by Ingrid Black
Was I really that bad?
“Really,” I said, and gave a friendly wave at the neighbour opposite as I shut the door, making sure that Grace didn’t see me as I did so. She wouldn’t approve of antagonising the neighbours. Me, I didn’t see what else neighbours were for.
I followed her into the kitchen and watched her pour a glass of red wine.
“I’m glad you’re not hostile to the idea,” she said. “I know it’s been difficult before, looking for a place together. I’m just fed up of this house. This street.”
“Cul de sac, don’t you mean?”
“This cul de sac,” she winced. “What more needs be said? I need a change of scenery. I only picked up the brochures a couple of days ago. It seems like a lifetime ago now.”
“Then we should make some appointments to view,” I said.
“That fast?”
“Why wait?”
I wouldn’t want to give myself a chance to change my mind, for one thing.
“You’re right,” she said. “No time like the present. But what a week to pick to start. I’m going to be tied up full time with this case. Christ, what an expression to use. Tied up.”
“On the contrary, there’s no better time,” I said. “Your friendly local real estate agent can’t get antsy if you have to cancel your appointments at the last minute. It’s one of the perks of being on a murder investigation. They’re not going to ask too many questions.”
“Sometimes they ask too many,” she said. “There’s never a happy medium.”
“Sure there is,” I said. “I had one of them read my palm once in Coney Island.”
“Coney Island,” she echoed. “That reminds me. We should’ve booked a holiday too.”
“There’s plenty of things we should’ve done.”
“Why didn’t we?”
“There was the Harcourt case,” I reminded her.
“And then the shooting in Crumlin. I remember.”
“And now Marsha Reed,” I said.
“Summer’s a busy time. Soon as the temperature rises a few degrees, so does the body count. Wouldn’t you love to get away and forget yourself in the sun for a few weeks?”
“You know what I’m like in the sun,” I said. “Too much of it, and I’d start contemplating murder myself. But yeah, it would be good to get out of Dublin.”
“You should book something for us,” she said. “For later, I mean, when this case is closed. Only don’t tell me what it is. Surprise me. Surprises are always welcome.”
“Alaska it is then. Would you rather have an igloo or a tent?”
My legendary wit was lost on her.
Her mind was already being used up by Marsha.
She held up her glass.
“Do you want some wine?” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Your vintage red is wasted on me,” I said. “Just throw me a beer. That’ll do.”
She paused halfway to handing me the bottle.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “What happened with your old friend JJ?”
“I’m still deciding what to do,” I lied smoothly.
She seemed to accept the lie easily enough.
“I should call him in to help with this case,” she said.
“Not giving up already, are you?”
“I thought you’d approve of me calling in the FBI.”
“I do. If you want something done, I’ve always said you should call in an American. Preferably a dark-haired, good-looking, female one with attitude and a great collection of boots. But I doubt your colleagues in the murder squad would be so keen.”
“That’s the understatement of the century,” said Grace. “Given a choice between having you telling them what to do, or sticking their mickeys in a mincer, most of them would chose the mincer.”
“And I’m more than willing to volunteer to turn the handle,” I added.
“Get in line. Me first.”
“Lucky then that you don’t need me or anyone else,” I told her. “You’ll get him.”
“Do you know a funny thing?” she said. “It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been here before, or how many unsolved cases we still have on the books in Dublin Castle – and that’s more than I’d care to admit, even to myself sometimes. But I still never doubt each time that we will get the man we’re looking for.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I just feel diminished by it all right now,” she confessed. “By Marsha Reed’s death. Or rather by her life. The kind of people she was involved in. It’s sad, that’s all, thinking of these people across the city, the things they do because they’re lonely, because they need someone. The danger they put themselves into. I’m just glad I have you.”
“I’ve saved you from a life of empty sado-masochsistic sex,” I said. “That’s some achievement. I’ll put it on my tombstone.”
“Stop fooling around and learn to take a compliment.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said. “I’m the one who told you all along you should apply for the Assistant Commissioner’s job, but would you listen?”
“Don’t remind me,” she said with a mock shudder. “That’s tomorrow’s nightmare.”
“You nervous?”
“About meeting my new lord and master?” She shrugged. “In a way, this whole thing with Marsha Reed has been for the best, awful as it sounds. It’s taken my mind off office politics in the DMP and allowed me to focus on what really matters. I haven’t had a chance yet to think about tomorrow. Besides, whoever it is couldn’t be worse than Draker, right?”
“You never know. There must be some people worse than him.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But whoever it is, it is. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Except carry on doing your job.”
“Except carry on doing my job brilliantly,” she corrected, “then come home and gripe to you about it.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, I have some other uses,” I pointed out, smiling suggestively
“I’ve noticed. And there was me hoping to get some beauty sleep.”
“Don’t worry. I’m a fast worker,” I said.
“Saxon,” she said, “sometimes you are so like a man.”
