Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “That’s incredible! Could Damian sue the lawyer for malpractice?”

  “He sure could. I know some tort guys who would jump at it … Cindy Hurley is your sister, isn’t she?”

  “The way I hear it, I’m her brother, her little brother.”

  “Cool woman … What I say can’t be used in court. But she could look into it and maybe come up with something that’s respectable.”

  “Yeah … You know, Mary Jane, this smells.”

  “Real bad. So do a lot of things around this place. I bet you could find that there was some effort to get Mikolitis off the case. Put one of their guys in. That’s not a hard one to pull off around here. They must have blown it … Hey, you’re married to that totally gorgeous singer, aren’t you?”

  “I’m her husband,” I admitted. She missed the irony.

  “She’s really great. What’s she like?”

  A brash question, but that’s the way the South Side Irish are.

  “I’m a very lucky guy, or so she tells me every day.”

  “I have all her discs.”

  “I’ll ask her to autograph one for you. That doesn’t violate any ethics, does it?”

  “Not out here.”

  “Your guy is from St. Gabe’s?”

  “Sure,” she said, grinning happily. Is there any other? … “So am I.”

  “I figured.”

  I should never have said that. Patronizing River Forest snob looking down on the barbarians from Canaryville. No harm was done. She took it as a compliment.

  And I wouldn’t have to tell Nuala Anne.

  This would be a tough case. No one in the O’Sullivan family would talk to us. Well, maybe Damian’s mother would, but how would we get to her. Perhaps someone else had wanted Rod Keefe dead and Damian was charged because his family wanted him charged. Maybe they were covering for one of their own or for someone else who was more valuable to them than Damian.

  Vile people.

  Someone might well have murdered Rod Keefe. His family had put the blame on poor Damian. I was no lawyer, but I knew enough law to know that such a person could be charged as an accessory to the crime. Maybe we could get at them through my big sister Cindy Hurley.

  “Ever since you got mixed up with that gorgeous Irish witch,” Cindy, a lovely matron in her early forties, said to me, “you been involved in some strange events.”

  “Witch” was not a hostile word in context. None of my siblings believed that Nuala Anne was fey, including George the Priest His onetime boss, the little bishop, confidently assumed that of course she was. They all adored her and yet there was still, they’d whisper to one another, something a little odd about her. And they didn’t know the half of it. However, they confidently asserted that she would make something out of me, though what was not something they were prepared to define. Moreover, the assertion that she would remake me, once spoken as a future event, now seemed to become an ongoing and constant project as in, “I think she’s really making something out of Dermot. Have you noticed how good he is with kids.”

  They had forgotten that I’d always been good with kids.

  “’Tis true,” I admitted, imitating Nuala’s sigh.

  “Let me get this straight. O’Sullivan replaced the public defender who might have kept his son out of jail with a tax man who pleaded him for five years in prison.”

  “Right.”

  “Why the hell did he do that?”

  We had neighbors like that in River Forest I reminded her. People for whom bloodlines (or more recently family DNA) were sacred responsibilities for which much would be sacrificed. We both knew of a family that had disowned a son who had flunked out of Notre Dame and thus disgraced three prior generations of Domers.

  “Sure, Derm, but everyone knew they were crazy.”

  “Some Irish are like that, Cindy. They have to undo generations of losers to confirm that they are truly winners.”

  “We weren’t like that, were we?”

  “Nobody wanted to disown me or put me in jail because I was a loser.”

  “Then you came home with that woman and we had to admit you weren’t a loser, at all at all, as she would say.”

  See what I mean?

  “And Rick Mikolitis rejected the plea,” Cindy changed the subject, “and gave him probation? That sounds like the kind of thing he might do all right. We’d have to get the record of the plea bargain agreement to see exactly what he said. I’d bet he just about accused this tax lawyer guy of incompetence.”

  “Could we sue?”

