“Before he went out?”
“No. When he came home. Every night at three in the morning I’d let him in and he’d hit me. He never hurt me much. He couldn’t-he was too drunk. He could barely walk.”
“According to the police report, Dan’s body was found on the sidewalk near Sacred Heart Church, not on your front porch. He never even made it home that night.”
Now she looked at me with no expression I could identify. Her face was set and grim but her eyes were full of tender sadness. “Early that morning someone found Dan on the porch and dragged his body down by the church. That’s where they discovered him, but that’s not where he died.”
“This person who moved Dan’s body must have been someone who understood what had happened and wanted to protect you. Who was it?”
Her expression did not change. “Hell will freeze over before I tell you that.”
She flicked away the cigarette, which had burned down to the filter. “So now you know. Jack trusted you and now I’ve trusted you. Will you give me the money, please? So I can return it to Pug?”
“How did Pug know what really happened? How could he be sure?”
She shrugged. “Was there ever anything that went on in the North End that Pug didn’t know about? I doubt it. He checked with Mike Shea, who told him I’d been called to let Dan in. He checked with everybody on Walter Street who he knew stayed up late or got up early and might have seen something. One of them had-Howie Fay, Mack’s dad. He saw Dan’s body being moved.”
“And he never mentioned it to the police?”
“No, just to Pug. Pug told him to keep his mouth shut. Danny was already enough of an embarrassment to Pug, and to have word get out that his son had been murdered by his own family would have been the final humiliation.”
“His own family?”
“Wife. His own wife.”
I studied her, and she looked away. I said, “So that’s why you can’t cross Pug-and why you tried to stop Jack from crossing Pug. I take it Jack did not know the true circumstances of his father’s death. Otherwise he’d have been more careful in his dealings with Pug.”
She nodded, watching me.
“Where the hell did Pug Lenihan ever pick up two and a half million dollars anyway? Or might I guess without trying too hard?”
A grunt of sour laughter. “From 1926 until 1974 Pug handled the finances for the Boyle brothers. Kickbacks, bribes, loans, gifts-it was always ‘one for the party, one for me.’ The Boyles must have gotten theirs too. They didn’t die in big fancy houses in Latham, so you can probably assume that there are suitcases full of money under three other beds in Albany-or were. That’s where he kept it, you know, under his bed. Mrs. Clert must have known about it, and old Howie Fay. I found out from Danny, who worked for his dad when he was young, and Danny told me about it when he was drunk one time. And I made one terrible, terrible mistake.” Her eyes were wet now.
I said, “You told Jack.”
She nodded. “Last summer I told him. In October Jack took the money out of Pug’s house when he was working out there. He was going to give it back, he told me. To the people of Albany.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When Jack was out here last week to pick up the laundered money, I removed the cash and stuffed newspapers into the suitcases Jack was sending to you, and I did what Pug told me to do on the phone, which was to send the money to Mack Fay, who was Pug’s driver. Mack was supposed to deliver the money to Pug. If I had told Jack the truth about his father’s death and what Pug was doing, he’d have killed Pug. I know he would have.
He hated him enough to do it. We all did. Don’t you see now what an evil man Pug Lenihan is? And why you have to return the money to him?”
“No, I don’t. What can he do?”
“Why, he can have us arrested! And charged with murder! There’s no statute of limitations on homicide cases. Pug told me that and I know it’s true. We could go to prison!”
“Joan, listen to me. The Albany police know the whole story. They figured it out an hour after your husband’s body was found. Only by using the most tortured legal logic can you be charged with murder in any degree. No jury could be found that would convict you. And in any case, the cops knew
Dan Lenihan and are inclined to think of his death as a piece of ugly bad luck. It’s just another sad story out of the old North End and not a police matter. Once in a while Irish fatalism has its uses, and this is one of them.
“Maybe you’re going to feel just a little bit cheated by this, but Pug Lenihan has nothing on you or anyone else in your family. Nothing at all. I spoke with Ned Bowman about it, and he told me nothing Pug Lenihan says anymore is taken seriously by anybody downtown. He’s a has-been, a relic, a fondly regarded old cipher. He’ll get a big flowery tearful funeral, but in the meantime he has no appointments to make and presumably no cash that is legally disbursable, so he’s just a revered shell, a monument for the pigeons to crap on. Why is he so hot to get the two and a half million back anyway? What could he possibly be planning to spend it on?”