“I’m nothing like a man. Men only think they’re right all the time. I know I am.”
Chapter Twelve
Fitzgerald had her driver drop me off next morning on her way back to Dublin Castle for the meeting with the new Assistant Commissioner.
She looked the picture of efficiency in her best suit, though it wouldn’t make her any less of a detective if she turned up in pair of torn Levi’s and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
I had them let me out near the Showgrounds on Merrion Road. Fitzgerald didn’t ask why I wanted to be dropped off in that particular spot, I guess she was a little distracted and didn’t have space in her head for queries about my own plans for the rest of the day.
Or maybe she didn’t think it was any of her concern. Fitzgerald and I had always known how to give one another space. That was one of the reasons our relationship worked.
I certainly didn’t offer the information unprompted. It wasn’t a secret as such, just something I wanted to keep to myself for now. Or maybe that’s what a secret is, I don’t know.
We made arrangements to meet up later, before standing on the sidewalk as the car pulled back into the traffic, watching until it was through the next set of lights. Then I turned and made my way along the narrow path that led between the sparkling narrow water of the Dodder on one side and the green haven of Herbert Park on the other.
The Dodder looked almost appealing that afternoon.
Almost clean.
As for the weather, there was still no prospect of a break in the sun’s campaign yet. Rare breaths of wind stirred the leaves on the trees, but mostly the afternoon was as motionless as an oil painting.
Cecilia Corrigan’s house,
or the house which had been Cecilia Corrigan’s before her death, was in a leafy backstreet off Morehampton Road on the other side of the park where all was in blessed shadow from overhanging trees and the houses sheltered under the branches like they were sunshades. As I turned into the street, I could hear a dog barking in one of the gardens. A cat lay sleeping on the wall. It opened one eye with a blink as the dog barked, and regarded me as if to share a bewilderment that anything could bother making such an effort on a hot day like this.
I checked along the gates.
Here it was.
Number 8.
The gate swung open with a protest of a squeak, and I walked up to the front door, which was surrounded with roses like some country cottage on a picture postcard.
The brass door knocker was in the shape of a cat too, and there was a grey stone cat sitting on the step with a spider’s web constructed neatly into the gap between its ear and shoulder. The garden looked small but neat, and a little overgrown. I guessed it must have been Cecilia Corrigan’s concern, and now she had gone the garden had been left to its own devices and was declining gently into a quiet chaos of tangled growth.
I knew the feeling.
I knocked.
Waited.
Traffic buzzed by distantly on the main road, and a closer buzzing denoted a bee that was hovering round the roses at the door, moving from flower to flower.
Apart from that, there was no other sound.
I knocked again, and this time a shadow abruptly loomed into view behind the glass, startling me. A moment later, the door swung open, and there stood a young woman, tall and slim with close-cropped dark hair, dressed in flat shoes and a loose-fitting summer dress with no bra. She was girlish-looking, with a tiny pointed nose, and definitely looked younger than her mid-twenties, and I knew she was in her mid-twenties because I knew who she was.
I’d seen her picture in the newspaper yesterday.
It was Cecilia Corrigan’s niece.
Becky stopped in surprise when she saw me. She clearly hadn’t realised I was there at all. She was wearing a shoulder bag, through which she had been rummaging for what I could only presume were her car keys because that’s what she was lifting out when we met.
“Oh,” she said.
It was a start.
“Becky Corrigan?” I said. “I scared you. Didn’t you hear me knocking?”
She didn’t answer. She just looked at me, and said, half to herself: “Another American.” That threw me. “I suppose you’re here about dear departed Aunt Cecilia?”
If I was expecting to find a woman in mourning, I’d clearly come to the wrong place. She certainly didn’t talk about her aunt as if the memory of her death was a painful one.
“If I’m not in your way.”
“You’d better come in,” she said with a sigh. “But I’m warning you, I haven’t got much time, I’m late for an appointment already.”
Before she could change her mind, I stepped inside to a long narrow hall in which stacks of boxes and old furniture were arranged untidily, virtually hiding an old grandfather clock in the corner. Through doorways I could see more boxes, more chairs upended, piles of books, and half-emptied shelves along the walls.
“I’m selling up,” she declared. “Aunt Cecilia was a bit of a collector, but there’s not much point keeping the place like a mausoleum just because she’s dead.”
“I guess not,” I said noncommittally, though her attitude seemed a little heartless even to me.
“Did you know Aunt Cecilia?” asked Becky.
“Not as such.”
“She was a harmless old bag, I suppose. But I wouldn’t say I was very close to her. I just started living here whilst I was studying in UCD. Afterwards, I sort of stayed on.”
“Did she leave you the house in her will?”
“She left me everything in her will,” she said. “Apart from a few thousand which she wanted the Cat Protection League to have. She was mad about cats. She had seven of them. They used to drive me mad.” Used to? She must have seen the confusion in my face. “I had them put down after she died. I can’t look after seven cats. I don’t have the time.”
