Black Diamond

by John F. Dobbyn

  We waited in silence for what seemed like an eternity until I heard shuffling footsteps approach from the other side. The door opened with a creak that bespoke the ancient origin of the church. There was just enough backlight from within to illuminate the bent form of an elderly man in a priest’s cassock.

  Mr. Kearney spoke first. “Seamus McGuiness sent us, Father. This is Michael Knight from the United States.”

  The only feature I could make out in the semidarkness was a nervous smile that creased the old priest’s face. His eyes scanned my face and then darted over my shoulder for a glimpse of anyone or anything that might have followed us. His voice seemed more energetic than his appearance.

  “Come in, come in, Mr. Knight. Quickly. You’re a sight I never thought I’d see.”

  I came in in a state of total bewilderment. He took my hand and shook it with unexpected sincerity. “Would ya come this way now?”

  This priest, whose footsteps earlier sounded like the labored trodding of old age, had an urgency when he walked ahead of me. He led me to a room to the left side of the altar and lit a dim light. “If you’d wait here, Mr. Knight. Sit, if you please.”

  I could wait, but I couldn’t sit. His burst of nervous energy had my own nerves on edge as well. I spent perhaps five minutes pacing, wondering what on earth would come through that door when he came back.

  When the latch on the door sounded its opening, I spun around. All I could make out was a large woman in what looked like the flowing black robes of a nun. I walked toward her with my eyes straining to make out the form of something in her arms.

  We were twenty feet apart, when she set down on the floor a tiny form that stood frozen for a moment. Then it seemed to move uncertainly in my direction. My mind refused to believe what every sense and instinct was screaming inside of me. Somehow, disbelief was suddenly shattered in both of us at the same moment. The two of us ran together so hard that we both just spun in circles when I clutched her in my arms. I held that tiny form so close that I was afraid of crushing it, until I realized that those little arms were holding me just as tightly. Between that face, with its nose burrowing into my cheek, and my own face there flowed an avalanche of tears that I couldn’t begin to control.

  I was almost afraid to open my eyes to find that it wasn’t true, but I knew the touch of that little cheek against mine so well that all doubt was overcome. I was actually standing there holding this angel that I thought was gone forever.

  When we could finally separate enough so that I could see her clearly, I realized that the tears were not all mine. When she called me Uncle Mike and said she wanted to see Mommy, I have no idea what kept my heart from bursting.

  It must have been five minutes before I realized that there were two others in the room. Even by that dull light, I could see that there was enough eye liquid to go four ways. The first to speak was the priest.

  “Mr. Knight, you’re a gift from God. Seamus said you’d be here, but I could only pray. And thank God for it. But time is precious now. Arrangements have been made. Sister Margaret, would you get Erin’s things ready?”

  Sister Margaret took Erin to get her ready. The priest, who introduced himself as Father Flaherty, asked me to sit for a minute. I did, and he pulled a chair up next to me.

  “I’ll be talking fast. We’ve made the reservations. You’ll be flying home with Erin, but not from Dublin Airport. That could be risky. Mr. Kearney will drive you to Shannon Airport. You’ll be there in time.”

  “Thank you, Father. I’m catching up as fast as I can. What about documents for Erin?”

  “We have them for you. We have an American passport for Erin and plane tickets for you both.”

  “I should cancel my tickets on the flight from Dublin.”

  “I wouldn’t. There are those I’d rather have think you’re going through with your original plans. It’s a small price to pay.”

  “That’s fine, Father. My mind’s spinning. How did—?”

  “It’s a long story, but I’ll be brief. There’s a gang from over here in Ireland, I’m ashamed to say, arranged for the kidnapping of Erin. I’m not sure why, but there it is. They brought her over here from America and kept her somewhere in Dublin.”

  “Was Seamus McGuiness involved, Father?”

  “He’s been associated with that crowd, I’m sorry to say it, from back in another time.”

