Obit

by Anne Emery

  “A lot of stuff happened on the waterfront.”

  “I hear you. This was in 1952, an incident on Pier One, when some guns were stolen. Desmond was supposed to have been on duty at the time.”

  “He wasn’t. The watchman on duty was an Italian guy. I don’t remember his name.”

  “Rinaldi. I saw it in the news clippings. Which is where I got your name. So Rinaldi was on duty, and he’s the one who got clobbered. Was there any mention of a Desmond?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “That’s good news, I guess, but I was hoping to get more information about this Desmond. The watchman position was the last work the family knew he had.”

  So the Desmonds were in luck, even if they didn’t know it: the police did not associate his name with the crime. But since all this was just my cover for contacting O’Brien, I had better move on.

  “Your beat was the waterfront, was it, Lieutenant?”

  “That was a good part of my career, yeah.”

  “You must have come across some real characters.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. Organized crime makes for some interesting characters. The Cosa Nostra kept me busy in those days. Never a dull moment.”

  “How about the Irish Mob? How well-organized would they have been? I’m thinking about code books, or —”

  “Organized? They’re Irish!” He raised his pint and wiggled it; a gold Claddagh ring glimmered on his right hand. “Organized would not be the word. Code books? I doubt it!” He shook his head.

  “The Desmond woman mentioned a name, but I couldn’t find out anything about him. Cathal Murphy. Ever hear of him?” O’Brien shook his head. “He also went by the name Fagan, she thought.”

  “Fagan, you say?” I had his attention now.

  “Yes. I don’t know why he had two names.”

  “I do, if it’s Charlie Fagan you’re talking about. He was running stolen guns out of here for years. Or so we suspected. I never knew him as Murphy. He stayed in a little rathole in Williamsburg. Lived like a monk. The Irish Republican movement was part of his religion. He was good, I’ll say that for him. Quite the operative. We could never catch him meeting with anybody in the gun racket. We figured he was using a go-between, a courier, to take the money to the suppliers. But we never saw it happening. We never saw him socializing. He worked in a manufacturing plant, came off shift and went home. We kept an eye on the plant for a while but, as far as we could make out, he didn’t have any Mick contacts there. He spent the occasional evening in a pub but all he ever drank was soda, and he didn’t have any regular pals.”

  “How did you know he was moving stolen guns if you never caught him at it?”

  “Well, I shouldn’ta said ‘never.’ We nailed him once. We were following an Irishman who we knew had flown over from the old country specifically to set up an arms network. This guy met with Fagan. But even then we could only get him for illegal possession of firearms. We couldn’t pin anything on the guy from Ireland. Fagan copped a plea, did his time like a man, didn’t give anybody up. He wasn’t inside very long.”

  “When was that?”

  “Early fifties. Fagan must have become a lot more sophisticated after his experience in the clink. We believed he was still at it for a long time after that, but we never had enough evidence to charge him.”

  “When you say he lived like a monk, how do you mean?”

  “Lived alone in this one-room dive near the waterfront.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah, he wasn’t married. I had a warrant to search his place one time. A little cot of a bed and a hot plate to cook on. Didn’t bother to hide his inclinations: the only reading material was Irish history, Irish saints and church stuff. Missals, holy cards, that kind of thing. The guy went to Mass every day of his life, far as I know. We had guys tail him into Saint Bridey’s a few times but he was just praying and attending Mass; he wasn’t hiding or slipping out the back door.”

  So Cathal had kept two apartments, one of his own and one for Nessie. Maybe he couldn’t afford to drink!

  “What kind of job did Fagan have? Manufacturing, you said?”

  “Yeah. He spent his workday in the warehouse, shipping and receiving. The outfit made aviation parts or something. Desailes Inc.”

  Picturing the arms smuggler in Mass every day reminded me of a detail Patrick had dug up about Cathal Murphy’s funeral. “Did you attend his funeral?”

  “What?”

  “Fagan’s funeral. You weren’t among the mourners, were you?”

