by Ingrid Black
Had Kaminski come to Dublin looking for evidence to prove it?
Whatever the reason, I had something to work with at last. It was at this point I realised, no matter how guilty I felt about interfering with things that were none of my concern, that it had gone too far now for me to turn back. Kaminski – Cecilia Corrigan – Jenkins Howler – I simply had to keep following the trail to see where it led.
And I knew just who to ask.
**********
Back home, I switched on the radio and weaved in and out of signals along the dial in search of more information on Marsha Reed’s death, but there was nothing apart from the usual diet of cheesy pop music for those with non-existent attention spans, and talk radio stations where people were encouraged to drown themselves in whatever sea of complaint was lapping at their personal shore at any particular moment.
That day, like most days, the voices were mainly spitting out the usual diet of bile about the United States. Here we go again. I’d learned soon after coming to Dublin that, though the welcome was friendly enough on the surface, you didn’t have to dig down very far to find that the people who passed as the foremost thinkers in Dublin, the ones whose voices whined out of every screen and every radio, considered the United States to be little better then the Third Reich, imperialist overlords imposing its savage and depraved values on the world. Values like, oh, democracy and free speech and respect for women.
Scary stuff, huh?
I’d quickly grown tired of being expected to show humility in the face of my country’s alleged litany of sins, or to parrot the carping as some precondition of membership of a club that I didn’t want to belong to anyway. There were plenty enough Americans in Dublin willing to do that. We were expected to whisper our nationality apologetically like it was shameful. Being American and proud of it was the new love that dare not speak its name.
Not that I’ve ever felt proud of being American either. Being proud of where you’re born makes no more sense than being proud of having blue eyes. There’s nothing you can do about it either way. But I damn sure wasn’t going to be made to be ashamed of it.
Eventually, I found a news station, but all they said was the same there’d been in the newspapers that morning, that a woman’s body had been found in a house in Dublin and that police were trying to contact all members of her family before naming her.
In the end, I snapped off the radio impatiently.
“Is that where the Chief is?” came Boland’s voice from over by the door.
Until about a year ago, Niall Boland had been a member of the murder squad alongside Fitzgerald, though he’d never really been cut out for murder, if that’s the right way of putting it. He knew that himself better than anyone.
There are plenty of fine police officers who should never be allowed near a murder investigation, and Boland was most definitely one of them. The writer Brendan Behan once said that the police in Dublin looked like they’d had to be coaxed down out of the mountains with raw meat, and I guess it was men like Boland he was thinking of. There was a thickset roughness about his appearance that spoke more of the farms and hills than it did of the city. In fact, it sometimes felt like some cosmic joke that he had been born in Dublin at all. Everything about him spoke of a man who ought to have been rising at dawn to inspect his own fields, and reclining at night with his feet stretched towards a peat fire.
But that country boy solidity masked a sensitivity that meant he was always going to find working the murder squad too damaging. Murder affected everyone, of course, unless they were chiselled out of stone, nursing hearts dead to the business of being human, but it was true that it took a certain sliver of ice in the heart to be able to go on doing it, day after day, murder after murder, and if Boland ever had ice in his heart then it had melted long ago.
Eventually he’d given up the battle against reality and jumped ship. With his girlfriend, he opened a locksmith’s store in the indoor market that ran between South Great George’s Street and Drury Street. It was Boland’s name I’d given to Hugh that morning.
I’d got back from the library to find him already at work. It said something for how much I trusted him that I didn’t mind him being here without me. There weren’t many people I could say that about. Like Lucas Piper, I was a little paranoid about security.
“You don’t have to call her Chief now,” I pointed out, walking over to the front door where he was kneeling, tightening screws. “You’re a free man.”
“She’ll always be Chief to me.”
“Don’t tell Cassie.”
“She’s Chief No 2,” he said with a grin.
“A man cannot serve two mistresses. Unless you’re one of those men who like being bossed about by big dominatrixes in leather masks and tight lederhosen with whips and chains,” I said. “I’ve read about your sort in the Sunday newspapers.”
“My secret is out,” Boland said. “That must be why I’m so good with locks.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “how much longer are you going to be?”
“Didn’t you ever hear that old saying about patience being a virtue? I’m nearly done. These are fascinating old locks you have. Seems a pity to replace them.”
“As long as they work,” I shrugged.
“Give me five minutes then and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“You meeting Cassie for lunch?”
“Not today,” he said. “I have to stay in and mind the shop.”
“Just imagine,” I said. “If you hadn’t left the murder squad, you could be over there now with the rest of the team instead.”
“No thanks,” said Boland firmly.
He was another one, getting on with their lives, like Piper.
Another one who’d been able to leave it behind.
“Do they have any idea who did it?” he asked now.
“No,” I said. “But there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a forced entry, and it was a bit late at night for the killer to be posing as the gasman or a courier to get inside, so either it was someone she knew and she let them in, or it was someone with a key.”
