Bobby Doyle’s wife was another matter. Deirdre Doyle—Dee Dee, as she was referred to on the back page of the Sunday Independent, usually in conjunction with the term fun-loving—was one of the standing army of society hostesses happy to support the careers of any number of interior decorators, fashion designers, restaurateurs and luxury hoteliers, and always available to march beneath the standard of whatever charity was in vogue. Autism, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and breast cancer had all benefited from her patronage, with extravagant balls and gala opera and theater nights attended by fluting hostesses of indeterminate age and their wealthy husbands. I had been at one myself a few months back, escorting Donna Nugent, Bobby Doyle’s PR flack and an ex—well, girlfriend would be overstating it—let’s just say when I lived in L.A. and she worked in San Francisco, there was a time when I saw a lot of her, and she of me.
Donna was very driven, too driven for intimacy, but she had healthy appetites, and always had two or three guys going at the same time. Back then I used to enjoy being one of them. Now I found I didn’t anymore. After the ball, which was for third-world debt, and the lost weekend that followed the ball, which was on Bobby Doyle’s tab in a city-center hotel whose name and location I forget, if I ever knew, it had taken me a week to get my balance back, and longer to move my jaw without its aching.
Donna was on the TV the following Monday spinning for the Independence Bridge and looking bright of eye and pink of cheek, like she’d just completed a marathon, which I suppose she had, and like she was ready for another, which was more than could be said for me. I stopped answering her calls, but she hadn’t stopped calling, suggesting nights she was free and hotels that would suit, maybe the same hotel. I’m not a saint, and Donna Nugent was thirty-four and very easy on the eye, but unless I bumped into her in a bar and she heaved me over her shoulder, it wasn’t going to happen. I still felt a little empty and lost after seeing her, as if there had been a terrible incident in the street and nobody had noticed it but me. But since she was my only connection to Bobby Doyle, I was going to have to call Donna Nugent back.
I was going to come up against Jack Cullen in the course of the fallout from Paul Delaney’s murder. So before I tackled Cullen and Doyle, I reckoned I should first eliminate George Halligan from the frame, especially if he was going to die at any moment. And since Steve Owen lived in the same direction, I decided it would be worthwhile paying him a call as well.
CHAPTER 8
My father was a mechanic, and he left a racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S, not exactly to me, but in the garage of my house. My friend Tommy Owens knocked the car into shape for me, and helps keep it on the road. It’s a big beast of a thing, nicknamed the Amazon, the kind of car a child would draw, and it attracts more attention than is sensible for someone who does the kind of work I do, but I somehow got it into my head that driving it helped pay some filial debt I owed, and although I couldn’t tell you exactly what that debt was, I felt the obscure obligation to go on repaying it, and probably always will.
St. Bonaventure’s Nursing Home was a large neo-Gothic villa complete with conical towers and stained-glass windows, set in a quiet square on the west side of Seafield within sound of the rising tide. The last time I had been here, it was to see a dying man who knew the secrets surrounding my father’s death, and although he tried not to give them away he told me more than he intended. I marched briskly past the nun at reception as if I knew where I was going. I remembered the wood paneling, the stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross and how they were placed about the floors in no particular order; I climbed the stairs past number four, the meeting with the Virgin, and arrived at number nine, the third fall.
Most deaths through illness and old age take place between two and six A.M., and I guess that makes sense, since they’re the hours when even the hardiest can feel a little fragile, when life’s trivial snags are transformed into thorns of steel. But if I was in a nursing home, I think the deathly afternoon torpor would finish me off: the distant sound of afternoon television, the mutter and hiss of respectful visitors, the sour smell of decay and hopelessness and bleach.
There was a steroid-swollen man with a red face and a ponytail and a large leather jacket that looked like a boat cover standing guard outside George’s room. That’s how I knew it was George’s room.
“George asked to see me,” I said. “Ed Loy.”
Steroid Man stood dead still and expressionless for a minute, maybe more, until I began to wonder if he was deaf, or if I was. Then he inclined his face toward me.
“What you say, Fred?” he said in an Eastern European accent.
“Ed. Edward Loy.”
He turned and went into the room and shut the door. I could hear George’s familiar bark inside, followed by a salvo of coughing. I suppose it sounded worse now he was dying.
Steroid Man reappeared.
“No George don’t ask to see you,” he said.
I nodded, and after a suitable pause, he stood aside.
“Yes George ask to see you.”
I nodded again, and went in before I had to endure another of those silences. George Halligan was sitting up in bed wearing black silk pajamas with a red stripe and a red cravat with a black stripe watching horse racing on TV with the sound down. He had newspapers and a bottle of Roses lime cordial on a tray in front of him. He didn’t look significantly different to how he had looked before, and I wondered how long he had been ill: his face was the usual clenched fist of clefts and creases; the dark mustache, now flecked with gray like the swept-back hair, overwhelmed the narrow mouth; the black eyes glowed like wet coals.
“The fuck do you want?” he growled.
“Thought I’d come and pay my respects,” I said.
