Mogaill choked when he tried to answer. He took a sip of water.
“Are you all right?” the waitress asked.
“You scared me.”
“I what—?”
“Dear girl, you remind me of my wife.”
“I’m seventeen years old, mister.”
“I didn’t mean anything—”
“Good.”
“My wife is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was from the other side.”
“The other what—?”
“Ireland.”
“Oh.”
“We had only two years together. And that’s nowhere near enough time, is it?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Neither did he. The girl stood there awkwardly with her autumn mountain hair, her smile lost. Mogaill stared out the diner window. He could see the panther shape of the sedan, the burning cigarette inside, rising from unseen hand to unseen lips, then dropping from sight.
He opened his menu, glanced at it quickly, and said to the girl, “My apologies, miss. I’ve been crowded by memories lately, the kind that do not lie softly in mind.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll have the fish and chips.”
The girl wrote this down on a pad, glad to be off and away to the kitchen with the order. Ten minutes later, Davy Mogaill’s lonesome dinner was delivered by a busboy, who complained about the waitress suddenly deciding to take her break.
Mogaill ate half his meal, put down enough money on the table to pay for it twice, then left the diner. He did not bother looking at the dark sedan. He figured it would follow him, which it did.
On the way home, he tuned the car radio to an all-news station, the kind of station where you know a story is big when they pad it up with adjectives and metaphors and it comes at you from an echo chamber. Mogaill was almost to the Queens side of the Triborough Bridge when the announcer, who might have been somewhere in the Swiss Alps, reported the “shocking Sabbath suicide of Father Timothy Kelly, beloved but troubled priest who put a gun to his head after confessing his secret horrors to another priest—smack in the middle of the sanctuary of Manhattan’s Holy Cross Church, the Lord’s house of hope in Hell’s Kitchen, the tough West Side neighborhood where blood and bullets have never been strangers …”
Along with that load came a sound bite from a quavering Father Twohy: “I am deeply saddened by today’s tragedy … We here at Holy Cross will pray for his soul … Of course, I am not at liberty to discuss the nature of Father Kelly’s confession.” Followed by a quote from Lieutenant Ray Ellis: “This sure ain’t about who done it, that’s as obvious as boils on a fat guy’s neck … The padre, he decided to check out, big time … Leaving us the question, what the hell for?”
Mogaill switched off the radio.
The clock on the dash read half past ten as Mogaill turned his car into the street where he lived. He calculated that Neil Hockaday and Ruby Flagg would land at Dublin airport in about four more hours.
Mogaill swung the Plymouth up into the narrow driveway leading to the tuck-under garage of his row house, pressed the remote control that opened the pleated door and slowly eased in. He checked his rearview mirror. The dark sedan cruised by.
Before leaving the car, Mogaill reached inside his suitcoat and unholstered a .38 police special. He stepped out into the drive, right arm and revolver cocked for action. The sedan was out of sight, the sounds were innocent: neighborhood cats, the rush of traffic from over on Metropolitan Avenue, the complaint of rusty hinges as he lowered the garage door. He walked up the short stoop, once lined with pots full of Brenda’s marigolds and geraniums, and let himself into the house with his keys.
Mogaill was home again in his house of unshared memories. He stood for a moment in the foyer of Brenda’s house; he thought of it that way, he had not been comfortable living in it alone all these years. And the idea he had begun to form at the Bronx diner was complete to him now: soon, I’ll be free of this, and other Irish memories that do not lie softly in mind.
He reholstered the .38 and loosened the fat Windsor knot in his tie. Before taking off his coat and tossing it over a chair, he went into a side pocket for the cassette tape he had taken from the late Father Kelly’s answering machine, a Panasonic model much like the one he owned.
He poured himself a tumbler full of Black Bush and took this with him to the desk in his parlor. He fitted the priest’s cassette into his own Panasonic, and pressed rewind. Then he sat down, sipped whiskey and eavesdropped. There were three voices on the tape, all of which Mogaill recognized:
What is a true patriot?
