by Dan Mahoney
The Irish minister for home affairs had also been interviewed, and he scathingly denounced both the British and the IRA roles in the affair. He was disturbed that one or both had knowingly placed an agent in the Irish Ministry for Finance, an action he termed despicable. He promised that his government would get to the truth through its Special Panel of Inquiry and that appropriate diplomatic responses would be made.
Maggie Ferguson had certainly shaken up her world as she left it, McKenna thought. As he read on, he became more convinced that she had also shaken up his. It was implied in the article that it had been his fancy dress-up dinner with the beautiful spy that had brought matters to a head. The press had apparently also leaned heavily on the Garda, and some high-ranking Irish police official had collapsed under the pressure; the reasons for McKenna’s visit to Dublin were spelled out, almost word for word, from his interview with O’Dougherty.
McKenna thought that his account regarding his walk after seeing Ferguson off at the hotel was taken at face value by the reporter, but the blockbuster and the reason for the suggestive headline were contained in the final three paragraphs of the article. They were rife with innuendo seemingly designed to ruin McKenna’s life and reputation.
The first paragraph stated that although McKenna had claimed in his statement to the Irish police that Maggie Ferguson was happily married, concerted efforts by the press and the Garda had failed to turn up her supposed husband. The second paragraph disclosed that Ferguson’s body had been autopsied and evidence of very recent sexual intercourse was present. The third described McKenna as married, the father of three children, and living at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The article closed by saying that although McKenna was back in town, all attempts by the press to contact him for interview or comment had failed.
McKenna was beside himself as he folded the paper and started walking. A prime example of the Paddy Factor at work, he thought. Maggie Ferguson leaves me to see if her husband has murdered her boss yet. There’s no evidence of police activity outside O’Bannion’s girlfriend’s secret flat because O’Bannion isn’t there. He’s waiting outside Ferguson’s flat to murder her. So what does she do? She knows she’s looking good, she’s had a few drinks so she’s feeling good, she knows her girlfriend won’t be around because she’s in jail, she knows her husband is inside, probably tense and nervous, and she knows that O’Bannion’s secret flat is, after all, a very nice place. So she parks her car and stops in for a calming quickie with the husband she hardly ever sees. Probably right in O’Bannion’s bed, half an hour before her own life ended, she ruined mine!
McKenna searched for a way out. There were only two people in the world to whom he could tell his version of events, but feared that only one of them would believe him. He knew he could count on Brunette, but he realized that he wasn’t so sure about Angelita when he noticed that he was walking away from his apartment with the newspaper, not toward it.
He stopped on a corner and stood reading the article again. It didn’t get any better the second time around, but there was one bright spot that had nothing to do with his personal situation: No mention had been made of Mulrooney, which meant that none of the hundreds of cops working the case had blabbed to their favorite reporter.
One thing McKenna was sure of—he was not yet ready to bring the papers home. He stepped into the street and hailed a cab.
An hour and a half after he had left on his simple errand, McKenna brought the paper home to Angelita. Pao was there already, looking apprehensive, so McKenna knew that he had already read the Post. “Where have you been? We’ve both been worried sick about you?” Angelita said, so McKenna also knew that Pao hadn’t mentioned the article to her.
“I took a cab to Health Services in Queens.”
“Health Services? What for?” Angelita asked.
“To get a certified sample of my blood. It’s on its way to Ireland right now.”
“A blood sample? What for?”
McKenna placed the Post on the kitchen table. “Because there’s an article in there that strongly hints that I had sex with Maggie Ferguson right before O’Bannion killed her. My blood sample will set the record straight.”
Angelita sat down and stared at the page one photo of Ferguson for a full minute. Then she looked up at McKenna and she didn’t look happy. “Passably pretty, huh?”
They were the exact words he had used to describe Maggie Ferguson to Angelita when he had finally told her about the dinner. He couldn’t come up with an appropriate reply, so he and Pao just stood there shuffling their feet while Angelita read on.