  “You mean—”

  “During the Troubles. I have to be brief, Mr. Knight. When he heard that there was a little girl involved in their plans, he’d have no more of it. But he pretended to stay involved in their business. It was he who saw to it that she was well taken care of while she was with them. Then he heard that they were going to do away with her. God help us. That little angel.”

  I could see that his emotions were reaching the surface. I started to speak, but he held up a hand.

  “I have to finish while there’s time. Seamus won their confidence. He volunteered to do that terrible thing. They trusted him. He took Erin and brought her to us for safekeeping. Then he staged a burial with the undertaker. Empty coffin and all. It worked until this afternoon. That gang of cutthroats caught on. They forced the undertaker to tell them the truth. Then they went after Seamus. Whatever they did to him, he didn’t tell them she was with us. When they were through with him, they left him to die. He managed to call me. He said he’d do his best to get you to take her back to her mother.”

  “Thank God he got me to go along. He told me nothing.”

  “He couldn’t. He was afraid they’d get to you. He knew you couldn’t tell them what you didn’t know. For Erin’s sake.”

  “I understand. I should tell you that I think Seamus McGuiness is dead. His body is in the cottage where he met me.”

  Father Flaherty made the sign of the cross. “God rest that good man. When you have Erin back safe in her mother’s arms, say a prayer for his beautiful soul.”

  “I promise.”

  “Now on the other end. She’s not safe in Boston either. Is there somewhere you could take her?”

  When my benumbed mind had begun working again, I’d started thinking about that very problem. I had a possible solution. I used Father Flaherty’s phone to call Terry O’Brien. It was about dinnertime in Winthrop, Massachusetts. I hoped she’d be just getting home from work.

  It was a brief conversation, much like many brief conversations I’ve had with Terry when the more exotic aspects of my particular practice of law required it. Why she remained faithful to me when she could have had her pick of stable suitors who never get shot at or car bombed is a mystery to me.

  True to form, she listened to my incredible abbreviated tale about Erin and jumped in with her usual, “How can I help, Michael?”

  Once that part of the plan was nailed down, I made the call that I could not in my wildest dreams have predicted. I called Colleen. When I got that first full sentence out, she nearly came through the telephone line. Erin was back in the room in my arms, dressed and ready to travel. I put the receiver to her ear. When the two of them heard each other’s voices, the cries and the shouts from both ends were so loud that they practically didn’t need the phone.

  The flight from Shannon Airport went more smoothly than anything had since the day a hundred years ago when I watched that race at Suffolk Downs. Father Flaherty had arranged a separate seat for Erin, but she rode in my lap for the entire trip.

  When we landed in Boston, I rented a car and drove directly to the North Shore Shopping Mall in Peabody. Out of an abundance of caution in case she was still under surveillance, I had Colleen drive to the mall, go in one particular door of Nordstrom’s and pass through the store to go out another specific door. I was parked directly opposite that door with Erin.

  Caution or not, when Colleen came out of that door and Erin spotted her, no power on this earth could have stood in the way of either of them. They were locked in mutual hugs while the entire world disappeared around them. I thought that after the nig
ht before, Erin had no more tears left to release. I was wrong.

  They could not let go of each other, so I put my arms around both of them and moved them across to my rental car. Once inside, I drove by a circuitous route, again out of caution, to Terry’s house on Andrews Street on the shore in Winthrop. She had stayed home from work to be there to welcome them. She had even foreseen the needs of both of them for the essentials of clothing and such and had spent the morning shopping.

  I had a few minutes with Terry for an inadequate expression of my thanks for one more life-saving gesture. I made a renewal of my promise of a date free of the kind of violent interruptions that had punctuated, though apparently not slowed in the least, our falling in love.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The old Franklin Street digs looked like the gateway to Heaven. The hows and whys of Danny’s murder were still floating out of reach, and the gang of thugs who snatched Erin could still be out there planting bombs in the intestines of my Corvette. But I was on home turf. Given that, I felt I could take on the Chinese army.

