The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  McGarr shook his head. The pain was still with him, but without the tension on the rope he could at least breathe. And think. “I told you I don’t have them.”

  “Even if I believed that—and I don’t—sure, you would have kept a copy for your own protection. From Harney.” There was a pause and then: “You a man with a family and a career. I saw the pictures upstairs. What do you want your child to know about you?” When you’re gone, he meant.

  McGarr shook his head again, and the other man began climbing the stairs. McGarr tried to gain his feet, if only to lessen the distance that he would be hoisted.

  “Without those cards they—not you or me—will judge what went on in Sneem and your role in it. I have my side too, you know, which must be told.”

  How it felt to run down all those people, McGarr thought. Or, rather, why he decided they were expendable to get to O’Duffy. McGarr had read Paddy Power’s note cards, and whereas there was plenty of skulduggery, malfeasance, and graft, there was nothing in them even remotely approaching murder. Or, rather, mass murder.

  “And you yours.”

  What was McGarr hearing, compassion?

  Gladden looked up at the other man, who had reached the landing. “Where’s Mick? Shouldn’t he be back by now?”

  “Thing like this, he likes to linger. Don’t worry, he’s thorough for all his child’s play.”

  Gladden nodded, and just then Sammy, yolling “Whoopee!,” jumped from the landing.

  In the deep shadows of the tall yews that separated. McGarr’s property from the old woman’s, Bernie McKeon was waiting. With black bowler, black overcoat, and dark gray trousers, he was garbed nearly like an undertaker, he thought.

  Apart from the shiny Colt Python. It was warm and dry where it belonged, under the belt of his trousers. When provided the opportunity, McKeon’s approach to justice was swift, summary, and sure. Every other life form reserved the right to protect itself from predators, and the only sure protection was death. In such a way McKeon looked upon himself as one of society’s fangs.

  From over the wall he again heard the squeak of McGarr’s basement door opening and the slap of it meeting the jamb. No caution there. With impunity a predator was now prowling the sleeping neighborhood, its prey an old woman and her wounded dog.

  He listened to footsteps approaching through the crusty snow. Still without moving, he waited. Whoever it was would climb the stile in the wall, then pause at the top to look down before descending the icy stairs on McKeon’s side. McKeon wished him to see only friendly darkness and shadow. He pulled in a large chestful of air and held it so the vapor from his breath would not give him away. Still he did not reach for the Python.

  “Ah, fook.” The man had slipped on the icy stones of the stile. McKeon heard him grunt as he began climbing again. And his breathing on the top of the wall, as he looked down. Then one step down. And another.

  A scuffed black shoe and white sock appeared at the level of McKeon’s eyes.

  Before it could leave the shelf of stone, McKeon’s left hand shot out and grabbed the ankle. Raising the Python and glancing up, McKeon saw a young man with a great mass of curly brown hair on which sat a white campaign cap of an ambulance attendant. Holding what looked like an automatic fixed with an equally long silencer, he teetered there and tried to point the weapon down. Pulling up, McKeon wrenched the foot away from the stone, and the man fell.

  With the barrel of the Python, McKeon followed the back of the curly head down into the snow, where he squeezed off a shot that roared in the narrow space between the rock wall and brick house of the old woman. The curly mop jounced in the snow.

  McKeon rolled over what was now a corpse with a gaping third eye in its forehead. He began stripping off the white jacket.

  “What was that?” Gladden asked, as he rifled through the desk in the study, looking for anything—a garage rental slip, an automobile registration—that would tell him where the note cards were.

  “Mick, I guess.”

  “I thought he had a silencer.”

  Sammy hunched his shoulders and turned to the television set, which he had only just switched on. “Likes the noise. He’s the best I could get on short notice.”

  Gladden straightened up. A news announcer was saying, “…suspended for failing to follow Garda procedures in two separate matters related to Dr. Gladden.”

