A Carra ring imm-6

by John Brady

  Minogue eased another tissue out of his package. He glanced at Leyne’s shirt collar again. It remained closed.

  “We don’t play the blame game,” Leyne said. “Geraldine and I. That’s why I came to offer you what I can. To ask your help. For the second time.”

  He stared at Minogue. The inspector looked around the wall. The print of the mountains must be Rachel Tynan’s.

  “You’re steamed, aren’t you?”

  Minogue glanced up from his tissue. Tynan began flexing his fingers again “You think who’s this fucking tycoon sitting in here, going around your back, pulling strings. Leyne Foundation, money to the university here — what’s the title?”

  “The Leyne Chair in Early Irish History,” said Freeman.

  “This is not about special treatment here, Matt. I’m here to help. So’s Geraldine. Patrick grew up with Geraldine. She did everything she could. She got him counseling and everything when he screwed up. It was her idea to start the private eye stuff.”

  Freeman began lifting three-ring binders from a bag on the floor next to his chair. They had a faux-marble finish. He slid them one by one down the table.

  “This was after the first one. We settled that. It took nearly two years. The lawyers made a killing. The two-year thing was good because he had it hanging over him. She was a hooker, I don’t care what anyone says. I still say he was set up. Her and that bastard who represented her at the hearings and all that.”

  He grunted as he slid the stack. Minogue made no move to take them.

  “How does this help our investigation, Mr. Leyne?”

  “I don’t know if it does or not. It’s my way of saying, of proving to you that I’ll do anything I can to help you find out who killed Patrick.”

  “What does this cover?”

  “There’s three and a bit years. The full time was on for six months after he got stuck with that bitch.”

  Minogue looked at the logo on the spine of the folders.

  “Shawmut’s a small agency,” said Freeman. “But it’s done a lot of corporate stuff. Has a very good name.”

  “They did great stuff for people I knew,” said Leyne. “They were trying to figure out how their competitors were always two steps ahead. They couldn’t nail this Alison one on anything for us but they kept us clear on Patrick. It was to protect him. Us too, of course. There were people who’d like to have worked him and run one by us, I’m sure. Like that first one.”

  Minogue glanced at O’Riordan. He hadn’t uttered a word. Sitting there, with a grave expression all through this.

  “It’s not pretty,” said Leyne “And I hate damn near every word of every fucking page in here. That’s my son in there, but it’s like he’s a specimen. I paid for this, you know, and it kills me. Isn’t that something?”

  Minogue saw his eyes well up and he looked away. O’Riordan pursed his lips and patted Leyne on the shoulder. Leyne rubbed at his eyes, he took a deep breath and set his jaw. Minogue thought he heard a sigh. O’Riordan’s hand stayed on Leyne’s shoulder and he looked at the faces around the table. It was over then, was it, Minogue registered. The urge to sneeze had gone. Tynan pushed his chair back and slowly stood.

  CHAPTER 13

  "Great,” said Malone. “Fucking great. A ton of books telling us who or what he did three thousand miles away. What a load of crap, for Jases’ sake.”

  Minogue flipped by dividers. Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy had been a restless man. Maybe he should be cross-referencing these to phases of the moon. He stopped on a page that described a club called Coasters. June last year. Patrick had stayed for an hour. Left with a patron named Laura. Stayed at her apartment until exited at eleven-fifteen the following day. What was NCR? An adding machine?

  “Talk about hopping the ball, boss. Mind if I puke?”

  No Criminal Record — of course. She worked in a fitness club.

  “What?”

  “He’s trying to steer the case, boss! Wake up, will you? You with me now?”

  To the Exchange, lunch. Exited three-thirty with Karen Weiss to 301 Hyacinth Boulevard. Exited five forty-eight on foot to street. Taxi to apartment… Nice work, this property development job.

  “Twenty-four hours a day, this crowd,” he murmured. “That’d cost.”

  “Huh. To get him whatever his oul lad rigged up for him.”

  Exited apartment in car, 328 BMW convertible. Minogue closed the folder and stacked it on top of the other two. Malone examined his nails.