“The Chief should check her locks,” said Boland.
I frowned. What did Fitzgerald’s locks have to do with this woman’s murder?
“The dead girl’s locks,” explained Boland when he saw my blank look.
“I’m still lost,” I said.
“You’d be surprised by the things I’ve learned since starting this job. One thing I’ve learned is never to trust a locksmith. Apparently, there’s a brisk black market trade in keys.”
“There is?”
“Think about it,” he said, warming to the theme. “A locksmith gets called in to change someone’s locks, and when he’s in the house he sees a few nice pieces scattered about, maybe he even knows a bit about antiques or collectables and realises what they’re worth. More to the point, he knows other people who might be interested in getting their greedy hands on the stuff. So he makes a couple of extra keys of the place he’s just fixed up, and Bob’s your uncle. He sells them on and a few weeks later the people come home to find there are considerably less things in the house than there were when they went out.”
“This is a bit more serious than a robbery.”
“Same difference, as far as the methodology goes. You never know, her locksmith could’ve taken a shine to her and cut himself an extra key for when he summoned up the courage to act on it. Locksmiths make spares illicitly all the time, though they don’t like to shout about it, for obvious reasons. There was even a case in Japan recently of a writer who was murdered after publishing a book exposing what they were up to.”
“I guess that’s how you afforded a new car,” I teased him.
I’d seen the new people carrier parked on the kerb when I got back from the library. It looked impressive, though it wasn’t going to look so impressive once the clampers got to it.
“I got that entirely legit,” Boland said. “Just because I know some of the wicked w
ays of the trade doesn’t mean I take after them. Besides, I don’t need to. We’re doing so well now we’ve just taken a young lad on to work with us. Wish I’d done it years ago instead of plodding along, playing at being a real policeman. I hardly do the locks myself now. I just sit in the shop and send the new boy out. I’m only here doing these ones because it’s you.”
“I’m honoured,” I said. “Not to mention relieved. At least I can trust you not to go selling on my keys to the criminal underworld.”
“The bad guys wouldn’t stand a chance against you even if I did.”
“I wouldn’t say that. My karate’s a little rusty these days,” I joked. “It’s an intriguing idea, though. I’ll tell Fitzgerald what you said. It might be worth following up. At least it would explain how the killer got in and out without any sign of a break in.”
“You really think it’s worth checking out?”
He looked pleased to have come up with a useful suggestion.
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t. You know, Boland, sometimes I think you’d make a good policeman. You’re wasted in your new life. ”
Chapter Nine
“Your Cecilia Corrigan had an interesting taste in friends,” said Burke.
Thaddeus Burke, that is to say: owner of, and sole worker at, Burke and Hare’s, a radical (at least that’s what he called it) bookstore down by the quays, where the water slapped continually at brown stone, lingering idly on its way to the sea.
Decorated former US marine, lifelong communist, cat lover, whiskey connoisseur, truly execrable poker player – there was something in Burke’s overcrowded personality for everyone. And speaking for myself, it was the terrible poker that I liked best, plus the fact that he seemed to effortlessly gather a whole bunch of equally terrible poker players round him. For a girl who paid her way through college back in Boston playing poker, they made for easy, if not so rich, pickings. Sometimes I truly wished he’d get to know some rich people for a change and invite them along on one of his poker nights. Sadly, Burke was drawn to the marginalised and the penniless, and there’s only so much hard cash you can snatch from these people before you start feeling bad about it. Guilt takes all the pleasure out of winning.
Well, some of it.
All the same, I had to admit that playing poker with Burke’s inner circle of Dublin’s dissolute was less stressful than those far off days in college when I’d spent my nights in darkened downtown rooms across a table from the kind of men my mother had always warned me to stay away from. And she was right. Those were the days when, if you played poker, you were never really sure if you wanted to win. Losing might’ve meant poverty, but you didn’t know what winning might mean. Chances were it wouldn’t be pleasant.
No one ever asked any questions about what anyone else there did from nine to five. That was one of the rules. But they didn’t need to wear badges to signal that these were men who were less used to handing over their own money than taking other people’s money off them. Whether the other people wanted to hand it over or not.
An exile like me, it was inevitable that Burke and I would find our way to one another eventually, and so it had proved. I counted him now as one of my few genuine friends in the city, and I hoped he could say the same about me. His politics I wasn’t so crazy about, but I figure that a man’s politics are his own concern. More important than any ideological differences was how he carried himself as a human being, and Burke had a dignity and self-possession in his bearing that you often see in the best soldiers.
I’d never seen him lose his temper, not even when he came down from his room above the store some mornings to find the word Nigger painted across the front window.
The continuing suspicion of a black face in some quarters of the city was one of those hidden parts of life in Dublin that they never get around to mentioning in the guide books.
