Death on the Green

by Catie Murphy

  Neither, after a couple of minutes’ search, did she have Paul’s business card. “Heather? I’m going to go out—” She limped back to the living room as she spoke, although the pain of jabbing her foot was fading. “I’m going to go out to the office to borrow somebody’s old phone until I can get a new one. Can I get you anything? I have spare keys now anyway, I got them from Brian.” As if, she thought, Heather Walsh knew who Brian was, and clarified, “My dog sitter. Will you be okay?”

  “Go ahead.” Heather, still laden with puppies, hadn’t moved from the kitchen floor. Megan waggled the spare keys and dropped them on the table so Heather would know where they were, and trotted downstairs, heading for the garage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There were no fewer than five spare phones in one of the office drawers and, Megan knew, at least that many more again in one of the garage toolboxes. One of the office phones had a few percentage points of battery left, so she put her SIM into that one and sat on the floor behind the counter next to an outlet, where she could plug in the phone but not be in the public eye. Although, it being after nine p.m., she probably didn’t have to worry all that much about being interrupted by clients needing to suddenly hire a car.

  It took a minute to convince the phone to see her network, but once it did, she called Paul, her eyes closed as she listened to his phone ring. Voice mail picked up and she said, “Hi, this is Megan. Heather and Lou were having an affair and Heather thinks Martin could have paid Oliver Collins to kill Lou, then killed Collins to tidy up loose ends. Call me back.” She hung up, thought about how she’d just said all that as if it was perfectly normal, and indulged in a slightly manic giggle.

  The phone rang, startling her. More surprising was that it was Saoirse calling, not Paul. She thumbed it on and brought it to her ear. “Hey, Saoirse. Is everything . . .” Her face screwed up as she finished, “. . . okay? I mean . . .”

  “Oh, it’s grand.” Saoirse sounded so dry it bordered on drunkenness. “Martin had the balls to come back in after you left him—you left him! I don’t know whether to kill you or kiss you.”

  “He smashed my phone,” Megan said, almost mildly. “I don’t have to drive someone I consider a physical threat to my well-being.”

  “Nah, I don’t blame you so. Wait. We’re talking on the phone.”

  “I got the SIM and put it in a burner. Are you okay?”

  “I’ve no idea. The wake was banjanxed. Nobody wanted to talk about Da anymore, except to ask what he would have thought. Or tell me. Or tell one another. And then Martin came back in in a fury and got madder still when the whole crowd gave him the cold shoulder, so he was shouting how he’d done nothing wrong, and the lads told him he should leave, and he threw a punch at somebody, and so anyway someone called the guards to come and take him away.”

  “What? He’s in custody?”

  Megan straightened, then slumped again at Saoirse’s, “Nah. He went off and called a taxi when he saw they meant it. I’d say things went back to normal after that, but they didn’t. Everyone who came in heard about it all before they got past the threshold, so there I was being stared at more than sympathized with, until my girlfriends decided I’d had enough and threw everybody out a little while ago. A wake’s meant to go all night.” Her voice cracked.

  “I am so sorry.” Megan sighed. “Is it any use saying you should get a good night’s sleep so you can face tomorrow on its own terms?”

  “None at all.” Saoirse sounded almost cheerful in that moment, though it faded mercurially. “I’ll try, though. My friend Ellen, she’s come over and is going to stand in for me tomorrow at the planning board hearing. I might—it’s at half one and the funeral is at three. I might try . . .”

  “That’s mental.” Megan got up, forgetting her phone was plugged in, and nearly jerked it out of her hand when the cord reached its maximum length. “Look, let me . . . can you hang on for a second?”

  “Sure so.”

  “Thanks. Be right back.” She put the phone on the counter and stuck her head into the garage. “Hey, is Orla here?”

  Somebody shouted, “Orla lives here,” and somebody else said, “She does so, but she’s not, why? Everything all right, Megan?”

