The Going Rate

by John Brady

  An ambulance attendant came out of the room, carrying a bag. He was looking for someone. The someone seemed to be McNamara. He said something to McNamara about dressings. McNamara said they didn’t want them.

  McNamara filled his cheeks with a breath, held it for several seconds, and then let it out.

  “It won’t be textbook,” he said in a voice little above a murmur. “Will it, now.”

  Minogue was tempted to let McNamara in on how many sites he had worked on, sites that had been trampled on too. But McNamara’s remark took on its intended meaning before he said so, however. Collusion was being called for, if he and Malone were going to get anywhere. He wondered what favour Malone had called in to be allowed into the site before the Technicals showed up and began their painstaking prowls, like ghosts or Hallowe’en figures in their suits.

  “If it was textbook forensics we did every time, we’d be in the ha’penny place,” he said to McNamara.

  McNamara looked at the splintered edge of the door. He seemed to weigh Minogue’s words.

  “A quick once-over then,” he said, and reached into his jacket, “while the going is good. Very quick. But if the Scenes lads arrive, you’re out that door in a flash. Nod’s as good as a wink?”

  “In a flash,” said Minogue.

  McNamara handed Minogue one, then another glove. Malone was already pulling on his own.

  “What’s that smell,” Malone said. “That perfumey one. Do you smell it?”

  “Maybe it’s yourself you’re smelling,” said McNamara.

  “If it was I’d be passed out on the floor. No, there’s some pricey kind of smell. Men’s stuff.”

  McNamara gave him the eye. Malone shrugged.

  Minogue looked ahead before each footstep, stopping each time. The blood on the carpet was almost black already, and gave off no sheen.

  “How’s this for witnesses, Brian?”

  “Zero. There’s no night staff.”

  “Access, I wonder?”

  “Child’s play from the outside. Have a look at the delivery door out the back, on your way out. That’ll tell you plenty.”

  Minogue looked back at the splintered doorframe, and the door, with its smashed edge sticking out like feathers.

  “Classy joint,” Malone said.

  “They might have a nice honeymoon suite,” McNamara murmured. “Tell herself, why don’t you.”

  “That’s it,” said Malone. “You’re off the guest list.”

  “Not that I was ever on it.”

  “Sonya only felt sorry for you,” said Malone. “Thought she might be able to get you fixed up, you know.”

  McNamara had no smile, but in his voice Minogue now heard the dry restraint of the Claremen he had grown up around.

  “If you mean getting me a date with some wall-eyed cousin from Hong Kong, yous were doing me no favours. It’s Sonya or nobody for me. She’s too good for the likes of you.”

  “You’ll answer for that one in the ring. Mister Tough Guy.”

  Ah, Minogue realized, a cohort from the Garda Boxing Club.

  McNamara took a plastic bag from his pocket, and held it in his palm, arranging its contents.

  “UK driver’s licence. Justin Anthony Kilcullen, the one carted to hospital.”

  Minogue squinted at the photo, the expected neutral expression. Dependably nondescript.

  “Looks real enough,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” said McNamara, quietly. “But he’s a goner now. I don’t know why they didn’t put one in his brain, but.”

  McNamara let other cards slide into view.

  “The fella on the floor is going by the name of Gary David Parker. Is. Was.”

  There was a spray of darkening blood on the wall by the window where the man’s body lay. Most of the lines down ended after a few inches in the maroon beads that Minogue expected. Blood had pooled in his armpit, and freckles of it were under his jaw. A pistol lay eighteen inches from the man’s knee.

  “Is that gun taken care of,” he asked.

  “It is,” said McNamara. “It was a full clip that came out. He didn’t get one off at all. The other fella’s was still under his pillow, if you can believe it.”

  “That fast,” said Malone. “There had to be a few of them.”

  Minogue eyed the awkwardly turned leg and the one outstretched arm that ended in a bloody pulp where the palm used to be. Had he reached out to grab the gun?

  The boxer shorts were saturated with blood, and his singlet had been pulled up in his last movements.