  Cindy never asked who “we” might be. Obviously the Clan Coyne, all those dark-haired foreigners, contra mundum.

  “Hell yes, little bro, and we could depose the whole O’Sullivan family and embarrass them for years on end. Serve them right I’m not sure how that would help this kid who runs with dogs and paints. Nor does it find us the real killer or killers.”

  “Nuala will figure that out.”

  She was silent for a couple of moments.

  “I don’t doubt that for a moment … The country club is up in one of those North Shore suburbs isn’t it?”

  For the Coynes any region of the city north of Irving Park Road, was like Great Britain beyond Hadrian’s Wall.

  “Yes. So we can’t count on Mike Casey having as much clout with the local police as he does in this city.”

  “I can talk to this Mary Jane person, who sounds kind of cool.”

  “She hinted that she would talk to you and herself not even knowing I was going to have lunch with you.”

  Good feminist-bonding material.

  I ambled over to the Sun-Times Building to see what its archives had to say about the death of Rodney James Keefe. The obit was brief, all-American halfback at Notre Dame, served in Vietnam, awarded Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, Purple Heart, joined with his teammate John O’Sullivan to found O’Sullivan Electronics, responsible for products which made possible the Internet, survived by wife Helen and three sons, Rodney Jr., Mark, and Mathew. Mass at ten-thirty at SS Faith, Hope, and Charity.

  He had not been all-American at the Dome; neither for that matter had Jackie O’Sullivan, as it turned out both his friends and enemies called him. I had phoned my father, who had all such information at his fingertips. While the good doctor rarely said anything unpleasant about anyone, he commented, “Not everyone who played football at the Dome became an all-American. A lot of their memories become blurred later in life. Rod played enough minutes to earn a letter, but he was really a third-stringer. Jackie O’Sullivan was second-string MLB during his senior year but started the last four games of the season because the first-stringer was hurt. He was famous for tackling the wrong man and earning unnecessary roughness penalties.”

  “I’d say that’s pretty selective memory, Dad.”

  “Not as bad as the memories of those who never made the team but will tell you that sure they played football at the Dome. Most people don’t check.”

  “And you wouldn’t call their bluff?”

  “They don’t usually fib to me.”

  “What about their wives?”

  “Let me think for a moment … Jackie married a girl from St. Leo who went to St. Mary’s, Madge Clifford, pretty little blond kid. Rod was on his trophy wife. Dumped Joanne Kennedy from St. Sabina or one of those South Side parishes maybe ten years ago. He was always kind of a jerk. Drank a lot. Brilliant though. Everyone says that he was the genius behind their company. Made millions for Jackie, who didn’t really know the time of day.”

  “How did he die?”

  Dad had hesitated, searching his memory.

  “Some kind of auto accident as I remember, five, six years ago maybe.”

  He had asked about Nuala and the kids and chuckled at my stories about Socra Marie.

  “Funny little kid. Just like your sister Cindy at that age.”

  Perhaps. However, I suspected that the Tiny Terrorist’s energy came from the McGrail genes.

  He didn�
�t ask why I wanted to know about these Domer football heroes. He probably figured that I was my wife’s Dr. Watson again.

  There was nothing besides the obit in the papers about Rod Keefe’s death. The violent death of a Notre Dame football player and successful industrialist should have earned more notice. I checked the sports sections. Not a word.

  Jackie O’Sullivan, as I now thought of him, must have used a lot of clout to keep the stories out of the papers.

  I found a headline that said, “Friend’s son gets probation in death of Notre Dame all-American.”

  The piece was short. Judge Rick Mikolitis had sentenced Damian Thomas O’Sullivan to five years’ probation after he had pleaded guilty to negligent homicide in the death of Rodney Keefe, a football all-American at Notre Dame. O’Sullivan is the son of Mr. Keefe’s business partner, John Patrick O’Sullivan.

  That was all.