  “We’re thinking he flew over on his own,” he said. “But maybe he’d arranged to meet someone.”

  “Who?”

  Malone looked over his fingers again.

  “This Hartnett one. We could start in on whether he phoned her.”

  “Say he knew her,” said Minogue. “Knew of her anyway. To do what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever screwed-up millionaire brats do. Hang around with cool people. ‘The scene’? There’s probably a southside thing over there in Boston too, wait’ll you see. Losers and bollockses on the south side — ”

  “The usual hardworking salt-of-the-earth laboring men on the northside?”

  “Exactly.” Malone nodded at the folders. “And we’re going to look for leads in this mountain of stuff? Huh. This is a screen, boss. It’s to buy time for something. What do you think, someone followed him here from the States to pop him here? Oh that’ll be great for us. Bleeding marvelous.”

  Minogue stood and stretched. The longtime companion ache in his lower back was announcing itself clearly. He looked around the meeting room. He wouldn’t mind an office like this looking out onto Harcourt Street.

  “He’s dirty, boss. Clattering women and that. A druggie. Come on, now.”

  “Yes, Tommy.”

  “Record or no record. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not out to nail him just because his oul lad’s loaded. Stuff doesn’t square up, yet anyhow. Look: he got clobbered for something here. Someone saw him in action, decided, well, here’s a hit: rich, stupid — pissed even. Maybe he dropped the hand on someone’s ’mot.”

  “You don’t put much on any roots thing, do you?”

  “What, the ancient Ireland stuff, all the glory?”

  “Yes.”

  Malone cracked his knuckles.

  “Ah now…! Robbing and killing’s the main event, boss. It’s like Kilmartin says. Them’s the stats this past twenty-year here on the squad, right?”

  Minogue began counting pigeons prowling the footpath below.

  “Tell me what’s missing, that’s my approach,” said Malone “You want to bet he was carrying? Cash, I mean. Maybe the American Express routine. Yeah, don’t leave home without it — someone else’s like. Jases, boss, there’s hundreds of gougers walking the streets here who’d have a go at the likes of Shaughnessy if they thought they could get anything. Someone could be swimming in Margaritas on the Coasta Brava pretending to be Shaughnessy right now.”

  Minogue turned back from the window. He lifted the folders. It’d be a couple of days at least before they’d have any track of someone using stolen cards in Shaughnessy’s name. A week even, if they were smart how they used them.

  “Here, hard chaw,” he said to Malone “You carry them. We have other things to be thinking about at the present time.”

  Minogue held the door open for Malone. The hallway was empty but the door to Tynan’s office was ajar. Minogue looked through the crack in the doorway.

  “You’re off then,” Tynan called out. Minogue pushed the door open.

  “We are. We have our bedside reading.”

  Tynan looked over Minogue’s shoulder at Malone.

  “You know what he’s after, don’t you?” he asked Minogue.

  “I think so.”

  “What about yourself, Detective Malone. Are you wised up?”

  “Me ma says no. But she’ll always say that.”

  Tynan pushed his Biro into his tunic pocket.

  “John Leyne wants us to prepare for th
e worst,” he said. “Mrs. Shaughnessy would not be party to that last visit we just had. You know why, do you?”

  Malone shifted the folders against his chest.

  “She’d be in denial,” he said His voice had a tart edge to it.

  Tynan nodded and looked up and down the hall.

  “Did your ma ever tell you you should get on with your sergeant’s exams?”

  “Yeah she did. Sir.”

  “So are you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too busy fighting crime. Sir.”

  “Get a bigger stick then. Stripes, Garda Malone: we need you.”

  “Another brick in the wall,” said Malone again.

  He turned the Nissan off High Street. He managed to find the largest of a series of potholes first. Minogue listened for new hums and noises from the car.

  “What wall?”

  “Mr. Excitement Tynan. Throwing things at you out of the blue. His MO.”

  “He wouldn’t prod you if he didn’t think you could handle it.”

  “There’s a pair of you in it. ‘What about yourself, Detective Malone?’ Jases. ‘We need you.’ Is he gay or what?”

