The Death of an Irish Sinner

by Bartholomew Gill

  Setup, McGarr thought. Parmalee had been watched from the moment he had surfaced as a threat to Opus Dei, McGarr had refused to play along with their low-profile scenario of Mary-Jo’s death, and this was the result.

  No, this was part of the result. The other part was being played out at Richmond Hospital, and McGarr could only blame himself. Why had he taken Chazz Sweeney—the man who had supervised political corruption for over two decades—so lightly?

  “I’d love to whack two arseholes like you. We have all our ducks in line, and it would be so easy. So right. In the circle that counts, I’d be a hero.”

  Hearing the slight thrill in Flatly’s voice, McGarr knew the man would shoot them if he believed he could get away with it. And he obviously thought he could. It was the thrill of really big death, even bigger than what McGarr now realized he had been smelling since he first began climbing the stairs.

  But Maddie would need at least one parent, if Noreen did not pull through, and Nuala would need him as well. He dropped his Walther. “Hughie.”

  Ward let his fall to the carpet too.

  Flatly kicked them down the stairs. “Now then, Corrupt Cop One—you walk to that doorway and throw the light switch.”

  Flatly meant McGarr, who complied. “Now both of you enter the room and sit on the bed.”

  Where Parmalee was positioned on his stomach with his left wrist attached to his right ankle with Garda-issue handcuffs. The same way Geraldine Breen had left Ward at Delia Manahan’s house in Killiney. Less the bullet wounds.

  At least six were grouped at the back of Parmalee’s head, with the bright shell casings sprinkled over his blue blazer and the bedcover.

  McGarr thought of the other shell casing. And of Chazz Sweeney, who, to his knowledge, had been the only other guest recently left alone in the den of Ilnacullin in Dunlavin where Noreen’s shotguns were stored.

  “What have we here?” Flatly asked histrionically.

  “An example of Corrupt Cop Two’s handiwork? It wasn’t enough just to thump the fucking yoke, after he abused Whore One and threatened to expose your immoral ‘marital’ situation with Whore Two. No. You had to run him up here and dispatch the gobshite as well.

  “Check the shell casings, Corrupt Cop Two. Go ahead.” Flatly nudged Ward forward. “Pick one up.”

  Ward did. Examining it, he glanced up at McGarr and began extending his arm, before glancing at Flatly.

  “That’s okay. All right. The ‘Chief’—I believe they call you, Corrupt Cop One—should see it too.”

  As Ward handed McGarr the casing, their eyes met and a thought passed between them. If Flatly was alone, it was bad police strategy—one gun on two suspects. In such a small space, there was no chance of patting them and cuffing their wrists. And even if Flatly wasn’t alone, it was still unwise not to show the second man.

  Flatly hadn’t, because there was none. Flatly was alone, doing Sweeney’s dirty work singularly. Which also was not smart, ultimately, Sweeney being Sweeney.

  “And what caliber proof of your corruption might that cartridge be, Corrupt Cop One? Can you see it? Or have your eyes deteriorated along with your morals?”

  McGarr stared down at the small shell casing, knowing it was his chance. Now that Noreen and Fitz had been attacked, it was total war. He would not abide by the law while Sweeney and Flatly practiced their pillería with—how had Parmalee himself phrased it?—with God on their side.

  McGarr stepped toward the lamp by the side of the bed. “I’ll need me cheaters.”

  “Tut-tut.” Flatly quickly moved to the other side, where he would have two clean shots at them without having to swing the barrel much. “Open the jacket and show me.”

  McGarr complied.

  “Now slowly draw the glasses out.”

  Again he complied, feeling the frames slip by the concealed special-purpose pistol that he kept in a pouch of the pocket. He released the jacket and slid the frames of his half-glasses over his ears.

  After examining the shell, he would remove the glasses and ask to return them to the pocket. Maybe then he’d have a chance, with Flatly having seen that he was not wearing a shoulder holster.

  Reaching the shell casing under the lamplight, McGarr looked down. “It’s a thirty-eight.”

  “Bingo! Right you are, Corrupt Cop One. Now tell me, Corrupt Cop Two—what was the caliber of the gun you lost last night to a woman, no less?”

