by John Brady
“What?”
Kenny began shaking his head.
“Look. She thought… she thought…”
Kenny seemed to buckle at the waist. His hands sought the hand-basin and he hunkered down before it, shuddering. Minogue looked down at him. He had been right: there were highlights in his hair.
TWENTY
That was half eight, right?” Malone asked. Kenny nodded. Malone ran the tip of his biro along the lines in his notebook while he read. “ ‘I’ll phone Eddsy if you’re not back here with all the money at ten.’ ”
“Yes.”
Kenny had left his sleeves rolled up. He was rubbing his wrists. He tossed his hair back every now and then. The mannerism was driving Minogue to distraction.
“You knew all along you’d never come up with the rest of it, the rest of what she wanted.”
“The three thousand? Yes. I mean no. I knew I couldn’t.”
“You’re certain that you never actually told her that?”
“Right. I mean, what did she really think? She thought I had that kind of cash lying around the kitchen?”
Minogue shifted in his seat.
“You never told Mary anything which would lead her to believe that you actually wanted it, that you might be interested in selling the stuff-”
“Absolutely no way.”
“-or using the stuff.”
“Impossible. She was just coming the heavy, straight out. She’d tell the Egans if I didn’t cough up. I couldn’t believe it when she turned on me like that. Just unbelievable.”
Took the words out of my mouth, Minogue said within.
“She was really scared, you said. Scared she’d be found out?”
“Yes. Either the cash or the stuff had to be there. She said Bobby didn’t mind if she did a deal without advance warning. As long as the money was there right away. They’d been burned before, he’d told her. She said, anyway.”
“Look,” said Minogue. ”How would she form the opinion that you were in the market for this stuff? She told you she’d done something dangerous by taking the stuff from Bobby’s. Why’d she pin you for this deal?”
“Wait a minute here! You agreed earlier on that in no way was I dealing just because I took the package off her hands for a little while that night. No way! The worst thing I did, if I did anything wrong at all, was that I’d tried the stuff once or twice. Right? I mean, is that the crime of the century? You told me that wasn’t an issue here at all.”
“Stop, stop, stop, Mr. Kenny. What I’m trying to understand here is how you got yourself into this mess. You haven’t told us everything.”
“Ah, come on. You’re the cop! You know human nature, surely?”
Minogue eyed Malone.
“Everyone wants risk, don’t they? Oh, come on! Danger even. Mary was an attractive girl. She was ambitious. Anyone could see that. I grew up in a different way, a different world really, I suppose I’d have to say. I never really had to…you know?”
Minogue wondered how long she had been playing him. Was he hers or was she doing it for others? Mary Mullen had persuaded herself that this was her chance to cross into his world, the black furniture and the air-conditioning and the money that lived in the computers, real money that was clean and just as powerful as the worn and worried-over twenties she’d earned as a prostitute.
“It probably started and ended with me being stupid,” Kenny was saying. “Pretending I’d tried the stuff before. Or that friends of mine, people I know, had used-had said they’d used-stuff.”
“Stuff,” said Malone.
“All right. Drugs.”
“On one of those ‘one or two occasions,’ you used Ecstasy when you were with Mary. Am I right?”
“Yes. I admitted that. Right.”
“Did she?”
“No. She said she wanted to stay straight, that she liked it better that way.”
“She shoved this package into your lap when she got out of your car that evening,” said Minogue.
“Right. At first I hadn’t a clue, but then I squeezed it and I knew.”
“So you handed the package back to her.”
“Bloody right I did! Like a hot potato. But she threw it back in and walked off. More like ran off.”
“But not before she told you that you had to come up with the cash or else?”
“Or else Bobby’d know about it and there’d be big trouble.”
“Your reaction again?” said Malone.
“Well, like I said. I was, well, totally flabbergasted. I mean to say. It was so out of character for her. I really thought she was strung-out or something. Just nuts, she was. The look on her face, I mean.”
