by Ken Bruen
His voice already getting really slow, he asked, “See… what… I… mean?”
The day of the murder Angela kissed Dillon goodbye before she went to work, knowing it would be the last time she’d see him before Deirdre Fisher was dead. Dillon was in the dining area, sitting on a chair reading his book.
He held up a finger, said, “Listen to this.” Then in his richest, most gorgeous voice intoned, “This is from Shunryu Suzuki… What do you want enlightenment for?… You may not like it.”
She didn’t get it, said, “I don’t get it.”
He laughed, said, “Tis few do.”
Dillon said he loved New York, called it his twisted city, and she wanted to add, “Yeah, matches your lips,” but never did because she was afraid of his temper. Although Dillon had never hit her, she thought he was the type who could. Violence simmered in him. It was never turned off – just went dormant sometimes.
“I’m going to take this town by the balls,” he said, and she said, “Good luck.”
He stood, produced a green emerald brooch, and said, “Back home, on Paddy’s day, we have the wearing of the green.” He pinned it on her breast, hurting her a little, but she didn’t even flinch. She figured, like all his countrymen, he was truly fucked up and wouldn’t give a shit anyway.
He put on a pair of very snazzy shades and said, “One time I was in Lizzie Bordello’s in Dublin. U2 were holding court and I nicked Bono’s glasses, you think I look like him?”
He looked like a horse’s ass but being a woman, she said, “You kidding? You make Bono look like Shrek.”
Dillon smiled, said, “Hold that thought, allanna.”
Eight
I had to give the guy credit. He didn’t back down easy. I’d have to watch him closely. His type could sneak right up and bite you in the ass.
REED FARREL COLEMAN, The James Deans
Sixteen years ago, when he got back from Desert Storm, Bobby took an acting class at some place downtown on Broadway. He didn’t want to be an actor – no, that pussy Hamlet, Streetcar, Death of a Whatever shit wasn’t for him. He just wanted to learn how to play a role, make people know right away he was the type of guy who didn’t take shit from nobody.
He knew he needed some acting lessons big time when he pulled his first bank job, out at a Chase in Astoria. He went up to the teller, slid the note under the window, and stood there, trying to look like a guy who didn’t fuck around, like Ray Liotta in Something Wild. But the girl looked at him, just for a second, like, Are you for real? Bobby thought he even saw her start to smile for a second there, like she didn’t believe a guy looked like him could pull a bank job. His crew got away with the cash, no problem, but the girl’s reaction still annoyed the hell out of Bobby. He wanted instant respect.
Before the next job, Bobby watched Scarface like a dozen times, trying to get the whole Pacino badass shit down cold. He thought he had it, but when he went up to the window at the bank the same thing happened. He thought it must be nerves or something. When he pulled smaller jobs, at grocery stores and supermarkets, it was even worse. He’d whip out his piece, say, “This is a stick up,” and his mouth would be dry and the words would come out sounding all wimpy.
So he figured enough was enough and he signed up for the acting class. He felt out of place around all of the artsy-fartsy types, like he was crashing a party or something. He would’ve bailed but the teacher was this hot-looking little thing named Isabella. She’d been in something on Broadway and was in some soap opera for a couple of years. She knew her shit about acting and she gave great head too. Bobby stopped going to the class and got private lessons from Isabella. When she wasn’t going down on him, she was teaching him how to emote, use stuff from his past, shit like that. Sometimes they’d read lines from plays to each other. It took him a while, but he finally got good at it. Isabella said he should start auditioning and that’s when he knew it was time to dump her. From then on, whenever he pulled a job all he had to do was look at the fuckers and they knew what was going down. He probably could’ve robbed anyplace he wanted without ever showing a weapon.
Since Bobby got paralyzed he hadn’t tried to act at all. But he knew that for what he had planned with Victor at the hotel, he was gonna have to have his acting skills sharp as a fucking tack or the plan would have zero chance of working.
