by Catie Murphy
“Not much use for the proletariat,” Bourke said with a nod. “I won’t tell if you don’t. How are you holding up, Ms. MacDonald?”
“Please call me Saoirse. And I don’t know. Very badly, but as well as I can be. Have you—do you know anything?”
Bourke cast a sideways glance at Megan, who twitched an eyebrow in return, suddenly aware that they’d gotten sidetracked on the topic of their respective love lives and she hadn’t told him the rumor Niamh had shared with her. Bourke, apologetically, said, “Nothing yet” to Saoirse, who shuddered almost imperceptibly, but nodded.
“I didn’t think so. I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to think who would want to hurt Da, but I just don’t know. Not if Martin’s out of the picture.”
“Can I—I talked to Heather Walsh this morning, after you escaped Aibhilín,” Megan said, almost apologetically. “She said she didn’t know why you and Martin had grown apart, but she was afraid it had something to do with her. I don’t mean to be rude, but—”
“Of course it did,” Saoirse snapped. “She turned up like a gold digger and wrecked what Martin and I had. Nothing was ever the same after he started seeing her.” A few absurdly well-dressed people—princesses—glanced her way as her tone carried, and Paul invited her to the stairs with a small gesture. Megan, her heart racing with the thrill of uncovering information, kept the conversation going as they moved, saying, “She said Martin had been your coach. It must have been very difficult to have someone else come into that dynamic.”
Saoirse’s cheeks flushed. “You have no idea. All of a sudden he wanted her to come with us, wanted her to show me a swing, because she was a woman, she could teach me better—” They tucked just inside the top steps, Megan, the smallest by a considerable margin, still on deck and Paul a couple of steps down, so Saoirse wouldn’t feel crowded. She didn’t seem to notice, fire still building in her cheeks. “I’d no need for another coach. Martin was everything I wanted. But what he wanted mattered more, so there were three of us in it when all I wanted was himself and me. I thought she’d go away, but instead they got married! Him! And her! And herself four years older than myself, like some old hag, but sure he was a laughingstock for marrying her, half his age and all. Now if she’d been killed—” The color left her face in a heartbeat, leaving her the color of skim milk. “I never said that.”
Paul Bourke’s pale-blue gaze met Megan’s for a moment before returning to Saoirse’s, reassuringly. “Even gardaí say they’d kill someone like, in a moment of heat, and Mrs. Walsh is safe and sound. Don’t worry your head over it.”
Instead of worrying, the young woman slid down the staircase wall into a heap of stifled sobs. Bourke met Megan’s eyes again, a question in his arched eyebrows. She lifted her chin a bit, indicating she’d take Saoirse duty while he did whatever he had in mind. A brief smile of gratitude crossed his face, and he stepped past them both, returning to the upper deck and the princess party. Megan giggled unkindly at the thought, making Saoirse lift a dripping gaze to her, and Megan sat on the step below her, sliding an arm around the young woman’s lower back. “Nothing, I was just thinking, how like a guy to run away from the crying girl to go hang out with a bunch of rich princesses.”
Saoirse’s laugh emerged as the worst combination of crying and snorting possible and left her coughing and wiping her eyes. “Men are fecking awful, aren’t they?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know. They have their moments, and I’ve noticed women aren’t always sunshine and light either. So tell me, do you want to get off this boat or to raid Carmen’s extensive liquor cabinet?”
“I could stand a drink,” Saoirse admitted through sniffles. Megan nodded and helped her to her feet, then paused, astonished, to examine Saoirse’s face.
“Whoever did your makeup must have thought you were a real mermaid. I’ve never seen mascara that actually stayed put when someone cried.”
“You’ve never spent enough money on mascara, then.”
“That,” Megan agreed, “is almost certainly true. Okay, is the best booze up there, or down there?”
“Probably up there, but I don’t think I can face Carmen right now. If she thinks I’ve been crying, she’ll be so extra about it.”