When she had finished, she gave McKenna the shock of his life. She folded up the paper and flipped it across the kitchen and right into the trash can, a perfect ten-foot shot. McKenna had expected tears and a tantrum at the very least, but she just looked up at him, dry-eyed. “This is going to make things difficult for us for a while, but we both know what happened.”
“You’ve figured it out already?” McKenna asked, prepared to be amazed once again at Angelita’s reasoning powers.
“What’s to figure out? Your sex-starved Maggie Ferguson saw that she couldn’t have my husband, so she went over to O’Bannion’s and threw her dopey husband a boff before she went home to die.”
I love this woman! McKenna thought as he marveled at Angelita’s intelligence, her faith in him, and her basic, though somewhat flawed, understanding of the complex situation. But then another interpretation of events had to be endured.
Pao, who couldn’t possibly have had any idea what Angelita had been talking about, felt compelled to offer his support in his own way. “Yeah, that dumb nympho. I hope she managed to pass her horny husband one of her diseases before O’Bannion did her in.”
Both Angelita and McKenna just stared at Pao, amazed and open-mouthed, not knowing what to say. Angelita was the first to laugh, but only beating McKenna by a second. He joined her, with Pao standing there straight-faced and wondering what he had said to provoke this round of merriment.
Sheeran was sitting on McKenna’s desk, waiting for him, when McKenna arrived. The five detectives in the office all had their faces buried in copies of the New York Post and none of them seemed to notice McKenna. He stopped in front of his desk and Sheeran stood up and put an arm around McKenna’s shoulders.
“Listen up, everybody. I’ve got an announcement to make,” McKenna shouted.
Everyone looked up from their newspapers, all seeming to notice McKenna for the first time.
“I’m only going to say this once, and you can believe it or not,” McKenna stated loudly. “I did not at any time boff Maggie Ferguson, nor did I even think of doing so.”
All except for Cisco Sanchez continued staring at McKenna. He, instead, dramatically held his front page of his newspaper at eye level, looking from that knockout Maggie Ferguson photo to McKenna over and over while everyone watched him, center stage. Then he reached his conclusion and voiced the group’s sentiments. “For heaven’s sake, Brian! Why not? I sure would’ve.”
And that was the simple truth of the matter. Cisco sure would have, everyone knew, but Cisco wasn’t done with his analysis of the situation. He stood up and continued in rapid fashion. “I would have boffed her so long and so hard that O’Bannion would have died of old age waiting for her to come home. I would’ve saved the lovely señorita’s life and ruined her for other men, as is my custom. If I had been the one in Ireland with this luscious Maggie Ferguson, she would now be alive and happily listed among the countless—”
“Thank you, Cisco,” Sheeran said, but the way he said it left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Cisco had just received a direct order to sit down and shut up.
Cisco did, but it was to a round of polite applause. Everyone watched as Cisco, whistling happily, took a pair of scissors from his desk and cut Maggie Ferguson’s picture from the front page of his newspaper, taking special care to cut away the inset of McKenna’s face from the photo. He then placed the photo on his desk and admired
it lovingly for a moment. He stopped whistling only for the moment it took him to bend down and kiss the Ferguson photo. Then, whistling again, he placed it with special care in his top desk drawer.
All this time Cisco was seemingly oblivious to the attention he was getting. He stopped whistling and looked around the room at everyone looking at him. “What?” he asked innocently.
It was Sheeran who answered. “Cisco, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but it seems to me that you’re in love with a dead girl.”
“Everyone knows that Cisco is not stupid, Inspector,” Cisco replied indignantly. “He doesn’t just look at the pretty pictures in the papers like many dumb detectives he knows. No, Inspector, Cisco reads the papers and knows all the hard words. So naturally Cisco knows that lovely Maggie Ferguson is untimely dead, but everyone knows that Cisco is a hopeless romantic and that Maggie Ferguson will live in his heart forever.”
