Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  “Because, Bel,” Cargan had said, “criminals are stupid.”

  I thought of that as I looked at the various Web accounts of Mugsy Calhoun, a guy who had grown up in South Boston, not Ballyminster, and who still resided there after having lived in Ireland for a long time, according to the latest account of his exploits. To my mind, he had been hiding there most likely. He was a Southie, through and through, and while extortion, blackmail, and drug running were part of his past and present, so was philanthropy, apparently, something that made some South Bostoners who remained, despite rapid expansion and downtown growth of buildings and businesses, devoted to the guy, more so than they should have been. He was a guy who engendered a lot of loyalty and trust from the neighborhood types and was wily enough to escape the police. He lived in the shadows yet out in the open. He spent time in Ballyminster but more of it in Boston now. And he had a devoted crew, one of whom, if the photo in the news story that I was currently reading was recent and accurate, included Domnall Kinneally, otherwise known as “Donnie the Gazelle” for his ability to make a quick getaway.

  Before I was finished with Donnie—aka the Gazelle—and Mugsy, I went to the online yellow pages and put in the address where we had found Pauline previously. Although I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was. The name Connolly appeared, the phone number belonging to one of Angus’s brothers, one of the juvenile delinquents with whom I had grown up. I wondered if Cargan had known about the home’s owner.

  I slammed my computer shut and raced down the stairs of the apartment, thinking about Donnie’s nickname. It was a terrible one but clearly apt because when I threw open the door to the suite in which I had situated the louse, the bed was made and everything was neat and tidy, despite being completely empty of any signs of life, particularly those of Donnie the Gazelle.

  CHAPTER Thirty-nine

  I took the Vanagon, telling Dad about the dead Volvo and lying that I needed to make a run to Restaurant Depot for supplies.

  “Ah, Jaysus, Bel,” he had protested as he handed over the keys. “That car ran just fine until you got your mitts on it.”

  “It’s not my fault, Dad!” I said, sounding like a twelve-year-old. “That car’s got so many miles on it that you should see if Volvo wants to do a commercial with you in it! The muffler was gone and now it won’t start. How is that my fault?” I was yelling at him, the stress of all of this getting to me, something that he was unaccustomed to, and when I saw his face, I dropped my voice to a whisper. “It’s not my fault.” I couldn’t count how many times I had uttered that sentence in my life. A thousand? Two? Whatever. The Volvo could wait. I hadn’t stopped thinking about how two people could disappear into thin air and wondered, if I were them, where I would go? I left Dad in his studio, working on a new installation, the keys to the car in my hand. I got into the van and drove down the Manor driveway with no clear plan or destination. In the rearview mirror, I spotted Cargan and Kevin walking the grounds of the Manor, two men with a shared occupation in deep conversation. What it was about, I had no idea, but I knew that I didn’t want to involve either one of them in what I planned to do.

  Thoughts of chicken Marsala and beet poisoning filled my brain and I took the Vanagon on a familiar journey to O’Halligan’s to see Angus Connolly. He was at his usual place at the bar when I arrived, a smile plastered on his face as he listened to the tale being spun by a very drunk patron seated next to him. The smile faded when he saw me. The bruises around his eyes were still visible though a little less multihued than they were when I saw him last. “You,” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not welcome here?”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” I said. “I get it. Now, answer me one thing: have you seen Pauline?” I asked. It was a long shot but one worth taking. She had few allies, and even though she had bilked Angus out of money and he was angry at her, clearly she had few options. And obviously, she was quite the sweet-talker, getting guys to do what she wanted whenever she wanted them to.

  “I have not seen her,” he said. “Are you an idiot? I don’t want to see her and I hope I never lay eyes on her face again.”

  “But you put her up. In your brother’s house north of here. Why did you do that?” I asked.

  He pointed at the door. “Out.”

  I sat down at the bar. “I’m not leaving until I get some answers.”

  “You will if I call the police. None of this is your business,” he said.