  “‘The Hammers’?” Minogue said. “What is that?”

  “Don’t you know that?” asked Malone. “I was going like the hammers in me new French car? Like the hammers of hell…?”

  “Hardly, now.”

  “Do you have a thing called a telly vision in your house out there in wherever?” Malone asked. “And when you’re finished milking the cows or whatever yous people do out there on the south side, do you look at the front of the telly vision, the glassy-looking bit? There does be a thing called soccer on there, a lot. A crap team called West Ham.”

  “Okay, I get it. I would have gotten it by myself eventually.”

  Malone gave him a skeptical look.

  The smell of latex from the gloves was beginning to irritate Minogue’s nostrils.

  “Savages for fans,” Malone added. “Looks like they have one less now.”

  “Any particular items you’re looking for?” McNamara asked.

  “Effects belonging to some people,” Minogue said. “Any sign at all.”

  “Are you sure about that.”

  McNamara spoke with no hint of exasperation that Minogue could detect. Still, he made sure of his footing, and his balance, and he half-turned to McNamara.

  “I’m not being contrary,” said Minogue. “I actually have no idea.”

  “Fair enough,” said McNamara. “Now did Tommy here tell you anything? These pair aren’t, weren’t, shoplifter league.”

  McNamara pulled at his gloves over his knuckles and looked over at Malone.

  “Tommy. Your outfit got the same bill of goods as we did, right?”

  “What kind of a question is that,” said Malone. “Of course we did. Even faster than yous.”

  “On your arse, you did,” said McNamara. “You chancer.”

  He turned back to Minogue.

  “Was he like this when you worked with him?”

  “Worse. Infinitely.”

  “Doubt that,” said McNamara. “So you know then that these two were serious business. Ex-army, dog-rough and all. They’d be getting well paid for their trip here. Well, whatever the going rate for hit men is, fancy ones. So housebreaking wouldn’t be high on the agenda.”

  “It could be they were up to no other stuff,” said Minogue. “Their own sidelines, as it were.”

  He returned to his study of the floor, a location that he had learned over many years was where gravity placed items that would be useful in his investigations. He eyed the folded pieces of silver paper by the half-empty bottle of vodka, and began to make his way over. No traces of powders that he could see.

  Malone had made his way foot-over-foot to the toilet, where he squatted, opened a pen-knife and used it to lever up the edge of a towel. He stood slowly, and leaned out to look into the shower stall. Minogue heard him lifting the lid on the toilet tank, and replacing it.

  “So,” said McNamara. “There was some expertise on show here, planning and carrying this out. That much we know.”

  Minogue continued his inventory of what he could see from where he had stopped. Half-bottles of white rum, empty; a takeaway coffee cup, salt and vinegar crisps, a remote for the television. No cigarettes. Bits of paper – receipts they looked like – on top of the chest of drawers, next to coins. Jeans in a ball by the leg of a bed, T-shirt, one sock. Malone was looking behind the television now, balanced on one leg like a ballerina.

  “A setup from the start, even,” said McNamara. “What do you
think there, Tommy? Are the Egans that underhanded?”

  Malone merely snorted.

  “Those bags,” said Minogue, looking at the soft-sided bags by the door to the toilet again. “Could we…?”

  McNamara sucked in his breath noisily, and shook his head.

  “We’re pushing it already. I have to close it down. Count to twenty and that’s it, you’re out of here.”

  There was a mobile phone by the leg of the bed.

  “Can you get them to go through that phone first, Mister Sir?”

  “Shag off, Tommy. The Bureau has its own thing. Like you didn’t know.”

  “But you’ll hassle them on my behalf, right?”

  “I don’t want a falling-out with them, do I, by mentioning your name.”

  “Why are you such a bollocks?”

  “What else did your mother say to you?”

  “The bags, come on. Nobody’ll know. We’re on the same team here, I think?”

  McNamara didn’t bother to answer this time. He gave Minogue a diversionary look, a signal of his forbearance. He must owe Malone a lot, Minogue thought, to go through this.

