Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  His date with Jane was tomorrow night. He supposed that after most of a decade he ought to be able to wait another day to see her. So he went back to his office, sat at his desk, and started trying to figure out some areas where Glitsky might be able to help him. He then called the friend of Jane’s father—Matthew R. Brody, III, it turned out—and was told he could have an appointment on Monday morning.

  He tried Arturo Cruz at his office and learned that the publisher had taken an early, and what was expected to be an extended, lunch.

  He listened to twelve rings at Army Distributing before deciding that Linda Polk probably wasn’t at her desk, and if she was, she was staring at the ringing thing there, either thinking it was really groovy or wondering what would make it stop.

  Well, he thought, that killed fifteen minutes.

  It was one-thirty. The Shamrock opened in a half hour. Maybe Moses and he could while away another few hours, so long as he was careful to omit any mention of Jane. The Mose had spent many hours reconciling Hardy to having put Jane out of his life. He might have a hard time accepting putting her back in.

  “Well, wait, he’s here right now.”

  Moses handed him the telephone and returned to preparing the bar for Friday night. He pulled the backup bottles from the cardboard boxes on the floor, humming off-key as he picked up the near-empties, dusted the shelf, and put the full new bottles behind him.

  Hardy was the only customer and wasn’t yet halfway through his first Guinness in what seemed like a month. Although nobody knew for a fact that he was here, anyone who knew him at all knew they had a decent chance of finding him at the bar. He took the phone, spoke for a couple of minutes, and hung up.

  Moses glanced over at him. “Getting born again doesn’t really make you younger. I don’t care what they say.”

  “Just ’cause he’s a priest doesn’t mean he’s not a human being,” Hardy answered.

  Cavanaugh drank Irish whiskey, but by the time he’d finished his first one, the bar had gotten crowded. Hardy suggested a walk, maybe through the park across the street.

  “While we’re talking about reversing roles,” Hardy said, “you ought to be playing detective. How’d you locate me at the Shamrock?”

  “I called Erin and she asked Frannie, who gave me your number at home, and then when you weren’t there she said to try calling her brother, that he might know where you’d gone. It was just luck you were there right then.”

  “If you believe in luck.”

  “Luck, faith, all those intangibles. They’re my stock in trade, Dismas.”

  But something else struck Hardy. “How’d Erin get in touch with Frannie?”

  “She just asked. Frannie’s at her house. She didn’t go home after the funeral yesterday.”

  Hardy should have remembered that somewhere. He wasn’t thinking very well.

  “Why do you want to know?” Cavanaugh asked.

  Hardy shrugged. “Just something I wanted to remember to ask her.”

  They had come up by a lake with lots of couples in paddleboats. It was a slow midafternoon, still and warm. They walked along a red cinder path, covered over closely with pines, dotted sporadically with horse dung. On the lake, swans floated among the paddleboats while, nearer the dock, a dozen ducks quacked for a young girl’s bread.

  “Innocence,” the priest said. “What a beautiful thing.”

  Hardy looked sideways at the priest, alert for a touch of the blarney, but Cavanaugh seemed genuinely moved. His eyes roved around, to the trees, the sky overhead. He seemed almost to be memorizing this moment, as though its innocence—if he wanted to call it that—were something he’d later need to draw on in a different life.

  “I just couldn’t get going this morning,” Cavanaugh said enigmatically. Their steps crunched in the cinders. Hardy, hands in pockets, nodded. “I really appreciate this,” the priest repeated, apologizing for the third or fourth time.

  Reversing roles. That’s what he’d said. There’d been a bond, he felt, with Hardy. Instant. Two guys, Catholic backgrounds. A lot in common there.

  He needed to confess. No, more, he needed absolution. And not from another priest. He didn’t just need the form of forgiveness, but its substance—the understanding of one of his fellow men.

  So, sure, Hardy had said. Why not? He felt oddly drawn to the man himself—victimized perhaps by the charisma, but most of Hardy’s friendships had started like that. Some spark, something a little unusual, as long as there was that confident presence. And Jim Cavanaugh had presence to burn.