“Don’t be such a fucking swish,” he said. “Whatever you want, you can stay and have a drink. No one is coming to visit me except cunts. I’m only in here so I could get away from them crowding around the house, muttering and wailing. And I don’t like to drink on me own. Standards. You keep them or you’re fucked. Rinse them glasses like a good man.”
I took two glasses across the room to the sink and rinsed them with liquid soap and hot and then cold water. When I brought them back to George, he pointed to the wooden nightstand by his bed. Inside there was a bottle of Tanqueray gin and a black-leather-and-chrome-clad casket full of ice.
“No lemons?” I said.
“It’d be limes, you fucking smart aleck. Gibsons. Gin and Roses’ lime juice.”
“Gimlets.”
“That’s what I said. Are you going to mix them, or stand there like a fucking woman, like a fucking wife, in fact, and let the ice melt?”
I mixed them. But I couldn’t let it go.
“You said Gibsons, not gimlets.”
“The fucking difference? Sláinte.”
“These are gimlets. Gibsons are martinis with pickled onions instead of olives.”
George’s eyes flickered with mockery, and his face congealed into a leer of derision.
“Pickled onions?”
“Americans call them cocktail onions.”
“As if that made them any better. Fuck sake, pickled onions. That’s…that’s disgusting, so it is. What was that about, the war, was it?”
“I think it was a banker, some businessman anyway, wanted to treat clients to a three-martini lunch and get them good and drunk while remaining sober himself. So he told the waiter to keep the drinks coming, but to put water instead of gin in his glass, and to give him an onion rather an olive so he could pick his drink out. Then when he has them good and oiled, he slides in for the kill. You know the drill, George.”
George Halligan had once drugged the orange juice and champagne he was serving me and left me to have my head kicked in by his brother Podge. He smiled now, maybe with nostalgia for better days, maybe with approval of an artfully devised stratagem, probably with a mixture of the two.
“Well. Business is business. If you’re not winning, the
other cunt is.”
His eyes slid across to the horse race unfolding on the TV screen with a look of mild displeasure, as if watching racing was a duty and a chore and no one should expect him to take any pleasure in it. George owned horses now, and took his place in the parade ring among the cashmere and Barbour and fur. A long way from the poverty of Fagan’s Villas or the Somerton Flats.
“So. To what do I owe the pleasure? You’re hardly here for the good of me health,” George said.
“I’m sorry to hear you’re ill, George,” I said, and found that I meant it. Having led a crime family specializing in drug dealing and extortion, having presided over the savage beatings and murders that go with that particular terrain, largely inflicted by his brother Podge, having made a fortune from a life of crime, George Halligan had now gone legit, or as good as, give or take his still being George. The monies had been laundered without the Criminal Assets Bureau ever managing to bring a claim, Podge was in jail, and George had moved into property and racehorses, like any respectable Irish businessman.
He was still a ruthless Irishman, and had very nearly been the death of me on more than one occasion, and would think nothing of giving the order moments after I left his bedside today if he thought I was a threat to his interests. But we had grown up together, and that counted for something; for all that I despised him, I felt a curious bond with him. Maybe it was history; maybe it was the devil I knew: behind him came a line of feral, coked-up twenty-year-olds who’d stab you for spilling their drinks. Whatever it was, I knew I’d regret his passing, just as he would regret mine. The difference being, I wouldn’t be the cause of his death, unless his hands were at my throat and it was him or me.
“If you don’t have your health,” George said, and flashed me something that looked like more than guts, something that looked like the expression I’d seen on his face after his unfancied horse had swept the field, or his favorite had mysteriously lost and George had bet against him, something that looked suspiciously like glee. Not quite the look I associated with terminal cancer. Maybe his meds were kicking in.
“Now Ed. What can I do you for? Nice to share a drink, but I have races here, obligations,” George said, agitating the newspapers on the tray in front of him and waving a nicotine-stained hand toward the TV screen, then disintegrating spontaneously in an avalanche of coughing that sounded like a brick house collapsing unexpectedly. As his face reddened and his neck corded and pulsed beneath the force of the racking tremors, the yellowed hand shifted its angle and pointed unsteadily but determinedly toward his drink. I brought the glowing green liquid to his mouth and, by sheer force of will it seemed, he stopped coughing long enough to down the gimlet. He spluttered a little, and then there was silence, punctuated first by George tapping his platinum signet ring against the glass and handing it to me to be refilled, which I did, and then by his voice, the bass notes reedy with strain.
“Show’s over. Speak up, or get to fuck,” he said, and swallowed half the fresh drink in one.
“Brian Fogarty,” I said. “A tax inspector, murdered in his home fifteen odd years ago. Remember it? They sent the wife’s lover down. Steve Owen. Then Owen got off on appeal. Conviction unsafe. But the Guards said they weren’t looking for anyone else.”
George’s face flexed in the way he had, with all the features disappearing into a mask of crevices and folds, a mask somewhere between “don’t understand” and “don’t give a fuck.” It didn’t look quite as menacing without the wreath of smoke that used to accompany it, but it was far from inviting.