  There were several obvious stories that had been missed. Why such a lenient sentence? Why no discussion of the judge’s decision to go easy on Damian O’Sullivan? Why no comments from the victim’s wives or sons? Why no references to how Keefe had died?

  Smellier and smellier, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll.

  I phoned home to report my successes to herself.

  Danuta answered the phone.

  “Missus take baby out, kids in school, girl come soon, boy play with dogs.”

  Herself had perhaps called Madame and brought along the Tiny Terrorist for protection. Knowing that little conniver, I was sure that she would turn on her charm and act as grown-up as her big sister.

  I met Larry Ryan, a contemporary from Marquette, at Billy Goat’s, a subterranean bar on lower Wacker Drive once notorious as a watering spot for journalistic drunks but now a tourist spot because of the taxidermy of the Billy Goat who had allegedly cursed the Chicago Cubs.

  Larry, a sophisticated analyst of Chicago businesses, was waiting for me, as were a busload of tourists. He was sipping some kind of dark brew.

  “Diet Coke,” he said dyspeptically. “Deirdre said she’d throw me out of the house if I didn’t stop drinking.”

  “High time,” I said.

  “I told her she should have done it five years ago.” He shrugged. “She agreed.”

  “You look great.”

  A wispy little guy with faded brown hair and innocent freckled face was once more the weary angel he had been in college.

  “I should. I’ve lost weight. I sleep at night. No hangovers.”

  “Should we be meeting here?”

  “No problem! When I see the drunks here I realize that would be me in a couple of years if Dede hadn’t lowered the boom … What’ll you have to drink?”

  “Same poison as you.”

  He laughed.

  “You on the wagon too?”

  “I never did drink much.”

  “Lucky you … Well, what can I do for you?”

  “What can you tell me about O’Sullivan Electronics?”

  He hesitated, as if not altogether certain how to begin.

  “Well, he’s a phony shanty Irishman who’s made a lot of money, but I gotta give him credit, he runs a profitable company, well within the limits of the law, though you wouldn’t want to work for him. He saw the electronics revolution coming, figured out what kind of miniature chips they’d need for pagers and phones and Palm Pilots and that sort of thing and mass-produced them. He undersold the potential competition and hired the kind of engineers who have kept him one step ahead of the game. A shrewd, tough son of a bitch. You wouldn’t want to mess with him.”

  “Me personally?”

  “He’d come after you if he thought you were a threat and he’s not smart enough to learn how much clout you have.”

  “Me?”

  We both laughed.

  “He has no business problems?”

  “Do you remember DEC?”

  “Computer company that merged with Compaq?”

  “Right, because it couldn’t keep up with the flow of the game … Remember Compaq?”

  “Yeah, it did a noisy merger with Hewlett-Packard because it couldn’t keep up with the flow of the game.”

  “The computer game is the closest thing we have to real capitalist competition in this country. Compaq was number one a few years ago, then along came Dell and Gateway and creamed them. Top management gets arrogant, thinks it can’t be touched and bingo, a year or two and they’re looking for a white knight to save them.”

  “That’s happening to O’Sullivan?”

  “Word on the street is they’re on the edge. It’s a closely held family firm, though the widow of Rod Keefe, who was a partner in the firm for a long time, holds maybe thirty percent of the stock. They continue to be profitable, which is better than most such firms are able to do just now. Worry is about his kids.”

  “Kids?”

  “Look, Derm, if a guy is running a company, he’s gotta be very careful about putting his sons in top-level jobs. Maybe the kid is as good as you are, hell, maybe he’s even better. But maybe he’s not quite as good or quite as driven or maybe he’s a lout but you can’t see it. Get what I mean?”

  “Not that I have a company or ever will, but you’re saying I get a dispassionate outside evaluation of my son before I make him COO?”

  “Right! Jackie O’Sullivan doesn’t see it that way.”

  “How does he see it?”

