A Carra King (23 page)

Leyne's greeting was a raised hand quickly dropped back onto the table. Minogue took in the watery eyes, the open shirt, the ashtray half-full in front of him. Fianna Fáil, he thought: bagman, fixer. Leyne waved at a half-standing Freeman.

“You met Jeff here,” he said. He looked up sideways.

“What are you now, Jeff? What do we call you?”

“On our good days, Director, Management Support Services.”

Minogue noted the attaché case on the floor behind Freeman. Leyne tapped his cigarette on the ashtray.

“You may know Billy O'Riordan.”

Minogue nodded but O'Riordan extended his hand. Minogue turned to Malone. His colleague had jammed his hands in his pockets.

“Garda Malone here's a principal investigating officer on this case.”

Tynan was first to sit down. His thumbs and forefingers joined and slowly separated over the table. A glance at Tynan's face confirmed Minogue's suspicions: wound up, calmly annoyed — a manner that Kilmartin mocked and feared.

“So what's the news?” said Leyne.

Nooz, Minogue heard. He flipped open his notebook and let it rest on his knee. Malone had pulled a chair out from the table. He sat almost behind the Inspector. Minogue took out the bag of paper hankies and separated two.

“You took the words out of my mouth, Mr. Leyne.”

He watched Leyne draw on a cigarette. Freeman sat the way only Americans sat: the ankle over the knee. Minogue blew his nose, crumpled his hanky into a ball and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Now he could smell the sweet sour whiskey breath.

“Okay,” said Leyne. “Patrick screwed up plenty of times. There.”

“Could you be more detailed, please.”

Minogue noted that Tynan's finger and thumb motions had stopped.

“I'm on the level here. Whatever he did or didn't do, he didn't deserve this. Dumped at an airport in the trunk, in the boot, of some rented car.”

Minogue turned several pages back in his notebook. He looked up at Leyne.

“Your last contact with your son, Mr. Leyne?”

“A phone call the day before he left.”

“He phoned you.”

“That's right. I hadn't heard from him for weeks. I was in Palm Springs. We, I, have a place there. A friend of mine. Patrick was barred from visiting.”

“Barred.”

Leyne gave Minogue a glance.

“I kicked him out last year. He got mouthy, rude that is, with Pauline. Pauline and I are what you call an item. We've been friends for some years.”

“Pauline's surname?”

Leyne's look fixed on Minogue for several seconds. The Inspector did not look up from his notebook. He heard Malone shifting in his chair.

“Olson. Pauline Olson.”

“O-L-S-E-N?”

“O-N,” said Freeman. There was a tint in the glasses, Minogue decided. He returned Freeman's fleeting smile with a dull stare.

“Your ex-wife, Mr. Leyne. Her residence currently?”

“Geraldine lives in Boston,” Leyne said. “We get along fine. We've gone our separate ways. I go to Palm Springs five, six times a year. Pauline's there most of the time. She's trying to be a movie star. She wants to do screenplays too. Her and a hundred million other people. Anyway, Patrick phoned. He came by the office pretty regularly, I'd have to say. Which was fine. I didn't want to have to guess what the hell he was going to do there. In the office I could deal with him.”

“Where did he live again?”

“Well, he'd had his own room with his mother, Geraldine. She kept it for him. In Boston. That's where he grew up, well from age ten anyway. When we split up. But he has . . . he had, his own place, since, well he was nineteen or twenty. His own apartment, I mean. That's how he wanted it. He'd call by Geraldine's a lot though. She's tremendous. She's a hundred times better parent than me. No secrets on that score there, er, Mike.”

“Matt's fine.”

“I'm an open book here, Matt.”

“That conversation you had, the phone call. What did you talk about?”

Leyne coughed and lit another cigarette. He spun his lighter several times on the table.

“News, that kind of thing,” he said.

“News? Does anything stand out? He told you he was going to Ireland?”

“Oh sure. Was there anything I wanted. As if there was no other way I could get it, you know?”

“Being . . .”

Leyne grabbed the lighter and stood it up.

“Christ, who knows? A souvenir or something? Ah, he was trying to make himself useful, I suppose. What's that word, ingra . . .?”