  “Come on, lads,” he said then. “I plan to keep me job. Let’s go.”

  Minogue let his gaze travel along the carpet by the edge of the bed. The shadow there diverted around something. He got down carefully on his hunkers.

  The notebook was one he had seen in a window in Wicklow Street, and almost admired it. Moleskin…? Hardly. He found his pen in his jacket pocket, and got its chewed end around the back of the notebook, and he gently drew on it. It took several stops-and-starts as it pivoted around the pen.

  Malone had spotted what he was doing. McNamara too was watching.

  The pen skipped on Minogue’s first try of the cover, but he lodged it under the cover and pushed in when the cover began to lift.

  “Well,” said Malone. It occurred to Minogue that Malone had already decided on matters here.

  “In my world,” said McNamara, “hit men don’t carry little notebooks. How about you two.”

  Minogue said nothing. The writing was often bunched together in small boxes, with the writing going in several directions, and there were drawings everywhere. Some of it was illegible, but still its author had underlined several parts. There were numbered lists, exclamation marks.

  Minogue heard Malone stoop down beside him.

  “That says Donneycarney,” said Malone. “And there’s Finglas. Ronanstown. Crumlin – and I know that place, by God, Captain’s Road.”

  Minogue made out other words: innit, dunnit/ dannit, roight, London?

  “Well who owns it?” McNamara said.

  Almost reluctantly, Minogue lifted his pen and let the pages fall back, stopping only when the inside of the front cover began to lift.

  “‘Reward offered,’” said Malone. “And there’s a phone number.”

  He stood, and took out his mobile.

  “That’s Fanning’s number,” he said after a few moments. “His mobile.”

  “‘These notes have no…’” McNamara said. “What’s that?”

  “‘…monetary value,’” said Minogue, “‘….but are of value to the owner. If found, please call…’”

  “Where’s his name then?”

  Minogue looked up.

  “Wanted to stay anonymous there,” said McNamara. “So’s anyone wouldn’t think they could, you know, get a big whack of money out of him.”

  “Is he famous?” Minogue asked.

  He received no answer. He poked his way back to random pages. There was a drawing of a street that seemed to be running with rain, with street lamps reflecting off the puddles.

  “He’s a good drawer,” said Malone.

  Minogue could now make out most of the words in a box that ran to the outer corner of the page. T falls for M’s girl – she agrees M is psycho, wants out – M enters pub coked wants to get T.

  “Plots,” he said. “Ideas.”

  “That’s not bad at all,” said McNamara. “That drawing. Real Dublin type of scene there. Very not bad.”

  There were footsteps outside. McNamara stood up quickly, and strode to the door, where he intercepted a detective.

  “Already?” Minogue heard him say. “Christ. Okay, go down and get them started, I suppose.”

  Minogue let go of the pen as he finished reading something about a shipment from the docks. The notebook seemed to fall in on itself.

  “Time to split there,” said McNamara. “You were never here, unless you hear me say you were, okay?”

  “Thanks,” said Minogue.

  “Tommy?” asked McNamara.

  “I’m a ghost then,” said Malone. “See, I’m invisible. Him too.”

  “You’re a ghost who owes me a big one then,” McNamara said.

  In the hall, Minogue peeled off the gloves with some difficulty. He pocketed them, and turned around in time to see the first of the Technical Bureau appear in the lobby.

  “Done in for his notebook,” Malone said. “That’d be a first.”

  “What did his wife say again, about down the quays, and the Polish man?”

  “He said he couldn’t tell her then and there, but if anything happened, to look in his notebooks.”

  “Notebooks? Not, notebook, singular?”

  Malone shrugged, and began a long, slow yawn that seemed to cause him pain.

  Chapter 50

  KILMARTIN WAS FIDGETY, and he had a cowed, expectant look to him. The new clothes he had taken so much trouble to pick out just didn’t work. The cut of the jacket, the pattern on the shirt, looked way too full of effort, and the shoes looked downright uncomfortable. He cleared his throat, and turned up toward the restaurant with Minogue.

