The good life imm-5

by John Brady

“Indeed. The Quakers fed people in my home parish of Lisnacree during the Famine. So I think of this restaurant in a special way. How things come around… I’ll wager good money that other people say the odd prayer here too.”

  “We’d be fools not to,” he said. She frowned at him.

  “Girls are beaten, Inspector. Beaten at home. Beaten by their fathers and their boyfriends and their husbands. By their brothers and their sons. If they turn to a life on the streets, they’re beaten by their pimps. They’re beaten by their clients. With Mary, a girl I can barely recollect, I know that God’ll see her life and the lives of other trapped girls as their own Via Dolorosa.”

  Trapped, Minogue considered. He had begun to think of Mary Mullen as a woman with plans and ambition, someone who chose to be close to professional criminals.

  “I believe in the resurrection,” said Sister Joe. “So I hold out hope. Always.”

  “Are there women who drop into the centre who’d know Mary?”

  “Probably. But if you want to find such girls, you’ll let me go about the matter.”

  “I want to find who killed Mary Mullen.”

  Her eyes stayed on his.

  “I understood that from the moment you first contacted us. Do not regard the centre as a resource to be mined, Inspector Minogue from County Clare. I’ll inquire on your behalf.”

  “You have my word that I’ll do nothing to jeopardize the women in your care.”

  Her eyes bore down on him. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Another cup of coffee there, Joe?”

  Her forehead lifted.

  “Ah, go on,” he chided. “‘Come on the Banner County!’”

  She laughed but quickly held a hand to her mouth.

  “Tommy?”

  Malone shook his head.

  In the few minutes it took Minogue to get the coffee, lines of fatigue had appeared on Sister Joe Whelan’s face. He pushed her cup across the marble table-top.

  “Thank you. Normally, I wouldn’t now.”

  “May I ask now if the woman with the overdose is on the mend?”

  “No, she isn’t. This is the fourth time, the fourth that I know about anyway.”

  She laid her spoon on the saucer as though it were a delicate archaeological find.

  “I hadn’t seen her for a good long while. I began to delude myself into thinking that she was doing better, that she’d gotten out of the life completely. But they’ve gone beyond the streets entirely, I’m beginning to think. So far as I can gather anyway.”

  “I’m not sure I get it.”

  She looked across the restaurant to where Yvonne was smoking.

  “I mean that they may have stopped selling sex on the streets. Some of the girls seem to have graduated to being mistresses of a sort.”

  “You mean another type of criminal activity now, or a group?”

  “I know little enough about it. First it’s a suspicion, then it’s a rumour.”

  She drank more coffee.

  “I’ve heard talk about some girls boasting they could go to such-and-such a club and have everything paid for.”

  “You’re saying there’s been some change in the ways that girls do their business?”

  “If I knew more, I’d tell you. We might be getting left high and dry in the centre. Fewer girls call in. Maybe we need to change our tack. God knows, we’re busy enough with drop-ins and crisis interventions for family violence that maybe we haven’t been able to notice that girls are keeping away from the place. Maybe we’re missing the boat with those girls. They’re slipping away on us. The business changes. AIDS. Heavy drug use. More sophisticated types…”

  Her words trailed off. She watched Malone tapping his spoon on his saucer.

  “I have to be off now,” she said then. Minogue stood.

  “You’ll be in touch if you…?”

  “Depend on it now,” she said. “God bless.”

  Minogue flopped back down in the chair and sighed. A bath, he thought. Sit in the garden tonight with a lot of ice in a glass of something next to him.

  “Is she really a nun?” asked Malone. Minogue rubbed his lip.

  “The blue clothes are a giveaway, I suppose,” said Malone.

  Malone looked from face to face in the restaurant. Minogue made another effort to gather his wits. His effort gained him little reward. He swallowed the last of his coffee.

  TEN

  Jammy Tierney stood up and stretched. He turned up the sound on the Walkman, dabbed more oil onto the cloth and hunkered down again. He shoved the rag in between the exhaust pipe and the axle, grasped it as it showed beneath and then continued buffing. The numbers came back to his mind: how much the bike had cost, how much he’d sell it for, what he could use the money for. Trade it in for the new Suzuki or buy a car? He made a face and looked at its reflection on the exhaust. Car?

