Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  Still, something nudged him, hurting, almost like a cramp, or a screw turning in his heart.

  He moaned and sat up in bed.

  The beginning—

  Four and a half years before. New Year’s Eve. Frannie McGuire, still a few months shy of the legal twenty-one but damned if Hardy was going to card her.

  With madness raging all around and only swelling as the night wore on, Frannie nursed a few rum and Cokes at the bar. Hardy, in what he called his fun mode, pounded down everything in sight—beer, scotch, tequila, gin. Yahoo!

  And nobody to drive that party animal Hardy home except the quiet little redheaded, very much younger sister of his boss Moses.

  Sitting in front of his house, then, the party over—really over—and enough juice in him to forget that all of his own kid stuff was in his past, that he didn’t care about any of that. Not coming on to her, but spilling his guts—the whole thing—and finally passing out, he guessed, without so much as kissing her or even trying, waking up to a cold dawn, his arms around her waist, his head cradled in her lap on the front seat of his old Ford.

  And before he dropped her off back at her dorm, she said, “I hope I meet someone like you, Dismas, before life eats him up. I’d marry him in a minute.”

  She did.

  His name was Eddie Cochran, and after about three dates she appeared with him at the Shamrock. Took Hardy aside and whispered, “Remember what I said,” as though she’d only said one thing to him before in her life.

  But he’d known what she meant.

  One Sunday afternoon, a barbecue at Moses’s apartment, up on the roof looking over the Haight-Ashbury.

  “The what?” Hardy had asked. “Get out of here!”

  “Big Brothers,” Frannie telling Hardy.

  It wouldn’t have been like Eddie to mention it. He didn’t preach—he just did. “Hey, it’s one day a week, Diz,” Eddie had said in defense. “Gimme a break. Maybe do some good. Couldn’t hurt, anyway.”

  It sure could, Hardy thought. It could hurt you, you fool. Most likely your “little brother” will wind up taking a chip out of your heart. But he didn’t try to argue with Eddie—there wasn’t much arguing with Eddie on anything.

  But Hardy had said, “You think you can make a real difference, don’t you?”

  The two-hundred-watt smile that wasn’t a put-on. “I doubt it.”

  Except what got to Hardy was that, underneath it all, Eddie didn’t doubt it. He thought everything he did mattered a lot, that he personally really could make a difference. It reminded Hardy of the way he thought he used to be himself. Like Eddie. Long time ago.

  Rose stood at the top of the steps by the back door of the rectory. Father Dietrick was crossing the parking lot, head down, returning from bringing Father Cavanaugh the news.

  Bless them both, but it was going to be a hard month. June was always a hard month in San Francisco. It felt like God had given His promise in the spring and then taken it back. This morning Rose had thought it would stay bright and sunny, but already the fog was on them again.

  She wiped her hands on her apron. Her eyes came up to meet the young priest, questioning. He sighed. “Not too well,” he said. “He took off.”

  Though he wasn’t yet thirty, he mounted the stoop like an old man. Rose followed him inside.

  “Just took off?”

  He sat at the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him. Rose brought over a cup of coffee, three sugars and a drop of cream.

  “You know Father Cavanaugh,” he said, sipping the coffee. “There wasn’t an easy way to say it. He stood there getting out of his vestments and I thought I’d try to make him sit down, but as soon as I asked him to, he knew something had happened. . . .”

  “I’m sure you did what’s best, Father.”

  Father Dietrick sighed. “For a minute it was as though I’d hit him. Then he looked down at his hands, at the vestments, and just ripped the surplice off.”

  Rose made a note to go pick up the surplice. She’d just sew it back up and no one would be the wiser. She pulled up a chair next to Father and ventured a pat on his hand. “You know how he is, Father. He gets upset and it’s like the priest in him gives up for a minute. He has to let something go. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know. But maybe I should have gone with him.”

