A Carra King (7 page)

“Here's someone over now.”

Malone, bareheaded, water dripping down his face, appeared in the doorway.

“Christy Griffin says come on out,” he said. “The rain's dying down for the while anyway. He wants his orders.”

Minogue got up slowly. Christy Griffin says. Was that the way professionals worked? The backs of his trousers clung to his legs. He could almost hear his joints creak. Mr. Shaughnessy awaited. Six days missing, he had been, now missing no longer.

Kathleen Minogue was standing in the doorway. It had been the phone all right. Morning, then.

“Sorry, love,” she said. “It's work.”

He rolled onto his back.

“It's five to nine,” Kathleen said. “I have to be off.”

He listened again to the distant traffic on the Kilmacud Road.

“Raining still, is it?”

“No. He said he'd wait.”

“Who said?”

“John Tynan.”

Minogue yanked back the duvet and sat on the edge of the bed. It was gone three when he'd hit the sack, he remembered. He pulled his dressing gown off the hook and headed for the stairs.

Kathleen followed him.

“I'm away now,” she said. “Anne's outside.”

She opened the door, she took a step back, she kissed him. The air across his ankles made him shiver. The hedge by the window was clustered with raindrops. From the kitchen he heard the fanfare for the news. He rubbed his eyes again. The exhaust from Anne O'Toole's Volkswagen floating up over the hedge had a blue tint.

“Hello. John, is it?”

“And yourself. All in order, are you, save for the late night?”

“Touch and go for now. I'd be hoping for a fit of clear thinking shortly.”

“Good. A cup of something now would speed the process, would it not?”

Minogue watched the ancient and badly driven Volkswagen Polo take the bend around by the shops. The shocks were gone now, it was burning oil. My wife, he thought, my wife in that damned jalopy.

“You'd be doing me a favour,” said Tynan. “That cup of something in Mary Street. Upstairs by the window?”

Bewleys, Minogue gathered.

“Three-quarters of an hour then?” Tynan tried.

Minogue scratched a loose fibre on the knee of his pyjamas.

“Fair enough. Should I be bringing anything with me?”

“Yes, you should. Your ablest recollections of last night at the Garda Club.”

Minogue stopped scratching. He watched his fingernail turn pink again.

“Do you know a journalist by the name of Gemma O'Loughlin?”

“So that's who she was,” Minogue murmured. “Or what she was.”

Minogue couldn't take his eyes off the couple signing to one another at a table by the fireplace. They seemed to be getting such joy from their silent conversation. Tynan's driver, Sergeant Tony O'Leary, was eyeing them too. He watched O'Leary resume his pretend study of the massive stained glass window over Mary Street below. Maybe O'Leary was replaying or plotting the perfect stroke on Ballybunion. A golf nut, O'Leary. He had done a stint with the UN in Africa and there had been a picture in the newspapers of him playing golf on some dusty plateau there.

Tony O'Leary had returned to duty in Dublin just in time to put his foot in it and thereby come to Tynan's attention, ultimately to be posted to the Commissioner's staff. O'Leary had remained stubborn in his refusal to recant a statement about an arrest he'd witnessed. His statement had been used to defend and then acquit a thug with a long criminal record, who'd alleged mistreatment by nine arresting Guards during a free-for-all in a pub in Talbot Street. O'Leary had crossed a line within the force.

Tynan pushed his cup and saucer to the centre of the table.

“Should have recognized her, I suppose,” said Minogue. “But there's so many of them these days.”

“She was on a PR tour with Conor Lawlor. She's just finished researching a series on the Guards for the papers. We'd been hoping it'd be a positive item.”

“Is this the same Gemma O'Loughlin who let FIDO out?”

Tynan looked away. Last year's competition for schoolchildren to design and name a new Garda mascot had produced unintended results. Gemma O'Loughlin had ferreted out one of the more cynical Garda rank-and-file takes on what that mascot should be. New legislation and a cascade of regulations and guidelines for arrests, for ensuring the rights of an accused, had caused many Guards to throw their hands up.
Fuck it, drive off
had actually been put in print in the daily newspapers.

“She's adamant,” Tynan said then. “The tone, the general agreement among the Guards there. Vehemence, she described it as. Ferocity.”

“Drink, John. Spoofing. Come on, now.”

“And the bit with the gun?”

“Fingers — no guns.”

“She's sticking to it. ‘Any citizen would reasonably conclude . . . et cetera.' That Kilmartin meant the Guards had done it. At the very least condoned or approved it.”

“Larry Smith?”

“Larry Smith,” Tynan said.

“Selling papers. You know how they are.”

“Jim doesn't dispute saying it. I had a chat with him this morning.”

“Off-duty,” Minogue tried again. He knew he didn't sound convincing. “The Garda Club? Let off steam in? Have a few jars, bit of bad language. Remember?”

Tynan studied the crowd by the cash register.

“Well, now,” he said. “What
should
‘The Larry Smith Solution' mean to a citizen when she hears it from the senior Garda officer who was in theory responsible for the murder investigation of Larry Smith?”

Minogue thought of the clips in the news a few weeks ago. Larry Smith's brother Charlie, “The Knock,” jabbing his finger into the camera. The Guards wouldn't get away with executing his brother in cold blood: they hadn't heard the last of the Smiths by a long shot.

