by Con Lehane
“And if they do that,” said Barney, “they’ll find that Eliot’s gun was used in the murders of MacAlister and Betsy’s husband.”
I had my doubts, suspecting, as I did, that, for the three of us, our knowledge of police procedures came mainly from reading the Daily News.
chapter twenty-four
Barney and I stayed long at the bar that night, as the tension drained off into whiskey glasses. It had been a long time since we really talked, so I was glad for the time together after Ntango left. He was right about Barney. As hardened as he’d seemed the other night, Barney was a sentimental and gentle soul. After a few drinks, memories of his childhood in Ireland began to flow. Usually, it was a specific incident he talked about—fishing in Lough Gowna, a football match, or drinking a few jars of porter in the town of Armagh. This night, remembering what Pat Donohue had told me about the poverty where Barney spent his youth, I asked him about growing up.
“Aragh, it was hard, Brian. Many’s the night we had only a pot of potatoes for dinner. My mother died when I was two, so my oldest sister took over the rearing of me and my brothers and sisters. When my father was on the run, she was the only one. Try as hard as she would, we all ran wild. But she was very good to us.”
I listened to Barney, with the sense that he was trying in his own way to explain to me the person he was the other night in the wetlands.
“Those were troubled times. Internment began, and the women took to the streets. My sister Maura, the one who was like a mother to me, was one of the first women to join the IRA. She was grand, though a young girl, the fiercest of the brigade and a terror to the British soldiers.”
He told me about an incident when he was twelve or thirteen and had been caught with another boy throwing rocks at a passing army jeep. His sister came and took him away from the soldiers who held him at gunpoint.
“She walked up, grabbed me hand, and whisked me away, daring the soldiers to shoot. During the Troubles, she was interned, and from then she was different.” His eyes that had grown hard again met mine. “What they did to the women in the prison were unspeakable things, Brian. Maura never spoke a word about what was done to her. It was only years later, after the hunger strikers, when I heard from the other women who’d been interned what had been done to her. She left for America after that, so I was on me own by the time I was fourteen. It was a shame her leaving so, and our family breaking up. But those were the times over there. She had to leave, mind you. She would have been jailed again or murdered had she stayed.”
“Where is she now?”
Barney was lost in his memories. “Now?” he said, coming from far away in the past. “Aragh, she’s in Chicago with another sister of mine.”
“So if things got really bad here, you could go to them.”
Barney came back to the present, refocusing his eyes, gazing into mine. “Sure, you’re not giving up on us now, Brian?”
I didn’t ask Barney about his life during the years after the age of fourteen until he left Ireland himself. In a way, I wanted to know, but in another way, I didn’t. Deprivation, misery growing up, tossed out on your own when you’re too young to handle it—these things didn’t excuse the hardness in him, but they did explain where the hardness came from. They explained, too, what it was that brought him to vomit convulsively on the Jamaica Bay marsh when he thought he might have to kill Eliot.
We heard the next day through Pat Donohue that the cops had picked Eliot up, but that he’d made bail and was back on the street. Then Christmas Day, while I was having turkey dinner with Pop and Kevin at Pop’s apartment in Brooklyn, cops from the Sixty-ninth Precinct found Tom Eliot’s body in the trunk of a car parked on a dead-end street in Canarsie, not more than a couple of miles from Pop’s apartment and even closer to the spot near Jamaica Bay where Barney, Sam, Ntango, and I had taken him a few nights before. Eliot was identified in the next day’s Daily News as a labor leader with ties to organized crime.
I was sick when I read about Eliot, knowing, without knowing, that his blood was on my hands. His death cast a pall over my Christmas, which was a low-key affair to begin with—a few hours with Kevin in the morning and early afternoon, until he went to his mother’s, then watching the Knicks game on TV with Pop. I couldn’t get Eliot out of my mind. What I figured was that my rheumy-eyed benefactor found out Eliot killed the cop and MacAlister without getting the okay. Whatever he’d been going to do to Barney or me, he did to Eliot. Since I’d saved my own hide and probably Barney’s, too, I shouldn’t feel bad, but I did. Eliot’s pasty, gaunt face, the terror in his eyes, and the shit-stained suit pants haunted me. I felt like I’d murdered him, and if Francois’s theory of guilt eating away at you until you felt an irresistible need to confess applied to no one else in the world, it applied to me.
