The Death of an Irish Lass

by Bartholomew Gill

  Suddenly the man launched himself from the rocker, fell onto his hands and knees, and crawled in quick, spastic movements toward a corner of the kitchen, where he tried to vomit, with no result.

  The doctor began preparing a hypodermic needle.

  “His cousin says he’s been like this since early morning,” the guard explained. He had to speak over the man’s agonized spasms. “At first the cousin thought it was just too much to drink, although Jim’s a very moderate man usually. But the cousin returned later to find him burning more of the furniture, and that’s when he called for us.”

  The doctor tapped the guard on the shoulder and they both approached Cleary. The guard, a big fellow, grabbed him under the arms and raised him to his feet. The doctor pushed up a sleeve of the greatcoat to expose an arm mottled with dirt and lice. The doctor had to rub a good while with a piece of moistened cotton before the spot for the needle’s point was readied. The guard and an ambulance attendant carried the man out.

  McGarr noted that most of the papers were issues of the New York Daily News, then went back outside into the fresh air. Shortly after, the doctor appeared. McGarr offered him a smoke and introduced himself. “Has he been like this before?”

  “Twice.” The doctor began walking slowly toward the van. He was young, no more than thirty. He had fine, pixyish features and a thin build. He was just a bit taller than McGarr and his accent placed him in Clare. When they had gotten beyond the ambulance and the other policemen, he said, “Nervous breakdown. I wouldn’t tell anybody else that, of course.”

  “But I thought a nervous breakdown resulted from severe stress. You know, people who’ve got too much to do and no time and bills and…” McGarr’s voice trailed off. “—city people.” When it came to psychological classifications, McGarr was at sea. Once in Paris when he had investigated a series of murders involving mutilated corpses and aspects of gross indecency, he had immersed himself in books concerning deviant behavior. He had found them unavailing, since he had had to deal with an individual and not a type.

  “Usually that’s the case. But out here, things have changed almost as rapidly and perhaps more drastically than in the city. Take Mr. Cleary, for instance. He’s got…” The doctor looked around the area in back of the house where the land was going back to scrub; in the distance a jackass was bawling, his gray head sticking over a wall. “…the mud and the weather, the house, maybe a neighbor forty years older than he, and not much else. He’s got no wife, no kids, no family and no hope of getting one. His brothers and sisters have left and the last time he heard from one of them was in 1954 on his thirty-first birthday, when his brother sent him thirty-one pounds and advised him to have a bellyful of beer. He wound up in the Galway City jail.

  “Cleary doesn’t drink much anymore. He’s afraid he’ll go right off the handle again. So even the pubs are out for him. And anyhow, he’s a quiet, withdrawn man. I don’t think the pubs would help him even if he could drink regularly. And then the pubs in these parts aren’t what they once were. Have you been in one recently?”

  “This morning. Jolly place.”

  “It’s the weather. And the tourists. You should try one in January and February. More like morgues. Nobody talks. Everybody seems almost stunned.

  “And then Cleary isn’t a religious man, either. There’s nothing to support him here.” The doctor squinted the cigarette smoke from his eyes and let his eyes scan the field and the hill beyond. “Emotionally, that is. All the young and the ambitious are off to Cork or Dublin or England or Canada. It’s the city and the factory for them, and the sort of life they can see for themselves on TV.”

  McGarr had the distinct impression the doctor didn’t care for the new way of life much. After all, he himself could have chosen to practice someplace else and been rewarded with all the things the younger people in Lahinch wanted, but instead he had chosen this drear backyard and his patient, James Cleary, who was now resting in the back of the ambulance.

  “Could something else have brought on this attack?” McGarr asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like May Quirk. She’s home now. Wasn’t Cleary interested in marrying her?”

  “That was years ago.”

  McGarr had dealt with men like Cleary before, though—lonely, isolated men who had taken some small disappointment in their lives and built it into a tragedy, something to hang all their supposed failure on. “Has he ever talked to you about her, when, you know, you treated him in the past?”