  “It is my business and I want answers,” I said. I was tired of people not talking, or talking and telling me lies. It was all completely frustrating, and now that I was in it, a mobster ending up at my house, now that a mobster knew where I and my family lived, it was definitely my business.

  When this was over, I was definitely talking to Mom and Dad about their hiring practices, their lack of interviewing skills.

  Angus Connolly leaned in close. “I have a soft spot for the girl. What can I say?”

  “Enough to protect her? To give her a safe place to land?” I asked.

  “Yep. All of that. I didn’t want you to find her first so I lied to you. I thought I could get my money back. Quid pro quo, as it were. But the girl’s got a heart of stone.” He turned and looked at the bartender. “If you see this woman in here again, remember that she’s not welcome.” He looked back at me. “Now, out.” He pointed at the front door, where Cargan and Kevin were entering, their thoughts coinciding with mine and bringing them here to O’Halligan’s for a wee chat with the business owner.

  I knew my time with Angus was short and that it would probably turn out that I’d never speak to him again, so I asked the one question that I had on my mind. “What did you serve at the Casey/Mason rehearsal dinner?” I asked.

  He looked at me, confused, not really knowing why I would ask and figuring, I guessed, that he didn’t have to lie. It was an easy question, one that didn’t require a half-truth. “Salmon. Chicken français. A beef dish.”

  “Mushrooms in any of it?” I asked.

  He looked at me quizzically. “Not a one. Hate mushrooms. Always have. You won’t find them on the menu at O’Halligan’s.”

  CHAPTER Forty

  She would have to come back for her car. I figured that was a given. Cargan was a whiz at electronics; I had learned that a few months earlier when I discovered that he had bugged the whole Manor and had spent many a night in the basement, listening in on the goings-on upstairs, hoping to figure out how deep one of our father’s friends was in gunrunning for the IRA. An alarm triggered by the opening of a car door was child’s play to him and the system would be rigged in no time flat.

  After I left O’Halligan’s, I stopped in at the Manor and went to the lost-and-found box where a necklace that sure looked like it held a human pinkie on it was sitting, right where I had left it. The pinkie was rubber, as it turned out, but it confirmed for me that Mugsy Calhoun had been at Pegeen and Gerry’s wedding and had a relationship with someone in the family, maybe even Pegeen herself.

  The next night, after configuring an alarm system, Cargan stood back and admired his invisible handiwork. “Works like a charm,” he said to himself even though we hadn’t tested it. He was that sure.

  “Will you hear it in the Manor?” I asked.

  “Won’t need to,” he said. “I’m staying with you.”

  Pauline’s car was parked where she left it, right below the window in my living room. If the alarm went off—when the alarm went off—I would hear it, and if Cargan was staying with me, he would, too.

  “So you knew that the house up north belonged to one of the Connollys?” I asked once we were back in the apartment and I had started making macaroni and cheese, one of Cargan’s favorite meals.

  “Had a lead,” he said. “Figured I would check it out.” He watched me whisk some flour and butter together to make a roux. “You’ve got to stay away from Angus Connolly.”

  “Why?” I asked. The answer was obvious—it was none of my business and entirely po
lice business—but I figured it was worth the ask.

  “This is getting dangerous, Bel,” he said. “Mugsy Calhoun is no one to be trifled with.”

  “Why hadn’t any of us heard of him?” I asked. “Usually you hear mobsters’ names bandied about. Funny that we have never heard of him.”

  “You’d be surprised what you don’t know. Who lives beneath the surface. He’s not exactly on the Most Wanted list but he does his fair share of damage in Boston.”

  “And Ballyminster?” I asked.

  “By extension, yes. Ballyminster,” Cargan said. “Runs the drug trade pretty well, from what I understand.”

  I thought about my parents’ hometown, the rolling hills, the bucolic setting high on a hill, the tiny village with its tidy little storefronts boasting the one thing they sold: beef. Chicken. Bread. Pastry. The fact that there was a dark underbelly that provided a foundation for what lived aboveground was sobering and sad.