  “A stone cold killer they call them,” he said. “The FBI.”

  Minogue had almost forgotten the course that Kilmartin had taken years ago in Virginia.

  “They profile them, they dissect them – in a manner of speaking now – and they do a thousand interviews with them, but they’re still a what you call it, a…”

  “Enigma?”

  “That’s the word. Puzzle, we’ll call it.”

  “I heard they gave him four transfusions no less. Four. All those donations, just to keep him alive. And for what?”

  The old Kilmartin was revving up, all right, Minogue noted.

  “As for the other fella, well he wasn’t as quick on his feet as he should have been, was he.”

  With eyes almost clenched shut, Minogue had taken a fleeting glance at the other man lying awkwardly between a chair and the table. The dark mass above his scalp was blood and something else Minogue didn’t want to know about.

  Kilmartin seemed to be walking slower on purpose. They came to Wicklow Street. The Chang’s restaurant was within sight now. The deal was that Kathleen would bring Maura Kilmartin earlier.

  “A shame about that poor divil though,” Kilmartin said. “That Fanning fella that got mixed up with them. Never knew what hit him, I suppose.”

  Minogue was a little tempted to ask Kilmartin if he felt a bit sorry for the Murphy character, the one awaiting positive identification from the car.

  “And then to just dump him, and the car of course – on top of a car he dumped earlier on. What kind of a man can do that, I say to myself. What kind of a human being. … But why should I think that. God knows, we met enough of them over the years. Didn’t we?”

  Kilmartin had been talking non-stop since they had parked.

  “And another thing,” Kilmartin went on. “There’s no way around this: it dehumanizes people. The army, I’m talking about. Any army. Put a man in a uniform, give him a gun, let him think he’s better than the people he’s looking at, and that’s what you’re going to get – oh, and keep him ignorant, of course, so he’s sure of himself and doesn’t be thinking too hard about what he’s ordered to do.”

  Minogue did not want to dip his toes in that one.

  “But who’s responsible in the final analys
is, I say.”

  “For what?”

  “What that fella did, or those fellas did. Out there in Iraq, I’m saying. By the way, don’t take this the wrong way, but your listening skills are not up to scratch.”

  Minogue gave him the eye.

  “It’s true,” said Kilmartin. “You know it. Sorry to say, but.”

  Straight from the Self-Help section, Minogue wanted to retort. He began to make up titles for what Kilmartin had read, or consulted. Spousal Bliss Through Listening to Your Life Partner. Ears of Love. Tantric Listening.

  “He should have turned in that other fella,” Kilmartin said. “When he found he was dealing over there. ‘West Ham’ or whatever his name was.”

  “Parker. Gary Parker.”

  “No sense of right and wrong when you’re in the army. And sure the world knows, you can’t deal with a junkie. Not one inch can you trust one. But there he is, covering up for this fella over there in Iraq. That’s not how to do things, is it.”

  “Hardly.”

  “The story I heard,” Kilmartin said, his voice dropping. “I heard a rumour they were, em, gay.”

  “Em gay, or just gay?”

  “There you go again. But did you hear that too?”

  “I heard nothing.”

  “I thought gay fellas were supposed to be, you know?”

  “So did I.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s not the stereotype.”

  Minogue said nothing.

  “So here’s this fella, a corporal, and he’s trying to shield the other fella. And then see what happens for his trouble – your man goes off the deep end one night, and that family there in Iraq winds up dead. Isn’t that it? Tell me that’s an accident now.”

  “Not in the record,” said Minogue, the urge to mischief returning. He thought of Kathleen’s injunction, and the promise she had extracted from him, to try to avoid rows tonight.

  “Ah stop it, would you? The army brass got them out of there so fast, whitewashed the proceedings. Like they do everywhere, the British. Oh yes. Some people may forget, but the Irish don’t.”

  “Don’t forget what?”

  “Are you going to tell me it’s okay for some freelance hit men, trained and primed over in England, to be let loose here in Ireland?”

  “Our gangsters hired them.”