  After calling off the exhumation, I flew direct to Mr. Devlin’s office and shut the door. I watched the breath pour out of him in relief when I told him about Erin. When he could speak, it was not to me, and I could hear “Thank you” in his whispered phrases.

  A new day had dawned for both of us. A whole new set of ground rules applied since we were no longer worried about bringing harm to Erin.

  We set to prioritizing the questions that needed rapid answers with a preliminary hearing to set a trial date for Hector Vasquez inexorably approaching.

  For a first move, Mr. D. got Billy Coyne on the line. Given the breach of security in the D.A.’s office that tipped Hector off to the indictment, Billy preferred to converse over a clam roll at a rustic outlying restaurant north of Boston on Route 1.

  We converged in separate cars on the Sea Witch just after two in the afternoon. Our back table was the only one occupied, and if anyone had foreseen our meeting there with a wiretap, they were beyond psychic.

  True to my promise, I filled Billy in on every detail of my stay in the land of his ancestors and Erin’s safe haven in Winthrop with the hope of inducing him to cut loose some new piece of the puzzle. He listened in rapt, but stony silence to the very end. The only flicker of reaction, other than a steady deepening of the lines in his forehead, came when I painted Seamus McGuiness as a mixed bag of decent and villainous qualities, and finally conveyed news of his murder.

  The silence continued through an interminable sipping of his coffee. Mr. D. finally leaned into his field of vision with an impersonation of Billy’s flat Boston accent. “And so, Lex and Michael, in view of your selfless generosity with information gathered at no small peril to life and limb, I’ll break my damned infuriating silence with a reciprocal sharing of information. How’s that for a start, Billy?”

  Billy just looked up at Mr. D. as if the sarcasm just floated over his head.

  “This is not a Yankee swap, Lex. The kid did all right. But he barely got his toes wet. I thank God about the little girl, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  That stunned the both of us, but Mr. D. had the Irish temper. The volume rose ten decibels and to hell with privacy.

  “Damn it to hell, Billy! How can you sit there and say—?”

  “Because I know what’s going on, and you don’t. Damn it yourself. Give me credit for having an ounce of brains and integrity. There’s more to this than a fixed race.”

  “Then for the love of God, man, open up. Who do you think you’re talking to, some sleaze-bag informant? This ‘kid’, as you like to call him, brought home the bacon, and laid it on your plate. That should earn him, and me, a certain amount of trust.”

  Billy looked straight ahead, but he leaned to within three inches of Mr. D.’s face and dropped the tone to a whisper. “Trust has no part in it. I’d trust you with my life, Lex. And that without a second thought.”

  That brought Mr. D. back to earth, and a confidential tone of voice. “Then what? Why is there no give here?”

  Billy’s elbows were on the table and his head in his hands. The struggle that was going on inside was practically visible. He spoke quietly through his hands. “This is big. It goes beyond friendship, trust, professional courtesy, whatever card you want to play. For what it’s worth, Michael, you’ve added a significant piece to the puzzle. You’ve opened the window another inch.”

  I was so shocked to be addressed by my name that I had trouble assimilating the rest of the sentence. Mr. D. had no such trouble.

  “Then at least tell us what that piece is. Can you give that much? We’re defending a murder charge here. A weak one, but nonetheless.”

  Billy sat straight up, looked at me and then Mr. D., and dropped his napkin on the table in front of him. He spoke to Mr. D., but it was for both of us.

  “This city of Boston, this city that you and I love could be in a hell of a fix.”

  “What—?”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Lex, or so help me God, I’ll be out that door and be happy that I kept my mouth shut.”

  Mr. D. backed off. Billy dropped his voice three pitches.

  “I’ll say this and no more. I walked in here believing that the worst I had to worry about was coming from Seamus McGuiness. Now I know that McGuiness was a bit player in a scene that tests my imagination. And that’s a bit jarring to say the least.”