“So you didn’t put much store in her telling you that she was dead against drugs, that she never used?”
“Up to then I thought, well, she was admirable, I suppose. She hung around in that, em, subculture, like. I never saw her stoned. At least, if she was, I never knew. Never saw her overdoing the drink either. But at that moment, I knew I couldn’t reason with her. She was just nuts.”
“You decided to get a thousand quid together,” said Minogue.
“Not right then, no. I mean, I was late for the dinner with the client and everything.”
“When did you decide again?”
“All during that dinner, I was trying to decide what to do. I don’t think I tasted one dish that I ate. I knew it was time to get out of this, you know. I made up my mind that she could have the thousand quid. It’d be a way of saying goodbye, sort of. I had to ferret around a few bank machines, I tell you.”
“But you planned all along to go back to the canal at eight to meet her?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t keen to, I tell you.”
“So. Eight o’clock rolls around. You have a thousand quid and the package.”
“I gave her the envelope with the money. I tried to talk to her. She ripped open the envelope, saw what was in it and then she freaked again. I tried to tell her that we should, you know, give things a rest? That I didn’t like the direction we had been going in.”
“By this time, you’re steamed up, aren’t you?”
“Sure, I was annoyed-I mean it was pretty clear she’d set out to take me, right?”
Kenny held his hair back over his head with two hands. Minogue stared at the shine on his forehead. Kenny let go. His head drooped.
“I was working too hard,” he said. “Everything was too fast. I didn’t weigh things. I realized that it was time to-”
“Settle down?” asked Malone. Kenny looked up at him and frowned.
“Yes, settle down. But I resent the way you make it sound. I was ready for a serious long-term-”
“Relationship,” said Malone. Kenny gave him a hard look.
“Marriage, actually. You can understand that, can you?”
“Mary knew of this?”
“Not in so many words. But I think she knew something was up. Women’s intuition and everything, right?”
Minogue studied Kenny’s tentative smile.
“It might account for her rotten humour though, wouldn’t it?” Kenny added. “Timing, I mean, trying to get whatever she could before it was too late.”
“So. You tried to give her the package.”
“Right-as well as the money. The thousand quid. I told her that I guessed she was under some pressure and would this help her. Told her I just couldn’t get into this kind of thing. There was absolutely no way. Imagine, I said to her, me trying to get rid of this stuff to clients and friends and the like. I mean it would be funny if it weren’t so, well, tragic, I suppose. Accountants-the high life! Really? Christ, how naive. I really couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten the idea that the likes of me… Television, maybe? I don’t know.”
He glanced at Malone. The hostility lay like a shadow over his colleague still. For a moment he saw Mary Mullen and thousands like her, tens of thousands like her probably, standing at bus stops for late buses, full buses, to ferry them home to bligh
ted suburbs. Mary had seen too many Alan Kennys cruising by in their Mercedes.
“Maybe I yapped too much,” said Kenny. “About deals, the film business.” He looked from Minogue to Malone and back. “Maybe it’s when you guys, you know, finally crack a case. Yes. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Crack a case,” said Minogue.
“When you’ve just pulled off a big deal, I mean. When you’ve gotten it on paper? The deal. You’ve just got to talk about it to someone.”
“You boasted to Mary Mullen about your deals.”
“What I meant was that Mary might have picked up a false picture of the work I do. She thought it was just a matter of picking up a phone, talking big talk and then you went home rich.”
“Oh,” said Malone. Kenny’s lips tightened.
“It might look like that to someone on the outside,” he said. “She used to pick up on strange phrases. ‘The inside track’ was one. She wanted to be in on deals, deals she’d never understand. ‘In the know’ was another one. I bought an apartment, right? I kept it, I rode the trend and got out with a tidy sum. Okay? Is that so awful?”
Minogue looked at the wall above Kenny’s head.
“But Mary-people like Mary, anyway-they think it’s easy. They think it’s magic! They can’t see how it’s done. Don’t you get it? She said, ‘But you don’t use the apartment, you don’t even live in it.’ You see what I’m trying to get at?”