At work, the night after Christmas, I imagined the lounge was a funeral parlor, with its understated colors, subdued lighting, and the hushed sounds of the almost empty room. Betsy in her thigh-high cocktail skirt—well, Betsy in her cocktail skirt was a different matter. She’d done something to herself again, and my homing devices picked it up immediately.
“Something’s different about you,” I said, as she leaned against the service bar tugging at my heart with those sparkling eyes and heaving breasts.
“Something good?” she asked fetchingly, pushing her chest forward against the bar so the curve of the top of her breasts pushed further over the lacy top of her outfit. That was it. Betsy was coyly and innocently flirting with me, something she hadn’t done since this nightmare began.
“I’m relieved,” Betsy said. “Maybe that’s what’s different. It’s terrible about Mr. Eliot’s murder, but the detectives in Gerritsen Beach say he killed Dennis and Mr. MacAlister, that they were wrong to think I had anything to do with Dennis being killed.”
The thought of the killings brought back my memory of Eliot and the Jamaica Bay swamp. I wanted to tell Betsy what we’d done, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her about that or about Barney and me breaking into Eliot’s office. I hoped it was over now, that the dead would settle down now into their graves and leave us alone.
“Something’s bothering you,” Betsy said later that night. She had a few tables, and I’d had a party of five or six at the bar for a couple of hours, then a handful of solitary drinkers as the night progressed. At the end of the night, she sat at the bar watching me clean up and restock. “Do you want to tell me?”
I puttered around, searching my mind for words to say, but couldn’t find any. She patted my hand when she handed me my tip and smiled sadly before she left.
Late the next morning, as I headed out to Tom’s for breakfast, I found Detective Sergeant Pat Sheehan on my doorstep.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” said Sheehan.
“I was afraid of that. I thought you guys solved this one.”
“Word travels fast. Who told you?”
“Betsy.”
“A load off her mind, I guess.”
“So? I was going to breakfast. I’m hungry.”
“I’ll walk with you,” said Sheehan, falling into step beside me. It was warm again. I noticed the Christmas tree guys on the corner had packed up and left without a trace—neat Canadians. “You turn out to be a pretty good detective after all. Maybe I can put in a word for you with the department.”
“No thanks. Is the case closed now?”
“One case closes, another one opens. A pretty sleazy guy, this Eliot. I don’t think a lot of people will miss him. Still, I wouldn’t want to end up in the trunk of a car. Usually no one finds you for a few weeks until the smell leaks out, sometimes not even then. We got a tip. Got a tip about a break-in the other night in his office, too. That’s how we found the murder weapon. Turns out the gun the officers find in this guy Eliot’s office when they go there on a robbery in progress is a cop gun, and ballistics says it’s the gun that killed Tierney and MacAlister.”
“How do you know it was a cop’s gun?”
/>
“The serial number’s filed off. On service revolvers, the badge number is stamped on the stock. On this gun, that’s filed off, too. So you wonder where the guy gets a cop gun. There’s some around because the department’s been switching over to nine-millimeters. So maybe Eliot can find one. But it’s easier for your girlfriend to find one in her hubby’s arsenal, except there don’t seem to be any missing. Still, it makes me wonder that someone leads us right to the murderer and the gun. It doesn’t happen like that very often.” Sheehan managed, by some power of his will over mine, to make me look at him. His gaze was steady into mine.
I dropped the ball and looked away but caught myself pretty quick. “I’ve never done much in the way of gangland killings.”
Sheehan shook his head. “You seem to like the mean streets, though. How’s an almost normal guy like you get mixed up with so many shady characters?”
“Mean streets? Shady characters? You sound like a cheap detective novel.”
“Nothin’s cheap anymore,” said Sheehan. “The thing is, when they picked Eliot up, he said someone planted the gun. The calls make me wonder maybe someone did.”