Everyone didn’t know precisely that but everyone, including Sheeran and certainly McKenna, did know one thing through unfortunate experience: When Detective First Grade Cisco Sanchez got on his high horse and started speaking of himself in the third person, he was especially unbearable, but impossible to beat in any verbal contest.
All looked to Sheeran with bated breath, silently awaiting the inspector’s response, and all were relieved when Sheeran wisely surrendered. “All the same, Cisco. I want to be the first to offer my condolences on your loss.”
“Thank you, Inspector. Cisco graciously accepts your condolences, but he has a question. Who here could ever be foolish enough to think that a smart man like Brian McKenna would ever consider trying to boff one of Cisco’s girls, especially his current lucky favorite?” Cisco played his eyes around the room, looking for a taker. “Stand up, you dummy, whoever you are, so Cisco and his pal Brian can expose your stupidity to the world.”
It was suddenly and universally resolved that McKenna had indeed been telling the truth. Cisco gave him a smile and a regal nod, but remained seated as he busied himself with the Times crossword puzzle.
Minutes later, Cisco was the only one still seated. McKenna was at the end of the receiving line, accepting expressions of sympathy and support from everyone else until Sheeran dragged him into his office, closing the door behind them. Sheeran looked uncomfortably serious and McKenna guessed what was on his mind. “You’ve heard from a Constable O’Dougherty of the Irish police, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have,” Sheeran said, obviously surprised. “He called for you this morning. You weren’t here, so I took the call.”
“And he asked you to tell me that I didn’t have to, but he would appreciate it if I could send him a certified blood sample?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk to him right now. Could you do me a favor and call him back for me?” McKenna asked.
“Sure. What do you want me to tell him?”
“That a sample is already on the way to him, air express.”
“You knew O’Dougherty was going to call this morning?”
“Hoped he would. It’s gonna end a lot of uninformed, unwise speculation when they compare my blood to the semen found in Maggie Ferguson.”
“Why don’t you stop some of the speculation now and give a statement to the press right now?” Sheeran asked.
“Because I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction and they wouldn’t believe me anyway. I’d rather wait until they get the news from the other side.”
“Not a bad idea, but I don’t know if I’d be able to stand the kind of pressure you’re gonna be under while you’re waiting to be vindicated.”
“No pressure because Angelita’s behind me, so let’s get down to real business. Have we gotten that beeper information from Page America yet?”
“I sent Mendez and Sophia to their office with a subpoena. They should’ve been back already, so they might’ve run into a problem.”
Right on cue, there was a knock at the door. Joe Mendez and Joe Sophia came in. They had learned from Page America that Jack O’Reilly had purchased the three beepers and they had a three-page printout that listed all the return phone numbers that had been paged into them. They had also thought to stop by Tavlin’s office to get the location of the phones and had written it next to each number.
“It’s mostly pay phones, but there’s a few interesting ones in there,” Mendez explained. “There’s Mulrooney’s cell phone, O’Reilly’s house, the Pioneer Pub, and a new player in Woodlawn. Lady by the name of Brenda McDermott, residence of 889 East 220th Street, apartment 4A. Tavlin says she’s had the phone for five years.”
McDermott? Where have I heard that name recently? McKenna wondered. Then it came to him. “She’s probably connected to Crowley. The name he’s using on his bogus British passport is Kiernan McDermott.”
After Mendez and Sofia left, Sheeran and McKenna went over the list of the locations of the pay phones. The beepers had been in use since O’Reilly had signed on with Page America on March 6th. Three of the pay phones in Woodlawn had been used more than once, and two of those were located in Irish taverns. The other was on the street. Every other number that had been paged to only once was on the street in Woodlawn, Midtown, Jackson Heights, or Levittown.
“So, what do you think?” Sheeran asked.
