Irish Eyes

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Marie,” I said gently. “Look at me. Don’t worry about calling Chuckie right now. Think. Where would Corky go if he were in trouble? Where would he go, Marie?”

  “Why, he’d come home to me,” she said, smiling.

  I thought about those closed garage doors.

  “Marie, does Ila Jo Tice still live next door?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Her kids want her to move to Florida, because of her arthritis, but you know how Ila Jo is. Set in her ways.”

  The green address book was in the kitchen drawer with the warranties for the microwave and the dishwasher. I found Chuckie’s number, called and woke him up, suggested he might want to be with his mother. Then I called Ila Jo Tice and woke her up too. It took a few minutes to find Marie’s slippers. We walked next door, arm in arm, and I told Marie that Edna was fine, and that no, I wasn’t married, and yes, Maureen had a big job as a nurse, and my brothers were all right and Edna had three grandchildren.

  Ila Jo had shrunk, too. Or maybe I had gotten bigger.

  Once we had Marie settled, Mackey and Rakoczy followed me inside the Hanlons’ house, and I showed them the door from the kitchen into the garage. The Chrysler’s hood was still warm. Corky was slumped over in the front seat and there was a smear of blood on the driver’s side window. A bloodspattered cap was on the car seat.

  That cap. I’d seen it earlier in the day. The gray Chrysler too. Corky, the cap pulled down over his eyes, cruising past Memorial Oaks. Waiting. Waiting and watching for Deecie Styles to come out of her hidey-hole.

  I went back inside and closed the kitchen door. Marie wouldn’t like it if we tracked mud and blood all over the place.

  41

  Corky hadn’t had time for much of a farewell. The note was written on the back of an old envelope.

  “Marie. I’m sorry.”

  Mackey pulled a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket, slipped them on, picked up the gun, and looked at it.

  “Ragan was killed with a bullet from a nine millimeter,” he said.

  “You know many cops who don’t own one of these?” Rakoczy asked.

  The cash, mostly twenties and fifties, was rolled up in foillined empty paint cans on Corky’s workbench. Mackey fanned the bills out on the workbench. “Maybe ten, twelve thousand,” he said. “Not so much, really,” he said, looking down at the worn bills.

  “Not to you,” I pointed out. “But Corky was a sheriff’s deputy during the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. The most money he ever made was probably twenty-five thousand a year. He bought a house in the suburbs and put a kid through college on that. I don’t remember a time he didn’t work an extra job.”

  Rakoczy jerked his head toward the driveway. “That’s a brand-new Cadillac out there.”

  “For Marie,” I said. “I bet he paid cash for it, too. First time in his life.”

  “Last time in his life,” Mackey said dryly.

  They found the knife wrapped in a towel, shoved under the front seat of the Chrysler. The crime-scene technician held it out for us to see. “Blood and tissue on the blade,” he said. “This is good.”

  I thought of Deecie Styles, and of Faheem, and I gagged.

  “Some cop,” Mackey said, laughing at my discomfort.

  “Tonight? For once I’m proud to say I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”

  “What about the rest of them?” Rakoczy asked. “Boylan and those guys? And Viatkos?”

  “Corky Hanlon didn’t dream up this scheme all by himself,” I told Mackey. “Somebody recruited him. My money is on John Boylan.”

  “You really hate that guy, don’t you?” Mackey asked.

  “You think he’s not involved? You think he’s an innocent bystander in this whole deal?”

  “What I think doesn’t matter. I’ve got to have proof. Once I get that, I’ll knock Boylan’s fat mick ass in prison so fast his head will spin.”

  “What about Antjuan Wayne?” I asked. “Seems like he might have something interesting to say about all of this.”