  “And Angus Connolly?” I asked, peeking into the refrigerator for some cheddar. I figured if I kept the conversation casual, continued with the food prep, Cargan would be more likely to spill, to not realize what we were really talking about.

  “Collateral damage,” Cargan said. “Like me. Got caught in her web.”

  “You’re smarter than that, Car,” I said. “Much smarter.”

  He chuckled. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “At least she didn’t try to blackmail you, too,” I said.

  “Nothing to blackmail. I get up, I play soccer, I go to work, I watch television. Got no money to speak of. No secrets.”

  The secrets were out in the open now so he was right: he had nothing to hide, nothing to protect. Except us, Mom and Dad and the other brothers. Me. We both knew it and left it unsaid.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked, pouring milk into my roux. I wasn’t sure the Cordon Bleu would approve of how I made mac and cheese but it was how I had always made it and always would.

  “We do nothing. I do something. You stay put,” he said. He got up and looked out the living room window. “Getting dark.”

  I knew what that meant. If she was coming back, she was coming back after dark. So there was nothing to do but make dinner, have a glass of wine, and wait.

  “Haven’t seen too much of Joyce around here lately,” Cargan said, not taking his eyes off the front window, even though there was nothing to see.

  I was in the kitchen putting together a salad. “We’re both busy. Superbusy.”

  “You need to spend some time with him. He’s nice.” He turned back from the window and sat down at the kitchen counter. “You guys were inseparable over the summer. What happened?”

  “Too soon,” I said, but it was a lie. “It was too soon for me to jump into a relationship again.” It hadn’t been too soon in the beginning; it had been just the right time to make me forget that I had once loved a guy who was all wrong for me. But something had changed, and my brother, previously thought to be a few cards shy of a full deck, was perceptive enough to pick up on it.

  “He was there that night.”

  I didn’t have to ask which night. “That night” was frozen in my mind as the night that everything changed. “He was? I don’t remember.”

  “He was. I remember now. The party on the island. He was there, if only for a little while.”

  “What made you remember that?” I finally turned around, ready to meet my brother’s eye.

  “His braces. I saw a commercial the other night about braces, how they are different now, clear and invisible, and I got to thinking about braces. And Amy. That night on the island.”

  My brother’s mind was a thing to behold. I remembered Brendan’s braces all too well, had noticed when I first met him again how great his teeth had turned out after years and years of wearing braces, but only Cargan would make the connection between now and then. “Yes, he wore braces for a long time.”

  “He was there,” he repeated. “And by the look on your face, I can tell you had no idea.”

  “No, but it explains a lot,” I said. “The day they found Amy’s stuff in the river, we were there, having a picnic. And he left me there. Ran away from the scene.”

  “Why? Did he ever say?” Cargan asked.

  “He said that it made him upset. That it reminded him of too many things, of how things changed after Amy disappeared.”

  “You believe him?”

  I thought about that. I wanted to believe him but did I really? It was hard to say. It was the first time I lied to my brother when I said, “I do believe him. I do.” I was putting Brendan off, though, and if I were being completely honest with myself, it was because of that day by the river. The Pauline situation had been a mysterious distraction that had kept me busy and not thinking about Brendan’s desertion and what that had meant to me.

  And it was the first time my brother didn’t believe the lie, but he sipped his wine quietly and for the next hour we sat in companionable silence, waiting for the blare of an alarm that seemed a long time coming.

  The bottle of wine finished, I went into the cabinet and pulled out a Rioja that I had bought a week earlier. “Rioja?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Cargan said, holding out his glass.

  I poured him a healthy slug. “I don’t think Pauline’s coming back, Car.”

  “Just wait,” he said. “She’ll be back.”