  Rose knew what Father Dietrick meant. Father Cavanaugh was a bit of a rogue priest. It was, she was sure, why he’d never made monsignor. Not that he’d ever done anything seriously wrong. Shoplifting that one time. Occasionally a little too much whiskey, but sure that was the good man’s weakness.

  “He’ll probably go scream at the ocean,” she said. And Lord, why shouldn’t he, losing someone close enough to be his own son? Father had a temper, but he was still a beautiful man, and a fine priest, all the more human for his faults, she thought. Let him scream at the ocean—he had a right. Jesus himself had a temper. Didn’t He throw the money changers out of the temple?

  But this—Eddie Cochran’s death—would not have loosed his temper. It would have broken his heart.

  “I know where he’s gone,” Rose said suddenly. “Over to see Erin.” The priest acted like he didn’t know who she was talking about. She sighed, exasperated. “Come now, Father, you’ve got to learn to see things. Erin Cochran, Eddie’s mother. He’ll need to be with her.”

  “You think so?”

  Rose bit her tongue and said only, “I’d bet so, Father.” She didn’t say what she also knew, that he’d need to be with her because he loved her.

  The water was a long way down, slate gray through the fog. Jim Cavanaugh, shivering, leaned out over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. His teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering, whether it was the cold or everything else. He should have grabbed a coat before rushing from the church, but he’d had to get out—get out now before he broke down in front of Dietrick.

  So it had happened. Eddie was dead.

  And Erin? What would become of Erin now?

  He knew he ought to go see her, but would she want to see him? Would she ever forgive him?

  Could he be a priest to the Cochran family ever again?

  Last week he had tried to kiss her, to tell her . . . It had been a temporary weakness, that was all, but it had made a breach between them.

  And now this, with Eddie.

  The family would need him. He would have to be there now for them all. The kiss, her rejection and his flash of anger at her, now they could all be forgotten.

  She would forgive him. He could live again.

  He put his hands in his pockets and began walking back toward the tollbooths.

  4

  HARDY HAD LOVED his Suzuki Samurai when he’d bought it, but since learning that it tended to roll in strong winds or on weak grades, he had renamed it the Seppuku. Now he parked it at the corner of Tenth and Lincoln. The fleeting sun that had gotten him up had long since disappeared. The fog, the June freeze, insinuated itself into every corner out here, swirling, gusting. Hardy pulled his peacoat up around his neck.

  Now he was staring at the sign over his place of employment, “The Little Shamrock, established in 1893.” He found himself marveling at man’s originality. The sign, cleverly, was shaped like a shamrock.

  The sign itself had been established in its spot over the swinging double doors in 1953, and the green paint had chipped enough over the years that the sign at night now read “le rock.” Maybe it was a good thing, Hardy reflected, the shape of the sign. If it had been shaped like Gibraltar, people would think the bar was named the rock, or some French word that meant rock. Le rock. Maybe they should paint the l to look like a capital letter. Maybe they should have the neon repaired altogether.

  But no, he thought, it fit the Shamrock. The bar wasn’t exactly run-down, but it didn’t place too much emphasis on fixing itself up. It was a neighborhood bar, and Moses McGuire, Hardy’s friend and boss, the owner of the place, didn’t believe in attracting an unwanted el
ement (tourists) with too many ferns, video games or flashy signs. The Shamrock was an Irish dart bar, as nonpolitical as any of them got. It poured an honest (sometimes more than honest) shot and did a respectable business with locals, both male and female. Hardy had worked days there, Tuesday through Saturday, two to eight, for over seven years.

  Every night Hardy worked, Moses McGuire followed him from six until closing at two, and then until he’d rung out and cleaned up, sometimes having an after-hours drink. Sundays and Mondays a thirtyish raven-haired beauty named Lynne Leish with an eighteen-inch waist and more than twice that on either side worked double shifts and brought in a crowd of her own. But she was a good bartender, a pro at it. Moses McGuire would have no other kind.

  It wasn’t yet noon. Most days Hardy would arrive to open the bar and get it set up in ten or fifteen minutes. Today, between his thoughts and the memory that they’d closed without the usual cleanup last night, he thought he’d come down and kill some time.