“Listen, Matt. Let me be clear here. There's no talk of chopping Jim. Much less asking him to fall on his sword.”

“But there's some class of hairshirt bit called for, I take it.”

Tynan clasped and then released his fingers.

“There'll be a court injunction landing on her editor's desk if he decides to leave her insinuation that we're covering up anything in the Smith case.”

“When do these articles come out?”

“Well, they're not sure now. That's their line anyway. She was doing a series: ‘The Changing Face of the Gardai,' or so we thought. Now they propose to open with this Larry Smith case. Want some previews? ‘Seriously Disaffected.' ‘Malaise.'”

Minogue sipped more coffee. He felt O'Leary's eyes on him.

“Listen to me now,” Tynan said. “Do I care a damn what Jim Kilmartin thinks, or doesn't think, about the criminal justice system, juvenile offenders, the murder of a Dublin gangster, the prison system, or the price of eggs in a modern Europe?”

He tapped his knuckles twice on the marble tabletop.

“A little tact, that's all. There's enough talk about things being out of hand. Racketeers, drug barons.”

Minogue sat back.

“I didn't hear what Jim said. So how could she? She was further away.”

“You're used to tuning him out when you want to. She heard enough.”

Minogue watched Tynan shove crumbs from a scone to the edge of the table. He wondered if Tynan would drop any hint that he had engineered Kilmartin's absence for three weeks. A right operator, was Kilmartin's take on Tynan.

“So,” Tynan went on. “You're acting CO now. You may receive inquiries from the media. That's why we're having a chat here. There are people who might let things slip by accident on purpose, if you take my meaning.”

Kilmartin had left bruises in his wake on investigations, Minogue knew.

“There could be inadvertent remarks,” said Tynan, “internal or external to the Squad. Remarks that could be construed as lending credence to any innuendo leaking out of this article, this series.”

Tynan's eyebrows crept up.

“Translation: watch your back. And watch who you say what to.”

“Why did Lawlor guest Gemma O'Loughlin into the Garda Club?”

Tynan's eyes stayed on his for a moment. His jaw moved from side to side.

“Ask me a hard question, why don't you. The idea was to allow her a glimpse of hard-working men and women relaxing off duty. The chat, the jokes. Good-natured, decent Garda officers. Sure, it was PR. But now we have her telling the public that the Murder Squad doesn't know the difference between over
seeing
and over
looking
things in the investigation of the murder of a criminal.”

“Come on, John. The place is lousy with gossip. Always. She knows that.”

“Do you hear me arguing? The Larry Smith case is still open, isn't it?”

“The Smiths would love to stick it to the Guards.”

“Sure,” said Tynan. “But do you think that there are people who believe or want to believe that a death squad murdered Larry Smith because the law couldn't get enough of him?”

“No, I don't.”

“Wrong answer. You're not a tabloid man. So you're not up on this.”

“You'll get someone to plea bargain,” Minogue said. “Wait and see. Sooner or later we'll have some gouger sitting waiting on his lift to court and he'll decide to sell us whoever killed Smith.”

“But there's been no movement in the case, is there,” said Tynan. “Flat, right?”

“Well, Intelligence summaries float in every week. But there haven't been any fresh leads for months now.”

“Jim's still trying to ram the file back in the letter box of Serious Crimes?”

“Sorry. We've tried. Can't touch them. Get the RUC on it.”

“Paramilitaries down from Belfast still?”

“We'd still be going for that, yes. A contract, maybe. Drugs in it somewhere.”

Tynan licked his fingertip, picked up a crumb from his plate and examined it. A cell phone chirped at the far side of the restaurant. Minogue watched O'Leary slip a phone out of his jacket, pluck out the antenna and turn away.

“So,” said Tynan. “We can expect more of those damned posters going up all over town.” He glanced up and saw that Minogue didn't get it.

“No,” he added, “not the Citizens Against Drug Dealers ones. The phony ones that Smiths got up.”

Right, Minogue remembered. No one had discovered for sure who had paid for the ones that had appeared weeks after the Smith killing — Wanted for Murder of Lawrence Smith, Husband and Father: The State and the Garda Síochána. He, like others, had put it down to some kind of bitter retort by Smith's family or cronies. Smith himself, Smith the pusher and ringleader, had appeared on CADD posters as wanted for murder by causing overdoses and even several suicides.

“Enough of that,” said Tynan. “Last night, the airport. The American.”

Minogue thought back to the wind whipping at the nylon tarp over the car.

“He was beaten to death, John,” he said. “Left in the boot of a car he rented.”

“How long is he dead?”

“A couple of days anyway. He might have been still alive when he was dumped in the boot.”

Tynan was watching O'Leary now. The Sergeant pushed down the antenna and nodded at the Commissioner. Tynan looked at his watch.

“Was that our ten o'clock?”

O'Leary nodded. Tynan looked back at Minogue.

“Tell me again, Matt. Sorry.”

“He was badly done about the head. I didn't spot signs of a scrap yet.”

“Two or three days you're thinking?”

“Probably,” Minogue said. “It was there the whole time, I'd imagine,” he went on. “There was a dent, and a break in the seal under the spare tire. I'd bet the car was driven hard somewhere. Hit a rock sticking up in a boreen or a rock flying up under it maybe.”

“Why only yesterday evening then?”

“Derek Mitchell had his eyes open, if you're asking. Security. He's new.”