  The young doctor turned to McGarr. His eyes were small and dark and quick. “Certainly you don’t think me that much of a bumpkin that I’d tell you if he had, Inspector.”

  “I don’t think you’re a bumpkin at all, Doctor. I’m only asking because May Quirk was murdered last night. I want to know if you think Cleary’s behavior today is in any way extraordinary, given the problems you’ve treated him for in the past.”

  The doctor hadn’t even blinked at the mention of May Quirk’s name, although he must have been her near contemporary and probably had grown up with her. “No. He’d already burned the other furniture in the house. This was the last of it. The retching is usual too. I suspect he’ll start tearing down the walls next. One room at a time. If he lasts much longer.” He glanced back at the ambulance. “He hardly eats. He’s somewhat suicidal, too. I can see that aspect of his personality growing stronger now.”

  “Couldn’t you put him away where he could get some steady treatment?”

  “What treatment—locked doors, a steady regimen of pacifiers, and an institution full of crazies? That would finish him off. At least here he can die among some people who know him.”

  McGarr looked at the diminutive doctor, whose shoulders were no wider than the spread of McGarr’s hands. He seemed strangely cynical for a man so young. Doctors, McGarr well knew, were like policemen in that they often had too much of people and had to protect themselves by becoming hard. It was just a veneer, however. A really hard man couldn’t continue in either profession very long without the censure of his colleagues. But there was a half-note of bitterness in what the young man was saying, too. McGarr said, “What I’ve been meaning to ask is if you think Cleary is capable of murder. And specifically, of murdering May Quirk.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a policeman.”

  “Did he mention where he had been last night?”

  “I only got here a few minutes before you.”

  “Where would Cleary have gotten a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey?”

  “I’ve already told you as much as I know of his drinking habits.”

  “Did you know May Quirk?”

  “Yes. Of course. We went to school together.”

  McGarr flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it. He wondered why he smoked. He got such little pleasure from it. The whole process of lighting one up was automatic, a habit. “I’ve been having some trouble finding out who she was. Her parents, naturally, are distraught, and—”

  “She left when I went to university. Only she never came back.”

  “Until now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where did she go?”

  The doctor glanced at McGarr. He realized McGarr knew the answer to that question. “Right into the center of the storm. New York City. She made a big hit. Everybody knew she would. Big-time reporter, they tell me. Tens of thousands of pounds per year. Powerful friends and a lot of power herself. Not an Irish-American in the ‘New Land’ who wouldn’t invite her home for Christmas dinner.”

  “I.R.A. connections?”

  “They say that too. It’s the in thing, I suspect. Among all the protorevolutionaries in Manhattan.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I went to medical school at Columbia.”

  “Then you know she was a staff reporter for a big New York daily?”

  He nodded. “The biggest. The Daily News. Hard-hat newspaper. The sort of newspaper an I.R.A. gun
man would read.”

  “And you read what when you were there?”

  “The Times, of course.”

  “The university man’s newspaper. The sort a bright young medical student, who wanted to help his people in a way different from that of a May Quirk, would read, eh?”

  Again the doctor looked at McGarr. “Exactly.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother you very much that she’s been murdered.”

  “No more than when any of my patients dies. No less.”

  “What did you treat her for, Dr….” The young man had not given McGarr his name.

  “Fleming. She had missed her period. She wanted to know if she was pregnant.”

  “And?”

  “She was.”

  “Do you know who the father was?”

  He shook his head. “Could be about anybody.” He smiled slightly, then added, “Although that’s not fair. I know nothing about May Quirk’s sexual indiscretions. And don’t want to know, either. Now that she’s a historical figure, as it were, I’m sure the countryside will be crawling with types just like she was, all of them trying to dig up any squalid rumor about her past. I’m sure it’ll all make interesting reading for some.”