True patriots have guns in their hands and poems in their heads.
Nevermore!
It’s Saturday morning, Father, and this is—
Mogaill finished the whiskey. He would need more for the long night’s wait. He got up and poured out another Black Bush, and returned with the bottle to his desk.
He picked up the telephone and dialed the operator. “International connections, please.” He waited, then said, to a woman’s voice, “This is Captain Davy Mogaill of the New York Police Department. I’ll be needing someone in Ireland—with the Aer Lingus desk at Dublin airport. Can you do that for me, dear?” He hung up the phone, and waited for the operator’s callback.
Fifteen minutes later, Mogaill spoke with a clerk at Aer Lingus. He identified himself, and asked, “Could you have someone page Detective Neil Hockaday on arrival? Flight nine-zero-eight from New York. I’ll be wanting the detective to return my call.”
The clerk took down the information, and gave his assurance that the message would be passed to Detective Hockaday. Mogaill thanked him and rang off.
He then organized the things he would need later, and laid them out in the bathroom. Then he went from room to room of Brenda’s house, laying down wire that connected to a black box concealed beneath his favorite chair.
There he settled in to wait. And to drink, and wonder all over again what the world was coming to.
At midnight, his doorbell rang.
Chapter 10
Ruby nudged my shoulder, and said, “Hock, look—there it is!”
I woke from sweaty dreams of war and ghosts, lying aristocrats and slow-witted journalists. My face and neck were as clammy as a butcher’s handshake.
She nudged me again, and pointed out the cabin window. There below us, on the Atlantic horizon, was the Irish landfall: a great gray line of surging waves; pounded stone coastal walls topped in green; white sea mists, plumed like geysers between jagged cliffs; sunlight arced through ocean spray in bands of blue, yellow, and red.
“My God, it’s beautiful,” Ruby said.
And of course, it was. My whole life I had waited to savor this first sight of Ireland; always, I had believed in the simple charm of returning through time, of seeing what my ancestors saw, walking where they walked, knowing what they knew. Now the time had come. But not so simply as I had long believed. There were the recent dreams and the voices in my head, all warning that immigrants’ abandoned sorrows lay waiting discovery by the likes of me.
There’ll be no easy sleep … Time is a vandal …
I shrugged, and said, “Beautiful, and terrible, too.”
Ruby turned from the window. “What’s with you?”
“Irish eyes don’t always smile.”
“Yours should, after all the drinks you had. And the nap.”
“It wasn’t restful.”
“What, you had a nightmare?”
“Nightmares only scare you.”
“You’re dreaming about your father again?”
“You know about that?”
“It’s not so hard to know.”
“I can hear his voice. I know, that sounds nuts.”
“So it’s a little nuts. What does he say?”
“I’m not always sure.” I took another long look at the rugged Irish coastline, growing nearer. Ruby looked, too. Beyond the cliffs we
re brown bogs, villages and foggy pastures.
Ruby said, “Maybe he’s telling you that things down there on the ground don’t square with the picture postcard we’re seeing up here.”
“Like what?”
“I saw a movie once about an Irish farmer. He didn’t think the old sod was beautiful at all. He said the Irish land’s so hard it makes the Devil weep.”
The plane nosed downward slightly, and the whine of the jet engines changed pitch as we now left the sea behind us. We began a long, gradual descent toward Dublin on the eastern coast, not so far away. I checked my watch. In less than an hour, I would be with my ancestors. Do you really want to know?
“You ordered a car?” Ruby asked.
“No,” I told her.
“Then who’s the guy over there with your name on one of those little signs?”
We had just left customs. Which is to say, Ruby had just won release. My own fair and trustworthy face had been whisked through the line by the brown-clad agents. Ruby, since she is not a member of my own gene pool, was detained for the kind of luggage inspection reserved for suspected terrorists and drug couriers. Back home we would have made a stink about it; as foreigners, we were meek as moles. But we should have complained. I have since decided that when in Rome, it is not necessarily a virtue to do as the Romans do. So call me an ugly American.
