Dead Irish

by John T Lescroart

  “Sent Lynne home early. Felt like tending some bar.”

  Hardy pulled up a stool in front of the spigots. Reaching over, he stopped the flow of the stout. The glass had gotten about two-thirds full.

  “What am I supposed to do with that now?” Moses asked, his weathered face creased with laugh lines that Hardy knew wouldn’t get much use in the next weeks. “You losing weight again? You stop drinking Guinness, my business goes to hell.”

  Hardy couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. He cleared his throat, took off his hat and put it on the bar. “You hear anything from Frannie tonight?”

  Moses started to answer. “You know, it’s funny, she called here maybe-” Stopping short. “What happened?”

  Hardy held up a hand. “She’s okay.”

  Moses let out a breath. Frannie was about ninety percent of everything he cared about. “What, then?”

  Hardy met his eyes. Okay, just say it, he told himself. But Moses asked. “Eddie okay? She called to see if he was here.”

  “We gotta go up there, Mose. Eddie’s dead.”

  Moses didn’t move. He squinted for a beat. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Dead?”

  Hardy turned on his stool. He slapped the bar. “Okay, guys, let’s suck ’em up,” he said. “We’re closing early.” He got up, went behind the bar and sat Moses down on the stool back there. He was hearing the beginnings of the usual drunks’ stupid moanings about how they needed last call and it wasn’t fair. He lifted the shillelagh, an end-knotted, two-foot length of dense Kentucky ash, from its hook under the counter and ducked back out front of the bar.

  He tapped the bar a couple of times, hard. Making sure he had their attention. “Don’t even suck ’em, then. We’re closed and you’re all outside. Now.”

  Everybody moved. Hardy had wielded the stick before, and most of them had seen it. He glanced at Moses. “Let’s go, buddy,” he said quietly. “Let’s go tell Frannie.”

  Chapter Three

  ALL TWELVE trucks were parked in their spots behind the squat building that was the office of Army Distributing.

  At a backboard against the building, a tall black man named Alphonse Page shot hoops. He was a rangy semi-youth, with a hair net wrapped around his head, his shirt off revealing a hairless and flat chest, and high-topped generic tennis shoes. His fatigue pants were doubled up at the cuffs, showing six or seven inches of shiny thoroughbred leg between his white socks and his knees.

  The backboard was set flush against the building, making lay-ups all but impossible, although if you swished the basket just right you could get a reasonable bounce back into the key and follow up with maybe an inside hook.

  A fading orange Datsun 510 pulled into the lot, around the trucks, then behind the building back by the wrapping shed. Alphonse stopped shooting and began dribbling, all his weight on his right foot, bouncing the ball slowly, about once a second, and waited for Linda Polk to appear from around the building, which she did in under a minute.

  He fell in next to her, dribbling, as she crossed the court.

  “Nobody much around,” he said.

  “Daddy’s not in?” A note of desperation, of hope long since abandoned.

  “Shi…”

  “But where’s Eddie?”

  “No show. He ain’t here by six, everybody went home.”

  She seemed to take in the information like someone who was almost certain they had a terminal disease finding out for sure. She stopped walking. The sun, atypically strong this early morning, was behind them, glaring off the building. “You mean nobody’s here? Nobody at all?”

  Alphonse, the basketball held easily against his hip with one hand, pointed his other hand in toward himself. “Hey, what am I?” he said.

  “No offense.”

  Alphonse offered her his white teeth. Except for some acne, his long, smooth face was not unattractive. His skin was very black, his nose was thin. His lips were sensually thick. There was a light sheen of sweat from the workout, and his longish hair, which Linda thought his worst feature, was held in by the net.

  “No offense,” Alphonse repeated.

  Linda sighed. “So what happened to the papers?”

  Alphonse began dribbling again, walking next to her. The papers weren’t his problem. “Ain’t too many anyway.”

  They rounded the building. In front of the warehouse, Linda could see the morning newspapers, still wrapped from their publishers. Without La Hora, they made a pitifully poor pile in front of the corrugated iron door.