  Mackey shrugged. “For now, it’s up to the feds. Antjuan’s lawyer wants to cut a deal. Wayne’s saying he found out about the ATM robberies after Ragan got drunk and bragged about the new Rolex he’d bought himself. Wayne claims all he wanted out of Ragan was a chance to work some of those big money security jobs. So he told Ragan unless the Shamrocks cut him in on the action, he’d turn them in. Ragan supposedly referred Wayne to Viatkos, and Viatkos, who didn’t give a shit about ethnic Irish loyalties, suggested Wayne might be useful working at some of the black nightclubs on the Southside. Wayne swears he only did one robbery, at a strip club down there. After that, he claims, he told Viatkos he was through.”

  “What does he know about the Budget Bottle Shop robbery?” I asked.

  “He won’t talk about that,” Mackey said, shaking his head. “And he’s definitely not talking about Ragan’s murder. Not unless the feds cut him a deal.”

  “What I’d like to know is, where’s the money coming from to pay David Kohn?” Rakoczy asked.

  “The African American Patrolmen’s Association,” Mackey said. “These folks take care of their own.”

  It was dawn by the time Mackey and his men finished their search of Corky Hanlon’s house. When I heard the thud of a newspaper hitting the driveway outside, I went out on the front porch and sat in a wooden rocking chair and watched my old neighborhood come to life.

  Cars flashed by. A yellow school bus rumbled past, stopping at the same corner where my sister and brothers and I waited for the bus. Three kids clambered aboard the bus, dressed in the unisex uniform of the moment, baggy jeans that drooped around their hips, T-shirts, and ball caps turned backward. Two of the kids were black, one white.

  Ours had been the house across the street, a split-level ranch much like the Hanlons’, except ours was red brick, with a dark blue front door. The spindly little azaleas my mother had tended reached nearly to the porch roof now, and the new owners had converted the garage to a den with a big bay window.

  I glanced over to the right and saw Marie Hanlon silhouetted in the window of Ila Jo Tice’s kitchen. She was standing there, drinking coffee, watching her house, and the invaders who’d taken possession of what used to be her life. Chuckie’s blue minivan was gone from her driveway.

  I stood and stretched, then walked across the lawn to the Tices’ house, feeling the crunch of the browned-out winter grass beneath my boots.

  Ila Jo met me at the front door. She wore a print blouse and dark slacks, her hair was neatly combed, fresh lipstick in place, even though the circles under her eyes told me she had not slept the night before.

  “Is it true?” she asked, her voice low. “Marie says Corky was in some kind of terrible trouble. He’d been drinking. That’s why he did it.”

  I didn’t answer at first. “Do you think she’d mind talking to me?”

  “She’s been talking all night,” Ila Jo said. “First to the detectives, then to me. She’s trying to make sense of things. Chuckie didn’t want to hear a word against his daddy, of course. But Marie says she knew Corky was in trouble.”

  “Julia?” Marie called from the other room. “Come on in, honey.”

  Her hair was still wrapped up in those curlers, but she’d exchanged the green bathrobe for a fuchsia warm-up suit Heather had fetched from the house the night before.

  Ila Jo poured me a cup of coffee and the three of us sat down at the kitchen table.

  “He was drunk,” Marie announced. “Corky never would have killed himself if he were sober. So he can still have a Catholic burial, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, unsure.

  She went on, the words pouring out, like a spigot that had been suddenly unstoppered. “Will it be in the papers, do you think? Chuckie is so upset. He doesn’t want the kids to know their Paw-Paw was in any trouble. He’s going to tell them it was an accident, that Paw-Paw was cleaning his gun and it went off.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,�
�� I said. I thought it was a terrible idea to lie to kids, but then I didn’t have any of my own, so I wasn’t an authority on such things.

  “Corky has been so upset,” Marie went on. “He didn’t sleep. He’d get up in the middle of the night, and go into his office or out to the garage, and he’d stay for hours, just tinkering and piddling. He was drinking more, too, with those Shamrock fellows. Seemed like they had a meeting every night. He knew I didn’t like that, but he didn’t care.”

  “Did he talk about the other members? John Boylan? A woman named Lisa Dugan?”

  Marie looked shocked. “A woman? They let a woman in? Corky told me it was just the boys. He talked about somebody named Johnny. And there was a Sean, and some other men.”