“Ingratiate?”

“That's it. To make up. After his carry on. Trying to, well I suppose you'd say, be considerate?”

Freeman too was studying Leyne's work with the lighter. Leyne suddenly stopped.

“Trying to suck up, is a way of saying it too. Right, Jeff?”

Freeman opened his hands, shrugged and looked at the lighter again.

“Doesn't sound very nice, does it?”

“Your son had been through a bad patch, Mr. Leyne?”

Leyne snorted and he drew on his cigarette. He squinted at Minogue while he sucked on it. Never the patrician, Minogue decided, for all the money.

“That's what I like about here,” Leyne said. “About coming home. No, not home. There's no going ‘home.' It's hearing the way things are said here. ‘A bad patch' or ‘I'm sorry for your trouble' or ‘God bless you.' It's not that they're beating around the bush or trying to pull a fast one on you — no. It's just that way of
saying
things. A ‘bad patch' — and you're the cops too, the real McCoy too, the tough guys. Right, Jeff?”

Again the shrug, and a perfunctory smile from Freeman.

“I'm only standing in for the boss,” said Minogue. “He's on leave.”

“Huh. A bad patch . . .”

Leyne sat forward, his elbows pressed hard into the armrests, and stared down at his cigarette. Minogue wondered if he was trying to keep from crying.

“. . . A bad patch. Right. Well, it was more like a fucking quilt. He'd been to Brentwood. That's a clinic, a treatment centre down in New Jersey. A kind of last resort. That was last year. He'd kicked, he told me. Even the booze, but he could take a glass of wine and then stop. According to him anyway, he'd beat the whole thing.”

“Is that true?”

“Not sure,” said Leyne in a quiet voice. He let the smoke out slowly.

“The clinic tested him for drugs. I made them. Jesus, I paid them enough. One of the conditions I put on Patrick, we put on him, was that he get tested every week at the very least. Last I heard it was good.”

“A condition, you said.”

“Geraldine and I worked it out. The fiancée thing was the last straw. We decided to cut him off if he didn't get serious about his, his problems. Tough love, do people say that here in the old sod?”

Minogue nodded.

“The deal was he'd go to the clinic,” Leyne said. “He'd take the cure, however long it took. Move to a new place — whatever. I told him I'd stand by him, get him started up. He knew Geraldine would too, of course. He had to shake off that bunch of bastards he'd been running with, too. They were the problem. They were taking him for whatever they could. And he used to talk it up, you know, play the big shot. The name.”

“Your name, is it?”

“Right. He signed things, he promised things, that could have gotten him time in jail.”

Leyne took a long pull on his cigarette. He coughed and waved away smoke.

“Maybe I should never have bailed him out,” he croaked. Minogue watched the colour crest in his face and then fade. Brick red.

“How was he doing then?” Minogue said. “After this treatment centre.”

“Seemed to be okay,” Leyne said quickly. “I got him a start with a company near Boston. Denis Coughlan, property development. Denis'd get him trained and running, then he'd send him south. The Sun Belt. A lot of business is moving south. Patrick wouldn't be running the show.”

He spun the lighter again, stopped it and glanced at Minogue.

“Patrick wouldn't be able to run a bath. Denis would keep him on a short leash. Denis said good things about him actually. I was beginning to wonder, well, you know what I'm saying.”

“So your son just wanted to have a chat. Nothing else?”

“He wanted to meet me.”

“Did you?”

Freeman pushed at his glasses. Leyne stared at the tip of his cigarette.

“No, I didn't.”

Minogue looked at the cigarette rolling between Leyne's fingers.

“I was busy,” said Leyne. “I'm always busy. Christ.”

He looked from face to face around the table.

“Look,” he said. “I don't have that kind of patience. I worked my ass off. I started from nothing. You know, when I went to people here first with the idea that people would want to go to their fridges and take out frozen french fries — well, whatever. . . Marriages don't come with guarantees. But that doesn't mean that someone can go around blaming his parents for being fu—, for being a loser?”

“Is that what he did?”

“He tried to. Anytime I'd go after him, you know, show him reality, well he'd pull that one. But I'd have to say he hadn't been doing that for a while. No.”