It was Burke I’d asked to check up for me on Jenkins Howler, since he had a computer hooked up to the internet, where he could track the progress of the worker’s revolution across the globe (current status : way behind schedule), and I didn’t. He also needed it for his business. Half his sales were online now, he’d told me not so long ago when I was complaining at the permanent hum the computer made behind the desk. Most of his customers never even came into the store. My relationship with technology, by contrast, was almost as bad as my relationship with other people. Almost, but not quite.
It’s true that logging on to the internet would probably have made researching my books a whole lot more straightforward, but I still didn’t want one. I know my personality, my weaknesses. I’m too easily distracted. I wouldn’t trust myself with that much opportunity not to do any work. No, I preferred to stay with my usual methods of online research, namely getting Burke to do it. Besides, it gave me an excuse to come round and drink his whiskey.
That clinched any remaining argument.
“She’s not my Cecilia Corrigan,” I said now in answer to his earlier remark about the dead woman’s choice of friends. “She wasn’t anybody’s. That was the problem. Who’d chose to have a guy on Death Row for a friend if there were other available alternatives?”
“What have you got against prisoners on Death Row?” said Burke.
“What have I got against them?” I repeated incredulously. “You mean, apart from the fact that they’re a collection of murderers, rapists, gangsters, armed robbers, cop killers, drug addicts and child molesters?”
“Who says? The Texas Department of Criminal Correction?” said Burke. “That ain’t exactly the testimony of the angels. They make mistakes. Innocent men get strapped to the table whilst the doc injects them with that crap too, you know.”
“I know that, Burke, but you -”
“And have you ever looked at those statistics?” he interrupted. “Only eleven per cent of the population of Texas is black, and you wanna guess what the percentage is of black offenders on Death Row in the state? Forty per cent. Forty. Over 50 per cent of Texas is white, but white prisoners only make up 30 per cent of the inmates on Death Row.”
“That doesn’t excuse what they’ve done.”
“I’m not saying it does. I spent twenty years as a soldier. I don’t have any illusions about human nature. But you can’t divorce the issue of capital punishment from the social, political and racial context in which it’s implemented by the government,” Burke said.
“Shooting dead the cashier so you can take twenty bucks from the till isn’t making a political statement.”
“No, but giving thirty years to a white guy who shoots a cashier, and a one way trip to the prisoners’ graveyard in Huntsville to a black guy whose does exactly the same, is a political statement. The whole system stinks.”
“Look, not even I’m crazy enough to say the system’s perfect,” I said. “I just can’t think of an alternative. The dead deserve justice. It’s the only thing we’ve got left to give them. And those men, they carry on spreading evil even when they’re behind bars. It’s their nature. They should be dead.” I paused. “Is Jenkins Howler black?”
Burke grinned.
“You think I’m fooled by the way you just sidestepped the argument about capital punishment there and tried to switch the talk back to the reason you came round here?”
“Obviously not.”
“You’re damn right I’m not. But for your information,” said Burke, “Jenkins Howler isn’t anything anymore, black, white, Hopaki Indian or Eskimo. He’s dead, and there are no segregated buses in Hell.”
“Dead?” I said.
“That’s the usual outcome when you’re executed.”
Burke lay down a sheet in front of me, showing a headline from a three month old copy of the Texas Ranger which said: Rape-Murderer Executed in Huntsville.
It even featured a picture of him. Howler had been a weaselly man with a pinched mean-looking face, scrappy moustache, bad teeth.
And no, he wasn’t black.
“Good looking guy,” I remarked.
This lot turned out to be a pile of press cuttings and write-ups about Howler that Burke had downloaded and printed for me off the internet.
He laid them down on the table then sat back, watching the world go by outside his window, as I began to flick through the sheets. Burke, bless him, had even put the collection into chronological order – oh, what it must be to have a logical mind - starting with a ten year old news item about Howler’s arrest for the rape and murder of a female hitchhiker whose body had been found in shrub land by the side of the road near Austin three weeks earlier.
The gun which had been used to kill the girl was found in the glove compartment of Howler’s pickup truck. Not exactly a criminal genius then.
When DNA testing, as later news report confirmed, also linked Howler to the scene, he soon confessed. Though not to the murder of a young black woman shot dead at a crack house in Tyler two years previously, which tests showed was also carried out by the same gun. His story was that he’d bought the gun in a bar in Galveston, which was possible, I guess. Few guns being passed around on the black market had a clean history. Each one was corrupted by its history and corrupted by those who held them. Having too little evidence to go on, the prosecutor decided not to pursue that charge. The rape and murder was sufficient for a conviction as it was, especially when DNA tests also matched Howler to three further rapes against students in the university town of Austin some years previously.
There were further reports, growing more intermittent as time passed, of Howler’s trial and sentencing, then of the various appeals launched by his attorneys against the capital sentence, all of whom seemed to talk as if it was Howler who was the true victim of all this.