“Planted?” The word caromed through my brain. “What do you mean planted?” I don’t know if the color drained from my face or my eyes spun in my head. It felt like it. Someone pulled the plug and my world slipped off its axis. I was sure Sheehan clocked my reaction, even as I tried to recover. “Who would do that?” I got my feet under me again. “After all this, you still don’t think it’s Eliot?” I let myself get angry, my voice rising. “Even when you got the guy, you want to keep hounding us?” Shouting now, “You know fucking well what happened. That asshole went off on his own and killed a cop and the fucking gangsters killed him because he didn’t follow their fucking rules. Case closed. Leave me the fuck alone!” I was shaking, but I stood my ground and glared at Sheehan.
He took it in stride, but he did wax philosophical. “Your nerves are shot, McNulty. Pretty soon, you’ll be hiding behind lampposts. No one’s after you. As concerns the murders, greater minds than mine will decide if the case is closed. You been a cop as long as I have, sometimes you’re not satisfied the way something ends. But you get buried in paperwork. Another case comes along. You put it in the basket with all the other things that gnaw at you. After a while, you don’t remember the case. You just get a headache or indigestion, or an ulcer. Then it all ends with a big fucking bang when your heart blows up.”
He didn’t look to me for sympathy, but I sympathized anyway, despite neither him nor me especially wanting it. I couldn’t count the ways I thought he was wrong in how he saw people and how he saw life, with this idea that some people were scum and that explained crime. Somewhere in his blackened heart he knew he was wrong, that pretty much everyone who got themselves in terrible trouble traveled a hard road to get themselves there. Still, at the moment, I felt he was the better man, that he had seen weakness and shame in me and had let it go. But he’d seen it, and I couldn’t look him in the eye.
Eliot told us he was the killer, I reminded myself. I found the gun in his office. I didn’t put it there. Neither did Barney. Right? How would Barney have a gun to plant?
I might know the answer to that, too, so in the afternoon I went once more to the North Bronx. I wanted to talk to Pat Donohue. I don’t know why I needed to find out, why I wouldn’t be content to let it gnaw at me, like Sheehan. I guess I was beginning to think I might have been part of something I didn’t know I was part of and wouldn’t have chosen to be if I had known—that I might have been a sucker.
I didn’t know if Pat or Mary would be home, but I figured one of them would be. It turned out they both were. Whatever propelled me forward to find out the truth took away any sense of diplomacy I had. When Pat opened the door, before he’d gotten halfway through his warm Irish welcome, I asked him about his gun.
“A Glock,” he said, surprised but still smiling, his hand lightly on my shoulder to usher me into the living room.
“Where’s your old one, the .38?”
He stopped smiling. At this moment, Mary came hustling around the corner from the kitchen.
“Brian,” she said. “What brings you here? Isn’t it grand that the crimes are solved, though it was a terrible end for poor Tom Eliot, God rest his soul?” She didn’t give me time to speak. “Is it Barney you’re looking for?”
I shook my head. “Maybe it is Barney I need to talk to. I don’t know. Some things about what happened trouble me. The gun the cops found in Eliot’s office, the gun that killed MacAlister and Tierney, once belonged to a cop because it had the badge number filed off. That’s why I want to know where your .38 is.”
“It’s long gone now, isn’t it, Pat? Sure, you don’t think Eliot used Pat’s gun to do his killing?”
“I don’t know what I think. Let me get this straight about the gun. You had a .38. Did you turn it in when they issued you a nine-millimeter?”
Pat looked uncomfortably from his wife to me. “No, I didn’t turn it in.” He squirmed some more. “For the love of God, Brian, what’re you asking me? I sold the gun to some fellows from the Friendly Sons of Ireland to use for target practice.”
“Who?”
“Aragh, Brian. Do you know what you’re asking?”
The light went on. Both of them nodded, as I caught up to their thinking. What no one would say was that the gun had made its way back to Erin’s green isle, into the hands of a rebel lad, who would use it for purposes we’d all be better off not knowing about, certainly a New York City peace officer waiting out the time until his retirement.