Bobby opened his old Riverside Shakespeare book to a random scene in Macbeth. He took a couple of minutes to memorize the line, then he looked in the mirror, trying to look tough, like DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and said, “Come to my woman’s breast and take my milk for gall you murthering ministers, wherever in your sightless substance you seek peace…”
He tossed the book away, realizing this was a waste of his fucking time. He still had the magic.
The townhouse was a lot bigger than Dillon had expected. He knew it would be big, but he didn’t know it would be like big big, like a feckin’ palace. There were three floors and the whole place was filled with all kinds of rich, ugly shite – couches, tables, chairs, mirrors, God-ugly paintings on the wall. Dillon couldn’t wait till he was livin’ in this gaff – then he’d make some serious changes. First he was going throw out all this ugly shite. Then he was going to put in a Shebeen bar downstairs with one of them giant screen TVs – like the kind they had in the sports bars – and then he was going to have his own feckin’ club – call it A Touch of the Green. Every night he’d be blasting the Pogues with his own private DJ, and he’d invite all his boyos to come down, and they’d rock the place with jigs and reels. He might even teach some bollix how to play the spoons. He already knew how to play the odds.
Dillon still couldn’t believe that all this was going be his just for killing some rich old lady. Jesus, he’d offed fookers for the price of a pint.
It was funny – before all this started he was getting tired of Angela and was thinking about dumping her when she came to him with this great idea. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke – it all seemed too easy. She said all she’d have to do was “fool around” with the guy and get him to want to marry her. The funny thing was, he didn’t care if she took him on and ten of his friends, just as long as he got the dosh.
Dillon didn’t know why Angela thought that they were going to get married someday. Yeah, he had considered asking her to marry him, but what the hell did that mean? He’d asked lots of colleens to marry him – it was just something fellahs said to women to make them shut up. He’d a supply of silver Claddagh rings. Angela also wanted to have kids, buy a house in the country or some shite. Dillon had three kids already, that he knew about, and he had four separate wallets with snaps of them. And if he really wanted to have a wife and kids, he would’ve stayed with Siobhan, the girl he got pregnant in Ballymun. There was woman, fiery and able to sink the jar like a good un and cook, she made black pudding to die for.
The only reason he was with Angela at all was because of the way she was in that pub that night. Usually, he liked dumb women, but Angela looked good there, giving mouth to the ugly bartender. He’d been planning to take off after a couple of weeks, but he couldn’t afford rent yet, so he figured he’d live with her till he found a decent score.
He told Angela a lot of lies, afraid if she knew the truth she’d throw him out. He told her he was a scout for the RA, thinking sussing out schemes for the boyos was a patriotic ideal she’d understand. The truth was he was what is known in Ireland as a Prov-een. When the Irish want to diminish something, somebody, they add een, making it diminutive. You call a man a man-een, you’re calling him a schmuck, a wanna-be. The Ra had many guys who hung on the fringes, did off jobs for The Boyos but were never seriously considered part of The Movement. They were mainly cannon fodder, used and discarded and if they managed a big score, no problem. Dillon had actually made some hits for the Boyos, but it didn’t get him inside, not in the inner circles where it mattered. He knew where they hung out in New York but he didn’t know what the level of operations was. They kept him on a s
trictly need-to-know basis and a loose demented cannon like Dillon, he needed to know precious little.
There were two other other things he lied to Angela about – one was big, the other small. The small thing was herpes. He said he’d caught it off her, but the truth was he’d caught that shite a long time ago, back in the eighties. The big lie was that he’d only killed a few people before. Actually, he’d killed at least seventeen people – some memorable, some not. Like all his race, Dillon was deeply superstitious. All that rain, it warped the mind, added a mountain of church guilt. What you got was seriously fucked up head cases or as they called them in Dublin, “head-a-balls,” which doesn’t translate in any language yet discovered.