  “It’s grand.” Megan closed the office door and collected the phone again. “My boss has canceled the Walshes’ contract, so I’m theoretically not driving anybody tomorrow. I might be able to borrow a car and drive you so you can put in an appearance at the hearing and get to the funeral on time.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t. I’ll call you in the morning to let you know if I can manage it, all right?”

  “Why are you so fecking nice?”

  Megan laughed. “You can think of me as being a terrible busybody, if that helps. I love to know what’s going on. And I like people,” she said a little more seriously. “I mean, what are we here for, if not to try to help one another?”

  “You’re a sound one, Megan Malone.” Saoirse sighed hugely. “I’m a ruin. Maybe I will try to sleep.”

  “Good girl. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Megan hung up, saw she had three missed calls from Detective Bourke, and waited thirty seconds. The phone rang again and she answered, smiling wryly as she said, “And I hardly even told you the good stuff.”

  “There’s more?” Bourke sounded like a man trying to rearrange his priorities.

  Megan, trying to decide where to start, ended up saying, “There is too much. Let me sum up,” in her best Inigo Montoya accent. Bourke snorted, amused, and Megan said, “Saoirse admitted to the affair with Martin, which Heather had no idea about. Heather has, I think, left Martin for good—she’s at my apartment right now—and Martin smashed my phone in a temper tantrum.”

  She could imagine, almost see, the detective’s body language change to something cold and still as he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Megan promised. “Seriously, I’m fine. I thought he might have a go at me when I was picking up my phone, so I was pretty adrenaline spiky, but he was either not that dumb or isn’t that violent, and you know I can take care of myself.”

  “I do.” Bourke’s voice retained the steadiness of restrained anger and concern. “You got another phone?”

  “A burner from the office. I had to call you and didn’t have your card anymore.”

  “Okay. Tell me what you know.”

  Megan related what Heather had told her—affairs, finances, and all—ending with, “She maxed out the cash withdrawals from their credit cards, so I don’t think she’s going back, but if you look into their finances to see if there’s a connection between Walsh and Collins, you’ll see that.”

  “You said she’s at your apartment? I’d really like to talk to her.”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t mind if you come over. Should I warn her?”

  Paul said, “No,” judiciously. “I never like to give people time to think about their story, if I can help it.”

  “That’s a horrible, paranoid way to live.”

  “See, you don’t really want to be an assistant detective.” She could hear his smile. “You just want to be the neighborhood gossip.”

  “I’d be okay with being the neighborhood gossip with fewer murders to gossip about. Did you figure out anything about Collins yet?” Megan tilted the phone to check its battery. At 24 percent, it would probably get her home while they talked. She unplugged it, got off the floor, and locked the office door behind her as she left.

  “He was a parsimonious little shite,” Bourke replied rather grandly.

  Megan laughed. “A what? Pars—I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say that out loud before. It’s like . . . stingy, right? But he dressed really well.” The September evening air felt fresh and cleansing, though the office was hardly stifling. It was the day, Megan thought; all of its events carried a lot of emotional weight, and the cool evening lifted some of that away.

  “He did, but to hear everyone t
alk, clothes would be all he spent his money on. Someone else always paid when he went out or he wouldn’t go. It served him well enough, I’d say. He wasn’t well-liked, but he was conceded to do his job well. Very well, apparently. Membership in the club rose by forty percent in the three years he managed it, and it’s not an inexpensive prospect to join that club. We’re talking over ten thousand in fees.”

  “To play golf?” Megan’s voice skirled high in offense, drawing the attention of a group of teens passing her. They laughed, the too-loud raucous, judging laughter that could sometimes cut through even the most confident adult’s defenses. Megan rolled her eyes once they were past, though their laughter rattled the air a while longer.

  “That’s just to join the club. There are greens fees on top of that.”

  “I’m in the wrong line of work. I should have been born rich.”

  “Sure and it’s a moral failing that you weren’t. You could always marry her own self.”

  “Her own—oh, Carmen?” Megan laughed. “I don’t know if I want to be rich that badly.”