  So he wiped the bar, took the peels cleanly off the lemons with an ice pick, cut up the limes, checked the wells and stocked the back bar. He ran himself half a morning Guinness and whipped up the cream for the hated so-called Irish Coffee, for which he cursed Stan Delaplane, the Buena Vista bar and the Dublin airport.

  There were some glasses and bottles out front, left from the hurried exit of the night before. Some of the tables hadn’t been wiped down.

  The cash register. It hadn’t been rung out. He refilled his pint glass to the halfway point again.

  Somebody knocked while he was counting the money. Through the door he saw that it was a retired schoolteacher, a regular named Tommy, who ought to know better.

  “Two o’clock,” Hardy yelled, holding up two fingers. Tommy nodded and shuffled on by, past the front window.

  Hardy went back to ringing out. He looked at his watch. Twelve-twenty.

  “Slow down,” he told himself.

  But he didn’t. In five more minutes he was ready to open.

  He sat at the stool behind the bar, time weighing a ton and not getting lighter. He didn’t want to have that time to think. About the unaccustomed restlessness inside him. About ambition, where love had gone. Especially, he didn’t want to think about the ridiculous idealist Eddie Cochran and his wife, Frannie. He didn’t want to think that it might be important to help her in some way—maybe keep her from losing what he’d lost.

  The inside pocket of his peacoat, hanging on its peg at the end of the rail, held his darts. The leather case, velvet-lined, worked on him like worry beads as he rubbed it gently, passed it from hand to hand. Finally he opened it on the bar.

  The three 20-gram tungsten beauties sat in their slots, awaiting their flights, the pale blue, dart-embossed bits of plastic that Hardy had made himself, and that in turn made those hunks of metal fly true. Carefully, he emptied the case and fitted the flights to the darts.

  Over at the board, he threw some rounds, not really aiming. Not really shooting. Just throwing. Three darts. Walk to the board and remove them. Walk back to the chalk line. Do it again. Sometimes stop for a sip of Guinness. It didn’t matter where they hit, although, even without trying, Hardy put all the darts in the pie bounded by 1 and 5, with 20 in the middle.

  Hardy, in the bar by himself, throwing darts.

  Hardy, behind the bar, looked at the lined face of his friend, the oft-broken nose, the mountain man’s beard. McGuire’s eyes were shot with red. Moses had gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley when his deferment had run out. He hadn’t viewed being drafted as the tragedy many others had—he was a philosopher and believed that one of life’s seminal experiences was war. As it turned out, the war tempered both his philosophical bent and his intellectual appreciation of men killing each other and anything else that moved.

  He was two years older than Hardy and, back then, only two steps slower, which, Hardy had told him six hundred times, explained his getting hit in both legs at Chi Leng while Hardy made it to cover, only to turn around and carry Moses back out, picking up some lead in his own shoulder in the process.

  So, tritely, Moses felt he owed Hardy his life. When Hardy had changed careers, Moses had been there with the Shamrock and, owing him his life, had made a place for Hardy in the rotation, something he would have done for no one else with the possible exception of his sister Frannie.

  “So?” Hardy asked finally.

  McGuire looked into his glass, found it empty, twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. The bar still hadn’t opened.

  Hardy reached to the top shelf behind him and brought down a bottle of The Macallan, the best scotch in the house, if not the world. He refilled Moses’s glass.

  “This afternoon I gotta go see about getting the body taken care of. Frannie’s in no shape to do it. Especially after all the cops. They were all over the place, wouldn’t leave her alone. Why so many cops, you think?”

  Hardy the ex-cop said, “Reports, bureaucracy, bullshit.”

  Someone came and pounded at the door to the bar, still locked. “Let’s go where they can’t see us,” Hardy suggested.

  They went back to the storeroom. Cases of bottled beer lined two of the walls. On a third, wooden shelves held assorted bottles of liquor, napkins, peanuts, dart flights, other bar paraphernalia. Against the back wall was the stainless-steel freezer for the perishables that more than once had held the fish Hardy would bring by after a successful trip. McGuire lifted himself onto it.