“Maybe, Mr. Kenny. Maybe.”
“So I tried to explain to her that money was made in buying and selling merchandise and services. Products. An expert’s time and training. Property. Information. Investments. Her eyes would glaze over. So when she shoved those pills at me and I told her I could never use them, she tells me, ‘Well, you told me it was all about buying and selling stuff you didn’t need.’ Why couldn’t drugs be just another commodity there, you know?”
“They already are,” said Minogue.
“Yes, but not legitimate business, not in the sense of…”
He let the words trail off. His eyes still blazed as they bored into the Inspector’s.
“Okay,” said Minogue. “There you were. You gave her the money, you gave her the package. It’s eight o’clock.”
“I gave her the money, yes. I tried to give her the package.”
“That was when things turned, let me see…” He looked down at his notes. “ ‘Really nasty’?” Kenny nodded.
“I told her I just couldn’t do it. She could keep the money. I told her, tried to tell her, that it was time to, you know…”
“Go our separate ways,” said Malone. Minogue glanced at him. The detective’s face was blank.
“That’s right,” snapped Kenny. “And, by the way, I’ve heard your accent there.”
“And?” said Minogue. Kenny kept his eyes on Malone.
“Haven’t you heard of inverted snobbery?”
Malone shook his head.
“Well, maybe you can’t credit anyone who happens not to have been born on the Northside of Dublin with any feelings, any positive feelings, I mean. Is it my fault I grew up in Foxrock or something? Is it my fault I have a good job? Christ, man, you don’t know the hours I put in! But hey-I’m not complaining!”
Malone’s expression didn’t change.
“A thousand quid,” he said.
“Yes! A thousand quid. That’s a lot of money for me. A lot.”
“You tried to buy your way out,” said Malone.
“Buy my way out? That’s a damn lie! I reckoned on it being enough to get her out of whatever scrape she was in. Enough for her to forget that stupid stunt she was trying to get me into.”
Scrape, thought Minogue. What was the going rate for an abortion in London anyway?
“ ‘Scrape.’ ”
“Whatever she wanted to use the money for, I don’t know. Maybe she had debts?”
“You keep on saying, or suggesting, that Mary was under pressure. How so?”
“I don’t know. I don’t.”
“What did you suspect?”
“I really don’t know. Maybe they told her to hurry up. The Egans, I mean.”
“Um. It was at that time that she became, shall I say, explicit about threats?”
“Yes.”
“Go through it again.”
“Do I really have to? We’ve been talking… Oh, I get it. You want to find inconsistencies and then jump on me, is it?”
“Maybe,” said Minogue. “Do we, Tommy?”
“Don’t know about you. I wouldn’t say no to a bit of that. Yeah.”
“So, Mr. Kenny?”
“Number one: She’d tell the Egans that I had stolen the drugs-the package. They’d believe her, she said. Her word counted for a lot more than mine there. ‘When it really counted,’ she said. Maybe mine might count with the Guards, I remember her saying, but where it really mattered, hers would. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”
“Deeply,” said Minogue. “Go on.”
“This Eddsy Egan would do a number on me, personally. He was a sadist, she said. He’d, well, he’d…”
“‘Chop your fucking nuts off,’ ” Malone murmured. Kenny frowned at him.
“Yes. So I began to get more annoyed. I mean, who was she to threaten me like this? I mean, what had I done to her that I deserved that kind of thing?”
Done to her, Minogue reflected. Given her hope, maybe.
“I mean, all she has to do is bring the damn stuff back,” said Kenny. “Then she can keep the money, right? Go her own way. I mean to say, Mary knew how to take care of herself, didn’t she? But no. She goes into a tirade about us, how I was the scum of the earth.”
Malone began to recite, his finger following the scribble across his pages.