“This tax inspector had three people in his sights. Ill-gotten gains with no apparent income or tax history. Bit of a pioneer he was, back in those pre-CAB days. Anyway George, one of his targets was you.”
George Halligan’s face relaxed into a beam of pleasure, as if this was the most delightful thing I could have said to him.
“What are you now, Dave Donnelly’s fucking errand boy, running around doing his cold-case business for him? Fuck sake Ed, I thought you had some fucking pride. Nineteen ninety-three?”
“’Ninety-one.”
“Same difference. The dawn of fucking time.”
“And this is not Dave’s case. They knocked it back, in fact.”
“And I’m supposed to…fuck, I barely had a pot to piss in back then, I know the country was still on its uppers, but Revenue would want to have been desperate to think I could do much for them. Who are the others?”
That’s right, George, why don’t I give you my bank details as well, since we’re such good friends.
“Were you in the IRA back then, George?”
“The IRA? What kind of fucking madman are you here? Do bank jobs and then give the money to some other bunch of fucks so they can blow up a load of nordie fucks we couldn’t give a fuck about in the name of Ireland? That IRA? You must be fucking joking. I mean, I love my country same as anyone but fuck off, you know?”
“You’d’ve come across them over the years. Protection money. Concerned Parents Against Drugs.”
“So what? Is there an IRA connection? Some Provo took out a tax inspector. The mourners reached double figures. Just.”
George ventured a laugh at his own witticism, but it curdled into another hacking cough. He came out of it gasping for breath, his eyes streaming. The door opened and Steroid Man looked in. George shook his head and waved him out, picked up his drink and then put it down again untouched. It looked like I was running out of time. Sometimes you have to give to get back.
“One of the others he was targeting was Jack Cullen,” I said.
A tremor flickered across George Halligan’s face at the mention of Jack Cullen’s name, whether of simple recognition or particular memory, I couldn’t divine, flickered across his face and was gone like smoke across the face of the sky, leaving not a trace behind.
“Poor old Jack has his troubles, doesn’t he?” George said solemnly, in feigned sympathy, like an oul’ one savoring a neighbor’s illness and imminent demise. “Everyone’s heard about Lamp Comerford. And did Cullen have something to do with the Delaney fella?”
George’s eyes narrowed, as if seeing me for the first time.
“That’s Dessie’s brother, of course. Are you involved in that as well? Think the bould Dessimond will be making a return visit to these shores to view the body?”
Dessie Delaney had run with Podge Halligan for a while, and had been ready to give evidence against Podge for murder during the Dawson case, the first I worked after I came back from L.A. Podge had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, after pressure from his brothers, and Dessie’s evidence was never heard, but his willingness to give it had not been forgotten or forgiven, as was clear from the expression on George Halligan’s face. I looked at the wolflike smile that didn’t reach the cold black eyes and saw instantly the lack of compunction with which he would give the order for a hit on Dessie Delaney, and the relatively mild sense of satisfaction it would give him, and any kind of imagined fellow feeling with George Halligan instantly evaporated.
“I wouldn’t know, George. But I can tell you this: if Dessie reappears and he runs into grief from anyone connected to the Halligans, you’ll pay for it.”
George smiled.
“Big talk, Ed. Not your style. Must be the gin. Good value, aren’t they, the oul’ gimlets? Slap you right up there. Small man in a fast car. To be honest with you, I doubt I’ll see Easter, Ed. But it’s sound of you not to count me out. Now…I’m trying to remember this fucker Fogarty.”
“He lived in Sandymount. And he had the book on you George: details of the apartments there in Blackrock, and the two town houses in Castlehill.”
“From little acorns,” George said, his eyes glittering. “See we got the golf-club site turned over and all the properties sold off the plans before the recent, eh, unpleasantness.”
“The recent unpleasantness” was a long-awaited downturn in Dublin’s bloated property market, with prices correcting themselves by 10 percent or
melting down by 30 to 50, depending on which economist you listened to. Before any of that happened, values had been soaring, which was when George extorted the old Castlehill Golf Club site from Dawson Construction and arranged for it to be rezoned for high-density development by bribing local politicians, and murdering one of them. So Irish business as usual then. Apart maybe from the murder, and the extortion. And maybe not.
The development had a make-your-mind-up name like Castlehill Grange Manor, and hoardings around the site featured enormous photographs of square-jawed men in sports cars and lingerie-clad women in bedrooms the size of football fields. The crass vulgarity of this “luxury branding” was the subject of much derision in the serious newspapers, but the whole development was sold before a sod was turned, which just went to prove that a gangster like George Halligan had a better grasp of the new Irish rich than the high-minded commentariat of the Irish Times.
“But I probably didn’t come here to listen to you boast, George,” I said.
“I can’t take it with me though, Ed,” George said in an uncertain voice, and looked at me through widened eyes, as if I were some combination of priest and accountant who just might be able to give him advice to the contrary. He stared down at his nicotine-stained fingers, clasped together on the tray as if in prayer, and nodded, as if what he was about to say was difficult, but for the best.
All the Dead Voices Page 6