  McGarr didn’t care for this nasty young man. He doubted that Fleming was as disinterested in May Quirk’s past and her untoward fate as he claimed. “Where were you last night, may I ask?”

  “You may. I suppose it’s the price I must pay for having been candid with you. I treated a local man for gout.”

  “Who is he, and what time was that?”

  “Daniel Quirk.” Fleming smiled wanly at McGarr. “He lives in the village. He was May’s uncle.”

  “Yes; I know the man.”

  “Then I stopped in Griffin’s, which is the pub on the corner across from the traffic standard.”

  McGarr raised an eyebrow. “So you drink?”

  “I returned to Ireland, remember? It’s my right, wouldn’t you say? Anyhow, May was there with her following.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Not really. She never ever really drank liquor. She’d buy one for herself as a prop, and she’d buy for anybody else who wanted one too.”

  “And her following?”

  He shook his head. “As I just explained to you, Inspector. They’re the kids who want to get out of Lahinch and Clare and maybe Ireland itself. They don’t drink, on principle.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a pub crowd.”

  “May made up for it. She made everybody merry with her banter and jokes. She had a tongue in her.”

  McGarr wondered if that was a wistful thought. His tone was unchanged, however. “Were you a part of May Quirk’s ‘following’?”

  “Me?”

  “For a different reason.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Love. Hate. Maybe you liked to look at a pretty girl.”

  Suddenly his delicate features froze. He looked McGarr right in the eye. “Let me tell you something, McGarr. If May Quirk was pretty, it was only skin deep. To me she had lost her looks. She wasn’t very pretty. Not very pretty at all.” He turned and walked back to the ambulance van. He jumped in and the driver backed them out onto the road, where they drove toward Lahinch.

  “What do you make of him?” McGarr asked O’Malley, meaning Fleming.

  “Just a daft farmer. A loner. Probably got himself a proper snootful last night. A couple of days in hospital, a bath, and a few good meals and he’ll be on the mend. I’ll get a social worker to look in on him from now on. Maybe the priest can organize a work crew to come out here and clean up the house a bit. The kids in town will do that now, you know. Sure, there’s not much work for them lately.” O’Malley looked at the house and shuddered, then walked over and shut the kitchen door.

  When he returned, he realized McGarr had meant Dr. Fleming. “Oh—he’s a fine doctor. Wonderful training. They say he’s not just a G. P. but a surgeon, too. They offered him a fine post in Galway City and one in the States, too. Minneapolis, wherever the hell that is.”

  “As a man?” McGarr asked.

  “A loner. His father wasn’t much different, though, but hard workers, the both of them. The doctor was quite a scholar, too. A Gaelic language whiz, and mathematics and history and whatnot. They say some big foundation paid for all his years in New York.”

  “He struck me as a hard man. No sympathy for anybody who wants something different from him.”

  “Ach. We’ve all got to pick and choose. And everybody’s glad he chose to come back. Sure, the sawbones we had before him knew the anatomy of a porter bottle and little else. And he’s not as fussy as he’d let on, Fleming isn’t. When the vet died he subbed at that too, and I’ll tell you something—he was better at animals than the new boy. There’s some farmers who refuse to go to anybody else when they’ve got big animal trouble. For operations, there’s nobody like him. He’s got small, fast hands and a good mind, too. Nerves of steel.”

  McGarr got into the Cooper and called the Lahinch barracks. Much to his surprise, his wife answered. “Everybody else is busy.”

  “They are, are they?” O’Malley was embarrassed. “We’ll soon see just how busy, we will.”

  McGarr assumed O’Malley’s notion of retiring had left him.

  Noreen went on. “Hughie says you should meet him at Griffin’s. It’s across from—”

  “I have Superintendent O’Malley with me now,” said McGarr. “We’ll find it.” He wanted her to know of O’Malley’s presence so she wouldn’t make any observations about the barracks or the town.