“In Ms. de la Fuente’s defense,” Megan said as they made their way down the stairs, “I think extra is her only method of engaging with the world.” They threaded through the crowd in the second-deck living area, making their way to a bar appointed with a more expensive array of whiskeys than Megan had seen in any tony hotel in Dublin. The bartender, a young man with long black hair, sharp features, and a black suit highlighted by a green vest scarf with gold pointing, poured them each a generous couple fingers of a whiskey literally as old as Megan was. She turned away, drink in hand, with his costume itching at the back of her mind, then spun back with an objection on her lips as it finally struck her. He, clearly prepared for this, said, “Disney owns Marvel. He’s a Disney prince.”
Megan, gleefully, said, “He’s the shapeshifting mother of Sleipnir, too, so I think that makes him a Disney princess.”
The kid grinned broadly. “I was hoping somebody would catch that.”
Megan laughed, raised a toast to him, sipped the whiskey, and said, “Wow,” aloud, reverently. “Holy cow. This is amazing. Saoirse, did you—”
Saoirse slammed her whiskey and tapped the bar for another. Megan murmured, “Wow” again in a totally different tone, and offered Saoirse her own tumbler. “I can’t drink it all anyway. I have to drive the company car back to the garage tonight. I can drop you at home on the way, if you want to get obliterated.”
The green-and-black-clad bartender intervened, plucking Megan’s crystal glass from her hand and pouring it deftly into a silver flask that he topped off before screwing it shut and handing it back to Megan with a wink. At virtually the same time, another tumbler appeared at Saoirse’s fingertips, this one containing amber liquid that Megan suspected cost a great deal less than the drink Saoirse had just totally failed to appreciate. It was no doubt still more expensive than any apartment Megan had ever rented, but she supposed to the obscenely wealthy, these things were relative.
“No, it’s fine, I can get home on my own,” Saoirse muttered. “You should go find your detective boyfriend before he hooks up with a princess.” She threw back the second drink as quickly as the first and looked suddenly cross-eyed.
“Give me your phone,” ordered Megan. Saoirse did, and Megan programmed her own phone number into it. “You call me if you need anything, all right, Saoirse? Do you hear me?”
“All right already.” Saoirse had a third drink in her before she got her phone back in her aquamarine fishtail skirt’s cleverly hidden pocket: the scales disguised it perfectly, without destroying the skirt’s line. Megan backed off, giving her the room she needed to get very, very drunk. She had no intention of leaving the girl to fend for herself once the alcohol had rendered her numb, but neither would she get in the way. It wouldn’t help. Megan knew that, and maybe Saoirse did, too. It wouldn’t help, but she might need it in the moment anyway, and sometimes people just needed to be given the space to do something stupid, safely.
She bumped into Paul Bourke as she backed away, and he murmured, “Oh good, I was looking for you. I don’t know what you wanted to talk about over pints tonight, but I wonder if it had anything to do with the ladies upstairs being quite sure Martin Walsh broke that young woman’s heart.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A minute later, having rousted a pair of lovebirds out of an extremely comfortable chair meant for people of intimate acquaintance, Megan muttered, “In my misbegotten youth we would have called Walsh ‘skeevy,’” as she and Bourke tried to take over the seat without wrapping up in each other.
“Was your youth misbegotten?”
“Not really, but leave a girl her illusions.” The lovebirds, both more than a little intoxicated, blinked at Megan with the air of young people who didn’t know what to do next. She s
uggested, “Find a room?” and they, clearly stunned and delighted by the idea, clasped hands and disappeared from sight. Megan tried again to sit with, or beside, Paul, but it was clear that entangled was really the only way for two people to share the seat. After a moment she managed to mostly balance on the arm. She could keep an eye on Saoirse from there, but had to lean, with an arm on the chair’s back, to talk with the detective. It put her carefully taped cleavage indiscreetly near his nose, and there was no real way to keep her leg from brushing, or crossing, his. Their attempts at conversation kept dissolving into self-conscious laughter, until Megan finally said, “Honestly, we’re adults, we can do this without giggling.”
“Apparently we can’t.” Paul Bourke offered one of his brilliant grins, and Megan felt heat crawl down her breastbone to warm her unexpectedly.