  “I’ve seen him merry, Tommy.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You told me once that denial was a big river in Egypt.”

  Malone stood on the brakes and swerved to avoid another pothole.

  “Very funny, man. So very funny. I can be the gas-man Dub if you can hide behind being the Clare culchie.”

  “I am a Clare culchie. Ask Kathleen. ”,

  “You are on your bollocks. Am I blind or what? You and your shagging Magritte postcards all over the kip. Jases. The books — them snaps of those oul rocks there on the wall next to your desk.”

  “They’re not oul rocks.”

  “What are they so? Houses the Martians built on their last trip here?”

  “You win, Tommy. How did you know?”

  “No wonder Kilmartin does be looking over his shoulder. That frigging carry-on of yours.”

  He knew the Nissan’s speed wasn’t a good gauge for Malone’s annoyance.

  “We’re not going back to the Squad to be sitting and reading this stuff.”

  “Do you hear me fighting?” asked Malone. “But we keep the head straight.”

  “Aoife Hartnett, you’re telling me.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think she’s hiding, Tommy?”

  “No I don’t,” he said “I think she’s dead.”

  The rain started in earnest at eight. It kept going until nearly nine when Minogue went out to the car park to retrieve a box of Anadin from the glove box of his Citroen. It wasn’t any one particular thing that had given him such a clanger. Not the call from Serious Crimes to tell him that so far their informants had come up dry on gang activity at the airport. Nor was it the call to Eimear at the lab to tell him that Shaughnessy had no booze in him, that the whiff Donavan had noted must have been decomposition effects.

  He sat in the passenger seat and listened to the radio. He played with the fader and the balance and the presets and the idea of Patrick Leyne Shaughnessy as a killer. He stopped a search when he hit upon something orchestral. It turned out to be a rather stiff rendition of Handel. The rain on the sunroof had almost stopped now. He looked across the deserted car park. He imagined the gush from a nearby gutter was keeping time with the music. He’d ask the bland Freeman how long ago his boss had had the heart surgery. Interesting to see if Freeman balked.

  He slipped out of the Citroen, locked and alarmed it, and hot-footed it across to the door. He had forgotten the new dip in the tarmac left after last summer’s heat wave. He managed to splash right up to his chest and even flick drops on his chin. He was in the foyer using a lot of bad language when Malone found him.

  “That’s desperate language. Who’re you hanging around with?”

  “Get away from me. I should have stayed in the damned car and driven home, so I should.”

  “Why don’t you, so?”

  Minogue shook two pills into his palm.

  “Because I’ve nothing to sleep on, that’s why.”

  “Oh here we go. Are you the one preaching the Watch and Wait stuff at me awhile ago? The black art and the Zen thing? ‘The devil’s in the detail, Tommy’?”

  “I could have said anything by closing time in Willie Ryan’s.”

  Malone followed him to the kitchen. Minogue half-filled a mug with water.

  “We’re firmed up on Donegal, at least,” said Malone. “Those two places he stayed. One of the statements is in already. They have Guards doing the rounds in the pubs to ferret out more tonight.”

  Minogue let the water wash the pills off the back of his tongue. He stared at the chipped enamel by the front of the cooker.

  “What’s the link between the places he stayed?”

  “Who knows,” Malone said “Except they’re B amp; Bs, not the Hilton.”

  “If we could find her car,” Minogue muttered. He drank the rest of the water and turned to Malone.

  “We’d be clued in as to whether our man was acting the maggot. Prior intentions, plan. He must have said something to someone ‘Touring the west’?”

  Malone leaned against the countertop and stretched his neck. Minogue heard a crack.

  “She drove somewhere to meet him,” Malone said. “That’s where her car is.”

  Minogue’s eyes felt like bruises now. Even when he closed them, they felt they might pop out and roll down his cheeks. The flu maybe?

  “Hey, boss. Go home. We’re all right.”

  “Phone Fergal at the airport again, Tommy. We really have to get a time — a day even — for the love of God.”

  Minogue trudged back down the hall to the squad room. The splashes on his trousers made the fabric cold and gritty on his skin. He rubbed his toes around and felt the itchy slip of wet socks. He stood in front of the boards.