The one that gave Dillon pause was a tinker he’d killed, not that the guy didn’t need killing; he did, but you didn’t want to mess with a clan who knew a thing or two about curses. It was in Galway, a city of serious rain, it poured down with intent and it was personal. That town had swans and tinkers, and culling both seemed like a civic duty. There’d been a case in the place, swans and tinkers being killed, and the citizens were outraged about, yep, the swans. Dillon had been drenched, lashed with wet, the week of the Galway Races. Fookit, he’d lost a packet on a sure-fire favorite and then in Garavans the tinker had snuck up on him, doing the con, going, “How are ye, are ye winning, isn’t it fierce weather?” Like that. The whole blarneyed nine and then lifted Dillon’s wallet, headed out of the pub. Dillon caught him at the canal, rummaging through the wallet, so intent on his fecking larceny, he never heard Dillon coming. A quick look around, no one about, then Dillon gave him the bar treatment, a Galway specialty. You zing the guy’s head off the metal bars lining the canal for as long as it takes to say a decade of the rosary, keeping the deal religious. Thing is, you murder a tinker, you’re cursed – they have a way of finding out who did the deed and then damn you and all that belongs to you. Still gave Dillon a tremor when he thought about it.
Todd, that was the tinker’s name. Dillon would like to have lots of things in his past changed, and knowing the tinker’s name topped the list. Knowing the name made it, like, personal and shite. You didn’t ever want murder to be personal, you might start to take it serious, think it meant something. He felt the karma would come down the pike and hit him when he least expected it. He never shared this hibby jibby with anyone, but Todd was engraved in whatever passed for his heart forever. Wasn’t that curse enough?
Oh, yeah, and he’d committed one murder in New York. He cracked some guy’s head open against a brick wall because the guy had that plummy Brit accent.
Dillon had only gotten busted for one of his murders – a guy he’d cut for looking at his woman – and did five hard years in Portlaoise, where they kept the Republican prisoners. His first day, he’d found the Zen book on his bunk, left by the previous inmate. He’d picked it up from boredom and got gradually hooked. Hooked up quickly too with the Provo guys and got his arse covered though again, he wasn’t privy to any of their councils. They’d look out for him but didn’t feel any great need to stretch it.
He continued to ransack the downstairs of the townhouse. It was fun turning things over, destroying shite. A rush like when he was in his teens and the Brits came at them with rubber bullets, those suckers bounced off you, you hurt like a pagan for a week. The first time they got an armored car on fire and got the soldiers to crawl out, crying for their mammies, with a sniper picking the fookers off, one by British one. Fook, it got him hard just remembering. Those Brit accents, sounding polite even as they roared. Dillon was convinced then that he was one of the real Boyos. In fact, there was hardly a kid in the city who hadn’t been bounced by a rubber bullet – it came with the territory.
When everything on the ground floor looked good and wrecked, he went upstairs. He found the bedroom Max had told him about, which was filled with more ugly old shite that looked like rubbish his grandmother would buy. Everything was made of wood and they had some fierce gold-colored bed. Dillon imagined what the room was going to look like when he put mirrors on the ceiling, put down some reed mats, like home, get one of them waterbeds, and put a jacuzzi in the bathroom. He broke all the glass stuff from on top of the dresser and night table and dumped all the clothes out of the drawers. Then he found the old lady’s jewelry box and stuck all the diamond- and gold-looking stuff into a plastic bag he found.
On the wall, there were some pictures of a fat old lady – he guessed this was Mrs. Fisher. There was also a picture of Max Fisher standing on a beach somewhere. He looked the same as he did at the pizzeria and in Modell’s, except he had a bit more hair. Dillon couldn’t wait till he got to do Max too. He knew the plan was to wait for him to die but, fook, Dillon wanted to get on with his life. He hated that old bollix, the way he was sitting there in his posh suit. He reminded Dillon of Fr. Malachy, his principal in school. Dillon never understood what the priest was saying but nothing about school made much sense to Dillon. The only reason he went was to keep the Social Services away. But Fr. Malachy was always calling him down to his office for whatever, or suspending him. Malachy thought he was God almighty because he was the principal and could do whatever he wanted. Now Max Fisher was trying to pull that same deal, trying to call all the shots, but this time Dillon named the jig – now he was the man in charge and Max Fisher was the little Irish schoolkid sitting on the other side of the desk. When Dillon had heard that Malachy died in real agony from cancer Dillon had muttered, hope he died roaring.