  Which meant McGarr had the note cards, Gladden thought. He was letting McGarr hang for a while. It would make the pain all the more severe when they brought him down and questioned him with the old woman there. Whose house he had come from.

  A relative? There she was in a photograph on the desk, standing with the dog and a red-haired woman whose portrait was in other places in the house and was obviously McGarr’s wife.

  It was then that another, smaller-framed photograph sitting on top of the television caught Gladden’s eye, and he advanced on it: McGarr standing by the side of an older forest-green Mini-Cooper. An antique. Gladden had seen a car like that at Parknasilla. Could he have left the actual copies in the car, parked somewhere suitably far away from the house? It was a possibility.

  “Better check on McGarr,” he told Sammy. “And Mick and the old woman.” Now that he knew the question to ask.

  McKeon heard the order, and he raised his arms over his head. He was standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs in McGarr’s basement.

  Below him in the shadows McGarr was still unconscious, swinging from his handcuffs, which had been clasped behind his back and attached to a rope. The rope had then been pulled over a rafter, jerking his arms up and his feet out from under him. Evidently he had passed out from the pain, and McKeon hadn’t dared let him down for fear he might groan or cry out. But the handcuffs had given McKeon an idea how he would pay one of them back. In kind.

  In each hand McKeon now held an open ring of his own handcuffs that he had adjusted down to their shortest length. He had switched off the basement lights, and when a figure pushed opened the door and began feeling for the switch with his head and neck bent accommodatingly forward, McKeon looped the cuffs under the chin. Pinning a knee to the small of the man’s back, he then tugged up with all his force and caught, clasped, and locked the cuffs. “So much for police practice,” he whispered in the man’s ear.

  Choking, his hands clawing at his throat, the man spun around and staggered, as though he would plummet backward down the cellar stairs, which McKeon could not allow. Instead McKeon kicked open the door and shoved him out into the hall.

  Tearing at the handcuffs while issuing a thin, high, liquid sound, like steam escaping from a pressure pipe, the man blundered toward the study, slipping on a throw rug and falling on a hall table that splintered under his weight. Python in hand, McKeon followed at a cautious pace.

  It was then McKeon saw Gladden standing by the front door, a rifle raised to his face.

  McKeon threw himself against a wall, the rifle roared, and a plateglass window at the end of the kitchen shattered into silver fragments.

  Gladden opened the front door and stepped out of the house, closing it after him. He had McGarr’s key chain, and he would cruise the neighborhood in the ambulance, looking for the Mini-Cooper. In it he was now certain he would find the note cards. McGarr would not have trusted anybody else with them, and Gladden knew he had not brought them home.

  The man in the house was obviously some other Guard, but he would not soon step out onto the exposed landing of the Georgian town house, knowing about the target rifle that Gladden now slipped under his greatcoat.

  Gladden turned around to hurry down the stairs, when he saw, standing below him in the middle of the footpath, a tall, well-dressed older man wearing a pearl-gray homburg hat and topcoat to match. The fingers of one hand were inserted almost casually in the slit of a side pocket, and his feet were planted wide. There was something in his other hand, which now came up.

  Without announcing who he was or that Gladden was under arrest or, in fact,
saying anything whatsoever, O’Shaughnessy raised his revolver and emptied all six of its .357 magnum rounds into Gladden, tacking him to the heavy white paneled Georgian door. Against it Gladden slumped, his strange bald blue eyes raised to the biting winter sleet.

  The target rifle clattered down the stone stairs and came to rest at O’Shaughnessy’s feet. The door was now pink with Gladden’s blood.

  FALLOUT

  “It was like honey for my poor tormented heart to rise up on the shoulder of the mountain footing the turf or gathering the sods on each other. Very often I’d throw myself back in the green heather resting…for the beauty of the hills and the rumble of the waves that would be grieving down from me, in dark caves where the seals of the sea lived—those and the blue sky without a cloud travelling it, over me—it was those made me do it, because those were the pictures most pleasant to my heart….”

