by John Brady
The rain had kept off. Collins had told him earlier that a new coffee place had opened up just beside the pseudo-Italian delicatessen. He had been half-reading the Irish Times again. The size of the headlines was indeed rare, he believed, something for big bombings or constitutional referendum votes. He’d kept away from the high-voltage stuff about the murder of refugees, and the editorial about what this crime said about modern times in Dublin and Ireland generally. The Garda spokesman had been Cooney out of CDU. Minogue didn’t understand how the case had gone to them.
He heard Malone yawn in the middle of saying something about this may be wrapping it up for now at least.
“Well, you still have a job,” he said to Malone.
“If you can call it that. A day of meetings with fellas in from the city centre units.”
Minogue let his eyes drift over the newspaper again: a car leaving the scene at speed, thought to be a Renault; two men in it.
“What’s this new gig like then,” Malone asked him. Minogue stretched and looked around the room.
“Well, it seems to be either an overdose, or this girl took bad drugs.”
“Was she in the trade?”
“She was a schoolgirl, Tommy.”
“Sorry. Tell you the truth I’m surprised we don’t have more of that.”
“The line here is she had bad luck. Her parents are connected though.”
“So you got dropped in?”
“That’s it. I’m just going through her school stuff. You know the way they write things, diaries.”
“I don’t have good memories of when I was a schoolgirl. Sorry.”
“Ah, come on. Bits of songs. Drawings.”
“Really? I fecking-sure remember being bored out of me skull a lot of the time.”
“I want you to do something for me. Get me dealers and suppliers in the South City.”
“Where are you talking about?”
“This girl went to Honora Park. In Milltown.”
“Isn’t that a fancy school?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Milltown’s still got rough patches. Better than it was though. A fair number of gougers there and down the way in the flats in Donnybrook, though.”
“That’s a start. Names, though.”
“Dealing at a school, though?”
“Well, find out, will you? Whoever would know people, right down to the street.”
“Give me a day or two.”
Minogue risked a question to Malone about his brother.
“He’s getting some treatment. But the thing the other day is on me mind still.”
“So it should be.”
“I just want to know for sure if the bastard was spoofing or if Quinn really has something going there. Yeah. I’d like to get a hold of him, Doyle.”
“When you do, you’re going to take someone with you. Am I right?”
“Yeah, yeah. What gets to me is that I know that they know it’s working.”
“What’s working?”
“This is how they do it. They’re never direct, like, out straight: ‘make a call to so-and-so and tell them so-and-so, and we’ll look after you.’ They like to just, you know, insinuate. It’s a head game. And it works, doesn’t it?”
Minogue thought about Terry Malone, the face the same as his brother’s but then in subtle ways different. Of course, it was the way he wouldn’t look you in the eye, but there was a lack of solidity to him the time he had met him last year, of something about his shoulders or his way of standing that Malone had. But it had been years since Terry had done any ring training, Malone had told him.
“Don’t go losing it now, Tommy. Are you with me, now?”
“Huh,” said Malone.
Minogue was finished with Niamh Kenny’s copybooks when Tunney showed up. Tunney had his roll half-eaten coming in. He planted an unopened tin of Fanta orange on the table. He finished the roll and stood again, plucking, shaking, and patting the crumbs and pieces of crust from his shirt and lap.
“That’s how the Mullingar men dance,” Tunney said.
“Mullingar?”
The wife told me that years ago. They don’t move their feet, says she.
“Is she from Mullingar?” Minogue asked.
“Edenderry. I met her and I was stationed in Mullingar. In my salad days.”
“Great.”
“There’s nothing great about it,” Tunney said. “Except maybe the bypass.”
Minogue wondered if this was a thaw, or Tunney winding up something.
“I’ve heard that said about the Midlands, all right,” he tried. “But I don’t know.”
“That’s right you don’t know,” said Tunney. “But I do. That rain that’s held off since the showers earlier on? Well, in Mullingar it doesn’t hold off. It just stays.”
“Where did you get that roll?”
Tunney sat down in a swivel chair and hoisted his feet on to the desk that Collins had been writing at earlier.
“Delaney’s below,” he said. “It’s a tuna fish thing. Where’d you get the girl’s school stuff?
There were things in her locker got sent home. Her father gave it to me. I sent a jumper and two T-shirts for testing.”
“I bet you left that place with your ears burning, but.”
Minogue looked over his list. Lyrics from Nirvana, wasn’t that a bit dated now?
“It’ll dawn on him,” Tunney said. “Sooner or later. Hard not to feel bad for him, all the same.”
How hard would that be for you, Minogue didn’t ask.
“But by Christ he is a royal pain in the hole. He was to me and Collins anyway.”
Minogue heard the Fanta wash down his gullet.
“Have we set up talk-time with her friends yet, Niamh’s friends?”
Tunney took another swig from the can.
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, we know who went with her to the club. We can start with her, if that’s okay then.”
“Grand,” said Tunney and he drained the can.
“If Mick Collins was still here I’d be asking for a hand, so I would.”