“We can. Anyway, their story corroborates Niamh’s rumor—”
“How does she know the goss on everyone in Dublin?” he interrupted, mystified. “If the guards had half her contacts . . . !”
“Focus, Paul. If it’s true . . .” Megan looked toward Saoirse, who had stopped drinking and now slumped at the bar, her red hair pooling across its gleaming walnut surface. “Honestly, I think it is true. She said earlier today that her last boyfriend had married what she thought was the bit on the side. And she was furious when we asked her about Heather.”
“Do you think Heather knows?”
“I don’t. I think she’d think it was skeevy, too. But what I can’t see is how it gets us any closer to figuring out who killed Lou.”
“‘Us’?” Bourke sounded amused, and Megan looked down her nose at him.
“Don’t tell me there’s not an ‘us’ in this, copper. Assistant Intern Associate Detective, remember?”
“Accidental Investigative Detective Adviser, but you’re not.” Bourke grew serious a moment. “Never mind the hell I’d catch for letting a civilian help with an investigation, Megan. Things got dangerous with the Darr case. You could have been killed, and that would have been on me.”
“It certainly would not have been. I make my own decisions.”
“That may be true in cold hard fact, but it would do nothing to alleviate the guilt I would feel if something happened to you. You’re not my assistant.”
Megan tilted her chin toward the ceiling—the recessed lights glowed through refracting lenses she was certain were lead crystal—and sighed. “All right, fine. We’re a couple of mates out for a pint to discuss a bit of gossip about the death of a man whose daughter we both know. And I still don’t see how knowing about this affair helps. If Martin had ended up dead and Lou was the murderer, I’d get that, but it’s not what happened.”
Bourke shifted, making her balance change, and she caught herself before falling into his lap. “Or if Martin was dead and herself over there the killer, it’d be an open-and-shut case, but that’s not it either. There’s something we’re—I’m—missing yet.”
“Had Lou any enemies you’ve learned about?”
“I could never tell you.”
“I hate that I can’t tell if that means no, yes, or maybe. Separated by a common language.” Megan craned her neck to look at Saoirse again. She’d been approached by a tallish man in a suit that somehow seemed more like Bourke’s than the tuxedos worn by other men that evening: expensive, but not incomprehensibly so. Saoirse shrugged the man off and he turned away, not looking particularly miffed, and Megan frowned. “I’ve seen him before. I think he was at the game this morning.”
Bourke followed her gaze. “Ah, he’s a . . . banker, or something. I remember his face from the news when the banking crisis hit in the Aughts, though I wouldn’t know his name. He wasn’t a big man in the scandal. I’d say he came out of it well enough, if he’s here. People must still trust him with their money.”
“Do people go to golf tourna . . .” Megan stopped herself and laughed. “To rub elbows with money. As if there’s not a whole culture of business deals done over golf games. Do you think he knew Lou?”
“Or her own self.” Paul nodded toward Saoirse, which brought his nose into Megan’s cleavage again. “Sorry so.”
Megan waved it off. “There’s nothing to be done unless I actually sit on your lap. Which might be less awkward, except I’ve never really liked sitting on laps. I feel like I’ll squish them.”
“You? You’re only a wee small thing.”
“But in my mind I’m an Amazon.”
“I don’t see why the one has to be exclusive to the other.” Paul, however, didn’t try to convince her to sit on his lap, for which Megan was grateful. She was comparatively small, and men often thought that meant she should be happy to take an available lap. Some people were. Megan wasn’t one of them.
“Tell you what.” Megan twisted to look at Saoirse again. “I’ll drive her home—wait, do you have a car, or can I give you a ride?”
Bourke snorted suppressed laughter so hard it sounded painful. Megan looked back at him, eyebrows furled in confusion, and found his blue eyes watering with censored amusement as his face slowly turned hot pink from his collar up. She stared at him, bewildered, then suddenly realized her error and half-shouted, “Lift! Can I give you a lift!”