She said, “On his deathbed he’s going to hand it over to the archdiocese to reopen Immaculate Conception School.”
“Ah. A benefactor of institutions of character building.”
She was looking at me dazedly. “Are you telling me the truth? About-what the police said?”
“I am. I spoke with Ned Bowman about it this morning. You have nothing to worry about from the Albany police or DA. Nor does any other member of your family.”
She quickly stood up and began to pace back and forth. She walked over to a car parked at the edge of the lot and suddenly pounded a fist on the hood. Trembling, she came back to where I was seated on the grass, and I was afraid for an instant that she was going to pound her fist on me.
Raging and weeping, she cried, “He raped me! Before I left, he raped me.”
“Pug did?”
“He brags about it. On the phone he calls me a cheap slut-his last piece of ass but not his best. I let him do that. For eighteen years I’ve let him-” She collapsed.
After a long dinner, they drove me to the airport. At the boarding gate, Joan said, “I still don’t think I want to go back to Albany for a while. Maybe never.
But Corrine is coming out here in two weeks for a long visit. I’m so happy that she’s finally going to do it.”
“It’ll be good for both of you. She needs you. And there are some things she might need to talk about.”
She looked at me evenly. “Oh, no,” she said. “Corrine and I never talk about that.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“I’m nervous about this,” Timmy said.
“Maybe you should have hired an armored truck. What if were in an accident and this stuff goes flying? ‘MOTORISTS’ MOOLAH MANIA-Two Albany Men Held After Dollar Storm Causes 300-Car Thruway Pile-Up.’”
“We’ve got five suitcases and only three seat belts back there. What can I do? I’m driving very, very carefully.”
We passed the Woodstock exit on the way south. The sky was blackening in the west, but if the forecast was accurate we’d make the city before the snow began to fall. Anyway, New York was expecting rain, not the foot of snow predicted for Albany, where the newspaper said a group of Jamaican scientists was expected to arrive soon to study what life in the tropics would be like in the event of a worldwide nuclear winter. I figured in Albany the catastrophe would hardly be noticed.
Timmy said, “After all you’ve been through-and I’ve been through-I guess I am kind of sorry you couldn’t find a way to clean up the money and get it to Sim Kempelman. I’d have loved to watch the machine kicked around by its own misplaced left feet. They’d never have known what hit them.”
“Yes, they would. Larry Dooley would have explained it to them.”
“That would have been even better.”
“The millennium in Albany will have to wait a couple of years. It’s okay though. In a lot of ways I like Joan Lenihan’s idea ev
en better.”
“It’s just a shame though that we can’t make the presentation in Pug Lenihan’s name. Get his name in the Albany papers one last time.”
“Too risky. Questions would be asked, maybe investigations launched.
Also, the news might have finished Pug off-a stroke, or coronary, or something. What we’re doing is safer, surer, and a reasonable approximation of justice.”
“Are you sure their office is open on Saturday? We can’t just leave the suitcases on the sidewalk.”
“I phoned. Somebody’ll be there.”
Timmy became thoughtful for a couple of minutes, then said, “I am glad I decided to take a few weeks’ vacation, I really am. I had the time coming, so why not use it? But I’m still a little unclear about why you wanted to travel so far away. I mean, it’s awfully expensive. And it’s so far south too. Even though it’s summer down there, don’t you think it might be kind of chilly in Patagonia?”
“That’s just the thing. It’s off the beaten path. We’ll avoid the crowds of noisy nuclear families from New Jersey and spend time in a place uncontaminated by overdevelopment and so forth.”
He nodded but remained, I suspected, curious.
Our flight from JFK was due to leave at four, and we arrived on West Twenty-fourth Street just after one. No parking spaces were to be found in the vicinity of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis headquarters, so we double-parked in front of the building. This wasn’t going to take long.
We dragged the suitcases out of the car and toted them past the signs advertising the organization’s lobbying, social service and fund-raising efforts on behalf of AIDS victims. On the stairway we put on our ski masks, then hiked up to the reception office.
“This is not a holdup,” I told the startled chap behind the counter. “It’s an anonymous donation,”
Before he could speak, we dumped the suitcases, turned, and fled.
In Patagonia it snowed, so we left after a day and a half and flew up to the Yucatan, where we climbed up and down Mayan pyramids for ten days.
Timmy got sunstroke and I got dysentery, and the place was awfully hot.
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Ice Blues ds-3 Page 21