Dillon heard voices and a noise – a key turning in a lock. He took out the. 38 he’d gotten from the Boyos’ place down off the Bowery. When he’d showed up there, they’d rolled their eyes, like, here’s this mad annoying fook again. But he had money to pay for the piece and, what the hell, he’d brought some decent bottle of Jameson. They treated him like a younger brother who’s always hanging on but is never, like ever, going to be in the gang.
Heading downstairs, he remembered what the Yanks said and used it now like a prayer, albeit a dark one, Lock n load.
Nine
Straight to Hell
THE CLASH
As Max was feeling for the light switch, he slipped and fell. The way he landed and the way the pain was shooting down his side, he thought he’d broken his hip. When he started to get up he realized he was okay, but wondered what the cold wet stuff on his hands was.
For some reason, this whole time he’d been planning the murder, Max hadn’t thought about what the body would look like. He thought Deirdre would die like people in old westerns died. In those movies you never saw any blood – the cowboys and Indians just fell off their horses and lay there nice and still. In modern movies, they always showed the blood squirting out of people’s heads, gushing from their mouths. Max always thought it was just Hollywood exaggerating things, but now he realized that those movies didn’t show half of the real horror.
If it weren’t for her short, blond hair, Max might not have recognized Deirdre at all. Blood had leaked from her head into a twoor three-foot-wide puddle around her body. Although she lay on her back, Max could barely make out the features of her face. He thought, This can’t be fuckin’ happening. It was part of a dream – soon the alarm clock would ring and he’d wake up. When a ringing actually started, Max thought he really had been sleeping. But then he realized that the noise wasn’t an alarm clock, it was the burglar alarm. Shit, it nearly gave him a coronary and his heart was in bad enough shape.
After he shut off the alarm, he glanced back at the scene, shocked again by all the blood. When he realized that the wormy stuff on the wall was part of Deirdre’s brain he started to throw up. No one told him it was going to be so… gross.
He went into the downstairs bathroom where he took off his blood-covered clothes and washed the blood off his hands. He still couldn’t believe this was happening. What the hell had he been thinking, planning this murder like some kind of lunatic you read about in the tabloids? The Daily News today had two twins on the front page, the one
s who’d murdered their parents, with the screaming headline, TWIN KILLING. Wait till they got hold of this.
He wondered if he was insane. He didn’t think he was insane, but what the hell did that mean? Insane people never think they’re insane so how did he know if he was insane or not? He certainly felt fevered and needed a drink – a whole bar of them.
He had to get a grip. He could worry if he was insane or not later – right now he had to do what he was supposed to do or he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, possibly on death row.
Trying not to look at Deirdre’s body, he walked back out toward the front of the house. He went upstairs to make sure it was ransacked like the downstairs was. He saw that most of Deirdre’s jewelry was gone, then noticed that Popeye had broken the jar that held his kidney stones. Now he’d have to get on his knees later and look for the fucking things. In the center of the room was a turd. Max squinted at it, truly horrified. Somehow it even seemed worse than the murder, that the animal went to the toilet on his carpet. How fucked up was that? Murder was one thing but this, this was a goddamn liberty.
He went back downstairs, just to make sure everything was right before he called the police. He was about to dial 911 when he saw something that made him freeze. Sticking out from the hallway into the living room was another pair of feet – a woman’s feet in high heels. He thought, Jeez, it’s just like The Wizard of Oz. Then nausea returned fast as he inched toward the hallway, shaking, covering his mouth. When he saw the second blood puddle he gagged, coughing up stomach acid. He couldn’t recognize this woman’s face either, but something about her body looked familiar. She was heavyset, wearing jeans and a light blue sweater. Her long curly brown hair looked familiar, too, like…
Fuck, it was Stacy Goldenberg – his niece, on Deirdre’s side. She was living in New York, going to school at Columbia. Sometimes she and Deirdre went shopping together and, for some reason, she must have come home with her tonight.