  Ward only looked at Flatly.

  “Thirty-eight, I’m guessing. Could this be the very weapon?” From a pocket of his leather jacket, Flatly pulled a handgun shaped like a Beretta with the long grip/magazine that could contain thirteen cartridges. It was a model 84, Ward’s weapon of choice.

  “No need to chat on. It’s your gun, the one you used to whack poor publisher Parmalee here, just when he was reaching the heights of celebrity. Why? Because he threatened to expose you and your whores and your whorish ‘family.’

  “All it now needs are fresh prints.” Flatly tossed it down on the bed near where Ward was standing. “Pick it up.”

  Ward did not move.

  “Pick it up, or I shoot him.” Flatly raised his Garda-issue Glock and pointed it at McGarr’s forehead. “You returned to the scene of the crime for Corrupt Cop One’s idea of how to dispose of the body. Exposed by me for who you are, you put up a fight. I, me—Enda Flatly—saved bloody fucking Ireland the anguish of a costly fucking trial. Pick it up!”

  It was then they heard a door slam below in the house, and the sound of whistling came to them.

  “Who’s that?”

  McGarr hunched his shoulders. “One of yours, perchance?”

  “Or a Parmalee ‘friend,’” said Ward. “Pity the gun’s not loaded.” He pointed to the Beretta on the bed. “Or does Gerry Breen do all your killing for you? What now, Righteous Cop? What’s God’s plan for you now?”

  “Maybe that’s Him on the stairs.”

  Plainly, Enda Flatly did not know how to proceed. The whistling was growing louder now, as heavy steps climbed past the empty floors toward the living quarters.

  “Know that song?” McGarr continued, removing his half-glasses. “It’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ You know, ‘When you walk through a storm, keep your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the—’”

  “Shut your bloody gob!”

  “But you’re too young to have heard it much and copped onto its message. An important message, wouldn’t you say, Corrupt Cop Two?” McGarr’s eyes met Ward’s again, and a far more important message passed between them. They had heard Bernie McKeon sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” countless times. It was his party piece.

  And a deep, orotund, but rather gravelly voice now came to them in loud echo, as the man opened the door to the second empty floor.

  “You’ll never walk alone! You’ll ne-ver walk alone!”

  “And, of course, killers like you and Gerry Breen always walk alone. Or is it work alone, as in Opus Dei. But maybe killing isn’t work for you. It’s just pillería.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Flatly hissed.

  “May I put my glasses away? I would hate my family and friends to think I died myopic.” There was no way that Flatly would shoot either of them any time soon and give away his position.

  “Down on the floor, the both of you. Arms and feet spread-eagle. Now. Now!”

  As McGarr turned to squat down, kneel, and then comply with Flatly’s order, he opened his jacket as though to put away his glasses. But with his body shielding his hand, he grasped the grip of his Advantage Arms model 422.

  “The old legs aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Shut up, cocksucker!”

  When Flatly swung his head to the door and the singing, which was loud now, McGarr pivoted on his heels, raised the small powerful gun in both hands and fired its four .22-magnum chambers simultaneously. At Flatly’s head.

  The report was stunning, and the concussion kicked back McGarr’s arms.

  On his feet
now, Ward rushed toward Flatly, who had reeled toward the open door. But there, two other shots, fired from below, staggered his body and kept it from tumbling down the stairs.

  Having fallen from Flatly’s hand, the Glock lay on the carpet. McGarr snatched it up.

  “It’s all right. It’s us, Bernie,” Ward hollered out the door. But they heard nothing except the sound of feet on the carpet, somebody heavy retreating down the stairs.

  “Go after him, but be careful.”

  Rushing down the stairs, Ward picked up his own weapon—the Beretta that Flatly had made him discard—and McGarr moved quickly toward the front windows.

  From there, a few moments later, he saw Chazz Sweeney lumber out of the building and climb into a waiting car that sped off.

  Obviously, he had come to take care of Flatly, who had shot Parmalee with the gun that Geraldine Breen had lifted from Ward.