  But this apologizing was getting a little old. “Hey, Father. You talk, I’ll listen. Then maybe you buy me a beer. If I get bored, I’ll let you know.”

  “How about you call me Jim?”

  “Okay, Jim, what’s the problem?”

  Jim waited until a couple on horseback had passed. “I feel like . . .” He stopped, and Hardy had the sense he was going to apologize again, but he didn’t. “Nope. That’s not it,” he muttered to himself. Then he took a deep breath. “I am fairly certain that I sent Eddie to his death.”

  The crunching sound of their footsteps suddenly sounded more loudly in Hardy’s ears.

  “He came by last week. I’m kind of, I guess you’d say, the other father figure in that family.” He chuckled without any mirth. “I’ve always prided myself on my . . . how can I put this? My moral courage. It’s what people talk to priests for, I guess. What they want to hear.

  “The rest of the world says to compromise and just get by, but I’ve always viewed our role—my role, the priest’s role, that is—as counseling that the hard choices, the right choices, get made.”

  “And Eddie had some hard choice?”

  “I’m sure it’s why he came to me. He wouldn’t have bothered if he didn’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re sure of that? Maybe he just wanted to talk.”

  Jim Cavanaugh shook his head. “No. He’d had a fight—more a disagreement really—with Big Ed . . . his dad. If he didn’t want to hear somebody else come up with his answer, he just would have driven home and forgotten about it.

  “You can tell, Dismas. Our Jewish brethren have a saying, ‘If you’ve got to ask, it’s not kosher.’ This is a little the same thing. Ed felt he had to ask me.” He laughed again at himself. “He wanted to hear that the right thing to do was what he planned to do anyway. More, he wanted to see if he could get away with not doing it. And, moral authority that I am, I told him he couldn’t. Although his father had said he could.”

  Suddenly the priest stopped short. He kicked at the wooden border to the riding trail so violently that it broke. “Fuck!” he said. The wooden slat had splintered at the vicious kick. Cavanaugh stood shaking his head, the outburst over. He went down to a knee and tried to pat the border back in place. Then, still genuflecting, he made the sign of the cross. A few seconds later he stood and faced Hardy, shamefaced.

  “I’m sorry.” That self-effacing chuckle. “Some priest I am, huh?”

  Hardy shrugged. “Shit happens,” he said.

  Cavanaugh hadn’t heard that one before. He laughed, looser now. “Well,” he said, “now you know why I didn’t want to go to regular confession.”

  “So what was it Eddie had to know about?” They were walking again, turning down now through lengthening shadows onto the paved road again.

  “You know about the troubles at Ed’s work?”

  “The distribution thing? A little.”

  “Well, that’s not all. I mean, it was bad for the company, all right, but Eddie thought they could just tighten belts and build up again within a year or so. He was talking to this new company—some other newspaper. . . .”

  “El Dia?”

  “Yeah, El Dia, I think. Anyway, he was also trying to get back in touch with the guy who’d cut them off.” Cruz, Hardy thought.

  The priest continued. “To make a long story short, it was just a matter of time before they were rolling again. At least that was Eddie’s
opinion.”

  “So what’s the moral dilemma there?”

  “That’s not it. That’s background. The problem was that Eddie’s boss—Polk, I think his name is—he was having a hard time dealing with the long-term approach.”

  “He didn’t want to rebuild the business?”

  “Essentially, that’s right. He’d recently married a younger woman—very much younger, evidently very beautiful.”

  “She is.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  Hardy nodded. “So have you. They were at the funeral.”

  That stopped Cavanaugh. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Hardy was again surprised at the man’s flair for Anglo-Saxon.

  “What?”

  “I think if I’d known that, I might have . . . I don’t think I could’ve done the service.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I think we’re going on the assumption that somebody killed Eddie—isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t think he killed himself.”