  “He says he’s having a drink with a fella by the name of O’Connor, who was with May Quirk last night.”

  McGarr and O’Malley swapped glances. “Rory O’Connor?”

  “He didn’t say. But he added that the fellow either doesn’t know or pretends not to know about the woman. He says rumors are flying thick and fast, but nobody’s certain of anything. He imagined you’d want to talk to him immediately.”

  “I’m on my way. Meet me there too.” McGarr threw the Cooper into first and pointed it toward Lahinch.

  FIVE

  Fleeting Things

  GRIFFIN’S BAR had leaded glass windows and snugs. In one sat Noreen, Hughie Ward, and a young man with a shock of thick black hair swept across his forehead. The snug door was open. The barman was bending to place a tray of drinks in front of them.

  McGarr waited for the barman to complete his task. He then asked for a small Jameson. “The old stuff.” He meant the twelve-year-old whiskey. He was tired of Canadian Club, as good as it was; somehow it just wasn’t his drink. It was too light and didn’t have enough taste for slow, steady drinking, which over the years had become McGarr’s method of imbibing. He well knew the practice had become a habit for him, but he never allowed himself to get out of the way and he had the experience necessary to avoid hangovers. And for the connoisseur, which he undoubtedly was, alcohol in all its forms was such a pleasant habit. He stubbed his cigarette out before entering the snug, however. That habit bothered him, mostly because, he decided then, it spoiled the taste of anything with alcohol in it.

  “Peter McGarr.” He offered his hand to Rory O’Connor, sat, and gave his wife a peck on the cheek.

  Noreen was a diminutive woman with delicate facial features and a body the beauty of which relied upon proportion, not size. A tight nest of copper curls and a fresh complexion made her seem doll-like, perhaps the creation of a master craftsman who knew what would please the eye without being obvious. What was more, Noreen, like most Irish women, had a delicacy of manner. One glance at her and you knew she was polite, well meaning, and a person you could trust. Also, she was brighter than McGarr (which he admitted only to himself, of course), and she was twenty-one years younger than he. That fact he never forgot. Her passion was art history. His had long been women, especially those who had possessed one or another of Noreen’s features and qualities. When he had met her, it had been as though
some higher power had wanted to reward McGarr for having been dutiful. It had been in the Dawson Art Gallery, which her family owned. McGarr had gone there for some technical information on the theft of several prints from Lord Iveagh’s mansion in Kildare. He had tried to kiss the young woman in the slide room to the rear of the shop. She had slapped his face and threatened to call the commissioner. That had been three years ago.

  “This man,” McGarr said, meaning Inspector Hughie Ward, “is a policeman. Has he told you that?”

  O’Connor shook his head.

  “I didn’t think he was a braggart.” McGarr was feeling good again, after having been somewhat depressed by the events of the day. Noreen always had that effect on him and what was more, she knew it, which galled him. That was a power over him, albeit a benign power, but nonetheless a threat of sorts. “And this hussy is my wife.”

  “Your wife? I thought—” O’Connor smiled. “Would you care for a drink, Mr. McGarr?”

  “No thank you, Rory.” McGarr then forced his own features to become serious. “I’ve already ordered one, and I have some bad news for you.”

  “Is it about May?”

  McGarr nodded, watching the young man’s features closely.

  “People have been talking.”

  In spite of what McGarr had heard about Rory O’Connor’s wildness, the big man seemed very gentle indeed. Like his contemporary, Dr. Fleming, he had the blackest of eyes, but his were large and soft. His skin was dark too, but clear. He was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt with a black alligator on the pocket. The alligator’s mouth was open and red, which made the teeth seem very white. Americans were a curious people, McGarr thought.

  The barman set his whiskey in front of him.

  “She’s dead.”

  O’Connor blinked. He began shaking his head slightly. “What’s that?” He placed his hands on his knees. His brow furrowed.

  “Somebody murdered May Quirk last night. In a pasture near the Cliffs of Moher.”