  “Not fucking likely. I didn’t know he croaked.”

  So O’Brien wasn’t the lone man at the back of the church.

  “One other thing, Lieutenant. What about women?”

  “We never saw him squiring any dames around town. He paid a lot of visits to this crippled girl. Relative of some kind. But, like I say, a real monkish type.”

  “So. Not the type to follow women around.”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “Just something that came up,” I said, unconvincingly.

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at. But if you’re talking about Fagan following somebody and he was spotted, it’s because he wanted to be seen. Otherwise, nobody would ever have known he was there.”

  †

  It was time to scoot up to Patrick Burke’s office. It was in a red-brick Victorian row house on the Upper West Side, with a bow window and a flower box. Patrick arrived at the same time I did, and we entered his waiting room.

  “Is my sister here yet?” he asked his secretary.

  “Not yet. There are a few telephone messages for you.” She handed him a stack of pink slips. “And here’s another one: ‘Tell Doctor Burke he’s a fraud and a quack and I have no intention of putting myself in his hands. T.’ Can’t win ’em all I guess, Doctor.”

  “That would be my brother Terry. Long years of training and experience lead me to the conclusion that he will not be participating in our session today.”

  Shit. “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Think about it, Monty. Would you really like to see an airline pilot go into a hypnotic trance in response to monotonous sights and sounds? Would you ever fly again?”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  “We’ll get what we can out of —”

  “Hi, Paddy! Put me under, put me out, put me down, I don’t care. I’ve had the most aggravating day. Oh, hi, Monty! I’d give you a big hello kiss but not under the watchful eyes of Doctor Freud here. He probably took note of whether your pupils dilated at the sight of me. Did they?” she demanded of her brother.

  “No, I didn’t see anything get bigger.”

  She dropped a heavy handbag on the floor and collapsed in a chair.

  “How are you, Bridey?” I asked her.

  “Don’t ask. How many kids have you got?”

  “Two.”

  “Don’t have any more.”

  “Not much chance of that.”

  “All right, sweetheart,” her brother said, “I explained to you on the phone what we’re going to do here. Would you like anything before we start? Tea? A glass of water?” She shook her head. “Just make yourself comfortable and I’m going to help you relax.”

  She closed her eyes. Patrick began to talk to her in a soothing voice. A couple of times her eyes opened, and she looked over at me. Her brother caught on and turned towards me. I was a distraction.

  “I’ll wait outside, Pat,” I said and left the office. Sooner than I would have expected, his secretary came out and beckoned me inside. Patrick motioned for me to sit behind Bridey’s chair, and he got her started on her recollections of the man who had followed her mother decades before.

  “Me and Terry have money to go to Zuckerman’s for a treat. We’re s’posed to bring something back for everybody.”

  “How old are you now, Bridey?” Pat asked her.

  “I’m seven! There’s that man again! He’s on our street. Now he’s
moving away. We’re following him to the bus stop. He can’t see us hiding behind the tree. Me and Terry are getting on the bus. Everybody thinks this lady with the shopping bags is our mother. When we get home we’re going to tell all about this man and where he lives. Mam will give us chocolate milk. Fran will be jealous. The man’s not even looking at us. Boo! No, we don’t want him to know. He’s staring out the window. We’re going a long ways from home. Terry’s pointing out everything he sees. I tell him to shut up. We’re secret agents! Oh, the man is getting off here. Us, too. He’s crossing the street. Red light! We can’t go. But we keep watching. Now we go. Long walk. The gardens! Bren and Molly took us here before. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Terry says, reading the sign. Shut up, Terry. We sneak in behind some people with a bunch of cameras around their necks. We should have brought Paddy’s camera. It’s beautiful in the garden, with all the trees and flowers. Good places to hide! There he goes. Now he’s sitting on a bench, reading the paper.