  Flatly’s corpse could then have been dumped in any side street—a zealous cop, the media would call him, this week’s victim of the drug trade. Where Breen was, was anybody’s guess. But she and Sweeney were linked, that much was now plain from the way Parmalee had been trussed on his stomach, wrist to ankle. Her signature hold.

  “Ring up Bernie and get the Tech Squad to document all of this. You write the report, just as it happened.” McGarr tossed Flatly’s Glock on the bed, then moved toward the stairs and his own Walther.

  “Also, issue an all-points for Sweeney. Armed, dangerous, and wanted for murder.

  “Then I want you to search this place thoroughly. You’re looking for the biography, the painting, and any connections you can make between Parmalee and the other principals in the case—Sweeney, Flatly, Duggan, Sclavi, Manahan, and Geraldine Breen.”

  If Parmalee had not killed Mary-Jo Stanton himself but had known through his illegal voice surveillance that she would be killed, and if he had subsequently induced Mudd to wrap—or had himself wrapped—the cilicio around the woman’s neck in an attempt to lead the investigation to Opus Dei, then he had also known who killed Mary-Jo.

  He had told Ward that it was Geraldine Breen, but only after a beating. And Parmalee had been fixated on damaging Opus Dei any way he could.

  “Where you headed?” Ward asked.

  “Sweeney’s office on the quays.”

  “You’ll need some help. He had a driver, he wasn’t alone.”

  Somehow, McGarr didn’t think Sweeney would want to lead him and a contingent of Garda to his office. Also, Sweeney’s office had been raided before by court order, the files sequestered, examined, and returned—with the famous apology and huge cash settlement.

  And what McGarr was looking for was at least ten years old, something that Chazz Sweeney—fixer, bagman, and Opus Dei avatar—would not have thrown out and would now consider innocuous.

  But that would make him eminently indictable.

  CHAPTER 18

  UNUSED TO THE mobile phone, Nuala fumbled with the device until McGarr heard, “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Maddie, your dad.”

  “Oh, Daddy—when are you going to get back here? Terrible things are happening, and…” Like a surgeon’s scalpel, her sob cut through McGarr.

  Nuala’s voice then came on. “Peter?” There was a long pause, as if she had to summon the strength to speak. But then her voice was strong.

  “Fitz is dead, and better off, from what the surgeon here tells me. The explosion ripped him apart. He would have been blind and under the knife for countless operations just so he could breathe and chew and talk normally. And, sure, we had a great life together.”

  In emotional shock, her voice was matter-of-fact, as though she were discussing the weather or something that had occurred in the course of the day. It might take a week for the reality to set in, and then she’d need help.

  Until McGarr asked, “What about Noreen?”

  “They still have her in there. A whole team of them. And”—her voice cracked—“I wouldn’t get your hopes up. He said, ‘It’s most delicate,’ extracting the blasted thing. So whatever you’re about, you should work away. Because she’ll be…unconscious when and if they’re ever through with her.” There was a pause, and then, “God bless and save our great, good young woman.” Upon which Nuala broke down.

  McGarr then heard, “Daddy?” It was Maddie again. “I know you have to do what you’re doing, but…”

  “Ring off, luv. He’s only doing what he should,” said Nuala through her tears.

  “Bye-bye, Daddy.”

  With tears in his eyes, McGarr looked down at the phone and could not keep himself from thinking how much like her mother she sounded. And he thought—if there was any God in the universe, He would let Noreen live.

  Looking like a decrepit tooth in an old mouth, Sweeney’s building sat alone on the quays in a swath of vacant lots slated for redevelopment as a harbor-area mall.

  Sweeney would repair its crumbling cornices, McGarr had read. He would replace the old paned windows, rehab the interior, and wind up with the one authentic period building in some architect’s monde nouveau scheme.

  How the man had engineered that was an indication of his power. Before tonight, when he became a gunman and murderer, and perhaps a double murderer, having sat in the den with the shotguns for hours—by Fitz’s report—before McGarr had arrived at Ilnacullin. Fitz, who was no longer a witness who could be sworn.