“He’ll be in in the morning,” Tunney said.
Minogue watched Tunney’s slow method of crushing the can. He made a dent with his thumb and then worked the two ends together over the buckle. It was almost noiseless.
“Is he working another end of it?”
“No,” said Tunney. “Not today.”
Minogue waited.
“I told him to go back to the car thefts. We were doing a lot of that before.”
“Who else can I get in with? There’s a lot to hear before things go stale.”
“Well,” Tunney said. “It’ll be plenty busy here then.”
Minogue looked down his list again. Collins had made himself scarce. He might have known Tunney was going to go on him for manpower.
Niamh had spelled her friend’s name Brona without the -gh at the end, he remembered.
“A few questions,” he said to Tunney.
“Fire away there. Fire away.”
“What do we know about her behaviour prior? Niamh’s . . .?
“Well, what I have is from her da. I had a short enough session with her ma before she, well before she went under, you might say.”
“Was she a bit wild maybe?”
“The girl? Not according to the da. But that’s not to say there weren’t issues, now. The da gave her a dressing down at Christmas about coming home a bit off.”
“How off was she?”
“She was half-cut, said the da. Not falling-down drunk now.”
“Late hours, friends they weren’t sure of?”
“She was ‘headstrong.’”
“Did she run with a rowdy crowd at all?”
“Her mates don’t seem that wild, no. She only started in that Honora place there in secondary. There are the usual pecking orders, is that the word?”
Minogue vaguely remembered Iseult’s tribulations in the middle years o
f seco, a particularly tireless pair of bitches, the names of Deirdre someone and Emer someone else. They’d been like a tag-team, he remembered Iseult saying.
“I’d be keen to get some names,” he said. “How was she doing in school anyway?”
“She wasn’t top of the class. They put markers down for her, the parents did, a while back. Marks in exams, study times and that.”
“She had a social life though?”
“Steady enough, says her da, yes.”
“Fellas?”
Tunney shook his head. “She went to hops, dancing.”
“Clubbing?”
“You know, I didn’t get into that part. But don’t you have to be eighteen or something?”
“No,” Minogue said. Tunney looked around the top of the walls.
“She’d been on an exchange thing in Germany last year, if that’s socializing.”
Tunney adjusted his slouch more. Over size twelve, Minogue had decided.
“Thing is,” he went on, “he says the wife and himself didn’t want to go too far with laying down the law. Like telling her what to do and that. He reckoned she could manage herself well enough.”
“Any idea what that meant?”
Tunney gave him the eye. Minogue didn’t care now that Tunney was on to him, maybe even keeping a count of the questions that were being fired at him.
“She wasn’t off the wall, is what he meant. That’s what I concluded, Cig.”
Minogue registered the dig.
“Well, did they know where she was when she was out?”
Tunney finished his Fanta, said aaahhhh. He mimicked a phone held to his ear.
“A mobile?”
Tunney shrugged.
“I know,” he said. “But what am I going to say to them that they don’t know already about mobile phones?”
“They knew about the place she went to that night?”
“No. But it was new, that was the draw too. ‘Planet Nine.’”
Tunney sat forward and laid his forearms on his knees.
“Let me ask you something.”
“Yes,” Minogue said and added “Planet Nine” to his to-do list.
“What exactly are you aiming for here with this, like what do you think has to be done to close this?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Minogue looked up from his notebook and shook his head.
“You were 2-I-C in the Murder Squad though.”
“I was.”
“So is this a murder case?”
“If I had more manpower I’d have an answer quicker.”
“Well, I sort of missed the bus maybe on this then,” said Tunney.
“You’re ahead of me now.”
“I mean, let’s say you get to find out where the girl got the stuff, I can see that. You might even nail a dealer too, fair play to you. But I’m sort of thinking you end up with a little creeping Jesus, a nothing who unloaded them from someone else up the line. You know how hard it is to go back up the line? They don’t talk. You saw what happened there the other day, the foreigners?”
Minogue didn’t say Albanians.
“So, like, it’s taken ten years or so, new laws, a few million quid—just to get started on the whole drugs racket here. I’m not telling tales on anyone here, am I?”
“No.”
“So you know how tough it is to get a little pisser off the street to put the hand on his dealer, his high-up dealer—the jack rats.”
“I’d heard.”
“Well, they won’t do it. They’ll take the three years or whatever they get.” Minogue could still smell the bread from Tunney’s sandwich.
“The PCP thing is all over,” Tunney said. “It’s kids now, it’s fellas at work, it’s housewives, it’s anyone really. They buy a bag, the clubbers do. Order them in over the phone. It’s cheaper than trying to get into a pub underage, isn’t it? Off they go, dancing their little feet off for ten hours straight. I’m telling you, parents don’t know the half of it.”
Minogue let the quiet drag on for a minute.
“The woman who found her, the nurse,” he said then. “She said she saw some young lads there.”
“Right,” Tunney said.
“The two kids haven’t shown up in the door-to-door?”