  He stood up when the figures appeared beside his own onion face on the exhaust. Painless he recognized. The other fella looked familiar. Pony-tail, studs along his ear. He pulled out the earphones.

  “Jammy,” said Painless. “How’s it going, man?”

  “Oh, great. How’s yourself.”

  He felt stupid with the rag in his hand. He bent his knees to ease the stiffness.

  “Going somewhere, are you?” asked Pony-tail.

  Like who’s asking, he wanted to say. He studied the dark patches under his eyes.

  “Nice bike,” said Painless.

  “Thanks.”

  “Paid for, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You up to anything these days, Jammy?”

  “The usual, you know. A bit of this-”

  “A bit of that?” Pony-tail asked. He took a step forward, blew a bubble and cracked it.

  “Like a bit of what?” asked Painless. Tierney glanced back at the sallow, expressionless face of Painless Balfe. Indoors all day, he thought. Probably a user. Psycho.

  “Things is slow on the buildings. I get the odd ruxer. Then the rock-and-roll.”

  “Still good with the balls, are you, Jammy?”

  He tried to smile. He realized his knees were turning to jelly on him.

  “You know yourself. Couldn’t make a living out of it. But the odd game does the job.”

  Painless’s face took on a quizzical expression.

  “Is that the only game you play, Jammy?”

  “You know me, man. Just trying to get along. I never went in for the excitement.”

  Balfe’s eyes bored into his now. Again he tried to grin. It didn’t come. A trickle ran down his back. He shrugged. Painless’s eyes slid down to the bike. He nodded several times.

  “How fast does this yoke go, Jammy?”

  “About one-thirty.”

  “A hundred and thirty miles an hour? Fuck me. For real?”

  “If you get the road, you know? It’s a real buzz if you’re into it.”

  Pony-tail blew another bubble.

  “Have you ever been on it when it went that fast?” he asked.

  Painless’s sidekick was grinning. His teeth were yellow. Average size, nothing special if it was a clean fight, but bad eyes. If the Egans had him on the payroll, he had to be the goods. Tierney rubbed at his eyes and looked down at the hands in the pockets. Knuckles, maybe.

  “No. Went to one-twenty once, though.”

  “Not fast enough,” said Pony-tail. Tierney looked at Balfe. His face was blank.

  “Seen Leonardo today?” Balfe asked.

  “Well, I seen him the other day, yeah.”

  Pony-tail chewed more vigorously.

  “I don’t stay in touch with the likes of him, though. I mean to say, he’s a fucking header, right?”

  Painless’s expression hadn’t changed.

  “He’s always messing,” he went on. “He’s a goner this long time, you know?”

  “He’s a mate of yours,” said Painless. “Am I right or am I right?”

  The fear made him vehement now. He jabbed at his own upper arm.
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  “No way. He stopped being a mate of mine when he started feeding his fucking arm.”

  “Feeding his arm?” asked Painless

  “Whatever he does. I don’t know exactly. I’m not into that. Never was.”

  “Fella saw you and him in the Eight Ball the other day,” said Pony-tail. “Charley’s?”

  He popped one bubble and stopped chewing.

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t fucking matter who,” snapped Painless.

  “Well he obviously didn’t hear me give Leonardo the brush-off, did he?”

  “Obviously?” sneered Pony-tail. “Obviously you’re trying to be fucking smart.”

  His hand slid out of his pocket. Tierney looked down at the rings. Pony-tail began a foot-to-foot motion as though testing new shoes.

  “Here, Painless, wait a minute!”

  Painless’s hand was already behind his back.

  “I’ll help find him for you, Painless, if that’s what you mean, you know, like?”

  “How?” Balfe’s eyes had gone clear and moist. “Said you didn’t fucking know him.”

  “Well, I know him, but I don’t know him.”

  “Fuck off out of the way, so,” said Painless. Pony-tail went by him and raised his arm.

  “Jesus, Painless, don’t, man! I swear to God!”

  He jumped out onto the street. A bread lorry honked but didn’t let up speed. Pony-tail brought his hand down in a chop. It glanced off the petrol tank.