A number of people looked around at her as Bourke gave up all hope of containing himself and threw his head back in breathless, body-shaking laughter. After a minute he wiped his eyes, peeked at Megan, found her waiting it out with hot-cheeked resignation, and burst into laughter again, this time shifting to put his head down on the arm of the chair as he guffawed into it. Megan fixed her gaze on an opposite wall and, with the long-suffering patience of an American pretending she failed to find the humor in using a locally insinuation-laden phrase, said, “Right after I moved here I took a yoga class, but I’d forgotten part of my workout gear. One of the teachers had extra things with her, and I said to her, ‘Can I borrow your pants?’”
Bourke’s shriek of laughter nearly drowned out the end of Megan’s story, although she continued, stoically, to tell it. “The poor woman gaped, turned the hottest shade of red I’d ever seen on a human face, and gasped, ‘Do you mean me trousers?’ back at me.” Paul’s long legs kicked straight out and he kicked his feet against the deck floor like a little kid before collapsing in a boneless, laughing heap in the chair. All of Carmen’s very wealthy friends were staring openly at them by now, and even Saoirse had lifted her head from the bar to look blearily in their direction. Megan, in sepulchral tones, said, “I’ve never gone anywhere without yoga trousers since,” and Paul, weeping with laughter, wiped his eyes again and tried to gather his dignity.
“What did you say before, separated by a common language? Oh, God, that was funny.”
Megan, maintaining the morose tone, said, “I’m glad somebody thought so,” and finally broke, giggling, too. “Honestly, on some level I knew about the pants thing, but ‘give you a ride’ is totally Irish. We don’t put any weight on that in the States. It must be our car culture or something.”
“I need neither a lift nor a ride,” Bourke assured her, his grin still bright and broad. “Go on with you, give Saoirse a lift, and keep your nose out of police business.”
“I will if police business keeps its nose out of mine.” Megan, smiling, disentangled herself from the laughing detective and made her way to Saoirse’s side. The young woman had lost interest in their hysterics and drooped at the bar again, tracing patterns in the circle left by condensing water on the whiskey tumbler. The black-and-green-clad bartender stood a few feet away, clutching a bar towel and twitching toward Saoirse’s little mess every time it looked as though she might be done mucking with it. “Come on,” Megan said to her. “Let’s get you home, and let that poor man wipe the bar down. He’s going to have a heart attack there.”
“There’s nothing for me at home,” Saoirse mumbled dismally, but she let Megan lever her off the bar-stool. The bartender swept in and wiped down the counter, his shoulders relaxing visibly as the reflective smear of
water disappeared. Megan chortled and waved at him with her fingertips as she maneuvered Saoirse toward the spiraling staircase at the other end of the room, and thought their escape nearly complete when Carmen appeared in a flurry of flowing silk and long, loose hair.
“Megan! You are not leaving already? And with my mermaid instead of your prince? I heard you were very laughing, the two of you. A lover who makes you laugh is important.”
Megan opened her mouth and shut it again on a correction about the nature of her relationship with Bourke. “I wish I could stay, but I have to be up early to drive another client, Ms. de la Fuente. Thank you for the invitation, and I’ll have this”—she gestured at her outrageous suit—”dry-cleaned and returned to you.”
A mixture of insult and amusement creased Carmen’s face, and she indicated her body shape relative to Megan’s. “It would never fit me. It’s a gift for you to wear when you drive me. You’re very handsome in your black uniform,” she promised Megan, “but it lacks a certain . . .”
A flighty motion of her hand indicated the only phrase that could finish that sentence, and Megan, a little wryly, said, “Je ne sais quoi?”
“But of course,” Carmen said with a smile. “All right, very well. And you may bring my mermaid home, too, as she looks a little seasick, poor dear.” For all her theatrical capriciousness, a trace of concern showed in Carmen’s brown eyes. “She has had very hard days. If she needs anything, Megahn, call me.” The deliberate drawing-out of the second vowel in Megan’s name returned, as if Carmen had realized she was showing a bit of soft underbelly and decided she’d better return to her usual outrageous personality.
Megan, surprised, thought maybe she had never really seen anything beyond Carmen’s shrill voice and sharp laugh. There was, perhaps, more kindness in her than she had imagined. She said, “I will,” and Carmen nodded, satisfied, as she ascended the stairs again.