Anyhow, we were in the main terminal of Dublin airport, where it is doubtful any of my ancestors ever walked; certainly none of them was ever greeted by a man in driver’s livery. And yet there he was in the taxi corridor, patiently shifting the weight of his solid body from one foot to the other, a fellow about twenty-five years old dressed in a chauffeur’s cap and a four-button coat. He had one of those big doorman’s umbrellas hooked over an arm, and held between his capable hands was a neatly lettered cardboard sign that read HOCKADAY.
I said to Ruby, “Unless I have relatives on the flight, he’s all ours.”
“Good, he’ll make up for the Klansmen back there in customs.”
We headed toward the chauffeur, pushing along our bags on a cart. He spotted us about halfway and gave me a snappy salute, which I returned. He looked not at all surprised to be meeting an American couple of our contrasting hues.
“Hi,” I said as we reached him, “I’m Neil Hockaday.”
“Top o’day to you, sir,” he said, taking my hand and pumping it. He tipped his cap to Ruby. “The same to you, colleen. I’d be Francis Boylan—Francie is what they call me.”
“And I’d be Ruby Flagg,” Ruby said, blithely. She put her lips to my ear, and whispered, “I love the colleen.”
“My uncle sent you?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” Boylan said. He smiled at me, the way an undertaker does when somebody asks the price of a coffin. “Mr. Patrick Snoody, he’s the one wanted you well met this morning.”
Because I was tired from the flight, I suppose, I forgot all about the most elemental rule of the detective business and asked Boylan a question to which I did not already know the answer. “My Uncle Liam never in his life mentioned this Snoody to me,” I said. “Just who is he?” Boylan only gave me one of his funereal grins.
Then Ruby gave me a look she no doubt learned from her head-waiter friend, Pierre, back in New York. She said to me, “I’ll bet you never gave a thought to how we’d get from here to your uncle’s, did you, Lover?” When I shrugged, she turned to Boylan and said, “Thank you, Francie. We’ll rely on the kindness of strangers.”
Boylan said, “Shall we be off to Dún Laoghaire then, Miss Ruby?”
“Yes, we shall,” Ruby said.
“How far is it?” I asked Boylan, with a small grumble.
“I should think two hours, including a wee tour-about.”
“Tour?”
“Mr. Snoody, he suggests I show you a bit of Dublin along the way. Just follow me.” Boylan took charge of our baggage cart, we trailed after him down the corridor toward the car.
“Could you tell me how my Uncle Liam is feeling?”
“I expect he’s in no immediate danger,” Boylan said.
We were nearly to a wide double door of glass that led to the passenger arrival drive when we heard a loud commotion from behind. I turned around and saw one of the customs agents galloping in our direction. He was shouting in a thin, nasally voice, “Mr. Hockaday … Mr. Hockaday—!”
I waited. Ruby was none too happy to see this one again, the very agent who had riffled through her clothes. I noticed that Boylan seemed to lose some of his cheer, too, although he said nothing. Ruby complained, “Again with the Klan?”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said the agent, gallop ended. His face was wet and flushed. He took a deep breath. “In all the excitement of inspecting your companion’s belongings—”
I interrupted him. “Rummaging through a lady’s unmentionables, this excites you?”
Ruby laughed. So did a dozen or so passersby who happened to hear the exchange. They stopped, expecting further entertainment.
“See you now—fair play!” the agent protested. “It was rummaging in the line of duty.”
There was another round of laughter, this one very hearty. The agent’s face grew stricken, and redder still. In an attempt to recover his dignity, he drew himself to military attention. He was a man in uniform, after all. The trouble was, it covered his lumpy body like the puckered skin of a baked potato. For all his effort, he only looked ridiculous. A voice in the crowd taunted, “He can’t help it, he’s a nancy-boy is what!”
He was now well deflated. But he manfully ignored the jeering, and appealed to me, “Sir, I never touched your lady’s knickers but when the law required.”