  “Well, if somebody did kill him, I’d just about bet my breviary that Polk was involved.”

  “Don’t tell me Ed was sleeping with Polk’s wife.”

  Dusk was catching up with them. They came out of the park halfway down to the ocean and turned back up toward the Shamrock.

  Clearly the thought had never occurred to the priest. “I was Eddie’s confessor, Dismas, and I’m not abusing the secrecy of the confessional when I tell you that he was faithful to Frannie. Completely. He was madly in love with her.”

  Hardy thought he knew that, but it was still nice to hear it. “Okay,” he said, “so what about Polk’s wife?”

  Cavanaugh was grappling with something. “All this, you understand, is just trying to get at the truth,” he said. “I don’t want to be saying things that may be scandalous if they’re irrelevant to what you’re doing.”

  Jesus, Hardy thought, suddenly remembering all too clearly why he had left the Church. If you took it all seriously, as Jim Cavanaugh certainly did, the rules could bind you up ’til you couldn’t even think, much less take any action.

  “Why don’t you let me decide? This is confession, remember. It ain’t going anywhere else.”

  The priest considered a moment, then nodded. “Eddie thinks—thought—that Polk’s wife was in it for the money. And after the drop in business, when the company started losing money, suddenly maybe Mr. Polk wasn’t so attractive anymore.”

  “Did he know this, or was it just a feeling?”

  “He found out . . .” Again that hesitation, that slow decision to continue. “He found out something.”

  Hardy couldn’t help himself. He stopped walking and laid a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I said I’d tell you if you’re boring me.”

  Cavanaugh grinned back, self-conscious. “It’s like I can’t just keep talking. Every single further step seems like a separate decision.”

  “In high school,” Hardy said, “I’d make out with somebody and wonder if the kissing and petting were all separate sins. Finally I decided no. If it was a sin, it was just one of ’em. Same thing here. You’ve made the commitment, so let’s get it out.”

  Cavanaugh grinned his movie-star grin. “Maybe you would have made a good priest, after all.”

  “I think my past was a little too checkered.”

  The priest got a kick out of that. “You’d be surprised. Quite a lot of priests have, as you put it, checkered pasts. I didn’t find my vocation ’til after high school myself.”

  That was interesting, Hardy thought, but it didn’t get any closer to Nika Polk.

  “So Mrs. Polk . . . what did Eddie find out?”

  “Polk was in a hurry for money. He laid off a lot of guys Eddie would have kept, and kept a couple Eddie would’ve let go. The staff was down to a few marginal workers. Anyway, one of those guys figured Eddie was in on it, too, and let it out that Polk was planning some drug deal.”

  They’d arrived back at the Shamrock. Behind them an orange and pink dusk was settling onto the Pacific. The Friday-night traffic here on Lincoln was kicking into gear. The bar was hopping, jukebox blaring, Moses working the bar like the artist he was. He had Hardy’s Guinness and Cavanaugh’s Bushmills in front of them so fast he might have seen them coming up the street four blocks away.

  The couch against the back wall was flanked by entrances to the bathrooms. Over it, a dirty stained-glass window let in a bit of the day’s last light. Patrons kept up a steady stream going by. In all, it was as private as any confessional Hardy could remember.

  Cavanaugh had removed his collar. He sat hunched forward, shirt open, startlingly handsome, sipping slowly at the Irish. His reticence was gone. It had to come out.

  “So here I am listening to a boy I could easily feel—hell, I do feel!—is my son, and he’s just burning, I tell you, Dismas, burning to do the right thing. He wants to confront Polk, somehow convince him that it can all work out with his wife, then go back to the publisher, take ’em all on one at a time and win them over just by the force of the argument. He really saw it so clearly. If everybody involved was fair and upstanding, it would all work out. The company would be saved, Polk could keep his wife happy, the whole megillah.”

  Hardy sipped his Guinness. “That’s Eddie. Sure as shit, excuse me.” Although apologizing for swearing in front of this man was, upon reflection, unnecessary. “He really thought that way, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “And you tried to point out a little, uh, reality?”