Minogue looked down at his notebook. Leyne rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed. He sat back and looked over at the window.

“Did I want anything,” he muttered. “That's what he asked me.” He held his cigarette close to his chin and fixed his gaze on nothing.

“Guff,” he murmured. “Bullshit, you say here now?”

“Both, Mr. Leyne. As a matter of fact I hear both terms used with frequency.”

“Ah,” said Leyne. “The political crowd here never changes, does it.”

“It was my daughter actually I was thinking of.”

Freeman allowed himself a smile. Leyne chuckled again. He eyed Tynan.

“Nice to see there are still some of the same Guards doing the job as I remember, Commissioner. The old guard.”

Minogue didn't look for Tynan's reaction.

“Do you put much stock in the psychology stuff here? Patrick did. It's a bloody industry back in the States. He told me stuff about Ireland that he thought I was supposed to know. The Irish. Did I know any of the legends and that. Finn McCool. Christ, as if we'd gone to school together. If I did, I don't remember him.”

“Did he always have that interest, your son?”

“We brought him here on visits when he was a kid, but back then he couldn't get back on the plane quick enough. It was cold. It rained all the time. The people talked too much. Other kids here were out of it — all that. But then he started talking about things. I put it down to another shot at getting on my good side.”

Put it down: the phrase circled in Minogue's mind. He thought of Daithi, how he still seemed to need to make him dispute, argue.

“Ah, some therapy thing there,” Leyne was saying.

“‘Discovering your family' or somesuch. Victim shit. ‘Reinventing your parents' was one of the things he blathered about once. Jesus wept. I mean, I had it explained to me by the people who ran it. The bottom line was, Patrick could get out of this habit he was always falling into if he learned more about us, about Geraldine and me. Figure that one out. Twenty-eight hundred dollars a week for that.”

“If he understood you as people, more than just parents, is it?”

“I suppose. He thought he'd do all this reading about Ireland, that this would sort it all out. Ancient Ireland, for God's sake. Me and Finn McCool, right?”

Leyne pulled his chair tighter into the table. Minogue eyed the bald spot, the once curly hair. It reminded him of some strange silver decoration on a Christmas tree, that light-as-gossamer stuff you pulled out of a ball and threw at the tree.

He spotted the top of the scar on his chest as Leyne straightened up. As though aware of the Inspector's interest, Leyne tugged at his collar. The gap closed. A glance at Freeman told Minogue that he too had been watching.

“So there,” muttered Leyne. “The Celts. Brian Ború. All the stuff I'd forgotten about fifty years ago. Talking about looking around for some university he could study it in. God, as if he had the marks to get into one. At the time he started this, I was just after getting into the foundation thing. I got talked into it a few years ago. What's it now, Jeff, the scholarship bit?”

“The Leyne Foundation,” said Freeman. “Scholarship to study in Irish universities and four for Irish students to study in the U.S. The Visiting Lecturer Chair will start up this year.”

“So,” said Leyne. “I thought, well, Patrick saw an angle here. Sour, aren't I?”

“Let me go back to your son's situation just before he left for Ireland. He was holding down a job?”

“Yes. And he still had his own place, too.”

“He lived alone there.”

“That's what he told me. He stayed over with Geraldine the odd time.”

Minogue looked down at the page. Next time there'd be a tape, damn it.

“Eight schools,” said Leyne. “Eight different schools. But he just didn't find that aptitude, whatever you call it. That focus. We worked and we worked, Geraldine and me — Geraldine and I. You'd think we'd be bitter, but we weren't. We're not. Geraldine dumped me, Mike.”

“Matt.”

“Matt. Sorry. She did. Geraldine is a lady. How I blew it, was I had no discretion. I didn't have those smarts then, patience. Why would I? I wasn't born with a goddamn silver spoon in my mouth. I was hungry to make it. I went at a lot of things with the head down.”

Minogue eased another tissue out of his package. He glanced at Leyne's shirt collar again. It remained closed.

“We don't play the blame game,” Leyne said. “Geraldine and I. That's why I came to offer you what I can. To ask your help. For the second time.”