  “Fucking thing,” he said. He drew back with his next swing and scraped the side of the tank.

  “Painless! Man! Just get him to stop it, for Jases’ sake, will you!”

  Painless had replaced something in his back pocket. He stared at the motorbike. Pony-tail began kicking against the exhaust.

  “These bikes,” Pony-tail grunted between kicks. “You could…fucking…get…yourself…hurt tearing around the place on one of these things.”

  “Lolly,” said Painless. Pony-tail turned with a mischievous look and smiled at Tierney.

  “Be seeing you, there. Stay in touch.”

  He counted the money again and tried to decide. It was too late for laying out the stuff on the paths along by the Green. But the office crowd would be on the move in a little while. He couldn’t decide. He flicked the cigarette away. His shoulder ached from lying on the grass. Two kids were throwing crusts to ducks by the pond. He stared at a can floating in the scum on the surface. Christ, the stink.

  The ache for a hit ran up from his stomach and his heart seemed to swell. He stood up and lit a cigarette. For several moments he was dizzy; the heat and the glare and the smoke in his lungs made the trees come at him, changing colour as they did. He closed his eyes. He’d have to carry the stupid bag with his change of clothes in it as well as the pictures all over the city. Again the craving came to him. He could make himself do it, he thought then, cold turkey. He wasn’t really into it anyway, not like people who needed it bad enough to knock pensioners around for a tenner.

  The tips of his fingers began to itch and tingle. He began walking around the bench. Eat something, that’d help. It was too hot. He looked down at the bags, imagining them in slow motion falling toward the water, taking his troubles with them. Grabbing the pictures, twisting them to a pulp, watching them sink into the pond. Nobody’d help him. He was out there on his own. People were looking for him. No shelter, the sun beating down on him like it was the Sahara. Through the trees and beyond the dappled walks he caught glimpses of the traffic wheeling around the Green. A man with his shirt open to his waist staggered around the shrubs and came toward him. He almost slipped but held the bottle of sherry upright. He slowed and began heading toward him again.

  “Hey, brother. Wait a minute there!”

  He grabbed the bags and headed across the grass toward the gate. Where could he go? Take Jammy’s advice and get the boat to Liverpool? Stupid bastard. No way: he’d go under there. There was no work. He didn’t know anyone. He moved faster down the path now, checking the faces and the parked cars. A faint hope began to leak into his chest and his stride settled. There had to be a way he could talk to the Egans, prove he had nothing to do with… Nothing to do with what? The thought of Mary dead made him slow almost to a stop. Nobody’d believe him. There was no safe place. He looked back at the foliage spilling over the railings in the Green. It was like an island away from all this heat and crap and noise, a place he could just walk in, a place where he could lie down to rest. But this was the busiest bloody park in Dublin. It was full of dopers. They closed it up when it got dark.

  The idea came to him then as a picture of dense woods. That’s where he could go. Hundreds of acres he could get lost in. Did the deer still run wild in the Park? And the zoo. If wild animals could do all right in a park in Dublin, why couldn’t he? He stepped back out onto the path and headed for the city centre. The bags felt lighter now. He’d get a bus down the quays to Islandbridge. There’d be a chipper down there near the gates of the Phoenix Park. He’d even spent a night in the Park once. A crowd of lads had gone into the Park, drinking and smoking dope. Someone got stabbed, he remembered, and everyone cleared out rapid before the cops came.

  There was a charcoal of David Bowie down by the Bank of Ireland. A woman was still working on it, a hippy type he hadn’t seen before. There were fifties and pound coins in her hat. She didn’t look Irish. He bought cigarettes and a Coke and caught a bus pulling out from O’Connell Bridge. The bus squealed to a stop by Merchant’s Arch. He’d laid out his stuff there a lot of times. He spotted another chalkie there, one he’d seen before, a fella who specialized in religious stuff. A man who had been leaning against the railings by the Arch turned as the brakes squealed louder. It was the fella who’d chased him from the house. He spread his hand on his cheek and looked down again. He hadn’t been spotted.

