Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  “That’s where you drive me crazy. If the toys are personal, they date the whatever the fuck you called it—the origin—to when? When’s the latest someone plays with things like Monkey in a Barrel? When they were eight, nine? Are you telling me that Jimmy Ryan did something to this wacko when they were in grammar school and now, twenty years later, he’s come back for revenge?”

  Z leaned back and spread his arms in supplication.

  “Ab, come on.”

  Abbie folded her arms and leaned back in the chair. Her mind was spinning.

  “It’s a black box. We can’t know what any of it means until we have a leak from inside the County. We have to get someone to talk.”

  “Right. Sure. I’ve been up and down South Park and Seneca talking to all the young business executives and Internet millionaires that drink dry martinis in the bars there. And they’re stumped. I know when someone’s holding back and this ain’t it. They’re in the same position we are. Spectators. The Clan or whoever is running the show has this wrapped up tighter than a Catholic girl’s panties.”

  Abbie made a face.

  “Sorry. Tighter than, uh …”

  “Forget about it, Z. I can feel a Jewish reference coming on. Who’s the person most likely to talk? Who’s most desperate right now?”

  Z tapped his fingers on the desk, looked past his shoulder. He looked like a contemplative walrus, thought Abbie. Finally, his eyes switched back to hers.

  “The two remaining members.”

  “Exactly. They know they’ve got a bull’s-eye burning through the back of their shirts right now. And, if the Clan isn’t using them for bait—which I find unthinkable, knowing how the County feels about all things Irish—then they must have the two of them locked down somewhere, with no access except for the absolutely trusted. We need to go back to the bars and find out who’s gone missing from work unexpectedly. Whose house has a car parked in front of it day and night? Who’s canceled their bowling night out with the boys?”

  “That’s good.”

  “But it’s not good enough. Let’s face it, Z, we’re not even playing at the killer’s level right now. And you know how much I like that.”

  “You look tired, Ab.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “You keep making me say that. Go home and get some rest.”

  “I will.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re going to go find Patty Ryan.”

  Abbie smiled.

  “Now, how’d you know that?”

  “Because she knows something you don’t. And we all know that’s one thing you can’t stand.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN ABBIE RANG THE DOORBELL AT JIMMY RYAN’S HOUSE, IT WAS HIS mother who answered.

  “Abbie! You’ve come for the photo.”

  Abbie hadn’t expected the old woman, but she smiled. “Well, yes.”

  “Come in, come in.”

  Abbie stepped through the door onto the semi-shag carpet.

  “I found it yesterday,” she whispered. “God knows what Patty was thinking—it was taken out of its frame and hidden away beneath the Waterford clock on their bedroom mantel. A strange place for a photo, don’tcha think?”

  Abbie tilted her head and made a face. “With all that’s happened …”

  “Sure, her mind’s in a thousand places. The paint stuck to the bottom of the clock as I lifted it. I hope she doesn’t notice.”

  That’s odd, Abbie thought.

  “Wait here.” Mrs. Ryan’s smile faltered and a look of spreading horror came over her face as she turned away. “Now let me think where I put it.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Abbie. Please remember where you put it.

  With one palm on her forehead as if she were a magician guessing a card, Mrs. Ryan weaved her way toward the kitchen.

  There was the clatter of drawers opening and cupboards being searched. Abbie sighed and studied the mantel. All the pictures were there except the one of the three men. If Mrs. Ryan did find it, she hoped someone could recognize the back of the third man’s head. There was no doubt Jimmy Ryan and Marty Collins were the other two.

  Mrs. Ryan bustled back into the living room, her face beaming.

  “We’re just like a pair of spies, aren’t we, Abbie, like what’s his name—James Bond.”

  Her face was close to Abbie’s now, and it had the terrible, friendly intensity that old Irish people sometimes had—the bursting blue eyes and the lips pulled back over the big shiny teeth, as if they were preparing to take a hungry little nip at your nose.

  She slid the picture away from her chest and placed it in Abbie’s outstretched palm.