  “What was he tinkering with?” I asked.

  “Just things. He had his gun case out in the garage, and he liked to get his guns out and clean and oil them. He’d work on that old Chrysler of his. Or he’d go in his office and lock the door. We put a desk and filing cabinet in there for an office for Corky, after Chuckie got married and moved out.”

  “What made you think he was upset?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t himself,” Marie said, her eyes filling with tears. “I’d ask him a question, just a simple question, and he’d bite my head off, really cuss me out good. Then he’d turn around and cry like a baby and beg me to forgive him. ‘Forgive what?’ I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

  “How long had he been like that?”

  “A year, maybe? I thought it was because he was working those security jobs. He didn’t really like to work nights, but he said the money was too good to turn down. And he worked Sundays. He hadn’t been to Mass with me in months. You know that’s not like Corky. He said it was just temporary. Easy money, he called it. We were going to take the whole family on a cruise to Alaska. That’s what he was saving for.”

  “Where was he working?” I asked.

  “Different places,” Marie said. “A grocery store on Buford Highway. He didn’t like that place at all. The Vietnamese man who owned it wanted him to go out in the parking lot and bring in the shopping carts. He was hateful to Corky, but Corky said that wasn’t his job. Sometimes he worked at a liquor store in downtown Atlanta. He liked that better, because he mostly just sat at the counter and talked to the clerk.”

  “A liquor store? Was it the Budget Bottle Shop?”

  “Bottle Shop?” Marie wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. “That could be right. Near the new police station. He knew almost all the old-time officers. Not so many of the younger ones, though.”

  “Did he ever mention a clerk who worked there? A girl named Deecie?”

  “That’s the girl the detectives kept asking about,” Marie said, looking up from her coffee cup. “Was she a skinny colored girl? Had a baby?”

  “That’s right,” I said eagerly. “Did Corky work with her?”

  “Sometimes,” Marie said. “I told the detectives that. Later on, Corky told me she stole a lot of money from that store, and that Pete, that’s the owner, wanted to find her and make her give the money back.”

  “Did Pete ask Corky to help find her?”

  “She lived over in colored town,” Marie said. “You know how those people are. Won’t say a word to a white person. Terrible neighborhood. Corky said a little boy no bigger than our grandson Adam tried to sell him some of that dope.”

  Marie rambled on some more about Corky and his plans for their family cruise, and how she needed to talk to Father Drennen about funeral arrangements.

  She stopped talking suddenly. “Was he in pain, do you think?”

  “No,” I said. “It was very quick.”

  Some solace.

  I went home and took a long hot bath. My knees were scraped and my hip was bruised from the previous night’s acrobatics.

  Edna was talking on the phone when I came out of the bathroom into the den. She hung up, her face stricken. “That was Ila Jo Tice,” she said. “She told me about Corky Hanlon.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “Poor Marie. Ila Jo says the police asked Marie about that girl Deecie. Do they think Corky killed her?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Why? That foolish old drunk. He was harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  I wanted to tell her about my experience the night before, looking down the barrel of Corky’s 9-mm, about scrambling away from the bullets he intended to kill me. About the blood-stained knife Corky had drawn across Deecie Style’s neck. Instead I took a comb and tried to bring some order to my tangled mop of curls. I yanked and tugged and nearly combed myself bald.

  “Why?” Edna repeated.

  “Money,” I said. “It looks like some of those Shamrock Society guys were involved in an armed-robbery ring. They got jobs working security at these bars and restaurants so they could figure out how to stick up the owners when they went to make ATM deposits. Corky was involved. We don’t know for sure, but we think somebody else put him up to killing Deecie. She knew Corky because he worked at the liquor store with her sometimes. She probably thought the same thing we did, that he was a sweet old drunk. She was terrified of the cops, but not Corky. Good old Corky.”

  “Fooled us all,” Edna said.

  “Say, Ma,” I said, remembering something. “Was it Baby or Sister who told you about the run-in we had over there at Deecie’s apartment complex?”

  “Neither one,” she said.