  Another hour passed and another glass of wine was consumed. I yawned, trying to give my brother the hint that this was a lost cause, that Pauline was in the weeds, never to be seen again. I picked up my glass when the yawn yielded no movement on his part and was on my way to the kitchen when the alarm finally sounded. The glass fell to the floor and shattered in what seemed like a million pieces. Although we had both been waiting for it, it was still a shock to hear it, bleating in the otherwise quiet night, likely waking up Mom and Dad, early-to-bed types who didn’t like to be disturbed once the clock hit nine. Cargan was off the couch in a shot, moving fast through the apartment, glass crunching under his tennis shoes, the same style he had worn since high school. Stan Smiths. Classics. He was out the door and down the apartment steps before I could even think to move, the glass all around me, my bare feet, the thought of stepping on a piece of glass paralyzing me. I picked my way over the floor and around the little shards that were everywhere and raced into my bedroom, pulling on a pair of clogs and racing down the stairs after Cargan but he was already in the Vanagon in hot pursuit of Pauline.

  The Vanagon versus the BMW? No contest.

  I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked around. The Manor was dark, a light on in an upper bedroom, the only light being cast from the two massive electrified lanterns on either side of the massive oak doors that fronted the place. Odd. The car alarm hadn’t awoken anyone, or if it had, they were unconcerned. My family defied logic.

  The sounds of the two cars far in the distance, I turned around, ready to reenter the apartment to clean up the glass and sit and wait for Cargan. Behind me, I heard the crunch of leaves, the sound of footfalls. I turned, and despite the lack of good light, the shadows that played across the lawn and the driveway, it was hard not to know who was approaching me.

  Mugsy Calhoun cut a fine figure in his suit and fedora.

  CHAPTER Forty-one

  “Can I clean up this glass while we talk?” I asked, not having moved from the hallway since we arrived back in the apartment.

  Mugsy smiled at me. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Despite the fact that I have a concealed weapon that I am more than prepared to use on you at any time, a broom would make a very handy weapon.” He looked around the apartment. “Have a seat.”

  I crunched over broken glass and went to the chair next to the couch, which afforded me a perfect view of the screen door and, hopefully, any help that might arrive. The darkened Manor was not heartening in that regard. “What do you want?” I asked.

  He sat on the couch, his hands clasped together and hanging down be
tween his legs. It was a relaxed posture but nothing about this meeting was relaxed. “Well, why don’t you start with telling me where Pauline Darvey is?”

  “I would but I don’t know,” I said. “She was here but now she’s gone again.”

  “That’s kind of her M.O.”

  “Why are you looking for her?” I asked. Outside, it was still dark and quiet. Not a sign of life.

  “She has something that belongs to me,” he said.

  “Drugs?” I asked.

  His smile turned into full-blown laughter. “No. Not drugs. It’s something much more mundane. Simple.” He settled down again. “And money. She owes me money.”

  “I thought Donnie owed you money?” I asked.

  “Him, too,” he said. “If she wants him to live, she’ll come up with the money.”

  “You’re going to kill Donnie over twenty grand?” I asked. “That seems like chump change to a guy like you.” I figured if I kept him talking, he wouldn’t kill me as quickly and maybe Cargan would come back in time.

  He laughed again. “Twenty grand. That’s cute.”

  I thought about Pauline’s empty locker in the basement of the Manor. She hadn’t even returned her apron. I had nothing related to the girl or her life so I couldn’t imagine what Mugsy Calhoun wanted with me and told him so. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “In due time,” he said. “Now, if you don’t mind, my colleague and I will take a quick look around and see if it’s already here.”

  “Colleague?” I asked. I hadn’t seen anyone else but I wasn’t surprised, either, when Domnall Kinneally’s face, a sheepish look on it, appeared at the back door. “Now, you. You I want to kill,” I said. Since the guy had arrived in town, we’d had nothing but trouble. “I thought you guys were on the outs with each other.”

  “He owes me money. I have jobs to do. It works out perfectly,” Calhoun said, looking at his colleague.