  PEIG SAYERS

  CHAPTER 25

  Deal

  MCGARR AWOKE THE next morning in a hospital bed. He had been X-rayed, strapped, and given a powerful sedative that was still with him. He felt groggy and sore.

  He tried to sit up, and Noreen, who was standing with Maddie beside the bed, moved to help him, saying, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Jesus—when I heard, I could have murdered you with me bare hands. I drove all the way here from Mayo in a rage.”

  McGarr looked down at his little girl who, clutching a small black stuffed dog with a beige bone clenched in its mouth, now stepped toward the bed. “Hi,” she said, and smiled, happy to have uttered the greeting.

  “Hi,” he said back. “How’s Tricks?” which was the name of the dog. And to Noreen: “Could you run that by me again?”

  “You knew Gladden would come for the note cards, which was why you sent us away with the photocopies.” She pointed to a plastic tote sack on a chair that contained a thick, banded sheath of photocopy paper. “Why in the name of hell didn’t you surround the place with bloody Guards?”

  McGarr wanted to reach out and lift Maddie onto the bed with him, but his upper arms were strapped to his chest. He had a complete shoulder separation in the left arm, and a partial with much muscle tearing in the right. His neck and back muscles were also strained, and he had been told he would be lucky to mend without some permanent problem.

  “You risked yourself, Maisie, the P.M., and who knows how many others. Our house. The neighborhood. Why?”

  He wanted to say: because he couldn’t have risked the possibility of scaring Gladden off. Because he had been suspended and was no longer a Garda officer. But mostly he, like her, had read the note cards and knew what they contained, and he did not still know if that information should be made public. Other cops, acting on Farrell’s orders, would have wanted to know where they were; they would have searched and found them.

  “You know what they’re saying?”

  “Who?”

  “Some of the press. That it’s like what happened to John Kennedy in Dallas. All the conspirators are dead, and key evidence is missing.” She reached for a newspaper and showed him the headlines:

  O’DUFFY

  ASSASSIN, ACCOMPLICES

  KILLED IN

  RATHMINES SHOOT-OUT

  New Questions for McGarr

  McGarr glanced at the bedside table. “Do you think I could get a cup of coffee around here?”

  “With or without?”

  McGarr’s eyes met hers. Was there a possibility?

  “In addition to the reporters who’ve staked out the lobby, waiting to speak to you, there’s also a man outside with a present that looks like a bottle. He’d like a word.”

  McGarr raised an eyebrow; any of his former staff would have been allowed into the room.

  “Harney the elder.”

  Daddy of O’Duffy’s heir apparent. “What is his newspaper saying?”

  “That the government has brought the unfortunate episode to a decisive close. His son, of course, is responsible for the quick action, having directed the search for Gladden from start to finish when,” she read from the paper, “‘…on-duty Garda senior officers Superintendent Liam O’Shaughnessy and Detective Sergeant Bernard Q. McKeon shot and killed Gladden after he fired upon them.’”

  “And Farrell?”

  “I didn’t see him mentioned anywhere in Harney’s paper.”

  McGarr thought for a moment. Were they still certain about branding him with Sneem, Farrell would have been prominently mentioned; obviously Harney had something to offer him. “I’ve never been much for roses. Or chocolates. At least he got the present right.”

  He glanced down at Maddie, who was rubbing an eye. “How long have you been here?”

  “Most of the night.”

  “Want to go home?”

  “Yes, if there’s any of it left. Last time I checked, some of Commissioner Farrell’s men had declared it a crime scene and told me they’d phone here when I would be ‘allowed’ to return.”

  They were searching the house for the note cards that McGarr had had McKeon take to the safest place he knew, where no “government man”—Gladden’s phrase—would think of looking: behind the bar at Hogan’s, the pub in Greater St. George’s Street that functioned as the Murder Squad’s second office. “Wouldn’t your parents’ place be better for the moment? There’s bound to be—” blood, he did not say, “—and I think I remember that the window in the kitchen is shattered.”