  He just stood up and shook his head. I saw a man ten years older than the one who sat down to lunch with us walk out the door.

  So far, the afternoon had produced a plate of the most wicked good, in the vernacular, fried clams west of Ipswich, but precious little illumination about whatever it was that Billy Coyne was dreading. On the issue that involved us directly, I had a firm grip on the obvious—the peculiarities surrounding Black Diamond and his running of that race were tied directly to Danny’s murder. The fixing of that race could be laid at the least at the feet of Vince Scully. Anyone else involved was still in the category of conjecture and speculation. That suggested the need for a visit I could happily have avoided for a lifetime.

  By four in the afternoon, the Failte Pub in Southie was taking on a cluster of beer-slugging patrons for what the martini and cosmo set on State Street would call “Happy Hour.” The buzz and rumble of conversation, in an amalgam of workingclass Irish and working-class Southie accents, were rising steadily.

  I picked a spot where I could not be seen by anyone coming through the door from Boyle’s office and wedged my way to the bar. The suit and tie drew the odd glance, but it always ended in a smile and a nod. The bartender at my end was not the one I’d encountered in my first visit. Hence the amiable “What’s yours, Mack?”

  I leaned over the bar to be heard. “Sam Adams lager, and a question.”

  He cocked a sideways ear. “Yeah, Mack. What’s up?”

  “Vince Scully?”

  He checked the clock behind him while he drew the Sam Adams. “Should be in any time. He expectin’ ya?”

  I gave him a kind of slanting nod with a wink and a smile. It could have meant anything. He seemed to accept it as an affirmative and answered the call of other demands down the bar.

  I leaned sideways on the bar and nursed the pint with an eye on the entry. At about four thirty, I saw the familiar figure of Vince Scully start through the doorway, catch one glimpse of me, and back out of sight in the time it took for one sip of the Sam.

  While I was deciding whether or not to go after him on foot, I heard the ring of the bar phone through the din. The bartender grabbed it, listened, and said no more than a couple of words before hanging up. He leaned over the bar and beckoned me to do the same. He said in the lowest voice that could still be heard, “Mr. Scully called. He said meet him in the same place. You’d know.”

  “When?”

  “That’s the whole message, Mack.”

  I gave the OK sign and slugged down the last couple of inches of the Sam. Before I could move off
, the bartender grabbed my arm and pulled me close enough to whisper.

  “He had one last word. ‘Alone.’”

  Since Scully gave no time, I figured he could only mean right then. The drive from Southie to the last place we met, the church on Arch Street in Boston, took only a merciful twenty minutes just before rush hour. It was also before the assemblage of office workers for the five p.m. Mass.

  I found that same dark figure in the last pew on the right side of the church. I slid into the pew directly ahead of him. I kept my voice as low as possible.

  “Mr. Scully. You called.”

  There was a stress in his voice that replaced the tough cockiness I expected.

  “What the hell were you doin’ in the Failte?”

  “I felt like a Sam Adams.”

  I barely got the words out when he grabbed a bunch of the back of my shirt collar and straightened me up. The voice came out as a strained hiss.

  “Don’t get wise, you little bugger. What were you doin’ there?”

  “I came to talk to you.”

  There was a moment’s pause that put the starch back in my probably unfounded confidence.

  “What do you want, lawyer?”

  “I want to breathe, Scully. Get off my neck and you’ll hear it.” He let go of his grip, which gave me an even greater sense that I had more leverage than I thought.

  “So talk.”

  I deliberately paused and slowly turned to face him. “An even swap. I’ve got information I think you need. I want information in return. That’s the price.”

  “I’m listenin’.”

  “I think you got yourself in one hell of a bind. You’re tied to that kidnapping. At least as a lookout man. That’s enough. In for a penny is in for a pound. You’re up to your neck in it. That’s how the law works.”

  Silence. The last time we met, he told me that he thought Erin had been killed. That meant he thought he could be facing a murder charge. So be it.