  Cavanaugh sat back now, the broad shoulders sagging. “There’s my sin, Dismas. That’s what I’ve been getting at.” The eyes lowered, matching the voice. “We talked a long time, Eddie and me. He was the most wonderful speaker, even one on one. Passionate, elegant, really convincing. He was the kind of kid could flatter you that he wanted your opinion.” He drained his drink. “So here I am, Father Cavanaugh, and I send this fine man off to slay the dragon. Do I think about the reality of it, about his pregnant wife, his real duties, whether he’s the man for the job? No way. Not me. The good holy Father Cavanaugh thinks about how right he is, what a wonderful notion it is, how everyone will be so proud.”

  His eyes came up. “Pride, Dismas. My pride killed Eddie Cochran.”

  15

  SAM POLK STOOD in the upstairs bathroom, combing his hair. Out the window in the warm night he heard the bubble of the hot tub’s jets, the soft music his wife was listening to.

  It was nice having a beautiful naked woman in your hot tub. Hell, it’s nice having a hot tub.

  He took the tiny pair of scissors—he could barely get his thick fingers through the holes—and carefully snipped at the hair that persistently grew out of the top of his ears. His stomach tightened up on him again. Not now, he thought. Just think about Nika downstairs. Not the other stuff.

  The hot tub was new. The whole house—after a lifetime in a flat in the Mission—was new. His life was good. Think about that. Don’t let the stomach betray you.

  He opened the cabinet and popped two antacids.

  “Sammy!”

  He opened the window. The tub glowed in the surrounding darkness. Looking down from this height, he saw her body through the water—the patches of shadow, the curve of flesh.

  “Be right down,” he yelled out the window.

  He didn’t care what it took, he wasn’t giving this up. It was bad luck the way the business had gone just after the marriage, and sure, he should have thought more for the future during the good years, but he would be damned if he’d let anything interfere with this.

  He’d worked his whole life, starting as a shoeshine boy downtown before he was ten, then selling peanuts at Seals games, finally getting a job with the old Call-Bulletin as a newspaper boy. And where the other kids his age had seen it as a part-time gig for spending money, he figured he could turn some decent bread by covering the same route, and then all the adjacent ones, for all four of the local papers. Those jobs had bought his fi
rst truck.

  And now it was fifty years later, near what should have been his retirement, six months after buying his estate in Hillsborough, eight months into his marriage to the woman who’d made him remember what it was to be a man. Nosiree, he wasn’t going to get beaten at this stage.

  But he was getting nervous.

  The money had been in his safe at work all week. That had made everything suddenly seem very real. Before that, while not exactly a lark, it had had the quality of make-believe. He hadn’t yet done anything illegal. Or at least anything he could be caught for.

  But then the call that the boat had arrived put everything into a new light. It was out in the Bay, waiting for the drop. Did he have the money? Where and when could he take delivery?

  So Friday had been a scramble day, and though he’d prepared for it, he found there was no way to lessen the fear of carrying around over one hundred thousand dollars in cash.

  He’d gone to different branches of his bank in the course of cleaning out his savings in the hopes that no one would review the account activity. And by the end of the week, he’d told himself, he’d been sure he’d have it all back reinvested and no one would be the wiser. And now it was the end of the week.

  The problem with this drug thing was that nobody had ever written a book on how to do it. It was all seat-of-the-pants, and the cash aspect was a major problem. If they only took American Express.

  And then there was the whole situation with the middlemen. His business acquaintance, his supplier, was one thing. They were exchanging product for money. But Alphonse Page, who worked for him at the shop, was another matter entirely. Young, black, street smart, neither intelligent nor creative, he was nevertheless the person Sam found himself depending on the most to pull the whole deal together. He had the connection to get rid of this stuff in town. He was important. He eliminated a whole layer of distribution. The problem was, after his years doing business, he didn’t like the fact that someone like Alphonse had become important. It made his stomach hurt.