  “All the more reason I want to return. It’s winter, if you can remember, and all our pipes will freeze.”

  “Didn’t they board up the window?”

  “Not when I was there. The place had the feel of a morgue.”

  Which gave McGarr a taste of what being an outsider would be like; in any other situation, the commander there would have taken steps to safeguard the home and possessions of a fellow Garda officer. He also thought of his desk in Dublin Castle, which he had been ordered to clean out, and his personal files.

  McGarr glanced at the phone on the bedside table. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Before leaving the room, Noreen clasped McGarr’s bald head to her bosom. “Ah, Peter—what would we do without you?”

  Or himself without himself, he thought.

  “Maybe we should think of doing something different.”

  We, was it? “I’m open to suggestions from the chin up and the waist down.”

  “You know what I mean. Haven’t you had enough of this work?”

  He had, definitely, but it remained outside in the hall, waiting for him. “Look—do me a favor before you go. There’s something you can get me.” He raised his head and whispered in her ear so Maddie and anybody else who might be listening would not hear.

  She regarded him. “Do you think you’ll need it? With him?”

  McGarr did not know, but his mobility was limited. She too had read Power’s note cards, which had described Harney as “the worst kind of thief, the one who will steal friendships with a wrong word slipped here and there.” And a thief was a thief was a thief, no matter what it was he stole.

  A few moments later Harry Harney entered the room and looked around, smiling to see that they were alone. He was an immense, flame-faced man with a bald head and his usual large cigar, which was his signature prop in a country where sin taxes made tobacco of quality a conspicuous extravagance. Closing the door, he pulled out a fresh one. “Smoke?” In the other hand he held a wrapped bottle. “Drink?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said McGarr. “Whatever you say.”

  Harney’s laugh was as large as himself, hearty, rollicking, and orotund of the sort that would make most other people smile. “I knew you were a man I could talk to.” He rolled forward, new heels clacking on the tiles of the hospital-room floor. His upper body, swollen like a robin, was bound in the precise pleats of a gray, pinstriped, double-breasted suit; in his lapel was a single black carnation. “Is there a second glass? I can’t have you drinking alone.”

  McGarr tilted his head toward the sink, and w
hile Harney went to fetch the glass there, McGarr reflected on what he knew of the man.

  In his note cards, Paddy Power had said that Harney was a consummate salesman, a man whose singular talent was the ability to convince others to go along with his schemes, which ranged from the sprawling housing estates that now ringed Ireland’s larger cities to shopping centers, high-rise buildings in Dublin, and, of course, his newspaper. This last he controlled as if it were an organ devoted to the whims of his personality, and yet for all its quirky newness, the Irish Spectator was a roaring success.

  “I know the Irish people countrywide and not just here in Dublin,” he had told a television interviewer. “What we want to read and know and wonder about.” And now with Sean Dermot O’Duffy and Paddy Power out of the picture, McGarr suspected, who they should have rule them—his son.

  “Wasn’t that Noreen Frenche I saw leaving the room? Your wife, I understand,” he said, unwrapping the bottle that proved to be—McGarr’s eyes widened—Hogan’s Own, the whisky that years ago the pub had bottled and was now a collector’s item. Having been first aged in sherry casks, the malt had its own distinctive reddish color, a somewhat sweet flavor, and a bouquet like none other. McGarr had not drunk any in, oh, years, and he wondered if it was just a coincidence—the gift bottle and where he had stored the note cards—based on the fact that it was general knowledge he frequented the pub. In any case, he appreciated how well Harney had prepared himself for the visit.

  “Wonderful family, the Frenches. Fitzhugh is a good friend of mine.” His bulging arms worked the cork, and he poured two large drinks. “Have you heard about Eire Bank? But of course you have, having been in Sneem. I suppose it’s in suspect taste to mention deals, given what’s transpired, but life must go on, and even with all the…distractions, Shane Frost surely worked a miracle out there at Parknasilla.”

  “Do you own a piece of Erie Bank?” McGarr asked.