Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  RJ: FBI officials remain silent, DeeDee, on the case of Special Agent David McAuliffe, who was arrested last night by Chicago police after neighbors summoned them because of noise at the apartment of Chicago novelist Dermot Coyne. The police charged McAuliffe with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Apparently McAuliffe and Agent Martha Regan attempted to force their way into Coyne’s apartment without warrants. Sources here at the Dirksen Building tell Channel 6 that McAuliffe and Regan had not been authorized to search Coyne’s apartment. Cynthia Hurley, Coyne’s attorney, said that Coyne would prosecute McAuliffe to the fullest extent of the law.

  CH: These two agents, acting on explicit instruction of Joseph R. Dever, Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge, attempted to raid my client’s apartment last night. During this Gestapo-like raid, Mr. McAuliffe drew his revolver and threatened my client, putting his life at risk as well as the lives of one of his neighbors and two Chicago police officers. We intend to bring Mr. McAuliffe to trial and to file charges against Mr. Dever. I am also seeking a restraining order against the United States Attorney and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prevent them from further harassing my client.

  RJ: Isn’t your client guilty of fraud in the commodities market?

  CH: He hasn’t even been charged. But the way the federal prosecutor in this city seems to operate is that you are convicted by news leak and remain guilty until you’re proven innocent, even if you are never indicted.

  RJ: Sources here at the Dirksen Building tell Channel 6 that Coyne has been implicated in the current FBI sting, Operation Full Platter.

  4:30 TELEVISION (LIVE)

  (Dermot Coyne exits from the Hancock Building. He wears light blue slacks, dark blue jacket and appears calm, cool, and charming. A swarm of vultures with microphones in their hands surround them. Coyne seems astonished by their interest.)

  First Vulture: Dermot, are you going to be indicted in the Full Platter sting?

  Second Vulture: Was your fiancée in the apartment when the FBI raided it?

  Third Vulture: Do you really expect the courts to convict the agents who raided your apartment?

  Fourth Vulture: Are you going to cancel your wedding? Dermot (most engaging smile): Give me a chance to respond. (Vultures calm down.)

  Dermot: I don’t know whether I’m going to be indicted or not. I have never discussed my trading practices with Jared Kennedy, who is their informant. If I am indicted, we will charge the Office of the United States Attorney with malicious prosecution and probably criminal fraud. My fiancée sleeps at her own home, not at my apartment, and we will continue this practice till we are married. I fully expect Agent McAuliffe to plead guilty to the charges against him. Finally, even if I wanted to delay our wedding, which I do not, my young woman would not tolerate it. Now, if you’ll excuse me … .

  (Dermot forces his way through vultures and enters cab.) Third Vulture: (jamming mike through open window of cab): Are your publishers disturbed by the bad publicity this scandal is causing?

  Dermot: On the contrary they are delighted, so long as the title of the book is mentioned: Irish Love!

  (Cab pulls away.)

  10:00 TV NEWS

  Anchor: Channel 3 has obtained excerpts from a highly incriminating conversation between novelist and commodity trader Dermot Coyne and an undercover agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Our investigative reporter, Rick Reams, has the full story.

  RR: (an overweight man with an unconvincing toupee and a voice which conveys perpetual shock at the criminal behavior of Chicagoans): Jenny, last night, controversial Chicago novelist Dermot Coyne arranged for the arrest of two FBI agents. Tonight Coyne himself stands charged with fraud in his commodity-trading practices before he retired at the age of twenty-four to write steamy romances. In a conversation with an FBI informant who is part of Operation Full Platter, Coyne admitted that his retirement was made possible by cheating his customers on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Channel 3 has obtained excerpts of that conversation.

  (Typed transcripts appear on the screen. RR reads from them.)