  “You’ll make sure to take care of this?”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ryan. It’s safe with me.”

  Abbie smiled. And again she marveled at how calm this woman was, with her son dead and in the ground just a week ago. And she hasn’t even asked me how the investigation is going, Abbie thought.

  Abbie said her goodbyes and turned to leave.

  “When this is all over, you come to my house for tea,” the old woman said, pronouncing it tay.

  “I’d be happy to,” Abbie said, feeling a little ashamed of how she’d tricked the old woman into finding the picture, while at the same time her brain tingled with giddiness at having it in her hot little hand.

  She turned and pushed the screen door open and stepped onto the porch. When she heard the wooden door close with a rush of air, she looked greedily down at the photo.

  “Damn it all—”

  It was the wrong picture.

  Abbie smacked the photo against her palm and stamped on the porch, turning to stare at the door. A tiny burst of water from a puddle there sprayed against her pant leg as she looked to see if Mrs Ryan was watching her from behind the curtains.

  Had the old woman switched it or had it been hiding under the clock for months or years? That crafty little bitch, she thought. That scheming old …

  Abbie sighed and stepped down to the first porch step. She looked at the picture again. It had clearly been taken the same day as the other one, but now the third man was different. He was taller and wearing a green polo shirt and his hair was chestnut brown and slicked back.

  Her eyes darted to the man’s face and she almost tumbled down onto the concrete path. Her vision slurred and her mind seemed to swerve and dip like a Tilt-a-Whirl.

  Abbie dashed for her car at a dead run.

  Sean MacCullahy took a modest sip from the pint of foamy Molson Golden and settled back in the stout wooden chair. He felt the beer slip down his throat. It was a harmless little drop, a tiny sting from the tail of a monster that had consumed nearly half his life. Having the taste was like nodding to a murderous old friend, now locked in shackles, begging through thick iron bars to talk shite about the old days. Sean had one beer and one beer only every time he came to the Gaelic Club, just to say he could. The whole crowd knew he’d beaten the drink, especially the ones who’d taken the Pledge—the Irish Church’s oath, whereby young men and women swore never to touch alcohol. Even they would nod at him with a gleam in their eye, though they couldn’t know the first thing of what he’d been through. But he’d nod back to them, peaceable now within himself.

  Good man, Sean, they were saying with their eyes. Show the fecker who won.

  Won? Drink had nearly ruined his life. Not nearly, it had. He’d been a black-browed terror to his wife, Colleen, whom he’d buried twelve years ago after exhausting her faith in the power of God.

  He’d barely known his two girls and one boy except as targets for his late-night rants on the subject of their mother’s whoredom and their probably being the offspring of some guinea trashman (the coloring on Margaret, his oldest, had always seemed suspiciously dark to him, her cheeks dusky even in the deepest winter).

  He’d made a hames of his marriage, as they said back in Cork.

  And yet he’d had a sterling career as a cop, retired now twenty years. Proved what you coul
d do with a hickory nightstick and a mean disposition. And in his fourth day off the job he’d sworn off the drink. It made him wonder if it was alcohol that had cursed him, or the streets of Buffalo. After he’d left them, he’d never felt the urge to lose himself in a bottle.

  But he’d survived it. His second girl, Colleen, like her mother, was even talking to him now, over the phone. Who knew, he might get to see his grandkids one day.

  He let his eyes drift across the crowd and settle on John Kearney, sitting across from him now, his old partner in the First Ward.

  “Did you see the car he pulled up in?” John said.

  Sean looked over to see where John had indicated with the nod of his head and the gaze of his steely blue eyes. Ah, Patrick Carduzzi. Half-Italian and half-Irish, but he preened around the Club like the son of Saint Patrick. The fool.

  “Was it a big Cadillac?” Sean said.

  “Course,” John Kearney said, and they laughed. “You can take the guinea out of a person, but …”

  Sean caught John’s slitted eye and they both cackled. How right he was. On St. Patrick’s Day, the man practically painted himself green. Just awful.