  “The man is just sitting there. I’m hungry and Terry is making me mad. He’s climbing the trees and you’re not allowed to. I hope he gets in trouble. This is no fun. The man didn’t go to his house, so we can’t find out where he lives. Da is going to kill us for being away so long. He’ll give Terry a crack on the arse and send me to my room. I have to pee. I already did, Terry says. Where, in the bushes? Look! The man is getting up. He’s following that other guy that just walked past the bench. Terry is whispering that our guy is Number One and the new guy is Number Two. Bet they wouldn’t like those names! There they go, out of the park. That’s Number Two’s car. There’s a bunch of boys peeking in the windows of the car. They’re gonna get in trouble. Number Two is yelling something at them; I can’t make it out. The boys are taking off. Both the men are getting in the car. Driving away. Now we can’t follow them. Now we have to find the bus home. What number was it?”

  We could see Bridey becoming agitated, a little girl in Brooklyn, with no idea how to get back to Queens.

  I signalled a question to Patrick. The car?

  “What does the car look like, Bridey?”

  “Black and shiny. Brand new.”

  “What’s happening now?”

  “I’m scared. We’re at the bus stop. Terry’s telling this lady we’re orphans and the Sunnyside Orphanage bus forgot us and we don’t have any money. But we do! The lady is patting his hair and giving him two bus tickets. We’re waiting. She’s giving us two candy bars! She says get on this bus that’s coming now.” Bridey stopped abruptly.

  “So you get home . . .” Patrick prompted.

  “And we’re in trouble. Mam was worried. Lucky Da’s not here.”

  What had Bridey said the other day? Something about Terry, and a fight. It sounded like the kind of day that would wind up in a crying spell. I found a pen and paper and scribbled a note: She and T had a fight.

  “Are you and Terry talking about what happened?”

  “We’re in a fight. We were going to make a big announcement at dinner time, that we followed the man who loves our mother. Now we don’t want to tell. And Terry’s saying it wrong.”

  “Saying what wrong?”

  “Some word. I just punched Terry in the face. He’s mad and he says he’s saying it right. But we both gave the guy his nickname, Mack. That’s where it came from.”

  “Where did it come from, Bridey? I don’t understand.”

  “From Potomac! That’s what it is. I say it’s ‘Po-TO-mac’ and Terry says it’s ‘POT-o-mac,’ but it’s okay because both ways you get Mack, and that’s what we’re going to call the man from now on.”

  Patrick looked at me and shrugged. I mouthed a question: Why Potomac?

  “You’re telling us about Potomac, Bridey. Why did that word come up?”

  “His car. Man Number Two’s car. It had a sticker on the back that said ‘Potomac Auto Rental.’ We got all excited, because you can rent any car you want. We’re going to get Da to borrow one a lot fancier than our car and take us for a drive.”

  Patrick brought her out of her hypnotic state, and the three of us sat in his office trying to fit the new information with what we already had. I would have to be careful not to let anything slip about Francis.

  “It sounds to me as if Cathal — the man following your mother — was playing a double game,” I said. “The police knew he was running guns to the old country. But they couldn’t catch him at anything except a minor offence. Now we have him meeting, and following some kind of tradecraft, with a guy from Washington. Imagine how that would go over back home, their man in New York meeting an FBI agent. When did he turn informant, I wonder. And now, all these years later, Cathal’s sister is murdered.” Drop it, Leo had warned. Whatever the Irish connection to the shooting of Declan, and whatever Francis’s role in it, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that the Irish were involved in the death of Nessie Murphy.

  I was about to speak again when a low-pitched, pleasant ring issued forth from Patrick’s phone.

  “Yes? Put him through. Terry! Change your mind? Care to put yourself under my power and — I’ll take that as a no. Yeah, I think we did. A Washington connection, it seems. Just to muddy the waters even more. Yes, he is. Here, I’ll put him on.”

  “Hi Terry.”

  “I heard from our skip tracer. We’ve found Gerard Willman. Why don’t we meet at O’Malley’s and figure out where to go from here.”

