind of delirium, a post-funeral fever dream. As I drank a cup of tea, I knew exactly what I had to do. It was simple: I would have my father declared dead, then hand responsibility for the house over to Doyle & McCarthy. They could organize an executor’s sale, subtract their no doubt exorbitant commission and send me the balance. In California. Because that was where I was going, as soon as I could get a flight. I’d had it with Dublin, where everyone was someone’s brother or cousin or ex-girlfriend and no one would give you a straight answer, where my da knew your da and yours knew mine, where the past was always waiting around the next corner to ambush you. It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas. Well, I wasn’t going back there. I was going to the place you went to when you’d had enough past, enough family, enough history, the place where they let you start again, make yourself up, be whoever you wanted to be. A happy orphan, in a land where no one knew my name.

  Blood

  YOU CAN’T WASH IT AWAY. HOT WATER ONLY FIXES THE stain, and bleach turns it green. Cold water cleans the visible stain away, but it’s still there, clinging to the floor, the walls, the curtains, the fireplace. And you can sand the boards and change the drapes, replaster and repaint, you’re still going to miss a drop, a splash, a smear. It’s no longer even the same fireplace now, not the same as the one he was standing in front of when they shot him. And it’s true to say they shot him. He took the first shot, she did the rest. He was supposed to do it all. She was just there to watch. But you know how it is, when you’re dealing with blood, things never work out quite the way you want them to.

  She said it would be cleaner if they used a gun. But that’s only true if you know how to use a gun, and he didn’t. His hand was shaking, and the expression of shock, of disbelief, and then of fear on his old friend’s face made things worse. She was screaming at him to shoot, and for a moment, he felt like shooting her, but then he steeled himself, and closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit her husband in the groin and punctured an artery. In an instant, there was so much blood it was like someone had stuck a pig. The gun fell out of her lover’s hand and clattered on the floor. Her lover looked at his old friend, who was on his knees, screaming in pain, and threw up. The woman picked the gun up off the floor and pointed it at her husband. It was hard to make out what he was saying, or indeed if he was using words at all, but you could tell that he was pleading with her, begging for his life. Too late. Blood was spreading in a dark pool beneath him. She looked around her. Her lover had stopped puking; now he was weeping. She looked at him, not with contempt, but with resignation, the sense that she probably should have known she would bear the brunt of it.

  She was wearing open-toed sandals, and she could feel the blood between her toes. She thought momentarily of being a child, getting her feet wet walking home in the rain. Then she thought of the sea. Then she shot her husband twice in the back. He stopped screaming, but you could still hear his breath. Her upper arm and shoulder hurt from the pistol’s recoil. The trigger was stiff, and she wondered whether she had the strength to squeeze it again. The sound of weeping told her she better had. She held the gun butt with both hands and shot her husband twice in the head.

  She dropped the gun in the blood where the shell casings fell, and went to cradle her lover in her arms, wiping his tears away and kissing his cheeks. Now, she thought. Now, at last, her life could begin.

  Part Two

  As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too.

  The trouble is that most of them are married.

  ROSS MACDONALD, The Zebra-Striped Hearse

  Eleven

  I WAS ON THE POINT OF RINGING DAVID MCCARTHY TO set probate in motion when the telephone rang. Maybe it was McCarthy ringing me, I thought, somehow anticipating my plans. But of course, it wasn’t.

  “Is that Edward Loy?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Loy, my name is Aileen Williamson. I understand you’re a private detective.”

  Here it was again, the old fever dream. You understand I’m a private detective, do you? Well, could you explain it to me?

  “Mr. Loy?”

  “I’m here. What can I do for you, Mrs. Williamson?”

  “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. I’m sorry about your husband’s death.”

  “My husband’s murder.”

  “Have the Guards declared it a murder investigation?”

  “Do you think we could meet?”

  “I’m not sure what good it would do, Mrs. Williamson. You see, if it is a murder investigation, the Guards will be conducting it. And Seafield Garda warned me off, directly.”

  “It’s not a murder investigation. But it should be.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “I got an anonymous phone call. A woman. She told me you were searching for Peter Dawson, the builder’s son. She said his death was connected to my husband’s, but that the Garda investigations into Peter Dawson’s case and my husband’s were being undermined.”

  “Undermined by whom?”

  “Senior officers, anxious not to offend powerful individuals.”

  Superintendent Casey? Despite what Linda had said, did John Dawson still have the clout to influence a Garda investigation? And why were he and Barbara seemingly so keen to have Peter’s death declared a suicide?

  “And what has this to do with me?” I said.

  “This woman said you didn’t care about offending powerful individuals. In fact, she reckoned you’d relish it. If that’s true, Mr. Loy, I’d like to hire you to find out who murdered my husband, and why.”

  Fever dream. Delirium.

  “Who was this woman who called you?”

  “As I said, it was an anonymous phone call.”

  “No clue as to who she might have been? Her accent, her manner?”

  “She knows you, not me. Sounded ordinary, soft Dublin accent. Friendly. A little nervous.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I have her phone number.”

  “You do? How’d you manage that?”

  “Joseph had caller ID phone
s installed.”

  “Joseph or Seosamh?”

  “No one who knew him called him Seosamh. I think that was a sop to the Irish-language constituency. The Guards advised him to get caller ID to deal with crank calls, nuisance calls, menacing calls. Of which he received a number.”

  This was my chance to escape, to get on a plane and never come back.

  Apparently, I didn’t want to take it.

  “Mr. Loy?”

  “Give me your address, and I’ll meet you in an hour.”

  Aileen Williamson gave me her address. She also gave me the phone number the anonymous call came from. I dialed it, and a tired-sounding woman said hello.

  “Hello, Carmel,” I said. “It’s Ed Loy.”

  “Ed. Good to hear your voice.”

  “Is it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “I assume your home number is unlisted.”

  “Of course. All cops’ phones are.”

  “Aren’t you curious how I got it?”

  “Maybe Dave gave it to you.”

  “You know he didn’t.”

  “Well. You’re a detective, aren’t you? I suppose you…detected it.”

  “You know you can conceal your number from people with caller ID telephones.”

  “You know you can turn that facility on and off.”

  “So if you wanted someone to find out your number—”

  “Yes, if you wanted that.”

  There was a long silence. Carmel broke it.

  “Dave is in a state over this, Ed. I’m not saying he told me to call Aileen Williamson…or that he’d be able to protect you in any way if you fuck up.”

  “Don’t you mean, when I fuck up?”

  “I love men. They’re always telling women what we mean.”

  “Does Dave think there’s a cover-up of some kind?”

  “Dave would like the chance to find out. He’s been pulled off the Dawson case.”