  Shaughnessy had started in Donegal, that’s how it looked. He’d spent at least a day there. He’d been with Aoife Hartnett. They’d been in her car. Why? He wasn’t scrimping: he was keeping his head down, out of sight. Shaughnessy had, as Minogue had heard so many times in the dry language of the books of evidence being quoted in court, formed an intent. He imagined him sitting in the Micra while Aoife Hartnett did the dealings’ buying petrol, meals, booking a room.

  He squinted at the map and let the names slide around in his mind. Ardara, Falcarragh, Gortahork; the Glengesh pass down into Glencolumbkille. Up again along that mountain road, out to Killybegs, and on to Donegal town. Down by Bundoran the marker’s blue line went, through Sligo, and out to Collooney where it stopped by the question mark. He took the marker and uncapped it. He found Ballina and then the village of Cahercarraig. He drew the dotted line slowly and put his initials by the question mark.

  John Murtagh yawned loud and long. He stood and groaned and stretched and groaned again and ambled over to Minogue

  “The guidebooks, you’re thinking,” said Murtagh. “Aren’t you?”

  “The crease on the page for Cahercarraig, John, yes. Right by these fields they’re going to open up. The Carra Fields ”

  “And the interpretive center thing, right. She’s the boss — ”

  Minogue’s sneeze caused Murtagh to take a step back.

  Murtagh was still poring over the list when Minogue finished blowing his nose. The phones had been silent for half an hour. Murtagh pointed at the eight-by-ten of the group at the museum party.

  “She’s the head honcho on that place, right?”

  “The photo there, John. Yes. The unveiling of the exhibition.”

  “What else is marked in that guidebook from the car?”

  “Just Glencolumbkille.”

  “Nothing for Mayo?”

  Minogue shook his head. He stepped over to the photos. Wine glasses, panels with pictures and columns of words behind the group. Aoife Hartnett. a fairly public smile, if he had
to find a word for it. Shaughnessy standing off to the side. Garland mightn’t have realized who he was if it had been a big enough do.

  Murtagh was back at the map with his finger in Mayo.

  “Cahercarraig then,” he said “Five or six miles?”

  “About that, John. Is it time we got our hardworking colleagues in County Mayo out on the roads too?”

  “You were promised the world, I heard,” Murtagh said.

  Minogue looked over at Pat Curran, the lone remaining Guard on the call-in line. Curran had turned out to be a rower. Minogue had forgotten which Garda rowing team had gotten into a drinking spree at the Garda Boat Club two years ago and started throwing one another into the river.

  “Thanks, Pat,” he called out. “Go home, like a good man. We’ll call you for follow-ups if we get inundated here.”

  Curran smiled and nodded. He stared at the phones for several moments as though to reproach them for not ringing. Then he rolled back from the table.

  “John,” said Minogue. “We can’t sit on our hands waiting. You’ll make the call to Galway. I’ll call Mayo.”

  “Feed them the Micra, and this monument stuff too? Vague, isn’t it?”

  “The car for sure then. And tell them there’ll be overnight faxes on Aoife Hartnett. Call us if they haven’t received them by ten tomorrow morning ”

  Murtagh exchanged a look with the inspector.

  “He or she, he and she, went on west to Mayo,” Minogue muttered. “Every member, patrol schedule or not, has to have her picture and the details and Shaughnessy’s too in their fists by dinnertime tomorrow.”

  He looked away from the map again. Murtagh hadn’t moved.

  “Go on with you, John Murtagh, and don’t be looking at me like that. I know it’s nine o’clock at night. We would have moved to an active search soon enough anyway. Any duty officers humming or hawing, or bellyaching, refer them to me.”

  Minogue used Kilmartin’s office to phone Tynan. He hung up when the voice mail took over and dialed the cell phone number. O’Leary answered. He had dropped the commissioner home an hour ago. Did Minogue have the home number? Minogue pretended he didn’t.

  He was too bewildered to frame a witty reply to Rachel Tynan when she said his name.