“No. But look at the reports yourself. Nearly every one of the fellas doing the door-to-door are from here. Downstairs, where they’re always short-staffed?”
Minogue closed his notebook and felt for his phone. Then he began putting Niamh’s Kenny’s belongings back in the bags. Shorthand, scribbled notes to friends, jokes, old projects. History of the Land War; study notes he supposed, on French irregular verbs. Calculus had driven her mad, it looked from the welter of lines and crossings out, Mr. or Mrs. Kenny had kept her clothes it looked like. He’d forgotten to phone and tell them he needed tests on the clothes. One of her hair things had fallen on the floor. He slid it into the bag.
“It’s tough,” Tunney said. “There’s nothing you can say that isn’t going to hurt them, is there?”
“That’s about it.”
“But we can’t give them false hopes. I mean what use is that?”
Minogue closed the drawer. He didn’t recall seeing Tunney thoughtful before.
“She got lost though, somewhere. Didn’t she? One bad move was all it took.”
“They want to know,” Minogue said. “Bad or good. I’d want to know too.”
“I’m willing to bet you something,” Tunney said. “And it’s this: there’ll be no end to what they’ll want or expect or demand, will there?”
Minogue had no answer.
“But Kenny will tear into us, into you, and poke and prod whenever he can. And phone his friends and his connections and all that. Isn’t that all part of the denial thing?”
“But in the heel of the hunt, he’ll be smart enough to realize that it’s not the Murder Squad he’s wanting. By the way, does he know we don’t have one anymore?”
“He was certainly told,” Minogue managed. “But I don’t know if he believes us.”
A Wee Chat
Grogan was trying not to watch David Frost doing something about celebrity homes when the phone rang. He waited, and at the third ring it stopped.
He levered himself up, made his way to the kitchen and took out the mobile. He’d kept it in the cardboard box that the pay-as-you-go phone had come in. By rights he should have dumped this one a fortnight ago. Maureen had messed up the other one, grabbing it without thinking one day back in May sometime.
He switched it on and waited for the signal.
Gallagher sounded like he’d just finished a yawn.
“You’ll remember what we talked about the other night, the business we had to get done there recently?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, there’s something’s come up. Something else.”
Grogan leaned against the closed door and shifted to his good foot. It had only struck him how small a kitchen it was after going on holidays last year. It was the first holiday he’d had in twenty years. Maureen had gotten the idea after she’d heard him slagging the Dublin crowd going to Portugal. Except for the heat, he hadn’t minded the week in Portugal, as long as he didn’t have to move around too much.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s got to do with your friend. Well, the word is that a mate of his is gone bad.”
Grogan looked at the tealeaves in the drainer. The shelf had he’d built all those years ago when he’d had the tools. Kieran like a bag of weasels every damned morning, always banging into something, hated school. The battle dress and sunglasses and flag hadn’t meant much to him at the gravesite. He was back in his cell that night anyway.
“He’s talking to the wrong people,” Gallagher said.
“To do with that business?”
“Well, we don’t know. But he’s talking, that we know.”
“But it was all kept tight,” Gro
gan said. “He handled it himself there, all of it.”
“The other fella is with him on a daily basis now,” Gallagher said. “You know who I’m talking about better than I do now.”
“I know who you’re talking about, sure I do. But he’s nothing really. Nothing.”
“A daily basis,” Gallagher said again. “They go back a lot of years, the two of them.”
Grogan held back.
“Well, we didn’t want you hearing about this problem from someone else first.”
We, Grogan thought. Why did it sound peculiar now?
“Do you have time for cup of tea then,” Gallagher said. “A wee chat?”
Grogan said okay to four o’ clock and he switched off the phone. He didn’t bother to plug it back into the charger.
He leaned against the sink, his back still prickling with the feeling of being here near the window, exposed. They had broken all these windows during the hunger strikes. Maybe that was what had done Kieran in, that kind of terror staying in his head from then on. It was Paras coming through, chasing fellas over walls, any excuse to knock out windows, especially a known man like Grogan. They’d known he wasn’t home that night too, so’s he wasn’t even there to protect his own family. And just as dependably as they sent in Paras to harass and taunt him, they’d sent in repairmen with new windows. Just as they put him in hospital for six months and made him limp every day of his life, they paid him dole and medical. An odd world indeed, the future had turned out to be.
Quinn and the Dublin crowd, he thought, that’s what the “chat” would be about. He didn’t feel up to persuading them again though.
He heard the ads through the wall, and remembered watching Maureen after she’d fallen asleep in front of the telly last night. He was quite a cook now, and he had time if he wanted to go back to doing the joinery and the furniture. People would always want things fixed, heirlooms, things they became attached to.
He went into the hall and took a piece of paper to write Maureen a note.
Do What You Have to Do
Minogue entered Honora Park thinking of pheromones, later of his own foolishness. They must hover in the air—they must—he was sure. But how thick was he, how misdirected his fossilized mind, to be imagining that a girls’ school emptied of its students for the summer could still be so alien, so charged, even in the absence of an overwhelming number of almost exclusively young female persons in the one place.