  Linda drew up again and sighed. “So I guess that’s really it,” she said. She threw her head back, looking to the sky for help, and finding none, she moaned, “I wish Daddy’d come in.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m waiting for.”

  “And Eddie didn’t come in at all? Did he call?”

  Alphonse smiled again. “I don’t do the phones, sugar.”

  They had come to the glass front doors. Linda got out her keys and let them in. Alphonse followed her across the small entryway into her office, which was in front of her father’s. She went behind the desk and sat down.

  Alphonse dribbled on the linoleum floor. The sound of the ball bouncing, flat and harsh, was interrupted by the telephone ringing.

  “Maybe that’s Daddy,” Linda said.

  She answered with a hopeful “Army Distributing” and then said “Yes” a couple of times. When she hung up, the terminal illness had progressed.

  “That was the police,” she said, and Alphonse felt an emptiness suddenly appear in his stomach. “They want to come by here and ask some questions.”

  Alphonse plumped heavily, quickly, onto the arm of the leatherette sofa. “What about?”

  “They said Eddie…” She stopped.

  “What about Eddie?”

  “They said he’s, like, dead.” She fumbled at the desk for a couple of seconds, then reached into her purse for a cigarette. “I’d better call Daddy,” she said, mostly to herself.

  The cigarette was misshapen and half burned down. Alphonse nodded knowingly to himself as she lit the end and inhaled deeply, holding it in. He got up, crossed to the desk, and held out his hand.

  “Cops be comin’, they better not smell that.”

  Linda still held her breath in, handing him the joint. She let out a long slow stream of smoke. “So we’ll open the windows.”

  “You callin’ your daddy?”

  “I’d better,” she said.

  “Yeah, you better,” Alphonse said. “I gotta talk to him, too.”

  The police had already arrived at Frannie’s-one black-and-white and another supposedly unmarked Plymouth parked closely behind it. The light over the doorway was on. Hardy and Moses could see shadows moving in the corner window. Hardy had decided he wouldn’t go in. He left Moses and drove on home.

  He let himself into his house, pushing hard, swearing, against the stuck front door. The house had been cold. The only light came from the muted glow of the aquarium in his bedroom.

  He must have stared at the fish awhile, sitting on his bed, his Greek sailor’s hat pulled down and his coat collar up. He didn’t remember.

  All he knew was that now it was morning. Bright sunlight streaming through his bedroom window was falling across his face. The coat was bunched under and around him, the hat flattened under his neck.

  Hardy rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling. It came back to him in a flood-the vision of Eddie on his side three feet from some nondescript China Basin building, a black pool under him.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t Vietnam anymore. Eddie wasn’t into anything heavy. He was a regular guy, a kid, and this kind of stuff didn’t happen to regular guys.

  Before, sure. Hardy had lived for a while in that life-and-death reality, where things happened all the time. Vietnam, partnering with Glitsky on their beat, even his short time with the D.A.’s office. But he’d passed on all that. A long time ago.

  Now his life didn’t need any adr
enaline kick start. You cared too much and it came back and got you. Now you had your job- not your yuppie “career” that ate up your time and your insides -but someplace you went and did reasonable work and got paid and came home and forgot about. You had a couple of buddies- Moses and Pico did just fine. You drank a little and sometimes a little more, but it was mostly top-shelf goods or stout and you kept it under control.

  Everything else-ambition, love, commitment (whatever that meant)-was kid stuff. Kids like Eddie, maybe, who essentially didn’t get it the way Hardy thought he now finally got it. Hardy had been through it. The kid stuff elements weren’t real. They were crutches, blinders, to keep you from seeing. Hardy’d proved that by getting away from all of them and surviving. He got along. Okay, maybe he skimmed over the surface, but at least he avoided deep shoals, hidden reefs, monsters lurking in the depths.

  Sure, Diz, he thought, that’s why you went to Cabo, ’cause everything was so peachy, ’cause fulfillment was the very essence of your existence.

  “Goddamn it.” Hardy laid his arm up over his eyes, shielding the sun. “Goddamn it, Eddie.”