  Agent: You sure were lucky when you made all that money. Coyne: Luck had nothing to do with it. I bought shares on a client’s account. Then the market suddenly collapsed. I knew it would bound back and shoot up again on Monday morning and the client would make millions. So I switched the purchase to my own account and told the client that it had been too late to make the purchase. First thing Monday I made enough to keep me in drinks and women for the rest of my life.

  Agent: You (blanked) your client then?

  Coyne: You bet I did, inside and out, backwards and forwards, real good. And he was too dumb to know what was going on.

  RR: So it does not look good for Dermot Coyne tonight. It looks much better for the FBI agent whose arrest Coyne caused last night. Jennifer?

  Anchor: Rick, is there any comment from Coyne or his lawyers about this development?

  RR: (voice loaded with skepticism) His lawyer, who is also his sister, says that the conversation never occurred.

  16

  “I’VE BEEN over it before a thousand times,” I pleaded with Cindy. “It sounds worse every time I tell it.”

  “I want to hear it once more,” she insisted, jabbing her finger at me like a homeroom teacher who had caught me sleeping.

  Cindy always jabbed her finger at me.

  Cindy was an Assistant States Attorney for Rich Daley and Cecil Partee when the Cook County Prosecutor’s Office was nonpolitical. After she was eased out because she was, like all our family, a fanatical Democrat, she joined the elite law firm of Winthrop, McClaren, Donovan, and Epstein and turned to estate law so that she could telecommute and spend more time with the kids. She misses the courtroom, however, and would doubtless revel in the confrontations that my case was likely to produce.

  Moreover as the oldest child and a girl at that, she had assumed at the age of fourteen responsibility for the oversize, clumsy, but pleasant boy child that Mom had brought home from the hospital. Ever since then she has played the role of a surrogate mother, a role she now shared as a coconspirator with me young woman.

  “OK, if you insist … The last time the stock market decided to take a plunge, there I was standing in the S and P pit bemused and confused. Some of my friends were making tons of money and some of them were losing tons of money and I wasn’t doing anything, because I had no idea what was happening. On Friday the market started to rally and everyone was buying like mad, hoping to ride up the index as it soared. One of my few clients called in a buy order—three hundred contracts …”

  “He thought the rally would last so he was going long?”

  “I did two things wrong. I was also going to buy a little bit on my own as well as buy on his account. My head was pounding as it usually was when the pit was hopping and my stomach churning somehow I got confused and sold three hundred cars … and somehow three hundred more on my own account.”

  “Went short instead of long? And on your own account, too? Not very swift, Dermot.”

  She jabbed her finger again. She always said that when I told the story of how I became a millionaire.

  “That’s what I thought on Saturday morning when I went down to the Exchange to catch up on paperwork. I was down six hundred cars, the three hundred he wanted me to buy and the three hundred I had sold on my own. Millions of dollars that I didn’t have.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Sell on my own? … I didn’t realize what I was doing. I must have given the wrong signal.”

  She sighed impatiently.

  All right, it was a dumb thing to do. I didn’t belong there. I shivered at the recollection. It was a terrible weekend, saved only by the Bear victory that Sunday afternoon.

  “So what happened then?”

  “So I went in on Monday morning, expecting the worst. I’d try to buy immediately before the market went up any more.”

  “And it fell?” She started to walk again, beginning to u
nderstand my story.

  “Like a rock. I watched it go down all day. I bought just before the closing bell.”

  “And you made a fortune!”

  “Just a little over three million dollars, not that I deserved any of it. I had made two dumb mistakes and was very lucky.”

  “So then what did you do?”

  “I sold my seat, returned the money and the capital to my father, paid my income tax, invested everything else in tax-exempt municipals and a conservative commodity account and retired.”

  She tapped her pen on the yellow, legal-sized notepad without which lawyers cannot think.

  “Fortunately for us, the records from your clearing house confirm what you did. So does your client, who rejoices in your success—though I don’t think he would have ever given you another order if you’d stayed in the business. The CFTC went after you like our golden retriever after a stick and found nothing wrong, though they thought you were dumb, too. The IRS wrung you out and ended up paying us money.”