  “He thinks his kids are as tough and as smart and as obsessive about work as he is. The word is out that the two he’s got up there aren’t in the same league as he is, only he can’t see it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sean went right from Notre Dame into the company’s senior management. Nice kid, they say, and as smart as the old man, but doesn’t much like to work. Enjoys playing with the company plane. His father can’t see anything wrong with him. Patrick, the second son, works hard, but he couldn’t make it at a small-bore Loop law firm. Put the two of them together and maybe you have one minor-league Jackie O’Sullivan. Smart young engineers don’t want to work for them. Deadly, see what I mean?”

  No mention of Damian O’Sullivan, the invisible son. Damian the Leper.

  “Aren’t there a couple of daughters?”

  “Jackie O’Sullivan let a daughter into the management of his firm? No way. Capitalism is for men.”

  “What do they do?”

  “One’s a doctor, pediatrician I think. The other’s a lawyer at one of the big firms. Supposed to be an obnoxious bitch; even the other women lawyers can’t stand her.”

  Larry could run down every important Chicago company in the same fashion. Moreover, he’d share his information with a friend and not ask why the friend wanted to know. Maybe he knew about Nuala Anne’s mystery-solving adventures, but he wouldn’t mention them.

  “So you’re saying the vultures are gathering?”

  “I didn’t say that, Derm, but you’re right. The smart money is saying that Jackie has another year, two at the most, and he’ll have to sell out. He won’t go down without a fight. He’s one of your South Side Irish types who think there’s always a way to tilt the playing field, but that doesn’t work when the big boys close in on you. He’ll make a ton of money of course, but take all the competition out of his life, he’ll fade pretty quickly. So will that pasted-on smile.”

  “What happened to Rod Keefe?”

  “He ran into the front end of Jackie’s car up at their fancy country club. They say that one of his kids was driving it. Nothing ever came of it. Rod was a genius and a falldown drunk. He was giving Jackie a lot of trouble …” Larry shrugged. “I think it probably was an accident, but a convenient one for Jackie.”

  “His second wife inherit the stock?”

  Larry’s eyes turned shrewd. He knew I was up to something. However, he didn’t much care. I was his friend and I was entitled, therefore, to any information he had.

  “No way. His first wife is one tough lady. She got the stock in the divorce settlement.”

 
I finished my Diet Coke, thanked him for the information, and told him to give my best to Dede. He smiled and said she was some woman. We agreed that we’d get together sometime soon. I’d tell this to Nuala Anne and that would make it certain that we would indeed get together. She argued that such a promise, however pro forma it might be when men made it, still had to be kept.

  My final stop was at the Reilly Gallery. My wife and younger daughter had already been there with Damian O’-Sullivan’s drawings. As Annie Casey brewed the usual apple cinnamon tea for me and served up the oatmeal raisin cookies that were de rigueur for visitors she heaped praised on Socra Marie.

  “Such a poised and pretty and well-behaved little girl. You’re very lucky, Dermot, to have such a grown-up two-year-old.”

  I didn’t know that they were going to stop at the Gallery on the way down to Madame’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. However, I wasn’t surprised by my daughter’s behavior. I knew that the little terrorist could become a manipulator when the occasion provided the opportunity. Like her mother, she could shift roles quickly.

  I said none of this, however, to Annie Casey. Rather I acknowledged that we were indeed fortunate.

  “That young artist of yours is very gifted, Dermot. If he does his work in oils or watercolor and on good paper, it will definitely be commercial. We’ll be happy to represent him. I kept two of his drawings. We’ll frame and hang them. People want paintings of their dogs and their children. Incidentally your daughter’s two wolfhounds are handsome creatures.”

  “Socra Marie’s dogs?”

  “Well, she kept saying, ‘my doggies.’”

  We both laughed.

  “That’s one you’re going to hang?”

  “Certainly!”

  Mike Casey drifted in, wiping paint off his hands. He too praised my daughter, my wife, my young find, and my doggies. Then we adjourned to his workroom.