  The problem was, why was he feeling now like he had to do something, anything at all, to make some sense out of this? He shouldn’t have let Eddie, or Eddie and Frannie, get inside of him.

  He hadn’t seen it coming, so hadn’t been prepared for it. He’d thought he’d kept them outside enough-acquaintances, not friends.

  Eddie was gone, and nothing was going to change that.

  Still, something nudged him, hurting, almost like a cramp, or a screw turning in his heart.

  He moaned and sat up in bed.

  The beginning-

  Four and a half years before. New Year’s Eve. Frannie McGuire, still a few months shy of the legal twenty-one but damned if Hardy was going to card her.

  With madness raging all around and only swelling as the night wore on, Frannie nursed a few rum and Cokes at the bar. Hardy, in what he called his fun mode, pounded down everything in sight-beer, scotch, tequila, gin. Yahoo!

  And nobody to drive that party animal Hardy home except the quiet little redheaded very much younger sister of his boss Moses.

  Sitting in front of his house, then, the party over-really over -and enough juice in him to forget that all of his own kid stuff was in his past, that he didn’t care about any of that. Not coming on to her, but spilling his guts-the whole thing-and finally passing out, he guessed, without so much as kissing her or even trying, waking up a cold dawn, his arms around her waist, his head cradled in her lap on the front seat of his old Ford.

  And before he dropped her off back at her dorm, she said, “I hope I meet someone like you, Dismas, before life eats him up. I’d marry him in a minute.”

  She did.

  His name was Eddie Cochran, and after about three dates she appeared with him at the Shamrock. Took Hardy aside and whispered, “Remember what I said,” as though she’d only said one thing to him before in her life.

  But he’d known what she meant.

  One Sunday afternoon, a barbecue at Moses’s apartment, up on the roof looking over the Haight-Ashbury.

  “The what?” Hardy had asked. “Get out of here!”

  “Big Brothers.” Frannie telling Hardy.

  It wouldn’t have been like Eddie to mention it. He didn’t preach-he just did. “Hey, it’s one day a week, Diz,” Eddie had said in defense. “Gimme a break. Maybe do some good. Couldn’t hurt, anyway.”

  It sure could, Hardy thought. It could hurt you, you fool. Most likely your “little brother” will wind up taking a chip out of your heart. But he didn’t try to argue with Eddie-there wasn’t much arguing with Eddie on anything.

  But Hardy had said, “You think you can make a real difference, don’t you?”

  The two-hundred-watt smile that wasn’t a put-on. “I doubt it.”

  Except what got to Hardy was that, underneath it all, Eddie didn’t doubt it. He thought everything he did mattered a lot, that he personally really could make a difference. It reminded Hardy of the way he thought he used to be himself. Like Eddie. Long time ago.

  Rose stood at the top of the steps by the back door of the rectory. Father Dietrick was crossing the parking lot, head down, returning from bringing Father Cavanaugh the news.

  Bless them both, but it was going to be a hard month. June was always a hard month in San Francisco. It felt like God had given His promise in the spring and then taken it back. This morning Rose had thought it would stay bright and sunny, but already the fog was on them again.

  She wiped her hands on her apron. Her eyes came up to meet the young priest, questioning. He sighed. “Not too well,” he said. “He took off.”

  Though he wasn’t yet thirty, he mounted the stoop like an old man. Rose followed him inside.

  “Just took off?”

  He sat at the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him. Rose brought over a cup of coffee, three sugars and a drop of cream.

  “You know Father Cavanaugh,” he said, sipping the coffee. “There wasn’t an easy way to say it. He stood there getting out of his vestments and I thought I’d try to make him sit down, but as soon as I asked him to he knew something had happened…”

  “I’m sure you did what’s best, Father.”

  Father Dietrick sighed. “For a minute it was as though I’d hit him. Then he looked down at his hands, at the vestments, and just ripped the surplice off.”

  Rose made a note to go pick up the surplice. She’d just sew it back up and no one would be the wiser. She pulled up a chair next to Father and ventured a pat on his hand. “You know how he is, Father. He gets upset and it’s like the priest in him gives up for a minute. He has to let something go. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know. But maybe I should have gone with him.”