I left the Donohues’ not much wiser than before I got there and headed for the Old Shillelagh, where Mary said I might find Barney. Sure enough, he was perched on a bar stool with a pint of Guinness in front of him and a phalanx of pals gathered around him. His bartender radar turned on, he spied me as soon as I came through the door.
“You have the look of a troubled man, Brian McNulty,” said Barney. “A jar of stout will have you right in no time.” He waved the bartender over, and I ordered a Guinness.
“Can we talk?” I asked after I’d taken a few slugs of my drink and Barney had introduced me to the half-dozen men around him.
We took our pints to a booth against the wall. Beams of sunlight filtered through the smoke-filled space between us and the bar. The odor of stale beer replaced any healthy oxygen the smoke hadn’t soaked up. Straight out, I told Barney what troubled me.
“I knew it would, Brian,” he said solemnly. “It will eat away at your heart. And God forgive you, if you ever can rest easy when you may have had a hand in what led to another man’s death.” After a moment to let this sink in, he went to the bar for another round. When he came back, he asked if I thought Sheehan suspected him of planting the gun. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his head. “I’d like to go back to work, but I can’t risk him inquiring about me papers. Why can’t the bugger take Eliot at his word?”
“He didn’t hear him. No one did but us. Too bad we couldn’t convince Sheehan that you couldn’t have done the killing because you were somewhere else.”
Barney threw up his hands. “Sure, I was somewhere else. I can prove I didn’t kill either of the blackguards. I could have the authority of fifty witnesses as innocent as the saints and angels. But what good would it do? I don’t have me papers.” His expression was that peculiarly Irish mixture of wistfulness and humor, as when the joke’s on us, after all.
“Well, maybe you could try it out on me. Where were you when those guys were killed?”
“Not with a host of angels, but close, Brian, me lad. When I left downtown, I hid out at the Passionist Fathers’ retreat house in Riverdale. The Cardinal Spellman Retreat House, Brian. There’s dozens who don’t even know me would vouch for me being there. I’d have to have been an angel myself to get out and kill those men without being missed. But what good does it do me? Once the coppers begin wondering who I am, me voyage to America is over.”
/>
“What would happen if you were sent back to Ireland?”
Barney’s face became a mask. “You’d never see me again.”
No longer willing to accept anything on faith, I went with Ntango the next morning to the Passionists’ Spiritual Center in Riverdale, which also fronts for the Cardinal Spellman Retreat House. Riverdale is not what most folks think of when they picture the Bronx, which as long as we’re at it is actually Bronx, like Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens. It’s not the Manhattan or the Brooklyn, and officially it’s not the Bronx, either—actually, it’s da Bronx. Riverdale is hilly, has lots of old trees with thick trunks, single-family houses among the tony apartment buildings, and its share of mansions.
Ntango found the place with no trouble. “You been here before?” I asked him.
“This is where I brought your friend Barney the night I brought him from Brooklyn.”
The retreat house was on a hilly estate with grassy lawns that rolled down to cliffs overlooking the Hudson and the palisades on the Jersey side of the river. The main structure was a three-story redbrick building that looked like a dormitory on the campus of a second-tier public university, but the grounds and view were breathtaking. A plaque on the doorway claimed the establishment provided “retreat programs, spiritual services, hospitality, and welcoming to all God’s people, especially the hurting and wounded.” You’d have to say Barney knew how to pick ’em.
The priest who answered the door was disappointing, with much more of a businesslike air about him than anything Friar Tuckish. He had the accent of a Bronx native and was initially as distrustful as any native New Yorker and as protective as any Irishman when the long arm of the Crown might be about. I showed him a Polaroid picture of Barney that one of the regulars had given me some time back and asked if he’d ever seen him. After a couple of rounds about who was who and who wanted to know, he owned up that Barney had stayed there, going so far as to find his name in the register and tell me the dates. Thus the door closed on my unfounded suspicions that Barney was a killer. I have to say my weary heart leapt.