  “There’s your problem,” Bourke said philosophically. “Your priorities are skewed.”

  “Maybe. On the other hand, I’m not the one who ended up dead in a sandbank this morning, so maybe I’m doing all right.” Megan reached her apartment’s street-level door and did the necessary rituals, punching in the key code, digging her keys from her pocket, stabbing herself beneath the fingernail all the way into the nailbed with a key as she tried to fish them out. The last didn’t often happen, but her nails were still Done, thanks to—or because of, at least—Carmen de la Fuente. It was the little things like that which kept her from having long nails all the time. “How long will it take you to get here?”

  “I’m on my way now. Twenty minutes, maybe.”

  “Okay. You didn’t tell me if you got anything on Collins, though.” Megan banged the outside door shut with her butt. Her bum, in Irish parlance. Once she’d injured her knee, told someone she had a “bum knee,” and gotten such a peculiar look she giggled now as she thought of it, even as Bourke answered her.

  “Not that I should be telling you a thing, but this link with Walsh and Collins might be the most solid lead we’ve got. I’ve already got someone checking on whether there are any unexplained payments to his account, or unusual spending recently. I—”

  “Paul?”

  “What?”

  Megan nudged puppies back into her apartment with her feet and edged forward far enough to close the door, searching the open-plan space with her gaze. Mama Dog heaved a dramatic sigh and rolled onto her back, pleading, lazily, for a belly scritch, and the puppies, thwarted in their escape attempt, attacked Megan’s ankles with nips and head butts and wagging tails. Megan’s spare keys were still on the kitchen table, and the takeaway food had been cleaned up. Even the dishes were done. The bathroom door stood open a few inches, the light inside off. Megan took a few more steps into the room, looking around as if she could be missing something, although she knew she wasn’t. “Paul, Heather is gone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Where were they staying?” Bourke’s voice went flat on the phone. “I’ll go there, in case she’s going to confront Martin.”

  “Clontarf Castle Hotel.” Megan searched the room, hoping for a note, for anything suggesting where Heather might have gone. The phone beeped in her ear, informing her the battery was almost dead again. “Dang it! I’m almost out of battery, look, I’ll meet you there?”

  “Don’t even think about it.” Bourke hung up, and Megan indulged in an inarticulate naaargh! before scurrying to her bedroom, where she dumped the bedside table’s drawer contents onto her duvet. A spare battery pack fell out among the other detritus. She pounced on it, checked its charge, then plugged the phone in to it, trusting its 47 percent charge would see her through the evening. A spark of hope flew through her as she thought maybe Heather had given Megan her number when Megan had dropped her at Brown Thomas, but a quick check through her contacts said she only had Martin’s number. She muttered, “Dang it, dang it, dang it, I thought modern tech . . .” The rest of the complaint didn’t make it as far as her lips, though the petering-out thought ran along the lines of modern tech was supposed to take the legwork out of solving mysteries. Maybe, if she was a cop who had Heather’s number and could magically trace her phone’s location through triangulation, or whatever it was they used on TV, but she wasn’t, and she didn’t, and besides, she wasn’t confident it actually worked that way anyway.

  She stopped in the middle of the living room, phone clutched in one hand and the battery pack in her back pocket as she tried to think. Bourke was heading for the hotel, so he’d cut Heather off before she got there, if that was her destination. Megan didn’t know the other woman well enough to imagine where she might go otherwise. She checked the time: ten p.m., or close enough, which made it around two in the afternoon in California. She called Niamh, hoping the actor’s inexhaustible gossip resources might have an answer, but Niamh’s phone was off. Despite herself, Megan smiled as she left a quick message: “Nothing important, but how dare you be, like, working when I want to get gossip. Talk to you later, babe.” She hung up, then, struck with a thought, made another call.

  A somewhat worried man’s voice answered a few seconds later. “Megan? Is everything all right?”

  “Hey, Uncle Rabbie. It is, yes. I just have a weird question.”

  “Grand! What is it?”