“They certainly like to stay in touch with each other, which tells us that they’re not together all the time,” McKenna said. “Probably living in different places. I’d say we have to put a few more surveillances and another wire in place.”
“You’re right. The wire on Brenda McDermott and the surveillances on her place and the other three Woodlawn phones,” Sheeran said, looking very unhappy.
“What’s the matter?” McKenna asked. “I’m the one who has to type up the applications and go to court for another eavesdropping warrant.”
“What’s the matter is that I’m running out of people. We’re stretched to the limit, everybody’s on overtime, and none of our regular cases are getting worked. Now we’ve got another wire and four more surveillances and I don’t know where I’m gonna get the manpower from.”
It was a complaint McKenna had never heard before. In a department of forty thousand people with four thousand detectives, getting enough people to work any mission on overtime had never been a problem. “How many people we got working on this now?”
“I stopped counting at a hundred and twenty.”
“Can’t you raid the precinct squads for more people?”
“I could, but then our operation here would be common knowledge all over the Job. It wouldn’t take the press long to find out what we’re up to.”
“How about the Intelligence Division?”
“They’ve already offered me ten people, so maybe I can squeeze twenty out of them by tomorrow. Makes no difference, I’m still gonna have to start cutting corners now to keep all the surveillances and the Brit locations covered.”
“Glad I’m not the boss,” McKenna said. “Mind if I use your phone to make a few more international calls?”
“Go ahead. You going to find out who Brenda McDermott is for us?”
“Gonna try.” His first call was to Peg Maher in Dublin. He got Kevin Hughes’s phone number in Belfast and called him.
“What can I do for you, McKenna?” Hughes said bluntly.
“Can you get a hold of Martin McGuinn right away?”
“No, I’d say not. After they cornered him last night, he’s hiding again from the press, thanks to you.”
McKenna ignored the implied criticism. “Okay. Maybe you can help me. Do you know a Brenda McDermott?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“How about Kiernan Crowley? Do you know him?”
“Used to know him, but heard he’s off to America. Is he running with Mulrooney?”
McGuinn had told Kevin about Mulrooney, McKenna realized, but knew the secret was safe with him. “He sure is, and he’s set to cause us some problems.”
“Ah!
Then I’m thinking that it might be his ex-wife, Brenda, who you’re asking about. But that Brenda’s last name was never McDermott. She was a MacAlary before she was a Crowley. Good republican family.”
McKenna promised himself that he would scream if he ever again heard somebody say “good republican family.” “Why is she his ex-wife? What happened between them?”
“Kiernan surely loved that woman, loved her so much that he divorced her before he went to the Maze to do ten years. Told her she had to get on with her life. I’d heard that she’d gone to America some years back.”
“Did she love him as much as he loved her?”
“It looked to me like she did.”
“Do you know what she’s doing here?” McKenna asked.
“Working hard at being one of your illegal immigrants, I imagine. That would account for the phony name she’s using. But I can tell you this. She was a nurse when she was here, and a damned good one.”
“Thanks, Kevin. You’ve been a big help,” McKenna said, then hung up. “Brenda’s a nurse and the love of Crowley’s life,” he told Sheeran. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to your misery and go visit our judge.”
“And then?”
“That’s it for me today, Inspector. I’ll take a break and then I’m picking up Thor at the airport at nine. After dinner with him, I’m going to try to get another good night’s sleep.”
“Before you go, I’ve got a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“I was wondering if you know who stuck it to Maggie before O’Bannion killed her,” Sheeran said.
“I do, and I’ll tell you right now, but only if you insist. In any event, I promise to tell you later.”
“Why not right now? Because I wouldn’t want to know?”
“Exactly. If I told you now, I’d have to tell you everything. Believe me, I don’t want you sharing the burden I’m carrying.”
“Then when?”
“Probably when we’re both older, grayer, and wiser, but certainly before they close the box on either one of us. We’ll sit down over a couple a drinks and I’ll explain the whole thing to you.”