  Through the crowd, Sean saw a strange black-haired woman approach. A look of incomprehension spread across his face. What was she doing in the Gaelic Club? His eyes narrowed before he realized that, of course, it was Absalom Kearney. She’d brought him here today. He was losing his mind, too.

  He liked Absalom. Hardworking, a good daughter to John. She had no choice about who she was, after all—she’d been taken from her natural surroundings like an orphaned kitten—and Sean accepted that. Hot-tempered when roused to it, but wasn’t he the same way himself?

  He took another drink, and nodded at Tom Murphy, the embezzler.

  Sean remembered the day John told her he was adopting an orphaned child, the absolute shock of it. “Y’ are not!” he’d blurted out, but John had gone silent and grim and his eyes were like coals from the bottom of a turf pit. John would never discuss it afterward. For him, it was some kind of holy obligation. What else could possess an Irishman in 1982 to adopt a gypsy-looking child and give it his own name?

  John had looked exhausted, worn down to a shadow, the day that he carried Absalom home. In one arm he’d carried the toddler, wrapped up in a dirty green blanket. The other hand held an old Bible with a cordovan cover and a photograph album with a faded green cover, taken from the mother’s things. It’s more than a Bible you’ll need, thought Sean at the time.

  But he’d never asked why John had done it. It was none of his business.

  “Gentlemen,” Abbie said as she placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, the cup making a tinkling noise against the saucer. She did the same for her father, tea with milk. John never drank coffee. How well Sean knew that, after twenty years of buying the man a Red Rose tea every morning without a cent in payment.

  “Good girl, Abbie,” Sean said, giving her a bright smile. John nodded curtly and ignored the tea. Sean, a touch embarrassed, smiled up at Abbie, who for some reason was looking rather intently at him.

  At a loss for something to say, he nodded toward the crowd at the bar.

  “Don’t bother with us, now. Go find yourself a young man.”

  The girl laughed, richly, deep in her throat.

  “Thanks, Mr. MacCullahy. But the youngest man here just had both his hips replaced.”

  He smiled.

  “Have everything you need?” She leaned over and smiled, staring him directly in the eye.

  “Fine, fine,” he said, again a little confused.

  The girl was trying to be her father’s daughter. She’d always tried.

  Sean rearranged the coffee so it wouldn’t spill if someone bumped the table, then looked up to see Absalom talking to a tall man in an Irish rugby shirt, with his back turned to the table. She was, Sean noticed, tapping her breast absently as she talked. He watched her hand flutter for a second, a long-buried erotic urge pushing at his bowels.

  She looked over at him. He stared back, trying to decipher the look in her eyes.

  “Oh, Jaysus, I forgot,” he said suddenly, looking at John.

  Sean reached into his lapel pocket and casually pulled out a photo.

  “I found this picture in my drawer in the workshop. Couldn’t remember where it was taken. You and Marty Collins, God rest his soul.”

  He slid the picture across to John Kearney, who was pulling his gold-rimmed reading glasses out of the LensCrafters pouch he carried in his front shirt pocket.

  “Marty?” he said, an edge of concern in his tenor voice.

  He picked up the photo shakily and studied it.

  “And that other one. Jimmy Ryan. Looks like it was taken out at the lake.”

  “ ’Twas,” John said, and his eyes grew big behind the powerful lenses.

  “Did I take it?” Sean said, looking away. “I can’t remember now.” He’d always been an able liar. Came with being a drunk.

  “No, you weren’t there. I …”

  John’s cheek, webbed with blue veins, suddenly began twitching.

  “Sean?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where’d you say you found this photo?”

  “In my workshop, back at the house. In my old fishing box.”

  John’s eyes were dangerously aflame.

  “Then you’re a born liar. What the hell is this?”

  He threw the photo faceup on the table, then clouted it hard with his open hand. The slap rang in the air like a bell clap, and the buzz of conversation dimmed, faces at the bar turning to look. John’s entire face was red now and his pale lips were set in a straight line, like a petulant boy.

  “Where you goin’?” Sean said. “Sit down—”

  “Where’d you get that picture?” Yelling now.