  “The thing is, there doesn’t seem to have been any reason for it. I mean specific. Here’s a kid got the world on a string. What the hell? Why’d he want to kill himself ?”

  “Who said that? That Eddie’d killed himself ?”

  “Well, nobody exactly, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Shit, Diz, you know. They find him in a lot with a gun in his own hand. What do you think happened?”

  Hardy leaned against the back wall. “I don’t think anything. It’s not my job.”

  “You’re a warm human being, you know that, Diz?”

  “Come on, Mose. You know, or maybe you don’t, that the police really do a number on any death, especially violent death. They don’t just call something a suicide out of the blue. They check into it—motives, opportunity, all that. They really do. I mean, even an old man they find who died in his sleep they check out.”

  “So what do you think happened? You think somebody killed Eddie? You think he killed himself? You knew Eddie.”

  Hardy kicked at some debris on the floor. “Yeah, I knew him. I’m sure not saying he killed himself. But the cops aren’t either, are they?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Believe me, they won’t.”

  “Why won’t they? It could be, it could have been, right?”

  Hardy scratched at nothing on his leg. “Mose, I’ve been a cop, right? Takes more than a gun in somebody’s hand.”

  “Maybe there was more.”

  Hardy felt a chill somewhere behind him. Was Moses hiding something? “What do you know?”

  “I don’t know anything.” But Moses was looking down.

  “It’s bad luck to lie to your friends,” Hardy said.

  “What do you know?”

  Moses fidgeted, his heels hitting against the freezer. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Probably, but what anyway?”

  “Just that Eddie has been a little down. Been in the bar a little more than normal, that kind of thing.” Hardy waited. “You know, they planned things, Frannie and Eddie. Not like you and me. They had this savings plan, all that, for when he went back to school.” Moses was still struggling with it, sipping at some scotch for something to do. “Anyway, his job’s been fucked up lately, maybe ending. It looked like they weren’t going to have enough money, or what they planned on, anyway. I offered to loan him some, but you know Eddie.”

  “And you think Eddie might have killed himself over a little money? Come on, Mose, not the Eddie we knew.”

>   “Yeah, I know, but the cops might think it. I mean, with that and the possible note . . .”

  “Abe—Glitsky—told me the note was bullshit. Just some old trash in the car.”

  “I don’t know. It might be. I’m just thinking that the note along with the other stuff . . .”

  “Well, if they do, it doesn’t really matter, does it? It isn’t going to bring him back.”

  “Yeah, but it matters. It matters they don’t call it a suicide.”

  Hardy suddenly felt very tired. “Why, Mose?” Thinking he knew what his friend was going to say next.

  “Frannie, mostly, I guess.” Moses slid off the freezer and spun his glass, empty again. “If they . . .” He ran his fingers hard across his forehead. “Shit, this is hard.”

  “If what?”

  “If they come up with suicide. I mean, think about Frannie. Rejected for good, know what I mean? And there’s also some money involved.”

  Hardy cocked his head to one side.

  “Insurance policy doesn’t pay on a suicide, though there’s double indemnity on violent or accidental death. The policy was for a hundred grand, Diz, and I don’t want to see Frannie screwed. She’s already been through enough.”

  “Well,” Hardy said, “then let’s hope he didn’t kill himself.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Hardy said nothing.

  “I just want to . . . I don’t know. Protect Frannie’s interests, I guess. Feel like I’m doing something.”

  Hardy figured Moses had been reading his mail. “I don’t know what you can do. Be there for her. What else?”

  “I thought I’d ask you if you’d watch what the police do. Make it your job for a week or two. Take a few weeks off here and just check it out.”

  Hardy couldn’t bring himself to look at his friend, who kept talking. “I mean, you used to be a cop and all. You know the procedures—”

  “Mose, I was a street cop a couple years before law school. That’s a long way from homicide.”