  “So why are we worried?”

  “We are worried because you don’t look or talk that dumb. People hear the story and they don’t believe it.”

  “Should I try to act dumb?”

  She waved that away. “It would only make matters worse.”

  “Oh.”

  “Dale can get an indictment by confusing the grand jury, which probably doesn’t like traders anyway. I don’t see how she thinks she can win a trial. Probably figures you’ll plead.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To save money, to avoid a couple of years of litigation, to get on with your life … Same reason Danny pled when his attorneys had used up all his money.”

  “She can drag it out that long?”

  “Maybe not. Your little game last night has forced them to react. You’ll probably be dragged before the grand jury next week and indicted before the week is out. We’ll ask for a dismissal of the charges. They’re so absurd that if we get the right judge, they’ll be thrown out.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  She shrugged. “Then we’ll do battle.”

  “We won’t plead?”

  “No way. Not even if she doesn’t want you to do time. That’s improbable. Dale always wants her victims to do time.”

  “That isn’t fair!” I protested.

  “Who ever said fair, Dermot? They can indict anyone they want and force the person to choose between bankruptcy and jail. Of course it’s not fair, but it’s the way justice works in this land of the free and home of the brave.”

  “She’ll be using my papers to hunt for confirmation of what I am supposed to have told Jarry?”

  “Right … His testimony and his tape are her only solid weapons.”

  “But I never had that conversation!”

  “I know that, Dermot. And that’s our ace in the hole. They’re going to have to give us the tape at some point. We’ll do a voice analysis and go in for a motion to dismiss. If it’s not granted—and only a truly dumb judge could turn us down—we’ll go up to the Seventh Circuit and be home free.”

  “So we have to get the tape?”

  “And they’ll stall before they turn it over to us.”

  “Why, Cindy? Because they know it’s fake?”

  “They don’t know it’s fake, Dermot. They believe Jarry, though they should have been much more careful. No, they’ll stall because they’re mean.”

  “You don’t want me to try to act dumb? As dumb as I really was?”

  “Nope! It wouldn’t work. Besides, you’re not dumb. You just didn’t belong on the trading floor … How’s herself holding up?”

  “Grace O’Malley? She’s fine. Spoiling for an alley fight with someone. Will not discuss postponing the wedding.”

  “‘Course not … You called her first thing this morning, didn’t you? To tell her about what happened?”

  “She phoned me just after the cops dragged those two agents over to Chicago Avenue. Wanted to know what was going on.”

  “She knew?” Cindy asked with a shiver.

  “Naturally she knew. She’s fey.”

  “Can she put hexes on people? Maybe she could … No, that wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “She pronounced a solemn curse on her brother last Sunday …”

  “That jerk.”

  “Only she didn’t mean it, so it doesn’t count. It scared the hell out of him. I’m not sure she can do the real thing. Or even would if she could.”

  “But if she could scare an Assistant United States Attorney … She does look a little like a Druid witch, doesn’t she, Dermot? Gorgeous and just a little dangerous?”

  “Druid goddess!”

  “Objection sustained … Tell her not to worry about any of this. We’re going to win.”

  She rose from her chair, dismissing her charming but helpless little brother.

  I stood up, too.

  “She doesn’t doubt it for a moment.”

  “Oh, one more thing, Derm,” she said as I was about to leave the office. “I almost forgot it. I assume they will leak some of the text of Jarry’s wire to the media. I further assume that they will use it without due diligence to determine its authenticity. That’s patently actionable.”

  Cindy was smiling. Dangerously. Nuala Anne wasn’t the only dangerous woman in the crowd that was circling the wagons around poor Dermot.

  “Which means?”

  “Which means, I’m already drafting our complaint. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll go into Cook County Court and file six defamation suits—against the four TV channels and the two papers!”