  Rose knew what Father Dietrick meant. Father Cavanaugh was a bit of a rogue priest. It was, she was sure, why he’d never made monsignor. Not that he’d ever done anything seriously wrong. Shoplifting that one time. Occasionally a little too much whiskey, but sure that was the good man’s weakness.

  “He’ll probably go scream at the ocean,” she said. And Lord, why shouldn’t he, losing someone close enough to be his own son? Father had a temper, but he was still a beautiful man, and a fine priest, all the more human for his faults, she thought. Let him scream at the ocean-he had a right. Jesus himself had a temper. Didn’t He throw the money changers out of the temple?

  But this-Eddie Cochran’s death-would not have loosed his temper. It would have broken his heart.

  “I know where he’s gone,” Rose said suddenly. “Over to see Erin.” The priest acted like he didn’t know who she was talking about. She sighed, exasperated. “Come now, Father, you’ve got to learn to see things. Erin Cochran, Eddie’s mother. He’ll need to be with her.”

  “You think so?”

  Rose bit her tongue and said only, “I’d bet so, Father.” She didn’t say what she also knew, that he’d need to be with her because he loved her.

  The water was a long way down, slate gray through the fog. Jim Cavanaugh, shivering, leaned out over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. His teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering, whether it was the cold or everything else. He should have grabbed a coat before rushing from the church, but he’d had to get out-get out now before he broke down in front of Dietrick.

  So it had happened. Eddie was dead.

  And Erin? What would become of Erin now?

  He knew he ought to go see her, but would she want to see him? Would she ever forgive him?

  Could he be a priest to the Cochran family ever again?

  Last week he had tried to kiss her, to tell her… It had been a temporary weakness, that was all, but it had made a breach between them.

  And now this, with Eddie.

  The family would need him. He would have to be there now for them all. The kiss, her rejection and his flash of anger at her, now they could all be forgotten.

 
She would forgive him. He could live again.

  He put his hands in his pockets and began walking back toward the tollbooths.

  Chapter Four

  HARDY HAD loved his Suzuki Samurai when he’d bought it, but since learning that it tended to roll in strong winds or on weak grades, he had renamed it the Seppuku. Now he parked it at the corner of Tenth and Lincoln. The fleeting sun that had gotten him up had long since disappeared. The fog, the June freeze, insinuated itself into every corner out here, swirling, gusting. Hardy pulled his pea coat up around his neck.

  Now he was staring at the sign over his place of employment, “The Little Shamrock, established in 1893.” He found himself marveling at man’s originality. The sign, cleverly, was shaped like a shamrock.

  The sign itself had been established in its spot over the swinging double doors in 1953, and the green paint had chipped enough over the years that the sign at night now read “le rock.” Maybe it was a good thing, Hardy reflected, the shape of the sign. If it had been shaped like Gibraltar, people would think the bar was named the rock, or some French word that meant rock. Le rock.

  Maybe they should paint the l to look like a capital letter. Maybe they should have the neon repaired altogether.

  But no, he thought, it fit the Shamrock. The bar wasn’t exactly run-down, but it didn’t place too much emphasis on fixing itself up. It was a neighborhood bar, and Moses McGuire, Hardy’s friend and boss, the owner of the place, didn’t believe in attracting an unwanted element (tourists) with too many ferns, video games or flashy signs. The Shamrock was an Irish dart bar, as nonpolitical as any of them got. It poured an honest (sometimes more than honest) shot and did a respectable business with locals, both male and female. Hardy had worked days there, Tuesday through Saturday, two to eight, for over seven years.

  Every night Hardy worked, Moses McGuire followed him from six until closing at two, and then until he’d rung out and cleaned up, sometimes having an after-hours drink. Sundays and Mondays a thirtyish raven-haired beauty named Lynne Leish with an eighteen-inch waist and more than twice that on either side worked double shifts and brought in a crowd of her own. But she was a good bartender, a pro at it. Moses McGuire would have no other kind.