  “Then how did you find out about it? I sure didn’t tell you.”

  “You had a call,” Edna said. “While you were gone. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. It was a man. He asked for you. When I said you were out, he laughed. Asked me if I knew where you were. That’s when he told me what had happened. About your nearly getting yourself killed over there.”

  “What man?” I asked. “He didn’t leave a name?”

  She shook her head. “He hung up before I could ask him anything else.”

  “Could it have been Corky?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. It was just a man. I was so upset about your taking the girls over there, I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”

  What if it had been Corky? I thought. So what if he’d been trying to warn me off. It didn’t change things. He was still a killer.

  I’d found the key in my jeans pocket, and I kept turning it over and over.

  “What’s that?” Edna wanted to know.

  “Something Deecie gave me,” I said. “Probably the thing that got her killed.”

  42

  William wore a disposable blue paper hospital gown, Faheem had a pale yellow gown and a green plastic pacifier.

  The room was quiet except for the creak of the rocking chair and the soft sucking noises made by Faheem, who was nestled against William’s chest.

  “This man who killed Deecie. He dead?” William asked.

  “Yes. He killed himself last night.”

  “And you say Deecie knew the dude?”

  “He worked as a security guard at the liquor store some nights. She probably thought he was a nice guy.”

  William shook his head. “Man, what kind of a man would do something like that? Kill a girl? Cut her throat?”

  “Fuckin’ evil man, that’s what kind,” Monique Bell said savagely. “White man like that, he think nothing about killing a little nigger girl. So what? One less nigger in this world, that’s good news.”

  “Hush up,” William ordered. “I don’t want Faheem hearing that talk. Don’t be saying the f-word. And I don’t want you saying the n-word in front of this boy either.”

  “He’s heard it before and he’ll hear it again,” Monique said, unabashed.

  “Not from me,” William vowed.

  “Sheeit,” Monique said, disgusted.

  “You asked about Corky Hanlon,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. He wasn’t always like that. He was a sheriff’s deputy. He had a wife, kids. He went to church and he coached baseball. He
took the neighborhood kids fishing. Somewhere, though, he changed. He started drinking more. He … went … bad.” It sounded lame, even to me.

  “Bad is right,” Monique muttered. She picked up the remote control from the table beside Faheem’s crib and clicked on the television.

  The noise filled the already cramped room, made the walls close in.

  “Turn that mess off,” William ordered. “I’m tryin’ to get this boy settled down.”

  Monique rolled her eyes, stood up, and gathered her cigarettes and lighter. “I’m goin’ outside for a smoke, if that’s all right with you,” she said, glaring at William.

  When she was gone, Faheem seemed to relax, snuggling against William’s chest. His eyelids fluttered a little, then closed.

  “Is he getting better?” I asked. “I mean, I assumed since they put him in a room, he’s feeling better.”

  William nodded. “Lot better. The doctor said maybe he can go home tomorrow.”

  “Home. Where?”

  He winced. “They talking about foster care. Since Deecie’s dead, and his real daddy gone, the social worker say that’s the best thing.”

  “What’s Monique have to say about that?”

  “She raised h—Cain,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “But she’s got to work. And now she’s got to move, too. The apartment manager told her this morning as soon as the cops get done, she got to get out. He’s gonna put her stuff out on the curb, starting today.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said. “It’s subsidized housing. They can’t just kick her out like that. Not without cause.”

  “Tell that to Monique. She’s going out looking for a place after she leaves here.”

  “How do you feel about putting Faheem in foster care?” I asked.

  “At first, I was real mad,” William admitted. “I mean, Faheem, he thinks I’m his daddy. He calls me daddy. But your friend, that Linda Nickells? She come over here last night to talk to me. She’s a real nice lady. She called a lawyer she knows, and this lawyer says she’ll help me try to get Faheem back. My mama’s got an extra room at her house, and she says she can watch Faheem while I’m at work. Soon as I can show I’m working steady and got a place for us to stay, the lawyer lady says she’ll help me get the papers to adopt Faheem.”