  The bus shuddered as it pulled away. Terror still rooted him to the seat. They were out looking for him. They knew his spots. Maybe he should just go to the cops and hope for the best. But what could he deal with? Even if he signed a statement for the car jobs, the cops’d want to set him up. They’d turn him into a stoolie or something. They didn’t care. Nobody cared. The panic made his bladder ache. The whole world was closing in on him, punishing him for something he hadn’t done or even imagined. The rest of the journey down the quays passed in a daze. It was suddenly time to get off. He stepped out into a mass of jostling school kids. Everybody seem to be looking at him. His bag caught against a kid’s shoulder and he pulled it free. He skipped across the street.

  He looked over his shoulder, back toward the city centre. Was it vibrating? The heat. Jesus. A mirage right here in the middle of Dublin. He passed the Park gates and remembered the time he’d been there as a child. The main road stretched straight as an arrow ahead. He trudged across the grass for a quarter of an hour until he reached a small wood. He paused by the outermost trees and studied the shade and deeper shadows ahead. He entered the wood then and made for the middle. It was cool here, it smelled of clay. He let down his bags and lit a cigarette. The open fields beyond the wood were a dull glare now. He sat down against a tree and watched cars pass almost silently in the distance. It was only one of a hundred spots in the park, he thought. For a moment, he felt again as he had when he was a kid: this wood was a vast, limitless forest, a shelter where he could play and live forever.

  “What did she mean?” Kilmartin asked. “Your Sister Joe.”

  “That girls move from the streets indoors,” replied Minogue. “Money changes hands still, of course. Doyler agrees. The whole business is impossible to track.”

  He looked away from the window. Kilmartin was poised on the edge of his chair looking up under his eyebrows. A smell of salami from someone’s lunch hung in the stifling air of the squadroom.

  “Hnnkkk. This bloody flatmate of hers. Patricia Fahy. Christ, she has to start talking.”

  Minogue sat back and watched Murtagh writing on the boards: addresses fo
r hard cases and enforcers in the Egan clan. Next to one was the address of a shop owned by Eddsy Egan.

  “Probably. We need to go to her with something, Jim. Something which will make her cop on to the fact that the Egans can’t touch her. Something to make her wake up and realize that we’re all she’s got. Any word on Hickey yet?”

  “Not a sausage, and bugger-all new from the lab about Mullen’s bloody taxi either. I’ve been going through his log again, minute by minute nearly. We’re down to three or maybe four significant periods of time he could’ve had a chance. Murtagh’s got the file searches for regulars by the canal, the customers, well in hand. The gougers on the parolee list as well as ones on bail are coming up empty. We’ll have to widen the net. Open it up to a year even. Go through the logged incidents reported into stations. Jesus.”

  Minogue caught Murtagh’s eye.

  “This Balfe character uses the Egans’ shop as his HQ? ‘Painless’ Balfe?”

  Murtagh nodded. Minogue swivelled back toward Kilmartin.

  “We’re okay to jump on the likes of him, aren’t we? If we can’t poke the Egans directly?”

  Kilmartin blew out smoke from under his lower lip.

  “Don’t ask. Talked to Keane again. Last resort, says he. And I have to go through him if I want to. Holy God, says I, we have her in and out of one of the Egans’ houses-right from his own surveillance! ‘I know, I know, Jim,’ says he. Told him I could get a warrant as easy as kiss hands. ‘Course you could, Jim.’ All that shite. I talked to him for twenty minutes. Finally he drops the clanger: ‘Well, Jim, you’d really need to get good advice on going it alone with this.’ In other words, check upstairs or I’ll be pissed on. Trouble is, I knew that bloody Keane is right. But I didn’t let on, did I?”

  He snorted and stood. A smell of sweat and long extinguished cigars wafted over to Minogue.

  “I checked already with a certain party in HQ, you see. Turns out that Keane has all the trumps in the bloody deck. It’s a combo between Drug Squad Central, Revenue Commissioners, Customs and Excise, Serious Crime-with their automatics stuck down the back of their shagging trousers! Then, to put the tin hat on it, I find out that it’s the personal initiative of you-know-who, the Iceman himself. He set it all up. If I want to take the Egans in, it’s bloody Tynan himself I’d have to ask!”