  †

  Terry, Patrick, Brennan, Bridey and I shoved two tables together at the back of O’Malley’s, where we sat with pints of Guinness and shots of whiskey according to taste. Mickey was presiding as usual, and regulars lined the bar, poring over their racing sheets in the dim light. At one point they all roared a greeting to a man who was the head of something called the Hay Ho Haitch, which, I was told, was an approximation of the initials of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

  Patrick was the first to get down to business. “All right. What are we going to do about this fellow Gerard?”

  “Break his kneecaps,” Terry suggested.

  I looked at him as if to say: The kneecaps you break may be those of your brother. He closed his eyes and raised a hand as if to ward me off. I knew he had built his hopes up about Gerard, and who could blame him? But the fact remained: brother Fran had imported the gun. And skipped town.

  “What do we do about the police?” Patrick continued, as if his brother had not spoken.

  “We can’t keep this information to ourselves,” I answered, “if it turns out Willman is connected.”

  “What do you mean, if?” Brennan asked.

  “But we do have a problem,” I went on. “What is he going to say? More to the point, what is he going to say that will implicate your father?”

  “Obviously, we have to get to him first,” Brennan declared.

  “Let’s go round him up now. A posse of four.” Terry again. “Four? There are five of us by my count. Does this mean you’re chickening out, Terr?” Bridey asked with deceptive sweetness.

  “I won’t chicken out if you go in first. You seduce the guy and when he’s preoccupied, I’ll jump out and —”

  “Let’s be serious here,” Patrick urged. “One of us will meet him and it won’t be you, Terrence.”

  “Fine with me. It shouldn’t be hard to pick one of you three to do the job. People confess to Brennan, they tell Pat all their problems, and Monty cross-examines them for a living. Brennan knows sinners, Pat knows loonies and Monty knows criminals.”

  “We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I said. “So we can’t discount the possibility that something will set him off. If emotions are going to run high, that’s more likely to happen with a member of Declan’s family than with an outsider. Even though I’ll have to make it clear I’m representing the family.”

  “We’ve put you in harm’s way once too often on this trip. Let’s not do it again,” Brennan stated. “I’ll go.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t have the patience. I don’t even wan
t to think about you in the same room with the guy who tried to kill your dad.” What I didn’t say was: I already saw you in the same room with Francis, the guy who probably did try to kill your dad; you didn’t even know it and you laid waste to him. “Forget it. I’ll do it. But I’ll try to engineer the meeting in a safe place.”

  “He may not go along with that.”

  “We’ll have to see, won’t we? Where’s the phone? Let’s hope he’s there.” They all pointed to a pay phone at the back of the bar.

  “He’s there,” Terry promised.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I called his number just before I got here.”

  “Now for the small matter of what to say, to lure him to a meeting.”

  “How well do you do voices?” Terry asked. “Maybe you can imitate the old doll over the phone. He probably doesn’t know she’s dead, so —”

  “We can’t assume that. We can’t assume anything. We don’t know Gerard Willman, or what he’s done, or what else he knows by now.”

  “Tell him you saw him at the wedding reception, or you have proof that he was there,” Bridey suggested.

  I shot a glance at Terry, who seemed to be avoiding my eyes. Like me, he had good reason to doubt that Willman had been anywhere near the Saint Kieran’s gym when Declan was shot. It was Francis who had imported the rifle. And it was Francis who let slip the implication that there were two targets that night: “Maybe somebody just meant to scare them,” he had said to me. What role Willman played — but I was being prompted by my companions. They had come to an agreement.

  “Give him the old line, that you have the photographs,” Brennan suggested.

  “Nobody saw the guy. How could anyone have photographed him?”

  “He can’t be sure of that,” Brennan countered. “It should cause him concern that you’ve linked him to the wedding reception. Give it a try.”

  I got up and dialled the number. It rang and rang. No reply. Deflated, I returned to the table.

  “Nobody there.”

  “Sit awhile longer, then try him again,” Terry advised. “So, Bridey, what did you tell Doctor Strange-Spell today? Nothing about how your brothers are the root cause of that little twitch in your eye, I hope?”