The poor sod was hopeless. I said, “You came charging after me in an airport to talk about knickers?”
I barely heard him over the belly laughs. He handed me a folded-up bit of paper and said, “In the excitement, I forgot. They asked me to give you this message, sir. And, I might say—never did I realize you was the police.”
He tipped his hat to Ruby apologetically, then strode away, the back of his neck bright with embarrassment. Someone shouted after him, “Ta now, Nancy,”
I unfolded the paper. Ruby said, “What is it, Hock?”
“It’s Davy Mogaill. I’m supposed to call him, at his home number.”
“The captain from central homicide? Your drinking buddy?”
“That’s him,” I said, ignoring Ruby’s little dig. Could I expect her to understand a cop’s rabbi? I looked around for a public telephone. There were none in the corridor.
Ruby crossed her arms in front of her and scowled. “What are you going to do now, turn around and go back home?”
“How do I know?”
“You mean you would?”
“I’d better go call.”
Ruby sighed. “I’ll wait here with Francie.”
I went back into the terminal, located a telephone, and dialed the international operator. Mogaill would have to take it collect.
After ten rings, the operator said, “I’m afraid your party isn’t about, sir. Would you like to try again?”
“Let it ring some more, will you?”
“A little.”
Six more rings. I looked at my watch. Nine A.M. in Ireland, which meant four A.M. in New York.
“Sir, you really must try your call some other time.”
“It’s good you’ve come now, in the spring,” Francie Boylan told us over his shoulder as he drove the Citroen south from the airport to the city. “Spring’s the finest of our year, and today we’ve a fine, rare sun to help us see the sights.”
The sights just now were cute farms dotting the highway approach to Dublin. The scenery fascinated Ruby. I was even less interested in a rustic panorama than usual.
Farms I have seen before, on occasions when well-meaning friends have included me in trips to Jersey and Pennsylvania and places like that. Farms have black and white cows, things growing out of the ground and blowing in
the breeze, raw-boned men puttering along on tractors. And red barns, with advertisements for Mail Pouch chewing tobacco painted on the sides. So this was very familiar to me, except that in Ireland the barns are decorated with ads for Kerrygold butter, a lot of the roofs are slate and there are rocks and heather cluttering up everything.
Ruby rolled down a backseat window, which only let in a blast of farm-ripened breeze. She took a great swallow of the stuff, and said, “You can really breathe out here, can’t you?”
Up in front, Francie Boylan coughed. And this somewhat improved my estimation of his character.
“I’ve never understood what people see in the country,” I said. “There’s nothing to read and very little sin. Also there is no decent Szechuan takeout.”
“I wish you’d get your mind off New York,” Ruby said.
“Sorry, I can’t help wondering about Davy and why he would want me to call him right away from the airport—and why he’s not around to answer his phone.”
“It’s probably no big emergency.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
“Twenty bucks says he went to that bar where he got you all drunked up Saturday, he got himself swacked again all by himself, and he thought it would be a good laugh to leave you a message in Dublin. Then he stumbled home and forgot all about it. Right now, he’s passed out and can’t hear the phone.”
“Could be,” I said. Which was a lie. I believed none of Ruby’s easy suspicions. Davy Mogaill has long been a boozer, but never the easy sort. “I’m able to get drunk all on my own, by the way.”
Ruby, with the exasperation of a long-suffering cop wife in her tone, said, “Call him up later tonight if you want. But please, Hock, try to remember where we are, and why we’re here. Then ask yourself what it’s got to do with Davy Mogaill.”
There was an answer to that somewhere. But all that came to me were a few of Davy Mogaill’s very recent words: Might we drink to truer comfort than unchanging things that result in widows and orphans?
Boylan grew chatty again. He said to Ruby, “If you love the look of the land’round here, colleen, you’ll fancy it further down the line to Dún Laoghaire as well. Down there, the air’s not only sweet from working earth, but from the sea breeze, too. My own father Joe’s from country down around there. It’s him who loved the springtime so …”
Drown All the Dogs Page 6