“I see.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” she said defensively. “I’m not going to sit in every night looking after a bunch of cats that I never asked to be left in charge of in the first place. If you ask me, that’s where Aunt Cecilia went wrong. If she’d spent more time with real human beings instead of her cats, maybe she wouldn’t have gone so batty in the end. I don’t intend to make the same mistake. I’m going to enjoy myself whilst I’m young.”
She smiled a little too brightly, and then the smile was replaced by a frown.
I’d been waiting for this moment.
“What did you say you wanted again?” she asked.
“I didn’t.”
“I suppose it’s about her old friend Howler?” she went on.
I was thrown a second time.
“Do lots of people come round to ask about him?”
“No. But it’s what the other American wanted to talk about too. And I told him the same thing I’m going to tell you. I don’t know anything about Jenkins Howler and I don’t want to know anything. I knew my aunt wrote to him, and I knew about her campaign for him. She was always writing to the Minister for Justice demanding that he intervene and save lover boy from the electric chair, but of course he wasn’t interested. Why should he be?”
“You didn’t support her campaign?”
“No.” She shook her head firmly. “As far as I was concerned, they could have torn him apart limb from limb and I wouldn’t have given a flying fuck. After what he did to those women...” So she knew something about Howler at least. “Of course, she never told me what he’d done,” Becky added. “I had to look him up on the internet. We had quite a row about it.”
“What did your aunt say?”
“That every sinner deserves a second chance. That’s the kind she was. Always off to mass. She said Howler had found Jesus.” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
“But you didn’t fall out permanently over him?”
“No, no, nothing like that. She was lonely. This was her obsession. She was only in her forties, but you’d think she was sixty or something from the way she used to get on. I don’t know what she expected. That he’d be out one day and they’d get married, probably.”
“Had they talked about marriage?”
“I only looked at a couple of his letters. Maybe he meant it. Who knows? Someone like that, you wouldn’t know what was really going on in their heads, would you? I don’t know why there’s such a fuss about the whole thing really. He’s dead now. She’s dead.”
Once more, she regarded me oddly. It was as if she kept getting distracted by the sound of her own voice and then having to remind herself that there was someone else here.
“He was a reporter too,” she said.
“Jenkins Howler?”
“No, not Howler. Not as far as I know anyway. I meant the other American who came here. He worked for the New York Post. Or was it the New York Times? I can’t remember. He said he was doing a piece on my aunt for the newspaper.”
So Kaminski was posing as a reporter now, and she obviously thought I was one too.
I chose not to put her right.
“When was this?” I asked.
“About a week ago,” she said. “To be honest, I couldn’t understand what was so interesting about my aunt’s death. It’s not like she was murdered or anything. And it was months ago.” She said it like months ago was another century. Sometimes it is when you’re young. I wondered if she expected me to enlighten her as to why Cecilia Corrigan’s passing should excite such intrigue. I only wished I knew.
“Are you so sure,” was all I said instead, “that there really was nothing more to your aunt’s death than meets the eye?”
She regarded me oddly.
“He asked me that as well. And as I told him, my aunt wa
s knocked down. It was an accident, that’s all. Unless you both know something you’re not telling me?
“Me?” I said. “I don’t know anything.”
She continued staring at me for a moment, trying to read my expression. Then she jumped as the half-hidden grandfather clock chimed a muffled hour.
“And now I really am late,” she mumbled crossly. She glanced at her watch to back up the clock’s unwelcome news. “Look, Ms... I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Er, Kaminski.”
“Then I wish I could be more help, Ms Kaminski, but I really have to scoot.”
“There was one more thing before you go.”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask if I could read the letters Jenkins Howler wrote to your aunt.”
“You can’t.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I realise they’re private,” I said. “I won’t make them public if you’d rather -”
“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I haven’t got them anymore.”
“You haven’t got the letters?”
“I sold them,” she confessed. “The reporter I told you about, he offered to buy them and I couldn’t see any reason to refuse. He mentioned something about a book he wanted to write on women who struck up friendships with convicted killers. He said Aunt Cecilia’s letters would be invaluable for him. I didn’t think any more of it. They meant nothing to me.”
But they clearly meant something to Kaminski.
What could be in those letters that he was so desperate to get his hands on?
“I know it must be frustrating if you wanted to look at them,” Cecilia’s niece said, her voice becoming tetchy now as if sensing my disapproval, “but they do belong to me.”
“Did, you mean,” I pointed out.
Chapter Thirteen
My cellphone rang the moment I sat down on the tram heading back into town. There was only a handful of other passengers, so thankfully talking openly wasn’t a problem.
“Good morning,” said a voice.
It was Lucas Piper again, calling from New Jersey.
“Piper, I thought you’d forgotten me.”