  “John, calm down and have your tea.”

  But John Kearney pushed his seat away and stumbled back. Then he turned toward the door and was lost in the crowd.

  A few seconds later, Abbie slid into the chair.

  “I tried my best, Absalom.”

  “I know you did.”

  Sean looked down at the photo, studied the three men. He sighed; he was sure he hadn’t been there. And he couldn’t understand why it was so important to know who took it.

  “Couldn’t you just ask him yourself?” he said finally.

  He regretted it instantly, for the sharp look of pain that came into her bright blue eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ABBIE SPENT THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON TRAWLING THE BARS OF THE County for information on missing men in their fifties or sixties. She started in the bars of South Park, dank, dark rooms even in the middle of the day, lit only by the yellow lights over the pool tables and the red and white glow of the cigarette machines, with shadowy figures moving beneath stark cones of light. There was usually someone holding their face with a busted paw, victim of a fistfight, or muted sounds of couples battling in the alleyway behind. Abbie didn’t bother to ask about the blood and the noise. Maybe the County was beginning to work on her, finally, as everyone predicted it would. She ignored the wounded and asked each bartender about regulars who’d gone missing.

  The answers she got drove her mood down further. There were about three dozen men gone in South Buffalo. There was a crane operator who’d lost his job and disappeared last week, leaving his German shepherd to starve to death. There was a fireman who’d never got back on the plane from the Vegas “training convention,” which was really a whoring and gambling spree paid for by dollar bills placed in buckets of men going door to door in their metal hats. He hadn’t been heard from since. Maybe he’d stayed in Vegas because he liked the novel sight of the sun in January. His neighbors had rung his wife’s doorbell to see if there was anything they could do, but the woman had told them to fuck off, he was no good anyway and she was moving to North Carolina. There were barbers, insurance agents, Costco managers, and a whole squad of unemployed that had gone less dramatic
ally, slipping away in a swirl of rumor and unpaid bills. And none of them had left a forwarding address.

  By the end of the night, the soles of her shoes were sticky with rancid beer, and her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. Maybe Billy Carney had been right with his talk about the Rez. An invisible war was under way that she was powerless even to interrupt, a war of attrition.

  When she came home, she was about to put her key into the lock when she noticed something by the hallway light. Something stuck under her door. It was white, the corner of a piece of paper. She dropped down and studied it. The paper was blank, but there was clearly more of it under the door. Abbie took the corner and began to pull.

  As it came out, she saw writing in green—but it wasn’t a note. It was the packaging for a 50cc syringe, made by Hamilton.

  Abbie stood up quickly and stuck the key into the lock. Turning the door handle, she burst into the room. And she knew from the quality of silence that her father was already gone.

  Billy Carney was watching the Buffalo Sabres lose again on TV. A can of Molson Export sat on the coffee table next to his cell phone and the Sig Sauer. The volume was turned down low. It was the third period and the Sabres were down by one against the Maple Leafs. Billy watched the figures of the players sway and dash, willing someone to put the puck in the net.

  When he heard the noise, it sounded like it was coming from the side of the house toward the Riordans. He scooped up the Sig and slid to the wall in two steps, reaching over to kill the light switch, all in one herky-jerk motion. His eardrums seemed to throb as he listened in the dark, the plasma TV glowing as Rick Jeanneret called the play-by-play. Billy found he was calm.

  The sound had come from the bathroom. A scraping noise. He slid his back along the wall until he came to the hallway. Suddenly, he turned back and looked at the TV screen, then bent over double and padded over to the coffee table. He hit the power button and the picture died. The quiet of the house surged into the room.

  You think you’re hunting me, you coward? Billy thought. You got it backward. I’ve been waiting for you.

  The Sig felt snug in his hand as he padded quickly to the wall and threw his back against it. Billy’s heart was pumping painfully. He felt the edge of the wall and made the turn slowly into the hallway, the tube socks on his feet—Bishop Timon green and gold stripes around his calves—masking the sound of his movement.