“‘Southside fucking bastard…’ ”
“Yes, yes-whatever. That’s when she comes up with the photo bit. She tells me she has photos of a night in the Breffni hotel. I don’t care, I tell her. Well, Eddsy Egan does, she screams back.”
Kenny broke off to rub his hands alternately through his hair.
“You knew before then that she did photo sessions for the Egans?”
“No. She told me that Eddsy, the crippled-looking one, was the one who started her on them. Apparently he can’t, well, you know what I’m getting at. All he can do is look on, I hear. He likes to know the girls he’s looking at. The crazy one, Bobby, is into it as well. He gets prospects for the brother. Bobby’ll go, how can I put it, all the way. His harem. Him and Mary. As well as others, of course.”
“Back to the threats. The break-every-bone-in-your-body bit.”
“You make it sound trivial. Like it’s funny or something.”
Minogue and Malone stared at him.
“She said, ‘I know a guy who can break every bone in your body.’ ”
“ ‘Every bone in your fucking body,’ ” said Malone. He wasn’t looking at his notebook now.
“This is separate from the threat about Eddsy Egan?” asked Minogue.
“Well, I didn’t know, did I? At that stage I was thinking that she was so shrill about the Egans that there was something strange going on. More than just her anger and everything. She was losing it. Panicking. I got the idea then that she wouldn’t dare tell the Egans. That she’d get into trouble with them if they found out what she’d done, what she’d tried to do. That she was bluffing.”
“So the other threat was her own, sort of?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“You used the term ‘double-cross’ earlier on. You said you believed that Mary had been caught in a double-cross.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And that you were annoyed enough-the money, the threats-that you decided to just drive off.”
“That’s right.”
“With the drugs in the car.”
“With the package in the car, yes.”
“You wanted to teach her a lesson.”
“I never said that. I planned to come back late
r and try again. See if she had cooled down. See if I could talk some sense into her.”
“You made no attempt to find more money.”
“Absolutely not. No way! Look. You know I’m telling you the truth. I’m not going to grovel. Just look at the proof I’ve given you!”
“Proof? Sorry. Proof of what, now?”
“Proof that I’m telling you the truth! Proof I had nothing to do with what happened to Mary.”
Minogue looked down at the table-top, at the random marks of a biro from some other interview. Couldn’t the cleaners get them off or what? He rubbed at them with the heel of his hand.
“Mr. Kenny,” he said, and rubbed harder on the marks. “I have to tell you that I’m puzzled.”
“Puzzled? Okay. I mean, why? I don’t get it.”
“Puzzled. You are not obviously a stupid man. You have waived, or at least not exercised, the right to be represented by counsel. You have tendered information to us here, all building up to a substantial and useful statement, a statement I’m assuming you’ll sign your name to this evening.”
“I stand over everything I said here, that’s right.”
“Good, Mr. Kenny. Very good. Listen, now. You are right to be afraid of the Egans. It is a sensible and natural reaction. It’s an adaptive behaviour which has brought us out of the mud and the jungle to a fine city like ours here. With all its faults, of course. Many people are afraid of the Egans. That is business for the Egans. They make money out of fear. Now you seem to recognize that your rashness had led you to a pretty pass here. It’s after bringing you over the line where the law is concerned.”
“Technically, maybe,” said Kenny. “But you’ll see the package with your own eyes. It hasn’t been touched by me. Where is that Guard anyway, the one who I gave-you gave-my house-key to? He should be back by now, shouldn’t he? I never gave you or any Guard permission to search the flat for anything more than that, to retrieve that package, I mean.”
“Traffic,” said Minogue. “You know how it is. Dublin wasn’t designed for traffic.”
Kenny tapped his fingers flat on the palm of his other hand.
“Look. I swear it was never opened. Don’t you understand? It was Mary who made the arrangement, the time. If she had been there, I would have given it back to her. I would have dumped it on the path at the very least if she was still nuts. If she had just been there! You see? She should have been there when she said. I keep thinking that. She should have been there.”