  Megan smiled at the phone. Robert Lynch, “Uncle” Rabbie, was more accurately her second cousin, but he was a generation older than she, and Megan found it easier to go by generations rather than the vagaries of genealogical technicalities. “You know everybody in Ireland, right?”

  “Well,” said he modestly, “not everybody,” and Megan laughed.

  “But close enough. Look, do you know Martin Walsh?”

  “The golfer?” Rabbie asked in surprise. “I’ve met the man. I knew his friend Lou better, there was a grand auld soul, may he rest in peace.”

  Megan clenched a fist in triumph and went to sit on the floor beside a power outlet so she could plug in the phone while still at home instead of draining the battery pack. Dip trotted over and flopped in her lap so she could rub his ears. “It’s Lou I’m asking about, really. Kind of. Did you know he was having an affair with Martin’s wife?”

  A judicious silence came over the line, followed by, “I wouldn’t say I knew it, no, but now that you’ve said it, I can’t say I’m surprised. There was a fair bit of—what do the young people say today? ‘It’s complicated.’ There was a fair bit of complicated about Martin and Lou and their wives all along.”

  “Don’t make me beg for the details.”

  Her uncle cackled. “They married young, both of them, the first time, and to American women both. Susan Walsh and Kimberly MacDonald were both sound ones like, but Susan died young of the cancer, and I’d say Martin was jealous as the devil himself of Kimberly after that. Kim was a star,” Rabbie allowed. “She made Lou into the man he was, gave him direction. He became a great golfer because she loved the game. Susan, now, she shaped Martin, but he had the ambition all on his own. When Kim died . . . that child of theirs and Lou were destroyed, but I’d call it a happy day in Martin’s life.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “An accident. Some drunk arsehole plowed into her while she was out for a run. They never caught them as did it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’d say it probably wasn’t him.” Rabbie gave a self-satisfied chortle at Megan’s startled burst of laughter. “Walsh’s second wife divorced him not long after that and took all his money with her. No surprise, though, as he was at Lou’s side all the time. Helping him through Kimberly’s death and all. Being there for the little girl.”

  Megan bit her tongue on that, figuring she could catch him up on the gossip later, if someone else hadn’t already. “Was he in love with Lou?”

  “Hnh.” Rabbie sounded
like he was considering it. “I wouldn’t have thought so. I think he’s just a jealous bastard. What’s his is his and what’s yours is his. He wouldn’t even share that caddie of his.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about there maybe being big money involved th—” Megan broke off, a thrill splashing down her spine. “Oh, shoot! Oh, gosh! I wonder—I wonder—!”

  “Do ye now,” Rabbie said drolly. “What is it you’re wondering, my girl?”

  “Nothing—I just—do you know anything about the caddie? Anthony Doyle?”

  “I don’t. Sorry to be of no help, love.”

  “Yes, the fact that you don’t know the intimate details of every life on this island is scandalous. I don’t even know how you know as much as you do.”

  “Ah, well, people like to talk, don’t they? And I listen. And there’s all sorts come through the port, Megan, you know that.” Rabbie, although he was, to hear him say it, dangerously near retirement age now, still made it his duty to meet the ships at Sligo Port, where he’d been harbour master for decades. Megan thought it wasn’t so much the goods as the gossip that got him there every day, and his ear to the ground made him an absolute nexus of information. Everyone knew Rabbie Lynch.

  “Do you remember the first time I came to Ireland?” she asked, off topic but smiling.

  “When you came in to Rosslare like a silly fool and couldn’t get a bus to the West?”

  “The ferry was late! It wasn’t my fault I missed the buses!” A truck driver had taken pity on her, offering to drive her up to Dublin from the port city a hundred miles south of it, and—being Irish—had gotten her name and asked why she, a teenage American, was visiting Ireland on her own. She’d said she was on her way to visit her cousin in Sligo, and the man, in the wink of an eye, put the names together, said, “Wait, you’re never Rabbie Lynch’s cousin, are ye?” and drove her all the way across the country, delivering her safely to the Lynch family home.