  But why would he have spiked the barrel? What reason would he have had then—before he had appealed to McGarr—beyond distracting McGarr from his investigation of Mary-Jo Stanton’s death? And would he have done such a thing himself?

  McGarr thought not. Dispatching a surrogate like Breen or Flatly to do the dirty work was more his style, although he had not been beyond ridding himself of Flatly when needed.

  Seeing no visible signs of an alarm system on the building, McGarr moved round to the back, where he had caught sight of a window boarded up with peeling plywood. After a brief search through the surrounding rubble, he found a length of iron pipe and soon had the plywood off.

  Rearing back, he smashed the window and its sash bars so he could step in, his halogen torch casting a bright cone of achromatic light into what proved to be a storage room. It led into a hall and a flight of stairs, off which McGarr found Sweeney’s office.

  But McGarr ignored the office and instead climbed the stairs, suspecting that what he was after would have long since found permanent storage on one of the three floors above. And it took him the better part of two hours—during which he phoned the hospital twice more only to learn that Noreen was still in surgery—before he came upon what he was seeking:

  An old green file cabinet that had been battered in moving. Much of the paperwork contained inside was yellowed with age, and some of it dated back to the 1960s. But the letterhead on much of the photocopied correspondence was Francis X. Foley, Esq., Solicitor.

  It was the cabinet that had been removed from Foley’s office after his murder a decade earlier, the one that had left the patch of greener carpet on the floor. Sweeney would not have destroyed such useful information, McGarr knew—piecing through the folders and noting the celebrity and/or wealth of the names he came upon.

  There was a photograph taken from afar of the wife of a still popular politician, on a beach on her back, with her legs wrapping the thighs of some dark-skinned younger man, her head back and eyes closed in obvious sexual thrall.

  Another—taken through the windscreen of an automobile—pictured her husband performing what appeared to be fellatio on the same man, who looked bored, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he peered out the side window.

  Other files of other people contained tapes labeled “Phone Conversations, 6/6/66 to 9/10/66” or “Bedroom Tape, Enhanced—See Transcript.” From what McGarr saw in one drawer alone, Foley must have been blackmailing dozens of people simultaneously. Little wonder he could afford the several houses, the flash cars and lifestyle.

  Until he was found out by Sweeney and
whoever murdered him, McGarr remaining convinced it would not have been Sweeney himself.

  But there was nothing in the folder labeled “Mary-Jo Stanton/José Maria Escrivá,” not even a scrap of paper.

  McGarr closed the drawer and moved down the stairs to Sweeney’s office and the large old safe with the gold-leafed door that he had seen there. Removing his hat, he pulled over a chair and set about cracking it, which was yet another skill that he had learned during his first stint as a policeman—with Criminal Justice in France during the late sixties.

  At the time, Marseilles had been awash in drugs, and what was needed were young, tough, undercover cops who could infiltrate the drug rings and/or pose as buyers. Being demonstrably Irish with red hair, gray eyes, and execrable French was a big plus, and McGarr proved himself in shamrocks, coming up with a bust of over four metric tons of cocaine along with the entire chain of command behind the sale.

  But more valuable to McGarr was the training he had received from a cadre of French criminals who mentored the recruits in exchange for shortened sentences. Everything from stealing cars to second-story work to breaking into bank vaults was on the curriculum. And McGarr had proved an able student, who could now pick or crack almost any standard lock or safe.

  But all that was B.N., “Before Noreen,” as he would say to her in partial jest, now losing his concentration as a wave of worry and grief washed over him.

  Closing his eyes, he wondered if he could make contact with her if he thought hard enough, consciousness to consciousness, brain to brain, because of all the years—nearly twelve now—they had been together daily in the most intimate contact. In so many ways, they had become like two halves of one whole person, she certainly being the better part.

  Of course, she was neither conscious nor was her brain intact, but would that matter? he wondered. Was there, could there be a kind of consciousness that transcended any mere grave injury, such that even after death a person—that person whom you loved beyond the love in dreams—would remain with you in your life, like a kind of companion and helpmate? A presence who could continue to share your experience, your joys, sunsets, little pleasures, and quiet moments?