  Cindy looked liked she’d died and gone to heaven.

  “That will give everyone something to talk about, won’t it?”

  “It sure will.” She laughed happily.

  “I suppose you’ll be coordinating it all with Traci.” Traci was our sister-in-law and the senior partner of a PR firm.

  “Naturally.”

  “Remind her that the novel is called Irish Love and that it is available at all bookstores.”

  “I’ll tell her to emphasize the line that all Irish men are closet lovers.”

  “You do that.”

  I caught up with herself at the Abbey that evening. She was wearing jeans and a white knit top which reminded me of the white sweatshirt at O’Neill’s the night I had first encountered her, the night we both had fallen incurably and permanently in love. She embraced me with her radiant smile as I drifted in.

  She was, it seemed, singing nothing but lullabies that night. Mostly in Irish, some translated into English—her own translations naturally.

  “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to sing a sexy lullaby. It pretends to be for a boy baby, but if you knew the Irish implications, the lad is a baby only in the sense that all men are babies.”

  Laughter.

  “Once you know that, then all the lyrics make sense. Tradition has it that a bride sings it to her husband on their wedding night. I won’t be translating this one. Wouldn’t the police close us down if I did?”

  She looked straight at me as she sang it. Or I thought she did. No one in the pub turned to look at me, so maybe I was fantasizing.

  I had no doubt, however, that I would hear it on our first night together in our house on Southport.

  “Did you like me sexy lullaby?” she asked as I drove her home. A mixture of light rain and drizzle was falling. I turned on the windshield wipers. Their breathless sighs seemed very Irish.

  “I thought you could translate it. You Irish speakers are pretty indirect about everything. I bet there isn’t a single dirty word in the whole song.”

  “Go long wid ya, Dermot Michael. We Irish speakers can write erotic poems without using dirty language. And can’t we be very direct even when we’re indirect?”

  Her hand captured my knee. I tried to concentrate on my driving.

  “I’ve noticed that … I want to hear a translation, just the same.”

  “Well,” she said, pretendi
ng to ponder the implication of that. “Won’t I just think about doing that?”

  “I suspect I may hear it on my wedding night?”

  “Och, sure, won’t you be so destroyed altogether by the time I get around to singing it that you wouldn’t understand it in English or Irish?”

  “And wouldn’t I like to hear a song when I’m taking off your clothes and sort of teasing your breasts?”

  She gasped at the thought.

  “Dermot, me darlin’ man, I won’t be able to sing then, not at all, at all!”

  “We’ll see.”

  She hugged me fiercely, making my driving task all the more difficult.

  “Shall we stop at our own pub?” I asked.

  “Don’t I have to hear all the exciting things which happened today?”

  “I’m not sure how exciting they are.”

  We found a parking place on Clybourn and ducked into the pub under an umbrella I kept in the car for “soft” nights like this one—an Irish rain is “soft” if there’s no hail.

  “A jar of the regular for me, Sonia,” Nuala began, “and a glass of Bailey’s on ice for your man.”

  “You were great on TV tonight, Mr. Coyne. Really told those bitches off.”

  “They have to earn their living like the rest of us, Sonia,” I said. “And I’m still Dermot.”

  “And we will continue this practice till we are married!” Sonia quoted me. “Good on you, Dermot.”

  Nuala sniffed. “He’d better say that.”

  After our drinks were served, she said softly. “So tell me all about it, Dermot Michael, all about it.”

  I went through the news of the day, from the ringing house phone to the ten o’clock news with quotes from the alleged interview. She listened quietly, nodding sympathetically.

  “So tomorrow Cindy files her defamation suits and we regain the lead in the media war?”

  “I guess so.”

  “We’ll win, Dermot. You know we will.”

  “I guess we will. It couldn’t come at a worse time.”

  “We’ll both survive, me darlin’ man, and so will our love.”

  Grace O’Malley had become St. Brigid, everyone’s mother.